The Sri Lanka Podcast

David Swarbrick & The Editors of The Ceylon Press
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The Sri Lanka Podcast tells the stories behind what makes Sri Lanka, Sri Lankan - from history, religion and travel to culture, fauna, flora, and much in between.

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  1. The Wicked Monarchs of Sri Lanka: Part 1. A Ceylon Press Island Story

    EPISODE 1

    The Wicked Monarchs of Sri Lanka: Part 1. A Ceylon Press Island Story

    The awful thing about wickedness is just how interesting it is. Kind and benevolent rulers; admirable warrior kings; even the fumbling but kindly nice ones who build hospitals and live blameless lives – they all pale into guilt-wrenching insignificance when set before a list saturated by the sinful, iniquitous, and depraved.   And in this respect, Sri Lanka is spoilt for choice, simply by virtue of its statistics.    Around 200 kings, with the odd queen, ruled the island from its first recorded beginnings in 543 BCE to its last king, who was packed off into exile by the invading British in 1815. From island-wide kingdoms to those circumscribed by covetous foreign occupiers, the 2358 years of royal rule the country enjoyed were a considerably different experience. It was just as Longfellow had once said of a little girl: “When she was good, she was very, very good/ But when she was bad, she was horrid.”   The country’s monarchs averaged little over 11 years a reign, but with massive variances. Most lapped up a rule of just a few years; sometimes, only a few hours.    A happy few enjoyed reigns that must have seemed an eternity to their fortitudinous subjects. But if the ancient chronicles are to be believed, almost half of them died well ahead of their divinely allocated time – at the hands of their own successors, often sons, sometimes brothers, uncles or even wives or occasionally an invading Indian emperor or edgy Tamil warlord.   No studies have been conducted to precisely identify which country can claim to be the most regicidal. Still, in any future list, only a fool would put money on Sri Lanka not scoring somewhere around the top 5.   From this long, bloody start, regicide took a modest back seat during the rule of the Dutch and the British. But things picked up after independence in 1948. Assassination, often but not always fostered by civil war, promoted the killing of a sitting president, a prime minister, and a leading presidential candidate, Vijaya Kumaratunga, whilst another almost killed his own wife, the then president, Chandrika Kumaratunga, in 1999.   It was but one of many other fortunately failed attempts at regicide that the independent republic had to face, a trait that reduced, at times, its own leaders to accusing one another of hatching yet more malodorously mortal plots.   But selecting just 6 of the country’s most egregious baddies – barely 7% of the total of potential scoundrels - is as tricky as choosing which chocolate to take from an Anton Berg’s Heart Box. The box has an impossibly delicious mix of pralines, marzipan, nougat, soft caramel, coconut, sea salt, orange, Chocolate Liqueur, Nut Truffle, hazelnut, cherry, and apricot. To make it to this list, a Sri Lankan monarch had to be very bad indeed, a real and indisputable villein.   The list begins, quite neatly, with the county’s first recorded king. Embodying a prescient creation myth, which, like many of their type, mixes horror and achievement in equal measure, as with going into labour, Prince Vijaya fits the bill perfectly.   As Romulus and Remus had earlier demonstrated in faraway Rome, being a founding father often necessitated random acts of abomination and cruelty. And so it was with Prince Vijaya. Even his father heartily disapproved of him.   Coming from a royal Indian family said to have been descended from lions, psychologists might argue that the prince never had a chance. Violence was in his nature.    But the Mahavamsa, the great ancient Chronicle of Sri Lanka, which is rarely modest in praising anything remotely proto-nationalistic, pulls no punches when it comes to its paterfamilias. Given its mission (“compiled for the serene joy and emotion of the pious,”) the Mahavamsa had little other choice but to call a spade a spade.   “Vijaya,” it begins, as it meant to go on, “was of evil conduct and his followers were even (like himself), and they did many intolerable deeds of violence. Angered by this, the people brought the matter to the king; the king, speaking persuasively to them, severely blamed his son. But all fell out again as before, the second and yet the third time; and the angered people said to the king: `Kill thy son.’”   For the king, this helpful request enabled him to kill two birds with a single stone. He chose to rid himself of not just his own son, but of most of his kingdom’s rogues, whilst demonstrating, like the consummate politician he was, blameless clemency. The Mahavaṃsa records how “then did the king cause Vijaya and his followers, seven hundred men, to be shaven over half the head and put them on a ship and sent them forth upon the sea, and their wives and children also.”    The problem was exported. The prince sailed away from India and “landed in Lanka, in the region called Tambapanni on the day that the Tathagata lay down between the two twinlike sala-trees to pass into nibbana.”   This time, reference (“Tathagata”) to Lord Buddha notwithstanding, the renegade prince wasted little time in smiting most of those whom he first came across. His ruthlessness and expedient mindset can be seen at work in his marriage to Kuveni, a tribal princess, who was herself no stranger to brutality.   Piecing together what actually happened on his arrival is all but impossible. Still, from the extravagantly violent tales told in the Mahavamsa, the vagabond prince likely found no empty island – but rather one already well stocked with people who had ordered themselves in tribes, perhaps even miniature kingdoms. To carve out his own domain necessitated fighting, and in this, a marital alliance with a local princess who could help him in the fight was invaluable.     In piecing together the ghostly DNA of Sri Lanka’s pre-Vijayan native kingdoms, historians have had to turn to local folklore, Indian epic poems like the Ramayana, and the Mahavaṃsa itself. Still, the picture they present is blurred and fantastical.    There was the Ramayana, a half-human tribe founded by the ten-headed demon King, Ravana, whose followers have gone down in history as being a terrifying lot given to cannibalism.    A further tribe, the serpent-like Naga, may exist only in myth, despite references to Lord Buddha arriving among them to settle disputes. The Nittaewo, dark skinned, tiny, and understandably defensive, are a possible third tribal strand, their last members possibly smoked to death.   On marginally surer ground are the Yaksha, described by the Dipavaṃsa, the oldest of the island’s three ancient chronicles and which, with support from the later Mahavaṃsa, could have given rise to the Vedda.    Archaeogeneticists believe the Vedda are descendants of the original Mesolithic settlers who migrated from India 40,000 years ago. Scattered communities still exist today, an ever more ghostly presence on the island, their bloodlines dissipated by intermarriage.    They worship a range of ancient folk deities, as well as mainstream Hindu gods such as Murugan. Ancestor worship and the cult of the dead mark out many of their still-living practices.    This was Kuveni’s tribe, and they seemed to live in scattered communities of kingdoms in various parts of the island. Overcoming her first instinct to kill him, Kuveni instead married him, and on their wedding day, she helped hatch a plot to kill her own clansmen.

