The Sri Lanka Podcast

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

  1. The Long Farewell: The Tale of Sri Lanka’s Last Lambakanna Kings

    1D AGO

    The Long Farewell: The Tale of Sri Lanka’s Last Lambakanna Kings

    “If,” promised M.K. Gandhi, “you give me rice, I'll eat today; if you teach me how to grow rice, I'll eat every day.”  Gandhi only visited Sri Lanka once – in 1927 – which may explain why, erudite though his aphorism was, it remained, all the same, a lesson that had already been learnt long ago on the island - thousands of years ago, in fact, in the very earliest days of recorded Lankan history. Ever since the first distinctive water technology was introduced by the early Anduraupuran kings with the creation of the massive Panda Wewa reservoir around 450 BCE, their kings could provide an ever greater abundance of water, delivered just when and where it was needed. It was a proficiency that enabled an entire island to feed itself without trouble. Tummies full, its people could focus instead on the other great matters of life – religion, for example, war, politics, poetry – or the slow contemplation of a temple lotus pond during a long post-lunch siesta. This particular pastime – or ones not dissimilar to it – is still greatly prized here today. Sophisticated water technology made the island’s paddy fields so fecund that the country barely needed to bother much with the enrichments of trade or the grubby task of making excessive money. As the ancient world’s merchant ships crossed the Indian Ocean from China to Arabia, they may have made a point of stopping in Sri Lanka to buy its gems, spices, Mannar pearls, elephants, and hardwoods - but the riches this all brought were just icing. The country was already rich. And it was this richness that the last Lambakanna kings had on their side as the kingdom they ruled moved to its apogee. The great gilded last moments of Edwardian England were fuelled by cotton; the Ming by the porcelain trade; and ancient Athens, silver from the Laurion mines. But here it was rice – plentiful, abundant, nurturing rice.  Rice would have arrived with the island’s Mesolithic settlers, and it was first evidenced archaeologically around 800 BCE. Excavations made in the Anuradhapura area unearthed a remarkably large early Iron Age settlement – at least ten hectares, still with the spectral trace of irrigation systems and rice cultivation. The Mahavamsa Chronicle, starting a few hundred years later, around 540 BCE, noted that the island’s first recorded queen, Kuveni, showed rice to Prince Vijaya, the country’s founding paterfamilias. Vijaya’s hungry followers wasted little time, for the Chronicle goes on to document how they all then set about making themselves a fortifying lunch of rice and curry. The plentiful supply of rice, even then, was due to small village tanks and their ability to harness and store water. They did so in systems that brought together up to 10 individual tanks within a small land basin measuring about 6 to 10 square miles, recycling water along the path from the reservoir to the field. Historians have estimated that in just one area in the north central part of the island – an area otherwise noted for its dryness – 450 such systems may have existed at some time between the second and the fifth centuries BCE, containing about 4,200 small tanks. Ptolemy, writing in faraway Rome sometime between 127 and 170 CE, reported that the “country produces rice, honey, ginger, beryl, and hyacinth, and has mines of every sort, of gold, silver, and other metals. Large Tank systems followed the village ones – such as the Abhayavapi at Anuradhapura, the Tissa vava and the Nuwara vava. And from the fifth century CE onward, extremely long canals were added to the water network, opening up vast new areas for rice cultivation. By the sixth century, there was barely any suitable land in the entire Dryzone that had not been turned into paddy. Of course, there were, from time to time, droughts, with at least six mentions of them cropping up in the ancient chronicles between 161 and 569 CE - but they seem to have been far less devastating here than in other parts of South Asia. The Samantapasadika, an ancient chronicle written by a monk called Buddhaghosa in  Anuradhapura between 927 and 973 CE, notes the extreme care the state took to mitigate periods of water scarcity. “During the draught season,” it states, “when water becomes scarce, water is released in intervals. If someone does not receive his due share during the interval allocated to him and the crops become withered, then another should not receive his share during his allocation. If any monk drives water from a secondary canal to a field belonging to someone else, to a canal or a field belonging to him or to someone else, or covers the catchment, then he has committed the offence of avahara.” The highly specific administrative and legal infrastructure that the state wrapped around water collection and extraction gave it an unparalleled ability to manage droughts – a capability other parts of South Asia lacked to anything like the same degree. One ancient chronicler remarked that “by attending facilities for the cultivation of fields by means of tanks, he (the king) dispelled the famine in prosperous Lanka.” By the time the last of the Lambakarna kings came to rule in 691 CE, the country had been functioning as a recorded state for over 1,200 years. Rice had become the petrol of the nation. In this, Sri Lanka was little different to most other Asian countries – but what set it apart was its sheer abundance, its ability to power the kingdom so very effectively through good times and bad.  Indeed, when the last of the Lankbranaka fell in 993 CE and the country embarked on hundreds of years of uncertain life, even this did not bring rice production to its knees. To hold this almost folkloric expectation -  this expectation that you will not entirely starve - was a rare assurance in those pre-modern times; and the patriotic confidence it engendered is tellingly evident, even today. Other things may be wrong, even very badly wrong, but, so the feeling goes, we will feed ourselves, we will go on, we will get better. As one Singhala idiom puts it: "rather than cursing the darkness, it is better to light a lamp." Famine, scarcity, hardship – these are not conditions unfamiliar to Sri Lanka, then or now, but the island has largely escaped the widespread devastation that has gripped its neighbours, a theme that runs through its history from its earliest recorded times. North of Sri Lanka, uncountable millions died of famine in British colonial India - 36 famines in around 200 years. So appalling were they that people’s bodies actually evolved to store food as fat differently, so that their descendants now face significant health complications. Even before this period, famine routinely crippled the sub-continent. Over 1700 years from the 1st century CE, over 75 famines are recorded, with some, such as that in the Deccan in the 1630s, the Punjab in the mid-13th century and South India in the 11th century, being monumentally destructive. But not here.  "Flowers grow beneath her feet,” wrote Rani Manicka in her novel, “The Rice Mother,” “but she is not dead at all. The years have not diminished the Rice Mother. I see her, fierce and magical. Stop despairing and call to her, and you will see, she will come bearing a rainbow of dreams."  In the simplest of algebraic formulas, advanced water technology enabled the plentiful production of rice, or, more directly, an innate island-wide self-confidence: however bad life sometimes got, it rarely if ever reached the draconian depths other countries encountered. Sri Lanka was different, and it was rice, the very thing it had most in common with all other Asian countries, which set it apart. Rice still sits at the epicentre of all the island’s Buddhist services, at Pereheras, Yak and Bali ceremonies, distributed at every important occa...

