Dancing on Knives: The Ceylon Press History of Sri Lanka 5

The History of Sri Lanka

The Ceylon Press History of Sri Lanka 5

Dancing on Knives

Sri Lanka & The Lucky Break

“Every adventure requires a first step.”

The Cheshire Cat

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

Lewis Carroll 1865

The Careless King

“If I want a crown,” remarked Peachey, hero of Kipling’s Man Who Would Be King, and unexpected alter ego of Prince Vijiya, Sri Lanka’s first monarch, “I must go and hunt it for myself.”

If Peachey’s motivation was glory and riches, plain and simple, Vijaya’s was about raw survival, dodging assassinations and evading parental disapprobation. If, that is, the chronicles are to be believed.

And in this, Sri Lanka is exceedingly fortunate for it has not one but three great chronicles, claiming between them the title of the world’s oldest, longest historical narrative.

Although these turbulent chronicles muddle up man, god and magic with morality, history, and myth, they also lay a wraithlike trail of events and people through what would otherwise be a historical vacuum dotted with random and unattributable artefacts.

Prince Vijaya’s existence is known about only though the first two chronicles - The Dipavaṃsa Chronicle (complied around the third to fourth centuries CE) and The Mahavaṃsa, The Great Chronicle, an epic poem written by a Buddhist monk in the fifth century CE in the ancient Pali script.

These stupefying works, which put most soap operas and not a few Sci-Fi films to shame, open with Prince Vijaya’s arrival from Sinhapura, a lost legendary state in eastern India; and ends in 302 CE. At this point they hand the task of story-telling onto the third and last book, The Culavamsa or Lesser Chronicle, which covers events to 1825, an otherwise blameless year the world over with little more of note than it being the date of the first performance of Rossini's Barber of Seville.

But if love and eternal fidelity are rarely the subject of the three chronicles, gold, betrayal, and secrecy often are – though historians naturally debate the factual accuracy of the stories, in which the doings of men and kings take a poor second place to that of monks and Lord Buddha.

Even when the focus shifts from the divine to the secular, it is abundantly clear that, as with the most tenacious tales, history is inevitably written by the winners. Although verified archaeological, still less documentary evidence for Prince Vijaya, remains tantalizingly absent, he remains from every perspective, the great winner, the shaved head fugitive with a penchant for what The Mahavamsa calls “evil conduct and … intolerable deeds,” every bit the rebranded hero. Expelled by his appalled father, thrust onto a ship with seven hundred dependant followers and ordered to stay away on pain of death, Prince Vijaya has, though the centuries, still managed to take centre stage as the Sri Lanka’s paterfamilias.

Centuries later, over a shared arak and soda, and, courtesy of reincarnation, it is more than likely that the reformed villain would tell you that he finds his righteous reputation puzzling. After all, he never set out to be a hero, still less founder of a nation; and quite possibly not even a king, claiming, in his own lifetime, the much more modest title of Prince. Survival, a bit of fun, respect, of course, obedient followers, amendable wives, good food and the space to be his own boss was probably as much as he aspired to.

Indeed, so careless was he of his greater future that he almost destroyed his own fledging dynasty just as it was starting out, a nasty proclivity that was to reoccur just two generations later when his descendants tried to wipe themselves out. Twice, in under two hundred years the Vijayans, the dynasty that was to make Sri Lanka the world’s only Singhala nation, came perilously close to obliterating it altogether. It was the sort of carelessness typical of rulers bereft of the value of hindsight, operating like sword dancers twirling on the tops of lofty stupas, and utterly reckless with their unfathomable dynastic destiny.

The Cursed Crown

It is said that Prince Vijaya snuck into the country through the secretive Puttalam Lagoon.

If so, he enjoyed the value of surprise for the shortest of times. The Mahavamsa, whose respect for divinity of any sort is beyond reproach, has Lord Buddha task an acquiescent Hindu god with protecting the prince and reassuring him that the island he has alighted upon is pretty much empty.

“There are no men here, and here no dangers will arise,” claims the god, helpfully disguised as a wandering ascetic. If one is to found a future nation, this sort of starting point is enormously helpful; and thousands of years later, so little is known about the real social and political structures that existed on the island at this time, that this myth of a largely empty island merely waiting for noble race to occupy it is more than validated by ignorance.

But lines are there to be read through and The Mahavamsa wears the cognitive dissonance of its gilded lines with confident ease. Almost from the start, they imply, the prince and his followers found themselves fighting for survival, dominance, and land. The many conflicting stories surrounding his fights with man-eating wives, flying horses, skirmishes with indigenous tribes, protection under Buddha and willingness to swap his local wife Kuveni, for a more glamorous and aristocratic Indian princess, are in fact key parts of the country’s cherished creation myths. And curses too. For Kuveni, rejected, outcast and pushed to a shocking suicide, was to place such a curse on the king and his house as to taint “not only Vijaya but the descendants of Hela People (Singhala) as a whole,” wrote an observer. It has,” remarked another mournful raconteur, “overflowed to each and every nook and corner of Sri Lanka and enwrapped her people over the centuries.”

If the nation delights in the stories around Vijaya; those around Kuveni, a native queen of the local Yaksha tribe, cause much head shaking. For Kuveni was not simply a wife and weaver of cloth, a mother, lover, and queen - but also a demon, a metamorphoser, an outcast, an avenging fury, suicide, traitor, murderess, ghost, and mistress of deception. A descendant of gods, she is also a goddess to the country’s still living aboriginal peoples. We may be forest haunters,” said a Vedda leader recently, “but Kuveni our goddess.” Small wonder then that Sri Lanka, in not knowing what to really make of the Mother of the Nation, choses to push her deep into one of its many locked closets.

The First Colonist

The slimmest of ancient – almost folkloric - hints marks the Prince’s landing on Sri Lanka’s shores

Pulling his boats onto a beach of reddish-brown sand – “Tamba” meaning Coppe,; or as it was later known, Tambapanni, was the perfect spot for a settlement, commanding the access to a great natural harbour opening into the Gulf of Mannar and an almost inexhaustible supply of pearl oysters.

“Horse Mountain,” is another alternative name for Kudiramalai and for centuries, amidst the ruins of an ancient temple, the ruins of a massive horse and man statue stood on the cliffs. Made of brick, stone, and coral, it is estimated to hav...