DRAVIDIAN, a tenn which Dr. Caldwell applied to tho peoples and to the vernacular tongues of the great majority of tho inhabitants of Southern India. Dravida is wed in Sanskrit Brahmanical writings as an ethnological and philological term. Menu mentions the inhabitants, the Dravida, as out-castes and barbarians, i.e. not in communion with Brahmans. In the Brihat Sanhita of Varaha 3iihim, A.D. 404, Dravida is described AR divided into Chola, Pandya, Kerala, Karnataka, Kalinga, and Andhra. I'hilologiets identify the words Arava, Dravida, and Tarnil, and identify these with the Peutingerian tables, and tho Litnyrico of Ptolemy. The eastern and southern parts of the Peninsula of India, front the Vindhya mountains and the river Nerbadda to Cape Comorin, appear to have been peopled front the earliest period by different branches of one and the samo race, speaking different dialects of one and the same language; and scattered offshoots from the same stem are t.o be traced still further to the north and to the west, as far as tho Raj mallet hills and tho mountain fastnesses of Baluch istan. Their lino of route to their present sites, and the time of their advent, aro alike unlatown. They aro generally supposed to have streamed through the passes of the Himalaya, and also from tho west side of the Indus.
Fergusson, however (Ind. and E. Arch. p. 12), says if they came into India in historiml times, it was not from Central Asia, but from Ba.bylonia, or some such southern region of the Asiatic con tinent. 3Ir. Logan is of opinion that a Negroid race once occupied S. India ; and Professor Huxley has expressed the opinion (J. Eth. Soc. 1869) that the Dravidian, Tamilar, and tho Australian aro the SAME race.
Researches into the fatnilies of language to which the spoken dialects belong, and tho emitting physical peculiarities of the several races, permit tho belief that India and the island parts of South-Eastern Asia were peopled long prior to historic times, and that a succession of races, or of branches of the same human family, here entered India, and in some instances become amalgamated with or been dispersed amongst the prior occu pants, or have pushed them further on into Ims peopled or less fertile districts, or amid fon3st and mountain tracts. In India proper, front the Himalaya to Cape Comorin, even yet., every village and every hamlet have small bodies of predial slaves, who, though pwsessing certain minor agricultural and civil rights, are not allowed to purchase lands, are compelled to reside outside the village walls, and are pre vented quitting the locality, for they furnish the only free labour available for the work of the field. On this point Chevalier Bunsen mentions
(Report, Brit. Association, 18-17) that throughout Asia, the two great nations, who once centred the ono in tho Altai and tho pasture land towards the Himalaya, the other having its centre in the I Ural mountains, appear in Asia as tho subdued or printery element, as the sulalued substratum of Iranian civilisation, and that theaboriginal languages of India, which attained their full development in the Dekhan dialects, belong to that stock.
Professor Rask of Copenhagen, and Dr. Cald well, have given the opinion that the Dravidian languages are to be affiliated to the Scythian, Turanitm, or Altaic group of tongues. The Turkish, Finnish, Hungarian, and Japanese languages, though in many particulars distinctly Turanian, have become still more inflexional than the Dravidian.
A general name for all these peoples has not been fixed upon. In India they have been called the Mongoloid, pre-Aryan, non-Aryan, Tanau Turanian, and Scythian. Several of them in India are highly civilised, with cultivated lan guages; others, though without a literature, and even predatory, form large nationalities ; while there are many broken tribes, dispersed, homeless wanderers, or dwelling in forests. In Southern Indiathe Mongoloid races are in twogreat branches, the Dravidian and the Kolarian ; and their number has been estimated at 48,670,000, of whom the illiterate Mair, Meena, Kol, Bhil, Santal, and Gond constitute 12,000,000. The Dravidian section speak the Tamil, Telugu, Canarese, Kodaga, Malealam, Tulu, which are cultivated tongues, and the other branches in the south speaking uncultivated Dravidian languages are the Kurumbar, Badaga, Irular, Toda, Kota, Male Arisar, Ramusi, Gond, Khand, Khond, or Ku ; while the branches in the Central Provinces, Chutia Nagpur, and Bengal, are the Oraon, Gadaba, Rajmahali, Bhuiya, Bhuinhar, Binjhia or Binjhwar, Kaur or Kaurava or Kaurai or Raj Kaur, the Kochl, Hamlin, Sabar or Savara, and Yerkala. Of these uncivilised branches, the Kurumbar and Irular speak Tamil, the Badaga, Kota, and Toda have dialects of Canarese, the Male-Arisar use Malealam, and the Ratnusi Yer kala have the Telugu.