    1h 44m
  2. Explanations. Part 9. A Dissident Selection of the World’s 100 Most Important Poems

    1D AGO

    Explanations. Part 9. A Dissident Selection of the World’s 100 Most Important Poems

    C.P CAVAFY. Ithaka.   SHEL SILVERSTEIN. Where the Sidewalk Ends.   MARK DOTY. Reprive, From Atlantis.   GABRIEL OKARA. The Paino And The Drums.   DYLAN THOMAS. The Force That Through The Green Fuse Drives The Flower.   DU FU. A Woman Of Quality.   GEOFFREY HILL. From Mercian Hymns.   ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON: The Lady of Shalot.

    29 min
  3. The Devastation: Sri Lanka & The Fallen Throne. The Ceylon Press History Of Sri Lanka Book 23.

    1D AGO

    The Devastation: Sri Lanka & The Fallen Throne. The Ceylon Press History Of Sri Lanka Book 23.

    When Sena V took over his father's throne in 991 CE, his kingdom was running on borrowed time - and had barely ten more years of life to it.  At this late stage, there was little if anything either he or his successor, his son Mahinda V, could have done to avoid their fate.  The seeds of their doleful destiny had been sewn as far back as 6791 CE when their illustrious Lambakanna ancestor, Manavanna, had secured his throne with the aid of the Indian Pallava dynasty.  The military assistance and subsequent alliance had won him a throne, but at the cost of enlisting Sri Lanka in whatever was going on in southern India, where five dynasties were fighting one another for dominance.   Sometime around 800 CE, Mahinda II replaced the old Pallava friendship pact with one with their enemies, the Pandyans, a choice that seemed sensible at the time but was to prove his dynasty's undoing.  It was to prove the wrong choice in every way, for just waiting in the wings was a third dynasty ready to emerge from the gloom of anonymity as the ultimate warrior. In about 847 CE, Vijayalaya, a Chola warlord of otherwise unremarkable obscurity, emerged out of the chaos caused by the Pandyan and Pallava wars and seized the great city of Thanjavur.  It was the start of a celebrated and pugnacious dynasty.  He would go on to inflict many defeats on the two older kingdoms and, bit by bit, his successors rolled up the whole of southern India.   Around 897 CE, the Pallava kingdom began its slow fall to the Chola kings, beginning with Aditya I.  By 915 CE Parantaka I, had captured its capital Madurai. The Pandyan king fled into exile in Sri Lanka, and the Chola took over the most of his lands. The Chola kingdom itself suffered a series of reversals until, in 958 CE, King Parantaka II recovered most of his lost lands and annexed large sections of the Pandyan kingdom. Most of the remaining Pandyan lands were captured soon after by his son, Uttama.  By the mid-980s, the Chola dynasty, under Rajaraja I, had become the only show in town. Ancient inscriptions, known as the Larger Leiden plates, relate how Rajaraja "conquered the Pandya, Tulu, Kerala, Simhalendra and Satyashraya ; destroyed ships at Kandalur-Salai , captured Vengi, Gangapadi, Nulambapadi, Tadigaipadi, Kudamalainadu, Kollam, Kalingam, and removed the splendour of the Pandyas." Rajaraja, known not without cause as “the Great,” reigned from 985 to 1014 and internationalised his kingdom. From Goa to Andhra Pradesh, much of India was under him and his son, Rajendra I; the Indian Ocean Trading Zone, from the western Arabian Sea to Vietnam, was transformed into a Chola lake, with the kings dominating, influencing, or directly ruling much of everything in between – including Sri Lanka. At the heart of the Chola’s expansion lay a wholly reimagined view of naval power. Star charts, wind and monsoon patterns were calculated to improve navigation and mapping, and a spy network was set up among merchants and other mariners to deliver intelligence to Chola military planners. Boat-building technology was improved and different woods identified for different parts of their boats – teak for hull strength, bamboo for the flexible sections, and ironwood for parts most exposed to salt.  Their new ships could carry up to 200 soldiers in multi-decks over 200 feet long and furnished with specialised ramming heads and compartmentalised storage areas. Smaller, faster ships were developed to outflank the enemy; others to serve as more effective scout ships, and still others to provide support and munitions.  