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What’s the Story: The Sri Lanka Podcast
Hosted by David Swarbrick & Nestor de Silva @ The Ceylon Press · EN
What makes Sri Lanka, Sri Lankan...
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Losing One's Head: The Jungle Diaries, Sri Lanka. A Ceylon Press Off-Grid Memoir
2w ago00:11:48Tap to summarizeI was besottedly watching a gluttonous troupe of toque macaque monkeys lay waste to the mangos when a passing guest, a very down to earth birdwatcher from West Hampstead, told me he had lost his head. As he then went on to enumerate the names of several species, he had been able to photograph just that morning from beyond the pool, I realized he was rather pleased with this loss of his head. For him, it was a good thing, a very good thing indeed - an expression of extreme happiness.I was relieved., This is after all a hotel I am running here, and happy guests are much to be preferred to decapitated onesWould, however, that his expression of happiness was one I could so easily have adopted just then - for at the time my head had also been lost, but in no good way at all – and all thanks to the byzantine dealings with one of the country’s main governmental financial institutions.This particular state department lives to its utmost, Hamlet’s frustrating refrain: To be or not to be. Famous throughout the island for its ability to befuddle, confuse and delay the simplest of transactions, the institution’s mastery of procrastination would have given even the great Leonardo da Vinci a run for his money as he laboured for 15 years over the Mona Lisa. I can see this modest debate running for years and years until death or some great act of meritorious goodness moves the players on.But waking up as I did this morning to my jungle valley teaming with early-start birds and monkeys and an unexpected pair of Grey Hornbills, and watching the light slowly shift across the hills turning them from dark green to yellow green, I felt every bit the equal of this wearisome struggle. Inspired by the casual observations of my Hamstead guest, I’m more positively distracted by the unexpected positives involved in head loss.As a form of death, it is of course, spectacularly graphic, and final. More than a mere killing, it is a ritual or even a passage – for by removing a head, with all its attendant and deeply personal indicators of identity, it marks the complete destruction of an individual’s personality and distinctiveness. It is – almost - an (albeit shocking) physical embodiment of anatta. On the long and challenging road to purification, as embodied by the Theravada Buddhists who dominate the island, anatta is one of seven stages in the spiritual journey, the last of which, the purification by knowledge and vision leads immediately (and with no little sense of relief) to Nirvana or enlightenment itself, and a final breaking of the endless painful cycle of rebirth. Or in my case, no more vacillating emails from the directors of this state institution.The anatta stage comes more of less bang in the middle of the seven stages. To get to it you have to get through sila – the purification of virtue by bring moral discipline into your life; and citta, which purifies the mind through mediation. As a lapsed Anglian Methodist, moral discipline is something I have been struggling to get the better of all life long. Mediation, however, is much easier and I sink into it happily most days surrounded by my five meditating schnauzers.It’s the next stage – stage three - that is proving most difficult. For in stage three – ditti - you have to disaggregate the five things – known collectively as the skandhas - that make you who you are – your body, feelings, perceptions, consciousness and mental thoughts. Assuming you have done all this correctly, you get to achieve anatta or non-self. You have eliminated the fixed and illusionary permeant features of your personhood. You are free from suffering. From cravings. From any need to cling to things. What bliss that will be.Nagasena, a Buddhist sage who lived in nearby India around 150 BCE, equated the process to taking a chariot apart. Or, in the case of me and this bothersome government institution, taking it apart again and again and again. The chariot, Nagasena explained to an enquiring Greek king, Menander, has no independent nature of its own. Once you have removed its axles, wheels, and reins, the chariot simply vanishes. So too does the soul – once you have removed those the five things that make you who you are.You might – if pressed - say that removing your head achieves much the same sort of thing. I am not sure that either I or the eminent officers of the financial institution that is busy sending me contradictory emails is very far along the journey to anatta. Wer still have quite a way to go.Every time we seem to get to closure another bit of the symbolic chariot is discovered or rediscovered and the process defaults back to Stage One.Yet decapitation has form in Sri Lankan history and almost every Sri Lankan, officers of the state or not, will know of the story of, an early king who ruled Anuradhapura from 247 to 249 CE - Siri Sangha Bodhi.Sri Lanka’s famous Mahavaṃsa Chroncile, an epic poem written in the 5th or 6th centuries CE and covering its history since 543 BCE, took this particular king to heart, despite his criminal role in a conspiracy to murder an earlier king.He was, the ancient chronicler noted, “a righteous hero” who’s heart was “much shaken with pity”. Not just pity it seems, but extraordinary self-sacrifice too. For this king, in an act of anatomical wonder, severed his own head from his body in order to allow a beggar to collect the reward offered for his death.Legend though it might be, this extreme expression of self-effacement underlines the humility that so marks out much of any study of Sri Lankan’s kings. Though probably no better or worse than their royal counterparts anywhere else in the world, Sri Lanka’s kings were, by virtue of being Buddhist, unusually preoccupied with the importance of doing – however late in the day – acts of meretricious goodness. A good record in this department did not of itself lead to Niviana - but it was said to help ensure a favourable rebirth in the next cycle. It might help you avoid reappearing in the realm of animals, the realm of Hungry Ghosts or worst of all, the Realm of Naraka –hell itself.Siri Sangha Bodhi’s death, and that of his wife - who died of shock on discovering the body - so tormented Gothabhaya, the king who had placed the bounty on his head, that the repentant monarch fastened a skull made of gold to his dead predecessor prior to an extravagant cremation ceremony.No archaeological evidence has yet been uncovered to validate the story through numerous temples across Sri Lanka tell the tale in wall frescos and statues – mostly notably in the temple at Attanagalla some 45 miles from me here at The Flame Tree Estate where a stunning set of paintings by H Medis Silva decorates every inch of the inner temple.Collectively the frescos are wonderful depiction of a story that has, despite its dreadful beginnings, the happiest of endings for Siri Sangha Bodhi was destined to move immediately to Nirvana and Buddhahood following his self-decapitation. Non self has got him to where he most wanted to be. Non-self is a personal goal I chase and cherish when dealing with most government departments, not just the one that has come to mind today – and with the Bank of Ceylon – and even, come to think of it, the kamikaze drivers of Sri Lanka’ s big red busses. “Practice humility and patience,” advised Vincent de Paul, a catholic saint who had escaped slavery. Simone Weil, the French philosopher, put the process more directly: "Humility,” she advised, “is attentive patience." Taking in how measured and beautiful are the wild parts of this island, spaces that stetch about ...
