South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies

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Explorations in the Transmission of the Ramayana

in Sri Lanka

Justin W. Henry

To cite this article: Justin W. Henry (2019) Explorations in the Transmission of the
Ramayana in Sri Lanka, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, 42:4, 732-746, DOI:
10.1080/00856401.2019.1631739

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/00856401.2019.1631739

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SOUTH ASIA: JOURNAL OF SOUTH ASIAN STUDIES
2019, VOL. 42, NO. 4, 732–746
https://doi.org/10.1080/00856401.2019.1631739

ARTICLE

Explorations in the Transmission of the Ramayana in

Sri Lanka
Justin W. Henry
Department of Theology, Loyola University Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
This essay explores the identification of the island of Sri Lanka Puranas; Ramayana;
with the ‘Lankapura’ of Ramayana literary fame, tracing the trans- Saivism; Sinhala literature;
mission of the mythical geography of the epic from late medieval Sri Lanka; Tamil literature;
Theravada Buddhism
South India to Sri Lankan Tamil temple literature. The invading
Cholas of the tenth century were the first to identify Sri Lanka as
the ‘Lanka’ of the Ramayana, a geographical equivalence main-
tained by the Arya Cakravarti rulers who dubbed themselves
‘guardians of Rama’s bridge’ (c
etu kā valan). I highlight the
uniquely sympathetic treatment of Ravana by the Hindus of east-
ern Sri Lanka, and explore the likelihood that Tamil impressions
of Ravana impacted his appearance in Sinhala Buddhist literature
from the fifteenth century onwards.

Introduction: The presence and absence of the Ramayana

A number of paradoxes inhabit our reception of the Ramayana narrative (or ‘the story
of Rama-Sita’, as it is locally known) in Sri Lanka. On the one hand, we hear of no
‘Sinhala’ or ‘Sri Lankan Tamil Ramayana’, and the early Pali chronicles (the
Dipavamsa and Mahavamsa) say nothing of the historicity of the epic, and nothing
about it in relation to Sri Lanka. This is despite the fact that the Ramayana was known
from early on in Sri Lanka, its presence in scholastic circles attested by Kumaradasa’s
sixth-century Sanskrit version, the Janakiharana.1
On the other hand, the more you look, the more you see the Ramayana everywhere.
Miscellaneous references to the Hindu epic appear with startling frequency in Sinhala
folklore, poetry and middle-period historical works. Various landmarks, villages and
sites of interest throughout the island are associated with Ravana’s kingdom, Sita’s cap-
tivity, and the battle between Rama and the raksasa hordes. In Kandyan-period poetry
and still sometimes today, Sinhala speakers refer to the long ago era of the demon-
king’s reign as the ‘Ravana yuga’.2 From around the mid fourteenth century, Sinhala
historical works, topographia and poetry begin to assign the reigns of Ravana and

CONTACT Justin W. Henry jhenry4@luc.edu

1. K.C. Swaminathan, Janakiharana of Kumaradasa, V. Raghavan (ed.) (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1977).
2. G. Obeyesekere and A. Tissa Kumara, Ravana Rajavaliya (Colombo: Godage, 2005), p. 9. I have confirmed this
observation by Obeyesekere and Tissa Kumara through my own reading of the Ravana Kathava,
discussed below.

ß 2019 South Asian Studies Association of Australia

 SOUTH ASIA: JOURNAL OF SOUTH ASIAN STUDIES 733

Vibhishana formative significance, extending the history of Lankan kingship to a date

far earlier than the time of Gautama Buddha and Prince Vijaya (the first king of the
island and progenitor of the Sinhala Buddhist people, according to the Mahavamsa).
Why, after centuries of exclusion, does the Ramayana appear so suddenly and pro-
lifically in Gampola–Kotte period Buddhist literature? Several scholarly attempts to
answer this question have been made, and almost certainly the Ramayana made its
way into Sri Lanka’s Buddhist southwest by way of a number of avenues.3 The remain-
der of this essay is devoted to the northern avenue of diffusion of the Ramayana into
late-medieval and early-modern Lankan religious imagination.
The geographical identification of Sri Lanka as the ‘Lanka’ of the Ramayana seems
to have been a late first-millennium South Indian innovation, sustained by the Arya
Cakravarti kings of Jaffna. Rama and Ravana are featured as foundational figures in the
Tamil temple myths of South India, reproduced in the tala-puranams and the folklore
of northern and eastern Sri Lanka. However, as I argue, Lankan Tamils also innovate
on the South Indian perception of Ravana, rendering him a positive figure in the
island’s religious history—a steadfast devotee of Siva, and the original king of Lanka,
long before the arrival of Vijaya.

The geopolitics of ‘Lankapura’ in medieval South India

There is no indication that the ‘Lanka’ of Valmiki’s epic was intended to correspond
with the island of Sri Lanka. ‘Lankapura’ (or ‘Lankapuri’) is depicted as a city at the top
of Trikuta Mountain—a fortress with impenetrable ramparts and moats.4 Trikuta itself is
described as ‘an inaccessible rock’ in the ocean,5 its peak resembling that of Mount
Kailasa.6 Later first-millennium Sanskrit renderings of the epic give no indication of a
correspondence between Ravana’s Lankapura and Sri Lanka, with some versions even
making an explicit geographical distinction between the two islands.7

3. Jonathan Walters argues that the appearance of Vibhishana at fourteenth-century Gampola represented the
symbolic subjugation of southwestern Lankan regents to the Vijayanagar Empire (the kings of which presented
themselves as embodiments of Rama, to whom Vibhishana of the Ramayana was vassal). Jonathan Walters,
‘Vibhisana and Vijayanagar: An Essay on Geopolitics in Medieval Sri Lanka’, in The Sri Lanka Journal of the
Humanities, Vols. 17 and 18, nos. 1 and 2 (1991/1992), pp. 129–42. For a critique of Walters, see Sujatha
Meegama, ‘From Kovils to Devales: Patronage and “Influence” at Buddhist and Hindu Temples in Sri Lanka’, PhD
dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, 2011, pp. 39–41. Meegama advances her own hypothesis on the
rise in popularity of guardian deities associated with late medieval southwestern Sri Lankan courts, includ-
ing Vibhishana.
4. ‘With its splendid white mansions, Lanka, set high on the mountain peak, looked … like a city in the sky.
Hanuman gazed upon that city, built by Vishva-karman and protected by the lord of the raksasas, as if upon a
city floating in the sky’. See R. Goldman and S. Goldman, Ramayana, Book Five (New York: NYU Press/JJC
Foundation, 2006), p. 73, Sundara Kanda 5.2.15–20.
5. Prasad Shastri, The Ramayana, Vol. 3 (London: Shanti Sadan, 1862), pp. 4ff.
6. Ibid., p. 350, Yuddha Kanda, sarga 125.
7. Sri Lanka, ‘the territory of the Simhalas’, is identified as a separate location from Ravana’s Lankapura in
Rajashekhara’s ninth- or tenth-century Bala Ramayana. The distinction between Simhala-dvipa and Trikuta
Mountain is preserved in Bhoja’s eleventh-century Champu Ramayana. However, in the Yuddha Kanda appended
later to the work by Laksmanasuri, Trikuta is referred to as ‘the torus of the lotus flower that is the island of
Sinhala’ (in the gadya portion between verses 32 and 33); see Paramasiva Iyer, Ramayana and Lanka, Part 1
(Bangalore: Bangalore Press, 1940), pp. xi, xv. ‘Lanka’ and ‘Simhala’ are listed as separate domains of the ‘southern
division’ according to Sanskrit topographical reckoning, including that of the Mahabharata and Varahamihira’s
Brhat-Samhita. See J.H.C. Kern (ed.), Brhat-Samhita of Varaha-Mihira, Vol. 1, N. Chidambaram Iyer (trans.) (Delhi:
Parimal Publications), 14.11–16. On the geography of ‘Simhala Dvipa’ and ‘Lanka’ in the Mahabharata,
Markandya Purana, the early eleventh-century Tarikh al-Hind of Al-Biruni, the Goladhyaya Bhuvanakosa of
734 J. W. HENRY

