Negroids & Shudras, North-south

[Raveen Satkurunathan]

On Fri, 17 Mar 2000 17:09:21 -0700, Yashwant Malaiya
<malaiya at CS.COLOSTATE.EDU> wrote:

>Raveen Satkurunathan wote:
>
>>Pretty interesting that without the help of modern linguistics, old
Puranic
>>writers “some how” knew that the natives of Gujarat and Maharashtra were
>>Dravidian speaking although currently a majority of them speak in IE
>
>I don't know if there is any relationship with this, I know
>about a specific community in Maharashtra/Karnataka where
>many parents/grandparents speak Kannada but the children generally
>often speak Marathi.

True, another community, which has become complete Marathised, atleast in
the interior districts of Maharashtra are the Komatis who are Telugu
speaking. Further there are still, many Adivasis in Maharshatra who speak in
Dravidian languages (Gondi?) and it is only a question of time when these
people also will also acquire Marathi as their mother tongue.

This phenomenon of entire groups who have given up one or more languages to
acquire a culturally and "now" numerically "superior" language must have
gone on for a long time in Maharashtra because its caste structure reflects
the structure of castes in South India, Bengal and Orissa. Essentially there
are Brahmins and Shudras and nothing in between (there will be many
protestations :-)) the dominant Marathas are considered historically as
Shudras suggesting local origin and possibly Dravidian speaking.