South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies
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Lankapura: The Legacy of the Ramayana in Sri
Lanka
Justin W. Henry & Sree Padma
To cite this article: Justin W. Henry & Sree Padma (2019) Lankapura: The Legacy of the
Ramayana in Sri Lanka, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, 42:4, 726-731, DOI:
10.1080/00856401.2019.1626127
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SOUTH ASIA: JOURNAL OF SOUTH ASIAN STUDIES
2019, VOL. 42, NO. 4, 726–731
https://doi.org/10.1080/00856401.2019.1626127
INTRODUCTION
Lankapura: The Legacy of the Ramayana in Sri Lanka
Justin W. Henrya and Sree Padmab
a
Department of Theology, Loyola University, Chicago, IL, USA; bAsian Studies, Bowdoin College,
Brunswick, ME, USA
ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
The five articles which make up this special issue of South Asia Ramayana; Sri Lanka;
explore the role of the Ramayana in Sri Lankan art, literature, reli- nationalism; Sinhala
gious ritual and political discourse in shaping Sinhala Buddhist literature; Tamil literature;
Ravana; Saivism
and Tamil Saiva perceptions of the island’s distant past.
Contributors work to answer the question as to when and how
Sri Lanka came to be equated with the mythic ‘Lankapura’ of
Valmiki’s epic, exploring both positive and negative portrayals of
Ravana (ruler of Lanka antagonist of the Ramayana) in Sinhala
and Tamil literature from the late medieval period to the present
day. Authors work to account for the politicisation and historicisa-
tion of the Ramayana in twenty-first century Sri Lanka (including
similarities to and differences from the contemporary Indian situ-
ation), along with the appropriation of Ravana as a Sinhala
Buddhist cultural hero, and the incorporation of Vibhishana as a
‘guardian deity’ in the Sinhala Buddhist pantheon.
Famous throughout the region as an epic narrative and encyclopedia of ancient lore,
the Ramayana serves as a basic idiom through which South and Southeast Asians
understand and express their past. In addition to the many vernacular Hindu iterations
of the Ramayana, Jains, Sikhs, Mughals, Thai and Lao Buddhists, and various tribal
groups all have their own versions of the story, often with significant deviations from
the ‘standard’ (i.e. Valmiki’s) iteration, and often reflecting their own ideals of justice,
heroism and religious community. It is a subject of some curiosity, then, that Sri
Lanka—perhaps the very ‘Lanka’ which figures so centrally in the epic—should not
have a version of its own.
To date, scholarship addressing this question has focused on the absence of the
Ramayana in Sri Lanka, with a number of contentions having been put forward to
account for the exclusion of the epic from the island’s Pali chronicles.1 Largely
1. Heinz Bechert famously argued that the Mahavihara writers of early Pali chronicles consciously excluded any
narrative from the Ramayana in order to preserve the primacy of Sinhala Buddhist political and religious life on
the island. See Heinz Bechert, ‘The Beginnings of Buddhist Historiography: Mahavamsa and Political Thinking’, in
Bardwell Smith (ed.), Religion and Legitimation of Power in Sri Lanka (Chambersburg, PA: Anima Books, 1978),
pp. 1–12. Richard Gombrich speculated that the absence of the Ramayana in Pali historiography reflects
Theravada Buddhist hostility towards its Brahmanical Hindu values. Richard Gombrich, ‘The Vessantara Jataka,
ß 2019 South Asian Studies Association of Australia
SOUTH ASIA: JOURNAL OF SOUTH ASIAN STUDIES 727
overlooked however has been the routine presence of Ramayana characters, imagery
and narrative motifs in Sinhala Buddhist poetry and historical works, in the architec-
ture and ritual life of Buddhist viharas (temples), as well as in the myths associated
with the founding of some of Sri Lanka’s most significant Hindu temples. While there
appears to have been a tradition of composition of poetry related to the Ramayana in
