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Battles mentioned in the Rig Veda, whether between those called Aryans or Dasyus, are largely between the "five peoples" (pancha manava). These five are identified as the Turvashas, Yadus, Purus, Anus and Druhyus, which the Puranas describe as oRiginating from the five sons of Yayati, an early Vedic king in the lunar dynasty descended from Manu, and the son of Nahusha. These peoples, both Dasyus and Aryans, are also called Nahushas in the Rig Veda.(*24) Of the five the main people of the Rig Veda are the Purus who are usually located on the Sarasvati river or the central region. The Yadus are placed in the south and west in Gujarat, Rajasthan and Maharashtra up to Mathura in the north. The Anus are placed in the north. The Druhyus are placed in the west and the Turvasha southeast. These are the directions given to them in the Puranas.(*25)

In the original Puranic story there were two groups of people, the Devas and Asuras, or godly and ungodly people, who had various conflicts. Both had Brahmin gurus, the Angirasas for the Suras (Devas) and the BhRigus for the Asuras. Both these Brahmin groups we might add were responsible for many teachings in ancient India, including the Upanishads. The battles between the Devas and Asuras involved a struggle between their gurus.

King Yayati, the father of the five Vedic peoples and a follower of the Angirasas, had two wives, Devayani, the daughter of Shukra of the BhRigu seers, and Sharmishta, the daughter of Vrisha Parvan, king of the Asuras. Turvasha and Yadu were sons of Yayati by Devayani of the BhRigus. Anu, Druhyu and Puru were sons of Yayati by Sharmishta of the Asuras.(*26) Yayati's story shows that the five Vedic people were born of an alliance of Aryan and Asuric kings, and their Angirasa and BhRigu seers.

Vrisha Parvan and Shukra appear to have come from southwest India, Gujarat, as the BhRigus were descendants of Varuna, God of the sea, and have always been associated with this region of India (for example, their city BhRigukaccha or modern Baruch near Baroda). In the Puranic story their territory bordered on that of Yayati, who happened upon both Devayani and Sharmishta, while hunting.

Hence three of the original five Vedic peoples had Asuric blood in them through their mother. Puru, whose group ultimately predominated, had Asuric blood, whereas the Yadus, who were most criticized in Vedic and Puranic literature, had no Asuric blood but rather that of the Brahmins. In this story we see that both groups of people - thought by the Aryan invasion theory to be the invading Aryans and the indigenous peoples - had the same religion and ancestry.

These five peoples were styled either Arya or Dasyu, which mean something like good or bad, holy or unholy according to their behavior. Their designation can shift quickly. The descendants of an Aryan king can be called Dasyu or its equivalent (Rakshasa, Dasa, Asura, etc.), if their behavior changes.

For example, in the most important battle in the Rig Veda, the famous battle of the Ten Kings (Dasarajna), victorious Sudas, regarded as a Puru king, and located on the Sarasvati river, includes among his enemies called Dasyu groups of the five Vedic peoples like the Anus, Druhyus, Turvashas, and even Purus.(*27) However, the sons of Sudas themselves fall and in Brahmanical and Puranic literature are themselves called Rakshasas or demons for killing the sons of the great rishi Vasishta.(*28) Meanwhile the Kavashas, a seer family, listed among the defeated enemies of Sudas (*29) appear again in the Brahmanas and Upanishads as the chief priests of the famous dynasty of Kuru kings, particularly Tura Kavasheya, the purohit for King Janamejaya.(*30) The BhRigus, who were among those defeated by Sudas, appear as prominent teachers in later Vedic and Puranic lore as already noted. Such shifts would be impossible if Aryan and Dasyu were simply racial terms. Aryans and the Dasyus are not a racial or linguistic but a religious or spiritual divide, which changes along with human behavior.

Vedic battles are mainly among the Vedic people who are divided into various kingdoms, large and small, much as we find in the Mahabharata itself. Inimical peoples are generally Vedic Kshatriya or nobility among these five peoples. Divodasa, another great Vedic king of the Puru line, defeats Turvasha and Yadu in the Rig Veda.(*31) A king named Divodasa in the Puranas defeats the Yadus. In the Mahabharata, Mandhata, a great Rig Vedic king and Dasyu conqueror, defeats the Druhyus, the lunar dynasty king of Gandhara or Afghanistan.(*32) Parashurama, the sixth avatar of Lord Vishnu, chastises not only the Yadus (Kartavirya Arjuna) but all the Kshatriyas. The great king of the solar dynasty Sagara also defeats the Yadus, who had allied themselves with many foreign peoples.

