The Sri Lanka Podcast: The Ceylon Press History of Sri Lanka

The Ceylon Press
  • 3.0 (2)
  • History

In under 50 pint-sized chapters, The Ceylon Press History of Sri Lanka, tells the story of an island renowned for a history many times larger and more byzantine than that of far bigger nations. From prehistory to the present day, each short chapter makes a little clearer the intricate sagas of its rulers, people, and progression.

  1. A Royal Ruination: The Ceylon Press History Of Sri Lanka 18

    May 8

    A Royal Ruination: The Ceylon Press History Of Sri Lanka 18

    For almost a third of the 236 years during which the Moriyan kings ruled over Sri Lanka, stability of a kind had been enjoyed. Sure, it had come at the cost of patricide, familicide, and the kowtowing to a global superpower – but 4 kings over a near 70-year period, averaging between them about 18 years apiece, was consistency of a kind. What followed, however, was a sort of royal trench warfare in which around 20 successive kings chalked up an average reign of little more than 8 years apiece, with many falling far, far short of even that. Even to name the period as one of Moriyan hegemony is a rag-tag of a claim for many of the years that followed Kumara Dhatusena’s death in 524 CE, the Moriyan dynasty says itself fighting for power with the previous royal dynasty that they thought they had succeeded – the Lambakanna. Intermarriage made things yet more complicated, and trying to nail down any part of this period by bloodline alone is a task as thankless as guarding an empty room - and almost as pointless. But whoever was king, the wonder of this period is that they collectively managed to hang on for as long as they did, for their patent capabilities evidenced lives lived well beyond their real expiration dates. New money, old suspicions, religious strife, Persian mercenaries, joined in time by Tamil ones and the grim genie of regicide, now well out of the bottle – all conspired to make the next 167 years look like a battlefield over which no one could claim victory.  The years that lay ahead divided into some 4 phases. The first, rapid and remorseless, lasted just 3 years, from 524 to 526 CE, and saw all 3 kings who reigned during that time murdered. A corrective time of stillness came to replace this moment of national trauma. For over 80 years, from 526 to 614 CE, 7 kings reigned, only two of whom were murdered. A killing carousel followed this for 598 to 640 CE, over 42 years, 5 kings reigned, four of whom were murdered, and one of whom won and lost his crown three times before he was murdered. The last phase was a chaotic coda. Over its 41-year stretch 5 kings were to rule as the country plunged further into civil war, a war which claimed the final king as its last murder trophy. As the corpse of the king Kumara Dhatusena smouldered on its poetic bonfire, a fate the grieving king himself had brought on when he flung himself onto the funeral pyre of his great friend, the poet Kalidasa, he may have falsely hoped that, in the poet’s words.  “Yesterday is but a dreamAnd tomorrow is only a vision;And today, well-lived, makesYesterday, a dream of happinessAnd every tomorrow is a vision of hope.Look well therefore to this day;Such is the salutation to the ever-new dawn!  But it was no new dawn that saw in his successors' reign. The immolated king was succeeded by his son Kittisena in 424, whose nine-month reign ended with brutal brevity when his uncle wielded the knife and took the throne as Siva II.  Silva was not a lucky name – the previous Silva, a lover of Queen Anula, had managed only one year before being poisoned, and this second Silva fared no better, being killed by Upatissa II, the brother-in-law of the late king Moggallana. Siva didn’t even manage to last a month, his uncertain path to Nirvana happening just 25 days into his reign in 525 CE. Upatissa too was an unlucky name: the first Upatissa had reigned for only a year back in 505 BCE, and this second one lasted just twenty-two months until 526 CE. Although Upatissa had Moriyan blood, it is thought that he had yet more Lambakarna blood flowing through his veins, and the remnants of this last dynasty may well have supported his grab for power, which the Moriyans had succeeded in. Whatever the truth of the matter, Upatissa was not the horse to back. Described in the ancient chronicles as “old and blind,” he had little energy to devote to his new job. From the beginning, he seemed fully occupied trying to appease a rival nobleman, Silakala Ambosamanera. Silakala was the self-same ex-monk who had brought the Kesha Dhatu Hair Relic of Lord Buddha to King Moggallana. Despite his Lambakarna blood, Moggallana had promoted him to become his sword bearer.  