Summary - Lesson 2

1. Lesson 2
Inventing the
Dravidian Race

2. This chapter will explain :
 Imaginary histories and racial myths
• Inventing the Dravidian Race
• Linguistic separatism
 De-Indianizing the Tamil Tradition
• Christianizing the Thirukural
• Mapping Saivism on to Christianity
• Revisionist History of Classical Tamil Literature
 Horrible legacies of Invasion-cum-Racial Theories
• Srianka,
• Rwanda and
• Afro-Dalit Project

3. 2.1.1. Imaginary
histories and racial myths
Application of Race Science to India

4. Imaginary histories and racial myths
 Colonial administrators and evangelists were able to
divide and rule the peoples of the Indian subcontinent.
 Based on imaginary histories and racial myths – to the
extent of inventing an entire race called ‘Dravidians’.
 How evangelical and colonial interests worked in
tandem with ethno-linguistic scholarship to fabricate
the Dravidian identity.

5. The Birth of
Linguistic Separatism
Separation of Tamil from rest of Indian Languages

7. Francis Whyte Ellis and Alexander D.
Campbell
H.T. Colebrooke and William Carey – Sanskrit unified all the
Indian languages.
Turned upside down Linguistic perspective.
Tamil and Telugu belong to a different language family from other
Indian languages.
No Indian thinker had made such a claim before.

8. Ellis and Campbell : Mosaic ethnology
 William Jones considered Sanskrit to
be the language of Ham.
 Other scholars claimed that Sanskrit
descended from Noah’s oldest son,
Japheth.
 By the process of elimination the
remaining son of Noah, Shem, must
be the ancestor of the Dravidian
people.

9. John Stevenson - Brian Hodgson :
 Race based perspective.
 Invented the term ‘Tamulian’ - non-Aryan
indigenous population of India.
 Lumped all the languages that are today
classified in the Dravidian and Munda
families that allegedly predated the
arrival of Sanskrit from outside.

10. Bishop Robert Caldwell :
Comparative Grammar of the Dravidian
Race,
Dravidians were in India before the Aryans,
but got cheated by the Brahmins, who
were the cunning agents of the Aryan.
Dravidians needed to be liberated by
Europeans like him.
Complete removal of Sanskrit words from
Tamil to free Dravidian mind from the
superstitions imposed by Aryans.

11. A Conspiracy Theory is Born:
Cunning Aryan Brahmins
Exploited Innocent Dravidians
Everything good in Tamil literature is Christian influence. Everything bad in Tamil
literature is Brahmin influence and must be removed.

12. Missionary’s two pronged approach :
 First, they intensely studied the devotional Tamil literature and
praised it in glowing terms to Tamil scholars.
 Second, they projected the Tamil culture as being very different and
totally independent from the rest of India.

13. Discovering Christianity
in Tamil Literature
 It became strategic to show that Tamil religion had strong
ethical underpinnings, on par with ‘civilized’ religions, and that
‘civilized’ meant monotheistic.
 These positive features were isolated and claimed to be
indigenous to the Tamils, and shown to be in opposition to the
‘foreign’ traits that were attributed to the Aryans.

14. Linking Dravidian Ideology
with Christianity
 Two kinds of Tamil religious literature became privileged.
• One kind was a universal, ‘nonsectarian’ humanism, that was
best embodied in the Kural belonging to the post-Sangam
Age.
• The other was the Saiva Siddhanta corpus of scriptures,
seen as representing a native monotheistic counterpart to
Christianity.