The main Vedic and Puranic battles are hence between the Purus and their allies (like the Ikshvakus) and the Yadus and their various allies (mainly the Turvashas but sometimes the Druhyus). This is similar to the Deva-Asura battle as it places the people of the Sarasvati in the north versus those in the southwest, but again as a battle between kindred peoples. In the Rig Veda Indra first makes Turvasha and Yadu great and then humbles them before the Purus.

Rama, the seventh avatar, defeats Ravana who is said to have been a Brahmin descendant of the rishi as well as a Rakshasa (demon). Rama's brother Shatrughna defeats Ravana's friend Lavana in Mathura(*33), the region of the Yadus, who is also said to be a Rakshasa. This connection between Lavana and Ravana suggests that Ravana himself was a Yadu, a Gujarati migrant to Sri Lanka, not a Dravidian. The first wave of Aryans to come to Sri Lanka were from Gujarat and hence Yadus. In this regard Ravana abducts Sita on the Godavari river, which was also in the region of the Yadus. Meanwhile Rama's other brother Bharata conquers Gandhara, the land of the Druhyus.

The Pandavas, with Krishna, the eighth avatar, defeat their own kinsmen, the Kauravas, who are said to be the incarnation of various demons(*34), on whose side are the Pandavas own gurus like Bhishma and Drona whom they must also kill. The Kauravas moreover are descendants of a Gandhara or Druhyu mother, Gandhari. Krishna also kills Kansa, a wicked Yadu king of his own family.

Other prominent instances occur when Brahmins are the enemies or the seers fight among themselves. Vritra, the enemy of Indra, the greatest Vedic God, is said in the Brahmanas and Puranas to have been a Brahmin and Indra has to atone for the sin of killing a Brahmin after killing him. This idea goes back to the Vedas where Vritra is the son of Tvashtar, one of the Vedic Gods and the patron deity of the sacrifice. Many of the conflicts in the Puranas are between the seers Vasishta and Vishvamitra, both of which are honored throughout the literature of India as great seers. This conflict goes back to the time of Sudas where both vied to become his purohit or chief priest.

Vedic texts like the Brahmanas style the Dasyus as the fallen descendants of the Vedic king Vishvamitra, his older sons,(*35) making them the older descendants of Vedic kings and seers. This reminds one of the story of Yayati wherein it was Puru, the youngest son, who inherited his kingdom, and his older sons Yadu and Turvasha who became inimical.

Mleccha, another term which later referred to people speaking a different language or for foreigners, was first used in the Sutra literature, Brahmanas and Mahabharata for people of western India from Gujarat to Punjab (realms of Anu, Druhyu and Yadu predominance) which had temporarily become a region of impure practices.(*36) Such people were obviously speakers of Indo-European languages and were part of the same culture. These same regions included the kingdom of Lord Krishna in Dwaraka and the famous city of Takshashila in Gandhara from which the great grammarian Panini derived, which shows that such a designation was only temporary.

That the Vedic people must exclude those of different ethnic features or speaking non-Indo-European languages is an assumption deriving from the Aryan invasion theory and its Aryan race/language corollary. Vedic India was probably a pluralistic culture, like the pluralistic Vedic pantheon. The Vedas are the only books surviving from this era. This, however, does not mean that other books or teachings did not exist, including those in other languages. It may well be that the five Vedic peoples included groups who spoke different, even non-Indo-European languages, or belonged to different ethnic groups or different races. There were other Aryan traditions deriving from or alternative to the Vedic like the Zoroastrian, or the Shramana traditions that gave birth to Buddhism and Jainism. Once the Aryan invasion idea is given up we must recognize the diversity of Vedic and Aryan culture. There is no need to stereotype it by race, language or even religion, particularly when the tradition that came from it is itself very diverse.

The Puranas make the Dravidians descendants of the Vedic family of Turvasha, one of the older Vedic peoples. These ancient historians did not feel any need to limit the Vedic people to one linguistic group. The Vedas portray the large region of north India which must have been as complex culturally then as today. In fact the Puranas regard the Chinese, Persians and other non-Indic peoples to be descendants of Vedic kings. The Vedas see all human beings as descendants of Manu, their legendary first man. The Vedic seers are said to generate not only human beings but the animal creation as well as the realms of the gods and the demons.

