A History of South India from Prehistoric Times to the Fall of Vijayanagar c8.36

c8.36

There is a divergence of opinion among scholars as to which particular race was responsible for the introduction of the Austro-Asiatic languages into India. The proto-Australoid, the Mongolian and the proto-Mediterranean have all been suggested by different writers. Racial prehistory when correlated with linguistic prehistory seems to suggest the following provisional general conclusions. Indo-Aryan was the latest language family to reach India, and it seems reasonable to ascribe it to the Nordics, the last ethnic element to arrive. But the Nordics were by no means a pure stock when they entered India; on their way they must have absorbed much of the Alpine element of the Pamirs and their neighbourhood. For a similar reason, Dravidian must have been the speech of the round-heads, particularly the Armenoids who represent the earlier amongst the two strata of round-heads in India, and Austric the language of the Mediterraneans. About the language of the other ethnic elements noted above we have no knowledge.