Dravids

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The Dravids (from Sanskrit द्राविड drāviḍa ) are the people who speak one of the Dravidian languages common in southern India and Sri Lanka . The term "Dravids" was coined with this meaning in the mid-19th century by the British orientalist Robert Caldwell . In doing so, Caldwell resorted to the Sanskrit term drāviḍa , which in premodern times mostly referred to the Tamils , sometimes also summarizing all the peoples of South India. Based on Caldwell's findings, western researchers in the 19th century assumed a dichotomy between the Dravids, who were the indigenous people of India, and the Aryans , who immigrated to India from outside. At the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, these theses were taken up by Tamil intellectuals who propagated a Dravidian identity for the Tamils. From the early 20th century, the Dravid ideology was extremely powerful in the Tamil-speaking areas of southern India and led to the emergence of a political current known as the Dravidian Movement .

The Dravidian languages

Distribution area of ​​the Dravidian languages

In its common meaning today, the term "Dravidian" refers primarily to the Dravidian languages . These include the four major languages Telugu , Tamil , Kannada and Malayalam , which are spoken in southern India and (in the case of Tamil) Sri Lanka, as well as a number of smaller languages ​​in central and northern India all the way to Pakistan . In the north of India, however, mainly Indo-Aryan languages ​​are spoken. These include Sanskrit , which has played a prominent role as a religious and educational language throughout India for centuries, including in the Dravidian-speaking south. While the Dravidian languages ​​form an independent language family , the Indo-Aryan languages ​​are a branch of the Indo-European (or Indo-European) language family, which also includes most of the languages ​​spoken in Europe. According to the accepted doctrine, these spread around 1500 BC. From Central Asia to the Indian subcontinent . The Dravidian languages, on the other hand, were spoken before the arrival of the Indo-Aryan languages ​​on the subcontinent. It is unclear whether the Dravidian languages ​​for their part came to the Indian subcontinent from outside at an earlier point in time, or whether their original home is India. In addition to the Indo-Aryan and Dravidian languages, the smaller group of Munda languages and, in the peripheral areas, Tibetan-Burmese languages ​​are also widespread on the Indian subcontinent .

Culture

religion

Traditional ritual in honor of indigenous deities

Today most of the Dravidian-speaking peoples follow forms of Hinduism . However, there are still some who maintain the traditional folk animistic traditions.

Hero or ancestral stones (Naṭukal) are an integral part of the Dravidian culture. They show the life stories of heroes and / or the deceased. The motifs sun / star and moon are often depicted.

The original religion of the Dravids was a pronounced animistic - polytheistic religion with a strong ancestral cult . The Dravids believed in a life after death in the form of spirits in a spirit world separate from the physical world. Belief in reincarnation was completely absent and only spread later through North Indian sects after the end of the Vedic period.

The religion of the Dravids shows parallels to the ancient religion of Mesopotamia , ancient Egypt and the religion of the Mediterranean region .

Martial arts

Silambam: Representation of training with wooden sticks
Traditional weapons

The Dravids are also known for their martial arts. There are some traditional martial arts that influenced kung fu as well. They are also famous for their sword fighting skills. Some well-known schools are the Kalarippayat or the Silambam .

History of the term "Dravids"

etymology

The terms Draviden or Dravidian are derived from the Sanskrit word draviḍa or its adjectival form drāviḍa ( Vriddhi level). The forms dramiḍa and dramila also occur as variants of draviḍa in Sanskrit . Most likely there is an etymological connection to tamiḻ , the Tamil name . The Prakrit form damiḷa comes into question as an intermediate stage . However, the direction of borrowing is unclear. The Sanskrit word draviḍa may have been borrowed from Prakrit damiḷa in Tamil tamiḻ . During the transition from Sanskrit to Prakrit, the simplification of the initial consonant cluster dr- to d- and the change from retroflex plosive ḍ and retroflexe lateral ḷ are regular sound changes. If it were borrowed into Tamil, d would have changed to t , because in Tamil voicing and voicelessness are not phonematic . The change from ḷ to a retroflex approximant ḻ is more difficult to explain . The opposite way of borrowing is also possible. In this case, tamiḻ would have been adopted as damiḷa in Prakrit. The replacement of the sound ḻ by ḷ , which does not appear in Prakrit, is easier to explain than the reverse development. The Prakrit form damiḷa would have been sanskritized to dramiḍa or draviḍa . The initial r dr- would be a hypercorrection .

