Dravidians, << druh VIHD ee uhnz, >> were among the earliest known inhabitants of India. Their descendants now live mainly in southern India and trace their ancestry back at least 4,500 years. Dravidians and Indo-Aryans form the two major ethnic groups of India.
The term Dravidian also refers to a family of about 20 languages. They are widely spoken in southern India and northeastern Sri Lanka. The Indian government has formed separate states based on the four main Dravidian languages. Tamil is spoken in the state of Tamil Nadu, Telugu in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, Kannada in Karnataka, and Malayalam in Kerala.
The origin of the Dravidians remains unknown. They developed an advanced culture in India, growing crops and living in towns. About 1500 B.C., a people of central Asia called the Aryans conquered the Dravidians in northern India and drove some of them south. From about the A.D. 300’s to 600’s, Dravidian kings valued Brahmans (Hindu priests and scholars) from northern India for their literary skills and adopted much of their heritage.
Since the early 1900’s, however, Dravidians have organized movements against remaining aspects of the Brahman heritage. During the 1960’s, Tamil-speaking Indians were especially violent in protesting against a ruling that would have made Hindi, an Indo-European language, India’s only official language. Today, 4 of the country’s 22 official languages are Dravidian.
