Page:Origin and spread of the Tamils.djvu/72



NOTES TO LECTURE I 61 home appears to have been Lower Bengal and who travelled by sea to Burma, Cochin-China, Ceylon and Southern India. A king of this tribe named Tirayan who reigned at Käñci, the modern Kāñci-puram, contemporary with Karikāla-Cola, claimed to be a descendant of the god Vişnu, whose bed is on the ocean, according to Hindu Mythology. Another tribe of the Tamils was the Vanavar or Celestials. They were evidently natives of a mountainous region in the North of Bengal. The Cera kings belonged to this tribe and called themselves Vänavar or Celestials. They claimed affinity with the Vanavar inhabiting the Himalayas, and expressive of their origin they adopted the titles of Vanavarman or Imaya-Varman. Besides the Cera kiogs, other mountain chiefs such as Nandan, lord of Muthiram and Alumbil-Vel called themselves Vāna-Viral-Vemor Chiefs of the Vanavar, These views of Kanakasabhai cannot be accepted in the light of research since he wrote his thesis. For the views of Jules Vinsen who took an entirely different view see the Tamilian Antiquary, No. 1, p. 12. 12. Rai Bahadur Sarat Chandra Roy thus traces the successive strata in the racial composition of the land. The earliest inhabitants were, in all probability, a small black curly-haired Negrito race allied to the Semangs of Malaya and the Mincopis of the Andamans, Then there came a long-headed race, called pre-Dravidian and sometimes proto-Australoid, who might have entered from the northeast or the north-west or by the submerged Lemurian continent. "Wherever the pre-Dravidian might have originated, the racial type of the Indian proto-Australoid would appear to have been ultimately fixed in India under the influence of the Indian climatic conditions and he is thus the true aborigine of India," The next important wave of