The Brahuis in Iran and adjoining Western Pakistan speak a language, that is extremely close to the Dravidian ones in India....make of that in light of current discussion, what you will!

Yes, but nobody's quite sure when they got there. I've seen suggestions that they imigrated to their current location from the south of Indian as recently as the 1500s CE, as mercenary soldiers. Not saying I guy it, but make of that what you will

There are many Dravidian languages and *dialects in India, jheem....essentially all the four languages in the deep South - Tamil, Kannada, Telugu and Malayalam are Dravidian. Dravidian dialects are documented in Central India too. The four listed above have a definite Sanskrit influence and that has a lot to do with Brahminism.

Yes, I know that, but the Tamilophones are the ones I'm most familiar with (as Tamil is the only Dravidian language I've read linguistics books about). I've read varying reports on the magnitude of Sanskrit loanwords in Tamil: from zero to more than 10%. It's a touchy subject, and I guess I should make a full disclosure here: almost all of the South Indians I've come to know are Tamilians. Also, we shouldn't forget that there are other language families represented in India besides Dravidian and IE.

As for influence, it runs both ways. There's definitely a non-IE substrate in Sanskrit, but whether this proves that there were Dravidians in the Sarasvati river area when Sasnkrit-speaking folks arrived or whether they were met up with in central or southern Indian is another matter. If we drop the pesky Aryan Invasion Theory, we're left with where the Sanskrit / Prakrit speakers were and were the Proto-Dravidian speakers were. It's a similar problem, years later, to the Persian Moghuls invading. And they did make it into the South.

It is however, only amongst the Tamils, that a serious anti-Brahmin movement arose in the mid sixties. The Brahmins are considered Aryan and the Tamil Brahminical hegemony over all intellectual/socio-cultural, not to mention, religious matters was what brought things to a pass. Tamilian Brahmins suddenly had a lot of issues such as race, culture and origins to contend with. Thankfully things died down, but there is and has always been a DEFINITE, palpable difference between the Brahminical way of life in the South, especially Tamil Nadu, and the rest of the population.

Yup, so I noticed that recently when I spent time in Tamilnadu. Of course it helped that I was staying with a rather conservative (religiously) Aiyer Brahman family.

And, please, I'd like to remind everybody that I'm trying to discuss this topic as neutrally as possible. So, I hope nobody gets offended. And, now back to our previously scheduled linguistic issues. --sivaramakrishnan (my real Hindu name) aka jheem