What Makes Sri Lankans One? - Highlights of and Reflections on K. Indrapala’s...:

The evolution of an ethnic identity

Tissa Jayatilaka

OPINION: In the first ever Galle Literary Festival held several weeks ago, some of us participated in a discussion titled “What Makes Sri Lankans One?’. Opinion, not surprisingly, was divided amongst the participants.

Some were of the view that we aren’t one and indeed questioned whether we need(ed) to be, one! Others felt that the ‘Sinhala Buddhists’ consider themselves to be the ‘owners’ of Sri Lanka and this ‘Majoritarian’ viewpoint vitiates dreadfully our notion of our ‘oneness’.

Another tended to the idea that our common humanity makes us one whether we like it or not whatever may be our imagined ethnic and religious origins. Yet another observed that we were one people in the past and, once the fitful fever of contemporary ethnic rivalry has subsided, he is optimistic that we will surely return to that oneness at an auspicious future date.

Some argued that embracing the federal idea might hasten that seemingly elusive future while others felt that that goal could well be achieved within the parameters of a unitary state.

As is to be expected, most of us who participated in the discussion in Galle were arguing from our personal vantage points guided by our own biased politico - emotional convictions.

Interestingly and unsurprisingly perhaps, the one person who seemed the most dispassionate amongst us, the one who was most sanguine about our impending return to oneness notwithstanding the troubled and confused thinking that dominate our thought and action of today is a historian.

Perhaps he is aware, as other unbiased historians, of the fact that it is easy to misinterpret history to suit political expediency.

This is a pastime, as old as the hills, that has been indulged in by certain lax historians the world over. Such distortions and tragically irresponsible scholarship have diminished our humanity over centuries. During times of conflict — whether they be conflicts originating in communal, national or international bickering - - history and its closely allied discipline of archaeology are not infrequently among the first casualties.

The foregoing observations and preamble were prompted by my reading the other day of one of the most sane and readable books on Sri Lankan history I have encountered in a long while. I refer to K. Indrapala’s ‘The Evolution of an ethnic identity the Tamils in Sri Lanka C. 300 BCE TO C. 1200 CE’ published by My Publications for the The South Asian Studies Centre, Sydney, Australia in 2005.

Had I been the beneficiary of Prof. Indrapala’s superb insights found in his latest publication before the Galle Literary Festival, I could have been a far better participant at the discussion there. To those unacquainted with this wonderful human being, Prof. K. Indrapala is a product of the University of Ceylon at Peradeniya during its glory days.

He read History and received his first degree with Honours in 1960 and from that time until 1975, lectured in History in that university having read for and obtained his doctorate from the University of London in between. In 1975, he moved to Jaffna as the Foundation Professor of History in the new Jaffna Campus of the University of Sri Lanka which later became the University of Jaffna.

In 1977/78, he was Japan Foundation Fellow and Visiting Professor of the Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, Tokyo. In 1984, he was appointed Foundation Professor of Southeast Asian Studies at the Tamil University, Thanjavur. He now lives in Australia.

Prof. Indrapala is a remarkable Sri Lankan and is one of very few amongst us who can claim to be tri-lingual, i.e., proficient in all three languages in use in Sri Lanka. Several eminent men contributed to the making of Indrapala the man and scholar that he has become.

Among the significant of those contributors for my purposes in this article, however, are the poet Sagara Palansuriya (who initiated him into the study of Sinhala when he was ten years old), Dr. Klaus Matzel and Ven. Nanavasa Thera who helped familiarise Indrapala with different languages that enabled him to understand the history and cultures of various people with a perspective that would have been near impossible to develop without familiarity with their languages; Prof. K. Kanapathypillai, Prof. Tennekoon Vimalananda and Prof. W.J.F. LaBrooy.

While Kanapathypillai and Vimalananda helped develop Indrapala’s interest in epigraphy the latter, the Head, Dept. of History at Peradeniya in the 1960s, it was he who encouraged Indrapala to research into the history of Tamils of Sri Lanka when the young Indrapala’s interests lay in medieval South Indian History.

