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T H E V I J A Y A N L E G E N D A N D T H E A R Y A N M Y T H A Commentary on D. R. G. C. MENDIS ‘Mahabharata Legends in the Mahavamsa’ by S. J. GUNASEGARAM, M.A. (Lond.) September 1963 28 (Blank) 29 PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION My comments which form the subject matter of this booklet were written in 1958, as soon as a reprint of Dr. G. C. Mendis’ article, “The Mahabharata Legends in the Mahavamsa”, in the Journal of the Ceylon Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, reached me. (New Series, Volume V, Part I). For
nearly three years, the learned Council of the Society had toyed with my
comments and given various excuses for delaying to publish them. The shining lights of the Council during
this period were the trio, Dr. S. Paranavitane, Dr. G C. Mendis, and the late
Mr. C. W. Nicholas, a retired Excise Official. Dr. Mendis was the author of the
contribution in question, and the other two were pillars of the Society and
the custodians of the scholarship, learning and historical lore of After repeated reminders by me requesting the Society to either publish my reply or to return the typed script, I was officially informed, early in 1961, by its new Secretary, that the Council had at last decided to publish it in the Journal of the Society. The proofs were sent to me and corrected. When the final proof was ready and in print, I was informed that my article had been withdrawn from the 1961 issue of the Journal. The reason given was, that it had not reached the standard expected of a ‘learned Journal’ and that it’s ‘polemical asperity should be toned down’. I had waited for nearly three years, and borne the tantalising correspondence of the Society. I had no alternative but to thank the Society for its cultured, liberal and learned outlook, and to send in my resignation to the ‘Learned Society’, and to publish the Essay myself. Dr. G. C.
Mendis’ thesis was, in the main, a justification of his earlier assertion in
his ‘Early History of Ceylon’, that “Ceylon was influenced mainly by North
India up to the Cola Conquest”, i.e., from the time of Vijaya to the eleventh
century. He adds, “The influence of 30 the Cola, Pandya, and
Vijayanagara rose in succession.”
(‘Early History of He creates the impression in the minds of the readers that till the eleventh century, the influences that inspired Ceylon were mainly Hindu and North Indian (Aryan), and that the Pandyan and Chola Tamil Kingdoms which dominated Ceylon history after the eleventh century (Hindu again), had come into existence just about this period. Though he concedes that the earlier influences were mainly Hindu, he overlooks the fact that many of the most distinguished Kings from Vijaya to Panduvasa and Pankukka Abhya, and again from Sena and Guttaka and the great Elara to the time of Mahinda V (tenth century) (who had ordered that the regulations connected with Kama Wewa,¹ a tank in the Mihintale-Anuradhapura area, should be the same as those ordained by the Tamils of old), were all South Indians – Kalingas (Telugus), Tamils (Chola, Chera, Pandya) or Kanarese (Pallavas), another Dravidian people; and that the petty Chieftains (called Kings) of the South belonged to Dravidian tribes – Nagas, Moriyas, Ilambakkannas.² The kings that followed the Chola Tamil period, headed by Parakramabahu the Great were mainly Pandyans. Their names Parakrama Bahu, Vijaya Bahu, Vira Bahu, Wickrema Bahu, Bhuvaneka Bahu etc., are all of Tamil origin.³ The very names for tanks Kulam (Kulama), Vavi (Wewa), Eri (Eriya), are like the names of Kings, Prakritised Tamil, Dravidian, and not of ‘Aryan’ origin. The notion that the Sinhalese were Aryans, and hence from North India was one cultivated by the Buddhist Monks who began to enter this Island somewhere in the third century B.C. This belief has been strengthened by the fact that the language of the indigenous Southerner, Elu, came to be ignored and overlarded with Prakrit words, and because the birth place of the great founder of Buddhism as well as that of the Royal Champion of the Doctrine, was Northern India. I quote below what J. D. M. Derrett says in the “Origins of the Laws of the Kandyans” (University of Ceylon Review, Vol. XIV, No. 5, 3, 4, p. 149) “Yet of course the Sinhalese are not Aryans. From whence then comes the notion that their descendants are? This presents no difficulty. The Buddhists referred to any respectable member of the Sangha as Arya, and that usage must have been common throughout the Buddhist world. Moreover the Dravidians are accustomed to refer to non-Dravidians as Aryans.” 31 With the
waning popularity of Buddhism and the Saiva revival in the South in the sixth
and the seventh centuries, and later from the time of the Muslim occupation
of Northern India, Ceylon became the nearest and the most liberal place of
refuge for the displaced monks.4
From the period of the entry of Buddhism into Ceylon, the Tamils,
mainly for reasons doctrinal and religious, had become the enemies of the
