Midweek Review

The Kandy-floss Tea-Dance, or Walk like an Elephant

Published

3 years ago

2023/06/14

Sahan Weerasooriya

Matale Theru festival (file photo)

by Laleen Jayamanne

The Lankan ‘Tea-dance’ is a consciously-willed confection of a so-called ‘folk dance,’ attributed to the Malaiyaha women who work on the tea estates. Therefore, it is a frozen form with no basis in a living culture. Here I take ‘Kandy’ as a synonym for the hill-country, ‘Kande udarata,’ and also to describe the aesthetic quality of the artificial Tea-dance as candy, much like Bombai Motai (pink candy-floss woven of sugar and air).

Dr Sudesh Mantillake, the dance scholar and trained Kandyan dancer himself, has stated (in an original research paper) that the Tea-dance was invented in the 70s as part of a move by the state to invent folk dance traditions for the country, in the post-colonial Sinhala nationalist cultural revival, linked to various patterns and gestures associated with rural work. I am grateful to him for having formulated this field of research from a postcolonial theoretical perspective.

So, for the Sinhala girls, the kalagedi dance’ and the ‘harvesting of paddy dance’ were invented. I have photos of myself and friends doing both in primary school, wearing a cloth and choli jacket with small pots on our head. The Tamil girls in our school did Bharathanatyam, and some, irrespective of ethnicity did Manipuri, Ballet, Kandyan and even Spanish dancing at our school run by Irish Catholic nuns. According to Mantillake, distinguished Sinhala dancers and dance educators such as Pani Bharatha (with a resonant Indian name), Sri Jayana and colleagues invented the folk dances including the Tea-dance. It appears that the Tea-dance was made mostly for foreign consumption, without any engagement with the Malaiyaha communities, to popularise Ceylon Tea and also entertain the Lankan diaspora nostalgically celebrating Lankan festivals and National events. There are such shows in LA, Paris and New Zealand (I learn on YouTube), some done even by little girls of about five or six. The dancers are all girls, while usually there is a young boy as a Kangani with a cane in hand, supervising and flirting with them and creating bits of silly comedy. I discovered that the original Tea-dance was in fact British social dancing done by the colonial folk in Asia to liven up afternoon gatherings for tea-sipping and such. So, the name of the colonial masters’ dance was branded on the Malaiyaha community by the Lankan state, to sell tea.

The Tea-dance consists largely of gestures plucked from the act of breaking tender tea leaves, crudely combined with those copied from Indian films. The baskets, some small plastic ones, were tied to their back to make dancing easy, and the colourful costumes were also confected out of the transnational Bollywood film repertoire and dance moves. None of this of course had even a faint ‘ethnographic authenticity’.

The baskets the Malaiyaha women carried to work were not tied to their back (as the song in Sinhala says), but rather, were held with a long band strung across their heads which carry the weight, compressing the spine, as the neck is constantly bent to find the exact tender tea leaf. A Malaiyaha woman would only get a full days’ union award wage if they filled the large baskets with 16 kilos of tea per day!

Now, it’s this container, carrying the weight of their heavy labour, that is flung around like a light pot high in the air just for fun by the Sinhala girls rounded up to dance and prance around on a stage amidst admiring parents and a few whites. They hitch their skirts and provocatively shake and stick their hips out and carry on like some Bollywood dancers, producing pure kitsch. None of this is edifying in terms of gender stereotypes for these youngsters inculcated into ‘Lankan folk traditions.’

Mantillake cites Tamil names of a variety of folk-dance forms practised by the Malaiyaha folk and makes the point that the Tea-dance does not draw material from any of them. And in Sumathy Sivamohan’s feature film of the Malaiyaha, Ingirunthu (2013), there is a Hindu festival at the local Kovil with an extraordinary range of dancing by the devotees, both children and adults, as part of religious festivity. Some of the dancers show how their own folk-dance forms have evolved among them to include transsexual, transmedia dance gestures seen in many other parts of the world, including Indian films. I also noticed one transsexual dancer dressed as such figures did when they popped up from time to time in some early Sinhala films, such Pitisara Kella (Village Lass). Such figures were always found on urban streets, dancing for money, dressed in long twirling skirts. In those days, the name for them was napunsakaya, neither male nor female. This hybrid mixture of moves, gestures and rhythms, internalised and absorbed by the dancers at the festival, was an actual ethnographic event (of the people, by the people and for the people), filmed respectfully by Sivamohan’s camera and clearly of value to the Malaiyaha community gathered at the festival ritual to celebrate their gods.

