by Rajan Philips
(A modified version of a Review Article originally published in the Sri Lanka Journal of the Humanities, University of Peradeniya)
Having lived my life in equal parts in Sri Lanka and Canada, I have often modified the remark by a former Canadian Prime Minister, McKenzie King, that Canada “has too much geography and too little history”, to describe Sri Lanka’s never ending predicament: too much history, too little geography.
Ruwanweliseya (2nd century BCE), Anuradhapura: The oldest brick stupa in the world-pic: dailynews.lk
Much of this old history has been abused as political instruments over the last seventy years to essentialize and perpetuate the ethnic divisions in the country. A concerted counter to tendentious historicizing began with the 1979 seminar on the “Nationality Problems in Sri Lanka” organized by the Social Scientists’ Association. Since then several scholars and commentators have joined the debate to provide well substantiated alternative accounts of our past and challenge the mythopoeic creations and essentialist renderings that have for so long poisoned our politics.
Rajarajesvaram, Thanjavur: The oldest granite edifice now in its millennium year-Pic courtesy of The Hindu
K. Indrapala’s book (The Evolution of An Ethnic Identity: The Tamils in Sri Lanka C. 300 BCE to C. 1200 CE) is set in the same critical and positively revisionistic genre and, while primarily tracing the evolution of the Tamil ethnic identity in Sri Lanka, it provides a comprehensive account of the pre-modern phases in the evolution of Sri Lanka’s modern ethnic coexistences. The book captures “the complex interplay of cultures, languages and religions” over 1500 years based on a comprehensive and critical review of all available sources in archaeology, epigraphy, chronicles and literary texts.
The two-part book on Buddhism among Tamils (Buddhism Among Tamils in Pre-Colonial Tamilakam and Ilam) edited by Peter Schalk and A. Velupillai, with contributions from Sri Lankan and South Indian scholars (R. Nagaswamy, S. Pathmanathan, D. Dayalan), is a mixed bag of painstaking scholarship, exegetic interpretations and idiosyncratic commentaries.
While Indrapala attempts to extricate our ancient past from the quagmires of the present, Schalk’s commentaries unabashedly link the two in a seamless wrap that is also more polemical than analytical or reflective. The book labours the question why Buddhism historically has been nothing more than a minor religion or a minority religion in Tamil societies. Inexplicably and regrettably, the book takes an exclusively longitudinal approach, mixing past and present, rather than taking a more cross-sectional and comparative approach and asking the complementary question, why did Buddhism fail to flourish in almost all Indian societies? The more pertinent questions to my purpose are: how did Sri Lanka become the most abiding home for Buddhism throughout its history, and why did not Buddhism become Sri Lanka’s only religion in the pre-colonial era? These questions are not the main focus of Indrapala’s pursuit but they are important parts of the evolutionary history that he ends up weaving.
Neither the Sinhalese nor the Tamils arrived in their current habitats “pre-mixed, pre-cooked and pre-packaged”, as Indrapala reminds us drawing on British historian Norman Davies’s dismissal of similar renderings of the arrival of the English people in 5th century Britain. Those who now speak Sinhalese in Sri Lanka and those who speak Tamil in Sri Lanka and Tamil Nadu have been drawn from different ethnic stocks throughout their histories. Also contributing to these population pools were the ancestors of the present Keralas, Kannadas and Telugus of South India. Malay, Arabic and European elements would be added later.
There is nothing new about ethnicity, but as Indarapala emphasizes at the outset of the book, one has to differentiate between archaic ethnicity and modern ethnicity. One has to equally differentiate between ethnic consciousness and identity in the ancient world and what we encounter in our time. There is no connection at all between them, especially in regard to politics, and whatever connection that is claimed is claimed from the present to the past and not bequeathed from the past to the present.
