VINOD'S PLACES

Totagamuwa

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View northward along coastline from Seenigama breakwater

Totagamuwa (pronounced 'thot [short 'thought'] -er-gum-oo-were') is the name of an ancient complex of villages just north of Hikkaduwa on the south-western coast of Sri Lanka. It is situated in the Wellaboda Pattu (division) of the Galle District.

Getting there

Totagamuwa is located along the Galle Road. It can be reached via the Kurundugahahetkme exit of the E1 Southern Expressway (via Ambalangoda or via Batapola) or the Baddegama exit (via Aluthwela). It is within easy walking distance of the Telwatte Railway Station. It is also within walking distance of Hikkaduwa.

Map of Totagamuwa

History

The old Totagamuwa village stretched from Madampetota (modern Madampegama) in the the north to Molaputota (modern Totagamuwa) in the south, from the coast in the west to Metiwiltota in the east. In colonial times, hamlets within the village were separated administratively from each other, and the Totagamuwa name was given to the Molaputota hamlet. These hamlets expanded to become villages in their own right, and should more properly be considered urban neighbourhoods.

The modern Totagamuwa area is an extended island surrounded by sea and wetlands; the villages in the area, are (in order of distance from Hikkaduwa):

Totagamuwa (Molaputota)	Telwatte
Kalupe	Melawenna
Werellana	Kahawa
Seenigama	Akurala
Pereliya

In addition, inland beyond the wetland boundary are Weragoda, an important village associated with the Devol cult and Meetiyagoda - the location of the local Police Station and the site of an important source of kaolin clay and of Moonstones.

A noticeable fact about this stretch of coastline is the absence of churches. The area was solidly Buddhist after the departure of the Portuguese; Totagamuwa being the site of a higher ordination ceremony for Buddhist clergy in 1772. It was at the very kernel of the modern Buddhist revival which began in the late 19th century.

In 1953, the Totagamuwa area was one of the epicentres of the unrest leading up to the Great Hartal (general strike), and a focal point of insurrectionary action during the Hartal itself.

What's in a name?

Rose-ringed Parakeet, the symbol of Totagamuwa

'Totagamuwa' is derived from Tota (landing, ford or crossing) and gamuwa (village). It is mentioned in the Culawamsa as Titthagama (Pali for 'landing village'), which says it lay beside a stream known as the Sima Nadi ('Boundary river', probably the modern Molapu Oya river).

There may be a pun in the 15th Century Buddhist Sinhala poetic work the Loweda SangarawaI, which might refer to the village. In the third line of the first stanza, it says the Buddha is

Thith ganandura duralana dinidanan

(The Lord of the day - the sun - who dispels the thick darkness of heresy)

The ancient Sinhala for 'heresy', thith, comes from the Jain Sanskrit word for a 'crossing over', thirtha (which in Sinhala has the same secondary meaning of 'a sacred place'), for which the Pali is thith - having the same root as in thitthagama. The author, Ven Vidagama Maitreiya, a strictly orthodox Theravada monk, had a controversy with Ven Totagamuwe Sri Rahula, a practioner of deity-worship bordering on Mahayanism. The possible pun lies in that the similar-sounding 'Thith gam andura' means 'the darkness of Titthagama/Totagamuwa'.

Incidentally, the phrase Thith ganandura has come down to modern Sinhala idiom as 'thittha kalu' (bitter black) congruent with the English 'pitch dark'.

Tsunami

The Boxing Day Tsunami of 2004 affected the Totagamuwa area badly. Coral mining had depleted the reefs which protected the beaches from erosion, and the tsunami found no barrier in its path as it rushed up to the shore. The massive wave continued about a kilometre inland, destroying entire villages in its path.

Seenigama after the Boxing Day Tsunami

At Pereliya, the tsunami crashed into the Samudra Devi ('Queen of the Sea') train, causing the deadliest railway accident in history, in which over 1700 died.

Tsunami-recked train at Pereliya

Just south of the site of the accident, the Japanese Honganji Tsunami Vihara was built, to commemorate the disaster. There was built a replica of one of the famous Buddha statues from Bamiyan in Afghanistan, blown up by the Taliban government in March 2001.

Replica of Bamiyan Buddha, Honganji Tsunami Vihara

The 16.5 metre (54 ft) statue, gifted by the Higashi Honganji Temple Maintenance Foundation in Kyoto (京都の本願寺維持財団), Japan, stands on a 1.5 metre (5 ft) base, built according to the Japanese Daibutsu tradition. Around the plinth are inscribed the names of the victims of the Pereliya railway tragedy.

Close by, next to the mass grave of the victims, is a memorial to the casualties of this, the worst natural disaster to strike Sri Lanka in recent times.

Seenigama

Totagamuwa, virtually paralysed for months after the cataclysm, finally stirred back to life. Much of the credit for the rejuvenation of the area must go to foreign donors, especially to the international sports personalities who gave of their time and money to help rebuild the village of Seenigama. Much of this work was co-ordinated by the charity Foundation of Goodness. The village has a new cricket oval courtesy of England's Surrey County Cricket Club and a new swimming pool, built by the charity foundation of Canadian rock star Bryan Adams.

Seenigama Oval, with Bryan Adams' pool at the left rear

Seenigama is home to the island shrine of the god Devol, the Devol Devale. The island was originally on land, but it became detached due to heavy erosion of the coastline during the latter half of the 20th century.

The original Devol Devale

There is a parallel shrine on land, where most activities in connection with the cult take place now. However, on the island is the stone boat (on which the god was supposed to have arrived in Seenigama from Puhar on the Cauvery river). Devotees use this boat as a miris gala, (flat grinding stone) which is used to grind away curses made against them their enemies.

Devol Perahera

Every year in August the shrine has its festival, with the main Perahera (religious procession) in the Southern province, and the Devol Maduwa, a night-long ritual with singing, dancing, religious re-enactments and fire-walking. The festivities link Seenigama with the Devol shrine at Weragoda.

Kusumaramaya Vihara, Seenigama

Devol Maduwa ritual

A short way inland from the Seenigama Junction, past the railway station, is the Seenigama Kusumaramaya Vihara. It was to this monastery, on a small hill, that many of Seenigama's villagers fled from the oncoming tsunami.

Totagamuwa Vihara

North of the Tsunami Honganji Vihara, at Telwatte, is the Purana Totagamuwa Raja Maha Vihara (Ancient Totagamuwa Royal Great Monastery), an old Buddhist Monastery. It was once one of the great universities of southern Asia. On the premises are archaeological remains and early modern Buddhist art, including the only statue in Sri Lanka of Ananga, the South Asian Cupid.

Purana Totagamuwa Raja Maha Vihara

Telwatte Sanctuary

The Totagamuwa monastery is in the Telwatte Sanctuary, established as nature reserve in 1938. The sanctuary is home to wild boar, mouse deer, porcupines, parrots, jungle fowl, water birds, reptiles, amphibians and insects. It has an area of 1,425 hectares of both wetland and dry land - the latter mainly being under crops. The tsunami depleted the area of much of its vegetation and, while much of it has grown back, many bird habitats remain depleted. A project has been started to conserve the area.

Wetland, Telwatte Sanctuary

The sanctuary abounds in Rose-ringed parakeets (Psittacula krameri). A famous so-called "messenger poem", the Gira Sandesaya (Parrot Message), recording a message couriered by a parrot from the King in Kotte to Totagamuwe Sri Rahula at the Totagamuwa monastery. For this reason the Rose-ringed parakeet has become the symbol of Totagamuwa and of the sanctuary.
Incidently, the same poem says of the monastery

"Tuni yatiyen hunu paeti lehenun raegena
Situ atiyen pimbae aenga pirimaeda semena
Malagetiyen paen powamin atinatina
Siti paetiyen heranun gen weyi sobana."

"That monastery is adorned with young novice priests picking up tiny squirrels fallen from trees, feeding them with water from leaf-cups while cuddling them and stroking their bodies gently."

So it is fitting that the monastery be included within a nature reserve.

Akurala

Before the Tsunami, Akurala was the symbolic centre of the coral-lime industry. For generations, villagers had mined coral, both from the seabed and from ancient deposits inland. Lime kilns and mine pits dotted the countryside. Cement shops all over Sri Lanka advertised 'Akurala Lime'.

Beach at Akurala

However, the Boxing Day Tsunami filled the in many of the landward lime pits with rubble and corpses. The mining of the seabed for coral stopped immediately, as the causal link between damage to the reef and Tsunami damage was apparent.

Akurala has a small, reef-protected beach where swimming is safe. Unfortunately, the destruction of the reef has made the rest of the beach, all the way to Hikkaduwa, unsafe for swimming,

Totagamuwa Vihara, Telwatte

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Purana Totagamuwa Raja Maha Vihara

At modern Telwatte (pronounced th-el-what-the) on the south-west coast of Sri Lanka, lies an old Buddhist Monastery that was once one of the great universities of southern Asia. It is the Purana Totagamuwa Raja Maha Vihara (Ancient Totagamuwa Royal Great Monastery), and stands at the centre of the ancient village-complex of Totagamuwa (pronounced thot-a-gum-oo-were). On the premises are archaeological remains and early modern Buddhist art, including the only statue in Sri Lanka of Ananga, the South Asian Cupid.

The vihara is the cult centre in lowland regions of the god Natha, for whom there is a shrine as well as a statue in the main image house.

God Natha

Natha is said to be the Bodhisatva Avalokiteshvara and his name means 'no form' and also 'Lord'. He was the guardian god of Sri Lanka and the State. His worship faltered after the collapse of the Kandyan kingdom in 1815.

In addition to its Dutch-period and British period Buddhist art and architecture, the Totagamuwa Vihara has been a significant player in Sri Lanka's lively religious past and is well worth the visit.

Getting there

The Totagamuwa Vihara is located a little inland, off the 91st kilometre post on the Galle Road. It can be reached via the Kurundugahahetkme exit of the Southern Expressway, via Ambalangoda or via Batapola. It is within easy walking distance of the Telwatte Railway Station.

Map of Totagamuwa

The monastery is within easy reach of the many hotels in Hikkaduwa and is also accessible from the Bentota and Ahungalle resort areas.

Ancient roots

The monastery was said to have been founded by the Norman King William the Conqueror’s long-lived Sri Lankan contemporary King Vijayabahu I, who founded the Vijayaba Pirivena (Vijayabahu Buddhist University) on the site in c. 1055-1110. However, it is possible that a monastery had existed on this site much earlier.

Stone inscription from ancient monastery

The ancient chronicle the Culavamsa (Part II) mentions a long pasada (palace) of 20 metres (created by King Vijaya Bahu III (1232-1236 A.D). It was renovated by King Parakrama Bahu VI (1410-1468), as related by the Culawamsa (Tr. Geiger):

In the vihara of Titthagama where the big, long pasada [palace] forty-five cubits in size, erected by the great Vijayabahu, had fallen into decay, King Parakkamabahu himself built a beautiful, long pasada of thirty cubits in size, two storeys high, provided with lofty spires, glorious with bright-hued painting, and assigned it then to the venerable Grand thera Kayasatti who dwelt in the Vijayabahu-parivena. He also granted him a village, called Salaggama, on the banks of the river forming the boundary (of the monastery), making it a possession of the parivena. In fair Titthagama he had a park laid down, provided with five thousand cocopalms.

By way of comparison, the Bible (I Kings 6.2) mentions that the Temple of Jerusalem built by Solomon was sixty cubits long.

The park with its cocopalms represents one of the earliest mentioned coconut plantations in the world - the earliest was possibly that laid out by King Aggabodhi I (5th-6th century AD) near Mannar.

Goddess Tara (British Museum)

In the Kotte era (1410-1597), the Vijayaba Pirivena was one of the most famous universities in the Orient, teaching Sinhala, Tamil, Pali and Sanskrit language and literature as well as Buddhist philosophy. At this time the Vijayaba Pirivena also taught Mahayanic and Tantric practices and dabbled in sorcery and astrology; it instituted the worship of Mahayana-derived deities, such as Natha, Tara, and Vibishana. Reference

Totagamuwe Sri Rahula

The celebrated poet-monk Totagamuwe Sri Rahula (1408-1491) was the chief incumbent during the rule of his paternal uncle King Parakramabahu VI. He was born Wickremasundara Kumara Jayabahu to Prince Jayamahaladana Kumara Wickremabahu (otherwise known as Demeta Kumara - Bushbeech Prince) and the Keerawella Princess Sunethra, in Demetenna in what is now the Kegalle District.

