A historian who liked admiration too much

Published in my column in The Nation on April 28, 2013 

By Darshanie Ratnawalli

Leslie Gunawardana

Leslie (R A L H) Gunawardana, (not to be confused with Vivien’s husband, Leslie Goonewardena) was a historian specializing in the ancient period (500 BC to 1232 AD) of Sri Lankan history. He was a historical revisionist who aspired for admiration from a certain school and got it. His 1979 essay, “The People of the Lion” was reprinted in the Social Scientists’ Association (1984) and became a guiding star in an enterprise, which sought to deconstruct Nationalist ideologies (almost exclusively on the Sinhala side). This admiration had a potential dark side that could distract its recipient into byways that had dishonesty, suppression and shoddy research as landmarks. And so it came to pass. That Leslie Gunawardana had entered these byways in pursuit of a certain fan base and made these landmarks his pit stops was noticed by his peers.

“Many, though not all, of these post-modern scholars are immersed in the modern…their knowledge of the pre-British period is limited. That is where Leslie Gunawardana’s article has been of critical significance as an empirical foundation for the claims of the post-Orientalists and why it has gone through two reprints and been praised as a ‘master text’ that is marked by its ‘brilliance’ and ‘extraordinary comprehensiveness’... Such unqualified praise only serves to highlight the glaring deficiencies of empirical knowledge among the eulogists and marks an inability to discern the serious flaws in the middle segment of Gunawardana’s essay.”

- (Michael Roberts: 2003:8).

Among these serious flaws in ‘The People of the Lion’ (1979, 1984, 1990) was what could be termed Gunawardana’s Watergate or his Waterloo. He contested the conventional opinion that the term Sihala was used from the outset to refer to the generality of people in the island as well to its ruling elite. He claimed that ‘Sihala’ had extended its coverage from the ruling dynasty to the masses only by about the year 1200. From 1979 to 1992, as Leslie was collecting accolades and going from strength to strength his nemesis lay dormant among the pages of a 900 AD work called Dhampiya Atuva Gatapadaya.

Eerily, as if it had been waiting for a 1000 years to reply to someone like Leslie (perhaps it had), Dhampiya Atuva Gatapadaya gave chapter and verse of Sihala.

“How is (the term) “in the helu language” derived? That is derived on account of residents in the island being helu. How is it that (they) are (called) hela? Having killed a lion, King Sihabahu was called Sihala (as in the Pali phrase) “Sihala on account of having cut (or killed) a (or the) lion.” On account of being his progeny (ohu daru bavin), Prince Vida (Vijaya) was called Sihala. Others came to be called Sihala on account of being their retinue (evuhu pirivara bavin)”

In 1992, Dhampiya Atuva Gatapdaya found a modern outlet to confront Leslie Gunawardana: K.N. O Dharmadasa: 'The People of the Lion': Ethnic Identity, Ideology and Historical Revisionism in Contemporary Sri Lanka, Ethnic Studies Report, Vol. 10.

Let’s dissect one more error, to which Leslie had been led in pursuit of admiration. Pali is a basic requirement for any ancient period historian because it opens up doors to knowledge. Pali is also a Prakrit and a middle Indo Aryan dialect like Sinhalese Prakrit, the language of the prolific lithic Brahmi inscriptional record of Sri Lanka. A man who knows Pali is on a firm footing for deciphering these inscriptions.

To confront Leslie Gunawardana’s error, we have to go back to “The Sanskrit word ārya, first occurring in the ancient Indian text Rigveda some 3500 years ago (and related to the word airiya in the contemporary Iranian text Avesta)...”- (Indrapala: The Evolution: 108). In the Rigveda, Ārya is used for a people. “...the evidence in the Rigveda, acclaimed to be the oldest text in any Indo-European language, wherein we find that the people who composed and used the Rigvedic hymns were the Ārya.”- (ibid: 109). There are “references in the Rigveda to the ‘fair-skinned’ Āryans who fought with the ‘dark-skinned’ Dāsas”.-(ibid: 110).

These Āryans apparently did a great job of positioning their brand and built such brand equity that ‘Ārya’ became a byword throughout the Indian subcontinent, synonymous with all that was highest and the noblest. In this sense, almost a millennium after the Rigveda, the word entered the language of Buddhism, a non-racial supremacist religion and gave us the ‘ariya ashtangika margaya’. ‘Ariya’ in Pali is the diaeretic form of the Vedic ārya. See the entry for ‘Ariya’ in the Pali Text Society’s Pali-English dictionary, which gives the racial, social and ethical connotations of the word.

Now we come to the interesting part. The other Pali forms of ‘ariya’ are ‘ayya’ and ‘ayira’. ‘Ayya’ is the contracted (assimilation) form and means gentleman, sire, lord, master, a polite form of address like Sir, milord; amhākaŋ ayyo our worthy Sir. These Prakrit forms of Ārya travelled from the North to Sri Lanka and South India.

“... the most notable linguistic development in north India after the period of Vedic Sanskrit and other Old Indo-Aryan dialects is the emergence of the Prakrits or the Middle Indo-Aryan dialects...It was not Classical Sanskrit but these Prakrit languages that played an important part in the economic and cultural developments of the first millennium BCE... Pali, the most archaic literary Prakrit, became the language of the Buddhist canon, while another literary Prakrit generally known as Arddha-Magadhi became the language of the Jaina canon. It was the Prakrits of the long-distance traders and the Middle Indo-Aryan literary dialects of the Buddhist and Jaina monks that spread to the SISL region in the EIA (900-300 BCE) bringing new influences from the north.”

- (Indrapala: 116).

The Prakrit title deriving from Ārya was prominent in the 2nd century BC social formation of Lanka. ‘Ayya’, the Pali form is used in the Mahavamsa for some of the 2nd century BC nobility. “Now in Kalyani the ruler was named Tissa. His younger brother named Ayya-Uttika, who had roused the wrath (of Tissa) in that he was the guilty lover of the queen, fled thence…”- (Mhv, xxii. 13-22: trn. Geiger). The Sinhalese Prakrit lithic inscriptions are strewn with the title ‘aya’, the Sinhalese Prakrit form. Abi Savera, whom Paranavitana identifies with Vihara Maha Devi was the daughter of Maha Tisa and wife of Aya Tisa and entered the lithic record by dedicating caves in Kotadamuhela in Yala to the sangha.

This Ārya connection survives to date in ‘Ayya’ (elder brother) in Sinhala and interestingly also in Tamil. Which perhaps is not so interesting considering.

The Brahmi script was brought to the Tamil region by the Jainas and Buddhists in the post-Asokan period. The Jainas and Buddhists also fostered the Tamil language and authored some of the most remarkable literary works, above all the two epics - Silappatikaram andManimekalai. Even Tolkappiyam and many of the 18 didactic works, including the Tirukkural, are often assigned to Jaina authorship. There is a significant influence of Jain Ardhamagadhi - and not of Asokan Prakrit - in old Tamil, the language of Tamil-Brahmi inscriptions of Tamil Nadu. Also consider the number of Indo-Aryan loan words - mainly Prakrit loan words - derived from standard epigraphic Prakrit, in old Tamil. They are all nouns - names, religious and cultural terms. Some are derived from Jain Ardhamagadhi and interestingly also from Simhala-Prakrit. - (R. Champakalakshmi ).

Yet, Leslie Gunawardana was “… inclined to take the term ‘aya’, the occurrence of which is very widespread in the Brahmi inscriptions, as a ‘word of Tamil derivation which had the same meaning as Rajha and Gamani’”- (Indrapala: 152). How this inclination was born, whether from research laziness, a shaky foundation in Pali and other Prakrits or from an irresistible yen for admiration, we will never know. But what about Indrapala who quotes Leslie on this? His comment is; “The word ayya in Tamil and Sinhalese (as well in other Dravidian languages like Telugu), denoting ‘elder brother’, may well have originally meant ‘leader’ (the older brother as the leader of the younger siblings). It is also still used in Tamil and Telugu as an honorific form of address in the same way as ‘sir’ in English.” (ibid: 363: en12). This is one of the saddest examples of incompetence that I have seen in a couple of accredited historians.

An inexact man in an inexact science

Published in my column in The Nation on February 10, 2013 

By Darshanie Ratnawalli

                        Taking a tracing

“When it comes to ancient history, historical linguistics and such matters, surprisingly little is known in any tangible sense although much is claimed by the practitioners of such studies. ... We are not questioning the importance of such studies. But we insist that where little is known, little is known.”

