Note 22 — Introduction.

In the ‘Manual of Administration of the Madras Presidency,’ Dr. C. Macleane writes as follows. “The history proper of the south of India may be held to begin with the Hindu dynasties formed by a more or less intimate admixture of the Aryan and Dravidian systems of government. But, prior to that, three stages of historical knowledge are recognisable; first, as to such aboriginal period as there may have been prior to the Dravidian; secondly, as to the period when the Aryans had begun to impose their religion and customs upon the Dravidians, but the time indicated by the early dynasties had not yet been reached. Geology and natural history alike make it certain that, at a time within the bounds of human knowledge, Southern India did not form part of Asia. A large southern continent, of which this country once formed part, has ever been assumed as necessary to account for the different circumstances. The Sanscrit Pooranic writers, the Ceylon Boodhists, and the local traditions of the west coast, all indicate a great disturbance of the point of the Peninsula and Ceylon within recent times.22 Investigations in relation to race show it to be by no means impossible that Southern India was once the passage-ground, by which the ancient progenitors of Northern and Mediterranean races proceeded to the parts of the globe which they now inhabit. In this part of the world, as in others, antiquarian remains show the existence of peoples who used successively implements of unwrought stone, of wrought stone, and of metal fashioned in the most primitive manner.23 These tribes have also left cairns and stone circles indicating burial places. It has been usual to set these down as earlier than Dravidian. But the hill Coorumbar of the Palmanair plateau, who are only a detached portion of the oldest known Tamulian population, erect dolmens to this day. The sepulchral urns of Tinnevelly may be earlier than Dravidian, or they may be Dravidian.... The evidence of the grammatical structure of language is to be relied on as a clearly distinctive mark of a population, but, from this point of view, it appears that there are more signs of the great lapse of time than of previous populations. The grammar of the South of India is exclusively Dravidian, and bears no trace of ever having been anything else. The hill, forest, and Pariah tribes use the Dravidian forms of grammar and inflection.... The Dravidians, a very primeval race, take a by no means low place in the conjectural history of humanity. They have affinities with the Australian aborigines, which would probably connect their earliest origin with that people.” Adopting a novel classification, Dr. Macleane, in assuming that there are no living representatives in Southern India of any race of a wholly pre-Dravidian character, sub-divides the Dravidians into pre-Tamulian and Tamulian, to designate two branches of the same family, one older or less civilised than the other.