Naga People (Sri Lanka)
The Naga people in folklore were one of the four mythical peoples of Lanka who is said to have ruled Nagadeepa or Jaffna peninsula and Kelaniya.
Naga people were snake-worshipers, and may have been a race of the Dravidians. The word Naga was sometimes written in early inscriptions as Nāya, as in Nāganika - this occurs in the Nanaghat inscription of 150 BCE.
The Nagas lived among the Yakkha, Raksha and Deva in Ceylon according to the Manimekhalai and Mahavamsa and Ramayana. According to Ramayana Indrajit married to the daughter of Naga king.
H. Parker, a British historian and author of "Ancient Ceylon" considers the Naga to be an offshoot of the Nayars of Kerala Ancient Sri Lankan history book Mahavamsa mentions a dispute between two Naga kings in northern Sri Lanka. The Manimekhalai and archaeological inscriptions refer to the Chola-Naka alliance and intermarriage being the progenitor of the Pallava Dynasty. Many Buddhist temples in the south of Sri Lanka have assimilated the divine form of naga (Natha Deva) into a Bodhisattva.
Famous quotes containing the word people:
“America has made no reparation to the Vietnamese, nothing. We are the richest people in the world and they are among the poorest. We savaged them, though they had never hurt us, and we cannot find it in our hearts, our honor, to give them help—because the government of Vietnam is Communist. And perhaps because they won.”
—Martha Gellhorn (b. 1908)