15. Linking Dravidian Ideology
with Christianity
Identifying two key steps in the way these Tamil classics were
used:
• first, separating Brahmins and non- Brahmins using the Kural;
and
• second, linking Dravidian ideology with Saiva Siddhanta as an
interim step towards further linking it with Christianity

16. 2.1.2. De-Indianizing
the Tamil Traditions

18. Three main elements
 Thirukural
 G.U. Pope, an evangelist, maintained that it was Christian influence on Thiruvalluvar that
produced this literary work.
 Christian scholars at his time, and for decades later, rejected this theory. However, it is being
revived today by evangelical movements in Tamil Nadu.
 Saiva Siddhanta
 An indirect and diluted form of Christianity that works as a stepping stone towards direct,
pure Christianity.
 Tamil Literature
 Unconnected with rest of India
 Closer to Christian theology

19. 2.1.2a. Christianizing the
Thirukural

20. Christianizing the Thirukural
 Pope - A missionary Indologist who played
the lead role in claiming Tamil classical
literature to be un-Indian, un-Hindu, and
linked to Christianity.
 Thirukural - learned ethics from Christianity,
and that he was sharing it through his poem
so that the simple-minded Tamil people could
benefit from Christian ethics.
George Uglow Pope
(1820–1908)

21. Christianizing the Thirukural
“….Christian influences were at the time
at work in the neighborhood, and that
many passages are strikingly Christian in
their spirit. I cannot feel any hesitation in
saying that the Christian Scriptures were
among the sources from which the poet
derived his inspiration….”
G. U. Pope
(1820–1908)

22. Thirukural – Hindu influence
 Kama - 250 couplets of Thirukural’s third book, that are devoted to
Kama Purushartha.
 Kural refers to the Puranas and other Hindu texts in many of its
couplets, including frequent references to Hindu gods. Ex : Vamana
and Lakshmi.
 Moksha vs Trivarga.
• Economist Ratan Lal Bose : Arthasastra
• Justice Rama Jois : Manusmriti

23. 2.1.2b. Mapping
Saivism on to Christianity

24. Mapping
Saivism on to Christianity
 First encounter with Saivism, the protestant missionary scholars
condemned Saivism in the strongest words possible.
 It proves counterproductive.
 Strategy changed – Appropriation rather than Denigration.
 Saivism - shared common features with Christianity. Ex: One God, Guru
etc.
 Influences
• Good – Christian
• Bad – corruption from Hinduism

25. Eliminating every trace of Hinduism
 In 1853, when a Christian Tamil convert, Vedanayakam Sastri,
composed Tamil hymns for church liturgy, Bishop Pope
vehemently opposed him on the grounds that the composition
contained a traditional Tamil poetic signature element, which
Pope rejected as un-Christian.
 This missionary success in selectively appropriating and
spreading confusion has permeated academic Tamil studies
ever since.

26. 2.1.2c. Revisionist History of
Classical Tamil Literature

27. M.S. Purnalingam Pillai
 M.S. Purnalingam Pillai took the missionary thesis as its basis
and framed Tamil literary history in terms of the Aryan/Dravidian
struggle.
 The Kural and Saiva Siddhanta were recontextualized as part of
this framing.
 Pillai assigned the Kural to the Sangam period up to 100 CE,
which he claimed was the most influential Tamil period and free
from the influence of Aryans and Sanskrit.

28. M.S. Purnalingam Pillai
 Upto 100 CE - the Sangam period – I - Kural - free
from the influence of Aryans and Sanskrit.
 100 CE and 600 CE - Buddhists and the Jains –
peaceful non-Tamil outsiders.
 700 CE to 900 CE - ‘The Age of Religious Revival’ –
Tamil religion began to reassert itself after several
centuries of darkness.
 Several shameful compromises with ‘Aryanism’.
Purging all these influences.

29. Purging the Saiva Siddhanta
from Aryan and Puranic influences
“…..The Saiva Siddhanta is the indigenous
philosophy of South India and the choicest
product of the Tamilian intellect. [. . .] This high
and noble system, based on the Agamas or
Saiva scriptures, was corrupted by the puranic
writers, whose sole object was to reconcile the
Vedas and the Agamas [. . .] ….The Tamilar,
therefore, are in duty, bound to throw off the
puranic veil which dims their vision and to
realise the old conception of Him as enshrined
in the ancient Tamil poems based on the
Tamilian Agamas….”