The common SISL stock
Indrapala sets the geographical context for Sri Lanka’s evolution in what he calls the South India-Sri Lanka (SISL) cultural region comprising Sri Lanka, the present states of Tamil Nadu and Kerala and the southern parts of Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka. It is in this setting that the explanatory variables of population, language and religion began the evolutionary process that would eventually bring Sri Lanka to its current configuration. The material base that sustained this process was itself an evolving predicator, and one that was intimately shared by the emerging societies of the entire SISL region. The main stages in the development of this base are well established – beginning with the middle stone age (Mesolithic), through the Early Iron Age (EIA) and culminating in what has been called the hydraulic civilization.
Indrapala reiterates like others before him, including Senarat Paranavitana, that the main population source of the island was its original, Mesolithic inhabitants and not any massive population movement from elsewhere. He suggests that there is evidence of the Mesolithic peoples using different languages in the early phases. He notes the generally agreed beginning of the Tamil language before the Common (or Christian) Era (BCE) based on classical Tamil literature and contemporary inscriptions. The Sinhala language would emerge later in the Common Era, not from an immigrant population of Sinhala speakers but through a process of ‘language replacement’ involving transformation of one of the indigenous languages (presumably Elu) following its exposure to North Indian languages, Prakrit and Pali, as well as Tamil and even Munda, the Austroasiatic language from the Southeast Asian region. The emergence of the Malayalam, Kannada and Telugu languages in the SISL region went through a similar process.
Trade provided the primary avenue of contact between the SISL region and the outside world – northern India, Southeast Asia, West Asia and parts of old Europe. It was trade that brought in the Prakrit-speaking traders from the western and eastern costs of northern India and set in motion the process of language replacement. Prakrit was the first “lingua franca of South Asian trade”, just as Tamil would become a key mode of communication for trade involving the SISL region in later centuries, during the Pallava and Cola periods. There were also copious contributions from the religious and the learned languages of the times, Pali and Sanskrit. The evolution of languages in the early stages would appear to have been a syncretic process rather than a competitive one, and there was no rivalry between speakers of different languages on the basis of what they spoke. Indrapala recalls the earlier observation made by Leslie Gunawardana that it would have taken a long time before all speakers of a language were subjectively and objectively considered to belong to a group. This was no different from the evolution of linguistic identities in other societies. The use of language as a tool of divisive and violent nationalisms is a product of modernity.
Religion, and not language, proved to be the more potent agent of social organization, mobilization as well as differentiation. The evolution of religious societies in the SISL region went through several phases. There were pre-Vedic cults and rituals prevailing among the people. Commentators on classical Tamil literature have alluded to the secular nature of the Sangam poems, but this was followed by what Indrapala describes as the “silent penetration of the Vedic religion” from North India for about seven to eight centuries. Schalk opines that the bardic culture of the Sangam period that gave rise to Tamil heroic poetry composed in praise of martial chieftains blended well with the Vedic religious practices but was not amenable to the counter-ethos of Buddhism.
Buddhism in Sri Lanka, Saivam in Tamil Nadu
The most powerful impetus for a new religion was royal conversion. As with Asoka’s conversion to Buddhism before the Common Era and the conversion of Constantine to Christianity centuries later, the spread of Buddhism in Sri Lanka and that of Saivism in South India started off with respective royal conversions. In the third century BCE, Emperor Asoka sent his son Mahinda on a mission of conversion to Sri Lanka, who found his prize catch in Devanampiya Tissa the king of Anuradhapura. Tissa was the son of Muta Siva whose name, suggests Indrapala, implies the prevalence of Siva worship at that time. Velupillai asserts that the Mahinda’s mission was to include not only Sri Lanka but also Tamil Nadu, although there were no royal conversions to Buddhism in Tamil Nadu but to Jainism in the later Pandya and Pallava kingdoms. These kings were reconverted to Saivism in the sixth century CE that marked the beginning of the bhakti movement and the populist revival of Saivism in Tamil Nadu with spill over into Sri Lanka. The bhakti movement (6th-8th centuries CE) effectively ended the possibility of Buddhism and Jainism surviving as strong religions in Tamil Nadu.
