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Portuguese did not invade Sri Lanka A news item in The Sunday Times of October 5 states that the JVP is objecting to the commemoration of the 500th year of the Portuguese 'invasion' of Sri Lanka. It goes on to say that Sri Lankans should be 'ashamed' that the Government plans to celebrate this event. Whoever objects to any commemoration or celebration should not deliberately distort the facts of history and thereby mislead the public. The Portuguese never 'invaded' Sri Lanka. Lorenzo de Almeida was on a mission to intercept some Arab merchant vessels in the vicinity of the Maldive Islands when his fleet was blown by contrary winds to the coast near Galle. The Portuguese vessels then sailed north along the western seaboard and arrived at the roadstead of Kolon Tota, today's Colombo on November 15, 1505. The Rajavaliya and the writings of Joao de Barros, Diogo de Couto and Capt. Joao Ribeiro record the first visit in varying degrees of detail. None of these accounts calls the visit an invasion. If the Portuguese, then exploring Asia to wrest control of the lucrative spice trade from the Arabs, were interested in seizing the island to make it one of their colonies, they would not have ignored it for the next 13 years -- that is, until 1518 when they visited the island for the second time and sought the permission of the King at Sri Jayawardenapura-Kotte to establish a factory to trade in cinnamon. Invaders do not seek permission. They just go ahead and invade and damn the consequences. The Portuguese didn't do that. History, written by several persons testifies that the Portuguese found a power vacuum and filled it. Mercantile interests, then as now, hate political uncertainty and the instability it engenders and seeks to restore the equilibrium as soon as possible. The Portuguese did just that and in the process created a worldwide seaborne empire whose main object was the amassing of wealth through trading. Its spin-off was the conversion of indigenous peoples to Roman Catholicism. It must be remembered that the Luso- Iberian culture the Portuguese introduced has been almost fully indigenized during the period of their 'hegemony', 1505-1656. The Portuguese language has contributed many words to the Sinhala and Tamil languages. Those words have made themselves 'at home' to the extent that they are no longer recognizable as Portuguese words. Legal affairs, dress, cuisine, religion, music, song and dance have all been enhanced by the Portuguese presence. Additionally, they encouraged the people they brought here, a variety of races, to settle down and marry the indigenous population. Indigenous names from 'Abrew' (D' Abreu) to 'Zoysa' (Sousa) fill more than 60 percent of the Sri Lankan telephone directory and have their roots in the Iberian Peninsula. Even one of the prominent JVP politburo members bears a Portuguese name, 'Silva'! The country also has a Portuguese Burgher community that has added to its ethnic and cultural diversity. Such communities of mixed parentage and shared cultural traditions are to be found in India, Malaysia, Indonesia, Timor and Macau. Were these countries, too, 'invaded' by the Portuguese of the 16th century? If merchants became colonizers and then went on to dominate parts of this island that was due to internal disunity, strife and the irrefutable fact that different indigenous rulers invited the Portuguese to lend them military support in their campaigns against each other. Today, those who wish to point fingers and play the blame-game for any reason should realize that several fingers are pointing back at them! Colonialism triumphed because of internal deterioration and decay, disunity and the insatiable greed for power of the indigenous rulers. It has also been said that the Portuguese were barbarously cruel. Yes, they were so on several occasions. So were local rulers who had no qualms in massacring unarmed civilians who had converted and refused to recant their newfound faith. War, in any form and by whosoever conducted is barbarous. But that is no reason to be partisan or to exaggerate such events or downplay others. History is fact; it happened and no one should distort facts in order to mislead people. The Marxist JVP has also forgotten that the ideology it espouses and promotes in its distorted version was propounded by Europeans: Karl Heinrich Marx (1818-1883), Friedrich Engels (1820-1895) and Vladmir Ilyich Ulyanov a.k.a Lenin (1870-1924). And that its manifestation as the socialist utopia in Russia between 1918 and 1991 was one of the greatest social, economic and political failures in the known history of the world. As a failed experiment in transforming human society and nature, its cost in human lives and suffering has been horrendous and its aftermath is yet traumatizing those who live behind the former Iron Curtain. Those who know what this flawed 'ism' did to humanity will never be deceived by the JVP. Today, as the benefits of the electronic revolution spread, the facts of all other revolutions - the French, the American, the Russian and any others are only a click away. Neither the JVP nor anyone else should try to mislead the people. The Goebbels era is long gone and with an almost 100 per cent literacy in Sri Lanka, those tactics are not tenable. Let us face facts: the Portuguese arrival here on November 15, 1505 was a pivotal, even epochal, date because it forever changed the course of this country and dragged in it into a globalizing, modernizing world. That process goes on and if the commemoration or celebration happens, it will merely be another facet of that unstoppable historical process. |
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