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The Dravidian languages are a language family spoken by more than 215 million people, mainly in southern India and northern Sri Lanka, with pockets elsewhere in South Asia. Since the colonial era, there have been small but significant immigrant communities outside South Asia in countries such as Mauritius, Hong Kong, Pakistan, Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Philippines, Britain, Australia, and the United States.
Dasa is a Sanskrit language term found in ancient Hindu texts, such as the Rigveda and Arthashastra. It usually means either "enemy" or "servant".
The Elamo-Dravidian language family is a hypothesised language family that links the Dravidian languages of India to the extinct Elamite language of ancient Elam. Linguist David McAlpin has been a chief proponent of the Elamo-Dravidian hypothesis. According to McAlpin, the long-extinct Harappan language might also have been part of this family. The hypothesis has gained attention in academic circles, but has been subject to serious criticism by linguists, and remains only one of several scenarios for the origins of the Dravidian languages. Elamite is accepted by scholars to be a language isolate, unrelated to any other known language.
The Arthashastra is an ancient Indian treatise on statecraft, economic policy and military strategy, written in Sanskrit. Kautilya, also identified as Vishnugupta and Chanakya, is traditionally credited as the author of the text. The latter was a scholar at Takshashila, the teacher and guardian of Emperor Chandragupta Maurya. Some scholars believe them to be the same person, while most have questioned this identification. The text is likely to be the work of several authors over centuries. Composed, expanded and redacted between the 2nd century BCE and 3rd century CE, the Arthashastra was influential until the 12th century, when it disappeared. It was rediscovered in 1905 by R. Shamasastry, who published it in 1909. The first English translation was published in 1915.
Robert Caldwell was a missionary for London Missionary Society. He arrived in India at age 24, studied the local language to spread the word of Bible in a vernacular language, studies that led him to author a text on comparative grammar of the South Indian languages. In his book, Caldwell proposed that there are Dravidian words in the Hebrew of the Old Testament, the archaic Greek language, and the places named by Ptolemy.
Indology or Indian studies is the academic study of the history and cultures, languages, and literature of India and as such is a subset of Asian studies.
Sir Herbert Hope Risley was a British ethnographer and colonial administrator, a member of the Indian Civil Service who conducted extensive studies on the tribes and castes of the Bengal Presidency. He is notable for the formal application of the caste system to the entire Hindu population of British India in the 1901 census, of which he was in charge. As an exponent of scientific racism, he used the ratio of the width of a nose to its height to divide Indians into Aryan and Dravidian races, as well as seven castes.
The Indigenous Aryans theory, also known as the Out of India theory (OIT), proposes that the Indo-European languages, or at least the Indo-Aryan languages, originated within the Indian subcontinent, as an alternative to the established migration model which proposes the Pontic steppe as the area of origin of the Indo-European languages. The indigenist view sees the Indo-Aryan languages as having a deep history in the Indian subcontinent, and being the carriers of the Indus Valley Civilization. This view proposes an older date than is generally accepted for the Vedic period, which is generally considered to follow the decline of Harappan culture.
Colin P. Masica is professor emeritus in the Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations and the Department of Linguistics at the University of Chicago. Although ostensibly a specialist in Indo-Aryan languages, his real interest has been in the typological convergence of languages belonging to different linguistic stocks in the South Asian area and beyond, more broadly in this phenomenon in general, and in possible explanations for it and implications of it in connection with both linguistic and cultural history.
Slavery in India was an established institution in ancient India by the start of the common era, or likely earlier. However, its study in ancient times is problematic and contested because it depends on the translations of terms such as dasa and dasyu.
Bhadriraju Krishnamurti was an Indian Dravidianist and linguist. He was born in Ongole. He was Vice Chancellor of Hyderabad Central University from 1986 to 1993 and founded the Department of Linguistics at Osmania University where he served as professor from 1962 to 1986. His magnum opus The Dravidian Languages is considered a landmark volume in the study of Dravidian linguistics.
Dravidian people or Dravidians are the present and past speakers of any of the Dravidian languages. There are around 245 million native speakers of Dravidian languages. Dravidian speakers form the majority of the population of South India and are natively found in India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, the Maldives and Sri Lanka.
Thomas R. Metcalf is a historian of South Asia, especially colonial India, and of the British Empire. Metcalf is the Emeritus Sarah Kailath Professor of India Studies and Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of Imperial Connections: India in the Indian Ocean Arena, 1860-1920 (2008), A Concise History of Modern India, Forging the Raj: Essays on British India in the Heyday of Empire (2005), Ideologies of the Raj (1997), and other books on the history of colonial India.
Hindu scriptures are classified into two parts: shruti or śruti, meaning what has been heard and smriti, or smṛti, meaning what has been retained or remembered. The Vedas are classified under śruti.
Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human Family is an 1871 book written by Lewis Henry Morgan and published by the Smithsonian Institution. It is considered foundational for the discipline of anthropology and particularly for the study of human kinship. It was the culmination of decades of research into the variety of kinship terminologies in the world conducted partly through fieldwork and partly through a global survey of kinship terminologies in the languages and cultures of the world.
The Puranic chronology gives a timeline of Hindu history according to the Hindu scriptures. Two central dates are the Mahabharata War, which according to this chronology happened at 3138 BCE, and the start of the Kali Yuga, which according to this chronology started at 3102 BCE. The Puranic chronology is referred to by proponents of Indigenous Aryans to propose an earlier dating of the Vedic period, and the spread of Indo-European languages out of India.
Malaysian Tamil, also known as Malaya Tamil, is a local variant of Tamil Language spoken in Malaysia. It is one of the languages of education in Malaysia, along with English, Malay and Mandarin. There are many differences in vocabulary between Malaysian Tamil and Indian Tamil.
Gloria Goodwin Raheja is American anthropologist who specializes in ethnographic history. She is the author of several historical works where she explores the concepts of caste and gender in India, colonialism, politics of representation, blues music, capitalism in the Appalachia and other diverse topics. Raheja argues that caste stratification in India was influenced by British colonialism. Monographs on ethnographic history and India have been considered "acclaimed" by the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute.
Archaeology in India is mainly done under the supervision of Archaeological Survey of India.
The historiography of India refers to the studies, sources, critical methods and interpretations used by scholars to develop a history of India.
