Monday, April 28, 2008

From genetic studies to literary evidence - the non-existent Dravidas and dalits.



Comment by Anonymous on "Genetic studies - Dravidas and Kashmiri Pandits share a common ancestor."


“THE RESULTS ARE AS EXPECTED, THERE ARE DRAVIDANS, AUSTRALOIDS, MOGOLOIDS, ARYANS AND OTHER RACIAL GROUPS THAT IS PROVED. THOUGH THE PROJECT IS SMALL, THE SAMPLES ARE SMALL AND SO THE FINDINGS TOO ARE NOT LIMITED, A COMPREHENSIVE STUDY IS STILL REQUIRED.


OUT OF INDIA THEORY TO THE DUSTBN NOW, DRAVIDAN AND ARYANS ARE MERELY LINGUISTIC GROUPS BUT BELONG TO SAME STOCK, ARE SAME PEOPLE, PROVED FALSE. THERE MUST BE A STUDY TO PROVE THAT THE DALITS TOO ARE NON ARYANS. THAT IS EAGERLY EXPECTED, SOME RESULTS HAVE ALREADY PROVED THAT. STILL A DETAILED ONE IS REQD.”

____________________________

Jayasree’s reply:-

Reconstruction of the past can yield a true picture or nearer to a true picture,

only if we deal with it from different sources.

Genetic study is one, but it can not give a true picture of the people of very olden times

in a country like ours which has been continuously inhabited from very long

and where free mix of people had happened from very early times.


I suggested a genetic study among certain sections in my post

"Genetic studies - Dravidas and Kashmiri Pandits share a common ancestor."



because that was the recorded case of merger of people,

by Nacchinaarkiniyar in his prefactory note to Tholkaapiyam.

Not just a few people had migrated then.

Entire families of 18 types of Royal descendants,

18 types of feudal lords and tribes called Aruvaalar had migrated then.

People from different sections of Dwaraka had merged into Tamil society.

But this Tamil society that existed then also had its roots from different places of India.



The Cholan kings claimed

(copper plate inscriptions of Thiruvaalangaadu and in sangam texts)

that they are descendants of Sibi of Ikshvaku race in which Rama was born.


Cherans claimed that they are descendants of Parasurama, an avatara of Vishnu.

There is proof for this claim in PuranaanUru.


Pandyans claimed that they were descendants of Goddesses Gowri, wife of Lord Shiva. .

The Pandyans were located in the deep south in an area spread to more than 1000 miles

south of the present day Kanyakumari.


They only nurtured Tamil in the far-off kingdom which is now under the sea,

even when the present day Tamil nadu was not populated.

When a deluge happened corresponding to the time of deluge at Dwaraka,

they moved to the present day Tamil nadu.

Until then Cherans aand Cholans only were ruling Tamil nadu.


The Pandyans brought Shiva cult with them

although Tamil was prevalent in Cholans and Cheran lands

before the Pandyans migrated.


It will be nothing be short of idiotism to say that

these Pandyans with their Tamil subjects were Australoids or Africans or

Dravidas or what ever.


Any further tracing of their origins is to be related to Puranic stories of

Daksha Prajapathi whose daughter married Shiva of Kailash

- a North Indian / so-called Aryan in the words of Dravidian Chauvinists,

but who can be regarded as Dalit too in their nomenclature.

Because shiva exhibited tendencies of ‘pulaiyan’ in Tamil, whereas he is God.

This must make the Dravidian and caste talkers to realize

that they need to go a long way before understanding

what all these terms were meant in this country, in this dharma.



From the descendant of Gowri, daughter of Daksha prajapathi,

Pandavas had emerged.

The very ancient sangam texts talk of them as “panchavas”

(coming in the tradition of Goddesses Parvathi, also known as Pancha-paNi )

and “Gowrias” – coming in the tradition of Gowri.

They adopted Shiva, their son-in-law as their God.

Shiva in various time periods had married the incarnations of Parvathi and

one such marriage is again into the Pandyan family,

to Meenakshi,

which is a later day legend.


It is really a great insult to call the people of this tradition as Dravidan.




Dravidan came much later – perhaps just 1500 years ago.

It is not about a race.

It is about a place where people had ‘run to rest’

There are evidences by way of inscriptions too

(which I will be bringing in subsequent posts on One Aryavartha theory)

that the migrants had literally run to Tamil nadu – infact all over south India

which are now known as Tamilnadu, Karnataka and Kerala-

though they initially settled in Karnataka and parts of Kerala.

They were called as Dravidas by a section of their co-habitants of Dwaraka

(first mention of dravida found in Raja Tarangini of Kashmir)

who chose to migrate towards Kashmir after being dis-located

by the surging seas in Dwaraka.


Their trail is what we see as Indus-saraswad civilization in the Harappan excavations.

I make this claim based on the dating done so far.