South Indian religious literature, too, conforms to Valmiki’s geographically vague and
fanciful depiction of Lankapura. In the seventh-century hymns by Cuntarar, Ravana’s
‘southern Lanka’ is located somewhere ‘in the southern seas full of waves’ (tiraiyan
ar
ulnta tennilan_kai), and is ‘full of broad roads made for strong chariots’.8 The
kat al c

_
Lankapura of Kampan’s famed twelfth-century version of the epic is again a fortified city
jutting out of the ocean, ‘with the wide sea as its moat’.9 The Kantapuranam (the Tamil
version of the Skanda Purana) depicts ‘Ilankaipuram’ as a city somewhere far out in the
ocean which sank during a fierce battle between Skanda and Viravaku, resurfacing from
the water some time afterwards.10 Subsequent South Indian poetry tends to be similarly
equivocal on the whereabouts of Ravana’s ancient domain.11
However, direct identification of Sri Lanka with the abode of Ravana appears from
the eighth century in South Indian inscriptional discourse recording territorial con-
quests over the island. The first known example is contained in the Kasakudi plates of
Nandivarman. The encomium boasts that the king’s ancestor, Narasimhavarman I, was
a ‘victorious hero, who surpassed the glory of the valour of Rama by (his) conquest of
Lanka’.12 By the ninth century, the Ramayana began to take on substantial political
and religious significance in South India, among both Saivites and Vaishnavites. Rama
emerged as an ideal king, and a frequent standard of comparison in the literature cele-
brating real-life military and political adventurers.13 In connection with this develop-
ment, the Cholas standardised the equivalence between ‘Lanka’ and ‘Lankapura’ as they
began making military headway on the island in the early tenth century. A hymn cele-
brating the Citamparam Siva temple complex attributed to a Chola prince named
Kantaratitya (written during or some time before 907 CE) eulogises a recent victor,
stating that, just as Siva subdued Ravana, ‘the king of Lanka’ (ilankaiv
_ entan),
‘Cempiyan, the just Chola king of Uraiyur, conquered both the hot-tempered tyrant of
the [Pandyan] South and the king of Sri Lanka (
ılam)’.14

Bhaskaracarya, and the Skanda Purana, see S.C. Paul, ‘Pre-Vijayan Legends and Traditions Pertaining to Ceylon’,
in The Journal of the Ceylon Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland, Vol. 31, no. 82
(1929), pp. 263–300.
8. M.A. Dorai Rangaswamy, The Religion and Philosophy of Tevaram (Madras: University of Madras, [1958] 1990),
p. 298–9.
9. See vv. 3066–7 of the Aranya Kandam of P.S. Sundaram, Kamba Ramayanam (Tamil Nadu: Department of Tamil
Development-Culture, 1989). Extensive description of Lankapura’s geography is given in the Sundara Kandam
as well.
10. R. Dessigane and P.Z. Pattabiramin (trans.), La legende de Skanda: Selon le Kandapuranam tamoul et
l’iconographie (Pondicherry: Institut français d’indologie, 1967), pp. 101ff.
11. In Venkatesha’s fourteenth-century Hamsasandesa, Rama instructs his messenger bird to depart India ‘for the
royal seat of the demon king Ravana on Trikuta Hill in Lanka, the island country that appears and vanishes with
the rising and falling ocean tides’. Steven Hopkins, The Flight of Love (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), p.
56. Additional description of the island and city appears at vv. 1.54–2.6: the city of Lanka ‘stands on the sheer
peaks of Suvela’ (2.3). Ajay Rao identifies the Lanka of Venkatesha’s poem as Sri Lanka. Ajay Rao, Re-Figuring
the Ramayana as Theology: A History of Reception in Premodern India (Oxford: Routledge Press, 2015). The early
fourteenth-century Keralan Suka Sandesa references Rama’s setu in the vicinity of Rameswaram (Sri Lanka is not
explicitly mentioned). See N.P. Unni, Sukasandesa of Laksmidasa (Delhi: Nag Publishers, 1985), pp. 35, 45.
12. E. Hultzch (ed.), South Indian Inscriptions, Vol. 2 (Madras: Madras Government Press, 1891), p. 348.
13. Paula Richman notes that ‘in Tamil Nadu, the Thanjavur area has been closely associated with veneration of
Rama as perfect king, especially during the Chola dynasty’s imperial expansion’. Paula Richman, Ramayana
Stories in Modern South India: An Anthology (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008), p. 16.
14. P. Younger, The Home of Dancing Sivan (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 216. For the original text,
see Tirupaantal Kacimatattu Atipar (ed.), Tiruvicaippa (Madras: K. Cuppiramaniyam, 1974), pp. 224–6, Sec. 5,
vv. 7–8.
 SOUTH ASIA: JOURNAL OF SOUTH ASIAN STUDIES 735

Adversarial Sinhala kings and their armies were likened to Ravana and his raksasa
hosts. The Udayendram plates of Prthvipati II (c. 919 CE) boast that when this king’s
ally, Parantaka, ‘defeated the Pandya [king] Rajasimha, two persons experienced fear at
the same time: the Lord of Wealth (Kubera) on account of the death of his own friend,
and Vibhishana on account of the proximity of the Chola dominion to Sri Lanka’.15
The Tiruvalangadu plates of Rajendra (c. 1017 CE) assert that Rajendra’s campaign in
Sri Lanka was conducted even more efficiently than Rama’s:
Constructing a bridge across the water of the ocean with the assistance of able monkeys,
the Lord of the Raghavas (i.e. Rama) killed with great difficulty the king of Lanka (i.e.
Ravana) with sharp-edged arrows—[but] this terrible general of his (the general of King
Rajaraja, Rajendra’s father) crossed the ocean with ships and burnt the Lord of Lanka.
Hence Rama is surpassed by him (i.e. by Rajendra).16
The depiction of Chola enemies as ‘raksasas’ persisted until the twilight of the Chola
Empire, and was used in reference to Sri Lankans as well as continental adversaries.17

The Arya Cakravartis and the ‘guardians of Rama’s bridge’

Sri Lankan Tamils seem to have openly accepted the identification of the island with
the Lanka of the Ramayana, reversing however the negative and demonic connotations
associated with their Chola predecessors. Drawing an analogy with Rama and
Vibhishana, the Arya Cakravartis became themselves ‘guardians of the bridge’, that is,
protectors of the narrow, submerged isthmus connecting Rameswaram on the Indian
subcontinent with the island of Mannar.18 In addition, the island ceased to be an
‘abode of raksasas’ in Lankan Tamil literature. Instead, drawing from the Tamil Purana
traditions of South Indian temples such as Citamparam and Rameswaram, Ravana was
portrayed in a favourable light in northern Sri Lanka, remembered for his piety and
foundational role at places of Saiva worship across the island.
The seventeenth-century Setupati rulers of Ramnad and Sivaganga are the best
known ‘protectors of the bridge’, as their headquarters at Rameswaram and family
name (c
etu pati) suggest.19 Lankan sources reveal that the title was in operation three
centuries earlier on the opposite side of the ‘bridge’ among rulers of the northern king-
dom of Jaffna (who also traced their origin to Rameswaram in South India).20 Early
copper coins of the Arya Cakravartis, while borrowing their design from the mints of
Polonnaruwa and Dambadeniya, were imprinted with the word c
etu (bridge) in Tamil