    21 min
  2. Encounters at the Jungle Hotel: The Story of Sri Lanka’s Flame Tree Estate & Hotel. A Ceylon Press Island Story

    EPISODE 1

    Encounters at the Jungle Hotel: The Story of Sri Lanka’s Flame Tree Estate & Hotel. A Ceylon Press Island Story

    Encounters at the Jungle Hotel is a behind-the-scenes look at Sri Lanka’s Flame Tree Estate & Hotel. It starts, of course, with a welcome. And thanks for coming our way, for most of the listeners of this will no doubt be our guests.    Whatever else is happening in the world, here at least there is a cake for tea; birdsong from dawn to dusk; and from everywhere the sound of civets, bickering monkeys that look a lot like Mr Trump; and squirrels bouncing on roofs like Keith Moon.   To have made it this far, your car will have navigated our driveway of buffalo grass and untamed forest. Guerrilla gardening, we call it – it keeps at bay, if only metaphorically, what’s best avoided to safeguard a long and happy life: televisions, for example, or processed food, or terrorist warlords.    We enjoy being a secret to most and a companion to some. Our sophisticated friends in Colombo call this Village Country, all jungle; tiny hamlets, simple living, feral nature. But really, the jungle is far from feral. What looks so random is ordered, artful, and immeasurably peaceful. Its discreet hills and valleys keep safe a rare seclusion. Nightclubs, branded food concessions, still less a shop selling extra virgin olive oil – all have yet to open here. Somehow, we cope.    Nature, good food, schnauzers, art, walks, music, books, yoga, swimming, massage, few rules, bird watching, tree hugging, meditating, and that most lost of all life’s activities – just being: that’s what this tiny jungle principality is all about. That and the odd trip to a few places well off the beaten track. This little guide will try to give you a glimpse of what makes things tick. And how on earth did we get here in the first place?   Geographically, we are neither part of the Rajarata, the oldest kingdom that reached from Jaffa to the edge of the hill country, nor the hill country itself. We lie between the two, on the first high hills that rise from the dry northern plains to eventually reach Mount Pedro near Nuwara Eliya at 8,000 feet.   The hotel sits, belly button-like, in the middle of 25 acres of plantations and jungle that dip down to paddy and up to hills of 1,000 ft, all of it surrounded by yet more hills and valleys, almost all given over to forest. Until family wills and the 1960s land reform acts intervened, this estate was much bigger; a place where coffee, cocoa, and coconuts grew. They grow on still, fortified by newer plantations of cinnamon and cloves, and rarer trees.   Now almost 100 years old, the main hotel block, Mudunahena Walawwa, was built by the Mayor of Kandy. Walawwas, or manor houses, pepper the island, exuberant disintegrating architectural marvels, now too often left to meet their ultimate maker. In size and style, they range from palaces to this, a modest and typical plantation Walawwa with metal roofs, inner courtyards, verandas, and stout columns arranged around it like retired members of the Household Calvary.    But it was not always thus. This walawwa – like a caravan - moved to its present site when the water ran dry at its earlier location. The foundations of this first abode, on the estate’s eastern boundary, can still be seen. It overlooks the Galagedera Pass, which found its 15 minutes of fame in 1765 when villagers, fortified by the Kandyan king’s army, rained rocks down on an invading Dutch army that melted back to Colombo: fever, and early death. From that moment to much later, little happened - in the jungle that is.    Elsewhere, America declared itself independent, and the Holy Roman Empire dissolved. Europe was beset by wars, the Napoleonic, the First, the Second, the Cold. Asia threw off its colonial masters. Not even the LTTE civil war that so rocked the rest of Sri Lanka made much of an impression here.    In fact, it wasn’t until 1988 that the outside world caught up with the estate when a Marxist-Leninist insurrection crippled the country for three years in a blizzard of bombings, assassinations, riots and military strikes.  Entrusting the Walawwa keys to three old retainers, the family left the estate, and for 20 years, weather and nature took turns budging it into a Babylonian wilderness. Landslides embraced it. Buildings tumbled. Termites struck. Trees rooted - indoors.    Later, we arrived on holiday and bought it – a sort of vacation souvenir that could only be enjoyed in situ. No Excel spreadsheet; no SWOT or PESTLE analyses were manhandled into service to help escape the inevitable conclusion, which was, of course, to buy it.  The estate, the buildings were lovely, and only needed some love.   The love restoration programme that followed often felt like the unravelling of Denisovan DNA. Expect the unexpected, said Oscar Wilde. Prescient advice in the jungle as much as in Victorian London.    There were monks, of course. They arrived to be fed, to bless and leave, their umbrella bearers running behind them.    And five or six builders, not dissimilar to Henry VIII’s wives: some jailed, some cherished. There were monsoons, material shortages, power cuts, and work schedules giddily interrupted by alms-giving and wakes.    And of course, the Easter bombings, COVID, the bankruptcy and collapse of the government, and shortages of everything from fuel to yeast.    But with each cloud came the most golden of silver linings, fostering those most Sri Lankan of virtues - patience and fortitude.   As a thirteenth-century Sufi mystic put it: “What comes, will go. What is found will be lost again. But what you are is beyond coming and going and beyond description.”  With a wisdom you might expect from one who put up with Genghis Khan, Rumi was right. In the jungle, everything eventually settles back down. Nicely. And so, finally restored, the estate opened as a boutique hotel in 2019, becoming one of the island’s Top, albeit tiny, 5-star hotels.     Most hotels start their blubs with room details or menus. This one begins with plants. As befits a jungle hotel, we love them. Especially trees. We have planted almost 8000.    The gardens that cradle the hotel include yellow and pink shower trees, frangipani, flamboyant and Illawarra flame trees; coconut, lipstick, and queen palms; mangos, and wood apples.    In the outer garden grow cycads, orchids, sapu, Cook and Norfolk Island pines, jak, jacaranda, and tea. Rarer palms too - travellers, foxtail, ruffled, stilt and golden; pomegranates and citrus in force – from lime to kumquats, grapefruit to tangerines.   Small paths crisscross the estate with four easy walks laid out in the Garden, the Outer Garden and a half or full estate walk, with a fifth taking you further into the jungle and nearby hamlets.    Down one of these paths is our private Spice Garden planted with cinnamon, vanilla, pepper, cloves, turmeric, and ginger; nurseries of herbs, vegetables and rare saplings, the Elephant Graveyard, and a grove of cocoa. Beyond all this stretch the plantations where the jungle is kept at bay with ever more deliberate degrees of lassitude.   Deliberate – because that’s what the wild creatures demand in most surveys we have carried out.   Birds especially. Over 200 species breed on the island, including 33 endemic species.  We have counted over 50 species here, including kites, eagles, peacocks, parake...