Draviḍa / Drāviḍa in Sanskrit

In classical Sanskrit literature, the term draviḍa denotes a people or a country in South India, drāviḍa means “belonging to the Draviḍa people”. The terms appear in early texts such as the epic Mahabharata or the code of law Manusmriti , both of which are to be placed in the centuries around the turn of the ages. The Draviḍa are mentioned here in the context of lists of peoples. The Mansmriti, for example, contains a list of “exotic” tribes that have fallen away from the Kshatriya . In addition to the Draviḍa, these include the Pauṇḍraka ( Bengal ), Oḍra ( Orissa ), Kamboja (Northwest India), Yavana (Greeks), Pārada (Central Asia), Pahlava (Persians), Cīna (Chinese), Kirāta (Himalayan region), Darada and Khasa ( both Central Asia). In the Mahabharata , the Draviḍa are mentioned together with other apparently southern Indian tribes, such as the Cola (cf. Chola ) and Āndhra (cf. Andhra ). However, the information in the early sources is too vague to be able to identify the Dravi genauera more precisely, and in any case the question arises as to how exactly the authors of the texts were informed about the geography and population of South India.

In South Indian Sanskrit texts from the Middle Ages and the early modern period, the term drāviḍa is mostly synonymous with “Tamil”. The Tamil Vishnuits call the canon of Vishnuit literature in Tamil ( Nalayira Divya Prabandham ) in Tamil as tamiḻ-maṟai and in Sanskrit as drāviḍa-veda ("Tamil" or "Dravidian Veda "). At times, however, the term was also used collectively for the inhabitants of southern India. The Brahmins of India are traditionally divided into two main groups, each containing five subgroups: the Pañca-Gauḍa ("five Gauḍa") living north of the Vindhya Mountains and the Pañca-Drāviḍa ("five Drāviḍa") south of it. The latter group includes the Gurjara (the inhabitants of today's Gujarat ), Mahārāṣṭra ( Maharashtra ), Tailaṅga ( Telangana / Andhra Pradesh ), Karnāṭaka ( Karnataka ) and Drāviḍa ( Tamil Nadu ). The term Drāviḍa is used in a double sense, once in the narrow sense for the Brahmins of today's Tamil Nadu and once as a generic term for all southern Brahmins.

Origin and history

The origin of the Dravids was controversial until recently. An origin in India or an origin in the Middle East was discussed. Recent findings in archeology, genetics and linguistics confirm a Western Eurasian origin of the Proto-Dravids. According to a genome-anthropological study (Das et al. 2016), the proto-Dravids come from a region in what is now southern Iran . They immigrated to India more than 8,000 years ago and displaced the outnumbered hunter-gatherer populations almost completely. The Indus culture , one of the oldest human cultures, is ascribed to them. Genetically, the Dravids are closely related to other Western Eurasian populations ( Arabs , Berbers , Europeans and Iranians ). The researchers conclude that the Dravids originated in the ancient Elam region in modern-day Iran and supported the “Elamo-Dravidian” language family previously suspected by some linguists.

Today the term “Dravide” refers mainly to the language or culture and less to the ethnic origin.

Today's Dravidian peoples

The largest Dravidian peoples today are the Tamils , Telugus, Canadas, Malayalis, and Tulu in India and the Brahui in Afghanistan and Pakistan . There are also a large number of smaller peoples and tribes who are counted among the Dravids.

Dravidism as an ideology

Robert Caldwell and the "discovery" of the Dravids

Robert Caldwell (1814-1891)

In its current meaning, the term Dravidian or Dravidian was coined by the British missionary and linguist Robert Caldwell in his work Comparative Grammar of the Dravidian or South Indian Family of Languages (1856). In his work, Caldwell demonstrated that the languages ​​spoken in South India are related to each other, but not to Sanskrit and the languages that are common in North India today (the Indo-Aryan languages ). This discovery had been made forty years earlier by Francis Whyte Ellis , but it was only through Caldwell that it became popular. Above all, however, Caldwell coined the term Dravidian ( Dravidian in the English original) for this language group (Ellis had simply spoken of "South Indian dialects"). Caldwell adopted the Sanskrit term drāviḍa . He admitted that drāviḍa in Sanskrit often has a limited meaning only for Tamil; but since the Sanskrit authors had already used the word as an umbrella term for the peoples and languages ​​of South India, he considered it the most suitable term to denote the entire language family.

Aryans and Dravids in the Western Discourse

Unlike Francis Whyte Ellis, who dealt only with linguistic comparative aspects, Robert Caldwell expanded the term dravidian to a folkish-cultural level. Like other 19th century scholars, he mixed up the concepts of language, people and race. In addition to a Dravidian language family, Caldwell assumed a ethnic entity of the "Dravids", which he compared to the " Aryans ". In doing so, he took up a discourse that was very popular in India research at that time: The discovery made in 1786 by the British William Jones that Sanskrit and its daughter languages, like most of the languages ​​spoken in Europe today, form the Indo-European language family , was inferred Indo-European tribes who called themselves "Aryans" immigrated to India from outside and subjugated the indigenous population. In the extensive introduction to his grammar work, Caldwell expresses himself on the relationship between Aryans and Dravids. He concludes from a comparison of the common Dravidian hereditary vocabulary to a comparatively high level of the pre-Aryan civilization of the Urdravids. This was the first time that Caldwell defined the “indigenous peoples” that had previously only been negatively defined as “non-Aryans”.

