The Legend of Prince Vijaya-A Study of

Sinhalese Origins
R L KIRK
D e p n i t m e n t of Hitmrrri Bioloqy, I h e J o l i n Curtriz School of Meclicnl
R r s r n r r h , Canberrcl A C r 2 6 0 1 , A i ~ c t r r r l r n

K E Y WORDS Genetic distance Indian populations . Sinhalese

Legendary origins.

ABSTRACT Ancient chronicles relate the origin of the Sinhalese people of

Sri Lanka t o the arrival of Prince Vijaya from an area either in north-east or
north-west India, and his subsequent affiliation with people from south India.
Students of Indian history argue that the Vijayan legend should be interpreted
to favor either one or the other of the northern origins, or a mixture of peoples
from both areas. Genetic distance analysis however, despite the limitations im-
posed by the data, shows that modern Sinhalese populations are closer to the
Tamils and Keralites of south India and the upper caste groups of Bengal than
they are to populations in Gujarat or the Panjab.

The modern population of Sri Lanka
(formerly Ceylon) is comprised of a number
of groups differentiated from one another
by history and socio-cultural barriers. The
largest group, the Sinhalese, are mainly
Buddhist and speak a distinctive Sinhalese
language. Next in importance are the Ta-
mils, speaking the Dravidian language of
the adjacent area of south India. The Sri
Lanka Tamils themselves are comprised of
at least two groups: the longest established
inhabit the northern portion of the island
and arrived from south India in a succes-
sion of waves, both peaceful and aggressive
toward the end of the first millenium B.C.
and through to the early part of the second
millenium of the Christian era. The other
Tamil population is a more recent intro-
duction being comprised of the descendants
of labourers brought from south India dur-
ing the British rule to work on plantations
in the central hill areas, traditionally part
of the Sinhalese domain. Tamils belonging
to both groups mainly adhere to the Hindu
religion.
Among the smaller groups are Burghers,
descendants of Dutch and Portugese who
intermarried mainly with Sinhalese, a
number of Muslims, descendants of Arab
traders who came to Sri Lanka in the me-
dieval period via the Malabar coast of In-
dia, and also several small but distinctive
Christian communities. Finally there are
AM. J. PHYS.ANTHROP.,
45: 91-100.
the Veddahs, now numbering only a few
hundred, living in a few scattered com-
munities in the central and north-eastern
parts of the island. Believed to be the orig-
inal inhabitants of Sri Lanka (Seligman
and Seligman, '1 1) progressively confined
to smaller areas of the forest, they have
now almost abandoned their hunting and
food gathering existence and are inter-
mixed to a varying degree with Sinhalese
farming communities.
The first displacement of the Veddas
probably occurred sometime in the middle
of the first millenium B.C. with the ar-
rival of people from India bringing with
them a more sophisticated technology. No
contemporary documents survive to attest
the region of India from whence these ear-
ly, preBuddhist settlers came, and it was
not until the fourth century A.D. that a
written commentary in Pali appeared, the
Dipavamsa, or the Chronicle of Ceylon
(Law, '57). In the sixth century a more
authoritative version the Mahavumsa, the
Great Chronicle of Ceylon, was prepared
by Buddhist monks recording the legend
of the beginning of Sri Lanka history (Gei-
ger, '64).
The story in the Dipuvamsa, changed
and amplified in the Mahuvamsa, tells of
a h n g of the Vanga country, now fre-
quently identified as Bengal, and his queen
from the Kalinga country, now approxi-
91
92
Fig. 1 Map showing location of modern and historical locations associated with the Vijayan
legend.
mately the coastal area of southern Orissa
(see the map in fig. 1). The King of Vanga
had a daughter who grew to be both beau-
tiful and very amorous. Since her parents
disapproved of her behaviour she joined a
travelling band of merchants. While on
the road to Magadha (modern south Bihar)
she was captured by a lion in Ladha, or
Lala, was carried off to his lair where she
R . L. KIRK
lived as his wife, bearing him a son and
daughter.
One day they escaped: the sorrowing
lion ravaged the border villages until he
was shot by his son, who returned with his
sister as consort to Ladha. There his con-
sort gave birth to 32 sons. The eldest of
these, Vijaya, was a bad prince-regent and
the King banished him and his followers.