    27 min
  3. The Island That Floated Away: Sri Lanka & The Great Storm. The Ceylon Press History of Sri Lanka 2

    EPISODE 1

    The Island That Floated Away: Sri Lanka & The Great Storm. The Ceylon Press History of Sri Lanka 2

    Rusty, derelict, and irresistibly optically challenged, the old Talaimannar Lighthouse is a gratifyingly improbable key to unlocking the start of Sri Lanka’s recorded history.  It presents an even more unlikely clue to explain the profound differences the island shows compared to the rest of the world. Heraclitus, the weeping philosopher, with his fondness for the paradoxical, noted that “the hidden harmony is better than the obvious.” Indeed, the well-concealed harmony of this much mistreated lighthouse offers as good a set of clues as a historian is ever likely to find anywhere else on the island.   Despite its unmistakable presence and purpose, there is little truly obvious about a lighthouse such as this that no longer works.  One of a necklace of lighthouses built to help ships avoid disaster, the old Talaimannar Lighthouse marks the start of Adam’s Bridge at its Sri Lankan end. Erected sometime after 1850, it rises, with hearty inelegance, like a cooking pot on stilts, “a black skeleton steel tower 113 feet in height,” noted one observer in 1931, one of the last to witness how its once burning fire blazed a red warning to those few ships incautious enough to risk sailing nearby.   Twenty-three other lighthouses dot the country’s coastline, fourteen still active. Most are early twentieth century constructions, solid Edwardian, or First World War structures built with such consummate skill as to survive with resolute determination into the present day, despite monsoons, tsunamis, and decades of pounding surf, alleviated by minimal maintenance and the gathering indifference of most citizens, more agreeably distracted by the greater celebrity of architecture offering penthouses in downtown Colombo or glittering air conditioned shopping malls in previously blameless ancient towns.   A few, like Beruwala Lighthouse, Kovilan Point Lighthouse or the Little and the Great Basses Reef Lighthouses, off the coast at Yala, are accessible only by sea.    Two of the oldest, dating back to 1863, stand guard over the deep-water harbour at Trincomalee: Foul Point Lighthouse and Round Island Lighthouse, with a third, the 1857 Old Colombo Lighthouse, left peering with myopic despondency through a muddle of unremarkable modern buildings towards an ocean now almost invisible.   Others, like Sangaman Kanda Point Lighthouse, have been so shattered by nature as to be reduced to mere stumps.    The tallest and still active – at 49 metres - is at Dondra Head on the southern tip of the island, an edifice improbably constructed from rocks imported from Scotland and Cornwall.   The most famous is the 1939 lighthouse at Galle. However, the 1928 Batticaloa Lighthouse, the dizzily patterned one at Hambantota or Oluvil Lighthouse - the only one to date from after Independence - might all offer winning challenges to that accolade.   Pause briefly for but the merest hint of thought, and it is, of course, no great surprise that so small a nation should boast so great a range and number of lighthouses.  Like lonely exclamation marks finally given a voice of their own, these lofty beacons beat out a ghostly metronomic refrain that states, with unmissable clarity, the first and most profound reason why Sri Lanka is as it is.   This is an island.  That is what those lonely lighthouses declaim.  An island, capacious, yes; nevertheless, a single island; a piece of land unattached to anything else or a mere part of a string of other infant islands that make up an archipelago.   And that fact – more than any other – has determined the country’s character; for “islands,” as Richard Dawkins remarked, “are natural workshops of evolution.”   Of course, from Barbados to Singapore, there are many other island nations. Cuba may be twice Sri Lanka’s land mass, but its population is half, a disproportionality shared by Iceland, Ireland, and New Zealand.   Madagascar and Taiwan have populations similar to Sri Lanka’s, but are either much larger or much smaller in land area. Only Japan and the UK are island nations that far outstrip Sri Lanka in landmass and population. This may seem to be immaterially semantic – but a closer inspection shows just how deep the differences go, and, in so doing, make up the character of an island like no other.   But of all its many peers, Talaimannar, much battered in the civil war and now finding a modest following amongst kitesurfers, remains the country’s most significant beacon, for it is precisely here where Sri Lanka, in appearing to touch India, runs out into the sea and disappears.   From the Indian side, its infrequent visitors are mildly surprised to learn that the lighthouse is not part of the Indian mainland. Or, if not geographically, then at least politically or culturally. Or environmentally. Or perhaps linguistically.   But it is not. It is none of those things. In fact, the closer you look, the greater the differences. However much help the Old Talaimannar Lighthouse was once to shipping, it doggedly maintains its still greater purpose, which is to signal to all comers that what lives beyond its rusty form is an island, utterly divergent from the mainland beyond.    Flashing multicoloured neon lights, blinking to the blast of heavenly trumpets, could hardly make the point better. One step further, and you enter a world whose flummoxing and flamboyant similarities with the mainland merely disguise its differences.   More potent than any fortress, the three seas that surround Sri Lanka are a salty Cordon Sanitaire, keeping separate a 65,000-square-kilometre landmass.   On either side of the island stretch two vast bays, so incalculably immense that it seems petty to note that they contain 6.5 million square kilometres of water. Like the ears of Mickey Mouse, to the west the Arabian Sea and to the east, the  Bay of Bengal sit separated from one another by India to the north and centre, and Sri Lanka to the south, with the entrance to the Arabian Sea coming through the tiny Laccadive Sea - a modest antechamber or buffer oceanet that links the island more immediately to India, the Laccadive, and Maldive Islands.    Together these oceans bind Africa to Indonesia, with Sri Lanka lolling perfectly in the middle, a bejewelled tummy button, more dazzling than anything Beyoncé might have worn in her navel to the Oscars, the BRITS or Cannes.   Even so, a still mightier body of water stretches, bastion-like, to Sri Lanka’s south - the Indian Ocean, a vast water mass that holds one fifth of the world’s total sea water. Were you to set out across this sea on your super yacht from Galle and head south, you would encounter nothing until you reached Antarctica’s Davis Station, with its recorded minus 41 Celsius temperature.   But to the island’s north, the ocean story is very different. Here lie the Palk Straits and the Gulf of Mannar, with the shoals and islets of Adam’s Bridge separating them like the vertebrae on a crocodile’s back.   The bridge, a here-yesterday, gone-tomorrow geological formation of casual and confident utility, was prehistory’s great gift to Sri Lanka. This land corridor was later drowned in a fifty-kilometre stretch of water so shallow that in some sections it is barely one meter deep.  But despite being often more of a child’s paddling pond than an ocean, the Palk Straits is a deterrent all the same.   By virtue of being an island, Sri ...

