Q: Fair Tamil Castes

[Samar Abbas]

Raveen Satkurunathan wrote:
> ... the Tamils ...migrating overland from around the Mediterranean...
>joined the Negroid peoples who were already settled on the sub-continent.^

  Do the fairer-skinned Tamils form a separate caste/s today ? What would
be the names of these castes (if any)? Does Tamil literature describe
these castes as historically fairer than others ? Like all others on this
list, I have come across both fair-skinned as well as purely black (and,
as Ven Tantra says so wonderfully, `purple') non-Brahmin Tamils and
wondered what was the castes of these persons. No books that I have read
shed any light on this question. Also, if the fairer Mediterranean Tamils
freely intermarried with the indigenous Negroid Tamils 2000 years ago. there
would be no Caucasian Tamils left today.

 Perhaps this may explain the Caucasian features in many South Indian
bronzes.

 Moreover, there should be at least some linguistic relic of this
Mediterranean/Negroid divide. However, scholars are almost universal in
classifying the Kurumba, Irula etc. languages as dialects of Tamil.
Or, are we to presume that the Mediterraneans adopted the Dravidian
languages and discarded their own ?

Also, is it possible to distinguish amongst these Caucasoid Tamils those
of Mediterranean descent and those of later Roman, Greek etc descent who
settled in Poompahar ?

Samar