Tamil Nadu Governor RN Ravi vs CM Stalin: Know about Dravidian model of governance

Tamil Nadu Governor RN Ravi vs CM Stalin: Know about Dravidian model of governance

Subject: History

Context: The latest flare-up between Tamil Nadu Governor R N Ravi and the DMK government is over certain portions Ravi skipped from the speech submitted to him by the state for reading at the start of the Assembly session.

Dravidian model of governance:

• Dravidian model of governance is about peace, progress and prosperity, which is achieved by pursuing the principles of social justice, rational thought and action firmly rooted in equity.
• This translates to inclusive financial planning, access to education, housing, nutrition and health for all, a meaningful implementation of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, encouraging independent decision-making in structures of democratic governance at all levels, and the state adhering to the Indian Constitution in letter and spirit on all issues, including that of religious and personal freedom.

Dravidians in India:

• Dravidians, are an ethnolinguistic and cultural group living in South Asia who predominantly speak any of the Dravidian languages. There are around 250 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, Nepal, Bhutan and Sri Lanka. Dravidian peoples are also present in Singapore, Malaysia, South Africa, Myanmar, East Africa, the Caribbean, and the United Arab Emirates through recent migration.
• According to the Maps of India, the Dravidian language has three subgroups, namely North Dravidian, Central Dravidian and South Dravidian.
• In present-day India, the states of Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Kerala and Tamil Nadu are the significant regions with a Dravidian population.

Tracing Dravidian history

• According to reports, while genetically, farmers from Iran contributed to most of the DNA of the northwestern subcontinent, around 5,000 years ago, some farmer groups began to fan out, mix with the aborigine Indians in much of what is present-day India, and establish agricultural communities throughout the subcontinent.
• This mixture, which is around 25 per cent Iranian farmer and 75 per cent aboriginal Indian, spread throughout the subcontinent 4,000 years ago and has been labelled by scientists as Ancestral South Indian (ASI), another misnomer since ASI populations were the base populations of most of the subcontinent prior to 2,000 BCE.
• Somewhere, in this process of admixture, an expanding wave of agriculture, new stone tools, social organization, and rituals, the Dravidian peoples and language families were born.
• Judging from the ancient Dravidian-sounding toponyms (place names) of Sindh, Gujarat, and Maharashtra, it is quite likely the roots of this family lie in an eastward expansion along the coast of India into the peninsula and southern India; many of the millets and gourd-like crops cultivated by Dravidian peoples also indicate seaborne contact with tropical parts of the southern Middle East and eastern Africa, while the rice was adopted from the ea
• According to an article in The Diplomat, there is no evidence that Dravidian languages were spoken in the Ganges Valley and Punjab, and the native speakers of these regions may have spoken something related to the language isolate of the Hunza Valley of northern Pakistan, Burushaski.
• Recent linguistic analysis has found that the Dravidian language family is approximately 4,500 years old (2,500 BCE), which coincides nicely with the South Indian Neolithic period, a period after 3,000 BCE when archaeologists have noted the expansion of cattle rearing, lentil farming, and hilltop villages radiating out from the Godavari River basin in Karnataka and Telangana.
• While some linguists claim that Dravidian is related to the ancient Elamite language of southwest Iran, which has no known relatives, the jury is still out.

Dravidian languages:

• The Dravidian language family is one of the oldest in the world.
• Six languages are currently recognized by India as Classical languages and four of them are Dravidian languages Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam.
• The most commonly spoken Dravidian languages are Telugu, Tamil, Kannada, Malayalam, Brahui, Tulu, Gondi and Coorg. There are three subgroups within the Dravidian language family: North Dravidian, Central Dravidian, and South Dravidian, matching for the most part the corresponding regions in the Indian subcontinent.