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Why do Dravidian languages use postpositions instead of prepositions?

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Thematic map of South Asia showing the distribution of Dravidian languages, with different regions shaded or marked to indicate where specific Dravidian languages and subgroups are spoken. Most languages are concentrated in southern and central India, with some northern outliers in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and eastern India. A key identifies the languages by number and subgroup, and striped areas indicate regions where several subgroups overlap. — Dravidian languages Distribution of Dravidian languages.

The use of postpositions in Dravidian languages is a fundamental grammatical characteristic of the language family, rather than a feature adopted for a specific functional reason. In these languages, nouns carry postpositions instead of prepositions to indicate grammatical relationships.1

This usage is consistent with the broader syntactic structure of Dravidian languages, which typically employ a subject-object-verb (SOV) word order. In this structural framework, other consistent patterns include:1

Adjectives precede the nouns they qualify.1
Adverbs precede the verbs they modify.1
Auxiliary verbs follow the main verb.1

While Dravidian and Indo-Aryan languages have developed convergent grammatical and phonological features over millennia of contact, the use of postpositions remains a defining trait of the Dravidian grammar system.12