The term Dravids , coined by Caldwell, soon found widespread use and established itself as an antithesis to Aryans . In general, a dichotomy between immigrant Aryans and native Dravids was assumed and the Indian prehistory was interpreted under these auspices. The Indian caste system was explained by saying that the victorious Aryans had made the subjugated Dravids into Shudras (low castes) and casteless . While Caldwell was still quite benevolent of the Dravids, the majority of western Indologists of the 19th century assumed a racial superiority of the Aryans, who, according to the findings of comparative linguistics, were ultimately related to the European peoples. In its most extreme form, this view ultimately led to the Aryan ideology of the National Socialists .

Against this background, the Dravids were made the " Others ", in contrast to which the Aryans could be shown as superior. The fair-skinned, civilized and manly Aryans were contrasted with the dark, primitive and effeminate Dravids. At the same time, however, it was also necessary to affirm the superiority of the West over India under the prevailing orientalist thought patterns. The history of India has therefore been told as the story of the decline of the original Aryan civilization under the corrosive influence of the Dravidian spirit. For example, the emergence of temple cult and devotionalism ( bhakti ) in medieval Hinduism was explained as a Dravidian influence.

The emergence of a Dravidian identity among the Tamils

Against the background of British colonial rule , the Indian elites of the 19th century were confronted with the dominant Indian theories about Aryans and Dravids. Against this background, South Indian, especially Tamil , intellectuals began to formulate a Dravidian identity. Probably the first in the Tamil discourse, the scholar P. Sundaram Pillai propagated the thesis of the cultural independence of the Dravids at the end of the 19th century. He took the view that the Dravidian south was the "real India" and culturally independent of the Aryan culture of northern India. Based on Robert Caldwell's theses of the pre-Aryan civilization of the Dravids, Sundaram Pillai and his contemporaries were able to portray the Dravidian culture as at least equal, if not superior, to the Aryan. The Tamil intellectuals made no attempt to question the theory of Aryan immigration, which must have been problematic for them because of the negative judgments about the native Dravids. Rather, they took it over, but reinterpreted it in their own way. The attempt to resolve the Aryan-Dravid dichotomy only happens much later and in a completely different context, namely that of Hindu nationalism . From the 1940s, and increasingly since the 1990s, attempts have been made to refute the Aryan immigration thesis ( out-of-India theory ) and portray the Dravidian identity as the result of a divide-and-rule tactic of the British colonial rulers .

While the term Dravidian from a linguistic point of view includes not only Tamil but also the three other great South Indian languages Telugu , Kannada and Malayalam , it was essentially only speakers of Tamil who found favor with the Dravidian identity. The terms Dravidian and Tamil were largely used interchangeably, with the assumption that the Tamils ​​were the Dravidian "indigenous people". Robert Caldwell, who in his pioneering work presented Tamil as the most important and original Dravidian language, already contributed to this. The other Dravidian languages ​​had also been influenced by Sanskrit far more than Tamil, so that the thesis of the independence of the Dravidian culture from Aryan had to be less convincing to the speakers of these languages. In the end, the Dravid ideology was limited to the Tamils.

Parallel to the development of a Dravidian identity among the Tamils, the so-called Tamil renaissance took place , triggered by the rediscovery of the ancient Tamil sangam literature from the first centuries AD at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. Sangam literature, which is still largely free from the influences of North Indian culture, was now seen as the expression of a primeval Dravidian civilization. The discovery of the Indus culture in 1922 and the speculation that soon afterwards arisen that the bearers of this civilization were speakers of Dravidian languages ​​gave new impetus to the thesis that a high-ranking Dravidian civilization existed before the arrival of the Aryans. Probably the most extreme expression of the new Dravidian consciousness was the thesis that the Dravids / Tamils ​​were one of the pure primordial races of humanity and had taught culture and language from the lost continent of Kumarikkandam from the other barbaric peoples of the world and civilized them.

The Dravidian Movement in Tamil Nadu

EV Ramasami (1879–1973)

From the early 20th century, a political movement known as the Dravidian Movement formed in the Tamil areas of India . It was based on the one hand on the Dravid ideology, on the other hand on anti-Brahmanism, i.e. the rejection of the assumed supremacy of the Brahmanas . The thesis, already advocated by Robert Caldwell, that the caste system was introduced by immigrant Aryan Brahmins in South India, resulted in a link between anti-Brahmanism and Dravid ideology. The Brahmins thus appeared as Aryans, while only non-Brahmins could be Dravids or Tamils. In fact, in the discourse of the non- Brahmin movement, Dravide has often served as a synonym for non-Brahmin .

