The Ceylon Press History of Sri Lanka

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

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

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

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

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

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

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• The Island That Cultivated Philosophy: The Ceylon Press History of Sri Lanka 4

  Sri Lanka’s first recorded monarch founded a dynasty that would last over 600 years.   Expelled from either Bengal or Gujarat (scholars argue, as scholars do) by his father, Prince Vijaya, the founding father of an eponymous royal family, arrived on the island in 543 BCE, his landing kicking off recorded Singhala history, despite the first 100 years being anything but plain sailing. Occasional bouts of regicide, lassitude, rebellion and navel gazing aside, the dynasty was as textbook perfect as it could reasonably be expected to be, and Prince Vijaya’s thirty-six successors did all that was necessary to embed, improve, and make dominant the tiny state they had first instituted in the northwest of the land.   Not one to sit upon their laurels, and with a flair for marketing well ahead of their time, the Vijayans relaunched their realm barely a quarter of the way through their term, branding it as the kingdom of Anduraupura.  They ruled it, according to the later Stone Book or Galpota Inscription, as human divinities, with an almost-but-not-quite-divine authority, the result of personal merit earned through their unusual, holistically philosophical approach to life and governance.   Their capital city would become one of the planet’s longest continuously inhabited cities, enriched by cutting-edge industry, resources, structures, administrators, soldiers and all the other many disciplines critical to a prosperous ancient kingdom.  Expanding with elastic ease, their kingdom soon grew far beyond the Rajarata, or traditional royal lands, to encompass most, if not all, of the island.   To the east and south lay Ruhunurata, or Ruhana, a linked but junior principality founded around 200 BCE by Prince Mahanaga, brother to Devanampiya Tissa, the 7th or 8th monarch of the dynasty, and great-great-great-great-great nephew of Prince Vijaya himself.   To the west lay the third, much smaller principality of Mayarata, another linked family fiefdom, said to have been founded in the fourth century BCE by Prince Vijaya’s nephew, Panduwasdev, the dynasty’s third monarch.  Like light bulbs experiencing the almost reassuringly familiar power cuts and surges of the current Ceylon Electricity Board, a state company forever preoccupied by internal disputes, both principalities rose, fell and rose again, depending on quite how strong the Anduraupuran king was at any one time. All this was, of course, good wholesome leadership – but it was hardly groundbreaking.  Seen from the perspective of the Shang, Hittites, Achaemenids, Ptolemaics, the Punts, Medians, Seleucids, Mauryas, and numerous other successful ancient dynasties, there was little to differentiate the Vijayans from the usual preoccupations with sound, hereditary hegemonic rule. It was only halfway through the span of the Vijayan rule that, in welcoming to the island, Mahinda, the Buddhist son of the Indian Emperor Ashoka, they did something that changed everything.   In this, their simple act of hospitality, they were to remodel their kingdom to be so profoundly different to any other, anywhere, as to endow it with an authority and energy so inimitable that, even today, it is protected and characterised by that misty encounter of 247 BCE.  Not only did the Vijayans welcome the young royal missionary, but they took him, with fervent haste, into their hearts, and with him, his evangelising philosophy of Buddhism.   Like all Buddhists, Mahinda did not acknowledge a supreme god, and, despite later shorthand references to Buddhism as a religion, it is more appropriately described as a philosophy.  In welcoming Mahinda, the Vijayans crossed the line from standard overlords to philosopher monarchs governed by a formidable moral code and a preoccupation with achieving a state of transcendent bliss and well-being. If being an island was the first and foremost explanation for why Sri Lanka became Sri Lanka, Buddhism is, of course, its second explanation.   And a much more impressive one too, for it was a deliberate act – one that no less comprehensively than geography was to profoundly colour the country as if it had been dyed in Tyrian purple itself, that ancient and legendary dye, reserved by threat of death, for the clothes of the Roman emperors or the sails of Queen Cleopatra’s royal barge. Of course, not every king or subsequent island ruler made the moral imperatives of Buddhism their magnetic north. However, most tried to, and all were ultimately judged against its teachings as they are still today, by ordinary citizens in towns and villages across the land.  For however ordinary Sri Lankans are, they are also unexpectedly religiously minded.  Religion today, to the astonishment of many observers, is holding its own.  Right across the world, experts and pollsters have had to rethink their view of what would befall religion as countries modernised. Atheists, agnostics and all who are religiously unaffiliated account for a shrinking 16% of the global population, even if the balance of believers has a whiff of the secular in their spiritualism.  But as the West has become more secular, the rest has become less so - with God ever more likely to be best seen by Muslims or Hindus, but not Christians. Nor Buddhists, for Lord Buddha’s followers make up a shrinking 7% of the world’s population. But not in Sri Lanka, where Buddhism is estimated to hold its own at around 70% of the island’s population. Hardly surprising, then, that in repeated world polls, Sri Lanka is almost always found amongst the top five most religiously minded countries.  Once, most of Asia was Buddhist - but such countries are now a rarity as alternative religions, politics, and secularism have shrunk their reach.  Yet in Sri Lanka, Buddhism remains an indisputable force, supported by over 6,000 monasteries, 30,000 monks, and its own government ministry. Other gods retain a modest purchase.  Christianity probably arrived sometime after Thomas the Apostle's visit to Kerala in 52 CE, though it wasn't until the Portuguese arrived in 1505 that things really got going. Even so, just 7% of today’s population is Christian, less than the nearly 10% who practise Islam following the arrival of Arab traders in the seventh century CE, or the 13% practising Hinduism, here since even before the Chola invasion of the tenth century CE.  Buddhism and Sri Lanka are almost synonymous.  It is impossible to understand one without comprehending the other.  The Buddhist mindset – that life is one of suffering, only alleviated by enlightenment through meditation, spiritual work and doing good – is stitched invisibly into every fibre of island life. From its earliest beginnings, it has shaped the country’s language and culture, morality, education, politics, family, finance, prosperity, health, work, and its approach to the environment.  Presidents, for example, may win elections. Still, they are not taken seriously until they have received the blessings of the Chief Prelates of the Malwathu and Asgiri chapters, the two most critical Buddhist orders in the land.  Indeed, so great is the continual rush of ambitious politicians to the doors of both prelates that a traffic-light system might usefully be cons...