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On Being Absolutely Still: The Jungle Diaries, Sri Lanka. A Ceylon Press Off-Grid Memoir
3w ago00:08:09Tap to summarizeOn Being Absolutely StillA bird is calling.The sun has just started to light the more distant taller hills, but the ones nearest me remain in a deep blue shade as it is still barely 6 am – bang in the very middle of The Blessed Time, that moment from say 5 to 6.30 am - the golden 90 minutes, before the signs of any other humans really emerge. Just me, 5 dogs and the Sri Lankan jungle.I mean to eke it out in spirit at least until as late as possible. Key to this is staying in my pyjamas until midday, and only then breaking my fast. By then, Dissanayake will have prepared his magical sugar-coated crocodile buns, shaped like croissants, infused with cinnamon, a treasure to unfurl.But that's all still to come. For right now, it's awfully hard to move at all, lest I miss something, sitting here, looking out over these waves of green hills and valleys, like a guardsman who has woken up having misspent the night sleeping above the defensive entrance gates of some remote and tiny city. From here, from this balcony beyond my bedroom doors, you get a sense of the first hills of Sri Lanka as you approach it from the north.And I love that sense of all that lies beyond. The whole of what is called the Rajarata stretches out – reaches from my bedroom - all the way to Jaffna with the occasional interruption of a rocky outcrop like Sigiriya or, further to the east, the Knuckles. But that aside, the Rajarata’s huge, great, broad, flat, low coconut-dotted plain goes all the way from the bottom of these hills right up to the beaches of Jaffna, Manar, Delft Island, to Negombo on the west, to Trincomalee on the east. For this is an island you can touch from side to side, top to bottom, just within your head.You get a sense of all that from right here, sitting on this particular hill, a watcher, watching. And now, at least, in some small part, a watcher equipped with a few facts and a rudimentary map of history.It's no longer just nameless, unknown, unrelatable hills and valleys that stretch out beyond me here. I know the names of the trees that cover them. I know what they do at different times of the year. I know what's been planted recently and what is much older.I know whether a house deep in the valley is new or merely enlarged. I know when the temple will broadcast its mournful Poya prayers. When the Imman will sing. When the bread van goes past on invisible jungle roads, playing a piece of Beethoven to tell its customers it's time to buy a loaf.. And I know too where I sit in relation to where everyone else on this island is, the towns, the capital, the many old, discarded capitals, the forts. I sit on the ramparts of the hill country watching. Most of all, I know how little I know.Which makes it all the more comforting to merely watch those lucky wild beasts that have no mind but now. The many Toque Macaque monkeys feasting on young jak just beyond my window. A pair of iridescent blue kingfishers combing the adjacent amphitheatre. And out into the deeper jungle below, flocks of parrots, mostly plum-headed or emerald collared ones that like to bait the eagles.I remember Beata reading a book in Oxford called I am no one doing nothing, a somewhat Buddhist tome about just being. That title's stuck with me. And, when I think of it now, as I sit here, the light slowly beginning to light up newer sections of the hills and valleys in front of me, I see what Emily Dickinson meant – “I'm Nobody! Who are you? Are you – Nobody – too? Then there's a pair of us! Don't tell! they'd banish us – you know!"Trying to be nobody is much harder than trying to be someone, like moving imperceptibly across an abyss; the slower you go, the more you see.Given all that has come before, this challenge of just being is addictive. I was so busy all the way through my twenties, my thirties and forties, rushing around, going to films and restaurants and holidays and buying stuff, and having dinner parties and opinions, talking and talking and working.Yet life is really what you best hear when you're absolutely still. It’s the hardest of all skills, one that eluded my busy mother, even as she lay dying, over 3 long years, making lists in her head – of her favourite curries, or golf courses, recounting the jackals at Tollygunge, the different dishes that made up rice feats in downtown Jakarta or the little stations on the way to Ooty.Each was an invitation to relive the experience, to stay busy despite being paralysed – but even then, I thought, there ought to be more to life than just living – or reliving. Some tick or method for putting all that activity into perspective and fathom what it was all for and why. And even whether any of it did any good to anyone else.I envy the pious with their apparently strong beliefs, balancing religious devotion with family or civic duty and levelling the whole formula with the Gifts of the Spirit – though it seems something of a blasphemy to ever believe anyone can ever define a god, still less what a god might want or order.Which leaves just faith, unrooted now in these most secular of times, scrambling to establish itself on something other than the obsessions of our times – perhaps for me here on these jungle hills and the slow arranging day.
