Podcast
The Sri Lanka Podcast
Hosted by David Swarbrick & The Editors of The Ceylon Press · EN
The Sri Lanka Podcast tells the stories behind all that makes Sri Lanka, Sri Lankan - from history, religion and travel to culture, fauna, flora, and much in between.
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Ambling in the Inner Gardens: A Walk at Sri Lanka’s Flame Tree Estate & Hotel. A Ceylon Press Island Story
2d ago00:22:43Tap to summarize“Once, when I was young and true,” wrote Dorothy Parker in 1926, “Someone left me sad; Broke my brittle heart in two; And that is very bad.” Fortunately, an early broken heart was not to be my fate. Gardens were. Plants. And especially trees. For it was gardens, not love, that occupied my childish imaginings. Gardens, I concluded, were all variants of a single standard – the best example to be found amidst the faultless flower beds of the governor’s house, in Madras, the Raj Bhavan. This was a proper garden. Built in the 1670s, its regimented perfection even extended into a deer park, whose trees were as disciplined as they were well-mannered. Of course, it helped that armies of gardeners tended them, but of these unsung heroes, little was ever said. Later, when I saw Versailles, it all came together. Gardens were actually houses, albeit with green bits. Over the years, I tested this theory: in window baskets overlooking Scotch House Corner, on Bayswater balconies, Welsh seaside cottages, and Oxfordshire villages. It seemed to hold. Until, that is, we set about gardening in the jungle. We had bought, incautiously and without any help whatsoever, a 25-acre Plantation north of Kandy in central Sri Lanka. It had been abandoned during the JVP uprisings. It's 1,000 high rocky hills stalled a Dutch army in 1765, and until the civil war, the estate stretched over 100 acres with three working elephants. When the estate agent had closed the deal, the estate had been reduced to 25 acres and a bewildering number of buildings, all of them as unstable as a Sunday morning drunk. Trees grew in rooms; animals lived on shelves. And rapidly, I realised that the real world was precisely like my childhood definition of a garden, only the other way around. Limitless green forest with the odd house attached – and forever fighting an unsuccessful campaign to keep nature at bay. Earth Org, the environmental news website, agrees, stating that despite the interminable assaults made upon it, nature is still the boss. Just 20% of Earth's land surface is either urban or farmed. So our jungle gardening is undertaken modestly, with the lightest of hearts, the boundary between wild and tamed conveniently blurred so that excesses on either side are easily tolerated. It’s a green version of the balance of power and an opportunity to see Nudge Theory in practice. Even so, this estate, having been abandoned for twenty years before we bought it, had sided a little too firmly with the jungle. The balance of power was extravagantly unbalanced. The estate road was undrivable; the plantations had become savage forests, and trees grew in its courtyards and buildings, guests occupying superior VIP suites. Pushing these boundaries back was like sailing down the Nile: a slow voyage, with plenty of opportunities to become distracted by everything that happens when you blink. But slowly, slowly, our gardening team reclaimed parts of the interior and created four different walks to take you around most of it. Some areas remain wild, unvisited for a decade at least, cherished no-go zones left to shy lorises and civets. Of these four walks, the gentlest of perambulations is The Home Garden Walk. This stroll begins just outside the main hotel office and porch, with both buildings shaded by THE PARROT DAKOTA, a tree named after New York’s towering Dakota Apartments. This Sri Lankan Dakota version is no less a Renaissance creation – a Java Cassia, or to give it its common name, The Pink Shower Tree. Flowering with puffs of Barbie pink clouds in April and May, it fruits and sheds its leaves in December. Our specimen is over 120 years old; its hollows and defensive height make it our leading parrot apartment block. Amongst its many tenants are rose-ringed, plum-headed and Layard’s parakeets – three of the world’s 353 parrot species. Layard’s parakeet is easy to spot, as it has a long, light-blue tail, a grey head, and a fondness for sudden, prolonged screeching. The green-all-over rose-ringed parakeet is a giveaway too - with a bright red beak and the slimmest of head rings. But the most striking is the male plum-headed parakeet. He is a stunner, his proud red head offset with purple and blue feathers. He would turn heads in any nightclub. Two other parrot species live on the island but have yet to be spotted here: The Alexandrine parakeet is similar to the rose-ringed parakeet – only much larger. It’s a bit of a city dweller. The other, the sparrow-small, endemic Sri Lankan hanging parrot or lorikeet is a rare creature: a twitcher’s crowning glory. All these birds can be found in G. M. Henry’s celebrated 1958 Guide to The Birds of Ceylon, which sits in the hotel library, together with some of his original watercolours. Henry was one of the last great ornithologists – the sort you would fight to sit next to at dinner. A discoverer as much as a describer of species, he wrote extensively about the island’s wildlife. Born on a tea estate in Sri Lanka in 1891, his bird guide is remarkable not only for its comprehensiveness but also for its entertainment. His descriptions are unforgettable and funny; of the lorikeet, he remarks, the bird is not simply another parrot but a convivial and restless one with highly ridiculous breeding habits. Reading his identifiers, you almost feel you have met the bird concerned at a party, conference, dentist’s waiting room or orgy. Close to our blushing Cassia is KASHYAPA’S CORNER, a small garden of Frangipani trees, named for the anonymous 5th-century mistress of Kashyapa, the king who built the Sigiriya pleasure palace, where he partied for 22 years before being murdered. Its frescoes show her holding the wickedly fragrant frangipani flowers – wicked, because, despite lacking nectar, their dreamy scent tricks moths into pollinating them. Arguments rage gently over whether there are 20 or 100 species of the tree, but none of this matters in Sri Lanka, where temple-goers have so eagerly adopted the plant that it is called the "Araliya" or "Temple Flower Tree". South American by origin, it spread around the world on the backs of gardening missionaries. However, this does nothing to explain how its flowers came to be depicted over 1500 years ago in Sigiriya. A small tree, rarely more than 20 feet high, it flowers in shades of red and yellow, white, and peach; and even when bare, it is as close to an architectural marvel as any tree can get. Stretching out beyond KASHYAPA’S CORNER is a croquet lawn, instead unwisely planted with Australian grass for its smoother velvety feel, but continually under siege by the more rampant and feisty Malaysian grass, which possesses the invasive qualities of pirates. A much-sheared golden dewdrop hedge surrounds it; the plant is liberally tolerant of the hardest pruning and has become something of a poster girl for tropical topiarists. Growing through them are a few dozen stately Queen Palms. We call them DONA CATHERINA’S PALMS, after the island’s most beguiling queen, Kusumasana Devi. Three times tempestuous queen of Kandy (1581 to 1613), Dona Catherina died of grief, outwardly Buddhist, inwardly Catholic. It was her bad luck to be caught up in the wars between the Portuguese and the kings of Kotte and Kandy, and as the last descendant of the original Kandyan kings, she was a...
