Dhanuka Bandara
Ravan’s place in the Sinhala Buddhist consciousness is somewhat ambivalent. According to the Mahavamsa, a revered chronicle of the early history of Sri Lanka and Buddhism’s advent on the island, he is supposed to have lived in pre-history, before the arrival of Prince Vijaya in 6th century BCE. As such, he was not a Sinhala Buddhist king. In the Ramayana, the ancient Hindu epic, Ravan is often depicted as a demon-king who ruled over Lanka, and some other texts describe him as a committed follower of the Hindu deity Shiva. Yet modern-day chauvinist groups such as the Ravana Balaya have attempted to co-opt Ravan and the mythology around him to promote an ultra-nationalist agenda geared to prop up the Rajapaksas, Sri Lanka’s Sinhala Buddhist strongmen until their dramatic fall from power in 2022. A series of popular Sinhala-language books in recent times by the writer Mirando Obeyesekere has further established Ravan as a central figure in the Sinhala Buddhist nationalist discourse.
Alongside this resurgent interest in Ravan, there has emerged Ravan-centric tourism in places popularly associated with various legends of the Ramayana, especially in the central highlands of Sri Lanka: Nuwara Eliya, Horton Plains, Ella and such. There is even a theory which posits that the earth in Nuwara Eliya is black as it contains residue from nuclear tests carried out by Ravan. The Divurupola Temple, close to Welimada, is supposed to be the site where Sita faced her “Agni Pariksha”, the trial by fire where, as consort to the hero Ram, she had to prove her chastity after being spirited away by Ravan. Hakgala Gardens is famous as the place where Sita was kept after she was abducted, and where Hanuman, dispatched by Ram, first encountered her. The island chain that traces a path between the southern tip of the Indian mainland and the northern tip of Sri Lanka is meant to be the Rama Setu, the bridge Ram constructed to reach Lanka to rescue Sita after besting Ravan in battle.
A recent commercial by the state-owned Sri Lankan Airlines invites visitors to a “Ramayana Trail” in Sri Lanka. It shows an elderly Indian woman, apparently Hindu, relating to her grandson the mythic battle between Ravan and the prince of Ayodhya, Ram. The video juxtaposes images from a children’s-book version of the Ramayana with footage of actual sites in Sri Lanka, erasing any distinction between mythology and history. This is calculated marketing: the clearest target audience are moneyed Indian Hindus increasingly and uncritically invested in Ram, especially after India’s Hindu nationalist government under Narendra Modi has made it a point to build a temple to Ram on the site of a razed Mughal-era mosque. Yet this same audience, weaned on the dominant Indian telling of the Ramayana, also sees Ravan as the villain to Rama’s hero. In the pursuit of tourists and much-needed tourism revenues, then, Ravan’s putative herohood in the Sinhala Buddhist telling is conveniently put to one side.
The complications hardly stop there. Sunela Jayewardene’s The Line of Lanka: Myths and Memories of an Island (2017) and Ravana’s Lanka:The Landscape of a Lost Kingdom (2024) are, to a great extent, focused on Ravan mythology although Jayawardene would no doubt eschew the use of the word “mythology”. Jayawardene’s framing of Ravan is meant to challenge the dominant Vijaya- and Mahavamsa-centric traditions of understanding Sri Lankan history and archaeology, especially in academic circles.
In the study of the Sri Lankan past, the Mahavamsa – supposed to have been first compiled in the 5th century, and attributed to the monk Mahanama – plays an especially central role. It notably portrays the Sinhalese as an “Aryan” people descended from the “Aryan” invader Vijaya, who vanquished earlier inhabitants such as the Nagas and the Yakshas. Jayawardene portrays Ravan as a pre-Vijayan king, a Shaivite and possibly a speaker of a Dravidian language, whose legacy has been suppressed by “Aryanist” historiography. Yet her reading of Ravan still incorporates him into a tangibly nationalist discourse, Sinhala Buddhist or otherwise. Jayewardene views Ravan, and pre-Vijayan indigenous “tribes” or clans such as Raksha, Yaksha, and Naga, as progenitors of a now much-degraded people.
