climatic conditions and the hardships they had been subjected to during the previous ten centuries of residence on the scorching plains of the unprotected East.
There was no caste system among the Nagas and the Dravidians. It is an institution introduced by the 'cow-loving' Aryan settlers. The Tamils or the Naga-Dravidians were first divided into tribes, not castes, according to the territory wherein they happened to live when the earliest Aryans colonized the Tamil country. The numerous Tamil castes of modern times, with the exception of a handful of Vellalas, must have grown out of a few territorial tribes of Nagas. The Velirs or Vellalas alone were Dravidians. The Viswa-Brahmans and the Dravida Kshatriyas had no place in this system.
The home-speech of all these people, including the Brahmans, is Tamil. It is ignorance of the elementary principles of philology on the part of Tamil pandits that has led them to attribute divine origin to their mother tongue. Tamil is an ancient member of the Dravidian family. What language the Nagas spoke we have no means to find out. Tamil belongs to the agglutinative group of languages and it has no relation whatever with the inflectional Sanskrit. We may however find some remote affinities between it and the Indo-European languages—both in their grammar and vocabulary—a fact which indicates that the Tamils lived with the Aryans in Upper India before their downward march to the Dekhan Tamil