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Ordered Disorder: The Story of Sri Lanka’s Bats. A Ceylon Press Island Story
2d ago00:19:26Tap to summarizeCryptology, fractals, even Einstein’s Theory of Relativity – they all pale into bashful insignificance when compared to bat taxology. Between the kingdom within which a bat might exist, and the species to which it is classed as belonging, there are at least eight levels of mind-numbing grouping that bat scientists, or chiropterologists as they prefer to be called, pin their descriptions to. Unwilling to rest there, many then spend entire careers reordering the species, family and even the genus of these miniature mammals. The more daring go much further and bestow new subspecies divisions with all the generosity of a pool's winner. The net result is that this most tiny of all mammals has had - and continues to endure - more name changes than even the hapless city of Plovdiv in Bulgaria. This blameless city of some 350,000 souls, famous for its icon painting, has endured 11 name changes so far. Somewhat coincidentally, it is also renowned for its bats, which host over 20 species and regularly host Bat Nights to introduce its avian mammals to its two-legged ones. Short of dusting the animals with poisonous radioactive dust and equipping them with a miniature Kalashnikov, there is little else science can really do to make them more unapproachable, which is a terrible shame because bats – like lichen, coral, or bees - are among the world’s best indicator species, those that tell you relatively how healthy or not the environment really is. Chiropterologists aside, we ought to pay attention to what is going on in the bat world, for if what bats have to say is anything to go by, then we are in trouble. All around the world, bats are in decline. Facing a tsunami of pollution, habitat loss, climate change, and aggressive new farming techniques, bat numbers worldwide have plummeted, and the continued existence of almost one-third of their species is threatened. It is ironic that, in the face of such a burgeoning catastrophe, the number of identifiable bat species continues to grow – it is now over 1500. The counting of bat species in Sri Lanka is an art still much in the making, but all the signs are that, notwithstanding the overall decline in numbers, the country bats way above its weight. Though occupying barely 1% of the world's total landmass, Sri Lanka hosts well over 2% of the world's recognised bat species. Scientists are, of course, minded to disagree with one another most of the time; indeed, put just one Chiropterologist in a room by himself and you will foster dissent. This is especially true when it comes to nailing down the number of bat species that exist here. It was thought to be 28. Then 29. Several new bats were discovered. Older bats were reclassified. Today, the number appears to be 37, though like adolescents with mood swings, this can change in an instant and often does. But whatever family, genus, species, or subspecies they belong to, they all share certain bat-like traits. They all fly, for example. Bats are, of course, the only mammals able to truly fly, angels excepted and are famous for roosting upside down from their feet, viewing the world like happy drunks, a propensity made worse by their inferior vision. They all enjoy ultrasonic sound, and with this gift of supercharged hearing, they navigate the world with expert dexterity. Most live in large colonies and are much given to hibernation, a habit that accounts for their exceptionally long lifespan; one bat was recorded as living 41 years. Less happily, many are enthusiastic carriers of disease, especially those best able to leap from animals to humans. XSThe Extra Small BatsSri Lanka’s bats can best be divided into eight broad categories, the first of which are the tiny bats, the ones so extraordinarily petite that their bodies barely measure 2 to 3 centimetres. There are three bats in the XS range, the smallest being the Indian Pygmy Pipistrelle Bat, whose Latin name (mimus mimus) is all the guidance you really need to know relatively how tiny it is. Next up in size is the Painted Bat, sometimes known as the butterfly bat. Small though it is, the creature is also dazzlingly beautiful, with thick, bright orange fur all over, its wings decorated with black pyramids inset on orange lines, like stained-glass windows. Decidedly less glamorous is the rust brown Pungent Pipistrelle, common in SE Asia but rarely found in Sri Lanka. The more exacting scientists have long ago declared its few sightings here to have been avoidable mistakes. The third XS bat, Hardwicke's Forest Bat, is one of those wretched beasts whose existence has been especially tortured by name changes and reclassifications. The most recent occurrence was in 2018, when it was dragged out of one species and reallocated to another under the name The Malpas Bat. Unlike most other bats, Hardwicke's Forest Bat is something of a loner. It was named after the East India Company soldier, Major-General Thomas Hardwicke, a man as much noted for his love of natural history as for his determination to defeat Tipu Sultan in battles across India. Like many East India men, Hardwicke had a complicated domestic life, leaving behind five illegitimate children and two other daughters born to his Indian mistress. SBats of Small SizeEight bats populate Sri Lanka’s Small Bat category, their sizes averaging around 4 centimetres, with upper ranges for some of up to 6 centimetres. The Indian Pipistrelle stands out, despite its size, for its rampant fertility. Most bats give birth once a year – usually to a single pup. The Indian Pipistrelle, however, does this three times a year. Dull orange with a worrying tendency to beige, the Fulvus Roundleaf Bat follows bat reproductive norms more exactly, breeding in November, to produce a single pup who will take well over a year to gain sexual maturity. Little is known about the third XS bat, the Sri Lankan Leaf-Nosed Bat, as it was only identified as a new endemic species in 2025, its existence until then having been clumsily muddled up with other cousins and near cousins. Its tell-tale giveaways were its extra board nose, unusual ear shape, and a marginally different set of tiny head bones. The same sorry fate was to befall the Dekhan Leaf-Nosed Bat, which, until 2025, had been horribly confused with several other species to which it only had a nodding acquaintanceship. It is considered critically endangered, and most scientists believe it doesn’t actually exist in Sri Lanka at all. Most, that is, but not quite all. Such rarity does not haunt Schneider’s Leaf-nosed Bat, which lives in colonies of around 1000 mates in caves across Sri Lanka. The Rufous Horseshoe Bat, beautifully orange though it is, remains one to be avoided, being responsible for the 2002–2004 SARS outbreak. Van Hasselt’s Mouse-Eared Bat was named for the great biologist Johan Conrad van Hasselt, whose wretched reputation was such that almost everyone who joined him for expeditions into the unknown died or returned with a terminal illness, himself included. His little bat is unusual for its fondness for living alone near water. More social is Cantor's Leaf-Nosed Bat, named for a Danish zoologist more famous for having nailed the taxonomic complexities of Siamese fighting fish. MBats of Medium SizeFour baths fill the medium-size bat category, though medium means little more than between 5 and 5.5 centimetres body length at most. Of the four, the stand-out star is the Sri Lankan Woolly Bat, firs...
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Bejewelled: Sri Lanka’s Greatest Sapphires. A Ceylon Press Island Story
2d ago00:30:08Tap to summarizeWhilst not everyone has access to a family tiara, you don’t need to be an oligarch, still less a duke, to notice if one’s tiara needs an upgrade. The crown upgrade is very straightforward. Get a sapphire. There is nothing a sapphire cannot put right - for no stone sits more sumptuously on head, hand, or breast than the sapphire. The Sri Lankan sapphire, to be exact. Quite apart from the orgone light that illuminates its wearers, it is, if some sapphire traders are to be believed, a not inconsequential medical aid. Claims that it helps combat cataracts, inflammations, hair loss, skin diseases, nerve pain, rheumatism, and colic – to name but a few – are widespread, albeit untested. Buddhists have long since taken this positive attitude to the stone one big step further, believing that sapphire accelerates spiritual enlightenment. Ellen Conroy, in her seminal 1921 book “The Symbolism of Colour”, quoted Buddhist texts that claimed the jewel produced peace of mind and equanimity: “it chases out evil thoughts by establishing healthy circulation. It opens barred doors to the spirit. It produces a desire for prayer. It brings peace, but he who would wear it must lead a pure and holy life.” Like the claim for curing cataracts, inflammations, hair loss, skin diseases, nerve pain, rheumatism, and colic, this claim, winsome though it is, is also untested. It is, say some Buddhists, nothing less than the transformative third eye – the one that symbolises clarity and insight, so enabling you to see beyond plain earthly things. Less happily, the Chinese, traders with the island since ancient times, believed that sapphires were the congealed tears of Buddha - though this was not how Cleopatra was reputed to see the stone, using it with lavish application ground up in her eye shadow. Clearly, though, the affinity between Sri Lanka and its sapphires is deep and well beyond most measures of what is ancient. Gem mining here reaches back to at least the second century BCE, with the mention of a gem mine in The Mahavamsa, one of the island’s most ancient chronicles. However, if biblical rumours of King Solomon’s wooing of the Queen of Sheba with gifts of priceless Sri Lankan gems are to be believed, the country’s mines can be dated back at least another 700 years. 