So says Chandre Dharmawardana that famous emissary from exact sciences arrived on the social sciences scene to explode the ‘pretense of knowledge cultivated by social scientists’ and show that it’s ‘more relevant to emphasize our quasi-total lack of knowledge’. But there’s a problem. When Chandre Dharmawardana insists that little is known, it usually means that little is known by Chandre Dharmawardana. This is usually due to a substandard facility for acquiring knowledge than to an actual lacuna in the body of knowledge. When Chandre signals us to emphasize our quasi-total lack of knowledge, he is really asking us to empathize with his personal lack of knowledge.

It starts from basics, this personal lack of knowledge and continues upwards. The evidence strongly points to Chandre having missed many of the ‘Elementary my dear Watson’s of the ancient period: i.e. Brahmi is not a language, but a script, Prakrit is a Middle Indo Aryan language while Tamil is a Dravidian language and using the oxy-moron Tamil-Prakrit is an obvious way of displaying your ignorance.

I present exhibit A; “…a form of southern Prakrit known as ‘Elu’ seems to have been prevalent in Lanka, and was close to Asokan Brahmi. Another southern Parkrit (sic), called Tamil-Parkrit (sic) by Mahadevan is also close to Elu-prakrit”- (from ‘Regarding Thamilians and Inscriptions’: 2012: Chandre writing as ‘Gam Vaesiya’)

First, ‘Elu’ is not the name of any Prakrit but the name given for poetic Sinhala. Between centuries 10th and 15th A.D. written Sinhala “was internally diglossic, employing one “alphabet” for writing Sinhala poetry and one for Sinhala prose. The script was the same for both; the difference between the two was the number of permitted letters (aksaras), prose having fifty-seven, against thirty six for poetry. The alphabet for poetic Sinhala (elu) prevented the use of many Sanskrit loanwords (tatsamas) because it lacked letters for the aspirated consonants of Sanskrit, although Sanskrit loanwords became… common in Sinhala prose …in spoken Sinhala too, as well as in Sinhala Buddhist discourse: the Sanskritic dharmaya (Truth, the Buddha’s Teaching) is far more common than daham or dähäm found in elu…On the other hand, poetic Sinhala frequently privileged the ä vowel (e.g., dähäm) and the half-nasal, which are not found in Sanskrit or Pali…” –(Charles Hallisey, ‘Works and Persons in Sinhala Literary Culture’). Elu is not a Prakrit, but a spawn of the literary tradition that begot the Sigiri poetry (8, 9, 10 centuries A.D.) and eventually became the ideological ancestor of the language affected by the Hela Hawula.

Secondly, a man who boldly goes public with the statement that the prevalent language in Lanka (a Prakrit) was close to a script (Asokan Brahmi) is a man who has taken ‘pretense of knowledge’ to a level that no man has taken it before. Nevertheless, it is education such a man deserves not ridicule. I fought with my baser instincts to keep the ridicule at bay. It was hard, especially when I contemplated Exhibit B; “…it is very unlikely that such ethnic feelings or differences existed in, say, 5th or 6th century BCE. Those days Lanka most probably had its own form of southern Brahmi or Elu- Prakrit, very close to what we know today as ‘Tamil Brahmi’…” –(e mail note from Chandre to Michael Roberts)

Chandre’s Elu, a southern Prakrit is close to Asokan Brahmi. It’s also close to Tamil Prakrit (a fellow southern Prakrit). Even this is not enough closeness for Elu. It’s also very close to Tamil Brahmi. This is a linguistic ‘Bold and the Beautiful’. Elu is the eternally fascinating Brooke, who was recently accidently close to her daughter’s boyfriend, having been close earlier to the said daughter’s father, who was incidentally the husband of an older daughter, whose father she was also close to in the midst of being close to his son.

In reality the ancient languages are not so catholic and follow patterns more conducive to sanity. First it’s important to understand, in order to avoid gaffes like ‘The prevalent language of Lanka was close to Asokan Brahmi’, that Brahmi is an ancient script used to write many of South Asia’s languages before they developed their own vernacular scripts and is therefore considered ‘the ancestor of most of South Asia's modern vernacular scripts’(Coningham et al:96). ‘The earliest accepted examples of this script’ used to be ‘the pillar and rock inscriptions of the Mauryan emperor, Asoka, dating to the middle of the third century BC’. ‘Passage to India? Anuradhapura and the Early Use of the Brahmi Script’, Coningham et al: 1996, displaced Asokan Brahmi from this pioneer pedestal and announced that “Sherds inscribed with this script, recently found at Anuradhapura, with dates of the beginning of the fourth century BC, now represent its earliest dated examples anywhere in the subcontinent”. It countered the model that cast Sri Lanka as merely ‘the recipient of material culture diffused from more northerly regions’ and suggested that ‘Sri Lanka may have played a pivotal role in the development of Brahmi’ . Have to stop now. More next week.

Who is Chandre Dharmawardana?

A response to ‘What to do with Dharshanie Ratnawalli?’

Published in my column in The Nation on January 27, 2013 

By Darshanie Ratnawalli

I view with extreme concern Dr. Dharmawardana’s efforts to extricate himself from a past indiscretion. This was committed when he confided to Dr. Michael Roberts in an email note that the inscriptions of Lanka in the second century B.C. are really not Sinhala or Tamil and that the utmost that can be claimed was that a betting man would be justified in placing the odds on Sinhala because the Prakrit is close to Pali. This was the gist of the part of his email note, which by reason of its extraordinary asininity impressed me. It goes;

“I personally think there were no Damila or Sinhala in the 2nd century BC. The inscriptions are really not Sinhala or Tamil. The Sinhala has an advantage because the Prakrit is close to Pali, but I personally think the ethnic distinctions came up probably after wars of Dutugamunu…”

The lexical definition of asinine is ‘failing to exercise intelligence or judgment; ridiculously below average rationality’. A more asinine statement than the above cannot be imagined, unless it’s the following written by Chandre to excuse the above.

“This is not a statement of linguistic history, but a judgment about the onset of ethnic consciousness.”

It is indeed a statement on linguistic history. ‘The inscriptions are really not Sinhala or Tamil. The Sinhala has an advantage because the Prakrit is close to Pali…’ brings it firmly into the ambit of linguistic history. The primary purpose of the statement is to declare a personal belief that in the second century B.C. there were no ethnic distinctions, no ethnic labels. While this personal belief represents a new height of asininity, it was not (and is not, even now) my intention to deal with it (It demands its own separate space). My intention was to pass lightly over it and batten down on the real treasure; which is the appalling gap in Chandre’s knowledge about the language of the 2nd century B.C. inscriptions. ‘The Inscriptions are really not Sinhala or Tamil. The Sinhala has an advantage because the Prakrit is close to Pali....’ represents the attempts of a man to fill this knowledge gap with speculation arising from the said personal belief.

Would a man who had heard at least through hearsay, of a Geiger identifying the language of the stone Brahmi inscriptions of Lanka as the oldest form of the Sinhalese language, of a Senarat Paranavithana describing the same inscriptions as being in old Sinhala, of a James W. Gair talking about inscriptions in old Sinhala dating from the early second or late third centuries B.C. of an Iravatham Mahadevan declaring that among the inscribed potsherds found in Tamil Nadu, a small but significant group is in the Sinhala-Prakrit language written in the Early Sinhala-Brahmi script, have written that the inscriptions are really not Sinhala or Tamil? More critically, having said that and upon being exposed, what kind of a man continues to insist that what he said is consistent with what Geiger said? An asinine man. Chandre’s 'The inscriptions are really not Sinhala or Tamil’ is light years from being consistent with Geiger’s ‘The inscriptions are in the oldest form of Sinhalese called Sinhalese Prakrit’. They clash horribly.

I had just remarked in my 9th December 2012 column ‘Language Problem of Speaking Stones’;

“The number of academics in history and related disciplines together with those in unrelated disciplines but dabbling in history out of keen interest, who do not know what language the cave inscriptions of Lanka are written in, would fill a good sized tourist bus. This is a bold surmise based on three clues uncovered during my personal investigations.”

The third clue was none other than this email note from Chandre to Michael. To get permission to use it, I wrote to Michael Roberts first;

“Dear Dr. Roberts following is a note from Chandre D that you sent to me some time ago. In my last article, I talked of 3 clues that led me to believe that people are clueless about the Brahmi inscriptions. This is the third clue. Could you possibly write to Chandre D and get his permission for me to quote the red text as coming from him to illustrate the state of knowledge that exists in the public realm on the language of the Brahmi scripts?”

