Don’s Diary IVb: Peradeniya

By Mahesan Niranjan –JANUARY 6, 2020

Prof. Mahesan Niranjan

Continued from Don’s Diary IVa: A Week in Jaffna.

Friday: After checking in at the hotel, I take a walk around Kandy. I have a couple of hours before sunset, enough to buy credit for the phone, take some photographs and act a bit of a tourist. I take a three wheeler drive to Bahirawakanda where there is a massive Buddha statue of which I noticed something different. The Buddha was sporting a pottu (bindi) dot on the forehead. But isn’t the pottu is usually associated with Hinduism? I don’t recall seeing the Buddha statues in Dambulla or Aukana decorated with pottu. Perhaps something modern here, a form of reconciliation between religions, I wondered. 

But I have my own pet theory comparing religions. Take Hinduism as practiced nowadays. Strip off the superstitions and rituals from it. The poojas, the Holy Ash, the offerings of food and fruits, the thought that a cat crossing from left to right is bad omen whereas right to left is OK, etc. Once you are done, what remains, you will be surprised to know, are the philosophical teachings of Gauthama Buddha. Of transcending within. Of a critical examination of the self. Of the sensitivity to and awareness of poverty, old age and death. Of birth, life and death as an eternal cycle. That is Gauthama’s beautiful philosophy. Reflective and inspiring. Now Buddhism as above is inadequate to preform little miracles. It won’t make you pass exams or win elections. You need to bring back rituals and superstitions. Flowers have to be offered. Nool (string) has to be tied on wrists. When you add enough of it, mix some hatred in it and top it all up with the pursuit of political power, what do you get? Is it not Buddhism as practiced by our countrymen (or dare you quote the scholar’s word ‘betrayed’)

At the temple, there were strict instructions. On how young men and women ought to behave. On treating the place with respect which had to be in line with Buddhist and Sinhala values. But the toilets in the place were only for foreign tourists! I got caught out on that one. I could legitimately claim foreigner by virtue of my present passport. But I had not paid an entrance fee, the colour of my skin having come to my aid at the gates.

Back in town, I got trapped by a missing comma. I insisted that what I need is a Mobitel phone card and that the pol rotti phone card he was selling wasn’t going to work on my phone. The shop guy gives me a funny look. “Picking on a missing comma, are you a don setting an exam or what?” written all over his face.

Past the lake, I get a chance to photograph birds in nests. Branches of lakeside trees come slanting down to about two meters form the ground, so a cameraman can be just four or five meters from the birds, feeding the young and practicing to fly.

Saturday and Sunday: 

Two friends drive down from Colombo to spend the weekend with me. “What are nice places to visit?” I ask the receptionist at the hotel. She is not imaginative. “You can visit the Tooth Temple, er, and , er… and you can visit the Tooth Temple.” But my friends had done their homework. We take a walk in a beautiful park just up the hill Udawathe Kele and drive to a few ancient temples ten or so miles away. The Embekke Devala, not really a temple, but a meeting place of Kings of the Gampola period has beautiful carvings on its wooden pillars. Wrestlers, horsemen and pretty young ladies. Well preserved from the 14th century. Such skills of the carpenters. 

Where have I seen such skills before? Yes. My grandmother’s house in Karainagar. The doors and door frames had beautiful carvings. Lady Goddess of wealth seated on lotus, Six headed God, Elephant face God. All of them designed to bless her next harvest. Carpentry cum artistic skills of the Forties, Fifties and Sixties, passed down from father to son and kept within a caste that practiced that particular trade. It is all lost now. We began losing those partly due to the evil caste-based societal suppression and partly because easy money was to be made in the Seventies by taking odd jobs in the Middle East. Jobs performed under semi-slavery conditions, but you could bring back home a duty-free two-in-one (an audio device that could tune to radio waves as well as play a magnetic cassette tape of music). Anything that did survive that trend got blown up in the thirty-year dirty war. 

We lost it.

I didn’t quite agree with the Archaeology Department’s characterization of the Kataragama inhabitant as a war-god of the Sinhalese. With six heads and two wives, the good God Murugan was supposed to be a rather peaceful one, I had thought. 

But we have to accept, what was then is what our archaeology department finds now. 

Gadaladeniya and Lankathilake temples. One had beautiful carvings on stones. Drummer, dancer and, once again, pretty young ladies. Good Lords Vishnu and Buddha seem to have shared accommodation in these temples quite comfortably those days. In the South. Around the same time, or even before, the Northerners were quite comfortable contemplating the teachings of Gauthama. Today it is different. There is popular discourse about whose accommodation should be bigger, what should be State supported, what could spring overnight with armed protection etc. “When did it change,” I wondered, “where did it go wrong?”

The stone carvings at Gadaladeniya were impressive. Unassumingly carved out on the steps of the temple structure. But they are getting worn. Protection from the elements is minimal. A saddening sight. 

Monday:

There is a new viral activity out there. That of painting random walls. I think it started as a beautifying project with a sprinkling of patriotism thrown in. I expected the paintings to consist of elephants on parade, kings on elephants beating up other kings, be it Rajarata 250 BC or Mullivaikkaal in more modern times. There were hints of such triumphalism here and there, but the best of the paintings was to be found on the upper Gampola Road in Peradeniya, which was of my favourite two Gauls, who enjoyed beating up Romans.

Read More