Upatissa even gave his daughter in marriage to his rival in the hope of keeping the peace, but the gesture failed. Silakala fled south, raised an army and marched back to Anuradhapura. The city lay under the protection of Upatissa's own son, Giri Kasyapa. Still, the young prince, realising that the forces surrounding him were unstoppable, fled at night, taking with him his elderly parents and the royal regalia. But in this, he failed too and took his own life before being captured, his death apparently soon followed by his father’s, though whether from shock or assassination is impossible now to tell. After a surplus of bloodshed, an incipient civil war, evidently and always only just slightly below the surface, the shattered nation would have pulled Silakala Ambasamanera’s 13-year reign deep into their weary hearts in 526 CE. Having managed the career move from monk to warrior earlier with such success, Silakala proved himself something of a shoo-in for king. He delegated much to his sons, pushing the two oldest out of the capital and far from its many attendant temptations, with one, Dathappabhuti, sent to administer the south, and the oldest, Moggallana, sent off to manage the east of the country. Secure in his capital, Silakala Ambasamanera busied himself, irritating his monks – or at least some of them. For this king, unlike the last few, was more inclined towards Mahayana Buddhism, a preference that did not go down well with the majority Theravada Buddhist establishment. Matters came to a head when a young merchant arrived unexpectedly at court, carrying with him the Lotus Sutra, a document held in the highest esteem by Mahayana Buddhists. Its two main teachings were seen as borderline blasphemous by the Theravadans, for they stated that all Buddhist practices offer ways of reaching Buddhahood, and that the Lord Buddha himself did not pass into final Nirvana but was still alive and actively teaching. The king, said one monk, witheringly, had so little understanding of real doctrine that he was like a "firefly who thinks it is the sun."  Nevertheless, the firefly arranged for the sutra to be housed in Jetavanaramaya itself, with an annual festival held to honour it. The king’s deft hand at government got weaker as he got older. He found himself facing so great a rebellion in the southern province of Ruhuna that he lost control of the region altogether to a Moriyan nobleman called Mahanaga, a man who would, in another twist between the Lambakanna and Moriyan clans, in time become king himself. Despite these later cheerless clouds, the king still managed to die a natural death in 531 CE. After a brief skirmish among his sons, Upatissa, Dathappabhuti, and Moggallana, he was succeeded by Dathappabhuti – but not for long. Dathappabhuti had eased his way to the succession by killing his brother Upatissa, but he also fatally neglected to kill his older brother,  Moggallana. Inevitably, Moggallana assembled an army and headed off to war. The ancient chronicles say that the two brothers decided on the unusual practice of single combat to determine who would win the day. During the ensuing duel, Dathappabhuti’s elephant was wounded, and the six-month king, seeing that his time was up, put himself to the sword. The war of the three brothers was over, and once again the country settled into a period of stability – for Moggallana II was to rule for 20 years, from 531 to 551 CE. Although the new king soon gave up on the possibility of winning back Ruhuna, he concentrated his efforts on taking good care of what he actually possessed. The consequences of this decision have since led to his gain...

