The Presence of the Past: Chronicles, Politics, and Culture in Sinhala Life 9781501736896

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The Wilder House Series in Politics, History, and Culture

The Wilder House Series is published in association with the Wilder House Board of Editors and the University of Chicago. David Laitin, Editor Leora Auslander, Assistant Editor George Steinmetz, Assistant Editor

The Presence of the Past: Chronicles, Politics, and Culture in Sinhala Life by Steven Kemper

ALSO IN THE SERIES

Language and Ponder: Exploring Political Cultures in Indonesia

by Benedict R. O’G. Anderson Reclaiming the Sacred: Lay Religion and Popular Politics in Revolutionary France by Suzanne Desan State and Society in Medieval Europe: Gwynedd and Languedoc under Outside Rule by James Given Communities of Grain: Rural Rebellion in Comparative Perspective

by Victor V. Magagna

Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2018 with funding from The Arcadia Fund

https://archive.org/details/presenceofpastchOOkemp

The Presence of the Past Chronicles, Politics, and Culture in Sinhala Life

STEVEN KEMPER

Cornell University Press Ithaca and London

Copyright © 1991 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, 124 Roberts Place, Ithaca, New York 14850. First published 1991 by Cornell University Press. International Standard Book Number 0-8014-2395-3 Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 91-55059

Printed in the United States of America Librarians: Library of Congress cataloging information appears on the last page of the book. ©The paper in this book meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984*

For Anne, Jordan, Shannon, and Jessica

Contents

Preface

Introduction

ix

1

I.

Past Uses of the Past

26

2.

Heroic Leaders and Discourses of Unity

53

3-

Colonial Constructions of the Past

79

4-

Contesting the Past

105

5-

Races and Places

135

6.

An Elected Government Invokes the Past

161

7-

Nationalist Discourse

194

Bibliography

227

Index

241

Preface

This book follows in a tradition of interest in nationalism, historical anthropology, and culture theory; it attempts to explain how the past weighs on present-day affairs in one South Asian society. My interest in the Sri Lankan past derived from my concern for a society that has descended into terrorism, civil unrest, and social despair. I came to an interest in the MuhavuMsci not because of its literary or histo¬ riographic content, but because of its relationship to that concern. It is obvious to anyone familiar with the deep estrangement between Sinhalas and Tamils in Sri Lanka that a specifically historical kind of reasoning has given form to each community’s view of the other and justified acts of injustice and violence. The Mahavamsd warrants much of this historical argument, which means that its importance lies as much in its popular understanding as in its scholarly value. Since the nineteenth century, the Mahavamsa has given direction to what Sri Lankans call Sinhala nationalism, the assertion of Sinhala cultural identity and political interest. In studying the relationship between a sixth-century court chroni¬ cle and the rise of Sinhala nationalism in a society long dominated by colonial power, I came to realize that the Sri Lankan example chal¬ lenged most accounts of nationalism in colonial societies. Most inter¬ pretations treat nationalism as a phenomenon that arose no earlier than the late eighteenth century. There is nothing unusual about na¬ tionalists themselves claiming much older origins for their “nations,”

although few look back to a past as venerable as the 2,500-year history Sinhala nationalists invoke. What is unusual is that several soberminded scholars make similar arguments, claiming that Sinhala nation¬ alism began at least as early as the sixth century with the compilation of the Mahavamsa. By that logic, Sinhala nationalism would antedate nationalism in other parts of the world, including the New World and Europe, by more than a millennium. I will not make that argument myself, but I will evaluate it. This task requires sorting out the relationship among social identities, events, practices, and their representation. Trying to make sense of the tangled skein of representations of the Sri Lankan past pulls me in opposite, emotional directions—the first exhilarating, the second ter¬ rifying and depressing. The exhilaration develops in this way: I am recounting some part of the Sinhala past when I realize that I am reiterating someone’s representation of the past, itself subject to polit¬ ical and discursive influences. As I write, I make a mental note of my distance from that assertion, marking the source or the reliability of the knowledge I am recounting. Thinking about the past, I see that actors’ and scholars’ representations of distant events take on a life of their own and themselves shape subsequent events. That perception gives me the dizzy feeling of playing ccskin-the-cat.” I move from the outside of the object (constructions of the past) to the inside (the flow of events in time). Not only are these constructions the outside; they have insinuated themselves into the inside as well. As my account edges toward the present, it becomes possible to rely on the direct testimony of witnesses and actors—what people tell me of their own lives, what I hear secondhand, newspaper accounts, popular publications, academic writing. Where does the object—in this case, Sinhala attitudes toward history and nation—end and cri¬ tiques of that object begin? When I read academic accounts of the Sinhala past, the problem comes into sharpest focus. Sometimes the arguments are clear-sighted; sometimes they are clouded by the same notions and figures that shape popular consciousness. I stop and ask myself, am I relying on this source as incisive analysis or as a secondorder example of a cultural discourse that turns on priority, continu¬ ity, heroes, unity, and religious mission? Then I think of my own interpretation and see myself as a participant in the interpretation game. If it is interpretation all the way down, it is also interpretation all the way up. The uskin-the-cat” feeling grows stronger.

Preface

xi

Following recent events in Sri Lanka produces a somewhat similar feeling, but one that leaves me depressed, not exhilarated. I have worked in Sri Lanka four times since 1983. In that interval some 15,000 Sinhalas and Tamils, most of them noncombatants, have been killed, houses and shops have been burned, lives have been torn up by their roots. I have walked through neighborhoods in Colombo where Tamil families lived before the holocaust of July 1983. I have talked to Sinhalas whose relatives have been shot point-blank by terrorists. Yet being in Sri Lanka on an everyday basis gets me no closer to the object than being at home. The news published in Sri Lanka is usu¬ ally less frightening than the New York Times’s treatment of the same events. That disparity adds to the feeling of never getting to the bot¬ tom of the matter. Am I an outsider looking at events, or am I a participant in them? Is Sri Lanka paradise, or is there a guerrilla war going on here? Occasionally a corpse is brought to town for burial, but the place where I am living is so calm that is is possible to imag¬ ine that nothing is happening at all. The “skin-the-cat” feeling re¬ turns. My account of Sinhala society and its history adds another layer to the process of representing the past in Sri Lanka. The first layer comes from the actors themselves; the writers of the Mahavamsa pro¬ vide a second layer by compiling local traditions about the historical past; and what Sri Lankans have believed about their society and its history, ideas themselves shaped by the Mahavamsa, makes up a third layer. My account adds a fourth. I believe that all understandings of the past are interpretations and not simply descriptions, but I do not believe all interpretations—including those with similar intentions— are equally good. On my account, the good ones are not more “ob¬ jective” than the bad, but the human beings who make those inter¬ pretations are more aware of the conditions in which they work, and they try to evaluate other interpretations in similar terms. When I say that I want to separate Sri Lanka’s historical “past” from the moral and political traditions that have become its “nationalist past,” I in¬ tend to separate not “objective” truth from falsehood, but two forms of representation, each with its own epistemic economy, from each other. As the fact that my interpretation comes in book form suggests, being an academic in a rich industrial society has given me the time and the resources to give long-term, leisurely thought to matters that

Xll

Preface

Sri Lankans think about more passionately and more practically. The complication is surely that many Sri Lankans are themselves influ¬ enced by written materials, many of which have a scholarly origin. If the large number of small publications on history and nationalism given to me by friends, acquaintances, and fellow passengers on trains and buses is any indication, nationalism is a kind of discourse that regularly circulates between scholarly texts and everyday thinking. The account that follows is fuller than most representations of these issues, but it is still part of the same circulatory system, and it is still an interpretation. I have not tried to interject my presence and my perspective into the way I have presented the material. This is not a close reading of the Mahavamsa, experimental ethnography, or her¬ meneutic anthropology, but it is an interpretation. Except for firstperson references that I make occasionally because I think the alterna¬ tives are cumbersome or dishonest, the “I” largely disappears after I get under way. As the “after I get under way” indicates, the “I” disap¬ pears, but it never dissolves. I finished fieldwork for the book in July 1987, just before Sri Lanka and India signed a peace accord and Indian troops moved into the Northern and Eastern Provinces to separate Tamil guerrillas and Sri Lankan soldiers. The appearance of Indian forces in the island caused a reaction that moved the axis of contention from Sinhalas and Tamils to Sinhalas who supported the government and its peace accord and Sinhalas who did not. With the departure of In¬ dian troops some twenty-two months later, the situation reverted to a conflict between Tamil guerrillas and Sri Lankan troops. This turn of events reinforces the sense that the devolution of Sri Lankan life is a tragedy that keeps repeating itself. Despite radical shifts in the political situation, my attempt to make sense of ideas about the past, heroes, and the discourse of unity speaks as directly to pres¬ ent circumstances as it did to events leading up to India’s interven¬ tion. I find no pleasure in the continuing relevance of what I have said here, and nothing but pain in the continuing deterioration of life in Sri Lanka. To the extent that ethnic feelings have been motivated by feelings about the past and the role played in it by an unreasonable and vio¬ lent other, Sinhala and Tamil ethnic feeling alike grow from the his¬ torical imagination. This book concentrates on the Sinhala side of things because the communities I have studied over the past twenty years are predominantly Sinhala, the people who have helped me are

Preface

xiii

Sinhala, and most of my friends in Sri Lanka are Sinhala. But trying to explain the way the historical imagination has motivated and justi¬ fied acts of violence in Sri Lanka puts me in the position of criticizing people who have helped me and whom I deeply respect. The position of Buddhism in this book is equally delicate, for my appreciation of what the Buddha taught is genuine, and I have no desire to follow in the tradition of missionaries, administrators, and Westerners in general who have criticized Buddhism. Buddhists de¬ fend their religion’s role in ethnic conflict by saying that its use in inspiring acts of violence is not “true” Buddhism or by pointing to acts of courage on the part of Buddhists acting to make peace or shelter Tamils. Both points are reasonably made, but on the issue of “true” Buddhism, I think that the Buddhism that should concern us is the one that people practice. I also believe that speaking of “true ’ Buddhism, like writing “national” histories, is an exercise that ignores the interconnectedness of all human affairs. Just as Christians and Westerners bear some responsibility for the effects of colonialism and missionary Christianity in Sri Lanka’s recent past, Buddhists are entangled in a common history that they themselves have only par¬ tially made. The best example of interconnectedness is the role that an American industrial magnate and Civil War colonel played in the nineteenth-century revival of Buddhism. Henry Steele Olcott s anom¬ alous but important presence in the Sri Lankan past is part of a com¬ mon history that includes Sinhalas, Tamils, Muslims, Europeans, and even later arrivals such as myself. Despite the emphasis on uncovering anachronisms in treatments of the Sri Lankan past, I have occasionally used expressions such as “Buddhism” and “Sinhala” in some places where they are not strictly warranted. To speak with complete care would require my writing of a collection of beliefs and practices organized around what the Bud¬ dha taught,” which continued until the nineteenth century, when we can speak of the emergence of “Buddhism.” In regard to ethnic iden¬ tity, it would require referring to “people who lived on the island and believed in ‘what the Buddha taught’” until the sixth or seventh cen¬ tury when growing numbers of Sri Lankans began to think of them¬ selves as “Sinhala.” The reader needs to keep this disclaimer in mind while reading the book. To speak of the Mahavawisa as the Sinhala national chronicle is to impose today’s language on a court chronicle that was itself an instrument in creating a Sinhala identity, and that identity itself has changed with time.

xiv

Because this book contains a large number of foreign terms, I have used several devices to reduce the jarring effect of italicized words and diacritical marks. After the first, italicized use of Sinhala expressions, I have generally relied on roman type; the names of monasteries, clans, and political parties appear in roman type throughout. I have shown diacritical marks on all premodern personal names, but after the time of Anagarika Dharmapala—whose life at the turn of this century marks the beginning of contemporary Sinhala Buddhist practice—I have abandoned them, hoping both to simplify the text and to avoid making contemporary figures look exotic. In the same spirit, I have minimized the use of status titles for Buddhist monks, college pro¬ fessors, English lords, Jesuit fathers, and Madame Blavatsky. I have translated Sinhala expressions and the tides of Sinhala texts without indicating the original language, but on the few occasions I have used Sanskrit (Skt.), Pali (P.), or Tamil (T.) terms, they are so indicated. Unless a translator’s name appears in the appropriate footnote, trans¬ lations from Sinhala sources are my work. To side-step the curious effect of dating early Sri Lankan events relative to the Christian calendar, I have marked pre-Christian events as b.c.e. (before the common era) and post-Christian events c.E. (common era). Although this practice creates its own ironies, it has the virtue of clarity and consistency, and I can find no better remedy for the hegemony of the Christian West in non-Christian lives. I am indebted to the Rockefeller Foundation, which supported my research in 1985 and 1986, and the Social Science Research Council, which made it possible for me to return to Sri Lanka in the summer of 1987. I also owe thanks to friends who have read and criticized parts of the manuscript: Leslie Gunawardana, C. R. de Silva, John Strong, Dennis McGilvray, John Rogers, Arjun Appadurai, Nicholas Dirks, Michael M. J. Fischer, Patrick Peebles, and Loring Danforth. In Sri Lanka H. D. C. Dissanayake helped me learn to read Sinhala and shared with me his knowledge and love of Sinhala culture. I also thank the many Sri Lankans I have talked with about Sinhala identity and the island’s past. Finally, I owe a great deal to Bates College and to Sylvia Hawks and Joyce Caron. Steven Kemper

Lewiston, Maine

The Presence of the Past

Introduction

The past inhabits the present in a variety of ways—in practices, things, and memory—leading most human beings to the reasonable conclusion that the present is continuous with the past. The idea that the past is different from the present is a more unlikely conclusion. In the West it derives in part from changes in the epistemic standards by which history is written, marked by Hegel’s argument that the possi¬ bility of historical knowledge depends on the historian’s recognition that the past must be understood as outside of, and different from, the historian’s consciousness.1 But it also derives from historical events themselves that have created a break between past and present. The French Revolution is a leading example, although the First World War made the point more widely. ‘The Great War,” to quote Paul Fussell, “was perhaps the last to be conceived as taking place within a seamless, purposeful ‘history’ involving a coherent stream of time running from past through present to future. The shrewd re¬ cruiting poster depicting a worried father of the future being asked by his children, ‘Daddy, what did you do in the Great War?’ assumes a future whose moral and social pressures are identical with those of

i. G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), p. 15.

2

Introduction

the past. Today ... no such appeal would shame the most stupid to the recruiting office.’12 This book is about a South Asian society where the past is very much present in popular discourse and the lives of ordinary people. Sri Lankans today look back on a 2,500-year past, but the important point is not that the Sri Lankan past is so ancient but that it is so present. That presence derives in part from the practice of chronicle¬ keeping, centered on the Mahdvamsa—first compiled in the sixth cen¬ tury c.E.—which preserves traditions that reach back a thousand years earlier to the Lord Buddha’s three sojourns in the island. Up¬ dated in the twelfth, fourteenth, and eighteenth centuries, the Ma¬ hdvamsa constitutes the oldest historical literature in South Asia. It is also the only ancient chronicle that has been updated and brought down to the present. When the J. R. Jayewardene government set up a committee to extend the Mahdvamsa to the beginning of its admin¬ istration in 1977, the chronicle served to tie together a society that it says was founded six centuries b.c.e. with what is virtually the pres¬ ent moment. The focus of this book falls on that book, for I begin by treating the Mahdvamsa as a source of political notions and textual strategies, before I consider the events surrounding the extension of the chronicle as one of several practices that link the Sri Lankan past to its present. The authors of the Mahdvamsa had every reason to look for conti¬ nuity in the past. When Mahanama compiled the first Mahdvamsa in the sixth century, he tried to make two connections—the first with the Buddha himself, making the Theravada monkhood, to which Ma¬ hanama belonged, the guardian of orthodox belief; the second with the Sri Lankan monarchy, drawing a connection between religion, state, and what was to become the Sinhala people. What we can con¬ clude from other sources on the Sri Lankan past is that other forms of Buddhism made claims to their own orthodoxy, the relationship be¬ tween state, Buddhism, and people evolved slowly and erratically, and the Sinhala people’s awareness of themselves as an ethnic group devel¬ oped largely after Mahanama’s time. But his compilation of traditions imposes on the Sri Lankan past a single and continuous point of view that is Sinhala and Theravada Buddhist, however much more compli¬ cated that past may have been in actuality. 2. Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modem Memory (London: Oxford University Press, 1975), p. 21.

Introduction

3

The character of the terms that dominate Sri Lankan life nowadays distorts any discussion of the past. The Mahdvamsa is certainly not the Sri Lankan national chronicle, for Tamils, Muslims, and Chris¬ tians today would have difficulty seeing themselves and their history reflected in the text. And to call it the Sinhala national chronicle raises other problems because Sinhala ethnic identity developed only centu¬ ries after events the Mahdvamsa describes in what appear to be ethnic terms. The Mahdvamsa has become the warrant for the interlocked beliefs that the island and its government have traditionally been Sin¬ hala and Buddhist, and that a person cannot be Buddhist without being Sinhala. But it has done so by playing a part in the creation of those beliefs, not by simply recording what was already there. Even the expression “Buddhism” (“Buddhagama”) has its difficulties, for it arose, along with an exclusive community of “Buddhists,” probably no earlier than the nineteenth century. What is useful to remember at regular intervals in reading this book is that the chronicle’s initial purpose was to celebrate the relationship between the Theravada monkhood, following one version of the Buddha’s teachings, and the monarchy. Only by stages has the object of the Mahdvamsa’s interest expanded from the ruling Sinhala dynasty to the Sinhala people, and from those clerics and their religious interests to Buddhism as it now exists in Sri Lanka.

The Past as a Political Resource On most scholarly accounts, nationalism derives from one of three sources. Either it is borrowed from some other nation, typically the colonial master, or it derives from structural necessities, or it is the recrudescence of local ideas and interests. Elie Kedourie first made the argument that nationalism was essentially a European phenome¬ non, carried around the world by colonial circumstances, and when Benedict Anderson treats nationalism as a transportable, “modular” phenomenon, he follows in the tradition that sees nationalism as imi¬ tative.3 Ernest Gellner points to a structural connection between na¬ tionalism and the needs of modern, industrial society: nationalism creates the common culture and social homogeneity needed for the 3. Elie Kedourie, Nationalism (London: Hutchinson, 1966), pp. 9-19, and Bene¬ dict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 1983).

4

Introduction

complex and constantly changing division of labor in modern soci¬ eties.4 But he also assumes the imitative character of many nationalist movements. In his words, nations do not so much create nationalism as nationalism creates nations. The task of establishing modern social arrangements requires an ideology to legitimate the polity, and after the nineteenth century nationalism became the waiting vehicle for lo¬ cal independence movements. Other scholars see nationalism in a third way—as the work of traditional elites, trying to protect their advantages and preserve customary practices. Hobsbawm speculates that nationalist movements derive from “middle peasants” seeking to preserve a threatened way of life and their own advantage or that the state mass-produced tradition for the sake of its own legitimacy.5 I think that these approaches to nationalism shortchange the com¬ plex relationship between the past and present by virtue of their com¬ mon attitude toward consciousness. I can best clarify that position by setting it against Benedict Anderson’s recent work. By their nature, Anderson says, nations had to be “imagined” communities. Their size and complexity made the possibility of citizens knowing one another in a face-to-face way quite ridiculous. But the spread of print technol¬ ogy made it possible for enormous numbers of people to know of one another indirecdy, for the printing press became middleman to the “imagination” of the nation. Some of the ways the press propagated the nation, such as by communicating its distinctive values, are ob¬ vious, but Anderson emphasizes consequences of newspaper publish¬ ing that are considerably more subtle. The very existence and regu¬ larity of newspapers caused readers, and thus citizens-in-the-making, to imagine themselves residing in a common time and place, united by a print language with a league of anonymous equals. Before the late eighteenth century, sacred communities—Islam and Christianity are Anderson’s chief examples—had organized the polity differendy. Pivoting on a cosmic center and a king armed with a sacred warrant to rule, the polity was held together by a sacred language and a group

4. Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983). 5. Eric Hobsbawm, “Some Reflections on Nationalism,” in T. J. Nossiter, A. H. Hanson, and Stein Rokkan, eds., Imagination and Precision in the Social Sciences, Essays in Honor of Peter Nettl (London: Faber and Faber, 1972.), p. 400, and Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).

Introduction

5

of clerics who understood it. The polity viewed its own development according to a sense of time in which history and cosmology were inseparable (p. 40). Only by destroying these institutions could print capitalism lead to the invention of “the people” as the nation’s right¬ ful agents. As nationalism spread from the New World to Europe and eventu¬ ally to the very colonies of those newly imagined European nations, the people of the world were presented with the choice of being na¬ tionalists or being nothing. Anderson argues that nationalism could be so widely exported because of both its “modular” structure and the expansion of print capitalism. The character of the vernacular press provided its form, and the people of the place provided its content. The emphasis in Anderson’s work on new technology and new forms of social organization gives the impression that nationalism began as a “big bang.” Before the bang there was no nation; after the bang, there was. Before the bang, most human beings lived in huge trans¬ continental communities organized around the world religions; after¬ ward, the nation arose, redividing most people into smaller units held together by a new conception of power, fraternity, and time. It was the local realization of these three conceptions that organized national feeling, but Anderson’s emphasis on the novelty of the nationalist project and its subsequent importation to alien places gives no clue as to why citizens-in-the-making took these ideas seriously or how they interacted with traditional conceptions of leadership, moral behavior, and identity. At the very least, one has to be suspicious of Anderson’s studied avoidance of the ethnic and religious identities that played some part in most nationalist movements. Anderson gives no single account of exactly who these people were who invented and propagated these new conceptions. But it is clear that he does not have traditional intellectual elites in mind. In the New World, he points to “creole government functionaries and pro¬ vincial creole printmen” (p. 65); in Europe, “lexicographers, philolo¬ gists, grammarians, folklorists, publicists, and composers” (p. 73), as well as the “cultivated middle classes” (p. 124). As for the former colonies of Africa and Asia—the places where nationalism came late and had the most to displace—Anderson gives great importance to colonial school systems and their functionaries (p. 109). In each case, the carriers of national feelings are social types that emerged at roughly the same time as nationalist movements, politicians are no-

6

Introduction

ticeably absent from the list, and nationalism is seen as driven by the material interests of print capitalists and founded on any conception of power, fraternity, and time fit for the printed page. Nationalism was thus a big bang in two senses, for it was marked by the emer¬ gence of both new social types and new conceptions of political com¬ munity. Although I have learned a great deal from Anderson and Gellner, I prefer another approach to the transition between the “great trans¬ continental sodalities” and the modern world of nation-states. Where Anderson characterizes that transition as a fundamental break, I argue for more continuity and a more complicated relationship between past and present. Gellner makes the expediency argument in its most cynical form—“The cultural shreds and patches used by nationalism are often arbitrary historical inventions. Any old shred and patch would have served as well” (p. 56)—but Anderson too handles what nationalists do and say as a rationalization of political and economic interests. Even allowing for the widening of scope that occurs be¬ tween Gellner’s first assertion and his second, I think that modern nations draw on the past in a way that is not altogether arbitrary, and that understanding that process requires more attention to cultural forms and their transformation. Nationalist visions of the past are frequently unreliable as historiography, but they do not begin from scratch, for nationalists found many of their materials already on hand. Some nationalist practices are genuinely ancient; others are not. This book concentrates on the way ancient practices have been trans¬ formed by nationalism in a society dominated in turn by the Por¬ tuguese, Dutch, and British. In this regard, Anderson would empha¬ size Sri Lanka’s being one of the world’s most thoroughly and continuously colonized societies. I emphasize the Sri Lankan response to this 400-year period, suggesting ways Sinhala nationalists have drawn on the island’s long past to build the nationalist project. Both Anderson and Gellner pay almost no attention to nationalism as a political phenomenon. Anderson begins by calling “nation-ness” “the most universally legitimate value in the political life of our time” (p. 12), but once under way he turns to print capitalism and says almost nothing about the political character of nationalist move¬ ments. Lor his part, Gellner ignores politics altogether until he comes to a set of cases that his stress on the structural origins of nations cannot explain. In Latin America, nations proliferated, he admits, far

Introduction

7

beyond any economic motivation, forcing him to acknowledge politi¬ cal causes, saying that in these cases the self-interest of politicians acted to create more states (p. 135). But generally Gellner treats poli¬ tics as a surface phenomenon driven by hidden needs. As he puts it, “Nationalism is not what it seems, and above all it is not what it seems to itself’ (p. 55). If nationalists think their movement is politi¬ cal, and if scholars find political forces working in nationalist move¬ ments, on Gellner’s logic, both groups must be deceiving themselves because nationalism is a necessary response to the rise of industrial¬ ism. This neglect of the political character of nationalist movements fol¬ lows logically on the neglect of culture and consciousness. In many cases, emerging nationalist movements are motivated by cultural ex¬ pectations about what one can expect from politics and political leaders, as well as by traditional ideas about power, fraternity, and time. On that point, Anderson and Gellner have conspicuously little to say. I think nationalism needs to be seen as a conversation that the present holds with the past. Those who live in the present speak both parts, but neither part of the conversation has any absolute advantage, making the conversation itself the instructive phenomenon.6 Conver¬ sations with the past hardly constitute the entirety of nationalist movements, but we need to appreciate both traditional expectations about politics and the regular use in the past and the present of those expectations if we are to move the study of nationalism beyond the “shreds and patches” stage. What we also need to recognize is that the conversation includes several voices in the present arguing about exactly what kind of past actually existed. In the Sri Lankan case those voices include an academic profession, a nationalist movement that arose in the nineteenth century, other ethnic communities, and the Buddhist monkhood. The Sri Lankan past is not so much imagined as contested and negotiated, and this negotiation produces a distinc¬ tive nationalist discourse that incorporates Western as well as local forms. As Gellner points out, traditional agrarian societies allowed local cultural differences to flourish for a variety of reasons: they were irrel¬ evant to political hegemony; they constituted the proper order of 6. J. D. Y. Peel, “Making History: The Past in the Ijesha Present,” Mon n.s. 19, (March 1984): pp. m-32.

8

Introduction

things; or their existence was simply invisible to the state (p. 12). In the Sri Lankan past the political and economic order was self-con¬ sciously built out of the functional and status differences of various caste groups. When circumstances warranted, new immigrants from India were incorporated into Sri Lankan society as new caste groups, or old caste groups were assigned new economic functions. The asso¬ ciation of caste with the Sanskritic tradition gave it a legitimacy, a hegemony that allowed aristocrats to incorporate newcomers while protecting their status advantage. Exactly how culturally diverse these caste groups might have been is hard to determine, but newcomers must have brought distinctive ways of life with them to Sri Lanka. Hindu and Muslim trading and farming communities found a posi¬ tion in the larger scheme of things or remained beyond the reach of the state. The arrival of foreigners and foreign influences over the past 2,000 years has made accommodating cultural difference an ongoing political task. But the Mahavamsa pays no attention to the actual construction of this society. Instead it envisions the past as a myth-become-history, the story of Vijaya’s sailing from North India and founding Sri Lankan society. Thus when nationalist feeling arose in the nineteenth century, it found a historical serendipity—a historical chronicle orga¬ nized around contemporary identities and the notion that Sinhala identity had followed a moral trajectory, still unfinished. This seren¬ dipity notwithstanding, Anderson and Gellner are absolutely right in saying that the nation demands new forms of social organization whose emergence requires prizing apart older forms. But what is lost in forgetting the role the past plays in this process is any appreciation of the contest of wills over which parts of the past will best support the nation’s “nation-ness.” What characteristically motivates national¬ ist claims on the past is an interest in parts of the past marked by resonance and pathos. Nationalism needs to be a comparative project in which the present resonates with the past without being as good as it was, for nationalism gathers its political force by creating a sense of insufficiency and indignation that requires a particular kind of histori¬ cal plot. Having made the case for the importance of the past in nationalist movements, I need to move now in the opposite direction because I am not claiming that the past is direcdy continuous with the present or that nationalist historiography presents the past as it happened. In

Introduction

9

the Sri Lankan example, the past ordinary people know of and talk about is part fact, part fiction, a set of events recast as a drama moved along by anachronistic forces and institutions. I would go Anderson and Hobsbawm one better and suggest that nationalist movements in former colonies often borrow not only technology from the West, but also part of the content, not just the generic form, of nationalist discourse from the colonial power. My claim is that while nationalist movements may use the past falsely, they do not use it arbitrarily. The reason is simple enough: just as some visions of the past are more reliable as history than others, some are more serviceable than others as ideology. Nationalists make choices, and they make changes. But they do not make them willy-nilly because culture weighs on the peo¬ ple who create nationalist ideologies as much as on the people who are later moved by them. The question is how we are to understand culture in this formula¬ tion if we assume that cultural forms are something less than fixed and something more than infinitely revisable. Let me use Bruce Kapferer’s study of Sinhala and Australian nationalism as an example. Kapferer deserves great credit for taking consciousness seriously and looking specifically for the everyday origins of the deep passions that motivate ethnic and nationalist feeling. My complaint turns on his locating it in a traditional ritual of exorcism and the mythology that accompanies it, for he assumes continuity between ritual practice and nationalism.7 Kapferer says that there is a striking similarity between the “logic” of those rites and recent cases of ethnic violence against Tamils. To make that connection, Kapferer has to put the word “on¬ tology”—which he uses to mean a “prereflective” understanding rooted in cultural practices that has its effect by shaping ideology—to new uses because on his account people have “ontologies” (p. 84). The exorcist fends off an external threat to the sick person, and the thug acts against an external threat to the state because both act on a common “ontology.” Nationalist or ethnic feeling is thus continuous with the Sinhala past and the culture of rural Sinhalas. I portray nationalism against a different background, because I think that calling cultural forms “ontologies” makes culture theory plausible only to believers. Besides mystifying the notion of meaning 7. Bruce Kapferer, Legends of People, Myths of State (Washington, D.C.: Smithson¬ ian Institute Press, 1988).

io

Introduction

by giving it a metaphysical sound, the expression carries on the an¬ thropological inclination to objectify culture. It also makes interpreta¬ tions of meaning difficult to evaluate because “ontologies” work on actors without their knowledge. I believe that even when nationalism understands itself as growing naturally from history, religion, or race, and even when it has an ancient chronicle such as the Mahdvamsa to invoke, it develops by changing, creating a phenomenon that is both local and foreign, ancient and modern. To this extent, nationalism is an expression not of a cultural “ontology” but of the way human beings use cultural forms to respond to circumstances. On my ac¬ count, culture is more of a conversation about what ought to be done than a blood feeling that shapes what is done. Instead of finding sig¬ nificance in an “ontology,” I find it in the production of culture, and the relationship between the producers of culture and its consumers. I think it is important that when J. R. Jayewardene appointed his first minister of state to create the political culture of a righteous Buddhist society, he chose Anandatissa de Alwis. As the head of the Colombo office of the J. Walter Thompson agency, de Alwis had previously created the first advertising campaign aimed at selling products to ordinary, rural Sinhalas.

Ancient Practices and Modern Contexts If one way to reify the past in an anthropological account is to call it an “ontology” and to locate it in the transcendental subjectivity of a society, another is to characterize traditional practices and beliefs by lifting them from their social context. When the Indologist Richard Gombrich did fieldwork in a Kandyan village in the 1960s, he came to the conclusion that modern-day Kandyan Buddhism is pretty much the same religion it was 1,500 years ago. As he puts it, “the doctrines of the villagers would have been approved by Buddhaghosa [the fifth-century commentator] and . . . most of their religious prac¬ tices would have been familiar to him and his contemporaries.”8 By insisting that the past was unitary, fixed at one particular historical moment, and unambiguous, the very idea of orthodoxy invites this peculiar view of temporality and consciousness. For Indologists and 8. Richard Gombrich, Precept and Practice (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), 45

-

p.

Introduction

11

believers alike, orthodoxy is culture in its most immanent and objec¬ tive condition. Although characterizing action in terms of orthodoxy gives Gombrich a way to evaluate Buddhist precepts and practices and thus to measure change, it also raises a number of problems. Assuming that the doctrinal and practical core of Buddhism in Sri Lanka has not changed since the fifth century, what can we do with the discrepancy between that core and the larger world? How can we avoid rusticat¬ ing the people of villages such as the one where Gombrich settled? They believe that reciting the Buddha’s virtues will protect them from evil spirits, but they also vote in elections, listen to the radio, and study science in school. How can we make space in anthropological accounts for the past without imagining it to be static and independ¬ ent of the present? My view is that the past needs to be understood as a relationship between practices and beliefs on the one hand and prac¬ titioners and believers on the other. In Bernard Williams’s words: “playing seventeenth-century scores on seventeenth-century instru¬ ments according to seventeenth-century practices, admirable enter¬ prise though it may be otherwise, does not produce seventeenth-cen¬ tury music since we have necessarily twentieth-century ears.”9 In what follows I argue similarly that ancient practices and beliefs in the con¬ temporary world cannot be understood in themselves even when they reach the present relatively unchanged. Just as musicians can no longer produce seventeenth-century music, Buddhists can no longer practice fifth-century Buddhism. When the practitioners and believers occupy a world different from the time of those practices and beliefs’ origins, tradition needs to be understood as part of a process involv¬ ing a “fusion of horizons.”10 Anderson, Gellner, and Hobsbawm avoid the consciousness prob¬ lem altogether by treating nationalism either as a purely meretricious phenomenon without historical depth or as a project that succeeds for reasons having nothing to do with what nationalism means to people. It is true that contemporary Sri Lankan life has thrown up a number of practices that look ancient but are not. For example, when Sinhala farmers are given land in areas of the island recently put under irriga9. Bernard Williams, Descartes: The Project of Pure Enquiry (Harmondsworth: Pen¬ guin, 1978), p. 9. 10. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (New York: Seabury Press, 1975), pp. 267-74.

I2

Introduction

tion, the government sometimes commemorates the act with a deed inscribed on a stone tablet. The character of the deed makes the prac¬ tice look ancient, even if grants of land in the past were seldom com¬ mitted to stone, and farmers themselves were never their recipients. Such acts are a simulacrum of the past, given shape by nostalgia and a fine sense of invention. But contemporary Sri Lankan life is organized around a number of other practices that are genuinely ancient—the practice of chronicle-keeping, the renovation of sacred places, the cel¬ ebration of heroes, and the reformation of the Buddhist monkhood— all at least as ancient as the Mahdvamsa proper. For my purposes, the interesting part of these practices is not the question of their being ancient or recently invented but the way that they interact with other parts of Sinhala life. “Historical consciousness is aware of its own otherness,” Gadamer argues, “and hence distinguishes the horizon of tradition from its own.”11 But what is central to nationalism is an attitude in which the historical horizon and the present are not absolutely distinguished from each other. When contemporary Sinhalas speak of the past, they do so as if yesterday’s actors were moved by today’s motives, as if today’s criteria of description and classification were available thou¬ sands of years ago. Take the example of Dutagamunu, the heroic king who, according to the Mahdvamsa, reclaimed control of the is¬ land from a Tamil king some two centuries before the beginning of the common era. By imputing anachronistic motives to what Dutugamunu said and did, contemporary commentators make an ancient warrior sound like a militant member of Parliament representing a constituency in the Southern Province (and vice versa). However un¬ reliable as historiography, this fusion of horizons is what motivates nationalist feeling. Only by imagining that Dutugamunu lived in a world envisioned to be like the present can one feel the historical legitimacy of the nationalist cause. But as the Dutaigamunu example also suggests, that fusion cannot be complete because nationalist talk requires an asymmetry between noble ancestors and their successors, for “nationalists” such as Dutugamunu brought glory on the “na¬ tion,” and the uncertainty of whether his descendants will do as well gives actions carried out in the name of nationalism their peculiar compulsion. ii. Ibid., p. 273.

Introduction

3

i

Several characteristics of the Sri Lankan present encourage—and make especially dangerous—that fusion of horizons. A sheerly demo¬ graphic and geographical fact about Sri Lanka as a place encourages historical thinking. The ethnic categories that marked the action re¬ corded in the first compilation of the Mahdvamsa are today’s ethnic categories, and that continuity is quite remarkable in itself. The prob¬ lem is that the past and the present are not nearly as much alike as popular representations would have us believe. Present-day Sinhalas and Tamils are not likely to be the descendants of those mentioned in the Mahdvamsa because wave after wave of immigration followed the chronicle’s first compilation, a complication scarcely noticed in the popular understanding of the past. Nor is it commonly recognized that many of today’s Sinhalas are yesterday’s Tamils. It is also essen¬ tial to recognize the differences between what the very categories Sinhala and Tamil meant in the past as contrasted with their present usage, the changing character of the relationship between the two communities, the unprecedented economic and political circum¬ stances of the present, as well as the larger geopolitical context that shapes Sri Lankan life today. These are academic concerns; for most Sinhalas, they and their ancestors occupy a common estate. Sinhala nationalists began in the 1930s to argue that Sinhala life had always been organized around the tank and the temple. Besides the anachronistic use of the term “Sinhala,” what they forgot was that the temple might then have been Hindu, not Buddhist, or Mahayana, not Theravada, that Tamils practiced Buddhism in Sri Lanka until the tenth century (and in South India perhaps as recently as the four¬ teenth century), and that many Sri Lankans have made their living throughout the island’s past not by growing rice but by slash-andburn agriculture, gardening, fishing, and doing business. But rice ag¬ riculture and Buddhism are genuine continuities, and there were others. The building and maintenance of irrigation works was the great kingly responsibility of the ancient Rajarata (the north-central part of the island, literally, the “land of kings”) civilization; the devel¬ opment scheme along the Mahavali River to reclaim abandoned 11 ngation systems and build new ones in the Rajarata was the J aye wardene government’s great project. Until the Sri Lankan state was overrun by the British in 1815-, the abiding political problem was unifying the island under one government. The same centrifugal forces have threatened the unity of Sri Lanka since independence, the

M

Introduction

more so since the middle 1970s when Tamil militants began to talk openly of creating a separate Tamil state in the Northern and Eastern Provinces. Without overemphasizing these continuities between the distant past and the present, I believe it is useful to recognize the forces—call them nonideological, demographic, or structural—that make historical arguments compelling. Who lives in the place, how they pursue their religious lives, and what political problems they characteristically face give the advantage to some “pasts.” The inter¬ pretive problem is to appreciate continuity where it exists with¬ out attributing anachronistic motives to historical actors and with¬ out assuming that the culture of temple and tank has survived 2,500 years without change or complementary modes of livelihood and belief. Most scholarship on nationalism, like nationalism itself, has been shaped by horizonal qualities, only here the horizon involved belongs to scholars, not actors. One part of that scholarly horizon is the incli¬ nation of people who self-consciously live in a postmodern world to be either unnerved or delighted by the cacophony of ancient forms pursued in contemporary settings, the pastiche of colonial cultures, and the bricolage produced by intercourse between societies far sepa¬ rated in space. Consider Public Culture's comment on the popularity of Western toys in South Asian settings: “In Bombay, through school socials and advertising, Barbie has been linked to He-Man, that 6-inch male, who commands his own world of toy subordinates, and confirms the steroics [sic] of today’s wrestlers and athletes alike, a peculiar look for the slim and hungry in places like India.”12 As the editors quickly add, these ironies belong to the observer, not to In¬ dian children. What they see in such toys is more coherent: “the blond Barbie is parasitic on the fantasy world of Hindi film and HeMan draws allusive power from the epic world of the Rumuyana and Mahdbhdmtu. . . . In 1989 the TV cartoon about the Transformers could be seen on Sunday morning just before the serialized version of the MahdbhdmtaC The relevant point for studies of nationalism is this: even if culture were produced in a freewheeling way, it is not received thus, but fitted to the local form of life. A second horizonal quality that marks studies of nationalism is the liberal reaction to the fate of nationalism in Third-World countries. 12. Editor’s comment. Public Culture 2 (Spring 1990): i.

Introduction

i5

Where one could reasonably expect nationalism to lead to progress and freedom as it did in the West,13 it has led instead to the destruc¬ tion of traditional social forms and unspeakable violence. The obvious way to act on one’s moral feelings is to expose nationalist ideologies as chauvinist and to break open their anachronisms. There is a great deal to expose. But in reacting to nationalism’s liberal rationalism run amok or to what Anderson calls its “philosophical poverty,”14 schol¬ ars have forfeited the chance to understand why people take national¬ ism seriously, why Lithuanians, Karens, Ibos, and Sinhalas regard ethnic identity not merely as a means but an end ot lite. I think that part of the scholarly inability to take nationalism on its own terms derives from portraying nationalism as absolutely discontinuous with the past. Nationalism is an invented political community, yet to de¬ scribe it as “invented,” as Anderson remarks of Gellner, is to link it not to “falsity” and “fabrication” but to “imagination” and “creation.”15 Once we accept Anderson’s usage, we then need to remember that the nation-state was scarcely the first form of political community to be “imagined.” If the “theater states” and “galactic polities” of pre¬ modern South and Southeast Asia are not highly “imagined” forms of political community, nothing is.16 The modern imagination can hardly overlook the traditional, especially in places such as Sri Lanka where the “national” imagination has both 2,500 years of history to invoke and a chronicle tradition reliable enough in many of its representa¬ tions to win the credence of professional historians. Nor is the politi¬ cal motivation of belief a nationalist invention. Nationalism, in Sri Lanka and elsewhere, is simply the most recent stage in the ongoing construction of a “past.” There is no denying the ironic possibilities implicit in either a mod¬ ern audience earnestly listening to a performance of seventeenth-cen¬ tury music or a democratically elected government proposing to ex¬ tend a sixth-century court chronicle. But from die point of view of the consumers of culture—in this case the Sinhala people, largely

13. See Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World—a Derivative Discourse? (London: Zed Books, 1986). 14. Anderson, Imagined Communities, p. 14. 15. Ibid., p. 15. 16. See Clifford Geertz, Negara (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), and S. J. Tambiah, World Conqueror and World Renouncer (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni¬ versity Press, 1976).

16

Introduction

agricultural, living in villages, but linked by various media to the na¬ tional government in Colombo—the question is exactly what, be¬ yond the assertion of continuity, makes the present the palpable ex¬ tension of the past. In what follows I suggest one part of that process by taking a figure of speech from the MahdvamscCs treatment of early Sri Lankan history where the idea of unity appears as a trope, the center of a discursive formation, and the object of righteous rule. It reappears in the Jayewardene administration’s extension of the chron¬ icle, and it dominates public talk about political community in con¬ temporary Sri Lanka. How unity is to be achieved and who are to be its agents change radically in the present-day understanding of the Sri Lankan past. And whether ancient and modern “unity” are one figure of speech now transformed or two distinct but similar figures is less important, it seems to me, than what is clearly the case: the modern invocation of the need for unity resonates with the traditional usage and takes its force from this resonance.17 The unification of the island, enacted by the Buddha on his first visit to the island and later achieved by Vijaya, was brought to its full realization with the consecration some 250 years b.c.e. of Devanampiyatissa as the first Buddhist king of the island. The Mahdvamsa (7.74) describes Vijaya as enjoying sovereignty over the entire island (P. lahkam akhilam anusdsamdno)\ Devanampiyatissa’s consecration makes the same claim expressively. The conception of the island’s po¬ litical unity soon came to be described in terms common to most traditional South and Southeast Asian states. According to the Mahdvamsa (25.71 and 25.75), the island is ruled “under one parasol” (P. ekdtapattaka) or as a “single sovereignty” (P. ekachattena). What the Mahavamsa reveals inadvertently is that the unification of the is¬ land was a goal realized only occasionally, and when it was achieved, people the text describes as Sinhalas and Tamils, as well as tribals and smaller communities, had to be brought into political alignment. But the figure of unity is no less important for not being often realized; like die unequaled achievements of heroes, the absence of unity now¬ adays gives nationalist practice great power. Without continuity with 17. Michael Schudson’s definition is pertinent: “resonance is not a private relation between cultural object and individual, not even a social relation between cultural object and audience, but a public and cultural relation among object, tradition, and audience’1 (“How Culture Works,” Theory and Society 18 [March 1989]: 170).

Introduction

17

a past, nationalist ideology cannot convince anyone of the primordiality of its identities and dilemmas; without disparity between past and present, it loses the pathos that moves people to action. In today’s political discourse the unity of the people (samapfiya or sammuttiya) eclipses the unity imposed on the island by a heroic leader. When people invoke the need for unity nowadays, they do so in a way that has little connection to the thematic concerns or the political circumstances of the Mahdvamsa, but a way which follows— almost inevitably, it seems in retrospect—from the text’s invocation of Sinhala identity and the apparent instability of the state. The unity at stake today is the unity of the Sinhala people, and its rationale is Buddhist; it envisions a return not to monarchy but to a social order where individuals act in concert and live in harmony. Appeals for unity of this kind make sense against the background of democratic government, but in the present as much as the past, unity derives its local value from associations that are as much religious as political, and as traditional as they are specifically modern. Acting in unity re¬ quires the individual to cope with what Buddhist thinking takes to be the great problem, the self, by putting aside self-interest, greed, and personal entanglements. The Buddha would surely be bemused to find that Buddhist selflessness has now been linked to ethnic chauvin¬ ism, but it is no secret that the vitality of cultural forms consists in their capacity to encompass new circumstances. I will try to stress this one figure of speech and the practices associ¬ ated with it without allowing the past to meld seamlessly into the present. I do not believe that there was “nationalism” as such in Sri Lanka a thousand years before the rise of the nation-state in the New World and Europe, but something—whether one calls it a set of identities, beliefs, or practices, a discourse, a relationship between the king and his clerics—was there, ready to be transformed. To argue otherwise is to imagine nationalism in a place such as Sri Lanka being delivered full-grown into the world by the nineteenth century. The historical issue is the transformation of past practice and the way liv¬ ing actors make use of these practices. As an anthropologist, I ap¬ proach that transformation by emphasizing that the function of be¬ liefs and practices is interpretive, not generative. The common way of putting it is to say that cultural practices allow actors to proceed into an inchoate future, not hold them captive to the past. The radical way of

i8

Introduction

putting it is to borrow Foucault’s definition of the author: culture is the principle of thrift that constrains the proliferation of meanings.18 This book attempts to illustrate Foucault’s principle of thrift by showing that the force of a political value such as unity consists in the set of transformations that it makes possible. The process of transfor¬ mation works on foreign influences as well as on the past, but it favors foreign ideas that resonate with local ideas, practices, and cir¬ cumstances. It seems to me that however marked by foreign influence nationalist movements may be, “imitation” is not the right notion for thinking about these influences. Nationalists use foreign traditions the same way they use their own traditions—they imagine, reinvent, and misunderstand them. To this extent. South Asian nationalism is less imitative of the West and less discontinuous with the local past than most accounts have it. In what follows I observe Marshall Sahlins’s dictum: “History is made the same general way within a given society as it is between societies.”19 A good example comes from an American Civil War officer, Henry Steele Olcott, who visited the island in the 1880s. Olcott encouraged Buddhists in their struggle against Christian domination and sug¬ gested the value of propaganda and lay organizations. Quite oblivious to the traditional emphasis given to the value in the Mahavamsa, he stressed the need for Buddhist unity. Olcott’s interest in unity was motivated by a set of Western practices and values, and the role they played in the renewal of Buddism has been duly noted. What I want to add is that Sinhala receptiveness to these changes was motivated by the recognition of not only their utility, but also their resonance with a set of local values. What complicates the matter is that the same nationalists were discovering their own traditions by way of the Ma¬ hdvamsa at the same time they were listening to Olcott. But it seems to me to be closer to the way people make their own history to drop the notion of imitation in favor of a principle of thrift and to recog¬ nize that the past is never simply continuous or discontinuous with the present. The figure of unity constitutes part of a larger discourse concerned with ethnicity and moral behavior, but by itself it functions as a gear 18. Michel Foucault, “What Is an Author?” in Josue Harari, ed., Textual Strategies (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979), p. 159. 19. Marshall Sahlins, Islands of History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), pp. viii-ix.

Introduction

19

that turns without moving any other gears. Where ideas have their effect is where they enter social formations. Thus where nationalism asserts its power is less in the formal expression of values than in its ability to appropriate traditional practices—in this case, extending an ancient chronicle, celebrating heroes, and attending to sacred places— by making them speak to nationalist causes. In themselves these prac¬ tices are not nationalistic. But nationalism makes these practices venues of morally charged dramas where people learn the existential truths of nationalist ideology. Print capitalism is essential for articu¬ lating this ideology, yet what must be articulated is not just national¬ ism in particular but a much broader sense of life that makes national¬ ism plausible. Where most people come upon nationalist talk, as Anderson argues, is probably in print form. But I will try to show that without reference to a set of real-life practices, such talk finds no example and gains no existential force. Entertaining Kapferer’s argument about culture as “ontology” re¬ quires believing that culture is best understood as a causal agent, a transcendental subjectivity that works on people without their knowl¬ edge. The present merely provides the material on which the past, the tradition, or the culture works. To this extent, Kapferer sees culture on a par with Gombrich’s treatment of orthodoxy; both are a fixed set of values and practices from the past delivered to the present. I agree on the importance of culture, but I think its active force dwells in the present and that it has its effect not by “becoming” nationalism but by being made to speak in an idiomatic way to a variety of social circumstances. To argue that culture dwells not in the past but in the present, responding to change and incorporating foreign influences, is not to reduce it to being expedient, arbitrary, or unimportant. It is to understand culture as more of a “principle of thrift” than an “on¬ tology.” All the good things said about Kapferer’s emphasis on everyday practices such as exorcism and his attention to consciousness, the problem with this way of thinking about the influence of tradition on new phenomena such as nationalism is its simplistic understanding of temporality. The proposition that the past comes before the present and thus that the old shapes the new appears so straightforward as to be indisputable. But culture does not always evolve in phase with an objectivist chronology, and a society’s uses of the past follow a dialec¬ tical path that requires our speaking very carefully about notions such

20

Introduction

as causality and temporality. Once asked if his movies had a begin¬ ning, middle, and end, Jean-Luc Godard replied yes, but not neces¬ sarily in that order.20 Godard’s rejoinder can be usefully remembered when thinking about cultural forms in general and nationalist uses of the past in particular, the more so because it suggests another reason to avoid essentializing culture.

The Organization of the Argument I begin with the popular notion that the Sinhala people derive from a North Indian adventurer and his 700 followers who arrived in Sri Lanka some five centuries before the beginning of the common era. Even if one puts aside the possibility that the Vijaya story is an abso¬ lute fabrication, the idea that the Sinhala people of today derive from Vijaya fails to do justice to the historical construction of Sinhala soci¬ ety in at least three ways. The first complication depends on what we know of Sri Lankan culture before the coming of Vijaya. Archae¬ ological evidence supports the commonsensical conclusion that there must have been cultural continuity between prehistoric Sri Lankan settlements and South Indian ones. The physical similarity of village tank-based irrigation systems, wattle and daub houses, iron tools, pottery vessels, and funerary monuments suggests both cultural and human intercourse between the island and the mainland. However large the component of early Sri Lankan society derived from North Indian immigrants, another part was furnished by South Indians liv¬ ing on the island. The second complication derives from literary evi¬ dence that speaks of human passage during the Anuradhapura and Polonnaruva periods between Sri Lanka and those parts of the penin¬ sula that are now Kerala, Tamilnadu, and Orissa. The third complica¬ tion simply extends the second, for there is historical evidence that some Sinhala caste communities of today—the Karava, Salagama, and Durava—were recognizable Indian groups that settled in Sri Lanka after the thirteenth century. I want to approach the question of how these people became Sin¬ hala by turning to the Mahdvamsa because it is as much an exercise in textualizing a set of identities as a record of the Sri Lankan past. 20. See Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination (Boston: Little, Brown, 1973), pp. 175-76.

Introduction

21

Through its early extensions the Mahdvamsa was not interested in creating the “national” identities of the present, but from its earliest chapters the Mahdvamsa used the Sri Lankan past in a way that en¬ ables the rise of nineteenth-century nationalism. These identities evolved with each extension of the chronicle, which is to say that the creation of a nationalist identity is only the latest example of putting the past to political ends. What confounds our understanding of this process is a local instance of the cunning of reason: the textualization of inchoate identities in early installments of the chronicle is paral¬ leled by the emergence of those identities as social realities before the next installment of the chronicle gets recorded. As a result, the text’s self-fulfilling quality makes it hard to separate the author’s historical horizons from the events he describes. But we are helped by other historical texts, inscriptions, and external accounts, and by the way the Mahdvamsa itself leaves traces of its own rhetorical production. These resources make it possible to step outside the historical stream and look back on Mahanama and his successors constructing these textual identities—first of the Buddha, then of the island itself, its kings and aristocrats, and finally of the Sinhala people. Chapter i begins that task. The Mahdvamsa has always been a political tradition (political in its content and political in its motivation), and where narrative structure and political motivation come together, I argue, is in the textualiza¬ tion of a set of identities. In Chapter 2 I analyze the central figure in this process: the construction of the heroic careers of three great kings, Vijaya, Dutugamunu, and Parakramabahu. The Mahdvamsa makes each king the center of a discursive formation that is both po¬ litical and moral. They are the leaders who impose unity on the Sri Lankan state, and although their personalities differ, their narrative destinies do not, for only by putting the island under a single author¬ ity can they protect the Buddhist sdsana (the teachings of the Buddha as a historical phenomenon). Vijaya and Dutugamunu lived many centuries before the emergence of Sinhala ethnic identity. But their textual identities played a part in fostering ethnic feeling by connect¬ ing their careers as Sinhala leaders to the Buddhist sasana. Quite apart from the Mahdvamsa, the Buddhist tradition developed a second con¬ ception of political community which over time came to be separated from its ethnic and institutional origins. It took as its paradigm the Vajji kingdom of the Lord Buddha’s time, and it too turns on the

22

Introduction

idea of unity, in this case, unity achieved by individuals acting in concert. These two figures of unity constitute the raw material that Sinhala nationalists have used to fashion a sense of ethnic identity and moral purpose since the nineteenth century. Chapter 3 consiciers how the Mahavamsa itself became a central issue in the nineteenth-century contest between historians and nation¬ alists over what kind of “past” Sri Lankans would entertain. After British conquest of the Sri Lankan state in Kandy in 1815, the chron¬ icle was submitted to unprecedented political and epistemological at¬ tention as European administrators and scholars began to evaluate the Mahavamsa in terms of its historical truth. When Sinhala nationalists rediscovered the Mahavamsa, they found a text that dignified the eth¬ nic identities of the nineteenth century, warranted a variety of social practices such as the veneration of heroes and sacred places, and gave clues to the location of Buddist places then in ruins. As historians and nationalists struggled over what to make of the Mahavamsa, a new kind of historical discourse developed, melding Western histo¬ riographical conventions with Buddhist forms of authority. In 1935 a solitary Buddhist monk, Yagirala Pannananda, extended the chronicle from the conquest of the Kandyan kingdom to the end of the long colonial interlude, and Pannananda’s extension speaks this hybrid lan¬ guage. His Mahavamsa, Part III provides an indigenous, if un¬ solicited and unofficial, view of the state, society, and sangha (monk¬ hood) under foreign domination, treating British governors in the same way the Mahavamsa had treated the Sri Lankan monarchy and plotting the history of the colonial period as the natural extension of times past. By this example, I mean to suggest a further stage in the textualization of Sinhala identity, organized around Pannananda’s as¬ sumption that the Sinhala people are a “race,” now deprived of its birthright by colonial domination. The projection of “race” on earlier times and Pannananda’s celebration of monarchy in modern times constitute local examples of the conversation of past and present in which each is changed by the other. Not all nationalist movements are created equal, for some are better served by the past than others. As Hobsbawm and Ranger suggest,21 some have to invent tradition from scratch, while others transform what already exists. Sinhala nationalism has been as well furnished as 21. Hobsbawn and Ranger, Invention of Tradition, pp. 1—14.

Introduction

23

any movement by a full array of ancient personae and practices. Up¬ dating the ancient chronicle represented Yagirala Pannananda’s at¬ tempt to put an ancient practice to both traditional and nationalist ends. In Chapter 4 I consider a more widely known phenomenon that focuses peoples’ interest in the past—popular argument about heroes who lived thousands of years ago. Interest in leaders such as Dutugamunu and the Tamil king Elara is scarcely new, but it has been transformed and intensified by talk about “race” and ethnic dif¬ ference. With the recovery of the bodily relics of righteous and heroic figures of the Sri Lankan past—Dutugamunu, and the third-century king Sirisamghabodhi have both been recovered—the substantializ¬ ing logic of race is joined to a traditional practice that has its own substantializing logic, the veneration of relics. The nationalist appro¬ priation of figures such as Dutugamunu transforms past practice in a way that serves political ends while using the tradition in a coherent way. This process, I argue, has produced a culture of nationalism. Chapters 5 and 6 look at cases where nationalist ideology interacts with traditional practices. The emphasis falls on the ways a nationalist ideology appropriates those practices to produce an order of plau¬ sibility that I have said derives from nationalism being more than just a view of self and other. Nationalism creates a form of life—organiz¬ ing a set of historical dilemmas as well as a sense of identity, and appropriating an array of everyday practices that provide exercises in nationalist feeling. In Chapter 5 I focus on the cult of sacred places to explain how renovating, maintaining, and venerating sacred places create this embodied sense of nationalism’s truth. Taking care of relic mounds and temples was the traditional way for a king to establish his righteousness. The Mahdvamsa celebrates kings who have shown charity and protection to the monkhood and religion, and renovating sacred places constituted the most frequent and most visible way kings met this religious responsibility. Appropriate changes being made, renovating and respecting sacred places continues to play the same role for elected governments. In a modern state all traditional practices acquire new inflections, as in the case ot the rhetoric of righteous leadership now borrowing elements of the nineteenth-cen¬ tury scholarly talk about race and nation. The cult of sacred places has been reshaped by the same ideas and given great practical importance by democratic politics and the government’s settlement policy. I con¬ centrate on what has come to be regarded as a historically important

24

Introduction

relic mound at Seruvila as an example of how nationalism refashions traditional practices. In the 1930s, long before he became Sri Lanka’s first prime minis¬ ter, D. S. Senanayake began to look to the past, identifying himself with the heroic exploits of the ancient king Parakramabahu. Some of his supporters went further by drawing up a genealogy that made him a direct descendant of Parakramabahu. In Chapter 6 I take up J. R. Jayewardene’s decision to update the Mahdvamsa after he took office in 1977. Where Senanayake found his link to the past in both fictive kinship and policy for he self-consciously imitated the actions of a king known for his development of agriculture, Jayewardene did so by making a number of campaign promises that recalled the rule of the Indian king Asoka. He promised to create a dharmistha (right¬ eous) society, a neologism that followed in the tradition of Asoka’s own invention of a number of expressions signaling his devotion to dharma (moral conduct). For my purposes, the extension of the Ma¬ hdvamsa was the central act of Jayewardene’s attempt to create a model of legitimate leadership by averting to past practice, and I con¬ centrate on the circumstances surrounding the compilation of the Ma¬ hdvamsa, Nut ana Tug ay a (Mahdvamsa of the New Age) as another ex¬ ample of nationalism’s transformation of traditional practice. Chapter 7 focuses on the discourse of nationalism, considering the way Sinhalas talk about ethnic identity in terms of heroes, race, and popular unity. As befits a democratic state whose policies are charac¬ teristically justified by its concern for ordinary Sinhalas, the unity that Sinhalas speak of nowadays is a popular unity. But Sinhala national¬ ism also draws on the earlier kind of unity, for the heroic is trans¬ formed but not eliminated by talk of the unity of common people. Under these circumstances, heroes are celebrated not so much to cre¬ ate new heroes as to create a sense of collective identity for Sinhala Buddhists, to move them to new political forms by remembering those who created older forms. At the end of the chapter, I look at the way two Buddhist monks have tried to imagine new political forms to recapture the unity they suppose characterized the past. However unreliable these visions of the past may be, they suggest how the deeply felt experience of disunity motivates the present-day use of the idea of unity for talking about political issues. On the face of it, the nationalist invocation of the value of unity looks properly Gellnerian—borrowed, opportunistic, and driven by

Introduction

2-5

the structural needs of modern society. I argue that it is something more by showing how this new usage resonates with the traditional language of unity and traditional practices while also incorporating foreign talk about race. On my account, identities textualized in the sixth century produced Sri Lankans who valued Sinhala identity and who much later became members of a Sinhala “race.’1 Given my pur¬ poses, it matters less that those ideas about race were Western and wrongheaded than that they were fitted into the local scheme of things. Rather than seeing nationalism as an imitative response to colonial domination, I portray it as the production of culture, accom¬ modating foreign influence in the same way it accommodates the lo¬ cal past, reimagining both at the same time. Nationalism, to be sure, is a “derivative” discourse, but local influences need to be taken into account as much as the foreign ones.

1 Past Uses of the Past

The early establishment of Buddhism in the island is the fundamental fact of Sri Lankan history. This fact draws additional importance from what Sri Lankans believe about how it occurred. The traditional account says that the Lord Buddha sojourned briefly in Sri Lanka on three separate occasions. Some 250 years later the Indian king Asoka sent a delegation of Buddhist monks to the island.1 Except for scat¬ tered periods of suppression and decay, Buddhism has flourished there ever since. The religion’s antiquity gives it a unique place in Sri Lanka. It has also made Sinhala Buddhism the center of the Theravada (literally, the “doctrine of the elders,” the variety of Buddhism looked to as orthodox by the Buddhists of Burma, Thailand, Laos, and Cambodia) world. Sri Lanka is the place, according to the Mahavamsa (1.20), where the Buddha’s doctrine was destined to “shine in glory.” This chapter is concerned with the way these expectations figured in creating political community in early Sri Lanka. I begin with the MahavamscCs representation of the island’s history and des¬ tiny, suggesting what makes historical thinking important, and em¬ phasizing how the chronicle uses the Sri Lankan past to textualize various forms of social identity. Beginning in the sixth century c.E. with the Buddhist monk Ma1. For the sake of consistency, I date the regnal years of these kings according to the chronological list given in K. M. de Silva, A History of Sri Lanka (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1981), pp. 565-73.

Past Uses of the Past

2-7

hanama, Sinhala monks have kept a chronicle of the island, its people, and their governance, celebrating die role of Buddhism in holding all these elements together. The Mahavamsa is not itself part of the Bud¬ dhist canon. It is not Dhamma.2 I think the Mahavamsa can best be regarded as sacred history. It sounds distinctly religious themes, and it is plotted in ways that point a moral. Until the nineteenth cen¬ tury—which is to say of an ancient tradition, until the recent past—it concentrated on the doings, both pious and impious, of the virtuosos of the religion, the Buddhist monkhood. The king is the other great actor in the Mahavamsa, his deeds scrutinized from a Buddhist per¬ spective. Kings rush by; dynasties rise and are eclipsed by others; South Indian armies advance and withdraw. Before it is done, the Mahavamsa recounts some 150 kingly reigns and twenty-five centu¬ ries of Sri Lankan Buddhist history. Most chapters conclude with a moral reflection that puts the worldly contents of the chapter in a doctrinal context—the flux of worldly affairs is unending and without exception. Others end by praising the king for his practical accom¬ plishments and meritorious acts; and between those two registers— one of the other-world and one of this-world—the Mahavamsa finds its dramatic balance. Compared with the Indian societies to the north, Buddhist monks in Sri Lanka showed a precocious interest in recording their own history. The Mahavamsa represents, in the words of Heinz Bechert, “the only early historical literature within the realm of South Asian culture.”3 By providing a reliable chronology of kings and specifying their regnal years, the Mahavamsa gives us more than the history of Sri Lanka alone. The text provides a framework to date synchronous occasions in the lives of important Indian kings. Much of our knowl¬ edge of important affairs in early India—the Buddhist councils at Rajagrha and Vesall, for instance, and the rise of the Maury an dynasty— can now be dated because of the monks’ interest in establishing a chronology of their own past. Besides giving details about Asoka’s

2. The Buddhavamsa, which enumerates the twenty-four Buddhas culminating in the historical Buddha, is the sole example of a vamsa text that is part of the canon. It was later supplemented by a postcanonical work, the Andgatavamsa, which presents the future life of the Buddha Maitreya. 3. Heinz Bechert, ‘The Beginnings of Buddhist Historiography,” in Bardwell Smith, ed., Religion and Legitimation of Power in Sri Lanka (Chambersburg, Pa.: Anima Books, 1978), p. 3.

