Google the name ‘Kavantissa’ in English or in Sinhala and you’ll get tons about the majestic tusker who died a few days ago. That’s not unusual. The death was foretold in many narratives. The death was contextualised in terms of human-elephant conflict. The death was of an elephant who was known and had caught the imagination of the curious, the conservationists, those concerned with ecological politics and of course ordinary people who for whatever reason have a soft corner for elephants and are moved by tragedies, majestic or otherwise.
I didn’t google Kavantissa before the condition of this tusker made the news, but my gut feeling is that the top references would have been about him. My gut feeling, again, is that if I googled ‘Kavantissa’ before this particular elephant was named, I would probably have got a short reference about King Dutugemunu’s father.
Today I googled ‘Kavantissa’ along with ‘Waruna Chandrakeerthi’. I googled ‘Kavantissa Vadapilivela (The Kavantissa Program). I tried various combinations. I got the reference to the book written by Waruna, published by Sri Lanka Seehanada Buddhist Institute. And then, pages and pages about the elephant.
Kavantissa the Tusker needs to be talked about. He needs to be talked about in all the context in which the talk has been about. No argument.
But what of that other Kavantissa, known mostly on account of having been the father of a person widely regarded as a hero-king? According to Geiger, Kavantissa is a corruption of Kaakkavannatissa, literally ‘Tissa who resembled (the color of) a crow’. It is claimed that it is an ease-of-tongue version of Kahavan Tissa or ‘Tissa the Golden Coloured.’ Then again, what’s a name is not what the person carrying it, what that person did or didn’t do, said or was silent about?
My introduction to the detailed version of Kavantissa, if I may, owes to Udayasiri Wickramaratne’s lyrical novella, ‘Swarnamali Maha Raja’ or ‘King Swarnamali the Great,’ which details Dutugemunu’s reflections after fleeing the Royal Palace and his eventual acknowledgment of his father’s greatness.
Udayasiri in turn, owes it all to the work of Waruna Chandrakeerthi. Waruna has spoken of Kavantissa for years. Actually decades. Four, at least. His thesis, in a nutshell: ‘Much has to happen before a Dutugemunu can be the Dutugemunu associated with heroism, leadership and nation-building.’
That’s why ‘Kavantissa’ is not only a majestic tusker and a king but a program. Unfortunately, we think of ‘Dutugemunu’ or ‘Prince Sapumal’ or a saviour or messiah or some kind of fallen-from-the-sky type miracle cure for the ills of our country. We think this leader or that will deliver. As for the would-be saviours, be it an individual, a party or political bloc, they do toss out ‘programs’ come election time, but they all lack, without exception, the seriousness, intellect, pragmatism and even the flexibility that marked the Kavantissa Program of that other time, the time of Dutugemunu and the Dravidian invader, the good king Elara.
We wait for heroes. And, as Bertold Brecht in ‘Galileo’ noted, we are not an unhappy people because we don’t have a hero, but our tragedy is that we need one. A Dutugemunu (or whoever you think exemplifies the ‘deliverer’). We don’t think of ‘Kavantissa,’ because that’s too damned hard. It involves work. Involves a deep examination of the present, a long and wide reading of the past, the ability to visualise an end point (or interims towards such lovely telos) and the innovative skills to fine-tune strategy.
Dutugemunu, for all the alleged villainy of his younger days, came to understand his father and moreover to adopt his ways. This is probably best understood in the instructions given to his brother, Saddatissa, to cultivate, cultivate and cultivate. That’s preparation. That’s economic planning. And he, Dutugemunu, knew when enough was enough, for at one point he said as much: Ethi Male (Enough, Brother). That ‘spot’ is marked even today by the name, as the legend goes: Ethimale, somewhere within the jurisdiction of the Siyambalanduwa Divisional Secretariat in the Moneragal District of the Uva Province.
Kavantissa knew that victory (we could call it ‘prosperity for one and all’ or ‘improvement in the happiness index’) was predicated on economic strength, military readiness, strategic alliances, planning to the smallest detail, expectation of the unexpected, courage, determination, the will and support of the general public, all underlined in sobriety.
When all such things are ticked, Waruna says, we can have any number of Dutugemunus or any number of people with names that are not as extravagant to put the finishing touches provided of course that he or she has the intellect and humility to acknowledge the wisdom of the Kavantissas who came before and the plans put in place. If not, he or she could wreck it all. We’ve seen that in our lifetimes. Perhaps this is why we go for personality over program. We don’t have to. After all, we have an amazing template: the Kavantissa Plan.
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