literate circles from quite early on in Sri Lanka (most famously attested in
Kumaradasa’s fifth-century Janakiharana), it is not until the fourteenth century that
we begin to see a sizeable impression of the Ramayana in Sri Lanka (in Sinhala
Buddhist folklore, literature and temple life in particular). This shift is explicable inso-
far as the fourteenth century corresponded to increased South Indian influence in Sri
Lanka, in the context of (1) the emerging independent Tamil kingdom of Jaffna; (2) a
change in composition among the ruling elites of the island’s southwest (with two
prominent royal families of this era being of Malayali extraction); and (3) at the level
of the overall demographics of the island, with Sri Lanka’s south and southwest absorb-
ing a sizeable influx of immigrants from the southern subcontinent from the fourteenth
century onwards. The incorporation of aspects of South Indian culture into Sinhala
Buddhist architecture, and temple and agricultural rituals, as well as the Sinhala lan-
guage itself has been catalogued in a number of significant scholarly works.2
The contributions to this special section of South Asia are intended as preliminary
efforts toward a fuller understanding of the literary and social history of the Ramayana
in Sri Lanka. Contributors work to answer the most elementary of historical
questions—when and how Sri Lanka became associated with Ravana’s mythical abode
of Lankapura (an equivalence nowhere to be found in the earliest Sanskrit versions of
the epic)—going on to consider the prominence of Vibhishana (Ravana’s brother and
Rama’s appointed successor to the crown of Lanka) at medieval Sinhala Buddhist and
temples, his continued relevance, and the significance of the earliest references to
Ravana as ancient ruler of the island in Sinhala chronicles, topographical works
and poetry.
Together these contributions point out that either by embracing the ‘standard
Ramayana’ or re-envisioning the narrative in a uniquely local fashion, in various con-
texts, the epic was made to serve the interests of both Tamil Saiva and Sinhala
Buddhist religious and political elites in Sri Lanka historically. The essays direct the
the Ramayana, and the Dasaratha Jataka’, in Journal of the American Oriental Society, Vol. 105, no. 3 (1985), pp.
427–37. Steven Collins has suggested that the Pali Vessantara Jataka was able to serve as a substitute for the
Ramayana in Sri Lanka because it is made up of the same basic story matrix. Steven Collins, ‘What is Literature
in Pali?’, in Sheldon Pollock (ed.), Literary Cultures in History: Reconstructions from South Asia (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 2003), pp. 649–88.
2. Gananath Obeyesekere traces the Sri Lankan domestication of the goddess Pattini, deriving originally from the
character Kannagi of the Cilappatikaram, in his landmark Cult of the Goddess Pattini (Chicago, IL: University of
Chicago Press, 1984). On the incorporation of South Indian hereditary occupational groups into the medieval Sri
Lankan social landscape, see Bruce Ryan, Caste in Modern Ceylon: The Sinhalese Caste System in Transition (New
Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1953); and Michael Roberts, Caste Conflict and Elite Formation: The Rise
of a Karava Elite in Sri Lanka, 1500–1931 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982). On the appearance of
South Indian architectural motifs at Buddhist viharas and temple complexes, see Sujatha A. Meegama, ‘From
Kovils to Devales: Patronage and “Influence” at Buddhist and Hindu Temples in Sri Lanka’, PhD dissertation,
University of California, Berkeley, 2011. For a study of the impact of the Tamil language on Sinhala lexicon and
grammar, see Peter Silva, ‘The Influence of Dravida on Sinhalese’, PhD dissertation, Oxford University,
Oxford, 1964.
728 J. W. HENRY AND S. PADMA
reader to the ways in which these various trajectories of the Ramayana mirrored the
island’s religious, political and social relations with the Indian subcontinent
and beyond.