So, the dancing of the folk at these religious festivals is not a mummified museum category among Hindu communities on the tea estates, but is, rather, open to the transnational flow of contemporary media images as well. It’s this living syncretic tradition of collective dance that sustains them spiritually and emotionally and lifts them up from their daily arduous physical drudgery. For the Hindus, dance is an integral part of the metaphysics of their religion because within its cosmology the world comes into being, and is also dissolved, by the Dance of Shiva Nataraja, the king of dance. However, the three great Middle Eastern Religions of The Book, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, focus on The Word, proscribing the primordial body in dance. And sadly, according to the bible story of Genesis, the human body is fallen, sinful, banished from paradise.

When dance is invented according to the imperatives of state patronage, without some integral local connection to the lives of people whose emotional expression it is, the result is a highly artificial dance, a parody and an insult to the folk it supposedly represents. No other South Asian country would stoop so low as to sell their own, say Darjeeling tea for instance, with such a gimmick.

Fabricated dances

These fabricated dances also run the risk of sanitisation of folk traditions of their own. When this ideology determines the school and university curricula one has a perfect recipe for recreating mediocrity, through inbreeding. Mantillake, as an educator himself, is especially critical of the deleterious effects of such a dance curriculum on schoolchildren, in promulgating ethnic stereotypes of minorities. Lankans could have studied how India revived and nurtured their vast repertoire of traditions during decolonisation under Nehru’s modern cultural policies, from song to dance, from weaving to painting and sculpture. They had lost some of their dance forms but they had the theoretical texts (shasthriya) and the temple sculpture from which scholar-dancers were able to derive the mudras and poses, create anew the Indian traditions and train the young.

This was possible also because Indian classical forms reach towards the principle of the pose of dynamic equilibrium. Just imagine Siva Nataraja poised on one leg, balancing on a tortoise while dancing with his many arms, beating the hour-glass drum. It’s a life-size bronze icon of Shiva Nataraja that the Government of India gifted to CERN, the centre for the study of quantum phenomena such as the Higgs Boson, in Switzerland. Shiva Nataraja now dances there communing with the quantum energy of the universe.

We can move from the classical to the simplest of Indian folk instruments, the bata-nalava, the bamboo flute of both Krishna and the cow-herd, to understand the richness of Indian performance modes. There is an annual folk festival of flutes of a hundred and one varieties, and folk-group dances of both men and women, who dance for days, with startling Dionysian intensity and joy. Kumar Shahani’s film of this festival is on YouTube, called The Bamboo Flute (2000). In the same film he also has Pandith Hariprasad Chaurasia play his classical flute seated on the floor of his middle-class flat in Mumbai. Perhaps, the British didn’t reach the village folk playing the flute and therefore the unbroken evolution of the form, from the folk (Deshiya), to the most sophisticated of classical forms (Margiya), was possible and is perceptible and audible to this day. This was one of Ananda Coomaraswamy’s key ideas based on his meticulous research.

Perhaps, in the first instance, the dance forms of the folk were very few in Sinhala Buddhist villages (except in rituals of exorcism), regulated by the ethos of the Temple based on the precepts of Theravadha Buddhism, with its emphasis on calming the body and mind in meditation and chanting. Is this why many Buddhists are drawn to Katharagama (a Hindu shrine devoted to the brother of Ganesh, Skanda), and the trance dancing there?). Is this also why Asoka Handagama had an extended sequence of older Dalith men and women dancing together seriously, self-forgetfully, in a secular open air space, after work, on their pay-day, in his film Alborada (2021)? I hesitate though to call it an orientalising moment in the Sinhala cinema because the dancing was given a certain respectful attention. The director’s and Neruda’s fascination with the dancing is quite mutual and rather appealing.

Whatever the case, what appears to happen in the ‘nationalised folk-dance forms’ is that girls especially have become, in my opinion, more and more narcissistic as performers, incited to be ‘sexy’, elaborating a very limited set of gestures and movements, some of which are directly inflected by provocative Indian film dance moves, pure fluff. The Popular Indian film music and dance were originally derived from the four or five classical forms, according to Paul Willemen, who co-wrote the 2-volume Encyclopaedia of Indian Cinema. His argument was that the film music and songs created a new 5th form initially, a hybrid, very outward looking one, aware also of Hollywood musicals from the 1940s. They were performed by highly trained professionals. Now, after globalisation and the internet and social media, the speedy hybridisation cannot any longer be quantified, and doesn’t even need to be for purposes of legitimisation of that once critically maligned popular cinema, because of its transnational reach, domestic social and political power.