25% of its total land area is gem-bearing, mostly around Ratnapura and, to a lesser extent, Elahera. Thanks to the extreme age of its rocks (90% are between 500 and 2.5 million years old), Sri Lanka’s gems are so numerous that they often wash out onto floodplains and into rivers and streams. Its waterfalls would make Cartier wince. Indeed, the mining of alluvial deposits by simple water-winnowing river mining was for long the classic technique used to find gemstones. Nowadays, brutalist earthmovers excavate the topsoil; though tunnel mining is mildly kinder to the environment, with pits 5 to 500 feet deep dug and tunnels excavated horizontally from them. Sales of Sri Lanka’s gems boomed from a trifling $40 million in 1980 to over $473 million in 2022, a phenomenal acceleration promoted by two bouts of unusually effective government intervention: the establishment of the State Gem Corporation in 1971 and the 1993 Gem and Jewellery Authority Act. With these moves, the government centralised and professionalised the issuance of gem-mining licenses and the leasing of government land for mining. They extended control over sales and exports and made it mandatory that gems discovered in mines be presented at public auctions, with the government receiving a 2.5% share of sales. The industry’s value chain is almost as long as a piece of thread. Gem miners sell their stones to dealers, who sell to other dealers, who sell the rough rocks to cutter-polishers. Historically, these have usually been Ceylon Moors, descendants of Arab traders. The stones are then sold on to wholesalers and then retailers. And then to auctioneers, who often resell the rocks back to other consumers, or to retailers who resell them to new consumers. And so on, down all the ages of recorded time. But of all its many types of Sri Lankan gems, mined in apparent inexhaustible plenty, it is sapphires that anyone with the merest hint of glitter associates with the country. Eighty-five per cent of the precious stones mined on the island are sapphires. Blue as the morning, the ocean, the sky, sapphire, is most commonly red, purple, pink, gold, and lavender – the colour variety depending on the stone’s chemical composition. Its green sapphires are addictively distinctive, but the island also excels at producing Hot Pink Sapphires. This yellow sapphire is apparently a good deterrent against witchcraft, as well as orange and white ones. And it is famous for a variant known as a padparadscha sapphire – from Padmaraga - a pink-orange stone, as converted as the grail or meaning of life. But despite all this, the colour that gets the most acclaim is – of course - the Blue Sapphire, the blue of inestimable, sophisticated material contentment. Selling for $5,000 - 8,000 per carat, blue sapphires are as much statements of investment as they are items of adornment: “A kiss on the hand may feel very, very good,” noted Anita Loos, “but a diamond and sapphire bracelet lasts forever”. Long before Loos got round to writing “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes,” the country’s sapphires were the go-to gem for crowns, thrones, diadems, and later, accessories for First Nights and cocktail parties – and just to feeling special curled up in front of the television with a hot chocolate and a sapphire ring. Harly surprising then that over the centuries, eighteen of the island’s sapphires have won for themselves an ineradicable place in the hearts of collectors, connoisseurs, aficionados, enthusiasts, and experts. And, of course, auctioneers. Despite being made to be worn, flaunted, and noticed, all but two of the country’s most famous sapphires are either trapped in museums or lost to the public eye. One of the two you can see still worn is the Stuart Sapphire, last sported by Charles III at his coronation in Westminster Abbey on the 6th of May 2023. Arguments – all but improvable – rage gently over this 104-carat stone that sits, God, at the top of the British crown, surrounded by supplicant diamonds. Is it from Sri Lanka, Afghanistan, India, or Burma? Most experts reckon it is from Sri Lanka, but its provenance is obscure, and it can only be reliably dated to Charles II and his brother, the hapless exile, James II. Less controversial is the only other famous island sapphire still worn in public today - the Princess of Wales’s Engagement Ring. Compared to the other notable sapphires given by Sri Lanka to the world, Princess Diana’s Engagement Ring, now worn by the current Princess of Wales, Catherine, is best described as small but perfectly formed. A mere twelve carats, this oval ring rocketed into the homes of anyone with a television set when the then Prince of Wales declared his love (“whatever that is”) for his future wife, Lady Diana Spencer, in 1981. Her elder son later inherited it and, at some point between 2010 and 2011, resized it to fit the finger of his own fiancée, Kate Middleton, a brilliant blue reminder of Sri Lanka in any of the millions of photographs published of her around the world every week. But...
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The 3 “B’s”: Finding the Bears, Buffaloes & Boars of Sri Lanka. A Ceylon Press Island Story
2d ago00:16:54Tap to summarizeIt is all too easy to mistake what Sri Lankans might call the “Three Big B’s” for Mr Bandaranaike Senior, Mrs Bandaranaike Senior, and Mrs Bandaranaike Kumaratunga. But in fact, Sri Lanka’s Three Big B’s are not politicians. They are its bears, buffalo, and boars. And remarkably, each beast shares a close and initial affinity with those other, and still more famous, Big Three “B’s” of the classical music world: Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms. The buffalo, that most solid, refined, and traditional of creatures ever seen in all corners of the island, is the Bach of the mammalian world. The wild boar, with its laudable pack control and mastery of its environment, is the unmistakable Brahmas of the jungle and grassland, blending the complexity of its world with ease. And the bear, of course, is the Beethoven of the country: powerful, introspective, heroic. “It seems,” wrote Beethoven in his most bear-like mood, “as if every tree said to me, 'Holy! Holy!' Who can ever express the ecstasy of the woods! Almighty One, In the woods I am blessed.” As to the Sri Lankan sloth bear, although it is most often found in the dry zones of the country – such as Yala and Wilpattu – it is never far from trees, for in the trees it finds the ants, honey, and fruit it especially loves. Hanging like the strangest of fruits themselves, they will stay in the branches for hours at a time, often bringing cubs with them to join the feast. Having feasted, it will usually then continue to hang on in the most relaxed of ways, enabled by twenty sharp, curved claws that give them the kind of grip that denture wearers can only dream about. To see one suspended in so complete a seventh heaven is, of course, to call immediately to mind the Allegretto or "Shepherd's song” from Beethoven’s Pastoral itself – that moment when all that remains is pure gratitude and celebration of the tranquillity of the natural world. Even so, the bear is easily tempted to descend from its high table for termites – a food item of indulgent delight, for which their highly mobile snouts are exceptionally well designed. With nostrils closed, the snouts become vacuums, sucking out the termites from their nest. And their long claws enable them to dig the nest ever deeper till the last juicy termite has been consumed. Sri Lanka’s Sloth Bear is a unique endemic subspecies of the very same sloth bear that inhabits the Indian subcontinent, in ever-declining numbers from India to Bhutan, Nepal, and, until recently, Bangladesh. It is a little smaller in size than its Indian cousin, with shorter fur and, sadly, sometimes without the cuddly-looking white tummy fur of its northern relative. Even so, it is no midget, typically measuring six feet in length and weighing in at up to 300 pounds for a male or 200 pounds for a female. Once found in plentiful numbers across the island, they are now in severe decline, with an estimated 500-1000 bears in the wild today. The destruction of their habitats has been instrumental in their decline, but the fear they engender amongst village populations has also played its part. They are often hunted and killed, with a reputation for damaging property and killing or maiming domestic animals, humans running like a wave of terror before them. The “sloth” part of their name is somewhat misleading, for the bears are quite capable of reaching speeds of thirty miles an hour – faster than the fastest human yet recorded. Evolution has cast the sloth bear towards the Grumpy Old Man side of the mammalian spectrum – brooding, bothered, and bold, as if Beethoven’s late soul-searching Sonata No.32 in C minor, Op.111 had assumed a furry life of its own. Its poor sight and hearing leave it very dependent on its sense of smell, so it can all too often be surprised by what seems like the abrupt appearance of something threatening – like a human – which it will attack with warrior-like ferocity before asking any questions. In this, the bear It is very solitary, living alone in the forest except for those rare moments when it seeks a mate. Reproduction is not its strongest skill, and most females produce a single cub that stays with them for two to three years, the first months of which are endearingly spent living or travelling on its mother's back. D.J.G. Hennessy, a policeman who had a couple of bears on his land in Horowapotana in 1939, noted the emotive articulateness of their paw-sucking. Hed wrote that “ the significance of the notes on which the bear sucks his paw is interesting; a high whine and rapid sucking denotes impatience and anger, a deep note like the humming of a hive full of bees on a summer’s day indicates that he is contented and pleased with life, a barely audible note shows great happiness while a silent suck in which he usually indulges in just before going to sleep on a full stomach denotes the acme of bliss”. It was as if, Hennessy might have added, had he been as musically minded as he was bear minded, the bear was playing out his own version of the final movement of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 - the "Ode to Joy". Just as Brahms was seen to take Beethoven’s music to its best and logical conclusion, so too does the Sri Lankan Wild Boar complete some of the limitations of the sloth bear. Unlike the bear, the boar is exquisitely social, living in groups – or sounders. This word originates from 14th-century Norman French to collectivise a group of wild pigs who communicate constantly with grunts and squeals. Like the famous Mosuo from the Yongning lakes of China – one of the world's last remaining matrilineal societies – wild boar packs are centred around an old and necessarily dominant sow who is in charge of all that they get up to – where they rest or eat, wallow, swim, play or grub. Each sounder pack is made up of several generations of boar – all females and younger males, often numbering 20 beasts. By at least their second year, the males will lope off to live alone, like blokes in sheds, returning to the sounder merely to mate, although some have been known to form temporary bachelor groups, like flat-shares for men learning to break free. Mating, like all good things, follows the weather patterns: most encounters occur during the monsoon from September to early March, and very little, if anything, occurs during the dry seasons of June to August. Occasionally, the more eager beasts produce two litters a year. Still, one is the norm, relying on the not inconsiderable investment of days of gestation and usually six little piglets to show for the effort. And in true Mosuo style, where couples living in close domestic harmony and fathers staying to be a key part of the household is regarded as a shocking eccentricity, the male boar, having done his bit, will jog off back to his introverted life. Their communicative skills are not unlike those of Brahams himself, with a sound scope that moves from the softest pianissimos to the loudest fortissimos by way of full harmonies, raw registers, and lush orchestration. Low- to medium-frequency grunts maintain group cohesion. Soft purring denotes contentment, and rhythmic grunts denote courtship. Low-frequency growls suggest aggression; squeaks and squeals suggest excitement, their rising amplitude indicating distress rather than elation. A low huffing “Uh...
