The Sri Lanka Podcast: Island Stories

The Ceylon Press
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From elephants to sapphires, tea to cricket, Island Stories: The Sri Lanka Podcast explores a remote and secret Eden to discover the stories behind the things that make Sri Lanka, Sri Lankan. 

  1. Gods & Ghosts: A Tour of Secret Trincomalee

    EPISODE 3

    Gods & Ghosts: A Tour of Secret Trincomalee

    Gods, Ghosts & and the faintest haunting of historical whispers of what was and - just about - still is, is the subject of this podcast, which delves beneath Trincomalee on Sri Lanka’s eastern seaboard.     Haunted might be too strong a word for Trincomalee – but by any measure, the town, like the country, has more than its fair share of ghosts. And plenty of gods as well: all of them centre stage; stage left, stage right. Indeed, rarely, if ever, off stage. Not least Buddhism itself, the foremost and complex creed, is little different now from when it first arrived on the island in 236 BCE.   From the ten-headed demon king Ravana of Lanka to the country’s founding father, a terrorising prince descended from lions, the island’s earliest creation myths feature a multitude of alarming divinities. Set beside them, the animist and ancestral spirits of the island’s original inhabitants, the Vedda, feature with almost kindly comfort.    Kindness might be said to have been in short supply with much of what followed: the demanding Catholic dogmas of the early Portuguese invaders, the innumerable Hindu gods of the Tamils, the strict protestant god of the Dutch, and his Anglican iteration; the rigorous god of Islam, albeit with a more forgiving spirit among the Malay moors.   And all are present in distant Trincomalee. But for a place so abundantly represented on any map, Trincomalee itself remains oddly invisible.    It is not what it seems, a small town of passing consequence. Like a true aristocrat, it wears its reputation with uttermost modesty, restrained as a crown of sapphires under a hoodie.    The great eastern port of the ancient kings, a later key link in the chain of European wars fought from 1652 to the downfall of Napoleon that turned South Asia British, it holds its history with absolute discretion, noticeable only if you look amongst its graves and within some of its almost vanished communities; in the scared walls of temples and buildings linked to the passage of its many gods, its forgotten kings and even great artists – all symbolised by the rare birds that flock to an overlooked lagoons north of the town.   Whilst Sri Lankans and tourists alike cluster around the south coast, and a few choice parts of the centre of the island, barely any make it to this part of the east coast.   Once part of the Rajarata, the homeland of the first island kings, Trincomalee and the east slowly became ever more isolated as the island’s development surged along the western seaboard, in the hill country, and in the far south.    The modern world pushed it even further to a back seat - thirty years of civil war, a tsunami, and the troubled new decades of the twenty first century, years marked so extravagantly by the fact that it was an island off the town that was selected as one of the only remote safe spots to house a prime minster, toppled by the 2022 Aragalaya that saw so much old government swept aside.   Two main roads lead into the town – the A12 from Anuradhapura and the A6 from Dambulla, both skirting a large wildlife park - whilst a third, the A15, leads towards the coastal villages of the south.    None brings with them that dawning sense of bleak certainty that you are approaching an urban centre. There are no outlying suburbs or factory sites to speak of. Optimistic half-built retail outlets, busted petrol stations, billboards proclaiming glittering but affordable developments of villas and family homes: all are missing.    A beautiful, sparse, and dry landscape borders the roads, ceding very occasionally to almost green forests. A most twenty-first-century silence grows as you cut through the countryside, arriving, almost without notice, at Trincomalee itself.   And almost immediately, you find yourself driving along an esplanade, the sea on one side and a graveyard of miniature and broken architectural wonders on the other.  Within it, most unexpectedly lies a monument connected to the world’s greatest novelist: Jane Austen, for the cemetery contains the grave of her favourite brother, Charles Austen - her “own particular little brother,” and the model for the manly and caring character of William Price in Mansfield Park. Etched indelibly across a wide rectangle of granite read the words    “Sacred to the memory of His Excellency C.J. Austen, Esq., Champion of the Most Honourable Military Order of the Bath, Rear Admiral of the Red and Commander-in-Chief of Her Majesty’s Naval Forces on the East India and China Station, Rear Admiral Charles Austen CB. Died off Prome, while in command of the Naval Expedition on the river Irrawaddy against the Burmese Forces, aged 73 years.”   Outliving his more famous sister by decades, Charles was an euthanistic reader of novels – especially hers; and it is perhaps no little accident that the brother of so great a writer should lie in gentle comfort here on an island whose contemporary writers have so recently burst like firecrackers over world fiction – from Sri Lanka itself of course, but also from Canada, Australia, the UK, the US or New Zealand, part of a raw diaspora created by civil war and corruption.     Their fiction has become an unexpected global embassy, bringing humour, a unique sensibility and a sharp, ironic eye to the themes that preoccupy every great novel - from war, sex, fashion, addiction and love to loss, pets, the jungle, fame, fortune, and bankruptcy. And, of course, family; for in Sri Lanka, as almost nowhere else, the family really does come - inconveniently, beautifully, reassuringly, alarmingly - first.    Family was close to Charles Austen’s heart far beyond his famous sister, for he created a scandal back home with his serial marriage to two sisters. But this failed to detract from his lasting memory, and he is remembered by one of his subordinates as stoic and dutiful to the end.    “Our good admiral won the hearts of all by his gentleness and kindness while he was struggling with disease and endeavouring to do his duty as Commander-in-Chief of the British naval forces in these waters. His death was a great grief to the whole fleet. I know that I cried bitterly when I found he was dead.”   All around his grave are earlier and later graves, mostly of British colonists, military officers and engineers who staffed this most distant part of the empire. Out of tombs and obelisks, which enhance the weathered details of Georgian architecture, grow trees and shrubs. Buffalo graze amidst them. “Home at last, thy labours done, “reads the tomb of Charles Frank Miller, who died aged 235 in 1899, “safe and blessed the victory won…angels now have welcomed thee.”   It is rumoured that occasionally a few dedicated members of the Jane Austen society fly out to tend Charles Austen’s grave; but come more often they must, for within the next few decades the graveyard will be all but obliterated by weather and neglect, like the vanished church of St Stephen’s that once oversaw it all.    In the placid residential suburbs north of the graveyard lives another fast-disappearing record of the island’s colonial times – this one linked to the Portuguese, who first came to the island in 1505. For here, around the self-contained streets of Palayittu live the last descendants of the island’s Burgher community – descendants of Portuguese and sometimes Dutch men and local women who still speak a remarkabl...

