Indus age (was: Re: RAJARAM EPISODE - BLOWN OUT OF PROPORTION)

[Venkatraman Iyer]

Prof. Sharan wrote:
>I believe that the Indus Valley civilization is a at the substratum
>of entire India, and not any particular region.

Sure. But how to account for the Dravidian which occupied a low status
in the eyes of Sanskrit texts in early times (Cf. Manu) and,
has increasingly contributed to the development of Sanskrit?
Both in terms of *syntax* and *loanwords* which features steadily
increase from Rgveda to Vedic and Epic material. Linguists
like Emeneau and Deshpande have proposed Dravidian bilinguals
co-opting and eventually going for a language shift to Indo-Aryan
languages. In this very list, it is made clear over the years
that Aryans and their languages immigrated into India after
the decline of Indus age and, Vedic culture is not the
high culture of Harappans. Of the two attested clasical
languages of India, Tamil obtains a very good chance once
Sanskrit is ruled out for Harappan high culture.
But there are all kinds of attempts to explain away Dravidian
from the Indus civilization. One reason is that
not many in the academia, both in India and the West, do not
read Tamil and other Dravidian literatures.

Regards,
V. Iyer



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