====================================================== | | Nasal | |Linguistic area.| Index.| Stature. ===================+================+=======+========= Paniyan | Jungle tribe | 95.1 | 157.4 Kadir | Do. | 89.8 | 157.7 Kurumba | Do. | 86.1 | 157.9 Sholaga | Do. | 85.1 | 159.3 Irula, Nilgiris | Do. | 84.9 | 159.8 Mala Vedan | Do. | 84.9 | 154.2 Kanikar | Do. | 84.6 | 155.2 Chenchu | Do. | 81.9 | 162.5 Pallan | Tamil | 81.5 | 164.3 Mukkuvan | Malayalam | 81. | 163.1 Paraiyan | Tamil | 80. | 163.1 Palli | Do. | 77.9 | 162.5 Ganiga | Canarese | 76.1 | 165.8 Bestha | Telugu | 75.9 | 165.7 Tiyan | Malayalam | 75. | 163.7 Kuruba | Canarese | 74.9 | 162.7 Boya | Telugu | 74.4 | 163.9 Tota Balija | Do. | 74.4 | 163.9 Agasa | Canarese | 74.3 | 162.4 Agamudaiyan | Tamil | 74.2 | 165.8 Golla | Telugu | 74.1 | 163.8 Vellala | Tamil | 73.1 | 162.4 Vakkaliga | Canarese | 73. | 167.2 Dasa Banajiga | Do. | 72.8 | 165.3 Kapu | Telugu | 72.8 | 164.5 Nayar | Malayalam | 71.1 | 165.2 ======================================================
This table demonstrates very clearly an unbroken series ranging from the jungle men, short of stature and platyrhine, to the leptorhine Nayars and other classes.
In plate V are figured a series of triangles representing (natural size) the maxima, minima, and average nasal indices of Brahmans of Madras city (belonging to the poorer classes), Tamil Paraiyans, and Paniyans. There is obviously far less connection between the Brahman minimum and the Paraiyan maximum than between the Brahman and Paraiyan maxima and the Paniyan average; and the frequent occurrence of high nasal indices, resulting from short, broad noses, in many classes has to be accounted for. Sir Alfred Lyall somewhere refers to the gradual Brahmanising of the aboriginal non-Arayan, or casteless tribes. "They pass," he writes, "into Brahmanists by a natural upward transition, which leads them to adopt the religion of the castes immediately above them in the social scale of the composite population, among which they settle down; and we may reasonably guess that this process has been working for centuries." In the Madras Census Report, 1891, Mr. H. A. Stuart states that "it has often been asserted, and is now the general belief, that the Brahmans of the South are not pure Aryans, but are a mixed Aryan and Dravidian race. In the earliest times, the caste division was much less rigid than now, and a person of another caste could become a Brahman by attaining the Brahmanical standard of knowledge, and assuming Brahmanical functions; and, when we see the Nambudiri Brahmans, even at the present day, contracting alliances, informal though they be, with the women of the country, it is not difficult to believe that, on their first arrival, such unions were even more common, and that the children born of them would be recognised as Brahmans, though perhaps regarded as an inferior class. However, those Brahmans, in whose veins mixed blood is supposed to run, are even to this day regarded as lower in the social scale, and are not allowed to mix freely with the pure Brahman community."