Overcoming the Aryan-Dravidian split

Tamil Nadu Governor has been criticized by some Expressing his views on the Aryan-Dravidian partition, Some have even gone to the extent of calling it political interference. this is unfair. Expressing one’s views on a sensitive issue cannot be construed as political interference.

However, what the governor has done through his remarks, it distorts the popular view that former Tamil Nadu chief minister CN Annadurai’s abandonment of the demand for a separate Dravidian state was only a practical pact, and that Aryans and Dravidians were racially discriminated against. Different people remain. , The eminent historian, PT Srinivasa Iyengar, never subscribed to this view, even though he maintained that cultural differences existed between Vedic and non-Vedic peoples. In Pre-Aryan Tamil CultureHe wrote, “A careful study of the Vedas … reveals the fact that the Vedic culture is so reddened by the Indian soil and Indian environment that the idea of ​​a non-Indian origin of that culture is absurd.”

The governor described the Arya-Dravidian partition as an act of the British, which has been Criticized as the toe of the Hindutva line to the point. This criticism is also unfair as many eminent scholars, both local and international, have written about the colonial origins of the Dravidian movement. The linguistic theory, the unscientific history of racial origin, the politics of the non-Brahmin movement and the modern rationalism of the Swabhiman movement have their roots deep in colonial thought.

Caldwell’s Philology

One of the major early proponents of the idea of ​​the Dravidian language family as a scientific entity was Robert Caldwell, in 1856. Not many people would know that 40 years ago, Francis White Ellis, the Collector of Madras, had already laid the foundation stone of Caldwell. theory through his writings. The American historian Thomas Troutman writes, “Alice’s Dravidian proof is a dissertation … [in which] We see more clearly the connection between the Languages ​​and Nations Project and the Orientalist scholarship of the British in India.” This “project of languages ​​and nations”, or the tendency to link languages ​​to nations, is, according to Trautman, “a part of pure science.” It is not a matter that frees itself from the shackles of religion, as is often represented…[but] It has its roots in the Bible, and in the genealogy of the nations that descended from Noah and his three sons.” Even more problematic is the language-and-race project. Of this Trautmann says, “The European view of race as a fundamental force of history had a profound effect on the interpretation of Indian history, and what I have called the racial theory of Indian civilization … Indo-European and Dravidian in India.” Confronting languages ​​as a racial character, and how false it is to racially identify civilization’s whiteness and wildness with black.”

How much politics has left science and history behind is evident from the fact that today Caldwell’s philology is rarely criticized by anyone in the mainstream. Just a decade after Caldwell’s work was published, Charles E. Grover of the Royal Asiatic Society wrote in his famous work on Tamil folk songs, “[about] The actual character of the language and linguistic progress that has taken place since the publication of Dr. Caldwell’s book, it may be noted that the scholar doctor gives an appendix containing a large number of Dravidian words which he claims to be Scythian. .. It is now known that each word in this list is clearly Aryan. ,

colonial masters

It was the work of missionaries like Caldwell and GU Pope that were exploited by the British authorities for political needs. As director of The Hindu Publishing Group, N. Ram noted in a paper economic and political weekly In 1979, influenced by these actions, the “brutal oppressive governor”, Mountstuart Elphinstone Grant-Duff, during his address to the graduates of the University of Madras in 1868, looked at non-Brahmins and said, “You belong to a pure Dravidian race” and ” I wish to see the pre-Sanskrit element among you asserting itself more”.

The eminent Cambridge historian, David Washbrook, identified the roots of Dravidian or non-Brahmin politics not in the historical fault lines that plagued Tamil society, but in “a new type of government and politics that existed in the early years of the British According to Washbrook, the centralization of bureaucracy in Madras at the end of the 19th century had created fear among British citizens of “caste factions”, which now controlled not only the districts but the entire province. Therefore, the policy should be ‘divide and rule’. The important leaders of the non-Brahmin movement were either influenced by colonial heritage or narrow interests, best exemplified by Rajmohan Gandhi, one of its founders, TM Nair describes, “Entering politics as a Congressman … blaming Brahmins for electoral vicissitudes … He left the Congress and became one of the founders of SILF … always in western attire. are found, a practice still widespread among South Indian men . In a series of articles … he argued that British authority had kept India united” and “tried to convince Montagu that the Home Rule League was financed with German money.”

to the modern paradigm

Scholars such as Ashish Nandy have long highlighted the importance of vague and overlapping identities in pre-modern India as a source of tolerance. Washbrook gave concrete examples and concluded as follows: “In his manual on the Coimbatore district … FA Nicholson independently acknowledged the inability to distinguish the ‘true’ Gounder Velas from the host of wealthy peasants, who espoused Gounder ceremonies, dress and customs adopted or adopted.In the 1891 census, Sir Harold Stuart noted the ability of the Nairs of Malabar to absorb immigrants … in a single generation without any apparent friction… Castes Recent In the work, S. A. Barnett suggests the diverse origins of the peoples who currently fill the category of Thondamandala Vellala… In these circumstances, in which the sub-regional varnas were so inconsistent, the politics of caste confrontation was rare and limited. In fact, his famous Castes and Tribes of Southern IndiaEdgar Thurston said, “The entry of the higher castes into the Paraiya caste sometimes occurs.”

With modern rationalism came the need to calculate and classify. And with Western-style nationalism came the need to identify enemies. When one of the movement’s great literary figures wrote in praise of Tamil, he also had to include a death wish for the “Aryan language”. Many neutral observers have observed parallels between Dravidian politics and other anarchic ideologies. Yet its ideology does not receive as much criticism from mainstream intellectual circles as is usually reserved for other nationalist ideologies.

Aditya Reddy is an Advocate in Madras High Court