The often perceived and frequently quoted racial division in India between the fairer Aryan North and the darker Dravidian South is pernicious and dangerous.
The British gave currency to this view of racial divide in India. It was part of their “divide and rule” strategy. The Northern people in India got especially sucked into this interpretation of history because it made the “Aryan” northerners appear racially closer to the white races of Europe. This viewpoint is also popular in Sri Lanka.
The Singhalese believe that they are the descendants of Aryans from the North of India. This short article summarizes recent scholarship on the Aryan invasion theory. New studies reject the view that Aryans entered India from the outside. They also reject the notion that the Dravidian people were the conquered races, or that the Dravidians were pushed down south by the invading Aryans.
Sri Aurobindo (1872-1950), a scholar of Latin and Greek as well as of Sanskrit, debunked this theory of the North-South racial divide in India. He disagreed with the theory that the languages of North and South India are unrelated. Sri Aurobindo’s study of the Tamil led him to discover that the original connection between the Sanskrit and Tamil languages was “far closer and more extensive than is usually supposed.” These languages are “two divergent families derived from one lost primitive tongue.” And, “My first study of Tamil words had brought me to what seemed a clue to the very origins and structure of the ancient Sanskrit tongue.” –See The Secret of the Veda, V 10, the Centenary Edition, p 36, 46. Sri Aurobindo also noted that a large part of the vocabulary of the South Indian languages (Tamil, Kannada, Telugu, Malayalam) is common with Sanskrit. Hindus collectively have no memory of an Aryan invasion of India that supposedly took place around 1,500 B.C. Hindu epics do not mention any such invasion. Surely, the extensive Hindu literature would describe the Aryan invasions if such had indeed taken place. Swami Vivekananda remarked: “As for the truth of these theories, there is not one word in our scriptures, not one, to prove that the Aryan ever came from anywhere outside of India, and in ancient India was included Afghanistan. There it ends.” (Collected Works, Vol. 3). Read on...