The social reformer EV Ramasami (Periyar) succeeded in turning the Dravidian movement into a mass movement. In 1925 he founded the social reformist self-esteem movement with the stated aim of giving non-Brahmans a sense of “self-respect” based on their dravidian identity. In 1944 the self-esteem movement united with the Justice Party, originally founded to represent the interests of the non-Brahmanic elite, to form the Dravidar Kazhagam organization (DK, "Bund der Draviden"). From this, in 1949, under the leadership of CN Annadurai, the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam party (DMK, "Dravidian Progressive League") split off as a political party. On the basis of the Dravid ideology, the DK and DMK represented radical nationalist positions and at times even called for a separate state, Dravida Nadu, for the Dravids of South India. The DMK quickly developed into an important political force in the state of Madras (now Tamil Nadu ) and won the parliamentary elections in the state for the first time in 1967. After Annadurai's death, the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK) party split off from DMK in 1972 . Tamil Nadu's politics are still dominated by these two "Dravidian parties" to this day. Even if the dichotomy Aryans vs. Draviden has lost much of its importance today, both DMK and AIADMK are named after the legacy of the Dravidian movement.

literature

  • Michael Bergunder , Rahul Peter Das (ed.): "Arier" and "Draviden". Constructions of the past as a basis for self and other perceptions of South Asia. Publishing house of the Francke Foundations in Halle, Halle 2002. doi: 10.11588 / xabooks.379.539 .
  • Robert Caldwell : Comparative Grammar of the Dravidian or South Indian Family of Languages. 1st edition. Williams and Norgate, London / Edinburgh 1856. (digitized) . (2nd edition. Trübner & Co., London 1875. Digitized version)
  • PM Joseph: The Word Draviḍa. In: International Journal of Dravidian Linguistics. Volume 18.2, 1989, pp. 134-142.
  • Bhadriraju Krishnamurti: The Dravidian Languages. University Press, Cambridge 2003.
  • Thomas R. Trautmann: Languages ​​and Nations. The Dravidian Proof in Colonial Madras. University of California Press, Berkley 2006.

Individual evidence

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  6. ^ Dept of Folklore and Tribal Studies - Dravidian Univeristy. Retrieved December 15, 2019 .
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  10. ↑ Otto Böhtlingk: Sanskrit dictionary in a shorter version. 7 volumes, St. Petersburg 1879–1889, keywords draviḍa ( Volume 3, p. 127. ) and drāviḍa ( Vd. 3, p. 129. ).
  11. ↑ See also the search for " draviḍa " and " drāviḍa " In: Oliver Hellwig: DCS - The Digital Corpus of Sanskrit. Heidelberg 2010–2016.
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  17. ↑ Dhavendra Kumar: Genetic Disorders of the Indian Subcontinent . Springer Science & Business Media, 2004, ISBN 1-4020-1215-2 ( google.com [accessed October 25, 2019]): “... The analysis of two Y chromosome variants, Hgr9 and Hgr3 provides interesting data (Quintan -Murci et al., 2001). Microsatellite variation of Hgr9 among Iranians, Pakistanis and Indians indicate an expansion of populations to around 9000 YBP in Iran and then to 6,000 YBP in India. This migration originated in what was historically termed Elam in south-west Iran to the Indus valley, and may have been associated with the spread of Dravidian languages ​​from south-west Iran (Quintan-Murci et al., 2001). ... "
  18. ↑ Vagheesh M. Narasimhan, Nick Patterson, Priya Moorjani, Iosif Lazaridis, Mark Lipson: The Genomic formation of South and Central Asia . In: bioRxiv . March 31, 2018, bioRxiv : 10.1101 / 292581v1 ( preprint full text), doi : 10.1101 / 292581 .
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  30. ↑ Bergunder 2002, p. 136.
  31. ^ Thomas R. Trautmann: Aryans and British India. Vistaar Publications, New Delhi 1997, pp. 165-189.
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  33. ↑ Irschick 1969, p. 282.
  34. ↑ Bergunder 2002, p. 172.
  35. ↑ Bergunder 2002, pp. 165–172.
  36. ↑ Dagmar Hellmann-Rajanayagam: Tamil. Language as a political symbol. Verlag Franz Steiner, Wiesbaden 1984, p. 139 f.
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  38. ↑ Irschick 1969, p. 275 f.
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  40. ↑ Sumathi Ramaswamy: Remains of the Race: Archeology, Nationalism and the Yearning for Civilization in the Indus Valley. In: Indian Economic & Social History Review. Volume 38.2, 2001, pp. 105-145.
  41. ↑ Sumathi Ramaswamy: The Lost Land of Lemuria. Fabulous Geographies, Catastrophic Histories. University of California Press, Berkeley 2004.
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