    31 min
  2. Bejewelled: Sri Lanka’s Greatest Sapphires

    EPISODE 4

    Bejewelled: Sri Lanka’s Greatest Sapphires

    Whilst not everyone has access to a family tiara, you don’t need to be an oligarch, still less a duke, to notice if one’s tiara needs an upgrade.    The crown upgrade is very straightforward. Get a sapphire.  There is nothing a sapphire cannot put right - for no stone sits more sumptuously on head, hand, or breast than the sapphire. The Sri Lankan sapphire, to be exact.    Quite apart from the orgone light that illuminates its wearers, it is, if some sapphire traders are to be believed, a not inconsequential medical aid. Claims that it helps combat cataracts, inflammations, hair loss, skin diseases, nerve pain, rheumatism, and colic – to name but a few – are widespread, albeit untested.   Buddhists have long since taken this positive attitude to the stone one big step further, believing that sapphire accelerates spiritual enlightenment. Ellen Conroy, in her seminal 1921 book “The Symbolism of Colour”, quoted Buddhist texts that claimed the jewel produced peace of mind and equanimity: “it chases out evil thoughts by establishing healthy circulation. It opens barred doors to the spirit. It produces a desire for prayer. It brings peace, but he who would wear it must lead a pure and holy life.”     Like the claim for curing cataracts, inflammations, hair loss, skin diseases, nerve pain, rheumatism, and colic, this claim, winsome though it is, is also untested.   It is, say some Buddhists, nothing less than the transformative third eye – the one that symbolises clarity and insight, so enabling you to see beyond plain earthly things.   Less happily, the Chinese, traders with the island since ancient times, believed that sapphires were the congealed tears of Buddha - though this was not how Cleopatra was reputed to see the stone, using it with lavish application ground up in her eye shadow.   Clearly, though, the affinity between Sri Lanka and its sapphires is deep and well beyond most measures of what is ancient. Gem mining here reaches back to at least the second century BCE, with the mention of a gem mine in The Mahavamsa, one of the island’s most ancient chronicles. However, if biblical rumours of King Solomon’s wooing of the Queen of Sheba with gifts of priceless Sri Lankan gems are to be believed, the country’s mines can be dated back at least another 700 years.    25% of its total land area is gem-bearing, mostly around Ratnapura and, to a lesser extent, Elahera. Thanks to the extreme age of its rocks (90% are between 500 and 2.5 million years old), Sri Lanka’s gems are so numerous that they often wash out onto floodplains and into rivers and streams.    Its waterfalls would make Cartier wince. Indeed, the mining of alluvial deposits by simple water-winnowing river mining was for long the classic technique used to find gemstones. Nowadays, brutalist earthmovers excavate the topsoil; though tunnel mining is mildly kinder to the environment, with pits 5 to 500 feet deep dug and tunnels excavated horizontally from them.    Sales of Sri Lanka’s gems boomed from a trifling $40 million in 1980 to over $473 million in 2022, a phenomenal acceleration promoted by two bouts of unusually effective government intervention: the establishment of the State Gem Corporation in 1971 and the 1993 Gem and Jewellery Authority Act.    With these moves, the government centralised and professionalised the issuance of gem-mining licenses and the leasing of government land for mining. They extended control over sales and exports and made it mandatory that gems discovered in mines be presented at public auctions, with the government receiving a 2.5% share of sales.    The industry’s value chain is almost as long as a piece of thread. Gem miners sell their stones to dealers, who sell to other dealers, who sell the rough rocks to cutter-polishers. Historically, these have usually been Ceylon Moors, descendants of Arab traders. The stones are then sold on to wholesalers and then retailers. And then to auctioneers, who often resell the rocks back to other consumers, or to retailers who resell them to new consumers. And so on, down all the ages of recorded time.   But of all its many types of Sri Lankan gems, mined in apparent inexhaustible plenty, it is sapphires that anyone with the merest hint of glitter associates with the country. Eighty-five per cent of the precious stones mined on the island are sapphires.   Blue as the morning, the ocean, the sky, sapphire, is most commonly red, purple, pink, gold, and lavender – the colour variety depending on the stone’s chemical composition.    Its green sapphires are addictively distinctive, but the island also excels at producing Hot Pink Sapphires. This yellow sapphire is apparently a good deterrent against witchcraft, as well as orange and white ones. And it is famous for a variant known as a padparadscha sapphire – from Padmaraga - a pink-orange stone, as converted as the grail or meaning of life.   But despite all this, the colour that gets the most acclaim is – of course - the Blue Sapphire, the blue of inestimable, sophisticated material contentment. Selling for $5,000 - 8,000 per carat, blue sapphires are as much statements of investment as they are items of adornment: “A kiss on the hand may feel very, very good,” noted Anita Loos, “but a diamond and sapphire bracelet lasts forever”.   Long before Loos got round to writing “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes,” the country’s sapphires were the go-to gem for crowns, thrones, diadems, and later, accessories for First Nights and cocktail parties – and just to feeling special curled up in front of the television with a hot chocolate and a sapphire ring. Harly surprising then that over the centuries, eighteen of the island’s sapphires have won for themselves an ineradicable place in the hearts of collectors, connoisseurs, aficionados, enthusiasts, and experts. And, of course, auctioneers.   Despite being made to be worn, flaunted, and noticed, all but two of the country’s most famous sapphires are either trapped in museums or lost to the public eye.    One of the two you can see still worn is the Stuart Sapphire, last sported by Charles III at his coronation in Westminster Abbey on the 6th of May 2023. Arguments – all but improvable – rage gently over this 104-carat stone that sits, God, at the top of the British crown, surrounded by supplicant diamonds. Is it from Sri Lanka, Afghanistan, India, or Burma? Most experts reckon it is from Sri Lanka, but its provenance is obscure, and it can only be reliably dated to Charles II and his brother, the hapless exile, James II.     Less controversial is the only other famous island sapphire still worn in public today - the Princess of Wales’s Engagement Ring. Compared to the other notable sapphires given by Sri Lanka to the world, Princess Diana’s Engagement Ring, now worn by the current Princess of Wales, Catherine, is best described as small but perfectly formed.    A mere twelve carats, this oval ring rocketed into the homes of anyone with a television set when the then Prince of Wales declared his love (“whatever that is”) for his future wife, Lady Diana Spencer, in 1981. Her elder son later inherited it and, at some point between 2010 and 2011, resized it to fit the finger of his own fiancée, Kate Middleton, a brilliant blue reminder of Sri Lanka in any of the millions of photographs published of her around the world every week.   But...

