Dravidian

Dravidian holds around eighty languages, concentrated in southern India, with a scatter of small languages in central India and one, Brahui, spoken in Baluchistan more than a thousand miles from the rest. Its four major members, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam, together have around 250 million speakers and each has a literary tradition of its own, Tamil's reaching back to the early centuries of the common era and being the oldest continuously attested literary tradition in India apart from Sanskrit. The family is securely established by the comparative method and has no demonstrated relationship to any family outside South Asia.

Proposals linking it to Elamite in ancient Iran, and to Uralic, have been made repeatedly and none has been accepted. The most consequential open question concerns the Indus Valley civilisation. Dravidian is the leading candidate for the language of the Indus script, on the strength of Brahui's northwestern position and of proposed Dravidian substrate features in early Sanskrit, and the case cannot be tested because the script has not been read. That is a genuine gap rather than a controversy, and it is one of the places where a single decipherment would change a great deal at once.

The most important thing this family does in the history of religion is provide a devotional literature that is not in Sanskrit and does not depend on it. From roughly the sixth century onwards, poets in Tamil composed hymns to Shiva and to Vishnu in their own language, in the ordinary speech of the country rather than the priestly one, and those hymns were collected.

The Shaiva collection is the Tirumurai, which includes the songs of the Nayanars; the Vaishnava collection is the Divya Prabandham, the work of the Alvars. Both are treated in the south as scripture, recited in temple worship and commented on in the same way Sanskrit texts are, and the Prabandham is sometimes called the Tamil Veda. What that means in practice is that a major stream of Hindu devotion has a canonical language of its own, with its own commentators, its own temples and its own lineage of teachers, and that a picture of Hinduism drawn only from Sanskrit sources will miss it.

The bhakti movements that later spread across northern India in vernacular languages have their earliest sustained expression here. A language family is not usually a religious fact, and in this case it is one. Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam each carry devotional literatures of their own on the same pattern, and the Lingayat tradition of Karnataka, whose vachanas were composed in Kannada from the twelfth century, held explicitly that the vernacular was the right language in which to approach God and the priestly one was not.

Sources Hymns for the Drowning: Poems for Vishnu by NammalvarNammalvar, translated by A. K. Ramanujan with Speaking of SivaA. K. Ramanujan (translator)

Dravidian is a family of about twenty six languages, principally Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam in southern India, with Tulu, Kodava and a group of smaller languages in central India, and Brahui, spoken in Balochistan a long way from the rest. Bhadriraju Krishnamurti's comparative grammar is the standard modern account. The family is not related to Indo-Aryan, and the two have been in contact long enough to have reshaped one another.

That contact is itself a religious fact. Sanskrit acquired retroflex consonants, which Dravidian has and which Indo-European elsewhere does not, and the Dravidian languages took in enormous Sanskrit vocabulary for religious and philosophical concepts. The Indus valley script is undeciphered, and a Dravidian reading of it is one of the leading proposals and remains unproven; the atlas records that question as open.

Tamil has the oldest literature of the family and the oldest surviving in any Indian language other than Sanskrit, with the Sangam poems and then the Shaiva and Vaishnava hymns that gave bhakti its first vernacular canon. Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam each developed their own devotional literatures, and Kannada in particular produced the Virashaiva vachanas, short prose poems attacking temple religion and caste.

Beside the temple religion of the south runs a stratum of village deities, most of them goddesses, who are territorial rather than universal, are concerned with disease, protection and boundaries, and are served by non brahmin priests. Mariyamman, associated first with smallpox and later with fever generally, is the most widespread. These cults are older than, and largely independent of, the Sanskritic tradition layered above them, and they remain the ordinary religion of a great many villages.

Dravidian as a category also became a political identity in the twentieth century. The Dravidian movement in Tamil Nadu, associated with Periyar E. V. Ramasamy, mounted a direct attack on brahmin authority, on Sanskrit and on the religious hierarchy attached to them, and it produced an explicitly rationalist and often atheist politics that has governed the state for decades. Temple entry legislation and the appointment of non brahmin priests followed from it.

The atlas records this because it is a case of a linguistic classification becoming a religious and political programme, which is exactly the movement it warns against elsewhere. Here the direction was reversed. The family name was taken up by the people it named, and used against a religious hierarchy rather than to construct one.

Sources A Temple Festival of MariyammanPaul Younger with Periyar: A Study in Political AtheismKarthick Ram Manoharan