Harappan settlements had happened after Dwaraka deluge

and we have evidence from Mahabharatha that

the Dwarakans vacated the city as and when it was being consumed by the seas -

with a section of them heading towards Himalayas along the river Dwaraka,

with Arjuna leading them.


It is possible that many of them settled on the way to North,

(which later sprang up as Harappan civilization)

while some of them headed for Kashmir, accompanying Arjuna.

It must be noted that the best of ancient wisdom and books of ancient wisdom

remained with Kashmiris only.


Even Ramanujacharya made a visit to Kashmir just to have a reading of those books

which were said to contain main inputs on Brahmasutras.

Ramanuja wrote his commentary on Brahma sutra,

based on the version found

in those books which were in possession of Kashmiri pandits.


It is significant to note that Ramanuja’s theory was centered on

the supremacy of Vishnu or Narayana whose incarnation was Krishna.

The source books in possession of Kashmirs must also have contained

notions of supremacy of Narayana.


This is understandable if we accept that they had their roots in Dwaraka

or to Krishna’s tradition.

Coming to the comment by anonymous,

there was no race called Aryan, non-aryan or dravida.

These names were based on attributes (for Aryan) and location (for Dravida).


There had been free movement of people for all times in the past-

Sibi’s decendant coming to South India and

establishing Cholan kingdom is a point in reference.


The people spoke different languages

but followed the same culture, the Vedic culture.

Everywhere on the globe from Southern to Northern hemisphere,

the same practices had been there,

the same kind of division into 4 varnas had been there.

The Demons (rakshsas) and yakshas were there in the south.

So too the Pandyas - but they were closer to equator.

Generally those in the Southern hemisphere were followers of Shiva.




The attempt to classify them on the basis of Language will yield

misleading conclusions than to lead to truth.

It is because at all times and at all societies,

at least two languages had persisted,

one for education and the elites and one for mundane or common place use.


To show how the linguistic analysis may yield to wrong conclusions,

let us see the present condition.


Today we have English for education and different tongues for common use.

Any researcher who come after, say, 2000 years later,

if he happens to get hold of our present day coins,

will end up with a ‘finding’ that English was spoken all over India

and that English was the mother tongue of all Indians

and all the India was one people, perhaps the descendants of the British!

He will conclude so because any coin excavated anywhere in India will be the same.

And all our coins contain information in English only.

By looking at the coins,

he will even conclude that we are very primitive,

and agrarian only with no knowledge of modern gadgets.

This is what our coins depict of ourselves.




He may even be confused with other ‘findings’ on linguistics

from different parts of India,

and conclude that an English speaking culture

using coinage for trade in agricultural products existed throughout India

along with others who spoke a variety of languages (our vernacular tongues).

He may even devise a theory that this English speaking people

were in collision with those of vernacular languages.




So all this talk about deciphering language on the basis of archaeological findings

will not yield correct picture.




Fortunately for us, sangam texts and Vedic texts are there

which can be dated based on the information in them.

The information they yield is that

the culture was one, only Vedic gods were worshiped throughout.

People were one.


Whatever be the regional differences and linguistic differences,

they followed the same culture, the same gods and the same Dharma.

The language of scriptures was Sanskrit

and language of the commoner was different in different places.

The scriptures were in due course adopted in local languages too.




About dalits.

The dalits, which the anonymous wants to be proved as non-aryans,

also may prove to be otherwise.

Because there were no dalits in India in the sangam period or

in the Vedic period.

Some were identified so, by the others in the later period

in a bid to perpetuate work-based differences into social inequalities.


In ancient texts,

there is at only one place that the word “panchama” appears.

It is in Jyothisha.

Jyothisha speaks of a sastra called “Panchama sastra”

Panchama sastra is the sakuna or nimitta sastra,

which is about predicting future

based on some naturally occurring events.

This sastra is called as Panchama, beacsue it is understood by the 5th varna.

There were only 4 varnas.

The 5th varna is the combination of all 4 varnas.


Each varna was identified as being capable of certain activities.

The activity that can be done by all the 4 varnas is identifying sakuna.

All the people were capable of knowing this.

That is why Sakuna sastra was known as

Panchama sastra.

I wish people know the past with its culture, its ways and terminologies

before jumping into conclusions.




The dalit is what is created by people –

not by the system of Varna dharma,

not by Aryan or Tamil culture.

(Yes, Tamil texts too speaks of varna variations and

we have definitions of this in the form of Tamil sutras.)


Any Dalit will share the same genes of the rest of the population.


But there are bound to be a mix-up from different parts of the world,

because people had been attracted to this place from time immemorial.


The mix-up was not by invasions

but by trading and other interests.




As Megasthanes noted in Indica in 3rd century BC,

The people of Aryavartha

“never invaded others and was never invaded” and

“existed long before the ideas of civilisation evolved elsewhere.”