Here I appended the entire e mail note with the relevant portion marked in red. The whole was then forwarded by Roberts to Dharmawardana with this explanatory note (Cc to me);

“Chandre, I received this note from Darshanie Ratnawalli. Do please respond to her request. I believe both of you will benefit from exchanges of views and research findings. Michael”

The crux of this note, which was the request for the permission was somehow missed by Chandre so I tried again (Cc Roberts);

“Dear Dr. Dharmawardena. I understand that you are busy right now. At this stage, the only assistance I want from you is permission to use the first part of your email note to Dr. Roberts (which he sent to me some time ago) attributing it to you by name, in my next article as an illustrative example of the current state of public awareness on the language of the Brahmi scripts of Lanka. The part of your note I am interested in goes;…I want to clinically dissect the forces that may have resulted in the state of knowledge revealed in the above excerpt from you. May I assume I have your permission to refer to this as a communiqué from you?”

This time I seemed to get through and the rest is history. But after all these explanations, what sort of a man writes; “I was not aware of what Ratnawalli wanted, she gave no clues to it and did not ask for any clarifications… So I was surprised to see a newspaper article!”? An asinine man. .

Language problem of the speaking stones

Published in my column in The Nation on December 09, 2012 

By Darshanie Ratnawalli

                        The Cobra hood cave in Sigiriya donated around 2nd century B.C. by someone called Naguliya

I went to Sigiriya recently. At the entrance to one of the several caves, at the base of the rock, a guide was doing his thing with his group of white tourists. The cave had been an abode of the cave dwelling Buddhist monks of the 2nd, 3rd century B.C. and sported the typical cave inscription proclaiming whose donation to the Sangha it had been. A Department of Archeology plaque nearby gave the reading of the inscription and the background. The guide reeled off the words of the inscription, first in the original language and then in English, looking straight at the cave wall and not at the plaque. “What’s the language of the inscription?” asked one tourist. “Brahmi” replied the guide (pronouncing ‘a’ as a short vowel). “But I thought it was in Sinhalese” protested the tourist. “No, it’s in Brahmi” asserted the guide. At this point, I almost intervened to inform the tourist that Brahmi is a script, not a language and the inscription was in the language known variously as old Sinhalese, proto Sinhalese or Sinhalese Prakrit. But then, I held back because, for one thing the guides’ guild seemed pretty powerful there and for another, I don’t look ‘knowledgeable’.

Chin up guide, you are in venerable company. The number of academics in history and related disciplines together with those in unrelated disciplines but dabbling in history out of keen interest, who do not know what language the cave inscriptions of Lanka are written in, would fill a good sized tourist bus. This is a bold surmise based on three clues uncovered during my personal investigations. The first clue presented itself to my stunned eyes, while looking through some old comment threads in ‘The Lanka Academic’. In the 21st century, some members of that community had sat around in a cyber ambalama and yarned about ‘The Evolution of an Ethnic Identity’ by Indrapala and the most voluble fan of the book let out the cat. He uploaded a portion of the Tamil Householder’s (Dameda gahapati) terrace inscription from Lanka (2nd century B.C.), labeled it 200 B.C. Tamil, uploaded a contemporary, but run of the mill inscription without allusions to Dameda, labeled it 200 B.C. Sinhalese, compared the scripts of the two samples and asked throbbing with inter-ethnic fellowship, ‘aren’t these the same?’. It was a ‘duh’ moment, which another blogger used to maximum advantage; brutally pointing out that the Tamil Householder’s inscription is not in Tamil, that the compared scripts were the same because they were the same language. It’s difficult to accuse ‘The Evolution…’ as the source of this misdirection however.

The second clue to the fellowship of the clueless (on the language of the earliest stone inscriptions of Lanka) comes from a higher stratum of academia than a thread on ‘The Lanka Academic’. It’s in a Heidelberg Paper by Michael Roberts. “Older scholarship, including the works of Geiger, deemed the language of these inscriptions to be “Proto-Sinhala” or “Sinhala-Prakrit.” I am not in a position to say whether scholars today would support this conclusion…” – (Blunders in Tigerland: 2007).This is a frank admission of ignorance by a scholar who should nevertheless have done his basic homework in historical linguistics before writing this research paper. This is rather like a scientist saying ‘Even though older scientists like Isaac Newton believed in gravity, I am in no position to know if the present day scientists share that belief’ This lack of fundamental grounding is not beautiful, especially when an entire science, a fertile and vibrant academic discipline called historical linguistics exists, where it’s such a given that the earliest Brahmi stone inscriptions of Lanka are the extant samples of 3rd/2nd century B.C. version of Sinhalese.

Historical linguists tell us that ‘the Indo Aryan and hence Indo-European origin of Sinhala is now a matter of consensus among serious scholars’ (Gair: 1985). One thing they ‘can be sure is that the language was well established on the island by the third century B.C.’(ibid) The reason for this certainty is not only the widespread infestation of a large number of inscriptions ‘in old Sinhala dating from the early second or late third centuries B.C.’(Gair:1981) but also the fact that by this time the language had undergone spectacular indigenization (‘by that time the language had already undergone important changes that made it distinct from any of the Indo-Aryan languages of North India’-ibid). The main symptom of this spectacular indigenization is the complete loss of the aspirated consonants. What’s so marvelous about this is ‘To the best of my knowledge, no other IA language has undergone complete deaspiration’ (Gair: 1985). Considering that all other Indo-Aryan languages have held on like leeches to their aspirated consonants, historical linguists marvel at ‘the thoroughgoing and apparently sudden change in Sinhala, apparently following upon its transplantation to the island’ (ibid). What makes them so sure of the chronology of this phenomenon is the language of the earliest Lankan inscriptions, inscribed on stone in the script called Brahmi; “The fact that aspiration was lost in Sinhala somewhere before the third century is attested to by the inscriptional evidence, and particularly by fluctuations and backspellings, such as second century B.C. jhaya ‘wife’… or first century B.C. rajha ‘king…” (ibid)

More understanding and less condemnation

Published in my column in The Nation on November 18, 2012 

By Darshanie Ratnawalli

Ananda Wakkumbura is a man who has recently put behind him a daunting task: translating into Sinhalese ‘Sinhala Consciousness in the Kandyan Period’ by Michael Roberts. Here’s the kind of sentence which makes this a daunting task. ‘Secondly he imposes the gemeinschaft/gesellschaft distinction borrowed from Tonnies, in a tautological fashion to assert that these types of community lacked ‘a convergence of interest’ of the gesellschaften kind.’ When I met Wakkumbura recently, in my negligible capacity as an assister of this work, he happened to mention that Dharmasiri Bandaranayake had mailed him my first article on Indrapala. Wakkumbura expressed his reservations about the need to be so harsh on Prof. Indrapala. He was of the opinion that given the ethnically tense situation, in which the book was begotten, more understanding was required than condemnation. And besides, opposite such atrocities as the pogroms against the Tamils; 77, 83, etc. and the Bindunuwewa massacre of LTTE detainees under the aegis of SLFP stalwarts, the whole subject was of such trivial importance.

Stand on Merit

If Indrapala’s ‘The Evolution…’ was meant to be an academic work, it must stand or fall by its own intellectual and analytical merits and not shelter behind circumstances. However, there are those who feel that it is not an academic work, but a circumspect book that makes allowances for the heightened Tamil nationalism, and should be read allowing for the circumstances. More nauseatingly, there are those who feel that all academic work should be circumspect enterprises that make allowances for (either nurture or refrain from challenging) causes of the right sort. The burden of making allowances gets almost unbearable as the Sri Lanka we know is distorted beyond recognition by Indrapala’s speculations.

Early Languages

We have no idea of the languages spoken by the pre-historic Mesolithic people of this country. We have no idea of the language or languages spoken by the people who propagated the Early Iron Age culture in this country (900-300 B.C.). They are pre-literate societies. But when the literate phase dawns in Sri Lanka, at the start of the early historic period (from 300 B.C. conventionally), it spawns this humongous compass that shows us the linguistic and cultural direction of the country. This compass is none other than the infestation(over 1400) of cave inscriptions found all over Sri Lanka (except in the Northernmost part, where there are no caves), in the language, known variously, as proto-Sinhalese, Sinhalese Prakrit or old Sinhalese.

