The emergence of the south was a significantly different
story. The
northeast emerged in the early first millennium B.C., but it was only
late in that millennium that the process got under way in the south.
Here too the emergence of states was a crucial development. They
adopted the culture of the north; like the Nubians in relation to
ancient Egypt. This meant large- scale importation of the
appurtenances of north Indian culture-notably Brahmins, their Vedas,
and their literate skills. There may also have been an element of
military invasion from the north. But to judge by the outcome, the
deployment of Aryan power cannot have been nearly as oppressive as in
the northeast. At least in the areas we now think of as the south, the
indigenous peoples retained their Dravidian languages and sooner or
later used them to develop literary cultures of their own. They
likewise preserved their non- Aryan ethnic identities, and despite the
significant roles played by immigrant Brahmins, their political elites
were predominantly non-Aryan. Only in Srilanka was a large territory
permanently colonized by an Indo- Aryan-speaking people, the Sinhalese;
and the key to this may be that they got to the island before the
Dravidian- speakers.
The northwest remained the gateway to the subcontinent
down to the
eighteenth century A.D. Through this gateway came a succession of
invaders, starting with the Persians in the sixth century B.C. and the
Greeks in the fourth. Typically the political domination of these
intruders was limited to the northwest, a pattern that still held good
as late as the Muslim invasion of the early eighth century A.D.
Culturally the impact of such invaders was usually absorbed or
contained without serious dislocation. Thus the famous Sanskrit
grammarian Panini is likely to have lived under Persian rule. The
Muslim presence was culturally less benign, and from the eleventh
century onward Muslim conquest was to become a major threat to the
traditional culture of India.