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Deer Friends: On Safari with Sri Lanka's Deer, Ponies & Donkeys. A Ceylon Press Island Story
2d ago00:11:04Tap to summarizeDeer abound across Sri Lanka, some like the Ceylon Spotted Deer are increasingly vulnerable, prey to poachers and habitat loss; others – like the Barking Deer – are flourishing and present little concern to the scientists who maintain the Red List of Threatened Species. Two species are considered endemic to the island – the Ceylon Spotted Deer, the Sri Lankan Spotted Chevrotain, with the Sri Lankan Sambar Deer the subject of mild debate among patriotic environmentalists trying to assess if it is so significantly more evolved as to present nature with what amounts to a new subspecies unique to the island. The remaining species found in Sri Lanka are also found across South and Southeast India – the Hog Deer and the Barkling Deer. Joining these quadrupeds are an extraordinary herd of feral ponies, abandoned by departing colonists, and a pack of wild donkeys, descendants of beasts brought to the island by ancient traders. Troubled by the sheer lack of scientific information about the behaviour of the Ceylon Spotted Deer, the Department of Zoology at Sri Lanka’s Eastern University conducted a detailed study of a particular population in Trincomalee. After months of observation, they concluded, reassuringly, that “their main activities were feeding and play.” Scientists are much divided on the subject of animal play, and tortured monographs have been written attempting to pin down the very concept of animal play. To some, it is merely an evolutionary byproduct; others claim it ensures animals teach one another about fairness and consequences. That the Sri Lankan Axis Deer should be minded to play at all is encouraging for it is an increasingly vulnerable species, its preferred habitats - lowland forests, and shrub lands –are shrinking, and with it the grasses, leaves, and fruit it lives on. Their numbers are now counted in the thousands. They live in herds of up to one hundred and are seen by leopards, bears, crocodiles, jackals, and hungry villagers as living supermarkets of fresh meat. Standing up to a hundred centimetres high, their delicately white spotted fawn coats present them as everything a perfect deer ought to be, as is appropriate for an animal that is part of the island’s select few endemic mammals. The Mouse Deer, or Sri Lankan Spotted Chevrotain, has evolved so dramatically that it presents scientists with the opportunity to grant it full endemic status as the Sri Lankan Spotted Chevrotain. Barely twelve inches high, it lives scattered in the forests of South & Southeast Asia. The Sri Lankan variant mostly sticks to the dry zones, especially Wilpattu, Udawalawa, and Sigiriya. It is tiny, gorgeous, even-toed and, unless you are a plant, entirely harmless– although popular superstition adds the caveat that a man who gets scratched by the hind foot of one will develop leprosy. This has yet to be verified by scientists. Tiny too is the Hog Deer – barely seventy centimetres tall. It has short legs, a predilection to whistle, fine antlers and dark brown fur. It actually looks nothing like a pig but gains that interspecies appellation for its tendency to rush through the forest, head down like one of the racing pigs at Bob Hale Racing Stables in far-off Michigan. Stretching across the grasslands of Sri Lanka and South and Southeast Asia, it is now classified as highly vulnerable, with its small herds shrinking amid habitat loss. Less threatened is the Indian Muntjak or Barking Deer. Carefree and with a propensity to eat almost anything, the Barking Deer is a cuddly irritant in the jungle and on low-hill estates, its numbers flourishing across South and Southeast Asia. It grows to around sixty centimetres in height and is covered in reddish brown fur and, for males, throws in a modest set of antlers. Shy, solid, rarely seen in numbers more than two, it gets its name for the dog-barking sound it makes when alarmed. It is a modest, if reliable breeder, with pregnancies lasting six months after which one or, occasionally, two pups are born. But among the island deer, the Sambar Deer claims the title of the largest and most impressive of the several deer species with which it shares genes. Within Sri Lanka, the species has evolved further and teeters on the edge of being declared endemic, as the Sri Lankan Sambar (Rusa unicolour). Much mistaken for an elk by early British colonists eager to shoot it, it can be seen in herds in places like Horton Plains – but it is classified as highly vulnerable all the same. It is a tempting target for poachers stocking up on game meat to sell, and the pressures on its grassland habitats are not getting any easier. Typically one and a half metres high (sometimes more), their herds consist of females with their fawns, which they usually produce yearly. The males, like men with sheds who have taken the designation to extremes, prefer to live alone - except when the mating urge overcomes them. Fossil records from tens of thousands of years earlier show the existence of a now-extinct ancestor, the Muva Sinhaleya, a species of Sambur smaller than the one alive today. Distant relations of a sort are the Ponies of Mannar. Strung out to the west of Jaffna in the Palk Strait is the tiny coral island of Delft, covering fifty square miles and home to less than five thousand people—and five hundred wild ponies. Dotted with Baobab trees, archaeological marvels from ancient to colonial times, and abundant wildlife, Delft has become the last refuge for the Sri Lankan Wild Pony, the direct descendant of the ponies exported to the island by the Portuguese and Dutch from Europe and their colonies in the East, to provide basic transportation. Left behind at Independence, and superseded by cars and lorries, they have carved out a fringe existence on the hot, dry island, fighting off as best they can dehydration and occasional starvation. The Wildlife Department has since offered them greater protection. Still, if there are any deep-pocketed millionaires out there dissatisfied by the sight of the likely heirs, the wild ponies of Delft offer a much more attractive option for legacies and reputational garnishing. No less threatened are Sri Lanka’s diminishing herds of feral donkeys. Found mainly in Mannar, Talaimannar and Puttalam, they are descendants of equine immigrants that entered the great port of Maathottam near Mannar - once the shipping gateway to the ancient Anuradhapura Kingdom. Arab traders were probably most responsible for importing the beasts to carry their cargoes inland. The species that lives here is said to be a direct descendant of the Nubian African Wild Ass, now extinct in its native Ethiopia and Sudan. Extinction also faces it in Sri Lanka, where its habitat is diminishing by the day, and hungry villagers occasionally help themselves to what will become tomorrow’s stew. There are said to be fewer than 3,000 still alive, and a fantastic charity, Bridging Lanka, has stepped in to try to nurse them back to happier times. The last of the island’s deer-like beasts is the Gaur, or Indian Bison. Once common throughout South and Southeast Asia, the Gaur is moving inexorably towards extinction, with just 21,000 mature individuals remaining. Related to yaks and water buffalo, they are the largest of all wild cattle and outrank in size only by elephants, rhinoceros, and hippopotamus among land mammals. The Ceylon Gaur (Bibos Sinhaleyus Deraniyagala) is a distinct subspecies that used to be found in Sri Lanka but was last spotted by British adventurers in 1681 in the menagerie of King Rajasinghe II of Kandy – though the Sri Lankan government recently proposed to its Indian counterpart that they send half a dozen gaur to the island as part of a reintroductio...
