By Rohana R. Wasala
(continued
from August 28, 2021)
Misrepresentation and distortion of history by colonialists and
separatists
The
independence or dominion status that Sri Lanka (then Ceylon to foreigners) was
granted by the departing British colonials was not more than a hangover from
the British imperialism of the previous one and a half centuries (1798-1948)
until real independence was realised through the constitutional change of 1972.
The promulgation of the republican constitution in that year was arguably the
first most momentous event in post-independence Sri Lanka, because it
definitively reversed the total loss of independence of the country of Sinhale
that happened in 1815 with the deposition of Sri Wickrema Rajasinghe the king
of Kandy (1798-1815).
The
small minority of aging Tamil separatist leaders do not like to accept this
palpable truth. They hang on to the facile and factless two nation or two
countries generalization incorporated in the Cleghorn Minute of 1799 (which had
been prompted by administrative convenience with hardly any regard for the
facts of history, based entirely on the then existing demography of the region.
Hugh Cleghorn was the colonial secretary; he must have been familiar with the
efficacy of the imperial divide and rule strategy (which made potential allies
against the invader turn against each other). Chief justice Alexander Johnstone
twenty-eight years later (in 1827) was guilty of an even more outrageous
falsehood; he thought it reasonable, on casual observation, to assume that
Tamils had inhabited the north and east provinces at the period of their
greatest agricultural prosperity” (as claimed in a paper presented at an Eelam
promotion London seminar in 1992). This erroneous assumption by that
servant of the British empire carelessly attributed the unparalleled achievements
of the well known hydrological/hydraulic civilization of the Sinhalese that
flourished in the Dry Zone from at least 5th century BCE to 13th century CE to
Tamils! (It was Magha of Kalinga’s invasion at the beginning of the 13th
century that put an effective end to that period not only of agricultural
prosperity, but booming trade with neighbouring countries, achieved by the
Sinhalese. Tens of thousands of large and small water reservoirs or wewas
(Sinhala)/wapi (Pali) and irrigation channels, whose exquisite engineering
sophistication still amazes the world, dot the island and serve the nation, by
enabling the cultivation of paddy in two seasons unhindered by the annual
occurrence of rainless months. Latest archaeological finds in the hilly Walapane
district indicate that the concept of storing water by damming streams
pre-existed even the construction of artificial lakes (wewas) by kings Abhaya
and Pandukabhaya in Anuradhapura in the 5th century BCE, where water reservoir
building has traditionally been thought to have originated.
Concept of a Tamil homeland in Sri Lanka debunked
Eminent
historians including Professor K.M. de Silva who wrote a research paper in 1995
specifically addressing the subject have comprehensively debunked the Tamils’
homeland concept. There is absolutely no historical evidence to justify the
claim that Tamils had total control over the vast area that now constitutes the
north-eastern region. The nearest the Tamils got to that was when they
established themselves in the Jaffna peninsula in the north and some areas
adjacent to it in the south in the Vanni (vana means jungle or forest in
Sinhala) district for about three centuries between the 13th and 16th centuries
(i.e., following the defeat and escape of invader Magha of Kalinga that put an
end to his tyrannous occupation of twenty-one years, 1215-1236 CE).
The truth: A
history of foreign invasions and dogged resistance from native Sinhalese
By the time of
the beginning of the European involvement in Sri Lanka with the arrival of the
Portuguese at the dawn of the 16th century, the island had survived seventeen
armed Dravidian invasions from South India, the first of which happened in 230
BCE (i.e., horse traders Sena and Guttika’s usurpation of the throne in
Anuradhapura; the two ‘reigned righteously for twenty-two years’ as the
Buddhist bhikkhu Mahanama Thera, the Mahavansa author, says in Chapter
XXI, without any trace of anger or vengeful thoughts). There is no doubt that
these invasions and later European interferences and interventions in the
internal affairs of the island were primarily triggered by exclusive trade
interests, rather than political or territorial ambitions of imperial powers.
Dravidians had occupied and ruled parts of the north and east of the country
intermittently for about 300 years of the first 2000 years of its 2500 year
recorded history. King Vijayabahu I (prince Keerthi born c. 1039) ) reigned
from 1055 to 1110. He expelled the Chola invaders who were occupying parts in
the north of the country after a seventeen year struggle and brought the island
‘under one canopy’ as under Dutugemunu (161-137 BCE) before him. South Indian
invasions again came after Vijayabahu’s death during the rule of his weaker
successors, until his grandson Parakramabahu I (1153-1186) beat the invaders
back and unified the country once again. This monarch who took great interest
in the economic and cultural development of the country was so powerful
that he even invaded South India and Burma (modern Myanmar) to ensure the free
flow of trade between the island and neighbouring states.
