Dravidianists Take Note: Dravidian Invasion Theory Gathering force

 

Dravidianists Take Note: Dravidian Invasion Theory Gathering force

Shrikant G. Talageri 

 

“Dravidianism” is the Breaking India Force which seeks to break/divide India on the grounds of Aryan-vs.-Dravidian. There are admittedly also a small number of “Aryanists” at the opposite end of the spectrum: those who insist the Dravidian languages are also descended from Sanskrit. But the core belief at the center of Dravidianist ideology is that the Dravidian languages were native to India (this part of it is true) but also that the “Aryan” (IE) languages (in the remote past, over 3500 years ago) entered a Dravidian India as the languages of invaders (this part of it is not true, and is based on pure invented theory, and has been disproved in detail by many writers, of which, need I point out, I am one).

But the seeds of a Dravidian Invasion Theory had also been planted long ago, and seem to be slowly gathering speed in recent times. Till now, the claim was that the Dravidian languages are related to the extinct Elamite language and in fact originated in the Elamite area (southwestern Iran and southern Iraq). I have already dealt with this baseless theory in many articles:

https://talageri.blogspot.com/2025/08/the-alleged-elamite-dravidian.html 

https://talageri.blogspot.com/2024/12/the-dravidian-invasionmigration-theory.html 

The DIT (“Dravidian Invasion Theory”) supporters who are also AIT supporters generally place the “Dravidian Invasion/Immigration” before the “Aryan Invasion”, thereby still making the “Aryans” invaders into a “Dravidian” India. But some of them, opponents of the AIT, actually bring the Dravidian languages (at least as immigrants, if not invaders) into an already “Aryan” India. Since it is not clear which languages, according to these particular Dravidian invasionists, were spoken in South India before the arrival of these “Dravidians”, it is not clear who (in terms of language) are the people of South India who were allegedly invaded (or linguistically supplanted) by the invading Dravidians, it is not clear if these invaders invaded “Aryans” or the speakers of some other unspecified language family.

 

But now, it looks as if the Dravidian invaders did not just come from comparatively closer Iran-Iraq: they came all the way from Africa (Sudan-Uganda, to be precise), and Elam in Iran-Iraq was just a temporary encampment on the way: 

https://x.com/NeilHD108

https://x.com/NeilHD108/status/1877204173139165641

“But Dravidian isn't having evidences of BEING LOCAL or even Asian origin, it came from Ilam area in southern Iran & even came further ahead from African Sudan-Uganda, entered south India from Kachh before splitting it in many branch, it is having links with African & Uralic group

9:32 AM · Jan 9, 2025

 

So this Dravidian invasion took place long, long ago, at some time after 10000 BCE!

So did the Aryans invade the Dravidians or did the Dravidians invade the Aryans? Neither of the two apparently, although both did invade (or immigrate into) India (shrewdly avoiding contacts with each other): though still no details about the earlier pre-Dravidian languages of South India!

https://x.com/NeilHD108

“Steppe origin of Aryans is true, the migration did happen. But none of R1aZ93 downstream lineages brought Indo-Aryan languages to India. There was an earlier wave of R1a migration, long before ghaggar stopped receiving its glacier-fed waters around 6k BCE”

1:27 PM · Nov 1, 2025

“And for Dravidian. No evidence of its presence either in IVC or deep south. In SriLanka you get pre Buddhist Brahmi, you find IA Sinhalese Prakrit in all Brahmi, but none in Tamil. If Dravidian already there, it should’ve reached island long before IA did”

1:38 PM · Nov 1, 2025

 

The linguistic evidence for all this African claptrap:

https://x.com/NeilHD108

https://x.com/NeilHD108/status/1863241831988994192

“Here's one interesting relationship between Tamil and Elamite (almost nothing) vs Dravidian Branches and Central African languages (distantly related) So, Dravidian is very less likely originated from Iran, Iran was just a junction point from its root travel from Sudan Africa”

8:50 PM · Dec 1, 2024

And he provides the following “genetic” charts (I neither know nor care for the source) to prove his linguistic claim:

 

8:50 PM · Dec 1, 2024

Note the disclaimers within the charts themselves!: How do they show that “Dravidian Branches and Central African languages” are “distantly related”, though they do indeed specifically state that “Tamil and Elamite are not related”?

 

But, on the basis of this, he confidently asserts that the Dravidian languages came into India from outside (and later, so did the “Aryan”/IE ones), though they did not “invade” one the other.

What is this “distant relationship”? Here, just for starters (I would welcome a more detailed analysis by anyone else showing this “distant relationship”), a look at Telugu and Mende numbers 1-100 from my article on numbers and numerals:

Telugu (Dravidian):

1-10: okaṭi, reṇḍu, mūḍu, nālugu, ayidu, āru, ēḍu, enimidi, tommidi, padi

11-19: padakoṇḍu, panneṇḍu, padamūḍu, padanālugu, padihēni, padahāru, padihēḍu, paddenimidi, pandommidi

tens 20-100: iruvai, muppai, nalubhai, yābhai, aravai, ḍebbhai, enabhai, tombhai, vandala

Other numbers: tens+unit. Thus 21: iruvai okaṭi,  99: tombhai tommidi

 

Mende (NigerCongo):

1-10: yira, fere, sawa, nani, lolu, woita, wofela, wayakpa, tau, pu

11-19: pu-mahũ-yira (10+mahũ+1) etc.