Ven Totagamuwe Sri Rahula, from a stamp issued in 1977

He was the author of some of the most celebrated poetical work of mediæval Sinhala literature, including the Kavya Sekeraya, the Paravi Sandesaya and the Sælalihini Sandesaya. Learned in seven languages, he espoused unorthodox and Mahayanist beliefs, including 'white magic', contending that the central problem of Buddhism, the alleviation of human suffering, required any help it was possible to obtain, including that of deities. He appears to have believed that Natha was his personal deity (ishta devata).

Sri Rahula was involved in a controversy with a contemporary, more orthodox practitioner of Theravada Buddhism, the author of the poetical Buddhist work, the Loweda Sangarawa, Ven. Vidagama Maitreya, who argued that the aid of deities was unnecessary to liberation from suffering, and who hence condemned their cults. This controversy has come down in folk-lore as personal animosity between Sri Rahula and his guru, Maitreya.

In the third line of the first stanza of the Loweda Sangarawa, it says the Buddha is

Thith ganandura duralana dinidanan

(The Lord of the day - the sun - who dispels the thick darkness of heresy)

The ancient Sinhala for 'heresy', thith, comes from the Jain Sanskrit word for a 'crossing over', thirtha (which in Sinhala has the same secondary meaning of 'a sacred place'), for which the Pali is thith - having the same root as in thitthagama. Maitreya may have been indulging in a pun, as 'Thith gam andura' means 'the darkness of Tithagama/Totagamuwa'.

Incidentally, the phrase Thith ganandura has come down to modern Sinhala idiom as 'thittha kalu' (bitter black) congruent with the English 'pitch dark'.

Body of St Francis Xavier

There are many who believe that Sri Rahula gained his knowledge by drinking an overdose of 'Saraswathi' oil (Saraswathi is the goddess of music, arts,culture and knowledge). Hence his body did not decay after death. The Portuguese, it is said, took his body and, substituting it for the body of St Francis Xavier, laid it to rest at the Basilica of Bon Jesu in Goa. There are several variants of this legend, such as this example, including - interestingly - some Roman Catholic ones!

Modern era

In the 16th century, the superstitious Portuguese conquistadors destroyed the monastery and the university, killing many monks in the process. Apparently only several stone inscribed pillars have survived this destruction.

Inscribed stone pillars from the original Vihara

In 1765, the Ven. Wehella Dhammadinna Thera recognised some of the ruins and instructed his pupil Ven. Pallatara Punyasara remain there and resurrect the temple. In 1772 it was the scene of the first ceremony of higher ordination to take place outside the auspices of the Siam sect.

Ven Hikkaduwe Sri Sumangala (right) with US colonel Henry S Olcott

In 1840 the Ven. Hikkaduwe Sri Sumangala, a star of the Buddhist-Christian Panadura debate, the first principal of the Vidyodaya Buddhist College in Colombo and a leading figure in the Buddhist revival, was accepted into the order here - the building at which this occurred still exists.

Buildings and Art

The modern monastery contains the following buildings:

Purana Buduge (Old Image House)

Completed in 1799, this was the original image house built under Ven Punyasara. It lies between the new image house and the dagoba.

Purana Buduge (Old Image House)

The outer passageway surrounding the inner sanctum contains a fresco representation of the Mara Yuddhe (the Mara War, in which the Buddha is assailed by the armies of Death, the Buddhist equivalent of Satan).

Mara Yuddhe (the Mara War)

The inner sanctum contains statues of the Buddha, representing him conventionally in the standing (educative), sitting or Samadhi (meditative) and recumbent or Nirvana (absolute perfection of the process of liberation). The Buddha statues appear to be newer than the older frescoes, probably replacing the originals. The recumbent Buddha is stylistically older (early modern) than the other two, and may merely be a restoration of the original.

Recumbent Buddha from Old Image House

Recently, several of the original Dutch-period frescos in this building, which had later been painted over with newer frescos) have come to light, notably one of the Buddha's two main disciples, the Arahant Moggallana, who is seen worshipping the standing Buddha.

The Arahant Moggallana

There are also several other frescos, notably of the Jataka story which explains the 'hare in the moon', the Oriental equivalent of the 'man in the moon'. Also notable are the fading fresco of god Vishnu and the exquisitely painted ceiling of the inner sanctum.

Aluth Buduge (New Image House)

This building was completed in 1805.

Aluth Buduge (New Image House)

In the outer passage surrounding the inner sanctum are statues of deities, notably the only representation in the island of the God of Love, Ananga.

Ananga, the South Asian Cupid

The deity is clearly identified by his bow his left hand and his arrows made of flowers (surely less harmful than the wood and metal ones apparently used by Cupid), which induce those struck to fall in love, in his right. Also notable is the statue of Natha, of which deity this monastery is a cult centre.

God Natha from the New Image House

Note the two lions rampant acting as supports for the torana (pandal or gateway) in which Natha stands. These are adapted from the lions rampant used by Dutch East India Company (Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie or VOC) and are symbolic of the God's role as guardian of the state. An excellent example of the VOC lions from Galle are here.

Poyage (Ordination House)

Poyage (ordination house)

Built in 1815, this was the building in which Hikkaduwe Sri Sumangala was ordained as a monk.

Natha Devale (Shrine of Natha)

Built in 1780. Because of the decline of the Natha cult, the main deity now shares this with other deities of the modern Quaternity (Sathara Varam Deviyo - gods of the four warrants), Vishnu and Kataragama. A notable absentee is Pattini, who receives obeisance in the Seenigama Devol Shrine.

Natha shrine with newer Vishnu shrine in the background

Vishnu Devale (Shrine of Vishnu)

Completed in 1906. Vishnu is identical with the deity Upulvan, who is said by the ancient chronicle Mahavamsa to have been entrusted with the protection of Buddhism in Sri Lanka by the Buddha Gautama himself.

Dharmasalava (sermon hall)

Completed in 1905, the sermon hall is still used for preaching and the chanting of the scriptures.

Dharmasalawa (Sermon Hall)

There is also a Bodhi (a sacred Bo-tree) planted in 1780.

There are also several more modern buildings, including a museum and a reading room, but mainly residential. The vihara was slightly damaged in the Boxing Day Tsunami of 2004, only the surrounding parapet wall being affected seriously. Reference: ICOMOS report

As one of the first Buddhist monasteries in the low-country areas to be resurrected following the depredations of the Portuguese, and as a repository of the religious art and architecture of the early modern era, the Totagamuwa Vihara should be a greater attraction than it is.

However, hardly any of the guidebooks mention it, despite its proximity to the Hikkaduwa resort area. This is a pity, since its rich heritage should make a visit almost mandatory.

Church of St John dal Bastone

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Church of St John dal Bastone, Pelawatte

The Church of St John dal Bastone (John of the Staff), in Pelawatte, Talangama South, is the only church in the world dedicated to the Sylvestrine hermit. His other cult centre is at St Benedict’s Cloister Church, Fabriano, in Italy.

John of the Staff

Giovanni Bonelli Bottegoni was born on 24 March 1200 in the village of Paterno, Fabriano, in the area of Italy known as the March of Ancona. He was the youngest of the five children of his wealthy farming parents, Bonello and Supela Bottegoni. A studious boy, his parents sent him to study the humanities at the University of Bologna, where he was attracted to religious matters.

He was suddenly afflicted with a purulent abscess on one side of his thigh, which put a stop to his studies in Bologna. He journeyed home on the back of a donkey, which weakened his thigh further. Consequently, he remained lame for the rest of his life, needing a staff to help him walk, for which he was nicknamed Giovanni dal Bastone (‘John of the Staff’).

St John of the Staff, figurine from the crypt, Fabriano

Although unable to continue studying, John had acquired a certain degree of culture. In order to support himself financially, he opened a school in Fabriano. About 1230 he was attracted by the reputation for holiness of the venerable Silvestro Guzzolini of Osimo, later canonised as St Sylvester Gozzolini, the founder of the Sylvestrine eremitic holy order.

St Sylvester Gozzolini

St Sylvester had established a hermitage at Montefano, not far from Fabriano, which followed a modified Benedictine rule. It was here that John went, to be tested by St Sylvester and be received into the holy order. The lifestyle at Montefano was austere, the aim being to minimise material things so that one’s attention was solely on God. John lived the next 60 years reclusively in a cell, observing the greatest poverty and dedicating himself to prayer.

Sylvestrine hermitage, Montefano

Seeing his progress, St Sylvester caused John’s promotion to the priesthood. His advice was sought by his fellow monks, when afflicted by worries or doubts. In 1264 Marsilia, a widow of Attiggio, a village at the foot of Montefano, together with her daughter Sorabona, named John a co-executor of their will, which left modest sums to each of the monks of the order (as well as other religious men and women and the poor of Fabriano). John was named first after St Sylvester in precedence, indicating his importance.

'St John dal Bastone celebrates mass', altar of St Benedict's, Fabriano

At the conclave held after the death of St Sylvester in 1267, John was the person to whom all turned to ensure harmonious relations. He continued to preach and acquired a reputation for great sanctity, becoming the most illustrious of the first generation of followers of St Sylvester.When he was 90 years old, John’s affliction worsened. The Sylvestrine Prior-General, Blessed Bartolo Tebaldi da Cingoli had a vision of a beam of light streaming down the mountain from John’s cell to the monastery at Fabriano. John was taken to Fabriano for treatment and died there on 24 March 1290, saying

'Courage brothers, when I get to heaven I will pray for you. I expect you all there!'

He was laid to rest in the cloister church of St Benedict in Fabriano.

Cloister Church of St Benedict, Fabrian

John was immediately acclaimed a saint by the voice of the people, without any canonical procedure. Venerable Rambotto Vicomanni, the Franciscan Bishop of Camerino, appointed a commission of two canons, aided by two laymen with a notary as their secretary, to collect and verify evidence of the authenticity of his miracles. However, it was not until 29 August 1772, under Pope Clement XIV, that he was beatified.

Cult centres and the Sylvestrines in Sri Lanka

In 1586 a crypt was built at the Cloister church of St Benedict,with its ceiling adorned with scenes from John's life. At the centre of the crypt is John's tomb, holding his relic and the staff that gave him his nickname. It is said that this crypt is in the house that John lived in when he moved to Fabriano; he is said, while living here prior to taking vows, to have prophesied that a church would be built on this spot.

Crypt of St John dal Bastone at the Cloister Church of St Benedict, Fabriano

In 1845, the Sylvestrine monk Fr. Giuseppe Maria Bravi (later the Vicar Apostolic of the southern vicariate of Colombo) had arrived in Sri Lanka under the auspices of Propaganda Fidei, soon to be joined by other missionary confrères. They were the first Benedictines in the island and their foundation in Sri Lanka was the first the Sylvestrines had outside Europe. They were responsible for the establishment of St Anthony's College, Katugastota, in 1854 and St Benedicts College, Colombo in 1863.

One hundred years after John dal Bastone's beatification, on 29 August 1872, the foundation stone was laid for a Church in his name, in the suburb of Pelawatte, in the town of Talangama, just outside Colombo. The Church, completed in 1881, was administered by the Sylvestrines.

Following the consecration of the Church of St John dal Bastone, the Sylvestrines moved from Colombo to the new Diocese of Kandy in 1883. They established St Sylvester's Monte Fano Monastery at Ampitiya, St Benedict's Monastery on the former Villiers' property of Adisham in Haputale and St Sylvester's College, Kandy.

By the turn of the century, Sri Lanka accounted for about 40% of the Sylvestrine congregation. It was from Sri Lanka that Fr Peter Farina, an Italian, went to Sydney in 1949, to begin the Sylvestrine congregation Down Under.

In 1972, Friar Michael Lanza, OFM obtained in 1972 from Archbishop Thomas Cardinal Cooray, the quasi-parish of Talangama and the church was entrusted to his order, of Franciscans and in 1974, a foundation of the Order of Friars Minor was established here. Almost nine years later, the foundation stone for a friary was laid here.

Foundation stone for the re-established OFM order, built into church wall

The church celebrated its 125^th anniversary in 2006, and a commemorative five-rupee stamp was issued by the Sri Lanka Post, which depicted the façade of the church together with an image of St John Bastone from one of the stained glass windows in the church.

125th anniversary stamp

Description

The church has a unique Italianate faux-Baroque façade (see larger photo HERE), with tropical Iberian influences. The façade is flanked by two bell towers (also used to mount loudspeakers). It is distinguished by a wide portico leading to the traditional three great doors. There are also two smaller doors leading to the outer aisles (which are not separated in this church by pillars, but form part of the nave).

Northern bell tower

The place of the traditional aisles is taken by two verandahs on the outside on either side of the nave (to which it is connected by steel-grilled doorways), to which access is via the lower arches of the bell towers. These lead (on the left) to the southern transept and the chapel and (on the right) to the northern transept and the padre's office at the rear. Two confessionals are located on these verandahs.