A Crescent Formation was developed to devastate the enemy, using the navy as if it were a single, vast, curved simitar. The Chola adapted Byzantine fire, creating their own recipes using coconut oil, sulphur, and tree resins, and adapted catapults, fire arrows, and other projective devices to hurl flames far and wide. Sailors were specially trained in ship-to-ship combat drills, including siege techniques to break coastal forts.  Given such attention to detail it was hardly surprising, therefore, that when either Rajaraja I or Rajendra set their mind to achieve something, it happened. When Mahinda IV died in 991 CE after a long 16 years trying to restore the rule of law in his kingdom, whilst simultaneously seeing off at least two Indian invasions, one of them a Chola enterprise, his successor was his 12-year-old son, Sena V.  This was no time for the office junior, however royal he was, to be in charge, and inevitably, pandemonium broke out almost at once. Advised rather poorly by his mother, he had the brother of his main general executed, prompting a full-scale rebellion, with the aggrieved general calling up a large band of Tamil mercenaries who set about looting the kingdom. Peace emerged only when the hapless king accepted his general's ongoing counsel.  The emasculated young king turned his mind to more pleasurable distractions.  As the Culavamsa puts it – “but while now the Ruler of Lanka had his abode there his low class favourites who obtained no leave from their teacher to drink sura, praised in his presence the advantages of drinking intoxicating liquors and induced the Ruler to drink. After taking intoxicating drinks, he was like a wild beast gone mad. As he could no longer digest food, the Ruler had to surrender  the dearly-won place and died in the tenth year of his reign, still youthful in years.” Ever eager to point out the moral of any story, the Chronicle went on to observe, “When they see from this that the yielding to evil friends leads to destruction, let those who seek their highest good here or hereafter, avoid such evil friends as a snake full of deadly poison.” “Things, Howard Jones wrote in his hit song in 1985, “can only get better.”  But this was not the experience of Sena’s successor and brother, Mahinda V, who was to live out the horror of Murphy's alternative law for his whole reign: “Anything that can go wrong will go wrong." It little helped that Mahinda inherited a threadbare realm in 982 CE. “Splendid Anuradhapura,” wrote the Culavamsa sorrowfully, “was full of strangers”, and mercenaries washed up by the disasters of the previous reign.  The state's coffers were bare, its peasants recalcitrant, and the new king himself not up to the task.  Within the first paragraph of its description of his reign, the Culavamsa pulls no punches, saying of its new overlord, “he wandered from the path of statecraft and was of very weak character; the peasants did not deliver him his share of the produce.” Soon enough, he had “entirely lost his fortune and was unable to satisfy his troops by giving them their pay.” The new kings' rule effectively ended in 993 CE with the first sacking of Anuradhapura, though its formal end dragged on a little longer. But in these roughly 10 years of rule before the curtains began to fall, calamity piled upon catastrophe, misadventure upon misfortune, and farce upon fiasco. At its heart lay not just a weak and incompetent central government but also a country awash with mutinous mercenary Tamil soldiers.   The kingdom was bankrupt.  The heavy taxes Mahinda levied backfired, prompting even more revolts. As the Culavamsa records, “All the Keralas who got no pay planted themselves one with another at the door of the royal palace, determined on force, bow in hand, armed with swords and other weapons, with the cry 'So long as there is no pay he shall not eat.”  But the King duped them. Taking with him all his movable goods, he escaped by an underground passage and betook himself in haste to Rohana.” And just as everything was imploding, “a horse-dealer who had come hither from the opposite coast, told the Chola King on his return about the conditions in Lanka.” Rajaraja I wasted no time, assembling h...

