Opinion Korean, Hebrew and Tamil: Why the global history of our Dravidian past is unexplored

As I turned the pages of the book, I spotted this sentence: “The Korean language belongs to the Dravidian group of languages spoken in the south of India.” It took me by surprise. Human migration fascinated me, but in my reading on the subject, I had not come across any suggestion of a connection between Koreans and South Indians. Since the Korean language, like Japanese, has a pictorial alphabet, I too had linked the Koreans with the Japanese. Unfortunately, Rhee’s book cited no authority to establish a Korean connection with the South Indian languages.

Since Tamil is the oldest of the Dravidian languages, any ancient external link of the Dravidian group must be with Tamil. During the colonial period, British and other European scholars had established the connection between Sanskrit, which the Aryans had brought to the subcontinent, and major European languages.

Indians speak a multitude of languages belonging to several language families. About 78 per cent of them speak languages linked with the Indo-European family through Sanskrit. Less than 20 per cent speak languages belonging to the Dravidian group. The rest speak languages belonging to the Austroasiatic, Sino-Tibetan and other language families. Once it was established that an overwhelming majority of Indians were their Aryan kin who had parted from them in Central Asia, the Europeans apparently lost interest in Indians and their languages. They did not attempt to explore the external links of Tamil.

During the census poll, the British found that a small tribe in the Balochistan province (now part of Pakistan), known as Brahuis, speak a language known as Brahui. It has a Persian-Arabic script. The Brahuis are not Dravidians but their language belongs to the Dravidian group. Scholars came up with a theory to explain how the Brahuis acquired a Dravidian language. Before the arrival of the Aryans, the Dravidians lived in the northern region. The Brahuis moved into the area at that time. They interacted with their Dravidian neighbours and picked up their language. When the Dravidians moved south under pressure from the Aryan migrants, the Brahuis stayed put and they continued to use the language they had acquired from them.

Aryan migration from Central Asia to the Indian subcontinent is believed to have taken place after 2000 BCE. The most reliable information now available about the Dravidians is that they came into the subcontinent from the Mediterranean region about 1,500 years before the arrival of the Aryans. Some scholars, therefore, refer to the Dravidians as a Mediterranean race.

The Mediterranean origin of the Dravidians points to the possibility of affinity between Tamil and the languages of the Middle East. In 1948, when diplomatic relations did not exist between India and the newly created state of Israel, the government of India had allowed the Jewish state to set up an honorary consulate in Mumbai to meet the consular needs of the Jews living in this country. The consulate used to publish a monthly newsletter named News from Israel. My father, A K Bhaskar, was on the consulate’s mailing list, and he received the publication regularly by post at Kollam. In one issue of the publication, I read an article by a professor at Hebrew University in Jerusalem on the closeness between Hebrew and Tamil. Following the method used to establish affinity between the different languages of the Indo-European group, he drew up a list of 50 basic words in Hebrew and Tamil. I do not have the publication with me now. And I do not remember the name of the professor. But I still remember the first three words of the 50 words he listed. They were (in English, Hebrew and Tamil, in that order):

1. Father: Ebba (Hebrew) Appa (Tamil)

2. Mother: Emma (Hebrew) Amma (Tamil)

3. Rice: Riz (Hebrew) Ariss (Tamil)

I do not know if any Hebrew or Tamil scholar made an effort in the last 75 years to study the matter further. But I have come across papers presented at various seminars in which scholars from different countries spoke of links between Tamil and various Middle Eastern languages. One scholar speculated that the language of that region which is closest to Tamil is Aramaic, believed to be the language Jesus Christ spoke. Many of the ideas put forward by academicians on linguistic affinity appear to be tentative formulations. They need to be confirmed through proper study. That has not happened.

German missionary Hermann Gundert made valuable contributions to the Malayalam language. Some other Indian languages also benefited from the interest foreigners evinced in them. However, their interest does not seem to have extended to exploring the external links of the Dravidian languages. Several foreign scholars with different backgrounds have spoken of the affinity between Tamil and their own languages.

Unfortunately, Indian universities have shown little interest in the comparative study of languages. By and large, they limited their studies to the predominant languages of their respective region. They did not look into its foreign connections. The University of Madras is one of the three universities established by the British Indian government soon after it took over the subcontinent’s administration from the East India Company. It quickly earned a great reputation as an institution of higher learning. But it made no worthwhile contribution to the exploration of Tamil’s links with foreign languages.

The fact is that the political, cultural and academic climate was not conducive for the university to undertake studies relating to the Dravidian past. The Vedic stream dominated officialdom and academia during the colonial period. Its leading lights believed that if there was anything worthwhile in the subcontinent’s past, it was the work of their Aryan ancestors. The colonial masters readily subscribed to this view and assumed, even without proper studies, that the Aryans were the makers of the glory that was India. When the remains of a glorious urban civilisation were found at Mohenjo Daro in Sind, the British Indian authorities instinctively assumed it was the work of people of the Aryan stock. The excavations yielded much valuable material. But there was nothing that indicated an Aryan connection. The excavations were then abandoned. The reason stated was that conservation must now get priority as it was becoming difficult to protect what was exposed due to the excavations carried out already.

For its own reasons, the Dravidian political movement will also not be enthusiastic about studies that may show that their ancestors, like the Aryans, came from outside the subcontinent.

Truthful and meaningful studies can only take place in a climate of intellectual honesty.

The writer is a journalist and human rights activist from Kerala. His autobiography, ‘News Room’, recently won the Kerala Sahitya Akademi award