Page:Tamil studies.djvu/62

Rh been the home speech of a Dravidian tribe in Baluchistan. The latest verdict on that language is that of Mr. Denys Bray, I. C. S. In his monograph on that tongue he says that “it is sprung from the same source as the Dravidian language group; it has freely absorbed the alien vocabulary of Persian, Baluchi, Sindhi and other neighbouring languages; but in spite of their inroads its grammatical system has preserved a sturdy existence.' Mr. Bray goes on to give us a word of advice so that we may not identify the Brahuis with the Dravidians. He says 'We can no longer argue with the child-like faith of our forefathers from philology to ethnology, and assume without further ado that this race of Baluchistan whose speech is akin to the languages of the Dravidian peoples of Southern India is itself Dravidian ; that it is in fact the rear guard or the van-guard according to the particular theory we may affect of a Dravidian migration from North to South or from South to North.'

The term 'Dravidian' means one thing for an ethnologist and another for a philologist. Sometimes both are confounded. The peoples whose homespeech at the present day is a Dravidian language, are not necessarily Dravidians by race ; and there are non-Aryan tribes who speak an Aryan language. To avoid further confusion and misapprehension which have unnecessarily led to conflicting theories, it must be said once for all here that the term 'Dravidian' does not include the very black hill and forest