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Finding Gorgonzola: The Jungle Diaries, Sri Lanka. A Ceylon Press Off-Grid Memoir
3w ago00:09:08Tap to summarizeFinding Gorgonzola I wake and see two yellow Minivets flying off into the jungle. And, by a dizzy sequence of associations too tiresome to make sense of, my mind is turned almost immediately to thoughts of gorgonzola.Gorgonzola is not an easy cheese to find in Sri Lanka. Even the capital’s only self-proclaimed cheese shop, Luxe, has yet to discover it, preferring instead to pack its chill cabinets with cheddar, edam, gouda and brie. It has, however, been discovered at Colombo’s latest addition to its still demure roster of uber luxury hotels – the Cinnamon City of Dreams.That the building itself is significant is evident from the outside, even from several roads away. It sticks out like the sort of Lego construction children enjoy making, one with extravagant and extraneous extensions that stick out like the antenna of discarded Daleks. Great white 3D stripes randomly ribbon the exterior, as if some kind of fashion-inclined soul has bought a set of sumptuous designer clothes to give to a poor but deserving relative. Like the best of spoken luxury, this creation puts you firmly off guard the moment you arrive, the car drawing up at an entrance bland enough to pass for a toothbrush factory. But beyond it stretch vast, cosmic, profuse marbled spaces - a set of dreams nearly arranged into rooms and retreats, lobbies and bars, cafes, and arcades, all cryuing out for GPS. So spaced out is this particular city of dreams that you might be mistaken for thinking you are its only inhabitant. In so busy and noisy a city as Colombo, finding yourself in the equivalent of a silent and closed monastic order is an unexpected challenge.But it was the restaurants I was here for, not the challenge, and for one in particular that a friend of a friend had said it had real gorgonzola on its menu.I should have felt some shame in making such a determined and transactional an approach as this, but a whole year without Gorgonzola had rather neutered my moral compass. And after checking out a variety of possible restaurants, I realised with grateful astonishment that it was the modest, if brazen, hotel buffet that had the delicacy on offer.For there sat the cheese itself, on a chilled open shelf of cured meats and other, lesser cheeses. The buffet and the accompanying à la carte menu offered a multitude of other impossible-to-find tasties, and I tried my best to enjoy some of them. But really, it was the gorgonzola that I came back for, time and again. Rich, salty, earthy, savoury, sharp, it was like being permitted to nibble the cheek of some unreachable Olympic god. I rolled bits of it around in my mouth, letting it stick to my tongue and palate and fill the gaps between my teeth to be gently sucked out, to produce again and again that wonderful taste combination, detonating like a kind bomb within my wistful head. Sometimes I added a tiny slice of dried fruit to a morsel of the hallowed cheese, sometimes a crumb of a hard biscuit – anything, really, to experiment with and prolong the taste tour. And I was still journeying with the memory of it all as the car drove back out of Colombo, past the lovely lagoons that lie south of Negombo, on past the airport and the string of impassable villages up to Mirigama before the first completed section of the new central expressway finally began – and with it, the speedier ascent to the first foothills of the central highlands and my home at the Flame tree Estate.Ii was, I thought, a journey not unlike life itself, a sort of gourmet interpretation of the seven stages of living.The prenatal stage was certainly the unknowing expectation of eating such a cheese as this, not knowing what I would come to know. The infancy period was the dawning knowledge that such a cheese existed at all. The childhood part of the evolution was coming to understand that the cheese did not merely exist, but that it actually existed just 100 kilometres or so away from me. It was within my grasp. The adolescent part of it was the acceptance of reality, the drive to the so-called City of Dreams to achieve my goals. Adulthood was, of course, eating in every way possible, via every conceivable combination of options.This is, of course, the point at which I should have died. For people who die before their 50s - usually in shocking or outrageous circumstances – by murders, car crashes, sudden heart attacks – they are the glamorous ones. They have gone out on such a high, their deaths creating such cavernous holes, some monumental gaps that those of us left behind cannot ever really cover or make sense of.But for me, returning home with the taste of the cheese a memory in my mouth, was like instead entering into that final long stage of life, wandering out into the sunset until eventually the sun comes down, and sometime later somebody says, " Oh, what happened to David? Is he alive? Didn't he die? Was it last year? Of the year before? Maybe he hasn't died yet? Do you know? “The unexamined life,” said Socrates, “is not worth living, adding, for good measure, that “the only good is knowledge”. Old as I now am, I have a lot of knowledge I need to catch up on if I am to have any of the benefits of an examined life at all. Too much, really.And that is, of course, the silver living in not going out with a bang. There is time, in greater isolation, to figure out the unfigurable. You get to take everything out of the box and order it, if order there is. And whether or not any sense of order or purpose dawns, it is an arresting and absorbing occupation, like putting on the red light in the recording studio to say work in progress – do not disturb too much, please.Returning up the estate drive, I met the dogs coming down on their evening walk, all 5 of them, beautiful as butterflies, barking their greater sense of now, the now that really is all that matters. Now? Then? Here in these hills, the two combine with effortless elegance, and the sunsets, like only the best and greatest of cliches – coming still, day after day- are a wonder that never pales.
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All About Eve: The Jungle Diaries, Sri Lanka. A Ceylon Press Off-Grid Memoir
