Disproving Tamil claims to antiquity and territory - III & IV

by Gamini Iriyagolle
Before considering the further relevant facts presented by Nilakanta Sastri (in his A History of South India, pub. 1955) and Karthigesu Indrapala, sometime Professor of History of the University of Jaffna (in his unpublished Ph.D. thesis of over 500 pages entitled The Dravidian Settlements in Ceylon and the Beginnings of the Kingdom of Jaffna submitted to and accepted by the University of London in 1965) and by others, we must clarify the Mahavamsa account of Vijaya's espousal of a princess from southern Madura on the occasion of his coronation. She was the daughter of the "Pandu" king who sent other maidens for Vijaya's ministers as well. Had the early Pandus of southern Madura been Tamil (as this writer himself believed earlier, then Tamil blood entered Sinhala veins in the second generation (if the story be true). But this was not the case. The Pandus (Pandyans) of southern India were originally a Ksatriya (royal) tribe of Aryans who migrated from the Madhyadesa in northern India D.R. Bhandarkar. Carmichael Lectures, 1918 p. 9 et seq. cited by Walpola Rahula in his History of Buddhism in Ceylon, 2nd ed. p. 48f n. 1).

It has been also affirmed, after examination of all available evidence, that from the 6th century B.C. onwards Sri Lankan (i.e. Sinhala) kings and South Indian Pandyan kings would have been Aryans who had established themselves as the rulers of the indigenous population (A. Parpola, cited b S.U. Deraniyagala in his monumental work Prehistory of Sri Lanka. Part II, p. 747.

After the Aryan clans seized power, the developments in Sri Lanka and in the Pandya country were different. In Sri Lanka the Aryans, who were called Sinhalese, assimilated the indigenous inhabitants and all later immigrants until their hydraulic civilisation decayed and collapsed in the dry zone. In South India the Aryan ruling class became Tamilized, though the Dravidian speakers themselves had been aryanized to a significant degree. "History begins in the South of India as in the North with the advent of Aryans" (Nilakanta Sastri. op. cit.p.64).

In Sri Lanka, which was called Sinhala after the Sinhala settlement in the 6th Century B.C. (H.W. Codrington, A Short History of Ceylon p. 1 ), the Sinhalese were confronted by the native yakkhas who were later called Veddo. The Veddo are said by students of Sri Lanka's prehistory to be anthropologically linked to the Balangoda Man who lived in the Stone Age ( S.U. Deraniyagala. op. cit. ). The National Atlas of Sri Lanka, publish in1988, states at p. 68 that human habitation in the island could be traced back 75,000 years while the Sinhala version of the same work, published in 1993, gives an estimate of 125,000 years, aging our Stone Age man by 5O,000 years in five years ! We are concerned in this discussion with the first known civilisation to have lasted till modern times and its governments.

The Mahavamsa account of the Indo-Aryan immigration and occupation of the island is firmly corroborated by archaeological finds and epigraphic evidence. Excavations in the citadel area of Anuradhapura have resulted in the discovery of potsherds which have been dated by radio carbon and photo luminescence methods to between 600 B.C. and 500 B.C. They bear two insriptions in the Brahmi script, one of which has been deciphered. It is in Prakrit which was an Indo-Aryan language from which the Sinhala language evolved - the course of evolution being traceable from the earliest times to the present day.

The inscription reads as follows: " biya.......Anuradha", the latter word being a proper noun. According to the Mahavamsa one of Vijaya's ministers was named Anuradha" and he founded, on the banks of the Kadamba river (Malvathu Oya) a settlement named after him (Mahavamsa Ch.VII Verses 43-45). Anuradha was also the name of one of the brothers of Bhaddakaccana, King Pandukabhaya's maternal grandmother who was Sakyan (Mahavamsa Ch IX Verses 9-10). This Anuradha is also said to have a settlement named after him (i.e. there were two Anuradhas who had Anuradhapura as their headquarters) What is important is the confirmation by epigraphical evidence of the Aryan immigration in the 6th century B.C. as narrated in the chronicles of the Sinhalese (S. U. Deraniyagala, op. cit. Vol. II Addendum 11 and Addendum III).

