116
செந்தமிழ்ச் சிறப்பு
a few words allied to Tamil words. The only legitimate inference from this is that the Tamil language or a language allied to it prevailed upto the North-west province in ancient times. This inference is supported by another fact, viz., that the modern dialects of Northern India now called Sanskritic or Gaudian, have a fundamental grammatical frame work and a scheme of syntax, the same as that of the Dravidian dialects, so much so that sentences from the one set of dialects can be translated into any one of the other set of dialects by the substitution of word for word without causing any breach of idiom. These facts can only prove that people speaking dialects allied to Tamil once inhabited the whole of India and not that these people must necessarily have come into India from outside the country. No single fact has yet been adduced that compels us to believe that the ancient people of India were not autochthones."
(The History of the Tamils by P. T. Srinivasa Iyenger, p.2.)
Where This Evolution First Took Place
The five sub-division of the habitable regions occur contiguous to each other and in a small fraction of the earth's surface in India South of the Vindhyas. It is therefore easy to understand how increase of population and alterations in the natural supply of food-stuffs brought about here at different periods the migration of men from region to region and the consequent development of the different stages of human culture, the hunter, the nomad, the pastoral, the coastal and the agricultural, due to the different stimuli provided by the changing milieu; in other words, the geographical control of the growth of human civilization can be worked out and set forth clear as on a map, by a study of man's progress in this restricted portion of the surface of the earth. Outside India, these five natural, regions occur on a vast scale, e.g., the Mullai, the vast steppe land extending from the Carpathians to the foot hills of the Altais, the Kurinji or the great mountain chain from the Pyrenees to the Himalayas and beyond, forming a great girdle round the waist of mother earth the Neydal, the coasts of the Mediterranean sea, and the Indian and the Atlantic oceans, and the Palai, the great desert of Sahara and its continuation in Arabia, Persia and Mongolia". (Ibid., p.14.)
The myth of the importation of the South Indian languages from outside India.