While royal patronage might have been a necessary condition for a successful beginning or revival of a religion, it was not enough to ensure its continuing survival and growth. The social bases for Buddhism and Saivism in Sri Lanka and Tamil Nadu were provided by the agrarian economy and the hydraulic civilization that sustained it. What has been described by P. Ragupathy as ‘hydraulic Buddhism’ in relation to the Sinhalese society could be extended as ‘hydraulic Saivism’ to Tamil Nadu. Indrapala cites two notable commentators in Sri Lanka and Tamil Nadu, Sudarshan Seneviratne and R. Champakalakshmi, respectively, who describe essentially the same ingredients of socio-religious organization in both contexts.
Even though Buddhism did not become a major religion or a majority religion in Tamil Nadu, Tamil Buddhism enjoyed a status of some prominence in the overall Buddhist world including Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia. The specific social bases for Buddhism in Tamil Nadu during the pre-Pallava, Pallava periods, and later under the Cola rule even after the bhakti movement were mostly among urban elites and mercantile communities. Ragupathy has described this phenomenon as ‘mercantile Buddhism’ among the Tamils. Tamil Nadu was also home to some well known Buddhist monasteries and scholar monks who were prominently associated with both the Theravada and Mahayana schools. The monasteries and the mercantile community provided the resources and the conduits for Buddhist missions emanating from South India and reaching not only the Tamil speaking parts of Sri Lanka but also Southeast Asian countries like Thailand and Vietnam.
The urban social base and the mercantile classes by themselves would appear to have been inadequate to sustain Buddhism as a socially viable religion in South India. The monastic structure of Buddhism made it difficult for it to compete against a socially established religion like Hinduism not just in Tamil Nadu but everywhere else in India. Peter Schalk suggests that the apparent insistence by Buddhist monks on the use of Pali rather than Tamil as the medium of religious rites was a factor inhibiting the acceptance of Buddhism in Tamil Nadu. Even so, Seethalai Sathanar’s Manimekalai, one of the five great Tamil epics assigned to the 2nd century CE, espousing Buddhist doctrines and teachings, is evidence that Buddhist thought had found resonance in Tamil literature at the highest level long before the bhakti movement. According to Velupillai, the influence of Buddhist teachings is also evident in the copious hymns sung by the Nayanars (Saiva Saints) of the bhakti movement, notwithstanding their acrimonious disputations against the Buddhist religion.
What neither book suggests outright but provides enough grounds for others to postulate is that the competitive interests of the Brahman forces vis-à-vis the Buddhist monastic establishments would have been a formidable impetus for the bhakti movement and Saiva revivalism. The establishment of brahmadeyas, or Brahmana settlements, was an integral feature of hydraulic Saivism. Indrapala points out that “gifts of land by kings and their officers to temples and Brahmans” had become a common practice in all of South Asia after the 6th century. While this practice had been in vogue among local Tamil chieftains, the Pallavas raised it to a higher level as part of royal Sanskritization aimed at achieving dynastic validation among the subjects.
Indrapala uses the sociological concept of Sanskritization, developed by M.N. Srinivas in relation to social mobility involving lower castes who adopt Sanskritic names and rituals to claim a higher social status usually following political or economic advancements, to describe “the process by which north Indian influences spread in South India, Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia”. He justifies it as a neutral term indicating linguistic and cultural influences in preference to the more commonly used terms such as Aryanaization, Indianization and Hinduization with their corresponding racial, colonial and religious overtones. The various ‘origin legends’ (for e.g., the Agastya and the Vijaya legends) among the Tamils and Sinhalese are also presented as part of the Sanskritization process.