View from the crossing: the nave and narthex.

Above the central doorway is a cartoon of St John dal Bastone. The place of the narthex is taken by the eastern end of the nave (the traditional westward alignment is reversed), and the baptismal fount is located here. It is separated from the seating area by the shrines of two Saints - St Benedict and St Francis - which flank the entry to the central aisle.


Shrine of St Benedict

Shrine of St Francis of Assisi

Above the doorways leading to the verandahs on either side of the nave are a number of stained-glass clerestories, depicting scenes from the Passion of Christ.

Northern aisle

In place of the apse, the transept itself houses the chancel and the sanctuary, so the main area of the church is in the shape of a 'T' rather than a '+'. However, the semblance of a cross is restored by the Sacristy, accessed via two doors on either side of the altar.

Chancel and sanctuary

Unlike the rest of the church, the crossing, the chancel and sanctuary have a ceiling, of wood. On either side of the chancel, the two arms of the transept house various shrines.

Northern transept

In the northern transept, which houses the choir, is a triple altar, the central place occupied by the shrine of St John the Apostle, flanked by those of St Anne the mother of Mary and the Madonna and child.

Shrine of St John flanked by St Anne (left) and the Madonna and child (right)

There is also a wooden triptych altar piece with a Madonna and Child (a reproduction of the original icon of Our Mother of Perpetual Help enshrined in the Redemptorist Church of St. Alphonsus in Rome), flanked by the two sides of the Miraculous Medal of St. Catherine Labouré.

Triptych with Our Mother of Perpetual Help

The stained-glass image of St John dal Bastone used in the commemorative postage stamp was taken from that in the circular clerestory on the wall of the northern transept.


St John dal Bastone in stained glass clerestory in Northern transept

The southern transept, which leads (via a glass door) to the chapel, has a similar clerestory, this time depicting St Francis of Assisi with Christ on the Cross.

Southern transept

The southern transept contains shrines of Jesus Christ,the Virgin Mary and various saints. A triple shrine, mirroring that in the northern transept, depicts St John dal Bastone, flanked by St Sebastian, St Francis of Assisi and St Anthony of Padua, as well as the Infant Jesus.

Shrine of St John dal Bastone, flanked by St Sebastian & St Francis (on left) and St Anthony and the Infant Jesus (on right)

Feast

John dal Bastone is remembered by the monks of the order of Sylvestrines on 24 March, but the feast of the church in Pelawatte is in late July. On the day following the ninth day of prayer (Novena), the vespers mass is followed by a procession, during which the statue of the Saint is paraded through Pelawatte.

Image of St John dal Bastone taken in procession

The statue of the Saint is preceded by marching bands and by members of the congregation bearing candles. The statue's arrival at places along the route is marked by the faithful by the lighting of crackers and launching of rockets.

Women of the congregation bearing candles

The streets along which the procession travels are decorated with coconut leaves, banners, lights and crosses, punctuated by images and shrines of the Saint.

Getting there, staying there

St John dal Bastone's church is on Church Rd, Pelawatte, off the Battaramulla-Pannipitiya road, just past the Cargill's supermarket. It can be reached easily from Colombo, Ethulkotte and Rajagiriya (via Parliament Road), from Nugegoda and Pitakotte (via Talawatugoda Road) or from the E1 Southern Expressway (via Kottawa and Pannipitiya Road). Access is also possible, via the Pahalawela Road, from the Japan-Sri Lanka Friendship Road, which borders the Diyawanna Lake.

Map of Pelawatte, showing location of church

There are regular bus services along the Panniipitiya Road, and the church provides an interesting addition to a visit to the Parliament area or the Diyawanna Bird Sanctuary.

If one wishes to stay in the area, there are two very expensive villas available for rent. La Villa Sanctuary, Talawatugoda, borders the marsh, less than a kilometre from the Church. The Villa Talangama lies on the Talangama Tank, about two kilometres away. Both have excellent views of the wetlands and of the bird life protected by the sanctuary.

Click HERE for the website of the church.

Sanchi - rediscovery & restoration

2012-07-25T20:12:00.001-07:00

Continued from: Sanchi - expansion & fall

Sanchi was rediscovered in 1818, after 600 years, by General Taylor of the Bengal Cavalry, who came upon the overgrown monuments during a campaign against the Pindharas. He reported them to be in a good state of preservation, an opinion backed by Captain Fell, who visited Sanchi the next year.

Drawings of stupas 1 & 2 by Maisey, which show the damage inflicted on them by British treasure hunters

However, in 1822 Herbert Maddock, the political agent of Bhopal, aided by his zealous assistant Captain Johnson, inflicted considerable damage to the magnificent monuments, looking for treasure.

Eastern gateway and Great Stupa by Murray

Subsequently, several - more serious - observers recorded plates at Sanchi, sending them to Numismatist and Philologist James Prinsep of the Asiatic Society. Most importantly, in 1837, Captain E. Smith copied and sent Prinsep twenty-five inscriptions and Captain W. Murray sent more drawings. The most important for Prinsep were Smith's copies of the inscriptions.

Facsimile of inscription from Sanchi copied by Captain Smith

Prinsep noticed that they all ended with two letters:He guessed (with the help of an Indian Pundit, who is seldom given any credit) that they represented the word danam (gift) and took their values to be 'D' and 'N'. He used this clue as a key to decipher the Brahmi Script. Prinsep's article in the Asiatic Society journal can be read HERE.

The ruins, then called the 'Bhilsa Topes' ('Bhilsa' being the mediaeval name of Vidisha, tope being Hindi for a stupa) were further explored, beginning about 1840, by the 'Father of the Indian Archaeological Survey', by Captain (later Major General) Alexander Cunningham. Together with Captain (later General) Frederick Charles Maisey he managed to recover a great deal of valuable material. Unfortunately, the primitive techniques they used damaged the monuments further.


Great Stupa in 1906 [original at Victoria & Albert Museum]

The structures were not in good shape, and restoration work was begun in 1881, supervised by Major HH Cole, the Curator. However, work was slow and did not go very far (as may be observed from the 1906 photo of the Great Stupa, above). The credit for the restoration of the Sanchi site should go to Sir John Marshall, the Director General of Archaeological Survey of India, under whom this work was carried out in 1912-1919.

Sanchi hilltop site plan

Altogether over 50 monuments were excavated and conserved. Of these 30 were stupas which, apart from the Great Stupa and Stupas 2 & 3, were quite small, as exemplified by Stupas 28 and 29, seen below.

View from the top: the lesser domes of Stupas 28 & 29 adjacent to Stupa 5, which is hidden behind the trees

Before Marshall came on the scene, however, there had been much looting of the site. Articles such as the beautiful thrice-bent (tivanka) Bodhisattva torso from Temple 45 (9th century, now at the Victoria and Albert Museum) ended up in private collections. Indeed, there was even a proposal to cart off the fences and gateways of the Great Stupa to England!

Figurines of Sariputta and Maha-Mogallana

In 1851, Cunningham found two relic boxes inside Stupa 3, engraved with the names of Sariputta and Maha-Moggallana, the two chief disciples (agra-sravakas) of the Buddha, containing bone-relics. These found their way to London and ended up in the Victoria and Albert Museum.

In 1939 the Maha Bodhi Society (the Buddhist organisation established by Sir Edwin Arnold and the Sri Lankan Buddhist leader Anagarika Dharmapala) requested their return. In 1947 the relics arrived in India and were entrusted to the Maha Bodhi Society. After touring India, Myanmar and Sri Lanka (parts of the relics remained in the latter two countries), they were returned in 1952 to Sanchi, where they were enshrined in the newly-built Chetiyagiri Vihara by Prime Minister Shri Jawarhalal Nehru.

Chetiyagiri Vihara

Fortunately, the Indian government has separated the modern Vihara premises from the archaeological site, preventing the inhibition of the latter's pristine splendour (as has taken place, for example in Anuradhapura in Sri Lanka).

Guides in shalwar khameez & dupatta

Visitors are shown around the site by pulchritudinous women guides, dressed in monochromatic but not displeasing attire. For a touch of colour, one should look at the local visitors from Bhopal and Vidisha, in their sarees, shalwar khameezes (pajamas), lehenga cholis (long skirts & blouses) and dupattas (scarves).

Visitors: sarees, shalwar khameezes, and (girl in orange) lehenga choli & dupatta; the little boy wears a Nehru waistcoat with his shalwar khameez.

The site offers breathtaking vistas of the Malwa countryside, particularly from the upper pradakshina patha of the Great stupa. The view of the landscape from near the Western gateway is HERE.

The Archaeological Museum, run by the Archaeological Survey of India, is at the foot of the hill, between the station and the archaeological site. It holds many of the items excavated from Sanchi and other nearby sites, including material returned from Britain.

Barrier free

In co-operation with the Bhopal-based voluntary organisation Arushi, the Archaeological Survey of India has made the site the first in India to be barrier-free for physically challenged people. The stupas have been made wheelchair-accessible, special tactile walkways have been constructed for easy access and manoeuvrability, information plaques and signs in braille have been made available, along with beepers and a Braille map, while toilets and canteen areas which cater to the otherwise-abled have been provided. Most importantly, the guides and other staff have been trained and sensitised to deal with physically challenged tourists, including those in wheelchairs and with visual impairments.

The people speak a local dialect, but standard Hindi is understood. Because of tourists from Sri Lanka, Sinhala and English are also widely spoken, and it is possible to get by in these languages as well.

Sanchi - map of location

Sanchi can be visited with ease from Bhopal, which is well connected by air (domestically, from Ahmedabad, Delhi, Ahmedabad, Hyderabad, Indore, Mumbai & Raipur) and rail as well as road. There are road and rail links from Vidisha. Regular bus services connect Sanchi with Vidisha, Raisen, Bhopal, Sagar, Indore and Gwalior.

There are few places to stay in Sanchi: the Madhya Pradesh Tourism Development Board's Gateway Retreat hotel (**½, bookable on-line) and its Gateway Cafeteria (also bookable on-line), the Krishna Hotel and the New Jaiswal Lodge. There is also a Public Works Department 'circuit house', but this must be booked through the Raisen District Collector.

It was due to the dearth of rooms in Sanchi that the governments of Sri Lanka and Madhya Pradesh co-operated to build the New pilgrims' rest house for the Mahabodhi Society, the Sanchi Vandana Niketana (Sinhala) or Theertha Niketan (Hindi). It includes an image house and sermon rooms for pilgrims. Rooms can be booked by contacting the resident monk.

Mahabodhi Pilgrims' Rest and temple

During the pilgrimage season (Autumn-Winter), rooms are difficult to come by, so it may be easier to stay at Vidisha or even Bhopal (where there are many more hotels) and commute.

However you may come, or wherever you may stay, Sanchi should not be missed. It is one of the great archaeological sites of the world. Unfortunately it is not sufficiently appreciated. Neither, it should be noted, is the rest of incredible Madhya Pradesh which, while resplendent with ancient sites, beautiful vistas and nature reserves (Rudyard Kipling's Mowgli stories were set in 'Seeonee' and the Mowgli Pench Sanctuary is located there) receives only a fraction of the more than 5 million visitors to India each year.

Sanchi - expansion & fall

2012-07-24T20:19:00.001-07:00

Continued from Caityagiri Vihara, Sanchi

Monastery 51

Sanchi has seven monastery buildings in total. The first appears to have been Monastery 51, which might have been commissioned by Queen Devi. Its thick walls were built with flat bricks, while charred wood remnants indicate that the superstructure was of wood. About 33 metres (108 feet) square, it consisted of a central open courtyard enclosed by a verandah and flanked cells (kuti) for the monks to live in. Apart from the 22 cells, it also contained common rooms. It is situated west of the Western gateway of the Great Stupa, just beyond the upper tank.

By way of comparison, according to the Bible, Solomon's Temple in Jerusalem was 60 cubits (27 metres) long and 20 cubits (9 metres) wide, less than a third the size of this monastery.

The Great Stupa rebuilt

About half a century after the demise of Asoka, a Mauryan general, Pusyamitra overthrew his overlords and established the Sunga dynasty. Pusyamitra is said to have persecuted Buddhists and it appears that the great Stupa of Sanchi was damaged at this time. However, the later Sungas rebuilt it and erected Stupas 2 & 3.

The dome of the Great Stupa was mounted on a high circular drum, with space for a path (pradakshina patha) meant for circumambulation, with access via a double staircase from an outer pradakshina patha at ground level.

Elevation & plan of the Great stupa

The dome was flattened near the top and crowned with a square platform with railings on top of the stupa (harmika), and three superimposed parasols (a chattravali or chattra).