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Demon Queen: The Quest for Kuveni, Sri Lanka's First Queen. A Ceylon Press Island Story
2d ago00:25:49Tap to summarizeThe Search for Sri Lanka’s Demon Queen unpicks with the very earliest stories and places associated with Sri Lanka’s first steps as a nation, and with two particular people: Kuveni and Vijaya. The pair were the pin-up lovers of their generation, the Bonnie and Clyde, Tristan and Isolde, Tarzan, and Jane of 543 BCE. Only theirs was a more unorthodox passion - more akin to Dido and Aeneas, with the queen immolating herself. Or Medea plunged into full-scale murder after a disastrous encounter with Jason and the Golden Fleece. Vijaya and Kuveni are the Sri Lankan lovers whose names are most unequally recalled on the island today. Public roads, management consultants, radio celebrities, hospitals, even bags of branded cement: it is hard to find a corner of Sri Lanka that is not branded “Vijaya,” in besotted memory of the country’s founding king and paterfamilias, Prince Vijaya. Much harder, indeed impossible, is to find similarly smitten organisations or people who bear the name “Kuveni,” Prince Vijaya’s first wife. Coming from a nation that proudly boasts the modern world’s first female head of state, Sirimavo Bandaranaike, in 1960, this seems a monumental omission. But delve a little further, and it becomes increasingly clear why Kuveni, the lost queen of the isle of rubies, is the queen the country is too alarmed by to acknowledge adequately. For Kuveni was not simply a wife and weaver of cloth, a mother, lover, and queen - but also a demon, a metamorphoser, an outcast, an avenging fury, suicide, traitor, murderess, ghost, and mistress of deception. A descendant of the gods, she is also a goddess to the country’s still-living Aboriginal peoples. For anyone, still less a queen, that’s more than enough baggage to weigh down one’s reputation. But the baggage need not weigh down your journey for the locations on the island where you are likely to draw close to her are few and scattered. And if taking in important sites, monuments, and attractions at a rate of (say) half a dozen a day, or perhaps just one and a half a day, is an essential measure of how successful a holiday or tour goes, then it would be best to abandon the search for Kuvani immediately. For she is, thankfully, not made to measure for orthodox sightseeing. The obvious eludes her. Mercifully, she is no credible candidate for Instagram. She is more like a Slender Loris or Serendib Scops Owl, rare, almost nocturnal, secretive, whose sightings are best made for the journey, not the destination. Yet, in following her wreathlike footsteps, which are still, from time to time, just about discernible in certain parts of the island, one puts together a travel schedule like no other; unique, eccentric, authentic. It will take you into the secret heart of the country itself, past, present, and future, and allow the muscles of your personal imagination to demonstrate their value. Much of what we know about Kuveni and her husband, Vijaya, comes from two of three incomparable, paternalistic and subjective ancient chronicles (Dipavaṃsa, Mahavamsa, and Culavamsa) written from the third century CE onwards. Laying a shadowy trail of events and people through what would otherwise be a historical vacuum, they riotously mix up man, God and magic with morality, history, and myth. Historians naturally debate their factual accuracy, in which the doings of men and kings take a poor second place to that of monks and Lord Buddha, but this misses the point. No country, after all, is simply the total of its facts. It is also – and much more importantly - fattened up, like old-style foie gras, on all that its people believe too. And that is why the sorrowful and violent tale of Prince Vijaya and his demon queen so shockingly illuminates an island that, as Romesh Gunesekera put it, “everyone loves at some level inside themselves. A very special island that travellers, from Sinbad to Marco Polo, dreamed about. A place where the contours of the land itself form a kind of sinewy poetry.” “In Sri Lanka,” notes another writer, Michael Ondaatje, “a well-told lie is worth a thousand facts;” and, in the tale of Vijaya and Kuveni, the polar opposite of what is believed is the more likely truth. Vijaya, whose alter ego may well have most recently emerged on The Dick Van Dyke Show, was doubtless ever one to say “That ain't no lady. That's my wife.” For a monster though Kuveni seems to be, one hardly needs the helpful filter of modern feminism to realise that she was in fact an iconic victim of men, and most heartening of all, a victim who bit back with unrestrained fury. Had a man behaved like her, it would have generated awe-stuck changing-room chatter, eager to understand, sympathise with, and even emulate. But not a woman. Kuveni was to confound and challenge all ancient ideas of womanhood, and go on challenging them to this day. Keep this in mind as you set out to first encounter Viyaja, recreating a moment that happened well over two thousand five hundred years ago. The path, though gossamer thin, still sustains a few sites, frail as a spider’s web. The first of these is some 180 kilometres from Colombo. A gentle curving cape juts out from a mountain range in the Wilpattu National Park and into the northern entrance to the Puttalam Lagoon. If you were a ship approaching it from the Laccadive Sea, you would slide towards it as if it were a lighthouse, pointing your tiny, tired vessel into the vast, safe, shallow waters of the lagoon. This is Kudiramalai, said to have been the original site of Tambapanni, the ancient kingdom and port founded by Prince Vijaya. Given all that was to come, this unremarkable shore enjoys a myth of mocking irony. A warrior queen, Alli Rani, and her Amazonian army, were said to have lived here exploiting and exporting its pearls until a great flood buried her palace under the waves and turned the enclosed lake into a lagoon. And this is what Prince Vijaya found, pulling his boats onto a beach of reddish-brown sand – “Tamba”, meaning Copper; or as it was soon and later known: Tambapanni. It was the perfect spot for a settlement, commanding access to an excellent natural harbour opening into the Gulf of Mannar and an almost inexhaustible supply of pearl oysters. For centuries, it was a key strategic port for island arrivals, even later welcoming Annius Placamus, one of the Roman Emperor Claudius’ tax collectors. Pliny refers to the place, naming it as the “Hipporus” harbour with a related town on a nearby hill - presumably Kudiramalai Mountain, patrolled, and still patrolled by white-bellied sea eagles. “Horse Mountain” is another name for Kudiramalai, and for centuries, amidst the ruins of an ancient temple, a massive horse-and-man statue stood on the cliffs. Made of brick, stone, and coral, it is estimated to have been at least 35 feet high, its front legs raised, its rider clinging to reins, bearing a lantern to guide ships into the port. Locals still point to some modest ruins, all that remains, they say, of the horse and rider. And continually, raked by high waves and surf, broken bricks, pottery, and building materials, wash up on the shore, the priceless debris perhaps of the island’s first kingdom. This, then, is all that remains of Sri Lanka’s earliest recorded kingdom...