15. W.M.K. Wijetunga, Sri Lanka and the Cholas (Ratmalana: Vishva Lekha Publications, 2003), pp. 51–2.
16. R.S.H. Krishna Sastri (ed. and trans.), South Indian Inscriptions, Vol. 3, Part 3 (Madras: Madras Government Press,
1920), p. 398 (text) and p. 421 (trans.), v. 80. This inscription was written shortly after Rajendra’s annexation of
the northern portion of the island.
17. Rajendra Chola III (r. 1246–79) is remembered as ‘a very Rama of northern Lanka, renowned as the abode of
the Vira-raksasas’. K.A. Nilakantha Sastri comments: ‘this is clearly a reference to a campaign against the
Sambuvarayas, some of whom called themselves Vira-raksasa and who held sway in the region of North Arcot’.
K.A. Nilakantha Sastri, The Colas, Vol. 2, Part 1 (Madras: University of Madras, [1937] 1975), p. 202.
18. The episode in Valmiki’s Ramayana is given by Shastri, The Ramayana, Vol. 3, pp. 51–5, Yuddha Kanda, sarga 22.
19. The earliest reference to any Setupati ruler in South India is from 1604 CE. See S. Thiruvenkatachari, The
Setupatis of Ramnad (Karaikudi: Dr. Alagappa Chettiar Training College, 1959), esp. pp. 25–8.
20. A cirappuppayiram of the Cekaracacekara-malai states that the Arya Cakravartis originated from Rameswaram,
identifying them as belonging to the ‘Ganga’ (kankai) dynasty. See S. Natesan, ‘The Northern Kingdom’, in H.C.
Ray (ed.), History of Ceylon, Vol. 1, Part 2 (Colombo: Ceylon University Press, 1960), p. 691.
736 J. W. HENRY

lettering.21 This, it would appear, is an abbreviated form of the title c
etu kā valan,
‘protector of the bridge’ (the same meaning as c
etu pati). The c
etu label also appears in
a Tamil inscription commemorating an Arya Cakravarti military victory at Kotagama
(only thirteen miles northeast of Dadigama, where Parakramabahu’s capital lay at the
time), most likely dating to the mid to late fourteenth century when Jaffna exercised
tax authority over the ports of the south.22 The epithet appears later in connection
with Cekaraca Cekaran, most likely Pararaca Cekaran VI (r. c. 1478–1519) or his son,
Cankili I, in a colophon of the Cekaracacekara-malai, an astrological work composed
under his sponsorship:
Uniting the domains of southern Lanka (tennilank
_ apuri ticaitoru maruvum),23
_
Uprooting [his opponents] as onlookers say, ‘O his glittering spear!’ …
Cinkai Ariyan, protector of the bridge (c
etu kā valan),
Lord of the Ganges, tilaka among the learned,
Teacher of many across the broad ocean,
Having no equal with respect to mastery of the triple Tamil,24
Cepparum Cekaraca Cekaran.25
A similar title appears in a colophon of the Taksina Kailaca Puranam belonging to the
late fifteenth or sixteenth century:
Guarding over the shore with its expansive bridge,
The one with his dark spear raised,
Commander Cinkai Ariyan,
Cekaraca Cekaran who is ornamented with fame.26
As for the possible origin and significance of the c
etu pati title, it is noteworthy that
the submerged isthmus joining India and Sri Lanka makes the Palk Strait navigable at
only two points: one near Rameswaram (this passage being only twelve feet at its deep-
est), and the other off the coast of Mannar. For this reason, Mannar was a strategic
asset with respect to the control of shipping in the region, one which fell within the ter-
ritory of the Jaffna kingdom.27

21. F. Medis, ‘An Over View of Sri Lanka’s Mediaeval Coinage with a Consideration of Some Interactions and
Influences of the South Indian Coinage of the Period’, in Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Sri Lanka, new
series, Vol. 37 (1992/1993), pp. 63–4, 67–8. Medis speculates that the Tamil design (but not the c
etu epigraph)
was first copied from the ‘lion coins’ of Parakramabahu I.
22. See A. Veluppillai, Ceylon Tamil Inscriptions, Part 2 (Peradeniya: Royal Printers, 1972), pp. 91–4; and
S. Pathmanathan, Ilankait Tamil Cacanankal (1300–1900) (Colombo: Department of Hindu Cultural Affairs, 2013),
pp. 211–22.
23. This locution referring to ‘southern Lanka’ exhibits continuity with the Chola designation of the island.
24. This is a reference to the three domains of Tamil composition according to the classical scheme: poetry, song
and drama.
25. ‘Introduction’, in S. Padmanathan and K.C. Nataraca (eds), Taksina Kailaca Puranam of Cinkai Cekaracacekaran,
Vol. 1 (Colombo: Department of Hindu Religious and Cultural Affairs, 1995), p. xxi, citing a Cirappuppayiram of
the Cekaracacekara-malai. Again, the king is referred to later on in the body of the text as ‘Cekaraca Cekaran,
utmost in learning, protector of the bridge’ (p. xxii). Pathmanathan gives a more complete citation in his
Ilankait Tamil Cacanankal (1300–1600), pp. 214, 220. On the dating of the Taksina Kailaca Puranam, see Justin
Henry, ‘Distant Shores of Dharma: Historical Imagination in Sri Lanka from the Late Medieval Period’, PhD
dissertation, University of Chicago, 2017, pp. 91–5.
26. S. Padmanathan and K.C. Nataraca (eds), Taksina Kailaca Puranam, Cirappuppayiram (Colombo: Department of
Hindu Religious and Cultural Affairs, 1995), p. i.
27. See C.S. de Silva and S. Pathmanathan, ‘The Kingdom of Jaffna up to 1620’, in K.M. de Silva (ed.), History of Sri
Lanka, Vol. 2 (Peradeniya: The University of Peradeniya, 1995), pp. 105–6.
 SOUTH ASIA: JOURNAL OF SOUTH ASIAN STUDIES 737

