Page:Tamil studies.djvu/30

Rh ﻿accept these more rigid social rules and practices developed by the Dravida Brahmans of South India, came to be distinguished as Pancha Gaudas. From the fact that the Malayalam-speaking Brahmans, the Nambudris, are not mentioned in this classification, it may be inferred that the division of Brahmans into Pancha Dravidas and Pancha Gaudas had taken place long before the evolution of the Malayalam language in the thirteenth century.

From what has been said above it would be clear that the term Dravida had no ethnological significance at first, but this it acquired later on. The definition of the word 'Dravida' quoted by Dr. Caldwell from Sanskrit lexicons 'as a man of out-cast tribe descended from a degraded Kshatriya’ is open to question. The genesis of the Dravida castes and tribes given here and that given by Manu cannot be accepted as literally true. It is one of those fictions, familar to Indian sociologists dealing with the question of the origin of caste by which the Brahmans got over the troubles and conflicts between themselves and the numerically stronger and socially more influential sections of the non-Brahmanical tribes on whom they imposed their culture and civilization

To Dr. Caldwell is due a further extension of the meaning of the term Dravida. When the comparative study of the South Indian languages was first started by him, the glossarial and grammatical affinities between them were so marked as to lead him to the conclusion that they were allied languages of the non-Aryan