3w ago00:08:18Tap to summarizeIt is 6 o'clock, and the skies are twitching with impossibly neon colours – but it's not the sunset I’m here for, but the quiet valleys and hills. They stretch as far as you can see, with not a building in sight. And it is the sheer overwhelming greenness of the view, rather than the spectacular sunset, that fires the imagination. I imagine the armies that struggled over these hills to try and capture Kandy, the Kings who fled Tamil invaders to hide out in caves nearby here. The millions of unrecorded lives lived out in spaces cleared for stacked paddy fields, spice, and fruit plantations—the rebels who almost toppled the British colonists. And Eve, of course. For Eve, or at least her Sri Lankan sister, must have lived here quite happily centuries ago – and would have been so bedazzled by the range of native mangos, rambutans, belli fruit, coconut and other delicacies that she would have had no need to pluck any apples. Or even go looking for them in the tiny Cargil's supermarket outlet in the nearby village. This is not a land where religion ever needs to be imagined, for it is present in every village temple and roadside shrine. And most especially right now in Kandy, where a very particular religious festival is drawing to its exhausted finale. This event happens just once every 16 or so years. The golden casket containing the relic of Lord Buddha’s tooth is displayed in pubic. Normally, the casket is demurely screened deep within the temple, with a replica bought out annually for the Kandy Perahera. But for this festival, the real McCoy is unveiled. And in their hundreds of thousands, devotees file past to show their reverence. Two million in 7 days – or thereabouts. The queues have coiled their way through city streets. People have fainted in the sun. One or two have expired. The odd queuing mother-to-be has become a mother in fact. But it is hard to find a similar gathering of so many people in a single place that has passed by with a quite so pacific and gentle a mood. The many police and soldiers on hand have had little more to do than twirl their batons and pass on bottled water. But with traffic stacking back for at least 8 kilometres, getting into the city was impossible. Though one or two VIPs did manage to penetrate the cordon, they were transported there by the presidential train. – to be rewarded with a view of the tooth itself, and not simply its golden casket. The many arguments over whether it is the tooth of Lord Buddha, still less a human tooth at all, seem rather beside the point amid so much conviction and pity. Belief has always been more important than mere facts, and if people are wrong about exactly what the relic is, then there are many worse things to be wrong about than this. The festival’s ability to galvanise much of the nation with thoughts of god is also something of a triumph. In much of the rest of the world, it is largely thoughts of shopping that preoccupy most people, who have taken the real Eve too much to heart. Were she alive today, she would, of course, be an Influencer, eager to populate the pages of Hello magazine and advise her many social media followers exactly which lipsticks or fruit to buy. The Bible is non-committal on any ongoing relationship between Eve and the troublesome serpent that so bewitched her. But were the said serpent Sri Lankan, it is more than possible that he was the devil beloved of Christian mythology. In Buddhist and Hindu traditions, the cobra is actually something of a god. Buddhist scriptures depict the serpent-king Mucalinda shielding Lord Buddha from a terrible storm. The Hindu Lord Shiva even wears the serpent-king Vasuki entwined around his neck. Cobra statues guard temples, stupas and shrines across the island. As in many traditional parts of the country, such as the one around us here in Galagedera, cobras are often considered incarnations of dead ancestors, useful for the enhanced protection they offer to the family. Several protect us here. A splendidly large and old one lived in the mango tree in Frangipani Hill. She kept to her place and we to ours. Once, when I discovered several of her tiny offspring about to be washed down a monsoon drain in a storm, I rescued them and placed them back close to her in the mango tree. An unspoken symbiosis seemed to dawn. My fondness for serpents does not, however, extend to the rather malicious little Russell's Viper, not to the Cruella de Vil-like krait with its glamorous black and white markings. These beasts have a much less considered life, with little of the philosophical trappings and preoccupations of the cobra. But looking out over my unrestricted green jungle view, considering the dense soft undergrowth, the countless invisible rocky streams and giant trees, I am reminded of Thomas Jefferson’s proclamation that “all men are created equal and have the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Of course, Jefferson neglected to practice what he preached, freeing just a couple of the 600 slaves he owned at his death. Not was he in any way memorable for his equal faith in the rights of animals - even snakes – to go about their business untroubled. “The time will come,” said Leonardo da Vinci, “when men such as I will look upon the murder of animals as they now look on the murder of men.” Even so, his words carry as much truth for humans as for other animals. I try to bear this in mind when I dwell too much on the more terminal options for dealing with Eve and the lesser snakes of life. Living up to the real logic of morality is much harder than getting through the traffic in Kandy or even enduring a daily gym workout. And all its challenges are inescapably evident when considering my mindful sunset view of limitless jungle hills and valleys.
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The Long Farewell: The Tale of Sri Lanka’s Last Lambakanna Kings
3w ago01:43:35Tap to summarize“If,” promised M.K. Gandhi, “you give me rice, I'll eat today; if you teach me how to grow rice, I'll eat every day.” Gandhi only visited Sri Lanka once – in 1927 – which may explain why, erudite though his aphorism was, it remained, all the same, a lesson that had already been learnt long ago on the island - thousands of years ago, in fact, in the very earliest days of recorded Lankan history. Ever since the first distinctive water technology was introduced by the early Anduraupuran kings with the creation of the massive Panda Wewa reservoir around 450 BCE, their kings could provide an ever greater abundance of water, delivered just when and where it was needed. It was a proficiency that enabled an entire island to feed itself without trouble. Tummies full, its people could focus instead on the other great matters of life – religion, for example, war, politics, poetry – or the slow contemplation of a temple lotus pond during a long post-lunch siesta. This particular pastime – or ones not dissimilar to it – is still greatly prized here today. Sophisticated water technology made the island’s paddy fields so fecund that the country barely needed to bother much with the enrichments of trade or the grubby task of making excessive money. As the ancient world’s merchant ships crossed the Indian Ocean from China to Arabia, they may have made a point of stopping in Sri Lanka to buy its gems, spices, Mannar pearls, elephants, and hardwoods - but the riches this all brought were just icing. The country was already rich. And it was this richness that the last Lambakanna kings had on their side as the kingdom they ruled moved to its apogee. The great gilded last moments of Edwardian England were fuelled by cotton; the Ming by the porcelain trade; and ancient Athens, silver from the Laurion mines. But here it was rice – plentiful, abundant, nurturing rice. Rice would have arrived with the island’s Mesolithic settlers, and it was first evidenced archaeologically around 800 BCE. Excavations made in the Anuradhapura area unearthed