The History of Sri Lanka

By: The Ceylon Press
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  • Summary

  • In 100 pint-sized chapters, The Ceylon Press History of Sri Lanka, makes accessible an engaging account of an island renowned for a history many times larger and more byzantine than that of far bigger nations. From prehistory to the present day, each short chapter makes lucid a period of the island’s history, telling the intricate story of its rulers, people, and progression.
    The Ceylon Press
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Social Sciences Travel Writing & Commentary World
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Episodes
  • Last Chance Saloon: The Ceylon Press History of Sri Lanka 13

    Last Chance Saloon: The Ceylon Press History of Sri Lanka 13
    Nov 25 2024
    The Ceylon Press History of Sri Lanka 13Last Chance SalonSri Lanka & The Fourth Invasion“How fine you look when dressed in rage. Your enemies are fortunate your condition is not permanent. You’re lucky, too. Red eyes suit so few.”Alice's Adventures in WonderlandLewis Carroll1865.Tough LoveIt is unnecessary to employ the mind reading capabilities of Descartes or The Amazing Kreskin to discern how Sri Lanka might have reacted to Gotabhaya taking the throne in 253 CE.After decades of Lambakarna kings, many eagerly pious, ruling with unremitting incompetence, Gotabhaya was nothing less than a shock. After all, he had been one of the very same three plotters who drove the kingdom into yet another civil war just years earlier, apparently as unaccountable to good governance as any of the many earlier Lambakarna kings who ruled as if they were celestially charged to gambol their through reigns like ancient Ves dancers, leaving lakes of regicidal blood in the wake of their inopportune administration.It was as if some brooding and machismo junior army officer had upended his own army, bending generals, kings and sleek courtiers to the austere new realities of a victorious coup in the style of Jerry Rawlings, or Gamal Abdel Nasser. Comparing notes with either of them would have given Gotabhaya all the validation he required. Not that he was the sort to seek approval.Competent dictators have their moment in the sun too; and the time was more than ripe for the arrival of Gotabhaya. His very name is still used in the country to suggest authority, command, control. Army bases, naval ships, even an ex-president who strove with little success to aspire to his reputation – all bear the name of this stern Lambakarna king. What he lacked in charm, charity, and religious tolerance, Gotabhaya made up for with the sort of firm government that took the fizz out of regicide.And so, in around 253 or 254 CE, Gotabhaya grabbed the throne and for fourteen years ruled Sri Lanka with the proverbial rod of iron. A man of deeply conservative religious beliefs, he was unimpressed by the Vajrayana movement, a form of tantric Buddhism that was making slim but noticeable appearances into his kingdom. The movement was closely aligned with Mahayana Buddhism and seen by many as incompatible with the Theravada Buddhism that had been practiced on the island since the 3rd century BCE. The king did all he could to thwart it, even banishing sixty monks for such beliefs.But what he kept out with one door slammed shut, he inadvertently let in with another. For he entrusted his sons’ education to an Indian monk named Sanghamitta, a closet follower of Vaitulya Buddhism. The Vaitulya doctrinal strand was even more radical than the Vajrayana doctrine that Gotabhaya was so busy trying to eradicate. Like a time bomb, the impact of this private religious education on his successor, was timed to go off the moment this alarming and archaic old king died.His death, in 267 CE, left behind a most divided country. Several ministers, blithefully (and, as it turned out, suicidally) bold, refused to participate in his funeral rites. His son and heir, Jetta Tissa I, a chip off the monstrous old block, had dozens of them rounded up, staking their impaled heads in a mournful circle around the old king’s body, a pitiless and iconic pageant of power that has haunted the island through the centuries, its most recent appearance being during the brutal JVP uprising in 1971 and 1987 when anxious neighbours calling on nearby villages might find such similar circles of horror.Even so there is a time when a country needs tough love; or even just tough everything, and Gotabhaya’s son sought, with creditable success, to assiduously out-tough his terrifying old father. This display of strong-armed governance under yet another king was probably what was most needed to help keep at bay the lurking regicidal and anarchic tendencies inherent in the dynasty. Jetta Tissa’s decade long rule is unlike to have been an easy ride for those around him. Indeed, states The Mahavamsa Chronicle “he came by the surname: the Cruel”. It then elaborates with dismay the steps he took to move patronage and resource from the orbit of Theravāda Buddhism to Vaitulya Buddhism.Quelling the BabbleFrom the perspective of the majority Theravada Buddhists, life manged to take a further turn for the worse when Mahasen, the king’s brother, took the throne in 277 CE, a succession notable for being natural. Like his brother, Mahasen had been educated by the radical monk Sanghamitta.A twenty-seven-year reign lay ahead of the new king, who got off to a good start commissioning what would include sixteen massive reservoirs (the largest covering an area of nearly twenty square kilometres) and two big irrigation canals. But this did little to defray the resentment his pro-Mahayana religious policies caused, which prompted a wave of further insurrections opposing his own ...
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    3 mins
  • A Murder of Kings: The Ceylon Press History of Sri Lanka 12