 SINHALESE ORIGINS
Prince Vijaya set out by sea and arrived
first at Supparaka, identified by historians
as Sopara, just north of Bombay. Forced to
flee again they arrived finally in Sri Lanka
on the day, i t is claimed, when the Buddha
achieved nirvana. Vijaya married one of
the aboriginal inhabitants, subdued others
and extended his hold over the land. Later,
discarding his wife he took a princess from
Madhura in south India, who brought
many women of high class who married
his followers. Vijaya was succeeded by his
nephew who came from Sihapura in Ladha,
bringing with him thirty two companions
disguised as monks. Thus the legend clear-
ly identifies the origin of the Sinhalese
with Indo-Aryans arriving first with Vijaya
and subsequently with fresh immigrants
from south India and finally with arrivals
from the original birth place of Vijaya who
brought with them the religion which was
to be the main feature of Sri Lanka cul-
ture from that time on.
Basham (‘64) in a critical interpretation
of the legend of Prince Vijaya argues that
there must be many elements of fact buried
in the story. He points out that although
Vijaya’s great-grandfather came from
Vanga, Vijaya was born in Ladha. How-
ever, Ladha as well as Vanga appears to
have been non-aryanized at the time of
the Buddha so it is possible the legend con-
fuses Ladha with Lata, a region in north-
west India. Basham concludes “The early
Sinhalese had strong traditions that their
ancestors came from the Western coast of
India. Invaders from the East there may
also have been. A n early Aryan outpost
seems to have been Tamilitti, in the Ganga
delta, whence, according to the Jatakas,
ships sailed for Ceylon. But the weight of
the Vijayan legend is on the side of the
West coast.”
Linguistic evidence also has been exam-
ined to indicate the likely origins of the
Sinhalese language. De Silva (’69) in the
most recent review of Sinhalese linguistics
states that exponents of the two main
theories of the origin of the Sinhalese peo-
ple use both statistical and chronological
occurrences of particular features in the
Sinhalese language to bolster their claims.
The strongest supporter of the north-west-
ern theory was the great Sinhalese scholar,
Wilhelm Geiger. In the preface to his Gram-
mar of the Sinhalese Language (Geiger,
93
’38) he writes “. . . I hold that the first
Aryan colonists under the guidance of
Vijaya, came to Ceylon from north-western
India, but that immediately after this event,
a lively intercourse began to take place
between the island and the provinces of
north-eastern India. By later immigrants
from this part of the Indian continent, who
brought their own dialects to Ceylon, the
north-western language that was originally
spoken here was, of course, considerably
influenced.”
This syncretic view of the origin of the
Sinhalese people is one now accepted wide-
ly. Nicholas and Paranavitana (‘61) out-
line the socio-economic conditions which
prevailed in India around the 6th century
B.C. They point out that the Indo-Aryans
were already seafarers and had established
connections as far away as Babylon. Mer-
chants in India itself, travelling by ship
down both the east and west coasts, must
have known of the rich banks of pearls off
the island of Lanka and the precious stones
which abounded in the south of the island.
Settlers almost certainly arrived to exploit
these riches, and further contact would
have been encouraged with many parts of
India.
It is against this inconclusive but intrigu-
ing background of speculation concerning
the origin of the Sinhalese people that the
modern student of population genetics must
examine his own fragments of evidence.
Two approaches to the problem are to
consider firstly the distribution in Indian
and Sri Lanka populations of distinctive
inherited traits and secondly to use more
sophisticated indices of genetic distance
to analyse the available data on the fre-
quencies of genes in the various modern
populations of the two countries.
1. Distinctive inherited traits
Two traits suggest a closer relationship
between the Sinhalese and populations in
north-east India than with other Indian
populations. One of these is the abnormal
haemoglobin, HbE, and the other is hairy
pinnae.
Saha and Bannerjee (‘73) recently re-
viewed the distribution of abnormal haemo-
globins in India; particular variants have
interesting restrictions in their geograph-
ical or population distribution. Of special