20, 40, 60, 80, 100: nu-yira-gboyongo, nu-fere-gboyongo, nu-sawa-gboyongo, nu-nani-gboyongo, nu-lolu-gboyongo

Other numbers: vigesimal + 1-19. Thus:

21: nu-yira-gboyongo mahũ yira (20+mahũ+1), 99: nu-nani-gboyongo mahũ pu-mahũ-tau (80+mahũ+19).

Is there any connection between these two: and if not in respect of numbers, then in respect of any other aspect of language?

 

I think someone should put a full-stop to this DIT rubbish, which is even more ridiculous than the AIT (since in the cae of the AIT we do at least have undeniably related languages far outside India), unless more credible linguistic evidence can be produced.

I would request Koenraad Elst to clarify the matter, since he is an opponent of the AIT, but is he also a supporter of the DIT? His reply to the above would seem to indicate this:

https://x.com/ElstKoenraad/status/1863226862580666645

“The Dravidian Immigration Theory had already been theorized decades ago (Elamite origin),& now genetics points the same way: from W Iran, where Elam was to come up, 8-6000y ago. Can also be reconciled w/ the Heggarty paper; Manu's bringing IE from there.”  

7:51 PM · Dec 1, 2024

And in reply to the following from https://x.com/NeilHD108

“Dravidian does preserve elements of African languages from Sahel belt as demonstrated by Bernard Sergent. It's presence as a single language is late to mainland India and it never reached IA heartland in the north, it moved Deccan and split into branches”.

1:48 PM · Nov 1, 2025

Koenraad replies:

https://x.com/ElstKoenraad

https://x.com/ElstKoenraad/status/1984612094050754870

“Thanks for this reference. I reported on Sergent's hypothesis in my book *Update on the Aryan Invasion Debate* (1999), but have since not followed up on it. At the time I doubted it, as Sergent included even languages from Senegal. But if they could reach India, why not Senegal?”

6:52 PM · Nov 1, 2025

Who are these people who “could reach India”, and on what basis is this being concluded or even speculated?

These matters should not be left hanging inconclusively in the air. They should be thrashed out – if there is indeed anything to be thrashed out!  – or else nipped in the bud.

 

APPENDIX ADDED 2 November 2025 night:

I put up this article today morning (2 November 2025). The following comment was given by a reader named Rahul: “There are very ancient remains of pre-Dravidian language substrate in Dravidian itself as per recent study. Guliga a deity worshipped by locals in coastal regions in south India to this day is very ancient and likely adopted from these ancient people.”

I replied: “This kind of talking in the air is absolutely meaningless. Which "pre-Dravidian language", and when did all this happen, and what is the evidence for it?”

His reply: “The remnants of very ancient language related to population of Aborginal remnants in South Asia, elemental god derived from common Australian Guli(hear). The idea is that languages die out every 5000 years and new languages replace them but the presence of additional deep substratum in Dravidian shows that some words could survive and live forever. This could also be case for names of Vedic dieties especially names of elemental gods like for example fire (Agni) could be very ancient more than Vedic language itself.”

And he gave the URL of the following article by Václav Blažek:

https://www.academia.edu/44051940/Australian_Substratum_in_Dravidian_Mother_Tongue_XI_2006

To this I replied: “Thank you for that paper. It is fascinating, both as an example of deep knowledge (on the part of Václav Blažek) as well as the general tendency in western academia to go berserk in amassing and overloading large amounts of data (not always correct or genuine, and not always following the strict phonetic correspondences and rules they demand from others) in order to prove their points. But it does not have any relevance to the present subject. I have just now come home (it is night) but I will add an appendix to my present article some time tomorrow to deal with this (Václav Blažek's) article.” However, I am adding the appendix today night itself.

So here is my assessment of the irrelevance of Václav Blažek's article to the subject of my present article (on the DIT).

But first, in passing, a word on the following in the above comment: “This could also be case for names of Vedic dieties especially names of elemental gods like for example fire (Agni) could be very ancient more than Vedic language itself.” Apart from the fact that this is totally unconnected with the subject of the DIT, Agni cannot be a substrate word in the Vedic language: it has cognates in other IE languages (e.g. Latin ignis, Lithuanian ugnis, Slavic ogni, etc.).

 

But, coming back to Blažek's article. It has no relation at all to the question of any Dravidian invasion-of/immigration-into India from either Elam or Africa:

1. Blažek starts out by referring to the different studies linking Dravidian languages variously with Altaic, Uralic, Sumerian, Elamite, and Kartvelian/Caucasian (Georgian, etc.), and even Indo-European. He also then adds Afro-Asiatic (which includes Semitic, Chadic, etc.), He only discounts other studies connecting Dravidian with Wolof (a Niger-Congo language of Africa) and Japanese. Almost all these languages are unrelated to each other!