    22 min
  4. Voyaging to Wonderland: Sri Lanka & The Cunning Lilly. The Ceylon Press History of Sri Lanka 3

    EPISODE 1

    Voyaging to Wonderland: Sri Lanka & The Cunning Lilly. The Ceylon Press History of Sri Lanka 3

    Adam’s Bridge was a bridge crying out for repair, even before the great storm of 1480 shattered it forever.   Unpredictable and uneven, sailing had long been the better option. But for Sri Lanka’s first settlers – who had still to master boats – a short walk from India was all it took.    And walking was what they did: Palaeolithic and later Mesolithic migrants from the Indian mainland who strolled across, their effortless trek belying the extreme complexity that, hundreds of years later, would colour Sri Lanka’s relationship with India – from war, intermarriage, Buddhism itself, to the borrowing of kings and armies.   Since Jurassic times, some 200 million years ago, Sri Lanka had, as part of India, broken off from the great Gondwana supercontinent that had formed 100 million years earlier in the Triassic era. Adam’s Bridge became the sole point of access to the far south, but by 7,500 BCE, it was almost impassable.    As successive mini-ice ages wavered one way and then another and sea levels rose or fell over the years, the bridge was laid bare at least 17 times. Until then, this roughly 100-kilometre-wide, 50-kilometre-long finger of land had been so effective a crossing that it even bore rivers across it, explaining the similarities between the island’s freshwater fish and those of India.    And not just fish.  Plants, animals, all flocked over, whilst they still could.  Some were doomed to become extinct in their new home: the Sri Lankan Lion, and possibly an ancient variant of cheetah too; the unique Sri Lankan hippopotamus; two dissimilar subspecies of Rhinoceros: Sinhaleyus and Kagavena; and the bison-like Ceylon Gaur, the last recorded one living a miserable and solitary existence in the zoo of the Kandyan King, Rajasinghe II.     And with them all came unknown numbers of prehistoric men and women, sauntering south in search of a better life – an ambition not that dissimilar to that of the many tourists who decant into Colombo’s Bandaranaike airport today.   Beguiling hints of these earliest inhabitants are still only just emerging. Excavations conducted in 1984 by Prof. S. Krishnarajah near Point Pedro, northeast of Jaffna, revealed Stone Age tools and axes dating to between 500,000 and 1.6 million years ago. As the fossil record demonstrates, the land they inhabited was ecologically richer and more dramatic than it is today, teeming with wildlife still found in Sri Lanka.   Hundreds of millennia later, one of their Stone Age descendants left behind the most anatomically perfect modern human remains yet uncovered on the island.   Balangoda Man, as he was to be named, was found in the hills south of Horton Plains inland from Matara, a short walk from the birthplace of Sirimavo Bandaranaike, the “weeping widow” who ran independent Sri Lanka with steely determination for almost 20 years. His complete 30,000-year-old skeleton is bewitchingly life-like.   Probing his remains, scientists have concluded that Balangoda Man and his heirs were eager consumers of raw meat, from snails and snakes to elephants. And artistic, too, as evidenced by the ornamental fish bones, seashell beads, and pendants left behind.   Across the island, similar finds are being uncovered, pointing to a sparse but widespread population of hunter-gatherers living in caves – such as Batadomba and Aliga. The tools and weapons found in these caves, made of quartz crystal and flint, are well ahead of such technological developments in Europe, which date from around 10,000 BCE, compared to 29,000 BCE in Sri Lanka.   The island’s Stone Age hunter-gatherers made the transition to a more settled lifestyle well ahead of time.   By at least 17,000-15,000 BCE, Sri Lanka’s original hunter-gatherers had taken to growing oats and barley on what is now Horton Plains, thousands of years before it even began in that fulcrum of early global civilisation - Mesopotamia.   Astonishingly, their direct descendants, the Veddas, are still alive today, making up less than 1% of the island’s total population, an aboriginal community with strong animist beliefs that has, against all odds, retained a distinctive identity.  Leaner, and darker than modern Sri Lankans, their original religion - cherishing demons, and deities - was associated with the dead and the certainty that the spirits of relatives killed can cause good or bad outcomes. Their language, unique to them, is now almost – but not quite - extinct. Their DNA almost exactly matches that of Balangoda Man.   Barely a couple of competent arrow shots away from where Balangoda Man lay down and died is Kiripokunahela, a flat-topped rocky hill.  The spot, at first sight apparently wholly unremarkable, presents to the adventurous traveller (for to get to the site requires a willingness to hike far in hot sun whilst constantly checking a compass), what is quite possibly the island’s first and most eminent art gallery.   Hidden in a shallow cave, the most minimalist of minimalist salons, a leopard faces off against a man riding an elephant.  Painted in a thick white paste, this infinitely ageless portraiture has defied most scientific analysis.  All its admirers seem to agree that it is the work of tribes that predated and, most likely, gave rise to the Veddas of Lenama.    This most singular of all Vedda tribes is famous for having been later annihilated by the Lenama leopards, as a punishment ordered by the Murugan god of Kataragama for crimes and wickedness now long since forgotten.  Only one person is said to have survived the devastation; his testament, passed down through his ancestors, recalls leopards far bigger than those familiar to the region, with stripes not just spots, reddish fur, and massive paws.     Curiously, the animal’s reddish fur was later also witnessed by Hugh Neville, the impossibly Renaissance civil servant and scholar of anthropology, archaeology, botany, ethnology, folklore, geography, geology, history, mythology, palaeography, philology, and zoology. Encountering the beast in the 1880s, he observed that it “stood higher than any I have seen before and was remarkably thin. The tail was of the full length and unusually long.. While the fur was of a dark tawny orange with no appearance of spots”.   Neville is also the only reliable source for the Nittaewo, said to be a diminutive and still earlier version of the Vedda, standing between three to four feet in height, covered in reddish hair like tiny Yetis, and whose language amounted to a sort of burbling, or birds' twittering. Neville noted that their name may have derived from the Singhala word "nigadiwa" used to describe the primate tribes that predated Prince Vijaya.    Whatever the Nittaewo’s distant ancestral relationship to the Vedda, it was insufficient to secure their ultimate survival.  Neville recounts that the last members of this miniature race were genocidally suffocated by smoke forced into their cave over three days by the Vedda themselves sometime around 1800.   Successful for a time, the early Vedda tribes terrified and excited island visitors.   It was the early Vedda tribes of Yaksha and Naga that Fa-Hsien, the 5th-century CE traveller, had in mind when he conjured up his fable of early Sri Lanka in his book  “A Record of Buddhistic Kingdoms,” a colourful travelogue that rivets the early archaeological origins of the country to fl...