Buddhist Priesthood – not because they were Tamils but because they were
Saivites or non-Buddhists. This bias
had naturally become a source of infection among their converts in the It is ominous to note that, in our day, a similar hatred is being envinced against the Roman Church, in particular, and towards the Christians in general, not because of their ‘race’ but because of their Faith. This Commentary is written in the hope that a critical and informed view of the early history of this Island and its people will, in the years to come, remove prejudices made bitter through the centuries, and make the Sinhalese majority in this country realise their intimate cultural, racial and linguistic connections with their ancient Tamil neighbours of Izham (Ilam), and bind us with a common love for our Motherland, enabling us to grow into a peaceful, united and tolerant people. S. J. Gunasegaram Kopay 32 PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION Within a month of my writing the Preface to the first edition of this booklet, I am obliged to write a Preface to the second edition. It is a
compliment to the reading public of our Making an allowance of one week for the delays in our Postal Department, and, another for the digestion of its contents by the Swabasha pundits of our English Press, one would have expected at least a line of notice or criticism of a work that has sought to clear the dust and the paint that had covered the researches and claims of the favoured historians of our Island’s story. The
“Daily Mirror”, I must say, ought to be singled out for praise in this
context. Its review which appears in
the issue of No wonder our Press has been in the front line in the attack against any encroachment on the ‘freedom of the Press’. What it apparently wants is the freedom to publish and extol what it considers is likely to bring the largest quantity of shekels, while the truth, for the most part, is left to look after itself. I have no doubt that the second edition (with certain spelling errors corrected, and with the addition of an appendix dealing with the ‘Nagas and Tamil’) will be greeted with the same interest as was the first by discerning readers. I take this opportunity to thank my young friend Mr. K. Paramothayan, for reading through the proofs and for preparing the Index. S. J. Gunasegaram 33 REFERENCES AND NOTES 1. Epigraphia Zeylonica, Vol. 1, pp. 112-113. 2.(a) ‘Anthropoligy in (b) Dr. G. C. Mendis – ‘Moriyas’, ‘Lambakarnas’. ‘Early History of Mairu (Mayil), Ilambakannas, are names of Dravidian origin. Vide, Tamil Dictionaries for meanings and the ‘Dravidian Etymological Dictionary’ by T. Burrow, and M. B. Emeneau, Sections 3793; 1311. 3. Dravidian Etymological Dictionary. Tamil origin of Prakritised names of some Tamil Kings of Ceylon. i. Prakrama Bahu Pakan (3331) ‘Elephant rider’, ‘charioteer’, id. Paku. ‘art’, ‘ability’, Ak. (u) (282) ‘to make’, ‘become’, ‘increase’, ‘create’, ‘prosperity’, (in Elu, the name becomes Parakum). ii. Wik-rema – (Elu – ‘Vikum’) Vik (a) – (4477) ‘Valiant’, ‘courage’, Vik (u) – iii. Vira – Viru-Vira (4491), ‘be eminent’, ‘distinguished’, ‘splendin’. iv. Similarly Valla – BA. Val (4406) ‘lustre’, ‘splendour’, ‘fame’ Val (4317) ‘strong’, ‘might’, ‘hero’ Val (4340) ‘bounty’, ‘liberality’, ‘strenghth’ v. Bhuveneka (Nayaka) Pu. (3564) ‘flourish’, ‘bloom’ ‘richness’ Naya (2977) ‘respect’, ‘esteem’, etc. (It may also mean Puvi-Nayagam, ‘the Lord of the earth’.) 34 4. “Fa-Hian
in the fourth century was assured by the people of Reference also may be made to MHV, to note that several
thousands poured into ________________ 35 ANCIENT MAHAJANAPADAS “In the
seventh century B. C.,
(An Historical Atlas of the Indian Peninsula, p. 6, by C. Collin Davies, Oxford Press, 1959.) The Sixteen
Mahajanapadas:- (1) Anga (2)
(6) Malla (7) Chedi (8) Vatsa (9) Kuru (10) Panchala (11) Matsya (12) Surasena (13) Asmaka (14) Avanti (15) Gandhara (16) Kamboja In the sixteen Principalities, it will be noted that neither Vanga nor Kalinga of the Mahavamsa is included. In fact the Northerners knew very little of the purely Dravidian States in the South. The traditional Tamil kingdoms referred to, in the quotation given above, are the Pandya, Chera and Chola kingdoms. Again among the sixteen principalities Kuru is referred to as a power but no mention whatever is made of Pandu about which Dr. Mendis writes. “Even in the first century of the Christian era”, says the ‘Cambridge History of India’, p. 540, “the South seems to have felt little the influence of the Aryan Culture of Northern India…….Dravidian Society was still free from the yoke of Brahmin caste system.” DISTANCES A. (1) The distance from Mathura (Muttra) on the banks of the Jumna to the nearest
sea-port on the West Coast of India, to Sopra
or Supparaka (as the crow
flies – across rivers and forests), is about 600 miles. (2) The
distance from Supparaka to Mathotam
(Mantote), on the West Coast of Total
distance c. 1,600 miles 36 B. (1) The distance from (2) The
distance from Tamralipti by sea
either to Mathotam (Mantote) on
the Total distance c. 2,000 miles C.
