In the ‘Manual of Administration of the Madras Presidency,’ Dr. C. Macleane writes as follows. “The history proper of the south of India may be held to begin with the Hindu dynasties formed by a more or less intimate admixture of the Aryan and Dravidian systems of government. But, prior to that, three stages of historical knowledge are recognisable; first, as to such aboriginal period as there may have been prior to the Dravidian; secondly, as to the period when the Aryans had begun to impose their religion and customs upon the Dravidians, but the time indicated by the early dynasties had not yet been reached. Geology and natural history alike make it certain that, at a time within the bounds of human knowledge, Southern India did not form part of Asia. A large southern continent, of which this country once formed part, has ever been assumed as necessary to account for the different circumstances. The Sanscrit Pooranic writers, the Ceylon Boodhists, and the local traditions of the west coast, all indicate a great disturbance of the point of the Peninsula and Ceylon within recent times.[22] Investigations in relation to race show it to be by no means impossible that Southern India was once the passage-ground, by which the ancient progenitors of Northern and Mediterranean races proceeded to the parts of the globe which they now inhabit. In this part of the world, as in others, antiquarian remains show the existence of peoples who used successively implements of unwrought stone, of wrought stone, and of metal fashioned in the most primitive manner.[23] These tribes have also left cairns and stone circles indicating burial places. It has been usual to set these down as earlier than Dravidian. But the hill Coorumbar of the Palmanair plateau, who are only a detached portion of the oldest known Tamulian population, erect dolmens to this day. The sepulchral urns of Tinnevelly may be earlier than Dravidian, or they may be Dravidian.... The evidence of the grammatical structure of language is to be relied on as a clearly distinctive mark of a population, but, from this point of view, it appears that there are more signs of the great lapse of time than of previous populations. The grammar of the South of India is exclusively Dravidian, and bears no trace of ever having been anything else. The hill, forest, and Pariah tribes use the Dravidian forms of grammar and inflection.... The Dravidians, a very primeval race, take a by no means low place in the conjectural history of humanity. They have affinities with the Australian aborigines, which would probably connect their earliest origin with that people.” Adopting a novel classification, Dr. Macleane, in assuming that there are no living representatives in Southern India of any race of a wholly pre-Dravidian character, sub-divides the Dravidians into pre-Tamulian and Tamulian, to designate two branches of the same family, one older or less civilised than the other.
The importance, which has been attached by many authorities to the theory of the connection between the Dravidians and Australians, is made very clear from the passages in their writings, which I have quoted. Before leaving this subject, I may appropriately cite as an important witness Sir William Turner, who has studied the Dravidians and Australians from the standpoint of craniology.[24] “Many ethnologists of great eminence,” he writes, “have regarded the aborigines of Australia as closely associated with the Dravidians of India. Some also consider the Dravidians to be a branch of the great Caucasian stock, and affiliated therefore to Europeans. If these two hypotheses are to be regarded as sound, a relationship between the aboriginal Australians and the European would be established through the Dravidian people of India. The affinities between the Dravidians and Australians have been based upon the employment of certain words by both people, apparently derived from common roots; by the use of the boomerang, similar to the well-known Australian weapon, by some Dravidian tribes; by the Indian peninsula having possibly had in a previous geologic epoch a land connection with the Austro-Malayan Archipelago, and by certain correspondences in the physical type of the two people. Both Dravidians and Australians have dark skins approximating to black; dark eyes; black hair, either straight, wavy or curly, but not woolly or frizzly; thick lips; low nose with wide nostrils; usually short stature, though the Australians are somewhat taller than the Dravidians. When the skulls are compared with each other, whilst they correspond in some particulars, they differ in others. In both races, the general form and proportions are dolichocephalic, but in the Australians the crania are absolutely longer than in the Dravidians, owing in part to the prominence of the glabella. The Australian skull is heavier, and the outer table is coarser and rougher than in the Dravidian; the forehead also is much more receding; the sagittal region is frequently ridged, and the slope outwards to the parietal eminence is steeper. The Australians in the norma facialis have the glabella and supra-orbital ridges much more projecting; the nasion more depressed; the jaws heavier; the upper jaw usually prognathous, sometimes remarkably so.” Of twelve Dravidian skulls measured by Sir William Turner, in seven the jaw was orthognathous, in four, in the lower term of the mesognathous series; one specimen only was prognathic. The customary type of jaw, therefore, was orthognathic.[25] The conclusion at which Sir William Turner arrives is that “by a careful comparison of Australian and Dravidian crania, there ought not to be much difficulty in distinguishing one from the other. The comparative study of the characters of the two series of crania has not led me to the conclusion that they can be adduced in support of the theory of the unity of the two people.”
The Dravidians of Southern India are divided by Sir Herbert Risley[26] into two main groups, the Scytho-Dravidian and the Dravidian, which he sums up as follows:—
“The Scytho-Dravidian type of Western India, comprising the Marātha Brāahmans, the Kunbis and the Coorgs; probably formed by a mixture of Scythian and Dravidian elements, the former predominating in the higher groups, the latter in the lower. The head is broad; complexion fair; hair on face rather scanty; stature medium; nose moderately fine, and not conspicuously long.
