With the new civ changes comes a renaming:
Tamils -> Dravidians
- The Tamils have been renamed to Dravidians to strengthen their connection to Telugu and Kannada polities and most importantly Vijayanagara
As I wrote in the thread, I'm not a big fan of this, because "the Dravidians" isn't really a meaningful political or ethnic group. It's primarily the name of a linguistic family of languages, and by extension can be used to refer to the various cultures that speak those languages. But politically, there is no such thing as "Dravidia", and there never was. It would be an artifice to lump somewhat related groups into one South Indian civilization. It can be justifiable (in fact the "Indian" civilization is a similar artifice, and so is the Mughal one), but I think it's worth trying to avoid it if we can.
I understand why you made this change but I want to register that I think it sounds silly to use a primarily linguistic grouping as a civilization
But I don't have a better solution, other than splitting the civ into Tamils and some other group like the Kannadigas or something.
So let's explore seriously the spontaneous suggestion I made to split the Dravidian civilization into the Tamils and the Kannadigas. (In practice, adding the Kannadigas and keeping the Tamils more or less as they are.) The Kannadigas are the Kannada-speaking people, living in the modern state of Karnataka. In other words, they're one of the four main Dravidian groups, the others being the Tamils, the Telugus, and the Malayalis (who speak Malayalam). Malayalam diverged from Tamil only around 800 AD, so for our purposes we can consider them to be the same group.
Why the Kannadigas? Let's look at South Indian history. As far as I can tell these are the main South Asian states that existed since ancient times:
- Pandya dynasty (Tamil): -300s to 1600s
- Chola dynasty (Tamil): ancient, revived 850 to 1279
- Chera dynasty (Tamil): -200s to 1100s
- Satavahana dynasty (either Telugu or non-Dravidian, ruled the north of South India only): -100s to 200s
- Pallava dynasty (unclear origin, possibly non-Dravidian or Telugu / Tamil): 275 to 897
- Kadamba dynasty (Kannada): 345 to 540 (first Kannada state)
- Western Ganga dynasty (Kannada): 350 to 1000
- Chalukya dynasty (Kannada): 543–755
- Rashtrakuta dynasty (Kannada): 753 to 982
- Western Chalukya Empire (Kannada): 975–1184
- Hoysala Empire (Kannada): 10th to 14th centuries
- Kakatiya dynasty (Telugu): 1163 to 1323
- Jaffna kingdom (Tamil, in north Sri Lanka): 1215 to 1619
- Kolathunadu (Malayalam): ancient to modern (poorly known)
- Bahmani Sultanate (non-Dravidian, split from the Delhi Sultanate, ruled over some Kannada and Telugu areas): 1347 to 1527
- Vijayanagara Empire (Kannada; Telugu and Tamil also spoken, but Kannada was the court language): 1336 to 1646
- Kozhikode / Calicut (Malayalam): 1124 to 1806
- Kingdom of Mysore (Kannada): 1399 to 1799 (became prominent after the fall of their Vijayanagara overlords)
- Nayak kingdoms (various independent states after the fall of Vijayanagara, speaking Tamil, Kannada or Telugu).
- Notably, the Madurai Nayak dynasty controlled Tamil country from 1529 to 1736. Interestingly, the royals were of Telugu origin and spoke that language, but ruled over a Tamil-speaking population.
After this South India is controlled by European powers until the independence of India, so there are no Dravidian sovereign states anymore. (Sri Lanka is majority non-Dravidian, though it has a Tamil minority.)
My reading of this is that there were two main centers of power in South India over time: the Tamil coast in the southeast, and Karnataka in the northwest. The Telugu area to the northeast also gave birth to some states, but apparently less often and less powerful ones.
Meanwhile, the Tamil civilization is especially well represented in ancient and early medieval times, though it still had states into the modern era. The Kannadigas appear around AD 350, give rise to a number of powerful dynasties (Chalukya, Rashtrakuta), and then in 1336 to arguably the most important South Indian state, the Vijayanagara Empire, which we know Leoreth wants to represent in the game better. Later, another prominent South Indian country, Mysore, was also culturally Kannadiga.
Of course, all these areas were always interlinked, which is why it's not
totally outlandish to think of a "Dravidian" civilization. Vijayanagara, for instance, although it spoke Kannada in court and has its capital in modern-day Karnataka, was also an era of flourishing for Telugu culture and I think Tamil also. Still, the fact that they mostly coexisted and entered conflict (e.g. Vijayanagara conquered the Tamil Pandyan capital of Madurai in 1370) means that it would make sense to represent the Tamils and the Kannadigas as distinct civilizations. One that spawns around 300 BC on the southeast coast, with a game focused on the ancient and medieval eras, on culture, and on building a maritime empire; and the other spawning inland in 350 AD, with a game that involves military conquest, resisting the Mughal and British invasions, monumental architecture, and Mysorean rockets.
A concern is space on the map. South India isn't huge, and a coexisting Kannadiga and Tamil civilizations would be able to only have 2-3 cities each in their core. (Of course they can also choose to conquer each other.) On the other hand, if this forces the Tamils to be a more maritime civilization, it wouldn't be a bad thing. The Telugu area would also be up for grabs to both (and to India / the Mughals).
To give you an idea: the city of Vijayanagara would be roughly on the spice, south of the ivory and north of the river; Madurai (Pandyan capital) would be on the rice near the tip and Thanjavur (Chola capital) one NE of that. Mysore would be 1N of the aluminium, and Bangalore, the current Karnataka capital, probably 1N of that. Chennai/Madras, the current Tamil Nadu capital, would be on the gems at the mouth of that river.
It's a bit cramped.
Anyway, I don't expect the current plans to change due to this post, but maybe it's worth considering such an addition for an eventual overhaul of India. There was also some discussion in the past about creating e.g. a Bengali civilization, so maybe that can all happen at the same time. Or maybe it's better to stick to "Dravidia", I don't know. At least I used this opportunity to learn more about a part of the world I knew very little about.
bonus for Scientific Method.
