Tribes in Ancient India c66.11

c66.11

The Ceylonese chronicles (*Dīpavaṃsa* and *Mahāvaṃsa*) refer to the country of Lāḷa in connection with the first Aryan migration to Ceylon, led by Prince Vijaya. Attempts have been made to identify Lāḷa both with Lāṭa or Lāḍa in Gujrat, and Rāḍha in Bengal, and both countries claim the honour of the first Aryanization of Ceylon. Prince Vijaya is described in the chronicles as having been the great-grandson of a princess of Vaṅga; hence one school of scholars mainly depending on historical evidence proposes to equate Lāḷa with Rāḍha, while the other school finds Lāḷa to be philologically more closely akin to Lāṭa or Lāḍa. It is not impossible that the tradition of two different streams of immigration came to be knit together in the story of Vijaya, as Dr. Barnett thinks.¹