The distance
from Old Total distance c. 150 miles ________________ INSERT MAP COMMENTS ON “THE MAHABHARATA LEGENDS IN THE MAHAVAMSA” ‘The Mahabharata
Legends in the Mahavamsa’ is the title of an Article contributed by Dr. G. C.
Mendis to the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, Ceylon Branch, New
Serices, Vol. V, Part I, and reprinted in booklet form for the Society by the
Colombo Apothecaries Company, Limited.1 His
thesis appears to be that (a) the early kings of To suggest that the author of the Mahavamsa, sixth century A.D., had drawn mainly from tales and his imagination in writing the history of Ceylon from Vijaya to Devanampiya Tissa, and possibly from the alleged visit of the Buddha, is to pronounce an adverse verdict on the reliability of the Mahavamsa as a historical record. That the author (Mahanama) could have become suddenly dependable in his account from the time of Devanampiya Tissa, will have to be accepted with considerable misgivings. Would it be therefore unreasonable to suggest that there is the probability of a Dravidian origin of these early kings, as their names and the areas from which they hailed suggest? Is not Devanampiya Tissa referred to in the Mahavamsa as a ‘friend’ of the great Asoka3 – an association which could be 40 cherished with pardonable pride
as indicating an Aryan origin to the Sinhalese, and tracing, at the same
time, an intimate acquaintance with and regard from one of the greatest kings
of It should be remembered that inspite of the assertion by the author of the Mahavamsa that Mahinda and Sanghamitta were children of Asoka, there is neither any historical record in North India of any children of Asoka with such names, nor reference in the king’s Edicts themselves of any Mission sent to Ceylon by him through any of his alleged children. Geiger has tried to gloss over this difficulty by stating that an argument from silence is not admissible. (Introduction to Geiger’s Mahavamsa, p. XVIII). But certainly an argument drawn from reliable records will be more convincing! The Rock
Edicts of Asoka (II and XIII), refer definitely to the Tamil Kingdoms in
South India – the Cholas, the Pandyas and the Cheras – while the name
Tambapanni is supposed to indicate Ceylon.
Historians have been at pains to discover whether Tambapanni refers to
the well known Tinnevelly district in It should
not be wondered at that Vincent A. Smith in his ‘Early History of India’, pp.
115-118, calls the stories describing the conversion of There is
literary tradition mentioned in Sillappadikaram,6 the well known Tamil
Epic, to indicate that Mahendra, described as a brother of Asoka, visited the
Tamil country as a Buddhist missionary and left behind a Vihara at
Kaveripattinam. In the ‘Beal Records
of the Western World’, page 231, we are told that there was, near Madura, the
capital of the Pandayas, a Vihara built by Mahendra a brother of Asoka, and
to the east of it a Stupa constructed during the time of Asoka. In the Tailang records of Asoka (described as a great friend of Devanampiya Tissa), does not refer in his Edicts either to his ‘friend’ or even to his ‘own children’ who, it is said, had been sent by him as 41 Missionaries to The Mahavamsa is careful to add (Ch. XI, v. 19), ‘For the two monarchs Devanampiya Tissa and Dhammasoka already had been friends for a long time, though they had never seen each other’. How and
when did this friendship originate?