    17 min
  4. The Long Goodbye: Sri Lanka & The Counterfeit Calm. The Ceylon Press History Of Sri Lanka Book 22.

    1D AGO

    The Long Goodbye: Sri Lanka & The Counterfeit Calm. The Ceylon Press History Of Sri Lanka Book 22.

    That catastrophe did not immediately envelop the kingdom was due in part to the next king, Sena II, and his adept handling of the deadly new South Asian realpolitik that had drawn Sri Lanka into its magnetic field.  From his accession in 866 CE, the Anduraupuran kingdom had barely 125 years left to live.  Were it not for the phenomenal capabilities of Sena himself, who did much to arrest the decline of the previous decades, his 12 successors are unlikely to have had the opportunity to reign at all.  The Pandyan capture of Anduraupura under Sena I was no accident.  The easy-going dominance of the Pallavas, which had protected the island since that dynasty had helped Manavamma gain his throne in 691 CE, was all but over. In their place was a steelier freeholder, one given to absolute conquest. Clinging on to what they had was all the Pallava kingdom could now do. In the four-sometimes-five-cornered fight across southern India between the Pallavas, Cheras, Pandyans, Chalukyas and the Cholas, it was the Cholas who were to emerge as the new superpower. Around 848 CE, they captured Tanjore and then focused on driving Pandyan and Pallava kings into ever-tighter corners.  The Cholas were to eventually extend their boundaries from a kingdom to an empire of such political, military, and economic dynamism that the whole of Southern India, the Maldives, large parts of eastern India, Malaysia, and Indonesia fell under their influence.  But the fight was messy, and at any given time, a different power seemed preeminent.   In this stately spaghetti soup, today's allies were tomorrow’s enemies -  in the blink of an eye. Keeping one step ahead of this was the greatest challenge the Anduraupuran kings would now face. Depending on which chronometric school you follow, Sena II’s reign began in 866 or 853 CE and ended in 901 or 887 CE.  Either way, he ruled for a colossal length – over 30 years or almost a third of the entire time it took these late and last Lambakanna kings to trek to their final fateful nemesis. Although he inherited a defeated and shattered kingdom, he began his reign with several handy advantages.  He was royal, the nephew of Sena I.  He had few, if any, rivals, all of Sena’s brothers having died during the earlier Pandyan invasion.  He had the army on his side, being the king’s general in chief.  And he had a powerful local regional base of his own, coming as he did from the Ruhana side of the family, with a wife, Samgha, who was the eldest daughter of the late ruler of Rohana.  The family politics that had eroded the effectiveness of previous kings lay dormant throughout his entire reign. By any reckoning, he was a busy king, the sort of ruler who would multitask in his sleep.  Repairing the trashed irrigation systems in his kingdom, especially in the dry zone, was an immediate priority if economic strength was to be restored, famines avoided, and taxes made available for payment.  Many tanks, canals, and catchment areas were mended, including two of pivotal importance: the Sorabora Wewa – the Sea of Bintenna, a huge tank in Mahiyangana - and the Minipe Ela irrigation system, which included a massive canal that diverted the Mahaweli River to carry water from the wet zone towards the dry zone and nourish a vast area of the dry zone. The state’s bureaucracy was replenished with new hires, and, as two stone inscriptions made clear – the Mihintale plinth inscription and the Mamaduwa Wewa slab inscription - the small specifics that properly regulated a functioning state were put right – in this case, the prohibition of stealing fish from reservoirs and the collection of tax in gold from merchants. He did his dutiful best, putting things right with the Theravada religious establishment.  Many temples and monasteries were repaired.  The gorgeous Brazen Palace – the Lohamahaprasada – was restored.  A sacred golden Buddha image—looted during the Pandyan assault— was returned to the eminent Abhayagiri Monastery, and a hospital was built for the Mihintale Monastery.  Lapsed Buddhist festivals were revived, including what is one that remains the country's paramount festival for the sacred Tooth Relic.  And, in a move guaranteed to delight the orthodoxy, he stationed coastal guards in his ports to clamp down on heretical monks entering the land. Most importantly, he repaired the county's defence, which had been so neglected that it enabled the Pandyan invasion during the reign of Sena I.  The Culavamsa notes that “he made the Island hard to subdue by the foe and made it increase in wealth like the land of the Uttarakurus. Living beings on the Island who in the time of the former king had been in distress, felt themselves delivered in that they came to peace as from heat into the shade of clouds.” But perhaps, most remarkably, and in what was probably a first for Sri Lankan kings at any time, he intervened militarily and effectively in the political struggles within the ascendant Pandyan state.  The Culavamsa records that “at that time there arrived a son (thought to be Varaguna) of the Pandu King who, ill-treated by the king, had made the resolve to gain the kingship for himself. When the King saw him, he rejoiced greatly, treated him as was meet, betook Himself then to the seaport Mahatittha and while he sojourned there, collected a great force as well as all the appliances of war completely, like to a war-equipped army of the gods.” The king went to war, after first making an alliance with the Pallava king Nrupatunga I.  The plan was for a joint pincer operation against Srimara Srivallabha, the Pandyan king.  A fleet crowded with soldiers crossed the Palk Strait, landing on the Pandyan coastline and marched inland to besiege the Pandyans at their capital of Madurai.  The Pandyans were in no fit state to fight, having recently suffered a series of withering attacks by the Pallavas.  Madurai was taken and sacked, and Srimara Srivallabha himself was killed in the action, leaving the throne open for a more Sri Lankan-friendly ruler -  Varaguna.  Sena concluded what amounted to a long-term friendship pact with the new king, a change of alliance that would come back to haunt his successors. Among the plunder brought back to the island was much of what Srimara Srivallabha himself had stolen earlier, including the revered golden Buddha image, purloined from the Ratanapasada.  High-ranking hostages were patriated to Anduraupura and Sena returned in triumph and ”restored all valuable property in the Island as it was heretofore, without partiality, and the golden images he set up in the places where they belonged,” concluded the Culavamsa happily.  Or did he?  Near contemporaneous Pandyan sources – such as the Sinnamanur Plates - argue quite the opposite – that the invasion was repulsed.  But the Culavamsa account is corroborated by a further stone inscription- the Iluppakaniya pillar inscription – that records Sena II as the Madhura-dunu, the “Conqueror of Madhura.   What is certain is that Sri Lanka had gone to war, and although the fight may have been a terrible reversal of fortune for the Pandyans, in an obdurate way, Sri Lanka’s victory was also something of a prophetic disaster.  Its new alliance with the Pandyan kingdom committed the country irrevocably to the hell of South Indian politics.  As the Pallava, Pandyan, and Chola busied themselves trying to annihilate one another, there was no longer any get-out for Sri Lanka. Whether it liked it or not, it too was now part of the battle – and in time it would find itself locked grimly to the side of the eventual loser.  The great king spent the rest of his years kingdom-building and e...