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• Dancing on Knives: The Ceylon Press History of Sri Lanka 5

  “If I want a crown,” remarked Peachey, hero of Kipling’s Man Who Would Be King, and unexpected alter ego of Prince Vijiya, Sri Lanka’s first monarch, “I must go and hunt it for myself.”  If Peachey’s motivation was glory and riches, plain and straightforward, Vijaya’s was about raw survival, dodging assassinations and evading parental disapproval. If that is the case, the chronicles are to be believed. And in this, Sri Lanka is exceedingly fortunate, for it has not one but three great chronicles, claiming, between them, the title of the world’s oldest and longest historical narrative. Although these turbulent chronicles muddle up man, god, and magic with morality, history, and myth, they also lay a wraithlike trail of events and people through what would otherwise be a historical vacuum dotted with random, unattributable artefacts. Prince Vijaya’s existence is known only through the first two chronicles - The Dipavaṃsa Chronicle (compiled around the third to fourth centuries CE) and The Mahavaṃsa, The Great Chronicle, an epic poem written by a Buddhist monk in the fifth century CE in the ancient Pali script. These stupefying works, which put most soap operas and not a few Sci-Fi films to shame, open with Prince Vijaya’s arrival from Sinhapura, a legendary lost state in eastern India, and end in 302 CE. At this point, they hand the task of storytelling onto the third and last book, The Culavamsa or Lesser Chronicle, which covers events to 1825, an otherwise blameless year the world over, with little more of note than it being the date of the first performance of Rossini's Barber of Seville.  But if love and eternal fidelity are rarely the subject of the three chronicles, gold, betrayal, and secrecy often are – though historians naturally debate the factual accuracy of the stories, in which the doings of men and kings take a poor second place to those of monks and Lord Buddha.  Even when the focus shifts from the divine to the secular, it is abundantly clear that, as with the most tenacious tales, history is inevitably written by the winners. Although verified archaeological evidence is still less, documentary evidence for Prince Vijaya remains tantalizingly absent; he remains, from every perspective, the great winner, the shaved head fugitive with a penchant for what The Mahavamsa calls “evil conduct and … intolerable deeds,” every bit the rebranded hero.  Expelled by his appalled father, thrust onto a ship with seven hundred dependent followers and ordered to stay away on pain of death, Prince Vijaya has, through the centuries, still managed to take centre stage as Sri Lanka’s paterfamilias. Centuries later, over a shared arak and soda, and, courtesy of reincarnation, it is more than likely that the reformed villain would tell you that he finds his righteous reputation puzzling. After all, he never set out to be a hero, still less founder of a nation; and quite possibly not even a king, claiming, in his own lifetime, the much more modest title of Prince. Survival, a bit of fun, respect, of course, obedient followers, amenable wives, good food and the space to be his own boss was probably as much as he aspired to.   Indeed, so careless was he of his greater future that he almost destroyed his own fledgling dynasty just as it was starting, a nasty proclivity that was to recur just two generations later when his descendants tried to wipe themselves out.  Twice, in under two hundred years, the Vijayans, the dynasty that was to make Sri Lanka the world’s only Singhala nation, came perilously close to obliterating it.  