The Journal of the Siam Society Vol. LXIV, Part 1-2, 1976 - Khamkoo

REVIE\\ ARTICLE 321
As for the visibility of the interlinear writing, the whole thing
reminds one of a bus journey in up-country Ceylon. The buses had
rails to which those standing can hold. Then some small boys got on.
They could not reach the rails, in fact some of them were so small that
they could not even see the rails. So all those small boys said was,
"There ain't no such thing as rails on this omnibus, pal."
Paranavitana's reply was to produce his The Greeks and the
Mauryas and The Story of Sigiri, when he flooded his critics with
hundreds of pages of Sanskrit text. But all the time, the professor had
his supporters, mainly epigraphists and, of course, my ubiquitous friend,
Mr. Alexander B. Griswold, who is mentioned in the Preface to
The Story of Sigiri as supplying 600 dollars worth of photographic
material to the Archaeological Department on Paranavitana's behalf;
as well as a good typewriter and a stock of paper to facilitate the work.
There were short, very favourable reviews, but the epigraphists kept
quiet. So the situation degenerated further. Paranavitana was the
greatest scholar Ceylon produced in recent years, with an international
reputation to boot, yet his integrity has now been questioned. When he
edits an orthodox inscription, i.e. a non-interlinear one, such as the
Panuvasnuvara Pillar Inscription mentioned above, where the name
Kalinga appears, or the Madirigiri Slab Inscription, where the name
Maharaja Samara Vijayottunga appears (see Section 14 above) the doctors
of methodology suspect that be either invented the whole inscription or
misread certain parts so as to find support for his new theories. This
sounds like desecration of a great scholar to me,
As it happened, while I was writing this paper for publication in
the Journal of the Siam Society in instalments, the Ford Foundation was
kind enough to give me a research grant which enabled me to travel in
South Siam and Malaya, and to spend a month in Ceylon and another
month in Java. While in Ceylon, Mr. H. Amarasinghe, Publishing
Manager of Lake House Investments Ltd., who published Paranavitana's
last few books, took me under his wing. He introduced me to Simbalese
scholars, both those who supported Paranavitana and those who were
against his t4