    30 min
  3. Escape: The Sri Lankan Reading List

    EPISODE 9

    Escape: The Sri Lankan Reading List

    Stretched between the pleasure gardens of the bishops of London and the $300 million Fulham Football Club, once owned by the disgraced sexual predator Mohamed Al Fayed, Alphabet City is West London’s new Knightsbridge. From south to north, its streets are laid out with an intimidating, if inexact, alphabetical order. Its “exquisite array of Victorian and Edwardian homes,” claims its principal estate agent, “infuses the neighbourhood with a timeless architectural appeal.”   One house in one street stands out, the J. K. Rowling of the area, confident, plush, sophisticated, discriminating, and flush with Sauvignon Blanc. For in D for “Doneraile Street,” is where one of London’s most agreeable book groups meets. Membership is by invitation only, and its invitations are as infrequent as dry days in Wales.    There are more famous book groups - Daunts, for example or the Literary Lounge Book Club. But none so naughtily notorious as this. Blissfully undemocratic, it seethes behind silk curtains and French shutters; its gardens giving out to imported fig trees and olives; its tables glittering with canapes of citrus-cured seabass on blinis.   But for months it has been the centre of reckless disagreements and tormented tiffs – for its members struggled with that eternal book club question: which book to read next. Their discussions, like Middle Eastern peace negotiations, were marred by insurmountable differences - until, that is, they hit upon a winning solution, proposed by a member who had just returned from a holiday in Kandy.   Stick with novels from Sri Lanka, she said.   And so, somewhat unexpectedly, they did.  Harmony upon harmony has followed, it seems, like the notes of a celestial harp. And so it could for you too – for this guide offers a similar and blameless escape route to pleasure. It presents a long list of books that will keep you going for a good long time. A year at least. Sufficient time to give up the day job and move your grocery shopping to online deliveries only.   The unexpected books included in this guide will take you into all the most comforting and familiar genres. But it will then upend them with the most surprising of settings, perspectives, voices, and approaches, as if you’ve found a trove of mille-feuille in a Dunkin’ Doughnuts Drive-Through.                   Surprise, delight, glee – that is barely the half of it. For the books assembled here are as much a travelogue for the body as for the mind; a history of the recent world as well as a picture of worlds to come – or even worlds framed forever in the most necessary of Forevers, like psychedelic carnivals or enchanted forests.   They needed them most certainly. The merest glance tells you that the mainstream literary world has slipped into an odd torpor. As literary agents in London and New York whip their submissions into shape and tease them through the hoops, auctions, and cheque books of commissioning editors at Frankfurt, you may be forgiven for thinking that reading contemporary fiction is similar to eating a custard cream biscuit.  It’s nice enough.  But it’s as predictable as a dollop of AI creative writing.   Sri Lanka offers an opportunity to escape this literary listlessness. Through, why? You may disputatiously ask: why Sri Lanka? Why not another one of the world’s 200-odd countries?  Surely you can formulate a reading list for any country in the world.    Or can you? Few other countries are currently producing as much world-class literature as Sri Lanka. Sri Lanka’s contemporary writers have burst onto the world fiction scene like firecrackers. Try just a few, and you will see.    But which few? Of its multitude of authors and books, which ones should you start with?   This guide brings together many of the best, in one sense or another, Sri Lankan.    Most were born on the island; others left, often part of the diaspora created by civil war and corruption. But whether now in Canada and Australia, the UK, or New Zealand, each has written a novel only a Sri Lankan could, bringing humour, a unique sensibility and a sharp, ironic eye to the themes that preoccupy every great novel - from war, sex, fashion, addiction and love to loss, pets, the jungle, fame, fortune, bankruptcy.    And, of course, family; for in Sri Lanka, as almost nowhere else, the family really does come - inconveniently, beautifully, reassuringly, alarmingly - first.    The story starts relatively late, for although many inspired novels were written in the first half of the twentieth century, it was not until the 1960s that a trenchant new sensibility began to shape and flavour Sri Lanka’s fiction.     A band of new writers emerged for whom little was out of bounds - from the incipient civil war, belief, ethnicity, and feminism to gender, and, of course, the perennial themes of the island: family, love, the jungle, loss, and living.   Take Carl Muller and his famous trilogy, which is to Sri Lankan literature what John Galsworthy’s “Forsyte Saga” is to England or “The Godfather” is to New York. A saga writer first and best, he is rightly celebrated for the three books he published from 1993 onwards about the Burghers of Sri Lanka as told through “The Jam Fruit Tree,” “Yakada Yaka”, and “Once Upon a Tender Time.”    His trilogy unpacks a time when the world was golden, a kinder halcyon life that the later civil war would render almost unbelievable.    A much darker world is inhabited by Michael Ondaatje, whose novel “The English Patient” catapulted him to global recognition. In 2000, “Anil’s Ghost” came out, one of his most impressive works, a mystery set in Sri Lanka and riven with love and fear, identity, and antiquity.    But “sometimes,” wrote Cassandra King, the Queen of Southern storytelling, “we laugh to keep from crying.” And Romesh Gunesekera does just this with his novel “Reef,” a slow-burning tale of a young chef so committed to pleasing a seafood-obsessed master that he is oblivious to the unravelling of his own country.    But for something less cathartically seismic, there is Yasmine Gooneratne. Usually, to be an academic, teaching English literature is a necessary condition to disqualify you from ever writing good novels.    But not Gooneratne, whose novel “The Sweet and Simple Kind” is one of the greatest friendship novels you will encounter. Set in the newly independent nation, this coming-of-age tale of two cousins, Tsunami and Latha, intertwines with language and religion, politics and privilege, humour, and passion. It will keep you up all night long.    It was published the same year another author, Nihal De Silva, died, a victim of a land mine explosion at the Wilpattu National Park. One of the country’s most talented thriller writers, his war story, “The Road from Elephant Pass”, won a place in the hearts of all readers for its story of the LTTE Tamil woman and her Sinhalese army officer.   And then, as if by magic, the island’s writers moved on, articulating a measured and confident certainty, writing across any genre, in whatever way they chose, whatsoever. It was as if Elsa’s lion cubs in Forever Free had picked up pens and got to work. And with their new creative liberty came the most compelling insights into the sensibilities of the people they...

