Sunday Times 2
Dambulla heritage site and UNESCO’s double standards
There is confusion, downright lies, and kowtowing to the West in the recent public discussions on Dambulla temple and its Pin Pettiya. The culprits are various uninformed personnel in the tourist and archaeological authorities. And the politicians, current and former, are not to blame.
The Dambulla cave temple: In the centre of a controversy over conservation
The battle was for the collections from tourists at Dambulla, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The Dambulla complex was started around the 3rdand 2nd centuries BCE and restored and enlarged upon many times by ancient kings and their dayakas. The last restoration was by Kirti Sri Rajasinha in the 18th century.
A report a few days back of the oldest habitation of Australia 80,000 years ago makes my position clear. The Australian aborigines are not heir to a written tradition or a sophisticated system of thought, like Buddhist Sri Lanka. But shaming our unthinking ‘experts’, the Mirarr aborigines insisted that excavation was done under Mirarr control. They laid down the ground rule [according to the report] that “Mirrar people own this country,” and that they had total control over the archaeology dig and the artefacts discovered. Under the agreement with the archaeologists, the aboriginal community could stop the archaeology whenever the Mirarr wished and “the agreement allowed them to enter into discussion from a position of control”. They maintained “This is Mirarr home, we need to protect it.”
We have, for thousands of years, looked after and repaired our Buddhist sites like the Atamasthana and Solosmasthana in addition to many lesser sites like Dambulla. Following that tradition, the Ruwanveli Seya, the central stupa for Theravada was restored in the early 20th century. A local book–straight out of the colonial world significantly titled ‘Unmaking the Nation’, while denouncing our anticolonial resistance and the Buddhist revival–denies the historical importance of Anuradhapura. British colonials are here named as ‘discoverers’ of Anuradhapura and, nationalists who used Anuradhapura for the anti-colonial project are depicted as villains. The likes of Albert Memmi and Frantz Fanon would have easily recognised the authors’ mentality as from their descriptions of the colonised in their seminal books, ‘The Colonizer and the Colonized’ and ‘Black Skin, White Masks’.
The seeming ‘unmaking’ attempt at Dambulla began under the label of a UNESCO ‘World Heritage Site’. I have been a member of a couple of global UNESCO committees (for example in the preparation for the ‘Decade of Culture’, one on the ‘Future of Science and Culture’ and the ‘History of Humanity’ project). And I do know that UNESCO decisions are subject to geopolitical transactions. That UNESCO shadow had fallen on Dambulla and on the many large sites in Anuradhapura and Polonnaruwa and other equally ancient sites, not included in the UNESCO list.
Geopolitics and heritage sites
What are indeed UNESCO ‘World Heritage sites’? Their beginnings are in the effort in the 1960s to rescue the ancient monuments of Egypt being flooded by the Aswan Dam. Monuments were now removed from their original places which would go underwater and reassembled on higher ground. A parallel would be the rescue of our Gedige complex whose site went underwater under an irrigation project and was later reassembled on higher ground. A similar exercise occurred when in 1960s the Nagarjuna Sagar Dam of India was completed, inundating the ancient Nagarjunako, a Buddhist site of circa the 3rd century ACE. These were relocated on higher ground, principal among the relocated sites is the ‘Sinhala Vihara’ dedicated to Sinhalese monks.
Following the Egyptian rescue, UNESCO began the list of World Heritage Sites divided into natural and cultural sites. Here geopolitics has prevailed and many of the UNESCO sites are from the West. There is a huge under-representation of heritage sites outside of Europe. Analysis done seven years ago showed that more than 50 percent of the sites are in Europe and North America while 9 percent are in Africa and 7 percent in the Arab countries. The designated cultural sites in Sri Lanka are therefore only six from hundreds of our ancient sites.
