K. Indrapala, a story of a regressive evolution.

Published in my column in The Nation on August 19, 2012 

By Darshanie Ratnawalli

Why did Professor K. Indrapala write his 2005 book, ‘The Evolution of an Ethnic Identity’? Some people suggest external duress (Nalin De Silva; ‘he became a prisoner of the LTTE’) while some allege duress exerted by the subconscious. Michael Roberts, an old Peradeniya colleague of Indrapala said; “knowing Indrapala's history and the recluse position he adopted after criticism in the 1970s I believe he is trying to reclaim his Tamilness as a final swan song in old age”.

Two critical decisions made by the author at the inception of the writing enterprise, make Indrapala: 2005 extremely vulnerable. It’s these decisions that enable the central premise of the book.

Migratory impulses from various parts of India, electrified the Mesolithic base population languishing in the pre historic Lankan cauldron, causing it to metamorphose. This is well known. The world and his grandmother used to believe that it metamorphosed into a single language based identity leaving behind an un-metamorphosed residue, which eventually became the ‘veddas’. Then Indrapala: 2005 came along and posited two language based identities resulting from the metamorphosis. And now? The world and his grandmother retain the single brand evolution theory; “In brief, proto-Sinhala-becoming-Sinhala appears to have been the most widespread speech form for much of the first millennium CE. The recent book by K. Indrapala, … does not undermine this verdict, despite its convolutions.”- (Blunders in Tigerland: Michael Roberts: 2007).

What are the two decisions K. Indrapala made, which render his book ultimately impact less, create duress doubts and lay him open not so much to peer reproach but (more terribly) to peer pity? The first (and the most critical) decision was to suppress a body of evidence that would have shown that the process of assimilation and acculturation that occurred in the rest of the island during the early historic period, giving birth to the unmentionable (aka Sinhalese) identity went on unchecked even in the northern extremities of Lanka (Probably because an island is a unifier). The second critical decision was to suppress Sigiriya (not easy, it being fairly large).

The first suppression involves a body of evidence, which K. Indrapala himself had a hand in highlighting in 1965, though the provenance of the knowledge can be traced nearly four decades back to H. W. Codrington. “The place-names in the peninsula indicate that it was held by Sinhala inhabitants at no very remote date” was how he expressed it in Short history of Ceylon, 1926. How Indrapala expressed it in his PhD thesis was strikingly similar.

“…We refer to the toponymic evidence which unmistakably points to the presence of Sinhala settlers in the peninsula before Tamils settled there. In an area of only about nine hundred square miles covered by this peninsula, there occur over a thousand Sinhalese place names which have survived in a Tamil garb.

The Yalppana-vaipava-malai, the Tamil chronicle of Jaffna, confirms this when it states that there were Sinhalese people in Jaffna at the time of the first Tamil colonization of the area. Secondly, the survival of Sinhalese elements on the local nomenclature indicates a slow and peaceful penetration of Tamils in the area rather than violent occupation. This is in contrast with the evidence of the place names of the North Central Province, where Sinhalese names have been largely replaced by Tamil names. The large percentage of Sinhalese element and the occurrence of Sinhala and Tamil compounds in the place names of Jaffna point to a long survival of the Sinhala population and an intimate intercourse between them and the Tamils. This is also, borne out by the retention of some territorial names, like Valikamam (Sinh. Valigama) and Maracci (Maracci-rata), which points to the retention of the old territorial divisions and tell strongly against wholesale extermination or displacement of the Sinhalese population.”

