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Ceylon was Oriental in the last measure of completeness – utterly Oriental; also utterly tropical; and indeed to one’s unreasoning spiritual sense the two things belong together. Mark Twain, Following the Equator, 1897
In Colombo, there is nothing to entertain [the tourists] apart from some swimming baths at the Galle Face Hotel. Harry Williams, Ceylon: Pearl of the East, 1948
This is still true today.
The worst street for this was Galle Road.
Our hotel was at one end of this street.
Elsewhere in Sri Lanka, Tamils and Muslims are scattered to the north and east, and make up a precarious minority. Not here. Almost a third of this city is Tamil, and a quarter Muslim.
No one can remember how it started, this riot of work. Some think Colombo was an emporium at the edge of the Arab world. Others say the Moors arrived as an army-for-hire. By 1344, there were already five hundred ‘Abyssinians’ in town, spoiling for a fight. Marco Polo, writing half a century earlier, explained it like this: ‘The people of this island are by no means of a military habit, but on the contrary, are abject and timid, and when there is occasion to employ soldiers, they are procured from other countries, in the vicinity of the Mahometans.’ If true, the Moors must, at some stage, have
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1344 you say... Might explain Polunnaruwa period lasting from 100-1200…
There were the shrines in offices and homes, the purifying rituals, and the bus seats left empty for monks.
Then it's a good thing we didn't take a bus… We'd sit on a placed reserved for monks and upset the people.
In this regime of purity, sex was a difficult subject. It was seldom discussed, and there were no bodies in advertising, or public displays of female flesh. If a magazine ever ran one of those features, ‘How to spice up your love life’, it was usually recommending a new hairdo or a hostess trolley. Meanwhile, for outsiders, it’s often been hard to reconcile the apparent contradictions: on the one hand, the horror of human exhibition, and, on the other, the devala statues with their sensuous bodily forms. ‘Westerners,’ an abbot once told me, ‘can never understand that it’s possible to be both
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1. The purity is still there. PDA is unacceptable.
2. The sensational women sculptures are ironical. I did not notice that.
3. Haredi people would relate to the saying that you can be sensual\erotic and holy at the same time.
‘The Sinhalese have one of the highest suicide rates in the world, and yet they’re also the happiest. And the most generous. Despite the poverty, they give away more money here than almost anywhere else.’
‘Two female prime ministers?’ I tried. ‘And a president?’
‘Listen, we still live in a very ancient society, no? And, John, you know what? Women are nothing here. We’re empowered only if we’re born to power! That’s fine for the Elite, but, to the rest, it means nothing. Most women are worth no more than their dowry, and that’s not much. Out in the countryside, we’re just units of production. Cheap labour and baby-makers! The best thing a girl can do is head for the Middle East and get work as a domestic. Most have never even seen a microwave, let alone a set of company accounts! They’ll be beaten, cheated and locked up, but they’ll send home over a
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Women's rights in Sri Lanka. This was in response to the author mentioning there were two women prime ministers and one woman president.
‘The last thirty years have been unimaginable,’ Mohammed once told me, ‘and only now are we beginning to recover.’
In some places, I could still see the scars: craters in the concrete or chunks of masonry missing. Even now, Dehiwala railway station was without its outer walls. Other places had managed better, swamping the memories with traffic or a heaving crowd of commuters. But it was the sheer scale of the bombing that was so hard to comprehend. Between 1983 and 2009, explosions became part of Colombo’s routine, a sort of anti-landscape in which hundreds were killed.
This is very reminiscent of Tel-Aviv and Israel in general. We also had many years of explosive terror attacks. Especially in the 1990s and early 2000s.
‘And how did it all begin?’ I asked. Around the table, they looked at each other. ‘That,’ said Vasantha, ‘is a difficult question . . .’
Same for the Arab-Israeli conflict.
But, for all his elegant words, S. W. R. D. had never seen the danger. By making Sinhala the official language, the Tamils would become foreigners in their own land. That, of course, is just what the Chauvinists wanted. During the British era, Tamils had held two thirds of civil-service jobs, and yet they made up only fifteen per cent of the population. Now it would be the turn of the Sinhalese. S. W. R. D. did nothing to dampen their expectations, and so, by 1951, the issue had become a rallying point. In a matter of years, Ceylon would divide into ‘them’ and ‘us’.
One was S. W. R. D.’s widow, Sirimavo, who’d step into his role and become the world’s first female prime minister.
First female prime minister was in Sri Lanka! In the fifties!