    20 min
  5. The Island That Cultivated Philosophy: Sri Lanka & The Making of Nirvana. The Ceylon Press History of Sri Lanka 4

    EPISODE 1

    The Island That Cultivated Philosophy: Sri Lanka & The Making of Nirvana. The Ceylon Press History of Sri Lanka 4

    Sri Lanka’s first recorded monarch founded a dynasty that would last over 600 years.     Expelled from either Bengal or Gujarat (scholars argue, as scholars do) by his father, Prince Vijaya, the founding father of an eponymous royal family, arrived on the island in 543 BCE, his landing kicking off recorded Singhala history, despite the first 100 years being anything but plain sailing.   Occasional bouts of regicide, lassitude, rebellion and navel gazing aside, the dynasty was as textbook perfect as it could reasonably be expected to be, and Prince Vijaya’s thirty-six successors did all that was necessary to embed, improve, and make dominant the tiny state they had first instituted in the northwest of the land.     Not one to sit upon their laurels, and with a flair for marketing well ahead of their time, the Vijayans relaunched their realm barely a quarter of the way through their term, branding it as the kingdom of Anduraupura.  They ruled it, according to the later Stone Book or Galpota Inscription, as human divinities, with an almost-but-not-quite-divine authority, the result of personal merit earned through their unusual, holistically philosophical approach to life and governance.     Their capital city would become one of the planet’s longest continuously inhabited cities, enriched by cutting-edge industry, resources, structures, administrators, soldiers and all the other many disciplines critical to a prosperous ancient kingdom.  Expanding with elastic ease, their kingdom soon grew far beyond the Rajarata, or traditional royal lands, to encompass most, if not all, of the island.     To the east and south lay Ruhunurata, or Ruhana, a linked but junior principality founded around 200 BCE by Prince Mahanaga, brother to Devanampiya Tissa, the 7th or 8th monarch of the dynasty, and great-great-great-great-great nephew of Prince Vijaya himself.     To the west lay the third, much smaller principality of Mayarata, another linked family fiefdom, said to have been founded in the fourth century BCE by Prince Vijaya’s nephew, Panduwasdev, the dynasty’s third monarch.    Like light bulbs experiencing the almost reassuringly familiar power cuts and surges of the current Ceylon Electricity Board, a state company forever preoccupied by internal disputes, both principalities rose, fell and rose again, depending on quite how strong the Anduraupuran king was at any one time.   All this was, of course, good wholesome leadership – but it was hardly groundbreaking.  Seen from the perspective of the Shang, Hittites, Achaemenids, Ptolemaics, the Punts, Medians, Seleucids, Mauryas, and numerous other successful ancient dynasties, there was little to differentiate the Vijayans from the usual preoccupations with sound, hereditary hegemonic rule.   It was only halfway through the span of the Vijayan rule that, in welcoming to the island, Mahinda, the Buddhist son of the Indian Emperor Ashoka, they did something that changed everything.     In this, their simple act of hospitality, they were to remodel their kingdom to be so profoundly different to any other, anywhere, as to endow it with an authority and energy so inimitable that, even today, it is protected and characterised by that misty encounter of 247 BCE.    Not only did the Vijayans welcome the young royal missionary, but they took him, with fervent haste, into their hearts, and with him, his evangelising philosophy of Buddhism.     Like all Buddhists, Mahinda did not acknowledge a supreme god, and, despite later shorthand references to Buddhism as a religion, it is more appropriately described as a philosophy.  In welcoming Mahinda, the Vijayans crossed the line from standard overlords to philosopher monarchs governed by a formidable moral code and a preoccupation with achieving a state of transcendent bliss and well-being.   If being an island was the first and foremost explanation for why Sri Lanka became Sri Lanka, Buddhism is, of course, its second explanation.     And a much more impressive one too, for it was a deliberate act – one that no less comprehensively than geography was to profoundly colour the country as if it had been dyed in Tyrian purple itself, that ancient and legendary dye, reserved by threat of death, for the clothes of the Roman emperors or the sails of Queen Cleopatra’s royal barge.   Of course, not every king or subsequent island ruler made the moral imperatives of Buddhism their magnetic north. However, most tried to, and all were ultimately judged against its teachings as they are still today, by ordinary citizens in towns and villages across the land.  For however ordinary Sri Lankans are, they are also unexpectedly religiously minded.  Religion today, to the astonishment of many observers, is holding its own.    Right across the world, experts and pollsters have had to rethink their view of what would befall religion as countries modernised. Atheists, agnostics and all who are religiously unaffiliated account for a shrinking 16% of the global population, even if the balance of believers has a whiff of the secular in their spiritualism.    But as the West has become more secular, the rest has become less so - with God ever more likely to be best seen by Muslims or Hindus, but not Christians. Nor Buddhists, for Lord Buddha’s followers make up a shrinking 7% of the world’s population. But not in Sri Lanka, where Buddhism is estimated to hold its own at around 70% of the island’s population.   Hardly surprising, then, that in repeated world polls, Sri Lanka is almost always found amongst the top five most religiously minded countries.    Once, most of Asia was Buddhist - but such countries are now a rarity as alternative religions, politics, and secularism have shrunk their reach.    Yet in Sri Lanka, Buddhism remains an indisputable force, supported by over 6,000 monasteries, 30,000 monks, and its own government ministry. Other gods retain a modest purchase.    Christianity probably arrived sometime after Thomas the Apostle's visit to Kerala in 52 CE, though it wasn't until the Portuguese arrived in 1505 that things really got going. Even so, just 7% of today’s population is Christian, less than the nearly 10% who practise Islam following the arrival of Arab traders in the seventh century CE, or the 13% practising Hinduism, here since even before the Chola invasion of the tenth century CE.    Buddhism and Sri Lanka are almost synonymous.  It is impossible to understand one without comprehending the other.    The Buddhist mindset – that life is one of suffering, only alleviated by enlightenment through meditation, spiritual work and doing good – is stitched invisibly into every fibre of island life. From its earliest beginnings, it has shaped the country’s language and culture, morality, education, politics, family, finance, prosperity, health, work, and its approach to the environment.    Presidents, for example, may win elections. Still, they are not taken seriously until they have received the blessings of the Chief Prelates of the Malwathu and Asgiri chapters, the two most critical Buddhist orders in the land.  Indeed, so great is the continual rush of ambitious politicians to the doors of both prelates that a traffic-light system might usefully be considere...