    20 min
  4. The Seven Wonders of Ancient Lanka: Part 1

    EPISODE 11

    The Seven Wonders of Ancient Lanka: Part 1

    This first episode of a three-part podcast is dedicated to finding the seven greatest wonders of Ancient Sri Lanka.       Despite their iconic status, the original seven wonders of the ancient world fall short compared to the seven wonders of ancient Lanka, the subject of this podcast.       The world’s first Seven Wonders were assembled in the 1st century BCE by the historian Diodorus of Sicily, with help from Herodotus, who began the tally 400 years earlier.    Their list, focused on the Mediterranean and the Near East, comprised a garden, two tombs, two statues, a temple, and a lighthouse. It featured the Pyramids of Giza, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, the Statue of Zeus at Olympia, the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus, the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus, the Colossus of Rhodes, and the Lighthouse of Alexandria.    Sri Lanka’s list, though, is not all architecture with a nod to gardens – it is comprehensive, including a painting, a monastery, a book, a revolutionary new piece of technology that enabled a treasured dish, a shrine, a tree, and a lake.    It covers about a thousand years of the island’s earliest period of recorded history, from around 500 BCE to 500 CE. Each item is more than a mere wonder, for each helped set the abiding characteristics of the nation that has been called many magical names before settling on “Sri Lanka “– the Sanskrit words for shining island.    This apparent lexical borrowing is no random thing, for Sanskrit, a Bronze Age Indo-European language, is the lexis that has most influenced Sinhala, the language spoken by most Sri Lankans today. And its words, like the clues in an antique detective story, can be traced back to many others in European, Iranian, and North Indian languages.    Orphan language, it is most certainly not. Its lexical connections demonstrate the astonishing antiquity of the island’s culture, and the seven wonders explored here connect the country not just to its past but also to its present.    Invaded, occupied, plundered though it has been so often, there was ever something inimitably robust and resilient about its culture that ensured that the island, with each new renaissance, was able to use the best of its past to inform its future - with profound and confident certainty.    The story starts, quite inappropriately, where it ends - when the ancient world itself came crashing to a bloody end around the base of a 1000-foot mountain in central Sri Lanka in 495 CE.    With it ended one of the most notorious parties the world had yet enjoyed, one that, at 22 years, totally outlasted even Cleopatra’s Feast.    The party was Gatsbyesque in its exuberant excess. More opulent than the Rothschilds’ surrealist ball of 1972; more majestic than the Shah of Iran’s 2,500-year dynastic celebrations the year before, this party, like the ancient world itself, raced to its corporeal end with all the aplomb of the last serving of the previous martini on board the Titanic.   Of course, 500 CE is little more than a marker, a slender signal, a humble and iconic rounded-up figure that has been invented by historians eager to bring closure to the world of the Romans and Greeks, the Pharaohs, Assyrians, Hittites, Persians, or Han. But the date has stuck.    Thereafter follow the medieval and early modern ages. And the later early modern age; even the later modern age, and our own post-modern age, an age shorn of parties, or glamour, decadent or otherwise.   Sri Lanka’s 22-year end-of-history party followed exactly the dates of the reign of one of its most outrageous kings, an equatorial Nero with mesmeric hints, like the best of expensive wines, of other things - Vlad the Impaler; Nebuchadnezzar, Louis XIV.   In joy, as Mark Twain observed, is sorrow - and Kashyapa, king, party giver, gourmand, and libertine, knew that his moment of doom was due to come sooner rather than later.   Gazing across the plains from his high fortress walls in Sigiriya, he would have been presciently aware that his brother would eventually arrive to stop all the fun.   And so he did. Commanding a specially recruited mercenary army from nearby India, Moggallana had come to take back what he considered his by right – the throne.   The legitimate son of Dhatusena, one of the country’s most fabulous kings, as his heir, Moggallana would have looked forward to a reign of plenty after his father had chased the occupying Dravidian Tamils from the kingdom, and rebuilt the country, tank by tank, temple by temple. It was years of milk and honey (or Kittel) he had in mind – not penurious exile.   But it was not to be. His half-brother, Kashyapa, played family politics with the skill of a card shark. He outmanoeuvred his brother and, with the help of the head of the army, deposed his father, Dhatusena.    Had things ended there, we may never have heard of Kashyapa. He would just have been yet another one of the island’s numerous coup d'état kings.   But with Oedipian or Macbethian instincts, Kashyapa went further. Much further. He began by entombing his father alive in his palace walls. For so distinguished a king, to be reduced to mere bricks and mortar was a shocking way to end a reign.    And, to escape the widespread disapprobation this would have created, Kashyapa abandoned his capital of Anduraupura in much the same way as Tiberius had abandoned Rome for Capri, and headed for Sigiriya.   Twenty-two years later, he was to watch his sibling nemesis gather on the plains below him, his army spilling out across the water gardens and pleasure terraces of his Alhambra-like palace.   The day was to end with the death of Kashyapa and the extinction of all that Sigiriya stood for - one of Asisa’s most remarkable pleasure palaces; the venue for a lifestyle that made living one long, spectacular party.   It's like, anywhere in Asia, was probably not seen again until the Kangxi Emperor built the Gardens of Perfect Brightness in the Old Summer Palace, outside Peking, some twelve hundred years later, in 1707.    A capital for just one reign, Sigiriya was a cross between the Tivoli, Akhenaten’s Amarna, and the Brighton Pavilion. It enjoyed every last innovation and refinement available – and there were many.   The most advanced water technology in the world powers its fountains, lakes, wells, streams, and waterfalls. Artists whose frescoes equalled those of the later and faraway Leonardo da Vinci painted their perfumed inhabitants. Nothing was denied it – nothing until the Moggallana denied it everything.    The victorious brother returned the seat of government to the old capital, Anduraupura, like some brow-beaten and repentant deserter, ensuring that power was once again exercised with appropriate and demure propriety.   Even so, the world that ended in that sibling fight, fought just five years before the official end of the ancient world, would have felt more like a bump than an earthquake to the Anduraupura kingdom’s subjects.   Quite what these subjects numbered is the matter of modest academic dispute.  It is likely to be far south of a million, which was the island’s population in 1800 CE. &...