The Pandyas and Colas emulated these practices, with the latter extending it to Sri Lanka in the 11th century. The practice was also common among the Sinhalese rulers in the island. My point is that the Brahman forces in Tamil Nadu would have been threatened by the spread of Buddhism and the competition for patronage and land by Buddhist monasteries and that could have been among the more worldly factors behind the bhakti movement. At least, this is a more plausible line to pursue than the rather simplistic assertion by Schalk that Buddhism ran into suspicion in Tamil Nadu because it was associated with the enemy kingdom in Sri Lanka.
The circumstances in Sri Lanka were contingently different and clearly conducive for Buddhism to socially sink roots and flourish. The royal conversion facilitated the blending of Buddhism with pre-existing rituals and practices. The growth of a new religion and the emergence of a new language might have reinforced one another. More importantly, Buddhism became an integral part of the Sinhalese agrarian society that has appropriately been symbolized by the ‘robe and the plough’. Like Hinduism in India, Buddhism in Sri Lanka developed a syncretic ethos that allowed its followers to modify, adapt, and continue with pre-existing Hindu rituals and practices at the popular level, while developing its own reputation for orthodoxy and learning centred on the Theravada school. The Buddhist monastic establishment was also well positioned in Sri Lanka to thwart any competition for royal patronage and land from Brahman forces. As it turned out, no such competition materialized and although Buddhism had its difficult moments in Sri Lanka they were mostly the result of political changes and sectarian doctrinal disputes and not the result of proselytization threats from Saivism.
The evolution of identities
In Indrapala’s assessment, by the end of the 12th century the geographical and cultural platforms were by and large set for the emergence of the modern Sinhala Buddhist and Tamil Saiva identities. The once flourishing north-central parts of the island were depopulated and two distinct population settlements began to emerge with Sinhalese mostly in the south-western and Tamils in the north-eastern parts of the country. The main reason for the emergence of this particular configuration rather than any other configuration was the Cola rule over the northern half of the island for over fifty years in the eleventh century.
Inasmuch as the Colas could not extend their domination over the entire island they could not significantly alter the course of evolution of the Sinhalese Buddhist society. Buddhism in Sri Lanka was able to withstand the cultural pressures of Saivism just as the latter had been able to stem the tide of Buddhism in Tamil Nadu. The mutuality of influence between the two religions in the SISL region has been notably acknowledged. What the Cola rule may have prevented was the consolidation of Buddhism as the sole religion in Sri Lanka. In fact, it ensured the endurance of Tamil Saivism in the north-eastern parts of the country. The cultural sustenance of Saivism was reinforced by the arrival of Brahmans, soldiers, traders, artisans and other workers from South India. Although the influx of these social groups has been a common occurrence in the past, their arrivals during the Cola period left a more permanent imprint on the island’s population structure. The system of village administration introduced by the Colas as part of their governance structure remained in place long after the Cola rule had ended.
The point that Indrapala stresses in the end is that the eventual defeat of the Colas by King Vijayabahu was just that – a victory for Vijayabahu and defeat for the Cola ruling house, and nothing more. It was not a confrontation between Sinhalese Buddhists and Tamil Saivites, or between Sri Lanka and South India, as interpreted by Peter Schalk and many others. The armies of both sides were mixed with Sinhalese and Tamil speakers. Even after the expulsion of the Colas, Vijayabahu continued to patronize the Brahmans and Saiva temples just as the Colas had patronized Buddhism during their rule. The Tamil Buddhist and Saiva settlements that had emerged during the Cola rule continued under Vijayabahu and later.
The monarchical confrontations in the pre-modern SISL region were fights involving the ruling houses of Tamil Nadu and Sri Lanka. There were more confrontations between the chieftains of Tamil Nadu than between Sri Lankan and Tamil Nadu chieftains. Indeed, there was collaboration between Sri Lankan ruling houses and the South Indian Pallava and Pandya ruling houses in opposition to the Colas. I am not aware if there was ever an instance when all the South Indian kings ganged up on Sri Lanka. The ruling houses in Tamil Nadu and Sri Lanka were part of an endogamous group as exemplified by the numerous marital alliances struck between them. More importantly, the social and political organizations at that time were not predicated on an identity of interests between the ruling houses and their subjects. The powerful mercantile communities come across as independent and footloose rather than tied down to a territorial identity. In a remarkable observation, Indrapala notes that South Asian overseas traders were independent of their monarchic states whereas Chinese trade was state controlled.