    21 min
  6. Dancing on Knives: Sri Lanka & The Lucky Break. The Ceylon Press History of Sri Lanka 5

    EPISODE 1

    Dancing on Knives: Sri Lanka & The Lucky Break. The Ceylon Press History of Sri Lanka 5

    “If I want a crown,” remarked Peachey, hero of Kipling’s Man Who Would Be King, and unexpected alter ego of Prince Vijiya, Sri Lanka’s first monarch, “I must go and hunt it for myself.”  If Peachey’s motivation was glory and riches, plain and straightforward, Vijaya’s was about raw survival, dodging assassinations and evading parental disapproval. If that is the case, the chronicles are to be believed. And in this, Sri Lanka is exceedingly fortunate, for it has not one but three great chronicles, claiming, between them, the title of the world’s oldest and longest historical narrative. Although these turbulent chronicles muddle up man, god, and magic with morality, history, and myth, they also lay a wraithlike trail of events and people through what would otherwise be a historical vacuum dotted with random, unattributable artefacts. Prince Vijaya’s existence is known only through the first two chronicles - The Dipavaṃsa Chronicle (compiled around the third to fourth centuries CE) and The Mahavaṃsa, The Great Chronicle, an epic poem written by a Buddhist monk in the fifth century CE in the ancient Pali script. These stupefying works, which put most soap operas and not a few Sci-Fi films to shame, open with Prince Vijaya’s arrival from Sinhapura, a legendary lost state in eastern India, and end in 302 CE. At this point, they hand the task of storytelling onto the third and last book, The Culavamsa or Lesser Chronicle, which covers events to 1825, an otherwise blameless year the world over, with little more of note than it being the date of the first performance of Rossini's Barber of Seville.  But if love and eternal fidelity are rarely the subject of the three chronicles, gold, betrayal, and secrecy often are – though historians naturally debate the factual accuracy of the stories, in which the doings of men and kings take a poor second place to those of monks and Lord Buddha.  Even when the focus shifts from the divine to the secular, it is abundantly clear that, as with the most tenacious tales, history is inevitably written by the winners. Although verified archaeological evidence is still less, documentary evidence for Prince Vijaya remains tantalizingly absent; he remains, from every perspective, the great winner, the shaved head fugitive with a penchant for what The Mahavamsa calls “evil conduct and … intolerable deeds,” every bit the rebranded hero.  Expelled by his appalled father, thrust onto a ship with seven hundred dependent followers and ordered to stay away on pain of death, Prince Vijaya has, through the centuries, still managed to take centre stage as Sri Lanka’s paterfamilias. Centuries later, over a shared arak and soda, and, courtesy of reincarnation, it is more than likely that the reformed villain would tell you that he finds his righteous reputation puzzling. After all, he never set out to be a hero, still less founder of a nation; and quite possibly not even a king, claiming, in his own lifetime, the much more modest title of Prince. Survival, a bit of fun, respect, of course, obedient followers, amenable wives, good food and the space to be his own boss was probably as much as he aspired to.   Indeed, so careless was he of his greater future that he almost destroyed his own fledgling dynasty just as it was starting, a nasty proclivity that was to recur just two generations later when his descendants tried to wipe themselves out.  Twice, in under two hundred years, the Vijayans, the dynasty that was to make Sri Lanka the world’s only Singhala nation, came perilously close to obliterating it.  It was the sort of carelessness typical of rulers bereft of the value of hindsight, operating like sword dancers twirling on the tops of lofty stupas, and utterly reckless with their unfathomable dynastic destiny. It is said that Prince Vijaya snuck into the country through the secretive Puttalam Lagoon.  If so, he enjoyed the value of surprise for the shortest of times. The Mahavamsa, whose respect for divinity of any sort is beyond reproach, has Lord Buddha task an acquiescent Hindu god with protecting the prince and reassuring him that the island he has alighted upon is pretty much empty.  “There are no men here, and here no dangers will arise,” claims the god, helpfully disguised as a wandering ascetic. If one is to found a future nation, this sort of starting point is enormously helpful. Thousands of years later, so little is known about the fundamental social and political structures that existed on the island at this time that this myth of a largely empty island merely waiting for a noble race to occupy it is more than validated by ignorance.  But lines are there to be read through, and The Mahavamsa wears the cognitive dissonance of its gilded lines with confident ease.  Almost from the start, they imply, the prince and his followers found themselves fighting for survival, dominance, and land.  The many conflicting stories surrounding his fights with man-eating wives, flying horses, skirmishes with indigenous tribes, protection under Buddha, and his willingness to swap his local wife, Kuveni, for a more glamorous and aristocratic Indian princess are, in fact, key parts of the country’s cherished creation myths.  And curses too. For Kuveni, rejected, outcast and pushed to a shocking suicide, was to place such a curse on the king and his house as to taint “not only Vijaya but the descendants of Hela People (Singhala) as a whole,” wrote an observer. It has,” remarked another mournful raconteur, “overflowed to every nook and corner of Sri Lanka and enwrapped her people over the centuries.”   If the nation delights in the stories about Vijaya, those about Kuveni, a native queen of the local Yaksha tribe, cause much head-shaking. For Kuveni was not simply a wife and weaver of cloth, a mother, lover, and queen - but also a demon, a metamorphoser, an outcast, an avenging fury, suicide, traitor, murderess, ghost, and mistress of deception.  A descendant of the gods, she is also a goddess to the country’s still-living Aboriginal peoples. We may be forest haunters,” said a Vedda leader recently, “but Kuveni, our goddess.” Small wonder then that Sri Lanka, in not knowing what to really make of the Mother of the Nation, chooses to push her deep into one of its many locked closets. The slimmest of ancient – almost folkloric - hints mark the Prince’s landing on Sri Lanka’s shores Pulling his boats onto a beach of reddish-brown sand – “Tamba” meaning Copper, or as it was later known, Tambapanni- was the perfect spot for a settlement, commanding the access to an excellent natural harbour opening into the Gulf of Mannar and an almost inexhaustible supply of pearl oysters. “Horse Mountain” is another name for Kudiramalai, and for centuries, amidst the ruins of an ancient temple, a massive horse-and-man statue stood on the cliffs. Made of brick, stone, and coral, it is estimated to have been at least 35 feet high, its front legs raised, its rider clinging to reins, bearing a lantern to guide ships into the port.   Locals still point to some modest ruins, all that remains, they say, of the horse and rider. And continually, raked by high waves and surf, broken bricks, pottery, and building materials wash up on the shore. Inland are a further set of ruins – mere pillars standing or fallen in the jungle and known locally as Kuveni’s Palace. Here, where history is forever unprovable, the historian can either move swiftly on to the following footnote or succumb to the impossible romance of possibility. Succumbing is naturally the better bet; certainly the most ente...

