Dasyus and PaNis in RV

[Swaminathan Madhuresan]

"Samar Abbas" <abbas at IOPB.RES.IN> wrote:
>  Europeans have been living in Africa for centuries (eg.
>Afrikaners, Kenyan whites, etc.); except for some `bronzing' of
>skin tone they do not yet show any development of thick nose or
>curly hair, which, if at all possible, would require at least
>1000-10,000 years. Even the proposed changeover from blonde to
>brunette hair has not taken place. Hence it is likely that the
>Dravidians already possessed these features when entering
>India.

 Even Greeks were discussing Indians being black: due to the sunlight
or by birth. Tamil literature routinely praises black skin color,
mAl, nAL-/naL-/nal-, karu ... When patrons are eulogized, their black
hand, 'karuGkai' is particularly mentioned. "karuGkai oL vAL ATavar"
etc., The "black hand" is metanymy for "the trunk of an elephant"
"a black cloud" etc., Black elephants pouring out water jets
is likened to the Chief's philanthrophy, ... Hart has discussed
how this black cloud of the monsoons motif gains currency in Sanskrit
and earlier, this theme is common when the Hero returns home in
the monsoon season after war or foreign trips in sangam texts.

See the contrast in how black is loathed and despised in the Rgveda
and the Avestan.

Prof. Hock gives a different explanation:
p. 155, Aryan and Non-Aryan in South Asia, 1999
"To be sure, Deshpande (1993) cites a Mahaabhaa.sya passage
which defines brahmins as light-complexioned and contrasts
them with a person that is 'dark' (or 'black') and sits in
the open market. However, as noted in Hock 1995a (note 28),
"there is nothing in the passage that forces us to view
this difference as one of inherited skin color; it is
entirely possible that the difference reflects occupational
differences and prejudices between the upper-caste brahmin
who is able to avoid the sun (by finding shelter inside,
under a tree, or under an umbrella) and the lower-caste
merchant who has to sit in the blazing sun of the open
market. Similar class prejudices were a feature of European
societies, before the idea caught on that having a nice
tan is beautiful. And anybody who has been to South Asia
knows that there they persist to the present day." "


>> To the best of my knowledge, the ancient Central Asia(around
>>4000 BCE) did not show any signs of being populated by the
>>people with features and skin color attached to the ancient
>>Dravidians.


>It is hypothesised that the Dravidians were displaced from
>these regions as well. Certain place-names are said to be
>of Dravidian origin.

B. Sergent has written recently that Dravidians had
reached India well before TEN thousand years ago.

<<<
The latest theory I have seen concerning this matter is given
by Bernard Sergent in his recent book "Gen�se de l'Inde". On
the basis of physical anthropological material as well as
cultural and linguistic, he claims that the Dravidians migrated
from Africa and ended up in India after a stay in the Mediterranean
area. The alleged similarities between Dravidians and Uralian
languages is supposed to have come about through the mechanisms of
 area linguistics, indicating that at least some Dravidians and
some Uralians lived in the same area for long enough to influence
each other's language. Incidentally, Sergent does not believe that
 the Harappans were Dravidians - that is, except for the population
in the south of the IVC area. Again, his reasons are anthropological.
(He does not suppose that the IVC culture was monolingual).
The Dravidians are supposed to have reached India before the 8th millennium.
BTW: anthropologically they are Mediterranean, and therefore what we might
 term black whites. The question then becomes: were they white originally
only to become black, or is it rather vice versa? According to Sergent,
it is the whites who have lost their original black color - I assume due to
the bleaching northern climate :-).
>>> L. M. Fosse's posting


Cavalli-Sforza, "The History and Geography of Human Genes". Princeton
 University Press 1994.

 "1. The first component (Australoid or Veddoid) is an older substrate of
 Paleolithic occupants, perhaps represented today by a few tribals, but
 probably almost extinct or largely covered by successive waves and
 presumably leaving no linguistic relics, except perhaps for the Hunza and
 Nahali. There seems to be no linguistic trace of the Australoid-Negrito
 language but Andamanese speak languages of the Indo-Pacific family. This may
 or may not be their original language.
 2. The second is a major migration from Western Iran that began in early
 Neolithic times and consisted of the spread of early farmers of the eastern
 horn of the Fertile Crescent. These people were responsible for most of the
 genetic background of India; they were Caucasoid and most probably spoke
 proto-Dravidian languages. These languages are now confined mostly, but not
 exclusively, to the south because of the later arrivals of speakers of
 Indo-European languages, who imposed their domination on most of the
 subcontinent, especially the northern and central-western part. But the
 persistence of a very large number of speakers of Dravidian languages in the
 center and south is an indirect indication that their genetic identity has
 not been profoundly altered by later events.
 3. The most important later arrival was that of Indo-European speakers, the
 Aryans, who, about 3500 years ago entered the Indian subcontinent from their
 original location north of the Caspian Sea, via Turkmenia and northern Iran,
 AFghanistan, and Pakistan (see sec. 4.6).
 [.......]
 4. In the northeast and in the center, the many populations speaking
 Austroasiatic and Sino-Tibetan languages are a witness to other major
 migrations and infiltrations, mostly from the east and northeast. These are
 even less well known than the other three components and probably more
 diverse. In the case of the Munda, their genetic similarity with Dravidians
 indicates that their migration may have taken place before the Aryan
 expansion to the eastern part of India. [p. 241]"




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