The Island That Floated Away: The Ceylon Press History of Sri Lanka 2

The History of Sri Lanka

The Ceylon Press History of Sri Lanka 2

THE ISLAND THAT FLOATED AWAY

Sri Lanka & The Great Storm

“The vast unfathomable sea is but a Notion-unto me.” The Three Voices, Lewis Carroll. 1869.

Hidden Harmony

Rusty, derelict, and irresistibly optically-challenged, the old Talaimannar Lighthouse is a gratifyingly improbable key to help unlock the start of Sri Lanka’s recorded history. It presents an even more unlikely clue to explain the profound differences the island presents with the rest of the world. Heraclitus, the weeping philosopher, with his fondness for the paradoxical, noted that “the hidden harmony is better than the obvious,” and certainly the well-concealed harmony of this much mistreated lighthouse offers as good a set of clues as a historian is ever likely to find anywhere else on the island.

Despite its unmistakable presence and purpose, there is little truly obvious about a lighthouse such as this that no longer works. One of a necklace of lighthouses built to help ships avoid disaster, the old Talaimannar Lighthouse marks the start of Adam’s Bridge at its Sri Lankan end. Erected sometime after 1850, it rises, with hearty inelegance, like a cooking pot on stilts, “a black skeleton steel tower 113 feet in height,” noted one observer in 1931, one of the last to witness how its once burning fire blazed a red warning to those few ships incautious enough to risk sailing nearby.

Twenty-three other lighthouses dot the country’s coastline, fourteen still active. Most are early twentieth century constructions, solid Edwardian, or First World War structures built with such consummate skill as to survive with resolute determination into the present day, despite monsoons, tsunamis, and decades of pounding surf, alleviated by minimal maintenance and the gathering indifference of most citizens, more agreeably distracted by the greater celebrity of architecture offering penthouses in downtown Colombo or glittering air conditioned shopping malls in previously blameless ancient towns.

A few, like Beruwala Lighthouse, Kovilan Point Lighthouse or the Little and the Great Basses Reef Lighthouses, off the coast at Yala, are accessible only by sea. Two of the oldest, dating back to 1863, stand guard over the deep-water harbour at Trincomalee: Foul Point Lighthouse and Round Island Lighthouse; with a third, the 1857 Old Colombo Lighthouse, left peering with myopic despondency through a muddle of unremarkable modern buildings towards a now almost invisible ocean.

Others, like Sangaman Kanda Point Lighthouse have been so shattered by nature as to be reduced to mere stumps. The tallest and still active – at 49 metres - is at Dondra Head on the southern tip of the island, an edifice improbably constructed from rocks imported from Scotland and Cornwall. The most famously beautiful is the 1939 lighthouse at Galle, although the 1928 Batticaloa Lighthouse, the dizzily patterned one at Hambantota or Oluvil Lighthouse - the only one to date from after Independence - might all offer winning challenges to that accolade.

Pause briefly for but the merest hint of thought and it is of course no great surprise that so small a nation should boast so great a range and number of lighthouses. Like lonely exclamation marks finally given a voice of their own, these lofty beacons beat out a ghosty metronomic refrain that states, with unmissable clarity, the first and most profound reason for why Sri Lanka is as it is.

A Workshop of Evolution

This is an island. That is what those lonely lighthouses declaim. An island, capacious, yes; but nevertheless, a single island; a piece of land unattached to anything else or a mere part of a string of other infant islands that make up an archipelago.

And that fact – more than any other – has determined the country’s character; for “islands,” as Richard Dawkins, remarked, “are natural workshops of evolution.”

Of course, from Barbados to Singapore, there are many other island nations. Cuba may be twice Sri Lanka’s land mass, but its population is half, a disproportionality shared by Iceland, Ireland, and New Zealand.

Madagascar and Taiwan share population sizes similar to Sri Lanka’s but are either much larger or smaller in land mass. Only Japan and the UK present island nations that far outstrip Sri Lanka by land mass and population. This may seem to be immaterially semantic – but a closer inspection shows just how deep the differences go, and, in so doing, make up the character of an island like no other.

But of all its many peers, Talaimannar, much battered in the civil war and now finding a modest following amongst kitesurfers, remains the country’s most significant beacon, for it is precisely here where Sri Lanka, in appearing to touch India, simply runs out into the sea and disappears.

Looked at from the Indian end, its infrequent visitors are mildly surprised that the lighthouse is not part of the Indian mainland. Or if not geographically so, then at least politically, or culturally. Or environmentally. Or perhaps linguistically.

But it is not. It is none of those things. In fact, the closer you look, the greater are the differences. However much help the Old Talaimannar Lighthouse was once to shipping, it doggedly maintains its still greater purpose, which is to signal to all commers that what lives beyond its rusty form is an island, utterly divergent from the mainland beyond.

Flashing multi coloured neon lights blinking to the blast of heavenly trumpets could hardly make the point better. One step further and you enter a world whose flummoxing and flamboyant similarities with the mainland merely disguise its differences.

More potent than any fortress, the three seas that surround Sri Lanka are a salty Cordon Sanitaire keeping separate a sixty-five thousand square kilometres land mass.

On either side of the island stretch two vast bays, so incalculably immense that it seems petty to note that they contain 6.5 million square kilometres of water. Like the ears of Mickey Mouse, to the west the Arabian Sea and to the east, the Bay of Bengal sit separated from one another by India to the north and centre, and Sri Lanka to the south, with the entrance to the Arabian Sea coming through the tiny Laccadive Sea - a modest antechamber or buffer oceanet that links the island more immediately to India, the Laccadive, and Maldive Islands. Together these oceans bind Africa to Indonesia, with Sri Lanka lolling perfectly in the middle, a bejeweled tummy button, more dazzling than anything Beyoncé might have worn in her navel to the Oscars, the BRITS or Cannes.

Even so, a still mightier body of water stretches, bastion-like, to Sri Lanka’s south - the Indian Ocean, a vast water mass that holds one fifth of the world’s total sea water. Were you to set out across this sea on your super yacht from Galle and head south you would encounter nothing until you reached Antarctica’s Davis Station, with its recorded minus 41 Celsius temperature.

The Drawbridge

But to the island’s north the ocean story is very different. Here lie the Palk Straits, and the Gulf of Mannar, with the shoals and islets of Adam’s Bridge separating them like the vertebrae on an crocodile’s back. The bridge, a here-yesterday, gone-tomorrow geological fo...