No island is an island and ours is no exception
No
man is an island, they say. No island is an island either in these
globalized times. Indeed, it can be argued that islands never existed
and if they did their numbers were very small. The reference is of
course to human collectives and not land masses surrounded by bodies of
water. Complete isolation has always been the exception.
Throughout history, communities have been marked by the commerce of
goods and services, gifting, invasion and embrace, plunder and
counter-plunder, conversion to faith by force or threat and embracing of
doctrine on conviction and so on. Political boundaries are not cast in
stone either. The world map needs constant revision. I’ve seen a version
of King Lear where the kingdom is divided by the simple and dramatic
method of tearing the relevant map into three pieces. The invaders
carved up the continent of Africa by simply drawing lines on a piece of
paper, dividing communities arbitrarily and deliberately, engendering
wars that have survived their incubators.
Cultural ethos
No island is an island and ours is no exception to this rule. We are
linked by trade and treaty, friendship and relationship, the play of
power and threat, the need to mitigate pressure from one force by
seeking friendship with another. Nothing comes without a price. Some use
the age-old device called arm-twisting: ‘submit or else!’ Some just
stuff the unpalatable down unwilling throats, causing bowel disorders
and other convulsions that end up spreading a lot of blood-splattered
bad news around.
No island is an island and ours is no exception, this is true. Does
this mean that we do not have and indeed cannot have any core identity,
a shared cultural ethos or some corpus of beliefs and practices that are
unique and/or inform us regularly and substantially enough to allow for
collective identification? Those who for reasons they have no control
over and for lack of histories they are not to be blamed for often take
the convenient position, ‘we never were and we never will be’. That’s a
neat mechanism to justify the most negative and pernicious forms of
‘exchange’ in this island-less world.
It goes without saying that islands that are not islands interact
more with the closest islands that are not islands. We are no exception.
This is why there’s more India in Sri Lanka than say Mozambique or
Iceland. There’s more Pakistan in India than is generally acknowledged,
more Pakistan in Indian than Sri Lanka and more Pakistan in India than
Sri Lanka in India. Land-mass separation is a factor, one observes. Size
too. Sri Lanka would spread very thin over India while India could bury
Sri Lanka under several miles of earth. Land-mass volume also counts.
Such things, however, are not as significant when it comes to
commerce of other kinds. Culture, for instance. Size of nation or other
collective is not obstacle enough for an idea to travel the globe,
encounter, embrace, subjugate and liberate that which it encounters.
History is long, longer than is convenient for some and, happily or
unhappily, for us to know what really happened in those un-scribed
times. Proximate islands indulge in exchange. Perhaps this is part of
human nature, I don’t know. Today, several millennia since something was
invented, we really can’t tell who the inventor was or to which
community he/she belonged. All we know is what we can conclude from what
we already know.
Myths and legends
We have myths and legends as well as a rich folk history contained in
customs and beliefs, traditional practices, song and dance. We know of
Ravana. Even the Ramayana indicates that of the two protagonists, Rama
was essentially second-best on all counts. Add the Lankavathara Sutra
and we have a Ravana whose ‘ten heads’ refers to ten times the average
intellect. Consider the fact that he is credited with the invention of
chess and the violin, and as the father of Ayurveda, and we have a Lanka
that dwarfs and indeed engulfed her neighbouring ‘island’.
Let’s call all this meaningless conjecture. We could stick to the
known and focus on that which can be verified. We are told that India
made us who we are by giving us the greatest gift ever, the word of
Siddhartha Gauthama, our Budun Wahanse. The ‘word’ however existed
before Siddhartha Gauthama, for there have been other articulators of
the ‘Word’, other Buddhas, and there’s nothing to say that this island
was bypassed by word-travel in the relevant times. Still, let’s take the
above as true.
Magnificent gesture
Here are some facts. The Emperor Asoka sent his two children, no
less, with word and artifact. They were received not by barbarians but a
people ready for intellectual discourse and they chose to spend the rest
of their lives in this land. Forget Ravana and Ravana’s ‘Lanka’, Arahat
Mahinda did not come to a civilizational desert or a cultural badland.
The ‘word’, nevertheless, was gift and gift supreme too, let there be no
doubt about this. The question though is whether we received this gift
from India.
If indeed Ravana invented the violin and chess, if indeed he invented
the first flying craft, the Dandumonaraya, if indeed he was the
physician, botanist and biochemist supreme that legend claims he is, it
is strange that neither India nor the rest of the world (of the 21st
Century) acknowledge that Sri Lanka or Lanka, or, more correctly,
Sinhale, gave these gifts to the neighbouring ‘island’ and other islands
too. India didn’t give us Buddhism. The Emperor Asoka sent an emissary
and dharmaduta, and we are not ungrateful. India did not, because India
could not, for the simple reason that India was not! India is a colonial
construct. A man from the island that is now called India made a
magnificent gesture. I am grateful. Those who did nothing and indeed did
nothing other than plunder and coerce cannot take credit, I believe.
That’s forgettable commerce, I would think.
There are gifts and gifts. There is legitimate credit claim and
credit theft too. Not too long ago, some five million Sri Lankans paid
homage to sacred relics of the Buddha, brought here courtesy the
largesse of the Pakistani government for a 17-day exposition. That’s
gift too. Less significant of course than that which the Emperor Asoka
gave two millennia ago, but still, gift. Gift is not gift, one notes
when a price is extracted openly or subtly it does not matter how. The
Emperor Asoka, when he requested Arahat Mahinda to take the Word of our
Budun Wahanse to Simhaladeep and to his friend King Devanampiyatissa,
did not say ‘Tell him that he should redraw the provincial boundaries
and enact constitutional amendment to help legitimate the
unsubstantiated claims of this or that community and/or its
representatives’. That was gift and therefore I am grateful for the
commerce between these two islands.
No island is an island, and we are no exception. We give, we take. We
win, we lose out and at the end of the long days of ‘islandic’ history,
one hopes, it all balances out. Time is long and in our long-time, we
will see all kinds of commerce, that of the Ravana-Rama kind, the
Asoka-Tissa kind, the Rajiv-JR kind and other kinds still to come. We
are not an island, but we are nevertheless a nation. We lack size but
not imagination.
We lack nuclear weapons, but we have the Word that helped us more
than anything through terrible, terrible times.
That word was made of compassion. It was made also of wisdom. We know
therefore, when to bow before greatness and when to stand firm against
tyranny. We went down, but not forever.
We know how to fall. We know how to stand up. We are not an island,
and yet, we are a nation, a people, a civilization, a culture and a
solidarity that is not contained by map-line or edict, threat or
weapon-show.
No island is an island and ours is not an exception. It’s a good
thing, all things considered.
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