Ravana and Rama in Tamil temple literature

While the Arya Cakravartis identified themselves as ‘guardians of the bridge’, Ravana
and Rama appear ubiquitously as foundational figures in the Tamil temple myths and
historiography of Sri Lanka’s north and east. The characterisation of Ravana as a
devotee of Siva has deep roots in Indian literature. In Valmiki’s Ramayana, the
demon-king reports to his brother Vibhishana that he has travelled to the Himalayas in
order to undergo penance and win the friendship of Siva.28 A seminal theme of later
South Indian temple imagery and Saiva poetry, known as the Ravana anugraha murti
in the Sanskrit Puranas and Agamas, tells the story of Ravana’s harassment of Siva and
subsequent subordination. It involves variations on a basic theme: Ravana was flying
through the air on his chariot when his route was blocked by Mount Kailasa.
Arrogantly, he uprooted the mountain and began to toss it aside. Siva intervened, pin-
ning Ravana beneath the mountain. After a thousand years of being trapped thus,
which he spent singing hymns of Siva’s majesty in apology, Ravana was released by
Siva, who blessed him with a boon (in some versions consisting of long life, in others
an invincible sword, in others a lingam to worship).
An early reference to the story appears in the Kalittokai of the Sangam corpus,29
and afterwards as a frequent literary motif in South Indian Sanskrit and Tamil works,
often with various permutations.30 In the Siva Purana, Ravana cuts off nine of his ten
heads as an act of penance, impressing Siva sufficiently to win the boon of his own
Siva-lingham to worship.31 The Ravana anugraha murti is a steady motif of the
seventh–eighth century Tamil Nayanar poets. Ravana is mentioned in each of Appar’s
patikams,32 and Campantar refers to the story in the eighth verse of nearly every one
of his hymns.33 Cuntarar describes Ravana as a mighty raksasa (val arakkan) who
regrettably misdirects all of his abilities towards wicked ends. When finally penitent,
however, pinned under Mount Kailasa, Ravana applies himself duly, making a lute
using his severed arms as strings and severed head as a sound box.
South Indian Saiva temple literature draws from the Ravana anugraha murti and
related stories in the Siva Purana to render Ravana an instrumental figure in the estab-
lishment of a number of locations of devotional significance. The temple literature of
Varanci (in Tamil Nadu) and Mahabaleshwar (in Maharashtra) invoke the story of
Ravana’s failed attempt to transport a Siva lingam to Lanka, which first appears in the
Siva Purana. In each case, Ravana accidentally lays down the lingam he has been given

28. Shastri, The Ramayana, Vol. 3, pp. 410–2.

29. See Murugan’s translation in V. Murugan, Kalittokai in English (Chennai: Institute of Asian Studies, 1999), p. 135,
no. 37.
30. On eighth-century Pallava reliefs of Ravana lifting Mount Kailasa at Kailasanatha (Kancipuram), the
Vaikuntaperumal Visnu temple, and on the origin of the imagery at Mathura in the fifth century, see Valerie
Gillet, ‘Entre demon et devot: la figure de Ravana dans les representations pallava’, in Arts Asiatiques, Vol. 62
(2007), pp. 29–45.
31. See J.L. Shastra, The Siva-Purana (Ancient Indian Tradition and Mythology Series, Puranas in Translation) (Delhi:
Motilal Banarsidass, 1970), §1366–8.
32. See Sekkizhaar Adi-p-Podi and T.N. Ramachandran, Tirumurai the Sixth: St. Appar’s Thaandaka Hymns
(Dharmapuram, Mayiladuthurai: Dharmapuram Aadheenam, 1995). South Indian tradition explains this fact on
the basis of Appar’s insistence in a previous life that Ravana sing praises to Siva. See David Shulman, Tamil
Temple Myths: Sacrifice and Divine Marriage in the South Indian Saiva Tradition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1980), p. 322; and Rangaswamy, The Religion and Philosophy of Tevaram, p. 296.
33. Rangaswamy, The Religion and Philosophy of Tevaram, p. 296.
738 J. W. HENRY

as a reward for his penance en route from the Himalayas to Lanka. When he attempts
to pick it up again, he bends the lingam out of shape, causing it to appear like a cow’s
ear (a go-karna).34
_ ‘Gokarna’ is also an early designation for the Koneswaram Temple of
Significantly,
Trincomalee in Sri Lanka, where Ravana is regarded as an influential founding figure.
The Taksina Kailaca Puranam gives a brief account of the Ramayana, the slaying of
Ravana, and Rama’s bestowal of the kingdom of Lanka on Vibhishana. Rama then
prays to Siva and attains a rarefied mental state as a result of darshan.35 Following his
example, Vibhishana too worships at ‘the place of Gokarna’, imploring Rama that they
build a temple to Siva at that spot.36 Rama assents and construction begins. The temple
is decorated with paintings of various devas, including a prominent one of Ravana
(Vibhishana’s devotion at the sight of this artwork is remarked upon, so the inclusion
of Ravana seems to be out of respect for his fallen brother). Deities, including Indra
and Visnu, come to worship at the temple, and do so until Rama grants permission for
them to return to their abodes. The text recalls a time when Ravana too sang sweet
praise to Siva on his v
ınā at Koneswaram.37
Similar stories appear _ in the later tala-puranams and the oral traditions of other Siva
temples in northern and eastern Sri Lanka as well. The temple literature of
Thiruketiswaram in Mannar has it that Mayan, the father-in-law of Ravana, had a temple
built there in order to install a Siva lingam. Rama is said to have later worshipped there
on his return to India from Lanka.38 The tala-puranams of Munneswaram (located on
Sri Lanka’s northwest coast) declare that the site gained prominence when Rama—
returning to Ayodhya on his flying garuda after having defeated Ravana—stopped to rest
at an uninhabited spot. Determining that it would be a good place to worship Siva,
Rama dispatched Hanuman to India to retrieve a lingam for this purpose. When
Hanuman tarried too long, Rama built his own lingam out of sand. Hanuman eventually
returned with the lingam, only to have Rama hurl it away towards India in annoyance.
Rama’s sand lingam remained after the two of them returned to the subcontinent, thus
established as the first lingam to be worshipped at Munneswaram.39

34. In the Siva Purana, Ravana stops to urinate, entrusting the lingam to a cowherd who is unable to hold it for
the duration. See Shastra, Siva-Purana, vv. 1366–68. In addition to being the name of the forest in which Siva
practised his penance according to the Sanskrit Puranas, ‘Gokarna’ is a place name associated historically with
at least three Indian temples: Mahabaleshwar, Kedaram in Bengal and the Gokarna Temple of Mahendra
Mountain in Kalinga. See S. Pathmanathan, Hindu Temples of Sri Lanka (Colombo: Kumaran Book House, 2006),
pp. 57–8. On the identification of ‘Gokarna’ as a place in ‘Malaya Dvipa’ (the island containing ‘the great city
Lanka’) in the Vayu Purana, see G.V. Tagare, The Vayu Purana, Part I (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1987),
§ 48.20–30. Gokarna is also mentioned as the name of a mountain of uncertain location in the Ramayana. See
Goldman and Goldman, Ramayana Book Five, p. 206, Sundara Kanda, 5.34.73.
35. S. Padmanathan and K.C. Nataraca (eds), Taksina Kailaca Puranam, Tirunakarac Carukkam (Colombo: Department
of Hindu Religious and Cultural Affairs, 1995), vv. 1–8.
36. Ibid., v. 10.
37. Ibid., vv. 12, 15.
38. S. Arumugam, Some Ancient Temples of Sri Lanka (Colombo: Ranco Printers & Publishers, 1980), p. 36; and K.
Vaithianathan, ‘Thiruketheeswaram Temple and the Port of Mantota’, in K. Vaithianathan (ed.),
Thiruketheeswaram Papers (Colombo, privately printed, 1960), pp. 19–20. Vaithianathan adds that according to
local tradition, ‘Arjuna, the hero of Mahabharatha and the kinsman and disciple of Lord Krishna, also visited
Thiruketheeswaram in the course of his pilgrimage to the South’.
39. The story is found in the Sri Munnesvara Manmiyam (eighteenth or nineteenth century), as well as in the
Daksina Kailasa Mahatmyam, a (most likely modern) Sanskrit work glorifying the Hindu temples of the island.
See Pathmanathan, Hindu Temples of Sri Lanka, pp. 243–4; and Rohan Bastin, The Domain of Constant Excess:
Plural Worship at the Munnesvaram Temples in Sri Lanka (New York: Berghahn Books, 2002), p. 45. Many Saiva
 SOUTH ASIA: JOURNAL OF SOUTH ASIAN STUDIES 739

