Sunela Jayewardene interview: ‘Despite his devotion to Shiva, Ravana was ultimately the loser’

Sunela Jayewardene is hailed as ‘Sri Lanka’s leading environmental architect’ who has several award-winning projects, such as Colombo Court, Jetwing Kaduruketha, etc., in her kitty. But now she is retired from architecture practice and lives at Dunvila, on the border of Wasgamuwa National Park in the centre of the island nation.

It is probably not a mere coincidence that she lives at Dunvila. An important site on the Ramayana tour, this is where Lord Rama is supposed to have shot the arrow that ultimately felled Ravana. It couldn’t have been more appropriate for Jayewardene to make Dunvila her home because for quite some time, she has been researching the history of Ravana — the most famous of all the rulers of Sri Lanka since the beginning of time. Her story of the historical existence of Ravana and his realm has recently been published as a book, Ravana’s Lanka: The Landscape of a Lost Kingdom (Vintage/ Penguin Random House, Rs 499).

A facet of Sri Lankan history

While Ravana continues to be remembered in the strongest of terms across the Hindu world — as the very synonym of evil — the Lankan king and his dynasty’s rule remain under matted cobwebs in the island nation. As Jayewardene painstakingly explains to all those readers who are not so familiar with the historical contours of her country, Sri Lanka’s history is widely known to begin with the arrival of the wayward prince of Magadha (present-day Bihar), Vijaya, in the middle of the sixth century. The great Vijayan dynasty, established by him in 543 BCE, is the first recorded Sinhalese royal dynasty to rule over Sri Lanka; he and his descendants gave birth to and nurtured a new civilisation, centred on their citadel of Anuradhapura, that lasted a millennium.

Sri Lanka’s historical past is most simplistically divided into pre-Vijaya and post-Vijaya times. But before Vijaya was Ravana. That’s a fact segregated from history and consigned to mythology in the modern understanding of Sri Lanka’s historical origins, which is precisely what Jayewardene’s beautiful, engrossing, and richly researched book tries to unravel and peel for common understanding. She writes: ‘Among modern Sri Lankans, brushing us like an evening breeze is a memory of a pre-Vijayan era. An ancient time, before the Sinhalese, Tamil and Muslim people were formulated, when the shadowy tribes of our legends — the Yakas, Rakusas and Nagas — ruled our island nation.’

I’m not a historian and therefore, I approached the book with the common Indian’s curiosity of what could have been the historical times in which the great king of Lanka lived. He, who the very people burning his effigies every Dusshera across India unanimously agree was the most learned Brahmin ever and the most devout of all of Lord Shiva’s devotees; he, under whom Lanka scaled heights of prosperity to earn the epithet, ‘soney ki Lanka’ or golden Lanka, for eternity.

Yet, Ravana remains a part of history that nobody knows the whole truth about. Talking about her interest in unravelling Ravana, Jayewardene says, “My deeper interest is actually in the kingdom that Ravana and his dynasty ruled over. This interest began after my husband and I purchased a property in the remote central forests of Sri Lanka. As I started spending more time here and hearing the stories of the people of rarely-frequented hill villages, their conviction and their ability to tie their tales to specific landscapes, drew me in. I feel this is a facet of Sri Lankan history that needs airing... a story that needs to reach beyond the tiny hamlets they’ve been lodged in for all these millennia.”

Piecing together his story with folklore

The beauty of the book lies in its detailed construction of the story. Jayewardene goes back in time very far to set the ground for the readers to understand the Sri Lanka that became Ravana’s territory. She goes back to 200 million years, when the supercontinent Pangea broke up, setting afloat, among other things, the huge landmass that is now the Indian subcontinent.

The author weaves academic bits of geology, history and anthropology into a wholesome tapestry that grips the attention, her easy style of narration recreating the events of the eons gone by like an animated flash in your mind’s eye. Sample this: ‘Lanka remained unperturbed by the escapades of her large, northern neighbour. Even when the Indian subcontinent collided with Eurasia, this southern island remained at a distance, witness to the titans crashing. Travelling in isolation, in the middle of that migrating tectonic plate, the island became a bio-raft for the species she carried from ancient Gondwanaland.’ Lucidly, Jayewardene takes the reader to the point when the Mayuranga dynasty came to rule, of which the greatest king was Ravana.