Kalinga Magha
invasion
Kalinga Magha’s
invasion of Sinhale in the first half of the 13th century (1215-1236) took
place at a particularly unstable period of royal disputes caused by rivalries
and intrigues between pretenders to the throne, which had led, as can be
guessed, to much internecine feuding and violence, disorder and anarchy, that
attracted hostile foreign adventurers. Those ‘wicked and cruel and
grievous deeds that the inhabitants of Lanka had done’ (as admitted by the
Mahavansa author, would have seemed, at least in the marauder Kalinga Magha’s
eyes, to extenuate the enormity of the cruel excesses committed by him on his
Sinhala victims. About invader Kalinga Magha, Chapter LXXX of the Mahavansa
(continued in the form of Culavansa) says (The author monk’s language does not
reflect the actual economic, political and military background to this event)
:
And it came to
pass that, because of some wicked and cruel and grievous deeds that the
inhabitants of Lanka had done, the gods who had been placed in different parts
thereof to watch over them and to protect them cared no longer for the country,
and looked not any more after their safety. Thereupon a certain wicked prince
of the Kalinga race, Magha by name, invaded the country at the head of twenty
thousand strong men from Kalinga and took possession of the island of Lanka.
And he was a follower of false faiths, and had a mind only to do mischief…”
(quoted from Mudaliyar L.C. Wijesinghe translation/1889). (Note again the
detached, equanimous tone of the monk author – it’s a monk of a later age who
composed this Culavansa part of the Mahavansa.) The Magha invasion dealt a near
death blow to the historic hydraulic engineering based civilization of the
Sinhalese in the dry zone, which arguably had reached its apogee under
Parakramabahu I. After twenty-one year occupation of the Lanka kingdom, Magha
was beaten and driven away by the Sinhalese; apparently he did not return to
his country Kalinga unlike earlier invaders, but stayed on in the north and
started ruling there.
After this
fortuitous disintegration of the country of Sinhale, there appeared in its
southern part, several Sinhalese kingdoms, including the Kandyan kingdom in the
central interior, which remained independent until 1815. However, the idea of
one country one state seems to have survived the post-Magha division of the
country; the division was something that was not psychologically accepted
by the Sinhalese. The Sinhalese kingdom that emerged the most powerful at any
time laid claim to lordship over the whole of the island, at least in
principle. No authority I have read has articulated this conception of the land
of the Sinhalese (Tri Sinhale) as a single sovereign nation, cherished by them
over the millennia, better than the distinguished former professor of
anthropology Gananath Obesekere of the University of Princeton:
In his 2017 book
The Doomed King: A Requiem for Sri Vikrama Rajasinha”, he writes: ….. all
Sri Lankan kings believed that the ‘nation’ as a whole constituted an entity
known as Tri Sinhala (the three parts of the Sinhala land)………….. Tri
Sinhala refers to the division of the nation into three broad semi-independent
regions in a kind of loose unity: Rajarata or Pihitirata in the north, part of
the ancient kingdom; Maya, the western part; and Ruhuna, the very south and
east. In that conception foreign invaders were there on sufferance and it is
the duty of kings to redeem that historic unity…”.
In this book,
Obesekere paints a positive vision of the king using both British and Sinhala
sources until his final capture and banishment…”. He thinks that the king was
depicted by the intriguing British as a brutal tyrant who committed cruel
excesses against his own people that he suspected of disloyalty, and who thus
caused resentment and disaffection among his subjects. This was to justify
their own aggressive designs on the kingdom. In reality, Sri Vikrama was ruling
as a good king amidst many challenges he had to face because of the treachery
of the Kandyan aristocrats engaged in intrigues with the prowling British. The
researcher calls Sri Vikrama a ‘doomed king’ because the dream of Sri Lankan
kings of restoring the unity of the nation (mentioned above) which he
also must have entertained had become unrealistic and futile when the
maritime provinces were conquered by the Portuguese and the Dutch, especially
after the British turned them into a crown colony under the British empire in
1798. The king was doomed to be removed sooner or later, for they would not
have allowed the Kandyan kingdom to be independent, posing a threat to their
overlordship. Both governor Thomas Maitland (1805-1811) and the spying
intermediary between the Kandyans and the British in Colombo John D’Oyly knew
that the Kandyan kings claimed the whole of the island as their legitimate
right (p.53). So, what was ceded to the British in 1815 was the whole of the
land of Sinhale. That, I think, is the reason why Obesekere says that probably
the deposition of king Sri Vikrama was the most momentous event in Sri Lankan
history (i.e., the complete loss of independence for the first time in its over
2500 year recorded history).
(Incidentally,
separatists make much of Sri Vikrama Rajasinha being allegedly a Malabar/Tamil.
