This
country, Sri Lanka, is littered with tanks. Tanks? Well, that’s the
common English or rather Sri Lankan English translation of the Sinhala
word ‘wewa.’ The translation or rather the transliteration says a lot
about conceptions, misconceptions and general ignorance. Or was it a
deliberate mis-naming?
The word ‘tank’ comes from the
Portuguese ‘tanque,’ which they borrowed from the Gujarati ‘tankh’ which
means ‘cistern, underground reservoir for water,’ or the Marathi word
‘taken’ or ‘tanka’ which means simply reservoir. Trace it back further
and linguists would say it’s from the Sanskrit word ‘tadaga,’ which
means ‘pond’ or ‘lake.’ Anyway, they all refer to a container or
containment of water.
Today is could mean a closed container for
liquids or gases, an open container for storing water or other liquids,
a cage for fish and corals, a pond, a pool, a small lake that is
natural or artificial, an armoured fighting vehicle, a large reservoir
built to irrigate land or generate hydropower, and even a prison cell!
The
key element in all this is containment. And that is not the ‘whew.’ Not
according to Peter Wise. When I met this irrepressible resident of the
regions surrounding Thanamalwila more than twenty years ago, I was told
that a wewa is not a tank or a reservoir for those terms don’t capture
the true social, cultural and ecological weight of this particular kind
of water-body.
People in Sri Lanka know what a wewa is. Children
learn about the great bodies of water built by their ancestors, the
Kala Wewa, the Tisa Wewa, the Nuwara Wewa, Minneriya, Giritale,
Parakrama Samudra and so on. But theen there are the innumerable
‘lesser’ wew (wewas?) sometimes crafted into entire cascade systems.
They are ingeniously designed water conservation mechanisms where at the
top end you get the polkatu weva, then the kulu weva, then the gam weva
associated with a particular village, followed by the maha weva and
then of course the mighty ocean. They have certain common features.
There are the sluice gates, a spill and canals leading into tracts of
paddy fields of sizes corresponding to the capacities of the particular
wewa.
But they are people. They are elements of a social order
that is acutely aware of ecological factors and more so the related
dependencies. The cascade systems traced by the names mentioned above
are very much in evidence even today. There’s a lot of scholarship on
how things were and how things are today which question the ‘logic’ of
dominant development paradigms and points towards alternatives which
take into account catchments and their conservation, soil types, water
tables, the intersections of human activity and foraging preferences of
other creatures, raising of water tables and indeed, in today’s context,
sustainable climate resilient agriculture.
The point is that
water can be caught, trapped and released, but ‘tank’ makes people and
the environment invisible. When key elements cannot be seen (or aren’t
shown), everything is reducible to simple arithmetic. It greatly
enhances the probability of error and possibility of engendering
disasters unimagined.
A wewa is about the past, present and
future. A wewa is about a social as well as ecological system. A wewa is
about collective well being. A wewa is not a stand-alone liquid island.
It is a part of, feeds off and feeds other ‘islands,’ some of which are
not stagnant but move laterally and vertically. Some are made of water
and others are not. There are keywords here: whole and wholesome, in
particular.
The ancients knew. They got it. Others in more
recent times probably suspected. Very few understood. Speaking strictly
for myself, I do not. Nevertheless, I am fascinated. This is why,
reading Udula Bandara Avsadahamy’s ‘Wewa’ which he dubs, ‘a study on the
social, economic, environmental and technological antecedents of the
“wewa,”’ I am compelled to read further and more importantly walk as
much of the vast territories of which the ‘tanque’ is a prominent but
not self-contained feature as I can in the time I have left. This is why
I desire even more than before to talk to those who have walked,
observed, studied and figured out the secrets of that which is sacred
associated with the ‘wewa.’ And this is what inspired the following
which can be read as the reader will.
The Portuguese saw contained water
and they called it tanque
and so we have tanks
but a 'weva' is no ‘tankiya’
and is not water contained and nothing else
for water is caught, it flows, conserved and released
and does so much more
for the above and below
of earthly things — creatures and vegetation
but we see water,
contained,
still but for a ripple or two,
We are water bodies
and are seen as such
we remain unseen, you and I,
offer thanks to nomenclature
the chronic idiocy of eyes
the humour of wisdom,
and return to the sacred
which must remain a secret.
There
are tanks. There is a ‘wewa.’ We would do well not to confuse them. We
would do much better, in fact, not to treat them as coterminous.
[This article was published in the Daily News under the weekly column title 'The Recurrent Thursday']
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