Indrapala of 1969, the objective scholar unhesitatingly calls this language Proto-Sinhalese as in; "We have also the evidence of three Brahmi cave inscriptions datable to about the second century B.C. for the presence of Tamils, presumably traders, in the Island. But here too the impression given by these inscriptions is that these Tamils were foreigners. Although the inscriptions were set up by the Tamils whose names are mentioned in them, the language is Proto-Sinhalese as in the case of all the other inscriptions of the Island at this time. But more important than this is that the recorders have made special mention of the fact that they were Tamils, which would indicate that they considered themselves to be distinct from, if not alien to, the general population just as much as the Sinhalese donors in the pre-Christian cave inscriptions of the Tamil country made known the fact that they were Sinhalese. In later times, too, we get instances of Tamils who made grants to temples outside the Tamil country recording the grants in the language of the area but making mention of the fact that they were Tamils.”

In contrast, Indrapala, 2005, ‘the allowances scholar’ attempts some shilly-shallying to misdirect the reader on the language of the cave inscriptions. He asks on page 90; “Was Hela the same as the language of the Brahmi cave inscriptions?” He answers a few sentences later; "The few scholars who have worked on the early inscriptions have expressed differing views on the language of these records and generally tended to avoid the issue of its connection with Hela."

Old Sinhala

This is in fact one of the clear-cut instances of naked dishonesty manifest in ‘The Evolution…’ Professor James W. Gair, a pre-eminent authority on South Asian linguistics calls it ‘Old Sinhala’ without any shyness in ‘Sinhala, an Indo Aryan Isolate’-(1981). "Sinhala Tradition has it that the group that brought the languages with them arrived on the date of the parinibbana… traditionally 544-543 B.C. As a matter of fact, somewhere around this time does appear to be a reasonable date, since we have inscriptions in old Sinhala dating from the early second or late third centuries B.C., and by that time the language had already undergone important changes that made it distinct from any of the Indo-Aryan languages of North India." In fact scholars studying the history of Sinhala phonology and the origins and the influences on that language, use old Sinhala of the cave inscriptions as a the specimen for the second major stage in the evolutionary pathway, that goes as Middle indo-Aryan to old Sinhala to Sinhala.

Devolution choices; a common man’s dilemma

Published in my column in The Nation on October 14, 2012 

By Darshanie Ratnawalli

What does the common man want? He wants among other things to be fair; to keep up at least a semblance of fairness and fair play. When the CFA came into being in 2002, and it looked like they were finally going to wrench Sri Lanka free, from the pincer-like grip of the integrating dynamic it had been held in for millennia, and harness it to a segregating dynamic, how did the common man feel? Did his token sense of fair play cry out or lie quiescent?

I rather think the latter. For one thing, at this stage, the common man was bored and could not be bothered. For another, by this time, certain ideas had floated into the common man’s ideology-sphere, which let him think, maybe a segregating dynamic was not such a bad thing; perhaps, ‘the context’ even demanded it. Let me give an illustrative example. Back in 2009 August, when I was much less informed than I am now, I wrote a long comment to http://indi.ca/2009/08/framing-the-elections/. Indi Samarajeeva, the blog editor, gave a response, which was a text book illustration of the insidious inroads the segregating dynamic had made into the common man’s psyche;

“If you go to the North and East they speak Tamil and they have their own culture and ideas. They are not South Indian ‘invaders’. The Sinhalese people were invaders too at some point, and the borders have been pretty porous. Even the Kandyan kings generally married Indian Tamil brides. I don’t think there’s any genetic dominion the Sinhalese have over the whole island.

If there is a blueprint for the country it’s the Constitution, and that calls for significant autonomy in the North and East. I think it is a very different place, especially based on language. They should have a strong Chief Minister and be able to appoint their own police, etc.”

Indi probably did not know it (which makes it all the more sinister), but this response stemmed from and contained an almost a word for word rendition, in layman’s language, of the definition of the ‘Nation’ given in Josef Stalin’s pamphlet ‘Marxism and the National and Colonial Question’. “It is a historically evolved, stable community of people, living in a contiguous territory as their traditional homeland, speaking a common language, having a common psychological make-up, manifested in a community of culture’

Nevertheless, in Sri Lanka certain factors undermined the common man’s belief in the autonomy justifying Otherness of the North and the East. A common man in Sri Lanka could get pretty dismissive of that particular Otherness. How?; “Indeed, if one goes further back in time to the era of the Rajarata civilisation in, say, the fifth to twelfth centuries CE, as Wilson and every Sri Lankan knows only too well, the eastern regions as well as the Jaffna Peninsula were ‘the traditional habitat’ of Sinhala speakers. ‘Tradition’ and ‘history’ constitute a cake that can be cut in many ways.”– (Michael Roberts, ‘Narrating Tamil Nationalism: Subjectivities and Issues’)

Indeed, it was possible, for a common man able to access higher frequencies of the Lankan ideology-sphere, to come out of it all saying; “Pah, Otherness, all smoke and mirrors!” Here’s how;
“…to the misintelligence among the Lisbon authorities that Jaffna was inhabited by the Sinhalese, the Jaffna mudaliyars owed their survival…Such misintelligence was not confined to Lisbon. The Count of Vidigueira, after serving as viceroy at Goa for 7 years (in two terms) and after a term as President of the India Council in Lisbon, still believed in 1626 that the inhabitants of Jaffna were Sinhalese. ...Even Fernão de Queiros’ work was not free from this error. See pp. 357, 361, 366, 371 etc” – (T.B.H Abeyasinghe, ‘Jaffna under the Portuguese’)

Something else was also floating around in the ideology-sphere, casting an inescapable shadow. This was a chronic, deep seated inability to see the north as Other. This finds the most striking expression in one of Ahalepola’s long, haranguing letters to D’oyly (27 November 1811, reproduced in Roberts: 2004);

“… the host of Seyde Malabars landing at Jaffna, having offered presents to the Gods and Lords, who at that time enjoyed the Sovereignty, and obtained Permission merely to remain trading on the Sea Coast, and (thus) residing, when a considerable time had elapsed, as the [sic: “they”?] displaying omens of their destruction, commenced War in hostility to the great Command, and capturing also a few Countries whilst they are residing, Dutugeymanu God and Lord Supreme, like the great Prince of Lions cleaving the Crowns of Elephants, as foreign Enemies attaining to the Sovereignty, having destroyed and expelled the Host of Seyde Malabars, like a gross Mass (?) before a gigantic Wind, increasing the Prosperity of the World and Religion in the happy Isle of Lanka…”

History, Historians and the dustbins of History

Published in my column in The Nation on September 30, 2012 

By Darshanie Ratnawalli

The DPhil (Oxon.) who lent me his copy of ‘The Evolution of an Ethnic Identity’ by K.Indrapala had written with a scornful pen on the last page of the preface; “So: Indrapala is NOT a charlatan, a political animal. Indrapala seeks intellectual rigour.” This is the impression the author seeks to create by marshalling, in his preface and introduction, a colourful arsenal of invective against historians who slip up. These ‘charlatans and pseudo scholars’ we are told, are ‘political animals’ who ‘have not only compromised the very fundamentals of intellectual decency but are now in the process of subverting the study of history for personal ends and political expediency’. ‘Such lumpen intellectuals’ do not ‘want the real past, but only a past that suits their purpose’ and undoubtedly ‘belong in the dustbin of history’. ‘Now, I’, Professor Indrapala seems to say, ‘am above all that’.

But he hasn’t been above all that at all. The real past remains unexplored in ‘The Evolution…’. Even the past that has been explored by the author in 1965 and 1969 is blocked out, not because the findings are out of date or have been superseded by better research, but merely to make way for a past that suits his purpose in 2005. The bitter struggle in ‘The Evolution…’ between the real past and the past that suits the purposes of K. Indrapala of 2005 will inspire many future writers to attain unmatched heights of caustic wit.

What drew me to ‘The Evolution…’ was the following email from Dr. Michael Roberts, sent in response to ‘Communal claims on common land’;

“The use of the Dutch map, supported by Codrington, to reveal the fact that the “traditional homelands” of the Tamils in their heartland were also Sinhala homelands at one stage was both innovative and useful. You should develop the theme further.

But also attend to the “preceding prologue” (and Indrapala’s failures and sleight of hand in this regard.)

1. Given the ancient provenance of Tamil in southern India in the last centuries B.C. and the narrowness of the Palk Strait it is probable that there were Tamil speakers in JP and northwest THEN.

2. But with the development and expansion of the Anuradhapura kingdom from the 1-2nd Century B.C. and especially in the millennium A.D. it is probable that these peoples were Sinhala-cized and absorbed into the demographic majority (though south Indian trading communities emerged newly or remained in Mannar and such places).

