Explorations in Sri Lankan Archaeology with Raj Somadeva PART.pdf

8/18/2019 Explorations in Sri Lankan Archaeology with Raj Somadeva PART.pdf

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criteria has been discredited as a non-representative ‘laundry list’ which is not adequate to explain

pre-modern urbanism. You have ancient civilizations that had no writing system. For example the

civilization of Great Zimbabwe. You have civilizations that had no proper cities. For instance take the

case of the Egyptian civilization.

DR: There are ideological differences within your discipline. What is the nature of your relationship

with the archaeologists of the University of Jaffna?

RS: I have a very good relationship with Professor Pushparatnam.

DR: There are concerns in certain quarters over the intellectual rigor of Professor Pushparatnam’s

interpretations. Could you comment?

RS: That is the scholarly tradition. If you are an academic, you have the privilege of doing your

interpretations independently. We can deal with them very diplomatically.

Raj Somadeva and

team at the inscribed drip ledge cave at Kuragala.

DR: Is there reason to believe that some drip ledge caves in Wessagiriya and elsewhere may have

been dedicated to Jain Sramana. We hear of Jain aramas in the chronicles, that even Abhayagiri

was built where a Jain called Giri had anarama, so isn’t it reasonable to suppose that some caves

were dedicated to Jains? Is there a school of thought among archaeologists that some of the drip

ledge caves of Lanka may have been the dwelling of Jain Sramanas? Where do you stand in this? Are

there any Jain religious words in the cave inscriptions? Some South Indian scholars (i.e. Y.

Subbarayalu) hold that the absence of the term‘Sangha’ in Tamil Nadu caves contrasting with its

https://thuppahi.files.wordpress.com/2014/11/2.jpg


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prominence in SL caves is clinching evidence for excluding Buddhists from the TN corpus of cave

inscriptions. But even we have inscriptions that follow the short formula and don’t mention the

word ‘Sangha’ . Could some of them have been given to Jains?

RS: No we don’t have any substantial evidence to keep up the idea of the prolonged prevalence of

Jainism in ancient Sri Lanka as a religion. But it does not mean that the believers of Jainism were

not present in Anuradhapura. Because Anuradhapura was the only cosmopolitan city developed in

the southernmost periphery in the Greater South Asian region. The city was rushed by merchants

from far regions of the Indian Ocean rim. They brought here not only the trading goods but also

different ideas and practices. I do not agree with your argument. The caves where the word Sangha is

absent were not the caves dedicated to Jain clergy. My argument is that they are the oldest caves

dedicated to the Buddhist Sangha. I have physically observed a fair number of such caves and the

measurable evidence that help to prove their deep antiquity are still found in such locations. My

report on this survey will be released by the end of November.”

DR: But there are prominent archaeologists in this country who teach people that some of the caves

may have been given to the Jains. (This question is inspired by a photo-description the interviewer

has once seen posted on the webpage for the 2008 session of ISLE, a study abroad program offered

by Bowdoin College, USA in affiliation with the University of Peradeniya: ‘ Material Culture

professor and Director General of Sri Lanka’s Central Cultural Fund, Sudharshan Seneviratne

lectures at Vessagiri, an ancient dwelling for Buddhist and Jain monks in Anuradhapura’.)

RS: You mean Professor Sudharshan Seneviratne?

DR: Yes.

RS: (After a ten second silence). People can express their own ideas.

DR: You don’t think they were given to the Jains?

RS: No.

DR: So, that’s your opinion and it’s a matter of opinion?

RS: Yes.

DR: There are others who have a different opinion?


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RS: I think only Professor Seneviratne. Because he studied in India and got his training under

Champaka Lakshmi and Romilar Tharper, he was greatly inspired by the Indian tradition. Once he

tried to incorporate our megalithic tradition with South Indian megaliths. I don’t agree with that.

DR: You don’t believe that our Parumaka is derived from perumakan?

RS: It can be. But what about from Sanskrit pramukha? It can be derived from that too. We have to

rethink all these things. That’s why we started in 2006, a new project called ‘Hunters in transition’.

We have to re-think our history from the point of decline of our hunter gatherers; what happened to

them? Whether as Dr. Deraniyagala thinks, they retreated to the uplands or if they took an alternate

way to develop their technology towards the mainstream history.