a remarkably large early Iron Age settlement – at least ten hectares, still with the spectral trace of irrigation systems and rice cultivation. The Mahavamsa Chronicle, starting a few hundred years later, around 540 BCE, noted that the island’s first recorded queen, Kuveni, showed rice to Prince Vijaya, the country’s founding paterfamilias. Vijaya’s hungry followers wasted little time, for the Chronicle goes on to document how they all then set about making themselves a fortifying lunch of rice and curry. The plentiful supply of rice, even then, was due to small village tanks and their ability to harness and store water. They did so in systems that brought together up to 10 individual tanks within a small land basin measuring about 6 to 10 square miles, recycling water along the path from the reservoir to the field. Historians have estimated that in just one area in the north central part of the island – an area otherwise noted for its dryness – 450 such systems may have existed at some time between the second and the fifth centuries BCE, containing about 4,200 small tanks. Ptolemy, writing in faraway Rome sometime between 127 and 170 CE, reported that the “country produces rice, honey, ginger, beryl, and hyacinth, and has mines of every sort, of gold, silver, and other metals. Large Tank systems followed the village ones – such as the Abhayavapi at Anuradhapura, the Tissa vava and the Nuwara vava. And from the fifth century CE onward, extremely long canals were added to the water network, opening up vast new areas for rice cultivation. By the sixth century, there was barely any suitable land in the entire Dryzone that had not been turned into paddy. Of course, there were, from time to time, droughts, with at least six mentions of them cropping up in the ancient chronicles between 161 and 569 CE - but they seem to have been far less devastating here than in other parts of South Asia. The Samantapasadika, an ancient chronicle written by a monk called Buddhaghosa in Anuradhapura between 927 and 973 CE, notes the extreme care the state took to mitigate periods of water scarcity. “During the draught season,” it states, “when water becomes scarce, water is released in intervals. If someone does not receive his due share during the interval allocated to him and the crops become withered, then another should not receive his share during his allocation. If any monk drives water from a secondary canal to a field belonging to someone else, to a canal or a field belonging to him or to someone else, or covers the catchment, then he has committed the offence of avahara.” The highly specific administrative and legal infrastructure that the state wrapped around water collection and extraction gave it an unparalleled ability to manage droughts – a capability other parts of South Asia lacked to anything like the same degree. One ancient chronicler remarked that “by attending facilities for the cultivation of fields by means of tanks, he (the king) dispelled the famine in prosperous Lanka.” By the time the last of the Lambakarna kings came to rule in 691 CE, the country had been functioning as a recorded state for over 1,200 years. Rice had become the petrol of the nation. In this, Sri Lanka was little different to most other Asian countries – but what set it apart was its sheer abundance, its ability to power the kingdom so very effectively through good times and bad. Indeed, when the last of the Lankbranaka fell in 993 CE and the country embarked on hundreds of years of uncertain life, even this did not bring rice production to its knees. To hold this almost folkloric expectation - this expectation that you will not entirely starve - was a rare assurance in those pre-modern times; and the patriotic confidence it engendered is tellingly evident, even today. Other things may be wrong, even very badly wrong, but, so the feeling goes, we will feed ourselves, we will go on, we will get better. As one Singhala idiom puts it: "rather than cursing the darkness, it is better to light a lamp." Famine, scarcity, hardship – these are not conditions unfamiliar to Sri Lanka, then or now, but the island has largely escaped the widespread devastation that has gripped its neighbours, a theme that runs through its history from its earliest recorded times. North of Sri Lanka, uncountable millions died of famine in British colonial India - 36 famines in around 200 years. So appalling were they that people’s bodies actually evolved to store food as fat differently, so that their descendants now face significant health complications. Even before this period, famine routinely crippled the sub-continent. Over 1700 years from the 1st century CE, over 75 famines are recorded, with some, such as that in the Deccan in the 1630s, the Punjab in the mid-13th century and South India in the 11th century, being monumentally destructive. But not here. "Flowers grow beneath her feet,” wrote Rani Manicka in her novel, “The Rice Mother,” “but she is not dead at all. The years have not diminished the Rice Mother. I see her, fierce and magical. Stop despairing and call to her, and you will see, she will come bearing a rainbow of dreams." In the simplest of algebraic formulas, advanced water technology enabled the plentiful production of rice, or, more directly, an innate island-wide self-confidence: however bad life sometimes got, it rarely if ever reached the draconian depths other countries encountered. Sri Lanka was different, and it was rice, the very thing it had most in common with all other Asian countries, which set it apart. Rice still sits at the epicentre of all the island’s Buddhist services, at Pereheras, Yak and Bali ceremonies, distributed at every important occa...
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Explanations. Part 9. A Dissident Selection of the World’s 100 Most Important Poems
3w ago00:28:33Tap to summarizeC.P CAVAFY. Ithaka. SHEL SILVERSTEIN. Where the Sidewalk Ends. MARK DOTY. Reprive, From Atlantis. GABRIEL OKARA. The Paino And The Drums. DYLAN THOMAS. The Force That Through The Green Fuse Drives The Flower. DU FU. A Woman Of Quality. GEOFFREY HILL. From Mercian Hymns. ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON: The Lady of Shalot.
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The Devastation: Sri Lanka & The Fallen Throne. The Ceylon Press History Of Sri Lanka Book 23.