3. From memory what I find striking in Indrapala’s work is the ABSENCE OF PROOF THAT TAMIL-SPEAKERS WERE found in JP in the first millennium A.D.; and the total neglect of the indirect evidence from the Sigiiri graffiti. Instead he spends (1) an inordinate amount of time on archeological evidence from the first millennium B.C. – which by its nature says little about linguistic practice and thinking; and (2) Paranavitana bashing –an easy target if you select work from Paranavitana’s lunatic phase.”

The almost staggering scope presented by ‘The Evolution…’ for the exploration of a professional historian’s odyssey from the heights of research acuity to the depths of a lumpen intellectual’s dustbin, remains, as yet, largely unexplored. One person who explored it, was Bandu de Silva (‘History Writing in an Ethnic Debate Environment. Indrapala on Evolution of Tamil Identity’, in The Island). Now on the eve of having a more academic review of ‘The Evolution…’ published in the JRAS, DGB reminisced about the writing of that newspaper article;

“After the article, I had an email from KNO to say that I had done something that our University men do not do. I sent my Newspaper Draft to several historians. None even replied except the late Dr Karl Goonewardene asking me to go ahead. The point is I am no accredited historian though I studied history and taught history at the University of Ceylon for a time. I had to be careful as I was taking on a reputed research scholar. Now I am well equipped to meet Indrapala. I was so annoyed with our historians that I addressed an email circular letter to them…”

“Look, what Sri Lankan historian has written during the past 10 years, except Nira Wickramasinghe? K. M. de Silva had been incapacitated and Leslie Gunawardana died” snapped Michael Roberts to this writer re the silence of the professional historians. Nira Wickramasinghe, of course couldn’t be expected to write on this subject, it being outside her period (which is the British and the modern) and Leslie Gunawardana had his own problems, the most publicized of which was the readiness to assign a late date (12th century A.D.) to the development of the Sinhala identity at the drop of a hat, without doing even the basic home work. ‘Dampiya Atuva Gatapadaya’ a 10th century work setting out the chapter and verse of the Sinhala identity being, literally, a closed book to this ancient period historian was exposed by K. N.O Dharmadasa.

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.

Pre-Colonial Sinhala Buddhist Consciousness - Fact or Fiction?

Published in my column in The Nation on July 22, 2012 

By Darshanie Ratnawalli

Is religious rivalry in Sri Lanka a modern thing begotten and sustained by another modern thing; the Sinhala Buddhist consciousness? Or is it an old thing, which owes its genesis to something deeper and older? The latter of course. The former is a 1980s 90s delusion of a particular Ism; Post-orientalism. This school of thought, which traces the genesis of Sinhala Buddhist consciousness to the colonial encounter, has been thoroughly licked. Usually in journalese, one can only say smugly ‘that theory is now totally debunked’. Space issues and complexity usually forbid anything else. But in this case, the debunking has been so data rich that one itches to demonstrate.

The reason rivalry and anti-Other discourse get spotlighted so much in discussions on Sinhala Buddhist consciousness is because they are strong and conclusive evidence of a ‘We-ness’ standing out in a sea of ‘Otherness’. The Buddhistness of the pre-colonial Sinhalese, the post-orientalists have claimed, failed to develop into a distinct brand. A brand’s characteristic pre-occupation with maintaining a distinct identity that sets it apart from other brands, they say, was conspicuously absent. The pre-colonial Buddhism of the Sinhalese, insist the post-orientalists, did not maintain sharply defined boundaries (policed by strict brand custodians with false-belief detectors), between itself and say Saivism.

There indeed was an unusual degree of tolerance. Buddhism has borrowed from and incorporated other belief systems and Hindu deities. Siva and Visnu and an extensive Company of minor gods share venerated space within Buddhist temples. At times, due to Hindu influences, even the way Buddhism was practiced by the Sinhalese was changed in essence, not just in trimmings and trappings. Hindu ritual occupied pride of place in medieval royal courts, Brahmin ‘purohitas’ galore and kings dispensed multi-religious patronage.

The defining failing of post-orientalism is in interpreting all this to be proof of an absence of a Sinhala Buddhist consciousness. To them, the proof of a consciousness lies in sharp Othering and unremitting rivalry. Such a love-fest as the above could only have existed because there was no Sinhala Buddhist consciousness, no such brand as ‘Sinhala Buddhist’ to sustain rivalry.

Post-orientalists have been informed by numerous scholars that if only they’d bother to look, Sinhala Buddhism “often appears to be at once conservative and mutable, defensive and tolerant”-(Alan Strathern:2007) and that “sometimes new religious forms were attacked outright and sometimes they retained an integrity that would tug Sinhalese religiosity in new directions”- (Strathern:2007); that far from being evidence of no consciousness, these are the defining features of this particular consciousness; that far from indicating absence of a brand, these comprise important brand attributes. Post-orientalists have not been able to take this on board because multi-layered reasoning is not their thing.

Into this sea of fuzzy logic, other scholars have sailed with plenty of evidence of rivalry and sharp Othering. ‘They want rivalry? We will give them rivalry’ is the spirit that conclusively broke the back of post orientalism. Rivalry that has its wellspring in one major colonial encounter (with the Colas) in the late Anuradhapura period (latter half of the first millennium) and flows like a river across the centuries (carrying Saivism as its main flotsam) until it comes to the second major colonial encounter (with the western powers) and gets its second cargo of flotsam (Christianity) not as an original burden but strangely fused with the first burden.

Michael Roberts: 2004 informs us “...one should recall that anti-Saivite expressions had entered a range of Sinhala texts intermittently from the late Anuradhapura period onwards (See Sahassavattuppakarana, Saddharmakaraya and Rasavahini …Also Culavamsa…This list is not exhaustive.)” It was Charles Hallisey: 1988 (we are told by Strathern: 2006) who first highlighted the role of anti-Saivite and anti-Brahmanical discourse way back into the first millennium.

Roberts: 2004; “In the folksy poetry of the Budugunalankaraya the god Siva is even presented as “he … who wears a leather garment around his loins, he who holds the maid Uma over half his body, … [and] who burnt Kama’s body to ash.” In depicting the polluted and libidinous character of Saivism, such expressions were designed to render the religion repulsive to Buddhist listeners and readers”. Strathern: 2007 talks more about pre- colonial Sinhala Buddhist boundary erection against its ideological Other;

“Hierarchs wrote denunciations of the insidious influence of bhakti or ridiculed the behavior of Saivite ascetics, notably in the fifteenth-century texts Saddharmalamkaraya, Saddharmaratnavaliya, and Budugunalamkaraya.

The latter, written c. 1470, reveals a world of religious competition between opposing Saivites, Vaisnavas, devotees of Agni, Buddhists and Jains. The great educational centres- the pirivenas –that flourished in Parakramabahu VI’s reign would have prepared their students for inter-religious debate through the comparative study of Brahmanic texts. (We know also that the Brahmajala Sutta, which discusses a wide range of metaphysical positions as a list of 62 false beliefs, was taught at the Karagala monastery of the vanavasi sect in Parakramabahu VI’s time,…) … We can say then that Sinhala Buddhists could have recourse to something like a conception of heresy, if by that we mean a conception of false and even dangerous doctrines that require vigorous denunciation. The suggestion that it was not until the Christian challenges of the nineteenth century that that Buddhism was configured as a ‘religion’ (or ‘a deployable ideological entity’) can therefore mask a long and vibrant history of theological opposition.”

In a sense, it’s on ground primed by R.F. Young and G.S.B. Senanayaka in 1998 that Roberts and Strathern are playing. It was their work ‘The Carpenter-Heretic. A Collection of Buddhist Stories about Christianity from 18th Century Sri Lanka’ ’that irrevocably undermined the assertion, that the kind of Sinhala Buddhist consciousness required to sustain religious rivalry did not arrive until the modern era. These texts of heresy were inscribed in palm leaf in 1762 and emerged from a background of non-textualized lay Buddhism. They inspired Young and Senanayake to come up with their fascinating theory (what I’d like to call the ‘fused flotsam in the river of rivalry theory’). The theology of these texts fuses and merges Christianity and Saivism together, or assimilates Christianity to long-standing tropes defaming and demonizing Saivism. It’s common in these stories for the same characters to crop up in different contexts under different names without losing their identities. One such character is Isvara or Siva who is presented as the fount of all evil. But Isvara also appears as Ispittu or the Holy Spirit. The Christian God and the Saivite god were thus merged. (Roberts: 2004 and Strathern: 2006). In other words, Christianity did not dig this particular trench in this particular ground, merely stepped into a trench already dug.