Justin Henry’s paper, ‘Explorations in the Transmission of the Ramayana in Sri
Lanka’, summarises scholarly perspectives on the presence and absence of the
Ramayana in Sri Lanka, seeking to explain possible sources for the appearance of the
epic’s dramatis personae (Rama, Ravana and Vibhishana) in late medieval Sinhala lit-
erature. He traces one route of diffusion of the epic into Buddhist historical literature
and folklore by way of the Tamil Hindu kingdom of Jaffna, arguing that Sri Lankan
Tamils openly accepted the identification of the island with the Lanka of the
Ramayana, reversing however the negative and demonic connotations of their Chola
predecessors. Tamil Hindu kings of northern Sri Lanka became themselves ‘guardians
of the bridge’, that is, protectors of the narrow, submerged isthmus connecting
Rameswaram with the island of Mannar (identified with the causeway built by Rama
and his monkey accomplices, connecting India to Ravana’s island fortress of Lanka).
Henry concludes by making the case that these Lankan Tamil attitudes (as well as
Ramayana-related Tamil texts) had a direct role in shaping Sinhala Buddhist literary
images of Ravana in Kandyan-period Sinhala poetry.
Sree Padma, in ‘Borders Crossed: Vibhishana in the Ramayana and Beyond’, observes
that while the Ramayana traversed much of southern Asia to find unique cultural expres-
sions in different locales, premodern Sri Lankan literature stands out in its selective por-
trayal of certain events derived from the epic, and also in its project of indigenisation of
certain Ramayana characters (Vibhishana, most notably). Political and demographic
changes from the thirteenth century introduced many gods of epic, Puranic, South Indian
origin, including those of the Ramayana, into the Buddhist milieu. While the fifteenth-
century cult of Rama had been conflated with the cult of Visnu, a deity who emerged as
part of the satara varan devi (four warrant deities or guardian deities of the Sinhala
nation), Padma points out that Vibhishana, the trusted ally of Rama who is understood as
inheriting the kingdom of Lanka from his dead brother Ravana, and whose role in the
death of Ravana is controversial, came to be worshipped by Sinhala rulers as a guardian
deity in his own right, and so thereby expected to give protection to the island and its
Buddhist religion. ‘Borders Crossed’ traces the circumstances surrounding the origin of
the Vibhishana cult by amplifying the historical details. Sree Padma lays out the factors
that led to the sustenance of Vibhishana’s cult and his transition into the Buddhist pan-
theon of gods even after the contemporary emergence of the Ravana cult that has been a
part of recent Sinhala Buddhist nationalism.
In ‘Mapping Lanka’s Moral Boundaries: Representations of Socio-Political
Difference in the Ravana Rajavaliya’, Jonathan Young and Philip Friedrich provide a
close reading of the Ravana Rajavaliya (or Sri Lankadvipayaye Kadaim), a c. sixteenth-
century text examining one of the earliest examples of the Sinhala textual tradition that
employs a narrative of Ravana. These authors explain how the Ravana Rajavaliya
embeds the story of Ravana within a discourse of virtuous topography. The landscape
the text, they argue, tells a tale of the moral decline of the Dambadeniya kingdom
against the backdrop of the rise to power of the virtuous kingdoms of Gampola and
Kotte, as this text would have it. The authors then consider how the text’s discourse on
SOUTH ASIA: JOURNAL OF SOUTH ASIAN STUDIES 729
kingship manages a set of local political anxieties over the surge in social mobility occa-
sioned by changing patterns of trans-regional circulation in the island’s southwest dur-
ing the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The authors argue that the text does not
represent ‘others’ as an undifferentiated threat, but rather in terms of proximity to and
distance from a spatialised moral order. This landscape forwards desirable forms of
selfhood as instruments by which ascendant social groups, many with persistent ties to
South India—such as Brahmans, merchants and itinerant soldiers—were assimilated
into an emerging Lankan state society. The intended contribution of the paper is to aid
specialists of Sri Lankan history and religion in better understanding the historical uses
of Ravana within Sinhala literary culture. More generally, the paper will help South
Asianists reconsider intractable debates over the applicability of rigid notions of ethnic
and religious identity in earlier historical settings, as well as the putative role of kings
and kingdoms in managing such identities.
