Layout 3 - India Foundation for the Arts - IFA

of the early period, the island is
referred to as Sinhala, the land of the
lion. It is only after the fourth century
AD that the name of the island is
changed to Lanka. So the problem for
historians is that the place names and
dates don’t match.
Getting back to the two variants, they
establish a change of authorship,
language, audience and ideology (a
term I am using in the universal sense
to mean the world of ideas that shapes
a text), switching as they do from
Buddhist to Brahmana /Vaishnavite
to Jaina, and from Pali to Sanskrit to
Prakrit. We tend to forget that all
texts are written for a very specific
audience. The Valmiki version was
meant for the literati, people who
knew Sanskrit well enough to
appreciate poetry; the Dasaratha
Jataka was open to a broader range of
people such as urban householders
and to monks, as also was the Jaina
Myth Retold – Romila Thapar
text. These were groups among whom
Buddhism and Jainism had a
substantial following.
Epics, by their very nature, are texts of
nostalgia. The nostalgia is for a society
that belongs to the past. This comes
through in the writing and
composition of the text. I would like
to argue that these texts are actually
trying to capture the essence of the
society or various kinds of societies
from the past, rather than the
historicity of person and event.
I would also like to argue that they
encapsulate the transition from clanbased
societies to the emergence of
kingdoms. Apart from the story in the
Valmiki Ramayana there is another
underlying theme, that of the clash
between clan society and kingship—
between Lanka’s rakshasas and the
kingship of Ayodhya. The atavikas,
primitive forest-dwelling people, or
The identification of the Lanka of the Ramayana
with the Sri Lanka of today remains popular,
although there is no evidence of any such connection
in traditional Sri Lankan sources.
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