No man is an island, they
say. No island is an island either in
these globalized times. Indeed, it can be argued that islands never existed and
if they did their numbers were very small.
The reference is of course to human collectives and not land masses
surrounded by bodies of water. Complete
isolation has always been the exception.
Throughout history,
communities have been marked by the commerce of goods and services, gifting, invasion
and embrace, plunder and counter-plunder, conversion to faith by force or
threat and embracing of doctrine on conviction and so on. Political boundaries are not cast in stone
either. The world map needs constant revision. I’ve seen a version of King Lear
where the kingdom is divided by the simple and dramatic method of tearing the
relevant map into three pieces. The
invaders carved up the continent of Africa by simply drawing lines on a piece
of paper, dividing communities arbitrarily and deliberately, engendering wars
that have survived their incubators.
No island is an island
and ours is no exception to this rule.
We are linked by trade and treaty, friendship and relationship, the play
of power and threat, the need to mitigate pressure from one force by seeking
friendship with another.
Nothing comes without a price. Some use the age-old device called
arm-twisting: ‘submit or else!’ Some
just stuff the unpalatable down unwilling throats, causing bowel disorders and
other convulsions that end up spreading a lot of blood-splattered bad news
around.
No island is an island
and ours is no exception, this is true.
Does this mean that we do not have and indeed cannot have any core
identity, a shared cultural ethos or some corpus of beliefs and practices that
are unique and/or inform us regularly and substantially enough to allow for
collective identification? Those who for
reasons they have no control over and for lack of histories they are not to be
blamed for often take the convenient position, ‘we never were and we never will
be’. That’s a neat mechanism to justify the most negative and pernicious forms
of ‘exchange’ in this island-less world.
It goes without saying
that islands that are not islands interact more with the closest islands that
are not islands. We are no exception.
This is why there’s more India in Sri Lanka than say Mozambique or
Iceland. There’s more Pakistan in India
than is generally acknowledged, more Pakistan in Indian than Sri Lanka and more
Pakistan in India than Sri Lanka in India.
Land-mass separation is a factor, one observes. Size too.
Sri Lanka would spread very thin over India while India could bury Sri
Lanka under several miles of earth.
Land-mass volume also counts.
Such things, however, are
not as significant when it comes to commerce of other kinds. Culture, for instance. Size of nation or other collective is not
obstacle enough for an idea to travel the globe, encounter, embrace, subjugate
and liberate that which it encounters. History
is long, longer than is convenient for some and, happily or unhappily, for us
to know what really happened in those un-scribed times. Proximate islands indulge in exchange.
Perhaps this is part of human nature, I don’t know. Today, several millennia since something was
invented, we really can’t tell who the inventor was or to which community
he/she belonged. All we know is what we
can conclude from what we already know.
We have myths and legends
as well as a rich folk history contained in customs and beliefs, traditional
practices, song and dance. We know of
Ravana. Even the Ramayana indicates that
of the two protagonists, Rama was essentially second-best on all counts. Add the Lankavathara Sutra and we have a
Ravana whose ‘ten heads’ refers to ten times the average intellect. Consider the fact that he is credited with
the invention of chess and the violin, and as the father of Ayurveda, and we
have a Lanka that dwarfs and indeed engulfed her neighbouring ‘island’.
Let’s call all this
meaningless conjecture. We could stick
to the known and focus on that which can be verified. We are told that India made us who we are by
giving us the greatest gift ever, the word of Siddhartha Gauthama, our
Budun Wahanse. The ‘word’ however existed
before Siddhartha Gauthama, for there have been other articulators of the
‘Word’, other Buddhas, and there’s nothing to say that this island was bypassed
by word-travel in the relevant times.
Still, let’s take the above as true.
Here are some facts. The Emperor Asoka sent his two children, no
less, with word and artifact. They were received not by barbarians but a people
ready for intellectual discourse and they chose to spend the rest of their
lives in this land. Forget Ravana and
Ravana’s ‘Lanka’, Arahat Mahinda did not come to a civilizational desert or a
cultural badland. The ‘word’, nevertheless, was gift and gift supreme too, let
there be no doubt about this. The
question though is whether we received this gift from India.
If indeed Ravana invented
the violin and chess, if indeed he invented the first flying craft, the Dandumonaraya, if indeed he was the
physician, botanist and biochemist supreme that legend claims he is, it is
strange that neither India nor the rest of the world (of the 21st
Century) acknowledge that Sri Lanka or Lanka, or, more correctly, Sinhale, gave
these gifts to the neighbouring ‘island’ and other islands too. India didn’t give us Buddhism. The Emperor Asoka sent an emissary and dharmaduta, and we are not ungrateful.
India did not, because India could not, for the simple reason that India was
not!
India is a colonial construct. A man from the land that is now called
India made a magnificent gesture. I am grateful.
Those who did nothing and indeed did nothing other than plunder and
coerce cannot take credit, I believe.
That’s forgettable commerce, I would think.
There are gifts and
gifts. There is legitimate credit claim and credit theft too. Not too long ago, some 5 million Sri Lankans
paid homage to sacred relics of Lord Buddha, brought here courtesy the largesse
of the Pakistani Government for a 17-day exposition. That’s gift too. Less significant of course than that which
the Emperor Asoka gave two millennia ago, but still, gift. Gift is not gift, one notes when a price is
extracted openly or subtly it does not matter how.
The Emperor Asoka, when
he requested ArahatMihinda to take the Word of our BudunWahanse to Simhaladeep
and to his friend King Devanampiyatissa, did not say ‘Tell him that he should
redraw the provincial boundaries and enact constitutional amendment to help
legitimate the unsubstantiated claims of this or that community and/or its
representatives’. That was gift and
therefore I am grateful for the commerce between these two islands.
No island is an island,
and we are no exception. We give, we take.
We win, we lose out and at the end of the long days of ‘islandic’
history, one hopes, it all balances out.
Time is long and in our long-time, we will see all kinds of commerce,
that of the Ravana-Rama kind, the Asoka-Tissa kind, the Rajiv-JR kind and other
kinds still to come. We are not an
island, but we are nevertheless a nation.
We lack size but not imagination. We lack nuclear weapons, but we have
the Word that helped us more than anything through terrible, terrible times.
That word was made of
compassion. It was made also of wisdom. We know therefore, when to bow before
greatness and when to stand firm against tyranny. We went down, but not forever. We know how to fall. We know how to stand up. We are not an island, and yet, we are a
nation, a people, a civilization, a culture and a solidarity that is not
contained by map-line or edict, threat or weapon-show.
No island is an island
and ours is not an exception. It’s a
good thing, all things considered.
This article was first published on June 27, 2011 in the Daily News, for which newspaper I wrote a daily column under the title 'The Morning Inspection'
Malinda Seneviratne is a freelance writer who can be reached at msenevira@gmail.com
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