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a few words allied to Tamil words
a few words allied
to Tamil words. The only legitimate inference from this is that the Tamil
language or a language allied to it prevailed upto the North-west province in
ancient times. This inference is supported by another fact, viz., that the
modern dialects of Northern India now called Sanskritic or Gaudian, have a
fundamental grammatical frame work and a scheme of syntax, the same as that of
the Dravidian dialects, so much so that sentences from the one set of dialects
can be translated into any one of the other set of dialects by the substitution
of word for word without causing any breach of idiom. These facts can only prove
that people speaking dialects allied to Tamil once inhabited the whole of India
and not that these people must necessarily have come into India from outside the
country. No single fact has yet been adduced that compels us to believe that the
ancient people of India were not autochthones.''
(The History of the
Tamils by P. T. Srinivasa Iyenger, p.2.)
Where This
Evolution First Took Place
The five
sub-division of the habitable regions occur contiguous to each other and in a
small fraction of the earth's surface in India South of the Vindhyas. It is
therefore easy to understand how increase of population and alterations in the
natural supply of food-stuffs brought about here at different periods the
migration of men from region to region and the consequent development of the
different stages of human culture, the hunter, the nomad, the pastoral, the
coastal and the agricultural, due to the different stimuli provided by the
changing milieu; in other words, the geographical control of the growth of human
civilization can be worked out and set forth clear as on a map, by a study of
man's progress in this restricted portion of the surface of the earth. Outside
India, these five natural, regions occur on a vast scale, e.g., the Mullai, the
vast steppe land extending from the Carpathians to the foot hills of the Altais,
the Kurinji or the great mountain chain from the Pyrenees to the Himalayas and
beyond, forming a great girdle round the waist of mother earth the Neydal, the
coasts of the Mediterranean sea, and the Indian and the Atlantic oceans, and the
Palai, the great desert of Sahara and its continuation in Arabia, Persia and
Mongolia''. (Ibid., p.14.)
The myth of the
importation of the South Indian languages from outside India.
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