Let me list a few UNESCO sites of the West and its rich allies that are a contrast to our predicament. There are many ruins of the Roman and Greek periods, mostly buildings once dedicated to their earlier religions, now in regions, later replaced by Christianity. In Germany, there are many operational Christian churches in the UNESCO list. Included are also buildings related to the Christian reformer Martin Luther’s birth house, in addition to Luther’s death house. Whole European towns which are continuously repaired are included in the UNESCO list. There are UNESCO designated irrigation systems, including one in Germany built between the 16th to 19th centuries with its set of reservoirs, dams, ditches and other adjuncts. Other UNESCO approved irrigation systems include one in China begun in the 3rd century BCE and an irrigation system in Oman dating back to 500 ACE. And included in Japan, among many ancient temples are the ‘Sacred Sites and Pilgrimage Routes in the Kii Mountain Range. This site includes Koyasan, the central temple of Shingon Buddhism.
The selection of the international sites by UNESCO is done with advice from the ‘International Council on Monuments and Sites’ (ICOMOS). It’s more recent ‘Nara Document’ legitimises the ‘practice of periodic dismantle, rebuilding, repair and re-assemble’ of ancient sites. In Europe, the cathedrals and towns included in UNESCO are continuously repaired; so are designated temples in Japan. How UNESCO sites are selected elsewhere could easily be found by googling UNESCO sites.
If a reader is mystified by ancient sites and archaeology, rest assured, with a university first year science background, it is easy to understand, but not so easy to practise. What is required in archaeology is a large amount of patience for careful excavation, knowledge of science-based dating like those involving carbon-14 and thermo-luminescence, pollen analysis and similar approaches used in archaeology. Most of our archaeologists would not be direct practitioners in these science-based efforts, but send their samples to labs either in Sri Lanka or abroad. Several other approaches used elsewhere are not known or used in Sri Lanka. If you find the above a bit confusing, do not worry, you are in the excellent company of some local archaeologists. Let me explain.
Story of Giri
Our Postgraduate Institute of Archaeological Research (PGIAR) should be the parallel of the Postgraduate Institute of Medicine. In an international conference at the Bhikshu University in Anuradhapura there was a presentation in Sinhala by a monk on his excavations at Abhayagiri. He began by relating how the name was derived from ‘Giri’ the Jain monk. His Sinhala presentation was translated for the Indians in the audience by the chairman of the sessions, the PGIAR director. Unfortunately, the director was unable to translate this well-known story of Giri. I did translate and asked the director why he did not know this background known to every child. The director’s learned response was “I do not pretend to be a historian”. A few months ago, the same director who publicly said he did not know history and who is expected to defend our traditions, had given a talk at a New Delhi University on ‘Buddhism in Sri Lanka and Stupas’. There he had allegedly attacked our Buddhist monks using the most obscene language. The enraged Sri Lankan students present had complained to our High Commission (the students sent details of the incident to our Royal Asiatic Society, RASSL). If this was the Director of Post Graduate Medicine or for that matter any doctor and not the Director of Postgraduate Archaeology, there would be a judicial case for malpractice, but not in our archaeology. Surely, you may ask, there must be academic fora in archaeology where these issues are argued out.
There is indeed the annual sessions of the Archaeology Department which begins with all attendees reciting Buddhist precepts, the first time I have seen a religious ceremony for an academic event. I have attended a couple of these events and as I was then the president of RASSL, I was also asked to light the ceremonial lamp. These conferences are mostly a transmission belt for information, and not for significant debate. Let me give two examples: one, a session which I chaired which had a paper by an employee of the Galle Maritime Museum. After encouraging the audience to respond, I later asked her why unlike maritime museums elsewhere, our museum was only projecting foreigners coming to us, and did not emphasise us going to the external world. Her totally irrelevant response was that my wife had taught her. Another instance was where I presented a PowerPoint on archaeology being falsified by LTTE supporters including depicting the Buddhist ruins near the Trincomalee hot wells as built by ‘Ravana’. Ravana as the hero of the Ramayana myth was invented in the 1930s by South Indian Tamils for their then separatist project. I also presented how the Jaffna Archaeological Museum which depicted mostly the 1917 findings of an RASSL expedition in Jaffna was deliberately falsified. The chairperson did not allow any discussion on the topic. And when I suggested that he could end the formal sessions but allow for informal discussion, he said no. I could give many other easy to understand examples.