30. M.S. Purnalingam Pillai
 A Primer of Tamil Literature - university examination
needs, had an appendix with sample questions for
students.
 Through its widespread usage, it became what
Ronald Inden has called the ‘hegemonic text’.
 Rise of Tamil nationalism - against the ‘Aryan
religion’.
 Call for return to an imagined ancient pristine past.

32. 2.2. Horrible legacies of
Invasion-cum-Racial Theories
Three Case Studies : Srianka, Rwanda and Afro-Dalit Project

33. 2.2.1. Case Study 1 :
Dravidian Racism and Sri Lanka

34. Dravidian Racism and Sri Lanka
 We have seen how the academic study of languages played a
role in European Race Science, and how colonial
administrators and evangelicals adapted this scholarship for a
divide-and-conquer strategy.
 In Sri Lanka, pure fantasy was added to deepen the divisions
of the racial identities.
 These are so strong today that people shed blood over them.

35. Aryan – Sinhalese Identity
1.The Sri Lankan Sinhalese began to see themselves as Aryans
who had discovered Sri Lanka and brought civilization to it. In
the process, they stigmatized Tamils as an inferior race.
2.The Dravidian myth of the Lemurian origins allowed Tamils to
claim that they were the indigenous population of Sri Lanka,
and to describe the Sinhalese as alien Aryan intruders.

37. The lost continent of Lemuria
 Similarities between the plants and animals of the two continents of
Africa and India
 British zoologist Philip Lutley Sclater – 1864
 According to this theory, a massive continent called Lemuria once
spread across the vast Indian Ocean region from present-day
Madagascar to India and Sumatra, and then it became submerged
beneath the Indian Ocean.
 Natural sciences was used to support racist notions

38. The lost continent of Lemuria

39. The lost continent of Lemuria
‘The Tamils or Tamilar were certainly the
natives of the ancient Tamilaham or
Lemuria, a continent in the Indian Ocean
about the equator, submerged a hundred
centuries ago’.
Native Tamil scholars felt proud of this
mythic sunken continent of their
ancestors

40. T.R. Sesha Iyengar’s
Who then are these Dravidians?
 “…They form the original type of the
population of India . . . The Hebrew scriptures
have preserved a distinct account of an
appalling deluge . . . Geological research has
shown that the Indian Ocean was once a
continent and that this submerged continent,
sometimes called Lemuria, originally extended
from Madagascar to Malay Archipelago
connecting South India with Africa and
Australia…”

41. Lemuria origin + Brahmin
Conspiracy
A recipe for separatism and fragmentation

42. Devaneya Pavanar (1902–81) :
An Indian Chrsitian Tamil Scholar
“…Westerners do not know as yet, that Tamil is a highly
developed classical language of Lemurian origin, and has
been, and is being still, suppressed by a systematic and
coordinated effort by the Sanskritists both in the public
and private sectors, ever since the Vedic mendicants
migrated to the South, and taking utmost advantage of
their superior complexion and the primitive credulity of the
ancient Tamil kings, posed themselves as earthly gods
(Bhu-suras) and deluded the Tamilians into the belief that
their ancestral language or literary dialect was divine or
celestial in origin…”

43. Theosophy :
Buddhism Uses Aryans to
Counter Evangelism

44. Aryans- Sinhalese
 Max Muller–Caldwell camp won in shaping the consensus that Sinhalese
and Tamil are two separate linguistic and racial categories.
 Scholars like Dharmapala; a Sri Lankan Buddhist monk and Alfred Ernst
Buultjens; a Dutch convert to Buddhism.
 Popularizing the Sinhalese-Buddhist-Aryan identity among the Sri Lankan
public.
 Tamils as hadi demalu (filthy Tamils). Sri Lankan Tamils and Africans as
essentially inferior to Aryans

