The Austronesians in India

 There are no Austronesians in India today. Nonetheless, given their relative closeness, it would be surprising if they did not reach India quite early. Apart from relatively late contacts represented by the Hinduised states of SE Asia, Waruno Mahdi has presented an array of evidence for the embedding in Indian culture of Austronesian concepts  Mahdi traces references to coconut-eating, buffalo-sacrificing fishermen, with snake-bird-sacred tree cults in early Indian literature and adduces arguments for the Austronesian origins of some key terms in South India. In many Sanskrit sources these are referred to as Naga, although today this refers mainly to the tribes of NE India