The Sungas were driven from the area by the Sātavāhanas, an Andhra family who started out as vassals of the Mauryas but declared independence.

The Sātavāhanas were responsible (c 70 BC - 50 AD) for replacing the wooden fence-like enclosure (vedika - evolved from ancient Vedic villages) and gateways (toranas) with stone balustrades and elaborate stone gateways. An inscription on the Southern gateway reads:

Gift of Ananda, the son of Vasithi, the foreman of the artisans of rajan Siri Satakarni

(Satkarni being a Sātavāhana monarch).

Eastern gateway (torana) and balustrade (vedika)

They also added the gateways and balustrades to the other, Sunga-era stupas. The carvings on the gateways and balustrades were mainly of scenes from the life of the Buddha and from his previous incarnations (the Jatakas). The image of the Buddha himself was absent, but various sacred events were represented by motifs, such as the Dhammacakka (wheel of the Dhamma), the stupa, the Bo-tree, the Buddha's footprint and animals, like the horse named Kantaka, on which he left his home. The elephants on the Eastern gateway, for instance, probably represent the legend of the birth of the Buddha.

Detail of Eastern gateway (torana)

The carvings were mostly gifts by prominent citizens, who appear to have requested their favourite Buddhist scenes, and the artisans who executed them drew from the ordinary daily life of the period. As a result, the gateways and balustrades provide us with an insight into contemporary mundane existence, including such minutiae as clothing, jewellery, tools, utensils and weapons.

Guardian of the gate on Eastern gateway

For instance, the image of a guardian of the gate (dvarapala) in the panel below shows a soldier armed with a spear and a sword-scabbard. The spear has a broad head, with sharp sides for hacking with, as described in Kautilya's Arthasastra. The man is adorned with bangles and a niska or ornamental collar, and wears a dhoti, one end draped over his arm like the end of a Roman toga; evidently, he was quite the man-about-town.

Steppe dynasties, the Guptas and the Gurjaras
The Sātavāhanas were displaced by the Sakas (the Western Satraps), who conquered the area in the 1st century AD, and later by the Kushans. During the reign of the Kushan King Vasishka (247-265) several inscriptions were made at Sanchi, including one found on the pedestal of a Buddha statue in the debris of Stupa 29.

Vasishka, from a contemporary coin

These descendants of steppe peoples were conquered by the Gupta dynasty. The Guptas embellished Sanchi with temples and statues, including four statues of the Buddha facing the four gateways of the Great stupa.

Buddha statue

By now, the representation of the Buddha by iconic motifs had given way, apparently under the influence of the Indo-Greeks of Gandhara (modern Kandahar). Read more about Buddhist aniconism HERE. It should be noted parenthetically, however, that there is a school of thought which considers that Buddha images antedated this period and that the aniconic theory is wrong. Read about it HERE.

Some history here, involving invasions and alternating dynasties. If you wish to avoid it, skip the three paragraphs below.

The Gupta Empire fell under the onslaught of Hephthalites, called Sveta Huna (White Huns) or Turuksha (Turks) by the Indians. A Huna king, Toramána, established his sovereignty over eastern Malwa about 485 AD. His son, Mihirakula conquered most of North India and established an anti-Buddhist persecution in 515 AD. Fifteen years later, he was defeated, apparently by a coalition of anti-Huna forces led by the Aulikara king Yasodharman, who chased him to Kashmir. A decade later, Yasodharman's death saw the demise of his empire and Guptas again ruled the Malwa kingdom.

The Guptas were in turn displaced by the Pushyabhutis, one of whom, Rajyavardhana, captured Malwa in 605 AD. On Rajyavardhana's murder, his brother Harsha came to the throne. Harsha or Harshavardhana was the last of the four great Buddhist emperors, the others being Asoka, the Græco-Bactrian Menander (known as Milinda) and the Kushan Kanishka.

On Harsha's death, his empire broke up, to be taken over by the Gurjara Pratihâra dynasty, one of whom, Nagabhatta I, conquered Malwa. Following several years of struggle, the Pala dynasty of Bengal displaced them in the area. They possibly ruled through the Paramara Kings of Malwa, who succeeded them sometime in the 9th century. The Paramaras held Malwa until the 12th century.

Later development & fall
There were several upsurges of building and other creative activity in this era. To the Aulikara-Gupta period (6th century AD) can be dated one upsurge, during which Stupas 5 and 7 were built. Others occurred during the 7th to 8th centuries (after Harsha brought stability) and again about the 10th century. Much of this activity was in the form of rebuilding or embellishing existing monuments.

Temple 18

An exemplary monument is Temple 18, located just south of the Great Stupa. It is a Buddhist chaitya hall, a prayer hall housing a small relic chamber (chaitya is derived from the Sanskrit for 'a pyre' or 'a pile of ashes'. It is built like a classic Buddhist rock-cut hall of worship (chaitya-griha).

Temple 18 - plan by Maisey

The temple consists of an apse, a central nave and side-aisles, immediately facing the Great Stupa. The temple was originally built on a raised platform in the Maurya or Sunga era.

In the 7th century AD, the temple was rebuilt; the apse was based on the earlier foundation of the temple. It was surrounded by a solid masonry wall and looked out on an antechamber formed by several 5.2 metre high square pillars and pilasters over which were mounted architraves, on which was fitted the wooden roof.

The temple was re-modelled in the 10th or 11th century. The floor-level of the apse was raised and carved door jambs were added.

Nothing remains of the small stupa which was at the centre of the apse and which contained relics, some of which were recovered by archaeologists in the 19th century.

While most of India became Hindu, in eastern Malwa Buddhism continued to flourish until the 12th century, up to when the monastery complex existed with the support of Vidisha, rebuilt as Bhilsa in the 9th century.

Reconstruction of the Sanchi ruins (from 'The Architecture of India' by Satish Grover)

After the 13th century, the monastery seems to have been abandoned and knowledge of it was apparently lost. This may have been because of attacks of Turkic Islamic rulers such as Iltutmish, who in 1234-35 led an expedition to Malwa, sacking Ujjain, Bhilsa and Raisen; and Alla-ud-din Khalji who repeated the performance in 1292-93.

Continued: Sanchi - rediscovery & restoration

Caityagiri Vihara, Sanchi

2012-07-24T07:48:00.002-07:00

In October 2009 I had the good fortune to visit the Buddhist pilgrimage site of Sanchi in India. The site, although off the beaten track for most pilgrims, has especial importance to Sri Lankans, for reasons made clear (it is hoped) below.

The village of Sanchi is located in the Raisen district of Madhya Pradesh, about 45 kilometres north-east of Bhopal, on the Malwa plateau. It is about 8 km from Vidisha and has a population of about 7,000 whose income is dependant mainly on the tourism generated by the place’s significance in Buddhist history. The tourists are those who come to visit the Vihara (Buddhist Monastery) atop the adjacent, 91 metre-high hill.

Entrance to the Sanchi monastery complex

This hill was originally known as Vedisagiri (hill of Vidisha) or Caityagiri (hill of the monastery) and later as Bota Sri-Parvata. The monastery was known as Kakanava or Kakanaya in the 2nd century BC: this might be derived from an inscription on a pillar, Kakanaye bhagavato pamanalathi, which either meant 'may the Buddha's blessings radiate always' or 'the Buddha's staff at Kakanaya' - the scribe may have been punning!

Visitors climbing up the hill

After about the 5th century AD it was named Kakanadabota (probably meaning 'kakanada monastery'. Two centuries later, the hill was Bota Sri Parvata ('blessed monastery hill'). This became Santi Sri Parvata ('santi' or 'shanthi' meaning 'bright', 'shining' or 'peace', शान्तिः in Sanskrit). Through vulgar usage, Santi became Sanchi - सांची in Hindi.

Asoka & Devi
The Mauryan Emperor Asoka the Great was a convert to Buddhism. Sickened by the casualties (One hundred and fifty thousand were deported, one hundred thousand were killed and many more died from other causes) of his victorious campaign to conquer Kalinga (modern Orissa), he was receptive to the teachings of the Buddha. He then set about propagating Buddhism with all the zeal of the convert.

Prior to rising to the imperium, Asoka was governor of Avanti, one of the 16 Janapadas or settlements of ancient India. He married Devi, the daughter of a merchant-banker (vaishya-setti) of Vidisha, who bore him a son, Mahinda and a daughter, Sanghamitta.

Asoka and Devi, played by actors Shah Rukh Khan & Hrishitaa Bhatt in the swashbuckling, swords-&-sandals Bollywood epic Asoka

Mahinda was later to convert the King of Sri Lanka, Devanampiya Tissa, to Buddhism, while his sister Sanghamitta was to take to the island a sapling of the great sacred Bo Tree at Bodhgaya - which, planted in Anuradhapura, became the Sri Mahabodhi, the oldest recorded tree in the world. Both Mahinda and Sanghamitta are said to have begun their journeys from the monastery at Sanchi, where Asoka had built a dagoba, the earliest representation of a hemispherical stupa in India (earlier stupas appear to have been more phallic).

Socio-economic significance
Sanchi was in a quiet and secluded area suitable for meditation, while not being too far from Vidisha which (apart from being Devi’s birthplace) was a rich and populous city, having a wealthy community of merchants and bankers capable of supporting such a large monastery.

Sanchi's position on the main early trade routes [original at V & A website]

Vidisha was strategically close to the confluence of the Betwa and Beas rivers, as well as on the main trading route from the Gangetic plain to Ujjain (Udeni, the capital of Avanti - Ozene to the ancient Greeks) and beyond: to the Deccan in the south and the Arabian Sea ports of Broach (Bharukachcha - Greek Barygaza) and Sopara (Supparaka - Greek Suppara) in the west. It was along these routes that the artistic and cultural influences were exchanged, along with trade goods.

According to British Archaeologist Julia Shaw, who did an extensive archaeological survey of the area, monks moved into the area armed with a culture of agrarian and urban production (including irrigation systems), enabling local communities to extend their economic support to new monasteries which sprang up in the hinterland of Vidisha; Sanchi may have been a 'strategic base' for missionaries of the new belief system.

Upper tank

The hill itself was the site of a rainwater harvesting system, its slopes forming a natural catchment area. It had three reservoirs or tanks, each above the other; gullies and drains collected rainwater and channelled them into each tank, and water flowed downhill from one tank to the next. The upper tank (a converted quarry), which provided water to the monasteries on the western slope, has been restored.

The Great Stupa

The Great Stupa & southern gateway

Sanchi might have existed as a Buddhist monastery before Asoka, but he certainly embellished it. He erected Stupa 1, the 'Great Stupa', the main dagoba of the complex at the centre of the hill-top plateau. It was one of 84,000 said to have been built by Asoka to house the relics of the Buddha taken from seven of eight older dagobas.

Great Stupa, drawings done by Maisey in 1851

The Stupa was made with four paths and gateways, to represent a junction of four roads, since a stupa should always be erected at a crossroad. The stupa was surrounded by a wooden fence and had the gateways were of wood. The shape appears to evoke a swastika - a sacred solar symbol and nothing to do at all with anti-Semitism or fascism.

Swastikas, Nazi & solar (courtesy: Temple Illuminatus website)

Asoka's edict pillar
At its southern end, Asoka erected a pillar, an example of the Seleucid-influenced Græco-Buddhist æsthetic style, with its exquisite proportions and structural balance. It was broken by a local landlord to make a sugar cane press - an early, oriental example of Thatcherism - and only the shaft stands here today.

Asoka's pillar

On the pillar was inscribed one of Asoka's famous edicts, which read (the opening lines are illegible):

'... path is prescribed both for the monks and the nuns: As long as (my) sons and great-grandsons (shall reign and) as long as the sun and moon (shall shine), the monk or nun who shall cause divisions in the Sangha should be caused to put on white robes and to reside in a non-residence. It is my desire that the Sangha may be united and of long duration.'

Note: The Sangha is the Buddhist 'clergy'. Read more about it HERE.

Lion-capital of the Asoka pillar

The rest of Asoka's pillar is now housed in the Sanchi Archaeological Museum, including its capital, famous for its four lions standing back-to-back. This symbol, found atop several Asokan edict-pillars, was later to be adopted as the national emblem of India.

Indian emblem (courtesy: Government of India website)

The complete pillar was 12.8 metres high and weighed about 50 tonnes - a considerable load to transport from what is now Uttar Pradesh to Sanchi and then up the hill (even with today's heavy Tata lorries).