45. Clash of Colonial
Constructs:
Aryan-Buddhist-Sinhalese
vs. Dravidian-Saivite-Tamil

46. Sri Lanka
30 year civil war
80,000 killed
9,00,000
displaced
Failed State

47. 2.2.2. Case Study 2 :
Rwandan genocide

48. Hutu vs Tutsi
 Agricultural people were considered
Hutu, while the cattle-owning elite were
identified as Tutsi.
 Tutsis are believed to be the Hamitic
people.
 The majority of Hutus are believed to be
Bantu.
 Tutsis - foreigners, invaders or migrants.
Hutus - older race but not the original
one.
 Striking Similarities with AIT

49. Rwanda
Killed 1,070,014 in
100 days.
400,000 orphans
Thousands of
widows, many of
whom were
subjected to rape,
are now HIV-
positive.

50. Control of Narratives
 The preceding sections have shown how invented histories, identities, and
racial categories were formed and nurtured by colonial powers.
 Even with the end of colonialism, such categories survive because they serve
vested interests.
 Control of narrative offers the colonizing civilization not only cultural superiority
but also economic advantages and political dominance over the controlled
civilization.
 Once the native peoples have passively accepted the imposed narrative, civil
wars can be triggered.
 This has been true of both Rwanda and Sri Lanka, where the internal
fragments were nurtured to the point of genocidal conflicts.

51. 2.2.3. Case Study 3 :
The Afro-Dalit Project
Striking parallel between Rwanda and South India

52. The Afro-Dalit Project
 Dravidian separatism = academic studies + evangelical ambitions +
administrative projects.
 Similar elements in the parallel Dalit empowerment movement.
 The word ‘Dalit’ - ‘broken’ and ‘untouchable’. They can be found all over
India – don’t share a common ethnic or religious heritage.
 Caste = Race. Tracing it to the Hamitic myth in the Western Bible.
 Dalit exploited by invader called Aryan + Brahmin

53. Aryan/Dravidian
and Hutu/Tutsi
Parallels
 In both South India and Rwanda,
relations between two local groups
were reinterpreted in a racial
framework with conspiracy
theories and negative stereotyping
of one group as cunning and
scheming, and the other as a pure
and innocent victim.
 In India, this type of discourse is
becoming more elaborate and
institutionalized, developing into a
hate narrative.

54. Dalits in India vs
Blacks in the United States
 A common racial origin for Dalits and Blacks.
 The Dalit activism based on this ideology finds support from
Western evangelists, left-liberal NGOs, and government
bodies.
 The proponents of the Afro-Dalit project claim Hinduism to be
a racist structure.

55. What Rwandan Hutus had been
taught about Tutsi :
‘….The ‘Tuutsi’ invaders conquered the land that once had
belonged to the ‘Hutu’. But they accomplished this appropriation
not simply by violent means. And here begins a second layer of
meanings of the ‘Tuutsi’/‘Hutu’ pair: They, the ‘Tuutsi’, did so by
trickery: . . . Before the Tutsi came, the Hutu were not Hutu at all;
they were simply abantu which . . . signifies in Kirundi ‘the Bantu
peoples’ or simply, ‘human beings’. . . . The name Hutu, the
refugees said, was imported by the Tutsi from their home in the
north and means ‘slave’ or ‘servant’. Thus . . . ‘we became their
slaves’…’

56. If one substitutes Aryan for Tuutsi,
and Dravidian for Hutu, the myth becomes what
Caldwell wrote in south India
‘…the Brahmanas acquired their ascendancy by their intelligence
and their administrative skill. . . . The Brahmans who came in
‘peaceably, and obtained the kingdom by flatteries’ may probably have
persuaded the Dravidians that in calling them Sudras they were
conferring upon them a title of honor. If so, their policy was perfectly
successful; for the title of Sudra has never been resented by the
Dravidian castes..’

