Page:The history of the Bengali language (1920).pdf/56

34 festival is called Onam. It is narrated, that no one ruled the earth with so much justice as Bali did, and all sorts of sins and iniquities were unknown in his time. The song that is sung at the Onam festival, relates these accounts; two lines of it are given here, which purport to say that in Bali's time theft and other crimes were unknown:

You can clearly see that it is the Southern country which is our Pātāla, and the Pauranic account relates to the invasion of the country by the Aryans. That Bali was considered to be the forbear of the Vanga people as well as of other allied races, shows that the non-Aryan origin of all these races was fully known to the Aryans. That Bali's queen gave birth to Anga and his brothers, was narrated to Hiuen Tsiang when he was at Monghyr. The feminine form of Bali as Bali-amma, is the name of the principal goddess of the Sinhalese and the Vaeddas of Ceylon; her consort Kande has assumed now the name Skanda because of Tamil-Hindu influence.

Let us now halt to consider a point of ethnic interest. The writer of the passages occurring in the Mahābhārata and the Purāṇas as relate to the history of the non-Aryan tribes, did not certainly make a scientific ethnological study of the tribes in question, but the facts narrated above justify us in holding that they carefully observed and noted some important points of agreement and difference between those tribes. The Angas, the Vangas, the Puṇḍras, the Suhmas and the Kalingas were noted in the first place as tribes perfectly distinguishable from one another, and in the second place as peoples closely allied to one another. It was noticed that they were all Nāga-worshippers and that they were all the sons