The necessary first hand knowledge of archaeology was provided to Indrapala by Dr. P.C. Sestieri (UNESCO Adviser to the Government of Ceylon), Dr. Vimala Begley (University of Pennsylvania Museum Project), Dr. P.L. Prematilleke, Dr. Siran Deraniyagala, Dr. R. Nagasamy (Director Archaeology, Tamilnadu), Dr. P Ragupathy (Jaffna University) and Prof. Senake Bandaranayake. Thus several Sri Lankans -’Burgher’, ‘Tamil’ and ‘Sinhala’ - and other citizens of the world from both near and far have lent Indrapala a hand along the way.

It is this combined human labour that made it possible for Prof. Indrapala to give to the world of Sri Lankan scholarship this wonderful gift of The Evolution of An Ethnic Identity. It is a gift that may serve to enlighten the purblind, the pseudo- nationalist and the Sinhala and Tamil supremacist in our midst.

Significantly Prof. Indrapala has dedicated his book ‘To the innocents who lost their lives as a direct consequence of misinterpretations of history’.

We could interpret this dedication to include all human beings, irrespective of time and place, who have lost their lives due to misinterpreted history no less than to those Sri Lankans who have suffered such irreparable loss in recent years in particular.

A major contributory factor to this tragic state of affairs in South Asia, points out Prof. Indrapala, is the dangerous tendency of those with ‘little learning’ in history to consider themselves superior to the specialists in the field. It is useful to let him speak for himself:

In South Asia, with its long and chequered history and multi-ethnic population, every other person with some education seems to consider herself or himself as an authority on history and tends to pay scant respect to the views of specialists, if those views do not agree (sic) with what she or he holds to be the truth.

Through a process of selective quoting, with no regard for the nature of the source, favourable views are put forward. I have no doubt that a number of general readers will show unusual interest in this book. Many are likely to view what is said here in the light of contemporary prejudices.

To them, I wish to say that Sri Lanka has been, from time immemorial, the home of various ethnic groups. There have been political and social conflicts among them but the kind of ethnic consciousness and destructive prejudices that have surfaced in the twentieth century and continue to plague the island were not part of Sri Lanka’s pre-colonial history.

The first kings that we know of in the centuries before the Common Era were not all of the same ethnic group or religious persuasion. Neither were the last kings of the island before the European invasions. (Author’s Preface to The Evolution of An Ethnic Identity, pp. viii-ix).

There is much wisdom to be gleaned from the above sober reflection as the political ideologies espoused by competing groups in times of conflict affect not only ordinary citizens but also intellectuals, some of whom (mis) interpret history and archaeology to support the views they favour. As the clich‚ has it, the first casualty in war and conflict is truth.

Such criminal distortion of history we now know occurred in Germany, Japan and certain other countries during the Second World War. According to experienced and unbiased specialists among us, it appears that, in the last three decades, a number of Sri Lankan scholars, resident in the country and outside of it, have been guilty of peddling their wares in the academic marketplace in a most disappointing manner.

They have been feeding narrow political and ideological fantasies while Sri Lanka was burning. History has been enlisted and mobilised to fight the issues of our day. Some politico-academic historians have become willing recruits for this battle.

As Eric Hobsbawm has pointed out, however, Sri Lankans do not have a monopoly in this arena of pseudo-scholarship. We live in an era where in many countries history has become a highly dangerous weapon in the hands of political activists.

In his On History, (New York 1997) Hobsbawm tells us that ‘History is the raw material for nationalist or ethnic or fundamentalist ideologies... If there is no suitable past, it can always be invented...The past legitimizes. The past gives a more glorious background to a present that doesn’t have much to celebrate...’.

Prof. Indrapala notes that the kernel of The Evolution of An Ethnic Identity is to be found in a series of 13 popular articles under the title “Tamils in Ancient Sri Lanka” that he published in 1969 (May - August) in the Sunday edition of the Sri Lankan Tamil daily Virakesari.

His intention was to impress upon the minds and hearts of ordinary citizens of Sri Lanka the fact that there were close relations between the pre-historic peoples of Sri Lanka and South India and that the Sinhalese ethnic group evolved in the island as results of Prakritic influences that spread among the pre-historic people.