The temple’s origin story is in fact a very close facsimile of that of the Rameswaram
Siva temple across the ‘bridge’ over the Palk Strait in southern Tamil Nadu. The only
discrepancy between the stories is that it was Sita, not Rama, who constructed the ini-
tial sand lingam of Rameswaram.40 Rameswaram’s reputation as a place of devotional
significance for Rama is present as early on as the Siva Purana, wherein Rama com-
plains that Siva’s gift of invincibility to Ravana was inordinately generous, and asking
that he too be made invincible in battle against the demon king. Siva grants this
request, transforming himself into ‘the lingam named Rameswara’.41
While still acknowledged as the antagonist of the Ramayana, Sri Lankan Tamils
remember Ravana sympathetically as an ardent devotee of Siva. In the temple literature
of Koneswaram, the sentiment of Ravana anugraha murti is inverted, making Ravana’s
feat of lifting Mount Kailasa an act of extreme heroism and piety (rather than an act of
arrogance). The eighteenth-century Tirukonacala Puranam gives the (still popular)
story of Ravana’s resolution to bring Koneswaram to his aged mother, Kanniya, who
was nearby but too ill to make the journey to the top of the mountain in order to wor-
ship. In the act of cutting away a portion of the mountain, however, Ravana’s sword
broke and he was dragged into the sea; a tall cleft in the rockface at the temple prem-
ises is now called ‘Ravana’s cut’ (irā vanan vet: t: u) in reference to this incident. Realising
_
that his strength was inadequate for the task, Ravana turned instead to penance, goug-
ing out his eyes and offering them as flowers to Siva, and pulling out the tendons of
one of his arms to fashion a lute (yā l) on which he sang songs of devotion (Figure 1).
Satisfied, Siva restored Ravana’s body, and allowed himself to be transported, along
with his temple at Koneswaram, to Kanniya. The devas, worried that their regular wor-
ship at Tirumayilai would be interrupted, sent Visnu to falsely inform Ravana of the
death of his mother. Believing him, Ravana performed her funerary rites at the nearby
hot springs where she was residing, immediately after which Kanniya actually died.42

temples on Sri Lanka’s east coast also claim to be locations at which Rama stopped to perform religious rites in
memory of the departed on his return to Ayodhya. See Arumugam, Some Ancient Temples of Sri Lanka, pp. 20,
75. Some Hindu temples of the Batticaloa region also identify Ravana as their founder. See Dennis McGilvray,
‘Mukkuvar Vannimai: Tamil Caste and Matriclan Ideology in Batticaloa, Sri Lanka’, in Dennis McGilvray (ed.),
Caste Ideology and Interaction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), p. 72.
40. See Shulman, Tamil Temple Myths, pp. 50–1; and G. Sethuraman, The Saiva Temple of India: A Study on
Ramesvaram Temple (Delhi: Sharada Publishing House, 2013), p. 25.
41. Shastra, Siva-Purana, vv. 1381–4. Ramanathasvami Kovil at Rameswaram is one of twelve jyotilingam temples
throughout India, where Siva is worshipped as a physically manifest beam of light, represented by ancient
lingams. The Sanskrit Lingam Purana also prefigures later Tamil temple literature, saying that Rama established
a lingam at the seashore at Rameswaram after killing Ravana. The motif of Rama expiating the sin of killing
Ravana at Rameswaram was known and clearly significant in Jaffna by the Portuguese period. See Fern~ao de
Queyroz (Queiros), The Temporal and Spiritual Conquest of Ceylon, S.G. Perera (trans.) (New York: AMS Press,
[1930] 1975), I.58. On Indian literature referencing pilgrimage to ‘Rama’s bridge’, see Phyllis Granoff, ‘Rama’s
Bridge: Some Notes on Place in Medieval India, Real and Envisioned’, in East and West, Vol. 48, no. 1/2 (2004),
pp. 93–115. The story of the bridge’s construction is the subject of Pravarasena’s seventh-century Setubandha,
and Shankara’s disciple Padmapada visits the bridge (at Rameswaram, after visiting Chitambaram) in the
Shankaradigvijaya. Other accounts of pilgrimage to the tirtha of Rama’s setu are later, from the sixteenth century
onwards.
42. C. Sivaratnam, Outline of the Cultural History and Principles of Hinduism (Colombo: Stangard Printers, 1964), pp.
255–6. For the version of this refiguring of the Ravana anugraha murti as it appears in Padmanathan and
Nataraca (eds), Taksina Kailaca Puranam, see chapter 6 of the text, the Tarucanamuttic Carukkam, vv. 103–35.
Until recent times, Ravana’s mother was herself worshipped at the hot springs which bear her name several
kilometres from Koneswaram; for a nineteenth-century account of the practice, see J.E. Tennent, Ceylon:
An Account of the Island, Vol. 2 (New Delhi: Asian Educational Services, [1859] 2011), pp. 496–7.
740 J. W. HENRY

Figure 1. Ravana and his yā l (lute) at Swami Rock, Koneswaram Temple, Trincomalee, eastern
Sri Lanka. Source: photograph by author, May 2014.

The Ramayana figures foundationally in Sri Lankan Tamil historical writing

as well. The Vaiya Padal, a sixteenth-century chronicle of the kingdom of Jaffna,
as well as the eighteenth-century Yalppana Vaipava Malai, begin their narration
of the island’s history with Rama giving the kingship of Lanka to Vibhishana, who
‘continued to reign up to and during the early part of the present yuga’. The resident
raksasas departed the island upon Vibhishana’s death ‘from fear of foreign
 SOUTH ASIA: JOURNAL OF SOUTH ASIAN STUDIES 741

subjugation’.43 The eighteenth-century Maddakkalappu Purva Carittiram, a Tamil his-

tory of Batticaloa, similarly traces Lankan monarchy from Ravana’s reign to the arrival
of Prince Vijaya, saying that Rama remained to rule Lanka instead of returning to
Ayodhya after the battle.44 South Indian tala-puranams clearly represent a substantial
source of influence on the popularity of motifs related to the Ramayana in Lankan
Hindu temple histories. The temple literature of Citamparam (in Tamil Nadu) in par-
ticular seems to have influenced the Puranas of Koneswaram. While our knowledge of
the mechanics of textual exchange between the Indian subcontinent and northern Sri
Lanka prior to the late fifteenth century is hazy (as are nearly all details concerning
the kingdom of Jaffna), only a modicum of imagination is required to speculate as to
how they might have taken place. The Yalppana Vaipava Malai even relates an
account of the direct importation of Sanskrit and Tamil literature from Rameswaram
to Jaffna. Cekaraca Cekaran, the scholar brother of Pararaca Cekaran VI (r. c.
1478–1519), is said to have made a book-buying trip to Cetukkarai in order to stock
the library at his Jaffna academy.45