That is a fallacy, too. He was not a Tamil at all. He belonged to the Telegu
speaking Nayaka dynasty who had come to Tamil Nadu from the north to rule
there (hence called the Vadugas or northerners; they were a warrior class who
had come from Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka) ; they were not Tamil themselves.
The Kandyan kings maintained relations with the Vadugas. In the Kandy royal
court, Sinhala, Telegu, and of course Tamil were used. But most ordinary
Kandyan Sinhaese were ignorant of Telegu; neither did they understand
these fine distinctions. They revered the Nayaka kings including Sri Vikrama as
Sinhala Buddhist kings, though they knew that they were not Sinhalese by blood,
and though they thought they were Tamil. As Obesekere says, those Kandyan
Sinhalese labelled even the Portuguese as Tamils! Sri Vikrama was consecrated
as a Buddhist king to rule over the kingdom of Sinhale. He was crowned king not
because he was a Tamil or a Vaduga, but because he was the legitimate heir to
the Sinhale throne according to the rules of succession of the time.)
The last native
sovereign to unify the whole of Lanka after the breaking away of parts of the
kingdom caused by the Kalinga Magha invasion of the 13th century was
Parakramabahu VI of the 15th century (1412-1467). He was able to do this by
1450, having conquered the northern Jaffna kingdom. However, following his
death ten years later, Jaffna and Kandy broke away again. When the Portuguese
made their initial moves, the kingdom of Sitawaka was the most powerful of the
Sinhalese kingdoms. Despite the vicissitudes of fortunes of history over
millennia the Sinhalese never gave up their sovereign claim to the whole of the
island. From 1505 to 1815, the European imperial powers – the Portuguese,
Dutch, and English – separately occupied the maritime provinces, while the
Sinhale kingdom was reduced to the hilly interior of the island (the Kandyan
kingdom), which still occupied more geographical territory than the invaders,
with free access to the Trincomalee and Batticaloa harbours in the
East.
The Portuguese
were in Sri Lanka from 1505 to 1658, in which year they departed permanently,
giving way to the Dutch. Until about 1530, Portuguese involvement in the
country was limited to trade. But it became more determined and more menacing
following the death of king Bhuvanekabahu VII of Kotte in 1551. The Dutch were
already dominating by 1640. But their power gradually declined. The Dutch
occupied territories were ceded to the British in 1796. The British overcame
the entrenched Kandyan resistance through intrigue in 1815, and brought Ceylon
under one rule/the British empire, having thus subjugated the whole of the land
of Sinhale as a single entity. It was this unified country that was granted independence
from foreign domination in 1948, at least nominally.
Vaddukoddai
Resolution of 1976
The
so-called Vaddukoddai Resolution unanimously passed and adopted at the first
National Convention of the Tamil United Liberation Front (TULF) held
under the leadership of S.J.V. Chelvanayagam MP Kankesanturai in May 1976
resolved primarily that the restoration and reconstitution of the (alleged)
Free, Sovereign, Secular, Socialist State of Tamil Eelam based on the right of
self determination inherent to every nation, has become inevitable in order to
safeguard the very existence of the Tamil Nation in this Country”. It was based
on a completely questionable reading of history, which arbitrarily and
erroneously claimed that the Sinhalese and Tamil nations have divided the
possession of Ceylon, the Sinhalese inhabiting the interior of the country in its
Southern and Western parts from the river Walawe to that of Chilaw and the
Tamils possessing the Northern and Eastern districts…..and …..that the Tamil
Kingdom was overthrown in war and conquered by the Portuguese in 1619, and from
them by the Dutch and the British in turn, independent of the Sinhalese
Kingdoms…… The British colonialists joined the Tamil and Sinhalese Kingdoms for
purposes of administrative convenience on the recommendation of the Colebrooke
Commission in 1833…”. It directed the Action Committee of the Tamil
United Liberation Front to formulate a plan of action and launch without undue
delay the struggle for winning the sovereignty and freedom of the Tamil Nation,
and called upon the Tamil Nation in general and the Tamil youth in particular
to come forward to throw themselves fully into the sacred fight for freedom and
to flinch not till the goal of a sovereign state of Tamil Eelam is
reached”.
The reality
behind the Portuguese conquest of Jaffna in the early 17th century does not
support the implicit claim in the Vaddukoddai Resolution that a significant
Tamil kingdom was then in existence there. The truth was that the
Portuguese defeated the Pandyan ruler who had been placed in power there and
who was maintained by a mercenary army from Tanjore. When he lost to the
Portuguese, that army left, and most of the inhabitants with them. Jaffna was
almost totally emptied of its small population. The Portuguese had to import
several thousand coolies from south India to work on their tobacco plantations.
