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Updated: June 2, 2025
But the characteristic form of Dravidian religion is an emotional theism, running in the parallel channels of Vishnuism and Śivaism and accompanied by humbler but vigorous popular superstitions, which reveal the origin of its special temperament.
In Syria to this day a woman who has her courses on her may neither salt nor pickle, for the people think that whatever she pickled or salted would not keep. The Toaripi of New Guinea, doubtless for a similar reason, will not allow women at such times to cook. The Bhuiyars, a Dravidian tribe of South Mirzapur, are said to feel an intense dread of menstrual pollution.
It was from the Dravidian and Kolarian aborigines, we are told, that Indian religion took its later corruptions. The Vedic religion has no idols, it has no dark descriptions of hell, the caste system on which later Brahmanism was based is absent from it, it has no demons to be guarded against, and no bad deities. The doctrine of metempsychosis is not found here, except perhaps in germ.
In the centre of India, amongst the Vindyah Mountains, live the Djangals or Bandra-Lokhs, the latter name signifying man-monkey, and thus associating itself with the tale of Rama, above alluded to. Like most of the Dravidian tribes, they live in great misery, and show every sign of their condition in their attenuated figures. One of this tribe measured by Rousselet was five feet in height.
It may here be remarked that the stature of the Dravidian races exceeds that of the purer Negritos, a fact due, no doubt, to the influence of crossing. Both are weak and dwarfish, the latter especially so.
The names of over two hundred are cited and of these more than thirty are known to be extant in MS. The majority were composed in north-western India but the Pâncarâtra doctrine spread to the Dravidian countries and new Saṃhitâs were produced there, the chief of which, the Îśvara Saṃhitâ, can hardly be later than 800 A.D. Of the older works Schrader thinks that the Ahirbudhnya was written in Kashmir between 300 and 800 A.D. and perhaps as early as the fourth century.
Many of the greatest Hindu teachers were Dravidians and at the present day it is in the Dravidian regions that the temples are most splendid, the Brahmans strictest and most respected. It may be that this Dravidian influence affected even Buddhism in the third century A.D., for Aryadeva the successor of Nâgârjuna was a southerner and the legends told of him recall certain Dravidian myths.
Perhaps it feels too secure of the unchallenged supremacy which it has enjoyed through the ages as a social and religious force without ever aspiring to direct political ascendancy. Perhaps the admixture of Dravidian blood has imparted to it a more serene tolerance.
Then, all India, including Ceylon, was Hinduized, though in differing degrees; the purest Aryan civilization being in the north, the less pure in the Ganges Valley and south and east, while the least Aryan and more Dravidian was in Bengal, Orissa, and India south of the Kistna River.
The origin of caste is to be found in the superiority of the Aryan conqueror to the Dravidian aborigines. The people of light complexion looked down on the dark-skinned race, and drove them to the wall.
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