> An entire political class and "Dravidian" political parties have been > built up on cooked up history. There is no such thing as Dravidian, any > more than there is "Aryan", although the southern languages tend to be > called "Dravidian" languages. There are links with these southern > languages all along the coast up to Gujarat, Sindh and further North - > and perhaps as far away as the homeland of the Finno-Ugric languages. So > a connection with Sanskrit would not be surprising, given that retroflex > phonemes are common to Dravidian and other Sanskrit derived Indian > languages but are absent in all other Indo European languages outside > India.
When the Piltdown man was shown to be a hoax, many evolution-deniers used it as an excuse to say that evolution itself is a hoax. Similarly, as we improve our understanding of what "race" means, some people seem to want to throw out the fairly solid work done in understanding our languages. There are numerous linguistic features that are considered when classifying languages. Prevalence of retroflex consonants in Dravidan languages may often be cited as one, but that's hardly the only reason. Words for primary objects (i, you, he them etc), word order, cases & case markers, inclusive & exclusive "we"s, gendering, types of agglutination, negation etc are different enough that they are classified in a different family. The origins of Dravidian politics have about as much to do with linguistic theories as the origin of the "Bible belt" in the USA had to do with the Bible. Whatever narrative of history is presented, someone will twist it to suit their political needs. They are just convenient origin myths used to teach simplistic views of history. BTW, I just wrote an answer to similarities between Hindi & Tamil that you may find interesting: https://www.quora.com/Tamil-language/What-are-some-important-similarities-between-Tamil-and-Hindi