28

The Presence of the Past

grandfather Chandragupta, the Mahavamsa allowed nineteenth-cen¬ tury scholars to identify the king named “Piyadasi” who had caused the erection of great pillar edicts across India with Asoka. The Sri Lankan chronicle makes it possible to establish both the date of the death (parinibbana) of the Buddha and a set of synchronisms between the kings of Sri Lanka and India.4 The historiographical dilemma is this: the chronology, accounts of practices and events, and the text’s considerable literary value are intertwined with elements that were clearly ideological when written and nowadays serve as a basis for Sinhala ethnic chauvinism. What makes the Mahavamsa interesting for anthropological pur¬ poses is the fact that the chronicling has never stopped. Last things quickly become the last things before the last; the chronicle falls be¬ hind events—often by several centuries; and another monk picks up the task of recording events on a palm-leaf manuscript. The updating has been neither regular nor frequent. But it requires only a single king and a scholarly monk to undertake an extension. The chronicle is updated during moments of reform, although there are numerous ref¬ ormations of the religion—some nine of thirteen reformations that occurred before the British conquest of the island—without a corre¬ sponding extension of the chronicle. When the two actions go to¬ gether, updating history is itself reformative. Scholarly monks have extended the chronicle five times since its first compilation in the sixth century (these extensions are sometimes called the Culavamsa; I call the entire tradition the Mahavamsa, although sometimes it is con¬ venient to refer to the later part of the chronicle as the Culavamsa to distinquish it from the first part of the Mahavamsa, the Mahavamsa proper).5 Mahanama compiled the Mahavamsa proper in the sixth century after the Theravada monkhood had been restored to a privi¬ leged place in Anuradhapura. Buddhist revivals in the twelfth and 4. Maurice Winternitz, History of Indian Literature: Buddhist Literature and Jaina Literature (Calcutta: University of Calcutta, 1953), 2:216, and Bimala Churn Law, “Contemporaneity of the Kings of India and Ceylon,” in Bimala Churn Law, ed., Acarya-Puspdhjali Volume (Calcutta: Indian Research Institute, 1940), p. 373. 5. It was the German Indologist Wilhelm Geiger who called this part of the chronicle the “Culavamsa.” Contemporary opinion favors making no distinction be¬ tween the first installment of the Mahavamsa and what follows. See Wilhelm Geiger, trans., Culavamsa (Colombo: Ceylon Government Press, 1953), 2:99.76 for what Geiger took to be an internal warrant for the distinction. The text there speaks of the kings ot ancient Sri Lanka as the “great dynasty” (mahavamsa). A distinction between these kings and the kings of mixed blood who follow, the “lesser dynasty” (cu¬ lavamsa), is implied.

Past Uses of the Past

29

fourteenth centuries gave rise to the first two extensions. An eight¬ eenth-century reformation of the religion produced a third extension. When the Kandyan kingdom fell to the British in 1815, the mutually supportive relationship between king and clerics was lost forever, and the chronicling tradition itself changed directly, but it did not die.

Buddhist Chronicles Sophisticated Sri Lankans often react to the Mahavamsa, Nutana Yugaya that J. R. Jayewardene initiated after his election in 1977 by dismissing it out of hand as a political device, die modern-day exploi¬ tation of a sublime tradition of historical writing. The Mahavamsa tradition ended with the fall of the Kandyan state, they say, and it cannot be revived. In understanding the chronicle tradition, I begin by looking for continuity, not rupture, because continuity is both the Mahavamsa, Nutana Yugaya editor’s conception and the popular un¬ derstanding of both the chronicles and the island’s history itself. But to make that case, I need to begin with a disclaimer. Once we admit that perceiving and recording the past is itself a sociological phenom¬ enon—liable to ideological, political, and economic effects—I think it is fair to say that the new Mahavamsa is a continuation of the ancient tradition. But the continuity that has characterized the Mahavamsa since its sixth-century beginning is a rolling continuity: earlier install¬ ments of the chronicle have their own peculiarities, their own ways ot using the tradition to meet contemporary needs. Continuity, faithfulness to tradition, and orthodoxy are ideas that carry great weight in Theravada Buddhism. Let me suggest three ex¬ amples. The Dhamma itself does not appear to be very historically minded. Theravada Buddhism never developed methods of inter¬ preting the Dhamma that recognize the importance of history for making sense of what the Buddha taught.6 The Dhamma is eternal truth. Even so, those eternal truths are portrayed as emerging from a historical context. The Pali suttas (verses) that make up the Suttapitaka (the part of the Dhamma composed of the Buddha’s dis¬ courses) are not arranged chronologically, but rather by length, topic, and mnemonic convenience. But the individual suttas “mostly have 6. See George Bond, “History and Interpretation in Theravada Buddhism and Christianity,” Encounter 39 (Autumn 1978): 405-34.

30

The Presence of the Past

their place of origin noted, and sometimes the time, and they give a detailed and circumstantial account of the events leading up to the main discourse or dialogue. . . . The actual doctrine of the Buddha, then, is usually presented against a background of events which give point and force to it.117 The truths are eternal, but they are taught in a way that uses the historical moment to give their didactic point a context. As with the doctrine, so it is with the disciplinary code (Vinaya) that guides a Buddhist monk’s life.7 8 Each of the 227 Vinaya rules issues from a monkly dispute brought to the Buddha for judgment. The incident is recounted, and the Buddha gives a ruling on some unprecedented ambiguity. For example, a monk cannot eat solid food after noon, but what if the circumstances are extreme? What if there is famine? Can an exception be made? The historicity of these in¬ cidents has been questioned, and whether each case was actually brought to the Buddha for resolution seems even more unlikely, but what makes the rules credible are precisely these two conventions. As the monastic tradition in Sri Lanka developed, doubts about the au¬ thenticity of these rules grew, even in the face of the historical vi¬ gnettes that give each rule a context. Another tradition arose to meet these doubts, beginning with the fifth-century scholar Buddhaghosa’s commentary on the Vinaya, the Samantapasadika, which gives a his¬ torical treatment of the origins and transmission of the Vinaya rules. A metahistory thus serves to justify the historically framed judgments of the Lord Buddha. Over and above the Vinaya rules, Sri Lankan kings have drawn up rules to guide the behavior of monks after times of monastic corrup¬ tion.9 These reformations produced codes of regulations, katikavatas, which themselves follow the same historicizing logic that marks the Vinaya. The katikavatas are more sociological in character than the 7. A. K. Warder, ‘The Pali Canon and Its Commentaries as an Historical Rec¬ ord,” in C. H. Philips, ed., Historians of India, Pakistan, and Ceylon (London: Oxford University Press, 1961), p. 47. 8. I. B. Horner, trans., The Book of the Discipline, 5 vols. (London: Pali Text Socicty-> I97°)- The strong form of this argument is Erich Frauwallner’s suggestion that the Mahdparinihbdna Sutta was originally the first part of the Vinaya rules; see The Early Vinaya and the Beginnings of Buddhist Literature, Serie Orientale Roma, no. 8 (Rome: Institute Italiano per il Medio ed Estremo Oriente, 1956), pp. 43-49. On Frauwallner’s account, the Buddha’s life itself was intended to provide a historical setting for the monastic rules. 9. Nandasena Ratanapala, trans., Katikavatas (Munich: Kitzinger, 1971).

Past Uses of the Past

3i

Vinaya, and they respond to local problems, most often the consider¬ able amount of wealth controlled by the monkhood in Sri Lanka. They usually begin with the descent of Theravada monks from the Buddha’s lifetime and the bringing of the religion to the island. They then go on to relate the difficulties of preserving the good name of the monkhood, laying out the incidents that have threatened die monkhood’s moral character, demanding in turn the formulation of new rules. But the rules are not just given. They are first justified in terms of the historical conditions that made them necessary. Besides explaining the present in terms of the past, the katikavatas are cu¬ mulative. Each presumes the existence and force of previous ka¬ tikavatas. Here the past weighs on the present directly and exactly. The vamsa literature has a similar character. The primary sense of the word is “lineage” or “descent.” By describing the descent of prac¬ tices, institutions, and objects over time, the word acquires the sense of “history.” In a South Asian context, knowledge, skills, and institu¬ tions do not survive from age to age through the unembodied trans¬ mission of ideas and practices. They are recited by one generation, another referent of the word “vamsa,” and learned by the next. They survive because human relationships are organized in ways that guar¬ antee their protection. In the Hindu tradition, the most reliable kind of knowledge is so regarded because it is “that which is heard” (Skt. sruti). The relationship between persons exists to make hearing a cer¬ tain kind of knowledge possible, not as an open channel to relay any kind of knowledge. Buddhaghosa’s very name—“voice of the Bud¬ dha”—is artfully chosen. What he says is what the Buddha said. The Buddhist Dhamma has been preserved for twenty-five centuries along similar lines. A monk cannot learn the Dhamma without taking a teacher, nor can he transmit the Dhamma without formally taking a student. There were vamsas before there was Buddhism. The Vamsa-Brahmana, the Brhadaranyaka Upanisad, and the Harivamsa are ancient Hindu prototypes. The Vamsa-Brdhmana enumerates the succession of Brahman teachers, for in both a Hindu and Buddhist context, vamsa writing presumes the practice of organizing education in terms of enduring relationships between teacher and student (pfuru-sishya) which in time produce ecclesiastical lineages (parampardva).10 In this 10. Bimala Churn Law, On the Chronicles of Ceylon, (Calcutta: Royal Asiatic Soci¬ ety of Bengal, 1947).

32

The Presence of the Past

relationship lies the structure of South Asian civilization; through it flows the content of that civilization. How much weight comes to ride on this relationship between the person who has knowledge and the person who will learn it can be seen by considering the flill range of meanings carried by the word “vamsa”: race, family, caste, lineage, tradition, generation, legend, chronicle, and hereditary custom. When the sacred texts are at stake, the authority of the past de¬ pends on evidence of an unbroken chain of human connections, link¬ ing the present moment to its origins.11 In a similar way Sri Lanka’s claim to being the repository of orthodoxy depends on a similar hu¬ man connection and the enduring identification it created between the religion and the island. The Buddha himself made the connection. The Mahavamsa says that he visited the island on three occasions, and taught the Dhamma while physically present in the island. On this account, not only did he teach the Dhamma, he propagated it, by subduing the yakas (demons) and establishing his sovereign authority over Sri Lanka. The Mahavamsa recounts the episode as if it were not a spiritual conquest but a military one: To this great gathering of . . . yakkhas went the Blessed One, and there, in the midst of that assembly, hovering in the air over their heads, at the place of the (future) Mahiyarigana-thupa, he struck terror in their hearts by rain, storm, darkness, and so forth. The yakkhas, overwhelmed by fear, besought the fearless Vanquisher to release them from terrors, and the Vanquisher, destroyer of fear, spoke thus to the terrified yakkhas: “I will banish this your fear and your distress, O yakkhas, give ye here to me with one accord a place where I may sit down.” The yakkhas thus answered the Blessed One: “We all, O Lord, give you even the whole of our island. Give us release from our fear.”12

Later, when Asoka’s son Mahinda brought Buddhism to the island, it was again the human connection that made the knowledge he transmitted reliable. Put aside the incongruity that there should have been no need for a third-century b.c.e. mission of monks to intro¬ duce the teachings to the island if the Buddha had done the same 11. See Arjun Appadurai, ‘The Past as a Scarce Resource,” Man 16 (June 1981): 201-19, for a theoretical treatment of the role assertions of continuity play in histori¬ cal arguments. 12. Wilhelm Geiger, trans., Mahavamsa (Colombo: Ceylon Government Press, i960; first published in 1912), 1:23—28. I have used Geiger’s translation in all of the quotations from the Mahavamsa that follow. All further citations will appear in the text and take the form Mv. followed by chapter and verse.

Past Uses of the Past

33

thing himself two centuries earlier. That is simply an incongruity. Mahinda’s visit follows the same successional logic. By virtue of the embassy of Mahinda and his followers, the Sri Lankan king Devanampiyatissa came to be associated with the far more important Indian king Asoka, besides establishing that the local monkhood had been properly founded by a prestigious group of teachers. Scholars since Jean Przyluski and Hermann Oldenberg have cast doubt on these assertions, and no ancient account outside Sri Lanka identifies Mahinda as Asoka’s son.13 But the sacred history of Sri Lanka is writ¬ ten around the evolution of two intertwined institutions—the mjaparamparava (line of kingly descent) on one side and the theraparamparava (line of monastic descent) on the other—that reach back to North India. To the extent that vamsas establish models of authority and give privilege to certain relationships and knowledges, historical writing has a political character. The Mahavamsa is the court chronicle. It flatters the king and secures the rights of certain religious virtuosi, but vamsa writers describe their task as serving higher purposes. Taken at their word, vamsas want to edify—by glorifying and cas¬ tigating, by pointing a moral, and by creating “serene joy and emo¬ tion among the pious.” To call such traditions Whiggish or ideologi¬ cal imposes contemporary conceptions of historical writing on materials that share few of our intentions. The point is not that the ancient histories are unreliable—although the extent of their re¬ liability is always at issue—but that they demonstrate a characteristic way of legitimating present-day arrangements. Great emphasis has been placed throughout the history of Buddhism in Sri Lanka on the idea that the connection between past and present must be unbroken, whether between a sacred place and the historical events that created its importance or between a group of monks and the historical origins that guarantee the authenticity of their teachings. In some cases the historical accounts that warrant and the ritual or texts that are war¬ ranted merge into one another. A fourteenth-century work on the Tooth Relic, the Dalada-sirita, begins with the history of the relic: its sojourn in India after the death of the Lord Buddha, its journey to Sri Lanka, and its growing involvement with the medieval Sinhala state. 13. Jean Przyluski, La legende de Vempereur Agoka (Paris: Paul Guethner, 1932); Hermann Oldenberg, trans., Dipavamsa (New Delhi: Asian Educational Services, 1982).

34

The Presence of the Past

The last chapter of the Dalada-sirita discusses the rites necessary for venerating the Tooth Relic. If one takes the book’s title as a guide to its intentions, the work is both a history of the Tooth Relic and an account of the ceremonies to be observed in its worship, for the word “sirita” means “life history,” “life story,” and “rite.”14

The Passing of History and the Vamsa Tradition Sri Lankan monks are men who have written things down. They were the first to commit the Dhamma to writing, producing in the subse¬ quent 2,000 years a substantial body of other texts as well: commen¬ taries on the canon, treatises on astrology, Ayurvedic medicine, and grammar. In this literature, historical writing assumes a special place. History is not just another genre of literary production, for by vouch¬ ing for the reliability of the knowledge found in other texts, historical writing serves an epistemological function. Mahinda is said to have brought to Sri Lanka not only the Dhamma but also the traditional history of Buddhism in India, preserving a record of Buddhist teachers, an account of the councils, a chronology of the kings of Magadha, and the first missions.15 In Sri Lanka other monks took on the task of recording the past. Since the first chronicle—the Dlpavamsa—written some four centuries after the beginning of the com¬ mon era, monkly writers have recorded political and military matters as well as religious ones. The Sri Lankan origin of these histories is the Sinhala-language atthakathd, itself not a history at all but a Sinhala commentary on the Pali canon. The Sihala-atthakathd was an oral tradition, an interpretation given in the spoken idiom, carefully preserved by certain monks who specialized in committing this kind of knowledge to memory.16 Apropos the tendency to run together knowledge and the human relationships that make that knowledge reliable, a historical introduc¬ tion—the Sihala-atthakathd-mahdvamsa—came to be joined to the 14. Ananda Kulasuriya, ‘The Minor Chronicles and Other Traditional Writings in Sinhalese and Their Historical Value,” The Ceylon Historical Journal 25:1-4 (1978): 12. 15. H. C. Ray, ed., University of Ceylon History of Ceylon (Colombo: Ceylon Univer¬ sity Press, 1954), vol. 1, part 1, p. 47. 16. N. A. Jayawickrama, “Literary Activity in Pali,” in Education in Ceylon: A Cen¬ tenary Volume (Colombo: Ceylon Government Press, 1969), vol. 1, p. 63.

Past Uses of the Past

35

commentary itself. In Oldenberg’s words, the Sihala-atthakatha-ma¬ havamsa is “a historical account (mahavamsa) which forms a constitutent part of a theological [sic] commentary (atthakatha) . . . com¬ posed in order to give the dogmatical contents of the latter the indispensable historical foundation.”17 The historical account begins at the beginning. It recounts the Buddha’s visits to Sri Lanka, treats the coming together of the monks at councils every one hundred years, and ends with the coming of Mahinda. Since the audience was the monkhood itself, a recitation gave Theravada monks grounds for trusting in the authenticity of the teachings they espoused. Where the historical account laid out the monks’ identity, reading or hearing that account enacted it. From the Sihala-atthakatha came the Sinhala commentarial tradi¬ tion; from the Sihala-atthakatha-mahavamsa came the Dipavamsa and Mahavamsa.18 The Dipavamsa is the oldest chronicle of that which survives in Sri Lanka. Wilhelm Geiger felt that the Dipavamsa was produced by a society in which the oral tradition was declining, bas¬ ing his case on the character of the chronicle’s diction. Its language is clumsy, occasionally incorrect, and its structure is highly repetitive, broken into sections by formulas or mnemonic passages.19 Other qual¬ ities suggest that the Dipavamsa is a compilation of the work of sev¬ eral authors. Despite the grammatical problems in some parts, other parts are entirely “free from irregularities in metre and mistakes in grammar. Some accounts have one part in one metre and another in another metre. . . . Some passages give only the speeches without any mention of the speakers, while others, which give the speakers, seem 17. Oldenberg, trans., Dipavamsa, p. 4. 18. G. C. Mendis argued that the Dipavamsa was not based on the Sih ala-atthakatha-mahdvamsa\ see ‘The Pali Chronicles of Ceylon,” University of Ceylon Review 4 (October 1946): 24. For my purposes it is enough to recognize a history of histori¬ cal writing in which the Sihala-atthakatha-mahavamsa comes before the Dipavamsa and Mahavamsa. The dominant view is Geiger’s opinion that both chronicles have a common source; see The Dipavamsa and Mahavamsa and Their Historical Development in Ceylon, trans. Ethel Coomaraswamy (Colombo: Ceylon Government Press, 1908), pp. 14-16 and 63-69. 19. Geiger called these mnemonics “memory verses,” in The Dipavamsa and Mahdvamsa and Their Historical Development in Ceylon, p. 10. The paradigm example is: “the island, the capital, the king, the affliction (which vexed the island), the relics, the Thupa, the lake, the mountain, the garden, the Bodhi tree, the (chief) Bhikkhuni [nun], the (chief) Bhikkhu, and the most excellent Buddha: these are the thirteen subjects (to be treated in the following exposition)” (.Dipavamsa, 17.3-4).

36

The Presence of the Past

to represent a more developed form of such speeches.”20 Sometimes die reader comes upon two accounts of the same event, another hint that it is a collection of differing recensions that belonged originally to different monasteries. The Dlpavamsa?s disjointed character has another source. Episodes are held together by “memory verses” inserted to facilitate the chroni¬ cle's being recited, for whether it was written or not, the Dlpavamsa seems to have been recited.21 These “memory verses” gave the reciter space to explain the meaning of the episodes that follow. Why the reciter might feel the need to comment on the text derives from the Dipavamsa?s attitude toward the past and present. It is often said that the Dlpavamsa represents the earliest stage of chronicle-writing, and that it “hands over the traditions largely as it found them.”22 But this fidelity to the past is balanced by the Dlpavamsa?s practical interest in the present. The Dlpavamsa is a polemic. By the first century of the common era, kings began to give their support to world renouncers who were either renegade Theravada monks or holders of heterodox views. The monks of the Mahavihara (the chief Theravada monastery in Anuradhapura) were put upon to defend their place and the ortho¬ doxy of their tradition. They did so by invoking the history of the religion in India and their unsullied descent from those traditions. The “memory versus” serve to organize the memory toward that end. We possess an independent account of those traditions by virtue of the Cullavapfpfa in the Vinayapitaka. The Sri Lanka monks alter that history in ways that both address a Sri Lankan audience and endorse the authority of Theravada Buddhism: There are many elements in the Sri Lankan tradition not noticed in the Cullavagpa. The leading monks of the First Council are said to have been those, who were specially commended by the Buddha during his lifetime, and it is emphasized that they had learnt the doctrine at the feet of the Buddha. The Theravada is called the apfpfavada, the highest doctrine. A general challenge is thrown out to all opponents. It is con¬ tended that “neither monk nor brahmin, however clever, will be able to 20. Mendis, “The Pali Chronicles of Ceylon,” p. 18. 21. See 4.47 and 12.30-33. Other vamsas were recited to kings, and in the case of the Ariyavamsa, wealthy people endowed monasteries with land to ensure that it would be preached to laypeople at regular intervals. See Walpola Rahula, “The Signif¬ icance of the Ariyavamsa?" University of Ceylon Review? 1 (April 1943): 59-68. 22. L. S. Perera, “The Pali Chronicles of Ceylon,” in C. H. Philips, eds.. Historians of India, Pakistan, and Ceylon (London: Oxford University Press, 1961), p. 31.

Past Uses of the Past

37

subvert the religion, which stands like the Sineru mountain.11 There is a repetitive insistence that die doctrine as rehearsed at the Council is indestructible, “neither God, nor Mara, nor Brahma nor any earthly being can find in it the smallest ill-spoken word. . . . The Theravada is founded on true reason, free from heresies, full of true meaning.11 . . . Describing the Second Council held a hundred years later, the chief monks who participated are made to derive their authority from the monks of the First Council. Not only are they pupils of these monks, but they had actually seen the Buddha.22

That Buddhist monks a hundred years after the Buddha’s death are said to have seen him suggests the Theravada monks’ understanding of what guarantees authority and orthodoxy. Although it recounts many of the same episodes, the Mahavamsa is a more literary production than the Dipavamsa. Mahanama organized the chronicle in ways that self-consciously set it apart from the older sources, which he describes as “here too long drawn out and there too closely knit” (1.2). Where the Dipavamsa is faithful to its own sources, swallowing whole episodes from the oral tradition, the Ma¬ havamsa recasts material from these sources in a deliberate attempt to create a more poetic and coherent narrative. ‘The whole Mahavamsaf Geiger wrote, “is a kavya [poetic prose or verse], subject to all the rules of alamkara [poetic convention or embellishment] valid in In¬ dian literature.”24 Just as the Mahavamsa draws on older sources for much of its material, so it expresses those events in terms of poetic models established by earlier kavyas. By tradition, a kavya could be either prose or verse; the plot can be—to use Western categories— either historical, or romantic, or mythological. It is “embellishments” (alamkara) that make a work a kavya. They allow the author to de¬ velop a sentiment (rasa) and an accompanying emotion (bhava). These emotions have several sources, but the central theme of both the Dipavamsa and Mahavamsa—Lankavijaya (the winning of Lanka) —called up especially intense feelings. Between the initial characteri¬ zation of the island as the Dhammadipa (Mv. 1.84) (the island of Dhamma) and sounding the theme of Lankavijaya, the chronicles im¬ posed a dramatic and moral identity on the island. 23. Sirima Kiribamune, ‘The Dipavamsa in Ancient Sri Lankan Historiography,” The Sri Lanka Journal of the Humanities 5:1 and 2 (1979): 94—95. 24. Geiger, preface to G. C. Mendis, The Early History of Ceylon (Calcutta: Y.M.C.A. Publishing House, 1932), p. xi.

38

The Presence of the Past

Even though the Mahavamsa’’s author, Mahanama, saw himself as more of a poet and historian than were the ancient authorities, he did not avoid inconsistencies between episodes altogether, and he did not deviate widely from his sources.25 The Dlpavamsa ends abruptly, treat¬ ing Mahasena’s twenty-seven-year reign in a single page. The one event related in that final reign is his intellectual seduction by “shame¬ less” monks holding wrong doctrines. These monks are excoriated, but the Dlpavamsa leaves die struggle between Theravada and other varieties of Buddhism unresolved, concluding by finding doctrinal significance in the confusion of Mahasena’s life: “having performed through his life, in consequence of his intercourse with those wicked persons, evil as well as good deeds, this king Mahasena passed away” (Dv. 22.75). The Mahavamsa was compiled perhaps as much as two centuries after the Dlpavamsa, and by the time Mahanama composed the Mahavamsa in die early sixth century, Theravada Buddhism and the Mahavihara monks who espoused it had carried the day, the prophecies the Lord Buddha was believed to have made were ful¬ filled, and the line of monks that the Lord Buddha began had been safely conducted to Mahanama’s day. The Dlpavamsa records the bat¬ tle, in other words, the Mahavamsa, the victory.26 The Dlpavamsa and Mahavamsa participate in a tradition where borrowing is good practice, and both texts draw on canonical and noncanonical sources alike. Later vamsas borrow from the Dlpavamsa and Mahavamsa. A writer innovates only to the extent of cleaning up defective language, deleting unnecessary sections or adding material whose importance his predecessors did not recognize. This is Mahanama’s innovation on the Dlpavamsa. Changes can be smuggled into the text, but always under the cover of maintaining die tradition. To this extent, Mahanama follows a South Asian scholarly “regu¬ larity,” to use Bourdieu’s term, insisting on his fidelity to the text.27 Vamsa writers met another responsibility by updating a chronicle or undertook the virtuous work of translating a Pali vamsa into Sinhala, as in the case of the Thupavamsa and the Dhatuvamsa. In a society where knowledge is transmitted along human chains of teachers and 25. Mendis, “The Pali Chronicles of Ceylon,” p. 11. 26. Kiribamune, “The Dlpavamsa in Ancient Sri Lankan Historiography,” p. 99. 27. See Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), pp. 16—30.

Past Uses of the Past

39

students, historical accounts of these chains similarly acknowledge their dependence on the ancient authorities {forana). Students de¬ pend on teachers; later historians depend on earlier historians. Under these circumstances, institutional forces require change to be masked and political interest justified in terms of orthodoxy. The felt recognition of continuity is reflected in the chronicle in another way. The Mahavamsa begins to maintain a record of regnal years in the reign of Dutugamunu (161-137 b.c.e), and the practice is continued in the chronicle’s later extensions. “Even apart from its accuracy,” L. S. Perera argues, “the almost unbroken history of the island must have provided these writers with some notion of the con¬ tinuity of history within a chronological framework.”28 When the twelfth-century chronicler, Dhammakitti, updated the Mahavamsa, he started the practice of tallying events relative to the death of the Bud¬ dha. This framework gives the chronicle a point of closure because the Buddha foretold that the sasana would last 5,000 years, declining in stages until its disappearance. Reckoning events relative to the Buddha’s life gives the chronicle a measured trajectory to follow. The Mahavamsa proper provided Dhammakitti with a textual identity for the Buddha, the island, the monarchy, and the island’s Buddhist com¬ munity. And by reckoning Sri Lankan events relative to the life span of the sasana, Dhammakitti endowed these identities with signs of finitude and fragility. Mahanama appears certain to have known the Dlpavamsa and to have put it to use in composing the Mahavamsa. But the Mahavamsa is a substantially larger work than the Dlpavamsa. In today’s form, the Dlpavamsa narrates the early descent of the religion up to the reign of Mahasena in about one hundred pages. The Mahavamsa needs 270 pages to cover the same interval.29 The brevity of the Dlpavamsa may come in part from its origin as an oral tradition. What is more inter¬ esting is the nature of the material Mahanama adds. Geiger attributes the difference to his “more liberal use of the material contained in the original,” that is, the Dlpavamsa.™ But much of the Mahavamsa s ad¬ ditional length comes from popular material that Mahanama adds to 28. L. S. Perera, ‘The Pali Chronicle of Ceylon,” in Philips, ed.. Historians of India, Pakistan, and Ceylon, p. 34. 29. These figures derive from Oldenburg’s Dipavamsa and Geiger’s Mahavamsa. 30. Geiger, introduction to Mahavamsa, p. xi.

40

The Presence of the Past

enlarge the account of the origins of the Sinhalas. The Dipavamsa speaks tersely of Vijaya’s coming to the island. His descent from Slnhabahu, his half-lion, half-human father, his “wicked and fearful” deeds, his forced exile from India, and his circuitous journey to Sri Lanka are told in thirty-eight verses. The Mahavamsa recounts the same events in two chapters of 111 verses. Vijaya’s consecration marks the beginning of the Sri Lankan mon¬ archy, but the first king to receive a full Indian-style consecration was Devanampiyatissa, not accidentally the Sri Lankan king who wel¬ comed a delegation of Buddhist monks sent by the Indian king Asoka, accepted Buddhism, and built the Mahavihara for the monks. Relics and saplings of the bo tree under which the Buddha was seated when he achieved enlightenment are brought to Anuradhapura and installed in places of honor. The narrative very quickly passes to the story of Dumgamunu, for two Tamil kings usurped the throne of Anuradhapura around 200 b.c.e., to be followed by Elara, who came from the Cola country in India and ruled for forty-four years. Dutugamunu’s story comprises most of the remainder of the Mahavamsa proper. As I suggest in the next chapter, the events of his life furnish the emotional material with which Mahanama constructs a picture of the Sri Lankan state and its proper governance. The Mahavamsa ends with Mahasena’s reign some four centuries later, but the great portion of the story has been told. Dumgamunu is the island’s fourteenth king, Mahasena the sixty-first. The intervening kings are treated in four chapters summarily titled ‘The Ten Kings,” ‘The Eleven Kings,” ‘The Twelve Kings,” and ‘The Thirteen Kings.” No one king gets special attention, the text emphasizing their com¬ mon problem: increasingly frequent, if still sporadic conflict with usurpers trying to take over control of Anuradhapura. At the end of the Mahavamsa proper, Mahasena becomes an internal threat to the Mahavihara and the Theravada orthodoxy it represents. Since the reign of VattagamanI Abhaya (c. 103 b.c.e.), Anuradhapura had sup¬ ported dissident groups of monks following doctrines that today we would call Mahay ana and Jain. Doctrinal dispute was nothing new when Mahasena came to power some three centuries after Christ. What was new was his active suppression of the Mahavihara, al¬ though the Mahayana or proto-Mahayana monks had themselves

Past Uses of the Past

4i

been suppressed by Gothabhaya (249—62 c.E.). Sixty of these monks were exiled, some going to Kaveripattana, a center of Mahayana learning and practice in the Cola kingdom, and the place where the Mahayana monk Sanghamitta was educated."1 He came to Sri Lanka and became the teacher of Mahasena, who was soon to assume the throne after the death of his elder brother. As king, Mahasena put into practice a plan that Sanghamitta is said to have entertained for forty years. Raising up the Mahayana monks, he allowed Sanghamitta to try to convert the Mahavihara to Mahayana. Although he failed, the Mahavihara monks had to flee to friendly villages in Malaya (the hill country) and Rohana (the South), leaving the Mahavihara de¬ serted for nine years. Sanghamitta demolished the seven-story Lohapasada, which Dutagamunu had built for the Mahavihara, carry¬ ing off building material from the demolition and planting beans in the Mahavihara’s land. The Mahavihara monks recovered because they had close friend¬ ships, as K. M. de Silva writes, “with all sections of the population, but above all with nobility.”32 One of Mahasena’s ministers and close friends rebelled against him, fled to the hill country, and returned to make war. But the minister first met his old friend and convinced Mahasena to relent, saving the Mahavihara from complete destruc¬ tion. Then one of Mahasena’s favorite wives, grieving over the de¬ struction of the Mahavihara, has Sanghamitta put to death when he comes to pull down the Thuparama (the first relic mound built at Anuradhapura). Challenged, orthodoxy thus survived, and the Ma¬ havihara monks soon recovered their former privileges. When Mahanama recounted these events some two centuries later, Theravada had prevailed absolutely. The Mahavamsa, unlike the Dipavamsa, has sufficient distance to look back on these events calmly, knowing that they were to lapse. When it concludes by characterizing the life of its greatest enemy Mahasena—“thus he did gather to himself much merit and much guilt”—the evenhandedness of that judgment sug¬ gests the assumption of both distance and authority (Mv. 37.50).33 31. Walpola Rahula, History of Buddhism in Ceylon (Colombo: M. D. Gunasena, 1956), p. 9432. de Silva, A History of Sri Lanka, p. 48. 33. See Culavamsa, intro., p. iii.

42

The Presence of the Past

Culavamsa, or the Mahavamsa Continued What is known as the Culavamsa is the extension of the Mahavamsa proper, begun by a monk named Dhammakitti in the twelfth century. Whether it deserves to be called the Culavamsa, as was Geiger’s prac¬ tice,34 or whether it is an integral part of the Mahavamsa is more than a philological dispute. How the issue is settled determines what con¬ temporary commentators make of the historiographical tradition in Sri Lanka as well as what Sri Lankans make of their society and its past. To call the entire narrative the Mahavamsa is to assert the conti¬ nuity of Sri Lankan history and the early historians’ continuing recog¬ nition of that continuity. To break the narrative into the Mahavamsa and the Culavamsa is to characterize the tradition as discontinuous. Geiger chose discontinuity on philological grounds. Others see the tradition as continuous. Everything in the present situation inclines toward seeing the Sri Lankan past as a seamless and continuous story. Sinhala history is akanda (unbroken), and hence, the argument goes, the Buddhism practiced in Sri Lanka today is orthodox, the Sinhala people are the descendants of Vijaya, and the rise of the nation-state and Sinhala nationalism are reexpressions of political forms estab¬ lished first at Anuradhapura. •

•

Dhammakitti was a foreigner who continued the chronicle under royal patronage. While the Culavamsa itself says nothing about its author, one tradition says he was a Burmese monk who came to Sri Lanka during the reign of Parakramabahu II (1236-70). Another says he came from the Cola country of South India.35 The Culavamsa itself speaks of a monk named Dhammakitti, whom Parakramabahu I (1153-86) sent to lower Burma (Ramannadesa) (76.32). He is re¬ ferred to as a scholar, but nothing is said that indicates he composed the Culavamsa. During the reign of Parakramabahu II, there appears another Dhammakitti—a monk from South India, brought to the island by the king to reform the monkhood—and he too might have been the author. Whoever compiled this first part of the Culavamsa seems to have been a foreigner or at least a Sri Lankan with cosmo¬ politan connections. This first part of the Culavamsa runs from chapters 37 to 79, pick34. See ibid. 35. Law, On the Chronicles of Ceylon, pp. 16—17.

Past Uses of the Past

43

ing up the narrative from the king who succeeded Mahasena (274301) and continuing to Parakramabahu I (1153—86). A century later another installment was written, which takes the account from the king who followed Parakramabahu I, that is, Vijayabahu II (118687), to Parakramabahu IV (1302-26). Chapters 80 through 90 re¬ count events in the lives of these twenty-three kings. This second part of the Culavamsa may have also been written by a foreigner, namely a monk from Cola country brought to the island at the invitation of Parakramabahu IV. First an installment after a long 600-year interval, then another installment written slightly more than a century later— these first two parts of the Culavamsa constitute the early medieval part of the chronicle. That both parts may have been written by for¬ eign monks raises doubts about the contemporary opinion that the Mahavamsa records 2,500 years of ethnic feeling unless of course the ancient writers recorded those feelings without knowing them them¬ selves. But there is no doubting the writers’ dominant intentions. Like Mahanama before them, these two writers produced a praise poem to celebrate the rule of a hero-king. When the narrative moves to Parakramabahu II, the focus shifts because for Parakramabahu II the enemy is not local but South In¬ dian and Tamil. Before he conquers the Tamils, he performs a sacrifi¬ cial festival for the Tooth Relic and builds a temple near his palace so that he can worship the relic three times a day. These two purposes— driving out the Tamils and honoring the Tooth Relic—are portrayed as one. They are instruments for protecting the dispensation of the Buddha and guaranteeing the survival of the monarchy. In this regard Parakramabahu II treats the island itself as a moral entity. First he makes a royal pilgrimage, visiting the sacred places that define the island as a moral unit.36 Then he expels those who would break the connection between Buddhism and the state, making a “solemn decla¬ ration”:

36. These sixteen pilgrimage places owe their sanctity to their being visited by the Buddha, but the practice of pilgrimage to them begins much later. Gananath Obeyesekere says it began at least as early as the eighteenth century; see “The Bud¬ dhist Pantheon in Ceylon and Its Extensions,” in Manning Nash, ed.. Anthropological Studies in Theravada Buddhism, Yale University Southeast Asia Studies, Cultural Re¬ port Series, no. 13, 1966, p. 23. If the author of the second installment of the Culavamsa knew of the pilgrimage during the time of Parakramabahu IV (1302-26), the practice was considerably older.

44

The Presence of the Past

Our sublime Buddha, god of the gods, the Sage, strong in miraculous power visited this island of Lanka three times, and that most supreme of men went away, having sojourned here and there and having made of sixteen prominent places spots hallowed by his use. Therefore it is that Lanka is not under the power of kings of a false faith, but under the power of kings of the true faith it flourishes in the right manner. Aforetime also on this island the Ruler of men by name Asela, son of the Ruler Mutaslva, wise in statecraft, conquered the Damilas Sena and Guttaka who carried on horse-dealing by sea and held sway while shel¬ tering the Order of the Victor. Then the famous Great king Dutthamanl Abhaya vanquished Elara of the Cola country and protected the laity and the Order. Again the Monarch Vattagamani vanquished in combat five very cruel Damila princes and protected the laity and the Order. Then the Ruler of men, Dhatusena, subdued six Damila kings with their countless great warriors, and sheltered the laity and ithe Or¬ der. Again the great Vijayabahu put to flight in battle the Coliyas and the Damilas and protected the laity and the Order. Now I too have the wish to vanquish the insolent Damilas (Cv. 82.17-26)37

In passages such as this one, nineteenth-century Sinhala nationalists found another textual identity—the cruel, arrogant, and innumerable Tamils.

The Medieval Mahavamsa With the account of Parakramabahu II the Culavamsa makes another turn, away from the concerns of the Mahavamsa proper—the achieve¬ ments of hero-kings, the parallel careers of Buddhist kings and clergy, and the vicissitudes of the monarchy—and toward religious pan¬ egyric. While the literary style continues, and the reigns of successive kings still provide the narrative structure, after the reign of Para¬ kramabahu II, the chronicle keeps its gaze fixed on relics, festivals, and religious benefactions. Perera calls this drift away from politics “a development of the religious panegyric of the Mahavamsa under the influence of the late degenerate kavya style.”38 The writer of the third section of the Culavamsa did not begin his work until the middle of 37. In several places the Culavamsa’s author has Parakramabahu make a distinction between people of the Co}a country and Tamils. Whether “Damila” refers to non-Colan South Indians, Sri Lankan Tamils, or Indian Tamils with political loyalties to which the writer is hostile warrants closer investigation. 38. Perera, ‘The Pali Chronicle of Ceylon,” p. 37.

Past Uses of the Past

45

the eighteenth century, some 400 years after his predecessor. When he picks up the narrative, the “style and language exceed in extrava¬ gance those of the previous section, and the author seems to have lost the significance of many of the events of his time. . . . history seems to have passed him by.”39 The growing importance of relics, sacred places, and popular religion has a motivation beyond the text. In the interval between the writing of the first two parts of the Culavamsa and the third, that is, between the collapse of the Rajarata civilization and the rise of the Kandyan kingdom, the king stopped fighting in military engagements. The last Sri Lankan king to appear in combat was Rajasimha I (1581-93).40 He led troops into battle, mounted on an elephant. It may have been the enormous power of European weapons that made it injudicious for a Sri Lankan king to expose himself to harm. It may have been changing notions of proper kingly behavior. By the Kandyan period kings stuck to their palaces. When Klrti Sri Rajasimha (1741—82) asked Tibbotuvave Buddharakkhita to update the Mahavamsa in the 1750s, there may have been material reasons for him to look away from war and heroism to religious pan¬ egyric. Colonial power made the ideal of both the unified state and the heroic king unrealistic. But why he abandoned politics altogether is another question. From 1734 until the eclipse of the Kandyan state in 1815, the last Sri Lankan kings were Tamil and Saivite. They pre¬ sented themselves in public as righteous Buddhist kings, but their careers knew considerably more palace intrigue than heroism. The third part of the Culavamsa picks up the narrative at chapter 90, verse 103 and carries on for ten chapters. Thus the Culavamsa ends conven¬ iently after chapter 100. Most of Tibbotuvave Buddharakkhita’s part centers on his patron Klrti Sri Rajasimha. Although only two of the ten chapters pertain to Klrti Sri Rajasimha, those two chapters take up more than half of the total length of the Culavamsa?s third part. Educated during the reformation of Buddhism in the middle dec¬ ades of the century, Buddharakkhita was the chief student of Valivita Saranamkara and one of the outstanding monks of the time, widely known for his knowledge of Dhamma and Vinaya. He was also the son of an aristocratic Kandyan family that has maintained a central 39. H. C. Ray, ed., University of Ceylon History of Ceylon, p. 53. 40. See K. W. Goonewardena, The Foundation of Dutch Power in Ceylon, 16381658 (Amsterdam: Djambatan, 1958), for an account of the last Sinhala king, Rajasimha II (1635-87) to direct the army. He himself did not fight.

46

The Presence of the Past

place in the Siyam Nikaya (the part of the monkhood that claims descent from the Mahavihara) to the present. Buddharakkhita wrote of his patron: “When [Klrti Sri Rajasimha] heard of the doings of former kings, of Parakramabahu and others, he recognized it as right and imitated their doings” (Cv. 99.72). The same is true of Bud¬ dharakkhita himself, only his paradigm was not Parakramabahu but earlier writers of the Mahavamsa, for he lived in a time of reform, and updating the chronicle was itself a reformative act. Chapter 90 through the first five verses of chapter 92 concern the precolonial period when the Kandyans had to worry about only the Colas and internal dissension, including occasional conflict with a Tamil kingdom that came into being in Jaffna around the thirteenth century. By chapter 92, verse 5, the capital has shifted to Kandy. From that point Buddharakkhita concentrates on the internal affairs of a small kingdom in the central highlands of the island. The moving force of the period was elsewhere, set in motion by the arrival of colonial powers on the coast. Of the Portuguese, he says little besides characterizing them as “heretical evil-doers, cruel and brutal” (Cv. 95.5). He is slightly more forthcoming about the Dutch, who sup¬ planted the Portuguese, but from the reign of Vimaladharmasuriya (1687-1707), the chronicler’s attention fixes on the king and his re¬ lationship to the religion. Of Klrti Sri Rajasimha, he mentions his destruction of the books and buildings of the Roman Catholics (Cv. 90.80-83) but concentrates on the monkhood and the Tooth Relic. The extraordinary circumstances that brought Tamil kings to sit on the throne of the Kandyan kingdom draw virtually no attention. Bud¬ dharakkhita says of the first of these kings only that he was “diligent in harkening to the sermon of the doctrine” and that the Tamil queens kept the five precepts, offered food to the monks, and vene¬ rated the Tooth Relic (Cv. 98.3—28). Chapter 100 recapitulates Klrti Sri Rajasimha’s good deeds, which are first treated in chapter ninetynine. Because Buddharakkhita wrote chapter 100 long before British conquest, he did not speak of the final decades of the indigenous state. And when the British colonial government asked Hikkaduve Sumamgala and Pandit Batuvantudave in 1877 to add a small sup¬ plement, it was a foreign government that brought the Culavamsa to a close. Sumamgala and Batavantudave disposed of this traumatic thirty-five-year period in three pages. The supplement ends lac¬ onically but exactly: “After they brought the king, the torturer of his

Past Uses of the Past

47

people, to the opposite coast [South India], the Ingirisi by name seized the whole kingdom” (101.29).

The Mahavamsa as History The first Western reaction to the Mahavamsa was to dismiss it for its mythological elements and exaggerations. Vincent Smith later charac¬ terized it as the “silly fictions of mendacious monks.”41 But the Ma¬ havamsa is clearly not that. It has mythological parts, and poetic fig¬ ures are essential to the kavya style. But substantial amounts of archaeological and inscriptional evidence show that the Mahavamsa rests on facts.42 The difficulty is separating those facts from the reli¬ gious purposes they serve. The Mahavamsa is history, but sacred, di¬ dactic history. “A ‘history’ that begins with a great man, is trans¬ formed into an order of monks as the continuers of the tradition, and then expands into a sangha and sasana within a polity,” Tambiah says, “is of course ‘objectively’ a cooked and tendentious account. But it is precisely because that historical vision contains a magnificent plan of unfolding; a set of moral criteria by which to evaluate the acts of kings and monks; and a framework for describing a succession of kings (vamsa), together with a succession of monastic lineages and saintly theras (elders) that the Buddhist scholar monks of Lanka, Burma, and Thailand wrote the kind of continuous historical chroni¬ cles that are so conspicuously sparse, if not lacking, in India.”43 The Mahavamsa's textualization of a set of identities—of the Lord Bud¬ dha, of the island as “something special,” of the Sri Lankan king and 41. Vincent Smith, quoted in H. C. Norman, “A Defense of the Chronicles ol the Southern Buddhists,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society (G. B. and I.), (1908): 3. Norman quotes Smith without giving the origin of the quotation, and, although I have searched through the second edition of Smith’s Asoka, the Buddhist Emperor of India (Delhi: S. Chand and Co., 1964), I cannot locate the characterization there. G. P. Malalasekera quotes the same phrase, saying that it came from Smith’s early career, in The Pali Literature of Ceylon (Colombo: M. D. Gunasena, 1958), p. 6. 42. Wilhelm Geiger, “The Trustworthiness of the Mahavamsa,” Indian Historical Quarterly 6 (June 1930): 205-28. Also see his “Contributions of the Mahavamsa to Our Knowledge of the Medieval Culture of Ceylon,” Journal of the Greater India Society 2 (July 1935): 89—111; 2 (July 1936): 139—57^ 4 (Juty I937): 79~9^\ (Janu¬ ary 1938): 1-21; 5 (July 1938): 93—12743. S. J. Tambiah, The Buddhist Saints of the Forest and the Cult of Amulets (Cam¬ bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), p. 118.

48

The Presence of the Past

his court, and finally of the Sinhala people—is central to that “mag¬ nificent plan.” The historicity of parts of this plan, especially in their emphasis on priority and continuity, is highly suspect. Let me begin with the Mahdvamsa's treatment of the Buddha, which links him to Sri Lanka in two ways. Although it seems very unlikely that the Lord Buddha ever left North India, the Mahavamsa says that he visited the island three times. The Buddhist tradition in other parts of Asia says nothing about his visiting the island at all, however conventional the transpor¬ tation. The second connection is both more subde and more mun¬ dane. As Thomas Trautman has shown, instances of cross-cousin marriage that occur in Pali literature are found only in postcanonical texts.44 Cross-cousin marriage has always been a sign of Dravidian peoples or practices, and it continues to characterize both Tamil and Sinhala marriage choice and kin behavior in traditional settings. North Indian models of correct marriage look far afield for spouses; Dravidian models prefer a spouse already related to the marriageable person as mother’s brother’s child or father’s sister’s child. What, then, to make of the fact that the Mahavamsa (2.14-24) portrays the Buddha as the product of four cross-cousin marriages? The obvious answer is that the Sakya clan followed the practice.45 But there is no evidence for cross-cousin marriage in the canon and no independent source that speaks of it in canonical times. Trautman follows M. B. Emeneau in arguing that the Mahavamsa''s understand¬ ing of the Buddha’s genealogy reflects not historical fact but the imposition of Sri Lankan assumptions on North Indian relation¬ ships. Knowingly or not, the chronicle constructs the Buddha’s iden¬ tity in a way that must have seemed fitting and proper, the Dravidian way. But in so doing, Mahanama contradicts his own attempt to make a connection between North India and the Buddhists of Sri Lanka. This local idiom becomes considerably more tendentious when the Buddha’s genealogy is brought to bear on later royal marriages in Sri Lanka, for early and medieval Sri Lankan kings claimed to be kins-

44. Thomas Trautman, “Consanguineous Marriage in Pali Literature,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 93 (April 1973): 158—80. 45. See, for instance, A. M. Hocart, “Buddha and Devadatta,” Indian Antiquary 52 (October 1923): 267—72.

Past Uses of the Past

49

men of the Buddha.46 The Mahavamsa (8.18—28, 9.1—29) says that Pandu, the son of Amitodana, the Buddha’s father’s brother, learned that the Sakya clan was destined to be destroyed soon and set his daughter Bhaddakaccana adrift on the Ganges in a ship that eventu¬ ally reached Sri Lanka. She became the bride of Panduvasudeva, the nephew of Vijaya, and their marriage produced ten sons and one in¬ comparably beautiful daughter, Citta. When the royal soothsayers first appraised the infant Citta, they revealed that her son would kill his ten uncles and take the throne from them. Despite the uncles’ considerable efforts to prevent this eventuality, Citta produces a son, Pandukabhaya, who grows up, marries the daughter of one of his mother’s brothers, and slays eight of the remaining uncles. Thus the Pandukabhaya who comes to set up his capital in Anuradhapura— “under the state parasol of his uncles” (10.77)—is the great-grand¬ nephew of the Buddha. His claim to sovereignty has two bases, for he is a prince of the Sakya clan and a kinsman of the Buddha. And he can make the connection with the Buddha on both his father’s and his mother’s sides. As the founder of the Anuradhapura dynasty, Pandu¬ kabhaya is a newcomer, but consanguineous marriage gives him a superior kind of legitimacy based on his connection to the Buddha. The coronation of Tissa as Devanampiyatissa (250 b.c.e.) marked the beginning of the Anuradhapura kings’s assertion of sovereignty over the island. He took the tide maharaja and received a proper Indie consecration. Rituals followed which called for the presence of lesser kings in Anuradhapura to honor the sacred bo tree, itself grown from the tree under which the Lord Buddha had achieved enlighten¬ ment. From the time when Devanampiyatissa first asserted his sover¬ eignty, Anuradhapura became a theater for kingly actions—ceremo¬ niously feeding the monks, showing deference to relics, occasionally withdrawing from the world and giving temporary sovereignty to the sasana—that gave legitimacy to the exercise of power.47 The rhetoric 46. R. A. L. H. Gunawardana, “The Kinsmen of the Buddha: Myth as Political Charter in the Ancient and Early Medieval Kingdoms of Sri Lanka,” in Bardwell Smith, ed., Religion and Legitimation of Power in Sri Lanka (Chambersburg, Pa.: Anima Books, 1978), pp. 96—106. 47. R. A. L. H. Gunawardana, “Social Function and Political Power: A Case Study of State Formation in Irrigation Society,” Indian Historical Review 4 (January 1978): 262. Also see L. A. Wickremeratne, “Shifting Metaphors of Sacrality: The Mythic Dimensions of Anuradhapura,” in Bardwell Smith and Holly Baker Reynolds, eds., The City as a Sacred Center (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1987), pp. 45-59.

50

The Presence of the Past

of kingship outraced reality. Local rulers did not necessarily submit to the authority of the center, and the administration of the Rajarata kingdom required cooperation and conciliation. The Anuradhapura kings lacked a standing army. They scarcely exercised sole power over the island as they claimed.48 As K. M. de Silva puts it, “the relation¬ ship between Anuradhapura and Rohana was not governed by any formal administrative structure or institutional links but by the more volatile and unpredictable give-and-take of personal ties.”49 But kingly status was to grow, and proper ambition required the king’s absolute control of the entire island. At some points the Mahavamsa indicates the existence of regional kingdoms; at other points it asserts the abso¬ lute sovereignty of one Sinhala king when in fact there were more. In the case of Parakramabahu II, we know from Pandyan inscriptions that there were at least two Sri Lankan kings at this time, despite his claims to complete sovereignty. The Mahavamsa records the king’s generosity because it demon¬ strates the king’s righteousness. But there were as many complications on the monks’ side of the relationship as on the king’s. There were various kinds of Buddhist monks about, not to say brahmins, and Hindu and Jain ascetics. Just as the Mahavamsa''s vision of the past emphasizes the sovereignty of only one king, the one who sits, or should sit, in Anuradhapura, it enunciates the views of only one kind of monks, the monks of the Mahavihara. The first of the other commu¬ nities were the monks of the Abhayagirivihara, which, the Mahavamsa says with a precision that suggests more than casual interest, was built “two hundred and seventeen years ten months and ten days . . . [af¬ ter] the founding of the Mahavihara” (33.80-81). The new monas¬ tery was built by King Vattagamani Abhaya and took his name. Its origins were not doctrinal, for Vattagamani built it simply as another residence for Mahavihara monks in Anuradhapura. Its doctrinal and organizational distinctiveness developed after the Mahavihara ex48. W. I. Siriweera, “The Theory of the King’s Ownership of Land in Ceylon: An Essay in Historical Revision,” Ceylon Journal of Historical and Social Studies n.s. 1 (Jan¬ uary 1971): 48-61. 49. de Silva, A History of Sri Lanka, p. 23. De Silva says, on the other hand, that complex administrative arrangements did obtain in matters of irrigation, and increas¬ ingly so as time passed. The combination of decentralized political power and central administration of irrigation sounds improbable but has a rough analogy in the tradi¬ tional Balinese state. See Clifford Geertz, Nejjara (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980).

Past Uses of the Past

5i

pelled one of its members, Mahatissa, allegedly for being too friendly with laypeople. He fled to the Abhayagirivihara and a community of monks formed around him. As the Mahavamsa puts it, “thereafter these bhikkhus [monks] came no more to the Mahavihara: thus did the bhikkhus of the Abhayagiri(pzMra) secede from the Theravada” (33.97). In other words, the Mahavamsa treats the political differ¬ ences between Theravada and the undefined kind of Buddhism of the Abhayagirivihara as a product of the corruption of one of its mem¬ bers. But it is equally plausible to say that Vattagamani’s support of Mahatissa was repayment for the monk’s previous support for his struggle against Tamil claimants to the throne. The rise and fall of orthodoxy, it is clear, is entangled with the rise and fall of individuals and political causes, and what has come to seem a “magnificent plan” was neither history as it happened nor a view of the past simply in¬ vented in a political vacuum. Rather, it was a representation of the past that was, if not publicly negotiated, asserted and defended.50 The contrast with the commentarial literature in Sri Lanka is strik¬ ing, for commentaries on the canon were written by many hands, including a good number of foreigners. N. A. Jayawickrama writes that “the majority of the commentators were either Cola monks or those who had connections with South India.”51 Many commentators were foreigners: Buddhadatta came from a village near Tiruchirappalli; Buddhaghosa is linked to a variety of places in India (Bodh Gaya in the north, and Mayavaram, Kanchlpuram, Kotanemalipuri, and Gundlapalli in Tamilnadu); Dharmapala came from Tirunelveli; and Ananda, too, was an Indian. A principal motive for writing com¬ mentaries in Pali was to make the tradition accessible to Buddhist monks living outside Sri Lanka. Certainly until the time of Mahanama, and perhaps for as long as 500 years after his life, it was still possible to be Tamil and Buddhist at the same time. Pali made the religion accessible to such people. The process by which Buddhism in 50. The Mahavamsa is neither patently dishonest in describing these events nor very forthcoming. Elsewhere it speaks of nigandias (Jain monks), ajlvakas (an ascetic order that resembled Mahay ana), and brahmins, as well as ascetics and mendicants who are not further identified (10.97—102). Mahanama finds himself at cross-purposes in regard to these groups. They are heretical in his view, and he hardly wants to draw attention to their beliefs or their involvements with the larger society. But he also feels obliged to mention their existence because they are the objects of the king’s generosity. 51. Jayawickrama, “Literary Activity in Pali,” p. 68.

52

The Presence of the Past

Sri Lanka was “ethnicized” was a long-term development, and before the point where one could no longer be Buddhist without being Sinhala, the religion was materially enriched by its association with South Indian monks. The forest-dwelling tradition in particular seems to have been guided by South Indian monks. Although there is evidence that several historians were also for¬ eigners, what motivates the vamsa literature differs directly from what motivates the commentaries. The Mahavamsa assumes that the island is the appropriate site for the textualization of local identities. The historical tradition that developed around the Mahavamsa is tied to lesser places, and these historians write to bring the tradition directly down to a particular line of monks, a relic, or a sacred place. These are histories written and kept in certain places, about those places. The same is true of Sinhala secular histories—kadayim pot, vitti pot, and rdjdvaliya. “Kadayim” means “definition of boundaries,” and a kadayim pota intends to define the boundaries of a place for which it presents a historical account.52 The localizing tendency need not be nationalistic, but historical writing was neither unmotivated nor cos¬ mopolitan. Naming places, defining their boundaries, and recording their virtues is surely less than a full-blown political ideology, but these narrative conventions constituted the expressive edge of the his¬ torical process that decided who got what. For the Mahavamsa, the locale is the island itself which becomes, in a way at once literal and metaphorical, the ground on which the story unfolds, for it is here that unity is realized. As the chronicle creates one textual identity after another, the island serves as foil. Recall that when the yakas gave the island to the Buddha, they gave it to him wholecloth, leaving no place for themselves. The Buddha in turn rem¬ edied that problem by creating another place for them (Mv. 1.23 — 32). The Vdmsatthappakdsini (a Pali commentary on the Mahavamsa) asserts the unity between the Buddha and the island even more strongly. When the yakas offer the island to the Buddha, he is seated on a rug which expands until its dimensions match the island pre¬ cisely. His body does the same until rug, the Buddha’s body, and island are symbolically one.53 It is hard to imagine a more vivid ex¬ pression of unity and mutuality. 52. C. E. Godakumbura, “Historical Writing in Sinhalese,” in Philips, ed., Histo¬ rians of India, Pakistan, and Ceylon, p. 78. 53. G. P. Malalasekera, ed., Vdmsatthappakdsini (London: Pali Text Society, 1935),

2 Heroic Leaders and Discourses of Unity

Heroes live a distinctive life. Their origins are anomalous, for one parent is often a god or an animal, and the conditions of their con¬ ception are just as extraordinary. Their lives are fixed on a single ob¬ jective, and their actions metonymize a cause or a community. The Mahavamsa’s treatment of the great Sri Lankan heroes Vijaya, Dupigamunu, and Parakramabahu I, emphasizes another, local characteris¬ tic—each brings the island under a single sovereign authority. Other qualities are subsumed by this one purpose. The Mahavamsa remem¬ bers Vijaya as an adventurer and ne’er-do-well, who made a place for Buddhism by imposing his authority on the island. Dumgamunu is a properly Buddhist hero, but he is also an implacable warrior who slaughters large numbers of people. Parakramabahu too regains sov¬ ereign control of the Anuradhapura state, doing so with acts of de¬ ception and chilling brutality. In this chapter I suggest what charac¬ terizes the Mahavamsa’s vision of political order by considering how the chronicle imagines the careers of these three heroes: each seizes power in a way that creates political unity, in turn protecting Bud¬ dhism. I also suggest several sources of the parallel idea that unity is properly achieved by the selfless consensus of individual human be¬ ings. Sri Lankans knew both conceptions of political community long before the nineteenth-century rise of Sinhala nationalism, which thriftily put them to new uses.

54

The Presence of the Past

Three Heroes The Dipavamsa’s characterization of Vijaya’s life begins the story of Vijaya’s coming to Lanka in these words: “The island of Lanka was called Slhala after the Lion (slha), listen ye to the narration of the origin of the island.”1 It then hurries over the origin of Vijaya in four verses, examines his evil conduct that led to his father’s sending him away from his own kingdom, and concludes with his storm-guided journey to Lanka, via Supparaka where he and his 700 followers re¬ turn the hospitality of their hosts with “drinking, theft, adultery, falsehood, and slander, of an immoral, most dreadful, bad conduct” (Dv. 9.18). At sea he again loses his bearings and is blown ashore where he spends three months in a place called Bharukaccha, exas¬ perating the inhabitants, then returning to the journey the Lord Bud¬ dha had prophesized for him. While Buddhist monks compiled both the Dipavamsa and the Ma¬ havamsa, the way the Mahavamsa relates Vijaya’s legend does not “sa¬ vor of the vihara (monastery).”2 It savors of quite a lot else. Like many other parts of the Mahavamsa, Vijaya’s story bears a strong resemblance to a number of Jataka tales, Hindu epics such as the Mahabharata and Ramayana, and Greek fables.3 Where the Dipavamsa emphasizes the events that led to Vijaya’s coming to Sri Lanka, the Mahavamsa enlarges on his extraordinary ancestry, and it is the Ma¬ havamsa' s incorporation of this astonishing tale that recalls these other South Asian traditions. The Mahavamsa uses this material to construct an origin myth, which has become the “history” of the Sinhala people, but which was intended to justify the status claims of the ruling dynasty at Anuradhapura. The chronicle attributes Vijaya to the union of a lion-father and a human mother, a princess of the Vanga kingdom in Bengal, who is abducted by the lion. She bears him a twin son, Slhabahu, and daughter, Slhaslvall, and when the son

1. Hermann Oldenberg, trans., Dipavamsa (New Delhi: Asian Educational Serv¬ ices, 1982), 9.1. I have followed Oldenberg’s translation in all of the quotations from the Dipavamsa that follow. 2. H. C. Ray, ed.. University of Ceylon History of Ceylon (Colombo: Ceylon Univer¬ sity Press, 1959), vol. 1, part 1, p. 99. 3. See Merlin Peris, “Greek Elements in the Vijaya Legend,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, Sri Lanka Branch n.s. 26 (1982): 43—66.

Heroic Leaders and Discourses of Unity

55

becomes aware of just how unusual his father is, he flees with his mother and sister. They are rescued by his mother’s cross-cousin, who marries her, while Slhabahu returns to kill the lion, his father, in re¬ turn for which the Vanga king gives Slhabahu his kingdom. But he immediately hands over the kingdom to his mother’s new husband and builds the city of Slhapura in the kingdom of Laja where he makes his sister his queen. She bears him sixteen sets of twin sons, the eldest of which was Vijaya. Vijaya’s misdeeds are never specified, but his conduct is so evil that the people of Lala urged Slhabahu to have him put to death. Instead Slhabahu installed him and his 700 fol¬ lowers on a ship and sent them forth. When they reach Sri Lanka, Vijaya meets Kuvanna, a demoness who assaulted his group, throwing all 700 into a ravine. Vijaya ap¬ pears, demands their return, bodily seizes Kuvanna who offers him her kingdom. He demands a rice meal for his followers, and when Vijaya passes the food to her, Kuvanna responds to his kindness by assuming the shape of a sixteen-year-old maiden. Vijaya takes her as his wife, and she bestows kingship on him yet again, showing him how to slay the other demonesses despite their being invisible. His party then spreads out, and his ministers found villages, returning to Vijaya to urge him to be their king. He consents only on condition that a maiden of a noble house be consecrated with him as his queen. To satisfy his demand, the ministers bring a daughter of the Pandu king of Madurai in South India as well as less well-born women for themselves. Completing this transition into the world of human be¬ ings, Vijaya sends Kuvanna and their two children away. She dies, and his son and daughter start a lineage of people called the Pulinda in the jungly mountains of the central highlands. In turn Vijaya is consecrated and rules over “all Lanka in peace and righteousness [for] thirty-eight years” (Mv. 7.74). The contrast with two variants of the Vijaya story recorded by Chi¬ nese pilgrims to South Asia around the time of Mahanama’s life sug¬ gests what motivated his use of the past. Fa Hsien visited Anuradhapura in the fifth century, and he relates a different story of the island’s settlement. He says that the island was originally inhabited by spirits and ndgas with whom merchants of different countries carried on trade, wordlessly taking away goods and leaving payment accord¬ ing to the spirits’ instructions. When they spread word of “how pleas-

56

The Presence of the Past

ant the land was,” other people sailed to the island and established a great kingdom.4 What is most striking about this legend is its em¬ phasis not on monarchy and North India, but on trade and the grad¬ ual coming of people to the island. Although he never reached Sri Lanka, the seventh-century traveler Hsiian Tsang gave a much richer variant of the Vijaya legend. On his way to the island, Hsiian Tsang was turned back at Kariclpuram when he learned of a famine in the island. Because this account thus derived from an Indian source, its historical value is questionable. But it is all the more useful for my purposes, suggesting how the origin story may have been understood in a context independent of the par¬ ticular ideological forces that gave it shape in Sri Lanka. According to Hsiian Tsang, Vijaya’s story begins in South India, where a princess is carried off by a lion who fathers two children on her—“in form and features they resembled human beings, but in disposition they were like the beast tribes.”5 When the boy grows up, he asks his mother how she can live with his father “as you differ in kind.” He then carries off his mother to a village in her father’s kingdom. Griev¬ ing over his lost family, the lion ravages the surrounding villages, prompting the king to offer a reward for the lion’s death. The boy sets off to win the reward, saying that there is no harm in slaying an animal. The lion, by contrast, feels only love for his son and, when the boy plunges his knife into his bowels, “the lion still exhibited . . . love and tenderness.” When the king hears the story from the boy, his admiration for the man who slew the lion turns to revulsion for the son who killed his father: ‘Thou wretch! If thou wouldst kill thy father, how much more those not related to thee. ... I will reward your good deed largely, but you shall be banished from the country” (p. 239). Thus the boy and his sister are set adrift in two ships—she is driven over the sea to Persia, and he to Sri Lanka. Later the boy meets a group of merchants and kills their chief, adopts his children, and thus—in the words of the English transla¬ tion—he “extended his race” (p. 239). Those descendants call their country Simhala after their ancestor who got his name from catching a lion. On Hsiian Tsang’s account, the founder of Sri Lankan society 4. James Legge, trans., A Record of Buddhistic Kingdoms (New York: Dover Pub¬ lications, 1965), p. 101. 5. Samuel Beal, trans., Buddhist Records of the Western World (New York: Paragon Book Reprint, 1968), p. 236.