We can compare the Vedic wars with those of Europe. However fierce such battles were they were like the conflicts between the Catholics and Protestants or between the Germans the French, struggles between related peoples and religions, who also had long periods of peace between them besides the more dramatic periods of conflict. We don't have to bring in the idea of outside invaders to explain these conflicts and certainly Vedic and Puranic literature does not support this.  

The languages of South India are Dravidian, which is a different linguistic group than the Indo-European languages of the North of the subcontinent. The two groups of languages have many different root words (though a number in common we might add), and above all a different grammatical structure, the Dravidian being agglutinative and the Indo-European being inflected. Dravidian languages possess a very old history of their own, which their legends, the Tamil Sangha literature, show a history in South India and Sri Lanka dating back over five thousand years.

Along with the difference of language there is a difference of skin color from north to south of India, with the southerners being darker in skin color (though northerners are hardly light in color by Western standards, with the exception of some people of the far northwest). Though a less pronounced difference than that of language it has been lumped together along with it again assuming that race and language must be the same.

The Aryan invasion theory has been used to explain both the linguistic and racial differences between the peoples of North and South India, and such differences have been put forth as "proof" of the invasion (as if no other explanation were possible). As the Aryans were made into a race, so were the Dravidians and the Aryan/Dravidian divide was turned into a racial war, the Aryan invaders versus the indigenous Dravidians of Harappa and Mohenjodaro. By this view the Vedic people promoted the superiority of their race and language and simply drove away those of different races or languages. We have already discussed how Sanskrit Aryan is never a racial term but a title of respect. Even the Dravidian kings called themselves Aryan. Nor is there anything in Vedic literature that places the Dravidians outside of the greater Vedic culture and ancestry. Hence to place Aryan against Dravidian as terms is itself a misuse of language. Be that as it may, the Aryan and Dravidian divide has also failed to prove itself.

Now it has been determined that there is no such thing scientifically speaking as Aryan and Dravidian races. The so-called Aryans and Dravidian races of India are members of the same Mediterranean branch of the Caucasian race, which prevailed in the ancient civilizations of Egypt and Sumeria and is still the main group in the Mediterranean area, North Africa, and the Middle East. The Caucasian race is not simply white but also contains dark skinned types. Skin color and race is another nineteenth century idea that has been recently discarded.

Darker skin color is commonly found in peoples living in more southern regions and appears as an adjustment mechanism to hotter climates and greater sunshine. For example southern Europeans are darker in skin color than northern Europeans, though they are not a different race because of this. This suggests that the Dravidian branch of the Mediterranean race must have lived in South India for some thousands of years to make this adjustment, and the same thing could be said of the people of North India as well if we would make them originally light-skinned invaders from the north.

The issue of language is similarly more complex. It is now known that Dravidian languages, with their agglutinative patterns, share common traits and are of the same broad linguistic group as such Asian and East European languages as Finnish, Hungarian, old Bulgarian, Turkish, Mongolian and Japanese, the Finno-Ugric and Ural-Altaic branches of languages. As the common point between these groups lies in Central Asia some scholars have recently proposed that the Dravidian peoples originally came from this region.

The same linguistic speculation that led to the Aryan invasion theory has following the same logic required a "Dravidian invasion." Not only are the Dravidians like the Aryans styled invaders into India, they took the same route as the Aryans. The city-state of Elam in southwest Iran, east of Sumeria, which had a high civilization throughout the ancient period, shows an agglutinative structure like the Dravidian, as does possibly the Sumerian itself. This would place Dravidian type languages in Iran as well. Thereby the Dravidians, just like the Aryans, would have migrated (again the reason for which is not clear) from Central Asia and into Iran, with one group moving west to Mesopotamia and the other, apparently larger group, going east into India. Later the invading Aryans are said to have forced the Dravidians to move to the south of the country from their original homeland on the Indus and Sarasvati rivers. (However, we have already noted that there is no evidence of such migrations, nor of any Dravidian references to the Sarasvati like those of the Vedas.)

The Dravidian and Aryan invasion theories turns the migration of particular language/racial groups from Central Asia into a kind of panacea to explain the developments of race and language for much of humanity, particularly for India. However both invasion theories appear far too simplistic given the complex ways in which cultures, languages and races move and interact.

The Dravidian claim to be indigenous to India has, like the Aryan, been discredited by linguistic argument. Yet the argument brings the Aryans and Dravidians back into contact with each other and derives them from the same region, suggesting a long term association between them outside of India. However if we give up the invasion model such association can be better explained by contact within India which we know was an historical fact.

