Page:Origin and spread of the Tamils.djvu/23



12 ORIGIN AND SPREAD OF THE TAMILS and connect them with flat-nosed aborigines of the Dravidian type. Sāyaṇa interprets it as asyarahita and means speechless. Not that they were all dumb but they spoke an unintelligible dialect as against Samsksta, literally a polished tongue. Various ingenious suggestions including their identification with the Iranians, have been made to identify these Dasyuš with some stock or other. The more satisfactory explanation seems to be to treat them as the uncultured peoples who lived in woods and hills, with no cultivated dialect and with no religious discipline. The Aitareya Brah mana mentions Dasyus as sons born of sage Vis'vāmitra whose name occurs in the third mandala of the Rg Vedasanhita. If the Dasyus are identified with the Dravidians as some scholars are inclined to, then the sage Vis'vāmitra must himself be a Dravidian. The fact is that the Dasyus were not non-Aryans. The theory--that the Dasyu-Dravidian inhabited the Punjab and the Ganges valley at the time of the so-called Aryan invasion of India, and overcome by the latter, they fled to South India and adopted it as their homecannot stand. To say that all India was a wild country once, and that it was civilized by the invading Dravidians first and by the invading Aryans next, cannot carry conviction home. This is to set aside completely the valuable source of information-archaeology. We have a continuity 18 of culture from Paleolithic to Neolithic, from Neolithic to Megalithic and Megalithic to Iron Age in South India. It cannot be that this primitive indigenous culture was buried by