It translates from the Sinhala as ‘Great Chronicle.’ There are many chronicles, but this is the one that’s really elevated to Olympian status. The very first entry, in the section on ancient and medieval history, is from the Mahavamsa, the national epic. Some of the authors are long dead, some still living.Ĭan you give me a sense of the kind of excerpts that he includes? What he’s put together in this book are these very accessible short excerpts that cover the whole range of history-about 2,500 years of it-taking us all the way to the end of the Civil War in 2009. He’s a specialist on Buddhism and its relationship to Sinhala culture and has a long association with Sri Lanka. It’s edited by John Holt, who is now emeritus professor at Bowdoin College in Maine. That’s the one most people go to, especially if they’re not specialist historians.īut for an introduction that’s erudite and not superficial, The Sri Lanka Reader is the one I would go to. There is a rather good textbook on the history of Sri Lanka by Professor K.M. Of all the books I’ve read on Sri Lankan history, this is the one that I found best in terms of a sweeping overview of a blend of history, politics and culture, from many different angles and authors-as opposed to having, say, a textbook by one author. On that note, let’s turn to the books and in particular The Sri Lanka Reader which you mentioned as the best place to start. The Sri Lanka Reader: History, Culture, Politics It’s incredibly complicated which makes it interesting: there are puzzles to unravel. These travels and my book project have been a good excuse for me to dive into Sri Lanka’s history, cultures and religions. My school career was highly fragmented, back and forth between Britain and Sri Lanka: I think I changed schools 10 times before I turned 16. I didn’t really get a sense of Sri Lanka’s many-layered history as a child. Yes, which I knew little about until my mid-40s. I suppose to get a grip on these contradictions you need to have an understanding of the history? So, that’s the attraction of Sri Lanka for me, in a nutshell. I suppose that central paradox of beguiling charm and violent eruptions was the really hard puzzle that I set off on my travels with, when I came back to rediscover Sri Lanka in my mid-40s. That, among other contradictions, always puzzled me as a child, and they lingered with me during my three decades or so of absence. The obvious paradox is this beguiling charm I mentioned, especially of Sinhala-Buddhist culture in the lush, green wet zone, alongside an astonishing record of violence that leaves admiring foreigners completely puzzled and in a state of consternation.
In the book, I say it’s a heaven-and-hell country, engulfed and consumed by its own extremes. I call it ‘paradoxical’ in the subtitle of my book, and for a small country with a population of around 20 million, there are just so many contradictions. The other thing I would point to about Sri Lanka is its baffling complexity. In a mid-sized island roughly the size of Ireland, you have an incredible variety. You don’t have to travel long distances in Sri Lanka to come across something quite different. I can’t think of anywhere else-at least that I’ve been to-where in a comparable space you have as much variety of people, cultures, flora, fauna, and landscapes.
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Getting under the skin of people in these places, walking all over the landscapes, was just wondrous. My main fresh discovery, traveling around the island properly, was the back-of-beyond places that I didn’t really get to see as a child. The attraction of Sri Lanka beyond that, for me, is all wound up with being half Sri Lankan and having been born and spent my childhood there, and then coming back to write a travel memoir about the country. You see that expressed in the way people dress and what they eat, where they go to worship, and the languages: Sinhala and Tamil as well as English. It’s an incredibly diverse country, culturally, ethnically and religiously. I like to think of the Sri Lankans as the Irish of Asia or the Irish as the Sri Lankans of Europe, because they’re very friendly, open, warm and welcoming.
Most of it is very green and lush-that’s the wet zone of the country, which covers over half of the landmass. There’s the immediate charm of the place. Before we get to the books, I wondered whether, as an introduction, you could tell me why Sri Lanka is such a fascinating place to discover? You then rediscovered it as an adult so, in a way, you’ve experienced it as an outsider as well. You were born in Sri Lanka and lived there until you were 12.
Foreign Policy & International Relations.
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