Heroic Leaders and Discourses of Unity

57

never directly encounters the demonesses of Vijaya’s legend, and the boy neither marries a demoness such as Kuvanna nor receives the kingdom from her. Hsiian Tsang’s version of the origin story is orga¬ nized around two distinct episodes in contrast to the Mahdvamstfs single account. The records of the Buddhist religion, Hsiian Tsang says, tell of 500 demonesses living in a great iron city in Sri Lanka, and they dominate the second episode. A great merchant in India at the time, who seems to have also been a king, entrusts his house to his son, also named Simhala, who then sails off to Sri Lanka with 500 merchants to look for gems. They are welcomed and seduced by de¬ monesses whose devices for ensnaring sailors parallel the Sirens of the Odysseus. Having each given birth to a son, the demonesses make plans to imprison the merchants and move on to new lovers, but Simhala rescues the men by leading them to the sea coast where a divine horse flies them back to India.6 But the demonesses follow them, and with “recourse to seductive blandishments” lead the merchants back to Sri Lanka. Simhala is wiser and rejects the advances of his demoness-lover (p. 243). She in turn goes to his father, saying she is his son’s abandoned wife. He believes her despite his son’s protests that she is a demoness, and decides that since his son has rejected her, he will marry her. Once settled in the father’s house, she kills all the inhabitants, devouring their flesh and drinking their blood. Simhala becomes the king of his father’s kingdom because the ministers recognize his wisdom, virtue, and loyalty, but his work is not complete until he returns to Sri Lanka, drives the demonesses into the sea, saves the merchants, de6. The second episode concerning the 500 merchants being taken captive and the role of the divine horse, Kesi, suggests the way the account Hsiian Tsang relates has been melded from various sources. The episode appears in the Valahasa Jataka—see E. B. Cowell, Jataka (Delhi: Cosmo Publications, 1973), 2:89-91—and in a Chinese text, the Liu-tu-chi-ching, where the horse is understood to be the Buddha in a former existence—see Thomas Watters, On Tuan Chwang’s Travels in India, ed. T. W. Rhys Davids and S. W. Bushell, (Delhi: Munshi Ram Manohar Lai, 1961), p. 2.34. The story of the 500 merchants also appears in a Chinese version of the Abhiniskramanasutra in a story that the Buddha relates to his monks as a parable about heresy: just as the merchants were misled by illusion, so 500 followers of Sanjaya, a heretic, were misled by his teachings. At the chapter’s end the Buddha concludes: Now at this time, Bhikshus; the five hundred merchant men were these five hundred heretics, the followers of Sanjaya; Sariputra was the wise chief, and I was the horse Kesi (Samuel Beal, ed.. The Romantic Legend ofSakya Buddha [Delhi: Motilal Banarsidas, 1985], P340). The Kesi story has another source in the Divyavadana. See E. B. Cowell and R. A. Neil, eds., Divyavadana (Cambridge: The University Press, 1886), pp. 523-28.

5«

The Presence of the Past

stroys the iron city, and establishes his own capital where he rules as king. In both Hsiian Tsang’s and Mahanama’s versions of the story, the island acquires the name Simhala after the founder’s name or origin, for he is born of a lion. But the differences are clear enough to sug¬ gest the Mahavamsa"s motivation. Instead of two separate episodes, Mahanama attributes the parricide not to the founder of Sri Lankan society, but to his father, Slhabahu, and understands the original pop¬ ulation of the island to be not the children of merchants whom the founder adopts after killing their father, but followers from North India. Mahanama begins the narrative in North India, and minimizes the back-and-forth action—from South India to Sri Lanka, back to South India, and again to Sri Lanka—between the island and the mainland. In so doing, he affirms a prestigious connection to the land of the Buddha and limits the connection to South India. Looking at these traditions from the present, we might understand the suppres¬ sion of the South Indian connection on the ethnic lines that dominate present-day social life in Sri Lanka. But if anything militated against the South Indian connection, it was trade, not ethnicity. Indeed Ma¬ hanama wants to affirm a different kind of South Indian connection by virtue of Vijaya’s marriage to the royal family of the Pandyan king¬ dom. One thus finds contradictory motivations in the Mahavamsa: on the one hand, the attempt to connect Sri Lankan relationships to North India (betrayed by the imposition of South Indian kin forms on North Indian arrangements);7 and on the other hand, the assertion of a secondary connection to South Indian royalty. But what Ma¬ hanama wants to convey should be obvious. On Hsiian Tsang’s tell¬ ing of the story, Sri Lankan society has two founders, one a parricide, the other a heroic son of a South Indian merchant, both identified as Simhala.8 The people of Sri Lanka have an equally confusing status. Are they to be known as the descendants of the merchant chief the first Simhala kills, or are they children of the 500 South Indian mer¬ chants by way of their union to 500 demonesses? The MahavamstTs 7. See Thomas Trautman, “Consanguineous Marriage in Pali Literature,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 93 (April 1973): 158-80. 8. Watters attributes the first story to popular lore, written or otherwise, that Hsiian Tsang encountered in South India, and the second story to the Buddhist scrip¬ tures, in On Tuan Chwang’s Travels in India, pp. 233-34.

Heroic Leaders and Discourses of Unity

59

story establishes a distinct set of identities—Vijaya arrives in the is¬ land with his 700 followers, and they people the island. It is true that Sihabahu’s parricide is equivalent to Simhala’s, though it is far less emphasized, but Vijaya is clearly and simply identified as a king’s son, driven from home because of conduct that is condemned but never explained. The Mahdvamsa constructs his career with the enthusiasm of a monarchist, properly disdainful of commerce, and Vijaya’s ori¬ gins give Mahanama a heroic, superhuman founder to whom he can tie the Anuradhapura kings of his time. The Dipavamsa has the Lord Buddha speak simply to Sakka about the destiny of the island: “Do not neglect ... the care of Lankadlpa” (9.23); while the Mahdvamsa races into the future, leaving no question about the destiny of the island: “Vijaya, son of Slhabahu, is come to Lanka. ... In Lanka, O Lord of gods, will my religion be established, therefore carefully pro¬ tect him with his followers and Lanka” (7.3—4). Vijaya is the prophesized king of the island, and when he is consecrated, his destiny is realized. Buddhism is the prophesized religion of Lanka. The way the Mahdvamsa tells it, Vijaya is made king of Lanka on three occasions. First Kuvanna offers him her kingdom for her life. Second she repeats the offer when he passes her a plate of rice. And third he is consecrated as king by his own people and takes a princess from a noble house in Madurai as his queen (.Mv. 7.6-31 and 4673). Here, as in the later case of King Pandukabhaya, the Mahdvamsa wants it known that the early kings were properly betrothed and mar¬ ried to queens in the Ksatriya caste (in classical Indian social theory this is the caste that ideally provides rulers). These conceptions of royal consecration and proper marriage come—like Vijaya’s bride— from India, but they seem to have reached Sri Lanka long after the events they record. The Mahdvamsa's account may not savor of the vihara, but it clearly served the needs of the kings and clerics who established a condominium over Sri Lanka in the years that followed the return of the Mahavihara to a favored position in Anuradhapura. Mahanama’s inclinations favor monarchs over merchants and North India over South India, and Mahanama’s sixth-century political inter¬ ests depend on these constructions, for Vijaya begins a line of legiti¬ mate kings and the Buddha’s prophesy gives that line of kings a high purpose. The heroic leadership that Vijaya foreshadows is fully realized in the career of Duttigamunu. The Dipavamsa dispatches DuUigamunu

6o

The Presence of the Past

in some thirteen verses, commending him for a single action—build¬ ing the great relic mound at Anuradhapura for the Mahavihara.9 It concludes its account of his life by saying that his meritorious deeds caused him, after the dissolution of his body, to enter the body of a god in Tusita heaven (the same heaven where Gautama sojourned before the life in which he achieved enlightenment). Except for that remarkable transformation, the Dipavamsa treats Dumgamunu in a cursory way. The Mahdvamsa gives him 861 verses, creating what scholars have called the “Dumgamunu epic” within the Mahdvamsa itself. He is the hero that Vijaya cannot quite be and the paradigm of the righteous Buddhist king. With his career Mahanama finds a way to metonymize a political cause and a social identity. The cause is enunciated in a prophesy. Although the Mahdvamsa picks up his career after he has slain Elara and become king, it quickly returns to the beginning of his life, recounting a chain of events that lead inevitably to Dumgamunu’s slaying Elara. Dumgamunu’s birth is miraculous. His mother, ViharamahadevI, is a pious but barren queen. A monk gifted with supernormal powers foresees that she will eventually have children and urges her to visit a terminally ill monk. She does so, begging him to utter a wish to become her son. Al¬ though he refuses, she is not to be denied so she plies him and the monks who look after him with gifts of medicine and garments. The gifts have their intended effect. The novice dies to be reborn in Viharamahadevfs womb—surely the limiting case of the intertwining of the theraparampardva and the rdjaparampardva. Before she gives birth, the queen experiences pregnancy cravings that set the direction of Dumgamunu’s subsequent life. She craves both honey and water, but the rhetorical force of her cravings lies in the visions that accom¬ pany her cravings. She wants to eat honey, but only what remains after she has offered the monkhood a honeycomb large enough to feed 12,000 monks. She wants to drink water, but only after it has “served to cleanse the sword with which the head of the first warrior among King Elara’s warriors had been stmck off” (Mv. 22.44-45). Both cravings are prophetic—one foreshadowing charity to the monkhood, the other, vengeance against and victory over Elara and his army. The noble son she soon delivers is Dumgamunu. 9. Dipavamsa and Mahavamsa, p. 20, n. On this count the Mahavamsa gives more attention to Dutugamunu than to Mahinda, whose contribution to the development of Buddhism in the island it also enlarges. Some 220 verses on Mahinda in the Dipavamsa become 709 verses in the Mahavamsa.

Heroic Leaders and Discourses of Unity

6 i

The Dipavamsa praises Dupigamunu for only one act—charity to¬ ward the Mahavihara. As for Elara, it says this: “a prince, Elara by name, having killed Asela, reigned righteously for forty-four years. Avoiding the evil paths of lust, hatred, fear, and ignorance, this in¬ comparable monarch ruled righteously” (Dv. 18.49). The Mahdvamsa, by contrast, begins by identifying Elara as a Tamil of noble birth, who came to the island from the Cola country, and here South India enters the text in its continuing dramatic role, not as the home¬ land of the Sri Lankan people, but as a staging ground for invasion. But it also goes on to say that Elara was a worthy source of justice, treating in detail three incidents where he dispenses justice {Mv. 21.15-26). But Elara is kind as well as just. His equity guarantees that sufficient rain will fall; and his kindness brings all that rain dur¬ ing one hour of one night each week when it will not bother people. Elara’s righteousness notwithstanding, DuUigamunu’s historical role is to ‘Vanquish the Damilas and build up a united kingdom [in order to] make the doctrine shine forth brightly5’ {Mv. 22.47). As a boy, he begins to act out both sides of his destiny. He displays his loyalty to the Buddha’s doctrine and the monks who preserve it, and he shows his intention to drive off the Tamils. When the possibility is raised that Dutagamunu will never fight the Tamils, the boy retires to his bed and assumes the fetal position. “Why dost thou not lie easily upon thy bed with limbs stretched out?” his mother asks. He replies: “Over there beyond the river [in Anuradhapura] are the Damilas, here on this side is the [ocean], how can I lie with outstretched limbs?” {Mv. 22.85-86). The sharp feelings of ethnic difference and hostility are a projection of Mahanama’s time on earlier circum¬ stances, but by the sixth-century lines between communities are being drawn and redrawn.10 Dutugamunu means both to relieve his own cramped condition and to drive off the forces that cramp the Sri Lankan state in a single act. Warriors are recruited, and Dutugamunu announces his intention to make war on the Tamils. His father urges him to setde for posses¬ sion of the lands to the south of Anuradhapura. For his father’s coun¬ sel Dutugamunu has contempt and anger—thus the epithet dupi 10. Two useful attempts to see behind the imposition of ethnic categories on these events are R. A. L. H. Gunawardana, c People of the Lion. Sinhala Consciousness in History and Historiography,” and W. I. Siriweera, “The Dutthagamani-Elara Epi¬ sode: A Reassessment,” in Ethnicity and Social Lhancje in Sri Lanka (Colombo: Karunaratne and Sons, 1984), pp. 1—53 and 54-73.

62

The Presence of the Past

(angry). What arouses his anger is his father’s pusillanimous response to the usurpation of the throne. To mock him, he sends him a woman’s ornament (Mv. 24.5—6). Dutugamunu knew that to succeed meekly to his father’s position as king over the kingdom he ruled in southeastern Sri Lanka was to give up his lineage’s claim—which a careful reading of the chronicle reveals is good if not absolute—to controlling Anuradhapura. But the text subordinates that motive to Dutugamunu’s desire to bring glory to Buddhism by reclaiming the land on the farther side of the river. Even though Elara was an old man who had ruled Anuradhapura righteously, if without benefit of the Buddhist religion, for forty-four years, Dumgamunu will not be reconciled. His destiny requires his bringing the island under a single authority, for without unity Buddhism cannot be protected. Chapter 25 recounts Dutugamunu’s march into Anuradhapura and the elephant battle by which he slays Elara. Dutugamunu is never motivated by self-interest. Placing a relic of the Lord Buddha on the butt end of what was either a sword or a scepter, Dumgamunu makes his way north killing one Tamil prince after another. “Not for the joy of sovereignty is this toil of mine,” the Mahavamsa says he says, “my striving (has been) ever to establish the doctrine of the Sambuddha” (25.17). The batde with Elara occurs at the south gate of Anuradhapura. It is described briefly. Dumgamunu slays Elara, and Dutu¬ gamunu’s elephant pierces Elara’s elephant with its tusks. Dupigamunu celebrates Elara’s funeral on the spot, cremating him as a proper warrior and calling for a monument and its worship. Speaking some 400 years later, Mahanama concludes: “And even to this day the princes of Lanka, when they draw near to this place, are wont to silence their music be¬ cause of this worship” (25.74). As it turned out, the practice went on to outlive Mahanama by over a millennium, surviving until the nineteenth century. Before he can unite Sri Lanka, Dumgamunu must kill Elara and thirty-two Tamil princes—an auspicious number in South Asian tra¬ dition, itself associated with unity and completeness. The battle with Elara won, Dumgamunu retires to the palace, overcome with remorse at the slaying of “millions of beings.” Buddhist arah ants (enlightened monks) comfort him, insisting that no evil karma will come to him despite the slaughter. “From this deed arises no hindrance in thy way to heaven. Only one and a half human beings have been slain here by thee. The one had come unto the (three) refuges, the other had taken

Heroic Leaders and Discourses of Unity

^3

upon himself the five precepts. Unbelievers and men of evil life were the rest, not more to be esteemed than beasts” (Mv. 25.109—11). That killing a person and a half remains a problem and that even beasts are not a fit object for slaughter in Buddhist thinking are glos¬ sed over. Instead the monks tell Dutugamunu to find comfort in hav¬ ing brought glory to the doctrine of the Buddha. Despite the skillful leadership of Dutugamunu’s father, Kavantissa, Mahanama minimizes his achievements to make more room for his son’s.11 And as for Dutugamunu’s military success, his achievement belonged more to the domain of regional politics than to ethnic con¬ flict. The battle with Elara was not the end of Dutugamunu’s work for there were other rival powers to be subdued, Sinhala as well as Tamil. Sinhalas fought on Elara’s side and Tamils on Dutugamunu’s because strong anti-South Indian feeling among the Sri Lankan elite was not to arise until after Mahanama’s time, and the equation of Sinhala ethnicity with Buddhism became a reality only centuries after that period.12 Even on the Mahdvamsa's account, Elara ruled as a righteous Buddhist leader. But portraying the battle as occurring in Anuradhapura, the symbolic center of the island, fought by a single Sinhala and Tamil leader as a struggle to protect Buddhism gave Ma¬ hanama a drama that concretized Sinhala Buddhist identity in an evocative way. During Dhatusena’s time, just a half century before Mahanama’s lifetime, Sinhala consciousness was insufficient to unite powerful parts of Sri Lankan society against South Indian invaders.13 When Dhatusena restored Sinhala power in Anuradhapura, he put his own Moriya clan in a position of privilege, but the rival Lambakanna clan was soon to regain its long-held control over Anuradhapura. Harking back to Dumgamunu gave Mahanama a hero who preceded the Moriya-Lambakanna rivalry for political supremacy and who could thus serve as a vehicle for a broader, common identity. Under these circumstances, Mahanama reimagined the past to give socially disparate Sri Lankans common cause. Although Dumgamunu mled Lanka for some twenty-four years af¬ ter being consecrated as maharaja, the Mahdvamsa has almost nothing to say of those years beyond Dutugamunu’s extraordinary charity. But of that, it positively sings, recounting act after act of generosity 11. Siriweera, ‘The Dutthagamani-Elara Episode,” p. 62. 12. Gunawardana, “People of the Lion,” pp. 19—20. 13. Ibid., p. 24.

64

The Presence of the Past

to the monkhood. Mahinda himself had foretold Dutugamunu’s role as builder of relic mounds and dwelling places for monks (Mv. 27.1— 8). He builds the Ruvanvalisaya (or Mahathupa) relic mound and a building for performing ecclesiastical acts nearby. Riches—gold, sil¬ ver, precious stones, pearls—appear spontaneously, brought forth by Dutugamunu’s merit in a display that recalls Devanampiyatissa’s con¬ secration. With this wealth, and with the bricks that also simply ap¬ pear, Dumgamunu gains the material to build massive structures. La¬ bor cannot be had so easily, but he raises it jusdy, not by coercing peasants but by paying them out of his meritorious riches. In so do¬ ing, Dumgamunu makes himself die standard for judging righteous leadership, for his enormous charities have no hidden human costs. The Buddha relics that Dumgamunu enshrines in the Mahathupa had been destined by the Buddha’s deathbed instructions, the Ma¬

havamsa says, to settle at that spot.14 To venerate the relics—and to establish again the Buddhist character of the reclaimed state—Dum¬ gamunu makes an offering to them of a white umbrella, the symbol of sovereignty, encompassment, and unity. For seven days authority over the state resides with the relics (Mv. 31.111).15 For seven days the island is unified in and by the relics. Before stucco is added and the parasol-shaped chatta placed atop the relic mound, properly fin¬ ishing it, Dumgamunu falls fatally ill. Having himself placed on a palanquin, and carried around the Mahathupa, he gazes happily at his work. There, surrounded by 500 monks, Dutugamunu commands the pinpota (merit book) to be read aloud, enumerating his acts of charity. As Geiger pointed out, the Mahavamsa drew upon sources kept in monasteries that recorded “meritorious works by which the prince had furthered the Church (sasana) and the laity (loka).”16 Like the pinpota which Dumgamunu used to tally his good deeds, the

Mahavamsa is itself a puhhapotthakani (P., a register of meritorious deeds). With the monks reciting from the pinpota, Dumgamunu casts a final glance at the Mahathupa and dies. He is conveyed around

14. Thus the division of the Buddha’s remains into eight shares by King Asoka was a redivision of seven parts into eight. The original eighth heap was separated out earlier because it was destined for the Mahathupa. 15. Dutugamunu relinguishes sovereignty over the island to the monkhood on five occasions. See Mahavamsa 3 2..3 6. 16. Wilhelm Geiger, trans., Culavamsa (Colombo: Ceylon Government Informa¬ tion Department, 1953), part 1, intro, p. v.

Heroic Leaders and Discourses of Unity

65

the relic mound three times more, this time in a celestial car, before he is reborn in Tusita heaven. There, the text prophesizes, he will reside until the coming of the Buddha Maitreya, who will be born as Dutugamunu’s own brother, and Dutugamunu himself will be his first disciple {Mv. 32.81-83). The diird great hero of the Mahdvamsa appears only after an inter¬ val of 1,300 years. By that time the capital has been moved from Anuradhapura to Polonnaruva, and the great civilization of the Rd-

jarata is facing its end. The historical circumstances that gave rise to the writing of the extension of the Mahdvamsa proper, that is, the Culavamsa, are complicated and contradictory. The long interval be¬ tween Mahanama’s writing and Dhammmakitti’s was generally a time of prosperity, punctuated by intervals of military conflict. The mas¬ sive tanks and irrigation canals that the Sri Lankan kings built in the northern plains (Rdjarata) and southern Sri Lanka (.Rohana) guaran¬ teed high levels of productivity year after year. In turn came impres¬ sive buildings and a large number of monks. From its founding some four centuries before the beginning of the common era to its fall in the 990s, Anuradhapura was a prosperous, powerful capital, its lon¬ gevity a sharp contrast to other Indianized states centered on Angkhor, Pagan, and Sukhotai. But even after Dutugamunu’s unifica¬ tion of the island, its control over outlying parts of the kingdom was usually uncertain. Other rulers—sometimes related to the Anuradha¬ pura kings, sometimes not—were often in revolt. At other times they were left to themselves, and their inclination to go their own way seems to have acted as a constraint on what the Anuradhapura kings could do. The very way lesser kings called themselves raja suggests their ambitions, and regional capitals seem not so much to have com¬ plemented the royal center as duplicated it. The Culavamsa gives a Theravada Buddhist account of these turbu¬ lent centuries, emphasizing the need for strong leadership in desper¬ ate times. Speaking from the twelfth century, Dhammakitti occupied a historical moment after Polonnaruva had been reclaimed and after the reigns of two strong Sinhala kings, Vijayabahu (1055-1110) and Parakramabahu I (1153-86). Vijayabahu restored peace and revived Buddhism by having fresh ordination brought from Burma and rees¬ tablishing the monkhood, and Parakramabahu I was a still stronger leader. Quickly extending his control over the entire island, he went on to fight two foreign wars, one against the Burmese and one

66

The Presence of the Past

against the Colas. He aimed not at a punitive strike against the enemy but at occupation and incorporation, most likely following the Cola model. His religious actions were no less assertive. He reformed a monkhood that had fallen into dissolution by issuing a katikavata (code of conduct) and by joining the dissident monks into a single group— “as uniform as milk and water so that it could last in purity for 5000 years” (73.18). Parakramabahu I and Parakramabahu II dominate the CulavamstCs account of the Polonnaruva period. Restoring his namesake’s achieve¬ ment, the latter subdued the entire island except for the Jaffna area. Dhammakittfs part tells the epic tale of the first Parakramabahu. In a way that recalls the birth of both the Buddha and Dutagamunu, Parakramabahu’s person was marked by signs—“gifted with qualities with which those of others could not compare, and with all favour¬ able marks” (63.48—49). These are the marks of future power, for the astrological signs in the ascendant at the moment when he entered Anuradhapura were very auspicious. As a prince, Parakramabahu knew his own greatness. After Gajabahu II (1132-53), three “monarchs each in his province lived in amity. . . . But the Monarch’s son, Parakramabahu, the discerning one, who was well schooled in all the arts, with his intelligence, capable of distinguishing amid the multi¬ tude of things what should and should not be done, with his soaring plans and his extraordinary greatness, cared not at heart for the com¬ fort of life lived together with his mother and sisters. ... He thought: 'Princes like myself, gifted with heroism and other such like quali¬ ties—how can they live in such a secluded district?’” (Cv. 63.38-42). Where Dutugamunu’s struggle to reclaim Anuradhapura was moti¬ vated by his feeling hemmed in, Parakramabahu’s was motivated by his being left alone. Yet both lives follow a moral trajectory that cul¬ minates in Anuradhapura with the unification of the island under a Buddhist leader. Parakramabahu’s name—“strong arm”—suggests the quality that allowed him to prevail over animals and men. Riding his chariot one day, he comes upon a buffalo, which had gotten loose from its har¬ ness. The buffalo rushes at the prince. Although his charioteer and retinue flee, Parakramabahu decides it is unseemly to show fear, and he calms the buffalo by calling to it with a loud, resounding voice

(Cv. 67.3—8). With the same kind of courage, he prevails over other human beings. A retainer of a general (senapati) slain by Parakrama-

Heroic Leaders and Discourses of Unity

67

bahu rushes on him in vengeance. Parakramabahu, standing un¬ protected, simply looks at the man. The retainer, “trembling with fear . . . could not stand upright and flung himself at his feet” (Cv. 65.40). Before Parakramabahu can say “Seize him,” one of the soldier’s own friends kills him. While Parakramabahu considers the action, confu¬ sion breaks out a second time until he restores quiet by the wrinkling of his brows. Parakramabahu, in short, is the warrior-hero, the man of action and violence who figures prominently in the history of the Old World.17 But he is a warrior guided by a high purpose—to unite the island once again. The Culavamsa (64.33—49) has him think to him¬ self: My three fathers, the Monarchs and also my mother’s brother were not able to unite it under one umbrella. They divided it therefore and with the thought: if we only rule it to this extent we have done our duty, each in his province renouncing the desire customary in our family for the royal consecration, carried on the government like village chiefs whose one aim is farming and the like. Of these save my father’s brother Kittisirimegha, the three remaining monarchs have passed away in accordance with their deeds. Man’s longest span of life is now alas, but meagre; boy, youth, greybeard, all these living beings will one another suffer death, so fixed a rule as this there is otherwise nowhere else in this world. Therefore must sons of kings such as I am, take no heed of this frail, worthless body which is despised by all whose eyes are fixed on what is precious, and must ever pay heed to that which is worthy of aspiration and is abiding, namely fame. (I hear) in tales as in the Ummaggajataka and others, of deeds done by the Bodhisatta in the different stages of his development, the outcome of his heroic nature and other qualities. (I hear) in secular stories, in the Ramayana, the Bharata and the like of the courage of Rama who slew Ravana and the extraordinary deeds of heroism performed in battle by the five sons of Pandu, how they slew Duyyodhana and the other kings. (I hear) in the Itihasa tales of the wonders worked from of old by princes like Dussanta and others in combat with gods and demons—(I hear) of the great wisdom of Canakka, that best of Brahmanas who uprooted the kings of the Nanda dynasty. . . . When I hear such a happy and incom¬ parable life of those who are able on earth to accomplish extraordinary deeds, then if I, sprung of a noble stock, do not that which befits the best among noble heroes, my birth will be useless.

17. Michael Meeker, ‘The Twilight of a South Asian Heroic Age: A Rereading of Barth’s Study of Swat ” Man n.s. 15 (December 1980): 682-701.

68

The Presence of the Past

Parakramabahu’s reflections are themselves an extraordinary reca¬ pitulation of the South Asia literary tradition and the Old World paradigm of the warrior-hero, legitimated by Buddhist teachings on the evanescence of life. Sometimes the two inspirations contradict each other.

Parakramabahu misunderstands the

Ummajjgajataka,

which celebrates the wisdom of the Buddha, not his heroism. But heroism is what is needed after forty years of disunity and dissension. Parakramabahu’s campaign to bring the island under one umbrella is long and bitter. He leaves his home in Rohana, establishes a capital in Dakkhinadesa (modern-day Kurunagala District), reorganizes the ad¬ ministrative arrangements of his kingdom, annexes the central high¬ lands, and conquers Rajarata. Through the mediation of the monk¬ hood, he negotiates peace with Gajabahu, the ruler of Rajarata (Cv. 70.327-35). Still he must face the greater challenge of the ruler of Rohana who has no desire to be subordinated. But he too is forced to acknowledge Parakramabahu’s sovereignty over the island. The Tooth and Bowl relics remain in the Rohana kingdom, and Parakramabahu succeeds in bringing them to Polonnaruva, the successor city to Anuradhapura, which he seems to have largely redesigned and rebuilt.18 To accomplish all this, Parakramabahu must engage in activities— espionage and murder, as well as unprovoked aggression against his kinsmen who rule the other petty kingdoms—that are hardly noble. The Culavamsa passes no judgment on these activities because for its purposes, Parakramabahu is the ideal king. Both the Culavamsa and stone inscriptions describe him as a latter-day Asoka.19 His economic achievements are enormous. The Culavamsa credits him with the res¬ toration of some 165 anicuts (minor sluice), 3,910 canals, 163 major tanks, 2,376 minor tanks, 341 stone sluices, and 1,753 repairs to breaches.20 With its nine-mile-long bund, the Parakrama Samudra (“ocean,” that is, a tank as large as an ocean) is his most impressive single project. Building irrigation systems was a permanent legacy, harnessing die island’s waters so efficiendy that the Culavamsa claims not a single drop reached the sea without first having served human¬ kind (Cv. 68.11). 18. Senarat Paranavitana, “The Art and Architecture of the Poionnaruwa Period,” Ceylon Historical Journal 4 (July 1954—April 1955): 69—90. 19. Culavamsa, 78.6 and Epigraphia Zeylanica, 2:268. 20. Amaradasa Liyanagamage, The Decline of Poionnaruwa and the Rise of Damhadeniya (Colombo: Ceylon Government Press, 1968), p. 39.

Heroic Leaders and Discourses of Unity

69

Parakramabahu is not like Asoka because of his material accom¬ plishments alone, for the Culavamsa also makes him out to be a spe¬ cifically Buddhist king, and his life is made to enunciate Buddhist themes. He wants fame, and it comes to him because of merit accrued in previous lives (Cv. 67.8). Fame achieved, he turns to more mer¬ itorious ends. And as with Asoka, even when Parakramabahu acts morally, his actions are also prudential. He builds a temple for the Tooth Relic. Since possession of the relic legitimated the ruler’s right to rule, and since Parakramabahu had only shortly before suppressed rival claimants to the throne, holding great festivals for these relics in Polonnaruva and building a temple near his palace for the Tooth Relic redounds to his own advantage. So does his other great reli¬ gious action. He convenes a synod of the three sects and purges cor¬ rupt monks, bringing squabbling monks to order and imposing on them a single monastic organization (Cv. 78.6—11). Unification gives Parakramabahu centralized control over the monks as well as great prestige.

Heroism and Political Unity Unity figures variously, but centrally, in these three careers. The Ma-

hdvamsa portrays Vijaya as the embodiment of a mission; his name means ‘Victory” and his coming to the island is the rhetorical exten¬ sion of the theme of Lankdvijaya that begins with the Buddha’s three sojourns in the island. Relative to the importance of that mission, his character is unimportant. Where the Dipavamsa says that Vijaya landed in Sri Lanka during the last year of the Buddha’s life, the

Mahdvamsa has him land at the moment of his death. As Vijaya sets foot on the shores of the island, the Lord Buddha achieves his parinibbdna, advancing the Buddha’s prophecy that the island would be a Dhammadipa. Vijaya’s other task is to connect the ruling dynasty of the island at Mahanama’s time with a lionlike ancestor, a connection made in a more dramatic fashion in the architecture of Slgiriya, the fortress palace of a fifth-century Sri Lankan king. When Vijaya drives the demons from the island, he repeats the Lord Buddha’s act of purification when driving away an earlier set of demons (Mv. 1.24). In so doing, Vijaya both frees the newly arrived human inhabitants of the island from physical threat and makes himself king of “all

70

The Presence of the Past

Lanka”—an unbroken dominion without political opposition. Dutugamunu does the same, again in the name of the Buddha. The reli¬ gion, according to the Mahavamsa, cannot prosper as long as a hereti¬ cal king sits on the throne, so Dutugamunu kills Elara and defeats his thirty-two generals. The presence of outsiders prevents the creation of a united kingdom, and the lack of a united kingdom threatens the survival of the religion. Parakramabahu achieves unity in two contexts. He brings the is¬ land under his control, and he gathers dissident monks into one mo¬ nastic community—“as uniform as milk and water” (73.18). Courage and wisdom play a constitutive role in his life, and he is the one hero with marked physical prowess. He may not be as meritorious as Dutugamunu, but when his ministers beg him to be consecrated they speak of his “blossoming fortune” (P. kusalodaya). It would be “capa¬ ble of wielding sovereign power over the whole of Jambudipa [India], let alone the island of Lanka” (Mv. 71.24). Acknowledging the pro¬ priety of the ancient custom of consecration, he “left his palace, marched round the town with his right side towards it, like a fearless lion, [and] stunned with amazement by his splendour the thronging people” (Mv. 71.32). In a single sweep, he symbolically conquers the town that stands for the kingdom, showing himself a lion-kang and radiating charisma. In so doing, he realizes the hero’s destiny—he unifies the island so the doctrine itself can “shine forth brightly.” Because the Mahavamsa preserves the record of these heroic careers in a court chronicle, the social distribution of these stories is unclear. But looking at the Mahdvamsrfs use of expressions such as “Slhala” (“Sinhala”) and then looking at other sorts of historical evidence sug¬ gests how social identities may have functioned in the world beyond the text. The leonine origins of Vijaya sets him off from other Sri Lankans, and when the Mahavamsa looks back to him, it distinquishes the ruling dynasty from both indigenous Sri Lankans referred to as the Pulinda and other non-Ksatriyas. The supernatural character of kings found its fullest expression when Kassapa built a fortress and palace atop a massive rock formation at Slgiriya in the fifth century. Slgiriya took its name from the figure of a sleeping lion constructed on a rock ledge several hundred feet above the ground. The defensive value of a palace constructed on a 6oo-foot rock is a probable motiva¬ tion, but the political imagery is unmistakable. Each day when Kas¬ sapa left his palace to take up his royal responsibilities in Slginya’s public areas, he emerged from the very body of the lion.

Heroic Leaders and Discourses of Unity

7i

By the sixth-century compilation of the Mahdvamsa, two clans—the Moriya and Lambakanna—had come to dominate the Anuradhapura state. Scholars such as G. C. Mendis treated these groups as tribes, each identified with a totemic origin: Slhala (lion), Moriya (peacock), and Lambakanna (hare or goat).21 K. M. de Silva treats them simply as powerful clans that enjoyed the right to the Anuradhapura throne after Devanampiyatissa’s line became extinct in the first century.22 With or without the totemistic connection, the Moriyas and Lambakannas struggled for dominance throughout most of the Anuradha¬ pura period. When the first Lambakanna dynasty lost control of the state, it fell to a line of South Indian kings until the throne was recov¬ ered by a Moriya leader. From that point, control of Anuradhapura circulated between the two clans. Just before Mahanama compiled his sixth-century chronicle, six South Indian kings had controlled the throne. In these turbulent circumstances, invoking the heroic deeds of a Sinhala king such as Dutagamunu who had defeated a South Indian king gave Mahanama an identity that united Moriyas and Lam¬ bakanna alike by setting them at odds with an external enemy. But at least from this point on the expression “Slhala” was exploited to rally people who were not themselves Slhalas. Although an expression originally used to claim supernatural ori¬ gins had become a social identity that united two clans, it was still employed considerably more narrowly than its contemporary usage. Probably until the late twelfth century, the expression excluded lowcaste people.23 Despite the Mahdvamsa's strategic linkage between the Sinhala and Buddhist causes, some Buddhists did not consider themselves Sinhala, a situation that was further complicated when the Portuguese began to convert Sri Lankans to Catholicism.

But

throughout the Mahdvamsa's account of Sri Lankan history, political causes are envisioned as causes embodied by certain kinds of people and carried out for the sake of Buddhism. Heroes assumed a natural place in this discursive formation as leading examples of righteous behavior, but their function was as much exclusionary as inclusive. As Parakramabahu’s case shows most clearly, other men may rally to their cause, but only Ksatriya leaders can be legitimate kings. Heroic 21. G. C. Mendis, The Early History of Ceylon (Calcutta: Y.M.C.A. Publishing House, 1954), p. 5. 22. K. M. de Silva, A History of Sri Lanka (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1981), p. 18. 23. Gunawardana, “People of the Lion,” p. 27.

7 2.

The Presence of the Past

leadership serves as a steady focus of political loyalty, but it creates unity while respecting the hierarchical morality of caste and drawing a further distinction between the polity and a variety of other groups— indigenous people, nonbelievers, low-castes, and South Indians. To argue that nineteenth-century nationalism created national iden¬ tity from scratch is to ignore the skillful ways Sri Lankan leaders and Buddhist monks created and enlarged social identities throughout the history of the island. Ethnic identities are motivated by the presence of an ethnic other whose very presence required the solidarity of one’s own group or the confederation of groups such as Moriyas and Lambakannas. The celebration of heroic leaders is one obvious way to rally people to such causes, but the Sri Lankan case makes it clear that loyalty to such leaders was not meant to obliterate distinctions within the community. In the Sri Lankan context and beyond, nationalist movements of the nineteenth century were a moment in a long-term process of inclusion and exclusion. The nineteenth-century innova¬ tion was using heroes to reorganize relations not just between aristo¬ crats and other great men, but to rally the generality of people—male and female, high and low—to a common cause. And in this process, the figure of unity was put to ends that made self-conscious use of other parts of the tradition.

Consensus and Political Unity Elsewhere in the Buddhist tradition, there is considerable concern with unity understood in different way—as harmony achieved by in¬ dividuals. One example of unity of this kind comes from a fateful incident in the history of the monkhood when the Buddha was asked who he wanted to succeed him as leader of the Buddhist sangha. He answered, “be ye lamps unto yourselves. Be ye refuge to yourselves. Betake yourselves to no external refuge. Hold fast to the truth as a lamp.”24 The exactness of his response notwithstanding, the Buddha’s answer can be read as saying different things—that the Buddha 24. Mahd-parinibbdna Suttanta, in T. W. Rhys Davids, trans., Buddhist Suttas (New York: Dover, 1969), 2:33. There is an ambiguity in the translation of the word Pali word “dlpa.” Rhys Davids translates it as “lamp”; others have translated it as “island.”

Heroic Leaders and Discourses of Unity

73

wanted his sangha to remain charismatic and voluntaristic, that the monks should go their separate ways, making leadership unnecessary, that there was to be no leader after his death even though the sangha had a corporate life, or that there should be a leader, but political issues, such as who will lead, were always to be subsumed by religious values. I favor the last interpretation. But whatever the Buddha in¬ tended, or whatever the sacred historians of the religion remembered him as intending, one intention is undeniable. Whether the monks found need for a leader or not, their ultimate guide was always to be the Dhamma.25 And the Dhamma would exercise a kind of sover¬ eignty over the monkhood, which itself would create unity. On the other hand, the Buddha himself developed a close relation¬ ship with kings living in sixth-century North India. The Suttas speak of his friendships with Bimbisara, king of Magadha, and his son and successor, Ajatashatru, as well as Pasenadi, king of Kosala. All were supporters of his religion and his longtime friends. It was not until the time of Asoka that Buddhism became the religion of a North Indian state, but when it did, it served as the unifying ideology for a political system that stretched across most of modern-day India. In the process a close relationship developed between the religion and kingly authority understood in terms of the ideal of the universal, wheel-turning monarch (P. cakkavatti). Asoka was a cakkavatti, but he looked back to a more venerable example of cakkavatti kingship— the Buddha himself.26 The sacred history of the religion says that Gautama was born as a great being (P. mahapurisa) destined to be¬ come either a cakkavatti or a buddha. Academic accounts that empha¬ size the historicity and humanity of the Buddha say nothing of these traditions, but the idea that the Buddha had two parallel destinies— to establish his universal sovereignty by either political might or reli¬ gious insight—has been far more persuasive to Buddhist kings and laypeople. What Asoka harked back to was this idea that the cak¬ kavatti king has two fused destinies, and his political achievement be-

25. The Buddha’s instructions on how the monks should carry on after his death are understood differently in the Sanskrit, Pali, and Chinese traditions. See Andre Bareau, Recherches sur la biographic du Buddha dans les Sutrapitaka et les Vinayapitaka anciens, Publications de L’Ecole Franchise d’Extreme-Orient (Paris: Ecole Fran^aise d’Extreme-Orient, 1963), 53:131-50. 26. John Strong, The Legend of King Asoka (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), pp. 49-56.

74

The Presence of the Past

came a paradigm for later Buddhist kings; for where the very idea of cakkavatti kingship assumed universal sovereignty, Asoka came very near to creating an empire that encompassed all the peoples of India. There are other sources for the paradigm of righteous, unifying leadership, and these run from traditions that depend on the leader’s authority, righteously exerted, to ones that assume that unity lies in consensus. The Jat aka tales include some stories that can be read in either way. The Sammodamana Jdtaka suggests the Buddha’s capacity to create unity by his own example.27 In a previous life the Buddha was incarnated as a quail and lived in a forest as the leader of many thousands of quails. A fowler came each day, imitated the song of a quail, and netted the birds that came in response. The Buddha sug¬ gested a strategy to preserve their freedom: each captured quail was to stick its head through the mesh of the fowler’s net and fly in uni¬ son until they came to a thornbush where they would let the net down and fly away. Day after day the device saved the quails, but the fowler knew that the quails £Cwon’t live in unity always” and kept at his murderous work until the birds started to wrangle among them¬ selves, and then he recovered his steady supply of birds. The Buddha concludes: “such a thing as a quarrel among kinsfolk is unseemly; quarreling leads only to destruction. . . . Devadatta was the foolish quail of those days, and I myself the wise and good quail.”28 In this case, unity depends on acting in consensus, but it also depends on the counsel of a wise leader. The Rukkhadhamma Jdtaka teaches the value of a more clearly con¬ sensual kind of unity.29 The Buddha begins by saying that when kins¬ folk are as one, their enemies find no opportunity, a conclusion he illustrates with a story about trees, for “even sense-lacking trees ought to stand together.” In an earlier time, the Buddha says, a forest of sal trees was struck by a windstorm, but because the trees, shrubs, bushes, and creepers were laced together, the storm could do no dam¬ age. By contrast, a great tree that stood in a nearby courtyard was uprooted because it was not “united with other trees.” The Buddha adds that he had been a tree-spirit in those days and had advised other tree-spirits to stick to the sal forest: “united, forest-like, should kinsfolk stand; the storm o’erthrows the solitary tree.” In both Jdta27. Cowell, J at aka, 1:85-86. 28. Ibid., 1:86. Devadatta was the first schismatic in the sangha. 29. Ibid., 1:181-82.

Heroic Leaders and Discourses of Unity

75

kas, the survival of human beings depends on unity, but the counsel is directed more specifically at kinspeople. When the Buddha talks of the value of unity in the Kundla Jdtaka, however, he addresses his teachings to the entire population of Kapilavatthu and Koliya.30 The canonical source of this emphasis on unity reached by con¬ sensus derives from the Mahdparinibbdna Sutta, which relates the last days of the Buddha. In the city of Rajagrha, King Bimbisara has been succeeded by his son, Ajatashatru, who wants to attack a nearby re¬ public, the Vajjian confederacy. Like the Buddha’s own people, the Sakyas, the Vajjians were a republic, making group decisions in a republican assembly. Ajatashatru sends a messenger to the Buddha to get his advice on the likelihood of the Vajjians being able to with¬ stand a military attack. The Buddha responds to seven questions, each time laying out the conditions that would ensure the Vajjians’ sur¬ vival. The first two, and presumably the most important, conditions concerned unity: “So long ... as the Vajjians foregather thus often, and frequent the public meetings of their clan; so long may they be expected not to decline, but to prosper. ... So long as the Vajjians meet together in concord and rise in concord, and carry out their undertakings in concord ... so long may the Vajjians be expected not to decline, but to prosper.”31 Two instructive events follow. Having dismissed the messenger, the Buddha repeats for the monks exactly what he has just said to the messenger. As long as the sangha cleaves to its traditions, meets in republican assembly, seeks agreement in all matters, and honors its elders, it too will remain strong. The plan appropriate for creating political unity in society, according to the Buddha, is appropriate for creating unity among men who have renounced society. The second event occurred not in the text but in the historical period immediately after the Buddha endorsed the value of unity. The Vajjian confeder¬ acy fell apart. Meet though they did in assembly, dissension devel¬ oped among them, possibly instigated by Ajatashatru’s spies and pro¬ vocateurs. The Vajjian confederacy grew weak and was swallowed by the Magadhan state. Because of the collapse of the Vajjians, the Bud¬ dha’s recommendation of Vajjian unity lost some of its force as a political principle. But it lost none of its force as a moral value and 30. Ibid., 5:220. 31. Mahd-parinibbdna Suttanta, in T. W. Rhys Davids, ed., Buddhist Suttas, pp. 1136.

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The Presence of the Past

survived as the model for organizing the monkhood. It is true that the history of the sangha is not marked by abiding unity, a problem, as Tambiah has suggested, that may owe to the very nature—collec¬ tive but not authoritarian—of Buddhist renunciation.32 Within a hun¬ dred years of the death of the Buddha, dissension arose over orthodoxy. The Vajjian monks themselves were a primary source of dissension. The 500 monks who broke away with Devadatta during the Buddha’s life¬ time were Vajjians; so too were the schismatics at Vesall. Whatever the virtues of republican government and political unity founded on consensus. Buddhism reached Sri Lanka at a moment when Devanampiyatissa had established the island’s first genuine monarchy. The Sri Lankan state looked to India and Indian tradition for political as well as religious inspiration. At the same time Sri Lanka became Buddhist, it also became more Indie, that is, it came to be more influenced by a set of cosmo-magical ideas that are neither exclusively Hindu nor Buddhist. Both traditions shaped the reign of Devanampiyatissa. The chronicles celebrate his success in creating a unified state. If one looks at the huge number of inscriptions that survive from the Anuradhapura period, it is clear that the great ma¬ jority of kings who were referred to as maharaja, that is, king of kings, ruled at Anuradhapura, which was not accidentally the center of religious life.33 The capital city became the pivot of the kingdom and its most important pilgrimage place. But the sacred places that the Lord Buddha visited created a terri¬ torial unity, as did the island itself. Sovereignty over the entire island and close proximity to the virtuosos and sacred artifacts of Buddhism were mutually dependent practices. Without unifying the island, as Parakramabahu’s case suggests, the king has no right to a royal conse¬ cration.34 By the Polonnaruva period that consecration was essential to making the claim to cakkavatti status and authority. In contrast to a huge subcontinent such as India, the island setting made the politi¬ cal unification of Sri Lanka a practical goal, while the destiny of the righteous ruler made it simultaneously a moral one. 32. Stanley J. Tambiah, “The Reflexive and Institutional Achievements of Early Buddhism,” in S. N. Eisenstadt, ed., The Origins and Diversity of Axial Age Civiliza¬ tions (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1986), pp. 466-71. 33. Tilak Hettiarachchy, History of Kingship in Ceylon (Colombo: Lake House, 1972), p. 38. All but two of the lithic inscriptions that use the expression “maharaja” refer to kings of Anuradhapura. 34. See S. Pathmanathan, “Kingship in Sri Lanka: AD 1070-1270,” Sri Lankan Journal of the Humanities, 3:1 and 2 (1982): 144.

Heroic Leaders and Discourses of Unity

77

The tradition that the maharaja rules the entirety ot the island be¬ gan at least as early as Dutugamunu, and maybe as early as Pandukabhaya.35 His association with Buddhism and the Buddha entitled him to do so. On occasion the lesser kings whom he controlled ig¬ nored his authority or actively opposed it. But what distinguished the careers of the great kings of Anuradhapura and Polonnaruva—Devanampiyatissa, Dutugamunu, Parakramabahu I, and Vijayabahu— was extending the umbrella of sovereignty over the entire island, which in turn guaranteed prosperity, order, and the security ot Bud¬ dhism. Through the Kandyan period, the act of coronation remained tied to the monarch’s possession of the entire island. Without such control, the monarch was not entitled to the full Indie abhiseka (con¬ secration) constitutive of his cakkavatti status.36 The Culavamsa s de¬ scription of the eighteenth-century abhiseka of Klrti Sri Rajasimha (I747_82.) suggests that the act enacted a symbolic capture of the island: “he gathered together the whole of the inhabitants of Lanka completely in the fair, glorious town and moving along with royal magnificience, the Great king whose merit was now having its effect, marched round the town, his right wide turned towards it, thus mak¬ ing known that the realm of Lanka bereft of its king had again a king” (99.9-10). In a single Indie act, the king acted out his posses¬ sion of a part that stood for the whole—the capital that represented the state at large—and he did so in the company of people who themselves stood for the entire society. These traditions—one centered on the heroic action of the king, the other on the consensus of the people—represent distinctive con¬ ceptions of political community. The Mahdvamsa speaks only of the unity of heroic leaders, using the island and its physical integrity as the proper ground for achieving sovereign power without remainder. But the Jdtakaf celebration of the value of consensus is an older Bud¬ dhist tradition, some Jdtaka stories appearing in the canon itself. When he visited Sri Lanka in the early fifth century, Fa Hsien saw a festival for the Buddha’s Tooth Relic which involved the king s exhib3 5. Pathmanathan says that this tradition began with Dutugamunu (“Kingship in Sri Lanka,” p. 144). Gunawardana sees evidence of its beginning in the earlier reign ot Pandukabhaya, even before the official arrival of Buddhism under Devanampiyatissa; see “Kinsmen of the Buddha: Myth as Political Charter in the Ancient and Earh Medieval Kingdoms of Sri Lanka,” in Bardwell Smith, ed., Religion and Legitimation of Power in Sri Lanka (Chambersburg, Pa.: Anima Books, 1978), pp. 101-2. 36. K. W. Goonewardena, “Kingship in Seventeenth Century Sri Lanka,” Sri Lanka Journal of the Humanities 3:1 and 2 (1977): 9.

78

The Presence of the Past

iting “so as to line both sides of the road the five hundred different bodily forms in which the Bodhisattva has in the course of his history appeared.”'7 It is a fair guess that the Jdtaka tales of these 500 lives and the political values they implied were as much a part of the cul¬ ture of the court as the figure of the heroic leader that dominates the

Mahdvamsa. There is no need to assume that these ideas burned with equal brightness over the entire course of their historical lives, and when Sri Lankan nationalists began to reimagine forms of political community in the nineteenth century, they came upon these tradi¬ tions anew. They also approached their own traditions in ways shaped by Western political values. In many instances Sinhala nation¬ alists discovered all these notions—indigenous and Western—at roughly the same time and in the same places. But that is not to say that the nationalist use of the past is a thing of “shreds and patches” or that the content of nationalist practice is irrelevant to its power.

37. Legge, A Record of Buddhistic Kingdoms, p. 106.

3 Colonial Constructions of the Past

By the Polonnaruva period the coincidence of practicing Buddhism and being Sinhala became a social fact, although the Mahavamsa had begun to assert that identity in the sixth century. Yet until the tenth or eleventh century, it was possible to be Buddhist and Tamil; after that period only Sinhalas practiced Buddhism. Under British colonial rule, Sinhala ethnic identity in its “nationalist” form developed,1 and the production of that identity drew upon the very ideas about the Sinhala and Buddhist pasts that the Mahavamsa had earlier put to use in defending the monks of the Mahavihara and fostering the interests of a Sinhala monarchy. When nineteenth-century European adminis¬ trators, scholars, and men of letters began to approach the Ma¬

havamsa from an altogether new angle—in terms ol its truth value the Mahavamsa became a contested site for control of the Sri Lankan past. In this chapter I discuss the interplay of these contradictory claims on both the traditional Mahavamsa and Sri Lanka’s history. I also consider Yagirala Pannananda’s 1935 extension of the Ma¬

havamsa., which he called the Mahavamsa, Part III. Although he took on the task without support from the colonial government, the Bud¬ dhist monkhood, or any Sinhala nationalist group, Pannananda pro1. See Michael Roberts, “Problems of Collective Identity in a Multi-Ethnic Soci¬ ety: Sectional Nationalism vs. Ceylonese Nationalism, 1900-1940,” in Michael Rob¬ erts, ed.. Collective Identities, Nationalisms and Protest in Modem Sri Lanka (Colombo: Marga Institute, 1979)-. PP- 337-6°-

8o

The Presence of the Past

duced an extension that has become in retrospect part of the Ma¬ havamsa tradition, carrying the narrative through most of the period when the British controlled Sri Lanka. He also began to organize events in terms of a new Sinhala “national” identity because he plots events that led to die conquest of the Kandyan kingdom and British rule as the story of the Sinhala people, heirs to Vijaya, and rightful shareholders in the nation. To that extent, the Mahavamsa, Part III is both a colonial text—assuming the same modular logic that Ander¬ son says is constitutive of nationalism (we are being dominated by a nation, so we must fight back as a nation)—and a further stage in the textualization of Sinhala identity. But its peculiar relevance to my thinking about nationalism lies in the way Pannananda fuses horizons and scrambles any objectivist chronology by projecting race on the past and celebrating monarchy in his time.

The Mahavamsa as History and Birthright Exactly what Sri Lankans in the past have known of their origins is hard to determine. An account such as the Mahavamsa, written in a literary language and kept in monastic libraries, could not have been widely known in a peasant society. Sri Lankans probably knew of the heroic kings, battles, and acts of charity that make up the central epi¬ sodes of the chronicle, as well as stories from the folk tradition cen¬ tered on mythical kings, demons, evil spirits, and animals.2 By the beginning of the colonial period they certainly knew the Vijaya story. Judging from Fernao de Queyroz’s seventeenth-century account of the island’s historical traditions, I suspect that Sri Lankans knew sev¬ eral origin stories at the time, including a local variant of the Ramayana. But, as de Queyroz puts it, the story “constantly affirmed in their books and by tradition handed down from father to son” tells of the peopling of the island by Vijaya and his 700 followers.3 The story that he then relates differs in several ways from the Mahavamsa, saying that Vijaya was banished from his father’s kingdom because 2. but so Ceylon 3. Perera

The Jdtakas figured in Sri Lankan folk traditions during the nineteenth century, did a variety of stories of uncertain origin. See Henry Parker, Village Folktales of (London: Luzac and Company, 1910). Fernao de Queyroz, The Temporal and Spiritual Conquest of Ceylon, trans. S. G. (Colombo: Government Press, 1930), p. 5.

Colonial Constructions of the Past

8i

soothsayers said he would bring down his father and that he married two human wives. But his account is clearly a version of the same legend. He adds that Vijaya succeeded in making “his neighbors be¬ lieve that fable of his lineage [which was] afterwards believed also by those who descended from them, who recite it in ancient romances which they sing at their festivals, to which they give the same cred¬ ence as we to the documents of our antiquities.”4 It is more to the point to say that different Sri Lankans knew various traditions of Vijaya and his origins. The seventeenth-century shipwreck Robert Knox asked his captors “whence they derive themselves, but they could not tell. They say their Land was first inhabited by Devils, of which they have a long Fable.”5 Despite Knox’s saying that the villagers with whom he lived could not tell him their origins, they seem to have been doing pre¬ cisely that, for the “Devils” of which he speaks were probably the yakas of Sinhala tradition, and the “long Fable” popular traditions derived from the Mahavamsa. As soon as they told him that the island was once inhabited by “Devils,” Knox dismissed the very possibility of Sinhala historical knowledge. But he immediately relates a story, which villagers told him, that is surely the Vijaya legend. Knox, moreover, had very little contact with Buddhist monks, and they would have been most knowledgeable about the island’s history. Knox’s general assessment notwithstanding, it is hard not to find evi¬ dence in his comments that Kandyans of Knox’s time knew the cen¬ tral parts of the account that Sinhala people today recount as their history. Popular interest in the Mahavamsa tradition, to be sure, must have been itself a historical phenomenon, rising in some periods, falling in others. The coming of British colonialism, moreover, brought new constraints, and whatever eighteenth-century monks and laypeople knew of the island’s venerable past, nineteenth-century monks and laypeople were less likely to have known. Sri Lankan society’s knowl¬ edge of its own history was refigured by an educational system that brought with it an emphasis on England and Western civilization, pursued historical knowledge as a secular vocation, and looked at the past as a different time, a different place. But in a predominantly 4. Ibid., p. 6. 5. Robert Knox, An Historical Relation of Ceylon (Dehiwela: Tisara Prakasakayo, 1966), p. 115.

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The Presence of the Past

rural, traditional society such as Sri Lanka, many people find them¬ selves living in the midst of the past. Ask Sinhala villagers today when Dutugamunu lived, and many will likely say “long ago” (boho kal). I presume that the same vagueness was also true of previous centuries. But that vagueness means that the past has an uncommon presence in Sri Lankan life. When Marguerite Robinson went to do ethnographic fieldwork in the Kotmale Valley in the early 1960s, villagers took her to an unremarkable house where they urged her to live. When she asked why they favored that particular house, one man replied: 'This is the place where visitors live. First there was Prince Dutthagamani, and now you.”0 Sinhala people are likely to have heard of other famous kings— Vijaya, Parakramabahu, Sirisamghabodhi, and Yasalalakatissa—and celebrated their exploits whether they had known the Mahavamsa or not. In this regard, the Mahavamsa occupies the same position in Sinhala society that the Ramayana holds in Indian society. People know the tradition before they know that they know it. As children, they hear shreds and patches of the tradition recited,6 7 they see temple paintings evoking it, or they follow cartoons in Sinhala newspapers representing the lives of righteous kings.8 As they grow older, they discover that there is a historical chronicle from which those episodes derive. Direct knowledge of the chronicles is another matter. Con¬ sider an English civil servant’s assessment of the place of the Ma¬ havamsa in early nineteenth-century Sri Lanka: “I have never yet met with a native who had critically read through, and compared their several historical works or who had, till lately, seen a commentary on 6. Marguerite Robinson, ‘“The House of the Mighty Hero’ or ‘The House of Enough Paddy’? Some Implications of a Sinhalese Myth,” in Edmund Leach, ed.. Dialectic in Practical Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968), p. 127. 7. That the Mahavamsa and Dipavamsa begin with the Pali phrase “sunatha me” (“listen to me”) suggests that both chronicles were intended to be recited, but it is hard to tell how long the practice of recitation continued, what portions were recited, and how many persons heard such recitations. In the present context I am referring to the more casual recitation of episodes that derive from die chronicles, not of the chronicles themselves. But it is worth adding that since the fourteenth century, laypeople came to know about heroic figures such as Dutugamunu from Sinhala works such as the Saddhanndlankaraya. Like the Sinhala Bodhivamsa, this text was intended for a lay audience. 8. A ready example is a series of such cartoons that ran in Mihira in 1984 and 1985, as part of the series “Lakdiva Puvata Maha Vamsayen” (“Lankan Stories from the Mahavamsa”).

Colonial Constructions of the Past

83

the Mahawanse. ... I was enabled in 1827 to obtain a copy of that commentary, from a copy kept in the Mulgirigalla wihare [Mulkirigala vihara] ... I found that the work had not been seen by the chief or any one of the priests, of either of the two establishments [Malvatta and Asgiriya, the main chapters of the Siyam Nikaya] which regulate the national religion of the island.”9 George Tumour’s interest in the social distribution of knowledge of the chronicles grew out of his intention to make an English trans¬ lation of the Mahavamsa. He attributed his difficulties in finding a copy to work from—he repeats that it was “seldom consulted by the priesthood and consequendy rarely found in the temples”10—to the chronicle’s being a historical work, not a doctrinal one. But finding a copy of the Mahavamsa in the early nineteenth century was made more difficult by the sorry state to which monasteries and their li¬ braries had been reduced.11 It is impossible to say how many copies of the chronicle would have been found in monastic libraries in earlier centuries. My guess is that ordinary monks and laypeople had some knowledge, however spotty and thin, of its contents. The problem is to keep the two traditions separate and not impose the elegance and worked-up quality of the written Mahavamsa on popular knowledge or to imagine that the wide distribution of the popular tradition is equivalent to direct knowledge of the Mahavamsa itself. The Mahavamsa says that the Buddha visited the island three times by levitating himself, and he drove off the yaka (demon) population by finding a piece of land that carried them away, and the Sinhala people arose from the union of a lion father and a human mother. Because the Vijaya story has been influenced by both South Asian and Greek mythological traditions, the material is mythological in

9. George Tumour, ed., Mahdwanso (Cotta: Ceylon Mission Press, 1837), i:ii. 10. Ibid., p. ix. C. R. de Silva points out an interesting counterexample. The Por¬ tuguese historian Diogo do Couto bases his account of Sri Lankan history on the Rdjavaliya, indicating that at least one historical text found its way from a monastic library into European hands early in the colonial period. See D. W. Ferguson, trans. and ed., “The History of Ceylon from Earliest Times to 1600 a.d., as related by Joao de Barros and Diogo do Couto,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, Ceylon Branch 20:60 (1908): 56—388 and 410—45. 11. See Kitsiri Malalgoda, Buddhism in Sinhalese Society, 1750-1900 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), and Steven Kemper, “The Buddhist Monk¬ hood, the Law, and the State in Colonial Sri Lanka,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 26 (July 1984): 401—27.

84

The Presence of the Past

two kindred senses.12 One, some of the assertions are hard to credit, and two, some of the episodes take their form from other mythologi¬ cal traditions. Both characteristics contribute to the sense that Sri Lanka’s history, especially the historical record of the early period, differs from history as it occurred. But making that distinction is a contemporary way of thinking, fortified by a keen sense of true and false. In imagining how these accounts were understood by early Sri Lankans, we need to remember that their knowledge of the past was learned from Buddhist monks, the primary source of all higher knowledge. Paul Veyne characterizes similar knowledge in the ancient Greek case as “composed of events, not abstract truths against which the listener could oppose with his own reason.”121 would say that the Mahavamsa preserved a great number of abstract truths, but the last thing the listener to stories from the Mahavamsa was apt to do was oppose them. There are several reasons that the implausible parts of the Ma¬ havamsa gave readers and listeners no difficulty until the nineteenth century. One might begin with the character of a premodern society or local conventions of truth, dispute, and what is worth arguing about. But the chronicle’s own self-description suggests that it was not raw credulousness that made the Mahavamsa credible. The chron¬ icle addressed an audience that was already convinced. Mahanama ends each chapter in the Mahavamsa proper by saying that it was written for “the serene joy (pasada) and emotion (samvega) of the pious.”14 The Mahavamsa aimed to edify those who already believed, not win over those who did not believe or inform the people of Sri Lanka in general. A certain audience was assumed—most narrowly, Buddhist monks, most generally, kings and householders—and a cer¬ tain response expected—serene joy and emotion. It is useful to re-

12. See G. C. Mendis, “The Mahdhharata Legends in the Mahavamsa J Journal of the Ceylon Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society n.s. 5, part 1 (March 1957): 81-84. and Merlin Peris, “Greek Elements in the Vijaya Legend,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, Sri Lanka Branch n.s. 26 (1982): 43—66. Some of the Mahavamsa's episodes also appear in Tamil sources such as the Silappadikdram and Manimekalai. See Wil¬ helm Geiger, trans., Mahavamsa (Colombo: Ceylon Government Information Dept., 1964), addendum, p. 307. 13. Paul Veyne, Did the Greeks Believe in Their Myths? (Chicago: University of Chi¬ cago Press, 1988), p. 24. 14. The important exception is the last chapter attributed to Mahanama, chapter

37

-

Colonial Constructions of the Past

85

member these intentions in view of the contemporary tendency to understand the Mahavamsa as history, pure and simple. The Mahdvamsa works on three purposes—historical, moral, and political— at once. There have been secular histories, such as the Dambadeni Asna, in the Sri Lankan past. But even this secular history was meant, in its own words, “to be heard with religious faith” and addressed to “all pious and intelligent people of Lanka.”15 The first readers to approach the Mahavamsa without religious faith were European writers and scholars. Most ot them—James Cordiner, Robert Percival, Anthony Bertolacci, and John Davy are good examples—simply denied the possibility of a Sinhala historiography that was not myth or fable. Davy’s characterization suggests the com¬ mon attitude: “the Sinhalese possess no accurate record of events; are ignorant of genuine history; and are not sufficiently advanced to rel¬ ish it. Instead of the one they have legendary tales, and instead of the other historical romances.”16 The arrogance of Davy’s words aside, his inability to see some historical interest on the part of a society that produced the oldest historical literature in South Asia is made all the more peculiar by his going on to retell major parts of that history. He relates the Vijaya story, Mahinda’s mission to Devanampiyatissa, Dutugamunu’s victory, and a chronology of early kings that must have derived from the Mahavamsa, despite die chronicle’s not having been translated by Eugene Burnouf, Edward Upham, or Tumour when Davy wrote. His confusions duly noted, Davy’s characterization of Sri Lankan traditions about the past marks the point at which new readers began to criticize the Mahavamsa while also relying on at least some of its assertions. Under these circumstances, what Mahanama wrote as a court chronicle became a text that at least some readers eagerly opposed with their own reason. The central figure in the small group of Europeans who ap¬ proached the chronicles as genuine history was George Tumour. Born in Sri Lanka in 1799, Tumour was educated in England and well connected to high-ranking officials. He became a civil servant but went his own way, acquiring a knowledge of Sinhala, mixing 15. Ananda S. Kulasuriya, ‘The Minor Chronicles and Other Traditional Writings in Sinhalese and Their Historical Value,” The Ceylon Historical Journal 25:1-4 (Octo¬ ber 1978): 16. 16. John Davy, An Account of the Interior of Ceylon (Dehiwela: Tisara Prakasakayo, 1969; first published in 1821), p. 219.