    16 min
  5. Demon Queen: The Quest for Kuveni

    EPISODE 14

    Demon Queen: The Quest for Kuveni

    The Search for Sri Lanka’s Demon Queen unpicks with the very earliest stories and places associated with Sri Lanka’s first steps as a nation, and with two particular people: Kuveni and Vijaya.      The pair were the pin-up lovers of their generation, the Bonnie and Clyde, Tristan and Isolde, Tarzan, and Jane of 543 BCE. Only theirs was a more unorthodox passion - more akin to Dido and Aeneas, with the queen immolating herself. Or Medea plunged into full-scale murder after a disastrous encounter with Jason and the Golden Fleece.    Vijaya and Kuveni are the Sri Lankan lovers whose names are most unequally recalled on the island today.   Public roads, management consultants, radio celebrities, hospitals, even bags of branded cement: it is hard to find a corner of Sri Lanka that is not branded “Vijaya,” in besotted memory of the country’s founding king and paterfamilias, Prince Vijaya. Much harder, indeed impossible, is to find similarly smitten organisations or people who bear the name “Kuveni,” Prince Vijaya’s first wife.   Coming from a nation that proudly boasts the modern world’s first female head of state, Sirimavo Bandaranaike, in 1960, this seems a monumental omission. But delve a little further, and it becomes increasingly clear why Kuveni, the lost queen of the isle of rubies, is the queen the country is too alarmed by to acknowledge adequately.   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. For anyone, still less a queen, that’s more than enough baggage to weigh down one’s reputation.   But the baggage need not weigh down your journey for the locations on the island where you are likely to draw close to her are few and scattered.  And if taking in important sites, monuments, and attractions at a rate of (say) half a dozen a day, or perhaps just one and a half a day, is an essential measure of how successful a holiday or tour goes, then it would be best to abandon the search for Kuvani immediately.    For she is, thankfully, not made to measure for orthodox sightseeing.  The obvious eludes her.  Mercifully, she is no credible candidate for Instagram.  She is more like a Slender Loris or Serendib Scops Owl, rare, almost nocturnal, secretive, whose sightings are best made for the journey, not the destination.    Yet, in following her wreathlike footsteps, which are still, from time to time, just about discernible in certain parts of the island, one puts together a travel schedule like no other; unique, eccentric, authentic.  It will take you into the secret heart of the country itself, past, present, and future, and allow the muscles of your personal imagination to demonstrate their value.   Much of what we know about Kuveni and her husband, Vijaya, comes from two of three incomparable, paternalistic and subjective ancient chronicles (Dipavaṃsa, Mahavamsa, and Culavamsa) written from the third century CE onwards.    Laying a shadowy trail of events and people through what would otherwise be a historical vacuum, they riotously mix up man, God and magic with morality, history, and myth.    Historians naturally debate their factual accuracy, in which the doings of men and kings take a poor second place to that of monks and Lord Buddha, but this misses the point.    No country, after all, is simply the total of its facts.    It is also – and much more importantly - fattened up, like old-style foie gras, on all that its people believe too. And that is why the sorrowful and violent tale of Prince Vijaya and his demon queen so shockingly illuminates an island that, as Romesh Gunesekera put it, “everyone loves at some level inside themselves. A very special island that travellers, from Sinbad to Marco Polo, dreamed about. A place where the contours of the land itself form a kind of sinewy poetry.”   “In Sri Lanka,” notes another writer, Michael Ondaatje, “a well-told lie is worth a thousand facts;” and, in the tale of Vijaya and Kuveni, the polar opposite of what is believed is the more likely truth.  Vijaya, whose alter ego may well have most recently emerged on The Dick Van Dyke Show, was doubtless ever one to say “That ain't no lady. That's my wife.” For a monster though Kuveni seems to be, one hardly needs the helpful filter of modern feminism to realise that she was in fact an iconic victim of men, and most heartening of all, a victim who bit back with unrestrained fury.   Had a man behaved like her, it would have generated awe-stuck changing-room chatter, eager to understand, sympathise with, and even emulate. But not a woman. Kuveni was to confound and challenge all ancient ideas of womanhood, and go on challenging them to this day.   Keep this in mind as you set out to first encounter Viyaja, recreating a moment that happened well over two thousand five hundred years ago.  The path, though gossamer thin, still sustains a few sites, frail as a spider’s web.   The first of these is some 180 kilometres from Colombo.  A gentle curving cape juts out from a mountain range in the Wilpattu National Park and into the northern entrance to the Puttalam Lagoon. If you were a ship approaching it from the Laccadive Sea, you would slide towards it as if it were a lighthouse, pointing your tiny, tired vessel into the vast, safe, shallow waters of the lagoon. This is Kudiramalai, said to have been the original site of Tambapanni, the ancient kingdom and port founded by Prince Vijaya.   Given all that was to come, this unremarkable shore enjoys a myth of mocking irony. A warrior queen, Alli Rani, and her Amazonian army, were said to have lived here exploiting and exporting its pearls until a great flood buried her palace under the waves and turned the enclosed lake into a lagoon.   And this is what Prince Vijaya found, pulling his boats onto a beach of reddish-brown sand – “Tamba”, meaning Copper; or as it was soon and later known: Tambapanni. It was the perfect spot for a settlement, commanding access to an excellent natural harbour opening into the Gulf of Mannar and an almost inexhaustible supply of pearl oysters.   For centuries, it was a key strategic port for island arrivals, even later welcoming Annius Placamus, one of the Roman Emperor Claudius’ tax collectors. Pliny refers to the place, naming it as the “Hipporus” harbour with a related town on a nearby hill - presumably Kudiramalai Mountain, patrolled, and still patrolled by white-bellied sea eagles.   “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, the priceless debris perhaps of the island’s first kingdom.   This, then, is all that remains of Sri Lanka’s earliest recorded kingdom...