Megalithic

Cemetery at Ibbankatuwa

DR: But the Sri Lankan megalithic tradition is very closely connected to the South Indian megalithic

tradition right? That’s what everyone believes. Not only professor Seneviratne…

RS: No he is the person who…(Who what? W e will never know because the interviewer interrupted

in midsentence.)

DR: He may be the person. But now the majority of the people believe…



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RS: Because they don’t have any alternative to explain the megalithic cemetery. They don’t do

research. They just sit in rooms with fans and read and use ideas propagated by their first generation

of scholars.

DR: But even active archaeologists like Robin Conningham…

RS: Ho!

DR: Why?

RS: No, no he is good.

DR: Robin Coningham has merely summarized the present view of the majority of scholars. [‘The

majority of scholars hold that this tradition is strongly linked to that of Peninsular India, if not

actually deriving from it (Begley 1981, 94; Deraniyagala 1972, 159-60; Lukacs & Kennedy 1981,107;Seneviratne 1984, 283)’ – From p93 of ‘ Anuradhapura and the Early use of the Brahmi Script ’ by

Coningham et al.]

RS: Robin is good. He is a reputed scholar. But I don’t think the things he tells about Sri Lanka are

right. Have you read his ‘Paradise Lost’? It has been published in one of the CambridgeUniversity

journals. In it he ultimately says, the most suitable terminology to denote the Anuradhapura

civilization is ‘forest civilization’. Forest Civilization? What do you mean by that?

DR: Why does he call it a forest civilization?

RS: I don’t know. But the statement clearly shows his bias.

DR: Do you really think he is biased?

RS: Biased. Biased. I know his teacher Raymond Allchin also. They are the agents of neocolonialism.

DR: Apparently in your recent explorations you have unearthed an inscription by Yakkhas. Is this

true? What does it say?

RS: Yes it is true. I found a cave inscription written in early Brahmi script on the roof of a cave

situated in Tamketiya in the village Nailgala of Kaltota. It is a donatory inscription. You asked me

about the content of this inscription. The purpose of setting up the inscription was to register a grant

of a cave to the Buddhist Sangha by a lay devotee. His name is Upasona. The text reads as

‘…Upasona aya Tisha puta aya Kerasha putaha aya Maha Shivaha lene Shupadine chatu disha

shagasha. …yagasha…’

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The ‘yaksha’ inscription: “Upasona aya Tisha puta aya Kerasha putaha aya Maha Shivaha lene

Shupadine chatu disha shagasha. …yagasha….”

DR: As per the above reading, the donor is not Upasona but aya Maha Shiva.

RS: Yes, Upasona is the grandfather of the donor. The mean height of the letters of this inscription is

25cm. The peculiarity of this inscription is there is another short line engraved in small letters below

the main text of the inscription. It reads as ‘yagasha’ . This word appears as a signature to theinscription. The wordyagasha is in genitive case and masculine gender. The consonant ‘ga’ here

stands for the consonant ‘ka’ . Consonant ‘ka’ transformed to ‘ga’ and vice versa in the early language

in Sri Lanka. The change of a surd between vowels to its corresponding sonant is familiar in the early

inscriptions. The letter ‘ga‘ is a sonant and it could change into the corresponding letter ‘ka’ , a surd.

This rule is only valid for sonants of guttural and dental classes. We know that the

letter ‘ka’ and ‘ga’ are guttural. It is one of the grammatical rules of writing Prakrit words in ancient

Sri Lanka. As Paranavitana has clearly stated this phonological change is only sporadically noticed in

the early inscriptions in Sri Lanka. It also a regular feature in many other prakrit languages in South

Asia. Therefore the word ‘yaga’ is synonymous to the word ‘yaka’ and the last letter ‘sha’ appears in

this case as the postfix of the genitive case. Then the word ‘yagasha’ could be translated as ‘belonging

to Yakshas’ or ‘who wrote this inscription are Yakshas’ .



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The estampage of

the ‘yaksha’ inscription

DR: Does ‘yaga’ represent a new addition to the bag of titles that appear in our cave inscriptions

such as bata, barata, parumaka, aya, etc?

RS: No it is not such. The word ‘yagasha‘ does not stand in this inscription to denote a mere

individual. I am sure it indicates a sort of professional identity of an indigenous group who occupied

the mountainous region in the deep hinterland of the country. I think this is the first time we got

unchallengeable written evidence about the people who lived here in this country before thepopulation migrations from the Indian sub-continent which took place in the mid first millennium

BCE. They are described in Mahavamsa as Yakshas. The other people mentioned

are Devas and Nagas.

