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Updated: June 14, 2025
These tribes who retired southwards are commonly known as Dravidians and possibly represent an earlier invasion of central-Asiatic tribes allied to the remote ancestors of the Turks and Mongols . At the time when the earlier hymns of the Rig Veda were composed, the Aryans apparently lived in the Panjab and did not know the sea, the Vindhya mountains or the Narbudda river.
Not only are there few historical treatises but even historical allusions are rare and this curious vagueness is not peculiar to any age or district. It is as noticeable among the Dravidians of the south as among the speakers of Aryan languages in the north.
Yet interbreeding has doubtless been an important element in the elaboration of the stupendous caste organization. We have abundant illustration of this very process and its results in modern times. Among the Dravidians, especially, there are many castes which trace their origin to miscegenation.
Its probable Indian representatives are known to-day as Dravidians the brown-skinned people still dominating South Indian life, whose exact place in the family of races puzzles every anthropologist. It was then that civilization was first walking up and down the great river valleys of the Old World.
But the Dravidians are not of the same race as the northern Hindus and since this ecstatic monotheism is clearly characteristic of their literature, it may have made its appearance in the south earlier than elsewhere. The Tiruvaçagam is not unorthodox but it deals direct with God and is somewhat heedless of priests.
We know, as a certain fact, that peoples to whom we have given the names of Dravidians and Aryans entered India from the north and north-west; that they increased and multiplied, overspread the whole of India, and reduced the aborigines to serfdom.
It would be rash to say that the Aryan invaders of India brought with them no god of this sort but it is probable that this element in their pantheon increased as they gradually united in blood and ideas with the Dravidian population. But we know nothing of the beliefs of the Dravidians at this remote period.
It is no less true of the Mongolic nomads of Northern Asia, of the Asiatic Aryans and of the Ancient Greeks and Romans, and it holds good among the Dravidians of the Dekhan and the negro tribes of Africa.
Indian religion is commonly regarded as the offspring of an Aryan religion, brought into India by invaders from the north and modified by contact with Dravidian civilization. The materials at our disposal hardly permit us to take any other point of view, for the literature of the Vedic Aryans is relatively ancient and full and we have no information about the old Dravidians comparable with it.
According to these data the Khasis are more brachy-cephalic than the Aryans, whose measurements appear in Crooke's tables, more brachy-cephalic than the 100 Mundas whose measurements appear in Risley's tables, more brachy-cephalic than the Dravidians, but less brachy-cephalic than the Burmans, whose measurements also appear in Crooke's tables.
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