The purpose of writing this book, Prof. Indrapala tell us, is to draw attention to some of the salient aspects of Sri Lanka’s distant past. Although the narration of the historical developments leading to the emergence of two separate ethnic identities ends in 1200, the story does not end there.

The dawn of the 13th century marks the beginning of the political separation of the two groups according to Prof. Indrapala. Most of the non-Sinhalese elements in the population of the island at this point in time came to be concentrated in the North, while most of the Sinhalese were confined to the south.

Neither group considered itself inferior to the other. The forces that held power in the North did not consider themselves to be ruling a smaller kingdom in the area under their control.

They aspired to the overlordship of the entire island whilst their counterparts in the South, too, claimed to be ruling the whole island. Tennilankaikkon (King of Lanka) was one of the epithets used to describe rulers in the North; Lankesvara (Lord of Lanka) continued to be one of the titles used by the southern rulers.

While the rulers of Sri Lanka’s North and South claimed to rule the whole country, though in fact they were de facto rulers of separate kingdoms, the Tamils of the North and the Sinhalese came to be isolated from each other. Meantime we learn that migrations from South India continued unabated bringing Tamils as well as Keralas and other South Indians to the North and South of Sri Lanka.

Prof. Indrapala informs us that there is absolutely no evidence of enmity between the Sinhalese and the Tamils in the centuries following the fall of Polonnaruva, despite the occasional invasions of each other’s territory by the Tamil and Sinhala rulers.

The significance of this point is that we need to stay away from an anachronistic attribution of group-based enmity to the realpolitik of medieval Sri Lanka and southern India.

We learn from Prof. Indrapala that until the arrival of the European colonial powers there existed close relations between the Tamils and Sinhalese in many areas of activity.

With the rise of Saivism, the one area in which such close relations were never to be seen again in religion. Although, interestingly, as we see from scholars like Charles Hallisey, Buddhist engagement with the figure of the Buddha became more devotional and emotional in ways probably influenced by Saiva Bhakti.

We learn further that the arts of the Tamils came into intimate contact with those of the Sinhalese, at both the elite and folk levels, resulting in an interesting cultural dialogue that helped to shape the late medieval arts of the Sinhalese. This dialogue is markedly to be seen in dance, music and drama.

In The Folk Drama of Ceylon (1966), Ediriweera Sarachchandra has shown us how two of the traditional forms of Sinhalese music, Vannam and Viraha, and two of the major genres of Sinhala drama, Nadagama and Kolam, arose as a result of contact with Tamil music and folk theatre.

Bharatha Natyam had arrived in Sri Lanka in the 11th century. Evidence from sculpture and painting, Sarachchandra has argued, strengthens the view that Bharatha Natyam constituted the entertainment of royalty and the lay elite.

Prof. Indrapala tells us that the status of the Tamil language in the Sinhala kingdom in the pre-colonial period would be an eye-opener to many. He informs us that, where necessary, Sinhalese kings and other authorities used the Tamil language for their epigraphic records.

He illustrates this fact by pointing us to a Tamil translation that exists on the same walls at the Lankatilaka Temple as does the Sinhala original of a record inscribed there.

This was in the 14th century. That Tamil inscription, we are told, is the longest Tamil epigraph in the island. We learn much more. The Tamil language was taught in the Buddhist pirivenas (religious schools).

Some of the products of these institutions who became prominent scholar monks were well-versed in Tamil. Ven. Totagamuve Sri Rahula was one of the most reputed among them.

Even in the mid-20th century there were erudite Tamil scholars among the Buddhist clergy such as the Ven. Hissalle Dhammaratana who read learned papers in Tamil at international conferences and seminars held in South India and elsewhere as H.L. Seneviratne has recorded in his The Work of Kings (1999:107).

Leslie Gunawardana has brought to our notice that a Sinhalese monk has spoken proudly of his ability to preach both in Sinhala and Tamil. Alagiyavanna, a Sinhalese poet, who obviously felt very proud of his knowledge of Tamil (and other languages), has gone to the extent of sneering at those not as fortunate as him to acquire such multi-language skills.

