Dravida = "Country of Hot Sun"

[Guest guest]

Forwarded is mail from Dr. Madhusudan Mishra in Indian Civilization

list of Dr. Kalyanaraman. Mishra, I gather, is a celebrated

authority in reading all IVC inscriptins as Sanskrit.

 

Does he know Tamil? I let Indologists explain

whether Dravida = "Country of Hot Sun".

 

Regards,

N. Ganesan

 

 

IndianCivilization, Madhusudan_Mishra@h... wrote:

DraviDa

 

Though the word draviDa or drAviDa has been current in India for a

long time, it has acquired a derogatory sense in the recent

ethnology, specially in relation to the racially Aryan concept of the

west. Really, it has no ethnological connotation. As a geographical

region it relates to south India. But when the people are considered,

even the Maharashtrans and Gujratis are included, specially the

Brahmins living there. It is however true that Maharashtra and

Gujarat cannot be reckoned as the Dravida country.

 

The word DraviDa or DrAviDa has no etymology. It may be taken to be

an agglutinative formation: dra +vi + da. The central -vi- is also

replaced by -mi-, and the name Tamil has actually come from dra-mi-

da. Then it appears that dra- is the basic element. It was extended

by -mida for one region and by -vida for the other. Later this

distinction was lost and the word Dravida became more common.

 

Though dra occurs in a passage in the AV (11,7,3), its meaning is not

known. But da = heat + ra = fire making dra may refer to the `hot

sun', and the following -mida or -vida may stand for a `region'. Thus

dra-mi (vi) -da seems to mean `the country of the hot sun'. Later it

began to refer to the people inhabiting that region.

 

Though of a similar derivation, Ki-rA-ta is free from any such

controversy. The word kirAta occurs since the VS (30,16), and Manu

has put them in the category of the drAviDas, but it is free from a

strictly racial controversy. They have never remained concentrated to

a region due to their wandering habit, which is confirmed from the

central syllable -ra-. In Prakrit, it is cilAa, but it is difficult

to identify them with some modern group with identical name.

 

Source Page:

 

http://www.indusscript.net/appendix.html

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