How was this alleged friendship maintained across a distance of nearly
1,500 miles? It is admitted on all
sides that Asoka had no control over the vast tract of country ruled over by
the Pandyas, Cheras and Cholas stretching between his Empire and One is compelled to infer that the same purpose which inspired the priestly historian of Buddhism in Ceylon to make the landing of Vijaya synchronise with the death of the Buddha impelled him to remark that Asoka sent his own children to introduce Buddhism into Ceylon, and to associate its ruler with that great king who was the champion of Buddhism. It will be noticed that Tissa is given the same name ‘Devanampiya’, as that by which Asoka was known. But Asoka, this great ‘friend’ of Devanampiya Tissa, does not appear to have been aware of even the existence of Buddhism in Jambudvipa, the land where his ‘friend’ ruled. Here is the account of his meeting with the thera Mahinda, as it appears in the Mahavamsa. (Geiger’s Translation, Ch. XIV, vv. 11-14). “Then came his people and surrounded him and the great thera caused the others who had come with him to be visible. When the king beheld these too he said, “When did these come 42 hither” The thera answered “(they came) with me”. And he asked moreover, “Are there in Jambudipa other ascetics like to these?” The other said, “Jambudipa is gleaming with yellow robes; and great is the number of Arahats learned in the three Vedas gifted with miraculous powers, skilled in reading the thoughts of others, possessing the heavenly Car; the disciples of Buddha.” Before proceeding to discuss the arguments urged by Dr. Mendis to prove his contention, it is necessary to acquaint ourselves with the origin and dates of the old stories and legends and the kingdom and peoples of the period under consideration. 1. Jataka Stories The Jatakas consist of stories of
the previous birth of the Buddhas. The
early Buddhist teachers adopted with but little change, the folklore and
fables already current in The collection of Jatakas which includes 547 birth stories was made in the fourth century B.C., though it had not assumed the shape it now has in the Sutta-Pitaka (a part of the Pali canon). There is a close connection between the stories contained in the Panchatantra and those found in the Jatakas. (George Havells, ‘The Soul of 2. The Mahabharata “An old
heroic poem dealing with the Bhagavatas, a tribe well known to the Rig-veda, forms the nucleus of the Mahabharata. The Mahabharata, in its present form, is
not earlier than fourth century B.C., and not later
than fourth century A.D.” (‘History of
“The Mahabharata shows that the Pandya, Kerala and Chola kings were present at the Swayamvara of Draupadi (1, 189, 7020). Before the Rajasuya sacrifice was celebrated by Dharmarajah, his brother Sahadeva is said to have fought with the Chola, Pandya, Chera and Andhra kings. These kings attended the sacrifice.” (II 31, II 73, 1134, 1988; II 52, 1893). The poem says also that Sri Kirishna conquered Kavata of the Pandyan King (VII, II, 324). (K. S. Ramaswami Sastri, ‘Hindu Culture in the Modern Age’, p. 337). 43 ‘The Kurus were one of the most prominent tribes of the later Vedic period, but it is curious the Pandus are mentioned for the first time in Buddhist literature, when they are described as a hill tribe.’ (Sinha and Banerjee, ‘History of 3. Ramayana The
Ramayana of Valmiki, a work believed to belong to an earlier date than the Mahabharata,
refers to the Kerala, Chola and ‘In the Kishkinda Kanda the poet speaks of YUKTAM KAVATAM PANDYANUM.’ ‘The
great commentator Govindaraja in his glossary on this verse refers to
Kavatapuram which was the Pandya Capital…….Valmiki describes the town Kavata
as being South of the river Tamraparni ( (K. S. Ramaswami Sastri, ‘Hindu Culture in the Modern Age’, p. 336). 4. Pandyas, Cholas, Cheras KATYANA
fourth century B.C., refers to the kings (Chera, Chola, Pandya). In Asoka’s Edicts third century B.C., there
are references to them. Asoka refers
to them as Antas, independent peoples outside his jurisdiction. “The Asokan inscriptions found in (K. A. N. Sastri, ‘History of Kalinga and the
Pandyans Kalinga
was one of the earliest Dravidian countries to be Aryanised in speech. It is important to note that though
Aryanised in speech they are a Dravidian people. The famous Hathigampha inscription of
Kharavela (first half of the second century B.C.), mentions a league of Tamil
States, 13 years old at the date of the inscription. (“History of 44 ‘In Kautiliya’s