The transmission of the Ramayana

As a number of scholars have noted and sought to account for, historically, Sri Lankan
Buddhist authors did not treat the Ramayana favourably, with Sri Lanka standing out
as unique among the Buddhist countries of southern Asia in lacking its own vernacular
version of the epic.46 Famed fifth-century Sri Lankan commentator Buddhaghosa twice
refers to the ‘Theft of Sita’ (s
ıtā harana) as a ‘pointless story’ (nirattha kathā ).47 This
_
appraisal was carried over into the c. twelfth-century Sinhala Amavatura and the
fourteenth-century Saddharmaratnavaliya, the latter referring to ‘stories such as Rama-
Sita as hindrances to the final realization and attainment of Nirvana’.48 The
Mahavamsa—the island’s famed Pali Buddhist chronicle begun in the fifth or sixth
centuries—draws from the Ramayana to furnish similes and allusions, but denies the

43. C. Brito, The Yalpana-Vaipava-Malai, or, The History of the Kingdom of Jaffna (New Delhi: Asian Educational
Services, [1879] 1999), p. 1; cf. K.C. Nataraca (ed.), Vaiya Patal of Vaiyapuri Aiyar (Colombo: The Colombo Tamil
Sangam, 1980), vv. 8–13. V.D. Hellmann-Rajanayagam gives a comparative study of the two texts in ‘Yalppana
Vaipava Malai, Kailaya Malai und Vaiyap Patal: Kulturelle Wahrnehmungen in der historischen Literatur der
Jaffna-Tamilen’, in Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenl€andischen Gesellschaft, Vol. 164, no. 2 (2014), pp. 469–500;
on this portion of the Vaiya Patal and Yalppana Vaipava Malai, see p. 473.
44. S.E. Kamalanathan and Kamala Kamalanathan (eds), Mattakkalappu Purva Carittiram (Colombo: Kumaran Book
House, 2005), pp. 1–4. This text is also known as the Mattakkalappu Manmiyam.
45. Brito, The Yalpana-Vaipava-Malai, p. 27.
46. See Heinz Bechert, ‘The Beginnings of Buddhist Historiography: Mahavamsa and Political Thinking’, in Bardwell
Smith (ed.), Religion and Legitimation of Power in Sri Lanka (Chambersburg, PA: Anima Books, 1978), pp. 1–12;
Richard Gombrich, ‘The Vessantara Jataka, The Ramayana, and the Dasaratha Jataka’, in Journal of the American
Oriental Society, Vol. 105, no. 3 (1985), pp. 427–37; and Steven Collins, ‘What is Literature in Pali?’, in Sheldon
Pollock (ed.), Literary Cultures in History: Reconstructions from South Asia (Berkeley: University of California Press,
2003), pp. 649–88.
47. Siri Dhammarama Dhammakitti (ed.), The Papanca Sudani, or, The Commentary of the Majjhima Nikaya, Part 1
(Colombo: Royal Asiatic Society, 1917–26), p. 201. Buddhaghosa also counts the Mahabharata (bharata yuddha)
among such ‘pointless tales’.
48. A. Seneviratne, ‘Rama and Ravana: History, Legend and Belief in Sri Lanka’, in Ancient Ceylon: Journal of the
Archaeological Society of Ceylon, Vol. 5 (1984), p. 229. The Saddharmaratnavaliya takes this statement from
Buddhaghosa directly. Gurulugomi’s Amavatura declares ‘books such as the Ramayana and Mahabharata’ to be
‘empty of substance’, ‘neither practical nor re-examinable’. See Udaya Meddegama, Amavatura: The Flood of
Nectar (Colombo: Central Cultural Fund, 2006), p. 98.
742 J. W. HENRY

narrative the status of ‘historical fact’ (itihā sa).49 Thirteenth-century Sinhala works
containing information on the history of the island (such as the Pujavaliya, Sinhala
Thupavamsa, and adaptations of other short Pali vamsas) are silent with respect to
the epic.
An apparent change in attitude among Sinhala Buddhist authors began to take
place around the mid fourteenth century, however, when literary and epigraphic
mentions of characters from the Ramayana became frequent, and Ravana’s reign
began to be treated as an actual historic episode. Characters from the epic appeared
for the first time as protective deities at the island’s courts of the southwest.
Vibhishana was first mentioned as one of the four ‘god kings’ (devirajjuruvan) of
the island, alongside Saman (Sumana), Ganesha (Ganapati) and Skanda, in a 1344
inscription at the Lankatilaka Vihara at Gampola.50 Sinhala historical works contain
scattered remarks on Rama and Ravana, authoritatively in the Rajavaliya—a Sinhala
chronicle of the kings of the island up to Rajasimha I (sixteenth century)—which
states that Ravana reigned 1,844 years before the time of the Buddha. The text
locates Ravana’s capital city as having been somewhere between northern Sri Lanka
and the southern tip of India, and explains that a large portion of Sri Lanka was
lost to flooding which occurred at the end of the demon-king’s war with Rama.51
Short topographical compendia common in temple libraries (kadaim pot or
‘boundary books’) begin their history of Sri Lanka with a condensed account of the
Ramayana, and go on to associate various locations in the island’s southwest with
the reigns of Ravana and Vibhishana.52
What is the relationship between the image of Ravana in Tamil northern Sri Lanka
and in the Sinhala literary tradition? Or, what is the probability that Tamil Ramayana
mythology had any significant impact on Sri Lankan Buddhist representations of
Ravana, Rama and Sita? There is, at the most general level, evidence of a
Sinhala–Tamil literary and linguistic interface in the island’s predominantly Buddhist
southwest in the late medieval and early modern periods, catalogued by scholars on a
number of fronts.53 With regard to specific indications of a Sinhala–Tamil literary
interface relating to the subject at hand, it is worth noting that key themes relating to
the topography of the Ramayana as presented in Sri Lankan Tamil literature also
appear in Sinhala prose, poetry and folklore from the fifteenth century onwards. The

49. Wilhelm Geiger, Culavamsa, being the More Recent Part of the Mahavamsa (New Delhi: Asian Educational
Services, [1929] 2003), 64: 42–44. For a list of allusions to the Ramayana in the Mahavamsa/Culavamsa, see C.E.
Godakumbura, ‘Sri Lanka and the Sinhalese Ramayana’, in R.K. Ramakrishnan (ed.), Ravana and Lanka (Delhi:
Global Visioning Publishing House, 2003), pp. 101–2.
50. See Sree Padma in this issue’s special section: ‘Borders Crossed: Vibhishana in the Ramayana and Beyond’, in
South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, Vol. 42, no. 4 (2019), doi:10.1080/00856401.2019.1631738. See also
M.B. Gunasekara, ‘Three Sinhalese Inscriptions: Text, Transliteration, Translation, and Notes’, in Journal of the
Ceylon Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, Vol. 10, no. 34 (1887), p. 83.
51. A.V. Suraweera, Rajavaliya: A Comprehensive Account of the Kings of Sri Lanka (Ratmalana: Vishva Lekha
Publications, 2000), pp. 15–6.
52. See Jonathan Young and Philip Friedrich in this issue’s special section: ‘Mapping Lanka’s Moral Boundaries:
Representations of Socio-Political Difference in the Ravana Rajavaliya’, in South Asia: Journal of South Asian
Studies, Vol. 42, no. 4 (2019), doi:10.1080/00856401.2019.1633114.
53. See note 2 of the editors’ introduction to this special section of South Asia: Justin W. Henry and Sree Padma,
‘Lankapura: The Legacy of the Ramayana in Sri Lanka’, in South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, Vol. 42, no.
4 (2019), doi:10.1080/00856401.2019.1626127. For a survey of additional evidence, see Henry, Distant Shores of
Dharma, esp. pp. 29–31, 79–81.
 SOUTH ASIA: JOURNAL OF SOUTH ASIAN STUDIES 743