He cites Leslie Gunawardana’s thesis that the term Sinhala, not unlike similar terms likes Moriya, Gupta, Pallava and Cola, initially applied only to the dynasty and the extended families belonging to the dynasty. It excluded the people who did not belong to the dynasty regardless of whether or not they spoke the same language or belonged to the same religion.
In this perspective, the oldest and the most debated monarchical confrontation in Sri Lankan history, between Dutthagamani and Elara, must be seen as nothing more than a monarchical confrontation despite the tendentious interpretations that it has received in modern times. The principal source for these interpretations is the 5th century chronicle Mahavamsa compiled by a monk named Mahanama, but as Indrapala points out extremists on both used have used and abused Mahanama by projecting onto his work present-day political controversies and ignoring the tradition, the context and the purpose behind his unique contribution to Sri Lanka’s historical sources. Indrapala argues that the Mahavamsa rendering of the Dutthagamani-Elara confrontation is a later day interpolation given the extent of its deviation “in style and content” from the rest of the chronicle. Even if one rejects this argument for other historical reasons, there is no excuse for using the chronicle as a contemporary political football.
Indrapala raises the interesting question based on epigraphic and literary evidence whether and how the Sinhalese or Tamils called themselves as a group, as opposed to how they were identified by others as constituting a group. Put another way, the self-expression of consciousness as an ethnic group that has become commonplace after modernity was hard to come by in the pre-modern period. One way of explaining this difference is to recognize the difference between archaic ethnicity and modern ethnicity and their corresponding attributes.
The available sources for determining the evolution of consciousness appear to be limited and it is not clear if Indrapala could have pursued this line more vigorously based on these sources. Such an investigation should go beyond the records of the ruling houses, and although Indrapala deals extensively with inscriptions relating to the mercantile communities, there is much unfilled void in regard to the evolution of the pre-modern social organization. There is hardly any description of the village organization including village assemblies even though, as Indrapala notes, records relating to them along with royal and religious accounts constitute the bulk of the epigraphic records in the SISL region. More significantly and rather inexplicably, the book is silent on the institution of caste. It would be impossible to get a complete picture of the evolution of ethnicity in the SISL region without bringing caste into the frame.
Indrapala draws his evolutionary story to a close at the end of the 12th century. By then, as noted earlier, the platform had been set for the Sinhalese and Tamils to arrive at where they are now. There were also other arrivals – apart from the continuing arrivals from South India who assimilated into the by-now indigenous Sinhalese and Tamil communities, a third community known as the Muslims of Sri Lanka began to evolve with the arrival of Muslim traders. The arrival of the Europeans in the 16th century led to the emergence of Burghers, and Malays came from the Indonesian islands during the Dutch rule. Finally, in the 19th and 20th centuries the British colonial rulers brought in a significant number of Indian Tamils to work the coffee and tea plantations. They are now called the Upcountry Tamils.
These recent arrivals have added to the historically entrenched hybrid nature of the Sri Lankan society. Sri Lanka’s hybridity needs to be celebrated and not questioned or denied. Celebrating hybridity means eschewing essentialism, the notion that the Sinhalese, the Tamils and the Muslims have been present in Sri Lanka from pre-modern times as “pre-mixed, pre-cooked and packaged” groups. Indrapala’s account of the evolution of the ethnic identity of the Tamils, provide evidence to the contrary. Notably, their group evolution occurred not in isolation but in interaction with the evolution of other groups. The interaction between these groups was informed by different circumstances and group characters at different times. It would be wrong to project on our past the controversies of the present. On the contrary, alternative accounts of the past challenging its more established versions, may provide more positive perspectives for dealing with our current predicaments.