    31 min
  2. Perdition: The Ceylon Press History Of Sri Lanka 17

    May 8

    Perdition: The Ceylon Press History Of Sri Lanka 17

    As Moggallana returned to his capital in Anuradhapura and seemed, on the face of it, to be restoring life to whatever had passed for normal before his brother Kassapa had murdered their father, it might have been hoped that national life would steady. But steadiness was not what lay ahead for either Sri Lanka or the rest of the Moriyan kings still to come. By the end of Moggallana’s reign, it would look as if an infernal inheritance had instead settled across the land.   For Moggallana’s route to power lay through the implacable and rough power politics of the Indian Ocean Trading Zone. It was not just the turncoat General Migara who had propelled him to power, but a mercenary army, the clutches of which would enfold the entire kingdom to a greater or lesser extent until the very end of the Moriyan dynasty itself.   The old story told of these times is of a Tamil mercenary army coming to Moggallana’s aid and then departing again, job done. But remarkable research by a new generation of historians, most notably Ranjan Mendis, has shown that this is far from the truth.   The real story begins in Persia, 3800 kilometres away - and with the ambitions of the Persian king of kings, Khosrow I ("the Immortal Soul"), to expand his empire in all directions and drive a cleaver through the Byzantine Roman end of the Maritime Silk Road trading empire, which the Emperors of Constantinople managed through their Ethiopian and Yemeni allies. Shutting off the Romans from any meaningful access to India and Sri Lanka via the Red Sea would hand Khosrow the world's most lucrative commercial monopoly.    It was superpower politics, an ancient world version of it, just as life-changing as that witnessed today between America, Russia, China, and India. Khosrow’s first step was to capture Yemen, which had earlier fallen to the Ethiopians on the request of the Constantinople Emperor Justinian to, as Procopius of Caesarea put it, “ sever Persians’ maritime links with India.”  But securing the Maritime Indian Ocean trading route even further east than Yemen was an irresistible cherry in Persian ambitions. It would place it well beyond the reach of the Roman emperors once and for all.   Plots were hatched. Messages were passed to Moggallana, who was then in long-term exile somewhere in South India, with the help of General Migara, a clandestine network of Persian Christian merchants living in Anuradhapura. By letter, and possibly even by his presence before the Persian king, Moggallana wove his way into the plan to ensure Sri Lanka became a safe house for Persian trade. He, as the new ruler, would be its guarantor – a Trojan horse as much as a replacement king.   A fleet of Persian ships carrying an elite Savaran cavalry contingent sailed to Sri Lanka, perhaps even under the direct command of Moggallana himself. They may have even taken with them the terrible new weapon used by the Persians just a few years earlier against Constantinople – petroleum and naphtha. They landed somewhere on the western seaboard of the island – possibly Chilaw- before marching inland to Kurunegala, so smartly circumnavigating both Anuradhapura and Sigiriya and catching both power centres off balance. Mistaking to the last that the presence of General Migara by his side meant that he was covered,  Kashyapa opted for suicide rather than capture when the general flipped his forces.   Writing a few centuries later, the historian Al-Tabari notes of the moment: “the king sent one of his commanders with a numerous army against Serendib, the land of precious stones, in the land of India. The commander attacked the king, killed him, and seized control of it, sending back from here to Kisa abundant wealth and many jewels.”  Clearly, the Persians wasted no time in ransacking the sensational riches of Sigiriya. Later Persian commentators record that the flow of bounty never really ceased. It continued for years to come and, in addition to items such as horses, jewels, and natural resources, elephants, teak, and pearl divers. It was less the gifts of one grateful king to another, and more tribute paid by a vassal to his master.   Unlike Kashyapa, who referred to himself as Maharaja or Great King, the inscriptions so far discovered for his brother Moggallana, and even Moggallana’s heir, merely refer to them as Rajas. Raja is most certainly a title used by lesser kings – kings beholden to other kings, not least Persian kings of kings. Studies of ancient texts by Professor Paranavitana suggest that the Anuradhapuran monks welcomed him as an imperial representative of the Persian king, not as a Sri Lankan king in his own right. Little good it did them, for the new king sided with the new money and the newer version of religion in the old city and did nothing to stop his merchants from unleashing so unremittingly barbaric a bout of bloodshed against often quite blameless people that the new king gained another title: “Rakshasa” – monster.   Persian imports flooded into the country – there is even evidence of Persian wine jars found in small villages near Dambulla, not known then, or now, for its predilection for fine wines. Excavations dating back to these times have revealed an abundance of Persian coinage and a Persian Nestorian cross, whilst testifying to the presence of scores of Persian ships docking in Sri Lankan ports. But of Roman artefacts found in plenty before this time, archaeologists today have unearthed nothing dating to this transformative period before the country pivoted towards Persia.   Moggallana is also known to have invested in a new navy to patrol the sea coasts, possibly tasked with deterring Roman ships, including those sent by Roman allies. Sri Lankan embassies sent to the Chinese emperor, representative at the time of Dhatusena and Kasyapa, abruptly ended and recommenced only in the 7th century as the Moriyan dynasty neared its end, a time that coincided with the collapse of the Persian empire itself when the king of kings fell to the Arab Caliphate in 654 CE.   Little is known of how Moggallana's reign went following the coup that brought him to power. He is presented in history books on the island today as a strong, capable, and respected king who busied himself with monastery and temple improvements – and not as a Persian vassal. His monster status is also conveniently overlooked.  The reality must have been much more complicated and nuanced. Keeping the Persian paymasters happy would have been a most consuming task – ensuring they reaped the commercial rewards that brought them to him in the first place, and keeping them in check as best he could, despite their random attacks on his subjects. No less all-consuming would have been simply maintaining the balance of power in Anuradhapura among competing versions of Buddhism, insurgent Christians, Theravada Buddhists, and merchants merely out to make lots of money.   Moggallana would certainly have welcomed a wonderful piece of serendipity when the Kesha Dhatu, the Hair Relic of Lord Buddha, found its way into his kingdom, brought there by a monk he had befriended whilst in exile in India – Silakala Ambasamanera, a Lambakarna ally. The relic was given the grandest of all receptions, carried in a great procession and enshrined in a crystal box placed in a specially built temple. Silakala was said to have been appointed its guardian, a task he took so seriously that he forsook his monkish status and became the king's sword-bearer (Asiggahasilakala) instead. This change of career would haunt the Moriyan kings, for Silakala Ambasamanera proved so adept at warfare that he would later seize the throne for himself. ...