Then he refers to various different studies linking Australian languages with Austronesian (Malay, Hawaiian, etc), Austro-Asiatic (Munda, Khmer, Vietnamese, etc), Papuan, Andamanese, and along with Dravidian, also (sub-Saharan) African, Indo-European, Finno-Ugrian and Amerindian!

Clearly, the world of interfamilial studies linking different families to each other is a free-for-all world of speculation in which the sky is the limit!

2. Blažek tells us that the date of arrival of the Australian languages in Australia, based on human artifacts in Australia, goes back to anywhere between 40,000 to 62000 years ago! Surely, this time-frame cannot be made to fit in with any accepted date or time-frame for any “arrival” of Dravidian languages into a proto-Australian-speaking South India!

Even if we accept that even after the main body of proto-Australian speakers (over 40000 years ago) had already passed out of India and into Australia, residual proto-Australian speakers still remained in South India as “natives” who were invaded by Dravidian invaders and immigrants somewhere in the last less-than-10000 years (at the maximum estimate), is it rational to postulate that words present in the Australian languages of Australia (which have been there since over 40000 years) were present in the alleged residual Australian languages in South India a few thousand years ago?

3. It is interesting that Blažek seems to cite speculative studies identifying Dravidian singular and plural first and second person personal pronouns with Australian ones as evidence that the Dravidian languages absorbed these Australian personal pronouns as “substratal” words in South India.

In my articles explaining the linguistic case to Indians who deny the existence of an Indo-European language family, I have pointed out: 

“But there are classes of words which are not easily borrowed. Personal pronouns are one such class. Compare the personal pronouns in the various Indo-European languages: the nominative plurals in Sanskrit vay-, yūy-, te, English we, you, they, and Avestan vae, yūz, dī, or the accusative forms of the same plural pronouns, Sanskrit nas, vas,  Avestan noh, voh, Russian nas, vas,  and the Latin nominative forms nos, vos.

Or the Sanskrit dative forms -me and -te with Avestan me and te,  English me and thee, Greek me and se (te in Doric Greek), Latin me and te, etc.

Again, one word will illustrate the picture much more clearly: Sanskrit tu-, Hindi tū, Marathi tū, Konkani tūȗva, Sindhi tuȗ, Punjabi tūȗ, Gujarati tū, Bengali tui, Oriya tu, Assamese toi, Kashmiri tsa, Romany (Gypsy) tu. In Iranian, we have Avestan tū, Persian tu, Pashto tu, Kurdish tu, Baluchi tæw.

Here are the words in the other distant branches: Latin tū, Italian tu, Spanish tu, Portuguese tu, French tu, Romanian tu, Catalan tu, Irish tu, Scots-Gaelic thu, Welsh ti, Old English thū (later English thou), Icelandic thu, German du, Norwegian du, Danish du, Swedish du, Old Church Slavic ty, Russian ty, Belarusian ty, Polish ty, Czech ty, Slovak ty, Ukrainian ty, Bulgarian ti, Serbian ti, Croatian ti, Slovenian ti, Macedonian ti, Bosnian ti, Armenian du, Albanian ti, Doric Greek tu, Lithuanian tu, Latvian tu, Tocharian tu, Hittite ta / du.

Compare this flood of Indo-European words with the Dravidian equivalents: Tamil nī, Malayalam nī, Toda nī, Kota nī, Brahui nī, Kurukh nīn, Kannada nīnu, Kolami nīv, Naiki nīv, Telugu nīvu.

It is extremely unnatural for languages to borrow personal pronouns from other languages. Therefore the completely sweeping nature of the correspondences among different Indo-European languages is again proof of the relationship between them.”

But here we have these linguists telling us that Dravidians entering India a few thousand years ago abandoned their own original Dravidian personal pronouns, and borrowed as substrate words Australian personal pronouns from the pre-Dravidian natives of South India – words still found in the Australian languages in Australia after over 40000 years! Does this make the DIT a credible proposition?

Or do these linguists mean that the Dravidian languages in South India are actually descended from the Australian languages, which is why they have the same personal pronouns: i.e. Dravidian languages are an evolved form of the proto-Australian languages spoken in South India since much more than 40000 years? In that case, the DIT stands automatically dismissed.

5. After this, I need not reiterate that the article exhibits “the general tendency in western academia to go berserk in amassing and overloading large amounts of data (not always correct or genuine, and not always following the strict phonetic correspondences and rules they demand from others) in order to prove their points”. The amount of free-for-all speculation exhibited in the article in order to try to connect Dravidian with Australian is self-evident.

6. And after all this, as I wrote in my reply to the comment: “it does not have any relevance to the present subject”.

No amount of alleged “Australian substrates” in Dravidian can be treated as evidence that Dravidian languages came from Elam in Iran-Iraq or from Central Africa, or indeed from anywhere outside South India.