Sinhala Consciousness

SINHALA CONSCIOUSNESS IN THE KANDYAN PERIOD, 1590s TO 1815

Michael Roberts

Colombo: Vijitha Yapa Publications, 2004-03-31

270 pages A 4 size, with 31 Images, 7 Maps and 4 Charts hardback = ISBN 955-8095-53-2 paperback = ISBN 955-8095-1-1

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CONTENTS

FOREWORD by Christopher Bayly v

AUTHOR’S PREFACE ix

Acknowledgments xi List of Appendices xiii List of Charts xiii List of Maps xiii List of Plates xiv Nomenclature xvi Diacritica & Transliteration xviii Capitalisation xviii Abbreviations xix Glossary xx chap

ONE Introduction: Sinhala Identity in Time and Place 1 TWO Modes of Communication, Orality and Poetry in the Middle Period 19 THREE The Kingdom of Kandy as a Sinhala State 39 FOUR Trisinhala or Sinhalē writ large 55 FIVE Centre and Periphery with Mahāvasala as Centre 72 SIX Sinhalē, Sinhala Consciousness and the British, 1795-1818 89 SEVEN The War Poems and Sinhala Consciousness in Sinhalē 114 EIGHT Associational Logic and Popular Culture in Sinhalē 138 NINE Looking Back, Looking Forward 148

APPENDICES NOTES on Chapters REFERENCES INDEX MAPS

PLATES

PLATE 1 An ambalama PLATE 2 Panāvitiya ambalama PLATE 3 Māngamuva ambalama PLATE 4 Vilant’s sketches of Kandyan drums, drummers and persons PLATE 5 Kandyan musical instruments PLATE 6 Dutugämunu d slays Elāra: a temple mural PLATE 7 Jeronimo de Azavedo PLATE 8 Pinhao and Ratnayake Mudiyansē PLATE 9 Rājasinha II of Kandy PLATE 10 General Hulft’s däkuma before the King of Sinhalē, 1636 PLATE 11 General Hulft’s procession to Sinhalē, 1636 PLATE 12 Agreen’s embassy to Sinhalē, 1736 PLATE 13 Dutch däkuma before the King of Sinhalē PLATE 14 “Ceremonious audience” for the Ambassadors from the Kandyan court at a Dutch reception in Colombo, 1772 PLATE 15 Vana durga, or the stronghold of jungle PLATE 16 Kīrti Śrī Rājasiñha PLATE 17 Front of the palace at Senkadagala, early 19th century PLATE 18 Lyttleton’s view of the palace, patiruppuva and Nātha Dēvāla PLATE 19 Lyttleton’s view of a perahära and the Daladä Māligāva PLATE 20 Sinhalese man and woman, 1726 PLATE 21 Sinhalese people, 1672 PLATE 22 Pilima Talauvva meets General Macdowall PLATE 23 John D’Oyly with Ähälēpola, Molligoda and Kapuvatta, March 1815 PLATE 24 An Adigār in procession PLATE 25 A Kandyan mohottāla in court dress PLATE 26 A Low Country Mudaliyar PLATE 27 A lower echelon headman, 1810s PLATE 28 A Kandyan chief in a palanquin PLATE 29 Van Dort’s caricature of Kandyan chiefs in the 19th century PLATE 30 Traitors impaled alive in the Kingdom of Sinhalē, 1638 PLATE 31 Seeking retributive vengeance: an aggrieved woman at a shrine LIST of APPENDICES

A. Ähälēpola to D’Oyly, 27 November 1811, in Wilson to Liverpool, 26 Feb. 1812, CO 54/42, pp. 42-51

B. Ähälēpola to D’Oyly, 8 February 1812, in Wilson to Liverpool, 26 Feb. 1812, CO 54/42, pp. 53-55

C. Alleged Letter from Ähälēpola to the Chiefs of Hēwāhäta, 1815

D. Specimen of D’Oyly’s letters to the Kandyan court during the early 19th century: No IX, D’Oyly to [Dumbara], 20 January 1808

E. Facsimile of Printed Page: Letter No. XVI from D’Oyly to [Pilima Talauvve], 21 Sept. 1810

F. Facsimile of Printed Page: Letter No. IV from D’Oyly to [Moratota], 6 May 1806

G. Dolapihilla’s Notes on Sinhalese Musical Instruments FOREWORD

Christopher Bayly Vere Harmforth Professor of Imperial & Naval History, Cambridge University October 2001