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Encounters at the Jungle Hotel: The Story of Sri Lanka’s Flame Tree Estate & Hotel. A Ceylon Press Island Story
2d ago00:26:55Tap to summarizeEncounters at the Jungle Hotel is a behind-the-scenes look at Sri Lanka’s Flame Tree Estate & Hotel. It starts, of course, with a welcome. And thanks for coming our way, for most of the listeners of this will no doubt be our guests. Whatever else is happening in the world, here at least there is a cake for tea; birdsong from dawn to dusk; and from everywhere the sound of civets, bickering monkeys that look a lot like Mr Trump; and squirrels bouncing on roofs like Keith Moon. To have made it this far, your car will have navigated our driveway of buffalo grass and untamed forest. Guerrilla gardening, we call it – it keeps at bay, if only metaphorically, what’s best avoided to safeguard a long and happy life: televisions, for example, or processed food, or terrorist warlords. We enjoy being a secret to most and a companion to some. Our sophisticated friends in Colombo call this Village Country, all jungle; tiny hamlets, simple living, feral nature. But really, the jungle is far from feral. What looks so random is ordered, artful, and immeasurably peaceful. Its discreet hills and valleys keep safe a rare seclusion. Nightclubs, branded food concessions, still less a shop selling extra virgin olive oil – all have yet to open here. Somehow, we cope. Nature, good food, schnauzers, art, walks, music, books, yoga, swimming, massage, few rules, bird watching, tree hugging, meditating, and that most lost of all life’s activities – just being: that’s what this tiny jungle principality is all about. That and the odd trip to a few places well off the beaten track. This little guide will try to give you a glimpse of what makes things tick. And how on earth did we get here in the first place? Geographically, we are neither part of the Rajarata, the oldest kingdom that reached from Jaffa to the edge of the hill country, nor the hill country itself. We lie between the two, on the first high hills that rise from the dry northern plains to eventually reach Mount Pedro near Nuwara Eliya at 8,000 feet. The hotel sits, belly button-like, in the middle of 25 acres of plantations and jungle that dip down to paddy and up to hills of 1,000 ft, all of it surrounded by yet more hills and valleys, almost all given over to forest. Until family wills and the 1960s land reform acts intervened, this estate was much bigger; a place where coffee, cocoa, and coconuts grew. They grow on still, fortified by newer plantations of cinnamon and cloves, and rarer trees. Now almost 100 years old, the main hotel block, Mudunahena Walawwa, was built by the Mayor of Kandy. Walawwas, or manor houses, pepper the island, exuberant disintegrating architectural marvels, now too often left to meet their ultimate maker. In size and style, they range from palaces to this, a modest and typical plantation Walawwa with metal roofs, inner courtyards, verandas, and stout columns arranged around it like retired members of the Household Calvary. But it was not always thus. This walawwa – like a caravan - moved to its present site when the water ran dry at its earlier location. The foundations of this first abode, on the estate’s eastern boundary, can still be seen. It overlooks the Galagedera Pass, which found its 15 minutes of fame in 1765 when villagers, fortified by the Kandyan king’s army, rained rocks down on an invading Dutch army that melted back to Colombo: fever, and early death. From that moment to much later, little happened - in the jungle that is. Elsewhere, America declared itself independent, and the Holy Roman Empire dissolved. Europe was beset by wars, the Napoleonic, the First, the Second, the Cold. Asia threw off its colonial masters. Not even the LTTE civil war that so rocked the rest of Sri Lanka made much of an impression here. In fact, it wasn’t until 1988 that the outside world caught up with the estate when a Marxist-Leninist insurrection crippled the country for three years in a blizzard of bombings, assassinations, riots and military strikes. Entrusting the Walawwa keys to three old retainers, the family left the estate, and for 20 years, weather and nature took turns budging it into a Babylonian wilderness. Landslides embraced it. Buildings tumbled. Termites struck. Trees rooted - indoors. Later, we arrived on holiday and bought it – a sort of vacation souvenir that could only be enjoyed in situ. No Excel spreadsheet; no SWOT or PESTLE analyses were manhandled into service to help escape the inevitable conclusion, which was, of course, to buy it. The estate, the buildings were lovely, and only needed some love. The love restoration programme that followed often felt like the unravelling of Denisovan DNA. Expect the unexpected, said Oscar Wilde. Prescient advice in the jungle as much as in Victorian London. There were monks, of course. They arrived to be fed, to bless and leave, their umbrella bearers running behind them. And five or six builders, not dissimilar to Henry VIII’s wives: some jailed, some cherished. There were monsoons, material shortages, power cuts, and work schedules giddily interrupted by alms-giving and wakes. And of course, the Easter bombings, COVID, the bankruptcy and collapse of the government, and shortages of everything from fuel to yeast. But with each cloud came the most golden of silver linings, fostering those most Sri Lankan of virtues - patience and fortitude. As a thirteenth-century Sufi mystic put it: “What comes, will go. What is found will be lost again. But what you are is beyond coming and going and beyond description.” With a wisdom you might expect from one who put up with Genghis Khan, Rumi was right. In the jungle, everything eventually settles back down. Nicely. And so, finally restored, the estate opened as a boutique hotel in 2019, becoming one of the island’s Top, albeit tiny, 5-star hotels. Most hotels start their blubs with room details or menus. This one begins with plants. As befits a jungle hotel, we love them. Especially trees. We have planted almost 8000. The gardens that cradle the hotel include yellow and pink shower trees, frangipani, flamboyant and Illawarra flame trees; coconut, lipstick, and queen palms; mangos, and wood apples. In the outer garden grow cycads, orchids, sapu, Cook and Norfolk Island pines, jak, jacaranda, and tea. Rarer palms too - travellers, foxtail, ruffled, stilt and golden; pomegranates and citrus in force – from lime to kumquats, grapefruit to tangerines. Small paths crisscross the estate with four easy walks laid out in the Garden, the Outer Garden and a half or full estate walk, with a fifth taking you further into the jungle and nearby hamlets. Down one of these paths is our private Spice Garden planted with cinnamon, vanilla, pepper, cloves, turmeric, and ginger; nurseries of herbs, vegetables and rare saplings, the Elephant Graveyard, and a grove of cocoa. Beyond all this stretch the plantations where the jungle is kept at bay with ever more deliberate degrees of lassitude. Deliberate – because that’s what the wild creatures demand in most surveys we have carried out. Birds especially. Over 200 species breed on the island, including 33 endemic species. We have counted over 50 species here, including kites, eagles, peacocks, parake...
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Escape: The Sri Lankan Reading List. A Ceylon Press Island Story
2d ago00:19:49Tap to summarizeStretched between the pleasure gardens of the bishops of London and the $300 million Fulham Football Club, once owned by the disgraced sexual predator Mohamed Al Fayed, Alphabet City is West London’s new Knightsbridge. From south to north, its streets are laid out with an intimidating, if inexact, alphabetical order. Its “exquisite array of Victorian and Edwardian homes,” claims its principal estate agent, “infuses the neighbourhood with a timeless architectural appeal.” One house in one street stands out, the J. K. Rowling of the area, confident, plush, sophisticated, discriminating, and flush with Sauvignon Blanc. For in D for “Doneraile Street,” is where one of London’s most agreeable book groups meets. Membership is by invitation only, and its invitations are as infrequent as dry days in Wales. There are more famous book groups - Daunts, for example or the Literary Lounge Book Club. But none so naughtily notorious as this. Blissfully undemocratic, it seethes behind silk curtains and French shutters; its gardens giving out to imported fig trees and olives; its tables glittering with canapes of citrus-cured seabass on blinis. But for months it has been the centre of reckless disagreements and tormented tiffs – for its members struggled with that eternal book club question: which book to read next. Their discussions, like Middle Eastern peace negotiations, were marred by insurmountable differences - until, that is, they hit upon a winning solution, proposed by a member who had just returned from a holiday in Kandy. Stick with novels from Sri Lanka, she said. And so, somewhat unexpectedly, they did. Harmony upon harmony has followed, it seems, like the notes of a celestial harp. And so it could for you too – for this guide offers a similar and blameless escape route to pleasure. It presents a long list of books that will keep you going for a good long time. A year at least. Sufficient time to give up the day job and move your grocery shopping to online deliveries only. The unexpected books included in this guide will take you into all the most comforting and familiar genres. But it will then upend them with the most surprising of settings, perspectives, voices, and approaches, as if you’ve found a trove of mille-feuille in a Dunkin’ Doughnuts Drive-Through. Surprise, delight, glee – that is barely the half of it. For the books assembled here are as much a travelogue for the body as for the mind; a history of the recent world as well as a picture of worlds to come – or even worlds framed forever in the most necessary of Forevers, like psychedelic carnivals or enchanted forests. They needed them most certainly. The merest glance tells you that the mainstream literary world has slipped into an odd torpor. As literary agents in London and New York whip their submissions into shape and tease them through the hoops, auctions, and cheque books of commissioning editors at Frankfurt, you may be forgiven for thinking that reading contemporary fiction is similar to eating a custard cream biscuit. It’s nice enough. But it’s as predictable as a dollop of AI creative writing. Sri Lanka offers an opportunity to escape this literary listlessness. Through, why? You may disputatiously ask: why Sri Lanka? Why not another one of the world’s 200-odd countries? Surely you can formulate a reading list for any country in the world. Or can you? Few other countries are currently producing as much world-class literature as Sri Lanka. Sri Lanka’s contemporary writers have burst onto the world fiction scene like