By Rohana R. Wasala 

At the conclusion of a thoughtful feature article under the title ‘A new identity for Sri Lanka’ in the Sunday Island of June 25, 2023, Uditha Devapriya, a young journalist that I admire for the quality of his writing, refers to what he calls a minority view that he shares about Sri Lanka’s contemporary culture. It is that contemporary Sri Lankan culture is ‘derivative and predicable’. To be frank, his concept of culture is not clear to me, nor what he exactly means by the phrase ‘derivative and predicable’. But in the same breath he explains that this quality of present-day Sri Lankan culture is ‘less of a weakness, less of a limitation, than it may appear’ because ‘cultures and histories progress through evolution, and evolution, it must be conceded, involves appropriation, sometimes imitation.’ Devapriya adds:

‘Thus, instead of looking condescendingly down on our modern” culture or being laid back and complacent about our glorious past”, we should avoid both extremes and strive to use our identity the way our ancestors did. The four ambassadors sent to the court of Emperor Claudius centuries ago were all representative of this identity: it has been surmised that they were non-Sinhalese, that they were all Tamils. The Romans did not bother about this. As H. A. J. Hulugalle has noted, all they were concerned with was that these ambassadors came from Ceylon, and that they were Sri Lankans first and Sri Lankans last. Perhaps that should be our strategy, our way forward, our redemption.’

I generally agree with the idea that we should ‘use our identity the way our ancestors did’. In fact, this is broadly similar to what I wrote at the end of a long article (not published in The Island) about racism and nationalism in August 2021. So, let me quote the concluding paragraph of my article in full:

‘It is internal divisions that encourage external attacks on our independence. The greatest potential for national unity, in my view, comes from the easy religio-cultural symbiosis  between the Tamil Hindus and the Sinhala Buddhists. Since the last mentioned  circumstance above – geographic location – cannot be changed by any means, it must be accepted as an unalterable physical reality in a nationally proactive spirit, not as a curse, but as a blessing. It is up to the youth of the country of diverse ethnic backgrounds untainted by historical baggage  to take up this challenge and forge ahead as one sovereign nation without allowing foreign powers to walk over us, as they have done over the last seventy-three years. I wrote this long essay, not to stoke fires of racial hatred, but to douse them by ascertaining the truth about our past as far as possible, which will enable us to see our way forward more clearly.’ (Please read seventy-five years for seventy-three years, as this was written two years ago.)

Now to deal with the crass lie that Devapriya reproduces from some distortionist source about the historic delegation of four Sinhalese ambassadors sent to the court of the Roman emperor Claudius by king Bhatikabhaya Tissa of Sihela/Sinhale (the European name ‘Ceylon’ is a corruption of the original name Sihela) in the first century BCE. The ambassadors from Sihela were all Sinhalese (not Tamils), led by a member of the reigning Sinhalese royal family, whose father himself had been a diplomat sent to China on a similar mission.This information is well documented history backed by foreign records. King Bhatikabhaya’s reign was a time of peace and plenty according to the ancient chronicles. But the Mahavamsa (Chapter XXXVI) says little about this king. The name given there is Bhatika Tissa. His reign was twenty-four years. The services he did to the Buddha Sasana and his developmental projects described in other chronicles are just glanced at by the Mahavamsa author. (Current entries about Ceylon history in Wikipedia are mostly anti-Sinhalese and anti-Buddhist distortions. It is up to our patriotic young scholars and historians to set these records right.)

I wrote about the Sinhalese ambassadors in the Roman court and why they went there in the same article written two years ago. I am quoting below the relevant section of my previous article (which was not published in The Island, probably because of non-publishing days due to communication disruptions caused by the Covid pandemic).

Sinhalese ambassadors in the court of emperor Claudius

The Roman historian Pliny the Elder (23-79 CE) in his Natural History gives a vivid account of a royal embassy consisting of four members with a person called Raki as its leader from the court of king Bhatika Abhaya Tissa (38-66 CE) visiting the imperial Roman court during the reign of the emperor Claudius (41-54 CE) to negotiate the purchase of red coral from there.  The coral was for making an ornamental net to cover the Maha Tupa (Ruvanveli Maha Saeya) at Anuradhapura as an offering to the sacred monument.  The fact that Ptolemy (c. 100 – c. 170) made his map of Taprobana (Taprobane as foreign visitors at that time called Sinhale) significantly larger than it actually was relative to his map of what is today called India to the north, signifies the importance he attached to the island as a country. 