Arthasastra (fourth century B.C.?), we can trace references to the exchange
of commodities such as cotton fabrics between Kalinga and the Pandyan
Countries. We find references to the
pearls obtained from the Southern corner of the (‘Age of Imperial Unity’, p. 229). Megasthenes and the
‘We have an explicit statement by Megasthenes that the country in the extreme South was ruled by a Pandyan Queen who maintained an orderly government and an organised administration. He further remarks that the queen’s territory consisted of 365 villages, each one of which brought its revenue to the State treasury on an appointed day…Asoka does not claim…authority over them. As neighbouring kingdoms he had to maintain the same relationship with them as with the distant western allies like the Greeks.’ (‘Age of Imperial Unity’, p. 229). The Pandyans The Cholas, the Pandyans and the Cheras were indigenous to the far South….. ‘The (Sinha and Banerjee, ‘History of Naval Traditions The North Indian people, i.e. the Indo-Aryans, never earned a reputation for being a maritime nation. ‘But it would be a mistake to think that the mystery of the sea never allured the Indian mind. The Dravidians in pre-historic times navigated the seas in pursuit of trade and commerce. The evidence of the maritime activity of the Aryans is not clear.’ (Sinha and Banerjee, ‘History of ‘The greatest achievements of the Dravidians was the art of navigation……There are Sanskrit borrowings of several 45 nautical terms from Dravidian
languages. Aryans in (S. V. Venkateswara, ‘Indian Culture through the Ages’, p. 11, Longmans Green & Co., 1958). Diole speaking of the maritime activity of the Tamils and their early contact with the East as well as the West says:- ‘We find
proof of their liaison in the people living at the further end of the great
route, the parts of South India where they serve as a link between the East
and Far-East. They were a half-way
house people. Perhaps in pre-historic
times they had watched the ships coming from the West and had loaded them for
the return journey with what their own ships had brought from (Diole, ‘4000 years under the Sea’, quoted by T. P. Minakshisunderam at the All India Oriental Conference, 1955, “Tamil Culture”, Vol V, No. 2, p. 142). From the
extracts and quotations I have given, there is ample historical as well as
literary evidence of the existence of powerful and well-organised Tamil
States – The Pandyans, Cheras and Cholas – in the South of India, in fourth
century B.C. The authors of the epic
poems of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata seem to have been aware of the
important position they held in The story
of the Pandus on the other hand, appears only in the Mahabharata, (which was
after all a poem, and not a historical record), while history as such knows
of no 46 It requires a considerable degree of credulity even on the part of modern Sinhalese historians to believe that this unknown hill tribe north of the barriers of the Vindhyas, lived and ruled in Mathura, a city near the banks of the Yamuna; and that one of the kings of this hill tribe sent his daughter and a large contingent of men and women with elephants and gifts, across a distance of about 900 miles from Mathura to the Delta of the Ganges, and a distance of another 1,100 miles from an unknown port there to the Mannar district in Ceylon. (See Map). The
Pandyas near To hold
that the author of the Mahavamsa had referred to the country of the Pandus
and not to the land of the Pandyans as the region from which the early kings
of Ceylon from Panduvasudeva to Tissa hailed, is to accuse Mahanama of
ignorance of the historic kingdoms of the South, the geography of India and
the state of navigation in the regions of which he speaks. The Pandus, by no stretch of the imagination,
could be confused with the Pandyans.
Foreign writers like Megasthenes and Ptolemy, the authors of the
Ramayana and the Mahabharata, and other Indian writers such as Katyana and
Kautiliya have nowhere associated the Pandus with the Pandyans of the ancient
historic Madura and After
this attempt to substitute the Pandus for the Pandyans, Dr. Mendis proceeds
to identify southern Madhura (referred to by the author of the Mahavamsa),
with ‘If there
were two Mathuras in On page 83, we find the following comments made by Dr. Mendis on Geiger’s views on the subject. 47 ‘Geiger
in his English translation of the Mahavamsa considered southern (Dakkhina)
Madhura to be the Madura of South India.
