5 Groups of Draavidas

Draavida/ Gouda

 Traditionally People were groups as Pancha Draavida and Pancha Gowda combinations.

These comprised Telugu, Kannada, Tamil, Malayalam, Marathi communities.

These are said to be the residents south of Vindhya Parvata.

North of Vindhya are said to be Pancha Goudas. (Five Sects - Bengali,/ Assami Orissa, Gujarati, Hindi and Kashmiri).

(For sectarian convenience, marriages were between these sects, were allowed at the most by elders of the earlier era.)

Now, we have the scientific evidence to back this up, stating that Maharashtrian communities are closely genetically linked with South Indians. Thus, we can conclude that the Pancha Draavida tradition is based on the evidence.

 Read the assertions of CCMB, a premier institution of Government, based in Hyderabad.

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Decoding the genetic mysteries of Maharashtrians, the city-based Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology has found that the population of Maharashtra has a closer affinity with South Indians than Central Indians.

The CCMB analysis suggested that people from Maharashtra state are largely derived from Palaeolithic ancient settlers. However, a more recent (about 10,000 years older) detectable paternal gene flows from west Asia and is reflected in the residents of Maharashtra. 

The CCMB findings reveal movement of people to Maharashtra through the western coast, rather than the mainland, where Western Ghats-Vindhya mountains and Narmada-Tapti rivers might have acted as a natural barrier.

“Comparing the Maharashtrians with other South Asian people reveals that they have a closer affinity with South Indians than with Central Indian populations,” said scientist Dr K. Thangaraj.

Maharashtra’s geographical location necessitates the study of the dispersal of the modern population in South Asia. Several hypotheses have been proposed to explain the cultural, linguistic and geographical affinity of those living in Maharashtra with other South Asian populations.

The genetic origin of populations living in this state is inadequately understood and had earlier been described at a low molecular resolution level. 

Besides the state’s strategic geographical position in the Indian subcontinent, the origin and migration of those living in various regions in Maharashtra and their affinity with other contemporary South Asian populations has not been explored, so far, at the high resolution level.

CCMB believes that Maharashtra works as a bridge with central, northern and southern India and could provide some clues about the inhabiting of the Indian subcontinent, especially with reference to coastal route migration.

The CCMB team analysed the control-regions and partial coding-region sequence variations of mtDNA (mitochondrial DNA which denotes maternal lineage)and 20 Y-SNP and 17 Y-STR markers of Y chromosome (male lineage) in two tribal populations (Mahadeo-Koli and Thakur) which live along the western coastal region of India and compared the results with the available data on contemporary populations.