The account of Annius Plocamus, a Roman tax collector from the Mediterranean region, (who mediated the royal ambassadorial visit during king Bhatika Abhaya Tissa’s reign (20 BCE – 9 CE)), currently available in the Wikipedia, provides a fine example of the deliberate distortion of Sinhalese history that has been carried on for nearly a century by certain Tamil racist historians. The Wikipedia entry refers to a certain Tamil writer by the name of T. Isaac Tambyah, author of ‘Psalms of Saiva Saints’ (1925). Isaac Tambyah assumes that the name given by Pliny of the leader of the embassy Rachias is a version of Rasaiah! He must have pronounced the name as Rashias instead of Rakias. Rasaiah is familiar to us as a common Tamil name. (Actually, to be fair by Isaac Tambyah, he only repeats an obviously uninformed guess that had been made by British governor Emerson Tennent (1804-1869) that the mispronounced Rachias suggested that the embassy was sent to Rome by an alleged Rajah of Jaffna’ It is absolutely certain that there were no permanent Tamil residents in Sihela until the 10th century CE. (The governor had been misled by a Tamil zealot’s figment of imagination for there were no Tamil rulers in Jaffna. Nor Jaffna either! The area was known as Dambakolapatuna in Sinhala {Jambukolapattana in Pali} in those pre-Christian times. Dambakolapatuna (orJambokola pattana in Mudliyar L.C. Wijesinghe’s 1889 translation of The Mahavansa Chapter XVIII) was where Sangamitta Theri disembarked with the Sri Maha Bodhi sapling in the third century BCE. There is no doubt that a Tamil distortionist had fed Tennent with wrong information! The same Wikipedia account suggests that the embassy was prompted by a trivial discovery of the sincerity of Romans by the king (What a trivial excuse to imagine for this most important Sihela embassy to Rome, whose express purpose was to make a costly purchase of a massive load of red corals to offer to the Ruvanveli Maha Seya. The Sihela kingdom’s foreign trade was flourishing under king Bhatikabhaya Tissa as was the country’s internal economy, free from south Indian invasions.) 

The late Dr D.P.M. Weerakkody, Western Classics scholar, wrote a paper  about historical Sri Lanka-Rome relationships in 2013, which I read later. It was obvious to me that Dr Weerakkody, whom I had personally known before as a person who loved Mother Lanka, never took the Tamil historian’s claim that Pliny’s Rachias was ‘Rasaiah’ seriously. He went by the strict rules of  academic research. I remember him criticising the imperfections of the late celebrated archaeologist, historian and epigraphist, Professor Senerath Paranavitana’s (1896-1972) later writings about epigraphy in a lecture at the University of Peradeniya  that he delivered some time after his return having earned his PhD in Western Classics from the University of Hull in England. In addition to that, he had obtained a qualification in music from the same university. This was around 1977-78 if my memory is correct. The shortcomings in Professor Paranavitana’s theses, it was implied, were due to his old age infirmity, and not to deliberate academic dishonesty.

Historical truth of the Sinhalese embassy to Rome

To resume my subject, the historical truth about the first century Sinhalese embassy to Rome is well established. Authoritative historians have found that the name Rachias is a  corruption of the Sinhala name Raki or Rakiya, one of the typically short Sinhala names that recurs in a number of inscriptions as distinguished professor in Archaeology Raj Somadeva of the University of Kelaniya, Sri Lanka,who is an alumnus of Uppsala University, Sweden, has clearly pointed out.  He has provided much documentary and epigraphical evidence to prove this. Pliny himself has given a detailed account of Rachias or Raki, which shows that Raki was an important personage, indeed, a scion of the Sinhalese royal family. Raki’s father was an ambassador too. He was employed by the king of Sinhale of the time to lead an embassy to China. For Raki to represent the Sinhalese king in the Roman court, he had to be of the Sinhala royal family. He won’t have insulted the emperor by sending ambassadors under the leadership of a non-Sinhala, non-native commoner called Rasaiah! Can you imagine that a king who was rich enough to buy red corals to make a huge net or jacket to adorn the stupendous Ruvanveli Maha Saeya would do such a thing? (rrwasala@gmail.com)