firecrackers. Try just a few, and you will see. But which few? Of its multitude of authors and books, which ones should you start with? This guide brings together many of the best, in one sense or another, Sri Lankan. Most were born on the island; others left, often part of the diaspora created by civil war and corruption. But whether now in Canada and Australia, the UK, or New Zealand, each has written a novel only a Sri Lankan could, bringing humour, a unique sensibility and a sharp, ironic eye to the themes that preoccupy every great novel - from war, sex, fashion, addiction and love to loss, pets, the jungle, fame, fortune, bankruptcy. And, of course, family; for in Sri Lanka, as almost nowhere else, the family really does come - inconveniently, beautifully, reassuringly, alarmingly - first. The story starts relatively late, for although many inspired novels were written in the first half of the twentieth century, it was not until the 1960s that a trenchant new sensibility began to shape and flavour Sri Lanka’s fiction. A band of new writers emerged for whom little was out of bounds - from the incipient civil war, belief, ethnicity, and feminism to gender, and, of course, the perennial themes of the island: family, love, the jungle, loss, and living. Take Carl Muller and his famous trilogy, which is to Sri Lankan literature what John Galsworthy’s “Forsyte Saga” is to England or “The Godfather” is to New York. A saga writer first and best, he is rightly celebrated for the three books he published from 1993 onwards about the Burghers of Sri Lanka as told through “The Jam Fruit Tree,” “Yakada Yaka”, and “Once Upon a Tender Time.” His trilogy unpacks a time when the world was golden, a kinder halcyon life that the later civil war would render almost unbelievable. A much darker world is inhabited by Michael Ondaatje, whose novel “The English Patient” catapulted him to global recognition. In 2000, “Anil’s Ghost” came out, one of his most impressive works, a mystery set in Sri Lanka and riven with love and fear, identity, and antiquity. But “sometimes,” wrote Cassandra King, the Queen of Southern storytelling, “we laugh to keep from crying.” And Romesh Gunesekera does just this with his novel “Reef,” a slow-burning tale of a young chef so committed to pleasing a seafood-obsessed master that he is oblivious to the unravelling of his own country. But for something less cathartically seismic, there is Yasmine Gooneratne. Usually, to be an academic, teaching English literature is a necessary condition to disqualify you from ever writing good novels. But not Gooneratne, whose novel “The Sweet and Simple Kind” is one of the greatest friendship novels you will encounter. Set in the newly independent nation, this coming-of-age tale of two cousins, Tsunami and Latha, intertwines with language and religion, politics and privilege, humour, and passion. It will keep you up all night long. It was published the same year another author, Nihal De Silva, died, a victim of a land mine explosion at the Wilpattu National Park. One of the country’s most talented thriller writers, his war story, “The Road from Elephant Pass”, won a place in the hearts of all readers for its story of the LTTE Tamil woman and her Sinhalese army officer. And then, as if by magic, the island’s writers moved on, articulating a measured and confident certainty, writing across any genre, in whatever way they chose, whatsoever. It was as if Elsa’s lion cubs in Forever Free had picked up pens and got to work. And with their new creative liberty came the most compelling insights into the sensibilities of the people they...
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Lost: Unearthing Sri Lanka’s Extinct Mammals. A Ceylon Press Island Story
2d ago00:18:12Tap to summarizeThe mind blanks at the glare,” wrote Philip Larkin “Not in remorse — The good not done, the love not given, time Torn off unused — nor wretchedly because An only life can take so long to climbClear of its wrong beginnings, and may never; But at the total emptiness for ever,The sure extinction that we travel toAnd shall be lost in always. Not to be here, Not to be anywhere,And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.” Larkin’s poem Aubade counts the cost of personal extension. But as Descartes might have gone onto conclude, with the value of hindsight, “If I don’t exist then everything else probably can.” For it is by being human that we are triggering the party to which no one desires an invitation, the Earth's most extraordinary extinction event. We were, of course, not responsible for the earlier ones, but anyone fond of models will find they all offer scenarios that even Hollywood would baulk at. The first of these events, the Late Devonian extinction (383-359 million years ago), killed off about 75 per cent of all living species. One hundred million years later came the worst of all – the Permian-Triassic extinction, or Great Dying. This event dispatched 96% of all marine animals and 3 out of every four land animals that had managed to survive since the previous extinction. After 51 million years of exhaustive recovery, the Triassic-Jurassic extinction swept across the Earth, exterminating 80% of all living species. All three, it seems, were caused by the climate change sparked by volcanic eruptions and shifting plate tectonics. The last, and most famous, mass extinction, the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction, 66 million years ago, was the one that claimed the lives of the dinosaurs – and with them 76% of all Earth’s species. For this, a wandering asteroid was probably to blame. The credit for the next one is one we, as a race, must step up to take: the winner of the Oscars from Hell. Already, the stage is being set: the tables for the Oscars ceremony, the red carpet laid out, invitations being sent for the pre- and post-ceremony parties, the Governors Ball, the Vanity Fair Party, cocktails in the Diamond 25 Lounge. Invitations have already reached many in Sri Lanka. Anteaters, jackets, bears, otters, fishing cats, civets, axis deer, lorises and Toque Macaque have already propped up their gold embossed cards on their jungle mantelpieces as have the Ceylon Highland Long Tailed Tree and Spiny Mice, the tiny Serendib Scops Owl, the Nillu and Ohiya Rats, the Dusky Striped Squirrel and the Ceylon Highland, Pigmy and Long-Tailed Shrews. Even the Ceylon Tree Skink had received an invitation to this perdition party. The big beasts are, of course, especially invited, and the island’s elephants are the guest of honour. Before the British arrived, there were over 15,000 elephants in Sri Lanka, but that was when big-game hunting became fashionable. Its most notorious celebrity was a government agent, a Major Thomas Rogers, who managed to kill 1400 elephants in just 11 years. “His whole house,” recalled one appalled guest in the 1840s, “was filled with ivory, for amongst the hosts of the slain more than sixty were tusked elephants… At each door of his veranda stood huge tusks, while in his dining room every corner was adorned with similar trophies…” Mercifully killed at just 41 years, Rogers’ grave, still to be found beside the gold course in Nuwara Eliya, offered him little by way of eternal rest as it has been struck by lightning over 100 times, indicating one of the silver linings of climate change. Today, the island lays claim to less than half that pre-colonial number of elephants, with the BBC recently reporting that nearly 500 are dying annually, half of them at the hands of humans. The maths for continued survival looks a little better for the equally famous Sri Lankan leopard, now reduced to around 800 adults and desperately trying to recover from a 75% population decline during the 20th century. All across the globe, the more modest number crunchers calculate that a million species of plants and animals are facing total extinction. This seems especially impossible to be true in the fecund space of this island, which is so full of life, it appears as if nothing can ever end. Yet it can. It does. It has. From shore to shore lurk the traces of previous extinctions, their wrath like an imprint plotting a course as much forwards as it does back. Even so, despite being composed of pre-Cambrian rocks of such antiquity, they were old when Gondwana was young and produced the most unmistakable evidence across the whole of South Asia for the first Homo sapiens. Planetology is still a science that has far more to yield. Much of what little we know about the island’s earliest history and its extinct animals dates back to the remarkable work carried out between the 1930s and 1963 by P. E. P. Deraniyagala, Director of National Museums. Uncommonly hands-on for so senior a civil servant, his life's work was spent examining the alluvial strata better known for concealing gems around Rathnapura. Within its sandy layers, he uncovered fossils, fragments, teeth, and bones dating right back to the Pleistocene, when Sri Lanka was still– just about – joined physically to the Indian landmass and when the melting ice sheets caused the creation of these alluvial beds. His work, and that of his successors, including his son Siran, uncovered the existence of animals that pointed to an island very different from the one here today. Not just animals – but people too. The discovery of what is now termed Balangoda Man reliably dates human existence on the island to 30,000 years ago, with further island evidence showing that “in Sri Lanka, prehistoric man has lived at least 125,000 years ago, with the possibility of existence as far back as 500,000 years ago. Advanced 'microlithic' tool-making technology had already been developed in Sri Lanka 30,000 years ago, when Europe was still dreaming of this technology, which arose there only about 12,000 years ago.” Humans have, of course, flourished here since then – but not so some of the mammals that these palaeontologists also found. The most iconic of these was the Ceylon Lion. Now adorning the national flag, the Sri Lankan lion is thought to have become extinct in 37,000 BCE – about the same time as Balangoda Man walked his last steps. Panthera leo Sinhaleyus, as the subspecies is known, came to light in 1936 when P.E.P. Deraniyagala uncovered two fossilised teeth in Kuruwita, near Ratnapura. With the passion of a forensic detective, the archaeologist studied his modest clutch of teeth. One was so damaged as to be of little use in identifying the animal, but the other, a left molar, presented such a distinctive structure as to not just twin it with lions, but set it apart from all known species, too. From this single tooth, a lost subspecies was uncovered, its size indicating that the beast was a lion much larger than the present-day Indian lion. Back in 37,000 BCE, Sri Lanka was a very different place from what it would become, an island of open grasslands, a habitat perfect for lions. But over time, as the monsoon rainforest fuelled the proliferation of trees, its habitat became ever more restricted, and eventually the creature died out...