Even the few thousands made the place congested, which prompted the Dutch
governor of the time to remark how overpopulated it was in as given in ‘Memoirs
of Recloff Van Geons’ (December 26, 1663, translated by Reimers): Jaffna was
so full of people that they were on each other’s way, on which account the
country was too small to feed…..”.
The historically
unsupportable wild demands of the Eelamists involved more than one third of the
geographical territory of the country including particularly the ancient city
of Anuradhapura, that had remained the seat of government of Sinhale for more
than one thousand five hundred years, and also the eastern province the very
bedrock of the unique hydrological civilization of the Sinhalese that made them
world renowned, and in addition to this, two thirds of Sri Lanka’s coastline,
and hence two thirds of its territorial waters! All this for just 11% of the
population!
Task assigned
to Tamil intellectuals by the separatists
The leaders of
the then fast militarizing separatist movement assigned a special task to the
Tamil academics and intellectuals, and harassed those who didn’t agree with
them. This was for them to provide theoretical and ideological support through
their learning and superior intellect, particularly to convince the powerful
international players in world politics of the alleged justness of their cause.
Since the established facts were otherwise, they had to fabricate lies, which
they started asserting with increasing vehemence.
Even Karthigesu
Indrapala was compelled to virtually recant the conclusions that he provided
much scientific evidence to support in his 1965 PhD thesis, that had proved
that Tamil history in Sri Lanka began only in the 12th century CE. So he came
out with The Evolution of an Ethnic Identity: The Tamils in Sri Lanka” (2005),
which favoured the separatist cause. Stanley Tambiah of Harvard university (who
had graduated from the then University of Ceylon before attending Cornell
University for his postgraduate studies in the early 1950s), a social
anthropologist, wrote ‘Buddhism Betrayed: Religion, Politics, and
Violence in Sri Lanka’ in 1992. It was a shockingly shallow work of a biased
academic (I regret having to use that oxymoron in this context) that was
designed to feed the anti-Sinhala Buddhist misinformation drive of the
separatists. The title itself is gravely misleading. There has never been any
violence committed by Buddhists on religious minorities. There was no
connection between Buddhism and violence in Sri Lanka. It was all politics. It
is unfortunate that no politician in the country has thought about setting the
record straight in this regard. No worthwhile Sri Lankan academic has attempted
to answer this pseudo work of scholarship, probably because it is not worth
their attention.
Tamil youth
misled
The misguided
Tamil youth formed themselves into several separatist groups and after
years of internecine clashes among them, the most violent LTTE got rid of all
rival formations by killing off their leaders and emerged victorious. Its
leader Velupillai Prabhakaran was from the downtrodden fisher caste in the
caste-ridden Jaffna society. It is a fact that Tamils, especially Tamils in the
north and east, actually suffer from the Hindu caste discrimination, and not
from non-existent Sinhala majoritatianism. Caste-free Tamil intellectuals of
today, because they are correctly informed through their scholarship, and are
intelligent enough to know fact from fiction, know the truth about the justness
or otherwise of the separatist cause that they are now promoting through
academic misinformation about everything that is important for the survival of
the Sinhalese with their essentially Buddhist cultural traditions and
practices, and for the preservation of the records of their ancient history and
the rich archaeological heritage.
Bamboozling
intervention
Ironically, while
it is being demonstrated that America’s policy of intervening in other
countries is disastrous folly as in the case of Afghanistan, TNA MP MA
Sumanthiran was reported (The Island/August 27, 2021) as having called for
American mediation in Sri Lanka for resolving alleged issues faced by Tamils in
the North and East of the country. He pointed out that pushing this during
Michelle Bachelet’s tenure as High Commissioner for Human Rights was
advantageous for them. R. Sampanthan had earlier urged American ambassador
Alaina B. Teplitz to get involved in getting the Sri Lankan government to fix
the so-called issues affecting the Tamils in the North and East, and that those
two provinces should be merged and administered by the ‘Tamil people’. The TNA
was asking for a meeting with the president to discuss the implementation of
the UN recommendations passed in respect of Sri Lanka during the previous
sessions. This is racism taking refuge in supranationalism, for baiting
nationalism.
Greatest
achievement of the Sinhalese
To my mind, the
greatest single achievement of the Sinhalese is their having remained a single
sovereign nation with the same linguistic (Sinhala) and cultural (Buddhist)
identity intact for over twenty-three centuries in the face of so many
devastating onslaughts mounted throughout that long period not only on its
sovereign independence but its very survival by South Indian and then European
invaders (during the initial 2000 years and the last 500 years, respectively).
These ever-present threats to Sri Lanka’s sovereignty, unity, security, and
economic wellbeing, mainly caused by the fact of its geostrategically important
location, have not ceased yet.
Potential for
Sri Lankan national unity
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 baggages 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. (Concluded)