interest in the present context is that HbE
94 R. L. KIRK
occurs in Bengali populations (Chatterjea,
'66) but not in the north, north-west, cen-
tre or south of India, with the exception
of a single case reported by our own lab-
oratory in a recent survey i n Kerala (Saha
et al., '76), but other distinctive abnormal
haemoglobins, such as HbD. HbL, and
HbS occur i n some of these areas.
In the Sinhalese only HbE has been re-
ported, but its distribution appears not to
be uniform. Wickremasinghe and Ponnus-
wamy ('63) found no cases of HbE in more
than 1,000 Sinhalese, but earlier, De Silva
et al. ('59) had reported that the highest
frequency of HbE occurred amongst the
Sinhalese from around the city of Kandy.
This discrepancy may be because one study
examined the population in the Colombo
area and the other in the Kandy region,
which may have derived the HbE from in-
termixture with the Veddas, who have a
relatively high frequency of HbE (Wick-
remasinghe et al., '63; Kuk et al., '62).
Possibly the original Sinhalese brought
HbE from north-east India and contributed
it to the Veddas through intermarriage.
What is important is that other abnormal
haemoglobins, particularly HbS which has
a very high frequency among some tribal
populations in south India do not occur i n
Sri Lanka except as rare individual cases
(Wickremasinghe, personal communica-
tion).
A similar relationship between ancestral
populations in north-east India and Sri
L a n k has been postulated by Dronamraju
('61) on the basis of a higher frequency of
hairy pinnae among Sinhalese and Bengal-
is, than among people down the east coast
of India.
Papiha ('73) recently drew attention to
the similarity in the frequencies for genes
in the haptoglobin serum protein system
in Panjabis and Sinhalese and suggests this
indicates a closer similarity of the Sinhalese
with north Indian populations than with
geographically intermediate peoples. Hap-
toglobin gene frequencies vary significant-
ly in different parts of India with lower
frequencies of Hpl predominating in the
Tamils than among Bengalis, Panjabis,
Maharashtras and Gujaratis (Kirk, ' 7 3 ) .
Consideration of variation in gene frequen-
cies at a single locus, however, is not as
informative as the results obtained by com-
bining data on gene frequencies for a
larger number of independent loci.
2. G ~ n e t i cdistance studies
Ideally a complete study of the genetic
relationships of the Sinhalese would re-
quire information on Sinhalese fiorn a
number of localities in Sri Lanka with cor-
responding information for various castes
and tribes in the main regions of India.
The data should be derived from randomly
sampled populations and the number of
gene loci examined should be as large as
possible. Although at present this ideal is
not attainable, a sufficient number of stud-
ies on the distribution of genetic markers
among populations in Sri Lanka and India
during the last two decades enable a worth-
while genetic distance analysis to be made
The controlling factor in the present
analysis was data relating to the Sinhalese.
My own earlier investigation of blood and
serum group variation in Sri Lanka (Kirk
et al., '62) was carried out before tests for
red cell enzyme groups had been widely
applied. Fortunately, hov~ever,this gap has
now been filled by Roberts et al. ('72). My
own data from populations in various parts
of India together with that from other
sources has made it possible to contrast
with the Sinhalese five Indian groups for
which information is available on the fi-e-
quencies of genes in the ABO, MN and Kh
red cell antigen systems, in the haptoglo-
bin and transferrin serum group systems
and in the red cell enzyme systems acid
phosphatase, 6-phosphogluconate dehydro-
genase, lactate dehydrogenase, adenylate
kinase and locus 1 of phosphoglucomutase.
Twenty-nine alleles are segregating in
these ten systems, under the control of 11
independent gene loci.
The main geographical regions of India
significant in the present context are rep-
resented by the Tamils and Keralites from
the south, Bengalis from the north-east,
Gujaratis from the north-west and Panjabis
from the north. With the exception of the
Keralites data were pooled from several
sources, but i n the case of the Bengalis,
Gujaratis and Panjabis only high caste
groups were included. It was not possible
to be so selective i n the case of the Tamils
and the sample includes many different
castes: tribal populations in Tamilnadu
 SINHALESE ORIGINS 95

