Page:Tamil studies.djvu/49

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24
TAMIL STUDIES

the south of India'. Yet in another place the same scholar writes as follows: 'It would appear that long before the Aryan invasions, a people speaking a very primitive Central Asian language, had entered by the Sind passes. These were the Dravidas or the Dravidians of later times. Other non-Aryan races from the north pushed them onwards to the present Dravidian country in the south of the peninsula... The extrusion of the Dravidians from northern India had taken place before the arrival of the Aryan-speaking races. The Dravidians are to be distinguished from the later non-Aryan immigrants, whom the Vedic tribes found in possession of the valleys of the Indus and Ganges. These later nonAryans were in their turn subjugated or pushed out by the Aryan new comers; and they accordingly appear in the Vedic hymns as the 'enemies' (Dasyus) and 'serfs' (Sudras) of the Indo-Aryan settlers. The Dravidian non-Aryans of the south, on the other hand, appear from the first in the Sanskrit as friendly forest folk, the monkey armies who helped the Aryan hero Rama on his march through Southern India against the demon king of Ceylon.'

As Sir H. Risley has remarked, the basis of this theory is obscure ; and neither philology nor ethnology supports it. It will be shown in the sequel that the Dravidians were not driven from Northern India by later non-Aryan immigrants and that they were not the monkey armies who helped the Aryan hero Rama.

The Mongolian Theory: According to