Nagadeepa - Naga People

Naga People

Nāka people were snake-worshippers, a Dravidian custom, and spoke Tamil based on Ptolemy's description of the Nāka people. They also likely spoke Prakrit, a language of the school of Amaravati, Andhra Pradesh with which the early Tamils of Jaffna had strong cultural relations during the classical period. The Nākas were an offshoot of the Kerala Nayar community, at that time the Chera kingdom of ancient Tamilakam. The interchangeable names Nāyar and Nāka or Naga, meaning Cobra or Serpent were applied to and self described by these snake-worshiping people from classical antiquity. The word Nāka was sometimes written in early inscriptions as Nāya, as in Nāyanika - this occurs in the Nanaghat inscription of 150 BCE. Archaeological excavations and studies provide evidence of palaeolithic inhabitation in the Tamil dominated Northern and Eastern Sri Lanka and in Tamil Naadu and Chera Naadu (Kerala region). The findings include Nāka idols and suggest that serpent worship was widely practised in the Dravidian reions of India and Sri Lanka during the megalithic period.

The Nākas lived among the Yakkha, Raksha and Deva in Ceylon according to the Manimekalai and Mahavamsa. Cobra worship, Tamil speech and Keralan cuisine extant in Jaffna Tamil culture from the classical period attests to the Nāka's Tamil heritage.

Sangam literature details how the ancient Tamil people were divided into five clans (Kudi) based on their profession during the Sangam period, where the Nāka clan, who were in charge of border security guarding the city wall and distant fortresses, inhabited the Coromandel Coast - South Tamil Nadu, East Tamil Nadu and North Sri Lanka. The name Nāka as either a corrupted version of the word Nayanar or may have been applied to this community due to their head covering being the shape of a hydra-headed cobra in reverence to their serpentine deities. The rulers and society of Nāka-Tivu and Nāka-Nadu, meaning Nāka island (Tivu) or country (Nadu) are described in the Vallipuram gold plate inscriptions and Manimekalai for many centuries. H. Parker, a British historian and author of "Ancient Ceylon" considers the Nāka 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 Manimekalai and archaeological inscriptions refer to the Chola-Naka alliance and intermarriange being the progenitor of the Pallava Dynasty of Tamilakam.