Dasyu

(“slave”) The name used for non-Aryan
peoples in the Vedas, the earliest Hindu
sacred texts. The words Aryan and
Dasyu are an “us” and “them” opposition—in essence, the people who composed the Vedas called themselves
Aryans, and referred to the “outsiders”
as Dasyus. Although one cannot be certain whether these names refer to a particular group of people, or any group of
all, one theory is that the Aryans were a
people who had migrated from outside
of India, and the Dasyus were the
indigenous people in northern India.
The Vedas describe the Dasyus as living
in fortified cities, some of which were
destroyed by the god Indra. Some readers have interpreted this image as the
Aryans’ destruction of the Indus Valley
cities, but there is little historical record
for such spectacular conquests.
Other hymns in the Vedas describe
the Dasyus as dark-skinned and noseless, which is generally taken to mean
flat-nosed. This has led some to identify
the Dasyus with the Dravidian language
speakers who now live in southern
India, since some of them share these
characteristics. According to this belief,
the Dravidian language speakers would
have been gradually displaced toward
the south as the Indo-Aryan language
speakers—in short, the Aryans—came
into India from the north. One piece of
linguistic evidence for this comes from
modern Pakistan, in which a small
group of people speak Brahui, which is a
member of the Dravidian language family. This Brahui-speaking community is
entirely surrounded by people speaking
Indo-Aryan languages, and the simplest
theory for this anomaly is that these
Brahui speakers are an isolated linguistic fragment of that earlier time. These
theories are intriguing, but it is naive to
read the Vedas as an objective historical
account, or even to assume that any of
its references correspond to events outside the sacred world to which they were
the key.