The work of Deraniyagala and his colleagues is a major contribution to the history of language, for they have put before the world evidence of writing in Brahmi about three centuries older than the writings called Asokan Brahmi which had been previously regarded, along with 3rd century Brahmi inscriptions in Sinhala, as the oldest extant writings in this script

The 1992 version of the 15th edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica has this to say about immigration of Sinhalese and Tamils to Sri Lanka:

"The island's first settlers were probably tribes of the proto - Australoid ethnic group, akin to the pre Dravidian hill tribes of southern India. Remnants of these people were absorbed by the Indo-Aryans who immigrated from India around the 5th century B.C. and developed into the Sinhalese. The Tamils were probably later immigrants from Dravidian India, their migrations being spread out over a period dating from the early centuries A.D to about 1200 " (Vol. 28 pp. 194-185). This was written by a Tamil, the late Professor Sinnappah Arasaratnam whose Tamil bias is clearly seen in the article as a whole (e.g. the period of immigration of Tamils for settlement is antedated as we shalI see and no historical chronicle of the Sinhalese, though available in translation, is included in the bibliography, while Satchi Ponnambalam's malevolent and obviously well funded work "Sri Lanka: the National Question and the Tamil Liberation Struggle', with statements such as " Devanampiya Theesan, the Tamil Hindu king of Lanka at that time, accepted the missionaries from Asoka and became converted to Buddhism", is included). Arasaratnam's statements are nevertheless an important admission according to which Sinhala settlement in the island preceded the Tamil by more than 500 years.

The chronicle, referring to a period anterior to the Sinhala immigration, narrates encounters between the Buddha and people called nagas who lived in the northern part of the island and in Kelaniya. There is no evidence, not even an indication who these might have been, if they did exist, or of their origin. .If they did exist, they were absorbed by the superior combination of the Sinhalese and the Yakkhas, for no further mention is made of them while the Yakkhas (by that designation and as Veddo) are known down to our times.

There was thus no destruction of the Yakkhas and indeed this would not have been possible given the limited numbers of Aryan immigrants. Vijaya's military successes against the Yakkhas owed more to strategem than superior force, It was Pandukabhaya (5th century B.C.), only the second native born Sinhala king, who made a lasting settlement with the Yakkhas having himself being helped by them in his struggles against his maternal uncles. Political and cultural unity was strengthened by the conversion of Pandukabhaya's grandson Devanampiya Tissa (3th century B.C.) and his entire court to Buddhism by the mission of Mahinda, Dharmasoka's son. (the mission to Sri Lanka mentioned in one of Asoka's inscriptions).

Both as Yakkhas and as Veddo the natives became an important element in the new civilisation, much more important than the Tamils ever were till the l9th century. They helped Pandukabhaya to administer the realm. They fought in the armies of Parakramabahu I and Rajasinghe II. They were in the forefront of the Sinhala War of Independence (1817-1818 and paid dearly for their loyalty and valour. In fact one of the most prominent leaders of the Sinhalese in this war, who also held high office, Kiulegedera Mohottala, was of direct Vedi descent. He was betrayed by some Moors to the British, executed by the latter and deified by a grateful Sinhala people (Paul E. Pieris, Sinhale and the Patriots, p.421). Some of the highest Kandyan families of today are descended from the Veddo and entire villages, now Sinhala, are of Vedi descent and proud of it. The "wild" Veddo are decadent clans. There are Veddo ( "Coast Veddas " ) on the eastern coast who have become Tamil-speaking after inter marriage in comparatively recent times.