    15 min
  3. Oedipus Lanka: The Ceylon Press History Of Sri Lanka 16

    May 8

    Oedipus Lanka: The Ceylon Press History Of Sri Lanka 16

    Given such flawed beginnings, it is surprising that Kashyapa, father-killer that he was, enjoyed a reign that lasted as long as it did – from 473 to 495 CE. Having completed the bizarre brickwork that turned his father into a building by walling him up, Kashyapa’s reaction to the patricide that had left him reviled by subjects and priests alike was not dissimilar to that of the Roman Emperor Tiberius, who forsook his capital for a palace of pleasure he built on Capri. Similar – but not equal, for the new seat of government he built at Sigiriya was in every way grander, more beautiful, and more advanced than was Tiberius’ Villa Jovis. The move was no mere residential relocation.  It was not just a new palace that Kashyapa built, but a new seat of government. In this, he acted far more like Akhenaten, the heretical Egyptian pharaoh of the 18th Dynasty, who moved his capital from Thebes to the purpose-built city of Akhenaten – or Amarna. The pharaoh was to die with suspicious normality, and his son, Tutankhamun, wasted little time in swiftly moving the capital back to Thebes, a pattern that was to haunt both Kashyapa and his sibling successor, Moggallana. Hints of the long-lost forces that impelled and inspired such actions are now almost entirely lost. Although Kashyapa gained his crown by the simple expedient of murdering his father, Dhatusena, it is more than likely that he was largely put up to it by his brother-in-law, the General Migara. Migara had been instrumental in placing Dhatusena on the throne decades earlier but had fallen out badly with his father-in-law when the king murdered the general’s wife, who, as was the way with things then, was also the king’s sister. Sri Lankan politics, then, as now, is rarely straightforward, but this moment of homespun realpolitik set such new standards for utter complexity that they are still to be bettered today.  Undoubtedly, these family squabbles would have fed off all that was going on in the kingdom at the time. And there was a lot else going on. Under Dhatusena, Anduraupura had been turned on its head, the once inward-looking city now humming with foreigners, most of whom had come to either trade or convert. Arabs, Jews, Europeans, and Indians are just some of the groups known to have taken exuberant root in the city, as it opened itself up once more to the bountiful trade and money brought to Sri Lanka by the Maritime Silk Road – that vast maritime network of the ancient world that linked East Africa, Arabia, India, and China to Europe.  The kingdom was enjoying a moment of money-spinning madness, with riches pouring into the land as never before, transforming life much as the railroads did in 19th-century America. With trade came new forms of religion – Christianity, for example, and – much more threateningly – alternative schools of Buddhism that Sri Lanka’s overwhelmingly and all-powerful Theravada Buddhists saw as blatantly heretical. Conversions this way or that, as well as making and spending money, were the new order of play.  General Migara is thought to have leveraged these nascent forces to empower himself, but his alliance with Kashyapa came under pressure. The new king did not see himself as the leader of a Liberation revolution, however much he tolerated it for its money-making powers.  Kashyapa’s preference was for crafting a much more traditional and politically useful personal reputation – as a Buddhist God-king. An intriguing hint of this artful propaganda was discovered in a contemporary rock inscription in the monastery of Thimbiriwewa. The inscription noted a donation given “in the tenth year of the raising of the umbrella of dominion by the Great King Kashyapa, the Lord of Alaka.”  Alaka is a reference to the God Kuvera, the legendary ruler of mythical Lanka. Traditional Buddhists were familiar with this blending of god with king, a fusion that did much to legitimise government. If kings were gods, or as good as, what right did any subject, might or meagre, have to obstruct them? It was not in Kashyapa’s interests to do anything to imperil the traditional way in which his people regard kingship. Indeed, he is known to come very actively to the assistance of Theravada Buddhists when General Migara sought to emasculate them by favouring rival Buddhist schools whose attitudes to kingship were perhaps a little looser. But Kashyapa’s predilection for the expediencies of traditional religion was not always returned by grateful monks, many of whom, thinking it unsuitable for a king to have killed his own father, viewed him as well beyond the pale. One monastery is even known to have refused his offer of donations, branding him a father-killer. With his old capital,  Anduraupura, a seething pit of viperous power politics, and religion itself too often an uncertain alley, what better plan than to start anew at Sigiriya. Of money, there was no shortage, so building a better future elsewhere was well within his powers. But did he?  Kashyapa's reign lasted little more than 20 years, and it is a mathematical impossibility that in so short a time, so celebrated a place as Sigiriya could ever have been started, let alone finished. Indeed, it is unlikely that the previous king, Dhatusena, even established the city fortress. Modern historians are instead converging on the view that the site was begun much earlier, in 341 CE, by the Lambakanna king, Buddhadasa, a ruler so beloved that the Mahavamsa Chronicle has him down as a "Mind of Virtue and an Ocean of Gems". Archaeologists have discovered building periods in and around the site that point to earlier dates, though they have also noted how, over the Kashyapa years, the plans become monumentally more ambitious. Until more research is done, hunches, probabilities, and guesswork are the ephemeral friends of choice for concluding that Kashyapa, in moving to Sigiriya, relocated to an existing site and then set about radically improving it, not unlike Louis XIV at Versailles. But such caveats aside, Kashyapa’s Sigiriya was nevertheless one of the greatest wonders of Ancient Asia. It set imposing new standards for urban planning, the royal bastion surrounded by an elaborately laid out outer city, with a final circle of three types of gardens around it: water, terraced, and boulder gardens - 3 km in length and nearly 1 km in width, flanking its famous rock citadel. Ponds, pavilions, fountains and cut pools made up the water gardens. More naturalistic gardens were created around massive boulders, mimicking an artless park with long, winding pathways to saunter down. Brick staircases and limestone steps led up to more formal terraced gardens. Across it all stretched double moats and triple ramparts, defendable gateways, and steps in perfect geometric symmetry, locking all the elements of the fortress city together with mathematical precision and elegance and pierced by the massive sentinel sculpture of a crouching lion. The beast guards the staircase to the ancient palace six hundred feet above, though all that remains now are the two animal paws, rediscovered in excavations in 1898. Built with bricks and limestone, the lion’s full height was 45 feet.  The whole site was fuelled by a remarkable hydraulic irrigation system - the child of the most advanced water technology in the then-known world Rock-cut horizontal and vertical drains, underground terracotta pipes, tanks, ponds, interconnected conduits, cisterns, moats, and waterways channelled surface water to stop erosion and tapped other water sources to deliver water to the huge ornamental gardens, the city and palace - and harness it to help cool the microclimate of the royal residences. The consequences of the state’s remarkable achievements in water technology had given rise to similar attainments in many, many other quarters – all of which came to bear down w...

