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

08/21/23 • 8 min

The History of Sri Lanka

The Ceylon Press History of Sri Lanka 3

Voyaging to Wonderland

Sri Lanka & The Cunning Lilly

“Not all who wander are lost.”

Lewis Carroll

The Cheshire Cat

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

1865

Bridging the Gap

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 simply 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 - and 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 sub-continent that had been formed in the Triassic era a 100 million years earlier. Adam’s Bridge was becoming the sole point of access to the far south; but by 7,500 BCE it was almost unwalkable.

As successive mini-ice ages wavered one way and then another and sea levels rose or fell over a 700,000-year period, the bridge was laid bare at least 17 times. Until then this roughly 100 kilometres wide, 50km 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: Rhinoceros Sinhaleyus and Rhinoceros 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 that are anything from 500,000 to 1.6 million years old. As the fossil record demonstrates, the land they inhabited was ecologically richer and more dramatic than it is today, teaming not with a plenitude of the wildlife still found in Sri Lanka today.

Hundreds of millennia later, one of their Stone Age descendants was to leave 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 in 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 gathers, living in caves – such as Batadomba, and Aliga. The tools and weapons found in these caves, made of quartz crystal and flint, are well in advance of such technological developments in Europe, which date from around 10,000 BCE compared to 29,000 BCE in Sri Lanka.

Stories of The First Nation

The island’s Stone Age hunter-gathers made the transition to a more settled lifestyle well ahead of time.

By at least by 17,000-15,000 BCE, Sri Lanka’s original hunter gathers 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 civilization - 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 dead relatives 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 shot...

The Ceylon Press History of Sri Lanka 3

Voyaging to Wonderland

Sri Lanka & The Cunning Lilly

“Not all who wander are lost.”

Lewis Carroll

The Cheshire Cat

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

1865

Bridging the Gap

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.

Hundreds of millennia later, one of their Stone Age descendants was to leave behind the most anatomically perfect modern human remains yet uncovered on the island.

Stories of The First Nation

The island’s Stone Age hunter-gathers made the transition to a more settled lifestyle well ahead of time.

Barely a couple of competent arrow shot...

Previous Episode

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

The Ceylon Press History of Sri Lanka 2

THE ISLAND THAT FLOATED AWAY

Sri Lanka & The Great Storm

“The vast unfathomable sea is but a Notion-unto me.” The Three Voices, Lewis Carroll. 1869.

Hidden Harmony

Rusty, derelict, and irresistibly optically-challenged, the old Talaimannar Lighthouse is a gratifyingly improbable key to help unlock the start of Sri Lanka’s recorded history. It presents an even more unlikely clue to explain the profound differences the island presents with 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,” and certainly 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 a now almost invisible ocean.

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 famously beautiful is the 1939 lighthouse at Galle, although 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 ghosty metronomic refrain that states, with unmissable clarity, the first and most profound reason for why Sri Lanka is as it is.

A Workshop of Evolution

This is an island. That is what those lonely lighthouses declaim. An island, capacious, yes; but 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 share population sizes similar to Sri Lanka’s but are either much larger or smaller in land mass. Only Japan and the UK present island nations that far outstrip Sri Lanka by land mass 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, simply runs out into the sea and disappears.

Looked at from the Indian end, its infrequent visitors are mildly surprised that the li...

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

The Ceylon Press History of Sri Lanka 4.

The Island That Cultivated Philosophy

Sri Lanka & The Making of Nirvana

“Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?”

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. “Lewis Carroll. 1865.

The Dynasty That Was Textbook Perfect

Sri Lanka’s first recorded monarch was to found 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 the start of recorded Singhala history despite its 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, their almost-but-not-quite-divine authority, the result of personal merit earned by virtue of their unusual and 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 successful ancient kingdom. Expanding with elastic ease, their kingdom soon grew far beyond the Rajarata, or traditional royal lands, to encompass most if not all 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, and Thutmosides; the Punts, Medians, Seleucids, Mauryas or other numerous successful ancient dynasties, there was little to differentiate the Vijayans from the usual preoccupations of sound hegemonic hereditary rule.

Changing Everything Forever

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; they took him, with fervent haste, into their hearts, and with it, his evangelising philosophy of Buddhism.

Like all Buddhists, Mahinda did not acknowledge a supreme god, and despite the later shorthand references to Buddhism as a religion, it is more suitably 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 to achieve 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 his or her magnetic north; but most tried to, and all were ultimately judged against its teachings. As they are still today by ordinary citizens in towns and v...