Continued: Sanchi - expansion & fall

Hanwella Rest House

2009-09-29T20:52:00.002-07:00

A rather cryptic sounding Sinhala poem runs as follows:

Pun sandha séma payaala rata mædhdhé

Ran kendhi séma peeraala pita mædhdhé

Maara senanga vatakaragena yama yudhdhé

Lewké mæthindhu adha thaniyama wela mædhdhé

In English this may be rendered as:

Like the full moon shining in the middle of the country
Like golden strands combed down the middle of the back

[As] the armies of Mara surrounded [the Buddha] in the Yama war
The Minister Lewke is today alone in the middle of the field

This refers to an episode in the First Kandyan War of 1803-1805. Sri Wickrama Rajasinghe, the last king of Kandy was fleeing, having been defeated by the British in battle. As James Cordiner (A Description of Ceylon, London, 1807; Dehiwela, Tisara Prakasakayo, 1983) tells us:

The disappointed Monarch of Kandy was overtaken in his flight by Lewke Ralehamy, Dessauwe of the four corles, who led the attack on Hangwell, and the Maha Mottiar, or chief secretary of state, both of whose heads, in the violence of his indignation, he ordered to be immediately struck off; and left their dead bodies unburied in a ravine one mile beyond Royberg.

Sri Wickrama Rajasinghe

The battle from which Sri Wickrama fled was the last of the many skirmishes which followed the recapture by British troops of the fort at Hanwella (pronounced hung-wal-luh) - Cordiner's Hangwell.

The British forces involved in the battle were ad-hoc groups of soldiers of the 51st Regiment of Foot and the 65th Regiment of Foot, supported by Indian Sepoys and local Lascoreens, all under the command of Captain William Pollock of the 51st. The war-standard of the Kandyan kingdom, captured by Pollock during this battle, was later to be the basis for Sri Lanka's modern flag.

Hanwella, which means 'skin sands', was the site of an ancient ferry route across the Kelani river. When Mayadunne, the son of Vijayabahu VII (mentioned in the post on Menikkadawara) became king of Sitawaka, he built a fort here to protect the ferry. After the death of his son Rajasinghe I (see post on Pethangoda), the Portuguese occupied the fort and rebuilt it in their own style - mostly consisting of earthworks - in 1597.

The Dutch, who took over the lowlands of Sri Lanka from the Portuguese, built a new star fort at Hanwella using kabook (laterite) rock, completing it in 1684. One look at the plan of the fort shows that it was made according to the latest European design:

Plan of the Hanwella fort (Department of Archaeology)

Hanwella was on the border between the Kandyan and Dutch (and later, after 1796, British) territories, until the fall of the Kingdom of Kandy in 1815. It occupied a strategic position athwart the principal route from Colombo to the interior. It was also necessary to quell rebellions within the occupied territory: in 1797, shortly after the British occupied the lowlands, a rebellion broke out and sepoys of the 35th Madras Regiment were besieged within the walls of the Hanwella fort and took casualties.

The map below is an old Dutch one of Hanwella showing the location of the fort. Note that North is Down, a fact which may not be appreciated by Euro-centric readers.

A Dutch map of the fort situated at Hanwella

Robert Percival of the 19th Regiment of Foot tells us (An account of the island of Ceylon, London: C & R Baldwin, 1803) that the Dutch had built a rest house here, which was in a bad state of repair by 1800. According to Cordiner, the Fort at Hanwella was in a ruinous condition at the time of the Battle of Hanwella in 1803.

The Hanwella resthouse

The pleasant modern rest house occupies the site of the fort. In its grounds may be seen some of the remains of the military structure. And there is no mistaking the thick interior walls of the older parts of the building. Note the thickness of the walls surrounding this bedroom window:

Bedroom window

Nevertheless, the rest house is agreeable, being cool and affording a great view of the river; early in the morning one may even see the mountains of the central massif, and sometimes Adam's Peak. It is a wonderful place to sip tea and gaze at the water. In earlier days, this was done using two old stone seats which adorn the gardens overlooking the river. Here is one of them:

Stone seat and rear verandah of rest house

This stone seat has a history. In 1870 the rest house was visited by the then Duke of Edinburgh, Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, and Rufus Sewell lookalike Alfred Ernest Albert. At the time he was captain of HMS Galatea, and was the first member of the Royal Family to visit Sri Lanka. This was soon after he had been shot and wounded in Sydney.

Alfred Duke of Edinburgh (photo courtesy of thePeerage.com website)

In 1875 it was the turn of his older brother the Prince of Wales Albert Edward (later Edward VII). Details of the prince's earlier visit to Travancore can be found here. Here he is with his fianceé Alexandra Caroline Marie Charlotte Louise Julia zu Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg, Princess of Denmark, on their engagement in 1862.

Edward and Alexandra (photo courtesy Open University)

Edward later married Alexandra. In 1882, their two eldest sons, Jack-the-Ripper suspect and Duke of Clarence Albert Victor and Prince George Frederick Ernest Albert (later King George V), who were serving as midshipmen on HMS Bacchante, also sojourned here.

Princes Albert Victor and George (photo courtesy of English Monarchs website)

The visits of the princes were commemorated by inscribing the stone seats. The inscription on this seat marks the visit of Edward VII - presumably it had less moss on it when it supported the Royal Bottom:

Stone seat 2009

All of these confusingly-named Royal Alberts planted trees in the gardens, which Henry W Cave (The Book of Ceylon, London: Cassell, 1908) says were still flourishing some decades later. Today one particular tree, the Jak Tree (Artocarpus heterophyllus) planted by Edward VII behind the stone seat in the pictures above, has been preserved.

The Royal Jak Tree

The four princes, sitting on the stone seats, would have had a wonderful view of the river, later immortalised in this photograph (c. 1900) by HW Cave :

View from the rest-house, Hanwella

Alas, this view is no more. Instead there is a great big concrete bridge built smack in the middle of the prospect. Undoubtedly the bridge fills a great need, but one would have thought they would find a slightly less beautiful spot to ruin with it.

Modern view from the rest-house, Hanwella

The downstream panorama, on the other hand, is unspoiled. You can look out westward from the dining room across the gardens, dotted here and there with the ruins of the fort's ramparts.

Downstream prospect

A closer look at the bottom right of the photograph of the garden, above, reveals a log-like reptile. This might give one a bit of a shock, especially if one knows that, according to Percival, a private of the 19th Regiment of Foot was eaten by a crocodile here in 1800. However, in this case it turned out to be a Kabaragoya, a water monitor lizard (Varanus salvator), shown below in close-up.

A Kabaragoya all puffed up with its own importance

The kabaragoya puffs itself up when it sees a potential enemy. Usually, however, it keeps to itself. It eats snakes' eggs and so is a useful agent for controlling the serpent population. Unfortunately, it is hunted (illegally) for its oil, which is useless for everything except poisoning people and hexing them. There must surely be more efficient ways of getting rid of one's enemies than going out and killing a relatively harmless reptile - especially given the ease with which pesticides may be procured which would ensure the morbidity of one's victims.

Hanwella marked with blue pin

Hanwella may be reached from Colombo along the Low Level Road or the High Level Road. It is an obvious stop on the way to Nuwara Eliya up the Ginigathena Pass. It is also an excellent base of operations for visiting the Ruwanwella and Avissawella areas.

Lewke memorial (larger image here)

The place where Lewke Dissawe was executed is marked by a small memorial stone, which can be seen where the present Low Level and High Level roads meet, a short distance eastward from Hanwella rest house. The poem which began this post is carved thereon.

Dedigama

2009-09-24T19:26:00.001-07:00

The ancient Sinhalese chronicle, the Culavamasa tells us that the consort of Manabharana, the crown prince of Sri Lanka,

... bore a son at a moment marked by a lucky constellation. Clear at this moment were all the quarters of the heavens and cool, fragrant, gentle breezes blew. With the trumpeting of the elephants and the neighing of the horses the royal courtyard was filled with resounding din.

This heavenly event took place in a city known as Punkhagama, the capital of the principality of Dakkhinadesa, of which Manabharana was the sub-king (yuvaraja).

The child was named Parakramabahu (Parakkamabahu in Pali). Many years later, about 1153 AD he became king of the whole island as Parakramabahu I (the Great). He then constructed a shrine at the place of his birth, the Suthigara Cetiya (the Chaitya of the house of birth).

Interestingly, when Wilhelm Geiger (the father of Hans, the inventor of the Geiger Counter) was translating the Culawamsa, the location of Punkhagama had not yet been discovered. Geiger Snr tells us in a footnote that 'Parakkamabahu 1 erected a tope there 120 cubits high of which there ought still to be traces'.

Archaeological department board at the Kotavehera

This tope was identified later as the Kotavehera, in the modern village of Dedigama (pronounced tha-thee-gah-muh), and excavations were carried out there in the 1960s. So Punkhagama is most likely Dedigama. Apparently the place-name is derived from Jatigama, an alternative ancient name for the place.

The dagoba is the largest in the Wet Zone of Sri Lanka. Parakramabahu I was a great lover of monumental architecture and bigness generally. He made tanks in the Wet Zone (where they were not really necessary) in order to show off his prowess and in order to recreate the 'Milk Ocean' in a large-scale Mandala, a representation of the Indic Cosmos .

Obviously I am not a great fan of Parakramabahu's - his reputation was as much due to his panegyrist in the Culawamsa as anything he did; although it was possibly his unification of the Mahayana and Theravada Buddhist clergy in a single, state-controlled body which ensured for him a sympathetic press.

Sutighara cetiya from the north-east

Be that as it may, the dagoba is truly impressive. It is 78 metres (256 feet) in diameter and 14.3 metres (47 feet) high. I couldn't get the whole thing onto a single frame, so I had to do a stitch-up of two photos - a bit of a botch-up actually.

The size of the structure is illustrated by this photo of a senior citizen walking around it in the prescribed clock-wise manner. Note the multi-coloured branches of Na (Ironwood) trees in the foreground and the concentric perimeter rings (pesa walalu) at the base of the stupa.

Elderly man circling the dagoba

Not withstanding the size of the dagoba, it is referred to as the Kotavehera (short stupa) , not because of any deficiency in its height, but because it was built without the usual upper structure, the traditional cube-shaped enclosure (hatharæs kotuwa) and pinnacle (koth kærælla). Rather like calling a tall person short because they do not wear a hat.

On the eastern side of the dagoba, just above the second of the pesa walalu at the foot of the dagoba, is a smaller stupa, about 11 metres (36 feet) in diameter. It is said to mark the exact place of Parakramabahu's birth. It is that little pimple on the side of the dagoba, in my stitch-up shot above. The photo below shows it in close-up:

Smaller dagoba

The larger dagoba appears to have been anchored on the lesser. Here is an even closer shot:

Smaller dagoba

Excavations found a koraha (a pot for washing rice in) beneath the smaller dagoba. Not surprisingly, however, it was the larger which yielded the greater treasure. The main reliquary chamber, guarded by multi-headed cobras (like the one at Oorusitano tank), was complemented by 8 others arranged geometrically around it. The artefacts found there were housed in a museum built close by.

The way to the archaeological museum

A break-in occurred there not too many years ago, and the thieves got away with a large number of artefacts, especially some exquisite Buddha statues covered in gold foil. However, less monetarily valuable but priceless historically, the main prize of the collection was left behind. This was the elephant lamp.

Elephant lamp

This elegant oil lamp is one of a pair taken from the heart of the dagoba - the other being at the Colombo Museum. The identical lamps are of the hanging type and each consists an oil receptacle surmounted by an elephant and its mahout. The whole is suspended by the apex of a torana above the elephant, which is affixed to a chain.

Detailed drawing of elephant lamp

The elephant figure stands in the middle of the oil receptacle, which can be filled with oil. There is also a reservoir for the oil in the elephant's belly (marked in white on black in the central figure above). Oil is poured in using the hollow of one of the forelegs as a funnel.

After the lamp is lit, the level of oil in the receptacle goes down. When it goes below the level of the hole in the funnel-foreleg, an ingenious hydrostatic arrangement makes the pachyderm 'urinate' oil until the level of oil returns above the beast's feet. Obviously, the creator of this marvel of physics was something of a piss-artist.

Despite the burglary, many valuable artefacts remain in the museum, not just from Dedigama but from archaeological sites in the Kegalle area generally, including some interesting inscriptions. There is also a representation of the nine reliquary chambers of the Kotavehera, showing what was found where, and photographs of the dig.

You can get to Dedigama by turning to the right off the Colombo-Kandy road at Nelundeniya and driving about 3 kilometres (2 miles).

Dedigama is within easy driving distance of the rest houses at Ambepussa, Hanwella and Kitulgala, as well as the Ambalama hotel in Hanwella.