The first three contributions to this special section give a picture of diffuse and
highly localised Ramayana mythic topographies and folkloric traditions throughout the
island. In Tamil Hindu oral and textual traditions, the establishment of the major tem-
ples of Munneswaram and Koneswaram (along with various other devotional sites on
the island’s east coast) is associated with both Rama and Ravana. The topographical
works (kadaim books) discussed by Young and Friedrich in this collection centre
Ravana’s kingdom on the island’s central west coast, though there are separate tradi-
tions linking Ravana to the central highlands in the area around Sri Pada and Adam’s
Peak (see Henry’s contribution), as well as others locating his palace in the extreme
south near Hambantota, and yet others still placing the demon king’s abode in the
north-central Knuckles Range.3 Reconstructing a complete map of ‘local Ramayanas’
in Sri Lanka runs up against the limitation of the archives available to us, this despite
scattered evidence of a highly imaginative tradition of associating local landmarks with
key events and characters of the epic.4
With respect to recent developments, and to the continued relevance of premodern
aspects of Ramayana culture in Sri Lanka today, contributors to this special section
introduce readers to the twenty-first-century ‘Ravana revival’, a phenomenon over the
past decade wherein Sinhala Buddhists have claimed Ravana as a distant ancestor and
founder of the island’s monarchy. The proposition that Ravana was a distant ancestor
of the Sri Lankan Sinhala Buddhist people dates to the late nineteenth century, and
presents a challenge to the hegemonic Aryan-descent narrative of the Mahavamsa, a
Pali Buddhist chronicle of political and religious life on the island dating approximately
to the sixth century CE. The focus of the fourth paper, ‘Ravana’s Sri Lanka: Redefining
the Sinhala Nation?’, by Dileepa Witharana, focuses on the recent widespread surge of
interest in Ravana within the Sinhala community. This interest has reached unprece-
dented levels, to the point of redefining the Sinhala nation in popular public space by
discarding the theory of Aryan descent reflected in the Mahavamsa’s myth of Vijaya’s
arrival and replacing it with Yakka-Ravana descent. Witharana closely examines the
features of the contemporary Ravana narrative that provides the Sinhala community
3. See Jonathan Forbes, Eleven Years in Ceylon, Vol. II (London: Richard Bentley, 1840), pp. 104, 85–6.
4. See Anuradha Seneviratne, ‘Rama and Ravana: History, Legend and Belief in Sri Lanka’, in Ancient Ceylon:
Journal of the Archaeological Society of Ceylon, Vol. 5 (1984), pp. 221–36.
730 J. W. HENRY AND S. PADMA
with a new sense of its past. He considers the putative content of the Vargapurnikava,
a mysterious ola leaf manuscript widely referenced in popular literature, and used to
construct the narrative of the Yakka-Ravana descent of the Sinhalese, as well as the
Ravana Mission, a novel connecting the ancient Yakka past to contemporary Sri
Lankan politics. He also explores possible causes for this widespread surge of interest
among the Sinhalese in Ravana at this particular moment of time.
The conflict between Rama and Ravana has often been interpreted historically as
one between Aryan North India and the Dravidian South, for which reason the
‘standard Ramayana’ was not received with uniform enthusiasm everywhere across
South Asia. Some in the South Indian Dravidian movement of the early twentieth cen-
tury, for instance, rejected the Ramayana altogether, while others attempted to elevate
Ravana to the status of a great historical figure—virtuous ruler and ardent devotee of
Siva. The last paper in this collection, ‘Reclaiming Ravana in Sri Lanka: Ravana’s
Sinhala Buddhist Apotheosis and Tamil Responses’, by Pathmanesan Sanmugeswaran,
Krishantha Fedricks and Justin W. Henry, considers the emergence of Ravana as a cul-
tural hero and devotional figure among Sinhala Buddhists in the twenty-first century,
along with the Tamil responses to the so called ‘Sinhala Ravana’ phenomenon. The
authors introduce aspects of the twenty-first-century elevation of Ravana to the status
of a Sinhala cultural hero, including two examples in which Ravana has achieved semi-
divine status in ritual contexts at Buddhist temples. They trace the intersection of
nationalist discourses employing Ravana as an essential signifier of indigeneity in the
South Indian, Sri Lankan Tamil and Sinhala Buddhist contexts—including both inci-
dental, structural similarities between such discourses as well as the direct influence of
Tamil nationalist writing on twenty-first-century ‘Sinhala Ravana’ narratives.