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The Presence of the Past

with Buddhist monks, and becoming a man of letters.17 While in charge of Sabaragamuva province, Tumour began to translate the Mahavamsa from Pali into Sinhala with the help of congenial Bud¬ dhist monks, and then from Sinhala into English. In 1837 he pub¬ lished an edition of the part of the chronicle I have called the Ma¬ havamsa proper, namely, the part that runs to the fiftieth verse of chapter 37. He did so apparently unaware of Burnoufs work, not to say his very existence, for Burnouf had published his translation of the Mahavamsa in manuscript form and in Latin.18 But he was keenly aware of Edward Upham’s translation of the three “native histo¬ ries”—the Mahavamsa, Rajavally a, and Rajaratnakara—that Alex¬ ander Johnston had collected while he was the English governor of the island.19 Johnston looked to the three histories as a means to fit abstract principles of justice to local usages and feelings, assuming that they would reveal what constituted those feelings. And in Upham he found a translator who started from the assumption that the chronicles contained reliable material: “The dialectics of Buddhism,” Upham argued, “may amuse, but they rarely instruct us; while every relic of really authentic history we can rescue from the oblivious cloud which at present enshrouds all Indian records of the past, must be deemed alike interesting to the public.”20 Johnston’s position meant that Upham’s translation enjoyed state patronage, and the circumstances of its publication—“dedicated to the king, patronised by the court of directors, and sent out to this island, by die secretary of state, to be preserved among the archives of the government”—so irked Tumour that he vilified Upham’s work (in the introduction to his own).21 Upham’s problem was that his 17. Sir Emerson Tennent, Ceylon (Dehiwela: Tisara Prakasakayo, 1977), 1:267. 18. Eugene Burnouf La Mahavansa, transerit en lettres latines et traduit presque tout entier en latin,” 1826, quarto manuscript, unpublished. As it is described in a bibliography of his work, the translation ran to 273 pages. Burnouf also completed a study of place names mentioned in the Mahavamsa; see Chore de lettres d’Eutjene Bumouf (Paris: H. Champion, 1894), pp. 573—74. Burnoufs work was not unknown to other Englishment. Alexander Johnston had earlier asked Upham to “negotitate an edition of the Mahavamsa” with Burnouf; see Heinz Bechert, Wilhelm Geifjer (Col¬ ombo: M. D. Gunasena, 1977), p. 84. 19. Edward Upham, trans., The Mahdvansi, the Rdja-Ratnacari, and the Rdja-Vali, Forming the Sacred and Historical Books of Ceylon, 3 vols. (London: Parbury, Allen, 1833). 20. Ibid., p. vii. 21. Tumour, Mahdwanso, p. xi.

Colonial Constructions of the Past

8 7

translation misconstrued critical parts of the record: he thought that the Lord Buddha was born in Sri Lanka and ascended to heaven from Adam’s Peak, which Upham took to be the site of the Mulkirigala temple (the very place where Tumour found the copy of the Mahdvamsa-Tika from which he worked). “It is scarcely possible for a person, not familiar with the subject,” Tumour advises his readers who were precisely that, “to conceive the extent of the absurdities involved in these, and other similar passages. It is no burlesque to say, that they would be received, by a Ceylonese Buddhist, with feelings akin to those which an Englishman would read a work, written by an Indian, professedly for the purpose of illustrating the history of Christianity to his countrymen, which stated,—that England was the scene of the birth of our Saviour; that his ascension took place from Derby peak; and that Salisbury cathedral stood on Westminster ab¬ bey.”22 Tumour himself saw the Mahavamsa as less a guide to what the Sinhala people would want in the future than a record of what they had done in the past. To avoid the howlers of Upham and the Sinhala chiefs who assisted him, Tumour stuck to the parts of the text least liable to be misunderstood, first presenting a chronology extracted from the Mahavamsa, then publishing the Mahavamsa itself.23 The in¬ terest in the reliability of the text was one he shared with the firstgeneration of Europeans interested in Asian culture and history. He thought that the answer to their common question—“Does there ex¬ ist now, or is there any prospect of an authentic history of India being developed hereafter, by the researches of Orientalists?”—lay in establishing synchronisms between events in Sri Lanka and India.24 To that end, he added a two-part appendix to his translation of the Mahavamsa. The first part is a revision of the chronology of kingly reigns he had published earlier. The second argues that there are as many mythological elements in early Western histories as in the Ma22. Ibid., p. xi. 23. Eminent Orientalists (Madras: G. A. Natesan, 1922), pp. 80—83. 24. Tumour, Mahawanso, p. xiv. Tumour succeeded in a variety of contexts. His translation led to James Prinsep’s eventual identification of Chandragupta of the Ma¬ havamsa with the “Sandrakottus,” mentioned by the Greek ambassador, Megasthenes, and Piyadasi of the Asokan inscriptions with Asoka of the Mahavamsa. And when Sir Alexander Cunningham began reconstructing the daqaba at Sanchi in North India, he was guided by a description of the ancient structure in Tumour s translation of the Mahavamsa.

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The Presence of the Past

hdvamsa, citing passages in Herodotus and Justinus full of marvels and fabulous events. If European readers wish to regard Herodotus as the “father of history” and Justinus as the paradigmatic “epitomist,” diey cannot fairly dismiss Mahanama. Nineteenth-century Indological research—whether European or Asian—developed as the distance between Europe and Asia nar¬ rowed. Tumour’s translation allowed him to speak to a European audience of an exotic world whose outlines it could now recognize but whose civilization remained mysterious. A similar notion moti¬ vated local intellectuals such as James Alwis who in i860 translated the Attanajyaluvihdravamsa, a history of the Buddhist vihdra at Attanagala. Of this local history, Alwis writes that “there is much to excite admiration and suggest inquiry,—admiration for a people from whom has originated in the East, a desire for historical pursuits—and inquiry into matters of the greatest value to the Antiquarian and Philologer, as well as the Statesman and Christian Missionary.”25 These translations meant to link self-contained worlds at opposite ends of the globe, but they also linked people separate in time. When transla¬ tors encountered texts speaking of the same social categories in the past as they knew to exist in the nineteenth-century present, they nat¬ urally assumed that the Sinhalas of the Mahdvamsa were the ancestors of living people in Sri Lanka. The fact of the matter was considerably more complicated, but the generality of Sri Lankans had their own understandings confirmed and deepened by Western authority. Alwis’s efforts to find both value and utility in ancient texts suggest another element that figures in the construction of Sinhala national¬ ism: Sinhalas have a story, a history, and it deserves admiration. In the nineteenth century, when Sinhalas began to assert themselves as an ethnic community, as one nation among many, they began to em¬ phasize not only their past, but also their love of knowledge of the past as part of their identity. James Alwis took a passage from the Dipavamsa—“itihasa panchaman vedan, ugganhi so visarado”—and translated it from Pali into English as: ‘The Sinhala regard history as the fifth Veda.”26 Since Sinhalas have never accepted the four Vedas, the argument is more than hyperbolic, but it suggests one way that ethnic identity was tied to a recorded past. Alwis’s example in turn 25. James Alwis, trans., Attanagcduviharavamsa (Colombo: Ceylon Government Press, 1866), p. iii. 26. Ibid., p. clxxvi, n. 1.

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epitomizes an attitude that has grown among Sinhalas ever since his time. Sinhalas of earlier times may have been indifferent to history, but latter-day Sinhalas have come to believe that their history has been a specifically ethnic one, lived out since Vijaya’s time in Sri Lanka, and that they have always been moved by their own history.27 By the time that Wilhelm Geiger first visited the island in 1895, Indology had acquired a real measure of sophistication, and the colo¬ nial situation had become much more fractious. The monks he en¬ countered in Sri Lanka were drawn to his interest in Pali and Sinhala, and a few were interested in European philology, but they had their own project—recovering the preeminent place Buddhism and its offi¬ ciants had enjoyed in the Kandyan kingdom. Scholarly monks such as Hikkaduve Sumamgala and Vaskaduve Subhuti thought that the two projects were really one. They saw the recovery and propagation of their past as inseparable from their attempts to realize Buddhism’s rightful present.28 The monks’ fused motivations put Geiger in a diffi¬ cult position, for while he never became a Buddhist or even an active participant in the Buddhist revival, he felt obvious friendship for the scholarly and pious monks he met in Sri Lanka and sympathy for their attempts to revive Sinhala language and religion, as well as Sin¬ hala self-assurance.29 On the other hand, Geiger thought of himself as a scientist in the 27. The classic statement comes from [D. J. Wijayawardena], Revolt in the Temple (Colombo: Sinha Publications, 1953): ‘This Mahdvarma tradition has been ingrained in the Sinhalese mind for centuries. . . . For more than two thousand years the Sin¬ halese have been inspired by the ideal that they were a nation” (p. 3). 28. Under the pseudonym Don Arnolis, Hikkaduve Sumamgala wrote a pamphlet, Kevatta V amsaya, or the True History of the Karieyars and Paravas Disproving the State¬ ments in the Itihasa (Colombo: F. Cooray, 1877). The title suggests the continuing practice of using ancient history to pursue current social goals, for the Itihasa was a small book published by another monk, Valigama Sumamgala, to fix the status of the Low Country caste groups by appealing to the past. The pseudonym suggests Hikkaduve’s disinterest in doing so openly. 29. Heinz Bechert, Wilhelm Geiger (Colombo: M. D. Gunasena, 1977). PP- io9~ 10. It was his conception of the philologist’s task as scientific that drew Geiger to Subhuti. “Sumangala,” Geiger wrote, “has remained primarily a traditionalist, while Subhuti’s methodology is akin to modern European ways of research (p. 52). Sub¬ huti was friendly with an extraordinary number of Western scholars: Richard Morris, Robert Childers, Vigo Fausball, Henry Warren, Charles Rockwell Lanman, Alexander Cunningham, and Ivan Minayev, as well as Geiger; see K. D. Paranavitana, Scholar Monks of the Nineteenth Century and the Tragic Transformation of the High Priest Ven. Kapugama Dhammakkanda Thero,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, Sri Lanka Branch n.s. 28 (1983/4): 132.

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The Presence of the Past

broad, German sense of the word and wanted not simply to bring out an edition of the Mahavamsa, for Tumour had done that in 1837, as had Hikkaduve Sumamgala and Pandit Batuvantudave in 1877.30 His task rather was to make a scientific translation of the Mahavamsa. The scientific character of Geiger’s work had unintended results for the popular impact of his research. Earlier European philologists had characterized Sinhala in a variety of ways—as Dravidian, MalayoPolynesian, but most commonly as a mixed language. Geiger used the tools of comparative linguistics to analyze the morphology of Sinhala, and his study of the structure of Sinhala as compared with the ancient Indian Prakrits led him to the conclusion that Sinhala was an IndoAryan language. For Geiger, categorizing the contemporary language was simply a matter of scientific taxonomy; for Sinhala nationalists, it became a fundamental element in the twentieth-century claim that Sinhalas were an Aryan race. The scientific way to produce a sound text was by comparing var¬ ious recensions and establishing their relationship. Geiger’s first at¬ tempt to do so was The Dipavamsa and the Mahavamsa.31 It was also his first attempt to establish the trustworthiness of the text, an inter¬ est that ran through the rest of his work. While nineteenth-century European philologists committed themselves to establishing an accu¬ rate and authentic “text,” they were little inclined toward accepting the truth claims or worldview of the text. That was easier in the case of literary texts than the Mahavamsa, for its assertions, referring to a world that either had or had not existed, could be tested. Geiger’s access to this world was almost entirely by way of the text. When he made his stand for the trustworthiness of the Mahavamsa in a contro¬ versy with another important German scholar of the time, Rudolf 30. Hikkaduve Sumamgala and Pandit Bamvantudave, trans., Mahdwamsa (Col¬ ombo: Ceylon Government Press, 1877). To quote Batuvantudave’s account of the translation’s origins: “in 1871 I edited the book at the request of a few government officers. Sir [Hercules] Robinson the Governor of Ceylon at the time consented to bear the expenses of this venture, on our request. But it was printed only after Sir William Gregory became Governor. Considering the value of publishing this book, he consulted men in England educated in Oriental languages, and wishing to lend the government’s aid, he called me and said, ‘It is better for two persons to be in charge when editing a book.’ He instructed me to seek the assistance of Ven. Sumangala, high priest of Hikkaduwa” (p. 4). 31. Wilhelm Geiger, The Dipavamsa and Mahavamsa and Their Historical Develop¬ ment in Ceylon, trans. Ethel Coomaraswamy (Colombo: Ceylon Government Printer, 1908).

Colonial Constructions of the Past

9 1

Otto Franke, he made his case on philological grounds. Where Franke argued that the chronicle was a set of verses borrowed from the Buddhavamsa, Cariyapitaka, and Jatakas, thus denying its having any historical connection to Sri Lankan events, Geiger believed that both the Dipavamsa and Mahavamsa derived from an earlier Sinhala text, and it was thus at least potentially truthful.32 The odd thing about Geiger’s position on the ancient chronicles is the disparity between his general position—the texts are trustwor¬ thy—and scattered statements that damn the chronicles with taint praise.33 For instance: “I consider that such objective confirmation of the chronicles proves at least this much: that their statements are not absolutely untenable and are at least worthy of being tested.”34 Speak¬ ing of the Culavamsa, he writes, “the compiler of the Culavamsa (chs. . . . did not consciously relate what was false.”35 Even in a 1930 article setting out to establish that the texts are built on reliable foundations, he sounds just as tentative: “I have the strong impres¬ sion—and whoever reads the Mahavamsa without prejudice will have the same that the author at least wished to tell the truth.”36 These assertions come from different publications, but they read so much like paraphrases of one another that it is hard to resist the conclusion that they represent a continuing strand in Geiger’s thinking. Sirima Kiribamune says that “whatever criticism he made of the chronicles, he couched in the mildest of terms,” adding that “one almost feels that Geiger was somewhat inhibited in his style by perhaps a desire not to endanger the position of the Buddhist revivalists.”1 If the collected force of these scattered statements runs counter to his general insistence on the reliability of the Sinhala chronicles, it is useful to remember the historical moment and Geiger’s conception of scientific work. Fie entered Sinhala life in the midst of a Buddhist revival. His summary confidence spared the restoration; and his reser¬ vations spared his own integrity. When contemporary writers assert that he “unreservedly accepted” the historicity of the chronicles, they —

32. See Bechert, Wilhelm Geiger, p. 90. 33. 34. 35. 36.

Ibid., pp. 1-3. Geiger, trans., Mahavamsa, p. xx. Geiger, trans., Culavamsa, i:iv. Wilhelm Geiger, ‘The Trustworthiness of the Mahavamsa,” Indian Historical

Quarterly 6 (June 1930): 212. Italics in original. 37. Sirima Kiribamune, “Geiger and the History of Sri Lanka,” Ceylon Journal of History and Social Studies 7 (January—June 1977): 54-

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The Presence of the Past

do so by ignoring Geiger’s pointed comments in favor of the general way he tried to distance himself from contemporaries such as R. O. Franke and V. A. Smith, who dismissed the chronicles out of hand.38 Geiger was nothing if not reserved, and more so about some parts than others. The chronicle’s reliability, he said, “decreases, generally speaking, from portion to portion, while on the other hand, the lan¬ guage becomes more artificial and sometimes even abstruse.”39 But Geiger also said that external evidence suggests chapters thirty-seven through sixty are the most reliable part of the whole Mahavamsa. Buddharakkhita’s extension he discounts altogether—“It does not come at all into account as [sic] source of historical information.”40 The way through this morass to the truth of the matter, according to Geiger, is to slough off the mythological material and build on what remains, the historical core. Even here, he acknowledges the possi¬ bility that details that look reliable have been added at later times in ways that agreed with later historical circumstances. For this problem he suggested a second strategy: £CWe must keep to the most general statements if we would come near the historical truth. Everything special and particular should be looked upon with a certain scepti¬ cism.”41 Geiger’s dilemma became the dilemma of his student G. C. Mendis, who found himself in the middle of the gathering force of religious and ethnic feeling as the colonial period drew to a close. In denying the Mahavamsa\ reliability, Mendis became the first Sinhala scholar to voice misgivings about the tradition.42 C£The main defects of the Mahavamsa as a history,” Mendis wrote, “are due to the fact that it was composed by people whose ideas of what history should be 38. Consider, for instance, this assertion, which takes Geiger as its authority: “The historical value of the Ceylon chronicles has been unreservedly accepted”; in U. D. Jayasekera, Early History of Education in Ceylon (Colombo: Department of Cultural Affairs, 1969), p. 5. 39. Geiger, “The Trustworthiness of the Mahavamsa,” p. 213. 40. Heinz Bechert, ed.. Culture of Ceylon in Medieval Times (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, i960), p. xxi. 41. Geiger, trans., Mahavamsa, p. lvii. 42. In 1932 G. C. Mendis published The Early History of Ceylon (Calcutta: YMCA Publishing House, 1932), and Geiger wrote the foreword. Although this was only two years after the publication of his article on the trustworthiness of the Mahavamsa, Geiger makes another of his cautious statements in the foreword: “it would be a great mistake to assume that a simple extract from these [chronicles] would yield true his¬ tory, for they all require penetrative criticism” (p. xi).

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[were] quite different from ours. The Mahavamsa falls more or less within the category of histories of the earliest stage, which consisted of epic poems, legends of heroes and of wise and good men, of ge¬ nealogies and dynastic lists.”43 So characterizing the “national” chroni¬ cle put Mendis in an uncomfortable position in his own society and at a distance from his teacher. Where the general effect of Geiger’s work, ignoring the cautionary remarks, made Sri Lankans more confi¬ dent of the Mahavamsa’s historicity, the force of Mendis’s work cut in the opposite direction. Mendis, moreover, was a Christian, making his intentions suspect in the eyes of Sinhala nationalists, who took him for a brown Englishman who denigrated local traditions and the achievements of ancient Sri Lankans. His prestige and public career caused him to experience in a sharp way what Sinhalas have con¬ fronted ever since—one’s ethnic identity is tested by having conven¬ tional opinions about the past. Though Mendis’s efforts, history as an academic discipline in Sri Lanka came into being, but his role as Sri Lanka’s first professional historian aggravated his problem. He counted as colleagues a group of casual historians of considerable sophistication: P. E. Pieris, R. L. Brohier, H. W. Codrington, and S. G. Perera. But Mendis found himself in a rather different position because he made his living by teaching history at the University of Ceylon, and he spoke for history as a distinctive form of knowledge. By most accounts, Mendis was no less a patriot than his contemporaries.44 Yet he was also committed to teaching Sri Lankans their history as a dispassionate academic disci¬ pline. In Problems of Ceylon History he characterized the Mahavamsa in terms that reject his teacher’s confidence that philological skill could get to the bottom of the matter: Such an account, however valuable, cannot be a history of any country in any modern sense. Nor can it be reconstituted, as many writers have done, by omitting what is not historical fact, by modifying what is partially factual, and by adding what has been omitted. . . . [Modern history] answers questions different, for instance, from those the au¬ thor of the Mahavamsa asked. The author of the Mahavamsa seems to have asked the question, what lessons of permanent value can be learnt from these doings of rulers, chiefs, and craftsmen, and attached impor-

43. Ibid., p. 6. 44. K. M. de Silva, “Historians and History in Twentieth Century Sri Lanka,” Sri Lanka Journal of the Social Sciences 1 (December 1978): 6.

94

The Presence of the Past tance to them accordingly. A modern historian of Ceylon asks the question, how did the kings and chiefs manage their affairs two thou¬ sand years ago in the political, economic, and social sphere, and how have they come to do things differently afterwards. The answer to the second question cannot be based on the facts supplied to answer the first.45

Mendis’s treatment of the Vijaya story in particular antagonized Sinhala nationalists beginning to look to Vijaya as the founder of a race again coming into its own. Mendis argued that the critical histo¬ riographical fact about the Mahavamsa was that it was composed no earlier than the first century b.c.e.—five centuries after the landing of Vijaya ostensibly occurred. Against both Geiger’s and A. L. Basham’s insistence that the myth could be exploited for historical materials resting beneath the mythological, Mendis was uncompromising: “the Vijaya legend, according to evidence available is not a historical ac¬ count. Its value lies in the fact that it is a literary work, an epic poem, a product of the mind and not the story of the first Aryan settlement as it actually took place.”46 Basham responded by arguing that Vijaya was not himself a real person but a token of a real type—the South Asian adventurer-hero.4" Sinhala readers were undisturbed by Mendis’s pointing to the sim¬ ilarities between the chronicles and mythological motifs in the Jataka tales. But his views on Vijaya’s historicity were another matter.48 Newspaper editorials denounced him, saying that his Christian loy¬ alties stood in the way of love of country. One of his first defenders was a scholarly Buddhist monk, Polvatte Buddhadatta, who argued: Dr. G. C. Mendis has written several useful books for Ceylonese stu¬ dents. Although a Christian, he loves to see the development of educa¬ tion. His criticism of die Mahavamsa has raised a hornet’s nest among the public, as they were not used to such criticism. Prof. Geiger had done a critical study of both the Dlpavamsa and Mahavamsa; but many

45. G. C. Mendis, Problems of Ceylon History (Colombo: Colombo Apothecaries, n.d.), p. 79. Mendis studied with Geiger in London where he worked on the Ma¬ havamsa for his Ph.D., at the School of Oriental and African Studies. 46. G. C. Mendis, “The Vijaya Legend,” in N. A. Jayawickrama, ed., Paranavitana Felicitation Volume (Colombo: M. D. Gunasena, 1965), p. 279. 47. A. L. Basham, “Prince Vijaya and the Aryanization of Ceylon” Ceylon Historical Journal 1 (1952): 163—71. 48. See, for instance, Arnold Gurusinghe, Dr. G. C. Mendis and the Mahavamsa: Criticism or Sterile Scepticism (Colombo: Pahan Press, 1935).

Colonial Constructions of the Past

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did not know of Geiger’s work as it was published only in English. Certain extracts of criticism done by Dr. Mendis appeared in local newspapers, and without full knowledge people criticized Mendis. This is a critical age. There is not a single old book that is not being crit¬ icized. Therefore we must get used to criticism. Thus it is saici even in Buddhism.49

Mendis’s public forays in the 1930s marked the Mahavamsa became public territory claimed by a ing groups: historians, nationalists, rationalists, ments. When scholarly argument began to appear groups became commentators on a single past.

point at which the variety ot contend¬ as well as govern¬ in Sinhala, all these

The Mahavamsa, Part III The colonial government commissioned the writing of chapter 101 of the Mahavamsa in 1871 when Governor Hercules Robinson asked Hikkaduve Sumamgala and Pandit Bamvantudave to bring the Ma¬ havamsa up to the point of conquest.50 Robinson also asked the same two scholars to translate the Mahavamsa into Sinhala. In 1889 the colonial government underwrote an English translation of the Culavamsa and published it along with George Tumour’s 1837 transla¬ tion of the Mahavamsa.51 All things considered, the British showed a surprising amount of interest in the chronicles, although they were content with translating the ancient histories, making them available to a larger audience, and adding the small supplement that brought the Culavamsa up to the point of British conquest. When the chronic¬ ling tradition continued, it was at the initiative of solitary monks who started from an ancient chronicle and added an extension. The bestknown supplements are Yagirala Pannananda’s extension of the Ma¬ havamsa to 1935, and Ahungalle Vimalakirti’s continuation oi the 49. Polvatte Buddhadatta, Sri Buddhadatta Charitaya (Life of Sri Buddhadatta) (Colombo: Anula Mudranalaya, 1954). p. 191- Mendis’s Christian origins did have some epistomological consequences. Having been educated in biblical criticism, Mendis applied the same philological skills to early Sri Lankan history. 50. See Ahungalle Vimalakirti, Dipavamsa, Part II (Alutgama: VTdyavilas, 1959), p. 177. 51. L. C. Wijesinhe, trans., The Mahavamsa, Part II (Colombo: Government Printer, 1889). Wijesinghe was kachcheri mudaliyar in Matale when Governor Arthur Gordon asked him to translate the second part of the Mahavamsa, which Tumour had left undone.

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The Presence of the Past

DlpavamsaT Pannananda made more of a mark than he could have ever imagined. After J. R. Jayewardene became prime minister in 1977, the Mahavamsa Compilation Board decided to begin the con¬ temporary extension, that is, the Mahavamsa, Nutana Yupjaya, at the point where Pannananda stopped, 1935. Picking up where Panna¬ nanda left off suggests diat his section is a legitimate extension of the Mahavamsa. Thus a litde-known chronicle written at the initiative of a scarcely remembered monk has retroactively become part of one of the world’s oldest historiographic traditions. Pannananda was a student of Hikkaduve Sumamagala and himself a scholarly monk who made a Sinhala translation of a fourteenthcentury Pali grammar, the Balavatara, a work which his teacher had also translated.53 His religious attitudes were equally conservative. Carrying on the chronicle was his notion of the way an intelligent Buddhist monk profitably spent his time. The principal of Sudharmakara pirivena (school) in Induruva, he became a leader in the 1940s of monks and laypeople opposed to the entry of monks into electoral politics, writing a series of newspaper articles that condemned the “political bhikkhus.” The articles dismiss the monks’ interest in poli¬ tics as devoid of service to fellow beings and tantamount to theft.54 But he also believed in the restoration of Sinhala Buddhism and saw the Mahavamsa, Part III as a vehicle for achieving that end. For a properly behaved monk, scholarly work was one of the few legitimate ways to do so. To the extent that Pannananda saw his extension of the chronicle as the story of the Sinhala people, it represents a further step in the textualization of Sinhala identity. A close reading of the Mahavamsa and other sources suggests that the expression “Sinhala” was first used only for the royal lineage. In time it came to be associated with 52. Yagirala Pannananda, Mahavamsa, Part III (Gonagala: Maha Bodhi Press, 1935) and Anungalle Vimalakirti, Dipavamsa, Part II (Alutgama: Vldyavilas, 1959). There are several other extensions or editions of the ancient chronicles, all undertaken by individual initiative. Two of the best known are Polvatte Buddhadatta, ed. Mahavanso (Sinhala) (M. D. Gunasena, 1959), and Gunapala Weerasekera, Mahdvamsaya (Sinhala) (Maradana: Anula Mudranalaya, i960). 53. Yagirala Pannananda, trans., Balavatara Vamanawa (Alutgama: Saddharmaprakasa Yantralaya, 1928). Pannananda also wrote a biography of his teacher, Sri Sumangala Charitaya (Colombo: Lake House, 1947). 54. Silumina, May 9, and May 19, 1956 [sic], quoted by W. A. Wiswa Warnapala, “Sangha and Politics in Sri Lanka: Nature of the Continuing Controversy,” Indian Journal of Politics 12 (April—August 1978): 69.

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the island itself, then with the inhabitants of the island, and finally with the language they spoke. The twelfth-century monk Gurulugomi suggests the expansion of the referent of the word in a Sinhala-language commentary on the Bodhivarnsa. Gunawardana dates this ex¬ pansion of the referent of the word to the period between the fifth and sevendi centuries, not accidentally the time of the Mahavarnsa s composition.55 By the time the Culavamsa reaches the reign of Mahinda III (801-4), the text speaks of “Slhalas” (49*38), and the pluraiized expression comes to the fore in the long account of Parakramabahu where the text speaks of “Slhalas with their lion-like courage” (76.243). A Sinhala war poem of the early Portuguese period harks back to the heroism of Dutugamunu and speaks contemptuously of Tamils, suggesting the salience of the Sinhala-Tamil distinction in the early seventeenth century.56 Yet the Mahavarnsa later refers to the mideighteenth-century king Klrti Sri Rajasimha as “believing Ruler of the Slhalas” (99.167) and the “Sihala ruler” (100.144). Because Klrti Sri Rajasimha was a Tamil by birth, the latter expression must have understood “Sihala” not as a blood category but as a political one, unless the word refers to the people ruled, not the ruler. By contrast, Pannananda construes it as a blood category. He be¬ gins his history by saying that Tibbotuvave Buddharakkhita had abandoned the mahdkdvya style. Although the latter wrote the final chapters of the Culavarnsa in a learned manner, he inserted verses without rhythm (hhinna vurththagdtha) between chapters (p. 8). But while some critics pointed to the lack of mahakavya features, Panna¬ nanda finds no fault with the change. Even with changes, there is a continuing Mahavarnsa that lives to the present. Better to discard Gei¬ ger’s decision to call the second, third, and fourth parts of the Mahdvamsa the Culavarnsa, and think about the chronicle as a cumulative tradition. Consider the railway, Pannananda says, built to Ambepussa in 1858. It was later extended to Rambukkana and Peradeniya. Is it one railway or two? In the same way, the Mahavarnsa which he him¬ self now brings up to date will be again updated in the future, as long as Buddhism and the Sinhala people survive (p. 41)- The apocalyptic 55. R. A. L. H. Gunawardana, ‘The People of the Lion: Sinhala Consciousness in History and Historiography,” in Ethnicity and Social Change in Sri Lanka (Colombo: Karunaratna and Sons, 1984), p. 2.4. 56. See Joao Ribeiro, Ribeiro’s History of Ceilao, trans P. E. Pieris (Colombo: Col¬ ombo Apothecaries, 1909), p. 247.

98

The Presence of the Past

phrase—“as long as the Sinhala people survive”—did not originate with Pannananda, but it has served ever since as a discourse marker with which Sinhalas have talked about history, remembered heroes, and asserted interests. Its use also marks the text’s continuing confla¬ tion of truth and religious destiny that made Mendis suspicious of the Mahavamsa’s reliability. Pannananda’s project began in 1920 when Mldeniya mahd adikaram (a high-ranking Sinhala headman) came to him with a copy of the Mahavamsa and asked him to update it (pp. 41-42). Pannananda took on the task with the help of Madugalle Siddhartha, beginning his Mahavamsa by explaining his motives. Some are familiar ones—he wanted to make a record just as Mahanama had done because histori¬ cal events had been devastating to the Sinhalas and their religion. Had someone kept even a small account of the events that accom¬ panied the arrival of European colonialism, Pannananda concludes, it would have had great value (p. 7). Tibbotavave Buddharakkhita said nothing of the Portuguese desecration of temples and book-burning during Rajasimha’s reign. According to Pannananda, Buddharakkhita may have been put off these tumultuous affairs because of his high thinking (usas kalpanava). But Pannananda himself promises to keep the account focused on politics. Part of the motivation is a properly academic regard for adequately treating the last centuries of Sri Lanka’s independent history. But he acts on the grievance that he shared with the Sinhala elite of the time, believing that colonialism had been responsible for the unraveling of Buddhism and that its reformation depended on governmental action. Pannananda wanted to make a record of the dismal events of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries that led to the fall of the Kandyan state, but he treated these events in an appendix, which he calls parishista sangrahaya (a “collection of parts left out” of the Culavamsa). Here Pannananda puts the political history—focusing on alien rulers and rebellious villages—of the early colonial encounter on record. This device allows him to number his first chapter 102, and to follow the chronology of the Mahavamsa, by picking up the narrative where Hikkaduve Sumamgala and Batuvantudave stopped, in 1815 at chapter 101. This arrangement also gives him historical grounds to air his feeling of decline and grievance and to maintain the unilinear descent of the text in a way that reflects the unilinear de¬ scent of the Sinhala people. He begins his account of British colonial¬ ism with Sri Vikrama Rajasimha’s deportation. In Pannananda’s

Colonial Constructions of the Past

99

words: ‘The country had lost its chance for a king of the caliber of Parakramabahu” (p. 61). The history of the colonial state thus begins nostalgically, looking back to the last king to unify the island before the onset of colonialism. Adapting the chronicle to colonial conditions required several inge¬ nious changes. Since the ruling authority when the Mahavamsa, Part III begins was a king who ruled from London, Pannananda needed a less powerful term for the highest authority in Sri Lanka. He chose the expression “patiraja” (chief) as the appropriate expression to refer to the governors of the island. Another problem derived from the proliferation of new monastic groups that began in the last decades of the independent Sri Lankan’s state. Tibbotuvave Buddharakkhita’s fi¬ nal chapters said nothing of them, and Pannananda might have done the same because he too was a member of the Siyam Nikaya (monas¬ tic group), the traditional Kandyan monastic order of Valivita Saranamkara and Buddharakkhita himself. Despite their being Theravada, these groups arose in defiance of the Buddhist establishment in Kandy. But Pannananda believed that it was proper to include the history of these monastic groups—namely, the Amarapura and Ramanna Nikayas (pp. 44-45)—even though their founders had gotten their ordination from other countries and in opposition to Pannananda’s Nikaya. When he wrote to the chief monks of these groups, he discovered that being openhanded created its own prob¬ lems. Some chief monks wanted to leave Pannananda out of it alto¬ gether and write the history of their group themselves, and others refused to contribute if Pannananda included groups they considered illegitimate (born nikaya). Where previous installments of the Mahavamsa simply ignored di¬ visions in the monkhood or mentioned them inadvertently in recog¬ nizing a king’s generosity, Pannananda included as much of the monkhood’s fissiparous history as he could. In his Mahavamsa, as the sasana comes to have an identity increasingly independent of the state, the sasana—monks and laity alike—falls into contention with itself (p. 45). The important change for the Mahavamsa tradition is that Pannananda felt obliged to treat not so much the issue of monas¬ tic conflict but the life of Sinhala society as a whole. Once expanded to its present dimensions, Sinhala identity absorbs events that previ¬ ously would have gone unremarked simply because they have oc¬ curred in the context of Sinhala society as such. In the first years of British rule some Sinhalas, Pannananda writes,

i oo

The Presence of the Past

rejected English law and the English king’s rule. He specifically men¬ tions the descendants of noble families, some of the monks, and those who aimed at ruling Sri Lanka themselves (pp. 71-74). Others were content—“the country was ailing without a king, but people were happy to have the English monarch as their king” (p. 63); “from then onwards the Sinhala people treated the English king as their own” (pp. 64-65). With this division came disunity, and with disunity, Sinhalas were left to the mercy and benevolence of whatever governor was sent their way. All were of an alien religion (p. 131). Some, such as Robert Brownrigg, were compassionate and clever in politics; others, such as Lord Torrington, were neither (pp. 132-35 and p. 22). Sinhala kings and people of Ksatriya birth, Pannananda says, had departed for the other world (p. 134). The future lay with the Eng¬ lish governors, and Pannananda builds his account around each ad¬ ministration. English officials ignored the aspirations of common people in Sri Lanka, emphasizing instead the intrinsic fairness of Eng¬ lish law and administration. The rebellion of 1818 followed as a re¬ sult of the clash of these two forces. Some 15,000 Sinhala people died (p. 118). The first Sinhala attempt to throw off British rule failed because of disunity (p. 121). By the point where Pannananda reaches the events of 1818, he has introduced three themes that have marked Sinhala political discourse ever since: that in the absence of real heroes, the best one can hope for are leaders who resemble ancient kings; that there are common people with interests that deserve attention; and that disunity is the Sinhalas’ chronic problem. In a variety of ways the plausibility of these assertions depends on Pannananda’s assumption that colonial life is continuous with earlier times, that British governors were fig¬ ures equivalent to Sri Lankan kings, and that the Sinhala people were the object of earlier installments of the chronicle. Sinhala grievances in the 1818 rebellion were real ones, for the colonial power sup¬ pressed the attempt to return a Nayakkar prince to the throne with terrorism, starvation, and great brutality. But Pannananda makes them even more affecting by recounting the events of 1818 in an idiom that assumes the continuity of British rule with the traditional state, besides making a place for the aspirations of common people, and accounting for the Kandyans’ defeat in terms of their own dis¬ unity. Other events appear in passing. Pannananda notes the rise of the

Colonial Constructions of the Past

ioi

Low Country Nikayas, George Tumour’s 1837 translation of the Mah drams a, and the founding of the Royal Asiatic Society. The visits of English royalty to Sri Lanka are regularly noticed, as is Henry Steele Olcott and Helena Blavatsky’s tour in 1880 (p. 38). The first tramcars were introduced to the island in the administration of Governor Joseph West Ridgeway (p. 43), and cultivators were taxed at the rate of 10 percent of their harvest (p. 45). This concern for everyday life is new to the Mahdvamsa tradition. But the focus falls on the governors, with Pannananda generally giving each one a single chapter, and con¬ cluding each chapter with a Buddhist homily. At the end of chapter 112 he epitomized die administration ol Hugh Clifford from a Bud¬ dhist point of view (p. 74): “the Governors of Sri Lanka return to England on the instruction of the Emperor to spend a happy time at the end of their life. But they pass onto the next world. Pious ones (pinvatni), why don’t you look for the path to nirvana.” Sovereignty never saved any leader from death and rebirth—colonial governors simply make a stop in England first. Sinhalas liked William Gregory so much, Pannananda says, that they could not distinguish him from Pandukabhaya, Dutugamunu, Parakramabahu, and Rajasimha (Mv. Ill, p. 26).57 Gregory resembled early Sri Lankan kings in quite literal ways. He made Anuradhapura the center of the North Central Province, renovated ancient tanks and viharas, such as the Ruvanvalisaya which Dutugamunu had built, and established an allowance for monks to look after such places. He also became friends with pandits of Sanskrit and Pali. Gregory was the governor who asked Hikkaduve Sumamgala and Bamvantudave to add the final chapter to the MahdvamscCs account of the independent state and to make a Sinhala translation of the whole text. Religious freedom was allowed to flourish, and important centers of Buddhist education were founded—Vidyodaya and Vidyalankara pirivenas (monastic school), as well as Nalanda, Ananda, and Dhammaraja col¬ leges (p. 30). Because of the respect of the people, a bronze statue of

57. Before he arrived in Sri Lanka, William Gregory had been a very different hero—“the brilliant spoilted darling hero,” to quote Hulugalle. “Gregory’s story had all the accoutrements of a Trollope ‘political’: the friendships of older statesmen for the young hero, the mg between personal and political loyalties, the great hostesses pulling wires, the costly elections, the lure of racing and gambling, the names un¬ wisely set to bills for friends, even a dual to crown all” (H. A. J. Hulugalle, British Governors of Ceylon [Colombo: Daily News Press, 1963], p. 117).

io2

The Presence of the Past

him was erected in front of the Colombo museum. Crowds gathered there because he was such a good governor and like a “father to the country” (p. 29). Pannananda’s expression, and a whole set of West¬ ern notions that entered the Sinhala lexicon at the time—“mothercountry” (:mavbima), “patriotism” (deshapremiya), “nationalism” (jati alaya)—derived from Sri Lankans’ exposure to Western traditions, but they also follow logically from both the way British governors choose to carry out their offices in keeping with a local tradition of righteous leadership. The one event that stands out most in Pannananda’s history of the 1815-1935 interval is the Sinhala-Muslim riots of 1915, which Pannananda had experienced as a younger man and which remained a major source of disaffection toward British rule through his lifetime. At first Governor Robert Chalmers, Pannananda says, gave every in¬ dication of benign rule. He asked a scholarly monk, Sri Dhammarama to edit a commentary on the canon and made himself proficient enough in Pali to use the language to address public meetings (p. 49). But Chalmers failed Sinhalas on the religion issue. The trouble began when Buddhists gathered in Kandy to celebrate Vesak (the birthday of the Lord Buddha) by singing Buddhist carols (bhakti jyi). The group passed a mosque where Muslims made remarks, hooted, and threw stones. Rumors spread of a Muslim attack on the Temple of the Tooth. A Buddhist was killed in front of the temple itself, yet Chalmers’s troops took no action. Sinhalas began to riot, plundering the houses of Muslims. Colombo appeared to be a place, in Panna¬ nanda’s words, without a king (rajeku ndttek menviya) because Chalmers declared martial law only after days of turmoil. In Pannananda’s opinion, Sinhalas never had riots except with Muslims, and Tamils lived in perfect security.58 Even then, educated Sinhala Buddhists took no part in the violence. They gave shelter to Muslims. But the colonial government came down hard on Sinhalas. Buddhist leaders were arrested, indicted, given trials in which the de¬ fense could not cross-examine witnesses, and then punished with harsh sentences, including death and life imprisonment. The govern¬ ment also took wealth away from Sinhalas and gave it to Muslims. The king’s officers behaved like demons killing innocent Sinhalas in 58. These disturbances were not the first communal or religious conflict of the colonial period. Violent conflict began in 1883 when Roman Catholics attacked a Buddhist procession in Kotahena.

Colonial Constructions of the Past

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their homes. Matters improved only when Chalmers was sent home, to be replaced by John Anderson. Prisoners were released, wealth returned, and life resumed its normal pace. Pannananda is as positive about Anderson as he was about Gregory, for he punished his own English officials and administered Sri Lanka like an early Sinhala king. The people of the country considered him to be like a god (Ishvaradi). It was a time that recalled the reign of Devanampiyatissa (p. 58). Apart from these religious troubles and the subsequent collision ot Sinhalas and Muslims at Gampola, what the Mahavamsa, Part III has to say about religion and the state comes in passing comments. Pan¬ nananda voiced the grievances that most Buddhists shared—the colo¬ nial government’s abandoning obligations it undertook in the Kan¬ dyan Convention and its financial support of the Church ot England (pp. 21 and 37). But taking English rule as a whole, Pannananda found surprisingly much to like, claiming that Sinhalas began to look to the English king as their own soon after conquest (pp. 63-65). Although he makes a few critical comments, the Mahavamsa, Part III scarcely challenged colonial rule, even in its twilight. There is no way of knowing exactly what MIdeniya expected when he approached Pannananda in 1920, asking him to carry on the Mahavamsa. What he got was history acceptable to a late colonial government and the Buddhist elite of the time, as mythological and didactic in its way as its predecessors. Occasionally the reader comes upon concerns—such as Pannananda’s note that the population of the island had exceeded three million by the turn of the century—altogether new to the tradition (p. 41), and scraps of history that one does not find elsewhere. Pan¬ nananda argues, for instance, that one result of the 1915 riots was increased Sinhala interest in gods and their worship, a practice en¬ couraged by the colonial government after 1915 (p. 59). But the im¬ portant transition is as much historical as historiographical. The cen¬ ter of the society had not held—the monkhood had become fragmented, the government had failed to serve Buddhist interests, and the first signs of ethnic divisiveness were appearing. Pannananda responded by keeping the governorship at the center of things and chronicling as many peripheral events as he could manage. The tone is consistently Buddhist, even when colonial circumstances require in¬ genuity to place events in a Buddhist context. Some things—the ebb

10 4

The Presence of the Past

and flow of every human life, the potential for good and bad in hu¬ man action—never change, and here Pannananda finds Buddhist sig¬ nificance in unprecedented circumstances: ‘The Governors who ruled Ceylon governed according to their love of the country and worked for the good of both the English and Ceylonese people. The English returned to their country and passed away. Life is impermanent. Therefore, good people (sudaneni), gather merit for the next life.” (Mv. Ill, p. 48) The tradition of philological and historical scholarship that the British brought to nineteenth-century Sri Lanka created a new per¬ spective on the Sri Lankan past, making history something one could argue over as well as be edified by. Colonial rule also brought a sys¬ tem of education that intended to train clerks and minor officials, but it did so the same way similar people were trained in England—by exposing them to a classical education of history and literature. The addition of secular education had negative consequences for monastic education, but the pirivena system began to recover by the 1840s and produced a stream of Buddhist monks educated in their own tradi¬ tions. And once the literate population of the island was divided into these two groups—monks on the one side and the colonial elite on the other—the structure of “national” awakening was put in place. Some monks such as Pannananda brought the two traditions to¬ gether, creating a form of popular historiography that fused Western and local forms of authority at the same time it fused the horizons of the past and the present.

4 Contesting the Past

The contest for the Sri Lankan past—expressed in issues such as the historicity of the Mahavamsa, and the right to criticize the chronicle tradition—began in the nineteenth century among European and Sri Lankan scholars, sacred historians, and a small elite of Sinhala nation¬ alists. By the twentieth century, the contest had spread into other parts of the society, including political parties and the academic estab¬ lishment as well as the general public. The issues became more highly charged because of the new implications of their focus on the original peopling of the island, the conduct of ancient heroes, and the charac¬ ter of the societies described by the Mahavamsa. By the 1980s, news¬ paper writers began to characterize Sinhala ethnic chauvinism by call¬ ing it “the Mahavamsa mentality.” In this chapter I trace the conversion of the Mahavamsa into popular knowledge, and in so do¬ ing, bring the discussion both down to the recent past and outward from the text into Sri Lankan society. As representations first compiled in the Mahavamsa get put to new uses, their position in the larger design changes, and over a period of time a latticework of representations develops, suspended high above the historical events under description but supported by the weight¬ bearing role of other representations. As a result, the Mahavamsa de¬ rives much of its importance not so much from what it says, but from what people have said it says, and the underlying assumptions and practices that support those assertions. The results of a survey of ele-

io6

The Presence of the Past

mentary school textbooks currently used by Sri Lankan students sug¬ gests what critics have in mind when they speak of the £CMahavamsa mentality:” In the early grades (Kindergarten-Grade 2) the Sinhala readers main¬ tain a solely monocultural context: Sinhala Buddhist; the characters, way of life, festivals and practices in these readers are confined to this ethnic context: even the existence of Sinhala Christians, of whom an appreciable number of children study these books, is ignored. The cor¬ responding three readers in Tamil, however, include themes relevant not only to Hindus but also to the Christian and Muslim minorities, so that the experiences and culture of all groups of Tamil-speaking chil¬ dren reading the books find reflection in them. The divergence between Sinhala and Tamil readers is still sharper in Grades 3 to 9. Not only do the Sinhala readers continue to maintain their monocultural character in these grades; they also project an image of a Sinhala-Buddhist identity which is defined fundamentally through opposition to and struggle against Tamil invaders in past history and the existence of a multi-ethnic and multi-religious society in contempo¬ rary Sri Lanka is not merely ignored but denied, by representing even the independence won in 1948 as freedom won and to be enjoyed by the Sinhalese.1 The Sinhala and English-language press speaks similarly, but the most striking practice that follows from this narrow conception of the na¬ tion is the government’s tendency to enunciate the same ideas, some¬ times addressing its pronouncements to an audience assumed to be exclusively Sinhala.2 The nationalist reading of the Sri Lankan past depends on two figures, heroes and race, the first an ancient Sri Lankan notion justificably traced back to the Mahavamsa, the second a Western idea im¬ posed on the Sri Lankan past by nineteenth-century scholars and na¬ tionalists. The way these two figures interact seems to me to exemplify the influence of colonial culture on nationalist discourse, for the discursive formation that develops around heroes and races is 1. Reggie Siriwardena, “Language Media, Content of Education, and Ethnic Per¬ ceptions,” unpublished paper read at the Seminar on Education in a Multi-Ethnic Society, Marga Institute, August 1984, appendix C, p. 1. 2. Reggie Siriwardena, ‘The Press and Racial Violence in August 1981, Part II, The English Language Press” (Colombo: Council for Communal Harmony through the Media, 1982), and Gananath Obeyesekere, “Political Violence and the Future of Democracy in Sri Lanka,” in Sri Lanka, the Ethnic Conflict (New Delhi: Navran^, 1984), pp. 87-89.

Contesting the Past

107

neither simply Western nor local. Against Anderson, I argue that in this South Asian case the nationalist project takes much more than print capitalism and modular form from contact with British colonial domination. Sinhala nationalism borrows content as well as form, ideas as well as techniques. Given their social origins and educations, Sin¬ hala nationalists could scarcely have done otherwise, but they did not borrow arbitrarily. However seductive talk about Aryan languages and races must have been for the Sinhala elite of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the cult of heroes made that talk even more se¬ ductive. On the one hand, the heroic careers of Vijaya and Dutugamunu established the Sinhala “race’s” antiquity as well as its right¬ ful place in the emerging nation. On the other hand, every member of the race shared the blood of those heroic ancestors, and thus each was equally Sinhala and equally responsible for the common good.3

History as a Vehicle of Popular Argument Popular interest in the island’s history grew from the nineteenth cen¬ tury on, the more so with the granting of independence and the onset of the Buddha Jayanti (the 2,500th anniversary of the Buddha’s life and the birth of the Sinhala people) in 1956. It has remained a central part of public discussion ever since. With independence came democ¬ racy, mass education in Sinhala and Tamil, and rapid economic and social change, creating a situation in which growing numbers of Sri Lankans began to recognize the importance of historical knowledge. Many Sri Lankans found themselves in the midst of present-day cir¬ cumstances—access to resettlement schemes and higher education, as well as the survival of sacred places—where outcomes depended on historical arguments. In Chapter 1 I argued that the Mahavamsa s celebration of heroic leadership antedated the rise of nationalism by more than a thousand years. In this chapter I consider how Sri Lankans nowadays argue about heroes in terms that Mahanama 3. It is seldom noticed that the revolutionary potential of nationalist movements derives from their egalitarian and democratic elements. See Eric Hobsbawm, “Some Reflections on Nationalism,” in T. V. Nossiter, A. H. Hanson, and Stein Rokkan, eds.. Imagination and Precision in the Social Sciences (London: Faber and Faber, 1972), p. 389.

io8

The Presence of the Past

would hardly recognize, for Vijaya has become the founder of a race, and Dutugamunu that race’s greatest patriot. The volume and intensity of public discussion of historical issues indicates the importance of the past in Sinhala life.4 5 Sinhala, Tamil, and English-language newspapers carry frequent contributions relating parts of Sri Lanka’s history. Some of these newspaper pieces are extracts of larger academic works published elsewhere, as in the news¬ paper serialization of Mendis’s Early History of Ceylon in the 1930s. Others are written expressly for popular consumption. Only innoc¬ uous pieces are simply published. Contentious articles draw letters to the editors, creating a popular forum for the discussion of the past. Small paperbound publications written by citizen-historians and sold in bookshops serve as another forum. Like the newspaper articles, these publications—pamphlets and softcover books produced by a process known as roneography—encourage counterpublications. In London the Tamil Times regularly publishes historical articles and car¬ ries argument about who came first and who lived where to Tamils living outside the island. The most scurrilous articles appear as pam¬ phlets published and distributed direcdy by Sinhala and Tamil inter¬ est groups.3 They are seldom seen in bookshops and reach their pub¬ lic by way of public meetings, informal contact, or the post.

Public dispute about the past follows several social divisions in Sri Lankan society. Sinhala writers argue with Tamil ones and academic historians with lay writers, each asserting a distinctive “past.” Sinhala and Tamil writers enter the fray for identical reasons—because both ethnic groups, Sinhalas no less than the Tamils, fear for their future in the island. Both look to the past for evidence of their historical prior¬ ity and distinctive identity. Academic writers sometimes act on this motive too. Historians who manage to rise above their own ethnic feelings often see something else at stake—their conception of them¬ selves as seekers after truth. Professional historians in Sri Lanka scarcely lack confidence in themselves or their profession, a discipline characterized by K. M. de Silva as “by far the most vital, productive,

4. See Jonathan Spencer, ed., Sri Lanka: History and the Roots of Conflict (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1990). 5. See Kuman Jayawardena, Ethnic and Class Conflicts in Sn Lanka (Dehiwala: Centre for Social Analysis, 1985), p. 91.

Contesting the Past

109

and creative of the social sciences in Sri Lanka.”6 What they fear is not damage to their individual reputations but that history as a discipline will lose public credibility. “The effort to justify current policies,” C. R. de Silva writes, “through appeals to the past distorts history and the distortion of history in turn exacerbates ethnic tension. It also leads to a prejudice against the study of history itself. After a pro¬ longed debate in the Sinhalese newspaper Divayina on the subject of the unity of the country from ancient times and the evidence for and against the existence of an independent Tamil kingdom in the north several correspondents complained that going back to the past was a waste of time as we would never be able to find out what had really happened.”7 In a university system where history is studied by only a small frac¬ tion of the number of students who read history as recently as the 1960s, and in a society where historians—both casual ones and pro¬ fessionals—write popular histories in great quantity, of real sophis¬ tication, and with absolutely contradictory conclusions, it is easy to appreciate de Silva’s concern. Religious and political values above all, the priority of Buddhism—have always played a part in Sinhala historical writing. What makes the present situation unique is the size of the stakes—the partition of the island and who will rule it—cou¬ pled with the high literacy and hardened feelings of the ethnic com¬ munities involved. Through the first half of this century, a number of Tamil scholars—Mutu Coomara Swamy, Ananda Coomaraswamy, H. W. Tambiah—translated Buddhist works or pursued an interest in Sinhala history and culture. Hisselle Dhammaratne made Sinhala translations of the Silappadikamm and Manimekalai. In the present circumstances, it is hard to find either intellectuals or ordinary citizens with an interest in the ethnic “other.” Nothing is new about the “Mahavamsa” view of Sri Lankan’s past. Whether it was widely enter¬ tained or not, the Mahdvamsa has preserved parts of that view since the sixth century. But since the nineteenth century Sinhalas have 6. K. M. de Silva, “History and Historians in Twentieth Century Sri Lanka—the G. C. Mendis Memorial Lecture,” Sri Lankan Journal of Social Sciences 1 (December 1978): 9. 7. C. R. de Silva, “Ethnicity, Prejudice, and the Writing of History5’ (pamphlet), G. C. Mendis Memorial Lecture (Colombo: Evangel Press, 1984), P- 6. Also see Serena Tennekoon, “Some Reflections on Historical Revisionism and Nationalism: The Divayina Debate on Ethnicity and Social Change,” South Asia Bulletin 6 (Fall 1986): 27-33*

11 o

The Presence of the Past

thought of themselves as members of an Aryan race, and the joining of race to a heroic past has real consequences, for respect for heroes is not mutually exclusive in the way that being a member of a race is. The past that has interested most Sri Lankans is not the stately descent of the monarchy, but the doings of heroic figures such as Vijaya and Dutugamunu. And what people say about these figures is often unfaithful to what the Mahavamsa says, but of no less political and social consequence. Uncovering evidence that will settle these historical issues is conceivable, but there is no reason to assume that more evidence will decide things. The texts are generally known; re¬ cent discoveries of lithic inscriptions have largely confirmed long¬ standing academic opinion.8 Even the emergence of sophisticated work on Sri Lanka’s prehistory that would overturn traditional ideas about the Vijayan beginnings of civilization in the island need have no influence on popular thinking. There is already evidence to chal¬ lenge popular ideas about Vijaya and the origins of Sri Lankan soci¬ ety. It has had no effect on the public understanding that Sri Lankan history begins with Vijaya, that Dutagamunu saved Sinhala society from Tamil aggression, reclaimed the throne, and reunified the island, and that Sri Lankan history is the story of the Sinhala people. Eco¬ nomic and social change has called these sacred figures from the deep past, reanimated their mythologies, and rematerialized the relics on which their cults are founded. And where the ordinary person imag¬ ines the past by way of relics and places sacred to Buddhism, the national government does so by updating the sacred chronicle, but the two processes are intertwined. The Mahavamsa emphasizes Vijaya’s kingliness. It speaks of his su¬ pernatural origins, his evil conduct and his valor, his marriage to Kuvanna, whom he abandons for a second marriage to a princess brought by envoys from India. Several aspects of this account raise suspicion. As Mendis pointed out, it was composed at least 500 years after the events it recounts. There is no inscriptional evidence of Vi¬ jaya’s coronation or rule as king, no external confirmation of his life at all. The mythological details can be handled by merely separating them from what is to be taken seriously, but even events that do not defy the laws of physics require caution. Vijaya and his followers ar8. See K. Indrapala, “Epigraphical Discoveries in Ceylon in the Last Decade (i959~i969): A Brief Survey,” Ancient Ceylon 3 (August 1979): 155.

Contesting the Past

111

rive in a ship large enough to carry more than 700 people. A ship ol this size is at least conceivable, but unknown in the ancient world at large.9 An anthropological approach to these materials would treat Vijaya as a legend-become-history. But the lack of any independent evidence has not diminished the story’s potential as a vehicle for moral feeling and ideological assertion. Latter-day interest in Vijaya has picked up on a single part of his persona—his Aryan origins. That he was consecrated king has not been asserted or disputed, for very little depends on the issue of whether ancient Sri Lanka was a monarchy or Vijaya a monarch. Nothing much has been made ol his wild behavior in India or his cavalier treatment of Kuvanna. But whether Vijaya was North Indian, and thus Aryan, has been a subject of intense dispute, because he has become the founder ol a “race.” Conceiving of Vijaya as the founder ol the Sinhala race developed at a time early in this century when Sinhalas began to imagine the possibility that they might disappear as a people. Sinhala fears about the Tamil minority have been as much “racial” as economic, lor Sin¬ halas throughout the twentieth century have talked and written about the prospect that Sinhala culture might be lost and the Sinhala people deracinated. By the 1920s newspaper articles began to urge Sinhala women not to consort with non-Sinhala men, lest the purity of the race be lost.10 This contrast between the indigenous people of the country, having one blood and a distinctive culture, stemmed Irom Sinhala opposition to British hegemony in their lives. When Sri Lankan nationalists spoke ot the “nation” during the colonial period, at least some had all Sri Lankans in mind. But in recent years, nation¬ alism has come to refer to the patriotic sentiments one feels for one’s own ethnic community or race (jati alaya) alone, not the country as a whole. That reduction of scope follows naturally from the sentiments expressed in the Mahavantsa, and to this extent the Aiahavanysa is a self-fulfilling document. “History is witness,” argued Wijeratne Rambukwelle, the founder of an early Sinhala nationalist group, that only the peoples of Tri Simhala [the traditional three divisions of the Sri 9. Clarence Maloney, “The Beginnings of Civilization in South Indiaf Journal of Asian Studies 29:3 (1970): 603-16, and R. A. L. H. Gunawardana, “Seaways to Sihadipa,” unpublished paper read at the Sixteenth International Congress of Histori¬ cal Science, Stuttgart, August 19 8 5. 10. V tray a, April 17, 1926, quoted by Jayawardena, Ethnic and Class Conflicts in Sri Lanka, p. 31. In this case the non-Sinhala men were Malayali traders.

in

The Presence of the Past

Lankan state] are the indigenous people of Sri Lanka and that they alone are heirs to that rich inheritance of Rights, Privileges, Tradi¬ tions, and Way of Life which the Sinhala Race developed and sus¬ tained in spite of vicissitude, for twenty-five centuries. But the actions of Aliens living here now threaten, first, to usurp the People’s rights, political and economic, and then destroy the Nation.”11 Rambukwelle wrote those words as the leader of the Tri Sinhale Jatika Peramuna (Tri Sinhala National Front) at a point in the early 1950s when a Sinhala-majority government was beginning to cope direcdy with the Tamil minority. Anti-Tamil feelings were inchoate at the time but could be given a bloodcurdling context by making a historical argument. The Sinhala people, Rambukwelle writes, count themselves the victims of seventeen invasions. But the present-day effect of the Tamil community left behind by those invasions is not military. It is political and economic: Today the foreign encrustations and infiltrations are most powerful, and their grip on our economic and social life so intense and wide¬ spread that very soon it will be impossible to distinguish between what is indigenous and what is not, what is to Ceylon’s advantage and what is harmful, what is Sinhalese and what not, what is National and what is Foreign, what is Swabasha [local language] and what is not, who are entitled to rights in Ceylon and who are not, who are entided to own land and benefit from national institutions and who are not, who are entitled to trade and the power to govern and who are not, and finally who is a Citizen of Ceylon and who is not a Citizen.12 Such arguments owe a lot to the Vijaya legend, for he is the for¬ eigner who gives Sinhalas grounds for thinking of themselves as na¬ tives. The words of Palane Vajiranana are representative: “From the time of the arrival of Vijaya the citizens of this country had the name Sinhala. Ven. Mahinda came to the island 237 years from that date. Henceforth they were called Sinhala Buddhists. Thereafter for 2240 years Sinhalas were Buddhist as a nation.”13 Schoolchildren who came across the Vijaya story in the “Young Observer” section of the Sin11. Wijeratne Rambukwelle, “Tri Sinhale Jatika Peramuna will Unify the Nation, Under One Name, One Language, One Purpose” (pamphlet) (Kandy: Gamini Press,

I954P])» P- i12. Ibid., p. 3. 13. Palane Vajiranana, Sri Vajiranana Sdhityaya hevat Palane Siri Vidurundna una Pabanda (The Literature of Sri Vajiranana or the Compilation of Palane Sri Vid¬ urundna), ed. Madihe Pannasiha, (Colombo: Svabasha Mudranalaya, 1967), p. 20.

Contesting the Past

11 3

hala-language newspaper Mihira in 1985 learned this about Vijaya. In the process they also learned a few things about race, marriage, and being a parent: Now Kuveni [Kuvanna] as you know was of the Yaka race. It is true that Vijaya swore to be faithful to her. He had vowed never to take another wife, while she was alive. But his love for Kuveni was never very strong. She was very beautiful and he had fallen in love with her at first sight, and she was very kind and loving and helpful when he was fumbling in fear in this strange land. Now his power was estab¬ lished she was not useful any more and also, Vijaya was getting tired of her and her strange ways. He was longing for a wife of his own race. Vijaya was also thinking of his successors too. He loved his two chil¬ dren, but they were so unlike him in colour. It was unthinkable that Jeevahattha [his son by Kuveni] should rule after him. His pride of race was greater than his love for his son.14

Some writers talk about race as an irrepressible biological drive that forces itself into human affairs. On this account, Sinhalas are human beings united and motivated by common blood (Sinhala le iitiyan). Others, however, speak of race as a matter of cultural practices, not physiological facts. Even when foreigners settled in the island, the argument runs, they became Sinhala. They changed their race. Some¬ times the imagery is mixed. Consider, for example, the melding of bodily metaphors with those of trusteeship in a passage that a pub¬ lisher uses to introduce a collection of essays written by Madihe Pannasiha.15 “The nation and the land are joined together like the heart and the body (sirurin hadavat hadavatin sirurat). We can speak of the Sinhala nation and the Sinhala land in the same manner. The Sinhala who claim ownership to a nation from a written history of 2,500 years . . . did not look after this land like a hena [slash-and-burn garden] guarded by a scarecrow, but by sacrificing millions of lives and swimming in the enemy’s blood.” In the extreme case, such as the ethnic violence of August 1977, being different, whether that differ¬ ence is cultural or biological, justifies an extreme political moral: “Sri

14. “Vijaya Breaks Promise,” Story of Lanka, Mihira, May 8, 1985. 15. Madihe Pannasiha, Sinhalayage Anagataya> (What Is the Sinhalas’s Future?) (Colombo: Pahan Paharuva, 1985), “Apen Vachayak . . . !” (“A Word from Us”), n.p.