Alagiyavanna, in his Subhasitaya, Prof. Indrapala explains in his notes, has said that he composed this work for the benefit of the creatures who are ignorant of Tamil, Sanskrit and Pali (demala saku magada nohasala sata ta).

Happily it was not all one way in the area of language and literature. There were Tamils, too, who showed their skills in the Sinhala language. The Tamil Buddhist monks who came to reside in the monastries of the Sinhalese kingdom in the 13th and 14th centuries, Indrapala points out, were probably versed in Sinhala as much as they were in Pali, although their literary output was in the latter language.

C.E. Godakumbura, in his Sinhalese Literature (1955), has informed us that a Tamil Buddhist poet named Nallurutu-mini wrote the Sinhala work Namavalilya (referred to usually as the Purana-namavaliya).

Leslie Gunawardana (1990) considers the author of the Namavaliya to be a “Tamil prince who was married to the daughter of King Parakramabahu VI”. Gananath Obeyesekere has argued that there have been Buddhist migrations as well as migrations of merchants and folk specialists from South India to the Sinhalese kingdom.

The moral of the above cited historical and cultural evidence surely is that it is wrong to speak of ‘racial’ purity or exclusivity or superiority in modern times. The reality based on such historical and cultural evidence is that from very early times Sri Lanka has been settled by people from all parts of India who mixed freely to produce a new and unique culture.

The story of ethnic interaction becomes richer subsequent to the fall of Polonnaruva as a result of the emergence of a third major group, the Muslims. Their origins, we are given to understand, go back to the West Asian as well as Indian Muslim trade settlements at the ports and market-towns of Sri Lanka.

We have to bear in mind, Prof. Indrapala reminds us, that these Muslim traders married local women and, therefore, their descendants share the ancient ancestry of the Sinhalese and Tamils. We are asked also not to forget the fact that the Malay soldiers and the Portuguese who came later did not bring their womenfolk with them but married locally.

Thus the Malay and ‘Portuguese’ Burgher communities, too, share the ancestry of the others. Such a fascinating story of ethnic interaction does make all of us Sri Lankans one, doesn’t it? It also challenges strenuously the myth of the mono-cultural, mono-lingual people who migrated from some part of North India to settle in a Sri Lanka supposedly peopled only by demons.

Prof. Indrapala’s fascinating study is an attempt to re-remind us of our rich past during which the southernmost parts of India, comprising mainly the modern states of Kerala and Tamilnadu and the southern parts of Karnataka and Andra Pradesh, together with Sri Lanka formed a single cultural region.

Prof. Indrapala identifies this as the South-India-Sri Lanka region. He believes that the Sinhalese and Tamils are ultimately descended from the Mesolithic people who occupied almost all parts of the island in pre-historic times.

These Mesolithic people, we are informed, spoke different languages, all of which were replaced as a consequence of ‘elite dominance’, in the Early Iron Age and the Early Historic Period, by a Prakrit language in most parts of the island, especially in the south and the centre, and by Tamil in the northwest, north and northeast.

Prakrit, Prof. Indrapala notes, as the lingua franca of South Asian trade, had an edge over Tamil from the very beginning. The evolution of the two identities as Sinhalese and Tamil, assimilating many small social and cultural groups, according to Prof. Indrapala’s study, reached completion by 1200, although further assimilation, development and changes would continue in the later centuries. From about 1200 onwards, there is a marked geographic division between the two identities.

Prof. Indrapala points out the severe limitations of 19th century writing of Sri Lankan history by British officials who based themselves largely on the uncritical acceptance of the Sinhala and Pali chronicles. It is as a consequence of this lapse that colonial historical writing came to subscribe to the view that the Sinhalese were the ‘proper inhabitants’ of the island in ancient times and that the Tamils were invaders.

Before, long the Sinhalese were identified with the ‘Aryans’ and the Tamils with the ‘Dravidians’. With the exception of Early History of Ceylon written by G.C. Mendis, the other handful of Sri Lankan history books in use even as late as 1930 were according to Prof. Indrapala authored by historians of British origin.

These writings, based as they were on the Pali and Sinhala chronicles, sagacious Sri Lankan historians have told us, inevitably set the tone for the Sinhala-centrist approach that has remained the dominant characteristic of Sri Lankan historiography until recent years.