Michael Roberts’s study of the origins of Sinhala nationalism represents a major development and elaboration of themes which he has been exploring now for three decades. It also marks an important stage in the growing importance of Sri Lankan historical writing for history and the social sciences more broadly. I will first highlight some of his key themes and then move on to consider them in relation to parallel developments in Asian and European historiographies of ethnicity, nation-building and nationalism. Roberts has now been able fully to substantiate the claim, prefigured in his earlier writings, that a sense of Sinhala consciousness existed in the pre- colonial period and that it was not simply a product of late colonial intervention or a discourse of nationhood merely derivative of forms developed in Western Europe. He has traced the evolution of this identity over the period 1590s-1818, while arguing that the special features of a Theravāda Buddhist Sinhalaness may have existed in an inchoate form even before the fourteenth century. Crucially for his argument, this sense of identity was not simply a dynastic ideology. Instead, it was a popular sentiment, though one which was centred on, and embodied within, the notion of Sinhala Buddhist kingship. Roberts rejects the idea that there was a moral and ideological dichotomy between ordinary people and the ruling and landed elites. For him the idea of Sinhale was a diffused one, spread and maintained among ordinary people by means of the transmission of stories orally, often in poetic compositions. The oral storytelling interlaced with the religious iconography of w temple wall paintings, sculptures, and other artefacts of ritual as well as palm leaf manuscripts. In sum, these tales lauded the potency of the kings, the worth of the land, the bravery of its people and the perfection of its dharma. The tradition was passed on from generation to generation in the form of dramatic and poetic performances and in modes and styles of life and dress. This was an embodied identity, a ‘somatic’ proto-nationalism -- to adopt the words of Joseph Alter,i as well as a state ideology. It was also nurtured with reference to the doings of bad and barbarous ‘others’: non-Buddhists, South Indians (variously called Vaduga or Demala) and European invaders. Roberts successfully challenges the view that the ‘othering’ of non-Sinhalas was a feature of the British colonial period alone, while at the same time recognising that the capacity of the body politic of the ancien regime to assimilate and naturalise people from outside, whether they were ‘Moors’ or Tamils or even Europeans. The famous letters sent by the Sinhala court to the British in 1811 and 1812 which poured defiance on them in the name of the ancient Buddhist land of Sinhala were, therefore, not simply the announcement of Sinhala proto-nationalism. They were also the culmination of a much older process of patriotic identity formation. Since the charge of ‘primordialism’ has often been thrown against historians and social scientists who argue that national identity was anything other than a purely modern construction, it is important to note what Roberts is not arguing. He is too good a historian to argue that this notion of Siñhalē remained unchanged over the three or four hundred years that form the historical focus of the book. The boundaries of this centre-oriented concept were of less moment than its central life-creating capacity. Siñhalē absorbed outsiders and the social groups articulating this notion appear to have formed and reformed over the centuries. People, generation by generation, re-articulated and re-tailored the ideology and the practices surrounding it. Roberts, therefore, is not presenting an essentialising argument such as that promoted by ideologues of the nineteenth century, notably Anagārika Dharmapāla. Nor can his thesis be used to justify or explain today’s inter-ethnic conflict on the island. What Roberts implies is that it will not help to solve contemporary problems by mis-representing the inheritance of the past. Finally, he is careful to avoid the charge that he is some kind of empiricist, searching the past for ‘facts’ that will support his interpretation. For him, historical evidence merely forms possible traces of the past in present life. Interpretation should be a matter of weighing probabilities, not proving contentions with ‘facts.’ Michael Roberts’s approach complements and also develops a new synthesis emerging in history and the social sciences which advances the study of nationalism and ethnic identity beyond current received wisdom. Drawing in part on the work of other Sri Lankan historians, he puts the island in the forefront of the most sophisticated historical literatures on this issue. For thirty of forty years now, ‘modernist’ interpretations of nationalism, associated with writers such as Eric Hobsbawm, Benedict Anderson, Ernest Gellner, or in the Asian field, with Prasenjit Duaraii and Partha Chatterjee,iii have held sway. These authors have tended to argue that pre-colonial and pre-modern social identities were localised, permeable, communitarian, dynasty-centred, ethnically inclusive and class-divided. In this argument, nationalism by, contrast, was the project of modern intellectuals who invented a suitable past for their aspirant peoples. This was possible because certain features of modernity spread and generalised such notions. These included urbanisation, industrialisation, print-capitalism and the global dominance of colonial