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Updated: June 2, 2025
But the tea-gardens have attracted a primitive people, the Santals, who are typical of the true Dravidian stock of India a jolly, cheerful, easy-going, and, on the whole, law-abiding, truthful, and honest people who love a roaming life, with plenty of hunting and fishing. The Lepchas of Sikkim have risen above the first primitive stage. They clothe themselves well and dwell in well-built houses.
We get glimpses of successive kingdoms and dynasties rising and again falling in Southern India, as the Hindu Aryans gradually permeate and subdue the older Dravidian races and absorb the greater part of them, not without being in turn influenced by them, into their own religious and social system.
The races whom we call natives of the country found the Bhil in possession of the land when they first broke into that part of the world thousands of years ago. The books call them Pre-Aryan, Aboriginal, Dravidian, and so forth; and, in other words, that is what the Bhils call themselves.
In their eagerness for a copy of the Old Testament, which appeared in 1818, many Sepoys brought testimonials from their commanding officers, and in one year it led eighteen converts to Christ. Chamberlain's was preferred by Carey himself in 1819. We may pass over the story of the Dravidian versions, the Telugoo New Testament and Pentateuch, and the Kanarese.
It is possible that these un-Aryan cults attained in Dravidian lands fuller and more independent development than in the countries colonized by the Aryans, so that the portrait of Śiva, especially as drawn by Tamil writers, does retain the features of some old Dravidian deity, a deity who dances, who sports among men and bewilders them by his puzzling disguises and transformations.
Further infiltration of Dravidian blood was thus prevented, but Aryan race-purity had been destroyed. Nair, previously quoted, and S. Nihal Singh, "India's Untouchables," Contemporary Review, March, 1913. For the nationalist movement, see Archer, Chirol, and Morrison, supra. Regarding the Indian native princes, see Archer and Chirol, supra.
Also the forms which Śivaism assumed in these two outlying provinces present differences: in Kashmir it was chiefly philosophic, in the Dravidian countries chiefly religious. In the south it calls on God to help the sinner out of the mire, whereas the school of Kashmir, especially in its later developments, resembles the doctrine of Śankara, though its terminology is its own.
Yet the Dravidian districts are ample in extent, their monuments are remarkable, their languages are cultivated, and Tamil literature possesses considerable interest, antiquity and originality. Unfortunately in dealing with these countries we experience in an unusually acute form the difficulties which beset every attempt to trace the history of ideas in India, namely, the absence of chronology.
He complained to the Government, in stately language, of "the paucity of help accorded to me in my earnest attempts to start a potentially remunerative industry, and the flippancy with which my requests for information are treated by a gentleman whose pseudo-scholarly attainments should at lest have taught him the primary differences between the Dravidian and the Berkshire variety of the genus Sus.
Yet the Brahman needed the Sudra, and had to propitiate him in order to use him. So the Aryan absorbed into his own system some of the Dravidian gods, and usually did so by marrying to Dravidian female divinities male deities of his own. Siva, the Aryan god, for example, took for his wife the Dravidian goddess Kali. In many ways like this, the Aryan and the Dravidian united to form the Hindu.
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