‘I’m blind in one eye,’ she said, ‘so I don’t have the courage for driving in London.’ ‘And I’m all eyes, and don’t have the courage for Colombo.
Me neither had the courage to drive in Colombo...
Meanwhile, in Colombo, the goondas (or ‘thugs’) assembled, armed with electoral rolls. The lists they brought to the cemetery contained the names and addresses of all the city’s Tamils. As the writer Shiva Naipaul recalled in Unfinished Journey, ‘Before the axes could be wielded, before the petrol bombs could be thrown, before the pillaging could begin, a little paperwork had to be done.’
Same as the Nazis.
This, then, was the start of an exodus and a quarter of a century of war. Already, the mobs had displaced over 300,000 Tamils. Although the government tried to close down the ferries, over half of them fled, mostly to India. It was the beginning of yet another race in exile, nowadays almost a million strong. Meanwhile, of those that stayed, some drifted back to their Colombo homes, and to an uncertain future. A few even changed their names to become less Tamil. Then there were others who headed north, to Jaffna, seeking safety in numbers. Some would join the separatists, looking for guns and a
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Scale of losses in the civil war in Sri Lanka.
‘Be warned,’ I was once told, ‘this is a country of two halves: Colombo and beyond.’
I was given lots of advice on what I might need, or how I’d die. Out in the bush, there’d be scorpions, landmines, rabies, marauding elephants and – of course – the serpents. If there is one thing they love telling you in Colombo it’s that, out there, more people die of snakebite than anywhere else in the world.
Such sparsity would have surprised the Ancient Greeks. By 300 BC, Alexander the Great knew all about the fabulous wealth to be found here, in ‘Taprobane’. His ambassador in India, Megasthenes, was sending back reports of tortoises so big that you could build a house within their shell. Meanwhile, Alexander’s general, Onesicritus, noted that this was the place for war-elephants, more ferocious here than anywhere else.
Half an hour away was a city that was once one of the biggest and most ostentatious in the world. These days, not many outsiders have heard of Anuradhapura, but in Roman times it was so huge that it would have taken an entire day to walk across.
In the Sri Lankan tradition, there’s always been a far worse punishment than death (which is merely a temporary phase). It is, of course, to return to this world as a crow.
reservoir cities,
What does reservoir cities mean?
There was another flurry of murders, and then, in 1293, the invaders returned. A mere 223 years after its establishment, Polonnaruwa was battered to bits, and with it went the golden age. By the time Marco Polo arrived, later that year, there was no mention of great cities, just people who ate rice, drank ‘tree-wine’ and wore sarongs.
It's quite sad Marco Polo canr later ijn the year Polunnaruwa was sacked. Had they sacked it a year later thbe west would have remmebered it totally differently...
Even now, these ideas were appealing, perhaps more so than ever. They explained the robes and the proto-medieval parliament, and the overbearing sense of entitlement. For many, to suggest that this island be anything but Sinhalese was an affront to the ancient order. It didn’t matter that the cities had been overlooked for over five hundred years, or that their kings had often been Tamil, and so had their armies. Geneticists aren’t even sure there’s a distinct Sinhalese stock, or that the people who think they’re Sinhalese aren’t a glorious mix of everyone else. But, whatever the truth, the
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This is frighteningly similar to the Israeli -Palestinian conflict.
After the collapse of the reservoir-cities, a belt of vicious flora divided the island in two: Tamils to the north, Sinhalese to the south. For the next five centuries, Ceylon owed its peace to this: a giant hedge.
claymores on the trees. A terrible weapon, ah? When it blows off, it sends out hundreds of little steel balls. We lost a lot of men along here.’
This also reminds me the conflict with the Palestinians.
But the Portuguese were also inspired by Marco Polo, and soon their navigators were setting out in all directions.
Really? Never heard about links between Marco Polo and the Portuguese.
But all these things were fripperies compared to the big prize, deep in the forest. It was a small tree but it would change everyone’s lives: the kurundu, or cinnamon.
At some stage, we passed into ‘Ten Lakes’ or Wilpattu, and the national park. It was all brutally magnificent, just the sort of Sri Lanka I’d come to love.
The crocodiles looked bigger too. Every pond and every swamp of silty gloop seemed to have its own armoured thug. Although known as ‘muggers’, this didn’t do justice to their villainy. They were like tree trunks with a four-foot mantrap grin. In 1797, a vast, twenty-foot specimen was brought back to Colombo, slung between two carts. Percival describes how, when the beast was cut open, it was found to contain a local man in an advanced state of digestion. When I told Ravi about this, he winced. ‘They’re still big killers, especially amongst women, washing clothes.’