Indrapala: 2005 deals with this by ignoring it, in the hope that it will maybe go away. That it is a shabby and undignified thing to sneak away, seems to have jarred on his conscience, though not to the extent of motivating a frank and direct tackle of the issue. Buried in an end note (75 of Chapter 6), there is what seems like a mumbled recanting attempt;

“The survival of the word kamam (Pali, gama, village) as a suffix in some place names may further indicate the influence of Pali when Buddhism was a dominant religion in Jaffna. It may well be that this reflects a different Prakrit influence from that seen in the Brahmi inscriptions of the South where the word gama occurs. Such an influence may have come from Andhra, which region seems to have been a source of Buddhist influence in Jaffna. Early inscriptions from Amaravati, in Andhra, have place names ending in gama…”

Recent (17th century) maps of Jaffna in Sri Lanka, also have place names ending in gama (Welligamo, Vimangamo, Lilagamo, etc). Ditto place names ending in watte (Cottiewatte, Malwattoe), moene (Nagamoene), oya (Naloer), pale (Mepale), palle (Pollopalle, Alipalle), pola (Walewitakepoelo), goda (Tangode). In other words, Sinhala place names not yet clad in Tamil garb. This Dutch map sits in Nationaal Archief, Netherlands accessible on beeldbank.nationaalarchief.nl/na:col1:dat516410, a silent testimony to ancient period historian Indrapala’s lack of holistic knowledge, possibly due to period fixation. Portuguese records also mention ‘Colombagam ferry’, ‘aliyas’ (elephants) and ‘kuruwe vidanes’ (elephant handlers) in Jaffna. That the major Jaffnese territorial division Valikamam was still Welligamo in the17th century seems to have been news to Indrapala: 1965 as well. This may indicate not suppression but a genuine blind spot. Such blind spots about Dutch and Portuguese periods are far from uncommon.

How Indrapala: 2005 has swept under the carpet, Sigiriya, with graffiti inscribed by the un-orchestrated visitor flow from all over the island in the 10th, 9th, 8th centuries, representing valuable data on the language based identities in Sri Lanka is a story for my next installment.

Communal claims on a common land

Published in my column in The Nation on July 1, 2012 

By Darshanie Ratnawalli

However it may be defined elsewhere in the world, power sharing in Sri Lanka is about drawing up constitutional title deeds to enshrine communal claims on a common territory. Consequent to this local twist, there are many barriers to power sharing in Sri Lanka. One major barrier is the wide, nonexclusive dissemination of knowledge. Knowledge diffusion is mainly via Sri Lankan dialogues. The following dialogue had the following catalyst;

“The Kokila Sandesaya narrates the longest of the journeys from the southernmost point on the island, Devinuwara (Dondra) to its northernmost city, Yapa Patuna (Jaffna). It names seventy-two places along the journey. Some of the Sinhala place-names on the northern leg of the journey are no longer identifiable, because these areas are now home to a mainly Tamil population.”-

(Pieris, Anoma (2010) 'Avian Geographies: An Inquiry into Nationalist Consciousness in Medieval Lanka', South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, 33: 3, 336 — 362)

‘I have mailed you that article by Anoma Pieris’.
‘She is the granddaughter of G. C. Mendis isn’t she?’
‘Yes. She is at Uni of Melbourne. Thought the bit about the northern leg of the journey might interest you’.

‘That the 15th century Kokila Sandesaya should list Sinhala place names on its northern leg? Hardly a revelation. Take a look at that 17th century Dutch map; Kaart van Jaffanapatnam en onderhoorige landen en eilanden (Map of Jaffanapatnam countries and islands and dependencies). The manuscript is in the Nationaal Archief, Netherlands, but you can get a fairly large view at beeldbank.nationaalarchief.nl/na:col1:dat516410. Certain browsers let you translate the web page into English. Get it full screen and start spotting the Sinhala place names.