    22 min
  7. Heaven on Earth: Sri Lanka & The Double Windfall. The Ceylon Press History of Sri Lanka 6

    EPISODE 1

    Heaven on Earth: Sri Lanka & The Double Windfall. The Ceylon Press History of Sri Lanka 6

    In the previous 100 years, Sri Lanka’s little Vijayan kingdom twice risked absolute oblivion, courtesy of its carefree kings. But twice too, in the following 170 years, the self-same state would step up and prosper beyond all expectations, thanks to two other kings, both innate masters of nation-building.   For Pandu Kabhaya and his grandson, Devanampiya Tissa, were to set the mark way beyond what any other island leader might later hope to achieve and, in the rarified world of royal hustings, emerge as the nation’s two greatest monarchs by a country mile, Like the prize ride in a fairground big dipper, that such a double-double whammy should even have happened is about as rare as throwing a dozen sixes in Monte Carlo. But little else should be expected of the Vijayans, the luckiest of all the dynasties, for whom every cloud had not one, but several, silver and gold linings.  “The teeth of the dog that barks at the lucky man,” avowed a somewhat orthodontist-oriented Singhala folk saying, “will fall out”.  If true, then over the reigns of Pandu Kabhaya (437 - 367 BCE ) and Devanampiya Tissa (307 - 267 BCE), the island’s dogs would have been on a strict milk-and-roti diet to manage their missing molars better. Over this period, the tiny Vijayan state was radically expanded, endowed with a magnificent capital city (Anuradhapura), distinct laws, civil and administrative infrastructure, investments in agriculture and water harvesting, increased trade, and a new language – the earliest inscriptions in Sinhalese date from close to this period.  And, most critically of all, a new religion – Buddhism.  The subtle and profound chemistry between these manifold factors was to combine to create, like the rarest of new life in a petri dish, not just the world’s only Singhala state, but one that would still be flourishing, despite all manner of catastrophes encountered along the way, today. Pandu Kabhaya’s (improbably long) 70-year reign (437 to 367 BCE ) would have come as a blessed relief to family and subjects alike after so much earlier dynastic squabbling.  Having outsmarted, outmanoeuvred, foiled, defeated, imprisoned, and killed nearly all his troublesome uncles, he took up his place as victorious head of the fledgling Vijayan dynasty and set in train the real beginnings of the Anuradhapura Kingdom when he made his home in the future capital and, in Louis XIV-style, began building. By then, the site of Anuradhapura was already over 200 years old and covered more than 20 acres. Pandu Kabhaya took it to still greater heights for what followed was, to paraphrase Deborah Kerr and Carey Grant many centuries later, "the nearest thing to heaven". In all areas of enterprise - from farming and engineering to administration and construction, his rule harnessed the best available expertise to build a capital with the hugest of hearts, and through it, dominate an entire island. In the style of the much later and far away William the Conqueror and Doomsday Book, this king too commissioned a massive survey to take full stock of his domain, all the better to tax and manage it, plan investments, patronage, defence and yet further ascendancy.    A later medieval record from just one location – Kurunegala – states that the king formed 1,000 new villages in the area, and that his grandson later dispatched pedigree Indian buffaloes to graze there.  Even allowing for the exaggeration of breathless flunkies, even knocking one zero off the total, it still amounts to colossal development.  Some thirty men were appointed in this area alone to be at the king’s specific executive command, overseen by one Alakeswara Mudiyanse, a man whose name alone has survived these many hundreds of years. From Anuradhapura right across the Rajarata – the King’s country – and quite probably beyond, the royal writ ran. It encompassed old settlements and new ones, exacting political and social domination that would have placed the kingdom at the apogee of the other competing island societies that co-existed with it, for a time at least, especially to the east and south. In what was most probably something of a first for the Vijayan state, Pandu Kabhaya’s rule respected his Vedda allies, the Yakkhas, Cittaraja and Kalavela, clans of the island’s earliest original inhabitants. They had, after all, most likely been keen and critical allies in his fight against his many uncles.   Now was the time for a reward.  The Mahavamsa records his beneficial diligence: “He settled the Yakkha Kalavela on the east side of the city, the Yakkha Cittaraja at the lower end of the Abhayatank…and on festival-days he sat with Cittaraja beside him on a seat of equal height, and having gods and men to dance before him, the king took his pleasure, in joyous and merry wise.” Few areas of urban development escaped his planners’ eyes and The Mahavamsa elaborates that “he laid out four suburbs as well as the Abhaya-tank, the common cemetery, the place of execution, and the chapel of the Queens of the West, the banyan-tree of Vessavana and the Palmyra-palm of the Demon of Maladies, the ground set apart for the Yonas and the house of the Great Sacrifice”. Cities need public servants – and here too Pandu Kabhaya seems to have missed nothing: “he set 500 candalas [low caste workers] to the work of cleaning the town, 200 candalas to the work of cleaning the sewers, 150 candalas he employed to bear the dead and as many candalas to be watchers in the cemetery. And public servants, however low caste, needed homes: “For these he built a village north-west of the cemetery, and they continually carried out their duty as it was appointed. Toward the north-east of the Candala village, he made a cemetery, called the Lower Cemetery, for the Candala folk. North of this cemetery, between it and the Pasana-mountain, the line of huts for the huntsmen were built thenceforth.” God, too, in his many different iterations, was also provided for.  “Northward from thence, as far as the Gamani-tank, a hermitage was made for many ascetics; eastward of that same cemetery, the ruler built a house for the Nigantha Jotiya. In that same region dwelt the nigantha named Giri, along with many ascetics of various heretical sects.  And there, the lord of the land also built a chapel for the Nigantha Kumbhanda. Toward the west from thence and eastward of the street of the huntsmen lived five hundred families of heretical beliefs. “ Trade thrived exponentially, and there are even intriguing hints, documented in The Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Sri Lanka, of a small group of Greek merchants who later lived in the royal city itself. Nor did he neglect the utilitarian, and, in a marvellous feat of ancient engineering, constructed the first bisokotuwas to regulate the outflow of water from tanks and sluices and to secure them against destruction during the annual floods. Even health care was provided for.  “On the further side of Jotiya’s house and on this side of the Gamani tank, he likewise built a monastery for wandering mendicant monks, and a dwelling for the ajivakas and a residence for the brahmans, and in this place and that he built a lying-in shelter and a hall for those recovering from sickness.” “Ten years after his consecration,” concludes The Mahavamsa, never hesitant to call a spade a spade, “did Pandu Kabhaya, the ruler of Lanka, establish the village boundaries over the whole of the island of Lanka.” To claim to rule “the whole island” might have been stretching things a bit, but probably only a bit.  Indeed, Pandu Kabhaya ruled much of the i...