Kokila Sandesaya, a Sinhala messenger poem composed c. 1450 in the wake of the con-
quest of Jaffna by Prince Sapumal (son of Parakramabahu VI), describes the capital
city as one in which:
Lord Rama, King of the Gods, flourishes. In his body he shines with the color of the ocean
as if it has struck thereon when the great bridge (mahat setuva) was constructed with great
effort to convey the vast armies for battle against the Ten-necked One (Ravana).54
More direct evidence for the impact of Tamil literature on Sinhala forms of imagin-
ing the Ramayana comes by way of a seventeenth- or eighteenth-century poem, the
Ravana Kathava, which seems to have enjoyed a reasonably broad circulation in tem-
ple and personal library collections.55 The poem, consisting of some 120 Sinhala verses,
relates Rama’s refusal of the advances of Ravana’s sister, Surpanakha, whose nose
Rama subsequently cuts off. Ravana abducts Sita in retaliation and keeps her captive
in the central mountains of Sri Lanka. Hanuman flies to Lanka to discover Sita’s where-
abouts, is captured by Ravana, and escapes while setting ablaze much of the island
using his tail as a flambeau. Further destruction is wrought by Rama and his army, at
which point Ravana is slain.56 While the poem represents a uniquely Sri Lankan ren-
dering of the epic, its author credits the inspiration for the poem as deriving from
‘Tamil teachers’ (demala €aduru):
kamala rā vanā yuda teda yugatin
demala €aduru misa no daniti api d€an
_
sinhala _
basin kavi kara pada bandimin
vipula katika b€ari pavasami yantan
Regarding the close of the great era [in which transpired] the war involving
prosperous Ravana—
Since we now know very little of what the Tamil teachers [knew],
Unable to give a full account of the story,
I will narrate an abridged version in Sinhala verse.57
This apologetic caveat follows very closely the language of introductory verses found in
two roughly contemporary Sinhala poems: the Mahapadaranga Jatakaya, a late seven-
teenth-century re-rendering of the Mahabharata in which Yudhisthira’s character
(‘Dharmabuddhi’) is an incarnation of the Bodhisattva, and the Vetalan Katava, known
in Sanskrit as the Vetalapa~ ncavimsatika or The Twenty-Five Stories of the Goblin
(appearing in the Brihatkatha of Kshemendra and the Kathasaritsagara of Somadeva).
Both poems mention their indebtedness to Tamil antecedents, with the Vetalan Katava

54. E.T.W. Sumanasuriya, ‘A Critical Edition of the Kokilasandesaya with an Introduction’, PhD dissertation, University
of London, 1958, v. 258.
55. Citations from this text below derive from the Ravana Katava Kavi (Or. 6611.188) in the Nevill Collection of the
British Library. The Nevill Collection contains one other nearly identical version of the text (Or. 6611.189), as
well as a similar Ravana Hatana (Or. 6611.195). Two versions are held at the Peradeniya University Library, both
with significant deviations from those held in the Nevill Collection: the Ravana Kathava (Kavi) (ms. 278010), and
the Ravana Yudda Kavi (ms. 278529). Manuscripts held in the Colombo Museum Library are listed by W.A. de
Silva in his Catalogue of Palm Leaf Manuscripts in the Colombo Museum, Vol. 1 (Colombo: Ceylon Government
Press, 1938), pp. 301–2, nos. 1964–7.
56. For a summary, see K.D. Somadasa, Catalogue of the Hugh Nevill Collection of Sinhalese Manuscripts in the British
Library, Vol. 5 (London: The British Library, 1993), pp. 196–7.
57. Ravana Katava Kavi, Or. 6611.188, f. 1a, v. 2.
744 J. W. HENRY

referring to the basis of the composition as ‘a story belonging to the Tamil scholars of
long ago’ (poranin dema: l[a] €adurange katā v
e).58
_ permit me to give a detailed exposition here of the Ravana Kathava,
Space does not
though it is interesting to note that much of the perspective of the poem is from
Ravana’s point of view: Ravana’s relationship with his brothers is the subject of consid-
erable dialogue, the conflagration of Lanka is described in extended detail, and the
agony of Ravana upon seeing his kingdom ruined casts the demon-king as an almost
tragic victim. Ravana is described as ‘one possessing great merit’ (maha pin €ati),59 and
in an impassioned plea from his brother Kumbhakarna imploring him not to go to war
with Rama, the virtuous deeds of his life are recounted:
yant _ ̄ rā vana m
€aniyō
_ : a nikm
ı gal rat
e gena enda
mā n_ du _ kiyayi mangi
: d€arilanda _ n_ bas asan rā vana putā diyo
: ̄
san_ du _
: epayi ranrajunhat : a noyan rā vana putā diyo
: ̄
un_ da _
: tunlova kenek hari n€ata kiyayi rā vana m
€aniyō
O Ravana—who on that day brought the stone chariot speedily to your mother!
O Ravana—hear the plea of your dear wife asking you to spare your sons!
O Ravana—do not make war with King Rama!
O Ravana—whose mother said that there is no other amid the three worlds to
replace you!60
Throughout the poem, Ravana’s aerial vehicle is called his gal ratha or ‘stone chariot’
(not his pushpaka vimana as it is often in Sanskrit, nor his dandu-monara or ‘wooden
peacock’, which seems to be a late nineteenth-century Sinhala innovation), making the
reference here to Ravana bringing a ‘stone chariot’ to his mother somewhat confusing.
We get the sense of the author having some knowledge of the famous episode associated
with Koneswaram of Ravana bringing a portion of Mount Kailasa to Kanniya, though
there seems to be a conflation of the extracted portion of the mountain with Ravana’s
routine vehicle. If the Ravana Kathava was, as we assume, written somewhere in
upcountry Sri Lanka during the Kandyan period by a Buddhist with some (though per-
haps not extensive) knowledge of versions of the Ramayana and images of Ravana circu-
lating among his Hindu contemporaries, then it makes sense that we would encounter
inexact reproductions of the impressions of Ravana popular among Sri Lankan Tamils.
Beyond the Sinhala literary tradition, there is also evidence that the Siva temple at
Koneswaram represented a significant religious destination for kings of Kotte in the
island’s majority-Buddhist southwest as well. Prince Sapumal (crowned as
Bhuvanekabahu VI), who ruled Jaffna from 1450 to 1467 as a representative of his
father Parakramabahu VI, and then as king at Kotte until 1478, is identified in
Koneswaram’s seventeenth-century chronicle, the Konecar Kalvettu, as a temple
patron.61 Fern~ao de Queir os, in his retrospective on the Portuguese conquest of Sri

58. Fedrick Coorey (ed.), Vetalan Kathava (Colombo: Lakmini Pahan Yantrasalava, 1872), v. 39. See C.E.
Godakumbura, ‘The Dravidian Element in Sinhalese’, in Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies,
University of London, Vol. 11, no. 4 (1946), pp. 840–1; and C.E. Godakumbura, Sinhalese Literature (Colombo: The
Colombo Apothecaries’ Co., 1955), pp. 178–82.
59. Ravana Katava Kavi, Or. 6611.188, f. 16b, v. 1.
60. Ravana Katava Kavi, Or. 6611.188, f. 13a, v. 1.
61. The Konecar Kalvettu numbers ‘Puvaneka-kayavahu’ among the seven or eight historical patrons of Koneswaram,
designating him ‘a member of our clan’ (enkal kulattu). See P. Vaivel (ed.), Konecar Kalvettu (Colombo:
 SOUTH ASIA: JOURNAL OF SOUTH ASIAN STUDIES 745