    26 min
  6. Encounters At The Jungle Hotel

    EPISODE 16

    Encounters At The Jungle Hotel

    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
  7. Hidden Trails

    EPISODE 17

    Hidden Trails

    Sacred temples, royal palaces, leopards, tea tasting, ancient frescos, sandy beaches, gourmet curries, tamarind martinis, whale watching, trekking, turtle fostering – these are the things that most visitors to Sri Lanka typically get up to.   And they are lovely: very lovely. Well worth doing. But there’s more. Much more. “God saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it was perfect,” noted Moses with satisfaction in Genesis, and he must surely have had Sri Lanka in mind. Because what is special – most beautiful of all – is its ordinary life. The life you notice while driving its roads or walking its streets.    And it is all that enables this life that is the subject of this little, most local of tours, a tuk tuk drive from Sri Lanka’s jungle retreat, The Flame Tree Estate & Hotel. This journey will take you behind the door of what makes Sri Lanka Sri Lanka – those aspects of life that matter most to most people: god, food, water, culture, education, crafts, and local lords. These are the things that motor this little Sri Lankan community, perched in the jungle and paddy on the edge of the highlands, as it does most others. As Bad Bunny, the rapper, said, “Simple goes a long way.”  Especially here, far from the busy world.    History has the hardest of times being heard in a tropical climate, which is no respecter of artefacts. Much has been lost. The haunting story of Dingiri Menika in Galagedera exemplifies this—the fate of this renowned local beauty is intertwined with that of Kandy’s last king. Selected to stimulate the moribund fertility of the last King of Kandy, Queen Dingiri Menika was kidnapped by his soldiers, garlanded with jasmine, and carried on elephants, drummers, and banner-bearers to a stake atop Bahirawa Kanda, or Gnome Mountain, now home to one of the tallest statues of Lord Buddha.    Bound to a stake, she was meant to be a human sacrifice, though quite why anyone thought a feast such as this might make the despondent queen procreate is a mystery. Fortunately, the king’s elephant keeper got to Dingiri Menika first, rescued her, married her, in fact, and set up home with her in Welligalle Maya, in Cross Street, close to Kandy Super Phone, Ltd, a present-day mobile phone supplier. But although the king chose to terminate all future human sacrifice, his late-burgeoning liberal values were not destined to bring him any greater luck. Within a few years, he had been exiled to India, along with at least two of his four wives, the third of whom was to use her exile for bankrupting shopping sprees. Traces of the king remain in the museum in Kandy, but of the Galagedera home that housed his beautiful would-be sacrifice, there is none.   Yet the world she inhabited is not yet gone, and this tour will try to pick out which aspects of it still live on. We will visit Mrs Liyange and the tiny preschool class of tiny singing children at the ancient monastic school of Galayawe Sri Suvi Suddharamaya. And Manju and his family beside their paddy fields and figure out all that happens to our sticky rice pudding before it gets to be anything of the sort. We will finger inscriptions so ancient they predate recorded Sri Lankan history with a script that fell out of use nearly two thousand years ago, when we call in on Gunadaha Rajamaha. This cave altar was the refuge of a king who symbolised the enduring and unique culture of the Sinhala nation that is Sri Lanka today, and who rescued the young Anuradhapura Kingdom.  En route is a handloom workshop and a woodcarver, part of a great artistic tradition for which the Kandyan kingdom is famed. And an abandoned manor house dating back to the first years of British occupation.      