Is the Indus Valley Civilization Aryan or Dravidian ?

Aryan-Dravidian Kinship

M. Vaitialingam has observed:

" The Indus-Valley civilization is now accepted as the earliest civilization found on the Indian soil. It was an urban civilization, no doubt. We are not sure of the creators of this civilization. Some say it was the “Dravidians.” But “Aryans” and “Dravidians” are concepts comparatively very modern which were created by philologists of the 19th century. The Indus Valley people had nothing to do with them. What is more surprising that the Gods of the Indus Valley people are also the Gods of the Vedas and are Gods of the Hindu religion worshipped to this day a fact which has compelled the writers of ‘An Advanced History of India’ (Dr. Majumdar, Dr. Raychaudhari and Dr. Datta) to say “We must therefore hold that there is an organic relationship between the Indus-Valley and the Hinduism of today.


Shiva, one of the chief deities of the Indus Valley people has an important place in the Vedic patheon, and ‘not a minor place’ in the Vedas as the learned authors hold. In the heart of Yajur Veda, which is one of the three important Vedas, and which occupied a middle place among them, we find a collection of mantras called ‘Satarudriya or Sri Rudram which is the life center of the Vedas, and the holy ‘Pachaksharam’ of the Saiva religion is in the very heart and center of Sri Rudram.

According to modern theorists, the Tamils are supposed to be the descendants of the “Dravidians” of the Indus-Valley. But the ancient literature of the Tamils, the Sangam Literature, does not mention the name Shiva even once; whereas in Sri Rudram the word Shiva and the feminine form Sivaa, are mentioned several times. Yet Shiva is called a “Dravidian God!

Indra occupies a prominent place in Rig Veda. He is invoked alone in about ¼ of the hymns of the Rig Veda, far more than are addressed to any other deity. He is considered by Western Indologists as the national hero of the Vedic “Aryans”. This Aryan hero was also the God of the ancient Tamils – the “Dravidians.” Temples were built in ancient times in Tamilnadu for worshipping Indra. Grand festivals were celebrated by the Tamil kings in honor of Indra, the “the national hero of the Aryans.’ Indra was so much cherished by the Tamil people, that priority of worship was given to him in the great Epic Silappadikaram’ – the epic of the Anklet. Besides, references to Indra worship are found in Tholkapiam (600 BCE) Purananuru, Paripadal Aingurunuru and Pattupaddu, all belonging to the Sangam period. Certainly Seran Senguttuvan, his brother Illango Adikal, and, above all, the great Sangam Poets were not naïve as to accept Indra the lord of the Aryans who were the enemies of the Dravidians as their God, How can historians reconcile these contradictory views?

What did the Dravidians do after they were defeated and driven out?

The Western historians would have us believe that - All those who escaped the destruction migrated southwards, crossed the central mountain ranges, entered the Deccan plateau, settled down there and started building temples for Indra, the national hero of their inveterate enemy, the ‘Aryans’, and began to honor him with grand festivals, all as a reward, for driving them out of their habitat. So naïve are they! "
(source: Perennial Hindu Culture and The Twin Myths – By M. Vaitialingam The Thirumaka Press. 1980 p. 22-37).

The AIT theory requires that the early Rigvedic peoples had no worthwhile knowledge of the ocean or of maritime trade. It reduces them to a nomadic land-based people who had never even seen the sea. But there is a major problem confronting this theory. The Rigveda alone has more than 150 references to samudra, the common Sanskrit term for ocean, weaving it into its cosmology and the functions of almost every main God that it has. Witzel tries to explain away this problem by arguing that practically all the occurrences of the word samudra in the Rigveda refer to something other than a real terrestrial ocean. In other words he redefines samudra as something other than the sea. Witzel’s theory also requires ignoring the Sarasvati river, clearly referred to in the Rigveda as a major, exalted river. The Sarasvati was the main river of Harappan civilization and mainly dried up around 1900 BCE, contributing significantly to the civilization’s end. Witzel has to do considerable theatrics to ignore the numerous references to Sarasvati in the Rigveda and in other Vedic texts as the oldest and most sacred river of the Vedic people, in order to ‘prove’ his theory that the Aryans arrived from Central Asia a long time after the collapse of the Harappan civilization.

(source: Witzel's Vanising Ocean - by David Frawley).