The History of Ancient Sri Lanka

Title: The History of Ancient Sri Lanka – Its External Trade and Cultural Contacts from Earliest Times to 1200 AD

Author: Manisha Tyagi

Publisher: Khama Publishers, Delhi 2019 (First)

ISBN: 9788185495873

Pages: 331

 

Sri Lanka is a lush, nature-enriched tropical island situated adjacent to India’s southern coast. The physical distance between the two is a few kilometers over the Palk Straits, but the two have never been under a common political administration. Indian kingdoms and Islamic invasions never reached Sri Lanka. The British managed to annex both, but not under the same yoke. As a result, the two countries are so near, yet so far away in spirit. This does not belittle the cultural contacts between them which began in third century BCE with Ashoka’s missionary work in Sri Lanka. Generally, Indians are unaware of the historical course undertaken by their southern neighbour. This book’s title promised a rich source to fill that vacuum, so I thought – foolishly, as it eventually turned out. Manisha Tyagi is an assistant professor of history at Meerut, UP. She has more than fifteen research papers to her credit and this book is her doctoral dissertation.

 

Sri Lanka was known by many epithets in the past. Indians called the island Tamraparni on account of the tamra (coppery) hue of the earth. This was changed to Taprobane by the Graeco-Romans. Owing to its strategic position overlooking the Indian Ocean sailing routes, most of the ocean’s ships sailed in close proximity to it. When the Arabs entered the fray, they called it Serendip. Chola-era Tamils named it Elam or Elamandalam. According to Sri Lankan chronicles, Prince Vijaya from east India landed on the island with 700 followers during the sixth century BCE, which was also the day of Buddha’s parinirvana. The prince was believed to belong to a family of lions, so the land was called Sinhala. The book does not mention how ‘Ceylon’ came about. The pattern the author deduces is that north Indian kings spread culture and religion on the island in an earlier period while south Indian kings established commercial links. It is noteworthy that Ashokan rock edicts II and XIII mention Tamraparni.

 

The book makes a detailed description of the items for which Sri Lanka was famous in the past. Pearl fishery was the most lucrative business with an abundance of the precious material at many places on the island’s rim. The plentiful availability made the king exert only a nominal tax on the collected pearls which ensured rich revenue. Silver and cloth were also traded. The author is confused in the case of elephants which are claimed to be exported on some pages while import of elephants is mentioned at other places. To cover this ambiguity, the author argues that high demand in some places could not have been met by the island’s beasts and so they might have imported it from Burma for the purpose of re-export. This is not quite convincing, however.

 

The author tries to establish artistic and cultural influences with neighbouring regimes in the time period under discussion. Indian art was transported to the island with the necessary local adaptations. Anuradhapura has Buddhist stupa structures similar to north India while Polonnuruva display Chola-period structures of south India. Sri Lanka was very active on the religious front with various missions to other countries, even going as far away as China. Buddhism required that female nuns should receive ordination into the order from a nun only. When the religion spread in China, there were shortage of nuns and the emperor arranged a group of Sri Lankan nuns to travel to China and initiate hundreds of their Chinese sisters into the monastic order. The noted Chinese traveler Fa Hien who visited India to obtain spiritual guidance and rare manuscripts returned to his homeland through the sea and stayed in Sri Lanka for a brief period. Lankan missionaries had regular interaction with Burma and we see Lankan architecture influencing pagodas there.

 

The book seeks to analyse Sri Lankan contacts with India, Graeco-Romans, Perso-Arabs, South East Asia and China as derived from the historical sources, trade centres, trade routes, items of import and export and cultural interaction. Needless to say, this has resulted in boring duplication, especially in the case of trade routes as they would be the same irrespective of the trade partner at the other end. On the other hand, many contradictory statements can also be seen, like the claim that elephants and textiles were both imported to and exported from Sri Lanka. A crippling disadvantage of the book is that it does not provide a primer on Lankan history which it assumes the readers to know beforehand. Actually, this defeated the very purpose of my reading this book. It only talks about trade routes, items of trade and with whom they traded. There is an irritating repetition of facts. Hippalus’ discovery of the monsoon winds which enabled cross-ocean sailing is repeated nearly fifteen times! Similarly, the ancient manuscript ‘Periplus of the Erythrean Sea’ which is a rich source of data on Indo-Roman trade is mentioned as an author on page 18. However, on many other occasions it is rightly denoted as a book. The book is also silent on the Tamil political conquests of the Chola period which is another great disappointment.

 

Apart from these charitable observations, a shocking fact is that the book is poorly written with pathetic proof-reading. There are very few sentences in the whole book which does not have a spelling or grammatical error. The book is unappealing and has very poor readability which makes the reading experience miserable. Many maps are included but all of them are not legible. As this book fails the reader on every parameter of evaluation, it may be argued that the book’s somewhat stiff cover price of Rs. 990 may enable a reader to approach a consumer protection forum on the charge of cheating the customer.

 

It is advised to avoid this book.

 

Rating: 1 Star