    23 min
  5. Walking on Air: Sri Lanka & The Tra-La-La Years. The Ceylon Press History of Sri Lanka 21

    1D AGO

    Walking on Air: Sri Lanka & The Tra-La-La Years. The Ceylon Press History of Sri Lanka 21

    As Aggabodhi VI took up his crown in 741 CE, a sense of new beginnings would have struck the land.  For with his ascension came a generational shift in rule.  For 50 years, the island had enjoyed the Pax Manavamma as first the great old liberator king and then his three sons ruled the land. Given that most people then lived little beyond their mid-thirties, most, still less their fathers, would not have known of any other kings. The change would have felt seismic – but in all the nicest of all possible ways, for here at last came kings whose age brought them closer to their subjects.   But like so many apparently seismic moments, this one was all rather beside the point.  What distinguished the next nine kings was not so much their age as their cheery, freewheeling approach to kingship. To them fell the fruits of a kingdom, wrested from hell and made secure just five decades earlier.  For almost 100 years these particular descendants of king Manavamma would rule over Sri Lanka, point it here, prod it there, tinker with it – but still make plenty of time to get on with other, less arduous pursuits: with palace politics, temple building, calming down intemperate monks, resisting rebellions, not to mention all the more domestic distractions that, for most other people, pass as a full and busy life.  These were, in the words of The Wizard of Oz, the tra-la-la years.  “Ha ha ha, Ho ho ho, And a couple of tra-la-la's, That's how we laugh the day away, in the Merry Old Land of Oz!” Were it not for the accession of the reforming Sena II in 866 CE, this laissez-faire approach to kingship would have left the kingdom drifting into a never-never land, a victim of happy, unwitting neglect, instead of netting, for one last time, another 100 years of life.  The new era began with a steadiness not to be seen in later reigns, for Aggabodhi VI had already built a strong reputation within civil administration, the army, and the Buddhist orders as a leader who well ruled the eastern province for his uncle, Mahinda I, between 738 and 741 CE.  He must also have wisely spent time getting his cousin, Aggabodhi, King Mahinda’s son, on his side, for his accession to the throne does not seem to have been disputed by him.  His cousin, who sub-ruled Ruhuna for the Anuradhapura Kingdom, would later go on to become a king himself, as Aggabodhi VII.  The new king made his own son, Mahinda, the head of the army and promoted his cousin to the rank of Uparaja – or crown prince - to rule over the plum Eastern province.  The new crown prince seems to have had a rather wobbly moment a little later, organising a half-hearted rebellion against his uncle, but the uprising was easily put down, and Aggabodhi VI married his daughter to the Uparaja, thereby ensuring that what might have grown into a rivalry became a long-term alliance that worked in both their interests. Like his predecessors, the new king was clear about his preferred support for the country's traditional Theravada Buddhist orders, and they in turn were careful to give the king all the authority due to one described as the protector of the Dhamma – those fundamental teachings of Lord Bhudda, from the Four Noble Truths to the Noble Eightfold Path, and everything that may have lain in-between that this particular conservative branch of Buddhism deemed relevant.  Most notably, he commissioned a multi-storied hall in Anuradhapura within which the grander monks could study Theravada doctrines in greater comfort - and the decrees that have survived are strictly and, for the establishment at the time, reassuringly Theravadin in their language.  But his religious patronage was even more widespread.  Significant new temples and monasteries were built or enlarged in Vaparani, Managgabodhi, Hatthikucchi, Punapitthi, and Mahaparivena.  A large refectory was built for the iconic Abhayagiri Viharaya, and the entrance to the stately Ruwanweliseya stupa was repaired.   Unlike his illustrious grandfather, the king kept his focus on the home front rather than abroad, and Sri Lanka was spared any involvement in the internecine warfare going on in India between the Chola and Pallava kingdoms, which by the end of the century was to produce a major turning point, one not in the Pallavas' favour.  Even so, trade continued to be well supported.  At least 4 diplomatic missions are known to have been sent by him to the Imperial Tang court in China in a balancing act that sought to bring the island closer to this distant superpower without alienating the Pallava superpower closer to hand.  Playing India off against China remains the day job of any Sri Lankan President. When the celebrated and Chinese-oriented monk Amoghavajra visited Sri Lanka sometime around 746 CE for a seven-day palace sleepover, the state put out all its ceremonial bunting – including a daily ritual bathing with fragrant water from golden vessels.  Queens, ministers and even the crown prince, all on their most saintly behaviour, were in full attendance.  When he died, naturally, in 772 CE, it could be said that his greatest achievement was just keeping the great show on the road, emollient and trouble-free. The state continued to work well, taxes collected, irrigation systems managed and improved, the religious establishment respected, and the odd rebellion crushed with kind cunning. This itself was no small thing, but though nothing of major importance seems to have been done, and chaos continued to be averted, there is little indication that he read the runes of what was happening in southern India to better prepare his Pallava-oriented realm for what might be to come. The succession to his cousin and son-in-law, Aggabodhi VII, the son of Mahinda I, went without any known squabbles, but the new king had been a king in waiting for decades by the time he came to the throne, and, old as he was, his reign was predictably short - just 5 years. As with all Manavamma’s successors, Aggabodhi VII was the continuity candidate.  With little evidence of any departures from form or policy, the grand old kingdom show carried on. And grand it was for in him the country had a king who was not only the son of a previous king, but also the husband of the previous king’s daughter.  There could be no doubting his royalty.  “Thereupon,” noted the Culavamsa, “the Uparaja Aggabodhi, the fortunate, became king, son of the wise Adipada Mahinda.” For decades, he has effectively been his own king – albeit a sub one, ruling various outstation provinces for his uncle, the king.  He knew the ropes, the people, the power bases, the religious establishment.  And they all knew him. As the Uparaja – or crown prince – he was at the heart of the establishment. He sensibly moved his cousin, Mahinda, the head of the army, to take command of a distant province, made his own son the new Uparaja and settled down to enjoy his brief tenure without risk or family rebellions.   The Culavamsa also has him down as a king who received the laws, saying: “To the Order and to the laity he showed favour according to merit….By legal acts, he carefully reformed the Order of the Conqueror (Buddha) and, judging according to justice, he rooted out unjust judges.”  It was perhaps in response to this that he became known by the affectionate diminutive "Kuda Akbo". He took care to patronise Theravada Buddhist establishments, repairing the temple of the Sri Maha Bodhi in Anuradhapura, constructing two new temples in Kalanda and Mallavata, but also gave to other orders.  “He had rice by allotment distributed to the inmates of the three fraternities,” notes the Culavamsa in reference to the other Buddhist chapters, “and delicious foods f...

    29 min
  6. Lost: Unearthing Sri Lanka’s Extinct Mammals. A Ceylon Press Island Story