Pethangoda Grove

2009-09-20T06:29:00.000-07:00

A popular verse of Sinhala poetry runs as follows:

Rusiru pethangoda uyanata wædiyaaya
Napuru unakatuwak pathulehi ænunaaya
Sitiya sævoma vatakara mathulaaya
Raajasingha devi naamen mækunaaya

In English, this means:

He betook himself to the beautiful Pethangoda park
A wicked bamboo thorn pierced his foot
All those there surrounded him and chanted spells
Rajasinghe was erased from the names of the gods

This refers to king Rajasinghe I of Sitawaka, who fought an unrelenting war against the Portuguese. Apparently, he was known by his given name, Tikiri Bandara (still a popular name among the Kandyan Sinhalese) until 1555, when he captured the town of Alutnuwara from the Royal pretender, Vidiya Bandara, while still a prince. Thereafter he was popularly known as Raja Singhe ('regal lion'), later taking this moniker as his regnal name on mounting the throne.

Rajasinghe I witnessing an execution

Rajasinghe was quite a colourful character, who was reputed to have murdered his father king Mayadunne of Sitawaka, the son of Vijayabahu VII (the king mentioned in the post on Menikkadawara). He was rejected by the Buddhist clergy as a parricide and therefore become a devotee of the Hindu god Shiva.

In 1593, having been defeated in battle at Kadugannawa, he retired to Ruwanwella and went to his pleasaunce at Pethangoda (pronounced peth-un-go-duh and meaning 'hill of bauhinia tomentosa'). There, he had the accident with the bamboo thorn mentioned in the poem.

He was brought by royal barge down the Kelani river, but died of septicaemia at a place with the mellifluous - if unlikely - name of Kukulubittarawella (Cock's egg sandbank). An alternative name for the village is the slightly more rational Kikily Bittara Welaloo Wella (Sandbank in which the hen's eggs were buried) - no, I don't know the significance of this place-name.

Bamboo thorns, Pethangoda

But was it an accident? The mediaeval chronicle, the Rajavaliya tells us that Rajasinghe was succeeded by his grandson prince Raja Surya 'who', it says 'had caused the death of king Raja Sinha'. Apparently, Raja Surya had a dalliance with a damsel, the daughter of an astrologer called Dodampe Ganitaya. The latter had practised witchcraft to prevent the removal of the poison in Rajasinghe's wound. The inference is that there had been a trap set for the king.

Some say (darkly) that the bamboo thorn had been coated with poison. Still others say he was killed by a cobra's bite - indicative of divine retribution for his dual crime of killing his father and turning his back on Buddhism.

Thorny bamboo, Pethangoda

Be that as it may, the thorns at the Pethangoda park are pretty wicked. Some of them are about a metre (3 feet) long. Alas the photographs I took do not do them justice. These are Indian thorny bamboos, reputedly obtained from the subcontinent and different from the bamboos found in Sri Lanka. They have dark green shoots, not yellow as is the norm in this godly isle.

Looking towards the entrance and the lower clump

All that is left of the pleasaunce is a grove of two clumps of bamboo, on two levels, surrounded by a barbed wire fence. The clumps of bamboo themselves are enclosed behind wire mesh in order to prevent vandals from destroying them - they are already in a bad state due to vandalism (one wonders why there is no divine retribution on these hooligans).

The upper level of the grove

Nevertheless it is a pleasant spot, with a rubber plantation on three sides and a paddy field on the other. One can imagine how the king might have found solace from his eternal worries by sitting and gazing at the bamboo branches, especially the lovely pattern made by the bamboo against the sky.

Looking towards paddy field (A larger-size picture can be seen here.)

Incidentally, Raja Surya didn't get to reign long. He used to sneak off at night to be with Dodampe Ganitaya's daughter and on one such romantic tryst was done to death by his relatives. Soon after the kingdom of Sitawaka fell to the Portuguese.

After his death Rajasinghe was worshipped as Ganegoda Deviyo (God of Ganegoda). Incidently, Sri Lankan kings were considered divine while they lived, being addressed as 'Deviyanwahanse Budhuwewa' - 'may your godship become a Buddha'. So the transition couldn't have been too difficult.

Pethangoda marked with blue pin

Click here to see detailed google map of Pethangoda

Pethangoda is situated on the Anguruwella-Warakapola road, next to a stream known as the Gurugoda Oya. It is within easy driving distance of the rest houses at Ambepussa, Hanwella and Kitulgala, and the Ambalama hotel in Hanwella.

Menikkadawara

2009-09-12T06:07:00.000-07:00

In 2004 I was scouting out the terrain around the lower watershed of the Kelani river, when I (serendipitously) stumbled upon the village of Menikkadawara. To get there one has to drive up the Kandy road and turn left at Nelundeniya and drive for about 10 kilometres (6 miles) - not something a normal person would do too often without purpose. But there is a point to it.

Now a sleepy backwater, too unimportant to be marked on the map, Menikkadawara (pronounced man-ik-udder-were-r-er) was once a very important and strategic place situated in the foothills of the Four Korales (counties). The (not exactly accurate) mediaeval Sinhalese chronicle, the Rajavaliya tells us that two of the sons of the King of Ambulugala (Dharma Parakramabahu IX),

Prince Vijaya Bahu and Prince Raja Sinha built the city of Menikkadawara, and whilst young men, lived in one place and cohabited with one woman...

The first of these princes went on to become King Vijayabahu VII, while the second apparently died in Menikkadawara.

Menikkadawara marked with blue pin

Click here for detailed google satellite map of Menikkadawara

During the latter part of the Portuguese era, the bulk of the colonial forces were encamped here. A rather long-winded Jesuit historian, Rev Fernaõ de Queyroz (Conquista temporal, e espiritual de Ceylao, translated by Father SG Perera, SJ) wrote in about 1688 that

... in the county Beligal, in the village of Manicrauare, 9 leagues from Columbo to the interior, we generally had our arrayal encampment, surrounded by very high mountains, in which one can hardly see an entrance or outlet, and because of its site and other conveniences it was the best that could be chosen, for it is 6 leagues from Candea and lies between the Four and Seven Corlas...

Just to prove that it was not just the English who mispronounced foreign names, the Portuguese called the place Manicravaré or Manicavarê. Queyroz informs us that

Mani-cauarê, and not Manicrauarê as they call it, means 'Come here my precious stone', words with which, they say, the Father or Rajú called to his son.

The Rajú referred to by Queyroz may be Raja Sinha, the second of the two princes with the racy lifestyle referred to in the Rajavaliya above, who died at Menikkadawara.

The embittered Captain Joaõ Ribeiro tells us in 1685 (Fatalidade historica da ilha de Ceilao, translated by PE Peiris) that:

In the Four Corlas, five leagues from Balane and eleven from Columbo, there was a position in the midst of the villages, known as Manicravare; here was stationed our chief army for opposing the King of Candia and for defending the Seven Corlas. It consisted of twelve companies of three hundred and fifty Portuguese Soldados under the command of the Captain Major of the field, and there were also a Sergeant-Major, two adjutants, a Captain of Munitions and a Franciscan monk as chaplain. It was further the residence of the Dissava, an officer corresponding to a military Governor of a province over the natives, who always had in hand three or four thousand Lascarins with their officers, which number could be greatly increased in the event of war.

In 1599 the Portuguese constructed a tranqueira, a wooden stockade. In 1626, this was upgraded. The rectangular fortification was known as the Forte Santa Fe and the Cidadela (Citadel) of Forte Cruz, with the four bastions on each corner being named Saõ Iago, Saõ Boa Ventura, Saõ Jorge and Saõ Pedro by the religion-obsessed Lusitanians.

On the right side of the road is a sign put up by the Department of Archaeology, indicating the fortifications of the Portuguese. HCP Bell, the first Archaeological Commissioner reported that a stone slab bearing the Royal Arms of Portugal was found here. However, all that is left of the fortifications are massive earthwork ramparts, grown over with grass and weeds.

Portuguese earthwork rampart

Ribeiro also mentions that Manicavare (sic) was not entitled to be called by the name fortress, since it was made of a little earth. However the ramparts look quite formidable enough.

Looking along the earthwork rampart (larger photo here)

After the defeat of the Portuguese in 1658, the area was re-occupied by the forces of the King of Kandy. The Lusitanian crusade had targeted Buddhist temples and the Monastery that now exists in the village was built after the re-occupation.

The sermon hall (Dharmasalawa) has had the interstices between the stone columns filled with cement breeze blocks - obviously recent. But how light and utilitarian the structure looks in comparison with the behemoths that are more modern Buddhist temples!

Sermon hall, Menikkadawara Purana Vihara (larger photo here)

The brown strip at the bottom of the outer wall is caused by back-splash from rain pouring off the roof (notice the absence of roof gutters). As you can imagine, rain is quite a factor in the valley of the river Kelani. Queyroz informs us that

... though it rains in the island of Ceylon almost the whole year and sometimes for eight and ten days running, when the rain ceases there is no mud seen in that place because of a kind of stony soil and because the barracks (estancas) are on a height whence the water drains easily making for the fields which surround it.

Evidently it was the consideration of floods which caused the image house of the monastery to be built on a wooden platform mounted on short stone stilts. A temple building built in this architectural form is referred to as a tampita vihara. This one appears originally to have been built with an open verandah all round, which has been filled in with brick.

Image house (buduge), Menikkadawara Purana Vihara (larger photo here)

The image house is illustrated with frescoes of the Buddha and of the Cula Dhammapala Jataka. These probably date from the 18th or 19th centuries.

Image house door and doorway fresco

The ceiling has a beautiful floral design, marred somewhat by the 1930s-style electrical light fittings:

Image house ceiling design

Menikkadawara can be taken in while en route to Kandy from Colombo. Alternatively, for those who want to explore the whole area, there is a rest house at Ambepussa which provides accomodation. Also within easy driving distance of the rest houses at Hanwella and Kitulgala, and the Ambalama hotel in Hanwella.

Tusk, Tusker, Rogue Elephant & Jumbo

2009-08-30T04:46:00.000-07:00

In my earlier post on the Kombuwa, I referred to an elephant's tusks. Alas, at the time I had no image available and had to resort to plagiarising from a 17th century woodcut. Well, I had the good luck this morning to come across a really good-looking pair of tusks on a really magnificent-looking pachyderm.

Tusker, Hokandara Rd, Thalawathugoda

This chap was probably returning home after taking part in a perahera, a religious procession. Note the chains around his neck in the picture below:

Tusker, Thalawathugoda

'Tusker' can refer to any animal with tusks, eg. a wild boar. However, in the Sri Lankan context, 'tuskers' are, invariably, elephants. Henry Charles Sirr (Ceylon and the Cingalese, William Shorberl, London 1850) referred to them as 'tusk-elephants'. It was left to Sir James Emerson Tennent (Ceylon: an Account of the Island, Physical, Historical - Longman, Green, Longman, and Roberts, London 1859) to use the term 'tusker' for the first time (cf. Oxford English Dictionary).

Incidently, the OED credits Tennant with introducing 'Rogue Elephant' into the English language. However, it appears to have been Sirr (op cit) who did so:

It is well known these animals are usually found in herds, and when a solitary elephant is seen, the Cingalese say that it is a rogue-elephant, "hora alia", who has been expelled for nefarious and turbulent conduct by the other members of the herd.

In the Sinhala tongue, an elephant is an aliya (plural ali). A tusker, on the other hand, is called an æthaa, from the Prakrit hatthi (cf. Hindi hasthi) - 'elephant'. Now, the English 'Elephant' came (via Latin and French) from the Greek 'elephantos' or 'elephas' which, in turn probably came from the Phoenician 'elu' (the same as the Hamitic), although it might have originated from the Sanskrit ibhah. One wonders whether the Sinhala 'aliya' came from the same root as the Phoenician/Hamitic.

The earliest known examples of the Brahmi alphabet, as I mentioned in regard to the Kombuwa, are on potsherds, dating from the 6th century BC, found at Anuradhapura in Sri Lanka and at Kodumanal in South India. It is possible that it was a form of Phoenician, transplanted by traders. Compare the Brahmi and Phoenician alphabets.

Phoenicians bring treasure to King Solomon (Thanks to Karen Hatzigergiou)

The Phoenicians, along with the ships of Tarshish were hired by King Solomon (he of the mines) to bring his hardware and day-to-day groceries:

And the navy also of Hiram, that brought gold from Ophir, brought in from Ophir great plenty of almug trees, and precious stones. (1 Kings 10:11)

For the king had at sea a navy of Tharshish with the navy of Hiram: once in three years came the navy of Tharshish, bringing gold, and silver, ivory, and apes, and peacocks. (1 Kings 10:22)

It may be postulated that the Phoenicians and the Tarshishites were both familiar with India and hence Sri Lanka.

