Dravidian Kinship analyses the kinship system of South India and Sri Lanka as it has developed over the last two thousand years, combining historical evidence of the past with anthropological studies of the present. This classic book, reissued after fourteen years, provides the only comprehensive account of the Dravidian system. Professor Trautmann treats the kinship systems of the many local communities of South India and Sri Lanka as so many variants of a single Dravidian pattern, historically related to one another as descendants of a common ancestral system. He devises methods to identify and sift our the effects of outside influence (notably that of the Indo-Aryan kinship systems of North India), and reconstructs, through a comparative study of the variant local systems, the ancestral proto-Dravidian kinship system from with they derive. The book also analyses the relation of the Dravidian system to the culture of kinship norms to be found in the Dharmasastras, and its role in political alliance-building in the dynastic marriages of the Dravidian region.