however were excluded. Finally, from indices f f j (Cavalli-Sforza, '69), Q '' (Latter,
among the populations in Kerala we have '72) and D (Nei, '72, Nei and Roychoud-
studied recently (Saha et al., '76) only one hury, '74) and were selected because the
Hindu caste, the Izhava, was selected. It proponents of each claim they have a valid
has been claimed that the Izhava, who are biological meaning.
mainly workers on coconut plantations in The genetic distances in table 2 indicate
the south of Kerala, are descended from a that the Sinhalese are closest to the Tamils,
group who came from Sri Lanka by a re- with the Keralities next closest for two of
verse migration to south-west India. the indices, whilst the other shows the
An array of genetic distance indices has Sinhalese to be closest to the Bengalis with
been developed during the last ten years. the Tamils slightly further away. Of equal
These indices have been reviewed by Cha- interest is that the Sinhalese are most
kraborty ('76) and Balakrishnan et al. ('75) distant from the Gujaratis with Panjabis
among others. Genetic distance matrices next most distant for all of the indices.
have been calculated for seven of these in- Some of the other distance comparisons are
dices using the gene frequencies in each completely consistent; for example Kera-
population for the ten systems utilized lites are most distant from Panjabis for all
(table 1). Each of the matrices revealed three indices.
similar relationships between the popula- The magnitude of the standard errors
tions and for the present purpose three of indicates that little reliance should be
these are presented for comparison. They placed on some of the distance estimates
were computed from the genetic distance if the usual convention is observed of the