"We found that the Coast Veddas spoke of themselves as Verdas and said that long ago their fathers came from inland. They all speak Tamil but some assert that they still know, and at times use amongst themselves, their old Vedda language, but when we asked the men who made this statement to speak in their ancestral dialect, they spoke Sinhalese'' (Seligman and Seligman, The Veddas p.332)

" The descendants of the pioneer Indo-Aryan colonists of Ceylon had spread by the 1st. Century B.C., as their numerous inscriptions in the Brahmi script testify, not only over the entire (italics supplied) dry zone but also into Kagalla and Colombo districts of the lowcountry wet zone as well as into the lower montane zone around Gampola, Kandy, Teldeniya, Bogoda (north-west of Badulla) and MataleÉ (C.W. Nicholas, A Short Account of the History of Irrigation Works up to the 11th Century, Journal of the Ceylon Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, 1962). The population of Jaffnapatnam ( a corruption of the Sinhala names Yapapatuna and Yapapattanama) itself was Sinhala till after mediaeval times as demonstrated by the existence, even now,in the area of only about nine hundred square miles covered by this peninsula, of over a thousand Sinhala place names which have survived in a Tamil garb ( Indrapala, op. cit. p. 273; H.W. Codrington, Ancient Land Tenure and Revenue in Ceylon, p. 53: Even the extremely chauvinistic and dishonest Tamil writer C. Rasanayagam admits that the Sinhala occupation of Jaffnapatnam preceded that of the Tamils - Ancient Jaffna P.384 ).

The country was called Sinhala or Sinhaladwipa, " the Island of the Sinhalese" (Heinz Bechert, Wilhelm Geiger- His Life and Works. p 1, H.W. Codrington, A Short History of Ceylon p. 1, Encyclopaedia Britannica 1 4th ed. 1969 version vol. 5 p. 16).

The English name Ceylon and its other European variants such as the Portuguese Ceilao are all derived from the name Sinhala. The Arabic name Serendib stems from Sinhaladwipa and the Chinese name too is Sinhala "the country of the people of the lion" as Fa Hien states. More interesting is the fact that " Ilam"(now crudely camouflaged as "Eelam ) the Tamil name for the country as a whole is directly derived from the word "Sinhala." Professor Krishnaswamy Aiyangar of the University of Madras controverting Rasanayagam's bombast states as follows: " The attempt of the author to derive the name Eelam does not appeal to us as quite successful; Eelam to us seems to be directly derived from the Pali word Sihalam, which in Tamil] would be Singalam or even Singanam, but a strict Tamilising would make it EelamÉ "(Foreword to Rasanayagam's Anccient Jaffna, p.v - italics supplied). The Tamil Lexicon published by the University of Madras has the following entry:

n. Pali, Sihala < Simhala 1. Ceylon..." (p.382). The symbol < means "directly derived from". Codrington (op, cit.) explains: " in the Tamil it (the name Sinhala) is represented by Ilam. In Sinhalese the letters S and H are often interchangeable, and the old language, untouched by Sanskrit and Tamil, is the Hela or Elu, names also derived from 'Sinhala'' (p. 1, italics supplied - be it not that the Shor History, on the whole, is antipathetic to the Sinhalese).

Tamil Eelam thus means " Tamil Sinhala -land", a self contradictory piece of nonsense which could have come straight out of Through the Looking Glass.

We have seen (supra) that there are seven tiers in the Tamil political argument for the establishment of a Tamil state in this island with a considerable territory (which varies from time to time but never falls below 30% of the area of the island).

It would be recalled that the seven tiers are:

1. Tamil kings ruled the entire island in pre-historic times

2. In historical times, before the Christian era, the Tamil Kings Sena, Guttaka and Elara (mentioned only in the Sinhala Chronicles) ruled over the entire island.

3. For over a thousand years after the death of Elara, Sinhala Kings and Tamil Kings alternately ruled over the entire island.

4. As a result of these alternating fortunes of Sinhala and Tamil kings a separate exclusively Tamil kingdom called "Tamil Eelam" came to be established, at the beginning of the 13th century A.D., in what is today the northern half of Puttalam district and the whole of the Northern and Eastern Province; this territory is also referred to as the traditional homeland (whatever this may mean) of the Ceylon or Sri Lanka Tamils.