3w ago00:17:26Tap to summarizeWhen Sena V took over his father's throne in 991 CE, his kingdom was running on borrowed time - and had barely ten more years of life to it. At this late stage, there was little if anything either he or his successor, his son Mahinda V, could have done to avoid their fate. The seeds of their doleful destiny had been sewn as far back as 6791 CE when their illustrious Lambakanna ancestor, Manavanna, had secured his throne with the aid of the Indian Pallava dynasty. The military assistance and subsequent alliance had won him a throne, but at the cost of enlisting Sri Lanka in whatever was going on in southern India, where five dynasties were fighting one another for dominance. Sometime around 800 CE, Mahinda II replaced the old Pallava friendship pact with one with their enemies, the Pandyans, a choice that seemed sensible at the time but was to prove his dynasty's undoing. It was to prove the wrong choice in every way, for just waiting in the wings was a third dynasty ready to emerge from the gloom of anonymity as the ultimate warrior. In about 847 CE, Vijayalaya, a Chola warlord of otherwise unremarkable obscurity, emerged out of the chaos caused by the Pandyan and Pallava wars and seized the great city of Thanjavur. It was the start of a celebrated and pugnacious dynasty. He would go on to inflict many defeats on the two older kingdoms and, bit by bit, his successors rolled up the whole of southern India. Around 897 CE, the Pallava kingdom began its slow fall to the Chola kings, beginning with Aditya I. By 915 CE Parantaka I, had captured its capital Madurai. The Pandyan king fled into exile in Sri Lanka, and the Chola took over the most of his lands. The Chola kingdom itself suffered a series of reversals until, in 958 CE, King Parantaka II recovered most of his lost lands and annexed large sections of the Pandyan kingdom. Most of the remaining Pandyan lands were captured soon after by his son, Uttama. By the mid-980s, the Chola dynasty, under Rajaraja I, had become the only show in town. Ancient inscriptions, known as the Larger Leiden plates, relate how Rajaraja "conquered the Pandya, Tulu, Kerala, Simhalendra and Satyashraya ; destroyed ships at Kandalur-Salai , captured Vengi, Gangapadi, Nulambapadi, Tadigaipadi, Kudamalainadu, Kollam, Kalingam, and removed the splendour of the Pandyas."Rajaraja, known not without cause as “the Great,” reigned from 985 to 1014 and internationalised his kingdom. From Goa to Andhra Pradesh, much of India was under him and his son, Rajendra I; the Indian Ocean Trading Zone, from the western Arabian Sea to Vietnam, was transformed into a Chola lake, with the kings dominating, influencing, or directly ruling much of everything in between – including Sri Lanka.At the heart of the Chola’s expansion lay a wholly reimagined view of naval power. Star charts, wind and monsoon patterns were calculated to improve navigation and mapping, and a spy network was set up among merchants and other mariners to deliver intelligence to Chola military planners. Boat-building technology was improved and different woods identified for different parts of their boats – teak for hull strength, bamboo for the flexible sections, and ironwood for parts most exposed to salt. Their new ships could carry up to 200 soldiers in multi-decks over 200 feet long and furnished with specialised ramming heads and compartmentalised storage areas. Smaller, faster ships were developed to outflank the enemy; others to serve as more effective scout ships, and still others to provide support and munitions. A Crescent Formation was developed to devastate the enemy, using the navy as if it were a single, vast, curved simitar. The Chola adapted Byzantine fire, creating their own recipes using coconut oil, sulphur, and tree resins, and adapted catapults, fire arrows, and other projective devices to hurl flames far and wide. Sailors were specially trained in ship-to-ship combat drills, including siege techniques to break coastal forts. Given such attention to detail it was hardly surprising, therefore, that when either Rajaraja I or Rajendra set their mind to achieve something, it happened.When Mahinda IV died in 991 CE after a long 16 years trying to restore the rule of law in his kingdom, whilst simultaneously seeing off at least two Indian invasions, one of them a Chola enterprise, his successor was his 12-year-old son, Sena V. This was no time for the office junior, however royal he was, to be in charge, and inevitably, pandemonium broke out almost at once. Advised rather poorly by his mother, he had the brother of his main general executed, prompting a full-scale rebellion, with the aggrieved general calling up a large band of Tamil mercenaries who set about looting the kingdom.Peace emerged only when the hapless king accepted his general's ongoing counsel. The emasculated young king turned his mind to more pleasurable distractions. As the Culavamsa puts it – “but while now the Ruler of Lanka had his abode there his low class favourites who obtained no leave from their teacher to drink sura, praised in his presence the advantages of drinking intoxicating liquors and induced the Ruler to drink. After taking intoxicating drinks, he was like a wild beast gone mad. As he could no longer digest food, the Ruler had to surrender the dearly-won place and died in the tenth year of his reign, still youthful in years.”Ever eager to point out the moral of any story, the Chronicle went on to observe, “When they see from this that the yielding to evil friends leads to destruction, let those who seek their highest good here or hereafter, avoid such evil friends as a snake full of deadly poison.” “Things, Howard Jones wrote in his hit song in 1985, “can only get better.” But this was not the experience of Sena’s successor and brother, Mahinda V, who was to live out the horror of Murphy's alternative law for his whole reign: “Anything that can go wrong will go wrong."It little helped that Mahinda inherited a threadbare realm in 982 CE. “Splendid Anuradhapura,” wrote the Culavamsa sorrowfully, “was full of strangers”, and mercenaries washed up by the disasters of the previous reign. The state's coffers were bare, its peasants recalcitrant, and the new king himself not up to the task. Within the first paragraph of its description of his reign, the Culavamsa pulls no punches, saying of its new overlord, “he wandered from the path of statecraft and was of very weak character; the peasants did not deliver him his share of the produce.” Soon enough, he had “entirely lost his fortune and was unable to satisfy his troops by giving them their pay.”The new kings' rule effectively ended in 993 CE with the first sacking of Anuradhapura, though its formal end dragged on a little longer. But in these roughly 10 years of rule before the curtains began to fall, calamity piled upon catastrophe, misadventure upon misfortune, and farce upon fiasco. At its heart lay not just a weak and incompetent central government but also a country awash with mutinous mercenary Tamil soldiers. The kingdom was bankrupt. The heavy taxes Mahinda levied backfired, prompting even more revolts. As the Culavamsa records, “All the Keralas who got no pay planted themselves one with another at the door of the royal palace, determined on force, bow in hand, armed with swords and other weapons, with the cry 'So long as there is no pay he shall not eat.” But the King duped them. Taking with him all his movable goods, he escaped by an underground passage and betook himself in haste to Rohana.”And just as everything was imploding, “a horse-dealer who had come hither from the opposite coast, told the Chola King on his return about the conditions in Lanka.” Rajaraja I wasted no time, assembling h...
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The Long Goodbye: Sri Lanka & The Counterfeit Calm. The Ceylon Press History Of Sri Lanka Book 22.