11 4

The Presence of the Past

Lanka is unquestionably the land of the Sinhalese. ... It is the duty of every Tamil in this country to return to Tamil Nadu.”16 Vijaya’s role in all this is central, but it is not indisputable. To the contrary, everyone—Sinhala and Tamil alike—argues about Vijaya, because the legend is so hegemonic that few Sri Lankans can simply ignore it. Sometimes it is argued that Vijaya was not the founder of die race, but that Sinhalas descended from the yakas who the Mahavamsa says were the island’s first inhabitants.17 On this account, Vi¬ jaya arrived later, bringing with him the Sinhala language and Aryan blood. Other writers claim that the island’s first settlers were the Aryan descendants of the heroes of the Mahabharata. Again Vijaya came later. “Besides these Indian Aryans, who came for trade pur¬ poses to Sri Lanka, no Dravidian ever stepped on these shores ear¬ lier.”18 Sedawatte Dhammarucchi, a monk who happened also to be J. R. Jayewardene’s brother, argued that Vijaya’s entourage fathered both Sinhalas and Sri Lankan Tamils: “the Sinhala and Tamil people even of the Northern and Eastern provinces are one and the same race. They are descended from King Vijaya’s Ministers, from whom the Sinhalese people take pride of descent.”19 Dhammarucchi builds his case by drawing on the Mahavamsa: “After sending Ambassadors to the King at Madurai,” he says the chronicle says, “in the South of the Madras Presidency which is now Tamil Nadu, when he had thus obtained many maidens . . . sent his daughter ... to the conqueror Vijaya . . . then Prince Vijaya consecrated a daughter of the Pandu King with solemn ceremony as his queen. After that the youngest son of the King of Madras was sent to Ceylon as the Prince Panduvasudeva who became ruler of Lanka and from them and their minis¬ ters are the Sinhala and Tamil people descended. Thus is the descent of the two nations according to the Mahavamsa.”20 16. F. R. Jayasuriya, Sun, August n, 1977, quoted in Tarcisius Fernando, Dia¬ logue n.s. 4 (September-December 1977): 95. 17. This account appears in a new vamsa by a Sinhala poet, Arisen Ahubudu. See “Sinhala Wamsa Kathawa Presented to PM,” Daily News, October 8, 1985. 18. E. T. Kannangara, Jaffna and the Sinhala Heritage (Colombo: M. D. Gunasena, 1984), p. i. 19. “Eelam, the Truth, Being a Memorandum by the Ven. Madihe Pannasiha, Maha Nay aka Thero of the Bhikkhu Training Centre, Maharagama, Submitted to the Sansoni Commission in 1979” (pamphlet) (Colombo: Svastika Press, n.d.), p. i. 20. Ibid., foreword, p. i. The anachronistic reference to the Madras presidency owes to Dhammarucchi’s dependence on one of Geiger’s footnotes, written at the time when there was a Madras presidency.

Contesting the Past

11 5

For their part, scholars interested in the question have generally assumed that Vijaya and his followers were North Indian, relying on both the chronicles and the character of Sinhala as a language to sup¬ port the assertion.21 The axis of contention over the origin of the Sinhala people has seldom run between North India and South India, but between western and eastern North India. Distinquished peo¬ ple have held each position. Burnouf favored the east coast theory; Geiger, H. W. Codrington, S. Paranavitana, L. S. Perera, and A. L. Basham favored the west coast. Recent writing on the topic suggests two waves, one from each coast.22 A number of amateur historians, by contrast, have contended that Sinhalas are South Indians by origin. The fact that several Sinhala caste communities—namely, the domi¬ nant Low Country caste groups (the Salagama, Karava, and Durava—are South Indians who migrated to Sri Lanka between the thir¬ teenth and eighteenth centuries and became Sinhala is not at issue here.23 Even though historical evidence for tracing these caste groups back to South India is much more substantial than any evidence we will ever find of Vijaya’s origins, these later waves of migration are not part of public discussion of ethnic identity. If they were, the argu¬ ment for there being a Sinhala “race” would collapse. The pale form of the race argument is sometimes found in ethnic terms. Where Gunawardana argues that Sinhala identity took its pre¬ sent shape only in the nineteenth century, other scholars have insisted on continuity, saying that Sinhala identity was never the privilege of the royal lineage alone, but encompassed all speakers of Sinhala. The most concerted attempt to make the case for a strong and broad Sin¬ hala identity is K. N. O. Dharmadasa’s attack on Gunawardana’s frequendy cited “People of the Lion” argument.24 Dharmadasa relies on the 1,200-odd inscriptions from early Sri Lanka to reach a conclusion diametrically opposed to Gunawardana, who finds there references to foreigners but none to Sinhalas. Following Paranavitana, Dharmadasa 21. See S. Paranavitana, “Aryan Settlements: the Sinhalese,” in H. C. Ray, ed., University of Ceylon History of Ceylon (Colombo: Ceylon University Press, 1959), vol. 1, part 1, p. 87. 22. See K. M. de Silva, A History of Sri Lanka, p.7. 23. Michael Roberts, “From Southern India to Lanka: The Traffic in Commodi¬ ties, Bodies and Myths from the Thirteenth Century Onwards,” South Asia n.s. 3 (June 1980): 36-47. 24. K. N. O. Dharmadasa, ‘The People of the Lion: Ethnic Identity, Ideology and Historical Revisionism in Contemporary Sri Lanka,” unpublished paper.

ii 6

The Presence of the Past

says that “there was no need to distinguish any person by referring to him as such when the people as a whole were entitled to that name.”25 In place of Gunawardana’s argument that Sri Lanka was a cosmopoli¬ tan place from the twelfdi to the nineteenth centuries, Dharmadasa points to a variety of Sinhala texts of the period espousing virulently anti-Tamil feelings. What I see in the evolution of Sinhala identity is neither the transformative effect of the nineteenth century nor conti¬ nuity with the ancient past, but the workings of a “principle of thrift.”

Tamils and the Sri Lankan Past The first compilation of Sri Lankan Tamil history is the Talpana Vaipava-malai, written in 1736 at the initiative of a Dutch official administering Jaffna. The relative youth of this chronicle has meant that Tamil writers have no counterchronicle of comparable age, and they are forced to argue about their own origins on Vijaya’s turf. One Tamil writer in the 1930s made Vi jay a a model of ethnic amity: “In King Vijaya’s time, Tamils were entrusted with positions of [sic] highest trust and responsibility.”26 Nowadays one more commonly hears some version of this view: “Vijaya’s first act was a genocide of the Tamils. He slaughtered thousands. Then he founded the Sinhala race and kingdom. So deep and old is our distrust of the Sinhala people.”27 Other Tamil writers deflate Sinhala claims by arguing that the early Sinhala were Tamils. Samuel Livingstone uses a set of letters to his son at the University of Peradeniya to expose the true nature of race in Sri Lanka. His book is intended for Tamil students and tells a thoroughly Tamil story: “the Sinhalese were Tamils up to the time Buddhism came to Ceylon, and thereafter these very Tamils became Sinhalese gradually. To put it somewhat mildly, the Sinhalese are not Aryans, but have been Dravidians right from the very beginning to

25. Ibid., p. 4. 26. A. Nathaniel, Morning Star, October 9, 1931, quoted by Jane Russell, Commu¬ nal Politics under the Donoughmore Constitution 1931-1947 (Dehiwala: Tisara Prakasakayo, 1982), p. 147. 27. S. N. Ruthramoorthy, India Today, March 31, 1984, quoted by Reggie Siriwardena, “National Identity in Sri Lanka: Problems in Communication and Educa¬ tion,” in Sri Lanka, The Ethnic Conflict (New Delhi: Navrang, 1984), p. 219.

Contesting the Past

11 7

the present day, and their language too has been Dravidian.”28 Liv¬ ingstone’s argument produces an irony characteristic of Tamil chal¬ lenges to the Aryan pretensions of the Sinhalas. In trying to undo the Sinhala position, they allow the Aryan theory to determine the terms of discussion. Denying that Sinhalas are Aryans usually assumes the truth of the theory itself, but excludes Sinhalas from its protection: “the claim that the swarthy natives of Ceylon are of Aryan origin is in conflict with our accepted knowledge of the complexion and physical features of the genuine Aryans.”29 The argument that Tamil writers challenge dates to Anagarika Dharmapala’s days. By the 1920s Sinhala claims to Aryan blood en¬ tered the public domain as academic and learned discourse;30 by the 1970s this cluster of mutually supporting ideas—of Aryan origins, racial purity, and religious destiny—became the dominant ideology of most Sinhalas, encompassing all social classes and influencing every major political party in the South.31 The channels along which these notions are passed to the next generation run directly through the educational system. Although G. C. Mendis was skeptical of the Mahavamsa as a historical source, he conceptualized the island’s history in a way that follows the Mahavamsa's plot. He divided the island’s history into two periods—a North India (and Aryan) period, when Sri Lankan society was constituted, and a South Indian period, when it was put under attack.32 Earlier generations of English-speaking Sin¬ hala and Tamils acquired the same periodization from Mendis’s Early History of Ceylon, Donald Obeyesekere’s Outlines of Ceylon History, L. E. Blaze’s History of Ceylon, S. A. Pakeman’s Ceylon and World History. As innocent as issues of periodization sound, they lead quietly to as¬ sumptions about priority, continuity, self, and other even on the part of Sri Lankans who would concede Vijaya’s mythical character. 28. Samuel Livingstone, The Sinhalese of Ceylon and the Aryan Theory (Colombo: Mortlake Press, n.d.), p. 119. 29. Ibid., p. 117. 30. See, for instance, W. F. Gunawardana, ‘The Aryan Question in Relation to India,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, Ceylon Branch 27:74 (1921): 12-60. 31. Jayawardena, Ethnic and Class Conflicts in Sri Lanka, p. 91. 32. G. C. Mendis, The Early History of Ceylon (Calcutta: Y.M.C.A. Publishing House, 1932), introduction. This external view of Sri Lankan history has been crit¬ icized by Sinhala writers for not analyzing the island’s history in its own right and by Tamil writers for underestimating the influence ol South India during the so-called North Indian period. See S. J. Gunasegaram, The Vijayan Legend and the Aryan Myth (Jaffna: Sri Lanka Printing Works, 1963), p. ii.

11 8

The Presence of the Past

The upsurge of Sinhala nationalist feelings in the 1920s and 1930s paralleled changing scholarly understandings, which in turn influ¬ enced popular thinking.33 It was in the 1920s that scholars began to turn away from the argument that Vijaya had sailed from a kingdom in northeastern India down the east coast to Sri Lanka. Geiger argued for a western origin for the Sinhala language, and Paranavitana made a similar case, identifying Slhapura, the town Slhabahu founded, with a town of the same name said by Hsiian Tsang to be located on the Indus in Punjab. His summary argument—“the evidence is over¬ whelming that the original Sinhalese came to Ceylon from die West¬ ern regions of the Aryavarta [land of the Aryans]”—indicates what Paranavitana thought was at stake, although he speaks of later settlers from the Gangetic plain.34 The Aryan character of the Sinhala people became stronger still if they originated in northwestern India in the hearthland from which Aryan languages spread over India. It was also in the 1920s that Tamil writers began to create the argument for Jaffna as an independent, culturally distinct kingdom.35 There is no doubt that early Buddhist writers used the expression “Arya.” The word had the sense “noble” and carried no racial conno¬ tation. Members of the monkhood were often so described. South Indians used the expression, referring to outsiders as Arya; the Mahavamsa uses the expression to refer to South Indians.36 The shifting references suggest that the expression was neither a racial category nor a fixed one. A variety of sources—Sinhala historical works, Tamil inscriptions, a reference in Ibn Batuta—all speak of the fourteenthcentury kings of Jaffna as Aryacakravarti (noble world conqueror). In this case the usage was certainly an honorific. The expression is an¬ cient, but it has been put to changing uses. By the 1940s the idea of Aryan race became a common assumption of administrative and sci33. The same parallelism applies to the Tamil case. Mudaliyar Rasanayagam’s An¬ cient Jaffna (New Delhi: Educational Services, 1984; originally published 1926) was first published at a time when Tamils were campaigning for separate representation in the State Council. Rasanayagam’s efforts to demonstrate the cultural and political integrity of Jaffna before colonialism was undertaken with an eye to what would be¬ come of Jaffna Tamils at the end of the colonial period. 34. Paranavitana, University of Ceylon History of Ceylon, 1:93. Paranavitana later identified Slhapura as a town on the Malay peninsula. 35. The rising tide of Jaffna Tamil identity is discussed in K. Kailasapathy, “The Cultural and Linguistic Consciousness of the Tamil Community in Sri Lanka” (pam¬ phlet) (Colombo: New Leela Press, 1982). 36. See Cv. 61.36 and 63.16 for examples.

Contesting the Past

11 9

entific work. In the Census Report of 1946, Sir Arthur Ranasinghe introduced quantitative data on the races of Sri Lanka by reiterating those assumptions and building on them with two ideas of his own. Vijaya’s home was in the Pandava kingdom mentioned in the Mahabharata, he said, and Vijaya’s queen came not from the South India Madurai but from the North India Madhura.37 What enabled Ranasinghe to revise the latter understanding was the ambiguity cre¬ ated by there being North and South Indian towns widi virtually identical names. The Pandyans named their capital city Madurai, after the Pandavas’ legendary capital, Madhura. These status claims derive from a historical text, the Harivamsa, which provides the genealogical links to connect the Pandyans with the Pandavas of the Mahahhamta. 3S But the point to remember is that instances of this sort suggest not genetic continuity but the force of a South Asian cultural practice. South Asian groups are like one another not by blood but by their aspiration for venerable and often common origins. The considerable research on blood and race in Sri Lanka seldom takes this into account. Virtually all of it assumes the usefulness of making a racial distinction between Sinhala and Tamil. Howard Stoudt’s Physical Anthropology of Ceylon relies on the distinction be¬ tween the Sinhala race, which he categorizes into two types, and the

37. Sir Arthur Ranasinghe, Ceylon at the Census of 1946 (Colombo: Government Press, 1950), p. 2. These two ideas were not ultimately Ranasinghe’s. They came from Theodore G. Perera’s Sinhala Bhashava (Sinhala) (Colombo: M. D. Gunasena, I932)Perera writes in his introduction: ‘The Sinhalese Language has, for sometime past. . . been a theme for speculation specially on the part of some Non-Sinhalese students to whom, in spite of their erroneous views and misleading statements with regard to past history and philology, we are greatly indebted. . . . Errors are sometimes inevitable but they are very unfortunate, when even eminent men lose balance and are led by racial and other prejudices to entertain erroneous views. The theory that Vijayi, the queen consort of the first Sinhalese King was a Tamil lady belonging to the Pandyan Kingdom of Southern India of which Madura was the capital at a certain period, has given rise to the fallacy that the Sinhalese Language took its shape from Tamil and that its grammar is mainly Dravidian” (p. ix). Perera’s argument was directed at W. F. Gunawardana, who had dismissed the North Indian argument as a “sporting theory.” Gunawardana himself thought Sinhalas were Dravidians: “I have found that the Sin¬ halese are an entirely Dravidian race with just a slight Aryan wash” (‘The Aryan Question in Relation to India,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, Ceylon 27:74 [1921 ]: 14). 38. K. A. Nilakanta Sastri called the process “dynastic drift”; see his Colas (Madras: University of Madras Press, 1936), 1:101.

i2o

The Presence of the Past

pre-Dravidians.39 A more recent example is an article presenting re¬ search on the distribution of blood types among Sinhalas and Tamils living in Anuradhapura. Despite its premise that these racial catego¬ ries are legitimate tools of analysis, the article concludes that there is no appreciable similarity between the blood-type distributions of Sinhala and of North Indian groups.40 As for Tamil writers who have tried to challenge the Aryan claims of Sinhala writers, the argument gets framed more often in historical, inscriptional, and linguistic terms than biological ones. Rasanayagam contended that the nag as of the Mahavamsa were the ancestors of the present-day Tamils and that a naga kingdom flourished in Jaffna as early as 1500 b.c.e., giving one of their princesses in marriage to Arjuna, the protagonist of the Mahabharataf On his account, Tamils are like Sinhalas—North In¬ dians and Aryans—a claim that rests on no more evidence that Ranasinghe’s. D. J. Kanagaratnam used both Brahmi inscriptions and archaeological evidence to argue that Aryan and Dravidian cultures had fused on the mainland long before the Vijayan civilization spread to Sri Lanka.42 If the nagas and yakas that Vijaya encountered were not literally snakes and demons but South Indians, the Tamil claim on Sri Lanka improves proportionally, and this the Sinhala fundamentalist inter¬ pretation of the Mahavamsa will not tolerate. Because the Mahavamsa says that Sri Lanka was inhabited only by nagas when the Buddha visited the island, a Sinhala professor argues, this assertion “proves beyond any reasonable doubt that the Nagas mentioned in the Ma¬ havamsa were not human beings.”43 Paul Jayaranjan counters that claim by saying that the Tamils, not Vijaya and his retinue, were the original inhabitants.44 The more common Tamil turn is to look to the Indian past for their origins. Rasanayagam is only one example. Liv-

39. Howard Stoudt, The Physical Anthropology of Ceylon, ed. P. E. P. Deraniyagala (Colombo: Dept, of National Museums, 1961). 40. D. F. Roberts, C. K. Creen, and K. P. Abeyaratne, “Blood Groups of the Sinhalese,” Man n.s. 7 (March 1972.): 122-27. 41. Rasanayagam, Ancient Jaffna, p. 44. 42. D. }. Kanagaratnam, “Tamils and Cultural Pluralism in Ancient Sri Lanka” (pamphlet) (Colombo: Ananda Press, 1979). 43. Sirimal Ranawella, “So-called Kingdom of Jaffna,” Daily News, June 18, 1979. The Mahavamsa passage that Ranawella has in mind is 15.162-65. 44. Paul Jayaranjan, Historical Truths of the Legend Relating to Prince Vijaya (Col¬ ombo: M. D. Gunasena, 1985), pp. 19 and 55.

Contesting the Past

izi

ingstone’s contention that the Indus Valley civilization was a Dravidian civilization has surprising advantages. It is clear, he says, “that the Dravidians did not come to India from anywhere else, for they presumably were in India all the time.”45 Livingstone’s authority is K. Balasingham, whom he quotes as saying, ‘The Dravidian race did not come to India from the North but entered India from the South. It probably occupied the Island Continent of which Ceylon formed but a small part.”46 The Dravidians, on his account, not the Aryans, pro¬ duced the first great civilization ot India. But since Sri Lanka was part of India at this distant point in the past, Tamils can also claim histori¬ cal priority in Sri Lanka. Jayaranjan too identifies the early career of the Dravidian people with the Indus Valley civilization. He does so by tracing the naga cult to an Indus Valley origin, then showing the prevalence ot naga placenames and personal-names and phallic terracottas in ancient Sri Lanka to suggest a connection between both places.47 Once such an argu¬ ment establishes the early role of Tamils in Sri Lankan history, the next turn reverses his argument for separate Sinhala and Tamil “pasts.” The writer denies the purity of both races and languages, Sinhala and Tamil. Pointing to Vijaya’s marriage to a princess ot Madura and his followers’ similar marriages to South Indian women lays the foundation for racial mixture.48 Even if Vijaya spoke Sinhala, Livingstone reasons, he also spoke Tamil. So did his followers. How else could they have spoken to their Tamil wives? What language are the children of such unions likely to learn? They of course would have learned their mothers’ Tamil.49 James Rutnam uses his own observa¬ tions to make the case for racial mixture: “even in South India where there is a fair concentration of white and black brahmins, it will be most difficult to put those who claim to be Aryans or Dravidians into separate ethnic compartments.”50 He goes on to invoke academic au¬ thority: ‘There is not even a tittle of archeological evidence to prove a North Indian Aryan colonisation of Ceylon. But nobody denies the 45. Livingstone, The Sinhalese of Ceylon, p. 66. Italics in original. 46. Ibid. p. 67. 47. Paul Jayaranjan, History of the Evolution of the Sinhala Alphabet (Colombo: Col¬ ombo Apothecaries, n.d.), pp. 12-21. 48. Jayaranjan, Historical Truths of the Legend Relating to Prince Vijaya, pp. 27-32. 49. Livingstone, The Sinhalese of Ceylon, p. 99. 50. James Rutnam, “Sinhala and Sanskrit,” Times of Ceylon, March 6, 1969, in James Rutnam, Mixed Grill (Colombo: n.p., 1969), p. 2.

122

The Presence of the Past

peaceful Aryan penetration of South India and its subsequent absorp¬ tion.” In denying the Aryan theory, Rutnam himself succumbs to its charms, suggesting the Aryans moved as a group into peninsular India. Most students of South Asian prehistory would say that the Aryans did not migrate as a single group into peninsular India or even into India, but were racially mixed back on the Central Asian plateau. In newspaper correspondence on the Aryan-Dravidian controversy, Rutnam attempts to reduce the distance between the Sinhala and Tamil communities in another way. He recalls a part of the past when it was possible to be a Tamil Buddhist. I think it is time that we gave their due place to the Dravidians of South India for their magnificent contribution to the heritage of Pali Buddhism. Buddhaghosa was the shining light among them. But there were several others such as the great Buddhadatta, Dhammapala, Sanghamitra, Bodhi Dharma, Ilam Bodhiyar, Sittalai Sattanar, etc. The greatest Buddhist epic Manimekalai was written in Tamil by a Tamil in the second century a.d. Even Kaccayana, author of the first Pali grammar, was a Dravidian of South India, which for over a millennium continued to be a centre of Pali Buddhism. "Sinhalese Buddhism,” Sir Charles Eliot wrote while acknowl¬ edging that it came to Ceylon under the auspices of Asoka, "had probably a closer link with Southern India than the legend suggests.”51

Rutnam addresses these comments to Oliver Goonawardena, who in an earlier letter to the Times of Ceylon denied that Buddhaghosa was a Tamil. Both writers cite scholarly authorities and can do so because the commentator’s career has been associated with a number of places in both North and South India. Why the birthplace of a fifth-century Bud¬ dhist commentator attracts anything more than academic interest should be plain. To suggest that Buddhaghosa was a Tamil is to deny the mu¬ tually exclusive racial and cultural histories of the two communities. A newspaper account of a 1985 public meeting indicates that the matter had not been put to rest. Newspapers have published that in a speech made at a religious function in Galle a scholar monk Buddhaghosa had been identified as a Tamil. It appears that in that meeting there were many laymen and monks, includ¬ ing the mahanayaka. But no one had contested this statement. According to what we know Buddhaghosa was not a Tamil but a brahmin. ... [In 51. James Rutnam, “Aryan-Dravidian Controversy: More about Sinhala,” Times of Ceylon, March 12, 1969, reprinted in James Rutnam, ed., Mixed Grill, pp. 5-6.

Contesting the Past

123

Buddhadatta’s History of Pali Literature] on p. 158 it says that near the Bo tree in Buddhagaya, he was born the son of an advisory brahmin (purohita).52 His mother was Kesini, a brahmin woman. This also proves he was a brahmin. When the father is a brahmin, the son cannot be a Tamil. . . . About Buddhaghosa’s birth there are several opinions. None of them says that he was a Tamil. Therefore we appeal to educated laymen and monks to give us a correct interpretation.53

The assumptions that ancient societies were fixed in place and individ¬ uals did not move between them has especially malignant results in South Asia, where regional states have come and gone, and large human communities have moved about the subcontinent with great frequency. But a South Asian cultural “regularity”—the tendency of later states, caste communities, religious centers, families, and individuals to claim descent from noble groups of the past—creates the appearance of stabil¬ ity. What at first appears to be genetic continuity between groups far separated in time and space often turns out to be a rhetorical claim made by some arriviste group. Colonialism and the imposition of West¬ ern education neither replaced this practice nor changed the traditional grounds of prestige. To the contrary, Western influence deepened tradi¬ tional status concerns. Western academic disciplines—archaeology, epi¬ graphy, philology, physical anthropology—gave South Asians the tools to make such claims in a more sophisticated way. Western academic practices empowered the delineation of different kinds of ancient Sri Lankans, Sinhala and Tamil, Aryan and Dravidian, Buddhist and Hindu, and Western interest in Aryan peoples and their own inclusion in this category made identity and status concerns doubly seductive.S4 One has only to read Geiger or Basham on Aryan peoples to see how Paranavitana could have tided one of his chapters of the University of Ceylon History of Ceylon, “Aryan Setdements: the Sinhalese.” And from 52. Buddhadatta says nothing about ‘Tamil” and “brahmin” being mutually exclu¬ sive terms, but this surprisingly well-spread notion derives from a misunderstanding of the Tamil nonbrahmin movement of the early twentieth century. See Eugene Irschick, Politics and Social Conflict in South India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), pp. 1—26. 53. “Buddhaghosa Dravidayek Nove” (“Buddhaghosa Was Not a Tamil ), Sinhala Bauddaya, February 24, 1986. 54. See Leon Poliakov, The Aryan Myth (New York: Basic Books, 1971), pp. 182214.

12 4

The Presence of the Past

Paranavitana, it is only one step to literate Sri Lankans speaking in a similar idiom.55

Reconstructing Dutugamunu in Modern Circumstances The contest that developed over Dutugamunu, by contrast, turns less on the interplay of Western and local cognitive interests and more on a conversation between the Sri Lankan past and its present. Although Dutugamunu is a figure more powerful than Vijaya and the very para¬ digm of moral behavior and political will, the Aryan connection here is less important than the Buddhist one. In his batde to reclaim the throne of Sri Lanka, Dutugamunu hears that his troops have inadvertently killed their own people. He makes a “solemn declaration”: tcNot for the joy of sovereignty is this toil of mine, my striving [has been] ever to establish the doctrine of the Sambuddha” (Mv. 25.17). This assertion is the Mabdvamscfs best-known passage, and the summary expression of Buddhist thinking about the righteous use of power. One rules properly only by keeping personal interest subordinate to the interests of the Buddhist sasana. Where the Buddha told his monks to be guided by the Dhamma, Dutugamunu says he has been guided by his desire to estab¬ lish that teaching as a historical institution. The assertion subdy distinquishes Buddhism from the Sinhala people, insisting that the accidental taking of Sinhala lives is justified by Dumgamunu’s motivation to pro¬ tect Buddhism. With time, the passage has acquired a second sense, joining Buddhism and the Sinhala people. The obligation to protect Buddhism is an ethnic responsibility. Thus, when Cyril Mathew begins his Sihaluni! Budusasuna Berajjaniv (Sinhalas! Save the Buddhist Sasana) with Dumgamunu’s epigram, the force of the words shifts from the subordination of personal interest to the common obligation of Sinhalas to keep Buddhism in its proper place.56 Dumgamunu’s struggle combines the key figures of Sinhala national55. See, for instance, Wilhelm Geiger’s Culture of Ceylon in Mediaeval Times, ed. Heinz Bechert (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, i960), pp. 18-25, and Basham’s “Prince Vijaya and the Aryanization of Ceylon,” Ceylon Historical Journal 1:3 (1951): 163-71. Paranavitana’s chapter appears in Ray, ed.. University of Ceylon History of Ceylon, vol. 1, part 1, pp. 82-97. 56. See C. Cyril Mathew, Sihaluni! Budusasuna Berdganiv (Colombo: J. F. and I. Printers, 1981), frontispiece.

Contesting the Past

125

ist feeling: race, the unification of the island as a spiritual goal, foreign domination, religious responsibility. Walpola Rahula shows how the an¬ cient leader serves modem interests: A Sinhala prince from [the South] Dutugamunu by name rallied the whole nation round him in his fight for national independence against the invader. His slogan was: “Not for kingdom, but for Buddhism. The slogan was psychologically so effective that even bhikkhus left the Order and joined the liberating army. To fight against a foreign invader lor national independence became an established Buddhist tradition, since freedom was essential to the spiritual as well as to the material progress of the country. This was the beginning of real Sinhala nationalism, or rather religio-nationalism. From that day onward, throughout the history ol Sri Lanka up to the present time, Buddhism has swayed the national and political life of the people tremendously. Dutugamunu’s slogan in varying modem versions is being used even today by some political parties in Sri Lanka particularly during Parliamentary elections.5

Indeed it is. Anagarika Dharmapala employed DuUigamunu as a rally¬ ing figure for Sinhala youths. The nationalist playwright John de Silva wrote a play about him, as well as one about his mother. When labor leaders built a workers’ movement by stressing love of nation, which is to say ethnic community (jati alaya), they invoked DuUigamunu.58 Since the Donoughmore reforms of the 1930s, the story of Dutugamunu and Elara has been the most common figure for characterizing relations be¬ tween Sinhalas and Tamils. In the 1939 meetings of the State Council, a leading Tamil politician accused the leading Sinhala nationalist organiza¬ tion of holding a meeting at Anuradhapura where “Tamils were called usurpers and there was an injunction issued that a DuUigamunu should arise and throw these usurpers out.”59 When Sinhala civil servants orga¬ nized themselves secredy in the 1950s to combat Christian influence in 57. Walpola Rahula, “Influence of Buddhism on Sri Lanka’s Culture,” Sun, Octo¬ ber 15, 1984. Early in his career, Rahula held rather different views, telling the journalist D. B. Dhanapala: “At a time when even a hundred percent Indian like Mr. Jinnah has denied that he is an Indian, I stand before you to proclaim that we Sinhalese and Tamils in this island are blood of the Indian blood, flesh of the Indian flesh , see D. B. Dhanapala, Eminent Indians (Baroda: Nalanda Publishers, 1947)1 P- 173. 58. Michael Roberts, “Fissures and Solidarities: Weaknesses within the Working Class Movement in the Early Twentieth Century,” Modem Ceylon Studies 5:1 (1974)* 5~ 6. 59. Hansard, 1939, column 959, quoted by Russell, Communal Politics under the Donoughmore Constitution, p. 143, n. 5.

126

The Presence of the Past

government, they called their group Dutthagamani rahas Sanvidhanaya (Dutugamunu’s Secret Organization).60 Reform groups such as the Mahajana Eksath Peramuna (United Peoples’ Front) went to An¬ uradhapura to take oaths to protect Buddhism. They took that oath standing in front of a statue of Dumgamunu.61 So did the Pancha Maha Bala Mandalaya in 1954 when die group began its campaign for S. W. R. D. Bandaranaike, as did the Sinhala Bala Mandalaya in its 1982 campaign to save the Sinhala race.62 Political protests in Colombo—the march on Parliament in 1966 by political monks to protest legislation favoring equal language rights for Tamil is a good example—often gather in front of the statue of Viharamahadevl, Dumgamunu’s motiier. The park is a convenient place to collect marchers, but clearly something more is involved.63 When the Sri Lanka Freedom party (SLFP) government tried to take over Lake House, United National party (UNP) monks held a month-long pint (chanting of Buddhist verses) ceremony in die park. Lake House sur¬ vived, and popular confidence in die power of pirit and the auspicious¬ ness of the park increased accordingly. When Sinhalas today decry the destruction of sacred places in the Northern and Eastern Provinces, the evocation of Dutugamunu’s time sometimes leads them to realize how like the past the present has become. Testifying at hearings on antiTamil violence in 1977, a Buddhist monk said: “there was an attempt to destroy Buddhist places and harass Buddhist monks [too] during the time of Dumgamunu.”64 At other times it leads nationalists to realize that the present danger is much graver than the past: ‘The murders caused by the insurgents near the Sri MahaBodhi at Anuradhapura was an incident that never occurred even in the time of Dutthagamani and

Go. Baddegama Wimalawamsa, quoted in K. N. O. Dharmadasa, “Buddhism and Politics in Modern Sri Lanka,” unpublished paper, p. 22. 61. Ibid., p. 19. 62. “Rousing Welcome for ‘Save Sinhala Race’ March,” Island, May 24, 1982. The customary itinerary for such marches is to take a pledge in Colombo in front of the ViharamahadevI statue, march to Anuradhapura, and reiterate the pledge in front of the Dumgamunu statue. 63. Sumanatissa, Madagoda, K. H. M. Sumatipala, and Karunasena Jayalath, eds., Dambarave Ratanasdra Gundnusmrti Sangrahaya (A Collection of Remembrances of Dambarave Ratanasara ) (Colombo: Ceylon Government Press, 1971), p. 47. 64. Testimony of Kaduwedduve Nandarama before the Sansoni Commission; see ‘There Were No Traditional Tamil Areas in Past: Bhikkhu,” Island, August 25, 1978.

Contesting the Past

127

Elara ”65 Even when writers dismiss Dutugamunu’s relevance for today’s political circumstances—“The causes of the riots in August and Septem¬ ber 1977 have to be looked for a little earlier than 1977 but not as early as 161 bc when King Duttu Gemunu reigned”—the striking idea is the very possibility of drawing a line from the events ot 161 b.c.e. to the present.66 Dumgamunu is the subject of one ot the most distinquished Pali poems of modem time—Henpitagedera Nanasiha’s Gamani Gita. Sinhala schoolbooks—language texts as well as histories—continue to use him as the example of moral behavior and love of country.67 His noble parentage, the details of his birth, and his political and social service accomplishments are treated in several governmental publications. The souvenir issue released for the enshrinement ot Dumgamunu s ashes in Anuradhapura begins with the minister of cultural affairs striking a tamiliar parallel: The Vamsakathas [histories] give ample testimony to show how the great king Dutugamunu was successful in making the country stable in econ¬ omy and health. He made the country prosperous and built a righteous society following the footsteps of the Buddha Dhamma. I would also like to state that the present government too had laid the foundations for a righteous society.68

Sinhala politicians find Dumgamunu wherever they look. At the in¬ auguration of the Kotmale dam, Gamini Dissanayake told his audience that “Kotmale has a unique place in Sri Lanka’s history because King Dumgamunu . . . spent his youth in the mountains and valleys of Kot¬ male.”69 Having found a connection between the past and present, he went on to find a connection to economic development. 65. Bauddha Lanka, May 15, 1986. 66. Eelam—the Truth, p. 18. The connection between Dutugamunu’s time and the present was here made in Tamil testimony before the Sansoni Commission, claiming that Dumgamunu started the Sinhala-Tamil problem. 67. See W. I. Siriweera, ‘The Dutthagamani-Elara Episode: A Reassessment,” Eth¬ nicity and Social Change in Sri Lanka (Colombo: Karunaratne and Sons, 1984), pp- 67—

/

68

68. Sirimal Ranawella, Dutugdmunumaharajatuma (Colombo: Sri Lanka Govern¬ ment Press, 1980), preface. 69. ‘Terrorism Sheds Blood in Vain,” Island, August 25, 1985. The Dutugamunu myth also figured prominently in official publications for the Kotmale hydroelectric proj¬ ect. Like his father before him, Dudley Senanayake by contrast took Parakramabahu as a model, drawing an analogy between his efforts to build irrigation works and Para-

128

The Presence of the Past

Although there are some who would attempt to label him a racialist, the facts showed that Dutugamunu was one who went beyond the narrow bounds of race. His struggle was to protect the unity and integrity of the country and the pre-eminent position of the Buddha Sasana. . . . There was ample evidence that when there was disunity among communities the country was faced with decline. Foreign pressures increased during such periods. In most instances the cause of disunity was economic.

The minister then thanked the Swedish government for its assistance in building Kotmale, adding that Sri Lanka was underdeveloped “not be¬ cause of any shortcomings in [our] history or culture but because our natural resources are extremely limited.” Here the idea that Dutu¬ gamunu established the paradigm of good government appears in an¬ other form—he brought unity to the country and built great irrigation works, using arms and political skill to overcome the limits of an un¬ promising environment. As a potential leader of the UNP, as a son of Kotmale, and as the minister in charge of the construction of the new irrigation systems in the North, Dissanayake had additional reason to look to Dumgamunu. When he recalled the example of Dutugamunu’s leadership, he foregrounded his own claims. In the latter stages of the Mahavali project, Jayewardene made a stronger assertion, saying that he had done a greater service for the country than Dumgamunu, a conceit too grandiose for some of Jayewardene’s opponents. Labuduve Siridhamma chose an appropriate place, a meeting commemorating national heroes, to respond: There are no national leaders in our country today. We have only party leaders. A national leader should look into both the misery and happiness (,dukkha siipa) of the masses. They also can be recognized as national heroes (jatika virayan) who come to the rescue of the nation when it is in danger. It is sad to see those who sacrificed their lives for the country being held in contempt by those who are being considered the national heroes of the day. Having borrowed money from other countries and making one or two reservoirs and stating that they had served the country more than Dumgamunu—we should sympathize with these people!70 kramabahu’s earlier achievements. Senanayake’s opponents took up the analogy too, call¬ ing him “Pacha Bah if’ (false Bahu). See “National Unity—Basis of Ceylon’s Progress,” Ceylon Observer, March 30, 1970. Senanayake called his five-year term of office (19651970) the Parakramabahu yugaya (age). The SLFP responded by calling Senanayake’s term the panpiti yugaya (the age of flour), pointing out the fact that Sri Lankans ate more bread than rice during Senanayake’s administration. 70. “Dumgamunu vani vlrayanta garahimata Ida nodiya yutuyi” (“Heroes Such as Dutugamunu Should Not be Treated with Contempt”), Dinakara, February 9, 1984.

Contesting the Past

129

Siridhamma elsewhere suggested that Jayewardene was a traitor (drohiyd) to the Sinhala people.71 Here again the Dutugamunu paradigm ap¬ pears even before his name is invoked because he was the hero who saved Sinhalas from destruction. For Siridhamma’s purposes, Jayewar¬ dene is the national leader who betrayed them to the Tamils. In the eyes of Tamil critics, by contrast, Jayewardene is a Sinhala chauvinist all the more despicable for having hidden his true social ori¬ gins. Here Tamil critics insist not that Jayewardene has betrayed the Sinhalas or the Tamils, but that he is a Tamil. A recent article in the Tamil Times (the chief organ of Tamil propaganda in London) raised this charge against both the origins of Sinhala leaders and Jayewardene’s own exploitation of the past: During his visit to the United States last year, President Jayawardene pompously proclaimed that he was the 205 th |sic] Head ot State ol Sri Lanka in its 2,500-year long history. Many a king who sat on the “Sin¬ halese Throne” during the ancient and medieval periods, was either a Tamil like the last king of Kandy Sri Wickrema Rajasingha, or a descen¬ dant of a Tamil like Parakramabahu the Great. Passage of many centuries or even the intervening 450 years of European rule do not seem to have altered this historical tradition. Even in the late 20th century, two descen¬ dants of Tamils, Jayawardene and Mrs. Bandaranaike, would appear to be needed to lead the “Sinhala-Buddhist” country.72

In the body of the article James Rutnam argues that Jayewardene de¬ scended from a man named Tambi Mudaliyar, a Chitty (merchant caste) trader from the Coromandel Coast, who settled near Colombo and mar¬ ried a Sinhala woman, taking her name, Jayewardene, and her religion, Christianity. Tambi Mudaliyar first spied for the Dutch, until he be¬ trayed them for the British. In both cases, he betrayed the Sinhalas. Then again, on Rutnam’s account at least, they were not his people in any case. As Rutnam builds this argument, Dutugamunu is never far away. Junius Richard is as far different from Duthu-Gemunu, the great and chivalrous Sinhalese national hero, as chalk is to cheese. But behold Ju¬ nius coming riding on an elephant, and masquerading as a Duthu-Gem71. Jayewardene responded by casting aspersions on Sindhammas ordination, say¬ ing he was robed improperly. 72. James T. Rutnam, aA Legacy of Tambi Mudaliyar, Tumil Times, June 19 ^ 5 •> pp. 12-15. This article first appeared in another periodical. Tribune, August 30, 1957.

130

The Presence of the Past

unu to drive the Tamils into the sea. And for what? What have the Tamils done, the Tamils who have a culture, a language and a territory which have received the sanction of centuries of history? Has Sinhalese chivalry died with Duthu-Gemunu die First? Or is it that counterfeit DuthuGemunus, now in circulation, are debasing the true gold of Sinhalese currency? I would request Junius Richard Jayawardena to pause and re¬ flect for a while. If he does he will come to realise that before driving the other Tamils into the sea, it is his own body that he should throw into the sea first. For alas, of the chosen 2,500 years of Junius Richard’s long pedigree, in the direct male line 2,500 years at least consist cf a line of fullblooded Tamils and proto-Tamils, some of them noble, but at least one of them, very unnoble.73

There is the powerful temptation with Dumgamunu to see his career in contemporary terms—as the leader of a specifically Sinhala Buddhist army, who acted to restore the island to Sinhala Buddhist hands, for Buddhist goals. His enemy Elara is portrayed as a specifically Tamil leader. As the souvenir pamphlet the government issued when Dumgamunu’s ashes were recently installed in Anuradhapura indicates, the textual evidence for making that claim comes from a historical period much later than Mahanama’s time: The Buddha Sasana that [had been] established by Ven. Mahinda nine decades earlier was in decline due to un-Buddhist (abauddbaya) actions of the Colas. Rasavahini [a fourteenth-century text] states that the Colas of Elara had converted the beautiful city of Anuradhapura into a graveyard. They had destroyed the viharas and dagabas. The pleasant vihara premises were filled with dirty smelling matter. The branches of the sacred bo tree where devas and men venerated were cut. The Colas had used the sur¬ roundings as lavatories and latrines. Buddha images had been shattered. They lived in shrine rooms and behaved like animals. They caused inde¬ cent actions. When bhikkhus were seen, they pulled off their robes. . . . King Dumgamunu resolved that this should change.74

The anguish that the Mabdvamsa says Elara felt when he accidentally damaged a dagaba is replaced in this account by an assertion made some fifteen centuries after the event that “the Colas of Elara converted . . . Anuradhapura into a graveyard.” The triumphal battle by which Dum¬ gamunu defeated Elara has become the event by which these atrocities 73. Italics in original. 74. Dutugamunumaharajatwna (Colombo: Sri Lanka Government Press, 1980), pp. 27-28. The Dipavamsa says nothing of these degradations and nothing of Elara’s being a Co}a.

Contesting the Past

i3i

are righted and Sinhala control over the entire island reestablished. As Gunawardana has shown, external evidence and scattered remarks in the Mahavamsa itself deconstruct this anachronistic story—Dutugamunu’s campaign most likely received some Tamil support, and Elara seems to have had ministers advising him who were Buddhist, and perhaps Sin¬ hala.75 Elara’s defeat did not immediately give Dunigamunu control over the entire island, and establishing central control over the island seems to have become a realistic aspiration only long after Dutugamunu’s time. But creating political unity, and doing so in one fell swoop, domi¬ nates contemporary recollections of Dutugamunu’s career. Sirimal Ranawella, going one step farther, draws on the Sahassavatthuppakamna, another fourteenth-century work that formed the basis for the Rasavahini, to insist that it was not Buddhism alone that motivated DuUigamunu, but also his desire to unify the whole of Sri Lanka as an end in itself.76 Projecting the sharp ethnic divisions of the present on Dutugamunu’s time creates textual contradictions. The main problem is the character of Elara—too noble and well liked after ruling Sri Lanka for fbrty-four years for chauvinist tastes. Dutugamunu treated him with great respect. Having defeated the older man in battle, Dunigamunu had Elara buried on the spot where he tell near the south gate of Anuradhapura, cele¬ brated his funeral rites, and called for the public veneration of his re¬ mains. If the nobility of a Tamil adversary runs against the public mood in Sri Lanka today, one solution is to deny outright that Elara was a Tamil.77 Recent archaeological evidence has been used to substantiate this assertion. In giving testimony to the commission that investigated the ethnic violence of 1977, an assistant commissioner of archaeology argued on the basis of his department’s work in Jaffna that Elara was an Aryan, not a Tamil from the Cola country.78

75. See W. I. Siriweera, ‘The Dutthagamani-Elara Episode: A Reassessment,” p. 58-

76. Ranawella, Dutugdmunumabarajatumd, p. 37. 77. A. D. T. E. Perera, “Elara Dravidayek Nove” (“Elara Was Not a Dravidian”) Vidyodaya Journal of Arts, Science and Letters 3 (July 1970): 124. 78. ‘The Belief King Elara Was a Tamil Is Now in Doubt,” Daily News, February 20, 1979. The most ingenious explanations come from Henpitagedera Nanavasa, who argues in his Ph.D. dissertation that Dunigamunu was not Sinhala but a Persian follower of Mithra; see Gananath Obeyesekere, ‘The Conscience of Dutthagamani Abhaya: Or, The Anthropologist as Mythmaker,” Thirteenth Annual Conference on South Asia, Uni¬ versity of Wisconsin, Madison, unpublished Keynote lecture, i984-> P- 4-

132-

The Presence of the Past

Bringing Elara over to the Aryan side solves one problem but does nothing for another dilemma. Whether he was Aryan or Dravidian, Elara’s tomb received veneration until the recent past; Dumgamunu’s tomb went unmarked. The assymetry has now been put right. Scattered evidence suggests that Elara’s tomb was venerated until the second half of the nineteenth century. Besides the sixth-century reference in the Mahdvamsa, there is a ninth-century reference to the practice in the Vamsatthappakdsinl, a fourteenth-century reference in the Saddharmalankamya, an eighteendvcentury reference in the Rdjavaliya, as well as subsequent reports from colonial observers.79 Since Sinhala historical writing bor¬ rows unabashedly from its predecessors, these reports cannot be treated as absolutely independent, and that fact gives the colonial report special importance. In 1818 after his rebellion against the British had been put down, a Kandyan chieftain, Pilimatalawe, fled northward. When he got to Anuradhapura, hounded by British troops and nearly dead, he got down from his palanquin as Dumgamunu commanded, “and, not knowing the precise spot, walked on, until assured that he had passed far beyond this ancient memorial.”80 The first person to challenge the folk tradition’s identification of this practice with Elara was the first Sinhala commissioner of archaeology, Senarat Paranavitana, who suggested that the mound held the relics of Dumgamunu, not Elara. His argument followed a suggestion in H. C. Bell’s archaeological reports on Anuradhapura, raising the possibility that the mound near the south gate might be the dagaba of the Dakkhina-viham in which Dumgamunu’s ashes were said to be interred. Bell was very cautious in raising this conjecture. By contrast, Paranavitana erected a signboard, identifying the mound as Dumgamunu’s tomb, as soon as he had become commissioner of archaeology. He also began the excavation of the Dakkhina-vihara, eventually coming upon deposits of charcoal and ash. Using a set of cross-references found in the Saddhammalankdmya, the fourteenth-century text that recounts the Dumgamunu legend for a popular audience, he went on to identify the ash as Dum¬ gamunu’s mortal remains and had it transferred to the Anuradhapura 79. See James Rutnam, ‘The Tomb of Elara at Anuradhapura,” lecture. University of Jaffna, March 1981. 80. Jonathan Forbes, Eleven Tears in Ceylon (London: Richard Bendey, 1848; re¬ printed in 1972 by Gregg Publishers), 1:233. 1° a subsequent footnote, Forbes adds, ‘The remains of [Elara’s] tomb, and the custom alluded to, still exist at Anuradhapura,” (p. 374), suggesting that the folk practice continued through the 1840s.

Contesting the Past

133

museum. After the election of the present government, the relics were brought to Colombo and sealed to prevent further deterioration. In 1980 the Cabinet returned the ashes to the Dakkhina-vihara, resolving to build an 800,000-rupee display case that would allow pilgrims to view the ashes through bullet-proof glass.81 James Rutnam’s reaction captures Tamil feelings: In this dharmistha [righteous, Jayewardene’s campaign slogan] era it is a cruel irony of fate that a cherished memory which has lasted for over 2000 years, and which had been a proud boast of the people of Sri Lanka, should now be threatened with extinction. There is not a tittle of evidence that Dutugam units ashes were buried in this mound. And the “ash” that was said to have been found among the sand and charcoal that had contaminated it may not be human ash, tar less 2000 years old; but if at all it is so, the likely one to whom it belongs is Elara. Let us not make ourselves the laughing stock of the world.82

Important relics such as die Buddha’s alms bowl have been lost in the past, and others have been taken by European invaders, and ostensibly destroyed, only to reappear. But nothing like the present-day rediscov¬ ery of relics seems to have gone before. Sirisamghabodhi’s relics have been found at Rajanganaya, the place where he compassionately offered his head to a poor man. The Cultural Affairs Ministry later impaneled a committee of monks, pandits, and historians to authenticate the find. It also urged archaeologists to look for Vijaya’s ashes and commissioned archaeological work on a dagaba atop a hill just south of Paiiduvasnuvara, hoping to find evidence of what local tradition says is Vi¬ jaya’s resting place. Finding Dumgamunu’s remains was only the begin¬ ning, but a doubly useful one. In one stroke the recovery of Dumgamunu’s remains produced a substantial symbol for the celebra¬ tion of the Sinhala “national” hero and removed a reminder of both inter-communal chivalry and the presence of Tamils in ancient Sri Lanka. After the ethnic violence of August 1983, the Jayewardene govern¬ ment backed away from the connection Jayewardene had drawn be-

81. Daily News, August 12, 1980. 82. Rutnam, ‘The Tomb of Elara at Anuradhapura ” 83. “Siri Sangabo report to be sent to PM ” Daily News, November 3, 1980. The committee included neither archaeologists nor physical scientists. Its leader was Nalin Ratnayake, secretary to the minister ot cultural affairs, and the man who initiated the compilation of the Mahavawsa, Nutana Yugaya.

134

The Presence of the Past

tween his own work and Dumgamunu. Speaking to an audience about the devolution of power to Tamils in the North and East in 1986, Gamini Dissanayake argued that the identification with ancient leaders was unrealistic. Circumstances no longer allow power to settle in one person’s control. “Adverting to the critics who call devolution of power to the periphery an abridgement of the country’s sovereignty [Dis¬ sanayake] asked: 'Is there any country in the world which is sovereign as in Dumgamunu’s days?”’84 Although he earlier compared his efforts to build irrigation systems to Dumgamunu’s, Jayewardene himself tried to break the connection, saying that Sinhalas should now stop thinking about Dutugamunu. Dutugamunu . . . lived a long time ago and in a different age. At that time Sri Lanka was popu¬ lated solely by the Sinhalese. Elara and his men were foreign invaders, enemies, so that Dutugamunu was doing the right thing in fighting them and driving them out of the country. Today, however, Sri Lanka is a multi-ethnic country. And so not the environment in which it is possible to repeat the feats of Dumgamunu.85

But Dumgamunu is ubiquitous. In June 1987 Jayewardene went to Anuradhapura for the enshrinement of Buddhist relics in the Mirisavati dagaba which Dumgamunu had built. The night before the ceremony a section of the dagaba’s hemispherical structure split open and tons of earth and brick spilled to the ground. Jayewardene was reported to have been unnerved by the inauspicious turn of events. Gamini Dissanayake called it a messsage from Dumgamunu, telling the government to carry on with the restoration. Acts of merit (pinkama) always face obstacles.86

84. “Twin Problems in Way of Ethnic Negotiation Can be Resolved,” Daily Nervs, April 4, 1986. 85. “Cetiya Mishap ‘a Reminder from Dumgamunu,’” Daily Nenx, June 12, 1987. 86. Ibid.

5 Races and Places

Sinhala nationalism has been shaped by the way that a modern West¬ ern language of race has appropriated and changed a variety of genu¬ inely ancient practices in Sri Lanka. This chapter considers how pres¬ ent-day circumstances have refigured the practice of constructing, maintaining, and restoring sacred places such as relic mounds and viharas. My purpose is to make a general point about nationalism: however widely conceptions of race, nation, and patriotism may be distributed in Sinhala society these days, ideas have little force with¬ out contact with actual social practices. There is no denying that print technology engenders in citizens-in-the-making a feeling that they oc¬ cupy a common time and place. A more compelling part of the na¬ tionalist project brings all those citizens-in-the-making together with their progenitors, in this case, heroic leaders, and their achievements such as the construction or recovery of sacred places. It is this process that wreaks havoc on the past understood as a qualitatively different time or as linked to the present by an objective chronology. Print technology plays a fundamental role in allowing people to “imagine the nation, but that is only part of the nationalist task. Real-life expe¬ riences—or householders listening to Buddhist monks invoke the ex¬ amples of ancient heroes or of families going on pilgrimage to a sa¬ cred place—enact nationalism in a way that print journalism cannot, for here people are brought into the kind of ideal but lived commu¬ nity that Durkheim associated with the sacred.

136

The Presence of the Past

Even before the appearance of the nation-state, restoring sacred places created a “fusion of horizons” in a quite literal sense. I began to think about this fusion after visiting a relic mound with a Sinhala friend. When I asked him whether the place was ancient, he said “Yes, it was restored just last year.” So it is with sacred places—their antiq¬ uity requires their being periodically restored, and when they are re¬ stored, they are usually changed. In the case of many relic mounds and viharas, it is difficult to separate what is ancient from what is modern. Renovation saves the past, but it does so at a cost (at least for art historical purposes) because the process usually makes the past more like the present. Yet the blurring of past and present is the very thing that gives sacred places the palpable sense of their sacredness. Recalling his first feelings living alone by the ruins of the ancient place, the monk who restored the Seruvila relic mound characterized that fusion of past and present in a way that suggests the origins of deep feeling: “at certain times during the nights I heard pint [the recitation of parts of the Dhamma] being chanted from the side of the dagaba. The great forest was spreading to a never-ending dis¬ tance. I pondered the unbroken association of the Sinhala nation and Buddhism from beginning to end, and again from end to the begin¬ ning.”1 Constructing and maintaining sacred places have traditionally been the most meritorious acts of Buddhist religiosity. When Tambiah asked Thai Buddhists what religious action earned the most merit, they overwhelmingly pointed to building a monastery, saying it was more meritorious than becoming a monk or observing Buddhist pre¬ cepts.2 The task of rehabilitating and maintaining viharas and dagabas and endowing them with land is a shared responsibility, and everyone does what he or she can toward that end. But naturally aristocrats and kings had greater means to do so than ordinary people, not to say

1. “Nagenahira Bauddha Punaralokaye Nirmatruvarayano,” (“The Great Pioneer Monk Who Contributed to the Buddhist Revival in Eastern Sri Lanka”), (pamphlet) (Colombo: Vidyananda Mudranalaya, p. ix. 2. See S. J. Tambiah, “The Ideology of Merit and the Social Correlates of Buddh¬ ism in a Thai Village,” in E. R. Leach, ed.. Dialectic in Practical Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968), pp. 66-70. The same is true in Sri Lanka, al¬ though another tradition that lasted through the colonial period had it that the person who protected property given to the monkhood earned more merit than the person who donated it; see “Interim and Pinal Reports of a Commission Appointed to In¬ quire into the Working of the Buddhist Temporalities Ordinance, No. 8, of 1905,” Ceylon Sessional Papers 24 (1920): 9.

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political motives for wanting to be associated with certain places at certain times. In the past kings, aristocrats, ordinary people, and Bud¬ dhist monks have financed the refurbishing of sacred places. Nowa¬ days elected governments do so, as well as important political leaders, aristocrats, and ordinary people. There has always been work to be done because sacred places regu¬ larly fall to ruin or desecration according to the vicissitudes of the Sri Lankan state as well as regional political and economic changes. Since all quarters of Sri Lanka have been inhabited to some extent at some time in the past, there are ruins of sacred places scattered over the entire island. Several factors determine which ruined places get reno¬ vated. Judging from the Kandyan period, the active intervention of monks and laypeople in the form of petitions and informal contact with the court often convinced the king to look after an abandoned place.3 Historically important viharas and dagabas, especially those with well-known relics, got better treatment than ordinary monas¬ teries. The Mahdvamsa evaluates each king in terms of his faithfulness to this responsibility, and its great regard for Dutagamunu derives in part from the way he applied himself to building and restoring dagabas. But the chronicle makes no reference to the political benefits of the king’s charities because the political motive for renewing sacred places hides discreetly behind its meritoriousness. Sacred places in un¬ stable areas were rehabilitated to give the state an opportunity to gratify local aristocrats and monks and to establish a presence in the area. In other words, sacred places played an expressive role in estab¬ lishing the spiritual unity of the island while they simultaneously en¬ abled its political unification.4 As the colonial period progressed, ideas of race, culture, and peasantry gave sacred places a new salience, but the intertwined spiritual and political importance of attending to such places dates to the earliest period of Sri Lankan history.

Renovating Irrigation and Repopulating Places Sri Lanka’s island setting always gave the polity a set of physical limits, and the traditional hyperbole that the cakkavatti king rules the entire island put a moral construction on those limits. But it was only 3. Steven Kemper, “The Buddhist Monkhood, the Law, and the State in Colo¬ nial Sri Lanka,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 16 (July 1984)- 4°9-104. Cv. 100.128.

138

The Presence of the Past

with British conquest in 1815 that Sri Lanka became a territorial polity in the sense that characterizes modern nation-states. And it was only dien that the state began to extend its power into aspects of social life ignored by traditional forms of political authority. An in¬ structive example is the government’s efforts over the past half cen¬ tury to move Sri Lankans into vast tracts of empty land in the North and East. Both the colonial and independent governments of Sri Lanka have resettled people in sparsely populated areas, and these settlement schemes have introduced race into agrarian relations and given sacred places a set of nationalist associations. As a result, identi¬ ties and practices textualized in the Mahavamsa have assumed new meanings by way of government policy on agriculture. Although governments have pursued such schemes over the entire island, the focus of government attention has always fallen on parts of the island known variously as the Northern and Eastern provinces, the VannI, the Dry Zone, or the Rajarata. The variety of reference terms suggests the changing character of this part of the island, as well as some of its historical resonances. Even before the population density of the southwestern quadrant of the island became a problem, the British government could not overlook a geographical anomaly— some two-thirds of the island was virtually unoccupied. These vacant areas were also the site of the ancient civilizations. After the fall of Polonnaruva and the dispersal of its people, the Dry Zone became a set of small kingdoms, commonly known as the VannI chieftaincies.5 Most of these chieftaincies were held by Tamils, but there were also Sinhala and Vedda chiefs. K. Indrapala writes that the “occurrence of large numbers of Tamil toponyms in places that had Sinhalese names in the period before the thirteenth century certainly suggests that the area was occupied by Tamils and the majority of the Sinhalese people were either ousted by or, less probably, assimilated to the Tamil pop¬ ulation.”6 It is not clear why Indrapala assumes that assimilation was 5. See K. Indrapala, “Dravidian Settlements in Ceylon and the Beginnings of the Kingdom of Jaffna,” Ph.D. thesis, University of London, 1966, and S. Pathmananthan, “Feudal Polity in Medieval Ceylon: An Examination of the Chieftaincies of the VannI,” The Ceylon Journal of Historical and Social Studies n.s.2 (July-December 1972): 118-30. Pathmanathan argues that the VannI chieftaincies may have existed before the fall of Polonnaruva (pp. 122-25). 6. K. Indrapala, “Invasions from South India and the Abandonment of Polon¬ naruva,” in K. Indrapala, ed., The Collapse of the Rajarata Civilization (Peradeniya: Ceylon Studies Seminar, 1971), pp. 84—85.

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improbable, but he leaves out a third possibility altogether. Given the frontier circumstances of the VannI, I suspect that many people thought of themselves as neither strictly Sinhala nor strictly Tamil. Evidence of social arrangements in this part of the island is hard to find as one looks back beyond the nineteenth century, but the dis¬ persed setting invites families and individuals’ moving between social identities or allying themselves widi groups such as the Veddas who are neither Sinhala or Tamil.7 James Brow writes of a long-term pro¬ cess by which some Sinhalas became Vedda and some Veddas became Sinhalized, and it is clear from other contexts that individuals as well as groups have moved between Sinhala and Tamil identities. If the sharply defined ethnic categories of the present do not fit the realities of the past, they are especially inappropriate in a setting where people live in dispersed settlements, with little contact with the outside world, scratching out a living under very difficult circumstances. Un¬ til virtually the present, Sri Lankans living in the area have lived in a world that drew together Sinhala and Tamil practices. Consider what this account of one of the pioneer monks who migrated to Dimbulagala District in the 1950s says indirectly: ‘There in Egoda pattu [in Manampitiya District] there was a number of villages in the middle of the jungle. Ven. Kitalagama Silalankara . . . saw Sinhala people be¬ coming Tamil. The names of some were Mudiyanselage Herath Letchimi [the first two names are distinctively Kandyan; the last is Tamil]. . . . This monk visited every village to meet the Sinhalas and he told them that they were Sinhala.”8 In other words, however such people living in the VannI construed their identity before the arrival of Buddhist monks and government authority, afterward they saw themselves in terms of the ethnic categories of the national society. As early as 1845 a colonial committee suggested the restoration of the ancient irrigation tanks of the Dry Zone, and by 1856 an Irriga¬ tion Ordinance was enacted to restore a number of irrigation systems. William Gregory, the same governor whom Yagirala Pannananda re¬ members for his ability to speak Pali and for making Anuradhapura the capital of the North-Central Province, initiated a variety of irriga¬ tion projects in the cause of peasant welfare. Between 1870 and 1900 7. James Brow, Vedda Villages of Anuradhapura (Seattle: University of Washing¬ ton Press, 1978), p. 38. 8. Madihe Pannasiha, “From Ven. Madihe Pannasiha to the President,” Davasa, November 18, 1983.

140

The Presence of the Past

some ninety major irrigation systems were restored, followed by the restoration ofMinneriya in 1903, Giritale in 1905, and Nachchaduva in 1914.° Many of the ancient irrigation systems could be restored relatively cheaply, adding an economic rationale to an act of consider¬ able emotional importance, for reclaiming ruined tanks was reclaim¬ ing the island’s extraordinary past. B. H. Farmer’s appraisal suggests the psychological weight of later restoration projects as well as the constitutive role Western scholars played in the process: “the colo¬ nisation schemes in the Dry Zone have given the Sinhalese a justifia¬ ble sense of achievement. This is mixed with romantic nationalism, the feeling that they are returning to the homeland of their ancestors and recreating the Raja Rata of old days. . . . The people now have a sense of confidence in themselves, of ability to conquer problems, which has helped to overcome the colonial inferiority complex noted by foreign observers.”9 10 As time passed, the colonial government government began to go beyond simply restoring irrigation systems and making land available to settlers. After the First World War, various government schemes recruited peasants for newly irrigated land and saw to their material support. In some ways the government’s more active involvement in these colonization projects came in response to a food crisis brought on by the war; administrators could hardly ignore the pressures of landlessness, indebtedness, and the fragmentation of holdings on Sri Lankan cultivators. But by the late colonial period administrators who had once made policy choices purely in cost-benefit terms began to think about agricultural problems in terms of an emerging concep¬ tion of the “peasantry.” Instead of conceiving of farmers as simply producers of food, or part of a population problem, or the majority of Sri Lanka’s people, they began to conceive of “peasants” as a social institution that needed to be protected. And in a way that has grown progessively stronger since independence, the “peasantry” was con¬ ceived as the true locus of indigenous culture. Although it has spawned a Sinhala neologism, the English word “peasantry” had no equivalent in Sinhala, and when colonial adminis¬ trators spoke of Sri Lanka’s farmers as peasants, they framed the mat9. B. H. Farmer, Pioneer Peasant Cultivation in Ceylon (London: Oxford Univer¬ sity Press, 1957), pp. 101—12. 10. B. H. Farmer, “Peasant Colonization in Ceylon,” Pacific Affairs 25 (December 1952): 398

Races and Places

i 4 i

ter in a peculiar way. “Peasants” were conceived of paternalistically as small-holders with a way of life that was both static and fragile. Their dilemma had several sides: uncertain harvests, scattered, and thus uneconomical, plots of land, and the expansion of plantation agriculture. But most of all, the peasant’s enemy was capitalism itself.12 Thus agricultural policy worked for financial and credit arrangements for peasant cultivators that would keep them out of debt and preserve their way of life. This construction had social as well as economic implications because in Sri Lanka—as in many other colonial soci¬ eties—commerce belonged to minority communities, in this case, Tamils and Muslims. Capitalism by association was a “nonnational” phenomenon and the enemy of both the people and indigenous cul¬ ture. The idea that peasants needed to be protected from capitalism be¬ came the shared assumption of government bureaucrats in the 1920s and 1930s, the main issue becoming only who would do the protect¬ ing. In this context the “peasantry” served as a trope for both the Sinhala elite and British administrators, contending for control of the mass interest.13 Sinhala political figures such as D. S. Senanayake and D. B. Jayatilaka who took it on themselves to protect the interest of peasants were not accidentally also leading members of a Buddhist laity increasingly vocal about the restoration of Buddhism to its proper place. Such men were themselves highly Anglicized, “trou¬ sered” gentlemen whose families owed their fortunes to plantation capitalism. But their social origins prevented them from representing Sinhala peasants in the struggle against capitalism no more than they would have kept a Tory M.P. from defending the stout English yeo¬ manry. It did produce a curious kind of discourse in which the peas¬ antry was as much constructed as defended, and linked to a variety of 11

In speaking of the government agent of Batticaloa in the 1920s, Farmer men¬

tions that Brayne was the brother of F. L. Brayne “who did such good work in Indian villages ” adding that the brothers worked at a time of widespread European interest in agrarian reform in their own societies and sympathy for small-holders and their way of life (Pioneer Peasant Cultivation, p. 124). . . ■ 12 I think that this notion derived in part from the efforts of the Sri Lankan left in the 1930s to portray both urban and agricultural workers as victims of capitalism. For a brief account of the discursive origins of a continuing political notion, see Mic ae Roberts, “Fissures and Solidarities: Weaknesses within the Working Class in the ear y Twentieth Century,” Modem Ceylon Studies 5:1 (1974): 4~513. Mick Moore, “The Ideological History of the Sri Lankan Peasantry,

Asian Studies 23:1 (1989): 194.

