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Updated: May 2, 2025
Passing farther west, the Brahouis of Beluchistan, a Dravidian race, who regard themselves as the aboriginal inhabitants, live side by side with the Belutchis. Finally, in this direction, there seem to have been near Lake Zerrah, in Persia, Negrito tribes who are probably aboriginal, and may have formed the historic black guard of the ancient kings of Susiana.
Mostly of the primitive Dravidian stock that inhabited the peninsula before the great Aryan inflow from the north, and still speaking Dravidian languages, the people of Southern India have preserved in its most archaic form the social system of Hinduism which the Aryan conquerors, probably never more than a small minority, imposed upon them by the relative superiority of their civilisation quite as much as by force of arms.
But if so, no record of his school is forthcoming from his native land, though the possibility that he was more than an individual thinker and represented some movement unknown to us cannot be denied. We might suppose too that since Nâgârjuna and Âryadeva were southerners, their peculiar doctrines were coloured by Dravidian ideas.
In India, under the common generic name of Hinduism, there are also many sects: worshippers of Vishnu, worshippers of Siva, worshippers of Krishna. There are Sikhs, and Jains, and devil worshippers; among the Dravidian and other pre-Aryan tribes there are victims of every conceivable superstition. Now, a missionary must know something of these faiths if he would fight with "weapons of precision."
Near the latter he died before he was an old man. On his deathbed he is said to have asked forgiveness for going on pilgrimages and frequenting temples, because by so doing he had seemed to forget that God is everywhere. It is clear that his work both as an author and organizer was considerable and permanent, and that much of his career was spent outside Dravidian lands.
I have already mentioned the view that the worship of Śiva and the Linga is Dravidian in origin and borrowed by the Aryans. There is no proof that this worship had its first home in the south and spread northwards, for the Vedic and epic literature provides a sufficient pedigree for Śiva.
The Aryans were a fair-skinned people, unquestionably of the same general stock as ourselves. Pressing down from Central Asia through those north-western passes where alone land-access is possible to India, elsewhere impregnably guarded by the mountain wall of the Himalayas, the Aryans subdued the dark-skinned Dravidian aborigines, and settled down as masters.
These creeds did not make a conquest, for the Dravidian temperament obviously needed a god who could receive and reward passionate devotion, but they cleared the air and spread such ideas as the superiority of good deeds to rites and the uselessness of priests.
The highways of the Achaemenids yes, and which before them had trembled to the tramplings of the myriads of the godlike Dravidian conquerors.
These caste discriminations doubtless originated in remote ages when the Aryan conquerors from the north gradually subdued the aboriginal Dravidian populations.
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