57. Converting academic theories into
social movement.
‘…Comrades, we are the original
inhabitants and descendants of the race
that ruled this land. We are second to no
other race in pride, valor, intelligence,
force and civilization. Yet a small group of
barbaric, nomadic, non-working race of
usurpers has enslaved us for thousands of
years. This minority race had no weapons
like swords. Yet they have reduced us to
the level of beasts while they have
acquired for themselves economics,
politics and theology…’
EVR call for Dravidians
to rise against north Indians :

58. Lloyd Rudolph explains the violence
being generated by this movement:
‘….On occasion, DK Leader E.V. Ramaswami Naicker has called for
Brahmin killings and burning of agraharams (Brahmin quarters of
cities and towns) . . . These various elements of Dravidian movement’s
populism have been linked together and given overall coherence by the
conspiratorial and demonological theme of anti-Brahminism. . . . The
movement also expresses itself in direct action. In recent years EVR and
DK have carried on campaigns to erase Hindi lettering from railroad
signs, to burn effigies of Rama and smash ‘idols’ of Hindu deities, to
burn the Indian flag, or remove or erase the term Brahmin displayed at
‘Hotels’ (cafes or restaurants) to burn the Indian Constitution and
destroy statues of Gandhi and to burn the maps of India…..’

59. Hate literature becoming part of
textbooks :
 ‘….The Brahmins possessed
separate culture and language.
They considered the people of
Tamil Nadu as their enemies. . . .
They never mingled with local
population and led a separate life.
. . . The Brahmins who worked in
temples imposed the Agama
principles of the Aryans in the
religious worship….’
History of Tamil Nadu
up to 2000 AD
Written by the head of
the history department
at N.M. Christian
College.

60. American History Defines the
Afro-Dravidian Movement

61. Afro-Dravidian Movement
 The myth of the white-Aryan-barbaric-Brahmin-cunning-invader
versus the native innocent- cultured-black-Dravidian was given
boost.
 The Biblical myth of Ham - to project black supremacy to counteract
white supremacy.
 Christianity is black and Africa is the source of the Ten
Commandments.
 Are Dravidians of African Origin? Are Dalits of African origin ?

62. Afro-Dalit Connection
Vijay Prashad :
 ‘India and Africa was one land mass’.
 ‘So both the Africans and the Indian
Untouchables and tribals had common
ancestors’.
 Dalits ‘resemble Africans in physical
features’.
 India’s two hundred million Dalits are
racially related to Africans, and that the
upper-strata Indians are ‘white’ Aryan
immigrants/invaders.

63. Appeal to unite against
common enemy : Hinduism
Dalit Voice

64. Hinduism is our enemy. We are its victims.
But Christianity is a liberating religion
 Dalit Voice promotes the church’s stand that Dravidians and Dalits
are a black race related to Africans, and it gets support from radical
black supremacists.
 Dalit Voice promotes anti-Semitism and Brahminical-Zionist
conspiracy theories for world domination and persecution of blacks
in Africa and India
 Asia Team for Christian Aid presented a paper recommending that
the governments which give aid to India should consult and act
according to the advice provided by the missionary Dalit groups
operating from the Wes.

65. Afro-Dalitism is just one of many
such projects to alienate India’s
subalterns from India.

66. Academics promoting
Breaking India forces….
 Intellectual separatism - an implicit meta-narrative for Indian social
sciences - since Marxist class-struggle theories to India.
 Promoting theories for new communal tension in the name of ‘youth
identity ’ and ‘empowerment’ programs.
 Separatist or/and totalitarian movements - Nagaland movement in
India and East Timor independence from Indonesia.
 Indian nation-state as their main enemy and the oppressor.

67. Academics promoting
Breaking India forces….
 This is the intellectual pipeline supplying ideology to future militants
downstream.
 Most of their activities remains off the radar of security analysis.
 A new and subtle form of atrocity literature has become a genre of
South Asia Studies