A look at the linguistic and socio-political history of 'Dravidian stock'

On May 7, when M K Stalin took oath as Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu, he added an intriguing detail to his Twitter bio. He stated that he belonged to the ‘Dravidian stock’.

It was, at one level, a mere detailing of his linguistic and cultural background since Tamil, Stalin’s mother tongue and the language of Tamil Nadu, is a Dravidian language. But at another level, the assertion deserves a closer look. Besides being a cultural descriptor, ‘Dravidian’ has also come to stand for a worldview that came into the public consciousness through a movement that began in the early 20th century.

Linguistic term

In Banabhatta’s Kadambari, a 7th century text, reference is made to men hailing from the region of “Andhra, Dravida and Sinhala.” The Dravidas presumably spoke Tamil, since the Andhras and Sinhalas are differentiated from them and, therefore, Dravida could not have been a blanket term for all of South India.

Dandin, the 6-7th century Sanskrit grammarian, who hailed from Kanchipuram in modern-day TN, used the term ‘Dravidesu’ to refer to the Tamil-speaking region in his Dashakumaracharita, a coming-of-age narrative of 10 princes.

In Tantravarttika by Kumarila Bhatta, another 7th century text, the term ‘Dravidadi Bhashayam’ was used to refer to the tongue(s) he heard spoken in modern-day South and North Arcot, Chinglepet and Chittoor districts.

Lilatilakam, a 14th century treatise on grammar and poetics, an important work in Maṇipravāḷam (a blend of Malayalam and Sanskrit) laid down the condition “Dramida Sanghatakashara Nibaddham” (only Dravidian letters are to be used) for the pattu (song) genre of literature.

All these are instances of ‘Dravidian’ being employed in a linguistic context in pre-modern times.

When ‘Dravidian’ was employed by Robert Caldwell in his 1856 book, Comparative Grammar of the Dravidian or South Indian Family of Languages, he was, he said, drawing from Kumarila Bhatta’s usage of the word. But unlike Bhatta and the others, Caldwell used ‘Dravidian’ as a generic name for the family of languages spoken in southern India to distinguish them from Indo-Aryan, the branch of Indo-European languages spoken in the Indian subcontinent.

Credit must also be accorded to Francis Whyte Ellis (1777-1819), a British administrator who was the first to point out that the South Indian languages were a distinct family.

With the Dravidian family of languages being distinctly identified, events in the second half of the 19th century resulted in distinct faultlines emerging in the ‘Indian’ narrative that many were then attempting to fashion. Tamil, its champions asserted, was possessed of an independently ancient cultural and literary tradition and could not be subsumed under the larger Sanskritic (read Indian) narrative. The discovery of the long-forgotten Sangam texts in the late 19th century further strengthened this claim.

While the other South Indian languages too, in time, asserted their separateness from Sanskrit and much work was done to establish their ancient traditions, Tamil was the first to do so. This then gave rise to a distinct stream of thinking, best embodied in the social justice movement that adopted the name ‘Dravidian’.

The movement

In November 1916, at a historic meeting in Chennai, a ‘Non-Brahmin Manifesto’ was issued by C Natesa Mudaliar, P Theagaraya Chetty, Dr T M Nair, and others. Among their demands was for more non-brahmin representation in the then Brahmin-dominated government services. In 1919, the organisation that had taken birth on account of this meeting—the South Indian Liberal Federation (popularly known as the Justice Party)—won the first elections in the Madras Presidency under the dyarchy system introduced by the Montagu-Chelmsford reforms. Among the government’s actions in the 1920s were the introduction of a caste-based reservation in government services and State control of many temples in the province.

Nair’s death in 1919 and Chetty’s in 1925 meant that the leadership of the movement passed into the hands of E V Ramasamy Naicker (‘Periyar’). Periyar’s ascent ensured that the movement took both a vernacular and a popular turn. His movement, which he called the ‘Self-Respect Movement’, confronted caste, religion and patriarchy upfront.

Periyar had been a part of the Congress, but had left in disgust at what he saw as the casteism of its Brahmin leaders. He sought to make a distinction between the indigenous Dravidian and the North Indian Aryan, who in the Madras Presidency was represented, in his view, by Brahmins. One of the movement’s more trenchant agitations was against the imposition of Hindi by the Rajaji-headed Congress administration that ruled the province between 1937 and 1939. The Justice Party and Periyar’s movement merged in 1938 and in 1944, assumed the name Dravida Kazhagam (DK). In 1949, the DK split, with C N Annadurai forming the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) and choosing to pursue the electoral politics route, something Periyar had been ambivalent about.

Stalin’s assertion of his Dravidian identity harks back to both these proud histories. Tamil identity embodied in the ancient Tamil language as well as the DMK’s origins in a social justice movement that eschews caste and religion both find place in the moniker ‘Dravidian’.

(The author is a Bengaluru-based editor and writer)