Even without all this, there were clues that could have alerted the post-orientalists to the possible unsoundness of their theory on sacred space and false belief as modern concepts. Both concepts; mithyadrushti (false belief) as well as Lanka as a sacred space for Buddhism (dhammadeepa) possess wide and ancient currency in Lankan communiqués. There is that striking and famous passage in Pujavaliya, written in the 13th century in a spirit of resurgence and hope after Kalinga Magha’s ravages and which neatly crossed the written- oral divide by being a galloping good read in simple Sinhala (Personal experience. Read it and Saddharmaratnavaliya at 15. A good many of the stories have a delicious earthy sexuality) and passing easily into the repertoire of the illiterati via memorizing during customary read aloud or chanting at religious ceremonies. Here’s the passage;

“This island of Lanka belongs to the Buddha himself. It is like unto a treasury filled with the triple Gem (Buddha, Dhamma, Sangha). Therefore the residence of false believers in this island will never be permanent as that of the demons (yakkhas) of bygone days was not permanent. Even though a non-Buddhist king may some time rule this island by force, his lineage will never be established in this country. This is a special power of the Buddha. Therefore, this island of Lanka is befitting only for the kings of right belief, and their lineal heritage will certainly be established and flourish.”

- (Translated in Walpola Rahula: 1974.)

The ‘Demonic Projection’ of 1983 - a giant exorcism

Published in my column in The Nation on July 08, 2012 

By Darshanie Ratnawalli

The duo Nissan and Stirrat and the solo Bruce Kapferer were the anthropologists who discovered a unique and distinctive dynamic in the way the Sinhalese disposed of their Enemy Other. This, they said, was directed by the compulsions embedded within the Sinhalese cultural DNA. These cultural compulsions, said they, led the Sinhalese to see the Enemy Other as demons and caused them to automatically go into demon subjugation mode, which in turn produced some interesting styles of violence, manifested most memorably in July, 1983.

In 1987, Nissan and Stirrat showcased “strong parallels between representations of the (Tamil) terrorist and representations of the demonic” in the world of the Sinhalese. This demonization, they reasoned was what caused the special “styles of violence” in which the Tamil victims were “cut into pieces” or “doused in petrol and set on fire”. July 1983, said they, was not only about teaching the Tamils a lesson, but also “forcing them to submit to a superior power” just like the demons must submit to the Buddha and his teachings.

Academic hoaxes
Parallel to N and S, between 1985 and 1988, another adventurer ventured into the demon hunting psyche of the Sinhalese of Sri Lanka. This was Bruce Kapferer. He was believed by his peers to possess extensive knowledge of sorcery myths and rituals of the Sinhalese and to have used such knowledge to expound on how the Sinhalese do to their demonized enemies what they do to their demons. Supposedly clued in by a wealth of esoteric knowledge, Kapferer described how the violent acts of July 1983 “manifest the violence of [the process of] cosmic regeneration” encoded within “the practices of sorcery ritual”, how the passionate acts of assailants can be “likened to a giant exorcism”. He declared: “Acting with the force of their own cosmic incorporation, the Sinhalese rioters fragment their demonic victims, as the Tamils threatened to fragment them, and by so doing resubordinate and reincorporate the Tamil demon in hierarchy.”

After one year spent living in southern Sri Lanka researching and despite being assisted by a local research assistant, now dead but whose expertise in the relevant fields is generally well thought of, Bruce Kapferer ended up believing that Sinhalese folk exorcism ritual involved fragmenting and disintegrating of demons. This was one of the most audacious academic hoaxes of the 1980s and 90s. Its success is due partly to the obfuscating fogs that surrounded Sri Lanka at that time and partly to the nature of Kapferer’s target audience; an exclusive constituency of his peers, mostly nonresident, non Sri Lankan and all beautifully non-cognoscenti. To most of them, the sorcery rituals of the Sinhalese of Sri Lanka and the puberty rites of the tribes of the north Amazon would be fully interchangeable if shorn of the costumes and stage trappings.

Exorcism
“In the cultural world of the Sinhalese, the disintegration of demonic beings and naraka minissu is a conventional form of punishment, a just act.” proclaimed Dr Michael Roberts (Roberts 2004:125), a staunch, non cognoscenti Kapferer follower. Most of these, subconsciously primed on the Christian exorcism traditions, where demons are forces of fragmentation and disintegration, found it only too plausible that the Sinhalese too should seek to fragment and disintegrate their demons. What they would have found implausible is the premise that Kapferer, a colleague, would try to pull the academic wool over their eyes. That Kapferer was assisted in his research by Chandra Vitharana, a repository of local expertise, in their opinion, would also have militated against such an idea.

Little did they know when they enthusiastically hitched their wagons to Kapferer’s caravan, that in the sorcery traditions of Sri Lanka, no demon is ever fragmented. Because the demons are mandated by the Buddha himself, to afflict human beings, subject to the condition that when called forth and propitiated with offerings, they should accept the offerings, cure the afflicted and leave. It is this warrant, which gives the Sinhalese exorcism ritual its distinctiveness. The Warrant prescribes an exorcism mechanism of placating, negotiating and dialogue with the demons instead of a Kapferersque ritual involving fragmenting, disintegrating, burning up, torturing or manhandling of the demons.

Buddhist tradition
In common with the Christian exorcism tradition, the sorcery myths of the Sinhalese too, declare that no demon can withstand the power of the Lord Buddha. They cannot stay in a place where the Buddha’s power is in the ascendancy. Invoking His name makes the demons to burn all over. To subjugate the demons entering the world and afflicting humans, the Buddha visited their habitat, ‘Sakwala Gala’ and made it burning hot. Then the demons were intimidated and appealed, “Lord, we are wretched creatures. Spare us. Have mercy”. The Buddha was compassionate and granted The Warrant, which said in effect, “Go forth and afflict but...”

Yet, in the Sinhalese exorcism ritual, this original subjugation scene never finds expression. It starts, stays with and ends with The Warrant, because unlike the Christian exorcism ritual where the priest is a proxy for a Higher Power, the ‘kattadiya’ is merely an executor of the human part of the bargain laid down in The Warrant. The Warrant has two inbuilt limitations, one is that the demons are expected to hold up their end of the deal; cure and leave, if the humans hold up theirs; propitiate with ritual and offering. Demons, also, are forbidden ever to ask for human sacrifices.

Kapferer’s thesis that the assailants of 1983 and 1989 both JVP and State, saw the victims targeted for literal fragmentation, i.e. mutilation and dismemberment, as demons of some sort, metaphorically speaking, is untenable. If those Sinhalese assailants had indeed seen their victims as demons due to some deep-seated cultural conditioning, their physical response to them would not have been cutting, chopping, hacking, stabbing or dismembering. The Sinhalese cultural response to demons flows from the concept of The Warrant and involves recognizing and fulfilling to the extent that is practicable, a basic need of the demon, which has been legitimized by The Warrant. Fragmenting or disintegrating the demon is never an option. The folk Buddhist tradition does not confer even on the Buddha, the will to fragment a demon. All this Kapferer could have learnt by saving his research grant and reading among others, ‘The Folk Drama of Ceylon’ by Sarachchandra, in the comfort of his Australian home.

UTHR (J) forges ahead without narrow ethnic agendas!

Published in my column in The Nation on June 10, 2012 

By Darshanie Ratnawalli

This is a horror story. It follows a classic plotline of the genre; the gradual emergence of the hidden revenant from under the guise of apparent goodness. At night, during a thunder storm, the hero would be necking in the car with his beautiful girlfriend (who is really the female revenant, a malignant supernatural force in human guise). Suddenly, in a flash of lighting, for a fraction of a second, he would see the beloved face as the face of a rotting corpse. The next moment, it would be the familiar beautiful face and he would dismiss the revelation as a trick of the light. But these sightings will intensify during the coming days, until…

The equivalent moment in my horror story comes when an intense bloke with little warmth but earnest and assiduous, a Calvinist to the bone, enjoying extremely good press for passionate defense of human rights, the recipient of an Amnesty International award in recognition of same, tries to straddle the moral high ground and slips. He pontificates in glorious vein (doing the beautiful girlfriend number); “Social and political forces with narrow ethnic or religious ideological trappings continue to undermine democracy in most of the developing nations… There is only one way forward. An initiative to forge a broad multi-ethnic and multi religious movement that challenges these narrow ethnic and religious agendas… While the Government and Sinhalese chauvinism must be fought through alliances with Muslims and Sinhalese who understand the dangers…” And then voila, the sudden glimpse of the rotting corpse underneath in the shape of an earnest invoking of the Tamil community’s claim on the North and the East. The bloke is none other than Rajan Hoole and this horror flick is shown in UTHR (J) special report 34.