    A Murder of Kings: The Ceylon Press History of Sri Lanka 12
    Oct 5 2023
    The Ceylon Press History of Sri Lanka 12 A Murder of KingsSri Lanka & The Time of Ruin “We are all victims in-waiting.” Rumours of Disaster Two periods of state-sponsored homicidal self-indulgence were now to grip the kingdom. The first killings broke out in 195 CE; and the second in 248 CE. Both were leavened by brief moments of stability that managed, with seconds to spare, to prevent the country from collapsing altogether; and give it a modest but life affirming breathing space. Such pirouetting on political tightropes was hardly a novelty. The Vijayans, the previous dynasty, had indulged in much the same – fuelling at least four periods of regicide covering several decades and prompting at least two civil wars over six hundred plus years of dynastic reign. To this now the Lambakannas added these two more, bringing the total number of regicide bacchanalia to at least six since Prince Vijaya had first stepped foot on the island back in 543 BCE. It is doubtful whether any other contemporary kingdom on the planet showed such record-breaking prowess. Few, if any, that came later would have dynasties that possessed such a full set of dark skills as to trump this dubious achievement. This particular lethal phase was, in retrospect, modest by the standards of what was to follow. But this is not to detract from its disruptive consequences, nor its mystery. Over a two-year period three kings were to occupy the throne in a succession swifter even than a Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers foxtrot. On Kanittha Tissa’s death in 193 CE, his son, Cula Naga assumed power, only to be assassinated by his brother Kuda Naga in 195 CE. Kuda Naga was then despatched to the uncertain fields of reincarnation when his own brother-in-law, Siri Naga I had him killed in 195 CE. The only hint to help explain what might have promoted all this, mere family politics aside, is a famine mentioned in The Mahavamsa: “so small a quantity of food were the people reduced in that famine,” it notes, referring to the brief reign of Kuda Naga, when, it said “the king maintained without interruption a great almsgiving”. Famine is no friend of political stability and if it was the cause behind Cula Naga’s murder, the later food banks set up by his brother Kuda Naga were insufficient to calm the situation. Lost Clues There is nothing in terms of corroborating archaeological evidence to help us understand this dismal and murky period of national madness - though such evidence, for other periods, does exist. Stone inscriptions, for example, carry an unusually high degree of importance in Sri Lanka where the climate is preconditioned to quickly destroy any organic material used to record events. And, unlike other sources, they have better weathered the repeated theft and destruction carried out on the country by its many occupiers - be they Tamil or European. But of the four thousand stone inscriptions discovered in Sri Lanka, only one and a half thousand have been properly recorded and preserved. Written in Sinhala, Tamil, Brahmi, Pali – and even Chinese, Arabic, Persian, and Sanskrit, they most typically record donations made to temples, the rules around the maintenance of religious places, the establishment of tanks and how local officials should administer water resources. But so far none of them are of any help in understanding this particular period of Sri Lankan history. This may change as many more inscriptions indubitably await discovery. In 2023 for example, the largest stone inscription ever found on the island was uncovered in Polonnaruwa, measuring forty-five feet in length and eighteen feet in height. But none found and deciphered so far helps us with this period as the second century CE slipped, blood drenched, into the third. Buildings tell the story of the times; but no buildings or even repairs of any significance can be dated to this precise period. Coins also help validate the historical record; and some of the island’s coins date back to the third century BCE. Their symbols, dates, the metal they are made from, the craftsmanship and place where they were found – all tell their own stories but very few date from this very early period of Sri Lankan history. And those that do exist suffer from poor cataloguing and storage - and a great deal of theft, including a record heist involving over one thousand silver punch marked coins dating back two thousand years held in the custody of the Archaeology Department; and of which now only sixteen coins remain. Pottery is also an important voice in the historical record. Many shards of marked pottery have been excavated, most engraved with but two or three characters. But the joined-up study of ceramic inscriptions is a journey that has yet to be fully undertaken by academics – despite the fact that the first and earliest example of such artefacts in the whole of South Asia was found in Sri Lanka on a pottery shard dating...
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    11 mins
  • The Guardians: The Ceylon Press History of Sri Lanka 11

