Rohana R. Wasala

Nearly four and a half centuries of continuous subjugation under three separate West European imperial powers, namely, Portugal, Holland or Netherlands, and England from 1505 to 1948 served to increasingly conceal the indigeneity of the Sinhalese to their historic island home known as Sihela/Sinhale. The original inhabitants of Sihela who came to be called Sinhalas (Sinhalese in English) in historical times are almost certainly a racial amalgam of at least four different indigenous tribes, namely, Yaksha, Deva, Naga, and Raksha mentioned in traditional chronicles such as the Dipavansa and the Mahavansa. 

To elaborate this point a little, as appropriate to the contextual background of this essay: According to the ancient chronicles of the Sinhalese like the 4th century CE Dipavansa and the 5th century CE Mahavansa, and the later Rajavaliya of the 17th century CE (to name just a few of such historical documents), there were four ancient tribes that populated the island at the time of the arrival of the north Indian prince Vijaya, the fictitious founder of the Sinhalese race. They were the Yakkha, Naga, Deva, and Raksha communities, collectively known in the course of later history, as Siv Hela or Four Helas. (Incidentally, eminent archaeology professor and populariser of that discipline Raj Somadeva of Colombo’s Postgraduate Institute of Archaeology affiliated with the Kelaniya University, Sri Lanka, claims that the Mahavansa is the world’s foremost example of a  literary heritage  that has been continued by any human society unbroken over the centuries”; he states this in the Introduction to his 2022 book in Sinhala ‘Yakshi’, p.1).

 As for the name Sinhale, my commonsensical layman’s belief is that Siv Hela became Sihela or Sinhale, which the Europeans ultimately adapted to ‘Ceylon’ thus: The Portuguese turned Sihela/Sinhale  to Ceilao, the Dutch to Zeilan, and finally the British to Ceylon. The important point here is that the Sinhalese  are the direct descendants of the earliest inhabitants of the   island who nevertheless came to be subdued by the legendary Vijaya, a prince, pirate, or trader, from of the state of Sinhapura in what is today identified as the Bengal region in north-eastern India, and were thus subjected to significant genomic admixture in the long run with that invading North Indian tribe, that must have produced the ruling elite. In physical appearance, not surprisingly, most Sinhalese bear a striking resemblance to modern Bangladeshis. Later arriving South Indian guests in small numbers (as traders, mercenaries, and workers, etc) have left a similar genetic impact on the physical racial makeup of the Sinhalese. But it is the impression of the Indo-Aryan Prakrits (through the Pali language that is cognate with Magadhi Prakrit) on the indigenous Helu/Elu (proto-Sinhala) that has dominated it to the near exclusion of Dravidian linguistic influence.

The Yakkhas were apparently the largest community and hence formed the ruling tribe on the island at the beginning of the country’s recorded history. According to the Dipavansa mentioned above, the island was ruled by a single king. The island’s history of two and a half thousand years is traditionally reckoned from the  arrival of the legendary Vijaya from the kingdom of Sinhapura in the ancient Vanga in eastern India, which is the modern-day Bengal region already mentioned. The Bengal region is divided into two parts as East Bengal and West Bengal. East Bengal is the sovereign state called Bangladesh today, whereas West Bengal is a state of the modern Republic of India. The hoary beginnings of the history of the indigenous inhabitants of Sihela are lost in prehistoric antiquity. Almost certainly they started as cave dwelling hunter gatherers. But some recent overenthusiastic Sinhalese zealots, through their ignorance and illiteracy, seem to have unknowingly adopted the Ravana myth found in Sage Valmiki’s Ramayana, the ancient  Hindu epic poem (composed in Sanskrit between 750 BCE-500 BCE), as proof of the alleged glories achieved by their hoary ancestors; this is in the absolute absence of any trace of historical evidence to support such a claim! (The reference here to the Ravana myth is meant for a bit of comic relief.)

Sri Lanka has interacted closely with the huge mainland India (with its shifting composite identity over the centuries) commercially, culturally, and politically as a sovereign neighbour for over two thousand five hundred years of recorded history. A very significant historical reality is that the more ancient enduring sovereign state of the two is Sri Lanka, mainly due to its unique geographic location that favours independent insular isolation, while open to the ocean on all sides that forms a naturally available medium for communication with the rest of the world. 

