I forgot in the last post to just note the difference between patriarchy/matriarchy and patriliny/matriliny. It is generally observed throughout the world that no human culture tends to be matriarchal though some may have matrilineal descent systems, etc. So Dravidian society may also have been boringly patriarchal though it may indeed have had matrilineal descent, etc. (I don't believe it as certainly known at this point though) This can be illustrated using the Nair example itself- though the Nairs were matrilineal in that a child belonged to the mother's family and not the father's, the actual lord of the house was always the maternal uncle, that is the elderly male progeny of the matrons. Not that you were not aware of this- I just wanted to mention it. But then, it is strange that Tamils do not retain any of the patterns seen in Tuluvas and Nairs though. Tamils are very Indo-Aryanised as far as culture is concerned, sure- but don't we expect something more than the Telugu-like traces of matrilineality in Tamils?
And yes, I am a "mainstream" Telugu myself though a bit atypical, actually a lot atypical; I was naturally born (I'm sure of it) with a somewhat purist-extremist outlook towards language (I don't care what culture Telugu people follow if they try to coin at least some new words from Dravidian Telugu linguistic roots and stop so irresponsibly replacing native words in usage with shiny Sanskrit and English equivalents; it sometimes feels strange that Telugu people use Sanskrit words for even those terms as 'sun', 'moon', 'sky', 'star', 'blood', 'fear', etc.) and that tends to give me nothing but a lot of mental stress as far as interactions with Telugu people are concerned. Most of the Telugu people are utterly oblivious of the way the native part of Telugu has constantly been eroding throughout history and is almost a moribund language as far as lexical development and such things are concerned, and they also tend to close themselves off just on mention of things such as this. Some may even weirdly increase their singing of the praises of Sanskrit (but they do not appreciate Perso-Arabic and English borrowings though and consider both of them as making the language impure) because of this reason that the native vocabulary of Telugu is not developed to the extent of Tamil and Sanskrit.
Another stupid thing that the coastal Andhra people to whom I myself am related also biologically, do is to constantly disparage the dialect of Telangana as impure because it apparently contains a lot of Perso-Arabic and Urdu borrowings according to them- while it is in fact the case that most central coastal people also use lots of Urdu and Persian words in their so called pure Telugu which they entitle themselves. While there are no pure languages anywhere in the world, it is a matter of fact that degrees of purity do exist and Sanskrit and Tamil are two languages in India which take that concept very seriously and perceive it accurately while Telugu people erroneously deem the Sanskrit + Telugu mixture as the purest language. This is deeply embedded in the Telugu psyche and I do not know the reasons for this at all. I mean, it is indeed the case that the early urban societies of Prakrit-and-Sanskrit speaking north India were more advanced than the megalithic cultures of the Deccan but was pre-Indo-Aryan-contact Telugu really that backward and useless as a language with no capacity to derive new words and capable of semantic extensions of existing words? I don't know; I'm very much prepared to be humbled but I'd like to know the truth. I don't know when I would be able to.
Coming to the Satavahanas themselves, the reading that I did so far indicates that their earliest inscriptions appear in the northwestern Deccan, i.e. Maharashtra rather than the typical Telugu areas and definitely not Andhra. Also, the term "Andhra" as used to refer to the Satavahanas was done in Puranas which were composed considerably later and at which time, the Satavahana power was strong in the actual Andhra region which also did not refer to the entire Telugu speaking area but just the lower Krishna valley or something which was religiously very Indo-Aryanised (Buddhism) too, by then. Thus, Asmaka/Assaka is not Andhra; Asmaka was likely to have been a typical Indo-Aryan janapada located in southern Maharashtra and northern Telangana borne out of significant migration from northern locales and it was perhaps not entirely composed of Dravidian people either recently-language-shifted or still-Dravidian-speaking. Another intuition of mine to believe that the Satavahanas were originally Indo-Aryan-speaking is that the concept of kingdoms and imperialism seems not to have been existent in the Dravidian-speaking Telugus much at that time- I imagine (without much basis though) that they may have been somewhat like the initial Indo-Aryan tribes of India- having tribal organisation in society mostly, with internal tribal struggles and virtually no language-based ethnic consciousness at all. Contrast this with the situation in the contemporary Sanskrit world with its authors occasionally describing to what extent people spoke Sanskrit in various parts of the country and also their dialectal features, etc. The tribal chiefs of the far south did evolve to become kings and began to be imperialistic but I read somewhere that they behaved very much tribal chiefs a lot of the time after becoming kings too. There is also this strange possibility that some Indo-Aryans from Mathura in the north came and mixed into/formed the Pandyas who even named their capital city exactly the same as the northern Mathura! In Karnataka too the same thing seems to have happened with Kadambas being a Brahma-Kshatriya dynasty and even Gangas considered by some scholars as originally having migrated from the north (even though the majority opinion seems to be that the Gangas are likely the natives of southern Karnataka which does not exclude the possibility of them being nativised Indo-Aryans from a somewhat older migration). There seems to be something strange about the Dravidian (at least the dominant ethnicities like Kannada people and Tamil people) psyche of the period. Were they really that extremely backward compared to the undoubtedly quite advanced Indo-Aryans? Perhaps; it seems to be the case.