The paragraph that afforded me my first, fleeting glimpse of the revenant under the skin of UTHR(J), straddles pages 9 and 10 of the special report 34; “Instead of showing generosity, the Government made maximum mileage of the misery it imposed on Tamil civilians to solicit funds from reluctant donors to pay for the extralegal incarceration of IDPs and for other projects with ulterior aims, such as resettlement or development schemes that could change the ethnic demographics of the north and east to further weaken the Tamil community’s claim on those areas.

The fear that the Government will not allow the IDPs to resettle in all the areas they inhabited before the war, and will instead introduce new Sinhalese settlements and their familiar consequences would remain a real fear for the Tamils. …Meanwhile the Government appears totally indifferent to the squalor of the IDPs. The effect of its actions amounts to the decimation of a people by crippling them from birth through deprivation, routine harassment and dirt.”

What left such a profound impression of horror on me was the fact that they were not even bothering to camouflage the chauvinism with a democratic spin, i.e. ‘demographics confer political clout in a democracy and systematic plans to deprive minority communities of regional political clout they have traditionally enjoyed by changing established demographics are not exactly cricket’. Even that would have sounded dodgy without definite evidence of a systematic agenda. For example it’s not enough to show that the President got up one morning full of plans for Northern development and North-South highways and remarked to his brothers, “you know what all this would ultimately lead to, don’t you fellas?” and they remarked with relish “yes demographic change!” and looked like cats with cream. You need to show systematic manipulation of the system, to exclude or sideline the Tamil component of the population from participating in the enterprise, in order to bring about the desired demographic result.

However, where was I? Ah yes being horrified at Hoole’s chauvinism and hypocrisy. This horror led me to ask the opinion of someone who (in my perception) had always been liberal with the scorn for Sinhala chauvinism but trodden softly, like through fields of Tulip, when it came to anything that could be reasonably be interpreted as Tamil chauvinism. This person is none other than Dr. Michael Roberts who replied to my query in an email dated August 2011;

“Note that Rajan and the UTHR cluster in the north were caught in the middle in the period 1987-2009; and that both Rajan and Sritharan had to go into hiding from the LTTE. In short they were in extreme danger once Rajani T was assassinated. Even in Colombo Rajan moved around and when I set up a meeting with him once circa 2001 had to wait his call via Nesiah and for them to arrange a meeting.

He is an intense bloke with little warmth but earnest and assiduous. A Calvinist to the bone. This does not of course preclude errors of judgment but he will in my view never concoct material in the manner of Channel 4, Darusman etc. Whether he accepts or reprints testimony from liars is another matter.

If Rajan is buying into the standard claims re the Eastern Province as part of the “traditional homelands” then I would challenge him.

Re the present fear that the present govt is going to settle Sinhalese in areas that housed Tamils in the recent past (not just the pre-48 past): in voicing this fear Rajan is moving with the tide of articulate Tamil opinion (and some anti-govt Sinhalese). As far as I know this fear is unsubstantiated and has not come to pass but I have an open mind on the issue.

As for his comments on the IDP camps as “extra-legal” and having terrible conditions, my response would be (a) yes extra-legal but requisite in the interests of the rest of the population on a short-term basis and (b) the conditions were not that terrible and a remarkable job was done by govt and NGO and INGO agencies in catering to those people. On this issue he is speaking from the cloisters in Colombo or wherever.

In 1987-20009 Rajan and Co were in a crunch sandwich situ between Sinhala-dominated state and the LTTE (with latter as greater threat). NOW with the LTTE out their structured political situation is that of a former Tamil dissident faction that pursues its Tamilness by taking up Tamil grievances and thus liable to press exaggerations, pedantic claims and unrealistic demands.”

Can you blame him?

Published in my column in The Nation on March 25, 2012 
By Darshanie Ratnawalli

I wonder if it behoves me to say something about THE CURRENT ISSUE instead of being so stuck in the past and its different presentations. I could, but then there is very little emotional satisfaction to be had in holding up a spotlight to mediocrity. “To employ Pinter’s language, too many Sinhala wives and too many Sinhala children wanted peace, and so we killed as many Tamils as necessary. We just killed them. And for so many today, that’s ok.” That is Sanjana Hattotuwa providing the mediocrity (in his column last week in this very newspaper). And here’s Godfrey Gunatilleke providing the spotlight (in 'Truth and Accountability : The Last Stages of the War in Sri Lanka', an evaluation of the UN panel report on SL);

“…it is difficult to understand how the Panel ignores the facts given in its own account of the LTTE regarding its use of the civilians as buffer. …all clearly indicating that the LTTE deliberately integrated the civilians into the battlefield. The Panel…describes the army action in breaking into the NFZ and dividing it into two to separate the civilians from the LTTE cadres and freeing about 100,000 civilians. (para 109)It also reports how soldiers rescued civilians who escaped the LTTE killings during a mass attempt by civilians to break out. It also accepts that the eventual outcome of the operation was the release of the vast majority of civilians over 290,000 who were held by the LTTE. And after all this evidence which the Panel itself has collected, it concludes that the operation was aimed at the indiscriminate and systematic killing of a large section of the Tamil population and that the release of hostages was not an objective of government. The panel refuses to consider the government position that the military operation was launched with the objective of defeating the LTTE in order to free Sri Lankan citizens from LTTE control. In the panel’s view the government was operating in total disregard of the civilian population.

…There are significant omissions in the report. The report omits all mention of past actions and polices that may provide a more informed approach and better understanding of the actions of government in the Vanni operation than what is provided by the panel. There is no mention of the transformation the army had undergone and their visible improvement in discipline in respect of humanitarian rules of war. There is no reference to the war in the East immediately prior to the Vanni offensive and the very low level of civilian casualties in that operation which also had a hostage situation in Vakeneri. Such an account would have given credence to the government’s policy of “zero civilian casualties”. There is also no mention of government’s uninterrupted delivery of social welfare services to LTTE controlled areas prior to the commencement of the operation.”

Back to Sanjana; “Accountability is most stridently demanded and advocated today by an international community that tacitly supported the present government to treat collateral deaths of Tamil civilians as inevitable and necessary to end the war.” This is an untruth, the result of retrospective projection. There was no tacit acceptance at the time. The particular international community he means, best exemplified by Hilary Clinton were foaming at the mouth, braying for cease fire and pawning the ground preparatory to charging. They would have charged if they could have but were strategically held at bay and checkmated at every step of the way. The next spotlight (Michael Roberts: Realities of war: Frontline: written end April 2009) is switched on to show how.

“On April 22, Hillary Clinton told the world that “a terrible humanitarian tragedy” was taking place in Sri Lanka and demanded a halt in the fighting so that “we could secure a safe passage for as many of the trapped civilians as possible”.

The lady didn’t know it but she stood checkmated;

“Remarkably, for a superpower leader with access to up-to-date information Clinton appeared to have been some 48 hours behind breaking events: namely, the escape of some 107,000 Tamil “civilians” (doubtless including Tiger cadre who had given up the fight) from their hell-hole situation after a commando operation carried out by the Sri Lanka Army on the night of April 19-20. Alternatively, one must conclude that Clinton read this miraculous tale as something that spelt a humanitarian disaster – hence the use of the egg metaphor.”

Today, it may be convenient to forget the totally unexpected and innovative twists that deterred much awaited responses by challenging the stereotypical base on which they were invited;

“As I arrived in Sri Lanka on April 17, I told Kumari Jayawardena that the ground situation facing the army was labyrinthine. I could not, I said, see how it could move forward without generating disastrous death rates. Yet, today, we know that the commando operation was one for the textbook: it resulted in relatively few non-combatant deaths and created a path for streams and streams of Tamils to cross the lagoon and the beach over the next 2-3 days, roughly 110,000 people making this little epic journey. This, for me, was better than the tale of Moses crossing the Red Sea. It was both elevating and saddening.

It was distressing because of the condition of some of these people, displayed so starkly on camera, bespeaking the privation they had undergone in the immediate past. Indeed, as one or two died of dehydration or starvation while being bussed or airlifted by the military to the nearest hospitals in Vavuniya, one knew, now, why “the people of Tamil Eelam” had turned their back on the Eelam demand and the LTTE.”

Then too, the numbers game itself, as played at this stage, held the interventionists at bay.