TABLE 1

Gene frequencies for selected p o p u l a tio n 7 ZII Sri Lanka a n d I n d t a

System Allele Sinhalese Tamils Keralites Bengalis Paqjabis Gujaratis

ABO A 0.1880 0.1760 0.1520 0.1844 0.1695 0.1429

R 0.1650 0.1940 0.1780 0.2070 0.2955 0.1940
0 0.6470 0.6300 0.6700 0.6086 0.5350 0.6631
MN M 0.5780 0.6170 0.6250 0.6537 0.5817 0.6775
N 0.4220 0.3830 0.3750 0.3463 0.4183 0.3225
Rh R, ( C W 0.6500 0.6339 0.6230 0.6706 0.5779 0.4780
Rz (cDE) 0.0820 0.0508 0.1130 0.0792 0.0944 0.1200
Ro ( C B ) 0.0380 0.0122 0.0290 0.0550 0.0616 0.0293
R' (Cde) 0.0130 0.0263 0.0360 0.0341 0.0184 0.0270
r (cde) 0.2170 0.2768 0.1990 0.1611 0.2309 0.3457
Rz (CDE) 0.0000 0.0000 0.0000 0.0000 0.0168 0.0000
HP HP' 0.1710 0.1142 0.1690 0.1800 0.1952 0.1800
Hp2 0.8290 0.8858 0.8310 0.8200 0.8048 0.8200
Tf TF 0.9940 0.9994 1.oooo 1.oooo 1.0000 0.9990
TfD 0.0030 0.0006 0.0000 0.0000 0.0000 0.0010
TfB 0.0030 0.0000 0.0000 0.0000 0.0000 0.0000
Ac P h Pa 0.2530 0.2683 0.2500 0.2704 0.3235 0.2851
Pb 0.7340 0.7304 0.7500 0.7257 0.6714 0.7104
P" 0.0130 0.0013 0.0000 0.0039 0.0051 0.0045
AK AK' 0.9170 0.9367 0.8660 0.9133 0.9108 0.8885
AK2 0.0830 0.0633 0.1340 0.0867 0.0892 0.1115
6PGD PGD* 0.9840 0.9780 0.9850 0.9797 0.9787 0.9839
PGDC 0.0160 0.0220 0.0150 0.0203 0.0213 0.0151
PGDR 0.0000 0.0000 0.0000 0.0000 0.0000 0.0010
PGM, PGM: 0.7390 0.7364 0.6910 0.6989 0.7089 0.6909
PGMI 0.2610 0.2637 0.3020 0.2993 0.2840 0.3074
Others 0.0000 0.0000 0.0070 0.0019 0.0071 0.0017
LD H N 1.0000 0.9878 0.9850 0.9907 0.9929 0.9950
Cal-l and
others 0.0000 0.0122 0.0150 0.0093 0.0071 0.0050
Data sources: Sinhalese (Kirk et al., '62; Roberts et al., ' 7 2 ) , Tamils (Ananthakrishnan, '72; Steinberg et al.:
'61). Keralites (Saha et al., ' 7 6 ) ; Bengalis (Sen, '60; Das et al., '?0), Panjabis (Bhalla, '66; Blake et al., 71),
Gujaratis (Parikh et al., '69; Blake et al., '701.
96 R. L. KIRK

TABLE 2
Genetic d i s t a n c e s b e t w e e n p o p u l a t i o n s in Sri Lnnkn n n d Indrrr c o m p u t e d f o r t h r e e i n d i c e s
S t a n d a r d errors n r e shown in p a r e n t h e s e s . All valrtes X 1 0 - 4
Genetic distance index
Distance between
fe @* D

Sinhalese Tamils 67 (22) 33 (38) 12 (6)

Keralites 84 (29) 34 (33) 13 (5)
Bengalis 42 (12) 41 (60) 16 (9)
Panjabis 92 (29) 82 (62) 32 (22)
Gujaratis 94 (27) 135 (79) 55 (37)
Tamils Keralites 88 (29) 59 (23) 22 (9)
Ben g a1i s 80 (27) 60 (28) 22 (13)
Panjabis 130 (27) 93 (27) 34 (15)
Gujaratis 98 (23) 108 (47) 42 (24)
Keralites Bengalis 43 (1 1) 33 (10) 13 (6)
Panjabis 106 (27) 98 (43) 41 (24)
Gujaratis 94 (72) 90 (62) 37 (32)
Bengalis Panjabis 79 (18) 75 (83) 31 (15)
Guj aratis 113 (50) 138 (131) 57 (54)
Panjabis Gujaratis 119 (27) 125 (70) 54 (30)

SINHALESE

BENGALIS

KERALITES

TAMILS

PANJABIS

GUJARATIS

I I I i
120 100 80 60 40 20 0
Fig. 2 Dendrogram showing genetic distance relationships of the Sinhalese with selected
Indian populations using the fe statistics given in table 2.

distance value exceeding at least twice the
standard error to achieve significance. But
it should be noted that for Cavalli-Sforza’s
fe only the comparison between Keralites
and Gujaratis falls below this level. In the
case of Nei’s D only five and for Latter’s
@ * only six of the 21 comparisons are more
than twice the standard error.
The main conclusion which emerges
from these individual comparisons, how-
ever, is that north-west India and the more
extreme north seem to be excluded as a
major influence on the Sinhalese, whilst
the north-east and the south are genetically
much more closely related to them.
To visualise more easily the distance re-
lationships presented in table 2 two dimen-
sional representations are valuable. One
method of doing this is to construct a den-
drogram, or branching tree using the tech-
nique of Sokal and Sneath (‘63); another
is to use eigenvector diagrams, derived by
 SINHALESE ORIGINS 97
tl