At my suggestion, the RASSL Annual Research Sessions began to be organised, and has about 20 to 30 presentations on archaeology each year where discussions are encouraged. At one of these sessions, a group presented an expansion of a paper which had been given to the Medical Section A of the Sri Lanka Association for the Advancement of Science. Their expanded paper compared the physical stature of ancient Sri Lankans with those of modern Sri Lankans as well as of Veddahs. When they submitted the paper for publication to the RASSL journal, the two Sri Lankan reviewers, one a well-known pre-historian and the other an anatomist, rejected the paper. Realising its path-breaking potential, I sent the paper to a leading expert on the topic in the US and a fellow member of the World Academy of Art and Science. He came back saying the paper was indeed acceptable and good but required some tweaking. There are many other instances, but I would complete by the example of a good physical archaeologist Conningham who without understanding what Anuradhapura with its tall structures stood for, compared it with the human sacrificing structures of the Mayas and our irrigation with that of Cambodia which had different characteristics. Finding nobody responding to his misinterpretations I did correct him in the British journal which first published his.
Why these major errors are taking place is because there seems to be no significant interaction between different disciplines and when interacting with foreigners, our archaeologists seem to be overawed by them. The contrast is with our medical doctors whose different disciplines are linked to international standards and when a problem case arises, they interact using their different disciplines. The current SAITM debate is on its presumed lack of trained staff.
With this brief indicative background of the chequered nature of our archaeology, and having examined UNESCO sites elsewhere, can we comment on our sites chosen and not chosen.
A co-founder of UNESCO, the science historian Joseph Needham, had recognised our ancient interconnected irrigation as a pioneering example in the world. But a German irrigation system from the 16th century is recognised while our more than 2000-year-old system is not. The houses of birth as well as of his death of the Christian reformer Martin Luther are recognised, but not of our Dimbulagala Kassapa who was our reformer under Parakramabahu and whose influence spread to Southeast Asia deeply changing their beliefs. The Kii Mountain Range in Japan with its centre of Shingon Buddhism (whose roots can be traced back to Abhayagiri through Amoghavajra) is recognized, but only the forest area of the Central Highlands of Sri Lanka is a declared UNESCO site — not Sri Pada located within it. Dambulla is recognised but not, like the numerous sites in Rome and Greece, the many other ancient sites in Sri Lanka including the Solosmasthana. And, as important, not the very many sites in Southern and Eastern Sri Lanka.
Sri Lanka, since the 3rd century BCE, has been the oldest continuous Buddhist majority country, and so what is excavated are part of our living legacy. Our UNESCO designated sites have been used for collecting money from tourists. But it is not UNESCO, ICOMOS, our Archaeology Department or the tourist authorities that own our UNESCO sites including potential sites, but us Sri Lankans. Monies collected from them should be given to temple complexes themselves to develop them and other sites, with, if they wish, technical help from archaeologists. Such monies collected should definitely not be given to the tourist authorities because they have been promoting non-existent Ravana sites instead of Buddhist sites. This would be like promoting the goals of the LTTE.
The RASSL invited the tourist authority’s ‘Ramayana man’ for a technical conference on his invented Ramayana sites, but did not attend. An intellectual ally of the tourist authority, a lorry driver was, in the meantime, disfiguring inscriptions to depict this Ravana fairytale. Advocating the LTTE’s Ravana as truth, is ideologically equivalent to the LTTE attack on the Maha Bodhi. Recently in a tourist promotion in Hyderabad, our Tourism Promotion Bureau was promoting the fictitious ‘Ramayana Trail’ ignoring the nearby ancient Sinhala Vihara and other Sri Lanka related connections in the region from the 3rd century to at least the 14th century. Our recent tourist boom has seen many articles in the international media, including in India, and none writes about the fictitious Ravana sites of the unread and deluded man helping promote LTTE goals.
Conclusion: Our temple authorities should collect the tourist money and use that to rebuild sites in Anuradhapura and Polonnaruwa like how they do for ancient sites in Japan and Europe. They should have nothing to do with our tourist authorities keen on promoting a pro-LTTE agenda. They should also debar from Buddhist sites travel agents promoting that LTTE agenda. In addition, they could hire nationalist experts who would promote Buddhist tourism, like they do in India, and who would lobby in UNESCO for other Buddhist sites. In addition, these experts and private tourist companies should encourage tours to the many other heritage sites outside of the UNESCO ones.