Dravidian race

The Dravidian Race is the name sometimes still given to the peoples of southern and central India and northern Sri Lanka who speak Dravidian languages.

The Dravidian languages are grouped into Northern, Central and Southern categories. The Northern is mainly Brahui which is spoken in Northern or North Western Pakistan. The Central is made up of the hill languages. The southern is the most active and is further differentiated into the languages Tamil, Kannanda, Telugu and Malayalam. There has however been a great penetration of Sanskrit words into all four of these, the effected least being Tamil. These languages are called Dravidian for purely linguistic reasons; the peoples who use them are of varying racial types.

Some believe that Dravidian-speaking peoples may have been spread throughout the Indian subcontinent before the Aryans settled much of India. The early Indus Valley civilization (Harappan and Mohenjo Daro) is presumed to have been Dravidian. A theory which is controversial now, suggests that they were then forced southwards by the invasion of the Aryans.

Into the 21st century, Indians, with possible justification, continue to accuse the British Raj for exaggerating differences between northern and southern Indians, beyond actual anthropological differences, to help sustain their control of India. The British Raj ended in 1947. Yet all discussion of Aryan or Dravidian "races" remained highly controversial in India.

Some modern theories of the origins of both Hinduism and Buddhism focus on the resultant mixture of the "Aryan" and "Dravidian" cultures.