3w ago00:22:37Tap to summarizeThat catastrophe did not immediately envelop the kingdom was due in part to the next king, Sena II, and his adept handling of the deadly new South Asian realpolitik that had drawn Sri Lanka into its magnetic field. From his accession in 866 CE, the Anduraupuran kingdom had barely 125 years left to live. Were it not for the phenomenal capabilities of Sena himself, who did much to arrest the decline of the previous decades, his 12 successors are unlikely to have had the opportunity to reign at all. The Pandyan capture of Anduraupura under Sena I was no accident. The easy-going dominance of the Pallavas, which had protected the island since that dynasty had helped Manavamma gain his throne in 691 CE, was all but over. In their place was a steelier freeholder, one given to absolute conquest. Clinging on to what they had was all the Pallava kingdom could now do. In the four-sometimes-five-cornered fight across southern India between the Pallavas, Cheras, Pandyans, Chalukyas and the Cholas, it was the Cholas who were to emerge as the new superpower. Around 848 CE, they captured Tanjore and then focused on driving Pandyan and Pallava kings into ever-tighter corners. The Cholas were to eventually extend their boundaries from a kingdom to an empire of such political, military, and economic dynamism that the whole of Southern India, the Maldives, large parts of eastern India, Malaysia, and Indonesia fell under their influence. But the fight was messy, and at any given time, a different power seemed preeminent. In this stately spaghetti soup, today's allies were tomorrow’s enemies - in the blink of an eye. Keeping one step ahead of this was the greatest challenge the Anduraupuran kings would now face. Depending on which chronometric school you follow, Sena II’s reign began in 866 or 853 CE and ended in 901 or 887 CE. Either way, he ruled for a colossal length – over 30 years or almost a third of the entire time it took these late and last Lambakanna kings to trek to their final fateful nemesis. Although he inherited a defeated and shattered kingdom, he began his reign with several handy advantages. He was royal, the nephew of Sena I. He had few, if any, rivals, all of Sena’s brothers having died during the earlier Pandyan invasion. He had the army on his side, being the king’s general in chief. And he had a powerful local regional base of his own, coming as he did from the Ruhana side of the family, with a wife, Samgha, who was the eldest daughter of the late ruler of Rohana. The family politics that had eroded the effectiveness of previous kings lay dormant throughout his entire reign. By any reckoning, he was a busy king, the sort of ruler who would multitask in his sleep. Repairing the trashed irrigation systems in his kingdom, especially in the dry zone, was an immediate priority if economic strength was to be restored, famines avoided, and taxes made available for payment. Many tanks, canals, and catchment areas were mended, including two of pivotal importance: the Sorabora Wewa – the Sea of Bintenna, a huge tank in Mahiyangana - and the Minipe Ela irrigation system, which included a massive canal that diverted the Mahaweli River to carry water from the wet zone towards the dry zone and nourish a vast area of the dry zone. The state’s bureaucracy was replenished with new hires, and, as two stone inscriptions made clear – the Mihintale plinth inscription and the Mamaduwa Wewa slab inscription - the small specifics that properly regulated a functioning state were put right – in this case, the prohibition of stealing fish from reservoirs and the collection of tax in gold from merchants. He did his dutiful best, putting things right with the Theravada religious establishment. Many temples and monasteries were repaired. The gorgeous Brazen Palace – the Lohamahaprasada – was restored. A sacred golden Buddha image—looted during the Pandyan assault— was returned to the eminent Abhayagiri Monastery, and a hospital was built for the Mihintale Monastery. Lapsed Buddhist festivals were revived, including what is one that remains the country's paramount festival for the sacred Tooth Relic. And, in a move guaranteed to delight the orthodoxy, he stationed coastal guards in his ports to clamp down on heretical monks entering the land. Most importantly, he repaired the county's defence, which had been so neglected that it enabled the Pandyan invasion during the reign of Sena I. The Culavamsa notes that “he made the Island hard to subdue by the foe and made it increase in wealth like the land of the Uttarakurus. Living beings on the Island who in the time of the former king had been in distress, felt themselves delivered in that they came to peace as from heat into the shade of clouds.” But perhaps, most remarkably, and in what was probably a first for Sri Lankan kings at any time, he intervened militarily and effectively in the political struggles within the ascendant Pandyan state. The Culavamsa records that “at that time there arrived a son (thought to be Varaguna) of the Pandu King who, ill-treated by the king, had made the resolve to gain the kingship for himself. When the King saw him, he rejoiced greatly, treated him as was meet, betook Himself then to the seaport Mahatittha and while he sojourned there, collected a great force as well as all the appliances of war completely, like to a war-equipped army of the gods.” The king went to war, after first making an alliance with the Pallava king Nrupatunga I. The plan was for a joint pincer operation against Srimara Srivallabha, the Pandyan king. A fleet crowded with soldiers crossed the Palk Strait, landing on the Pandyan coastline and marched inland to besiege the Pandyans at their capital of Madurai. The Pandyans were in no fit state to fight, having recently suffered a series of withering attacks by the Pallavas. Madurai was taken and sacked, and Srimara Srivallabha himself was killed in the action, leaving the throne open for a more Sri Lankan-friendly ruler - Varaguna. Sena concluded what amounted to a long-term friendship pact with the new king, a change of alliance that would come back to haunt his successors. Among the plunder brought back to the island was much of what Srimara Srivallabha himself had stolen earlier, including the revered golden Buddha image, purloined from the Ratanapasada. High-ranking hostages were patriated to Anduraupura and Sena returned in triumph and ”restored all valuable property in the Island as it was heretofore, without partiality, and the golden images he set up in the places where they belonged,” concluded the Culavamsa happily. Or did he? Near contemporaneous Pandyan sources – such as the Sinnamanur Plates - argue quite the opposite – that the invasion was repulsed. But the Culavamsa account is corroborated by a further stone inscription- the Iluppakaniya pillar inscription – that records Sena II as the Madhura-dunu, the “Conqueror of Madhura. What is certain is that Sri Lanka had gone to war, and although the fight may have been a terrible reversal of fortune for the Pandyans, in an obdurate way, Sri Lanka’s victory was also something of a prophetic disaster. Its new alliance with the Pandyan kingdom committed the country irrevocably to the hell of South Indian politics. As the Pallava, Pandyan, and Chola busied themselves trying to annihilate one another, there was no longer any get-out for Sri Lanka. Whether it liked it or not, it too was now part of the battle – and in time it would find itself locked grimly to the side of the eventual loser. The great king spent the rest of his years kingdom-building and e...
