Tamils were living in Lanka before Sinhala land robbers

Prior to, and along with, the North Indian arrivals, there were small but
steady intrusions from Peninsular and South India into North and Central Sri
Lanka, from 1000 BC to 450 BC - Seneviratne

Tamils were living in the land called Iilankai before Sinhala land robbers
asked for refugee status after fucking lion in so called boruvamsa!!! These
monkeys used modern technology of sari rising like dog to bleach the skin.-
KS...

Call to stop politicising Sri Lankan history
COLOMBO DIARY | PK Balachanddran
Colombo, October 11

http://www.hindustantimes.com/news/1...4,00410008.htm

A top Sri Lankan archaeologist has called for a fresh, unbiased,
scientific and multi-disciplinary approach to the history of his island
country, in view of the great damage done to the national fabric by
unscientific studies and incorrect or biased reading of the past.

Prof Sudharshan Seneviratne of the University of Peradeniya told
Hindustan Times that history and archaeology in Sri Lanka had been badly
politicised, and that politicisation of this sort had contributed to the
Sinhala-Tamil conflict in the country.

Both Sinhalas and Tamils have been responsible for this, he asserts.
Both have distorted history to serve narrow and competitive political ends.

And sadly, there is little or no effort to stem the rot, he regrets.

"A new breed of charlatans and political animals in these disciplines
are responsible for the emergence of ahistorical and an anti-historical bias
in schools, at seats of higher education, and in the country as a whole,"
Seneviratne said in his GC Mendis Memorial Lecture in Colombo last week.

GC Mendis had pioneered efforts to give Sri Lankan historiography a
new and scientific outlook. In his Problems of Ceylon History, Mendis had
called for a methodology that distinguished historical persons from
supernatural or mythical beings; historical stories from legends; and
historical facts from religious beliefs.

"Subsequently, Lakshman Perera, in his Institutions of Ancient Ceylon
from Inscriptions had made a paradigm shift from interpreting ancient
history mainly through culture and religion, to looking at changes in the
social structure and social institutions," Seneviratne said.


At about the same time, a similar paradigm shift had taken place in India
too, thanks to the writings of the mathematician-turned historian, DD
Kosambi. But while in India many historians followed Kosambi, in Sri Lanka,
Mendis and Perera had very few followers, Seneviratne regretted.

Political use of epics

Early colonial and Sinhala historians began to look at the Middle Historic
Pali chronicles, Dipavamsa and Mahavamsa, from a Sinhala community point of
view, rather than a national or "Ceylonese" point of view.

"These chronicles helped Sinhala sub-nationalists create in their community,
a feeling of having had a glorious past. The historians' interpretation
helped distinguish the Sinhala-Buddhists from the Hindu-Tamils, and give
expression to the then emerging Sinhala-Buddhist nationalism," Seneviratne
told Hindustan Times in an interview.

"Duttagamini, the hero of the Mahavamsa, came to be portrayed as the hero of
the Sinhalas in their fight against the invading Tamils from South India,"
he noted.

However, the writers of the Mahavamsa could not be held responsible for
this, he said. "It is we who have politicised it."

Historians and political interpreters must remember that the Mahavamsa was
not as comprehensive as it is thought to be. Its scope was narrower than it
is popularly credited with. According to Seneviratne, the chronicle was
about the Theravada Mahavihara sect and the ruling families of Anuradhapura.
It did not cover other communities, including other Buddhist sects, except
to the extent that these impinged on the main theme. It was not about the
whole of Sri Lanka.

The chronicle was also rooted in a particular time period and reflected the
then existing concerns of society.

"Like all epics, it was written at a time of crisis in the society. In this
case, there were invasions by Tamils from South India, and challenges from
non-Theravada groups within the island itself," Seneviratne said.

What he meant was that the Mahavamsa should be seen in the proper context
and care should be taken while drawing inferences from it or putting
constructs on it to meet modern-day political needs.

Aryan arrival

The Mahavamsa and the Deepavamsa attribute the beginning of civilisation in
Sri Lanka to the arrival of Indo-Aryan speaking Kshatriya groups from North
West and North East India. This event is said to have coincided with the
demise of the Buddha in the Fifth or the Sixth century BC.

Later, this "Aryan" arrival was made the basis of the assertion that the
Sinhalas were of "Aryan" stock from North India, as opposed to the Tamils,
who were of "Dravidian" stock from South India, Seneviratne said.

"The bhikkus who wrote the Mahavamsa had a fascination for North India,
probably because the liturgical language of Buddhism was Pali, an Indo-Aryan
language. Another important influence was the fact that the great Buddhist
Emperor, Ashoka, was from North India," Seneviratne said.