The first name to hit you is Welligamo. As one of the four main divisions of Jaffanapatnam, it’s written larger. No big news there. Everyone knows about Valikamam and Weligama, but everyone may not know the transition happened post 17th century. The real revelations are the smaller print locations; Cottiewatte, Watane, Vimangamo, Walandale, Lilagamo, Tangode, Tambale, Batecotte, Anecotte, Naloer(Nal oya), Oergavature, Nagamoene, Tambegamo, Coylacandy (Kohila Kanda), Mepale, Pollopalle, Alipalle, Malwattoe, Anungay, Walewitakepoelo, etc. etc. These are just the ones that stand out without ambiguity to my naked eye on the computer screen. There are more names that are clear like Kenalavil, Ambellipattoe, Inkelampitty, etc. but with my limited linguistics, I can’t exactly slot them. Yet more names that I can almost identify, but my Times New Roman adapted eye won’t grant 100% certainty. I’d love to go over the original manuscript with a magnifying glass. Better still, I’d love to have someone with an eye for handwritten script and etymological expertise subject the manuscript to a magnifying glass.

And yet, in essence all this is old news. H. W. Codrington for one would have yawned. (The place-names in the peninsula indicate that it was held by Sinhala inhabitants at no very remote date, …- Chapter VI, Short history of Ceylon, 1926). I imagine he yawned from The Great Beyond in 1965, when the PhD student K. Indrapala highlighted “the toponymic evidence involving over a thousand place names of distinctly Sinhalese origin ‘in Tamil garb’” presented by the Jaffna peninsula. But then most people are not Codrington. For one thing, primary evidence such as the Kokila Sandesaya and the 17th century map impacts like a bullet between the eyes, while pronouncements by an expert, however respected, merely wait politely by your head for admittance. You can either take it or dismiss it as personal whim or idiosyncrasy of the expert. D. B. S Jeyaraj for example, responding to someone’s web comment about place name evidence went, “oh place names? But that PhD thesis has been superseded now by the Indrapala 2005”. It’s nothing of the kind. 2005 Indrapala merely maintains an undignified and deafening silence about the whole place names motif.

I am pretty sure that even scholars specialized on 17th century Lanka would find Sinhalese place names in 17th century Jaffna a trifle odd. On a purely academic, bloodless level, they may know of the distinctly Sinhalese origin place names in Tamil garb thingy, but in their minds the ‘garbing date’ would be long, long ago; the mid 13th century or the 14th century at the latest. There is this surgical deadline drawn in the time stream of Lanka. By 14th century latest, all Sinhalese place names in Jaffna should be decently covered in Tamil garb, all surviving Sinhalese populations should neatly die by assimilation. A clean amputation followed by cauterization. A definite closure to the Sinhalese chapter of the peninsular.’

‘Why don’t you write an article about these things?’

‘But the people know these things! And I wrote an article, I said; “While a Chechen may have much to celebrate in his historically entrenched, uniform and consistent association with Chechnya, I hold that he is also poorer because he is deprived of the experience of being part of a region with diverse and multi-cultural associations, such as our Northern Province. He will never know the experience of living in a land whose identity exists in layers, where the earlier layer still peeks through the current layer as enticingly as a camisole does through a sheer blouse.”’

‘Hmm..I don’t remember this.’
‘You aren’t supposed to forget!’
‘But, do the Colombo intellectual elite know?’

‘Shall we take a specific example, as not to offend any genuinely intelligent intellectual elite? My example is an intellect like a train. A train may be fast or slow but it is not truly mobile. It has to run on a fixed rail. It has to pass promising pathways without turning into them. Supposing that such an intellect comes across the devolution diamond in the course of its reading? In those books, the diamond would be presented in an ideal setting; an Ethnic Other, a Territory, a historically entrenched and exclusively predominant Association. Supposing that just like a train, this intellect is also relentless, maybe to compensate for its limited mobility? It cares little what kind of setting actually exists over here for this diamond. If it’s not here, it must be imagined into being. Mind over matter. Power of suggestion. And that’s what Dayan Jayatilleke was doing in 13/06/2010 Lakbima, when he conjured for the masses, a Lanka that had Ethnic Other areas since 2nd century B.C. with concessions being made even then to the cultural otherness of ‘those’ areas; Dutugemunu appointing a ethnic other Yuvaraj after the war to administer ‘those’ areas.’