It was the sort of carelessness typical of rulers bereft of the value of hindsight, operating like sword dancers twirling on the tops of lofty stupas, and utterly reckless with their unfathomable dynastic destiny. It is said that Prince Vijaya snuck into the country through the secretive Puttalam Lagoon.  If so, he enjoyed the value of surprise for the shortest of times. The Mahavamsa, whose respect for divinity of any sort is beyond reproach, has Lord Buddha task an acquiescent Hindu god with protecting the prince and reassuring him that the island he has alighted upon is pretty much empty.  “There are no men here, and here no dangers will arise,” claims the god, helpfully disguised as a wandering ascetic. If one is to found a future nation, this sort of starting point is enormously helpful. Thousands of years later, so little is known about the fundamental social and political structures that existed on the island at this time that this myth of a largely empty island merely waiting for a noble race to occupy it is more than validated by ignorance.  But lines are there to be read through, and The Mahavamsa wears the cognitive dissonance of its gilded lines with confident ease.  Almost from the start, they imply, the prince and his followers found themselves fighting for survival, dominance, and land.  The many conflicting stories surrounding his fights with man-eating wives, flying horses, skirmishes with indigenous tribes, protection under Buddha, and his willingness to swap his local wife, Kuveni, for a more glamorous and aristocratic Indian princess are, in fact, key parts of the country’s cherished creation myths.  And curses too. For Kuveni, rejected, outcast and pushed to a shocking suicide, was to place such a curse on the king and his house as to taint “not only Vijaya but the descendants of Hela People (Singhala) as a whole,” wrote an observer. It has,” remarked another mournful raconteur, “overflowed to every nook and corner of Sri Lanka and enwrapped her people over the centuries.”   If the nation delights in the stories about Vijaya, those about Kuveni, a native queen of the local Yaksha tribe, cause much head-shaking. For Kuveni was not simply a wife and weaver of cloth, a mother, lover, and queen - but also a demon, a metamorphoser, an outcast, an avenging fury, suicide, traitor, murderess, ghost, and mistress of deception.  A descendant of the gods, she is also a goddess to the country’s still-living Aboriginal peoples. We may be forest haunters,” said a Vedda leader recently, “but Kuveni, our goddess.” Small wonder then that Sri Lanka, in not knowing what to really make of the Mother of the Nation, chooses to push her deep into one of its many locked closets. The slimmest of ancient – almost folkloric - hints mark the Prince’s landing on Sri Lanka’s shores Pulling his boats onto a beach of reddish-brown sand – “Tamba” meaning Copper, or as it was later known, Tambapanni- was the perfect spot for a settlement, commanding the access to an excellent natural harbour opening into the Gulf of Mannar and an almost inexhaustible supply of pearl oysters. “Horse Mountain” is another name for Kudiramalai, and for centuries, amidst the ruins of an ancient temple, a massive horse-and-man statue stood on the cliffs. Made of brick, stone, and coral, it is estimated to have been at least 35 feet high, its front legs raised, its rider clinging to reins, bearing a lantern to guide ships into the port.   Locals still point to some modest ruins, all that remains, they say, of the horse and rider. And continually, raked by high waves and surf, broken bricks, pottery, and building materials wash up on the shore. Inland are...

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