The centrality of Tamil culture within the Dravidian space may have been an error of the imagination. Research is only now being directed towards areas that could yield a more complex picture, and without the benefit of that, even history-writing reflected chauvinistic trends, feels archaeologist/historical anthropologist Kathleen D. Morrison. Excerpts from an e-mail interview with Pranay Sharma and Sunil Menon:
Looking at prehistory and early history, is there something we can see as the beginnings of a distinct south Indian civilisation? And is it at all possible to map our modern sense of the Dravidian language family onto that?
South India has a very long history of human occupation and there’s no question that prehistoric south Indian cultures differed in important ways from those in the north from very early on. However, there has also been a lot of diversity within south India, so any north-south divide is inevitably going to be too simple.
One thing...
