Aryan and Non-Aryan in India by Madhav M. Deshpande & Peter Edwin Hook

Author:Madhav M. Deshpande & Peter Edwin Hook
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Michigan Center for South and Southeast Asian Studies

FIGURE 1 Tamil and Hindi Kinship Terms for Mother’s Brother, Father’s Sister’s Husband, and Spouse’s Father

The radical differences which distinguish the two kinship systems constitute an inherent obstacle to their complete convergence; a synthetic system cannot be created without altering the fundamental principles of one or both systems. Convergence between Dravidian and Indo-Aryan terminologies can be studied empirically, for their geographical distributions overlap, forming a broad frontier zone where castes of each kinship system live in close proximity, sometimes in the same village. In such settings we generally find a shared lexicon of kinship marking a divergent semantics which can easily be identified as either Dravidian or Indo-Aryan for any given case.

Kathiawar falls within the frontier zone, and analysis of Trivedi’s data on the terminologies of the Mer and of Gujarati (unspecified as to caste) of that area may be used in illustration of those effects.11 Terms for kinsmen in the parents’ generation are given in figure 2.

The vocabulary is identical, but the Mer employ only four of the ten Gujarati terms. This is because the semantic categories of the Mer are organized by a Dravidian logic which takes systematic cross-cousin marriage as its basis, and, in consequence, their terminology is fundamentally the same as that of the Tamils, in spite of its non-Dravidian lexicon. The groupings of genealogical referents in the Mer terminology may be derived directly from the genealogical representation of Tamil terminology in figure 1, producing the equations MB=FZH=SpF (māmā) and FZ=MBW=SpM (fuī). The remaining two groups, FB=MZH and MZ=FBW, Mer kākā and māsī respectively, are also found in Tamil which, however, additionally includes father and mother in these two categories while the Mer have distinct terms for them (bāpu, māṅ). The ten Gujarati terms, plus the two terms for father and mother (bāpu, man) not given in figure 2, by contrast, are structured both lexically and semantically in a manner fundamentally the same as among other Indo-Aryan systems. In other regions of the semantic field defined by Mer kinship terms the story is very much the same: in semantic structure the system is recognizably Dravidian, and although the influence of environing Indo-Aryan systems is by no means negligible, these influences are largely confined to such surface features as the lexicon.

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