2 THE KING’S HIDING PLACE   Hidden down tiny roads very close to the hotel is the ancient cave temple of Gunadaha Rajamaha, its lofty views and deep forest hinterland once home to one of Sri Lanka's most unlucky kings. Valagamba became King of Anuradhapura in 103 BCE, but had first to kill Kammaharattaka, his sibling’s murderer and chief general, before gaining what he regarded as his birthright - the crown.   This he did, but little good came of it. Decades earlier, royal misrule had set the grand old kingdom of Anuradhapura on a path to utter disaster. Within months of taking power, a rebellion broke out in Rohana due to a devastating drought. The kingdom’s preeminent port, Mantota, across the Mannar Strait, fell to Dravidian Tamil invaders. And at a battle at Kolambalaka, the hapless King Valagamba was defeated, racing from the battlefield in a chariot lightened by the (accidental?) exit of his wife, Queen Somadevi.    The king went into continual hiding - including here in Galagedera as he sought to build a guerrilla resistance to the invaders. His kingdom was now ruled by a series of Tamil kings who, between 103 BCE and 89 BCE, were either to murder one another or fall victim to the guerrilla campaign that now became ex-king Valagamba’s passion and priority.    For 10 years of war, regicide, and rebellion cripped the land. The first three Tamil kings murdered one another, and Valagamba’s successful guerrilla campaign killed the final two.   By 89 BCE, he had recaptured the throne/. He was to rule for a further 12 years, but his religious preoccupations, perhaps magnified by his long periods of hiding out in temple caves, set in motion the island’s first Buddhist schism.   Over the following hundreds of years, the ancient little temple carried on; its caves gathering statues; its forest getting ever denser; and the walls of the rock within which it hides being chiselled with medieval drains to fend off the monsoon.    Today it remains a place for solitude and prayer; a moment of stillness to carry with you, the lintel above the cave itself inscribed with a pre-Singhalese script – Brahmi, an alphabet that dates back to the 6th BCE in India.     3 TEMPLE, SCHOOL, MUSEUM, PEACE   A temple of a quite different sort is next on the tour.    There is no agreed word to describe a hunger for temples, but any such human condition is most easily put to rest in Sri Lanka, the island that averages a temple or kovil every three miles or so. Ancient, famous, revered, enormous, historic, picking out just one to especially favour is no easy task. But the one I would pick out, for its abiding spirit of serenity, its simple good work, its connection to its community, and its halcyon calm, is Galayawe Sri Suvi Suddharamaya.    Found off a tiny back road just a few kilometres from The Flame Tree Estate and Hotel, the temple is around 400 years old, dating back to King Rajasinha II, the collapse of the Portuguese occupation of the island, and the arrival of the Dutch.   Within its grounds lie a lovely elongated mini stupa, over 100 years old; a dormitory for its monks; ponds of koi carp, a range of Buddhist alters; a Museum; public rooms for workshops and eating; a medical facility; and the ancient temple itself.   It is overseen by Udawela Nanda Thero, whose kind and thoughtful character is almost all the argument you need to believe in the goodness of God. Half a century old, his family have presided over the temple since its earliest beginnings. Someone once said that anyone who loves books, dogs, and trees cannot be faulted for their essential goodness. And so it is here. Udawela Nanda Thero goes about his daily work, followed by his three adoring dogs, who ta...