Of the two books, The Line of Lanka is in many ways a less defensive one than Ravana’s Lanka, in which Jayewardene expressly distances herself from the ultra-nationalist Sinhala Buddhist discourse that accords Ravan a status similar to that given to Dutugamunu, the ancient Sri Lankan king who defeated the “Tamil” king Elara. That distancing has a class element to it too. In the very foreword to The Line of Lanka, Jayewardene, an environmental architect, describes herself as a “vagabond” and a “delicate product of Cinnamon Gardens, Colombo 7”, the country’s most elite and affluent neighbourhood. This rather tasteless declaration of class credentials identifies Jayewardene as coming from a different social sphere than those who talk about Ravan in mainstream Sinhala Buddhist discourse. Obeyesekere’s works target middle-class Sinhala speakers, whereas in Jayewardene’s case the target audience is the English-speaking bourgeoisie of which Jayewardene herself is a member. It is also the author’s class privilege that provides her with the means to access the various remote locations in Sri Lanka that she describes in her books. The assumptions, if not presumptions, of Jayewardene’s class underlie much of The Line of Lanka and are likely to nettle some readers.
Classist attitudes are also evident in the following description: “Muthu Banda’s mother moves with remarkable grace that could only be acquired from carrying heavy loads on her head along the steep mountain paths. I watch as she steps out of the house, adroitly balancing clay containers and to our delight, offers us pots of sweet thelijja, the unfermented sap of the kithul palm flower.” The role of labour, and possibly the exploitation of it, is brushed under the carpet, and instead we have a “grace” of movement that could only have been achieved through heavy labour. Most of the descriptions in The Line of Lanka come from the point of view of the elite outsider who has been introduced to a simultaneously alien yet native culture – one that the elite observer finds exotic yet talks of authoritatively. Most of the descriptions are replete with local terms calculated to imbue the work with a peculiar native flavour. This, of course, is a well-established trick of the trade used in much of postcolonial writing, especially when it targets a foreign readership.
That aside, Jayewardene often shows herself to be knowledgeable and passionate about her topic – the possibility of a technologically advanced pre-Vijayan civilisation in Sri Lanka under the kingship of Ravan. Jayewardene makes a passionate case, if not a cogent one, for the possible existence of such a civilisation. This also amounts to a critique of Western epistemology and historiography, which often seek to suppress the achievements of non-Western civilisations by, for example, privileging empirical proof to the neglect of oral memory. Jayewardene writes, “For the invading Europeans, it was convenient to dismiss these epics, along with other native disciplines such as Ayurveda, philosophy, ritual and sacred geography as hocus pocus or paganism.” That is all well and good, but from there Jayewardene immediately goes out on a limb: “The ancient epics were substantiated in the twentieth century CE, with the discovery of Dwarka, the city of Lord Krishna of the Bhagavad Gita.”
Ravan for Jayewardene is a figure not of mythology but of fact. She notes, “I have become a believer in the great Mayuranga and their long-lost kingdoms. I no longer doubt that my island home in its entirety, was once Lankapura, the vast golden citadel of a king of ten kingdoms and the centerpiece of a super-civilization.”
Jayewardene sets up a counter-narrative to the “Aryan”, Mahavamsa-centric story of Sri Lankan civilisation, which, as she correctly claims, neglects and is often hostile to the pre-Vijayan inhabitants of the island. The translations of the Mahavamsa by the orientalist scholars George Turnour and Wilhelm Geiger did much to establish the myth of Aryan origin in the Sinhala Buddhist nationalist consciousness, and arguably laid the foundations for the discourse of Sinhala Buddhist supremacy.
In the Sinhala Buddhist nationalist discourse “Aryan” is opposed to “Dravidian” – this latter label attaching to the Tamil inhabitants of Sri Lanka, whom Sinhala nationalists have long seen as intruders. (Although for the orientalist Max Müller, “Aryan” and “Dravidian” were linguistic categories rather than racial ones.) Jayewardene argues that tracing the origins of modern Sri Lankans back to pre-Aryan peoples such as the Raksha, Naga and Yaksha upsets Aryan-centered Sinhala Buddhist historiography. This point is even more strongly made in Ravana’s Lanka, where she writes, “In Sri Lanka, the prospect of evidence of the proclaimed primary Aryan civilization being pre-dated by any alternate civilization such as the Aryan-Persian or Dravidian-Persian would be controversial. The upending of a carefully manicured narrative could cause political upheaval, bringing discomfort or triumph to different communities.” Jayewardene frames her argument as going against the Aryan-centric – and, necessarily, Vijayan-centric and Sinhala-Buddhist-centric – understanding of Sri Lankan history. This argument, by extension, also challenges the Sinhala-Buddhist state-building project that has so profoundly shaped modern Sri Lanka, a project founded upon an Aryan supremacist discourse.