    The Guardians: The Ceylon Press History of Sri Lanka 11
    Oct 5 2023
    The Ceylon Press History of Sri Lanka 11 The GuardiansSri Lanka & The Golden Revolution The Grandest of Guards In 1929, as Wall Street crashed and the roaring twenties came to an abrupt end, archaeologists digging in faraway Trincomalee uncovered the remains of a once-lofty temple, built a stone’s throw from the Indian Ocean, sometime after 307 CE. Beneath earth, trees, and jungle, stretching out to the shores of a great lake, the Velgam Vehera’s many scattered ruins were brought back to sight for the first time in centuries: brick stupas, stone inscriptions, balustrades, buildings, moon stones – and mura gals. These mura gals – or guard stones – are especially moving, standing in silent upright pose, guardians of the flights of steps that had led a multitude of forgotten people out of the everyday and into the sacred temple itself. The steps they protect have worn down to just a few flights, the moonstone they encompass is almost entirely rubbed away; the temple beyond is now just an outline of ancient bricks, and the guard stones themselves are plain, almost stumpy, but still doing their ageless job as sentinels of the site. Similar guard stones stand in many other parts of the island, easy to see if you know what you are looking for, silent guardians of the state within. For to be a guardian is no little thing. Guardian is an emotive word in Sri Lanka. It can be found incorporated by health and education providers, insurance companies, the army, the priesthood, the home guard, air force, a news website, hotel and even a wedding business. But long ago it was also the meaning given to the Lambakarnas, the dynasty that succeeded the founding Vijayan dynasty. Originating possibly in India, it is likely that the Lambakarnas claimed descent from Sumitta - a prince who formed part of the escort that had brought the Bodhi-tree from India in 250 CE. From this botanical pilgrimage, they would go on to become one of the island’s great barons, alongside other such families as Moriyan, Taracchas and Balibhojak. Their power derived from their position as hereditary guardians or secretaries to the king. They took a prominent part in religious ceremonies. But there was more to them than merely carrying coronation parasols and flags. They were connected to the military, to weapon manufacture and, as writers, must have been involved in much of the critical administration of the kingdom. They managed the transition from one of several aristocratic families to ruling family with what, at first, appeared to be consummate ease. After the ruinous excesses of the last Vijayan kings, this new replacement dynasty seemed to grip the one fundamental axiom of kingship: govern well, live long. They were to rule all or much of the island (depending on the period) over two distinct periods. The first of these was to last for 369 years through the reigns of 26 monarchs, from 67 CE to 436 CE. Death of The Doppelganger For a terrible period of time, amounting to just over half the length of the Vijayans, the Lambakarna monarchs twice faced utter ruin. The first time ruin stared them in the face, they managed to draw back from the regicide and power implosions that rocked them to regain their savoir faire. But the second outbreak propelled them inexorably to their destruction, leaving the state weak, distracted, and unable to fend off an invasion of the island from the Pandyan dynasty of South India, the fourth such invasion for Tamil India that Sri Lanka suffered. Just under half the Lambakarna monarchs were to die at the hands of their successors, victims to a predilection for assassination that ran like a malign monomeric thread through their DNA. Even so, the nation they left behind was bigger, richer, more complex, developed and built out than it had been on its inheritance by them back in 67 CE. Stupas, monasteries, reservoirs, canals, temples, and dwellings filled out the land. The mores of society progressed. Agriculture flourished and technical advances from construction through to medicine bestowed its benefits on the kingdom. In particular the advances they made in water technology to build dramatically larger reservoirs, enabled the state to exponentially increase its agriculture and, through that, raise state revenues to support increased urbanisation and further infrastructure capital developments. Despite its palace coups, the state was strong enough to weather repeated religious schisms, as well as succession crises; and – ultimately – its sixteen-year occupation by Tamil kings, enabling the country to bounce back, albeit this time under yet another new dynasty. Overcaution, on behalf of the last (albeit fraudulent) Vijayan king, Subharaja, propelled the new Lambakarna dynasty and its first king to the throne. The soothsayers had been busy whispering appalling forecasts into his ear, foretelling of his certain destiny with death at the hands of someone called Vasabha. ...
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    6 mins

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Profile Image for gia s

Keep up the good work!

I enjoyed your sense of humor, smooth voice, and nice accent. As an American in Sri Lanka right now, I enjoyed picturing the places and history that I am learning about here. Also to have so many funny cultural references that I understand was fun. Thanks so much for your work and I hope you keep making podcasts.

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