“Take Nirmala Rajasingam’s passionate appeal in the British newspaper Independent on April 24. … Rajasingam also insisted that the government’s claim that there were few civilian casualties “defy reason,” and spoke of “huge civilian losses through indiscriminate fire”. …But what exactly is the count of those “civilians” killed as against those who have fled the coop in the past 5-6 months? A U.N. report dated April 24 estimated the death toll among civilians at 6,432, with those injured being estimated at 13,946. These figures must be qualified by two sets of facts: (a) they include individuals who stepped on LTTE mines and those shot by Tigers (or killed by suicide bombers) as they fled; and (b) a few of these civilians would be new conscripts who had not been issued with uniforms. Our adjectives must be relative. So, let us place these numbers in a comparative context beside the figure of 1,75,714 people who reached the government lines by April 24, with roughly 68,000 having escaped before April 20 and 107,000 in that remarkable moment between April 20 and 23.

The dead 6,432 make up roughly 4 per cent of those who have survived. Add the injured, some 13,000 according to the same U.N. report, and one has 20,000 casualties [caused by both sides] set against roughly 170,000 freed. While the figures are not to be laughed at, the death score is not “huge” while talk of “extermination” in “Dark victory”, displays mind-boggling bias and/or credulity… If there had been no restraint at all in the army offensive during the past six months, I can assure her that we would have had a death toll in the 30,000-50,000 range. As caveat let me stress that this claim does not mean that there was no cavalier bombing and artillery fire on some occasions.”

Indeed it was only after the war was over that somebody got savvy about the inadequacy of the pickings accruing from the numbers game and belatedly upped the stakes to 40 000 and more to fit the charge of unrestrained violence.

Talking of proportionality, I am sure to be in violation of its rules in using these particular spotlights on this particular mediocrity. Much too powerful for the task. Instead of merely showing up the mediocrity in the target statements, they also reveal the primary source of that mediocrity and end up exposing the dimensions of Sanjana’s mental equipment. Now did we really need to see that? This is why I prefer looking at the distant past. Much more exciting and the exposures are rarely so indecent.

Tales of fusion under a hegemonic umbrella

Published in my column in The Nation on March 4, 2012 
By Darshanie Ratnawalli

Some historians are good people who are ideologically excited by how harmoniously the multicultural motif lies on the landscape of this country’s past. They contemplate the Nayakkar accession to the throne of Sinhale, the medieval incorporation of South Indian immigrants and religious cults and the whole cultural syncretism thing with uncontaminated delight;

“Dravidian influence on Sinhalese society appears quite considerable…The Sinhalese literature of the period, specially works like the Pujavaliya and the Saddharmalankaraya, bear evidence of Tamil influence in so far as Tamil words are identifiable in these works. Indeed certain whole passages in the Dambadeni Asna are more akin to Tamil than to Sinhalese…..A whole range of personal names in use among the Sinhalese such as those which bear the prefix Tenna, Ponna, Alaha and the suffix peruma, koon and the like are distinctly of Tamil origin…….dictum of the sixteenth century Sinhalese poet Alagiyawanna,….a fool he is who has not mastered the Simhala, Tamil, Sanskrit and Pali languages…Throughout the long history of Sri Lanka Buddhism and Hinduism,…coexisted side by side, literally almost, in an atmosphere of harmony and concord. Hindu deities, particularly Siva and Visnu, in addition to an extensive minor pantheon, were housed in the premises of Buddhist temples and continued to be venerated by Buddhists throughout the island. In the medieval Sinhalese court Hindu ritual occupied the pride of place…”

- (A. Liyanagamage, Society State and Religion in Pre-modern Sri Lanka: 106-107)

When they carry on like this it acts as an incitement for other historians to pour some cold water on their euphoria. For, of course, the whole thing is much more layered and a big part of being an adult is being attentive to layers.

You won’t see the cohabitation of Buddhism and Hinduism in pre modern Lanka in its proper perspective unless you viewed it in the contrasting illumination thrown off by the whole ash thing.

“the sangharajjuruvan (Saranankara) and (other) leading monks, having failed in the attempt to preach and persuade the king to give up his heretical practice of anointing himself with ash, declared ‘we cannot sustain the sasana in cooperation with this heretical Tamil,’ and the monks of (the) Malvatte (temple) and radalavaru (“aristocrats”) taking counsel (decided) ‘Let us place some other worthy person as our king…’”

– (Sasanavatirna Varnanawa/K.N.O Dharmadasa 1979).

This ash episode featured in the 1760 rebellion against Kirti Sri Rajasinha, the second king of the Nayakkar lineage . One outcome of the rebellion was that “… the Sangha were reconciled after Kirti Sri gave up his ‘heretical’ practices and continued with added zeal his policy of being the lavish patron of Buddhism…..The king placed the blame for the rebellion upon himself and not only gave up the practice of anointing ash, but went so far as to ban the use of ash in preparation of ola-leaf manuscripts!...”- (K.N.O.-1979).

 Kirti Sri (as well as all the Nayakkar kings) was probably always in a state of dynamic equilibrium between ‘heretical Tamil’ and ‘amhakam sihalindo’ (this is what the author of the late 18th century installment of Culavamsa calls Kirti Sri, meaning ‘our Sihala king’ and ‘our happy, sublime Sihala ruler’), and after getting over the ash hurdle ruthlessly steered the equation towards ‘amhakam sihalindo’. Apparently as a definitive marker of Saivism, ash was a ricocheting, corrosive motif regardless of how many Hindu gods dwelt inside Buddhist temples. It were to surface again in 1815, attached to Sri Wickrama Rajasinha’s Nayakkar relatives who were all “anointing ash and appearing like matured ash-pumpkins” and “having anointed ash like dogs who had lain in (an abandoned) fireplace”-(Kirila Sandesaya/K.N.O 1979).

If you are partial to the incorporation motif present in Lankan history, however you’d like it served, with layers or without, you will always enjoy the Vanniyars. If you are a genuine multicultural fetishist, their story in Lanka will make you writhe in ecstasy. They came;

“It is significant that in the late thirteenth century some of the Sinhala kings appear to have induced a few immigrant chiefs to move across from southern India in order to re-settle specific districts that had been abandoned. The Malavara dignitaries, for instance, are described in one of the documents as having “cleared the jungle when there was no one else” (D G B de Silva 1996: 158, 172-73, 177). The Sinhala kings granted them land rights to these areas or, alternatively, responded to requests for land in this manner. Parakrama Bahu II (1236-70), in particular, pursued a programme of irrigation works and resettlement that attempted to recover the Nuvarakalaviya and Tamankaduva regions so that this migratory influx seems to have been linked with such policies.”

– (Michael Roberts: Sinhala Consciousness in the Kandyan Period: 74).
They fused;

“What language the Vanniyās used; or customs they followed; and private laws they used could have varied according to circumstance; but as Vanni chieftains they had received Sinhalese names on their investiture. They were supported by a hierarchy of local officials in the Rata Sabhās, when they adjudicated over matters concerning violations of local custom including failure to oblige with duties in respect of maintenance of irrigation work and agriculture. Some of them like the Malalas had fully assimilated into the local social and cultural milieu as seen from the positions they held at the Court and outside; one of them as the leading Vanniyā at Kaluvila; and two of them as the prelates of important places of learning. However, one also finds the Vanniyās retaining their original language (as Knox found at Nuvara väva); and some of their laws of succession, (as Hugh Nevill found existing among the chieftains of Hurulla which were similar to those of Malabārs and the Mukkuvās).”

- (D. G.B de Silva 1996: 190-191).
They remained distinctive;

“… Vanniyās formed a single class or caste intermarrying within their families, irrespective of whether they lived in the king’s territory or outside, whatever language they spoke; or what laws and customs they followed, the only exception being the Mukkuvās of Puttalama area and on the eastern coast.”

- (D. G.B:1996: 191).
And they were loyal;

“The “väddan” and “vannilayō” were among the forces of Rājasinha I of Sītāvaka (SH 1999:v.565); and in describing Rājasinha II’s preparations for battle against the Portuguese in the year 1638, for instance, the Rajasiha Hatana describes how he assembled forces from various regions, including

From Ratdala, Kitulāna, Yāla, Panama and Māgampura; from Wellawāya, Pālugama and Tirukkōvila from the Vädipattu and the great harbour of Kottiārama; and from many a land of the famed Vanniyäs.

P E Pieris’ reference to the “King’s Vanniyās,” albeit a passing remark, is in line with this information (1995a: 45).”

- (Roberts: 74-75)