He probably came to this conclusion as The ‘other’ referred to above, Dr. Mendis points out in a note below, is the now well known opinion of Mr. A. Ranasinghe, a Civil Servant, the author of the “Census of Ceylon” (Vol. I, Part I, p. 2). Dr. Mendis proceeds to lay down his conclusions- (a)
The earliest historical traditions of (b)
Vijaya comes from Sinhapura in Lala in (c)
He sends a letter to the same place to secure a
successor, and Panduvasudeva comes from there to become king of (d)
Panduvasudeva marries a daughter of Saka Pandu who
rules from a city on the right bank of the (e)
Devanampiya Tissa’s relations too were limited to Then he poses the question- ‘Is it then likely that Vijaya
sought a princess from While Dr. Mendis has taken great pains to support a statement recently made by a Civil Servant in the Census report against Geiger, the official Translator of the Mahavamsa, he ignores the studied opinion of a Sinhalese scholar and historian, Mudaliyar W. F. Gunawardhana, who had unequivocally exposed the fallacies involved in such an inference. It was the Rev. Theodore G. Perera, who in his work on the Sinhalese language, repeats what Mudaliyar W. F. Gunawardhana has referred to as ‘a sporting theory, that the Pandyan 48 Princess, the consort of Vijaya, came not from Dravidian
Madura of South India but from (an implied Aryan) Mathura of North India,
situated in the (‘Siddhanta Pariksanaya’, Part I. Introduction, by W. F. Gunawardhana). The
Mudaliyar proceeds to point out that this ‘laborious theory’ built up by Mr.
Bhandarkar to associate the Pandus with the Pandyans had encouraged the Aryan
enthusiasts in Here is what Dr. Bhandarkar had suggested- ‘What appears to be the truth is that there was a tribe called Pandu round about Mathura, and that when a section of them went Southwards and were settled there, they were called Pandus.’ It will
be noticed that when Dr. Bhandarkar said ‘What appears to be’ and ‘round
about ‘The Kurus were one of the most prominent Aryan tribes of late Vedic period, but it is curious the Pandus are mentioned for the first time in Buddhist literature, where they are described as a hill tribe.’ Not even
in the early Buddhist literature of I give
below the words of Mudaliyar W. F. Gunawardhana, who, unlike many others who
have attempted to write the history of ‘Now to the theory, to take it seriously, we shall apply a small test, something like a pin-prick, to the end of the series of propositions involved. ‘Was
there a Madura (Vel Madhura, Vel Mathura) in the 49 western bank of the ‘Madura
the capital of Pandya in the gahapayitva
pahesum-dakkinam puram, which with the context means that the ministers of
Vijaya sent an embassy conveying presents to the ‘city of ‘And from
this city the Princess came with all her numerous train.’ She therefore came not from the banks of
the distant His considered conclusion about the Sinhalese people, their origins and language, the Mudaliyar has expressed in unequivocal terms in the same work (Introduction p. 14). ‘I have found that the Sinhalese are entirely a Dravidian race with just a slight Aryan wash……. It now appears to me that the original contributors to the evolution of the language, viz. Yaksas and Nagas (the aborigines) Vijaya and his party, and the contingent from Madura, were all Dravidians.’ This was
written in 1924, by an admittedly first rate Sinhalese scholar with a knowledge of Tamil, and a student of 50 ‘We have surveyed a good part of the Kandyan Law, so far as it may be known from the published sources, where the institutions are such as might legitimately be believed to have remained little if at all modified by the passage of the centuries particularly in a highly conservative and remote community such as the Sinhalese were for at least a millennium, during which time the orthodox Hindus never mixed socially with them. (Note 278. ‘The Sinhalese were mlecchas’, (see Haradatta on Gautama dh. see 1, 9, 17) ‘and so unfit for contact of any kind. Their interference with South Indian politics in the 13th century is not likely to have made them individually more welcome amongst the orthodox’). ‘The natural inferences to be drawn from the similarity between Kandyan Law and Indian Laws and customs point in a certain direction.’ ‘We
cannot altogether neglect certain well known historical facts, although our
eventual conclusion must be laid at the feet of historians for their
consideration. It is generally
believed that Vijaya brought the first Sinhalese to ‘It seems
that the Sinhalese were a people of predominantly non-Aryan descent, with a
way of life substantially identifiable as akin to that common in modern Again in the next page (page 149) he says- ‘The antipathy of the Sinhalese to the Tamils, their closest neighbours, does not rest upon the millenium of conquests and invasions and political alliances and intrigues; there is no doubt that the racial affiliations of most of the Tamils differ from those of the original Sinhalese – the proportion of pre-Aryan 51 races in the mixture are different just as the proportion of Aryan is demonstrably different. Yet of course the Sinhalese were not Aryans. From whence, then comes the notion that their descendants are? This presents no difficulty. The Buddhists referred to any respectable member of the Sangha as an Aryan and that usage must have been common among the former Buddhist world. Moreover the Dravidians were used to refer to the non-Dravidians as Aryans.’ 8 To return
to Dr. Mendis’ repetition of his thesis, we find that in support of his argument,
Dr. Mendis assumes that the term ‘ Dr. Mendis in associating Madura with Muttra in the North does not seem to be concerned about considering whether the Ganges was and is navigable all the way from the East Coast to the neighbourhood of Muttra near the banks of the Jumna, or whether at this remote period of Indian history the Indo-Aryans or the alleged Indo-Aryan associates of Vijaya in Ceylon, had any experience of navigation to transport the large contingent of human beings, elephants and other gifts along the length of the Ganges and the sea, extending in all to about 3,000 miles from Muttra to the Gangetic delta, and then from there to the Gulf of Mannar, in Ceylon. Dr.
