The word Aryanisation suggests that the Aryan people in the course of their peaceful colonization of practically the whole of India met with and overcame opposition from pre- Aryan cultural groups and that the cultural identity of the latter was nearly effaced and at least a thick surface layer of Aryanism in all its aspects came to prevail.

Any student of Indian history knows how the Indo-Aryans had to face opposition from a superior civilization in the Indus Valley and could overcome it only by destroying it; secondly the Mahabharata battle was perhaps a battle more of antagonistic cultures than of political ambitions;

Thirdly when the Aryan interests and traditions were thwarted and opposed by the philosophers of north eastern India like the Jina and the Buddha the situation was managed by a vast programme of accommodation; then when the Aryans pushed on to the Deccan braving the perils and the hazards offered by the wild Dandakaranya and its wilder inhabitants (human and brute), they came up against unprecedented difficulties some of which are explained by the Ramayana stories regarding the sufferings of the ascetics at the hands of the non-Aryans depicted by the Aryans as demons.

Finally when they reached the end of the peninsula they must have again met with an operative civilization possessing its own cultural frame-work and functions and so once again obliged to accommodate.

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From the above account it will be clear that the Aryans destroyed whenever possible and accommodated whenever necessary; but even so the cultures physically overwhelmed by them £ till left sufficient traces of their practices and traditions to influence the Aryan way of life so that some of the ancient practices of Mohenjo-Daro and Harappa have not only survived, but deeply influenced the Aryans themselves.

This process of give and take occurred mostly in the fields of religion and mythology primarily and then in the field of language and literature. This was natural because language after all is the embodinv and expression of culture. An overall picture reveals according to some scholars not only an Aryanisation of pre-Aryan cultures but also a clear Dravidianisation of the Aryans.

In South India this is particulary marked. Even the earliest stratum of the Tamil Sang literature which is the oldest available in the whole region we have traces of this process of accommodation. Indra is already a God in the Tolkappiyam and this is a clear case of Aryanisation. Murugan of the hilly country carrying with him a mythology specially Tamil in character is at the other end and it looks as if the Tamil Murugan was exchanged for the Aryan Indra.

In between these extremities one sees the pastoral God of Mayon also called Mai, the same as Krishna and in this case we see clearly an attempted reconciliation between two pastoral cultures. The worship of the God of the littoral region is similarly significant. Kali, perhaps originally the female counterpart of Kala, the God of death, became the spouse of Siva in her angry mood and manifestations and even distantly equated with Parvati, the Lady of the Mountain.

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But what is obvious in all this is while the two cultures have been coming together there has been no fusion so thoroughly as to render recognition and identification of the component parts impossible. They are distinguishable.

What is pre- Aryan can certainly be even today distinguished from what is Aryan, even as in the field of language the Indo-Aryan element can surely be distinguished from the Dravidian; and this has been done well by eminent linguists like Burrow, Emeneau and so forth. Once it was held almost like a superstition that Sanskrit only lent and never borrowed but now it is clear that it has been from the beginning doing both fairly extensively.