rule. Modernist social scientists have written with the laudable intention of de-constructing what they saw as the dangerous re-emergent chauvinistic nationalisms and ethnic movements of the post-Soviet era. Arguably, however, these writers swung the tiller so hard against the idea of organic national identity that they obscured many aspects of the past and based their own case for the prosecution on dubious assumptions. There are few historians even now who would doubt that the nineteenth and twentieth centuries saw a broad ‘internationalisation of nationalism’ which hardened and sharpened national identities. But there are increasing numbers of scholars who have come to argue that the nature and form of those nationalisms cannot by understood without taking careful note of the continuing and active agency of pre-colonial identities in making this transition possible. These identities have variously been called ethnicity, ‘ethnies,’ patriotisms and proto- nationalisms. A particularly important recent intervention has been that of the late Adrian Hastings, the African and religious historian, whose The Construction of Nationhoodiv argues from a detailed knowledge of medieval and early modern historiographies against many of the modernist authors cited above, especially Hobsbawm and Anderson. In Hastings’s view, England and later France had fully formed national identities by the later middle ages or the early modern period. Religion, language and popular culture had already spread allegiance to proto-nations beyond the ruling circles to the ‘middling sort of people.’ T.W.C. Blanning v has recently endorsed this view for Germany. Germany remained divided politically until the 1870s, of course, but a powerful and quite violent German nationalism can be found working on and constraining the local courts in seventeenth and eighteenth century. Built around the legend of Arminius or Hermann, freedom-fighter against the ancient Romans, it was transmuted during and after the reformation into a fierce anti-French sentiment. Adrian Hastings shows that even in parts of Africa, amongst the Baganda for instance, pre- colonial popular patriotisms existed which cannot be dismissed as mere ‘tribalism’ or emanations of African military state-building. Mainland Asia, however, provides many interesting and more direct parallels to the European and Sri Lankan historiographical developments. Thant Myint U has now synthesised a nuanced picture of pre-colonial and para- colonial Burmese identity in his The Making of Modern Burma.vi This gives much weight to colonial intervention, but also stresses the importance of religion, legend, language and popular literacy and popular theatrical performances (pwes) in the long-term construction of the notion of Myanmar. David Marr has recently developed his earlier work on Vietnamese identity, conflicted and ambiguous as he always took this to be, to show how the sense of Vietnamese selfhood was modified over time.vii Other recent works which have stressed the changes of the eighteenth century in the southern delta of the country, have spoken of ‘another way of being Vietnamese,’viii rather than refuting Marr’s position. For China, the persuasive work of Prasenjit Duara has been balanced, as it were, by Joanna Whaley-Cohen’s contention that the later Qing emperors themselves built on and exacerbated a sense of territorial nationality which was already powerful amongst their Han Chinese subjects.ix I myself have argued that pre-colonial regional Indian patriotisms need to be taken much more seriously both as an impediment to, and as a matrix for, later Indian nationalisms.x None of these studies have in any way argued that patriotisms or nationalisms are not created in history by people. Nor have they asserted that these identities were in some way evolutionary, naturalistic demiurges. What they have argued is that construction was a long term and complex process, albeit one which was contested, ambiguous and uncertain of outcome. This is a historiography, therefore, which is both critical of the idea of nation and nationalism and also of the ‘modernist’ stance towards the origins of national identity. But it is critical in a constructive sense. It is a great tribute to the historians and social scientists of Sri Lanka that they have made such a powerful and sophisticated contribution to this debate. The publication of this book will surely bring their findings and their arguments to a wider international public. i Joseph Alter, The Wrestler’s Body. Identity and ideology in north India, Berkeley, 1992. ii Prasenjit Duara, Rescuing History from the Nation. Questioning narratives of modern China, Chicago, 1995. iii Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and its Fragments. Colonial and postcolonial histories, Princeton, 1993. iv Adrian Hastings, The Construction of Nationhood. Ethnicity, religion and nationalism, Cambridge, 1997. v T.C.W. Blanning (ed.), ‘Introduction’, in The Eighteenth Century. Europe 1688-1815, Oxford, 2000. vi Thant Myint U, The Making of Modern Burma, Cambridge, 2000. vii David Marr, ‘Individual and self in Vietnam’, Modern Asian Studies, 34, 4, 2000, 769-96. viii Li Tana, Nguyen Cochinchina. South Vietnam in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth centuries, Cornell, 1998. ix Joanna Whaley-Cohen, ‘Commemoration and War in Eighteenth Century China’, Modern Asian Studies, 1996, 30: 669-99. x C. A. Bayly, The Origins of Nationality in South Asia. Patriotism and ethical government in the making of modern India, New Delhi, 1998.