The geopolitical importance of Sri Lanka’s offshore setting is immeasurable: it is a central maritime hub in the Indian Ocean that straddles the vital east-west Sea Lines of Communication (SLOC). Its central position between the Middle-East and the Malacca Strait and its proximity to India make it highly contested in the superpower competition in the lately designated Indo-Pacific, primarily between China, India, and the Western powers. (The Indian Ocean was officially designated as part of the broader Indo-Pacific  strategic region in 2013, as a result of the Australian Government formally adopting the term in its 2013 Defence White Paper.)

This re-designation of the Indian Ocean region offers Sri Lanka immense opportunities  as well as formidable challenges, which it is the bounden duty of its leaders to manage for the good of all its diverse population. But unfortunately, at this point in our history, we find ourselves in the hands of the weakest set of politicians ever to have been elected to rule over us since independence. To be aware that their election is purely by fluke gives the patriots cold comfort. Given the predatory attention Sri Lanka is receiving from the three global competitors in the region as a small, threatened sovereign nation at present, as it appears, she looks like a doe about to be torn apart by three famished wolves. 

The connection between Sinhala speakers and Buddhism started with the formal introduction of  Theravada Buddhism to the island of Sihela (now Sri Lanka) by Arhant Mahinda Thera in the third century BCE. On his arrival, he preached the Dhamma in the native language of the islanders, as we can find in Chapters 14 and 15 of the epic Mahavamsa (composed in Pali in poetic form), where we have: “dhammaṃ bhāsitvā dīpabhāsāya evaṃ”, which directly translates to “having preached the doctrine in the language of the island in this way”. This implies that there was at that time a common language that the different tribes communicated in. There is no doubt that it was  the aforementioned Elu/Helu language or proto-Sinhala. 

The Buddha dhamma came from Jambudvipa or India as it is called today, but the language that received it was the proto-Sinhala that originated in the island. Sinhala is the only language that is native to the island. Even the language spoken by the Vaddas, often arbitrarily wrongly described as the indigenous people of Sri Lanka (as opposed to the Sinhalese), is a dialect of Sinhala. But the truth is that the Sinhalese are as indigenous to the island as the Vaddas (most probably, identifiable with the Rakshas mentioned in the chronicles) and the two groups (Sinhalese and Vaddas) are actually co-ethnics, as confirmed by modern genomic studies, linguistically equidistant from their closest neighbours, the South Indian Dravidians including Tamils and Malayalees.  

The total global population of Tamils is 80 to 90 million, whereas the corresponding figure for the Sinhalese is 16 to 17 million. While 63 to 75 million Tamils out of these live in India, mostly in Tamil Nadu in South India; only about 3 million Tamils live in Sri Lanka, mostly in the northern and eastern provinces. In contrast, roughly about 16 million Sinhalese live on the island, concentrated in the rest of the country. The Sinhalese diaspora ranges between 1.5 to 2 million. (From the earliest times to around the 10th century CE, the whole island was inhabited by the indigenes dominated by the Yakkhas and allied tribes, who had eventually merged as Sinhalas.) Sinhalese living in the north and the east were subjected to ethnic cleansing during the recent civil conflict (that lasted roughly from 1983 to 2009). Even 17 years after the end of the war, most of these war-displaced  Sinhalese are still waiting to be resettled in their original places of residence from where they were forcefully evicted by the separatists. 

 The powerful West-based Tamil diaspora influence that currently operates against the Sinhalese in every domain (politics, diplomacy, economics, education) will not be an insurmountable obstacle under a proper political leadership (yet to be elected, though) because of the unbreakable religio-cultural bonds of over two  millennia between the mainly Hindu Tamils and the mainly Buddhist Sinhalese. Sinhalese Tamil solidarity is indispensable for unitary Sri Lanka’s future survival in the face of its unalterable geographic destiny, especially in view of the global problem of steadily growing Islamism. To be continued