Interestingly, although Phoenician was a Semitic language, the general Semitic term for 'elephant' is pil (Arabic and Persian fil). A sub-species of the Asian elephant survived in Mesopotamia until the 9th century BC, when seems to have been exterminated by overhunting. So the Semitic people had their own word for the jumbo.

Now Jumbo, as most people will know, was the name given to a famous 19th Century elephant which died. Being about 4 metres ( 12 feet) high at the shoulder, it posthumously lent its moniker to large things, from the Jumbo Jet to the oxymoronic but mouth-watering Jumbo Shrimp , via an entire range of jumbo orchids, from the Jumbo Ego to the Jumbo Pip.

The dead Jumbo was stuffed and exhibited at Tufts University, an institution of higher learning in Medford, Massachusetts. Alas, the taxidermised mastodon was destroyed in a fire, but that never loosened the affectionate ties that ivory tower had with the tusker. In its hallowed memory, the Tufts University Science Library has created a database known as 'Tufts University Sciences Knowledgebase' or TUSK.

Jumbo the statue

Another Jumbo, this time a diminutive statue of an elephant from an amusement park, adorns the campus. By comparison with the person of average height standing next to it, it is obvious that it cannot be above 3 metres at the shoulder. On the other hand, compare the height of the tusker I saw with that of its Mahout:

Tusker with Mahout, Thalawathugoda

About equal to the original Jumbo I should think. Its tusks may be seen in all their splendour in this photograph, but they are dwarfed by the ivory on Millangoda Raja, an Elephant with really long tusks (allegedly the longest in Asia).

More on Daniel Detloff von Ranzow and immigration to Australia.

2009-08-24T05:19:00.000-07:00

Following my posting on The Old Dutch House, I received a comment from Leo van der Plas of Delft, the Netherlands. His von Rantzau website is a veritable mine of information on that aristocratic Teutonic family.

He confirms that Daniel Detloff von Ranzow, who was transported to Australia in 1838, was a son of Carl Ludvig von Ranzow, the son of Daniel Detlev von Ranzow and Johanna Elizabeth Cramer. He adds that Carl Ludvig was a former governor of Riouw, then residing in Malacca and Liem Akhaniong.

He further mentions that the Malakkan newspaper in 1836 carried an account of a fight which occurred between Carl Ludvig, Daniel Detloff and a servant on one hand and a Mr de Wind on the other - certainly unfair odds for a fight, more like a mugging.

Entry on for July 1836 on p 93 of Asiatic Intelligence, in the Asiatic Journal and Monthly Miscellany, vol xx.

So Daniel Detloff the younger, No 6095 in the van der Plas Rantzau database, appears to have been of a rather fiery nature, to say the least.

His father, the 'poor old count' Carl Ludvig was born in Mannar, in Northern Sri Lanka. The ancient port of Maha Tittha ('great harbour') had been in existence for two thousand years before the Portuguese built a fort there in 1560. This was captured in 1658 by the Dutch, who rebuilt it in its present form in 1686.

So Daniel Detloff is definitely in contention for the first Sri Lankan Dutch Burgher immigrant to Australia. The first Sri Lankan immigrants, were however, the O'Dean family.

Hon. Frederick North, later 5th Earl of Guilford, established the 1st Ceylon regiment, the first Malay regiment in the British Army, in 1802. It wore the distinctive scarlet uniform of the 'redcoats'.

Drum Major Jainudeen, a Malay of the 1st Ceylon Regiment, went over to the side of the King of Kandy - who had his own Malay regiment, the Padikkara Peruwa - in the first Kandyan War of 1803-1805. Upon the fall of the kingdom in the 2nd Kandyan War 1815, he was captured and transported with his Sinhalese wife Eve and children to New South Wales. Their arrival on board the vessel Kangaroo was reported in the Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser of 17th February 1816.

He was originally known as William O'Deen or O'Dean, but later became Hooden. Later still he was identified as John Wooden and the family became totally 'Aussiefied' (or, given their final name, 'lignified').

For more on Sri Lankan immigration to Australia, see James Jupp, The Australian people: an encyclopedia of the nation, its people and their origins, Cambridge University Press, 2001; ISBN 0521807891, 9780521807890.

A postscript: a 2nd Lieutenant Henrik Mattheus van Ranzow served with the 3rd Ceylon Regiment under the British, possibly one of the sons of August Carel von Ranzow. The Dutch were common but rich, and the German aristocracy noble but poor, so the latter served the former as merceneries.

Another PS: in the Parliamentary Papers, Volume 34 (London: HMSO, 1840), on p10 of 'Colonial Pensions' are two items: L 22 10 s paid as pension to Count ACF von Ranzow aged 71, in January 1820 and L 15 paid to his son and daughter at the same time.

ADDENDUM July 2012
Paul Thomas of Monash university has written a scholarly article on O'Deen, which may prove definitive. An abstract plus a pay-to-download version is available at:

OODEEN, A MALAY INTERPRETER ON AUSTRALIA'S FRONTIERLANDS, Indonesia and the Malay World, 40:117

Pattini Devale, Panama

2009-08-19T15:57:00.000-07:00

After the 2004 Boxing Day Tsunami, I made several trips to Pottuvil on the East Coast of Sri Lanka with loads of supplies for the displaced people. On one such trip, in early April, I continued south to the village of Panama (pronounced paa-nuh-muh).

Over 200 years ago, on the 13th of September 1800, an Englishman, William Orr, Esq (a civil servant) visited Panama on the way from Tangalle in the south to Batticaloa in the East. According to his report to the British Governor,

Paoneme contains sixty inhabitants, who cultivate seventy-three amonams of paddy ground.

The following year Thomas Anthony Reeder, surgeon of the 51st Regiment of Foot (who was to die soon after, during the 1st Kandyan War) travelled in the opposite direction. According to his journal,

Panoa is situate on a plain surrounded by jungle. Here are some cultivated fields, and several large stocks of paddee.

A year later, the British Governor himself, the Hon. Frederick North (later 5th Earl of Guilford), followed the southward route. He was accompanied by the Inspector of Hospitals in Ceylon, Thomas Christie, Esq, who reported that

Panoa is a considerable village, and the country round it abounds with paddee fields.

What these descriptions - which appear in James Cordiner's A Description of Ceylon (London, 1807; Dehiwela, Tisara Prakasakayo, 1983) - show (apart from the recognised inability of the English to tackle with any accuracy the phonetics of foreign place names) is that Panama's chief attraction was its paddy fields. The surrounding jungle was far more notable to these perfidious Albionians: Christie was highly excited by the sight, en-route to the village of

a herd of wild hogs, and an alligator, both of which allowed us to approach very near.

Rock, fields and tank at Panama

When I visited the place, however, it was in the knowledge that it possesses a Devale (temple) of the goddess Pattini. The shrine, on a rocky spot on the shore of a tank, is a Buddhist one. However, Hindu shrines of Pattini also exist, although she was not originally a Hindu deity.

Main Pattini shrine (larger photo available here)

Pattini is a goddess of fertility, who may originally have been a middle-eastern deity, Potnia. Mogg Morgan calls Pattini one of the many names of Isis, pointing out that in both cases the male consort is killed and dismembered, but brought back to life by the female deity.

Pattini was said to have been born from a mango and to have destroyed the city of Madurai by tearing off her breast and casting it on the ground, a sort of divine nuclear hand-grenade.

Image of Pattini in the shrine. The doorway to her right leads to the inner sanctum

Pattini was married to Palanga, a mythical ancient South-Indian version of Prince Philip. Palanga appears to have done little except hang around being dissolute with a pretty young mistress and get himself killed by a wicked king. Nevertheless he is propriated as 'Alut Deviyo' ('the New God'), having his own shrine next to his more powerful wife's.

Palanga's shrine (larger photo available here)

Originally Pattini and her consort did not have elaborate temples to house them, the present structures having been built in the 1920s. Instead, two large tamarind trees served as shrines.

Tamarind tree (original Pattini shrine)

In addition to the two large temples, two smaller shrines have been built to the Parakasa Deviyo, the guardian deities of the temple precinct - who punish those who misbehave on the premises.

Shrine of one of the two guardian deities (Parakasa Deviyo) (larger image available here)

One of the central rituals of the Pattini cult is the Ankeliya, the Horn Game, which is similar in concept to the town games of Uppies and Downies in Britain - including it being a male-only sport. In the Ankeliya, two opposing teams, the Udupila ('Upper team') and the Yatipila ('Lower team') try to break the horn of the opposing team in a game of tug-of-war.

Horn tree and channel for the 'thunderbolt tree' (another, larger photo of the Horn Tree available here)

The Upper team tie their horn to the 'horn tree', which grows about equidistant from and slightly behind the shrines of Pattini and Palanga. The Lower team tie their horn to a large tree trunk about 4.5 m (15 ft) long, pivoted in a 2 metre (6 ft) long channel and held in position by logs called 'haepini kandan' ('female cobra trunks'). This tree trunk is called a 'Thunderbolt Tree' (henakanda - cf Anaconda). Paranthetically, these Milliganesque references to snakes in what is, after all a fertility ritual should make a psychoanalyst positively drool.

Closer view of the channel for the 'thunderbolt tree'

The two horns are hooked together and two ropes are tied to the 'thunderbolt tree'. The two teams tug on the ropes, moving the the 'thunderbolt tree' forward and bringing tension to bear on the two interlocked horns until one of them snaps. The winning team - the one whose horn doesn't break - gets to yell obscene songs at the vanquished team; certainly worth more than a cash prize.

To see some photos of the ritual, go HERE.

If you want to visit Panama, it is quite close to the lovely Arugam Bay, which has a few hotels. If you want to learn more about Pattini, you can go to this website or read Gananath Obeyesekere's excellent anthropological study, The Cult of the Goddess Pattini (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1984; ISBN 0-226-61602-9). And here is an interesting take on Pattini in the context of modern Western society.

Colombo, the Pettah, the Dutch Museum & the von Ranzows

2009-08-16T06:35:00.001-07:00

Colombo was called Kalanpu by Ibn Battuta. A mainly Muslim trading port, the Portuguese took it over in 1517 and drove out all the non-Christians. They built a large fort, which encompassed present-day Fort and Pettah.

The Dutch and Sri Lankan armies before Colombo

Allied with the Sinhalese king Rajasinghe II, the Dutch under Gerard Pieterszoon Hulft laid siege to and captured the fort in 1655. The Hollanders were in the employ of the Netherlands East India Company, the Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie or VOC.

The VOC logo

The hitherto feudalistic Lusitanian colony was henceforth to be run with capitalist, Teutonic efficiency. The thrifty Dutch reduced the size of the fort to the area now encompassed within the Colombo city-core known as the 'Fort'. The remainder (outside the new fort) became the outer fort, the 'Pettah'.

Map: Dutch Period Museum marked with orange cross

The Fort is divided from the Pettah by a broad canal, linking the harbour to the Beira lake, which may clearly be seen on the map.

The Dutch Period Museum (larger Photo available here.)

On Prince St in the modern Pettah lies the 'Old Dutch House'. It was built in the late 17th century and was originally the home of the Dutch governor, Thomas van Rhee (1692-1697). In 1796 the British, who displaced the Dutch, took it over and made it into a Military Hospital . Still later it became a post office. The building was restored in 1977-81 and was opened to the public in 1982 as the 'Dutch Period Museum'.

Entrance to the museum

The museum is open daily - except Fridays - from 0900 to 1700 (9 am to 5 pm). Embodying the architectural features of a tropical colonial Dutch town house, it displays old Dutch furniture and artefacts and portrays aspects of contemporary Burgher life and culture.

Old Dutch furniture

Among the items illustrating the Dutch period is a copy of a portrait of Gerard Hulft, the VOC's First Councillor and Director-General of the Indies, Commander-in-Chief of the military forces over the waters of Ceylon and the Coast of India. Hulft was killed during the siege of Colombo.

Gerard Hulft by Flinck (detail)

The original of the portrait by Govert Flinck is at the the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.

Among the original occupants of the Old Dutch House was apparently August Carel Fredrik von Ranzow (also known as August Carl Friedrich von Rantzow, 1789-1844), who styled himself Graf (Count). He was a scion of an aristocratic German-Dutch-Danish family with the (rather Ruritanian-sounding) name of von Rantzau , who traced their ancestry back to Charlemagne. A son of Count Ferdinand Anton von Ranzow of Wolffenbuettel, his progeny engendered Brohiers, Sissouws and Greves, among others. He returned to Brunswick and married an equally aristocratic baronness, and three of the ensuing sons returned to serve the VOC in Sri Lanka.