Dangerous beasts: crocodiles in Sri Lanka.
Even the Portuguese had been impressed by such displays of might, and were soon rounding up the export models at the rate of about forty a year. The first one arrived back in Europe in 1507. Poor ‘Annone’, as she was called, ended up in Rome, where she was stuffed with bread and cakes, died of dyspepsia and was buried in the Vatican Gardens. No wonder today’s west-coast elephants looked so wary.
I wonder if there is a Wikipedia article about the elephant.
Nihal de Silva, the author of The Road From Elephant Pass, said that, during the civil war, Wilpattu was ‘a neutral zone where the army and rebels were present but did not really confront each other.’ This was to say nothing of the poachers, bandits, illegal loggers and deserters. Most of the park staff were murdered, and secret ammunition dumps still turn up from time to time. The area was so dangerous that, when de Silva’s novel was made into a film, it had to be shot in Malaysia. Not even the novelist himself survived this anarchy, and, in 2006, he was touring the park when his vehicle went
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A dangerous place in Sri Lanka.
Not surprisingly, such wealth worried the Portuguese. ‘The odour of cinnamon,’ wrote one general, ‘will bring others to Ceylon.’ With too few men to saturate this land, a string of forts was needed, set at intervals, no more than a day’s march apart.
Was the fortress in Gaulle built by the Portuguese?
I also learnt that a snake would never cross a coconut mat, and that you could never be poisoned, eating with a coconut spoon.
Every sea-girt country has its watery Gomorrah, and Sri Lanka has Negombo.
You said it best.
Each year, only a handful of offenders are ever brought to book, and the Westerners are usually deported. They are seldom charged. Negombo’s most notorious paedophile, Victor Baumann, was allowed home in 1996, despite fifteen years of abuse (although, back in Switzerland, he was soon clapped in irons). At least, after that, Sri Lanka upgraded its punishments. Until then, the maximum fine for violating a child would barely have paid for a decent breakfast.
Turns out Sri Lanka is a pedophile shelter...
From here, the Portuguese had sent out their last and most preposterous expeditions. They were preposterous for the sheer certainty of failure. It was one thing to send in raiding parties, in search of cinnamon. It was quite another, despatching armies to bring the highlands to heel.
Failure of the Portuguese to conquer Sri Lanka.
On my return from Negombo, I stayed on York Street.
A main street in Colombo?
Chekhov was here for six days in 1890, on his way back from a penal colony on the island of Sakhalin, in Siberia. It must’ve been like a transfer to heaven from hell, and he’d settled down to a little philandering and a new story, ‘Gusev’.
So what happened? How did this pearl of the Orient become its Havana? ‘Terrorists,’ people explained, ‘and twenty-six years of civil war.’
I feel your pain :(
(even Duran Duran had once made a video here, in some decomposing tea-rooms).
The Dutch had even formed a company to gather up the booty, the Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie, or VOC. It would create the world’s first private empire. During its first year of business, 1602, the company had set its sights on cinnamon, and – a generation on – VOC troops were at the gates of Fort.
Was it the beginning of Capitalism?
It must have been puzzling for the Kandyans, the sight of Europeans at each other’s throats. King Rajasinha II had agreed to help the Dutch with their siege, in return for some forts on the coast. It was immediately apparent that the VOC had no intention of honouring the deal. Furious, the king set fire to the surrounding countryside and returned to Kandy. He may have got rid of one enemy, but he’d now acquired another, this time pale, mercantile, black clad and Protestant.
But the Dutch knew that chutney alone wouldn’t save the empire. Forts were needed – just in case. And that, of course, explains the magnificence of Galle. * There was still a tiny Dutch town within the ramparts.
Construction of Galle fort.
Sipping gin and lime, it was tempting to imagine that evenings had been just like this for the officieren, three hundred years before. A little corner of Old Holland had been perfectly recreated, and now all that was missing was the Dutch themselves.
Wonder if michals mom would have loved it
Meanwhile, of all the drunks, the most famous was an Ondaatje, whose rages were exquisitely – and often painfully – portrayed by his son, Michael, in a memoir, Running in the Family.
I read this book.
Michael Ondaatje once said that Sinhalese music sounds like a scorpion in a test tube, or a frog singing at Carnegie Hall. In the confines of a bus, it becomes a form of auditory extortion.)
Michael Ondaatje once again...
Mattala Rajapaksa International Airport.
One of the emptiest and most deserted airports in the world...