Mendis proceeds to adduce what he considers a weighty reason to show that
Madura of the Mahavamsa is really ‘According
to the Mahavamsa the ambassadors from He does
not seem to be aware that the ‘Ten Madhura’ of pre-Christian times was not
situated on the same site as the Madura of today. In old Tamil literature ‘Ten Madhura’ or 52 In his ‘Hindu Culture and the Modern Age’, (1936), K. S. Ramaswamy Sastri makes reference to this fact, when he says, (p. 341):- ‘Korkai, which
is said to be the Kavatapuram of the Ramayana, was a great sea-port of the Referring to the old Madura, V. Kanagasabhai, in ‘The Tamils Eighteen Hundred Years Ago’, Second Edition, p. 13, says:- ‘Madura
was doubtless the most famous and important town in Tamilakam at the period,
being the capital city of the Pandyas who were renowned as the most powerful
of the Tamil kings, and munificient patrons of the poets…… The site of the ancient Madura or Kudal was
most probably Pala Madura (or old Mattura) now in ruins, which is situated at
a distance of about six miles to the south of the modern town of “Lord of the fortified city, whose walls knew no siege by any other enemy but the waters of the Vaigai when it is swollen with floods.” (Kalithokai, Stanza 67, lines 3 to 5) But
Mahanama (sixth century A. D.), the author of the Mahavamsa certainly appears
to have known something of the geographical distances involved in his
account. Referring to the message sent
to the ‘Pandu King’, he is careful to add that messengers quickly came by
ship to the city of Referring
to Bhaddakaccana, (‘the daughter of Sakka Pandu’), who came over from “For (love of) her did seven kings send precious gifts to the king (Pandu); but for fear of the kings and since he was told (by soothsayers) that an auspicious journey would come to 53 pass, nay, one with the result of royal consecration, he placed his daughter speedily upon a ship, together with thirty-two women friends, and launched the ship upon the Ganges saying “whosoever can, let him take my daughter”, and they could not overtake her, but the ship fared swiftly thence. “Already on the second day they reached the haven called Gonamaka9 and there they landed robed like nuns.” (‘Gonamuka’, Geiger says in a note, was at the mouth of the Mahakanda Nadi, near Mannar.) Does Dr. Mendis
think that Mahanama was such a simpleton as to imagine that a ship launched
on the But to admit that Vijaya and his followers obtained their brides from the Pandyan country is not to accept that the woman whom Vijaya married was necessarily a Pandyan Princess. It is a pardonable exaggeration on the part of the author of the Mahavamsa to describe her as a Princess, though the details of the account, supported by the position of eminence that the Pandayans held in the south of India at this period, and the origins of Vijaya and the alliance he had on his arrival in Ceylon, point to a different inference. It would require a great deal of credulity to believe that some unknown king from distant Muttra (North Mathura), could have sent his daughter all the way down the Ganges and the Bay of Bengal, to be married to Vijaya, a rebel or a bandit who had landed in Ceylon from an unknown area in Vanga, (probably ‘Vengi’ or ‘Vengadam’ near the Tirupati Hills, once a Veddah dependency of the Pandyan). |
) is used
sometimes to refer indiscriminately to any great river; even in 