February 23, 2020
Time against tradition
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MAHIYANGANA - The head man sat peacefully beside the wall on bench of compressed mud, a ceremonial axe at his side, a wall of photographs at his back.
I approached, lifted my hands and pressed my palms together beneath my chin. It's a Hindu greeting but known across all Indian religions. He pressed his own hands against mine.
The Vedda are one of the world's oldest and once one of the world's most remote societies. They lived in the jungle, hunted with bows and traps, took only as much from nature as they returned to it.
The head man gestured us to sit at his side. A dozen other visitors didn't get the same welcome and looked on from the edge of the room, standing. We don't know why.
I asked the greatest problem his village faced and the translated reply was simple: civilisation.
Civilisation has twice uprooted the Vedda. Once they lived in separate communities. Things have changed. People alive today remember how the road that passes at a distance from their settlement was far from the highway from one small city to another that it is now. It was no more than a track you had to know to be sure you didn't lose it. Elephants and other animals roamed at random - and at their own risk because they were frequently shot by trophy-hunters.
The government's response in the early 1980s was to create national parks and move the animals within them for their safety. The problem was that the parks were just where the Vedda lived and hunting wasn't what Sri Lanka wanted in national parks.
It took a long time to come to an agreement and, inevitably, the Vedda saw its disadvantages. A few old people live as they did but the rest seek a compromise, generally involving tourists. If you look at it cynically, you'd say they dress us as the people they once were.
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Much of this we learned from Mohin Settinayake, a gentle man with fluent English and a slight limp who has made it his life's interest to work with and understand the Vedda. We don't know why we had privileged treatment from the head man but we suspect it was from respect for Mohin, who'd taken us there from his bed-and-breakfast.
There are still 300 people in the community and many more in similar groups across the country. But even if they are still there in a hundred years, it will be in little but name, I fear.
Yesterday's rain had been followed by more during the night and the rising heat as we rode here created a sticky humidity that sent sweat running down our limbs. This was to the amusement of half a dozen locals drinking tea at a roadside café. They offered that it was hot for the season - 30 at most but it can climb beyond 40 when it gets going - but they showed no signs of evaporating as we were.
[] I am just leafing through a long and fascinatingly detailed account of Vedda tribes in 1911. The authors, a Dutch couple, suggest customs were weak even a century ago. Of one tribe, they wrote: "We believe that they keep up few if any of the old Vedda customs. They cultivate chenas and keep cattle, their bows and arrows are probably more for show than use... Some of them possess guns while others go to the Sinhalese and borrow them."
In contrast to today's Vedda and their dependence on tourists, the anthropologists say of one visit: "The elderly man and woman whom we first saw had between them scarcely a yard of coarse cloth as clothing, their hair hung loose in dishevelled twists and strings about their faces, and they both squatted so low that their knees stood up above their shoulders.
"But the most impressive thing about them was their unhuman apathy and utter lack of interest. Although we came upon them unexpectedly, and although, as they told us later, they had never before seen white people, nevertheless neither of them showed the slightest astonishment or interest in our appearance: both glanced up for a second, and then cast down their eyes, and continued silently shelling the seeds of the lotus pods beside them." - C. G. Seligman and Brenda Seligman (1993 [1911]), The Veddas, Cambridge, University Press, pp53-54.
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