    17 min
  4. Home, Sweet Home: The Ceylon Press History Of Sri Lanka 15

    May 8

    Home, Sweet Home: The Ceylon Press History Of Sri Lanka 15

    That so disappointing a dynasty was about to take office was in no way apparent at its beginnings. Indeed, the very opposite political calculation was what most wise onlookers might have offered for the early 450s saw Sri Lanka in turmoil – but with the cavalry just around the corner. The grand Kingdom of Anuradhapura had fallen to Pandian Tamils. The venerated old ruling Lankbranaka dynasty had obliterated itself with one palace coup too far. Only with some certainty did the smaller principality of Ruhuna hold out in the far south, forever the redoubt of Sinhala Buddhism. And it was from here that a new royal line emerged to take back the Anuradhapura Kingdom – under the leadership of Dhatusena, from a family called Moriya.    The origins of this dynasty are at best obscure. Indian Buddhist texts describe them as an Ashokan caste responsible for the royal peacocks – one linked to the Shakyas, the tribe to which Buddha himself belonged. If so, then they travelled a long way to get to the island they would come to rule - for the Shakyaas date back to the north Indian iron age, rulers of an oligarchic state based somewhere in Northern India or Nepal.    Shakya princes are known to have accompanied the sapling of the Sri Maha Bodhi to Sri Lanka in 288 BCE, and so it is possible that the Moriya clan arrived in Sri Lanka in this way. They even intermarried with the Lambakarnas, for the Cuḷavamsa, one of the ancient chronicles of Sri Lanka, states that Dhatusena was royal, but one whose ancestors had fled Anuradhapura around 155 AD. His bloodline may even have been enlivened by a more recent link to King Mahanama, whose death in Anuradhapura in 432 CE ushered in the last fractional moments of Lambakarna rule before the Tamil Pandians swept aside the dynasty. It was a fatal mingling of clan blood that would, in time, come to dominate Moriyan rule as the two dynasties fought each other for power like cats in a bag.   Dhatusena was clearly the kind of patriot for whom enough was enough. He wasted little time in making a name for himself with the Pandyan kings as the sort of rebel who was better off dead. Pandyan searches for him failed when, with the help of an obliging Buddhist uncle, he himself became a monk to better his cover – a cover he soon broke by organising guerrilla raids on the Pandyan kings from Ruhuna.    The raids emboldened him to formally claim the throne of Anuradhapura - even though it resisted his physical control. But with every successive Yala and Maha season, his military incursions cut ever deeper into the territory of his northern interlopers – and with ever greater gravity, as the bodies of two slain Pandian kings, Tiritara and Datiya, testify in 456 CE. His successes owed themselves in part to the military talents of his Machiavellian general and son-in-law, Migara – a man who would take for himself in the years to come, the title of kingmaker. By 459 CE, the last Pandian king, Peetiya, had been killed, and it must have been with some considerable joy that Dhatusena rode into Anuradhapura to have himself crowned as king.    Dhatusena settled down immediately to doing what all strong kings were wont to do. He built. Perhaps his most memorable commission was the Avukana Buddha, making a gesture of blessing. This statue, soaring fourteen metres in height, goes almost unnoticed today, lost in the jungle many miles north of Dambulla. Lost too is the name of its sculpturer - but the way in which his delicate pleated clothing clings with astonishing realism to his body indicates that the artist was familiar with two key regional art movements - the naturalistic Hellenistic Gandhara school, and the more sensuous Amaravati school.    Pious to a fault, Dhatusena also had some twenty other temples created. But his religious patronage was, for a kingdom almost wholly dominated by the more austere form of Buddhism -  Theravada - unusually multifaceted. Indeed, under Dhatusena and his son Kashyapa, the island was to settle down for a brief but almost unrivalled moment of iridescent liberalism.   Theravists - with their greater focus on the original teachings of Lord Buddha - regarded other versions of the religion, notably Mahayana, Vajrayana, and a related faction that formed around the Abhayagiri Monastery, as borderline heretical. Even so, the new king gave them patronage in the form of gifts, relics, and building commissions. His open-mindedness must have sparked a serious scandal among Theravadans, especially when, having rebuilt a monastery at the iconic site of Mihintale, he gave it not to Theravadans, nor even to Mahayana Buddhists, but to the Dhammaruchika sect, an offshoot of the Abhayagiri. The monastery – the Kaludiya Pokuna – is worth a visit, tucked into rocks with a vast 200-long pond whose now-utterly-peaceful nature belies the uproar that would have attended its inauguration. But the forward-looking king went much further, commissioning new shrines and decorated statues that were almost antithetical to Theravada Buddhism, even right next to the branches of the sacred Bodhi tree itself in Anuradhapura.  Some of the king’s newly commissioned embellishments cleverly implied a more absolute and direct linkage to the crown itself. One statue was of the Maitreya bodhisattva, believed to be the future Buddha destined to return to earth to preach the law anew to a people that had forgotten it -  a fitting symbol of his own new rule. Around this statue was set the royal regalia itself, protected by a royal bodyguard.   More practically, Dhatusena set about rebuilding the kingdom’s crumbling infrastructure. He encouraged, cajoled, and persuaded many of the people displaced by the Pandyan invasion to return to repopulate the abandoned regions in Anuradhapura from their refuge in Ruhuna. And he secured his kingdom’s food supply, repairing water infrastructure and buildings, and constructing at least twenty-six new tanks, half of them so vast and robustly made that they are still in working order today. A good example is the Maeliya Wewa tank, just north of Kurunegala. One of a series of smaller cascade tanks, it still provides harvested rainwater to 202 farmers across 155 acres.   Another tank, near Mannar, was described by Sir James Emerson Tennent in 1860 as a “stupendous work,” and so it is – with an embankment of seven kilometres and a capacity today of carrying thirty-nine million cubic metres of water within its 4550-hectare bowl. But perhaps the greatest of all his works was the double reservoir complex, Kala Wewa and Balalu Wewa, close to the Avukana Buddha statue. Together, these tanks store 123 million cubic meters of water; their central slice feeds into an eighty-seven-kilometre canal that descends in perfect meters to deliver its water to Anuradhapura, whilst feeding thousands of acres of paddy land on its way.   Under the firm hand of the new government, trade resumed with feverish intensity. It had much to put right – decades of neglect, isolation, devaluation, and the sort of lawlessness most detested by gainfully employed merchants. This king started from the top. At least one embassy is known to have been dispatched by Dhatusena to China, the trading powerhouse of Asia; undoubtedly, others were sent elsewhere. The king’s contemporary, Cosmas Indicopleustes, the merchant monk who sailed to India from Egypt, wrote of Sri Lanka at the time: “from the whole of India, Persia and Ethiopia, the island, acting as an intermediary, welcomes many ships and likewise despatches them….it gets the proceeds of each of the afore mentioned markets and passes them onto the people of the interior and at the same time exports its own native products ...