Another relative who served the VOC in Sri Lanka was Daniel Detlef von Rantzow (1741-1822), who is mentioned, in a list of those attending the funeral of a Robertus Cramer, as having married the daughter of OnderKoopman Salomon van Lier: "Anna Sophia Lier married in 1768, being a widow, with count Daniel Ditloff von Ranzow". He appears soon after to have married Johanna Elizabeth Cramer (possibly a relative of the aforementioned Robertus Cramer?).

Altogether, he had 22 children, one of whom, Ludvig Carl (born in Mannar, Sri Lanka) had numerous descendants, including the van Ranzows of California. Ludvig Carl's son Ferdinand appears to have served in Java. The Ranzows certainly went forth and multiplied.

The Slavic-sounding Detlev name seems to have been in the family since the early 1600s. Interestingly, the first von Ranzow immigrant to Australia appears to have been another Daniel Detlev von Ranzow (or Daniel Detloff Von Ranzow - born 1821), who had been transported in 1838 from Prince of Wales Island. The Australian National University's Elena Govor thinks he was Russian, from the Alaskan island of that name.

She says that he had

"non-European looks – yellow skin, dark hair and dark chestnut eyes. It is known that he was a literate man and had served as a captain’s mate on a ship, been arrested for an attempt to murder, sentenced for life in Bombay and deported to Australia. In 1841 he was released on parole."

Penang was named 'Prince of Wales Island' by the British, so he could possibly have been from there, rather than from an island of the same name in Alaska or Canada. It sounds like this Daniel Detlev was a mixed-race Burgher, possibly a descendant of the aforementioned Daniel Detlev. In which case, he was probably the first of many thousands of Sri Lankan Dutch Burgher immigrants to Australia.

Yudanganawa

2009-08-11T16:42:00.000-07:00

Near the town of Buttala in the Moneragala district, is Yudanganawa, an ancient monastery dating back to the 2nd century BC.

Map: Yudanganawa marked in yellow

I went there in early 2005, on the way back from Tsunami relief work in Pottuvil on the East Coast. At the entrance to the complex of Yudanganawa (which means 'woman of battle' or 'beauty of battle') stands the small dagoba of Chulangani or Chulanganawa ('small woman').

Chulangani stupa

Chulanganawa was the site of a battle between King Dutugemunu (Duttha Gamini Abhaya) and his younger brother Tissa (Tisa):

And between those two there came to pass a great battle in Culanganiyapitthi: fell many thousands of the king's men. (Mahawamsa, ch. xxiv)

Tissa not only defeated his older brother, he also captured the king's war-elephant, Kandula. Dutugemunu didn't re-capture his beloved pachyderm until much later. Kandula was the most celebrated elephant in Sri Lanka's history, later being used to batter down the wrought-iron gate of a fortress:

Roaring like thunder he came, daring danger, and with his tusks pierced the panels of the gate and trampled the threshold with his feet; and with uproar the gate crashed to the ground together with the arches of the gate. (Mahawamsa, ch xxv)

As an aside it might be mentioned that, in the 21st century, Kandula's monicker was bestowed on the first male elephant to be born to the Smithsonian zoo by articifial insemination - itself the child of a first-generation Sri Lankan immigrant to the USA.

Amazingly, after his eventual victory, the king commemorated his defeat in this battle by building the Yudanganawa monastery here. It is not often that one hears of a monarch celebrating his setbacks, especially a defeat as humiliating as this one!

Close by the dagoba is the image house or buduge (literally 'Buddha House'). Only the foundation, the pillars and part of the altar remain.

Image house ('buduge') at Chulanganawa

The approach to the main dagoba at Yudanaganawa reveals its impressive size. It is not as tall as the three large dagobas at Anuradhapura, but it is much broader at the base. Unfortunately the site is heavily forested, so I found it difficult to take a good photograph of the dagoba itself.

Yudanaganawa: main dagoba and image house

I first visited the image house. This is a mediaeval structure, possibly built on foundations similar to those of the Chulangani image house. Inside, it is illustrated in a typical mediaeval manner, with statues of deities and frescos and bas-reliefs on the walls.

The gateway to the inner sanctum is guarded by two painted bas-relief lions rampant. Sri Lanka has not had native lions for many centuries, and the artist was not familiar with what was almost a mythic beast. Hence, the lions looked more like large mastiffs. However they look frightening enough, so their purpose of inspiring awe in the beholder was probably served.

Doorway to inner sanctum of image house

The inner sanctum was very dark and I could just about get photographs of the frescos and statues on my cheapish camera. The art was very mediaeval - a regression from the artistic wonders of the 1st millenium - and, in comparison with the ancient structures visible outside, was not very impressive. That may have been why they installed the two fierce looking guardian lions - to strike terror in the souls of scoffing art critics.

Inner sanctum

The Archaeological Department has been carrying out excavation and conservation work at Yudanganawa for years, and it should continue for at least two decades more. When I went there the scaffolding, which had been erected to help with the archaeological work, was much apparent on the sides of the main dagoba.

Yudanganawa dagoba - note scaffolding for conservation work

The dagoba is quite different in style from conventional stupas - unlike them, it is built in two 'stages', with a smaller dagoba surmounting the massive main structure. It is rather as if the builder had sliced off the middle layer and laid the apex directly onto the base (as is apparent in the photographs below).

Noting that there was nobody around, your doughty correspondent decided to scale the scaffolding and (illicitly and with malice aforethought) climb up on top of the massive dagoba.

The view from the top

The view from the top was quite impressive. It was also good to be able to see, close-up, the consevation work going on right on top of the dagoba. It was quite obvious why this work was necessary - there were trees growing on top of the structure!

Conservation work on top

It was possible to see the hundreds of thousands of bricks of which the dagoba is composed. I wish one could say that the dagoba is made entirely of brick, but I am informed that this is not so: apparently the building contractors of yore were as shifty as their modern counterparts, and many dagobas have cores of clay.

The small stupa on top of the massive base

More on the Kombuwa

2009-08-08T16:36:00.000-07:00

My most illustrious and venerable older sister has given me greater insight into that magical-looking musical instrument, the Kombuwa. The term Kombuwa, originally a Tamil word, also stands for the non-initial letter 'E' in the Sinhala script.

Kombuwa, the Sinhala non-initial 'E'

My copy of Jayalalitha Swami's Tamil-English dictionary advises me that a kombu is the horn of an animal, a wind instrument, a branch of a tree, a shoot of ginger, an elephant's tusk, a pole of a palankeen, a symbol for the vowel 'e', or an opening in the side of a tank through which the water flows in or out.

The pro-Separatist website Tamilnet tells me (in relation to the place name Kompansaintakulam) that Kompu is in Tamil, a branch, a horn of an animal, a musical horn, a tusk; and in Malayalam, a Horn, a tusk, a musical horn, a branch, a pole, a mast, a spear. (P and B are both represented by a single letter in Tamil, hence the two different spellings).

Tamilnet also tells me that the Sinhala kombuwa is a musical instrument shaped like a French horn. However, neither the modern Sinhalese instrument nor the Tamil one look like a French horn. Another website gives more pictures of a Sinhalese kombuwa, for comparison.

The Malayalam (Keralite) one, on the other hand, does look more like a French horn. It also resembles the Sinhala non-initial 'e' letter.

Kerala kombus (Wikipedia)

The Tamil letter for the non-initial 'e' looks like this (and the Malayali is similar):

The non-initial 'e' letter in Tamil

Sinhala, Tamil and Malayali are all written in scripts derived from Brahmi. The earliest known examples of the script are on potsherds, dating from the 6th century BC, found at Anuradhapura in Sri Lanka and at Kodumanal in South India.

Hence it is likely that the terms for the letter all originated from a word which meant either 'branch' or 'horn' in a Dravidian or pre-dravidian tongue.

The tusks of an elephant looked like this to a 17th century English illustrator (please try and ignore the man being crushed by the elephant):

Elephant in Knox's Historical Relation

This is a fairly accurate representation, and it bears a strong resemblance to the South-east Indian kompu.

The Sinhalese kombuwa looks more like a French horn which has been untwisted and made straight in a less-than-perfect manner:

Mahanaga school bandleader with a kombuwa

Oorusitano Tank, Mahagama

2009-08-03T20:52:00.000-07:00

Map showing Oorusitano Wewa (cobra location on southern shore)

From the Mahanaga school we continued to the bund of the local tank, which is called the Oorusitano Wewa, built by king Mahanaga (3rd century BC). The tank originally covered an area of over 700 acres (280 hectares) but siltation has led to its shrinking to about 400 acres (160 ha).

Oorusitano Wewa from the south

Mahanaga means 'Great Cobra'. The cobra was a sacred animal - one was said to have given shelter to the Buddha. In Sri Lanka it was a guardian of the waters. Here is the original, carved at the time of Mahanaga, of the seven-headed cobra symbol later used by the Symbionese Liberation Army (of Patty Hearst fame) as its emblem.

Seven-headed cobra (see large image and location here)

There used to be two of these guardstones, but the other was moved to the Lord knows where in the past 4 decades. The cobra was carved in the time of king Mahanaga and was supposed to guard the waters.

Seven-headed cobra (showing relative size)

It lies at a place where a tunnel, part of a watercourse which drew water from the Oorusitano Wewa, discharged itself into the open.

The tunnel

When I looked into the tunnel I found that it was full of bats and smelled of guano. You might just see the bats fluttering in the centre of the photograph, in the light at the end of the tunnel.

Upper surface of the tunnel

A tale surrounds the name of the tank and that of this watercourse. It seems that a child had been found living among wild boar. He was rescued and brought up among humans and given the name of Sookara Sitano or Ooru Sitano, meaning Mr Pig. When Mahanaga built the tank, the entry to the watercourse (the sorrowwa) was hidden. Nobody knew how to control the flow of water out of the tank.

A silt trap in the middle of the tunnel.

Mr Pig had a magic clay pot. He would shake the pot and water would rush through the watercourse. One day somebody made a hole in the pot, so it lost its magic. The water would not flow. Therefore Mr Pig and his wife flung themselves into the water and water began to flow down the watercourse. When Mr Pig fell into the water, he made a 'buck' sound, his wife hit the water with a 'bock'. Hence the watercourse was known as the Buck-bock sorowwa.

Children swimming in the new watercourse

Today a new watercourse has replaced the Buck-bock sorowwa. I went down to its shores and one of the boys bathing in it shouted that there was a diya balla, a 'water dog' behind me. I looked round and spied an Indian Otter (lutra lutra nair) on the far bank. It dived in just before I could take a photograph. Its head is just visible underwater, just below the rocks on the centre-left and just to the right of the clump of grass on the right of the photograph.

New watercourse, looking downstream

On the road to Mahagama

2009-08-03T04:19:00.000-07:00

Map of the hinterland of Hambantota, showing Mahagama

On the weekend I went to Mahagama, close to Sevenagala. This Mahagama was one of several ancient towns of that name, which were capitals of the southern Sri Lankan principality of Rohana (modern Ruhuna). This particular village is said to be the capital of Mahanaga, the brother of king Devanampiya Tissa, who fled Anuradhapura and established his own kingdom in the south.

To get to Mahagama we turned left (eastwards) just before Embilipitiya and drove along the dam (the bund) of the Udawalawe tank (reservoir) .

Bund of Udawalawe reservoir

The Udawalawe tank was created by damming the upper reaches of the Walawe river in order to provide water for the farmers of lower Sabaragamuwa and Ruhuna. The main road to the Udawalawe elephant sanctuary and beyond lies on top of the bund.

Approaching the Udawalawe sanctuary, we pass European tourists who have hired Land Rovers and are out for a good day of elephant spotting - Udawalawe is one of the best places for seeing Sri Lankan elephants (elaphas maximus).

European tourists

Udawalawe sanctuary is marked by an electified barbed wire fence. Some elephants gather along the fence to get goodies from visitors, like this one:

Elephant, Udawalawe reserve

Some years ago, one of these elephants had managed to cross the fence and had ravaged the nearby houses. However, the villagers told us that they have not had any problems recently.

The elections to the Uva Provincial Council were due on 8th August, so the campaign was in full swing. Opposite where I took the picture of the elephant was an 'election office' of the ruling United People's Freedom Alliance, festooned with posters of candidates. Moneragala is a classic centre-left district, so UPFA posters were much more in evidence than that of the other parties.

UPFA 'election office'

A TV programme featuring Shasheendra Rajapaksa, one of the prospective UPFA candidates for the Moneragala district of the Uva province (13 is his lucky number!) was due to be videotaped at the Mahanaga school at Mahagama. I found the school band ready to welcome the guests, who were late; the band was restive.

Mahanaga school band

The band, who were dressed in saris, had an interesting mix of western and oriental instruments. The leader, on the right of the photograph, carried a curvy horn known as a kombuwa.