    1D AGO

    Lost: Unearthing Sri Lanka’s Extinct Mammals. A Ceylon Press Island Story

    The mind blanks at the glare,” wrote Philip Larkin  “Not in remorse    —           The good not done, the love not given, time    Torn off unused — nor wretchedly because    An only life can take so long to climb Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never;    But at the total emptiness for ever, The sure extinction that we travel to And shall be lost in always. Not to be here,    Not to be anywhere, And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.”     Larkin’s poem Aubade counts the cost of personal extension. But as Descartes might have gone onto conclude, with the value of hindsight, “If I don’t exist then everything else probably can.”  For it is by being human that we are triggering the party to which no one desires an invitation, the Earth's most extraordinary extinction event.   We were, of course, not responsible for the earlier ones, but anyone fond of models will find they all offer scenarios that even Hollywood would baulk at.   The first of these events, the Late Devonian extinction (383-359 million years ago), killed off about 75 per cent of all living species.   One hundred million years later came the worst of all – the Permian-Triassic extinction, or Great Dying. This event dispatched 96% of all marine animals and 3 out of every four land animals that had managed to survive since the previous extinction.   After 51 million years of exhaustive recovery, the Triassic-Jurassic extinction swept across the Earth, exterminating 80% of all living species.    All three, it seems, were caused by the climate change sparked by volcanic eruptions and shifting plate tectonics.   The last, and most famous, mass extinction, the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction, 66 million years ago, was the one that claimed the lives of the dinosaurs – and with them 76% of all Earth’s species. For this, a wandering asteroid was probably to blame.   The credit for the next one is one we, as a race, must step up to take: the winner of the Oscars from Hell. Already, the stage is being set: the tables for the Oscars ceremony, the red carpet laid out, invitations being sent for the pre- and post-ceremony parties, the Governors Ball, the Vanity Fair Party, cocktails in the Diamond 25 Lounge.   Invitations have already reached many in Sri Lanka. Anteaters, jackets, bears, otters, fishing cats, civets, axis deer, lorises and Toque Macaque have already propped up their gold embossed cards on their jungle mantelpieces as have the Ceylon Highland Long Tailed Tree and Spiny Mice, the tiny Serendib Scops Owl, the Nillu and Ohiya Rats, the Dusky Striped Squirrel and the Ceylon Highland, Pigmy and Long-Tailed Shrews. Even the Ceylon Tree Skink had received an invitation to this perdition party.   The big beasts are, of course, especially invited, and the island’s elephants are the guest of honour. Before the British arrived, there were over 15,000 elephants in Sri Lanka, but that was when big-game hunting became fashionable. Its most notorious celebrity was a government agent, a Major Thomas Rogers, who managed to kill 1400 elephants in just 11 years. “His whole house,” recalled one appalled guest in the 1840s, “was filled with ivory, for amongst the hosts of the slain more than sixty were tusked elephants… At each door of his veranda stood huge tusks, while in his dining room every corner was adorned with similar trophies…”  Mercifully killed at just 41 years, Rogers’ grave, still to be found beside the gold course in Nuwara Eliya, offered him little by way of eternal rest as it has been struck by lightning over 100 times, indicating one of the silver linings of climate change.   Today, the island lays claim to less than half that pre-colonial number of elephants, with the BBC recently reporting that nearly 500 are dying annually, half of them at the hands of humans. The maths for continued survival looks a little better for the equally famous Sri Lankan leopard, now reduced to around 800 adults and desperately trying to recover from a 75% population decline during the 20th century.   All across the globe, the more modest number crunchers calculate that a million species of plants and animals are facing total extinction. This seems especially impossible to be true in the fecund space of this island, which is so full of life, it appears as if nothing can ever end. Yet it can. It does. It has. From shore to shore lurk the traces of previous extinctions, their wrath like an imprint plotting a course as much forwards as it does back.   Even so, despite being composed of pre-Cambrian rocks of such antiquity, they were old when Gondwana was young and produced the most unmistakable evidence across the whole of South Asia for the first Homo sapiens. Planetology is still a science that has far more to yield.    Much of what little we know about the island’s earliest history and its extinct animals dates back to the remarkable work carried out between the 1930s and 1963 by P. E. P. Deraniyagala, Director of National Museums. Uncommonly hands-on for so senior a civil servant, his life's work was spent examining the alluvial strata better known for concealing gems around Rathnapura. Within its sandy layers, he uncovered fossils, fragments, teeth, and bones dating right back to the Pleistocene, when Sri Lanka was still– just about – joined physically to the Indian landmass and when the melting ice sheets caused the creation of these alluvial beds.   His work, and that of his successors, including his son Siran, uncovered the existence of animals that pointed to an island very different from the one here today. Not just animals – but people too. The discovery of what is now termed Balangoda Man reliably dates human existence on the island to 30,000 years ago, with further island evidence showing that “in Sri Lanka, prehistoric man has lived at least 125,000 years ago, with the possibility of existence as far back as 500,000 years ago. Advanced 'microlithic' tool-making technology had already been developed in Sri Lanka 30,000 years ago, when Europe was still dreaming of this technology, which arose there only about 12,000 years ago.”   Humans have, of course, flourished here since then – but not so some of the mammals that these palaeontologists also found. The most iconic of these was the Ceylon Lion. Now adorning the national flag, the Sri Lankan lion is thought to have become extinct in 37,000 BCE – about the same time as Balangoda Man walked his last steps. Panthera leo Sinhaleyus, as the subspecies is known, came to light in 1936 when P.E.P. Deraniyagala uncovered two fossilised teeth in Kuruwita, near Ratnapura. With the passion of a forensic detective, the archaeologist studied his modest clutch of teeth. One was so damaged as to be of little use in identifying the animal, but the other, a left molar, presented such a distinctive structure as to not just twin it with lions, but set it apart from all known species, too. From this single tooth, a lost subspecies was uncovered, its size indicating that the beast was a lion much larger than the present-day Indian lion. Back in 37,000 BCE, Sri Lanka was a very different place from what it would become, an island of open grasslands, a habitat perfect for lions. But over time, as the monsoon rainforest fuelled the proliferation of trees, its habitat became ever more restricted, and eventually the creature died out...

    18 min
  7. Redeemer Victorious: Sri Lanka & The Great Deliverance. The Ceylon Press History Of Sri Lanka Book 20

    1D AGO

    Redeemer Victorious: Sri Lanka & The Great Deliverance. The Ceylon Press History Of Sri Lanka Book 20