.. ,

Modem

142,

The Presence of the Past

causes. Senanayake’s Patriotism and Agriculture suggests one linkage.14 The Sinhala public would probably have added the word “Buddhism’1 to Senanayake’s tide. Reclaiming the Rajarata meant restoring sacred places as well as irrigation systems, and because of its historical importance and its function as a pilgrimage site, Anuradhapura became the focus of these efforts. Kandyan chiefs looked to it as the appropriate place to locate an administrative center; and Buddhist monks and lay reformers, as sacred space that required rebuilding and respect. By the 1850s a monk named Pailegama Revata was living by the sacred bo tree that Asoka s embassy had brought to the island some 2,000 years earlier. By the 1870s Naranvita Sumanasara had taken up residence at the Ruvanvalisaya, Sangharakkhita Unnanse at the Isurumuniya vihara, and Pahala Talave Medhamkara near the Abhayagiri dagaba.15 Their close proximity to colonial administrators, archaeological excavations, and a growing community of Europeans, Christians, and Tamils set the stage for a series of incidents in which Buddhist monks protested the encroachment of outsiders on those sacred places. The monks also began to look after the interests of Sinhala peasants in nearby areas, becoming sources of both religious guidance and ethnic solidarity. Local Buddhists were joined in Anuradhapura at the turn of the century by Walisinghe Harischandra, and he pursued Buddhist causes at a higher level of intensity. Harischandra wanted the entire city to be made into a sacred city by clearing out churches, Hindu temples, and administrative buildings. At one time he insisted that all land within a forty-eight-mile limit should be set aside for Buddhists.16 Encouraging others to squat on crown land, he directly confronted the colonial government, and when Sinhalas were removed from their makeshift settlements, he publicized the government’s harassment of Buddhists. By tracing ruins and unoccupied places back to sacred places mentioned in the Mahdvamsa, Harischandra succeeded in set¬ ting aside substantial amounts of land in Anuradhapura as religious places. What is most important for my interests is the way he made sacred places the site of an intense, agonistic confrontation between 14. D. S. Senanayake, Patriotism and Agriculture (Colombo: Associated News¬ papers of Ceylon, 1935). 15. Elizabeth Nissan, “The Making ol a Sacred City: Anuradhapura,” unpublished paper, pp. 6-10.

. Ibid.,

16

p.

14.

Races and Places

143

government and Buddhists. That confrontation began as conflict be¬ tween a colonial government and a colonized people, but it has been transformed in the present into a conflict between Sinhalas and mi¬ nority communities as mediated by the national government. When political constraints keep the government from fully meeting Bud¬ dhist demands these days, Buddhists conclude that their government is little better than its colonial predecessor. Although the colonial government resisted the majority of Harischandra’s claims, he succeeded in imposing a distinctive language of argument on religious affairs. In separating the sacred parts of Anuradhapura from the political parts, he made a distinction that had no equivalent in the ancient city. By trying to exclude Christians from the sacred precincts of Anuradhapura, he enunciated another argu¬ ment that shapes ethnic conflict—“sacred areas” are mutually exclu¬ sive places. Against the inclusive quality of traditional Indie concep¬ tions of religious behavior and architecture, sacred places have come to be linked to particular religious communities in a way that domi¬ nates communal politics across all of South Asia.1 And to the extent that religion coincides with “race,” different kinds of people now have rights to different kinds of religious places. The Sri Lankan case is complicated by a parallel identification. Peasants need to be pro¬ tected against capitalism, just as sacred places need to be protected against outsiders such as Christians, Hindus, and Muslims. When na¬ tionalists begin to insist that government protect both the religion of the Sinhala people against alien religions and the “sons of the soil” themselves against nonnationals—Tamils, Borahs, Muslims, and Af¬ ghans—culture is set against commerce in a doubly powerful way.

Restoring Sacred Places amid the Politics of Ethnicity The major human consequence of the construction of major irriga¬ tion schemes in the Dry Zone has been the movement of substantial numbers of people into newly irrigated lands. Sinhala settlers have 17. See Peter van der Veer, ‘“God Must be Liberated!’ A Hindu Liberation Move¬ ment in Ayodhya,” Modem Asian Studies 21 (April 1987): 283—302, and Romila Thapar, “Imagined Religious Communities? Ancient History and the Modern Search for a Hindu Identity,” Modem Asian Studies 23 (May 1989): 209—31.

144

The Presence of the Past

moved from the South and the West into these settlements; Tamil settlers have moved from the North and eastern littoral into the same areas.18 In Sinhala eyes, the move to the North and the East reverses the medieval drift away from these areas to the southern and western parts of the island. The transfer of population has also carried Sinhala attention to a region known for the ruins of a past much more splen¬ did than the colonial present. The distribution of Tamils in northern Sri Lanka has remained remarkably consistent since the sixteenth cen¬ tury with one exception. Throughout the twentieth century large numbers of Tamils have migrated into the Dry Zone because of land shortage in densely settled areas and government initiative.19 The eco¬ nomic motivations for migration have led to a historical argument to justify Tamil interests: the Dry Zone has become part of the “tradi¬ tional homelands” of the Tamil people. More has been written in the Sri Lankan press about this notion than perhaps any other historical issue that bears on the ethnic crisis. No other idea will substantiate the claims of the Tamil liberationists as well as the argument that Tamils had traditional control over part of the island, an arrangement that was forgotten in Sri Lanka’s long colonial interlude. These claims rest on the notorious Cleghorn min¬ ute of 1799: ‘Two different nations, from a very ancient period, have divided between them possession of the island: Lirst, the Sinhalese inhabiting the interior of the country, in its southern and western parts, from the river Wallouve [sic], to that of Chilaw, and secondly the Malabars, who possess the northern and eastern districts.”20 Hugh Cleghorn’s ethnographic judgment loses much of its force alongside other historical and inscriptional sources, and the cult of sixteen pil¬ grimage places—from Jaffna to Kalaniya to Tissamaharama to Dlghavapi—which suggests at least the conceit, antedating the Cleghorn minute by some 500 years, that the island was envisioned as

18. An account of the Tamil migration to frontier areas in the North and the East can be found in Sinnapah Arasaratnam, “Historical Foundation of the Economy of the Tamils of North Sri Lanka” (pamphlet) (Jaffna: Thanthai Chelva Memorial Trust, 1982). As in the Sinhala case, demographic pressure has led to Tamil immigration into the VannI. 19. Ibid., p. 3. 20. Ralph Pieris, “Administration of Justice and of Revenue on the Island of Ceylon under the Dutch Government (‘The Cleghorn Minute’),” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, Ceylon Branch n.s. 3 (June 1954): 131.

Races and Places

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a single Buddhist dominion.21 But it is ready-made for Tamil aspira¬ tions. One example will suggest what stands behind Tamil anxiety over their position in the North and East. Until the mid-1970s, Amparai was the dominant provincial town in this buffer zone between Sinhalas and Tamils in the Eastern Province. Official signboards and publications now refer to the town as “Ampara.” The transition from a Tamil to a Sinhala spelling has been accompanied by an influx of Sinhala settlers in and around the city. The contrast between the 1921 census figures for the district (8.2 percent Sinhala, 37.6 percent Tamil) and the 1981 figures (30.5 percent Sinhala, 20.1 percent Tamil) suggests what worries the new minority. Where the looming presence of Anuradhapura and Polonnaruva justifies Sinhala reoccupation of these core areas, lesser-known sacred places serve the same function in peripheral parts of Northern and Eastern Provinces, especially areas that have a majority of Tamil in¬ habitants. The Buddhist monk who traveled around Dimbulagala District in the 1950s telling people that they were Sinhala setded at a historically important but out-of-the-way place, the former forest her¬ mitage at Dimbulagala. Kitalagama Silalankara soon became a spokes¬ man for setders nearby, and in 1983 he was responsible for settling some 5,000 Sinhala squatters at the Maduru Oya irrigation scheme.22 His avowed goal has been to resettle people who had been forced to abandon their homes, in colonies established by D. S. Senanayake, after the ethnic unrest of the late 1950s. Although Tamil ministers such as K. W. Devanayagam have accused officials of the Mahavali Authority of helping to settle people illegally, Silalankara says that he has always worked on his own and has only resetded displaced farmers, not introduced new ones. And Silalankara himself accuses Devanayagam of settling Tamils in Kalkudah.23 In either case the po¬ tential for upsetting the social balance is clear. When President Premadasa declared Dimbulagala a sacred area, he aptly called it a “for¬ tress of Dhamma.”24 21. See Cv. 100.128, and Gananath Obeyesekere, “The Buddhist Pantheon in Ceylon and Its Extensions,” in Manning Nash, ed., Anthropological Studies in Thera-

vada Buddhism, Yale University Southeast Asia Studies, Cultural Report Series, No. 13, 1966, p. 23. 22. Madihe Pannasiha, Karunu hd Visandum (Causes and Solutions) (Colombo: Samayavardhana Printers, 1984), p. 54. 23. Weekend, October 23, 1983. 24. Island, June 3, 1986.

146

The Presence of the Past

Silalankara also made himself a missionary to the Veddas.25 By 1953 he had improved the living conditions of Vedda families in the areas and begun to ordain Vedda boys as novices. In that year Madihe Pannasiha visited Dimbulagala and gave ordination to fifty Veddas. But Silalankara’s efforts to reclaim thick jungle near Polonnaruva began as soon as he arrived in the area in 1948. He found people in those areas who spoke only Tamil until at last he came upon a single Sinhala family that told him that their hamlet was known as Sorivila. “He also found that this was a Sinhala village,” a recent newspaper account says, “and due to Tamil influence these Sin¬ halese had made Tamil their mother tongue. That day he resolved to re-Sinhalize this village some day.”26 The possibility that the village might have originally been Tamil, but in the process of becoming Sinhala before Silalankara’s arrival goes unremarked. The vicissitudes of South Asian social identities have an architec¬ tural expression that aggravates the ethnic situation. All over the sub¬ continent, a community’s migration into an area formerly occupied by people of another religion has not brought the establishment of altogether new religious places. Instead, a new building is constructed or a new image is installed, at the place where the former community maintained a shrine. What motivates this particular “fusion of hori¬ zons” is another South Asian “regularity”—sacred space remains sa¬ cred space. Since some of these sites have been occupied for thou¬ sands of years, ownership may have shifted several times as religious orientations changed or as communities expanded and contracted. What is now a Hindu kovil (temple) may have once been a Buddhist vihara. What now is a vihara may formerly have been a kovil. The way the historical memory takes presence to indicate priority clouds the issue further. The existence of a bo tree is often said to demon¬ strate that the place was initially a Buddhist vihara. But a bo tree can be planted after a kovil has been given up or in a place that is near some other sacred site. Although most Buddhists would deny it, the tree also grows wild. And while banyan and tamarind trees have privi¬ leged places in the sacred landscape of Hindu kovils, bo trees are

25. See Piyatissa Pandukkage, Dimbulagala Itihasika Toraturu, (Kuliyapitiya: Sastrodaya Mudranalaya, 1983), pp. 23-43. 26. The Sunday Observer, Feburary 19, 1989

Knees and Places

147

found there too.27 In South Asia, just as one community’s sacred area is not necessarily not another community’s sacred place, so it is with sacred trees. Sacrality has a generic character, suitable for being tapped by any religious community that so chooses. Because new monasteries tend to get built on the site of ancient ruins—whatever the religion of the place formerly—exactly how many sites exist in the Northern and Eastern Provinces is hard to determine and itself a political issue. As a result, the enumeration of Buddhist ruins is highly arbitrary, but the following figures are sug¬ gestive in several ways. The University of Ceylon History of Ceylon in¬ cludes an epigraphical map showing the sites of inscriptions carved between the fifth century b.c.e. and the twelfth century c.E. The map shows some one hundred inscriptions in the North and East.28 In¬ scriptions are regularly found at a variety of different kinds of places so that the number of Buddhist sites is substantially smaller. Gunawardana provides a map of the principal monasteries found in the island in the early medieval period. His map shows two monasteries in the North and eleven in the East.29 Since the deepening of ethnic tension in the 1980s, popular esti¬ mates of such places began to put the number much higher. Cyril Mathew’s Sihaluni! Budusasuna Beraganiv includes a map that indi¬ cates 261 ancient places (pumvidya stdna).30 A latter appeal that Mathew addressed to UNESCO updates the earlier map and shows 276 “places of archeological interest in the Northern and Eastern Provinces.”31 Of those 276 places, 21 are found in Jaffna District, 4 in Mannar District, 105 in Vavuniya and Mullaitivu districts, 81 in Trincomalee District, 22 in Ampara District, and 43 in Batticaloa District. The same 276 places have been cited by the Maha Sangha 27. Hansard, October 28, 1980, p. 2006. The testimony of M. Sivasithamparam, MP from Nallur: t£We respect the Bo-tree in the same way you respect the Bo-tree. If you come to Jaffna you will find a number of Bo-trees with a trident where people worship.” 28. H. C. Ray, ed.. University of Ceylon History of Ceylon (Colombo: Ceylon Univer¬ sity Press, 1959), vol. 1, part 1, facing p. 16 29. R. A. L. H. Gunawardana, Robe and Plough, Monastieism and Economic Interest in Early Medieval Sri Lanka (Tuscon: University of Arizona Press, 1979), p. 52. 30. C. Cyril Mathew, Sihaluni! Budusasuna Beraganiv, (Colombo: J. F. and I Printers, 1981), enclosure, n.p. 31. C. Cyril Mathew, An Appeal to UNESCO to Safeguard and Preserve the Cultural Property in Sri Lanka Endangered by Racial Prejudice, Unlawful Occupation or Willful Destruction (Colombo: J. F. and I. Printers, 1983), p. XI.

148

The Presence of the Past

Council (a committee of the most distinguished monks in the monk¬ hood) as places now at risk in the Northern and Eastern Provinces. Asked by the government to represent Sinhala Buddhist feelings rela¬ tive to power sharing, these high-ranking monks expressed their con¬ cerns about settlement in terms of their fears for the safety of these 276 sacred places. Many of these places are to be found in areas of the North and East that were predominantly Tamil in the recent past. Many are still so; some are in areas now dominated by recent arrivals of Sinhala farmers and merchants; and a few might be described as genuine combat zones where the ethnic distribution is less pertinent that the presence of Tamil guerrillas and Sri Lankan troops. Such is the social and political context in which the pious work of renovating a sacred place is carried out in the North and East.

The Events at Seruvila The prize among the Buddhist sacred places in the island has always been Anuradhapura. Since Walisinghe Harischandra began his cam¬ paign in the 1890s to protect religious places in Anuradhapura, both governmental and private initiative have undertaken to rebuild the ancient capital and honor the most sacred bo tree in the island. The Ruvanvalisaya was restored, and its pinnacle laid in 1939. The Jayewardene government set aside an unprecedented amount of money to conserve sacred places, establishing a “cultural triangle” running from Anuradhapura to Polonnaruva and Kandy and back to An¬ uradhapura. The city of Anuradhapura has been designated a “sacred city” and redesigned to increase the sacredness and efficiency of the city, enhancing the city’s role as a Buddhist pilgrimage center.32 What¬ ever the government’s ability to contribute, the restoration of sacred sites in the island—the Kalutara dagaba is a prime example—has re¬ quired broad public support. Near Kalutara, buses have slowed and conductors collected donations to put a handful of coins in the merit box near an emerging dagaba for more than fifty years. Whether res¬ toration has depended on the widow’s mite as in the Kalutara case or on a huge contribution from one donor, the ready support of the 32. See Elizabeth Nissan, ‘The Sacred City of Anuradhapura: Aspects of Sinhalese Buddhism and Nationhood,” Ph.D. thesis, London School of Economics and Political Science, University of London, 1985.

Races and Places

149

laity is not surprising in a religion committed to charity and preser¬ ving the past. Laypeople have made heroic sacrifices to restore sacred places. So have Buddhist monks such as Dambagasare Sumedhamkara who re¬ stored the dagaba at Seruvila (Seru) some fifteen miles from Trincomalee in the nordieastern part of the island. The proximity of mag¬ netite outcrops and evidence of the quarrying of copper indicate human occupation and exploitation of the site in the third century b.c.e.33 The most important point about the early occupation of the site is that early setders made use of resources in a way very similar to that seen at South Indian sites. Seruvila’s religious importance comes later and depends on a reference in the Dhdtuvamsa that says the forehead bone relic (laldta dhdtu) of the Buddha found its eventual resting place there.34 The relic had earlier been in the possession of the kings of Malla, one of the tribal republics living near the Sakyas in the first centuries after the Buddha’s death. It was brought to Sri Lanka during the reign of Kavantissa (also Kakavannatissa), Dutagamunu’s father, and deposited according to the Buddha’s wishes in a dagaba at Seruvila. Before he reclaimed Anuradhapura, Dutugamunu came to reside in Seruvila. Because of the importance of the relic, the Dhdtuvamsa says, the king’s ministers built smaller dagabas at the four cardinal points around the main dagaba, and the king himself exer¬ cised direct control over the place. That a first-class relic came to be interred in a monastery far from the capital city suggests that the strategic use of relics was not lost on early Sri Lankan kings. When the relic was brought to the island, Elara occupied the throne in Anuradhapura. But there were also pro¬ vincial lords in Kalaniya and Seruvila who did not acknowledge Kavantissa’s claims to the Anuradhapura or even the preeminence of his small kingdom in Mahagama. Let me simply quote the University of Ceylon’s History of Ceylon’s account of what followed:

33. Sudarshan Seneviratne, “The Utilization of Metallic Resources during the Early Iron Age: a Multi-faceted Study of the Metal Technology and Productive Tech¬ niques,” draft paper, World Archaeological Congress, Southampton, England, Sep¬ tember 1986, p. 9. 34. Kamburupitiya Nandaratana, ed., Dhatuvanpa (Colombo: Cultural Publica¬ tions, 1984). Other traditions have it that the forehead bone relic was preserved in the dagaba at Tissamabarama. See. K. Indrapala, “Epigraphical Discoveries in Ceylon in the Last Decade (1959—1969): A Brief Survey” Ancient Ceylon 3 (August 1979): 155.

150

The Presence of the Past

The story was made to gain currency by religious teachers that a sacred relic in the possession of Kakavanna was destined to be enshrined by him in a stupa at Seru, the Buddha Himself having prophesied it in that wise . . . the prophecy of the Buddha is said to have been brought to the notice of Kakavanna by a great thera (senior monk) who was the nephew of ViharadevI, and also of Giri Abhaya, the ally of the ruler of Seru . . . Kakavanna having stationed his elder son, Dutthagamani, at Mahagama, and his younger son, Saddhatissa, at Dlghavapi, proceeded with his army towards Seru, proclaimed the purpose of his visit and demanded all land-owners in and around Seru to come to his assist¬ ance. The thera who propagated the story about the relic also accom¬ panied the king. The kinglets of Seru and Soma must have found themselves on the horns of a dilemma. If they received Kakavanna in a friendly manner, it would have amounted to acknowledging him as their suzerain. If they did not do so, they would have alienated the sympathies of their own subjects for the declared purpose of Kakavanna’s visit was one which the people as a whole would have ap¬ proved. . . . The outcome was that the kinglets of Seru and Soma and their retainers received Kakavanna Tissa with the honour due to an overlord, and assisted him in the building of the shrine. Thus Ka¬ kavanna Tissa achieved what might well be described as a dhammavijaya [triumph of righteousness].35 The modern practice of identifying the ruins near Toppur with Seruvila of Dutugamunu’s time depends on the DhdtuvamscCs reference that Vilgam vehera (the vihara at Vilgama) was built by Kavantissa even though the Dhdtuvamsa does not indicate its location. A four¬ teenth-century history, the Sinhala Bodhivamsa, refers to ccVilgam of the nagas,” saying that it was near Seruvila.36 What “near” means in this context is not clear, and there are so many ancient Vilgams that caution is essential. The same uncertainty attends the identification of Vilgam vehera with the Vilgammula, a lineage of scholarly monks also known as the Sarogama lineage. A ruined vihara at Periyakulam, just to the north of Trincomalee, was known as Vilgam and said to be the site of the Vilgam vehera. Several other sources refer to places named “Vilgam” in the South and Southwest.37 But scholarly and popular opinion alike have linked the Sarogama monks with Seruvila. G. P. Malalasekera writes: “The headquarters of the Saro-gama frater-

35. University of Ceylon History of Ceylon, vol 1, part 1, p. 150. 36. Gunawardana, Robe and Plough, p. 304. 37. Ibid. p. 307, n. 136.

Races and Places

i 5 i

nity was at Seruvavila (Seruvila) near Trincomalee.”38 By that chain of reasons, Seruvila came to be identified with a first-class relic. When the dagaba fell into disarray is unclear, but a reasonable guess would fix the date sometime after the fall of Polonnaruva in the thirteenth century. If the Sarogama monks in fact made their headquarters at Seruvila, the monastery was likely to have been active through the fourteenth century.39 By then the Tamil VannI chieftains of Trincomalee would have inherited control over the surrounding area.40 When an inscription was set up in the early 1500s in Tirukkovil at the behest of the Sinhala king, its being indited in Tamil suggests the presence of a nearby Tamil population. The local chiefs were not obvious candidates to maintain a Buddhist sacred place for long, although it remains to be seen whether the growing alienation between Hindus and Buddhists in South India and Sri Lanka had any direct effect on local institutions. The place fell to ruins, and a Mus¬ lim village, Toppur, arose nearby. A Sinhala writer of a book on Ser¬ uvila translates “Toppur” as “the village that owns the dagaba” (from the Sinhala Thupaya satu fjama) .41 A less tendentious translation of the Tamil makes it ‘Village of the grove” (T. toppu). By the 1500s the east coast was being populated by Hindus and Muslims, although primar¬ ily along the coasdine, and there only in spots. The descendants of these groups live in the area today and carry on a way of life distin¬ guished by its own legal traditions, matrilineal inheritance, and an archaic form of spoken Tamil.42 But even in these changing circum¬ stances, an abandoned dagaba need not be forgotten. At least some 38. G. P. Malalsekera, The Pali Literature of Ceylon (Colombo: M. D. Gunasena, 1958), p. 188. For an attempt to identify Sarogama with a Vilgamuva in Laggala Pallesiya Pattuva, see C. W. Nicholas, “Historical Topography of Ancient and Medi¬ eval Ceylon f Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, Ceylon Branch n.s. 6 (1963): 36. This identification of Sarogama with a location some fifteen miles north of Mahiyaiigana would leave modern-day Seruvila with no clear historical importance. 39. Ibid., p. 188. 40. K. Indrapala, ‘The Origin of the Tamil VannI Chieftaincies of Ceylon;’ Ceylon Journal of the Humanities 1 (July 1970): 111-40. Pathmanathan says that the east coast became predominantly Tamil-speaking in the period between the tenth and mid¬ thirteenth centuries, although his evidence is scattered and debatable. See S. Path¬ manathan, The Kingdom of Jaffna (Colombo: Ceylon Newspapers, 1978), p. 136. 41. Sirisena D. E. Wirasinghe, ed., Seruvila-Kdvantissa (Sinhala) (Colombo: M. D. Gunasena, 1964), p. 156. I owe the Tamil translation to Dennis McGilvray. 42. See Dennis McGilvray, “Mukkuvar Vannimai: Tamil Caste and Matriclan Ide¬ ology in Batticaloa, Sri Lanka,” in Dennis McGilvray, ed., Caste Ideolotjy and Interac¬ tion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), pp. 40-48.

152.

The Presence of the Past

Buddhists preserved the memory of the relic at Seruvila, and certainly the Dhatuvamsa did so. Thus in 1797 the Kandyan king responded to a request from the Thai king to recover the relic which then lay in territory diat had fallen into British hands. He sent a Kandyan chief and a small party to Seruvila to excavate the ruins, and they made an unsuccessful attempt to reclaim the relic.43 The ruins were not reclaimed from the jungle until this century. In 1909 the Trincomalee assistant government agent inspected the ruins and found “a mound of earth 25 feet high and comprising the re¬ mains of a square platform, flights of steps, large pillars, and a single door-frame still held in place.”44 Dambagasare Sumedhamkara first visited Seruvila in 1921. He was not the first Buddhist monk to take up residence in a frontier area. Rather, he was just one of the pioneer monks who followed the examples of the monks who began to oc¬ cupy sacred places in Anuradhapura in the second half of the nine¬ teenth century.45 Sumedhamkara moved to Seruvila at the request of his teacher, Alutgama Silakhanda, the incumbent of a pirivena in Dodanduva, who was himself responding to a request from lay people in the Trincomalee and Batticaloa area. Born to a fisher caste (Karava) family, Sumedhamkara sailed to Muttur by boat. Once settled, he received initial support from other Karava people who worked in the Trincomalee area as fishermen and merchants. The monk de¬ scribes his first visit to Seruvila thus: I came to Seruvila in 1921 with a beating heart. There was nobody in the forest to tell about my pains, to ask for a little water to drink. I had only elephants and tuskers like walking rocks and bears like carved satin logs to be my acquaintances. If there was any human voice it was only 43. Jonathan Forbes, Eleven Tears in Ceylon (London: Richard Bentley, 1848; rpt. Gregg, 1972), 2:223. Rama I was rebuilding the Thai state in Bangkok in 1797, an appropriate time for installing a prestigious relic in a relic mound in the new capital. 44. “Seruvila’s Sacred City,” Observer, April 15, 1979. 45. Another was Maduve Ratanasara, who took up residence at Vilgam Raja Maha Vihara in 1951. The students of these first-generation monks were drawn from the sons of Sinhala colonists who also had moved into these areas. See C. Cyril Mathew, Velgarn Vehera saha Mandavatu Nuvara (Vilgam Vihara and the City of Mandavatu) (Colombo: Velgam Vehera Pujanagara Samvardhana Samitiya, 1981), p. 2. Besides Kitalagama Silalankara of Matara, who settled in the jungle near the ancient monas¬ tery at Dimbulagala in the 1940s, pioneer monks from the South included Gandara Dharmakirti, who took up the incumbency of the ruined Girihandu vehera (vihara). See C. Cyril Mathew, Girihandu Maha Vehera (Colombo: Sri Lanka Government Press, 1980), p. 20.

Races and Places

153

mine. At certain times during the nights I heard pirit being chanted from the side of the dagaba. The great forest was spreading to a neverending distance. I pondered the unbroken association of the Sinhala nation and Buddhism from beginning to end, and again from end to the beginning.46

Sumedhamkara came to Seruvila knowing of the traditions sur¬ rounding the frontal-bone relic and the ruined dagaba from an 1890 translation in Sinhala of the Pali Dhdtuvamsa47 In turn he published his own edition of the Dhdtuvamsa.48 The monk who intended to restore the ruined dagaba was also the monk who made a Sinhala translation of the text that explained the importance of the place. The editorial work proved to be easier, for the rebuilding of the dagaba stretched out from 1922 to 1977. D. D. Weerasingha became the monk’s first major supporter. Like Sumedhamkara, he came from the Southern Province, rising in the clerical service until he became mudaliyar of Kegalle in 1891. As a member of the Buddhist Theosophical Society and the Royal Asiatic Society, he cultivated an interest in Sri Lanka’s past. By 1922 he had resigned from government service to de¬ vote himself to religious activities. On pilgrimage to Anuradhapura he visited Seruvila and vowed to restore the dagaba. In 1923 he founded the Seruvila Dagaba Restoration Society, and by 1930 he had restored the dagaba and carried out the pinnacle-laying ceremony. Later he purchased 500 acres of nearby land and gave it to the monkhood so that Sumedhamkara and his students would be cared for.49 Who it was that worked those lands for the monks is not clear. There were very few Sinhalas in the district at the time of the 1921 Census. The Distribution of Settlements shows only one Sinhala setdement in both Muttur and Seruvila districts. It lies near the coast some ten miles from Seruvila. Some 12.8 percent of the population of Seruvila District was Sinhala (as against 0.8 percent in Muttur Dis¬ trict) in 1921. By 1981 the Sinhala share of the district’s population was over 30 percent. Sumedhamkara became a spokesman for Sinhala settlers who were given land between the Allai tank and the Ullackale lagoon. The land there is flat and low-lying, and the ancient temple originally depended on the nearby tank which allowed the controlled 46. 47. 48. 49.

“Nagenahira Bauddha Punaralokaye Nirmatruvarayano,” p. 3. See Malalasekera, The Pali Literature of Ceylon, p. 256. Nandaratana, ed., Dhatuvamsa, p. Lx. Wirasinghe, ed., Seruvila-Kavantissa, p. 15.

154

The Presence of the Past

irrigation of the surrounding fields. The restoration of the ancient temple depended on the restoration of the tank. In the past few dec¬ ades, substantial amounts of nearby land—something on the order of 10,000 acres—have been put under irrigation.50 Sumedhamkara wanted Buddhists settled on those lands. In a 1970 election rally, he said that if the incumbent UNP government “was following demo¬ cratic principles, they should explain as to why they were giving pref¬ erential treatment to non-Sinhalese, ignoring Sinhalese Buddhists who were a majority. As a result of the irresponsible statements of some Ministers to the effect that they would treat all Nationals alike great damage was being done to the Sinhalese people.”51 The dagaba’s entanglement with settlement policy was inevitable, but it emerged as a national issue only after Sumedhamkara met Cyril Mathew, minister of industries and scientific affairs, in the late 1970s. The monk told the minister of his determination to petition the gov¬ ernment to declare Seruvila a sacred city.52 Since the 1950s he had tried to convince several governments to designate the place a sacred area. Before the Buddha Jayanti, the supporters of the Seruvila dagaba petitioned the Bandaranaike government for sacred-city sta¬ tus. They complained that a Buddhist government had managed to change the names of roads in Colombo, but still had not removed the name—Allai—given to Seruvila by people the complaint calls “mis¬ believers.”53 Petitions to Mrs. Bandaranaike’s later government ap¬ peared to have worked, for in August 1963 newspaper articles an¬ nounced that Seruvila was to be made a sacred city.54 Nothing came of the announcement until the monk met Mathew: “I saw in the face of the Hon. Minister,” Sumedhamkara wrote, “that my aspirations would be realized.”55 With Mathew’s help, Seruvila finally became a sacred city in March 1979. 50. “Nagenahira Bauddha Punaralokaye Nirmatruvarayano,” p. 6. 51. “I Don’t Want Personal Favours from Any Govt.—Basnayake,” Ceylon Daily News, March 31, 1970. 52. The monk’s description of that meeting: ‘The Buddha had said that a person with good thoughts will meet another of the same qualities. Similar ideas bring one another into friendship. My mind was set on the further development of Seruvila. My ideas took this direction. I met the Hon. Minister at this juncture” (“Nagenahira Bauddha Punaralokaye Nirmatruvarayano,” pp. 5—6). 53. Wirasinghe, ed., Seruvila-Kavantissa, p. 157. 54. “Seruvila Puja Nagaraya Veya” (“Seruvila Becomes a Sacred City), Rividina, August 11, 1963. 55. “Nagenahira Bauddha Punaralokaye Nirmatruvarayano,” p. 6.

Races and Places

155

Sumedhamkara also became a major force for the protection of sa¬ cred places beyond Seruvila. By the time he died, he had become the mahanayaka of the Kalyanivansa Nikaya, in large part in recognition of his efforts in saving Buddhist ruins in the Eastern Province. Dur¬ ing the Dudley Senanayake government, he complained to govern¬ ment of the cutting of the sacred bo tree at Fort Frederick in Trincomalee. According to his student, this complaint led direcdy to Tamil reprisals. Eighteen bo trees all over Trincomalee District were desecrated, and the Sinhala-reading public all over the island learned that Tamils were hell-bent on destroying Buddhist places.56 Sumedhamkara also took an interest in the dagaba at Samudragiri, an an¬ cient seaport originally known as Lankapatuna. In 1975 he wrote to Cyril Mathew, complaining of the damage done to the ruins at Sam¬ udragiri and the construction of a kovil at the site.57 At the same time he played a principal role in forcing the national government to pro¬ tect the bo tree at Kiliveddy, across the Allai tank from the Seruvila dagaba. Although the bo tree stands some ten miles by land away from the monastery and dagaba that Sumedhamkara restored, the Kiliveddy bo tree has come to be known as the Seruvila bo tree: It is evident from the ancient remains scattered around the Seruvila temple that it had been an extensive monastic establishment. As there are inscriptions which belong to the Situlpavuva vihara in Rohana within a radius of ten miles of the central monastery it could be sur¬ mised that ancient monastic establishments were very extensive. There¬ fore, although this Bodhi tree was situated at a considerable distance from the temple, it could be definitely said that it had stood within the temple premises during ancient times.58

However dubious the argument sounds, it finds some support in a local tradition that the ruins of the dagaba and the other buildings of Seruvila lay on the opposite sides of the tank, “connected ... by a causeway through the water.”59 The monk and the minister were not the only actors in the cam¬ paign to save the Kiliveddy bo tree. The vice president of the Seruvila Restoration Committee’s complaints to Prime Minister Bandaranaike in 1964 made her aware of the first stages of the desecration: “all 56. 57. 58. 59.

‘Thera Continues Evidence,” Daily News, November 23, 1978. Mathew, An Appeal to UNESCO . . . , p. 131. Ibid., p.n Forbes, Eleven Tears in Ceylon, 2:223.

156

The Presence of the Past

those years Buddhists and Hindus used to pay their respects at this place and last week when I went there I was shocked to find the tree completely destroyed. We have not done any harm to any Hindu shrine.”60 The evidence for the dagaba’s having existed and having been venerated “all those years” comes from the Dhatuvamsa, which says that the Seruvila bo tree is even older than the dagaba which dates to King Kavantissa’s time. Devanampiyatissa (250-210 b.c.e.) is said to have planted the bo tree about a hundred years before the construction of the dagaba.61 By this logic, it is as old as Sri Lankan Buddhism itself, planted at the instruction of Mahinda, King Asoka’s Buddhist ambassador to Sri Lanka, and grown from one of the first five berries produced by the sacred bo tree at Anuradhapura. The Mahammsa itself makes no reference to Seruvila, saying only that “the other 32 Bodhi-saplings which sprang from four (later) fruits [were planted] in a circle, at a distance of a yojana [approximately seven or eight miles] here and there in the vihara,C (Mv. 19.63). More branches were cut from the bo tree in 1970, this time not by vandals but at the behest of the Federal party M.P. from Muttur, who allegedly wanted the way cleared for the installation of telephone lines to his house.62 Sumedhamkara complained to Mrs. Bandaranaike, the minister of cultural affairs, the government agent in Trincomalee, and the commissioner of archaeology. Mrs. Bandaranaike’s government did nothing, and within a year it was involved in the Che Guervarist insurgency. Efforts by the Department of Archaeology to protect the tree broke down too, apparendy because having a sacred site declared an archaeological reserve required a survey requisition from the local government agent. “In this regard,” M. H. Sirisoma, assistant com¬ missioner of archaeology, told the Sansoni Commission, “the Depart¬ ment had lots of difficulties with the Trincomalee, Mannar, and Vavuniya kachcheris [provincial government offices].63 The implication of Sirisoma’s testimony is plain. Tamils working in provincial govern¬ ment offices are the last people to protect Buddhist sacred places. 60. “Asst. Archeology Commissioner Gives Evidence,” Daily NeiPs, December 2, 1978. 61. Hansard, October 28, 1980, columns 1977—80. Some monks now believe that Devanampiyatissa himsell built the dagaba, a belief that increases the sanctity of the place still more. See ‘There Were No Traditional Tamil Areas in the Past: Bhikkhu,” Daily News, August 25, 1978. 62. Mathew, An Appeal to UNESCO, p. xiv. 63. “Assistant Archeological Commissioner Gives Evidence,” Daily News, Decem¬ ber 2, 1978.

Races and Places

157

Besides the alleged role of the Muttur M.P. in cutting bo tree limbs, the Kiliveddy bo tree was also threatened by a Hindu kovil that stands nearby. Since there are no historical texts indicating the importance or antiquity of the kovil, Hindu claims strike Sinhalas as empty. In 1976 Eric de Silva, the Government Agent in Trincomalee, reported that a few more branches of the tree had been cut, but more important, that plans were being laid to destroy the tree entirely at the culmination of a Hindu festival.64 The destruction of trees is not a regular part of Hindu rituals, but when de Silva visited the place two days later, he found nothing but a ten-foot stump. Sumedhamkara brought charges to the Muttur police at the end of 1976. In April of 1977 de Silva discovered that the stump itself was gone. In 1979 the Department of Archaeology took over the site as an archaeological reserve. The Tamil interpretation of these events is absolutely different, for the Kiliveddy bo tree, on their account, is part of the Mariamman temple that stands nearby. Where Sinhalas say that the Mariamman kovil is only fifty to sixty years old, Tamils say that the identification of the bo tree beside it with the Seruvila dagaba is more recent than that. When Sumedhamkara filed his case in 1976, the Court decided that the tree belonged to the Mariamman kovil. Tamil representatives admit the vandalism but accuse Sinhalas of worse acts: vandals destroy all religions, not only Buddhism, they destroy other religions. There was a statue of God Kanapathi outside Fort Frederick. One day it was taken and dumped in the sea, there was a board put up Gana Devid Ndnda Giya [God Ganesh has gone bathing]. Do we say that the Hon. Minister of Industries [Cyril Mathew] was responsible for it? No. Now that is vandalism. . . . Does the Hindu religion believe in shedding blood? But, surely, things have happened in this country which you cannot deny. Can you deny that in 1958 a Brahmin priest was burnt alive in Panadura, or can you deny that in 1977. I9 Hindu temples were destroyed in all parts of the country?65

The destruction of Buddhist sacred places is frequently cited as the cause of recent ethnic disturbances.66 Sinhalas see their response to outrages against Buddhism as fierce, but disorganized, reflecting their 64. Mathew, An Appeal to UNESCO, p. xv. 65. Hansard, October 28, 1980, column 2005. 66. See, for instance, ‘Thera Continues Evidence,” Daily News, November 23, 1978. Sumedhamkara’s chief student argued before the Sansoni Commission that “One of the main causes of the communal disturbances of August 1977 was the de¬ struction of Buddhist places of worship.”

158

The Presence of the Past

chronic problem, disunity. But the destruction of those Buddhist sa¬ cred places, on the same account, is never disorganized. Cyril Mathew called it part of a Tamil United Liberation Front plan to eliminate all evidence of Buddhist presence in the North and East, and thus to make a better claim for Tamil Eelam (the Sri Lankan Tamil state that Tamil liberationists demand). Fear of this plan caused him to appeal to the Sinhala people directly: Dlghavapi and Seruvila are places in North and East sanctified by the footprint of the Buddha . . . Madukanda raja maha vihara in Vavuniya, Tiriyay, Seruvila dagaba, Seruvila raja maha vihara, Velgam [Vilgam] vehera, and Dlghavapi maha thupaya are the signs of Sinhala Bud¬ dhism having lived here for thousands of years ... it is your duty and my duty to safeguard these religious and national ruins for future gen¬ erations. As Sinhalas we appeal to you to give your consideration for this task. This appeal comes to you directly from the Seruvila Sacred City Development Society. It is no secret that since some time we have faced a threat of the destruction of archaeological ruins found in the Northern Province and the ancient Rohana janapada [settlement] in the Eastern Province. It is not our duty to keep our eyes closed to allow these ruins to be destroyed any further, and if we are to safe¬ guard our private property only, it would mean erasing the Buddhist tradition and helping the uncivilized anti-Buddhist, anti-national movement indirectly.67

The destruction of sacred places is more than vandalism in these circumstances because desecrating a sacred place confirms each com¬ munity’s worst fears about the ethnic other. Yet beneath both the suspicion and misunderstanding lays a genuinely ancient cultural practice that Hindus and Buddhists share. Consider this exchange be¬ tween a Tamil lawyer and a Buddhist monk at a government commis¬ sion that investigated the 1977 attacks on Tamils: Question [Manikkavasar Underwood]: Whenever a convenient bo tree is found some Buddhists first build a wall or a shrine around it, and then bring a priest who does not do any work and thereafter claim that to maintain the priest, dayakayas [lay supporters] are needed, and settle them close by, and the result is a Sinhala settlement in a Tamil area and the entire machinery of government backs the Sinhala Buddhists . . . Answer [Seruvila Saranakirti]: I am happy that this suggestion has been made. Similarly Tamil Hindus whenever they find a banyan, margosa, or tamarind tree, and even an anthill they clear up the place, burn 67. Mathew, Sihaluni! Budusasuna Beraganiv, pp. 12—13.

Races and Places

159

camphor and offer a flower. After sometime they place a stone slab and draw a diagram of God Ganesha and start making offerings and wor¬ shipping there and also give a name to it. Then a committee is appoin¬ ted to administer the place and an aiyyar [priest] is appointed. Later on either a cadjan shelter of a tar barrel sheet is placed over it and little by little a kovil is constructed with donations collected among villagers. Some Sinhala Buddhists also worship there as all Buddhists respect God Ganesha. The activities are carried on to such an extent that the area is declared a traditional Tamil area and in that manner a whole lot of kovils are set up.68

The irony of two ethnic communities being separated by a com¬ mon religious practice scratches only the surface of the matter because Sri Lankan social difference depends nowadays on Sinhalas and Tamils being members of different races. Like Dambagasare Sumedhamkara himself, a majority of settlers around Seruvila are Karava (fisher) caste. Many of the pioneer monks across the Dry Zone have Karava origins, and although it is harder to discover the origins of other Sinhala settlers in those areas, the majority come from the southwestern quadrant of the island where Karava, Salagama, and Durava castes are concentrated. All these castes have a South Indian origin, having migrated to Sri Lanka after the thirteenth century. To judge from some family biographies, some Karava migrated from In¬ dia as recently as the eighteenth century.69 In the matter of “race,” these Sinhalas share a South Indian origin with present-day Sri Lankan Tamils, and to the extent that marriage choice has been con¬ strained by expectations of caste endogamy, the Karava have re¬ mained a bounded community ever since. They have become Sinhala neither by descent from Vijaya nor by intermarriage but by adopting Sinhala practices. In the colonial world religion and race became criteria of difference between people, and such differences overrode practices and beliefs that Sinhalas and Tamils shared. Where Dry Zone settlers might have found some solidarity in their common pursuit of small-scale agricul¬ ture, differences of religion and race came to be accentuated by the distinction between Sinhala settlers defined as “nationals” and Tamil settlers defined as members of a “nonnational” community. When 68. ‘Thera Continues Evidence,” Daily News, November 23, 1978. 69. See Michael Roberts, “From Southern India to Lanka: the Traffic in Commod¬ ities, Bodies, and Myths from the Thirteenth Century Onwards,” South Asia n.s. 3 (June 1980): 40.

i 6o

The Presence of the Past

Anagarika Dharmapala began to speak of peasants as “sons of the soil,” he clearly did not mean to give Tamil peasants the advantages he envisioned for Sinhalas. Very quickly differences between Sinhalas and Tamils became more than matters of ethnic identity or of who was “of the soil” and who was not, for as settlement schemes devel¬ oped, access to newly irrigated land came to be regulated by ethnic considerations. In this process sacred places became theaters of ethnic conflict, bearing out the truths of nationalist ideology in real-life events.

6 An Elected Government Invokes the Past

D. S. Senanayake was the first modern Sri Lankan politician to iden¬ tify himself with ancient kings and traditional practices. But one con¬ nection to the past he simply inherited; as the Senanayakes were mak¬ ing their fortune in the late ninetenth century, they began to trace their descent to Parakramabahu.1 What motivated the family to fabri¬ cate this connection is unclear, although Low Country caste groups of the time characteristically linked their origins to ancient Indian dynasties, and this association picked up on the common geographi¬ cal origins of the Senanayake family and the warrior-hero. Although Senanayake was very much a secular leader with Westernized tastes, he too came to feel the weight of the past in the 1930s when he undertook the renovation of the irrigation systems of the Northern and Eastern Provinces. In the words of Sir John Kotelawela: When D.S. Senanayake was once travelling through the Minneriya dis¬ trict, in connection with the extension of the railway to Batticaloa, he happened to get off the train and wander down a jungle path. He found himself standing on the bund, or dyke, of the Minneriya tank. The idea then came to him that what our ancient kings had done the modern rulers could do equally well. Thus began the restoration of

1. Janice Jiggins, Caste and Family in the Politics of the Sinhalese, 1947-76 (Cam¬ bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), p. hi.

i62

The Presence of the Past

large tanks, and the reclaiming of the land from the jungle for peasant colonies.2

In rebuilding the Minneriya tank, Senanayake returned to a project that Mahasena began in the fourth century, and when he later re¬ stored the Parakrama Samudra, he reclaimed an ancient reservoir that Parakramabahu had begun. At Senanayake’s initiative, R. L. Brohier, Assistant Surveyor General in die 1930s, began to compile his An¬ cient Irrigation Works in Ceylon, part commemoration and part plan for development.3 And in his efforts to increase agricultural produc¬ tion, Senanayake spoke in terms of Parakramabahu’s ancient meta¬ phor, saying that he would make the island a peradiga dhanyd gamy a (granary of the East). The Parakramabahu connection also owed something to the Sen¬ anayake family’s restoration of the Mahiyangana vihara, which had earlier been reconstructed by Parakramabahu’s charity.4 Senanayake served as the principal lay supporter of the Vidyalankara pirivena, be¬ coming particularly close to the monks of the Ramariria Nikaya. To this extent, he acted simply as a pious householder, but he also initi¬ ated the process that has culminated in the present-day practice by which elected leaders regularly show traditional forms of respect to Buddhism in public settings. The process began in March 1947 when the relics of the Buddha’s chief disciples, Sariputta and Moggallana, were returned from England to Sanchi vihara in North India. On the way, the relics were brought to Sri Lanka, where they were received by Senanayake, dressed as an up as aka (lay supporter) in national dress and white shawl {uturusaluva). He prostrated himself and then car¬ ried the relic casket on his head on behalf of the Buddhist public.5 From the jetty, the relics were taken on the back of an elephant to the Colombo Museum to be kept on display for forty-seven days. Some two million people visited the museum to venerate the relics, but just as important, the national leader was heard acting out his respon2. Sir John Kotelawela, quoted in H. A. J. Hulugalle, The Life and Times of Don Stephen Senanayake (Colombo: M.D. Gunasena, 1975), P- 108. 3. R. L. Brohier, Ancient Irrigation Works in Ceylon (Colombo: Ceylon Govern¬ ment Press, 1934-35). 4. A second account links the two sacred places by way of identifying the bo tree at Botale, the Senanayakes’ ancestral home, as a sapling of the bo tree at Mahiyaiigana; see Hulugalle, The Life and Times of Don Stephen Senanayake, p. 8. 5. Nandadeva Wijesekera, ed., Mahdvamsa, Nutana Tup ay a (Colombo: Govern¬ ment Press, 1987), p. 67.

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sibility to the religion because the event was broadcast over the radio. For Senanayake, public attendance on the relics was one thing, and policy quite another. During his administration, his biographer writes, “a leading Buddhist layman and two [monks] called on him and urged that Sinhala should be made the official language and Bud¬ dhism the state religion. He gave them a patient hearing and said that he was too busy dealing with the problems of food, shelter and em¬ ployment to turn his mind to less urgent matters.”6 The identification with Parakramabahu was thus appropriate in a second way. Like Parakramabahu, Senanayake put most of his energy into agricultural development, and when his son, Dudley Senanayake, became prime minister, he followed his father in invoking Parakramabahu’s exam¬ ple, to create a context for his efforts to increase agricultural produc¬ tion. In this chapter I consider this fusion of horizons since Senanayake’s time, concentrating on the heroic mode as a political form. Tamil cultural nationalism developed together with a nationalist cinema that gave M. G. Ramachandran a heroic persona long before he entered politics. The Sinhala cinema has never had a comparable mytho-heroic genre, and Sinhala politicians have made the association with figures from the past in other contexts, most often in election cam¬ paigns themselves.7 The best example is J. R. Jayewardene’s promise in the national election of 1977 to create a dharmistha (righteous) society, a neologism he invented to envision a return to the Buddhist leadership of the past. Once he was elected, Jayewardene renewed a practice that marked earlier times of reform by calling for the updat¬ ing of the Mahdvamsa.

The Heroic Mode in Contemporary Politics Despite the Senanayakes’ beginnings, it was S. W. R. D. Bandaranaike who made an institutional place in public affairs for Bud¬ dhism, and although he drew no parallel between himself and ancient 6. Hulugalle, The Life and Times of Don Stephen Senanayake, p. 79. 7. See Jayadeva Uyangoda, “Cinema in Cultural and Political Debates in Sri Lanka,” Framework 37 (1989): 39. One instructive consequence of the lack of Sinhala nationalist cinema heroes was the popularity until recent years of M. G. R. among Sinhalas.

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The Presence of the Past

kings, the contrast between the Senanayakes’ effect on the polity and his own caused political commentators to do so for him. The Sen¬ anayakes’ administrations emphasized agriculture, one writer sug¬ gested, Bandaranaike’s industry; the Senanayake years were stable, the Bandaranaike years, turbulent; culture lay dormant during the Sen¬ anayake years, it prospered under Bandaranaike; the Senanayakes sought to unify the heterogeneous elements of the polity and pro¬ duced harmony, Bandaranaike brought a period of divisive politics and ethnic conflict. The distinctive character of the each administra¬ tion had historical precedents: In our history, the Parakrama Bahu tradition represents essentially the classic strength of the great builders while the Dutugamunu tradition belongs to a strong vein of national emotionalism and romanticism. . . . On the one hand there is Mr. S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike who was in a significant way the identical political progeny of King Dunigamunu. Both played the political game ambitiously aiming to capture power at any cost. Both rode to power on the identical national issues of Buddh¬ ism and Sinhala. And both had Buddhist monks in their campaigns. On the other hand, there was D.S. Senanayake, who resembled King Parakrama Bahu in many ways. Professor E.F.C. Ludowyk summarises Parakrama Bahu’s major achievements in one sentence: “He unified the kingdom, restored tanks, built new ones, expelled the invaders and de¬ spatched expeditions overseas.” Except for embarking on political expe¬ ditions abroad D.S. Senanayake did achieve all these other things. By any standards he was a political genius who overshadowed other men in the field by his lucid prescience and colossal achievements. The only other parallel in our history is King Parakrama Bahu.8

Bandaranaike’s election in 1956 coincided with the Buddha Jayanti, and his landslide victory owed quite a lot to rising Buddhist feelings and Sinhala nationalism. Popular tradition associated Ban¬ daranaike’s victory with the belief that King Diyasena would appear at the Buddha Jay anti, conquer Anuradhapura with a great army, and reestablish a Buddhist polity,9 but Bandaranaike himself did nothing to encourage his being associated with Diyasena. And beyond Dudley 8. H. L. D. Mahindapala, “Man Who Won the Crown—Four Times,” The Ceylon Observer, Magazine Edition, April 6, 1970. 9. See Kitsiri Malalgoda, “Millennialism in Relation to Buddhism,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 12 (October 1970): 438—39. The potency of the Di¬ yasena analogy is also suggested by the example of the labor leader A. E. Goonesinha whose followers called him their Diyasena; see Virayd, November 27, 1929.

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165

Senanayake’s identifying himself with Parakramabahu and saying in the 1965 campaign that he would rule in keeping with the dasarnjadhamma (the ten kingly virtues of traditional Sri Lankan kings),10 politicians’ use of the past in this way was little more than a passing hyperbole. When he ran for office in 1977, J. R. Jayewardene changed all that, building his election campaign around respect for indigenous culture. Buddhism, and agricultural development. My sense is that Jayewardene and his advisers had no one ancient king in mind. But they had every reason to set off the righteousness of the past from present-day conditions. Before the event, Jayewardene’s election as Sri Lanka’s prime min¬ ister in the 1977 general election looked unlikely, if not impossible. Thrown out of office in 1970, the United National party (UNP) found itself reduced to seventeen of 157 seats in Parliament. Before the party could regain its confidence, Mrs. Bandaranaike’s coalition government voted in a new constitution and extended its own life. When Dudley Senanayake died in 1973, Jayewardene assumed con¬ trol of a party in disarray. Despite the disheartened condition of the opposition, things had hardly gone better for Mrs. Bandaranaike. The Che Guervarist insurgency of 1971 revealed the bitter disaffection of the young and unemployed. It also introduced revolutionary violence as a factor in national politics. The Sri Lankan economy deteriorated apace. By 1976, there was open talk of secession of the Northern and Eastern Provinces, and the founding of a new state—Tamil Eelam. The nation was beginning to come apart at the seams. In place of an incumbent Bandaranaike administration charged with autocratic rule, political victimization, favoritism to party faith¬ fuls, and abuse of power, Jayewardene talked of clean government, ethical conduct in public life, respect for the rule of law, the indepen¬ dence of the judiciary, and freedom of the press.11 But the creation of a dharmistha society was only half of Jayewardene’s platform. He also promised that his administration would make Sri Lanka’s citizens free (:nivahal), which required, Jayewardene argued, that the state not im10. Cv. 37.108. 11. In a campaign speech, Jayewardene summed up those charges: “Bad examples, treating one’s kith and kin, political victimization and slavery and incarceration with¬ out trial, taking over or controlling the mass media are things that must be shunned by a just government,” (“We Shall Live Exemplary Lives,” Assures JR,” Daily News, May 2, 1977).

i 66

The Presence of the Past

pose righteousness on people. Instead of allowing Buddhism or Bud¬ dhists to set policy, his government would assist the sasana by foster¬ ing moral behavior on an individual basis.12 Where the Bandaranaike government had tightly controlled the economy, the UNP manifesto proposed to open it up and encourage foreign capital investment in order to create employment. If elected, Jayewardene said he would bring Sri Lanka the economic expansion and prosperity that Singapore had enjoyed in the 1960s and 1970s. The process would entail dismantling state-run corporations and getting government out of commercial enterprises, large and small. But the manifesto also proposed to maintain existing welfare measures—subsidized food, medical care, and educational services—as well as cheap public trans¬ port. By reconstructing itself as a party as socialist as the incumbent gov¬ ernment, the UNP resolved a long-standing problem. It suppressed the charge that the UNP was the party of the capitalists (danapati), a characterization with a real sting in a country where the word for “capitalist” literally means “man who controls wealth,” and thus other people. And a party that wants to minimize its capitalist connections needs to emphasize its respect for what I described in the previous chapter as capitalism's opposite figure, the peasantry. Once the leftist parties quit the coalition government that put Mrs. Bandaranaike in power, the UNP claim to be just as concerned as the incumbent gov¬ ernment with the peasantry, village life, and the issue of poverty be¬ came that much more plausible. The difference could be seen—said a leading UNP politician, Lalith Athulathmudali, in a campaign speech—in the way the incumbent government had put those demo¬ cratic values into practice: ‘The SLFP [Sri Lanka Freedom party] concept of democracy meant the extension of the life of Parliament against the wishes of the people, the UNP stood for democratic prin¬ ciples being followed.”13 And why the UNP’s profession of faith in democracy could be trusted was clear enough. The UNP based its ideology on morality. The SLFP did not. Instead it believed in nepo¬ tism and Radala (high-caste Kandyan) privilege. iz. J. R. Jayewardene, “Mage Bauddha bhaktiya kisivekuta venas kala nohakiya” (“No One Can Question My Devotion to Buddhism ’)-* in J- R. Jayewardene, Budusasuna saha Prajatantravadaya (The Buddhist Tradition and Democracy) (Colombo: Government Press, 1982), n.p. 13. “I Will Lead the Nation without Discrimination,” Daily Nen>s, May 26, 1977.

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Jayewardene talked of drawing up a code of conduct for his office in a way that recalled the dasarajadhamma. But the ruler’s respon¬ sibility to govern righteously never figured before in a party platform. The UNP 1977 campaign manifesto promised righteousness in gov¬ ernment in the same breath as it announced its support for free edu¬ cation and food subsidies. Addressing an election rally at Panadura, Jayewardene declared that he had been an ahimsavddl (devotee of peace) all his life, although he acknowledged having done a little box¬ ing in school. “I have told my candidates,” he went on, “that liquor will be anathema in the next Parliament, bribery a thing of the past, and that we shall rule according to the ‘saddcharaycC [tradition of vir¬ tue] of the country. Any member of his party who failed to adhere to the code for members will have no place even for an hour in the National State Assembly.”14 Jayewardene would lead an exemplary life, and he expected the same of his ministers, members of Parlia¬ ment, and the Buddhist monkhood. Creating a dharmistha society would be the work of disciplined leaders, some in government, some in the monkhood. The monks would set an example for the members of his government, who in turn would set an example for the people. Drawing on his personal credibility, Jayewardene emphasized his own virtues. Vote for the UNP, he argued, because I am its leader.15 If the constitutional changes that followed his election can guide us, Jayewardene also intended to increase the power of his office, but at election time he emphasized only that the public could expect proper behavior from his government and its leader.16 S. J. Tambiah has argued that the Asokan model—especially in its emphasis on righteousness, charity, and reforming the monkhood— exerted great power on premodern societies of South and Southeast 14. “I Am an ‘Ahimsavadi,’” Daily News, June 14, 1977. Boxing seems to have played a continuing part in Jayewardene’s sense of himself. He made these remarks in an interview with the journal New International in 1981: “I know that they say I am a strategist and a schemer but you cannot be a leader unless you scheme—not in politics and not in any other human affair. Even a boxer has to scheme—and I was a boxer when I was young—you pretend to hit the face but you hit the stomach. Oh yes, you have to scheme,” quoted in E. M. Thornton and R. Niththyananthan, Sri Lanka, Island of Terror: An Indiament (London: Eelam Research Organization, 1984), p. 32. Jayewardene’s love of games and his directing his playmates in them is treated in K. M. de Silva and Howard Wriggins’s biography of Jayewardene, The Life and Times of). R. Jayewardene of Sri Lanka (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1988), 1:36. 15. “Vote for the UNP Because I Am Its Leader,” Daily News, June 16, 1977. 16. ccWe Shall Live Exemplary Lives, Assures JR,” Daily News, May 2, 1977.

i68

The Presence of the Past

Asia.17 In die Thai case, he writes that the Asokan example has shaped kingly style right down to the present. For the well-read Sri Lankan, the call for a dharmistha society may have evoked Asoka, because he too invented a variety of neologisms constructed from the root “dhamma.”18 But colonialism broke that tradition in India and Sri Lanka, and when these new nations harked back to Asoka, they did so with a number of colonial realities and historical discontinuities in mind. Asokan imagery reappeared in the expressive politics of newly independent India, despite the fact that India lacked any substantial number of Buddhists. In the Indian case where Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, and Christian communities dominate, invoking Asoka had virtue for what it did not emphasize. It put none of the major communities at a disadvantage, celebrating the moral intentions of the new state in a diffuse and nondoctrinal way, besides harking back to a period of righteousness almost 2,000 years before the British inflicted their own conception of good government on India.19 In contemporary Sri Lanka, invoking Asoka struck a very different chord because here what recommended Asoka was not his evenhandedness, but rather his capacity to exemplify both morality in govern¬ ment and the rising force of Buddhism in the national life. In the production of a vocabulary of righteousness, it is hard to overlook the presence of Anandatissa de Alwis, the minister of state in Jayewardene’s government. He took on responsibility for government infor¬ mation and broadcasting after a career at the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency, where he had created the first advertising cam¬ paigns aimed at rural Sinhalas. In a society where 5,130,152 of 6,667,585 voters registered for the 1977 elections came from rural electorates, and where rural electorates controlled 130 of 168 seats in Parliament, the appeal of imageries of tradition, piety, and the past is perfectly clear.

17. S. J. Tambiah, World Conqueror and World Renouncer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), pp. 159-78. 18. The expression “dharmistha” is Sanskrit, and its occurrence a little unusual in a Theravada Buddhist society. Where Jayewardene came upon the expression is thus an interesting question. The other key idea—that Jayewardene would make Sri Lanka nivahal (free)—is also worth noting. As against the more common word for freedom (“nidahas”), marked by the opposition party's name—Sri Lanka Nidahas Pakshaya— “nivahal” has the sense “not enslaved” (ni-vahal [slave]), picking up on Jayewardene’s opposition to communism and government control of the economy. 19. See McKim Marriott, ‘The Cultural Policy of the New States,” in Clifford Geertz, ed.. Old Societies and New States (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1963), p. 39.

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S. W. R. D. Bandaranaike made the first appeal to rural Sinhala voters, but the Jayewardene campaign did so at a much higher level of sophistication. For many years Jayewardene’s family had been ma¬ jor supporters of the ancient temple at Kalaniya, and he himself gave a large parcel of land to the monkhood in the late 1960s. He was also known to have sponsored several expensive and meritorious ceremo¬ nies that entail lighting 84,000 oil lamps (asu haradahas pah an pujdva) in honor of the Buddha. Whenever I have talked to people about the ritual, most have spoken of being impressed by Jayewar¬ dene’s piety. One person said that it was by such acts of piety that Jayewardene had managed to remain in politics so long. Well-to-do people typically sponsor the ceremony; they provide the oil and lamps, and villagers on pilgrimage to Anuradhapura provide the labor to light the lamps. The number 84,000 recalls Asoka’s legendary char¬ ity, which the Mahdvamsa says he demonstrated by building 84,000 viharas to honor the divisions of the Dhamma (Mv. 5.78).20 Jayewar¬ dene’s political opponents were less impressed by the analogy. One characterized him as wanting “not to be a ‘Dharmasoka’ [an Asoka of righteousness], but an ‘Agamathisoka’ [an Asoka who holds the office of prime minister].”21 Jayewardene embodied the full range of Christian, Buddhist, Euro¬ pean, and South Asian influences that weighed on children of his class and time. When he read of the Sri Lankan past, he came to it by way of colonial schoolbooks, and thus his view of the past was full of romantic images and Western cognitive interests. His mother took him as a young boy to meet Marie Musaeus Higgins, the author of a set of Sri Lankan historical tales, told in the manner of Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare. He was impressed enough with Higgins to visit her 20. The As'okavadana, by contrast, says Asoka built 84,000 relic mounds known as dharmarajikas (monuments of the King of Righteousness). See John Strong, The Leg¬ end of King Asoka (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), p. 109. Also see Mv. 34.80 for an account of lamp lighting as an encompassment of the island: “Over the whole island [the king] put up chains of lamps without a break, nay over the waters of the ocean within a yojana around.” 21. J. R. P. Suriyapperuma, the SLFP candidate for Minuwangoda, in a campaign speech in Gampaha, quoted in “UNP Today Comprises Only JR, Premadasa—Suri¬ yapperuma,” Daily News, July 1, 1977. In opposing the immense power with which Jayewardene invested his office once elected, Colvin R. de Silva argued: “This is the democracy of which the President and the Prime Minister have boasted to foreign audiences at the Bandaranaike Memorial International Conference Hall. Only dharmistha hypocrisy can paddle that tale” (“Dictatorship Tightens Is Grip on Sri Lanka” [pamphlet] [Colombo: Star Press, 1979], p. 15).

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The Presence of the Past

grave years later and to have the Department of Education reprint her two volumes when he became prime minister.22 In his eulogy for Dudley Senanayake, he bid his predecessor farewell by saying “Good night sweet prince. May the best of devas [gods] sing thee to thy sleep.’123 He also cultivated a taste for Western music. On a state visit to Washington in 1984 he introduced himself to President Reagan as Sri Lanka’s 193rd head of state, tracing himself back to Vijaya; while at a dinner party on the same occasion, he toasted Reagan, saying that his favorite song was Frank Sinatra’s “My Way.”24 Sinatra did not make his own trip to the White House to receive the Medal of Free¬ dom until May of 1985, but the lyrics of the song Sinatra made fa¬ mous spoke direcdy to Jayewardene’s own estimation of his long ca¬ reer in public life. He invoked the Buddhist past at the same moment he opened Sri Lanka to foreign investment with the exhortation “Let the robber barons come.” When events began to overtake Jayewar¬ dene’s administration, the invocation of righteousness became more ironic than eclectic. For as he was commissioning a new president’s flag, centered on a symbol that is both Asokan and Buddhist, the dhammptcakka (wheel of righteousness), the major ethnic minority was beginning to rebel against the hegemony in Sri Lankan life of the Sinhala majority. Asoka’s name does not come tripping oft' the tongue of Sri Lankans much more often than Frank Sinatra’s, but calling on his image was part of a process by which the new government created a political culture that gave expressive privilege to Buddhism, allowing Jayewardene the advantages of the imperial style in the bargain. Jayewardene moved Parliament to Jayawardhanapura in Kotte just outside Co¬ lombo, close to the center of power in the Kotte kingdom of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. In so doing, he struck a connection between the onetime capital and the man who built the new capital because it is Jayewardene’s good fortune to have inherited a surname that matches the medieval capital’s name. But Jayewardene’s affinity 22. de Silva and Wriggins, The Life and Times ofj. R. Jayewardene, p. 37. 23. H. B. W. Abeynaike, Parliament of Sri Lanka, 197-y (Colombo: Lake House, I977)> P- z6- Horatio’s words at Hamlet’s death have it, “Good night, sweet prince, and flights of angels sing thee to thy rest!” 24. “Visit of Sri Lankan President Jayewardene,” Department of State Bulletin, vol. 84, number 2090, September 1984, pp. 65-68. Jayewardene added that he had used Sinatra’s song as “part of my election campaign and asked the people to vote for my way, which they did” (p. 68).