Certainly the present population of India - which even the ancient Greeks and Persians regarded as dark-skinned - was not produced by light-skinned people from Central Asia (whether Aryan or Dravidian). Moreover, there cannot be a Dravidian invasion changing the language but not the population of India just like the Aryan invasion, as the idea is far-fetched to happen once but to happen twice in a row in the same region and by the same route is ridiculous.

If both the Aryan and Dravidian languages of India have affinities with those of Central Asia, and to peoples of different ethnic groups (the Indo-Aryan with the lighter skinned European and the Dravidians with both light-skinned Finns and Hungarians, and Mongolian race Turks) a phenomenon is created that is too complex to be explained by mere migration alone. It takes languages across the racial boundaries that migration theories uphold and places them on par with other cultural affinities (like art or religion), which are not limited by race.

The linguistic divide between Aryan and Dravidian, as that between the Indo-European and other language groups is also now being questioned. A greater Nostratic family of languages has been proposed that includes Indo-European, Dravidian and Semitic languages and looks for a common ancestor for all three. This requires a greater degree of contact between these groups which remote Central Asia cannot afford. Moreover, there are affinities between Sanskrit and the Munda or aboriginal languages of India, as S. Kalyanaraman has noted, that indicate a long and early contact, if not common evolution, which could have only happened in India. Such Vedic scholars as Sri Aurobindo have stated that the Dravidian and Sanskritic languages have much more in common than has yet been admitted and appear to have a common ancestor.

Dravidian history does not contradict Vedic history either. It credits the invention of the Tamil language, the oldest Dravidian tongue, to the rishi Agastya, one of the most prominent sages in the Rig Veda. Dravidian kings historically have called themselves Aryans and trace their descent through Manu (who in the Matsya Purana is regarded as originally a south Indian king). Apart from language, moreover, both north and south India share a common religion and culture. Prior to Vedic Sanskrit there may have been a language that was the basis of both the Dravidian and Sanskritic languages in India.

The idea that the same culture cannot produce two different language systems may itself be questionable. It may have been the very power of Vedic culture and its sages, with their mastery of the word, that they could have produced not only Indo-European like languages but also Dravidian.

In any case the Aryan/Dravidian divide is no longer sufficient to uphold the Aryan invasion theory. It leads to a more difficult to maintain Dravidian invasion theory. The Dravidian invasion theory is just a shadow cast by the Aryan invasion theory and reveals the erroneous nature of the latter.

Other aspects of the Aryan-Dravidian divide are predicated upon the invasion theory. For example the idea that South India represents a pre-Vedic Shaivite culture as opposed to the Brahmanical culture of the north follows only from this. Otherwise we see Shaivism in the North, in Kailas, Benares and Kashmir, and Shiva as Rudra of the Vedas. What have thereby been proposed as radical cultural differences between the North and South of India are merely regional variations in the vast cultural complex of the subcontinent and its interrelated spiritual traditions.

Dravidian pride or nationalism need not depend upon the Aryan invasion theory or denigrating the culture of North India. The Dravidians have long been one of the most important peoples of India and, perhaps ironically, have been the best preservers of Vedic culture itself. The best Vedic Sanskrit, rituals and traditions can be found only in the south of India. That South India was able to do this suggests the importance and antiquity of Vedic culture to this region.

Vedic texts like Shatapatha and Aitareya Brahmanas list a group of ten to sixteen kings, including a number of figures of the Rig Veda like Sudas, as having conquered the region of India from "sea to sea."(*37) Lands of the Vedic people are mentioned in these texts from Gandhara (Afghanistan) in the west to Videha (Bihar) in the east, and south to Vidarbha (Maharashtra), as well as from the western to the eastern oceans. The lands mentioned in the Vedas are much vaster in scope than those in any other ancient literature. The Vedas are hardly the pronouncements of a limited local culture or new intruders who had not yet known the region. They speak of a region are equivalent to the region of Europe from the Baltic to the Mediterranean seas and from Spain to Poland.

These passages were ignored by nineteenth century scholars dominated by the invasion theory, who stated that the Vedas show no evidence of large empires in India. The main reason again was the so-called absence of archeological data. However, the Harappan culture, which now has sites in most of these regions mentioned in the Brahmanas should cause us to take these references seriously. Were these figures great kings or emperors of the Harappan (Sarasvati) culture? Surely such a large culture would have maintained some memory of its great kings.