ABSTRACT
The Dravidian stock seems to have arrived in north-west India in the fifth or fourth millennium BC. Its exact provenance is not clear. A hither/central Asian origin for the language type, if not for its present bearers, finds some support in the thesis, first advanced by Caldwell in the middle of the nineteenth century, of a lexical and morphological relationship between the Dravidian and the Uralic language families. Comparison (e.g. by Burrow 1944) of certain semantic fields seems to place a lexical relationship of some kind beyond reasonable doubt; and there are structural parallels in the tense markers, the formation of the plural, the pronominal system, and the negative conjugation. M aterial so far deciphered at the M ohenjo-D aro and H arappa sites also suggests a connection with Dravidian.
