Why south India

Why south India: the Dravidian wall , The reason China has been isolated for such a long time is simple: it is surrounded by mountains and steppes. They built a huge wall (actually a set of walls) to close the steppes. Thus they suffered very few invasions from the outside. India too has its "walls". One is the Himalaya. One is the sea (that for many centuries was impossible to navigate from the west). There is, in my opinion, a third wall that has protected India over the centuries, and it is a human wall: the Dravidian people. The main cultural invasions came from Persia (the only part that is geographically easy to cross). The first major invasion was the invasion of the Indo-Europeans (the same people who conquered Europe a few centuries later). The Indo-Europeans came with their gods and their arts. They pushed the original people of India, the Dravidians, to the south. But the Indo-Europeans never quite controlled all of Dravidian India. Thus today India still has two main families of languages: Indo-European (such as Hindi) and Dravidian (such as Tamil). They are as different as English (a Indo-European language) and Arabic (a Semitic language). The second major invasion came from Afghanistan and it was Islam. Again, it was the Dravidian people that stopped this invasion. For thousands of years the Dravidians sort of defended the Indian identity that these invaders were trying to erase. The north of India became Muslim (Taj Mahal and the likes). The south of India remained largely Dravidian. The Cholas, Pallavas, etc were Dravidian dynasties that created their own empires in the south. Ironically, it was the Europeans who managed to tear down this wall, precisely by starting from the south. The Europeans were the first invaders who did not come from northwest: they came from the sea, after Magellan, Columbus, etc had invented long-distance navigation. They landed in the Dravidian lands and they slowly conquered all of India. Brief history of Dravidian India. At one point the Mauryan empire ruled over most of India. When this empire declined (around 200 BC), North India was invaded as usual from the northwest, while South India fragmented into a number of kingdoms: Chola, Pallava and others. There is evidence that these southern kingdoms traded with the Roman empire. Some of these empires extended as far as Indonesia. Muslims invaded north India in the 13th century and continued to invade it for centuries. The shock waves reached the south, but only bits and pieces of the south were conquered, and only for short periods of time. Thus there are Muslims in south India, but very few. Surprisingly, there are also very few Buddhists. There are in fact more Christians than Buddhists in India. The south remained in the hands of small kingdoms until the 17th century, when the Marathas unified a big chunk of India. Back to the ancient past. The Dravidian empires (no matter how little known in the west) created sophisticated civilizations. Their architecture and sculpture is a shock for westerners, who are not used to such density of details. Thousands of master sculptors must have worked on the major temples. Their art was also profoundly metaphorical: there is virtually no detail that does not "mean" something. They never portrayed an animal or a scene just for the sake of it. It always meant something. Thus their temples are layers and layers of details which are layers and layers of meaning. Visiting Dravidian India is an endless process of decoding/interpretation. You have to see the pictures of these monsters of temples to understand how different this world is. I have been trying to find a simple metaphor: in Europe architecture is grandeur (the king is great, the state is great, god is great); in China architecture is harmony (harmony with nature, mandate from heaven); in India architecture is a living encyclopedia. The temples in South India are obviously different from the temples in North India. FIrst of all, the main monumnets in the north are often Islamic, not Hindu or Buddhists, whereas in the South there is an overwhelming majority of Hindu temples. Second, in the north the temple tends to be more compact, or cut in rock. In the south the temple is part of a huge complex. The gates alone (the gorupas) are colossal structures overflowing with details. The temple itself is inside a walled area, and in many cases it is very visible because of the vimana (like a very steep Egyptian pyramid). Both inside and outside the walled area, the temple is surrounded by all sorts of additional structures. The halls (mandapa) are the equivalent of a Christian basilica: hundreds of pillars, each lavishly decorated. Thus the total experience. Thus kms and kms of hiking barefoot from one corner to the other one. The key names to remember are * vimana (the pyramidal core of the temple) * gopura (the colossal colorful gates of the compound) * mandapa (the vast column halls) North India'n Hindu temples instead are characterized by "shikharas" (curved towers).