As Ravana’s story slowly comes alive, one can’t help but feel confounded over apparent lack of information in contemporary times, in reconstructing the historicity of this most well-known ruler of Lanka. Jayewardene responds: “Perhaps, it is because there is still so much that is relatively recent and untouched. Perhaps, it is because passion and pride in their work seem to have evaded government archaeologists. In addition, rocking the boat of the accepted narrative of Lanka, the story written in the Mahavamsa (the chronicle that begins in 500 BCE), would be problematic on many fronts.” In the book, she writes: ‘Today, in a recent revival, possibly spurred by the end of a three-decade-long bloody ethnic conflict that uprooted every society, Sri Lankans have begun to search for memories of Ravana’s reign, the greatest king of Mayurangas. This obscure era — obscure perhaps due to the damnation and ridicule by usurpers, from Prince Rama to Vijaya and the later European colonists — is still concealed or disguised and protected by veils of secrecy.’

Jayewardene, whose first book, The Line of Lanka: Myths and Memories of an Island, was published in 2017, travelled to the deepest tropical forests of Sri Lanka to listen to the stories that have survived thousands of years of rule by people whose own civilisations contributed in pushing Ravana’s era further back into obscurity. It is through those surviving folklores and archaeological evidence that she has constructed the story of the lost kingdom of Ravana. The magnitude of what she unearths is best absorbed by reading the book.

The victor owns the narrative

One also comes amazed at the magnitude of this exercise and the very evident challenges the writer must have faced. Of course, being an architect helped in her ‘excavation’ of the forgotten, early history of the island. She says, “I think, my training as an architect has been very influential. It is the technological advances that are so evident to a trained eye, that fascinate me most. I see forms and applications of seemingly simple but actually very sophisticated engineering and irrigation systems that I think I would have missed and failed to understand, if I was not an architect. It is this understanding that has convinced me of a forgotten superior civilization and I write quite extensively on these subjects in both my books.”

Even as one devours pages of this book for the unfolding of a brilliant story of the king remembered till this date as the ten-headed demon — ten-headed for the super intelligence that he was possessed with — one cannot help but see the absolute disconnect this narrative has with what is known about Sri Lanka today. Looking from afar, the popular imagery about the island comprises decades of bloody civil war that lasted from 1983 to 2009, the most recent and ongoing economic crisis that began in 2019, and the cricket World Cup victory in 1996 under the legend Arjuna Ranatunga — all monumental events in the midst of which the lost kingdom of Ravana doesn’t seem to find a place. But at the same time, reclaiming a glorious, yet disregarded ancient history of the island nation could help heal some fault lines in modern Sri Lanka, the author feels. She says, “If the history of the foundation of our people, the three ancient races [the Yaka, Rakusa and the Naga] that coexisted and intermarried, becomes a more accepted narrative — even an official narrative — then our commonalities will override our differences, and it will be easier to seal the cracks.”

As I wind down to the final pages of the book, my original question about Ravana remains. Why do we know so little about his historicity? Jayewardene explains: “I think that despite his devotion to Lord Shiva and all the good he may have done for his people, ultimately, he was the loser. The winner’s narrative always supersedes — that it seems, is a core characteristic of human nature, unchanged despite the millennia, civilizations and technologies since. The Lanka that was left behind by Lord Rama’s triumphant army, was probably too broken to compile a cohesive story... This was followed by the arrival of Prince Vijaya and the building of a Sinhala race, then the European colonisation and each with their own narrative. Perhaps there never was time for recovery and reflection on the kingdom of the Yaka.”

This answer, the classification of Ravana as a loser, perhaps provides an answer not just to his missing history but also to the several missing histories that are waiting to be discovered, because the narrative always remained, and will always remain in the hands of the winner.