Short notes on the Role of Megalithic In South Indian History

The megaliths of South India are as interesting as they are problematic. Questions of their uniqueness in South India, their association with similar megaliths outside India, the scarcity of megaliths outside South India and the dating of these have intrigued historians.

When they were first discovered at the beginning of this century excavation work in regard to the discovery of these megaliths was confined to Adichchanallur and the Nilgiris.

Subsequent work has revealed a concentration of megaliths in the Chingleput district and the neighbourhood, as well as Pudukkottai and Cochin. The megalithic type discovered in these areas is of the same pattern. These monuments are really tombs.

In the first place the dead bodies were exposed till the bones alone were left behind. Then the bones were collected and deposited in urns, sarcophagi or dolmenoid cists with port-holes. In the neighbourhood of these burial spots iron implements and polished black and red ware are found.

It has been noticed that ‘these monuments have invariably been found to occur on rocky high grounds which are themselves unfit for cultivation, in close juxtaposition to a hillock and an irrigation tank, but in very close proximity to arable land’.

Probably these were the centres where earliest rice cultivation based on irrigation was known and practised. Evidence of megalithic practices comes from Brahmagiri in Mysore, Porkalam in Kerala, Sanur, and Kunrattur in Chingelput and Maski in Raichur.

On the whole it has been conservatively estimated that this belongs to between 700 and 400 BC. Megaliths as a class are associated with a cultural group which is identifiable. We have megalithic cultures in the eastern Mediterranean in the Caucasus and in Iran. These megaliths are dated 2000 to 1500 BC. Between these areas and South India we do not come across megaliths anywhere.

But it is also true that in the case of West Asia the megaliths occur around the coastal regions while in South India their occurrence deep in the interior is also noticed. But these differences apart, one must consider also the fact that the authors of this culture could have migrated under some pre-historic pressure from West Asia to South India by sea; this assumption explains many other similarities between the ancient people of West Asia and the early Dravidians of South India. Gordon Childe has shrewdly suggested: “the megaliths are concentrated in the south of the peninsula in areas not likely to be affected by land-borne impulses from Iran but exposed rather to maritime influences. If their distribution does suggest inspiration from the west that must surely have come by sea.”

To elaborate further on the megaliths of Dravidian South India we shall consider the views of a few more scholars. An attempt to relate the systems of burial mentioned in ancient Tamil literature of the early centuries before and after the Christian era has been made; that literature speaks of throwing away the dead body exposing it to natural sources of decomposition.

This literature perhaps represents also the culture indicated by the megaliths. Mortimer Wheeler’s work in the Chingleput district has revealed a pattern which does not take us far back into history. But it will not be safe to hold the view that these monuments are not older than the fourth century BC for as Sankhalia points out we have iron objects and black and red pottery in North India also in an earlier context.

But the relationship between the Iron Age and these megalithic monuments is undeniable. These monuments are tombs as we have seen above and the burials are all secondary burials, that is to say, the body is exposed to fowls or beasts, and the remains are collected and put in a pot (urn) and buried or enclosed among stones which are constructed in a form called dolmen.

Objects like iron weapons and tools, semi-precious beads, ceramic ware of various shapes, shell ornaments, etc., are left in the neighbourhood. In the case of these megaliths it is regrettable that it is not possible to get any idea of other aspects of their social life.

It may not be safe to conclude that the early megalithic culture could be credited with the details of social life described in the Sangam literature. If these megalithic people were rice cultivators we have no evidence of that either.

A hopeful piece of evidence for the archaeologists however is that the skeletal remains (including skulls) while being of limited use for the determination of non-ethnic data will at least help us to connect them with the present day speakers of the Dravidian tongues as Zuckerman does. We have quoted above Gordon Childe who has postulated the theory of Dravidian migration from the Middle East to South India.

Christopher Von Furer- Haimendorf has propounded a theory that the megalith builders were a people of mediterranean stock who perhaps reached South India by the middle of the first millennium BC by sea and spread northwards conquering the earlier neolithic and microlithic people who then were in the food-gathering stage of culture.

It has been admitted that such a relationship can be posited only if the Dravidian languages may be shown to have linguistic connection with European tongues. A few decades ago it was plausibly held that there were no such links but now the situation has changed and it is in this context that the researches of Lahovary become significant in the field of comparative linguistics.

He has looked up a number of languages spoken in the Middle East in ancient times like the Elamite etc., and shown the Dravidian elements in them. He has also demonstrated the Dravidian elements in the Finnish-Ugrian group; more than this his account of the unmistakable similarities between proto Dravidian and the Spanish dialect of Basque demonstrates the widespread occurrence of Dravidian in Europe.

If the linguistic nexus was the only missing link then it can be stated that with the supply of that link by the enormous and learned researches of Lahovary we should no longer be in doubt about assigning the origin of the South Indian Dravidian to an Eastern mediterranean homeland.