An Elected Government Invokes the Past

i 7 i

for Asoka is more than a happy coincidence.25 There is something unmistakable in the way Jayewardene made use of popular feeling for Buddhist moral leadership and traditional practices. As part of his redefinition of administrative districts, he had a sapling taken from the sacred bo tree in Anuradhapura and replanted in the foothills of Srlpada, the mountain in Sabaragamuva where, according to tradi¬ tion, the Buddha left his footprint. That sapling itself put forth nine more saplings in short order, which Jayewardene then had planted in the administrative capitals of the island’s nine provinces.26 His enemies frequendy pointed out that there was also something unmistakable about the monarchist imagery of Jayewardene’s admin¬ istration. One of the complaints people made most often about Jaye¬ wardene was his pretension. After his election, he asked people to address him by the honorific utumdnanvahanse (Your Excellency), a considerable elevation in the protocol of high office, although not as presumptuous as the tide devayanvahanse (Your Divinity) that critics accused him of coveting. Describing himself as the inheritor to the Sri Lankan monarchy, Jayewardene made speeches that sounded eerily similar to arguments Sri Lankan kings are known to have made. Speaking at the ceremony that marked the opening of the new cur¬ rency printing plant in the Biyagama Export Processing Zone, Jaye¬ wardene sounded the monarchist theme before an audience of Euro¬ peans and English-speaking Sri Lankans: “For 2,500 years, we have held our own with the biggest countries in the world. We have never been defeated; we have been partly conquered but we have never lost our independence to another. In 1815 we gave over our kingdom and exchanged the King of Sri Lanka for the King of Great Britain. I am the successor to that monarchy. We have therefore 2,500 years of unbroken, undivided lordship of the people over this country and we hope to continue it.”27 Jayewardene’s argument will not withstand

25. Jayewardene includes an early article on Asoka in a collection of speeches and articles, Buddhist Essays (Colombo: Government Press, 1982; first published in 1942), pp. 86-94. 26. L. A. Wickremeratne, “Shifting Metaphors of Sacrality: The Mythic Dimen¬ sions of Anuradhapura,” in Bardwell Smith and Holly Baker Reynolds, eds., The City as a Sacred Center (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1987), p. 57. 27. “Sri Lanka Can Never Be Destroyed—President,” Daily News, June 2, 1987. See also the government publication Golden Threads (Colombo: Government Press, 1982) which contains numerous kingly remarks and images. Jayewardene’s saying that

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The Presence of the Past

even a cursory reading of the historical record, suggesting all the more the power of ideas of continuity and unity. Jayewardene began to appear regularly at public occasions to dem¬ onstrate his sympathy for the religion of the Buddha and Sinhala cul¬ ture. Shortly after his election, he began a food drive by traveling to Panduvasnuvara, close by “the mellowed, time-worn bricks and stones of King Parakramabahu’s palace,” as a newspaper account had it, “nesded below the hill where the ashes of King Vijaya are believed to be buried.”28 When Jayewardene was minister of agriculture in the early 1950s, he had revived a ceremony—entering a paddy field be¬ hind a pair of bullocks to plow the first furrow of the sowing sea¬ son—that gave expression to the king’s involvement in rice agricul¬ ture. After he became head of state, he revived the ritual a second time, making it a much grander ceremony.29 Along with his ministers, he appeared with his sarong pulled up in a vahal pata (a way of tying the cloth above the knees, allowing him to work in a muddy paddy field), and his hair restrained by a jathava (turban). Other members of Parliament appeared in amudhayas (loincloths). The ministers watched as Jayewardene enacted the monarchical role. With this strik¬ ing act, Jayewardene signaled both the UNP’s traditional interest in increasing food production and helping the peasantry, as well as a new sympathy for the way of life and religious beliefs of the majority of Sri Lanka’s people. Jayewardene was not alone in looking to the past and Asoka’s rule. In a 1981 speech that marked the opening of a bodhiprakdra (the enclosure that protects a bo tree), Prime Minister R. Premadasa said this about the ancient Indian king: the Sinhala people have never been conquered may show the influence of Anagarika Dharmapala who often used that expression. But the claim is older than Dharmapala, dominating a message sent to the British by the Kandyan court in 1811: “One thing is certain, no foreign foe, be it English, Dutch, French, or Kaffir, will conquer Lanka. Through the protection of the four gods, the Guardians of its religion and the Merits of the King, for five thousand years no foe will continue to reside here” (quoted by Malalgoda, “Millennialism in Relation to Buddhism,” p. 433). The statement, how¬ ever, may have a colonial source in Cordiner’s more temperate assertion that the “Candians . . . have never been subdued by any foreign powers” (James Cordiner, A De¬ scription of Ceylon [London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme, 1807], P90. The telling point is that the same formula circulates between very different discourses. 28. “PM Will Inaugurate Vap Magul Ceremony on Oct. 26,” Daily News, October n, 197729. de Silva and Wriggins, The Life and Times ofj. R. Jayewardene, pp. 290—91.

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King Dhammasoka of India was the greatest of monarchs in the world who found effective solutions to political, economic and social prob¬ lems faced by humanity. His rule was highly just and marked by great successes. An examination of it showed that he had fashioned it by adopting a unique strategy, which no ruler had ever adopted. H.G. Wells says that Dhammasoka was the unique ruler for he substituted Moral Law for State Law. There are many people who say that a state cannot be run according to the Moral Law or Dhamma. If that is so I would like to ask you, what really are the objectives of State Adminis¬ tration? Through State Administration you surely expect to achieve unity, peace, and discipline among the people and development and prosperity in the country. To achieve prosperity, unity, peace, disci¬ pline, and development are indispensable. There can be no peace with¬ out unity. There can be no discipline without peace. There can be no development without unity, peace, and discipline.30

Linking Asoka to peace, discipline, and unity, Premadasa sounded the principal themes of Jayewardene’s government. Following his election, Jayewardene went to Kandy to the Temple of the Tooth Relic, where he delivered his first speech from the pattirippuva (octagonal pavilion) of the Temple. Looking down on the collected mass of well-wishers, Jayewardene spoke first of postelection violence marked by his supporters thrashing supporters of the de¬ posed government. Saying that his administration would usher in an age of peace, he went on to lay out the policies he intended to pur¬ sue. Looking up at Jayewardene, the crowd saw a leader assuming an exalted, traditional position, for the last Kandyan king, Sri Vikrama Rajasimha, had the pattirippuva built in order to watch spectacles from an elevated height. Jayewardene announced changes certain to affect Buddhists in contradictory ways. He would soon lower the sta¬ tus of the two Buddhist universities that had grown and prospered under the administration of both Bandaranaikes. Despite the fact that only one king had used the place and he was the first elected leader to do so, Jayewardene emphasized continuity with the precolonial past: When the country enjoyed freedom it is from here the kings addressed the people. Those who became Prime Ministers with your assistance

30. In R. Premadasa, Pan Men Surakimu Siri Lanka (Let Us Protect Sri Lanka), compiled by Christy Cooray (Colombo: Government Press, 1984), p. in. Premadasa’s allusion to H. G. Wells suggests both the rhetorical advantages of citing a Western authority to justify an Asian achievement and the circuitous, highly workedover process by which historical characters such as Asoka reach the present.

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The Presence of the Past

spoke from here. . . . Seventy percent of our country are Buddhists. Therefore we shall lead our lives according to the sacred words of the Buddha. . . . The U.N.P. government aims at building a new society on the foundation of the principles of Buddha Dhamma. We have a duty to protect the Buddha sdsana and to pledge that every possible action would be taken to develop it. At the same time we expect to help the cause of other religions equally.31

In the first year of his administration Jayewardene made a number of changes recalling the actions that a good Buddhist king takes at moments of reform and resurgence. The most substantial was his de¬ cision to speed up the Mahavali development scheme, completing in seven years projects intended to be finished in thirty years. Renewing and expanding irrigation works is a practical, economic action, just as it was in earlier times when Buddhist kings corveed labor to build irrigation works. The prosperity of the people is neither antithetical nor irrelevant to good Buddhist government, but the foundation of a righteous Buddhist society.32 In bringing water to the North-Central Province, Jayewardene linked himself to Parakramabahu and to fig¬ ures such as D. S. Senanayake who followed in that tradition. When Jayewardene proposed to look for large sums of money to develop historically important viharas and archaeological sites in an area that has come to be known as the Cultural Triangle—Anuradhapura, Polonnaruva, and Kandy—the same prudent righteousness marked his proposal.33 Saving the island’s Buddhist heritage opens up the eco¬ nomic possibilities to be enjoyed from “cultural tourism.” Sri Lanka in quick order became a place where European travelers comfortably

31. Nava Mavatak (A New Path), the collected speeches of J. R. Jayewardene (Co¬ lombo: Government Press, 1978), p. 1. Kandyans in particular were offended by Jayewardene’s presumptiousness, and they soon became even more alienated by talk of plans to move the Tooth Relic to Jayawardhanapura in Kotte, where it would occupy the place of honor in the then-proposed parliament building. 32. See Steven Kemper, “Wealth and Reformation in Sinhalese Buddhist Monasti-

cism,” in Donald Swearer and Russell Sizemore, eds., Ethics, Wealth, and Salvation (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1990). pp. 152-169. A doctrinal source for the righteousness of economic prosperity can be found in the Siffdldvada Sutta, but it is more directly seen in the actions of Buddhist kings. 33. Jayewardene did very well in finding a donor. UNESCO offered Sri Lanka 100 million rupees worth of assistance for archaeological conservation. The news appeared in local newspapers on September 20, 1978, the day after the first public notice that the government was going to update the Mahdvamsa. See “New Look for the Glo¬ rious Past: UNESCO Help for ‘Historical Triangle,”1 Sun, September 20, 1978.

An Elected Government Invokes the Past

175

visit the ruins of a precocious South Asian civilization before spending a few days at the beach or sitting on the verandah of a tea estate.

Updating the Mahavamsa under Modern Circumstances Besides making personal examples of himself and his supporters, Jayewardene set out to foster a dharmistha society by enlarging the activ¬ ities of the Ministry of Cultural Affairs and creating a Department of Buddhist Affairs. E. B. Hurulle, who was to become cultural affairs minister, said soon after the election that his ministry would carry the burden of creating a dharmistha society.34 Although the Ministry of Cultural Affairs had existed since the first Bandaranaike administra¬ tion, there had been no attempt, Hurulle said, to revive Sinhala civili¬ zation. Daham pdsalas (schools for teaching Dhamma to children) had received stepmotherly treatment. Hurulle’s ministry intended to cor¬ rect this indifference by appointing cultural officers in each electorate to foster culture at the village level. Asoka had done the same thing. Very shortly the depth of Jayewardene’s commitment was tested when a delegation of Buddhist laypeople from the All-Ceylon Bud¬ dhist Congress called on him. The group presented a list of seven proposals that had been approved at its annual meeting. As it had since the 1950s, the congress expressed its concern over the behavior of Buddhist monks and urged the establishment of both ecclesiastical courts to keep monastic disputes out of civil courts and a Buddha Sasana Mandalaya (Buddhist Affairs Committee) to watch over all matters relating to the sasana. But most of all, the delegation urged Jayewardene to make Sri Lanka a Buddhist republic. “As the goal of the Prime Minister was to create a dharmistha samdjaya (righteous society), the deputation reminded the Prime Minister that the setting up of a Buddhist Republic should be the ultimate aim of a Buddhist renaissance in Sri Lanka.”35 When the group returned a few days later to continue their conver¬ sation, Jayewardene put his own plan to them: “The Prime Minister 34. “Cultural Ministry Will Lay Basis for Dharmistha Society—Hurulle,” Daily News, October 1, 1977. 35. “ACBC Team Meet Premier: Buddhist Republic Topic,” Daily News, Septem¬ ber 5, 1977.

176

The Presence of the Past

reminded the delegation that all Buddhist matters would be referred to and handled by the new Department of Buddhist Affairs office. Steps would be taken for the propagation of Buddhism through the Sri Lankan embassies abroad . . . the Prime Minister said some of the matters raised by the deputation were really those that should be dis¬ cussed with the Minister of Education and the Minister of Cultural Affairs. He would therefore ask the Congress to take up those matters with the two Ministers concerned.”36 In quick order Jayewardene re¬ tained the high ground as a Buddhist leader without letting Bud¬ dhism or Buddhist leaders define social and economic policy. His plan was to pursue two transformations at once. Sri Lanka was to become a free-market, fast-developing economy, and it was to be¬ come a dharmistha society—the trick was keeping the two transfor¬ mations separate. To do so, Jayewardene put the responsibility of supporting the sasana on the Ministry of Cultural Affairs and the Department of Buddhist Affairs, while attending to the business of business himself. As an individual, he would be an exemplary Bud¬ dhist; as leader of the nation, he would be Lee Kuan Yew. Jayewardene argued that a dharmistha society depended on indi¬ viduals acting as individual moral agents, not on government legisla¬ tion: the Buddha never for a moment thought it was possible to reform society through legislation. There were many in society who did not understand that. Such persons were asking why would not the govern¬ ment bar the killing of animals, consumption of liquor, and the like in a Buddhist country like Sri Lanka. As the leader of the government he had set an example to others of fair play in administration, not taking revenge on political opponents, ensuring freedom and liberty for all people. There was a code for conduct for the Cabinet and the govern¬ ment party. . . . The government could help Buddhism in two ways— helping in the spread of Dhamma and Buddhist organizations. That was being done by the government. There were times when he wished to become a Buddhist priest [sic] away from the bustle and hustle of politics. But still he had a little craving for power that was why he had not made his mind up yet. If he became a priest he would go to a forest hermitage and meditate.37

36. “Office for Buddhist Affairs Will Be Set Up—PM Tells ACBC Delegation,” Daily News, September 10, 1977. 37. “Dharmisdia Society Cannot Be Built through Legislation—President,” Daily News, January 10, 1980.

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The president said that he would urge people neither to drink alco¬ hol nor to eat meat, but he would not propose legislation toward those ends. The same free-enterprise spirit he proposed for the eco¬ nomic order he envisoned for the moral order. If the society were to be nivahal (free), the state should not determine the morality of its citizens, nor should it allow Buddhist monks to make policy. The sensibilities of minorities were less important in shaping this UNP position than the desire to keep government as such, moral or other¬ wise, under restraint. Monks should act as moral exemplars. They should not, as has been increasingly the case since the 1930s, involve themselves in politics. When Muruttetuve Ananda led a strike in 1986 of a nurses’ union of which he served as president, Jayewardene denounced the action as contrary to Buddhism. Saying that Ananda’s activities violated the Buddha’s teachings about the proper relation¬ ship between monks and women, Jayewardene refused to meet the nurses’ delegation as long as it was led by the monk. Yet the real problem for Jayewardene has been the involvement as such of monks in political activity, whatever contact with women it might entail.38 His administration responded to monkly protest as the years went on in an increasingly aggressive way. At a cabinet meeting in 1982, he took up the topic of the Sinhala Bala Mandalaya, a group of monks and laypeople then trying to create unity by emphasizing race, religion, and country over party politics: “We want peace. We want unity. And I will not let any Mandalaya upset it.” That remark caused his minister of justice to defend the activism of the monks, suggesting that the UNP make use of it instead of suppressing it. Jayewardene reminded his minister that it was he who had enshrined Buddhism in the Constitution of 1977, adding “I have the greatest respect for those gentlemen of the scmgha who genuinely serve the interests of Buddhism.” Not so for monks who dabble in politics. ‘They are politicians, not priests.”39 Jayewardene had good reason for his sympathy for forest monks, in part because they are known for their self-discipline, in part because they are apolitical. But village monks too, on his account, should set examples not of activism but of moral restraint:

38. “Buddhist Monks Shouldn’t Dabble in Politics—President,” The Island, Febru¬ ary 10, 1986. 39. “President Slates Bala Mandalaya,” Daily News, July 31, 1982.

178

The Presence of the Past

“If the members of the Sangha show us the path, we as leaders will follow it and the people can follow us,” he said. The President was speaking at a meeting which followed the opening of a 3-storeyed building at the Wanawasa Sangha fforest-dwelling monkhood] head¬ quarters at Wathurawila. “I can fashion only one person and that is myself. To others I can only set an example by my words and actions,” he said. The President said that he had not known the history of the place when he received the invitation, but accepted it in the same way he accepted other invitations to such religious ceremonies. But he said, his interest grew when he read a book entitled, ‘The Forest Monks of Sri Lanka” by an American Michael Cerithers [sic].40 This writer said that he (the President) and the late Mr. Dudley Senanayake had visited this monk at Ridiyagama 40 years ago. The President said he could not remember this visit, but would accept the fact as it was mentioned in the book. Thereafter the monk had come to Wathuruwila and started this nikaya here. It was Dr. [W.] Dahanayake who as the Minister of Home Affairs in the Dudley Senayake government had registered this nikaya in 1968. The President said that he too was a member of that government. This was a very important book. It revealed the ideas of the forest monks, their meditation, their way of life and the difficulties they have undergone in following the teachings of the Buddha.

He intended to ensure that this book was translated into Sinhala and published and distributed ... so that all people could gain some knowledge about the way of life of these monks. That was the real Buddhist way of life—not talking politics and abusing ministers, MPs and officials.41 Jayewardene’s conception of Buddhism as a religion of individual responsibility had several consequences, justifying both his disinclina¬ tion to make Buddhism the state religion and his desire to remove Buddhist monks from political life and secular vocations. It also ex¬ plained his decision to make Vidyalankara and Vidyodaya universities secular schools, while returning monks to Vidyalankara and Vid¬ yodaya pirivenas. Since the first Bandaranaike administration, both 40. See Michael Carrithers, The Forest Monks of Sri Lanka (Delhi: Oxford Univer¬ sity Press, 1983), p. 190. 41. “An Exemplary Sangha Must Show the Way: President,” Daily News, February 4, 1986. Of the Sri Lankan monkhood, Jayewardene has written: “the order never quite became what it was meant to be. The Bhikkhus . . . very soon became Priests, living in temples built like palaces. To-day the lazy and ceremonious Church, split into Nikayas, based on caste divisions, maintains its place in society, not be tendering [sic] to the sick, the poor and the helpless, but by placing a Messianic halo above the Buddha-myth, and by chanting faint Pali e\athds to the cold, fruitless moon” (Buddhist Essays [Colombo: Government Press, 1982], p. 40).

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universities have graduated a disproportionate number of monks with interests in politics and secular employment. When Vidyalankara pirivena was reopened in 1980, Jayewardene spoke at the opening cere¬ mony recalling his opposition in the 1950s—along with D. S. Senanayake, R. Premadasa, and N. M. Perera—to turning the pirivenas into universities. “From that day to the present,” a reporter quotes Jayewardene as saying, “his views regarding what might be called the ‘plunder5 of the pirivenas did not change ... he was entirely in agree¬ ment with Ven. Walpola Rahula and Ven. Yakkaduwa Pragnarama about the need to take back the pirivenas. Lord Buddha has clearly defined the way of life one should follow. One’s aim according to the teachings of the Lord Buddha should not be to become a doctor, lawyer, or a Member of Parliament or the President, but to wean away greed, anger, and ignorance.5542 Entertaining such views—opposing the political and economic ac¬ tivities of monks, their attempts to guide government policy, and their plans to make Buddhism the state religion—makes it necessary for a Buddhist leader to find compensatory ways of supporting the religion. In Jayewardene’s case, those gestures began with his and his ministers5 regular presence at Buddhist occasions and culminated in more substantial acts of patronage to the traditional religion of the state. His government directed unprecedented amounts of money— governmental, UNESCO, and private donations—toward restoring Buddhist temples and relic mounds. From 1977 to 1987 the govern¬ ment said it spent 1,000 million rupees on the Cultural Triangle, ren¬ ovating the Jetavana vihara, Abhayagiri vihara, Dalada Maligawa (the Temple of the Tooth Relic), Natha devdle (shrine), Gadaladeniya vihara, and Lankatilaka vihara. It established or planned to establish as “sacred areas55 a huge number of Buddhist places: Tissamaharama, Kalaniya, Devinuvara, Dimbulagala, Seruvila, Dlghavapi, Tiriyay, Fahiengala, Tantrimalai, Kalutara, Kirinda, Dambulla, Mihintale, Kurunagala, Ratnapura, Getabaru, Mutiyarigana, Rajanganaya, Panadura, and Dambadeniya. Although Mr. Bandaranaike had estab¬ lished the Ministry of Cultural Affairs, its efforts were limited by lack of support. The Jayewardene administration gave the ministry more money and created the Department of Buddhist Affairs in 1981 to 42. “Sangha Has Vital Part to Play in Achieving a Just Society—President,” Daily News, January 4, 1980.

i 8o

The Presence of the Past

direct state support to favored Buddhist monks, to publish biogra¬ phies (charitdya apadana) on the occasion of the death of less impor¬ tant monks, and to support daham pas alas. With patronage came con¬ straint. The department also took over the registration of Buddhist monks and restarted plans for the implementation of an ecclesiastical court system.43 Amid these other gestures of concern for Buddhism, Jayewardene’s government announced its intention to bring the Mahdvamsa up-todate. The idea of extending the chronicle came from a student at the Ceylon Law College who put the plan to a civil servant in the Minis¬ try of Cultural Affairs, Nalin Ratnayake, who then became the proj¬ ect’s prime mover. Ratnayake called a public meeting—of scholars, laypeople, and the press—to lay out the proposal to take up the wri¬ ting of the Mahdvamsa once again. Dr. Nandadeva Wijesekera, an anthropologist, pandit, one-time commissioner of the Official Lan¬ guages Department, as well as former ambassador to Burma and Laos, was elected chair and editor-in-chief, and V. W. Abeygunawardana, a newspaperman and former editor of the UNP party news¬ paper, became secretary. The Ministry of Cultural Affairs gave Wije¬ sekera a budget of 485,000 rupees to begin work. When the secretary to the Ministry of Cultural Affairs held a press conference to publicize the chronicle’s extension, he indicated that President Jayewardene “had taken an interest in the project.”44 Wijesekera is a man who has worked—judging from what he says in his autobiography, fitfully—under several governments. He earned a reputation as a Sinhala nationalist for directing the Official Lan¬ guage Commission’s implementation of Sinhala-medium education. His publications on Sinhala culture and anthropology added to his popular reputation. Supervising the compilation gave him another way to celebrate the historical career of the Sinhala people and their culture. A clerk at the Mahdvamsa Compilation Board put the matter simply and sincerely, “The history of Sri Lanka is the history of the Sinhala people, no?” The project’s patronage by the UNP govern¬ ment suggests a second source of Whiggishness. While it recounts the 43. The similarity to the government of India’s administration of Hindu temples is striking. See Franklin Presler, Religion under Bureaucracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). 44. “Mahavamsa Will Pick Up Lanka’s Modern History,” Sun, September 19. 1978.

An Elected Government Invokes the Past

i8i

recent history of the Sinhala people, it does so in a time frame set by events of partisan importance. At first the board planned to end the narrative on February 4, 1978, the day on which Jayewardene took office. Later a UNP branch at Nalluruva adopted a resolution urging the extension to February 6, 1978^0 incorporate in the account Premadasa’s assumption of the office of prime minister.45 The Ministry of Cultural Affairs responded by extending the account further to Sep¬ tember 7, 1978, the date on which Sri Lanka’s latest Constitution was put into effect. Debate followed in Parliament over whether to extend the chronicle still further, but the government stood by its decision to end the extension at the moment when the new Constitu¬ tion took effect and Jayewardene assumed the new office of president. All these party connections notwithstanding, the finished product scarcely celebrates its patron, and that is a significant variation on the chronicle’s traditional motivation. Emphasizing the emergence of Buddhism in the life of the nation, the first volume in fact chronicles a process that the UNP vigorously opposed. But publishing the Ma¬ hdvamsa, Nutana Tngaya twenty years later gave the party a carefully chosen way to create a Buddhist identity for itself. By January of 1978 an advisory board had been appointed. From this board a subcommittee—Tallale Dhammananda, Poruna Vajiranana, D. E. Hettiarachchi, Sirimal Ranawella, Gunapala Senadhira, Amaradasa Liyanagamage, and Karunaratna Vijayatunga—was cho¬ sen and given the task of constructing an organizational structure for writing the new Mahdvamsa. The ministry had stressed the board’s fidelity to the traditional forms of vamsa writing, but the committee wanted substantial changes. Previous installments of the chronicle had been organized chronologically, and such was the original plan for the contemporary extension. One chapter would treat each of the eleven national leaders, from the British governors who exercised power after 1935 to the prime ministers since independence. Yet the committee decided in the end to organize the new Mahdvamsa in an entirely different way. Each chapter would take up a different topic on the model of the University of Ceylon History of Ceylon, which itself looked to the Cambridge History of India. The change indicates the force of professorial authority in the com¬ mittee’s deliberations. But it also suggests a set of other changes in 45. “Great Chronicle Updated to Sept. 7, 1978,” Sun, October 6, 1978.

i82

The Presence of the Past

authority: a number of authors replace the single monk who wrote previous installments, and each author is chosen as an expert treating matters he knows best. The modern period is too complicated and diverse to be treated as a single story. As a result, the 1935—78 period is divided into two parts, the first volume organized in topical chap¬ ters covering the interval from 1935 until the momentous changes brought by Bandaranaike’s election in 1956, and the second volume taking up the same topics for the period ending in 1978. The shift from a single narrative has further implications. Where the exercise of power and patronage gave the Mahavamsa its central focus, politics in the Mahavamsa, Niitana Yugaya has been reduced to one chapter standing between others on architecture and mass communications, and treated as a matter of administration, not the exercise of power. Academics wrote the majority of chapters, but the broader criterion was expertise as such. Even the chapter on the Buddhist sasana was written by a layman, not a monk, in this case a layman qualified as an expert by having a pandit degree. The committee decided to add a Sinhala text to the Pali stanzas that served as the language of previous parts of the Mahavamsa. Opening the Mahavamsa, Niitana Yugaya, the reader finds Pali gathas (stanzas) treating the high points of the chapter, followed by a fuller account in Sinhala prose. The Pali preserves only part of what the Sinhala says fully, but its use preserves the traditional form. The com¬ mittee decided that Pali, lacking a technical vocabulary, could not cope with some developments of the modern world. The chapters were composed in Sinhala, not Pali, except for a few chapters written in English. In other words, the new Mahavamsa is essentially a Sin¬ hala work, intended for Sinhala readers. Its language is simple Sinhala (.sarala sinhala), not the literary language that ordinary readers have difficulty following. The change in language level was not made casu¬ ally, for some members fought the change. Others argued for a differ¬ ent course, preferring the purified form of Sinhala, Hela, associated with the work of Munidasa Cumaratunga and the rise of Sinhala na¬ tionalism. The faction favoring simple Sinhala prevailed. Instead of sacred learning accessible only to highly educated monks or Hela known to even fewer, the new Mahavamsa was written in ordinary, demotic Sinhala. The committee’s hope was that a person who can read a Sinhala newspaper—which in a literate society means most Sinhalas—could also read the new Mahavamsa. The editor empha-

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sized his fidelity to the past by saying that he would begin the book with the Pali word “pubbalikhita” (following in the tradition). But the tradition to which the new Mahdvamsa attaches itself is a tradition that has itself changed many times. The practice of including a Sinhala paraphrase, for instance, began with Yagirala Pannananda. Choosing chapter topics set in motion other changes. An early newspaper account of the project said that the chronicle would in¬ clude chapters on politics, religion, language and literature, arts and architecture, education, social conditions, scientific and industrial progress, economic conditions, and mass media—a seemingly harm¬ less list.46 But one difficulty comes from trying to write about events—especially political events and economic and social develop¬ ments—that have happened only recently. Sri Lanka is a place where politics is a deeply serious, increasingly dangerous activity.47 Even in covering the 1935 — 56 period, the Mahdvamsa Compilation Board had a hard time finding authors willing to contribute to a project that seemed to face discomforting alternatives—objective, academic his¬ tory, destined to displease the editors or in-house, panegyric history, certain to defy the writer’s sense of objectivity. Piecing together my conversations with scholars who declined to write chapters, I suspect that most people reached that decision because of worries about their integrity, not their political prospects. The Advisory Board cast about for authors, writing letters of invi¬ tation to academic historians across the island. Many refused outright or discreetly failed to respond to the invitation. Finding writers for some chapters—the ones on politics, economic conditions, and social conditions—proved especially difficult. The board responded to the problem by replacing difficult topics with less delicate ones and setding for writers who were less well-known. When the Mahdvamsa, Nutana Tugaya went to press in August 1981, the text contained a set of chapters substantially different from what was originally planned, written by authors in many cases different from the editors’

46. “Mahavamsa Will Pick Up Lanka’s Modern History,” Sun, September 19,

I97847. Gananath Obeyesekere has written on the increasingly violent politics of Sri Lanka in “Political Violence and the Future of Democracy in Sri Lanka,” in Sri Lanka: The Ethnic Conflict (New Delhi: Navrang, 1984), pp. 70-94; so has S. J. Tambiah, Sri Lanka—Ethnic Fratricide and the Dismantling of Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986).

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The Presence of the Past

first choices. The proposed chapter on politics (deshapalanaya) was replaced by a tamer one on administration irdjapdlanaya). Chapters on economic and social conditions disappeared altogether. A single expert author wrote each chapter, producing a manuscript of the chapter (or part of it) and submitting it for review (Mv, Nutana Tug ay a, p. vii). 1. Buddha Sasana 2. Sinhala Language

3. Sinhala Literature 4. Education 5. Arts (A) Drama (B) Music (C) Dance 6. Science and Scientific Development (A) Ayurveda

(B) Western Medicine

7. Agriculture (A) Industry 8.

Architecture

9. Administration 10. Mass Media

Rajaklya Panditha Kapila Abhayavamsa B.A. (Hons.), Sri Lanka, M.A., Benares Prof. Vinnie Vitharana B.A. (Hons.), M.A., Ph.D., London, Ph.D., Sri Lanka V. W. Abeygunawardana Prof. Ranjit Ruberu B.Sc., Sri Lanka, Ph.D., London S. P. Charles Dr. Tissa Kariyavasam B.A., M.A., Sri Lanka, Ph.D., London Dr. Tissa Kariyawasam S. G. Samarasinghe, M.A., Pennsylvania Dr. Vimala de Silva B.A. (Hons.), Sri Lanka, Ph.D., London Rajakiya Panditha William Alwis D.I.M.S., Sri Lanka, M.A.M.S. (Hons.), Calcutta, B.A. (Hons.), London Prof. Nandadasa Kodagoda M.B.B.S., Sri Lanka, F.R.C.P., Edinburgh, D.M.J., London Prof. Wiswa Warnapala B.Sc., Sri Lanka, Ph.D., London Prof. Sirisena Tilakaratne B.A., Sri Lanka, Ph.D., London Justin Samarasekara F.R.I.B.A. Prof. Wiswa Warnapala Dr. Sunanda Mahendra B.A., Sri Lanka, M.Phil., Ph.D., London

Committees of two or three experts in the field reviewed each manu¬ script. The chapter on the Buddhist sasana, for instance, was written by Kapila Abhayavamsa and then reviewed by two distinguished monks, Madihe Pannasiha and Paravahara Pannananda. They gave the edited chapter to the Advisory Board of twenty-seven people who

An Elected Government Invokes the Past

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read drafts of each chapter before meeting for a final editing.48 The writing thus was done by individuals working on their own, and later approved by committees of editors. Institutions of the modern world—the division of intellectual labor joined to committee over¬ sight—had reshaped a tradition where a single monk once carried the entire burden. When the Advisory Board finished its work, the Sinhala chapters were passed on to the Pali Gatha Compilation Board, made up of five monks who then translated the prose into Pali verse. Each of the five monks held the title rajaklya panditha, indicating high achievement as a Pali scholar, except for Balangoda Ananda Maitreya who had re¬ ceived a still more prestigious tide from the Burmese government {Mv, Nutara Tuejaya, p. xi). Pali Gatha Compilation Board 1. Buddha Sasana 2. Sinhala Language 3. Sinhala Literature 4. Education 5. Arts (A) Drama and Dance (B) Music 6. Science and Scientific Development (A) Ayurveda

Rajaklya Panditha Kodagoda Nanaloka Nay aka Them Rajaklya Panditha Sastrapati Hagoda Khemananda Nay aka Thero Rajaklya Panditha Kodagoda Nanaloka Nay aka Thero Rajaklya Panditha Labugama Lankananda Maha Nay aka Thero Rajaklya Panditha Kodagoda Nanaloka Nay aka Thero Rajaklya Panditha Sastrapati Hagoda Khemananda Nay aka Thero Rajaklya Panditha Karagampitigoda Sumanasara Nay aka Thero Rajaklya Panditha Sastrapati Hagoda Khemananda Nayaka Thero Rajaklya Panditha Labugama Lankananda Maha Nayaka Thero

48. For the sake of brevity, I have not included a list of the members of the Advi¬ sory Board, which consisted of seventeen monks, three professors, a few lay intellec¬ tuals, and the editor and secretary. When a New York Times correspondent flew down to Colombo from New Delhi, Abeygunawardana described the harmonious workings of the Advisory Board. “We have Marxists and Buddhist monks and people of the right on our committee,” he said, “but the period we were covering [1935—56] was not very controversial. It covered Independence and a period of unified Sri Lankan nationalism” (“Sri Lanka Puts Modern Twist in Ancient Epic,” New York Times, April 18, 1982, p. 12). In fact the board contained only one layperson who might be called a Marxist.

i86

The Presence of the Past

(B) Western Medicine 7.

Agriculture

(A) Industry 8. Architecture 9. Administration 10. Mass Media

Agga Maha Panditha Balangoda Ananda Maitreya Maha Nay aka Thero Rajaklya Panditha Sastrapati Hagoda Khemananda Nayaka Thero Rajaklya Panditha Sastrapati Hagoda Khemananda Nayaka Thero Rajaklya Panditha Sastrapati Hagoda Khemananda Nayaka Thero Rajaklya Panditha Labugama Lankanancia Maha Nayaka Thero Rajaklya Panditha Labugama Lankananda Maha Nayaka Thero

Whether these monks were to be compensated for their work pre¬ sented the kind of dilemma that confronts a traditional practice brought into the modern world. Critics argued that the monks should work without payment. The editor insisted that they be com¬ pensated, and in the end they were—at five rupees for each gatha. Finally the Pali verses themselves were reviewed and edited, in this case by other Buddhist monks working in committees. Along with the monks who served on the Advisory Board that oversaw the final editing of volume i, these are monks who have distinquished them¬ selves as Pali scholars and leaders of monastic communities (Nikayas). They are heirs in several ways to Yagirala Pannananda, author of the Mahavamsa, Part III. Their appointment is one small way the Jayewardene government rewarded scholarly monks and raised their pres¬ tige relative to “monks who dabble in politics.”49 In the same act the government celebrated the continuity of Buddhist civilization and the harmless return of the monkhood to public life, demonstrating its concern for the majority community and its culture. Political forces influenced the publication of the Mahavamsa, Nutana Tugaya in contradictory ways. Organizational work began in No¬ vember 1978, and the actual writing in 1979* The ministry’s initial plan was to complete both volumes within a five- to six-year period, but by the middle of 1980, it accelerated the project in order to finish the first volume by June 1981 on the fiftieth anniversary of the Don49. As the participation of young monks in the violence that followed the Indo-Lanka Accords of 1987 suggests, the division between radical junior monks and more conservative senior monks has growing political importance. See Sarath Amunugama, “Buddhaputra and Bhumiputra? Dilemmas of Modern Sinhala Buddhist Monks in Relation to Ethnic and Political Conflict,” unpublished paper.

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oughmore reforms which brought universal franchise to Sri Lanka. The connection between the Mahdvamsa and the fiftieth anniversary of universal franchise is not obvious. Wijesekera said that the govern¬ ment’s motive was “to show that we are carrying on a tradition.”50 By that time Wijesekera had fallen out with the ministry.51 He had previ¬ ously complained of the ministry’s attempt to undercut his indepen¬ dence as editor-in-chief, but he pressed on with the work. Once the editing was finished, he gave over the manuscript of the first volume of the new Mahdvamsa to the ministry so that the minister could formally present it to President Jayewardene in August 1981. Wije¬ sekera resigned a week later. The ministry promised no interference and brought him back, providing funds to complete the second vol¬ ume in two years. In early December Wijesekera resigned a second time, saying that the ministry’s financial constraints were unaccept¬ able. V. W. Abeygunawardana took over. Newspaper headlines in August of that year proclaimed that the first volume would be published within three months.52 Despite the government’s plan to publish the first volume by 1981, six years pas¬ sed with the book unpublished. Why the project was first speeded up and then forgotten is not a matter that members of the Compilation Board themselves understand. The incongruity of publishing a history of the Sinhala people to celebrate universal franchise at a time when Indian Tamils on the estates had been without the franchise for al¬ most forty years does not seem to have been a factor. Nor does the rising tide of ethnic violence. Wijesekera’s departure itself did not delay publication, but an inexplicable amount of time passed before the first volume reached the public. The secretary of the ministry, Nalin Ratnayake, died during this interval, and because he had been the motivating force in beginning the project, his death had the op¬ posite effect. Moreover, events overtook the politics of Buddhist righteousness, as the ethnic conflict came to consume the govern¬ ment’s attention. Volume 1 was finally handed over to President Jaye-

50. Personal communication, November 18, 1985. 51. Nandadeva Wijesekera, Selected Writings (Colombo: M.D. Gunasena, 1983), pp. 58—59 52. “Nutana Mahavansaya Janadhipatita baradeyi, Masa tunak atulata mudunaya kere” (“The New Mahdvamsa Handed Over to President, to Be Printed within Three Months”), Dinamina, August 15, 1981.

i88

The Presence of the Past

wardene in May 1987, and television viewers caught a glimpse of it several months before it appeared in bookshops.

The Mahavamsa, Nutana Tugaya as History By ending its first volume on the eve of the Buddha Jayanti, the Mahavamsa, Nutana Tugaya brings the account to a natural break the cataclysmic events that put S. W. R. D. Bandaranaike in office. The chapters on the Buddha Sasana and administration are neither traditional sacred history nor academic historiography. The editors believed that they faced an entirely new dilemma. Determined to chronicle modern history as the natural extension of the past, they recognized that their task was maintaining the attitude (akalpaya) and style (slllya) that characterize the Mahavamsa, while dealing with events that are continuous with their own lifetimes. They said that their solution depended on keeping the account descriptive and not analytical or interpretive because these are sensitive, highly politicized issues and the writers did not have much distance on them. But they also began by characterizing the past forty years as “an age where there has been a clamor to recover the lost rights of the cultural heri¬ tage of the Sinhala Buddhists.”53 Despite some of their representa¬ tions, the writers and editors of the Mahavamsa, Nutana Tugaya did not merely describe this phenomenon. They celebrated it. As the edi¬ tors put the matter: “history should be understood by recognizing that the nation’s faith in religion [Buddhism] is its context (pasubima).S4 The historiographic tradition that began with Mahanama in the sixth century has always enjoyed governmental support. Even the 1877 revision of the Mahavamsa by Hikkaduve Sumamgala and Pan¬ dit Batavantudave was brought out at the instance of the colonial government. It is true that Yagirala Pannananda began the 1935 ex¬ tension of the chronicle at his own initiative, but he found funds for its publication through the support of the State Council. Government 53. Introduction, p. xxxii. 54. Ibid., p. xxvi. In a newspaper article Wijesekera said this of the celebratory character of the Mahavamsa, Nutana Tugaya: ‘The Mahavamsa tradition is derived from the spirit of Buddhism ... the historical objective is secondary in spite of its importance” (‘The Mahavamsa Tradition,” Daily Nen>s, January 9, 1979).

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initiative also made the Mahavamsa, Nutana Tugaya possible, but vol¬ ume 1 in no way celebrates the government that sponsored it. UNP leaders play the villain, opposing the emergence of Buddhism in the political life of the nation. If the Mahavamsa, Nutana Tugaya had been written in the fifteenth century, how likely is it that today’s scholars would recognize that an extension of the chronicle that extols politically engaged Buddhism was sponsored by a political party that two decades earlier had opposed it? Whatever political advantage the Jayewardene government derived from the Mahavamsa, Nutana Tug ay a it got independently of the contents of its first volume. There are other sources of incongruity between the celebratory framework that organizes each chapter and its prosaic contents. One comes from the absence of heroic kings. The activities of the colonial governor served Yagirala Pannananda perfectly well as the focus of his work. In principle, so should the activities of the prime ministers after independence. But die Mahavamsa, Nutana Tugaya turns away from the national leader and his relationship to the religion of the Buddha, taking up instead the thematic topics of the book’s ten chapters. The chapters on the Buddha Sasana and administration still address tradi¬ tional concerns, but the overall structure and emphasis of the work is new and different. To judge the Mahavamsa, Nutana Tugaya metahistorically: the absence of heroic leaders undermines the logical structure of the chronicle by denying it a single standard by which to judge the historical moment. But it does not destroy narrative coher¬ ence altogether. It transfers the plot onto the backs of many ordinary people—the citizens and leaders of the new nation—who played a role in reclaiming the cultural heritage of Sinhala Buddhists. Names are named, and achievements noted. Whether ordinary people have come to the fore in the life of the nation, they have come to the fore in the representation of the nation’s recent history, and they now replace kings and colonial governors as the agents of Sinhala history. Earlier in this chapter I mentioned a ready explanation for moving the focus away from electoral politics, for politics in Sri Lanka, apart from the ethnic conflict and its repercussions, is a risky business, and becoming more so. The supporters of a losing political party have since 1970 been subjected to organized attacks on their persons and property. Jayewardene said in his patirippuva speech following his 1977 elections that his government would bring Sri Lanka a new day of peace. What he did not say was that peace would come only after

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The Presence of the Past

the police restrained his own supporters from beating up SLFPers and vandalizing their property. Sri Lanka has been called the most politicized society in Asia, a society where employment, education, housing, and access to consumer goods have all been tied at various points in the past two decades to political loyalty.55 Sri Lanka is also one of the most literate societies in Asia where political causes and parties are regularly supported by pamphleteering and print journal¬ ism. It seems conceivable that the Mahavamsa, Nut ana Tug ay a ig¬ nored the prime minister’s role as the center of the story because passing judgment on political leaders and parties is just too sensitive. The problem with this explanation is that it does not match what people directly involved with the Mahavamsa, Nutana Tug ay a say about their participation in the project. A stronger reason for the shift of focus away from kings and monks to a variety of topical concerns such as agriculture and architecture owes to another change in the structure of Sri Lankan society itself, which is at once obvious and underemphasized. Sri Lanka has be¬ come a democracy, and the era of the ordinary person has arrived. That ordinary person is assumed to be male, Sinhala, Buddhist, and middle-class, but the chronicle begins from the assumption of the dominance of such people in the national culture. Participatory poli¬ tics creates a cultural shift as well as a political one, and with its em¬ phasis on equality, nationalism itself assumes the same cultural trans¬ formation. Here it is expressed not by an emphasis on the lives of ordinary people as such but on the extraordinary achievements of some ordinary people. It is true that major parts of popular culture go unremarked. No mention is made of the national passion for cricket, or astrology, or betting on horse races. The chapter on agriculture emphasizes the construction of irrigation systems, not the average farmer’s adaptation of those systems. The chapter on architecture talks of urban renewal projects in Colombo and the construction of new buildings in Colombo Fort, while saying nothing of vernacular architecture and the appearance in Sri Lanka’s villages of “Americanstyle” houses. But the focus has shifted all the same. I can make the argument more forcefully by suggesting the com¬ munity of readers and listeners that the Mahavamsa has assumed in 55. James Jupp, Sri Lanka: Third World Democracy (London: Frank Cass, 1978), pp. 115—18.

An Elected Government Invokes the Past

i9i

the past. The Mahdvamsa itself is reasonably forthcoming on its read¬ ership. Each chapter ends by invoking “the serene joy and emotion of die pious.” But as long as it was written in Pali, its readers were necessarily Buddhist monks, and scholarly ones at that. Given the ex¬ tremely small size of this constituency, the Mahdvamsa has been more a cultural object to be treasured than a book to be read. The historical fate of palm-leaf copies of die Mahdvamsa seems to have been to rest quietly in a few monastic libraries. The last installment of the Culavamsa says that Klrti Sri Rajasimha learned of the great kings ol the Mahdvamsa, and having done so, he decided to extend the account up to his time (Cv. 99.76). Kings as a group may have been the ideal consumers of the chronicle in the past, the audience for the monks recitation, and the object of their praise and admonition. But the Mahdvamsay Nutana Tugaya has utterly different assumptions. Printed in large quantity, priced cheaply by government subsidy, written in simple Sinhala, the Mahdvamsa, Nutana Tug ay a is aimed at a wide audience of ordinary people. All over the world the rise of nationalism was tied directly to the character of print capitalism.56 In large political communities where civic identity needs to be constructed, the medium of the printed page has allowed growing numbers of people to think of themselves in new ways. The Mahdvamsa, Nutana Tugaya represents one possi¬ ble development. Nationalist thought understands the polity as con¬ stituted of a congeries of covalent wills. When he was editor, Wijesekera was quoted as saying that the new chronicle “will not only help scholars as such but also the ordinary man and woman to understand the nuances of historical development which has [sic] helped to mould if not direct their lives.”57 He even said he hoped to have a Tamil translation of the Mahdvamsa, Nutana Tugaya which would speak to a Tamil audience of the influence of ‘Tamil culture, art, religious beliefs and the influence of Hinduism on the life of the peo¬ ples.” The nation is made up of individuals. It does not always live up to its own values, but the appearance of the individual as the nominal unit of value reflects a deep and irreversible change of Dumontian

56. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 1983), pp. 41 — 4957. “Updating the Mahavamsa,” Observer, October 8, 1978.

192.

The Presence of the Past

proportions.58 But where Dumont has portrayed diis transformation as the decisive emergence of modern social forms from traditional ones, I would prefer to see it less teleologically and less holistically as the cumulative effect of a series of smaller interactions between tradi¬ tion, innovation, external influence, and local response. It is entirely possible that only a few people will ever read the Ma¬ havamsa, Nutana Tuff ay a. Distributed to public libraries, it may well remain there. But that is not the editors’ plan. Their vision fixes on the ordinary person. Even the Pali gathas, Wijesekera said, were aimed at a broad audience: “the compilation will encourage the fur¬ ther study of Pali, the language of the Tripitaka. At present Pali is relegated to the chanting of gathas and recitals at Buddhist ceremo¬ nies. The Mahavamsa could be prescribed as a supplementary reader and school children should be encouraged to study the Mahavamsa.”59 As against Wijesekera’s argument that Pali is “relegated” to chanting and Buddhist ceremonies, Buddhist ceremonies have been the lan¬ guage’s proper habitat for 2,500 years. The idea that people other than monks should learn Pali and read the Mahavamsa recalls a time that never was, signaling the triumph of regular people by injecting their presence into the past. The Mahavamsa, Nutana Tugaya is for ordinary readers, and it is about ordinary people, but I need to say more about what sets these people apart. Their origins are unremarkable—their mothers have no visions before their conceptions; they are members of a “race,” not kinspeople of the Buddha—but their achievements are extraordi¬ nary—in architecture, literature, agricultural development, indige¬ nous and Western medicine, and so on. They are no less deserving of respect because of their humble origins, but they are not heroes (vtrayan). As a result, the Mahavamsa, Nutana Tugayas prose is sober and realist not only because its writers are academics but also because the events and personalities under description are so. Future exten¬ sions of the Mahavamsa may become more grandiose, but it is hard to imagine any return to the religious panegyric of the Citlavamsa. More likely the chronicle will continue to describe and celebrate a transition to a kind of politics that has been slow in coming and whose effects are still more nominal than actual, for ordinary Sinhalas have not 58. See, for instance, “Nationalism and Communalism,” in Louis Dumont, Reli¬ gion /Politics and History in India (Paris: Mouton, 1970), pp. 89—110. 59. “The Mahavamsa Tradition,’1 Daily Neiw, January 9, 1979.

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been very well served by electoral government. In the words of a recent account of Sinhala peasant politics: “The use of state power for the benefit of the ordinary Sinhalese has been, and remains, the pri¬ mary legitimation, implicit or explicit, of all governments elected since 1956 at least, and arguably, since 1931.7,60 The Mahdvamsa, Nutana Yugaya is a literary vehicle for legitimizing that power, and a skillful attempt to produce and propagate a Buddhist culture. 60. Mick Moore, The State and Peasant Politics in Sri Lanka (Cambridge: Cam¬ bridge University Press, 1985), p. 29.

7 Nationalist Discourse

I have argued that the culture of nationalism deserves attention in its own right. If we do otherwise—by treating nationalism as a modular phenomenon on Anderson’s model or as a structural response to in¬ dustrialism as Gellner suggests—we settle for a version of Malinowskian presentism, by conceiving of the historical imagination as arbitrary, expedient, and totally subject to present-day interests. Na¬ tionalism represents a transformation of older sources of political community—I have emphasized the extension of the court chronicle, the veneration of sacred places, and the cult of heroes in the Sri Lankan case. When this transformation takes place under colonial cir¬ cumstances, the political culture that nationalists imagine brings to¬ gether both traditional and colonial elements. This chapter considers one example, the notion of unity, which constitutes a key figure in a discursive formation that organizes Sinhala political talk and action by drawing together the Mahavamsa and Buddhist tradition as well as Western ideas about consensus and community. When I say that nationalism is a cultural form, I do not mean that it amounts to a latter-day expression of an “ontology” because Ander¬ son is right about nationalism’s opportunism and inventiveness. But nationalists are people of the place, and it seems only fair to begin from the assumption that most have genuinely believed in what they have said. The nationalist elite typically is made up of people raised in families whose Westernization is striking, but people who continue to

Nationalist Discourse

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evolve throughout their lives. To call such people “brown English¬ men” is to forget both the ambivalence of their position and the re¬ ceptiveness of all social processes to external influences. I think it makes sense to see nationalism as compounded from large portions of both foreign influence and local tradition, even when that tradition is a rediscovered form. Sometimes what is borrowed from the West is simply borrowed, but more often the production of culture— whether it is nationalism or everyday practices—is constrained by a variety of factors. The most important is bound to be neglected by scholarly accounts that reduce nationalism to structural causes or imi¬ tation and political self-interest. Nationalists may not be good histo¬ rians, and they may not be good anthropologists. But they take his¬ tory and culture seriously, understanding the nationalist project as continuous with the local form of life. We should do more of the same. I argued previously that not all views of the past are equally reliable as history, and not all are equally serviceable as ideology. What inter¬ ests me here are the constraints that make some views of the past more serviceable than others. One is resonance. Cultural changes that enjoy formal congruence with past practice have one obvious advan¬ tage. They hide change or they naturalize it by fitting it to other practices and beliefs. Another constraint is the capacity of some “pasts” to evoke pathos, specifically those that, having linked past to present, go on to make a distinction of this order—the present is continuous with the past, but the past was better than the present, or the present is an even more desperate time than the past, although the hostility of today’s ethnic neighbor was a problem even then. Still another is the way some “pasts” appropriate traditional practices, such as venerating sacred places, by making them sites of morally charged dramas such as the incidents at Seruvila described in Chapter 5. When a Buddhist sacred place is desecrated, an ancient “race” is denied part of its past, nationalist visions of the ethnic other are con¬ firmed, and the island home where the Sinhala people have “survived throughout history” is that much diminished. In this chapter I show how a colonial discourse of unity resonated with traditional images of unity and heroism, creating the deep emo¬ tions that motivate nationalist practice. First I suggest where this co¬ lonial discourse originated; then I point to a variety of everyday prob¬ lems that have made talk about unity both resonant and pathetic.

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The Presence of the Past

Because culture has its effect through a public and cultural relation among object, tradition, and audience,” nationalism responds to these problems in cultural terms.1 And even when a society discovers some of its traditions in a colonial context and uses them in a form that is altered by time and circumstance, what follows is less “a thing of shreds and patches” than a cultural process that deserves careful atten¬ tion. I tty to give it precisely that by considering contexts where Sinhalas speak about unity as a political value. At the end of the chapter I suggest a further development in the production of nationalism by turning to two Buddhist monks who have proposed ways to recap¬ ture unity under modern conditions. The growth of Sinhala nationalism was a process by which Sinhalas learned from non-Sinhalas. No one was more important in this pro¬ cess than the unlikely figure of a portly American Civil War colonel, Henry Steele Olcott, who arrived in the island in 1880 with Helena Blavatsky as founders of the Theosophical Society. Olcott became ab¬ sorbed in the struggle he saw Buddhist monks and laypeople waging against Christian domination in the island, and his enthusiasm for Buddhism and his contempt for Christianity gave him immediate in¬ fluence. From the moment he stepped on the jetty in Galle to cries of sddhuj sddhuy sddd, he showed no reluctance to use that influence, drawing on his considerable good sense to advise Buddhist monks and laypeople in their efforts to revive their religion. The tcwhite Bud¬ dhist” told them to take education back into their own hands, for as long as Christian missionaries educated their children, young people would grow up uncertain of their religious values and identity. A few Buddhists had tried to start Buddhist schools before Olcott’s arrival, but Buddhist publications gave him credit for awakening them to what had to be done, itself an indication of Olcott’s authority.2 While on lecture tours around the island, he collected money to be used for Buddhist education, and he copied the Christian missionary practice of raising funds at church bazaars. He told Buddhists to insist that the government remember its special obligation to Buddhism, solve the temporalities mess, and make the Buddha’s birthday a public holi¬ day. And, most urgently, he preached to Buddhists about the need 1. Michael Schudson, “How Culture Works,” Theory and Society 18 (March 1989): 170, my italics. 2. L. A. Wickremeratne, “Religion, Nationalism, and Social Change in Ceylon, 1865—188 5Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society (Great Britain) (1969): 129.

Nationalist Discourse

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for unity. Without it, Buddhism would never be able to influence governmental policy on education and religion. Without it, the move¬ ment would remain mired in petty rivalries between monastic com¬ munities, castes, regions, and self-seeking individuals, as well as sepa¬ rated by trivial differences of practice and belief." The unity Olcott had in mind was not the unity that the Mahavamsa celebrated, the unity imposed on the island by a righteous Buddhist king. It was a popular unity. What struck Olcott in his travels across the island was the contentiousness of the Buddhists, especially caste-based groups of monks belittling one another. But when he argued that Buddhism could not be revived unless Buddhists came together, he made a claim about unity that sounded quite like the ancient notion that the sasana would suffer unless a righteous Buddhist king unified the island. In this case, the sasana would never be restored until Buddhists themselves acted in an unified way. Some of Olcott’s closest acquaintances in the monkhood—Ambaghavatte Indasabavara and Hikkaduve Sumamgala are the best-known exam¬ ples—denied the legitimacy of one another’s ordination. When Low Country monks traveled to Kandy for a meeting in the cause of reviv¬ ing Buddhism, caste prejudice kept the Siyam Nikaya monks from giving them shelter.3 4 In July 1880, two months after he had first arrived in the island, Olcott addressed a meeting of Siyam and Amarapura monks and warned them of the injury being inflicted on the sasana by the maintenance of rival monastic communities. Of his seven suggestions, five were acted on in short order. The exceptions were his call for unifying the major monastic communities and for forcing the government to defrock immoral monks.5 Olcott suggested the advantage of having a Buddhist flag as a sym¬ bol to rally popular feeling. Whether he actually designed the flag is still being debated in Sri Lanka, but the difference in interpretations placed on the flag’s symbolism is more pertinent than who designed it. Local Buddhists wanted it to stand for the various-colored rays that were said to emanate from the Buddha’s head (Budu rds)\ Olcott

3. Henry Steele Olcott, Old Diary Leaves: The True History of the Theosophieal Soci¬ ety, 6 vols. (Adyar: Theosophieal Press 1974-75), 2:296. 4. Wickremeratne, “Religion, Nationalism, and Social Change, pp. 132—33. 5. Henry Steele Olcott, “How Buddhism Can Be Revived in Ceylon,” Buddhist 2 (June 1890): 193.

198

The Presence of the Past

wanted the colors to stand for unity in difference.6 To Olcott, the Sinhala interpretation must have seemed exotic and irrelevant; to Sinhalas, Olcott’s hopes for unity between different castes and monastic communities must have seemed unrealistic. In fact his hopes tor unity were much broader, for his missions to Burma and Japan were undertaken in hopes of creating an international Buddhist commu¬ nity. In Burma he preached to a monkhood, then divided into a large number of monastic communities, of the need for unity; in Japan he embarked on a lecture tour to make the same point, and refused to carry on with the trip unless it was financed by all Buddhist sects in Japan.8 At its widest, Olcott hoped, this unity would bring together both Theravada and Mahayana Buddhists.9 In Sri Lanka organiza¬ tional unity would allow Buddhists to exert influence commensurate with their numerical strength. Without it, smaller communities en¬ joyed the benefits of greater influence simply because they were better organized. As I will show, Olcott’s sense that minorities enjoyed great organizational solidarity and thus disproportionate influence shapes Sinhala views of other Sri Lankans to the present day. Sometimes colonial societies became enamored of virtues—unity, cleanliness, efficiency—that they associated with the colonial power, yet the process was not random but, in Sahlins’s words, uthe system¬ atic ordering of contingent circumstances.”10 Some virtues—the unity associated with British colonial society, for example—derived from the contingencies of living in a small community, far away from home. But for Sinhalas, the appeal of the figure of unity was system¬ atically ordered by its moral appropriateness and its capacity to evoke 6. The Theosophical Society says that Olcott designed the flag, but Olcott himself gaves credit to Colombo Buddhists: “our Colombo colleagues had the happy thought of devising a flag which would be adopted by all Buddhist nations as the universal symbol of their faith thus serving the same purpose as that of the cross does for all Christians. It was a splendid idea, and I saw in a moment its far-reaching potentialities as an agent in that scheme of Buddhist unity. . . . Our Colombo brothers had hit upon the quite original and unique idea of blending in the flag the six colors alleged to have been exhibited in the aura of the Buddha” (Old Diary Leaves, 3:363). 7. Dharmapala’s alienation from Olcott is said to have come to a head when Dharmapala encountered Olcott in India and found a Buddha image that he had been given to him in Sri Lanka being treated in a casual and indifferent way. 8. See Howard Murphet, Hammer on the Mountain (Wheaton, Ill.: Theosophical Publishing House, 1972), pp. 145 and 147. 9. Ibid., pp. 144-52. 10. Marshall Sahlins, Islands of History (Chicago; University of Chiago Press, 1985), p. 144.

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pathos, but most of all by its resonance with their own history. To be a nation, Sinhalas would have to return to the moral and political greatness of their ancient kings and become as unified as the colonial power that ruled over them. In 1902 some 2,000 Buddhists gathered in Colombo to hear a group of distinguished monks and laypeople discuss plans to protect sacred places at Anuradhapura. A Thai prince who had taken the robes as Jinavaravamsa talked of unity: “Let us twist together all the coconut fibre of Ceylon and the rice straws of Burma and Siam and make a strong rope; that rope will move the world and pull to our side even the British Parliament.’ To influence the English, the monk went on, Buddhists had to learn their secrets: We must now learn from them, whom we mistake to imitate more in dress and drink than in their ennobling qualities, the secret of their power of unity which makes them a great people, brings them out of a comparatively savage state in a few generations, and makes for them now a consolidated and mighty empire . . . and enables them to con¬ quer and govern us who are morally weakened by superstitious bar¬ riers. Grasp this mighty power of unity, then, true to our creed as followers of our Lord of Wisdom, use it peaceably to gain our rightful end.11

Having learned the secret of British power, Sinhalas needed to learn their own tradition by returning to what was a far richer past than most colonized societies looked back on. They should let the Mahavamsa be their guide, Anagarika Dharmapala told them: Let the methods adopted in the ancient days by the good kings of old, like Gamini, Buddhadasa, Parakrama Bahu, and other rulers be adopted.”12 But when Dharmapala spoke of Vijaya, he emphasized a single part of his persona—his Aryan origins—of which the Mahavantsa is silent.13 By emphasizing the Aryan character of their com¬ mon ancestor, Dharmapala gave a substantialized identity to the peo¬ ple who were to be brought into unity: 11. Ceylon Standard, July 15, 1902. For another example, see Sir Dinkar Rao, quoted in Bernard Cohn, “Representing Authority in Victorian India;1 in Eric Hobsbawn and Terrence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge. Cam¬ bridge University Press, 1983)1 P- 183. 12. Ananda Guruge, ed.. Return to Righteousness (Colombo: Ceylon Government Press, 1965), p. 496. 13. The Mahavamsa?s references to the Pali word ariya and to words that might be variants begin in the twelfth century (61.36, 63.15, and 90.16). The last ol these references (ariya [long a]) distinquishes it from the first two references to any a (short a). Each citation refers to warriors, dynasties, or places in South India.

200

The Presence of the Past

Two thousand four hundred and forty six years ago a colony of Aryans from the city of Sinhapura in Bengal . . . sailed ... in search ol fresh pastures. The descendants of the Aryan colonists were called Sinhala after their city, Sinhapura, which was founded by Sinhabahu, the lion¬ armed king. The lion-armed descendants are the present Sinhala, whose ancestors had never been conquered, and in whose veins no savage blood is found. Ethnologically, the Sinhala are a unique race, inasmuch as they can boast that they have no slave blood in them, and never were conquered by either the pagan Tamils or Europeans vandals who for three centuries devastated the land, destroyed ancient temples, burnt valuable libraries, and nearly annihilated the historic race.14

Dharmapala’s ideas about ethnology come from Max Muller’s early work on Aryan languages. By Dharmapala’s time, Muller had clarified his much-distorted arguments about the family of Aryan languages that spread through the Old World from Europe to South Asia by insisting that he was talking about language, not race.15 Dharmapala used “Aryan” as a racial category, which allowed him to portray Sinhalas as an ancient people, different from the other ethnic commu¬ nities of Sri Lanka, and superior to them because Sinhalas have “no slave blood in them” and have never been conquered “by either the pagan Tamils or European vandals.” Although he believed that the Sinhala race was intact, Dharmapala could not deny that Sinhalas had been corrupted by colonialism. There lay the asymmetry and the pa¬ thos. The British have built roads, extended railways, and generally intro¬ duced the blessings of their materialistic civilisation into the land; and with this inception of the modern era the Aryan Sinhalese has lost his true identity and become a hybrid. Practices which were an abomina¬ tion to the ancient noble Sinhalese have to-day become tolerated under the influence of Semitic sociology.16 14. Guruge, ed., Return to Righteousness, p. 479. President Jayewardene also con¬ tended that the Sinhalas have never been defeated; see Chapter 6, n. 27. 15. The Aryan-Dravidian distinction began as a linguistic contrast. By the 1820s European philologists such as Rask and Lassen had categorized Sinhala as a Dravidian (or Dekkanese, to use the term current before Caldwell began to use the term Dravid¬ ian) language. In the 1850s James Alwis made the argument for Sinhala’s being an “Arian or Northern” language. See his Sidatsangara, republished as James Alwis, A Survey of Sinhala Literature (Colombo: Ceylon Government Press, 1966), introduc¬ tion, p. xlvi. How seriously Max Muller disavowed the racist interpretation of the Aryan-Dravidian distinction has been questioned by Leon Poliakov, The Aryan Myth (New York: Basic Books, 1971), pp. 213-14. 16. Guruge, ed., Return to Righteousness, pp. 494-95.