) GUJARATIS

BENGALIS
-I t I t1
SINHALESE 0 TAMILS PANJABIS 0
0
KERALlTES 0

GUJARATIS 0

I I t1
BENGALIS 0 0 PANJABIS
TAMILS
SINHALESE

b L

-I
Fig. 3 Figenvectorial representation of the genetic distance relationships of the Sinhalese
and Indian population given in table 2 . a, for the @ * statistic; b, for the D statistic; Horizontal
h i s represents eigenvalue 1. Vertical Axis represents eigenvalue 2 .

the method of Lalouel (‘73). As examples, grams based on the distance matrices for
figure 2 gives the dendrogram for genetic Latter’s @ * and Nei’s D respectively.
distance relationships based on fe and The dendrogram based on fe shows the
figures 3a and b are the eigenvector dia- Sinhalese splitting with the Bengalis from
98 R L. KIRK
the Keralites; the next split is from the
Tamils, then Panjabis and finally Gujaratis.
Representation by means of a dendrogram
may give a somewhat misleading simplifi-
cation of the actual relationships. It is un-
likely that splits occurred in this way, and
further the coefficient of cophenetic cor-
relation for the dendrogram based on the
fb index is only 0.77 indicating a 23%
loss of information. Much more informa-
tion is retained in the eigenvector dia-
grams, the values of the coefficient of co-
phenetic correlation being 0.96 and 0.97
for Latter’s @ * and Nei’s D respectively.
Both the eigenvector diagrams demonstrate
the closeness of the Sinhalese and Ben-
galis, with the Taniils and Keralities also
relatively close. The Sinhalese (and the
Bengalis) are remote from the Gujaratis
and Panjabis in both diagrams.
The genetic structure of the living pop-
ulations therefore supports, within the lim-
itations discussed above, the interpretation
of the legend of Prince Vijaya which sug-
gests that the Sinhalese had their origins
in the south and in the north-east of India,
rather than f‘rom the further reaches of the
north-west and extreme north, and per-
haps, as Basham has stressed, many ele-
ments of fact are embedded in the legend.
The colonization of Sri Lanka itself
probably resulted from population pres-
sures i n the agricultural areas of neigh-
bouring India. Expansion from south India
would have been relatively easy, and dur-
ing the historical period records indicate
that a lively intercourse took place between
populations in south India and Sri Lanka.
The genetic distance study agrees with this
in giving low values for the distance be-
tween the Sinhalese and Tamils and Kera-
lites. The lowest distance value for the
Sinhalese however, for fe is with the Ben-
galis, but the differences in genetic dis-
tance between the Sinhalese and Tamils
on the one hand and the Sinhalese and
Bengalis on the other are not great. Indeed
Bengalis are closer to the south Indian
populations included in these comparisons
than they are to the other Indian popula-
tions in the north and north-west.
This aspect of Bengali relationships will
be explored in more detail elsewhere. In
the present context however it is apparent
that the modern Sinhalese are descended
from a n ancestral group influenced in its
genetic composition approximately equally
by peoples in both the south and north-
east of India. This does not rule out the
possibility that Prince Vijaya and his small
band of followers may have come from the
north-west. Indeed if this was the reality
embodied in the legend, the contribution
made to the original gene pool of the Sin-
halese by the Vijayan band has long been
submerged by the contributions from other
parts of India, particularly from Tamilnadu
and Bengal.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am indebted to Bronya Keats for mak-
ing the computations and for advice and
to Elizabeth Robertson and Marjorie Cog-
gan for valuable assistance in assembling
materials and preparing the manuscript.
I am indebted also to Winifred Mumford
for providing the map.
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