    32 min
  8. Restore, Recover, Reboot

    EPISODE 21

    Restore, Recover, Reboot

    To borrow, at least a small part of Emma Lazarus’s famous poem: “Give me your tired, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free -" and we will do our best to help put things right, for it is a comfort to know that it is of little matter whether the glass is half full or half empty. Thankfully, the glass is refillable. And fill it we do at The Flame Tree Estate & Hotel.   Should you want to restore, reset, reboot, or rebalance your mind or body, we are fortunate to have five of the very best therapists in Kandy on hand to help. All can be booked in advance through the Hotel office to come to treat you here at the Hotel, either in your room or in Coco’s Pavilion, our therapy treatment centre built into a private amphitheatre with gorgeous views across the secluded jungle hills and valleys that surround the hotel.   In particular, we have excellent physiotherapy, courtesy of Roshan Silva, our on-call and certified physiotherapist.   Accredited by the Sri Lanka Foundation and the American Safety and Health Institute, Rohan works with a wide range of clients, including athletes recovering from injuries. His work focuses on injury prevention, recovery and rehabilitation, and performance enhancement. One of his main clients is the Kandy Sports Club, founded back in 1874 and today the leading multi-discipline sports club in the country, known primarily for its rugby.   Rohan will begin the 60-minute session with a 5-minute consultation to identify any special areas of treatment that are necessary, previous treatments and specific vulnerabilities to be mindful of.   The physiotherapy massage at the heart of the session is delivered through hands-on treatment methods. It will first address pain, stiffness, muscular tension and any limited range of motion in the joints, muscles, and soft tissues.   It will also focus on longer seated pains in the spine and joints, shoulders, knees, and elbows, which are typically caused by strains or injuries to the muscles and soft tissues, as well as postural imbalances.   The session may also include, as appropriate, two other classic therapies that are commonly used by trained physiotherapists:   Dry Cupping helps improve drainage in inflamed areas of the body by encouraging the removal of excess blood and water.   K-Taping is used to assist with musculoskeletal damage by applying thin, elastic tape to support muscles, joints, and tissues.   The whole session lasts 60 minutes, but its shape can be determined in advance at the consultation. Rohan is also experienced in selecting and teaching aerobics and yoga exercises to strengthen further areas of vulnerability that you can practice regularly in your own time. If you would like to make time for him to determine and teach you a bespoke set of exercises tailored to your specific needs, this can be added to an extended session or included in a shortened physiotherapy massage treatment.   A more traditional island massage is also available courtesy of our two fully qualified Ayurveda masseuses: Udaya Rajapaksha and Yamuna Jayawickrama. Both are trained in a full range of Ayurvedic practices, including Panchakarma and Abhyanga, as well as Reflexology, and have been practising for over 14 years each.   The classic ayurvedic abhyanga oil massage they offer focuses on manipulating energy fields by applying it more to the skin than to the underlying muscles. It helps detoxify the body, improve circulation, release muscle tension, and reduce stress, and is especially good for nourishing the skin from head to toe.   Unlike a sport massage, which primarily kneads the muscles and skin, the ayurvedic abhyanga oil massage involves long, gliding strokes. It can also involve rhythmic tapping with the fingers or hands to stimulate nerve endings and rejuvenate the skin; quicker back-and-forth movements to generate heat and enhance blood flow; and specific pressure movements to target muscles and joints.   Our fifth therapist is Noel Dharmajith, our on-call yoga teacher, who has run some of the most popular yoga classes in Kandy for many years. He has been practising yoga since he was eleven, training continually with yogic masters in both Sri Lanka and India.   The Hatha Yoga that Noel offers is the sort of workout that nurtures both body and soul, stretching and rebalancing the muscles as much as it de-stresses the mind. It is much loved for its mellow and measured pace. It gains its name for its unification of all that the sun (“Ha”) as well as the moon (“tha”) embodies - active and passive, warming and cooling. It dates back to ancient and later medieval Indian traditions.   Two practices lie at its heart.   The first, the Asana physical postures, comprise a set of exercises that build strength and enhance flexibility. Each posture is held for a while, giving you space to connect with your breath and develop a deeper awareness of your body, whilst also stretching the muscles with careful attention. The second, the Pranayama - or Breath Control – is the other central part of the therapy. By extending, slowing, or intensifying your breathing, you become much more conscious of the energy within your body between exercises.   Many practitioners of Hatha Yoga also follow four other routines, which you can incorporate into your yoga session with Noel if you would like.   The first of these is the Shatkarma Purification Techniques, six cleansing practices that aim to purify the internal organs and set the stage for more advanced yogic practices.   The second are the Mudras Energy Seals, the classic hand and finger gestures taught by Lord Buddha, that are believed to channel energy within the body.   The third are the Bandhas Energy Locks - a set of internal muscle contractions that help to lock and redirect vital energy within the body.   And the last is, of course, meditation, often done at the end or start of a session to quiet the mind.   “What a long time whoever lives here is answering this door,” said Winne-the-Poo as he knocked on the door again. “But Pooh,” said Piglet, “it’s your own house!” “Oh!” Said Pooh. “So it is,” he said. “Well, let’s go in.” And so you can, body and mind returned to the unruffled and tranquil stillness that holidays are, in part, all about finding once more.     _________________________________________________________________________________________ That was a production from The Ceylon Press, based in the jungle north of Kandy at The Flame Tree Estate & Hotel, and set up to tell the story of Sri Lanka.   The complete list of podcast series from The Ceylon Press includes:   1.           The Ceylon Press History of Sri Lanka 2.           Island Stories: The Sri Lanka Podcast 3.           Complete Audio Books About Sri Lanka 4.           Poetry From The Jungle 5.           The Jungle Diaries 6.           The Archaeologies Diaries

    9 min
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From elephants to sapphires, tea to cricket, Island Stories: The Sri Lanka Podcast explores a remote and secret Eden to discover the stories behind the things that make Sri Lanka, Sri Lankan. 

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