5.5 The South
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.