Lanka drawn from diaries and records of conquistadors, a few Sinhala texts, and recol-
lections of Sri Lankan expatriates living in Goa during the 1680s, describes the pilgrim-
age of Bhuvanekabahu VII (r. 1521–51) to Siva’s abode at Koneswaram. The king again
withdrew to Koneswaram at the end of his life, ensuring that his ‘mortal remains were
interred in Trincomalee where the sepulchres of ancient kings of the island were’.62
The significance of this temple to the kings of the southwest is again confirmed by
Queir os when he describes the construction of a fort over its premises in 1622–24,
whereby the conquistadors ‘turned [the place] into [a] defense of Christians that which
was previously the abominable abode of his Idols and the honoured sepulchre of the
Kings of Cota (Kotte) and of the others of Ceylon, or the urn of their ashes’.63
Queir os, in his account of the general perceptions during the Portuguese period of Sri
Lanka’s inhabitants regarding the island’s distant past, also suggests Tamil influence with
respect to the historicity of the Ramayana. In his summary of the epic from the point of
view of his informants, Queir os describes Ravana returning to Sri Lanka with Sita in
tow, first retreating ‘to the port of Triquilimal^e (Trincomalee); and inhabiting and culti-
vating the land’, which was given ‘the name “Lancave” which means distant and delight-
ful land’.64 Rama sought out Ravana ‘with a powerful army, and making a bridge for his
passage across the shoals of Chila~ o and the Island of Manā r, had marched as far as
Palach^ena, near the port of Negombo’.65 For this portion of his chronicle, Queir os drew
upon the records of Captain Antonio Monis Baretto, dispatched to Colombo by the
Jesuit Francis Xavier to continue working to convert Bhuvanekabahu VII to
Catholicism.66 Transactions between the kings of Kotte and Koneswaram, along with ele-
ments of a mythic Ramayana topography of northern Sri Lanka shared by Tamil Hindus
and Sinhala Buddhists, are suggestive of a converging history of reception of the geog-
raphy of the Ramayana originating from medieval South India.
My final observation—one that must be regarded as speculative, but, hopefully, at
the same time suggestive of future research—is the convergence between the positive
representations of Ravana in Sri Lankan Tamil literature and roughly contemporary
Sinhala Buddhist works. While Ravana is remembered as having ultimately ruled in an
a-dharmic fashion in the Sinhala Rajavaliya and kadayim books, other late medieval

Department of Hindu Religious and Cultural Affairs, 1993), p. 110. The name ‘Bhuvanekabahu’ appears in
connection with the Nallur Kantacami temple to Murugan at Jaffna in several records, indicating that the shrine
was an object of Sapumal’s patronage. Until the twentieth century, the daily praise verse (kattiyam) recited at
the Nallur Kantacami shrine named ‘Bhuvanekabahu’ as a founder (or re-founder) of the temple. See H.W.
Codrington, ‘The Problem of the Kotagama Inscription’, in Journal of the Ceylon Branch of the Royal Asiatic
Society, Vol. 32 (1932–34), p. 220; and also M.C. Rasanayagam, Ancient Jaffna (New Delhi: Asian Educational
Services, 1984 [1926]), p. 332. The colophon of the Kailaya Malai records that it was Buvaneka Vaku who ‘built
the town of Jaffna and a temple for Skanda at Nallur’. On possible variant manuscript readings of relevant
sections of the Kailaya Malai, see Pathmanathan, Hindu Temples of Sri Lanka, p. 371, n. 31; and for a translation
of the text, Mootootambi Pillai, ‘Kailaya Malai’, in The Ceylon National Review (Colombo: The Ceylon Social
Reform Society, 1906), pp. 280–5.
62. Queiros, The Temporal and Spiritual Conquest of Ceylon, Book 2, pp. 271, 296: ‘From Calane he was taken to
Cota, and thence to Triquillmale, where he had prepared his resting place, all making reverence to him in their
fashion, for they say he died a great pagan’.
63. Queiros, The Temporal and Spiritual Conquest of Ceylon, Book 4, pp. 734–7.
64. Queiros, The Temporal and Spiritual Conquest of Ceylon, Book 1, p. 8.
65. Ibid.
66. On Queiros’ sources for the Temporal and Spiritual Conquest of Ceylon in general, see Tikiri Abeyasinghe, ‘History
as Polemics and Propaganda: An Examination of Fernao de Queiros, “History of Ceylon”’, in Journal of the Royal
Asiatic Society Sri Lanka Branch, new series, Vol. 25 (1980/81), pp. 39–45.
746 J. W. HENRY

Sinhala poems emphasise the fairness of Ravana, presenting Rama as the aggressor in
their conflict. It is explained that Ravana abducted Sita purely in retaliation for
Rama and Lakshmana’s violence against his sister Surpanakha, not out of lust or intem-
perance.67 It may be the case, as John Holt has argued, that the Sri Lankan Buddhist
impulse to elevate Ravana at the expense of Rama was in part to downplay the divinity
of Visnu, as he joined a number of other Hindu gods as a member of the Sinhala deva-
sā sana, important to the protection of the island and the throne, but subordinate in
status to the Buddha.68 Inspiration for the positive valuation of Ravana—and also his
status as a historic king of the island—also lies however in the uniquely Sri Lankan
Tamil Hindu representation of the classic villain of the Ramayana, being, as Valerie
Gillet has characterised Ravana in the context of medieval South India art, ‘between
demon and devotee’.69

Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the American Institute for Lankan Studies, Colombo, for providing the
initial forum in July 2016 to develop this paper in conversation with the other contributors to
this special section of South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies. A generous grant allowing
me to complete my University of Chicago PhD dissertation—one chapter of which served as
the basis for this paper—was provided by the Robert H.N. Ho Family Foundation in conjunc-
tion with the American Council of Learned Societies in 2016–17. Funding for subsequent
research significantly enhancing this article was provided in the spring of 2019 through the
Council of American Overseas Research Centers in conjunction with the National Endowment
for the Humanities. I am indebted to Professors S. Suseendirarajah, E. Annamalai and
Whitney Cox for their assistance in reading portions of the Takshina Kailaca Puranam and
for their comments. The input of two anonymous reviewers for South Asia also greatly helped
in developing my argument.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID
Justin W. Henry http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0624-8563

67. Ravana is presented as Sita’s positive romantic interest in the Kohomba Yakkama, a Sinhala text containing the
narrative of a ceremonial performance dance of the same name. See C.E. Godakumbura, ‘The Ramayana: A
Version of Rama’s Story from Ceylon’, in The Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland, Vol.
1 (1946), pp. 14–22; C.E. Godakumbura, ‘The Cult of Kohomba or the Three Sons of Sita’, in The Journal of the
Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland, Vol. 2 (1946), pp. 185–91; and C.E. Godakumbura, ‘Ramayana in
Sri Lanka and Lanka of the Ramayana’, in K. Krishnamoorthy (ed.), A Critical Inventory of Ramayana Studies in
the World (New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 1993), pp. xcv–cxviii.
68. See John Holt, The Buddhist Visnu: Religious Transformation, Politics, and Culture (New York: Colombia University
Press, 2004), pp. 138–41.
69. Gillet, ‘Entre demon et devot’, pp. 29–45.