    The day earmarked for the destruction of the Kiribath Vehera was still long to come, over 300 years away. When the returning Lankbranaka regained their throne in 691 CE, there was much to put right in a country that had been wracked by decades of civil war, caused in large part by themselves but, in no less measure, by the tenacious ineptitude of the reigning regicidal Moriyan dynasty. The Lambakanna, revived and determined, were to rule the kingdom for 326 years, an innings only slightly shorter than the 370 years earlier when the dynasty had occupied the Anuradhapura throne between 66 CE and 436 CE. Their first administration much resembled their second in its beginnings: throwing up a man who would grow into a great king, putting the country to rights. But thereafter the resemblances ended. The first Lambakannas had seen their power whittled away largely by an over-fondness for palace coups, botched successions, murder, and the occasional over-reliance on soldiers – sometimes mercenaries – of dubious loyalties. During the administration of the second Lankbranaka, a period of unique regal Ahimsa reigned, as successor after a successor displayed such great reverence for the life of the then-reigning king that it ended naturally, not at an assassin's sword. Of the twenty-six late Lambakanna kings, it is hard, indeed almost impossible, to find a whisper of malicious gossip about how they may have gained the throne. Neither ancient chronicles, nor pillar inscriptions, nor the testimonies of travellers, nor the study of coinage and buildings indicate any other than matchless manners in the matter of would-be homicide. Perhaps the wholesale slaughter of the preceding 228 years, when half the kings were murdered by the other half, had branded the kings to come with an appreciation of successional non-violence. Certainly, the returning Lambakannas, in the form of the new king, Manavanna, could not have failed to understand the awesome cost of such violence - to the state, still less to themselves. Manavanna’s own father, Kassapa II, had won his throne by killing his predecessor, and his own death had triggered a final bout of civil war in which Tamil mercenaries, in shifting alliances with the Lambakannas and Moriyans, won and lost power in pirouettes of dizzying complexity. But Manavanna’s own path to power lay more ominously through the wharves and great temples of the ancient Pallava port city of Mamallapuram, north of Sri Lanka in what is now Tamil Nadu. For over 600 years – until 897 CE - the Pallavas had been one of five dynasties that ruled over southern India, occupying their time, as dynasties like to do, brawling with other neighbouring dynasties for land and power. For hundreds of years, the Pallavas fought with the Tamil Cheras who ruled the Malabar coast; the Pandyans in Madurai; the Karnataka Chalukyas; and the Cholas, who, from their capital at Thanjavur, came to occupy most of Southern India, as well as much of Sri Lanka, parts of the Ganges and Sumatra. Sri Lanka’s late Lambakanna rule can only really be understood by first knowing a little of what was going on just north of the Palk Straits, in southern India, for the repercussions of these Indian wars were to have a transformative impact on the island.  Manavanna fled to India with his wife Samghamana shortly after the death of his father, King Kassapa II, in 659 CE, to escape the suicidal political instability that enveloped the island when Hatthadatha seized Anuradhapura and proclaimed himself King Dathopatissa II. Manavanna was to spend almost 20 years there, befriended by the Pallava King, Narasimhavarman I. Charismatic, so physically dominating he was known as “the great warrior”, determined, smart, expansive, as much a master of the arts and sciences as he was of war, he began his reign avenging his father’s death by sacking the Chalukyan capital at Vatapikonda and killing its king. He returned home with the almost-sacrosanct Vatapi Ganapati statue of Lord Ganesha, an adornment in keeping with his growing reputation for creating architectural masterpieces - for the shore temples, pavilions and shrines he commissioned in the shapes of temple chariots hewn from the granite rocks at Mahabalipuram are one of Asia’s greatest religious structures. Mahabalipuram was also expanded into a major port and naval base, helping the Pallavas dominate trade with Sri Lanka and part of the Indian Ocean trade routes. With the ancient sources modest on details and the other historical evidence often baffling in terms of dates, it is hard to assess exactly what Manavanna did for Narasimhavarman I over those two decades, but, sword bearer as he was, it is unlikely that he was idle as the Pallava king scrapped his way through southern India, when not building his masterpieces.  And ultimately, it was in Narasimhavarman’s best interests to have a compliant power in his far south in the form of a new king, Manavanna. With the military help of Narasimhavarman, Mahavamsa’s first attempt to capture the island almost succeeded. The Anuradhapuran king, Dathopatissa II, fled, but the mercenary army ground to a halt when Manavamma fell ill. The aspiring insurgent returned to India for many years, securing victories against other South Indian states for his Pallava paymasters whilst also fathering three sons who would, in turn, become kings after him - Aggabodhi V, Kassapa III and Mahinda I. The Chronicles note that he lived in no discomfort, for the king put him "on an equal footing with himself regarding food and lodging and honour and equipage.” But a second invasion attempt, made with a larger mercenary force in 691 CE, did succeed, as both the Mahavamsa and the Kasakudi copper plates confirm. In truth, his campaign was probably more like pushing on an open door, for by 691 CE, Anuradhapura was little more than a playground for Tamil merchants under Poththakutta and only loosely loyal to Hatthadatha - aka King Dathopatissa II. Much of the country was beyond the writ of any law as the hapless Poththakutta was soon to discover. Fleeing from the besieged capital after Hattadatha himself had been killed, the Tamil merchant leader was poisoned by a friend who, in a dither of mixed loyalties, chose to kill both himself and Poththakutta. From all who survived that day, it was a job well done. The Lambakanna had regained their erstwhile throne, Manavamma had got himself a kingdom, and the Pallavas had ousted rival Tamil power groups from the island, the better to keep it under their own influence. Thirty-five years stretched beyond the new king, a length of rule few earlier kings had ever enjoyed - and none very recently. Given that he spent 20 years in India and would have gone there at around 10-15, he may have been around 35 when he took up his crown. He brought to the task qualities and a mindset that few others had offered over more than 1,000 years of island kingship. He was a tested and assured military commander. The son of an earlier king, he would have harboured no doubts about his own rightful destiny to rule. And over the decades in India, he would have seen at close hand the detailed functioning of one of Asia’s most successful states, for the Pallavas were not simply military masters. They also dominated trade, built influential relationships to control commerce with Java, Sumatra, Cambodia, and China, harnessed religion to their benefit, managed an economy that produced abundant rice, collected taxes efficiently, issued credible coinage, and ran a kingdom through a polished and proficient bureaucracy. Manavanna would have had no doubt about what a successful state should look like. He began by giving himself the title Senaḍipati, the first island king to use the word. It indicated that he was king by right of military power. And as such, he re...

