SRI LANKA: Development Scatters Indigenous ‘Veddahs’

By Feizal Samath Reprint | | Print |

Feizal Samath

COLOMBO, Jun 7 1998 (IPS) - Hemmed in by rapid urbanisation and development, Sri Lanka’s indigenous ‘Veddahs’ may be forced to give up their hunting and gathering way of life in the new millennium.

The Indian Ocean island’s oldest inhabitants, the Veddahs who live in the northeastern jungles of the island, are close to extinction because of insensitive government policies and outside influences. Once they roamed the island’s jungles. Now, they are down to a few hundred (1,000 according to one estimate) with many young Veddah men and women choosing to leave the forests.

The Veddahs, who stayed together for centuries, could be further scattered with the death of Uruvarige Tissahamy, charismatic patriarch of the Veddahs and de-facto chief since he handed over power to his son.

On Jun. 1, Tissahamy was laid to rest, according to tribal rites, in a coffin made out of the bark of a tree, near his home at Damabana, in the northeast. The ceremony was simple, but the Sri Lankan government stepped in to give him a state funeral, attended by some 100,000 mourners, blaring loud-speakers and Buddhist and Catholic priests offering prayers.

Tissahamy had urged his son to hold a simple funeral, but the government wanted to bid farewell to “one of the most distinguished sons of Sri Lanka”. Observers said the recognition has come too late for a tribe that is set to vanish from the face of the earth in the new millennium.

Tissahamy, whose actual age is not known, and was believed, by some, to have been at least 104 years old when he died after a prolonged illness, will be remembered for his long struggle to prevent the Veddahs from being forced out of the jungle. His successor and son Uruvarige Wanniya, who became chieftain several years ago, though he never grew out of the shadow of his charismatic father, may not be able to fight to protect his people’s identity.

“Wanniya won’t be able to match up to the high status, charisma and power of his father. There are bound to be internal conflicts over leadership and external tension. Other Veddahs will make a claim for the leadership,” warns Tennyson Perera, a sociologist at the University of Sri Jayawardenepura.

The Veddahs who were first discovered in the jungles of Sri Lanka in 1681, remain hunters and gatherers, surviving on forest produce like honey, wild plants and roots. They live simple, but austere lives in the jungle.

According to legend, they fled to the mountains after the invasion of the island by the Indian prince Vijaya in 6th century B.C. Some anthropologists say they evolved from the Balangoda Man who inhabited Sri Lanka during the Paleolithic and Mesolithic (Stone Age) periods.

Tissahamy fought to retain his community’s identity, that was threatened, he said, by majority Sinhalese settlers and their Buddhist culture. “The new civilisations arrived, changing the country and the world in its wake. But it is my belief that a Veddah shall be a Veddah always,” he once said.

The jungle, he repeated time and again in interviews, was the Veddahs’ soul. “We were born there and will die there one day. My people prefer hunting, collecting bees’ honey and chasing iguana (monitor lizard).”

In 1958, the government attempted to move the Veddahs in the Uva-Bintenne areas into houses built for them, but Tissahamy refused to go. But some of his people were forced to leave when their traditional hunting grounds were declared a national park in 1982, and hunting was banned.

Tissahamy, however, defied the order and remained in the jungle and some years later, other Veddah families who had migrated, returned to their old homes. Many of those who returned did so out of fear that they may lose their identity by mixing with other communities.

Prof. Eugene Wikremanayake, an anthropologist at the University of Peradeniya, who has studied the Veddahs for 25 years, said their hunter-gatherer lifestyle has been under threat ever since Sri Lanka’s independence in 1948. New irrigation systems that were put in place soon after the island’s independence were the earliest threat. Though some became settled cultivators, doing rudimentary farming, they continued to hunt and gather food from the forests.

In time, as it became harder for them to live off the jungle, despite Tissahamy’s efforts to protect his people’s culture, the Veddahs let themselves become a tourist attraction – earning some money from curious tourists. “Like other indigenous people in the world they are likely to become extinct by the turn of the century,” warns sociologist Perera. The least the government can do is to let them be, say other friends of the Veddahs.

In 1924, R.L Spittel, an early chronicler of the Veddahs wrote in his book ‘Wild Ceylon”: “Let us leave the last of the Veddahs alone, and not try to fashion them to our ways, for, that will kill them sooner. Let them die out, scattered in their lonely jungles, the hunters they have always been.”