It's unfair that historically significant languages like sumerian, akkadian, native anatolian languages, egyptian, estruscan, elamite disappear w...

Tamil sangam lit provides an interesting contrast to ancient sanskrit lit

Nta but that comparison is not apt because while spanish is a language that came into existence after the late antiquity, telugu is older than it and is one of the earliest to split from the proto dravidian.
It's pre nannaya literature is destroyed or not preserved I think after brahmins gained prominence in the region. There's no way it had no literature before the 10th century when we have a telugu poetry treatise from the 9th century and poetry inscriptions from 7th century.
A lot of early tamil epics and sangam poems are not hindu but buddhist, jain, ajivika lit.

Telugu is the most Sanskritized Dravidian language. It's sort of the Latin-Italian-English to Tamil's Greek or Assyrian.

Literary/standard Tamil(dialect of brahmins) used to be heavily sanskritized too until the dravidian movement in the 20th century opposed sanskritization of tamil and the pre-eminence of sansritized brahmin dialects. Telugu wouldn't have been as heavily sansritized if they had also had their own variant of dravidian movement. Standard telugu was based on brahmin dialect of some coastal andhra region, and this was imposed on the entire telugu population via mass education, newspaper, literature and especially tollywood movies. While tamil scholars were coining terms for imported western ideas(political/scientific/philosopical) in pure Tamil, Telugu homies were either importing that shit from sanskrit or coining in Sanskrit.

It worked for them, though. They went from a wretched population of peasants and traders that could have flipped Maoist at any time to the lapdogs of what should be a crackpot Ayurveda cow urine party from Bihar. Americans have been thinking of the Telugu as their average Indian since at least the late 90s, there are more Telugu in the U.S. than Pakistanis and Bangladeshis combined, and it's almost to the point where they're making the only Indian movies Americans care about. They might not have the most functional society, but if they went independent today they would be Japan tier in 50 years.

>India is resistant to cultural change brought on by invaders. That's why they're all still polytheists
How did they do it? They even managed to crush buddhism when even chang emperors couldn't

Buddhism is the Brahmin-killer in the same way the Gospels are the israelite-killer and Pauline epistles are the Hellenic pagan-killer.

Ashoka still owns India's ass more than the backwards varna system could. The only palatable symbols they can think to bring come from Buddhism. He's basically the Constantine of the region.

It's not extinct, it's just not as prominent a part of the fabric of the many thousands of Indian religions we call Hinduism as the ethnoreligious parts. Buddhists in other countries have their local gods and spirits, and the same is true for India. The modern conception of Hinduism as the gas station elephant god shrine is a reduction of a complex situation where local spirits are on the same level as the Buddha, who is also there alongside Ganesha.

I know. I don't like Telugus that much, but that is the perception of them here in the U.S.. They have the right blend of old world corruption and an immigrant's chip on their shoulder to fit in the U.S. better as a whole than the rootless nature of every group that came before them other than maybe the Bengalis.

It was also a Telugu who killed literally the only positive representation of Indians in Western media.