5. The Portuguese, the Dutch and the British captured this state of Tamil Eelam in turn and kept its territory intact till the British amalgamated it with the rest of the island i.e. "Sinhala land", in 1833.

6. When the British relinquished colonial rule in 1948 they granted independence only to "Sinhala land" but not to the state of "Tamil Eelam" which was handed over to the Sinhalese to be exploited by the latter.

7. Therefore, every Tamil group and supporters worldwide have been fighting and will continue to fight, militarily and with propaganda, for the restoration of the "ancient state of Tamil Eelam"; if a "viable alternative" is proposed by a government of Sri Lanka i.e. of "Sinhalaland" (it appears that alternatives to a claim of right cannot be proposed by the claimants) this could be considered (Amirthalingam at the All Party Conference in 1984).

The Tamil groups, every single one of them, insist that the basis of any negotiation is the acceptance without examination or argument of a Tamil right to self-determination within the claimed territory i.e. the right to statehood within that territory is not negotiable and any negotiations would be between the representatives of 2 countries as to how the non-negotiable claims could be given effect to.

We have also considered (supra) the first two tiers in the argument and demonstrated that they are totally false. We may now examine the rest of the argument.

In the eleven centuries between the death of Elara in single combat with Dutugemunu and the Chola invasion of 993 A.D. the throne at Anuradhapura was occupied only twice by Tamils - firstly for 14 years from 103 B.C. to 88 BC and secondly for 27 years from 436 A.D. to 463 A.D. On the first occasion five Tamils, probably Pandyans, ousted Valagamba and held the throne till Valagamba won it back in 88 B.C. For more than half a millennium thereafter the island had no foreign invasion from South India or anywhere else and Sinhalese Kings ruled the entire country in a great era of cultural and economic development. It was during these 524 years that the Sinhalese perfected the science and technology of construction of major irrigation works. Vasabha and Mahasen were two of the great Sinhalese tank builders.

Six Tamils, also from Pandya country seized Anuradhapura in 636 A.D. and ruled the Rajarata until Dhatusena (463 A.D.-479 A.D.) restored national rule over the whole island. This long period of peace, prosperity and development under Sinhala Kings is represented in the Tamil claim as alternating rule by Sinhalese and Tamils. In the half millennium after the accession of Dhatusena there were three invasions from South India which, however, did not result in the usurpation of the throne. It must also be noticed that the two sets of Tamils who occupied the throne were all South Indian foreigners and that no local Tamil was ever enthroned in any part of this island at any time (with the possible exception of two paramours of Queen Anula's briefly brought to the throne by her).

Thus no part of the basis put forward by the Tamil groups for the emergence of a "Tamil Eelam" ever existed. "Tamil Eelam" is not a name ever to be found anywhere before 1976, and as we have seen, could not have existed as it means "Tamil Sinhalaland".

The Portuguese, who are alleged to have captured this fictional state from the Tamils, had no possession of or rule over any part in the Past of the island other than a fort built on Trincomalee hill in 1624 and one in Puliyantivu island in 1628 to control the Sinhalese ports of Trincomalee and Batticaloa. Until the Sinhala-Dutch Treaty of 1766 the Dutch themselves had only the land on which their forts stood on Trincomalee hill and Puliyantivu (see text of the Treaty published in vol. XVI of the JRASCB pp. 63 et seq., the Cleghorn Minute published in JRASCB Vol. III New Series pp. 128-152, Ponnambalam Arunachalam op. cit.) The Dutch governed the maritime districts under a single governor with a Disava (a Sinhala designation) in Jaffnapatnam. These maritime districts (there were 6 of them) were captured by the British in 1796, ceded to Britain under the Treaty of Amiens and proclaimed a British Crown Colony in 1802 with Jaffnapatnam as one of the districts of the Colony. No Tamil territory was administered as a separate political unit and indeed the Tamils themselves were designated "Malabars" by all three Western Powers, and by Tamils themselves by individual writers. The Sinhala kingdom, though truncated by the loss of its littoral in 1766, survived as a sovereign state till 2nd March 1815. On this date the Sinhalese ceded their kingdom to the British under a treaty of cession (called the Kandyan Convention). The cession was subject to conditions and British continued to declare themselves bound by the terms of the treaty though they violated these terms time and time again. It was this Kandyan Sinhala state which was administered as a separate country distinct from the Crown Colony proclaimed in 1802. What happened in 1833 was the dismemberment of the separate Kandyan Sinhala state and the reconstitution of the whole island into five provinces (and later into nine). The statements of Tamil leaders that a state of "Tamil Eelam was amalgamated with a "Sinhalaland" are further instances of their facility for falsehoods and of their total disrespect for the rest of the world.