    16 min
  5. The Lion’s Paws: The Ceylon Press History Of Sri Lanka 14

    May 7

    The Lion’s Paws: The Ceylon Press History Of Sri Lanka 14

    The Lion’s Paws:  The Ceylon Press History Of Sri Lanka Book 14 To Tanzania goes the mane. Sri Lanka excepted, the land boasts more lions than any other country. Admittedly, Sri Lanka’s capacious pride of lions is a depiction rather than a collection of living, breathing, roaring specimens – but right across the island, lions dominate the scene with a flamboyance that had much to teach the muted heraldic beasts on such other national flags as Spain or Paraguay.  Fluttering with pride across a million or more flagpoles from banks to private houses, government buildings to temples, lions have also given their name to any number of other things - from Lion tea to Lion larger, from Mount Lavinia’s Lion Pub to Galagedera Royal Lion Hotel, from soaps, cars, jewellers, insurance sales forces and even pop groups down south in Henakaduwa. Statues of the beast also found their way into early temples, palaces, and monasteries -  unfloutable sentinels of the great buildings of the state. But quite how lions got here is a matter of simmering altercation amongst vexillologists. Some point the finger at Prince Vijaya, others at King Dutugemunu, and still others at King Nissan Kamalla. But whatever the truth of the matter, there is more to the lion than just flags or brand names.  That lions should assume so central a role is a victory of sorts for Panthera Leo Sinhaleyus, a subspecies of the lion unique to Sri Lanka, which became extinct in 37,000 BCE – about the same time as the island’s famous Stone Age Balangoda Man walked his own last steps. Its discovery only came to light in 1936, when the archaeologist 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 exhumed teeth. One was so damaged as to be of little use in identifying anything, but the other, a left molar, presented such a distinctive structure as to not just twin it with lions but also set it apart from all known lion species. The discovery was later validated by a further breakthrough in 1962, when a complete right-limb middle phalanx of the same species was found. From these fragile artefacts, a lost subspecies was uncovered, its size indicating that the beast was a lion much larger than the present 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, and big ones at that. But over time, as the monsoon rain fuelled the proliferation of trees, its habitat became ever more restricted and at some point, the creature just died out.  Today, the Sri Lankan lion’s paramount historical descendant sits at the feet of what islanders call the eighth wonder of the ancient world - Sigiriya Rock. This massive lump of granite - a hardened, much-reduced magma plug – is all that is left of an extinct volcano. Lost in forests, inhabited by hermit monks between the third century BCE and the first century CE, it was exposed by colossal landslides and then selected by King Kashyapa I (or his father) as the location of a new fortress capital in 477 CE. Guarding the staircase to an ancient fortress, six hundred feet above, are the two immense animal paws, rediscovered during excavations in 1898, all that remains of a crouching sphinx-like lion that guarded the palace entrance. Built with bricks and limestone, the lion’s full height was 45 feet. The rest of the creature lies in dust around the site, but even so, it gave its name to the place: “Sigiriya,” the Sinhala for “Lion’s Rock.”  Gazing at it, the most irresistible connection is, of course, to the legendary Egyptian pharaoh, Rameses II, recalled by Shelley in his poem Ozymandias: I met a traveller from an antique land,Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stoneStand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,Tell that its sculptor well those passions readWhich yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;And on the pedestal, these words appear:My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!Nothing beside remains. Round the decayOf that colossal Wreck, boundless and bareThe lone and level sands stretch far away.” Sigiriya, like the palace of the King of Kings, is as much a ruin as the lion paws that yet defend it. Each mitten is a sorrowful remnant exemplifying the accepted and formidable face of authority and statehood.  From King Pandu Kabhaya founding Anuradhapura around 437 BCE, thereby marking the tangible beginnings of the Sri Lankan island state, to the inheritance enjoyed by the first Moriyan king, Dhatusena, in 463 CE, 900 years of solid national building had been achieved. Over those many centuries, an entire kingdom and culture had been consolidated, and an ancient state had thrived. Under, first, the Vijayan, and then the Lankbranaka, dynasties, a one-state government came to dominate the entire island, its grand writ running through countless villages from north to south, east to west, by means of the intricate bureaucratic, legal, and administrative structures that ordered its religion, water resources, taxation, and trade. At every stage, this sophisticated ordering of society was reinforced by caste demarcations that arose at least as early as 543 BCE with the arrival of the founding father, Prince Vijaya. With him came a variety of castes, most notably the Govigama – the landowners. A complex and hereditary feudal system soon developed from this, its voluminous obligations derived from work ordered by the king – the Rajakariya - for an astonishingly comprehensive set of occupations from toddy tapping to coconut growing, hair cutting to fishing. The state's managed bureaucracy had hierarchies so finely tuned that they even trickled down to village officials tasked with managing sluice gates and tanks. The arrival of Buddhism in the 3rd century BCE fortified and compounded these meticulous arrangements. That the state was strong – able to endure even the suicidal excesses of some of its kings, to shrug off occasional invasions, civil wars, and droughts – was in large part due to the enduring capabilities of the social order that underwrote the kingdom. This institutionalised aptitude allowed the nation to function when even, at times, the government itself did not. Even - all too often -  when the island’s very social order was manifestly unfair and destructive, it remained a firm and formative force.  “Sure,” cried John Steinbeck’s tenant farmer, “but it’s our land…We were born on it, and we got killed on it, died on it. Even if it’s no good, it’s still ours.”   Sri Lanka’s lion - most memorably exemplified by that built by the early Moriyan kings at Sigiriya - is an apt symbol of this decisive national trait, one so critical that it helps explain another key reason for what makes Sri Lanka Sri Lankan: not just Buddhism, nor its early radical water technology, or even its singular island status – but its ability to, as Winston Churchill put it, “keep buggering on.”  For the lion, grand and majestic though it is, is first and foremost resistant. Nothing defeats it. Never before the Moriyan kings had taken the throne had buggering on been such an imperative national trait. As the twenty-five monarchs of this third dynasty vacillated through their (usually brief) reigns, the state’s rulers became increasingly dependent on mercenaries to maintain control. The dynasty’s third king, Moggallana, made this something of a sine qua non when he overthrew his half-brother, King Kashyapa, with the help of mercenaries. He was not the first Anduraupuran king to do this: Il...