Yet Jayewardene’s work is still tangibly nationalist. She has a great deal of admiration for the military prowess not only of Ravan but also of later Sri Lankan kings such as Dutugamunu, who has been assigned a place of great significance in the Sinhala Buddhist nationalist consciousness. In The Line of Lanka, Jayewardene shows unrestrained admiration for Dutugamunu and fails to acknowledge his racialised reception in contemporary Sinhala Buddhist nationalist discourse. She writes, “Two thousand years ago, on the sweeping eastern slopes, beneath the shaggy brows of the Badulla hills King Dutugemunu marched with his invincible army on the historic Kalugal Bemma road.” Jayewardene also writes with great zest about the road that Dutugamunu and his army supposedly paved on their way to Rajarata, then the stronghold of the Dravidian ruler Elara: “This military road was paved as the great Sinhala army advanced to reclaim the Kingdom of Rajarata from the invasion of South Indian Soli.” She depicts Ravan as a capable military ruler whose defeat by Ram in large measure owed to betrayal by his brother Vibishana, who communicated military secrets to Ram’s army.
In Ravana’s Lanka, however, Jayewardene is quick to distance her work from the Sinhala chauvinist appropriation of Ravan. She acknowledges that, since the end of the Sri Lankan Civil War in 2009, certain “racially biased” groups have claimed Ravan as one of their own. She goes on to add, “with untidy knots of supernatural powers and science fiction, these racist groups have also begun to embrace Ravana as a Sinhalese hero; this is despite the understanding that the Yakas preceded the emergence of the Sinhalese race.” Jayewardene cogently argues in Ravana’s Lanka that Ravan was a Shaivite, establishing her work as antithetical to the Sinhala Buddhist appropriation of Ravan.
Another aspect in which Jayewardene’s work is broadly nationalist, despite the distancing from Sinhala Buddhist nationalism, is in its tangible utopianism and romantic yearning for a bygone epoch. Nationalism is in many ways a romantic project, which, as critics like Partha Chatterjee and Homi K Bhabha have pointed out, is both forward-looking and backward-looking at the same time. In the Sinhala Buddhist nationalist consciousness, the Anuradhapura Kingdom of over a millennium ago was the utopia that the nation must return to, by going forward. While Jayewardene expresses a great deal of admiration for the Anuradhapura period, the pre-Vijayan and pre-Aryan Ravan period for her represents a greater golden age.
Jayewardene describes how visitors from afar discover Sri Lanka today: a diminished and degraded version of a great nation of yore, “beset by woes of recovery from a protracted civil war, deficient socialist experiments and corrupt politicians.” Today, the world encounters “an island people bearing the post-colonial burdens of dismantled traditions and alien systems of governance; a struggling state, striving to reach beyond mediocrity, for the memory of the nation it once was.”
Similarly, the idea that Sri Lanka is a lost paradise is pervasive in Sri Lankan writing in English, and even in the work and thought of figures such as the renowned architect Geoffrey Bawa. This same idea of Sri Lanka as a lost paradise – perhaps even the Lost Paradise – is also very much present in Jayewardene’s thinking. In The Line of Lanka, she essentially claims that Sri Lanka was the centre of the ancient world, with the sacred mountain Adam’s Peak standing at the “0-0” intersection of longitudes and latitudes. Returning to the idea of the “line of Lanka”, she describes Adam’s Peak as “a peak that was close to Paradise–Heaven, the abode of Higher Beings.” Much of the mythology of Sri Lanka as a lost paradise is undoubtedly centred around Adam’s Peak, which is worshipped by followers of multiple religions. The scientifically established fact that the lowest-gravity point on earth is to be found in Sri Lanka is also presented as lending credence to the lost-paradise mythos.
This thinking, and much of Jayewardene’s writing, is deeply speculative rather than based on verifiable fact. Yet the utopian yearning for a lost golden age, even if rooted in sentimentality, can still resonate with the many Sri Lankans who are deeply frustrated with the current state of their country. It could be said – as the historian William Dalrymple does say in a mealy-mouthed blurb excerpted on the cover of Ravana’s Lanka – that Jayewardene’s books provide even the most sceptical reader something to ponder.
At their best, Jayewardene’s books are good travelogues for those interested in Sri Lankan history, art and architecture in general, and not just Ravan in particular. The scope of her work is wide, and she often goes beyond the well-known to uncover the obscure – like the Mesolithic burial grounds in Wilpattu or the Sufi mystic of Batticaloa. To that extent, Jayewardene has succeeded.
source : himalmag