We have to be mindful of and cautious about the manner in which history is ‘used’ in fighting contemporary issues. A friend and colleague I admire and respect, Prof. Amal Jayawardane, in his insightful introduction to Perspectives on National Integration in Sri Lanka has underscored the absolute need for discriminate and dispassionate assessment of history especially when seeking to understand complex present issues in the light of past experiences.

The late E.F.C. Ludowyk, a former Professor of English in the University of Ceylon, is author of two general histories of Sri Lanka that any professional historian would be proud of.

His words are apposite in the context of our present ethnic rivalries:

‘... the legendary heroes once created to satisfy the old needs are still resorted to in the entirely different circumstances of the present. That cultures have their mythical heroes is not surprising, indeed it would be strange if they should lack them.

There is a slight distinction to be drawn, however, between this and the need for heroes... To have invented what was once required is surely the normal and economical satisfaction of desires, to be met with in the history of individuals and communities. But to insist on satisfying a recurring need at all times in the same old ways is surely an indication of deep-seated malaise.

To be, at the present time, dependent on the mythopoeic creativeness of ages long past is to argue an inability to face up to the demands of the contemporaneous. When we continually cry for a cause, for a hero whom we could follow, when we need the sustenance of legendary forefathers, we are most probably showing symptoms, not only of angry unhappiness, but also retarded adoloscence (emphasis mine).

(E.F.C. Ludowyk, The Story of Ceylon, London 1967:33)

Similar sentiments, if more robustly expressed, are to be found in a piece written to The Island of 4 August, 2001, by another much admired friend and colleague, Prof. Sudarshan Seneviratne.

In it he warned us that the fields of archaeological and historical study in contemporary Sri Lanka are imperiled by certain unfastidious practitioners of these disciplines pursuing agendas of their own. Here is how Seneviratne acquainted us with this pernicious trend:

The future of both historical and archaeological studies in Sri Lanka is at crossroads facing a dilemma of priorities, choices, resource persons, attitudes and, above all, quality of research.

It is indeed reasonable to question the extent to which a new breed of charlatans and political animals in these disciplines are responsible for the emergence of an ahistorical attitude and an anti-historical bias in schools, at seats of higher education and the country in general.

‘Anti-Orwellian’ historians in this country who have slithered their way through ‘corridors of power’ 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.

Another leading historian who has expressed similar concern about this unfortunate trend in some of our historical writings is Prof. Leslie Gunawardana: A trend which appears to be gathering strength is represented by some researchers in the field of archaeology and history who see in their work the fulfillment of a duty to highlight the splendour of the Sinhala or the Tamil group as the case may be, and to bolster the claims of one’s own group to disputed territory.

While it has led to a growth of interest in research related to ethnic studies, this development has brought in its wake a noteworthy relaxation of intellectual rigour in research.

(Gunawardana 1994)

The deeper one delves dispassionately and scrupulously into Sri Lankan history the more one will find out how much the Tamils and Sinhalese have in common. They have a shared history and culture, and a common descent as Prof. Indrapala has demonstrated. The eminent Cambridge scholar and historian of science Prof. Joseph Needham has echoed Prof. Indrapala’s own conclusions.

Discussing one of the finest achievements in ancient hydraulics in his monumental work on the science and civilization of China, Prof. Needham has noted ‘that the achievements of the Indian civil engineers in ancient and medieval times are quite worthy to be compared with those of their Chinese colleagues,’ but concluded that ‘it was never in India that the fusion of the Egyptian and Babylonian patterns achieved its most complete and subtlest form.

This took place in Ceylon, the work of both cultures, Sinhala and Tamil, but especially the former’ (Science and Civilization in China, IV, Cambridge 1971:368).

The Sinhalese and Tamils achieved a remarkable hydraulic civilization in Sri Lanka about a thousand years ago.

Together we could achieve so much more in the future if only we combine our resources for our collective betterment instead of frittering them away in futile and deadly combat.

We must be grateful to Prof. Indrapala for labouring academically to seek to assist us to salvage ourselves from the national wreck we are in at present.