Explorations in Sri Lankan Archaeology

with Raj Somadeva PART I

DARSHANIE RATNAWALLI, BEING THE FIRST PART OF AN INTERVIEW WITH PROFESSOR RAJ

SOMADEVA PUBLISHED IN THE NATION (PRINT EDITION HERE) ON SUNDAY,9TH NOVEMBER 2014

Professor Raj
Somadeva, PhD (Uppsala), Post Graduate Institute of Archaeology, Sri Lanka
Raj Somadeva, one of the top Sri Lankan archaeologists, has drawn attention to his work in recent
times with two interesting claims viz: discovery of a yakshainscription and the existence of
Buddhism in the island complete with a cave dwelling monastic sangha prior to the 3rd century BC.
He spoke to Darshanie Ratnawallie on these claims as well as the ideological debates within the
discipline. The following are excerpts of the interview.
DR: Dr. Susantha Goonathilaka, the president of Royal Asiatic Society, Sri Lanka alleges that you
call every settlement complex a civilization indiscriminately when cities and/or evidence of writing
are necessary for a culture to be called a civilization. How do you define a civilization?

RS: First I want to say that I am confident about what I am saying and also academically and
professionally qualified to say so. Civilization is a particular state of development achieved by
humans. It is mainly characterized by an urban way of life. This is a highly relative notion. My stand
on what is civilization appeared in my book titled Urban Origins in Southern Sri Lanka. It was
published in 2006 by the UppsalaUniversity in Sweden in their series of Global Archaeology.
Presence of a writing system and cities are not the valid characteristics for identifying the emergence
of civilization any more. This bundle of criteria of pre-modern urbanism was first explained by
Gordon Child in his seminal article on Urban Revolution published in the 1940s. Now this list of
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 Pushparatnams
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 isnt 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 termSangha in Tamil Nadu caves contrasting with its
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 dont mention the
word Sangha. Could some of them have been given to Jains?
RS: No we dont 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 BuddhistSangha. 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 Lankas 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 dont think they were given to the Jains?

RS: No.

DR: So, thats your opinion and its a matter of opinion?

RS: Yes.

DR: There are others who have a different opinion?

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 dont agree with that.

DR: You dont 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. Thats 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? Thats what everyone believes. Not only professor Seneviratne
RS: No he is the person who(Who what? We will never know because the interviewer interrupted
in midsentence.)

DR: He may be the person. But now the majority of the people believe
RS: Because they dont have any alternative to explain the megalithic cemetery. They dont 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 dont 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 dont 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
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 the
inscription. 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 kaand 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 yagais 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.
 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 the
population 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 10th 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 Thera
Maha Mahinda.
 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. WHATS INVOKED AS SUPPORT FOR THE

PREMISE IS THE RULE LXXXI, GIVEN IN PARAGRAPH 290 OF PAGE LXXXVI OF PARANAVITANAS

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, ITS BY NO MEANS CERTAIN THAT IT WILL ALWAYS CHANGE INTO GA. THE
 RULE TELLS US THAT IT COULD HAPPEN. THE EVIDENCE TELLS US THAT SOMETIMES IT HAS

HAPPENED, MOST TIMES, IT HASNT. 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 Somadevas 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.