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Secret Kandy: Five Forgotten Stories. A Ceylon Press Island Story
2d ago00:21:29Tap to summarizeAn arc of land that fans out north of Kandy connected to the ancient Anuradhapuran kings and their successors, before passing into the control of the Kandyan kingdom, whose own borders ebbed and flowed in response to European invasions. This neglected northern section of the Kandyan kingdom centred on three provinces: Anuradhapura in the far north, Matale in the northeast, and the Seven Korales in the northwest. From the arrival of the Portuguese to the final annexation of the kingdom by the British in 1815, control over these three distant provinces fluctuated. But regardless of who was in actual power, nothing could blur the fact that in almost all respects of topography, climate, history, geography, resources and economy, these areas were utterly different to the high hilly and mountainous character of the rest of the kingdom. Although ruled in the main by the Kandyan kings, their own ancestry was much older, dating back to the first Singhalese king in 543 BCE. To walk through their fields and forests and witness their surviving ancient buildings is to see how the last Singla stronghold grafted itself onto the most ancient part of Sri Lanka like a limpet. And probably one of the best ways to experience it is to take a circular tour of 5 of the most significant temples that dominate this elusive land, to places long lost to modern travellers. The circuit starts at the Vilbawa Rajamaha temple, which legend connects to Kuveni, the wife of the island’s first king, Vijaya. But Kuveni was not simply a wife, nor even a weaver of cloth, a mother, lover, or queen. She was also a demon, a metamorphoser, an outcast, an avenging fury, a suicide, a traitor, a murderess, a ghost, and a mistress of deception. A descendant of the gods, she is also a goddess to the country’s still-living Aboriginal peoples. Kuveni and her husband Vijaya were the pin-up lovers of their generation, the Bonnie and Clyde of 543 BCE. Only theirs was a more unorthodox passion - more akin to Dido and Aeneas, with the queen immolating herself. But whilst it is hard to find a corner of Sri Lanka that is not branded “Vijaya,” in besotted memory of the country’s founding paterfamilias, it is much harder to find similarly smitten organisations that bear the name “Kuveni.” Coming from a nation that boasts the modern world’s first female head of state, Sirimavo Bandaranaike, in 1960, this seems a monumental omission. But delve a little further, and it becomes increasingly clear why Kuveni is the queen that the country is too alarmed by to acknowledge adequately. Kuveni was to confound and challenge all ancient ideas of womanhood, and go on challenging them to this day. Her story starts as she sits trapped in her modest palace, a pawn in her father’s political armoury. She is, naturally, no ordinary princess. Descending from King Ravana, the ten-headed evil demon king who fatally kidnapped the wife of the Supreme Being, her bloodline offers a clue, if ever one were needed, to a family proclivity for violence, chaos, and injustice. But in Vijaya, she spots a way to escape the prison of her family. Vijay, a shaved-head fugitive with a penchant for what The Mahavamsa calls “evil conduct and … intolerable deeds,” was exiled by his father and arrived in Sri Lanka, a man in need of friends. Friends, land, food: in fact, at the time he came on Sri Lanka’s shore, he was a man in need of pretty much everything. And in Kuvani, he found just about everything. Overcoming some immediate disagreements in which she almost eats him and imprisons his entire band of feckless followers, she performed a faultless volte-face, gave them food and clothing, and, according to the ancient Mahavamsa Chronicle, beaming with broad indulgence, if Chronicles can be said to beam, “assumed the lovely form of a sixteen-year-old maiden.” Although marriage was what Vijaya and Kuveni agreed on, they also executed a plan to annihilate her Yakka tribe. But much good did any of this do her? In using Vijaya, she was, in turn, to be even more devastatingly used by him. Soon after inaugurating his new kingdom at Tambapanni and fathering two children, Vijaya abandoned her, sending for a more respectable princess, one who was drawing-room perfect, and banishing his native wife to the wilderness. Rejected by both her husband and the people she came from and had betrayed and killed, Kuveni climbed or was forced to the top of a mountain and hurled down, cursing her disloyal husband as she died. Her husband was to die without heirs. A (presumably related) disease struck down his successor, and his entire children were demented by bloodshed, civil war, and familicide. Across the entire island, a lonesome scrap of haunting folklore offers a hint at the final resting place of Queen Kuveni. There is nothing to verify it except the curious behaviour of the local people. Visitors to the village are welcomed to its little temple, the Maligatenna Raja Maha Viharaya, but not permitted to walk to the top of the little hill above it, where the queen’s crypt is said to lie. About 15 miles from here is the Ridi Viharaya. Although substantially restored in the 18th century by the Kandyan king, Kirti Sri Rajasinghe, the temple dates back to the 2nd century BCE – roughly the same time as the Rosetta Stone was chiselled into a basalt slab in distant pharaonic Egypt. To better understand the supreme importance of this ancient temple, take a look at pictures of the oldest of the island’s three most incredible stupas, the Ruwanweliseya, built between 161 and 137 BCE by King Dutugamunu. The first steps in its construction are told in extraordinary detail by the Mahavamsa Chronicle. “King Dutugamunu had the workers dig a 7-cubit deep excavation. He had soldiers bring in round stones and had them crushed with hammers. Crushed stones were placed at the bottom of the excavation and compacted using elephants. The Elephants had their feet bound in leather to protect them. Fine clay was brought in from a nearby river. This clay was known as butter clay since it was very fine. King Dutugamunu ordered that butter clay be spread over crushed stones. After the butter clay layer was placed, the King ordered that bricks be brought. Bricks were placed on top of the butter clay layer. On top of the bricks, an iron mesh was placed. Mountain crystals were placed atop iron bars. Another layer of stones was placed on top of the mountain crystals. On top of the stones, an 8-inch-thick copper plate was placed. A copper plate was sprayed with Arsenic and Sesame oil. On top of the copper plate, a seven-inch-thick silver plate was placed.” And that was just the beginning. The king was to die before the stupa was completed, and the Mahavamsa tells of the dying monarch being carried in a palanquin to see the works. Standing for centuries and now much restored, its fabled relic chamber has yet to resist all attempts at excavation. Within it is said to be a vessel filled with Lord Buddha’s artefacts, placed atop a seat of diamonds, encased in a golden container adorned with gems, and set inside a room decorated with murals and a silver replica of the Bo Tree. The Mahavamsa Chronicle notes its sovereign importance: “The relic-chamber shall not shake even by an earthquake; flowers that were offered on that day shall not wither till the end of Buddha Gotama's Dispensation; the lamps that were kindled shall not be extinguished; the clay that was mixed with perfume ...
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