    17 min
  6. The Great Conundrum: The Ceylon Press History of Sri Lanka 1

    12/14/2025

    The Great Conundrum: The Ceylon Press History of Sri Lanka 1

    It took a refugee from Nazi Germany, with an interest in economics and Buddhism, to note the singular connection between two of the most apparent characteristics that distinguish Sri Lanka.    “Small,” remarked E. F. Schumacher in his eponymous book in 1973, “is beautiful.”     It was economics, rather than Sri Lanka, that Schumacher had in mind, but, as with all seismic observations, his simple statement lent a formative new way to understand previously inexpressible truths.   Sri Lanka is both small and beautiful. So small, in fact, that it could fit into India 50 times, into Britain almost 4 times, or even into Peru nearly 20 times, its nearest neighbour, Tamil Nadu, could accommodate it twice over, with land to spare.   Head a little further north, and 10 times as many people crowd into nearby Pakistan, or six more into Bangladesh.    Schumacher’s only other book, published on his deathbed in 1977, “A Guide for the Perplexed”, is a study of how humans live in the world – but it could easily have lent its title to a mandatory guidebook for issue to every person who passes through Bandaranaike Airport, citizen or guest, VIP or economic migrant.   For little about the island is straightforward, despite or because of its size and beauty.  Confronting it for the first time is like encountering Rubik’s Cube for the first time, that infamous multi-coloured rotating brick toy whose coloured ends seem so easy to organise into blocks.  The outcome, though satisfying and apparently almost effortless, remains virtually impossible to achieve.    Just below the surface of almost everything on the island, and simmering with delight, richness, chaos, or just plain thwarting befuddlement, lies the complexity of what is quite possibly the most byzantine and bewitching country in the world.   The more you see, the more you wonder. Why?    Why, for example, make a simple presidential election quote so convoluted and full of enough own-goal traps to risk making the spoiled votes equal to the good ones?  The 2024 presidential election brought almost 40 candidates forward for a preferential-style vote so complex that the Election Commission had to issue a 200-word note on how to correctly mark the ballot paper.     But perhaps this is to worry unnecessarily, for the country’s political system has, as horse riders might note, plenty of form.  By 1978, when the current constitution was adopted, it had already enjoyed three earlier ones, roughly one every 16 years.  Now regulated by this, its second constitution since independence, Sri Lanka possesses a governing document of such elastic resilience that it has undergone an average of one significant amendment every second year and has still survived.    Such political robustness is nothing less than what should be expected of an island whose circuitous history meanders through over 2,500 recorded years to take in at least 12 former capital cities, as many, if not more, kingdoms, and 300 recorded kings, some half of whom were estimated to have murdered the other half.  Conundrums, reversals and the sudden appearance of polar partisan opposites have riotously followed almost every step of that wild journey.  The kings eventually made way for the world’s first elected female head of a modern state when, in July 1960, Sirimavo Bandaranaike was elected Prime Minister.  Yet in 2018, a new President reimposed a four-decade-long ban on women buying alcohol.     Given that barely 6% of the country’s supreme law-making body, its parliament, is filled with female MPs, this institutional sexism is understandable – but to fully explain it, one needs to look little further than the fact that just under a fifth of all MPs have just one A-level to their credit.  But there’s much more to the rule of law than exams.  Should parliament depress you, look to the country’s Supreme Court, a focused and resilient body that has thwarted attempted coups and power grabs through the decades.     “Do I contradict myself?” asked the American poet, Walt Whitman. “Very well then, I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.).     And so too does Sri Lanka.     Despite Nobel Prize-winning scientists, Booker Prize-winning writers, and architects who have profoundly reshaped how people live across the tropical world, its best universities barely scrape into the top 1,000 worldwide, with a pedagogy that deliberately fails almost half its students.   Honest domestic consumers eager to pay their electricity bill must first correctly guess which of 8 categories they fit into before they can pay up, proof, if ever it was needed, that here at least there is little pleasure to be had in being a consumer.  Used car prices have more than doubled in the past few years, and at any given time, eggs, onions, rice, milk powder, or even turmeric have entered an Alice-in-Wonderland world, priced well out of reach of ordinary people.    Yet still the kiribath is made. This dish, of coconut-flavoured milk rice, is unique to the island, the muse behind Anuradhapura’s Kiribath Stupa, a monument of almost unimaginable antiquity that was once said to house the sacred tooth relic itself: the left Canine tooth of Gautama Buddha.  The snack itself never fails to delight, a comfort food that pushes Butter Chicken, Shepherd's Pie, spaghetti or chocolate brownies to the back of any gourmet’s fridge - yet seems but a demure option in a national cuisine enriched by visitors that stayed too long - Portuguese love cakes, Dutch lamprais, Lisbon pumpkin preserve, deliciously crispy yellow deep-fried Amsterdam koekjes, Tamil dosas, idlis and vada, roast paan, Keralan hoppers, English fish cutlets, Christmas cake, brown Windsor soup or tea itself.   Given the island’s history, it is no surprise that so many national resources should be devoted to the health care of its people.  The remains of at least five ancient hospitals are found among Anuradhapura's oldest ruins, and with them the tantalising Brahmi inscriptions of two physicians from the second century BCE.     King after king built and enlarged the hospitals across the land and endowed them with revenue.  One even built a hall for several hundred patients, each to be attended to by a slave. The third-century CE king, Buddhadasa, was so committed to health that he even took to doctoring himself, curing snakes and monks alike.     Today, the nation’s free universal Western health care system is among the best in South Asia.  Even so, patients, feeling some degree of illness, need first to self-diagnose before electing to see the correct doctor, praying all the time, as they hobble towards the hospital, that they are heading towards the proper cure – a fate that eluded a recent government minister who fell ill after spectacularly drinking a ‘miracle’ COVID potion, concocted by a man who claimed to have received its recipe from Hindu goddess of destruction, Kali.     Even so, it competes head-to-head with traditional medicine.  In village after village, town after town, the ancient medical practices of the land are easily accessible, endorsed by the government, and supported by their own doctors, ministries, training, teaching, and hospitals, curing and alleviating the suffering of thousands of people daily.     Nothing is really what it see...

    22 min
  7. The Island That Floated Away: The Ceylon Press History of Sri Lanka 2

    12/14/2025

    The Island That Floated Away: The Ceylon Press History of Sri Lanka 2

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

    22 min
  8. Voyaging to Wonderland: The Ceylon Press History of Sri Lanka 3

    12/14/2025

    Voyaging to Wonderland: The Ceylon Press History of Sri Lanka 3

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

    20 min
See All (18)

Ratings & Reviews

3
out of 5
2 Ratings

About

In under 50 pint-sized chapters, The Ceylon Press History of Sri Lanka, tells the story of an island renowned for a history many times larger and more byzantine than that of far bigger nations. From prehistory to the present day, each short chapter makes a little clearer the intricate sagas of its rulers, people, and progression.

Information

You Might Also Like