If anybody has had the right to a separate sovereign state within the island it is the Sinhalese population of the Kandyan Sinhalese Kingdom which should have been offered, when the British decided to quit, the restoration of the state the Kandyans conditionally ceded in 1815. This topic is discussed elsewhere.

The evidence relating to the antiquity or otherwise of early Tamil settlements in the island has been exhaustively dealt with by Karthigesu Indrapala in his 560 page work on the subject (Indrapala op. cit.) Indrapala has examined all the literature, every single inscription and the evidence of all archaeological finds relating to his theme. He concludes that there were no notable Dravidian settlements in the country until after the Chola conquest of the Rajarata at the turn of the 10th century A.D., though there is evidence of the presence of mercenaries and traders from South India. He states that the history of the island a history of the Sinhalese until the 13th century A.D. Indrapala's conclusions would be obvious even to a casual observer. There is not a trace today of Tamil or other Dravidian settlers who might have come with Sena, Guttaka, Elara and with the Damilas who briefly occupied the throne at Anuradhapura in the 1st Century B.C. and the 5th century A.D. Although Indrapala concludes that there were some Tamil settlements established in the North Eastern and Northern parts of the country between the beginning of the 11th and end of the 13th century, the North Eastern parts, with the exception of a few coastal settlements, was largely under forest at the commencement of the British occupation.

President Kumaratunga stands completely vindicated in regard to her statement in South Africa that the Tamils now demanding a separate state were not the original people of this country. She draws support not only from the efforts of scholarship but also from the writings of foreigners who lived in the island. Robert Knox states that the Sinhalese are the "natural people" of the country in contrast to the Dutch, the Tamils and the Moors. Knox spent 17 years in the country. Dr. John Davy who published his work in 1821 states that "The inhabitants of Ceylon may be divided into two great classes - the aborigines of the country and foreigners naturalized. The former are the Singalese...... the latter are chiefly Malabars (i.e. Tamils) and Moors..... the Singalese differ from Europeans less in features than in the more trifling circumstances of colour, size, and form" (An Account of the Interior of Ceylon. Chapter IV). Robert Percival who served 6 years in the island and knew Jaffnapatnam personally has written as follows: "The inhabitants of Jaffna consist of a collection of various races.

The greatest number are of Moorish extraction, and are divided into several tribes, known by the names of Lubbahs, Mopleys, Chittys and Choliars: they are distinguished by wearing a little cap on their closely shaven heads. There is also a race of Malabars found here somewhat differing in their appearance from those on the continent. These different tribes of foreign settlers greatly exceed in number the native Ceylonese in the district of Jaffna. Those I first mentioned were induced many years ago by the encouragements held out to them by the Dutch, to pass over from the Coromandel coast....." (An Account of the Island of Ceylon p 48). Percival's statement relating to "Moorish extraction" is supported by the incorporation of the Muslim law of pre-emption among co-owners in what is said to be the customary law of the Malabar inhabitants of the Province of Jaffnapatnam, codified as the Thesavalamai.

The Sri Lanka Tamils are an ethnic minority of 12 1/2% in a largely Sinhala country. They are entitled to recognised minority rights but in the context of this country. Their leadership however, does not claim such rights but do claim majority rights in a separate Tamil state; all the clamour relating to minority rights is to impress foreign audiences, to mislead the Tamils themselves and for bargaining with the major parties in auctions of minority votes.

(Concluded)