Nationalist Discourse

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The need for a venerable past followed on the perception that Sinhalas had a miserable present. In a 1910 public lecture at the premier Buddhist school in the island, John Senaveratne borrowed Dharmapala’s language: “the Sinhalese nation is one of the oldest nations of the world, and it stands today, among the countless races of the earth, in the proud and almost unique position of being able to de¬ clare, that its history is entwined in, nay, that it joins together, the two great ages of human civilization.”17 The second age is the mod¬ ern, colonial world of 1910 where Sinhalas found themselves the dis¬ tant subjects of a Christian king. But it was cultural contempt that rankled Sinhala feelings. Senaveratne quoted Sir Richard Digby as saying that Sinhalas had become “the women of the human race.” The defense against English contempt was for Sinhalas of the second age to remember their ancestors of the first, the independent Sinhala state that begins with Vijaya—the age of massive irrigation works, the first use of oil painting, and leaders of intense energy and patrio¬ tism. The contrast with the history of English civilization balances the scale: “when the rude barbaric ancestors of the British nation were dying their bodies with woad and covering their nakedness with leaves of the forest, the Sinhalese were living in prosperous cities and enjoying the benefits of a splendid Eastern civilization.”18 The Sinhala nation has declined since then and the English has risen, but Sena¬ veratne found reason for optimism. The idea of race made the past present and powerful. We anticipate in the doctrine of race, a philosopher tells us, something like that law of physiology that, whatever bone, muscle or essential organ is found in one healthy individual, the same part or organ may be found in or near the same place in its cogener, and we look to find in the son every mental and moral property that existed in the ancestor.19

When Dharmapala and Senaveratne insisted that Sinhalas “show themselves worthy of the mantle of racial greatness that has fallen on our shoulders,” the inchoate textual strategy of the Mahavamsa proper reached its logical conclusion.20 The Sinhala people, one and 17. phlet) 18. 19. 20.

John Senaveratne, “The Past Might and Glory ot the Sinhalese Nation” (pam¬ (Colombo: Lorenz Press, 1939), p. 2. Ibid., p. 3. Ibid., p. 6. Ibid., p. 17.

202

The Presence of the Past

all, are a racial group, not simply the original human inhabitants of the island. But having a racial and political identity is not sufficient in itself If they are to become a nation, the argument went on, Sinhalas need to recall the energy and love ot country that motivated their early ancestors and be moralized by those ancient examples. Only as a people could they recreate the unity that heroic kings had once im¬ posed. The discursive formation that developed around the figure of unity also derived from constitutional arrangements die British made at the very end of the colonial period. In this regard nationalist discourse was a reaction less to colonial domination itself than to the social experience of a political system that did not work very well. With the Donoughmore reforms of 1931, the British gave Sri Lankans a mea¬ sure of democracy in the form of a State Council of popularly elected members. But the onset of elected government developed amid the rising force of Sinhala and Tamil ethnic feeling, which the British knew would have divisive effects on the polity. In considering ways for Sri Lankans to govern themselves peacefully, the colonial govern¬ ment looked for institutional forms that would maintain political or¬ der by delaying the emergence of political parties which they feared would become vehicles for ethnic interests. The product was a com¬ plicated system of executive committees modeled on the League of Nations, which would serve as an alternative to communal represen¬ tation.21 Although the minorities favored the executive committee system, in the second State Council, they discovered that the system could still be maneuvered to elect a Board of Ministers constituted entirely of Sinhalas. The immediate effect was to exacerbate communal feeling, and by 1938 G. G. Ponnambalam was demanding that the minorities be given representation equal to the Sinhala majority. Both of the emergent political parties of the time—the Ceylon National Congress and the Lanka Sama Samaja Pakshaya—lacked any substantial con¬ nection to rural Sri Lanka, but when the Sinhala Maha Sabha arose, it began to express Sinhala, Buddhist, and rural interests. Despite its affliation with the Ceylon National Congress, under S. W. R. D. Bandaranaike’s leadership it began to make its own policy statements. 21. K. M. de Silva, A History of Sri Lanka (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1981), pp. 421—22.

Nationalist Discourse

203

often contradicting Congress itself. Although the successor to the Sinhala Maha Sabha, the Sri Lanka Freedom party, did not gain power until 1956, there were signs long before independence that the future lay with political parties, and that they would be divisive and increasingly organized around ethnic loyalties. With the development of political parties came the realization that Sinhalas were divided among themselves just as much as they were estranged from Tamil Sri Lankans. Under these circumstances the invocation of unity was a reaction to the social experience of the unraveling of a political order long held together by colonial hands. When D. S. Senanayake sailed to London in 1945 to negotiate Dominion Status, the Sinhala major¬ ity was so divided among itself that he went without a mandate to speak in the name of the State Council.22

Speaking of Unity It was in these contexts that unity became a central figure in modern Sinhala political discourse. Besides its resonance and pathos, a great part of its appeal derived from its power to give meaning to a variety of circumstances. The British were able to conquer the Kandyan king¬ dom, on this account, because of the disunity of the Sinhala aristoc¬ racy. They were able to solidify their power by imposing more dis¬ unity on the Sinhalas, dividing them in order to rule them. In the process Tamils were given undue advantages, first in education, but also in the employment possibilities that followed. The United Na¬ tional party that grew out of the Ceylon National Congress became a largely Sinhala organization, but it also tried to appeal to Tamil vot¬ ers. When Dudley Senanayake came to power in 1965, he formed a government that came to be known as the “national government,12 employing the word “jatika” to refer to all Sri Lankans. At Bogambara, where the fateful events occurred that led to the fall of Kandy in 1815, Senanayake spoke to a political rally about unity and its ab¬ sence: It was natural to think of historic Senkadagala there at Bogambara. The place evoked memories of the total subjection of the Ceylonese

22. Calvin A. Woodward, The Growth of a Party System in Ceylon (Providence: Brown University Press, 1969), p. 37.

204

The Presence of the Past

nation in 1815. The reason for that subjection was disunity among the people. What Independence we had was lost and the whole country became subject because of divisions, dissension, bitterness and jeal¬ ousies among the people. That was how Senkadagala was lost, and in the loss of that Independence, a lesson from history could be drawn. Disunity led to the loss of freedom of the people. Unity re-built meant Independence regained.23

True to the economic development policies of his father, Senanayake went on to link unity to economic forces. The scarcity, the queues and unemployment [of the previous Bandaranaike government] was all a result of the lack of development. Mr. Senanayake asked what development scheme of any magnitude had been undertaken during those years. How could there be development without peace and unity in the country. “They sowed hatred and jeal¬ ousy, not paddy” the Prime Minister said. With dissension and dis¬ unity, all kinds of divisions among the people how could there be a suitable environment for development? That was why there was no progress and dangerous economic problems cropped up. Once again the country learned the old lesson. Without unity there could be no development. “We lost our unity in 1956 and with that we lost our development.” To rebuild die economy, they had to re-unite the coun¬ try and work upon that foundation. That was why the Government they set up was christened the “National Government.”

“National” unity of this magnitude is not much discussed anymore, although its lack is a greater problem now than then. When politi¬ cians and Buddhist monks speak of jatika samagiya (national unity) nowadays, the audience is Sinhala and the vehicle for creating that “national” unity is also Sinhala. In today’s context, “national unity” means “ethnic unity,” and only that, despite the polysemy of the word “jati,” which can refer to the country as a whole, race, caste, or gender. And “jati alaya” (love of community or patriotism) as a result refers to primordial attachments, not civic ones, for patriotism has settled at the level of ethnic community.24 Despite the changing referent of the word “nation,” the unity dis¬ cussed in both instances is a kind of solidarity of which the Ma23. “Coalition Manifesto Accepts What I Have Done,” Observer, magazine edition, April 28, 1970. 24. For a discussion of the interplay of “nationalism” and “subnationalism,” see Michael Roberts, ed., Collective Identities, Nationalisms, and Protest in Modem Sri Lanka (Colombo: Marga Books, 1979).

Nationalist Discourse

205

havamsa is silent. Unity today is the spirit of unanimity that follows the suppression of personal interest, created by individuals yielding to the will of the group, not, as in the Mahavamsa\ sense, by a strong leader, however righteous, imposing it. Human communities gain this unity from the bottom up, through the enlightened seeking of agreement from each member of the group. It should be sought fre¬ quently and reached in absolute unanimity on the Vajjian model, and naturally the Buddhist monkhood becomes a paradigm for this unity; and Buddhist monks, its chief advocates. But talk about popular unity also feeds on images of heroes and the unity they impose. When Labuduve Siridhamma attacked J. R. Jayewardene on National Heroes Day in 1984, he put it this way: ‘There are no national leaders in our country today. We have only party leaders. A national leader should look into both the misery and happiness (dukkha sapa) of the masses. Those who come to the rescue of the nation when it is in danger can also be recognized as national heroes (jdtika vfrayan).”25 When national leaders do not make them¬ selves one with die people, there can be no unity among either Sinhalas or the country at large. There can only be party politics. Under these conditions, Siridhamma went on to say, it is contemptible for modern politicians—the monk thinking of Jayewardene—to compare themselves to real heroes such as Dutugamunu.26 Until he was removed from the Jayewardene government, Cyril Mathew made Dutugamunu a regular part of public discussion about ethnic identity. His major publications on the ethnic crisis have as their frontispiece Dutugamunu’s “for the cause of Buddhism" epithet, followed by a photograph of the Dutugamunu statue erected in An-

25. “Dutugamunu Vani Virayanta Garahlmata Ida Nodiya Yutuyi” (“Heroes Such as Dutgamunu Should Not be Treated with Contempt”), Dinakara, February 9, 1984. 26. The battle between Jayewardene and Siridhamma is an instructive place to un¬ derstand the struggle between a monk trying to reform the government and a govern¬ ment tying to reform the monkhood, for once Siridhamma made the charge of trea¬ son, Jayewardene brought the full power of the state against him, encircling his mon¬ astery in barbed wire, raising charges against the monk, and organizing groups of Peradeniya students to protest his actions. When Siridhamma died soon after the incident, the Jayewardene government denied him the honor of a state-sponsored funeral. Gossip, in turn, attributed Siridhamma’s death to a government plot against him.

206

The Presence of the Past

uradhapura.27 The very existence of sacred places preserves the mem¬ ory of their righteous builders, and the person who makes pilgrimage to the Ruvanvalisaya, according to tradition, honors not only the Buddha but also Dupagamunu who built it. As long as there is politi¬ cal benefit to be had in finding more tangible reminders of righteous leadership, governments will do so. Dupagamunu has been “found”; Sirisamghabodhi is “found,” if not yet installed in a sacred place; and Vijaya is still to be located.28 With the resubstantialization of relics, newly emerged heroes become symbols of a past regained. But the political cost is very high, as the occasional voice crying in the wilder¬ ness points out. At a 1985 meeting of the Navalapitiya Hindu Cul¬ tural Center, a Buddhist monk assessed the cost: “Before [1956] chil¬ dren of all communities studied in one school. There was no communalism. They lived in unity. But later the entire set up changed. Sinhala schools preached about Dutugamunu and his deeds against the Tamils. In the same way Tamil schools preached about Elara and his deeds against the Sinhala. Due to this from childhood, hate was planted in the minds of the young.”29 On the other hand, disunity is so rampant that it undermines the very possibility of a living politician’s achieving unity between the people and himself. People speak of it as a possibility that could be achieved only by the suppression of a problem Sinhalas take to be so chronic that it now constitutes a part of the Sinhala conception of 27. Publications by C. Cyril Mathew include: (1) An Appeal to UNESCO to Safe¬ guard and Presence the Cultural Property in Sri Lanka Endangered by Racial Prejudice, Unlawful Occupation or Willful Destruction (Colombo: J. F. and I. Printers, 1983); (2) Nova Pdraniya-Vana Ramaniya; Asirimat Kdlaniya {Blessed Kiilaniya, Not Becoming Older, But More Illustrious) (Colombo: State Corporations’ Buddhist Societies, 1980); (3) Sihaluni! Budusasuna Berdganiv (Sinhalas! Save the Buddhist Sdsana) (Colombo: J. F. and I. Printers, 1981); (4) Sinhalaydge Adisi Hatura {The Unseen Enemy of the Sinhalas) (Galle: A. H. Jeenis Fernando, 1970); (5) Sri Lanka Jativadi Prasnaya pilibanda Cyril Mathew mahata visin sakas karana lada lipiyaki {Evidence from Mr. Cyril Mathew Regarding Sri Lanka’s Ethnic Problem) (Vanavasala: H. D. David, 1984); and (6) Velgam Vehera saha Mandavatu Nuvara {Vilgam Vihdra and the City of Mandavatu) (Colombo: Velgam Vehera Pujanagara Samvardhana Samitiya, 1981). 28. The ashes of Sirisarhghabodhi were discovereci in the early 1980s, and a com¬ mittee of Buddhist monks recruited by the government to authenticate the find; see “Sirisangabo Report to Be Sent to PM,” Daily News, November 3, 1980. The govern¬ ment has financed archaeological work on a relic mound near Panduvasnuvara because local legend says that Vijaya’s ashes are interred there, but no relics have been found. 29. Kurunegala Piyaratane, “Politicians have ruined the country—Thera,” Island, April 16, 1986.

Nationalist Discourse

207

themselves as a society. When he was minister of lands, land develop¬ ment, and Mahavali development, Gamini Dissanayake used a joke to make the point in a campaign speech. The most visible weakness among the Sinhala people is the lack of unity. This major weakness is not only known in the world we live but also known even in hell. A story irom hell shows how those in hell treat us Sinhala people from Sri Lanka lor [sic] lack ol unity. Once a demon paid hell a visit, there he noticed how those from other coun¬ tries were kept behind bars with tight security. The Sinhala people . . . were seen loitering freely outside. The demon having observed the dif¬ ference of treatment asked the authorities in hell why that privilege was given to the Sinhala people. The authorities of hell explained. Those from other countries if allowed to stay outside escape one by one. None of them would bring the matter to the notice of the authorities. They are strong in unity. But the Sinhala people are not that. If any of their men made an attempt to escape the hell another of them is sure to report it.30 Sinhalas see themselves as having been repeatedly threatened through their history by outside forces, occasionally saved by heroic leaders, and now left defenseless. Their present-day weakness owes to laziness (alasakama), shortsightedness (aduradarshibhavaya), and dis¬ unity (asamagiya).31 These self-representations contrast sharply with Sinhala perceptions of the resolute unity, not to say the energy and farsightedness, of minority communities. In several of his publica¬ tions Madihe Pannasiha has struck the contrast by talking about heroes: According to what I think, the national hero in Lanka presently is Minister S. Thondaman. He can be assigned the highest place as a great leader who is devoting his work for a nation. Here are examples. He was born of an ordinary family and educated with much determina¬ tion, becoming the leader of the estate laborers. Facing numerous atrocities and contempt, defamation, and losses, he became a minister in the present government. Now he takes every benefit from the gov¬ ernment for his community. 30. “Lack of Unity, Major National Weakness,” Island, April 18, 1986. Dissanavake’s joke makes an instructive contrast with the incident in Sammodamana Jdtaka where the Buddha shows a flock of quail how to achieve their freedom by acting in unison. 31. Tirikunamale Ananda, ed., Prajnd Prabhd (.Liffht of Wisdom) (Maharagama: Ruvan Paharuva, 1983), p. 73.

20 8

The Presence of the Past

Speaking of the proposal in the mid-1980s to give citizenship to stateless Tamil estate laborers, Pannasiha went on to find the modern expression of the relationship between unity and heroic leadership: Those [Tamils] who were to leave Sri Lanka under the Sirima-Sastri pact, being without a country will receive citizenship. Then they all will be Sri Lankan Tamils. Those who came from South India are called Sri Lankan Tamils. Those who came later from South India are called Estate Tamils. Both sections belong to one country, one nation, and one language. Their unity in the future cannot be stopped even by Mahd Brahma. . . . The power of Minister Thondaman would be limit¬ less. He will have unshakeable power (balaya noselviyahaki) T

By way of his union of estate workers, according to Pannasiha, Thon¬ daman has made himself one with his people. Because they have no alternative, he wields absolute authority, and that has made Thondaman’s role heroic. He does not need politics or consensus as the leader of a union whose support is assured in a society where Sinhalas see themselves turned against one another by democracy and party politics. When political leaders make such arguments, they regularly return to the consequences of political parties for Sinhala unity, for the de¬ mocratizing process, which the Donoughmore reforms began, found new ways to suppress the Sinhala people. Without political parties in the past, Sinhalas were unified; without political parties in the future, they could be unified again. Although the idealization of the past as unified has little foundation, there is real evidence to support the per¬ ception of the nasty effects of party politics in what has become one of the most politicized societies in Asia.33 The association between labor unions and political parties has always given party membership additional force, but party loyalty has become increasingly important in the years since independence. Party affliations have been insinuated into local-level politics, into the relationship between Buddhist monks and their lay supporters, into government employment and prefer¬ ment. The political demonstrations that follow national elections have 32. Madihe Pannasiha, “If Sinhalas Don’t Unite, the Future Will Be Very Dan¬ gerous,” Rivirasa, May 22, 1983, reprinted in Madihe Pannasiha, Sinhalaydpfe Andpf at ay a? (What Is the Sink alas’s Future?) (Maharagama: Pahan Paharuva, 1985), pp. 34-36. 33. James Jupp, Sri Lanka— Third World Democracy (London: Frank Cass, 1978), passim.

Nationalist Discourse

209

grown more violent with each election since 1970, and the destruc¬ tion of shops, houses, automobiles, and the harassment of supporters of die losing party has had an embittering effect on many voters. Organized demonstrations in 1983 outside the homes of Supreme Court judges added a new anxiety about the independence of the judiciary, heightened by the suspicion that those demonstrations were organized by a political party. Less dian two decades after independence, the 1964 conference of the All-Ceylon Buddhist Congress appointed a committee to consider the need to do away with political parties.34 Opening a model village in 1983, when he was second in command to Jayewardene, President Ranasinghe Premadasa argued simply for the need for not only new houses but also new ideas. “It is because of this Party System that disunity, division and rivalry have arisen in society. We see even the young and growing children getting divided.” Premadasa also saw signs of change: Our division on the basis of Political Parties is only a very temporary one. A person may be in one Party today, in another tomorrow and in yet another Party day-after-tomorrow. This Party System is not going to be a permanent feature of our life. But humanity is permanent. I have a vision of future development, I see in my mind’s eye a new situation arising in this country before long, where our people will reject this Party System altogether and it will vanish from our life. I do not know whether this vision bodes good or ill for us. But this is a thing I clearly see. I already see the beginnings of this change. I see them unmistakably in the results of the Presidential Election, the Ref¬ erendum and the By-Elections held thereafter.35

All this talk about government without political parties hardly means that Sri Lanka is verging on such a system, but the talk reacts to the dislocations of democracy and a political system that has served politicians better than voters. In this context Buddhist monks are the natural proponents of that ideology, arguing that politicians are de¬ stroying Sri Lanka.36 What motivates politicians, the argument goes, is the desire to capture power. They are liable to say anything and unashamedly change policy and party on short notice. Party politics is 34. W. A. Wiswa Warnapala, “Sanjjha and Politics in Sri Lanka: Nature of the Continuing Controversy,” Indian Journal of Politics 12 (April—August 1978): 73. 35. Ranasinghe Premadasa, Pana Men Surakimu Siri Lanka (Let Us Protect Sri Lanka), Christy Cooray, compiler (Colombo: Government Press, 1984), p. 143. 36. “Politicians Are Ruining Country—Thero,” Island, April 11, 1986.

2io

The Presence of the Past

a vehicle for self-seeking, and it undermines “national” feeling. Its logical opposite is loyalty to one’s community—Sinhala nationalism or Tamil nationalism, so-called—which has patriotic virtue.37 And no one has a better claim on love of community than the Buddhist monkhood. On this logic, the monks constitute the patriotic alterna¬ tive to the self-interest of politicians, for they can produce social unity by transcending interests. Sometimes politicians speak of them as an¬ other political party or a “third force” mediating between left and right. More often politicians speak of them as an alternative to poli¬ tics altogether. Seeing the bhikkhu as the alternative to the politician follows in a tradition of rethinking the proper role of Buddhist monks that began in the 1930s. When Walpola Rahula wrote his Bhikshuvctge Urumaya, he envisioned a role that was activist without being partisan.38 Monks nowadays simply assume their rights to act politically. Those rights are guaranteed by the Sri Lankan Constitution, and in a monk’s case, political activism is ennobled by the monk’s independence. ‘There cannot be any power bloc or any individual,” Labuduve Siridhamma argues,” to infringe on the rights of the bhikkhu to talk against the powers that are suppressing the country, nation, and religion. The Buddhist bhikkhu will never be the cat’s paw of any political party.”39 Siridhamma’s claims of course are contradicted by the connections that tie monks to political parties, but his point is clear. Monks can support political parties, but they cannot be used by them. If asked, most monks in Sri Lanka would identify themselves with the SLFP. I have heard the estimate of such support put as high as 80 percent of the monkhood. But each of the major political parties re¬ ceives the public support of monks, some well-known and others not. The famous orator Devamottave Amaravamsa supports the UNP, al¬ though he was once a SLFP supporter. The mahanayaka of the Asgiriya chapter of the Siyam Nikaya, Palipane Chandananada, is a strong supporter of Mrs. Bandaranaike and the SLFP. Many monks,

37. Sinhala nationalist politicians have been quick to shift parties. See James Jupp, “Five Sinhalese Nationalist Politicians,” in W. H. Morris-Jones, ed.. The Making of Politicians: Studies from Africa and Asia (London: Athlone Press, 1976), pp. 183-94. 38. Walpola Rahula, Bhikshurage Urumaya, later published in English as The Heri¬ tage of the Bhikkhu (New York: Grove Press, 1974). 39. Labuduve Siridhamma, quoted in “Jatika Vipatin Rata Desha Muda Gamma” (“To Save the Country from the Ethnic Crisis”), Dinakara, October 21, 1982.

Nationalist Discourse

2 11

perhaps most monks, avoid political action altogether, making no public pronouncements in regard to local elections and national poli¬ tics. Other monks—Madihe Pannasiha is the best example—make public statements about politics, but resist all attempts to identify them with any political party. The general point is this. All monks, even the ones who explicitly support one political candidate or party, by virtue of being world renouncers enjoy the advantage of being viewed as rising above partisan politics. If they support one party today and another later, they still have an advantage that politicians who shift parties do not—monks represent the interests of Buddh¬ ism, and as the circumstances change, which party better serves Bud¬ dhism can be argued to change too. The publisher’s introduction to Pannasiha’s Sinhalayage Anajjataya? gives an account of the monkhood’s place in Sinhala society that I suspect most monks and laypeople would endorse. “Only Sin¬ hala monks know the distance that the Sinhala nation has come in the past or the historical journey they have made and the future road still to be covered. Bhikkhus saved the country from disasters and they pointed out the dangers that loomed in certain ages because Sinhala laypeople were too busy to see the danger.” Farsighted (duradarshi) monks should be able to see those dangers because they are not householders although party involvements can destroy both their vi¬ sion and their public credibility. Pannasiha himself is the foremost exemplar of a monkly activism that has monks giving advice without being dragged into partisan politics, and he regularly calls other monks back from party politics: Bhikkhus in Burma, Thailand, Cambodia, Laos don't dabble in party politics. The state of the people never induced them to enter politics. Therefore they have no political convictions. Therefore there is only one unanimous voice of the bhikkhus. It is so powerful in Thailand that even the king of the country bows down his head. ... In ancient Sri Lanka bhikkhus never dabbled in politics nor were they led into politics by other people. ... So the power of the bhikkhus was very great in those times. Bhikkhu unity was so great that the aggression made by three great empires could not maintain their power very long. ... It is the political laymen (deshapalanagihiyo) who pulled the bhikkhus into politics. They were the people responsible for destroying bhikkhu power.40 40. Ananda, ed., Prajna Prabha, 2:66.

2i2

The Presence of the Past

This unity depends less on the monks’ having a monopoly on vir¬ tue or more selflessness than laypeople than on the institutional ar¬ rangements that organize life in the sangha. Monks should vote frequendy on matters of common concern, reach consensus, and then accept those decisions unanimously. Those organizational practices have an obvious affinity to the values associated with Buddhist mo¬ nastic life, for to cast off the household life is to abandon the social ties and motivations that would lead a man into conflict. Personal ambition and politicking violate the very spirit of world renuncia¬ tion. Thus when high-ranking Siyam Nikaya monks elect a leader, the election is more than a political act; it constitutes a cultural perfor¬ mance, allowing monks a chance to show their principles (pmtipattiya penvanna). It is unseemly for monks to contest a monastic election. As newspaper accounts put the matter these days when a monk has been unanimously elected to high office: “In keeping with ancient tradition, there were no other contestants.41 Two qualifications are in order. The first is that monastic elections are not an ancient tradition. The office of mahanayaka of the two monastic communities was filled by the king in the Kandyan period. Appropriate disclaimers being made, earlier kings seem to have acted similarly. Monastic elections were imposed by the British to allow them to break the connection between the state and Buddhism, by keeping the colonial government offstage. The second qualification is that in the election mentioned in the newspaper, as well as in other monastic elections, there were other contestants. Candidates rounded up their supporters; they exerted in¬ fluence; they called in favors. Laypeople sometimes gossip about elec¬ tion to high office in the Siyam Nikaya requiring large cash gifts to members of the sangha sabha (governing council). But the proceed¬ ings are absolutely secret, and no outsider will ever know of this with any certainty, for whatever politicking goes on, goes on in private. The conventional form is election by unanimous consent, but before the public election comes the private maneuvering—the winner by one vote becomes the winner by common consent. Behind the public enactment of unity, the forces that motivate monastic life and monks’ involvement in national politics are as fully political as the forces that cause Sinhala laypeople to care deeply about politics. I once asked an 41. “Malwatte Gets New Head,11 Ceylon Daily News, November 25, 1969.

Nationalist Discourse

213

undergraduate monk at the University of Peradeniya what he and his friends talked about at night when they were alone in the university’s hostel for monks. I did not expect his answer: “Politics. It’s the only thing we talk about.” Many times when Sinhalas speak of unity, they do not have a ca¬ nonical example in mind. But when monks need a precedent for the kind of unity the present situation demands, the Vajjian example is ready to hand. It meshes perfectly with the nostalgic image of the temple and the tank, and both images of the past are made more powerful by the feeling that democracy has not served Sri Lanka very well. Henpitagedera Nanavasa puts it thus: Our parliamentary system is a urachakraniala (a garland that inflicts wounds on its wearer). The animal that wears the urachakramala feels pain when he is cut. But the garland appears to others to be only a garland. They beg for the decorated garland, but the animal who wears it is reluctant to part with it, even thought he is being cut. This system which destroys unity, justice, and good behavior is also a uracha¬ kramala. It destroys the rights of the people.42

One remedy for the self-inflicted injuries of parliamentary democracy and party politics is the creation of a Buddhist democracy. The Vaj¬ jian unity of the sangha is an achievement that government should itself emulate. Buddhist monks are the natural proponents of this remedy, and they are simultaneously its example. When the chief lay official of the Temple of the Tooth Relic talks of unity, he takes the monkhood as the foundation of “national” solidarity. Sinhala Buddhists should unite and safeguard the rights of Buddhists, the safety of the sacred places, and their own safety. We cannot depend on this safety from the [Jayewardene] government. Before coming into power this government pledged to give due place to Buddhism, but after being elected, they forgot their principles and Buddhism. They work against Buddhism and take revenge. We who are Buddhists have no political party. Our party is the party of the monks (ape pakshe bhikshu paksh ayayi). Our color is yellow (ape pat a kaha pat ayi). We fight for the security of Sinhalese Buddhists, the nation, and the sdsana. Therefore this Sinhala Buddhist unity will bring power to the Buddhist 42. Introduction to Henpitagedera Nanasiha, Apata Bauddha Palana Kramayak Avashya Ayi? (Why Do We Need a Buddhist System of Government?) (Ratnapura: Samupakara Mudranalaya, 1983).

2i4

The Presence of the Past

cause (Bauddha balavegaya). All the political parties should unite, for¬ getting caste and Low-Country and Up-Country differences. The headquarters should be located at the Temple of the Tooth Relic.43

The division of the monkhood into some forty monastic commu¬ nities, not to say the monks" support of various political parties, has no apparent effect on the association of monks with unity, producing this formula: the unity of the Buddhist sangha leads to concentric circles of unity, of the Buddhist laity, of Sinhalas, and then of all Sri Lankans. The notion may be older, but it was powerfully sounded by S. W. R. D. Bandaranaike when he formed the Sinhala Maha Sabha in the 1930s.44 Once unity is established among small communities, momentum overcomes the opposition of other parties. Speaking of how the country could be put together again in the aftermath of the 1983 Colombo riots, Lalith Athulathmudali made this argument: “Sinhala janatavage samagiya natuva cavadakavat me rate sulu jatinta mitratvayak sikuru karanna baha” (‘"Without the unity of the Sinhala people, the unity of the whole country can never be achieved”).45

Imagining the Future Two prominent monks have envisioned the Sinhala future in terms of the unity idiom, and both exemplify the way nationalist monks have responded to the effects of party politics. The writings of Madihe Pannasiha and Henpitagedera Nanasiha do not represent the only views of the future entertained by Buddhist monks, and certainly not by all Sinhalas. But both have been influential sources of opinion— Pannasiha perhaps more so than Nanasiha—and both speak of sam¬ agiya (unity) in a way that links the past, present, and future. Until his death in 1981, Nanasiha led a life of political activism and scholar¬ ship, acquiring the title rajakiyapanditha (king’s scholar). He was the author of an esteemed work in Pali on the life of Dutugamunu, as 43. “Sinhala Bauddhayage Arakshavata Aramudalak Pihituva Gamma” (“Establish a Fund for the Protection of Sinhala Buddhists”), Divayina, February 25, 1986. 44. See Towards a New Era: Selected Speeches Made in the Legislature of Ceylon 19319 (Colombo: Ceylon Government Press, 1961), pp. 50-51 for a speech in 1939 where Bandaranaike defended this argument. 45. Lalith Athulathmudali, quoted in Hansard, vol. 24, no. 13, August 4, 1983, column 1296.

Nationalist Discourse

215

well as an active participant in a series ot political incidents, the most significant of which was his involvement in an unsuccessful coup in 1964. Nanasiha began his career as an early supporter of D. S. Senanayake. When Senanayake set his course against monkly activism, Nanasiha became estranged from him. In the 1956 election he partic¬ ipated in the campaign for S. W. R. D. Bandaranaike. Later he sup¬ ported Mrs. Bandaranaike until he fell out with her too. Pannasiha by contrast has kept himself at a remove from partisan politics while always speaking his mind on political issues. Over the past twentyfive years, newspapers have published 2,000 of his “strong articles” (vejjavat lipi).46 Along with those articles, his organizational leadership has made him a leading actor in the Buddhist nationalist cause. As one writer innocently put the matter, “It is not wrong to say that widaout the name of Ven. Madihe many a racial problem cannot be discussed.”4 By virtue of both his contentious personality and the time he spent in jail after being convicted for conspiring to overthrow the govern¬ ment, Nanasiha appears to represent an extreme political position. But his views are extreme to the extent that they envision a very dif¬ ferent Sri Lanka, not that they are unparalleled. The early 1980s saw the death of two other nationalist monks—Labuduve Siridhamma and Matale Sasanatilaka—of the Ramanna Nikaya as well as Nanasiha himself. In their company Nanasiha attracted no special notice. Over the last ten years of his life, Nanasiha worked for the Sarvodaya Shramadana movement, and the participation in social service that it afforded him in his last year also mitigated his reputation as a fire¬ brand.48 He was as prolific as Pannasiha, but most of his literary out¬ put appeared in the forty-odd books he wrote or translated, not as articles written for newspapers. I will concentrate on the single most elaborate and coherent statement of his views, which he wrote while in prison. He titled the book Buddhist Socialism. It was published in 1983 and retitled Apata Bauddha Palana Kmmayak Avasya Ayi? (Why 46. Pannasiha so characterized his output on the occasion of publishing a small pamphlet to make known some of his articles that had been censured. See “Dan Pavatna Jatika Vipatin Sinhalayin ha Demilayin Bera Ganne Kesada? (“How Can Sinhalas and Tamils be Rescued . . .” (Colombo: Samayavardhana Printers, 1984), P- *• 47. Gunadasa Liyanage, Cavda Me? (Who is This?) (Colombo: M. D. Gunasena, 1968), p. 127. 48. See Richard Gombrich and Gananath Obeyesekere, Buddhism Transformed (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), p. 253.

2i 6

The Presence of the Past

Do We Need a Buddhist System of Government?) It lays out Nanasiha’s views on the ethnic problem, economic policy, and Buddhist political theory in a way that complements the concern Pannasiha has shown for these issues in his newspaper articles and book, Sinhalaydpfe Anagatay a? (What Is the Sinh alas’s Future?). Democracy and its failings figure prominently in both Nanasiha and Pannasiha’s thinking because democracy produces disunity, but on the issue of how unity is to be regained, the two monks part company. Nanasiha writes in his book that democratic government has caused people’s inner qualities to decline, bringing in turn rob¬ bery, corruption, and cheating. Future decline will bring the inability to protect Buddhism itself and the Sinhala nation (p. 2). Using the image of people taking up swords and dien cutting their own necks with them, Nanasiha argues that democracy has given Sri Lanka poli¬ ticians who care nothing for the will of the people (p. 15). “The innocent man casts his ballot in selecting his representative with great confidence. When he is returned to the Parliament, what a crime it is for him to favor his relations and others, forgetting that innocent voter” (p. 46). Nanasiha had only to look at his own life to see the effects of party politics, and he described his decision to work for social service organization as a retreat from political activism. The founder of Sarvodaya recruited him by emphasizing what would be gained both by social service and by avoiding politics: “Nayaka hdmudaruvane [Esteemed leader], why not give up this dirty game and join us to develop the country?” Nanasiha replied: “Yes, you are cor¬ rect. We cannot develop this country by party politics. I have realized it through experience. If we are to save this country from disaster we must unite the people first.”49 As Nanasiha saw it, a layperson should think only of family and occupation. Democracy in Sri Lanka has led laypeople to think of external duties, leaving behind a discipline not visible in the life of the villager today. Not even one out of a hundred is trained for the responsibilities entrusted to them. They spent time chatting. Responsibilities are overlooked because of talking of political issues unwanted by them. ... A character disciplined by Buddhism will have limited interest in these matters. [Such a person] would be silent. He would not argue with others, (p. 19). 49. “How a Great Monk Rescued Sarvodaya from the CIA Scare,” Sun, August 7, 1981.

Nationalist Discourse

217

The villagers' problem is not just giving their vote to unresponsive politicians, it is politics as such. In the twenty years of independence before Nanasiha wrote his book, party politics changed the character of village life: These parties which were divided only politically at the outset have created many divisions in the villages. It has caused a grave situation. Unity in the village has been lost to the vindictiveness and indifference inflicted by the party system upon the villagers. Our political leaders are responsible for this. The members of different parties in Parliament behave as friends. But in the villages people of different parties con¬ tinue their rivalries as if they had been inherited from previous births. (P- 38)

Parliamentary democracy cannot represent the people’s interests be¬ cause, without unity, there is no such thing as the “people’s interests,” only a congeries of different interests, individual and contradictory. Nanasiha suggests this example: “some citizens may like some policy and others may not. A vote is taken. Those in favor would be a hun¬ dred and those opposed ninety nine . . . the majority is only one, yet this is considered the people’s will in ‘modern’ democracy” (pp. 2324).5°

Nanasiha would not have written the book had he not had a solu¬ tion in mind. What he proposes has several inspirations: cakkavatti rule, Vajjian unity, and Soviet communism, which he commended as “the best form of government in the world today” (p. 12). Cakkavatti rule in ancient times, on Nanasiha’s account, had the same effect as Communist government in the Soviet Union. Both produced egali¬ tarian societies. “Equal living (sammajiva) in Russia has made the prisons empty. It has cleared the court rooms. Though these qualities characterize Communist Russia, they are principles of [Skt. ] cakravarti rule” (p. 8). All three models of government exercise power without opposition, and thus enjoy perfect unity. Party politics can never create unity. “People argue that the ruling party should be united with the opposition. But it has become impractical as the two parties differ in their ideologies. The present ruling party,” Nanasiha said in 1969 of the UNP, “favors capitalism. In short it protects the 50. For a comparable backlash against the will of the majority in India, see Robert Frykenberg, ‘The Concept of‘Majority’ as a Devilish Force in the Politics of Modern Indian History,” Journal of Commonwealth and Comparative Politics 25 (November 1987): 267-74.

21 8

The Presence of the Past

wealthy. The opposition completely abhors this. How can they be made united?” (p. 39). A government, whether it is based on cakkavatti rule, Vajjian unity, Soviet communism, or Buddhist democ¬ racy, enjoys unity only where the system works without opposition. 'There is no opposition in a Buddhist democracy. There is only one party. Opinions are discussed in peace and people come to a settle¬ ment. People meet in unity and disperse in unity” (p. 38). Nanasiha’s model for unity is the Buddhist monkhood. Just as the Vajjians were ruled by a representative body of 7,000, Nanasiha fore¬ saw Sri Lanka being ruled by 7,000 officers representing 7,000 vil¬ lages (p. 44). There will be no opposition because this conference of village councils will resemble a family. With colonialism Sri Lankans began to forget those family ties, thinking of government as some¬ thing external to themselves (p. 22). Now government must be re¬ claimed. When it is reclaimed, it will naturally be egalitarian, unified, and Buddhist. Discarding its urachakramala, a Buddhist society will return to principles appropriate to its culture and history. Elections will have a place in this Buddhist democracy, but they will be unlike today’s elections. When the majority vote is against Dhamma, a Bud¬ dhist administration will simply reject such decisions (p. 31). Besides his newspaper articles and pamphlets, Pannasiha has repre¬ sented the sangha and Buddhist community on several governmental committees. Nanasiha, needless to say, was not a ''government” bhikkhu. Despite his enthusiasm initially for the Bandaranaikes and the SLFP, the party kept him at arm’s length. His autobiography does not explain why he fell out with Mrs. Bandaranaike.51 But his radical politics were certain to have given conservative members of the party difficulty. By contrast, Pannasiha is well-connected to the Low Coun¬ try Sinhala elite. As a young novice he moved from Matara to Co¬ lombo, received his ordination from Palane Vajiranana, taking up res¬ idence at Vajirarama, an important center of Buddhist modernism. When Vajiranana died in 1955, Pannasiha succeeded to his office of mahanayaka of a small but not insignificant Nikaya of the Amarapura 51. Henpitagedera Nanasiha, Henpitapfcdcra sita Vdlikada harahd (From Henpitaffedem by Way of Vdlikada) (Colombo: Slmasahita International Graphic Maga¬ zines, 1982). By contrast, Nanasiha says he was responsible for Mrs. Bandaranaike’s decision to assume leadership after the assassination of her husband (pp. 106-7). After her election in 1970, Nanasiha was said to have become a political “kingmaker” able to advance or destroy the careers of members of Parliament.

Nationalist Discourse

219

Nikaya.52 Rising to that office at the extraordinarily young age of forty-three has put him in a prominent position for more than diirty years. When J. R. Jayewardene’s younger brother took the robes as a Buddhist monk in the 1970s, Jayewardene directed him to Pannasiha as a teacher and a source of ordination.55 Pannasiha’s view of the ethnic crisis needs to be understood in terms of his organizational initiatives and his close ties to important politicians and laypeople. On the one hand, he frequendy returns to the issue of unity, making the Chinese puzzle argument that bhikkhu unity will lead to Sinhala unity and eventually to Sri Lankan unity.54 On the other hand, he just as frequendy makes concrete proposals concerning political arrangements for making peace in Sri Lanka. As a member in the early 1980s of the Maha Sangha Council, he partici¬ pated in the Roundtable Conference, discussing power-sharing with Tamils in the North and East. But his interest in drawing up policy dates back to his participation in the Committee of Inquiry on Bud¬ dhist Affairs in the 1950s. Although he recendy received the rajaklya panditha degree, he has made a career not of scholarship but of estab¬ lishing organizations and advising governments in the cause of setting right the relationship among the monkhood, the laity, and the new state. His remarks on the Dhammavijaya society which he started in 1974 suggests his feelings on unity. The movement’s motto, samapjiyama yahapati (unity is good), harks back to the multi-religious policies of Asoka, as does the movement’s name which refers to Asoka’s invocation of Dhammavijaya (victory by righteousness) as opposed to dikvijaya (victory by war). The aim of the Dhammavijaya movement is “to move forward in unity, with one mind (eksitva) to make Sri Lanka a Dhammadlpa (island of Dhamma) and a granary of the East.5" First, Buddhists need to be united, then joined to non-Buddhists (abauddhayin). Later Sinhalas can be united and then united with the nonSinhalas {asinhala). His efforts to save children from malnutrition fol-

52. The Amarapura Nikaya is composed of thirty-odd smaller groups, also called Nikayas. Initially elected the leader of one of those smaller groups, Pannasiha more recently was elected leader of the entire Amarapura Nikaya. 53. Olcott Gunasekera, ‘The Venerable Madihe Pannasiha Mahanayake Thera,” in Tirikunamale Ananda, ed., Prajna Prabha, p. 36. 54. “Bhikkhu Unity Will Pave Way to National Unity,” Daily Nnw, May 9, 1986. 55. Pannasiha, “How Sinhalas and Tamils . . .,” p. 9.

220

The Presence of the Past

low the same logic. Pannasiha has established local branches of the Dhammavijaya society in fourteen Buddhist temples, where milk products and trlposha (a nutritional supplement) are distributed to 5,000 needy children. From those fourteen temples, the movement intends to spread to churches and kovils (Hindu temples). Like Nanasiha, Pannasiha has a plan for establishing a Buddhist democracy. Under the present system of representation, which uses a ratio-basis method for determining representation, unity simply is un¬ obtainable. The system of government Pannasiha recommends elimi¬ nates parliamentary opposition: Some people believe that democracy should have an opposition. There is no logic here. Until the establishment of the Soulbury government, democratic systems of government existed in this country. There was no opposition. Today in most democratic and socialist countries there is no opposition. It should be stated how this kind of government could be established. Six months before a general election a committee should be appointed of educated men well-versed in political science and other subjects and not belonging to any political party. They should make a five-year plan for the future development on the basis of the culture of the country. They should also prepare a manifesto, stat¬ ing how they will execute those plans, and this manifesto ought to be presented to parties and people. The political parties should be consul¬ ted before the preparation of this manifesto. People should vote for the parties who accept this manifesto. Those political parties can go before the people and say whether they intend to implement the manifesto. The party that gets more votes then wins. All parties that promise to implement the manifesto would form the government. The party that gets the most representation chooses its chief as prime minister. A min¬ istry will be alloted for every ten seats. There may be parties that win more than ten seats and they get a ministry. Every ministry will have a committee of elected members of Parliament. The members who did not accept the manifesto could be independent members (nidahas mantrivaru) .56

Pannasiha proposes to replace a strong leader with a strong plan that voters and political parties alike can support. His articles speak of unity as a phenomenon that begins with small communities and spreads outward, and for this spreading effect to work, Sinhalas must utilize their numerical advantage: “when 74 percent of the population is united [the Sinhala percentage of the island’s population], what can 56. Pannasiha, Sinhalayapfe Anagataya?, pp. 155-56.

Nationalist Discourse

221

the other 26 percent do?”57 In response to his perception of Sinhala disunity, many of Pannasiha’s publications take up demographic con¬ siderations. He writes of the pro-Tamil distribution of grade 1 schools, which prepare students for university educations, and teacher training colleges, citizenship statistics and the results of enfranchising estate Tamils, and the distribution of parliamentary seats among members of different ethnic communities.58 In the case of parliamen¬ tary representation, demography leads power-hungry Sinhala politi¬ cians to make alliances with non-Sinhala members of Parliament, and Sinhala interests, as a result, become subordinated to minority de¬ mands. Since the 1960s Pannasiha has been saying that Sinhalas have de¬ clined in every sphere of activity including the national economy. On his account, Sinhala traders dominated the Colombo bazaar a hun¬ dred years ago.59 Now weakened, Sinhalas are a majority only in num¬ bers. Even that majority is threatened by illicit immigration, family planning projects, and grants of citizenship to estate Tamils. The size of the Sinhala population itself worries Pannasiha: Police reports appear in newspapers that in every month 350 women are lost, most of them young girls. Out of these, 300 will be Sinhalas. If this report is correct, 3,600 Sinhala women would be lost annually. A few of them would die; 3,000 women would be leading dark lives helping to develop the population of non-Sinhalas. This type of woman would help to increase their population by tens and twelves. Even if five babies per woman are taken into account, 15,000 nonSinhalas will be produced every year. And the population that should have accrued to Sinhalas will be reduced by 15,000. When you think clearly about it, this is a loss to the Sinhala population of 30,000. There are also Sinhala women who have gone for domestic service due to their poverty and they too increase the population ol non-Sinhalas.60

Under diese circumstances heroic leadership is unavailing, and popu¬ lar unity, the only alternative. But the connection to the past is still 57. Ibid., p. 154. 58. Ananda, ed., Prajnd Pmbha, 2:74. 59. Pannasiha, Sinhalayage Andgataya? p. 118. From its founding the Colombo bazaar has been dominated by various trading communities—Arabs from Ormuz, Marwaris, Bengalis, Burmans, South Indians from Malabar and Coromandel, and Eu¬ ropeans. See R. L. Brohier, Changing Fdee of Colombo (Colombo: Lake House, 1984), p. 5. 60. Pannasiha, “Sinhalayanta Ratak Nativeda” (“Will There Be a Country for Sin¬ halas”), reprinted in Sinhalayage Andgataya? pp. 39-40.

222

The Presence of the Past

implicit because unity is the fruit of reformation. The unity that he¬ roic leaders achieved in the past through acts of will, nationalist monks such as Pannasiha believe, can be achieved again when ordi¬ nary people reform themselves by suppressing their individual wills.

Conclusion I think it is fair to say that the hegemony of Buddhism in the history of Sri Lanka has made the Buddhist chronicles a “dominant site of symbolic production, which supplies the major idiom ol other rela¬ tions and activities.”61 The vocabulary of unity, heroes, and sacred places “bathes in a celestial light of religious conceptions" an array of relations and activities not themselves religious—the relationship of the Sinhalas as a people, of Sinhalas and their government, and of the people of Sri Lanka at large. The language of unity insinuates itself into talk about economic development, political stability, individual morality, and attempts to imagine a better future. When Sinhalas at¬ tribute the ethnic crisis to the self-seeking and ruthlessness of politi¬ cians, they make an argument logically identical to what they say about political parties as such, government officials, and Buddhist monks who take property cases to civil courts. All are motivated by self-interest; all are willing to abandon values for material advantage. The ethnic crisis, to be sure, is more consequential, but Sinhalas knew they had a problem with disunity long before ethnic conflict arose in the 1950s. By the early twentieth century, “unity” had become a sta¬ ple of political discourse in both the English and Sinhala press. When the ethnic conflict developed, what made the historical moment poig¬ nant for Sinhalas was their perception of political restoration and reli¬ gious reformation. Just when they were beginning to sense a new unity among themselves, the Buddhist monkhood, and their govern¬ ment, the Tamil minority began to complain of discrimination. The power of a political value such as unity consists in both the variety of contexts to which it speaks and the associations it evokes. The Mahavamsa celebrates righteous heroes who impose unity, but unity, traditionally understood, serves as a ground for the modern appeal for the unity of ordinary people. To this extent, cultural pro61. Marshall Sahlins, Culture and Practical Reason (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), p. 211.

Nationalist Discourse

223

cesses are less the determinate unfolding of structures or the dura¬ bility of practices and notions and more the capacity of actors to use the old to encompass the new, to naturalize it, and to find in the past both standards for judging change and paradigms for action. That capacity to accommodate change also entails taking foreign notions and practices, and then localizing them. A good example is the rhe¬ torical appeal practice of “nationalizing” industrial or agricultural wealth. The Western, socialist notion entails taking wealth from indi¬ viduals and putting it in government hands for the public good. In a Sri Lankan context, the practice acquired a local motivation: taking wealth from “nonnationals”—Tamil Hindus, Muslims, Borahs, and Europeans—and putting it in government hands as a “national,” that is, Sinhala, trust. The transformation by which a socialist practice is reinterpreted as a chauvinist one is made possible by the presence of a set of attitudes toward economic life in which capitalists are under¬ stood as “men who control wealth” (danapati), that is, self-interested and different from the “people,” and where identities textualized in the Mahavamsa have come to be understood still more divisively as blood categories. The notion of unity has also accommodated external historical in¬ fluences. Olcotfs invocation of the virtues of unity—as linking to¬ gether Buddhist monks and laypeople from Sri Lanka to Japan—was quite different from both the unity celebrated in the Mahavamsa and the modern discourse of unity that developed after Olcotfs life. But that is precisely my point. Just as the language of capitalists as danapatis and the distinction between “nationals” and “nonnationals” gave “nationalization” its appeal, so the language of righteous leader¬ ship—and the unity they create—deepens the idea of popular unity. The process by which new events are understood in ancient meta¬ phors, rediscovered and put to new ends, is one that has taken a variety of forms since Mahanama began to impose Indie images of power on the Sri Lankan monarchy. In 1902 Vaskaduve Subhuti sent Edward VII a benediction on the occasion of his coronation. It spoke of Vajjian unity in a imperialist way: ‘The most Perfect Being [the Lord Buddha], who has taught the Vajja [Vajjians] and the Members of his Order of Sanpfha the eternal truth that, so long as they shall remain confederate and be united, walking in the path of Virtue, so long shall they not decline, but prosper: By the power of this great truth may Your Majesty succeed in uniting together all the great Eng-

224

The Presence of the Past

lish-speaking Races all over the World in one Happy Harmonious Whole.”62 The power of the past lies not just in its openness to being revised in ways that are appropriate to the present, although such is a regular phenomenon. Its power lies equally in its discontinuity from the present, for the past is a moral standard and better than life at present. And it is this discontinuity that allows actors to see the con¬ nection, for it is moral not historical, between the Vajjians and “all the great English-speaking Races,” and between the lives of righteous leaders and the circumstances of the present moment. The strength of nationalism as a political phenomenon is its ability to draw on sentiments—language, religion, family, culture—that ap¬ pear to be natural and autochthonous.63 Their cultural expression re¬ quired the emergence of a set of new and hardly autochthonous cir¬ cumstances. This is the paradox of nationalism. Its force depends on the capturing of primordial sentiments, even though the drawing to¬ gether of language, religion, or culture with the polity is generally a modern phenomenon. But to say that nothing at all was there is to misunderstand the nature of culture by separating it from history. In this regard, I prefer Sahlins’s argument that the assumption that the past is either continuous with the present or discontinuous is a false dichotomy: “every reproduction of culture is an alteration, insofar as in action, the categories by which a present world is orchestrated pick up some novel empirical content.”64 Nationalism builds the civic order by saying that it was there all the while. Of course it was not, but the instruments of nationalist practice were there, in this case in the form of a political rhetoric of righteous, unifying leadership and cultural forms such as the keeping of chronicles and attending to sacred places. If the Sri Lankan case has any larger moral, it is that the na¬ tionalist past cannot be invented arbitrarily. It is rather the product of a complex negotiation between colonial administrators, Western and local scholars, traditional intellectual elites, and the people of the place. And what guides that process are qualities such as resonance and pathos that favor certain “pasts” over others.

62. Colonial Office dispatch from Sri Lanka, C.O. 54/680, Public Record Office, London. 63. See Clifford Geertz, “The Integrative Revolution: Primordial Sentiments and Civil Politics in the New States,” in Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Culture (New York: Basic Books, 1973), pp. 255-310. 64. Marshall Sahlins, Islands of History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), P- 144-

Nationalist Discourse

225

The pecular character of modern political community consists in what Benedict Anderson calls “the remarkable confidence of commu¬ nity in anonymity.”65 In my terms, anonymity is a natural part of the transition from the heroic to the popular, for with nationalism the heroic is complemented by a “succession of plurals”—hospitals, prisons, villages, monasteries, religions, ethnic communities, mem¬ bers of Parliament, newspapers, political parties, and most important, citizens—all brought into a single context, if not unity, by their loca¬ tion in a common time and place.66 Just as people become citizens by imagining themselves as existing in a common setting, so the nation can be imagined by foreseeing the disappearance of the people who are its rightful heirs from their traditional home. As Pannasiha’s cal¬ culations suggest, when unity is invoked in these circumstances, it makes a distinctively modern appeal, for the Mahavamsa makes no demographic assertions. The women who have children by non-Sinhala men are faceless, but what counts is their being Sinhala—highly fertile ones on Pannasiha’s calculations—and on the verge of being “lost.” Where the nationalist use of the notion of unity empowers the individual, it does so without regard for her identity as a person. Because every vote counts, every person counts. The problem is that the democratic process that makes every person count brings with it political parties and disunity. Where once the heroic king cre¬ ated unity by the exercise of power—not to say violence—the call for popular unity envisions a cultural order without politics, built on the righteousness of individuals. The modern view envisions a political order that includes people from all social classes. The women at risk are poor, but they vote. Such is the cultural expression of political circumstances. The ordinary person—rich or poor, male or female— has replaced the hero. The logic of argument is no longer the synedochic force of the hero who represents the whole, but the aggregate force of equal individuals. Even the president of the country can be treated as just another individual, as in Labuduve Siridhamma’s char¬ acterization of Jayewardene as a drohiya (traitor) because the leader who fancied himself a modern Dutugamunu can be reduced to the level of the people by having his “love of nation” questioned. And, while ordinary people can be motivated by the example of heroes, it is they who must create unity, by acting on a set of primordial senti65. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 1983), p. 40. 66. Ibid., p. 35.

226

The Presence of the Past

ments. Thus, even when Nanasiha and Pannasiha envision Sinhala society without conflict, they do so in the age of the common person, and neither monk can imagine the exercise of power without partici¬ patory politics of some kind. There is no denying that nationalism borrows many of its inspira¬ tions, often from the very colonial power that creates the nation-tobe’s worst problems. Or that the coincidence of culture and polity in modern nation-states responds to a structural problem. But if nation¬ alism is less than nationalists think it is, it is surely more than borrow¬ ing and structural transformation. I think that nationalism—however reckless and horrifying some of its consequences—represents the al¬ teration that Sahlins calls the reproduction of culture. To call nation¬ alism a cultural form is itself a very modest claim, but it deserves a hearing because of the scholarly tendency to fix attention on national¬ ism’s historical anachronisms, inauthenticity, and chauvinism. It is not to take the nationalists at their word or to assume that culture acts as an a priori category of judgment that shapes human action. It requires us rather to listen to nationalist talk and to hear its reso¬ nances and pathos. To do otherwise is to abandon the attempt to understand what makes people take nationalism seriously.

Bibliography

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Index

Abeygunawardana, V. K. 180, 184, 187

Abhayagirivihara,

50-51

Alwis, James, 88-89 Anachronism, 3, 9, 12-16, 131, 226 Anderson, Benedict, 3-6, 11 Anuradhapura, 40-41, 49-51, 59-66, 125—27, 130-34, 142-43.

Archaeology, 20, 131-33, 142, 156 Aryan, 90, 110—24, 131—32, 199—201.

See

also Sinhala race Asoka, 27-28, 68-69, 73-74, 167-69, 172-73 See also Righteous leadership Athulathmudali, Lalith, 166, 214 Bandaranaike, S. W. R. D., 163-64, 169, 215

Bandaranaike, Sirimavo, 165, 215 Basham, A. L., 94 Bamvantudave, Pandit, 46, 90, 95 Bechert, Heinz, 27 Bell, H.C., 132 Bo tree, 40, 49, 142, 146-47, 155—59, 171 Bourdieu, Pierre, 38 Buddhadatta, Polvatte, 94-96 Buddhaghosa, 30-31 Buddharakkhita, Tibbotavave, 45-46, 97-98

Ddgaba, 132, 136-37, 149-50. See also Sacred places Dasarajadhamma, 165—67. See also Righteous leadership Davy, John, 85 de Alwis, Anandatissa, 10, 168 de Queyroz, Fernao, 80—81 de Silva, C. R., 109 de Silva, K. M., 41,50, 108-9 Devanampiyatissa, 16, 33, 40, 49, 64, 76 Dhamma, 29-34, 73, 218 Dhammadipa, 37, 69 Dhammakitti, 39, 42, 65 Dharmadasa, K. N. O., 115-16 Dharmapala, Anagarika, 199-200 Dharmistha (righteous) society, 24, 133, 165-69, 176. See also Righteous leadership Dipavamsa, 35—40, 54, 59—61, 88 Dissanayake, Gamini, 127-28, 134, 207 Disunity, 24, 100, 128, 157-58, 203-7, 216,

Buddhist monkhood,

27-33, 72-73,

175—80, 185-86, 209-19

Burnouf, Eugene,

168

See also

Sacred places

92,

Capitalism, 141-43, 166, 217-18, 223 Chinese pilgrims, 55-59, 77—78 Cleghorne Minute, 144 Colonialism, 81-104, 123-24, 138-43, Coomara Swamy, Mutu, 109 Culvamsa, 28—29, 42—44, 91, 95

85-86

220—25

Dravidian languages, 200 Dravidian people, 114-22,

132

242

Index

Dravidian practices, 40 Dumont, Louis, 191—92 Durava (toddy-topper caste), 20, 115, Dutugamunu, 12, 39,59-65, 124-34,

Kavya

(poetic prose), 37,

44-45, 97

Kedourie, Eli, 3 159

Kiribamune, Sirima, 91 Klrti Sri Rajasimha, 45-46, 77, 97 Knox, Robert, 81

149-50, 205-6

Kotelawela, Sir John, 161-62

Elara, 60-63, Ethnicity, 43,

Ksatriya

130-34, 206 58, 61, 88-93, 99, 105-8,

Foucault, Michel, 17-18 Franke, Rudolf Otto, 90-92 Fusion of horizons, 11—15, 21-22,

55-59

Lankavijaya (the winning of Lanka), 16-17, 104,

136, 146-47, 163 1-2

Gadamer, Flans Georg, 11—12 Geiger, Wilhelm, 39, 42, 89-93 Gellner, Ernest, 3-4, 6-8, 15, 24—25 Godard, Jean-Luc, 20 Gombrich, Richard, 10-11 Goonewardena, Oliver, 122 Gunawardana, R. A. L. FF, 97, 115-16, 131 Gurulugomi, 97

Flarischandra, Walisingle, 142-43 Heroes, 67-68, 189, 205-8 Higgins, Marie Musaeus, 169-70 Hinduism, 13, 31,50, 76, 106, 146-47, 157-59

37, 69-70

Dhammavijaya (the victory of Dhamma), 150, 219 Livingstone, Samuel, 116-17, 120-21 Mahanama, 2, 21,

37-39, 48, 54-6o,

84-85

Mahasena, 38-41 Mahavali River, 13, 128 Mahavihara, 36-41,50—51 Mahayana Buddhism, 13, 40-41,51 Mahinda, 33, 64 Malalasekera, G. P., 150—51 Mathew, C. Cyril, 124, 147, 154-55 Mendis, G. C., 71, 92-95, 117 Mldeniya mahd adikaram, 98, 103 Muller, Max, 200 Nanasiha, Henpitagedera, 214-18 Nanavasa, Henpitagedera, 213

Historical knowledge,

1-2, 8, 80-83,

93-94, 105-10, 117-24, 146

Hobsbawm, Eric,

59,

70-72, 100 Kuvanna,

115, 138-39, 204

Fussell, Paul,

(warrior and kingly caste),

4, 11

Nationalism, 3-15, 17, 135, 138, 224-26 culture of, 23, 194-96, 214-26 nationalist discourse, 24-25, 77-78, 100, 106-7, 196—226

Individualism, 176-78, Indrapala, K., 138-39

189-93, 222-26

as a political phenomenon, 6-7 scholarly approaches to, 14—15, 195

Nikdya Jataka tales, 74-78, 80 Jdti alaya (nationalism), 102, in, 204 Jatika samagiya (unity), 204 Jayaranjan, Paul, 120-21 Jayewardene, J. R., 13, 128-30, 133-34, 165-80, 219

Jayewardhanapura, 170 Jayewickrama, N. A., 51 Johnston, Alexander, 86-87 Kapferer, Bruce, 9, 19-20

Karava (fisher caste), 20, 115, 152, 159 Katikavata (code of monastic conduct), 30-31, 66

(monastic community), 99, 155,

186, 197-98, 215, 218-19 North India, 20, 48-49, 73, 114-15

Olcott, Henry Steele, 18, 196-98 Oldenberg, Hermann, 33, 35 Orthodoxy, 10-11, 19, 26, 32, 36-37

Pannananda, Yagirala, 22, 79-80, 95-104 Pannasiha, Madihe, 214-22, 225 Parakramabahu I, 24, 46, 65-70, 98-99 Parakramabahu II, 42, 50, 66 Paranavitana, Senarat, 123-24, 132-33 Party politics, 208-11, 216-21 Peasantry, 140-43, 159—60, 166, 172

Index Perera, L. S., 39 Pilgrimage, 43, 76, Sacred places

Sinhala race,

See also

142-44.

Polonnaruva, 65-66, 138-43 Premadasa, R., 172-73, 179, 209 Principle of thrift, 18, 116 Print capitalism, 4-5, 19, 135, 153, 192-93 Przyluski, Jean, 33

243

22-25, 107-25, 139-43,

159-60, 192, 195, 199-202

Siridhamma, Labuduve, 128-29, 205, 225 Sirisamghabodhi, 23, 133 Smith, Vincent, 47, 92 South India, 13, 20, 51-52, 55-59, 151 Co}a country, 40-46, 131 immigrants to Sri Lanka from, 20, 115, 159

Rahula, Walpola, 125, 179 Rajarata (the land of kings),

Sovereignty, 55, 65, 68,

72-73, 77,

101,

134 Sri Lanka Freedom Party, 166, 202-3,

138-42

Rajasimha I, 45 Ramachandran, M. G., 163 Rambukwelle, Wijeratne, in—12 Ranasinghe, Sir Arthur, 119 Ranawella, Sirimal, 219 Ratnayake, Nalin, 180, 187 Reformation, 28-29, 45—46 Relics, 33- 34, 43, 131—33, 137, 149-52, 162-63, 206. See also Sacred places Righteous leadership, 102, 163-80, 187, 205-6

210

Subhuti, Vaskaduve, 89 Sumamgala, Hikkaduve, 46, 90, 95-96 Sumedhamkara, Dambagasare, 136, 149, 152-60

Tambiah, H. W., 109 Tambiah, S. J., 47, 76, 136, 167-68 Tamils, 43-44, 51-52, 63, 97 in modern Sri Lanka, 14, 126, 131-32,

cakkavatti

(universal monarch), 73—76,

143—60 in Sri Lankan past, 44-48, 52, 60,

126, 137 Robinson, Marguerite, 82

Rohana,

61-64,

108-24

41, 50, 65, 68

Textualization of identity, 20-21, 47—48,

Rutnam, James, 121-22

80, 96-104

Theravada

Buddhism, 2, 13, 26, 29-31,

50-51 Sacred places, 23, 136-37, 142-43, 146-60, 179 Sahlins, Marshall, 18, 198, 222, 224, 226 ✓

Sakya clan, 48-49, 75

Salapfama 115,

Sangha

(cinnamon-peeler caste), 20,

159 (monkhood), 22, 72-76

Saranakirti, Seruvila, 158-59 Saranamkara, Valivita, 45, 99

Sasana

Thondaman, S., 207-8 Traditional homelands, 144 Trautman, Thomas, 48 Tumour, George, 82-88

(Buddhism as a historical

phenomenon), 21, 39,

47-49, 99,

United National Party, 165-67, 177, 203-4, 217-18 Unity consensual, 17, 21-22, 72-76, 197-98.

See also Vajji

174, 197

Senanayake,

Underwood, Manikkavasar, 158

D.

S.,

142-42, 161-63, 179

Senanayake, Dudley, 164-65, 203-4

kingly, 61-62, 66-70, 77, 98-99, 165, 202

Seneveratne, John, 201-2

territorial, 62, 69-70, 76-77, 137

Seruvila, 148-60

as trope, 16-19, 62-64, 177,

Simhala, 56-59

2°3

Upham, Edward, 85-87

Sinatra, Frank, 170 Sinhala identity, 71—72, 96-98, 115-16, 130-33 Sinhala nationalism, 44, 72, 79-8o, 91-104, 118-34, 204, 209-10

Vajiranana, Palane, 112, 218

Vajji 21-22, 75-76, 212-13, 217-18 Vamsa (historical) literature, 31, 42, 181

52,

244

Index

Veddas, 138-39 Veync, Paul, 84 Viharamahadevi, 60-61, 126 Vijaya, 20, 39-40,54-60, 80-84 contemporary concern for, 110-18, 133, 199, 206

Vimalakirti, Ahungalle, 95—96

Vinaya

(monastic rules), 30

Westernization, 169—70, 194-95 Wijesekera, Nandadeva, 180-88, 191-92 Williams, Bernard, 11