“The Dravidian type extending from Ceylon to the valley of the Ganges, and pervading the whole of Madras, Hyderabad, the Central Provinces, most of Central India, and Chutia Nāgpur. Its most characteristic representatives are the Paniyans of the South Indian Hills and the Santals of Chutia Nāgpur. Probably the original type of the population of India, now modified to a varying extent by the admixture of Aryan, Scythian, and Mongoloid elements. In typical specimens, the stature is short or below mean; the complexion very dark, approaching black; hair plentiful with an occasional tendency to curl; eyes dark; head long; nose very broad, sometimes depressed at the root, but not so as to make the face appear flat.”
It is, it will be noted, observed by Risley that the head of the Scytho-Dravidian is broad, and that of the Dravidian long. Writing some years ago concerning the Dravidian head with reference to a statement in Taylor’s “Origin of the Aryans,”[27] that “the Todas are fully dolichocephalic, differing in this respect from the Dravidians, who are brachycephalic,” I published[28] certain statistics based on the measurements of a number of subjects in the southern districts of the Madras Presidency. These figures showed that “the average cephalic index of 639 members of 19 different castes and tribes was 74.1; and that, in only 19 out of the 639 individuals, did the index exceed 80. So far then from the Dravidian being separated from the Todas by reason of their higher cephalic index, this index is, in the Todas, actually higher than in some of the Dravidian peoples.” Accustomed as I was, in my wanderings among the Tamil and Malayālam folk, to deal with heads in which the dolichocephalic or sub-dolichocephalic type preponderates, I was amazed to find, in the course of an expedition in the Bellary district (in the Canarese area), that the question of the type of the Dravidian head was not nearly so simple and straightforward as I had imagined. My records of head measurements now include a very large series taken in the plains in the Tulu, Canarese, Telugu, Malayālam, and Tamil areas, and the measurements of a few Maratha (non-Dravidian) classes settled in the Canarese country. In the following tabular statement, I have brought together, for the purpose of comparison, the records of the head-measurements of representative classes in each of these areas:—
| Class | Language | Number of subjectsexamined | Cephalic Index | Numberof times index was 80 or above | ||
| Average | Maximum, cm. | Minimum, cm. | ||||
| Sukun Sālē | Marāthi | 30 | 82.2 | 90.0 | 73.9 | 21 |
| Suka Sālē | Do. | 30 | 81.8 | 88.2 | 76.1 | 22 |
| Vakkaliga | Canarese | 50 | 81.7 | 93.8 | 72.5 | 27 |
| Billava | Tulu | 50 | 80.1 | 91.5 | 71.0 | 27 |
| Rangāri | Marāthi | 30 | 79.8 | 92.2 | 70.7 | 14 |
| Agasa | Canarese | 40 | 78.5 | 85.7 | 73.2 | 13 |
| Bant | Tulu | 40 | 78.0 | 91.2 | 70.8 | 12 |
| Kāpu | Telugu | 49 | 78.0 | 87.6 | 71.6 | 16 |
| Tota Balija | Do. | 39 | 78.0 | 86.0 | 73.3 | 10 |
| Boya | Do. | 50 | 77.9 | 89.2 | 70.5 | 14 |
| Dāsa Banajiga | Canarese | 40 | 77.8 | 86.2 | 72.0 | 11 |
| Gāniga | Do. | 50 | 77.6 | 85.9 | 70.5 | 11 |
| Golla | Telugu | 60 | 77.5 | 89.3 | 70.1 | 9 |
| Kuruba | Canarese | 50 | 77.3 | 83.9 | 69.6 | 10 |
| Bestha | Telugu | 60 | 77.1 | 85.1 | 70.5 | 9 |
| Pallan | Tamil | 50 | 75.9 | 87.0 | 70.1 | 6 |
| Mukkuvan | Malayālam | 40 | 75.1 | 83.5 | 68.6 | 2 |
| Nāyar | Do. | 40 | 74.4 | 81.9 | 70.0 | 1 |
| Vellāla | Tamil | 40 | 74.1 | 81.1 | 67.9 | 2 |
| Agamudaiyan | Do. | 40 | 74.0 | 80.9 | 66.7 | 1 |
| Paraiyan | Do. | 40 | 73.6 | 78.3 | 64.8 | |
| Palli | Do. | 40 | 73.0 | 80.0 | 64.4 | 1 |
| Tiyan | Malayālam | 40 | 73.0 | 78.9 | 68.6 | |
The difference in the character of the cranium is further brought out by the following tables, in which the details of the cephalic indices of typical classes in the five linguistic areas under consideration are recorded:—
(a) Tulu. Billava.
| 71 | ◆◆ | |
| 72 | ◆◆ | |
| 73 | ◆ | |
| 74 | ||
| 75 | ||
| 76 | ◆◆◆ | |
| 77 | ◆◆◆◆◆ | |
| 78 | ◆◆◆◆◆◆ | |
| 79 | ◆◆ | |
| 80 | ◆◆ | Average. |
| 81 | ◆◆◆ | |
| 82 | ◆◆◆◆◆ | |
| 83 | ◆◆◆◆◆◆◆◆ | |
| 84 | ◆◆◆◆ | |
| 85 | ◆◆◆◆ | |
| 86 | ◆ | |
| 87 | ||
| 88 | ||
| 89 | ||
| 90 | ◆ | |
| 91 | ◆ |