    20 min
  8. The Land Of Plenty: The Ceylon Press History Of Sri Lanka 19

    1D AGO

    The Land Of Plenty: The Ceylon Press History Of Sri Lanka 19

    “If,” promised M.K. Gandhi, “you give me rice, I'll eat today; if you teach me how to grow rice, I'll eat every day.”  Gandhi only visited Sri Lanka once – in 1927 – which may explain why, erudite though his aphorism was, it remained, all the same, a lesson that had already been learnt long ago on the island - thousands of years ago, in fact, in the very earliest days of recorded Lankan history. Ever since the first distinctive water technology was introduced by the early Anduraupuran kings with the creation of the massive Panda Wewa reservoir around 450 BCE, their kings could provide an ever greater abundance of water, delivered just when and where it was needed. It was a proficiency that enabled an entire island to feed itself without trouble. Tummies full, its people could focus instead on the other great matters of life – religion, for example, war, politics, poetry – or the slow contemplation of a temple lotus pond during a long post-lunch siesta. This particular pastime – or ones not dissimilar to it – is still greatly prized here today. Sophisticated water technology made the island’s paddy fields so fecund that the country barely needed to bother much with the enrichments of trade or the grubby task of making excessive money. As the ancient world’s merchant ships crossed the Indian Ocean from China to Arabia, they may have made a point of stopping in Sri Lanka to buy its gems, spices, Mannar pearls, elephants, and hardwoods - but the riches this all brought were just icing. The country was already rich. And it was this richness that the last Lambakanna kings had on their side as the kingdom they ruled moved to its apogee. The great gilded last moments of Edwardian England were fuelled by cotton; the Ming by the porcelain trade; and ancient Athens, silver from the Laurion mines. But here it was rice – plentiful, abundant, nurturing rice.  Rice would have arrived with the island’s Mesolithic settlers, and it was first evidenced archaeologically around 800 BCE. Excavations made in the Anuradhapura area unearthed a remarkably large early Iron Age settlement – at least ten hectares, still with the spectral trace of irrigation systems and rice cultivation. The Mahavamsa Chronicle, starting a few hundred years later, around 540 BCE, noted that the island’s first recorded queen, Kuveni, showed rice to Prince Vijaya, the country’s founding paterfamilias. Vijaya’s hungry followers wasted little time, for the Chronicle goes on to document how they all then set about making themselves a fortifying lunch of rice and curry. The plentiful supply of rice, even then, was due to small village tanks and their ability to harness and store water. They did so in systems that brought together up to 10 individual tanks within a small land basin measuring about 6 to 10 square miles, recycling water along the path from the reservoir to the field. Historians have estimated that in just one area in the north central part of the island – an area otherwise noted for its dryness – 450 such systems may have existed at some time between the second and the fifth centuries BCE, containing about 4,200 small tanks. Ptolemy, writing in faraway Rome sometime between 127 and 170 CE, reported that the “country produces rice, honey, ginger, beryl, and hyacinth, and has mines of every sort, of gold, silver, and other metals. Large Tank systems followed the village ones – such as the Abhayavapi at Anuradhapura, the Tissa vava and the Nuwara vava. And from the fifth century CE onward, extremely long canals were added to the water network, opening up vast new areas for rice cultivation. By the sixth century, there was barely any suitable land in the entire Dryzone that had not been turned into paddy.  Of course, there were, from time to time, droughts, with at least six mentions of them cropping up in the ancient chronicles between 161 and 569 CE - but they seem to have been far less devastating here than in other parts of South Asia. The Samantapasadika, an ancient chronicle written by a monk called Buddhaghosa in  Anuradhapura between 927 and 973 CE, notes the extreme care the state took to mitigate periods of water scarcity. “During the draught season,” it states, “when water becomes scarce, water is released in intervals. If someone does not receive his due share during the interval allocated to him and the crops become withered, then another should not receive his share during his allocation. If any monk drives water from a secondary canal to a field belonging to someone else, to a canal or a field belonging to him or to someone else, or covers the catchment, then he has committed the offence of avahara.” The highly specific administrative and legal infrastructure that the state wrapped around water collection and extraction gave it an unparalleled ability to manage droughts – a capability other parts of South Asia lacked to anything like the same degree. One ancient chronicler remarked that “by attending facilities for the cultivation of fields by means of tanks, he (the king) dispelled the famine in prosperous Lanka.” By the time the last of the Lambakarna kings came to rule in 691 CE, the country had been functioning as a recorded state for over 1,200 years. Rice had become the petrol of the nation. In this, Sri Lanka was little different to most other Asian countries – but what set it apart was its sheer abundance, its ability to power the kingdom so very effectively through good times and bad.  Indeed, when the last of the Lankbranaka fell in 993 CE and the country embarked on hundreds of years of uncertain life, even this did not bring rice production to its knees. To hold this almost folkloric expectation -  this expectation that you will not entirely starve - was a rare assurance in those pre-modern times; and the patriotic confidence it engendered is tellingly evident, even today. Other things may be wrong, even very badly wrong, but, so the feeling goes, we will feed ourselves, we will go on, we will get better. As one Singhala idiom puts it: "rather than cursing the darkness, it is better to light a lamp." Famine, scarcity, hardship – these are not conditions unfamiliar to Sri Lanka, then or now, but the island has largely escaped the widespread devastation that has gripped its neighbours, a theme that runs through its history from its earliest recorded times. North of Sri Lanka, uncountable millions died of famine in British colonial India - 36 famines in around 200 years. So appalling were they that people’s bodies actually evolved to store food as fat differently, so that their descendants now face significant health complications. Even before this period, famine routinely crippled the sub-continent. Over 1700 years from the 1st century CE, over 75 famines are recorded, with some, such as that in the Deccan in the 1630s, the Punjab in the mid-13th century and South India in the 11th century, being monumentally destructive. But not here.  "Flowers grow beneath her feet,” wrote Rani Manicka in her novel, “The Rice Mother,” “but she is not dead at all. The years have not diminished the Rice Mother. I see her, fierce and magical. Stop despairing and call to her, and you will see, she will come bearing a rainbow of dreams."  In the simplest of algebraic formulas, advanced water technology enabled the plentiful production of rice, or, more directly, an innate island-wide self-confidence: however bad life sometimes got, it rarely if ever reached the draconian depths other countries encountered. Sri Lanka was different, and it was rice, the very thing it had most in common with all other Asian countries, which set it apart. Rice still sits at the epicentre of all the island’s Buddhist services, at Pereheras, Yak and Bali ceremonies, distributed at every impo...

    19 min
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About

The Sri Lanka Podcast tells the stories behind all that 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
  • Years Active
    2025 - 2026
  • Episodes
    102
  • Rating
    Clean
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    © 2024 The Ceylon Press
  • Show Website
    The Sri Lanka Podcast