Urgent need to go to our roots for a harmonious life

By Suryamithra Vishwa 

Last week we featured some health related indigenous knowledge of our country presented at a symposium by the Royal Asiatic Society of Sri Lanka (RASL) titled Common Heritage and held on 30 November. 

It is pertinent to mention that the Royal Asiatic Society was started in 1845 as an initiative of the British Colonial Government for the purpose of studying the country from an Orientalist lens even as the coloniser oppressed and suppressed the people it had conquered. 

Although Sri Lanka is no longer controlled by Britain or its monarchy, the Name “Royal” assumably still implies British Royalty and what could be beneficial and meaningful to the country and to the RASL would be to shift the interpretation of ‘Royal’ to mean the heritage of Sri Lankan Royalty, to give more in-depth meaning to the current work done through the RASL to reclaim the identity of the nation.

It is a fact that the RASL played a major role in the establishment of the University of Ceylon, the Colombo National Museum, Department of Archaeology, Department of National Archives, Department of Meteorology, Department of Statistics, the Historical Manuscripts Commission and the Sinhalese Dictionary, and what was sorely needed since 1948 was that Sri Lankan policymakers transform the institutions set during British times and by British initiative, to truly represent the knowledge, skills, values and philosophies in all aspects of life that existed prior to Colonial domination where such knowledge was purposefully and very strategically wiped out to serve the profit of invading countries.

Judging by some of its past and recent initiatives it is also clear that the RASL under the Sri Lankan leadership, especially under its current President Ashley De Vos is actively pursuing the task of reclaiming Sri Lanka’s heritage and doing so boldly, if the last RASL symposium is anything to go by. 

How long it will take for the collective subconscious of the nation to rid itself of the colonial hangover that has seeped into our language use, our food, our tourism models, how we consider Western education, technology and medicine superior to our own, and how we look to foreign ‘advice’ from ‘pine tree cultivation’ to ‘sustainability’, one cannot say.

Some feel that waiting for this colonial hangover to vanish from our individual and collective systems may be futile but there are others, having dispensed of rhetoric, who are actively working towards reclaiming what was taken from us. 

Given the dedication shown by the Sri Lankan intellectuals of the RASL to promote what we were, there is much scope for those who are working for the promotion of the true identity of the country so as to serve the wellbeing of the people, to draw on the work being done by RASL and use it for common good. 

For example, one of the key aspects, among others, tackled at the RASL symposium was the concept of health and wellbeing as practiced in pre-colonial times. 

While the panellists delivered presentations that were treasure troves of information into Sri Lanka’s ancient knowledge, with proof that our island was ahead of the so called ‘developed’ world at the time, something that struck this writer, as I am sure it did others attending the event, was that the food we ate at the tea break did not reflect our attempts to capture in practice our heritage.

Food, is a key part of a nation’s heritage. It is linked with the bounty of the soil of the nation and the wellbeing and productivity of sons and daughters of a country. 

If Sri Lanka strived to reclaim actual authenticity, with the assistance of older generations of farmers who still remember a time they were not hostage of the ‘weedicide and pesticide industry and if policy makers worked with those such as Hela Waidawaru (indigenous medical practitioners hailing from an ancestry of physicians who served Lankan kings), to ensure the wellbeing of the masses through mass scale advice on the correct consumption of food (that is actually ‘food’) we would not have the proliferation of sickness that we have today.

We live in a country of utmost fertility and a land rich in biodiversity. Every traditional vegetable and herb doubles up as a medicine. If we truly used this knowledge and incorporated it within our policies and education systems, we would be a truly independent people, living in actuality our heritage. 

We would then be aware that our lost agricultural heritage which linked us closely with the soil and ecosystem (and not the pesticide industry or the hybrid seed industry) and we would have been proud torch bears of our food heritage and nation of people, healthy in mind and body. We would have then dispelled the imported myth fed to our farmers that local varieties of vegetables are not sufficient for mass scale consumption and that weedicide, pesticide and synthetic fertiliser is imperative for large scale cultivation.

If we had been truly independent, we would have then passed the ancestral agrarian and medicinal knowledge onto our younger generation through a school curricula focused on the wellbeing of the nation. If so we would not have sacrificed thousands of people to cancer, diabetes, obesity and made them pawns in the hands of an uncaring medical and purported “food” industry.

Conversations with few who study in-depth the ancient food and lifestyle patterns of Lanka show that rice-balls using the Kaluheeneti rice variety, known to provide vigour and boost immunity were consumed in ancient Lanka, especially by the fighting forces of the kings, 

Prior to tea being introduced to our country at the cost of our biodiversity, there existed the habit of drinking beli mal, ranawara, iramusu and a wide range of other herb based drinks that has great potential of being promoted as indigenous drinks of Sri Lanka both for Sri Lankans and as part of heritage promotion for tourism.

 

(Suryamithra Vishwa is a vegan. For medical and curative purposes she only uses Hela Wedakam and Ayurveda on the extremely rare occasion it is needed. She is a meditator in the Buddhist tradition and a comparative spirituality enthusiast. She is in the process of cultivating pre-colonial indigenous crops in a manner that is freely accessible to rural villages and is working on disseminating knowledge of pre-colonial wellbeing.)