    23 min
  8. Merry-Go-Round: Sri Lanka & The Spinning Sovereigns. The Ceylon Press History of Sri Lanka 8

    EPISODE 1

    Merry-Go-Round: Sri Lanka & The Spinning Sovereigns. The Ceylon Press History of Sri Lanka 8

    If ever there was a king who was entitled to get very cross indeed, it was Dutugemunu, one of the island’s standout sovereigns.     Known, not unjustifiably as “The Great,” Dutugemunu was to rescue his car crash of a dynasty, only to watch it (albeit from the life thereafter) speed off the proverbial royal road yet again, and with such casual ingratitude as to make common cause with Mark Twain - “if you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous he will not bite you. This is the principal difference between a dog and man”.   In the hundred years preceding Dutugemunu's ascension to the throne, the dynasty had been dethroned twice.  In the following hundred years they were to do it once more, this time with much greater injury to the state.    Stability is rarely the embodiment of absolute monarchies, and Sri Lanka suffered more than most from almost institutionalised political volatility, as if, just below the surface of the realm, with the constant rumbling and tremors of a gathering earthquake, yet another government eruption was making itself ready.     Instability haunted most of the dozen or so kings who succeeded Dutugemunu.  Five were rogue invaders from Tamil India; at least two were fated to be murdered by their scheming successors; and most of the rest reigned as if having signed up for a farce.   Only Dutugemunu and his later nephew, Valagamba, the Comeback King, were to move the kingdom progressively onwards.  For the rest, it was as if a life-changing ennui had floated into the palace throne room, a debilitating cloud that left every monarch much like Phil and Ralph in “Groundhog Day:   Phil: "What would you do if you were stuck in one place and every day was the same and nothing that you did mattered?"    Ralph: "That about sums it up for me."   Had he had any presentiment of what was to come, it is probable that even Dutugemunu, so famously proactive as to make a Long-life Battery appear idle, would have chucked in his chips and moved on.  But thankfully, no plot-spoiling deity, soothsayer, or psychic was to interrupt his indomitable spirit, and for a glorious moment, it seemed as if the Vijayan good times had returned. The lucky dynasty was back in business.   Although history has been reluctant to tell us Dutugemunu's height, he was probably short, for if ever a leader existed with the Napoleon Syndrome, it was this man, whose nature, evident from the many myths and tales of his childhood, was naturally geared to dominate and control. “Growing duly, Gamani came to sixteen years, vigorous, renowned, intelligent and a hero in majesty and might,” reported The Mahavamsa, with an almost palpable sense of relief and thanksgiving.   Dutugemunu's path to the ruler of Lanka was far from straightforward, coming as he did from a lesser twig of the Vijayan family tree.   Despite these disadvantages, Dutugemunu famously navigated an obstacle course of family hurdles intended to arrest his monarchical ambitions.  He even made a point of conquering the many mini-Tamil fiefdoms that had sprung up around and possibly within the Rajarata during Ellara's reign – a far from straightforward task as the four-month siege of Vijitanagara illustrated.     Here, having to calm his panicking elephants amid incessant Tamil attacks using “red-hot iron and molten pitch,” it was evident that the campaign was no walkover, but one that required planning and determination to ensure victory.  But the triumph was ultimately his. Power was consolidated, and his final victory over Ellara in 161 BCE left him ruling nearly the whole of the island, more territory by far than even that of the great king, Pandu Kabhaya.   And as if to confirm the return of Vijayan order, the construction of more buildings commenced. Anuradhapura expanded exponentially, with its infrastructure, utilities, and water resources so upgraded as to ensure it would flourish for centuries to come, the longest-surviving capital city of the Indian subcontinent.   Still more spectacular was the building of many more of what would become its most venerated celebrity structures.    A large monastery, the Maricavatti, was erected, together with a nine-story chapter house for monks, with a bright copper-tiled roof; and most famous of all, what is today called the Ruwanweliseya, the Great Stupa, which housed Buddha’s begging bowl.    The building programme was not restricted to the capital alone – eighty-nine other temples are said to have been constructed, along with hospitals and smaller tanks, in different parts of the kingdom.   The kingdom was return to order – precisely the kind of order that Megasthenes, the Greek historian based in India had noted just a hundred years earlier, relishing, with a commercial leer, the kingdom’s “palm-groves, where the trees are planted with wonderful regularity all in a row, in the way we see the keepers of pleasure parks plant out shady trees in the choicest spots;” and how the island was “more productive of gold and large pearls than the Indias."    After decades of enemy occupation and an incipient civil war, the Anuradhapuran state found itself a welcome prodigal returning to the honeypot table of the Indian Ocean economy.     Dutugemunu would have found little difficulty in rebooting trade, drawing back to its ports merchants from Arabia, Persia, India, East Asia and possibly even Rome; and, in so doing, wrenching back control of trade and custom dues from the merchants themselves for whom the laissez-faire regime of the earlier years had several commercial silver linings.    Accompanying this structural reform and state-promoted capital investment was a new sense of nationalism.  Dutugemunu’s recapture of the Anuradhapura state, the second in just a few decades, was not just a return to power for the Vijayans but also for the budding Singhalese country, whose growing cultural differences with the kingdoms across the Palk Strait were accelerating as never before.     “We own the country we grow up in,” the Sri Lankan writer Michael Ondaatje was to write thousands of years later: “or we are aliens and invaders”.   And own it they did, with Dutugemunu applying to the succession the most stringent of moral codes, most strikingly seen in how he disinherited his son Saliya, for having fallen for a girl from one of the lowest castes.    The ailing king, dying before his eye-catching Ruwanweliseya Stupa was finished, ensured the throne passed instead to his own brother, Saddha Tissa, in 137 BCE; enjoying, as he did so, an experience rare for most Sri Lankan monarchs - a natural death. And what an end it was.   “Lying on a palanquin,” records The Mahavamsa’s compelling heart-on-sleeve account, “the king went thither, and when on his palanquin he had passed round the cetiya, going toward the left, he paid homage to it at the south entrance, and as he then, lying on his right side on his couch spread upon the ground, beheld the splendid Great Thupa, and lying on his left side the splendid Lohapasada, he became glad at heart, surrounded by the brotherhood of bhikkhus.”   For the next thirty-three years, it seemed as if life had gotten back to normal, or to whatever passed for normal amidst the seemingly indestructible building and gardens of Anuradhapura.&nb...

    21 min
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About

The Sri Lanka Podcast tells the stories behind what makes Sri Lanka, Sri Lankan - from history, religion and travel to culture, fauna, flora, and much in between.

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  • Creator
    David Swarbrick & The Editors of The Ceylon Press
  • Episodes
    84
  • Seasons
    2
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    Clean
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    © 2024 The Ceylon Press
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    The Sri Lanka Podcast