/ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT/CULTURE-SRI LANKA: Ancient Tribe Made a Living Museum

By Feizal Samath Reprint | | Print |

Feizal Samath

KOTA BAKINI, Sri Lanka, Oct 3 2000 (IPS) - Seated on a mat spread on the floor of his small mud-wall-and-thatch-roof hut, in this eastern Sri Lankan forest village, the tribal chief grumbles that things are no longer the same.

Uruwarige Wanniyala Aththo, chief of Sri Lanka’s only indigenous community, complains that his land and people have been made a living museum by the government.

Curious tourists stare at the big, muscular, bare-chested tribal leader. Outside, some tribal men pose for photographs, axes slung over their bare shoulders or holding bows and arrows. Tourist buses are parked just outside the village.

“Life is not the same. Money has been the cause of all our problems and our downfall. We have had to depend on money since the government made this a protected area and hindered our normal lifestyle of hunting,” says the 54-year-old tribal leader, who wears a modern half-sarong, instead of the traditional loincloth.

The Veddha people can no longer hunt in the jungles, which they once considered their home.

The tribal community had special rules for hunting. “There was no indiscriminate hunting. We didn’t kill young animals or pregnant females. We didn’t kill animals, which were drinking water. We also didn’t waste any meat. Generally, we hunted only wild boar and deer,” he says.

But all that has changed for the 5,000-odd Veddha people who live at Kota Bakini and some other pockets in the same eastern region. Gone are the days when they hunted in the jungle, collected honey and bartered these at the local shop for pulses and salt.

Rather than face extinction, the Veddha community chose to become a draw for the hordes of local and foreign visitors who descend on Kota Bakini, 25 km from the eastern rice farming town of Mahiyangana.

“Our culture was such that we never saved for the future. It is still the same, but with money you can’t be like that. Most of us are in debt, because we don’t put something by for a rainy day,” says Uruwarige.

There is no shortage of guides to Veddha country. Just before the start of the jungle path leading to Kota Bakini, small children gather around tourist vehicles and offer to show the village to visitors for a fee.

Once inside the village, Veddha children surround the visitors and offer to dance in traditional style or sell small, hand-made, traditional objects. Sri Lanka’s present-day tribes still collect honey from the jungle, but now they sell it to the tourist shop near the village.

“Those days we led a self-sufficient life with the jungle as our main backdrop. We had ‘chena’ (slash-and-burn) farming. But we don’t have that freedom now to go anywhere and find our own food,” says the tribal chief, as he chews betel leaf.

Urawarige has travelled abroad often with the help of non- governmental organisations to help raise international awareness about the plight of the Veddha people.

His overseas trips, often bare-chested and wearing the half-sarong and with an axe slung over his shoulder, began with the UN- declared International Year of Indigenous People, some years ago.

He has met tribal people from other parts of the world and once, even climbed the Alps mountains in Switzerland. He is the son of the famous Veddha chieftain, Tissahamy Aththo.

When Tissahamy died on May 29, 1998 at an age past 80 years, a mass funeral, attended by thousands of people from all walks of life, was held to bury the leader.

In his life, Tissahamy desperately fought change and openly defied government efforts to declare the Veddha hunting grounds as protected sanctuaries and national parks.

Unlike Sri Lanka’s majority Sinhalese community, Veddhas don’t cremate their dead because they believe they were born of this earth, and burying their bodies would give something back in return.

Tissahamy’s colourful life has been chronicled by many local and foreign authors who have written about the Veddha. A museum of Tissahamy’s worldly possessions, including the hearing aid he wore later in life, has been set up at the village.

According to Eugene Wickremanayake of the Faculty of Medicine at Sri Lanka’s Peradeniya University, the Veddha community is facing a threat of extinction as “a consequence of their contact with the more advanced communities.”

The Sri Lankan researcher, who studied the Veddha lifestyle for a quarter century, said the existence of the tribe was first recorded by British author Robert Knox in the year 1681.

Veddha culture was well documented, centuries later by British government surgeon, R.L. Spittel, who worked in the Mahiyangana area when Sri Lanka was under British colonial rule. Spittel developed close and friendly links with the tribes.

In recent years, more and more Veddha people have married the Sinhalese. The children of these couples now go to school, unlike their ancestors.

Wickremanayake said some people now masquerade as Veddha at Kota Bakini, which is now a sure stop for most foreign tourists visiting places of cultural interest in Sri Lanka.

The tribal chief blames a lot of modern illnesses afflicting the Veddha community on the loss of their culture and traditional lifestyles.

“When we lived and hunted in the jungle, we never fell ill because we ate what we gathered. Whatever illnesses we got, were treated with herbs and plants found in the jungle. Hospitals, doctors and medicine were alien to us. Our women gave birth at home,” he says.

But now many suffer from diabetes, blood pressure and chest pains, “as if the environment has turned toxic”, laments the Veddha chief, who occasionally uses reading glasses.

Veddha women do not speak to strangers. Any attempt to speak to them, makes them hurry back into their houses and shut the door. The women do not even speak to other women if their men are not at home.

The community has also been studied by its only university graduate, Tennekoon Gunawardene, who studied at Colombo University and has written two books on his people.

Gunawardene agrees that the lifestyles of the Veddha worsened once they began dealing with money. “There was this major social change and the community was not mentally equipped to face this,” said the long-haired, 32-old man, who now teaches at a local school.

Gunawardene’s father is a Sinhalese while his mother is a Veddha.

“I see a vast change in the Veddha lifestyle from what my mother used to describe to me,” he says. He wrote about his community so that the new generation can know how their ancestors lived, he adds.