The Cambridge History of India, Vol. I: Ancient India v1.c31.s2.4

v1.c31.s2.4

At some very early date, several millennia before the Christian era, the greater part of India was inhabited by a dark negroid race of low culture characterised more or less by the physical features now known as ‘Dravidian.’ This early people however should more properly be termed *pre-Dravidian*. In course of time another race, higher in culture and speaking a language of ‘Scythian’ affinities, from which are derived the tongues now known as ‘Dravidian,’ gradually made its way from the north or north-west—probably through Baluchistān—into the plain of the Indus, and thence ultimately passed down into the regions south of the Vindhya. This race may be called the *proto-Dravidian*. Wherever it came, it mixed its blood to a greater or less degree with that of the earlier inhabitants. From this combination have arisen the Dravidians of history, who have preserved few traces of the physical characteristics of the proto-Dravidians, whatever those may have been¹. Most of the pre-Dravidian tribes in the countries south of the Vindhya adopted the speech of the proto-Dravidians, while they absorbed their blood, notably in the centre and south of the peninsula, the Tamil, Kannada, and Telugu regions. In Gujarāt the waves of Āryan immigration gradually submerged Dravidian blood and speech; in Mahārāshṭra the same influences obliterated the language, and the same has happened in Kaliṅga (now Orissa and part of the Circārs), where a Dravidian language, the Telugu, survives only in the southern districts.