Pathmanesan, Fedricks and Henry conclude by outlining recent Tamil responses to the
Buddhist appropriation of Ravana as a distant ancestor of the Sinhala people, relating
in addition efforts on the part of Sri Lankan Tamils to employ Ravana as a conciliatory
figure, exploiting him as a potential symbol of shared Sinhala and Tamil ancestry.
As editors, we hope that these contributions will motivate future literary, historical
and ethnographic scholarship on this much understudied (and continually relevant)
aspect of Sri Lankan religious and political life. Our special section joins a small but
substantive body of literature on the legacy of the Ramayana in Sri Lanka, to which the
five essays presented here are especially indebted. John Holt’s pioneering monograph,
The Buddhist Visnu,5 investigates the rise of the ‘cult of Upulvan’ in medieval Sri
Lanka, representing a ‘Buddhicised’ version of Visnu (and often, of Visnu’s incarnation
as Rama). Responding to a number of pop-cultural and pseudo-scholastic dimensions
of the recent ‘Sinhala Ravana’ phenomenon are the contributions to a 2014 special
issue of the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Sri Lanka (Vol. 59, no. 2). In this col-
lection of essays, several historians and archaeologists (notably Susantha Goonatilake
and Malini Dias) weigh in on recent Sri Lankan government promotion of ‘The
Ramayana Trail’, including what the authors see as worrisome misrepresentation and
falsification of putative epigraphical and archaeological evidence for the historicity of
the Hindu epic. The special issue also contains a helpful reference on Sri Lankan
5. John Holt, The Buddhist Visnu: Religious Transformation, Politics, and Culture (New York: Colombia University
Press, 2004).
SOUTH ASIA: JOURNAL OF SOUTH ASIAN STUDIES 731
Ramayana folklore in the form of a posthumously reprinted essay by C.E.
Godakumbura: ‘Ramayana in Sri Lanka and Lanka of the Ramayana’. Tissa
Kariyawasam’s ‘The Ramayana and Folk Rituals of Sri Lanka’ likewise gives valuable
background on the influence of the Bala and Uttara Kandas of the Ramayana in the
‘Kohomba Yak Kamkariya’ exorcism ritual practised in upcountry Sri Lanka.
No serious ethnographic work has yet been published on ‘The Ramayana Trail’, and
we regret that space and expertise have not allowed us to include a more substantive
discussion of the phenomenon in this collection of essays. We direct readers to the
forthcoming dissertation by Deborah de Koning, ‘The Many Faces of Ravana:
Ravanisation among Sinhalese Buddhists in Post-War Sri Lanka’ (Tilburg University),
which incorporates extensive fieldwork on this fascinating set of destinations in Sri
Lanka packaged for foreign Hindu tourists. De Koning’s recent essay, ‘The Ritualizing
of the Martial and Benevolent Side of Ravana’,6 also stands as a valuable and early con-
tribution to scholarship on the Sinhala Buddhist ‘cult of Ravana’ as it has emerged
since the conclusion of the island’s civil war.
A complete understanding of the precise history and significance of various narra-
tions of the Ramayana in Sri Lanka (both Sinhala and Tamil) is yet to emerge, and in
many ways, the essays contained in this special section represent only a prolegomenon
toward future, more in-depth research. We are grateful to the American Institute for
Sri Lankan Studies for sponsoring a workshop in Colombo in July 2016 during which
early drafts of these papers were presented.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
6. Deborah de Koning, ‘The Ritualizing of the Martial and Benevolent Side of Ravana in Two Annual Rituals at the
Sri Devram Maha Viharaya in Pannipitiya, Sri Lanka’, in Religions, Vol. 9, no. 250 (2018), pp. 1–24.