"The narratives of the Fourth Century BC carry conjectural myths of origin
and cultural cordiality with North India. Contrary to this, South India is
associated with invasions and confrontations," he noted.

Dravidian influx

Prior to, and along with, the North Indian arrivals, there were small but
steady intrusions from Peninsular and South India into North and Central Sri
Lanka, from 1000 BC to 450 BC. And it is these South Indian immigrants who
had introduced iron, rice, millet, the domesticated humped bull and the
horse, to the island, the archaeologist says.

This was revealed by Siran U Deraniyagala, a renowned Sri Lankan
archaeologist, after conducting excavations in Anuradhapura in 1969.

Therefore, by the time Prince Vijaya arrived from Bengal to create the
Sinhala race (500 BC according to the Mahavamsa ), there were fairly
advanced communities in North Central and Central Sri Lanka, which had
migrated from peninsular, and South India.

Aryan-Dravidian divide

"The rise of nationalisms in the Twentieth century, resulted in the Sinhala
and Tamil communities searching for distinctive identities. They sought to
authenticate their identities, origins and territoriality by referring to
texts and archaeological remains," Seneviratne says.

"They also imagined a biological, cultural, linguistic and ideological
homogeneity for gaining legitimate access to resources and the decision
making process in a particular geo-political context."

"The Sinhalas considered themselves as Aryans and the Tamils considered
themselves as Dravidians. The Sinhalas sought identification with the Aryan
North India and the Tamils sought identification with Dravidian South
India," Seneviratne said.

"An alarming factor in the politics of South Asia is ethno-national
confrontation based on religion, language and other forms of cultural
affiliations. In these confrontations, culture-related material retrieved
from historical and archaeological sources is used. It is now applied with
much sophistication and on an enhanced scale," Seneviratne notes.

"Various groups contending for power in the region have increasingly come to
appreciate the functional value of symbols drawn from the past, especially
in the construction of national identities, ultimately leading to the
invention of imagined political communities," he says.

Writers from both the majority Sinhala community and the minority Tamil
community, keep trading charges against each other about destroying cultural
symbols and historical and archaeological evidence, to lay claim to
territory and establish hegemony over territory.

"It is therefore useful to understand the functional role played by ideology
in synthesizing the past and the process by which the past is transmitted to
the present," Seneviratne says.

LTTE's role

According to Seneviratne, the LTTE has introduced a sophisticated use of
history and archaeology, and established a cross-regional racial and
cultural affiliation of the Tamil-speaking people of Sri Lanka with those
residing in South India.

It has attempted to cement this link with a vision of a pan-Tamil homeland,
he says.

The LTTE has also adopted Tamil symbols from across the Palk Strait, to
define the Tamils' separate identity in the island of Sri Lanka.

"The LTTE's symbol is the tiger, drawn from the imperial Chola. The Tigers
draw parallels from the South Indian Sangam texts, eulogizing the hero
fighting against the invading army. They construct funerary monuments for
their fallen heroes on the lines of the historic hero-stones (Virakkal) in
South India," Seneviratne notes.

"The existence of a Dravidian race, and the theory of mass migration from
South India to Sri Lanka (taken after the Orientalists and Antiquarians),
have been accepted as facts of history, and as symbols of their hegemony
over a particular geo-political region of the island," he says.

Aryan-Dravidian divide not racial

According Seneviratne, the Aryan-Dravidian divide, which has created major
social and political upheavals in Sri Lanka (and South India too) is a
baseless political construct. So is the notion of a mass influx of
Dravidians or Aryans into the island.

There were no mass migrations of Aryan or Dravidian peoples. On the
contrary, there were intrusions of small communities bringing with them
technological and other cultural elements, which integrated themselves with
pre-existing stone-using communities.

Seneviratne points out that recent palaeobiological studies of skeletal
remains found at the megalithic burials in South India and Sri Lanka have
indicated three things, (1) there is no evidence of a catastrophic invasion
or any new physical types associated with the Early Iron Age culture; (2)
megalithic peoples are biologically very heterogeneous. (3) a biological
continuum exists between the pre-historic peoples, the megalithic builders
and certain present-day populations of India and Sri Lanka.

"And on the basis of linguistic anthropological studies, these communities
may have spoken an admixture of Austric-Mundari and proto-Dravidian dialects
in the earliest phase, and Indo-Aryan dialects in the post Fifth Century BC
period," he says.

Seneviratne laments that colonial and post-colonial historians do not
acknowledge the fact that both "Aryan" and "Dravidian" are essentially
linguistic terms, or at the most, cultural identities.

"Very definitely they are not racial identities," he asserts.

(PK Balachanddran is Special Correspondent of Hindustan Times in Sri Lanka)