Dasyus and PaNis inRV

[Periannan Chandrasekaran]

--- "Narayan R. Joshi" <giravani at JUNO.COM> wrote:
> The academic understanding of the words"anasa" and "daasyu" has gone
> through a major change(Vidyasankar Sundaresan-Nov.7).Now the ancient Indian
> Dravidians are not to be grouped with RV Daasas and Dasyus. But I am
...
Parpola opines in his online article (that was posted at harappa.com/scripts)
summarizing his IVC findings that Dasyus were not Dravidians.


..> moved ahead).Long long ago it was accepted (not anymore)in the pre-history
> of India that white or fair color Aryan Indra destroyed forts of flatnose,
> dark color, curly hair Dravidians.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.
> Did the ancient Dravidians develop these features after entering the Indian
> sub-continent?

Scholars have repeatedly emphasized that Dravidians are mediterranean
caucasoid. (See KAN Sastri, Michigan Papers 1978, first article, Zvelebil etc.)
Associating flat-nose/curly-hair with Dravidians seems to be a layman's
(mis)conception stereotyping the prevalently dark skintone as going
hand-in-hand with non-caucasoid features.  Many laymen would be surprised to
find that even the scheduled castes of Tamilnadu have caucasoidal features.
Schedules tribes are a different matter but then they are historically not
mainstream Dravidians.


>o the best of my knowledge the ancient people from Central
> Asia were fair in color with respect to the average dark/brown color of the
> ancient Indians.The dark/brown population of Makuran coast could be due to
> the migrations from Oman/Yemen/Arabia regions in the known history.Now AIT
> is gone and AMT might be on the way to go.Will DMT(Dravidian Migration
> Theory) face the same future?Please correct my thinking if wrong.I would
> like to remain in step with New Scholarship and I do not want to fight the
> battles of the last century. Thanks.


That is really a problem created by Indian laymen both Dravidians and
Sanskritists not the much viled western Indologists who are actually in a
better position to view these facts.

I am often surprised to see in movies and informal videos of country side and
in photos appearing in scholarly books how featured Dravidian people are...
Actually a 1970s book by an American on Dravidian local goddesses, comments
below a photo of a group of country Dravidians (do not remember whether
scheduled caste or not) something to the effect of "note the caucasoid
features..".



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