113992242-Dravidian-Settlements-in-Ceylon-and-the-Beginnings-of-the-Kingdom-of-Jaffna-By-Karthigesu-Indrapala-Complete-Phd-Thesis-University-of-London-1965

320
class of chieftains is right in so far as the Sinhalese and P.li
sources are concerned. In these sources the term is used to
denote chiefs and chieftaincies in the areas that did not come
under the direct rule of the Sinhalese king. When the authors
of the Eu-attanag4u-vapsa and the Nikba-sarahaya refer to
vanni chieftaincies of earlier centuries, they were only using
a term that came to be applied to those chieftaincies in the
thirteenth century and later. These references need hot be taken
to imply the presence of a clan of people called Vinnia in those
times. When Geiger referred to the Vannis as a noble clan of the
Sinhalese who took refuge in the jungles in the time of }Agha,
he was only referring to those Sinhalese who set themselves up
as minor chiefs in the abandoned areas of Rjaraha which
came to be known as the Vanni. e was basing his statement on
solely on the Pli chronicle and did not take into account the
evidence of the Tamil sources regarding the Vauiyars. He is
wrong, as we shall see, in calling the present-day Vanni caste
of the Northern and North-central Provinces as the descendants
of the Sinhalese Vanni-rjno of our period.
In the Sinhalese and Pli works of the thirteenth
and fourteenth centuries, therefore, the name Van.ni has been
applied to the chieftaincies of Rjaraha and other forest tracts.
As Paranavitana has pointed out, there seem to have two classes