[Illustration: _Plate V_ Seoris or Savaras (_Mirzapur district_)] Let me then begin by giving a brief account of the two ancient and indigenous families of language in India, the Dravidian and Mundā families. Sir G. Grierson's _Survey_ has definitely established the fact that, in spite of the close physical resemblance between the Dravidian races properly so called and the inhabitants of Chota Nagpore, there is no linguistic affinity between them. In Sir George Grierson's own words "they differ in their pronunciation, in their modes of indicating gender, in their declensions of nouns, in their method of indicating the relationship of a verb to its objects, in their numeral systems, in their principles of conjugation, in their methods of indicating the negative, and in their vocabularies. The few points in which they agree are points which are common to many languages scattered all over the world." _The Dravidian Languages._ These are, as aforesaid, the languages of Southern India. Two of them survive further to the north in Chota Nagpore and the Sonthal Parganas, where they exist side by side with Mundā dialects. One curiously isolated Dravidian language is Brāhui, an extraordinary survival, far to the north-west, in the midst of the Iranian and Muhammadan languages of Baluchistan. The Sanskrit writers knew of two great southern languages which they named the Andhra-bhāshā and the Drāvida-bhāshā. The first corresponded to what is now Telugu and its cognates, the latter to the rest of the southern languages. Sir George Grierson classifies the Dravidian family thus: Number of speakers (1901) A. Drāvida group: Tamil 16,525,500 Malayalam 6,029,304 Kanarese 10,365,047 Kodagu 39,191 Tulu 535,210 Toda 805 Kota 1300 Kurukh 592,351 Malto 60,777 B. Intermediate languages: Gond, etc. 1,123,974 C. Andhra group: Telugu 20,696,872 Kandh 494,099 Kola-i 1505 D. Brāhui 48,589 56,514,524