Dravidian is the name given to a linguistically related group of people in India. They are said to be the first original settlers of ancient India. The group is mainly composed of the lower class people in the Indian society. Specific peoples include the Tamil, and more isolated highland tribes such as the Ghats and the Todas. Dravidian culture is very diverse, with some groups maintaining more traditional customs such as totemism and matralinealism, while others have developed the lifestyles of a modern technological society.
Dravidian language has remained relatively intact despite a considerable amount of contact and intermarriage with other people in the Indian subcontinent. Today with more than one hundred seventy million speakers, the Dravidians make up the fourth largest linguistic group in the world. India gained independence in 1947, and since then Dravidian groups have had to actively protest to prevent attempts to make Hindi, an Indo-European language, the only official language of India.
The Dravidians were a very advanced culture at this time. Extensive excavations indicate that the Dravidian culture was well established by about 2500 B.C., and more recent studies revealed that it covered nearly all of the Lower Indus Valley. This Indus Valley civilization was an empire that contained hundreds of cities, some of which had populations of thirty to forty thousand. The cities were centers for high civilization. Every household contained a bathroom, and every city contained a sewage system, far in advance to 18th-century Paris. There was a harbor in Lothal, another city, that could handle up to fifty ocean going vessels, doing trade with countries as far away as Egypt. The cities Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro, both located in the Indus basin, were principle sites for excavations. The Dravidians even had a very complex writing system. In fact, what is known of this ancient civilization is derived almost exclusively from archaeological data. This is because every attempt to decipher the Dravidian script has failed so far. It is believed that if the writing system could be translated, more could be discovered about the culture of these early peoples.
There was only one problem with the Dravidian culture, and it was that they were a civilized peaceful matriarchal empire. This is a very good thing, but not when another culture wants to take over control. The Dravidians were totally unprepared for invasion by the barbaric patriarchal tribes of Aryans. However the Dravidian empire did hold out for several centuries before being taken over by the Aryans. When the Aryans took the empire, they imposed a harsh patriarchal control over the land. The Aryans divided the empire into four classes and the Dravidians were at the bottom of the barrel. The defeated Dravidians, now called the Shudras, were enslaved and their only right was to serve the upper three classes of Aryans.
Sources:
A Tale of Two Histories http://home.earthlink.net/~pleiadesx/twotale.htm
Dravidian http://www.iversonsoftware.com/anthropology/dravidian.htm
Dravidian. The Columbia Encyclopedia: Sixth Edition 2000 http://bartleby.com/65/dr/Dravidian.html
The Development of Scripts in India http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Parthenon/2104/scripts.html
Written By: Jay Schultz