Sir after reading some of your comments it seems to me that u have great debating skills....... i just want to ask u if we consider IVC..... most of the historians believe it to be associated with the DRAVIDIAN..... the statue of dancing girl and the bust of the priest have always indicated the dravidian phenotype..... even the script has been linked to dravidian script.... coming to religion seal can be connected to lord pashupathi and mother godess to maa shakti..... even u will believe that history is built upon joining the links and clues and only assumptions can be made.... If IVC is linked to anyone then it should be DRAVIDIAN INDIA.... even the indo aryan theory states the migration of indus valley people towards south...... i dont think IVC has any links to pakistanis even north indians can be considered as they follow a similar culture
Dear Sir,
Rather than make a categorical statement, I would like to present to you all the facts, and leave you to decide for yourself.
My apologies for the late reply; this post had not come to notice earlier. It is not a good time to participate in these somewhat abstruse discussions, as I find myself perpetually sleepy and very slow to grasp things.
Your statement that I seems to have great debating skills made me cringe. Please consider that it is more a question of having been unfortunately educated in a discipline that is central to these discussions. Further things tend to stick to my mind, and it seems reasonable and proper to assemble these to address a point under discussion.
Coming to your points.
Yes, personally, I am of the view that the IVC was a Dravidian speaking culture. Judging by the dancing girl and the priest-king is dangerous; what one learns very early in Indian history, or in any branch of academic discussion connected to India, is not to go by racial stereotyping. Those two figures may look Dravidian. On the other hand, there are Santhal, and Oraon women who might have posed for the dancing girl. There are UP Brahmins who resemble the priest-king. So rather than depend on some uncertain racial resemblance, it is preferrable to address the core issues.
The consensus of learned opinion is that present day Indian, or more accurately, south Asian languages in the northern part of the sub-continent, are based on variants of Indo-Aryan languages' descended from Vedic Sanskrit, or the Indian variant of Indo-Iranian, through various developments of Prakrit. It is also felt that there is a sub-strate, an underlying layer, of Dravidian language. Words are borrowed, grammatical constructions are emulated, and place names are of older origin rooted in Dravidian. Details of those original Dravidian languages can only be guessed, as all this happened some three thousand five hundred or three thousand years ago.
To confuse matters, experts believe that there is a hidden layer beneath the hidden layer. They believe that there may be traces of Austro-Asian languages under the Dravidian layer, and that the Dravidiqn layer itself had replaced the original Austro-Asian layer.
This has been found true throughout north India, and the languages in the IVC geography follow this rule.
The languages followed in the valley hinterland today are Indo-Aryan in nature, with a layer of Dravidian language below each; linguists find that this is quite marked in the case of Marathi and Gujarati, but less so in the case of Sindhi. These remain, however, rather more influenced by Dravidian than other languages in north India.
Another element of confirmation that the language spoken in the IVC was Dravidian by classification is the existence of pockets of Brahui in Baluchistan. Brahui is a distinctly Dravidian language. Other such candidates exist. It is difficult to understand how Brahui, a Dravidian language, came to be spoken in isolated pockets in the north-west, other than if some groups of Brahui speakers managed to reach those present locations and then found themselves stranded there, or unless these pockets are what remains of an entire region speaking that or similar languages.
That shows us that the balance of the evidence is that the inhabitants of the IVC spoke a Dravidian language. What about the script? That is not proven. The closest that research has got to it has been a pattern matching exercise carried out on the symbols used on IVC seals, by a team of mathematical researchers, who found a very close match with patterns of characters used in sentence construction in Tamil. However, that is in no way a proof, only evidence towards a hypothesis.
I have nothing to say about two or three seals which believers have taken to be depictions of Pasupatinath. This is extremely, dangerously speculative.
Does this lead to a link between present-day Dravidians in the southern part of the sub-continent and the IVC? Is there any link between the IVC and present day dwellers of the same region? Is there any link between the IVC and present day north Indians, including citizens of Pakistan?
These are difficult questions.
What happened to the original inhabitants? We do not know with certainty. We only know that genetically, the population after the final decline of the IVC in 1300 or 1200 BC was the same as the population before the decline,
except that there was an infusion of central Asian genes some time between 3500 BC and 1200 BC. This is associated with the incursion of Indo-Aryan speakers from central Asia. The people were the same, but immigrants had joined them.
What about present day Dravidians in south India and the IVC?
They certainly spoke the same language, but were they the same genetic stock? Difficult to prove beyond doubt. The genetic variation between most Indians is very low. About the only differentiator is the trace of immigrant blood in the people still living in the Indus Valley. There is no evidence that there was a mass migration, which is most unlikely, considering that the IVC may have collapsed over decades, if not centuries, due to ecological devastation.
On balance, it seems that there is no genetic connection between the present day residents of south India and the original inhabitants of the IVC, only a linguistic connection.
What about present day dwellers in the same regions and the IVC?
They are genetically a combination of the same genetic composition as built the IVC and newcomers fro central Asia, or perhaps from Iran. They have a perfectly good right to be considered the genetic descendants, in part, of the IVC people.
Finally, what about the general mass of north Indians, and the sub-section of Pakistanis who belong to it?
They have the same genetic composition as the people living around the ruins, since the Vedic Sanskrit speaking incoming groups had the same encounter with Dravidian speaking original dwellers, but it is not at all clear that they are connected in any way. On the contrary, their pottery style, PGW, co-existed with IVC pottery, and they may have had their parallel culture.
With this information, it is hoped you can navigate your way around.