DR: If yaga or yaka is used as a title to indicate a group identity in that inscription, how do you

explain the fact that such a title is to be found nowhere in the large corpus of already published

inscriptions? Why is it a one off? Up to now, as far as I know the only known Lankan inscription to

mention yakshas in any form was the 10 th Century Vessagiriya slab inscription of Mahinda IV, where

it says that the waters of the Tisa Tank was the dwelling of a rakus who was converted by TheraMaha Mahinda.



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The site of

the ‘yaksha’ inscription, a cave situated in Tamketiya in Nailgala, Kaltota

RS: I cannot imagine how it happened. Deliberately or mistakenly it was so. I do not see any

significance of probing that history and therefore I am not so retrospective at this point. Anyway

there is no point of asking Einstein why scientists missed the theory of relativity before him.

Definitely this question has significance to a philosopher of history of science but not to a physicist I

hope.

A note on ‘yaga’ and ‘yaka’

PROFESSOR SOMADEVA STRESSES THE SCHOLARLY TRADITION, WHICH GIVES AN ACADEMIC THE

PRIVILEGE OF MAKING INDEPENDENT AND INNOVATIVE INTERPRETATIONS. I MERELY WISH TO

ADD A CAUTIOUS POST-SCRIPT. RAJ SOMADEVA CONCLUDES THAT THE ORIGINAL WORD ‘YAKA’

HAS BEEN WRITTEN IN THE INSCRIPTION AS ‘YAGA’. WHAT’S INVOKED AS SUPPORT FOR THE

PREMISE IS THE RULE LXXXI, GIVEN IN PARAGRAPH 290 OF PAGE LXXXVI OF PARANAVITANA’S

SIGIRI GRAFFITI, VOL 1: “SURDS OF THE GUTTURAL, PALATAL, DENTAL, AND LABIAL CLASSES

BETWEEN VOWELS OCCASIONALLY CHANGE TO THEIR CORRESPONDING SONANTS” . GETTING INTO

SPECIFICS OF THIS RULE HOWEVER, PARAGRAPH 290 INFORMS US THAT OUR INSCRIPTIONS

AFFORD HARDLY ANY EXAMPLES FOR ‘KA’ CHANGING TO ‘GA’. LITERARY WORKS PROVIDE US WITH

THE INSTANCE, WHERE THE ‘KA’ OF THE ORIGINAL SANSKRIT WORD, ‘ PHALAKA’ (SHIELD) HAS

BECOME ‘GA’ WITH A HALF NASAL IN THE CORRESPONDING SINHALA WORD; ‘ PALANGA’.

WHAT IT BOILS DOWN TO IS THAT WHERE THE CONSONANT ‘KA’ OCCURS BETWEEN VOWELS IN

EARLY SINHALESE, IT’S BY NO MEANS CERTAIN THAT IT WILL ALWAYS CHANGE INTO ‘GA’. THE



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RULE TELLS US THAT IT COULD HAPPEN. THE EVIDENCE TELLS US THAT SOMETIMES IT HAS

HAPPENED, MOST TIMES, IT HASN’T. WHETHER IT HAS HAPPENED IN THE CASE OF ‘YAKA’ AND

GIVEN US ‘YAGA’ HAS TO BE ESTABLISHED WITH MORE SPECIFIC EVIDENCE, SUCH AS MORE

OCCURRENCES OF YAGA AND YAKA AS ALTERNATIVE AND INTERCHANGEABLE SINHALESE

PRAKRIT FORMS FOR THE OLD INDO ARYANYAKSHA, WHICH IS DERIVED FROM THE ROOT ‘YAJ ’, ‘TO

OFFER’. (SEE,PARANAVITANA: 1929 “PRE -BUDDHIST RELIGIOUS BELIEFS IN CEYLON” )

Next Week:

Raj Somadeva’s views on mythology, the interaction between Great Indian Tradition

and the Lankan internal dynamic, the latest non-utility stone objects he has unearthed,

and how he differs from Harry Folk and K. Indrapala on the Tissamaharama potsherd

and the Annaikotte seal respectively.
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Explorations in Sri Lankan Archaeology with Raj Somadeva PART.pdf

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