CNN-IBN asks, in a highly irresponsible interview, ” Is Ram Sethu an irrelevant issue down south?” Irresponsible for out of all people, they gave credence to the views of the socalled “Dravidian rationalists” who have such rational claims to Tamil heritage as an ancient continent called Kumari Kandam that was present in the Indian Ocean region and got submerged long time ago. The people in today’s South India are the descendants of this ancient continent.

Is Ram Setu a nonissue in the South? Why do you have to go too far to answer this question? Stay in Tamil Nadu itself and you’ll find the AIADMK, a south Indian party, protesting against the SSCP. In Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh, Ram remains popular today irrespective of what Ram’s popularity status was in the past.

The socalled Dravidian movement, purportedly based on rationality and opposed to superstition, relies on a mixture of linguistic fanaticism, myths like Kumari Kandam, racism and xenophobia of people with white skin (read “destructive Aryan North Indians”) to perpetuate its purely political propaganda.

The theory on which their movement relies – broadly speaking, invading Aryans from North India imposing their destructive Gods over south Indian Dravidians – has been discredited long time ago by numerous scholars and is today considered pseudoscience. What’s more, this outlook is not shared by many south Indian Hindus themselves. As far as they are concerned, it was a sage who crossed the Vindhyas into southern India who brought Sanskrit and the Vedas to south Indian, not some destructive warmongering Aryan warrior God.

The rallying points of this political propanganda – a deadly mixture of ethnicity, myths, prejudices against specific groups based on skin colour, origin and language; racism and xenophobia is strikingly similar to the rallying points of the Nazis in their destructive genocide of the Jews. One can already see the results of this genocidal propaganda – many Tamil Brahmins have left Tamil Nadu and are living in other states and abroad.

Another reason why this interview was irresponsible was the fact that it tried to portray if south India is a monolithic entity and that the Dravidian parties are the main articulators of the issues of south Indians.

As a south Indian, I can state that the only thing that Tamil Nadu and the other south Indian states have in common is the common roots of their language – protoDravidian. Even food habbits, though largely similar in nature, show wide variations. There’s a Tamil cuisine and there’s a Telugu cuisine, a Kannada cuisine and a Malayali cuisine. Dressing styles are different. Festivals are different.

The outlook of the people is also different. While Dravidian nationalists base their movements on hatred of other groups – attributing the presence of social evils to specific groups, caste or religious – the rest of the people in south India practice a healthy and open outlook towards life without practicing any sort of prejudice or hatred towards specific groups. They go about solving problems instead of incessantly ranting about them or their supposed creators.

The people of Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka do NOT share the racist and xenophobic outlook that some people from Tamil Nadu feel proud about, especially those from the Dravidian rationalist camp.

This camp is hardly rationalist. All you have to do is read the following claims about Kumari Kandam (from the Wikipedia article):

In modern Dravidian ethnic nationalist literature, Kumari Kandam or “Lemuria” was the “cradle of civilization”, the origin of human languages in general and the Tamil language in particular. These ideas gained notability in Tamil academic literature over the first decades of the 20th century, and were popularized by the Tanittamil Iyakkam, notably by self-taught Dravidologist Devaneya Pavanar, who held that all languages on earth were merely corrupted Tamil dialects.

R. Mathivanan, then Chief Editor of the Tamil Etymological Dictionary Project of the Government of Tamilnadu, in 1991 claimed to have deciphered the Indus script as Tamil, following the methodology recommended by his teacher Devaneya Pavanar, presenting the following timeline (cited after Mahadevan 2002):

ca. 200,000 to 50,000 BC: evolution of “the Tamilian or Homo Dravida”,
ca. 200,000 to 100,000 BC: beginnings of the Tamil language
50,000 BC: Kumari Kandam civilisation
20,000 BC: A lost Tamil culture of the Easter Island which had an advanced civilisation
16,000 BC: Lemuria submerged
6087 BC: Second Tamil Sangam established by a Pandya king
3031 BC: A Chera prince in his wanderings in the Solomon Island saw wild sugarcane and started cultivation in Tamilnadu.
1780 BC: The Third Tamil Sangam established by a Pandya king
7th century BC: Tolkappiyam (the earliest extant Tamil grammar)

Mathivanan uses “Aryan Invasion” rhetoric to account for the fall of this civilization:

“After imbibing the mania of the Aryan culture of destroying the enemy and their habitats, the Dravidians developed a new avenging and destructive war approach. This induced them to ruin the forts and cities of their own brethren out of enmity”.

That folks, is the rationality that the Dravidian movement claims to pursue – an advanced civilization about 20,000 BC. That sort of thing is usually called pseudoscience. Quite similar in nature to the pseudoscientific claims that the Ramayana occured 1.7 million years ago, when human beings havent yet begun to live in large cities like Ayodhya!