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Walking on Air: Sri Lanka & The Tra-La-La Years. The Ceylon Press History of Sri Lanka 21
3w ago00:28:31Tap to summarizeAs Aggabodhi VI took up his crown in 741 CE, a sense of new beginnings would have struck the land. For with his ascension came a generational shift in rule. For 50 years, the island had enjoyed the Pax Manavamma as first the great old liberator king and then his three sons ruled the land. Given that most people then lived little beyond their mid-thirties, most, still less their fathers, would not have known of any other kings. The change would have felt seismic – but in all the nicest of all possible ways, for here at last came kings whose age brought them closer to their subjects. But like so many apparently seismic moments, this one was all rather beside the point. What distinguished the next nine kings was not so much their age as their cheery, freewheeling approach to kingship. To them fell the fruits of a kingdom, wrested from hell and made secure just five decades earlier. For almost 100 years these particular descendants of king Manavamma would rule over Sri Lanka, point it here, prod it there, tinker with it – but still make plenty of time to get on with other, less arduous pursuits: with palace politics, temple building, calming down intemperate monks, resisting rebellions, not to mention all the more domestic distractions that, for most other people, pass as a full and busy life. These were, in the words of The Wizard of Oz, the tra-la-la years. “Ha ha ha, Ho ho ho, And a couple of tra-la-la's, That's how we laugh the day away, in the Merry Old Land of Oz!” Were it not for the accession of the reforming Sena II in 866 CE, this laissez-faire approach to kingship would have left the kingdom drifting into a never-never land, a victim of happy, unwitting neglect, instead of netting, for one last time, another 100 years of life. The new era began with a steadiness not to be seen in later reigns, for Aggabodhi VI had already built a strong reputation within civil administration, the army, and the Buddhist orders as a leader who well ruled the eastern province for his uncle, Mahinda I, between 738 and 741 CE. He must also have wisely spent time getting his cousin, Aggabodhi, King Mahinda’s son, on his side, for his accession to the throne does not seem to have been disputed by him. His cousin, who sub-ruled Ruhuna for the Anuradhapura Kingdom, would later go on to become a king himself, as Aggabodhi VII. The new king made his own son, Mahinda, the head of the army and promoted his cousin to the rank of Uparaja – or crown prince - to rule over the plum Eastern province. The new crown prince seems to have had a rather wobbly moment a little later, organising a half-hearted rebellion against his uncle, but the uprising was easily put down, and Aggabodhi VI married his daughter to the Uparaja, thereby ensuring that what might have grown into a rivalry became a long-term alliance that worked in both their interests. Like his predecessors, the new king was clear about his preferred support for the country's traditional Theravada Buddhist orders, and they in turn were careful to give the king all the authority due to one described as the protector of the Dhamma – those fundamental teachings of Lord Bhudda, from the Four Noble Truths to the Noble Eightfold Path, and everything that may have lain in-between that this particular conservative branch of Buddhism deemed relevant. Most notably, he commissioned a multi-storied hall in Anuradhapura within which the grander monks could study Theravada doctrines in greater comfort - and the decrees that have survived are strictly and, for the establishment at the time, reassuringly Theravadin in their language. But his religious patronage was even more widespread. Significant new temples and monasteries were built or enlarged in Vaparani, Managgabodhi, Hatthikucchi, Punapitthi, and Mahaparivena. A large refectory was built for the iconic Abhayagiri Viharaya, and the entrance to the stately Ruwanweliseya stupa was repaired. Unlike his illustrious grandfather, the king kept his focus on the home front rather than abroad, and Sri Lanka was spared any involvement in the internecine warfare going on in India between the Chola and Pallava kingdoms, which by the end of the century was to produce a major turning point, one not in the Pallavas' favour. Even so, trade continued to be well supported. At least 4 diplomatic missions are known to have been sent by him to the Imperial Tang court in China in a balancing act that sought to bring the island closer to this distant superpower without alienating the Pallava superpower closer to hand. Playing India off against China remains the day job of any Sri Lankan President. When the celebrated and Chinese-oriented monk Amoghavajra visited Sri Lanka sometime around 746 CE for a seven-day palace sleepover, the state put out all its ceremonial bunting – including a daily ritual bathing with fragrant water from golden vessels. Queens, ministers and even the crown prince, all on their most saintly behaviour, were in full attendance. When he died, naturally, in 772 CE, it could be said that his greatest achievement was just keeping the great show on the road, emollient and trouble-free. The state continued to work well, taxes collected, irrigation systems managed and improved, the religious establishment respected, and the odd rebellion crushed with kind cunning. This itself was no small thing, but though nothing of major importance seems to have been done, and chaos continued to be averted, there is little indication that he read the runes of what was happening in southern India to better prepare his Pallava-oriented realm for what might be to come. The succession to his cousin and son-in-law, Aggabodhi VII, the son of Mahinda I, went without any known squabbles, but the new king had been a king in waiting for decades by the time he came to the throne, and, old as he was, his reign was predictably short - just 5 years. As with all Manavamma’s successors, Aggabodhi VII was the continuity candidate. With little evidence of any departures from form or policy, the grand old kingdom show carried on. And grand it was for in him the country had a king who was not only the son of a previous king, but also the husband of the previous king’s daughter. There could be no doubting his royalty. “Thereupon,” noted the Culavamsa, “the Uparaja Aggabodhi, the fortunate, became king, son of the wise Adipada Mahinda.” For decades, he has effectively been his own king – albeit a sub one, ruling various outstation provinces for his uncle, the king. He knew the ropes, the people, the power bases, the religious establishment. And they all knew him. As the Uparaja – or crown prince – he was at the heart of the establishment. He sensibly moved his cousin, Mahinda, the head of the army, to take command of a distant province, made his own son the new Uparaja and settled down to enjoy his brief tenure without risk or family rebellions. The Culavamsa also has him down as a king who received the laws, saying: “To the Order and to the laity he showed favour according to merit….By legal acts, he carefully reformed the Order of the Conqueror (Buddha) and, judging according to justice, he rooted out unjust judges.” It was perhaps in response to this that he became known by the affectionate diminutive "Kuda Akbo". He took care to patronise Theravada Buddhist establishments, repairing the temple of the Sri Maha Bodhi in Anuradhapura, constructing two new temples in Kalanda and Mallavata, but also gave to other orders. “He had rice by allotment distributed to the inmates of the three fraternities,” notes the Culavamsa in reference to the other Buddhist chapters, “and delicious foods f...
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Lost: Unearthing Sri Lanka’s Extinct Mammals. A Ceylon Press Island Story
3w 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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