Dance Therapy

A Kuchupudi dance teacher in Sydney decided to go back to Kerala, where she was from, and opened a dance studio which I visited once. She was about to start a workshop for a small group of young girls and told me that she was doing dance movements based on different kinds of walking rhythms. She told me to sit and observe but that I could also join in if I felt like it. My friend’s formal training was in Odissi, a classical form but she was dissatisfied with formal rigour and wanted to work as a dance therapist in a looser way, exploring movements, and had thought the many forms of walking in Indian dance would be good to start with.

Some of these are: walking like an elephant, walking like a deer, walking like a floating swan, walking on lotus flowers etc. I had previously seen these in Kumar Shahani’s films on dance, The Bamboo Flute (2000), and Bhavantaran (Immanence, 1991), a tribute to Guru Kelucharan Mahapathra, exponent of Odissi. At the opening of The Bamboo Flute, Alarmel Valli danced a magnificent invocation to Ganapathi (Ganesh), in the open air, near a temple beside a lake. There, this slim dancer also walked, swaying majestically like an elephant, with flute music in the air.

My friend’s workshop on walking was for young girls who were feeling low, withdrawn and depressed. She was interested in rhythmic walking to the beat of drums as a way of activating their feel for walking as such and generate a little energy in their body. She told me that many middle-class Indian mothers now instructed their daughters not to walk with swinging arms, but to keep them still, held beside the body as they walked. That was a code, she said, for restraining the female body of the young girls from using their pelvis in walking, the ‘pelvic walk’ being one associated with sex workers on the streets.

Triviality of Tea dance

When thinking of the triviality of the Tea-dance, these thoughts about dance therapy kept coming to me and I remembered that I found myself joining the girls, walking to the rhythms of the drums and then I found myself crying uncontrollably while still walking to the irresistible drum beats. I remembered that I was neither depressed nor unhappy then and discussed what happened to me with my friend after the class, over a cup of tea. She said that certain drum beats play directly on the nervous system and can touch one deeply, that they are primal vibrations. In Hindu metaphysics, in the beginning was sound. Whereas, according to the Bible, in the beginning was the word.

Trained Indian dancers and ordinary folk across the ages, in villages, towns and cities, have developed dance forms and rhythms, for many occasions and innumerable festivals, with immense intuition and craft skill, which connect deeply with other life worlds. All human communities are known to have danced from the beginning of time. According to anthropologists, two of the most ancient forms of dance are of people moving rhythmically in unison in undulating serpentine lines which become circular. Instead of training young girls to seduce an audience from the early age of six and boys to control them with a stick, even in jest, as in the mindless Sinhala Tea-dance, the Lankan Sinhala Buddhist cultural elite could be a little more mindful in trying to sell Ceylon tea. However, there is now a polished-up version of the Tea-dance (on YouTube, without the kangani), advertised as entertainment for local corporate events, by “Students of State Cultural Centers, Presented by the Ministry of Buddhasasana, Religious and Cultural Affairs.” (To be continued)

Michelle Jayasinghe in her book A Study of the Evolution of Lord Ganesh in Sri Lankan Culture, says that the Hindu Theru Festival was practiced all over Lanka but that the one in Matale at the Arulmigu Shri Muttumariyamman Kovil was special, in that Buddhists also actively participated in it with the Hindu devotees. She adds that it is commonly known that Muslims and Christians also contribute to and participate in it. She also indicates that this festival is of vital importance to the Malaiyaha people of the tea estates, especially given that they have lived and worked in the hill country for nearly two centuries.

“The land was originally part of a paddy field and was gifted by the owner in 1852. The current temple was built in 1874 funded by many devotees. The temple was originally a small statue under a tree prayed by the Hindu people and has been developed by the people in Matale” (The Sunday Observer, 25 February, 2018).

The thought I get from having read Jayasinghe’s cultural study is that there is a rather urgent need to undertake anthropologically based ethnographic field-research, so as to understand how folk from different ethno-religious groups have come together to celebrate five Hindu gods (Shiva, Mahadevi, Ganesh, Skanda, Chandeshvara), by building elaborately decorated chariots for each of them to be paraded through the city, as the major highlight of this festival. Here, the future researchers could also focus on whether the Malaiyaha folk have a unique relationship to this festival, as suggested by Jayasinghe, and if and how the different genders respond to it in their active participation in therapeutic dancing as well.

There is a YouTube film of the Theru festival in Matale where a young woman moves and shakes vigorously in a trance state, while an older man and a woman attend to her with care. This is clearly a therapeutic folk practice (dance) focusing on one single individual, which can’t be commodified. The Kovil itself was also ‘severely damaged’ in the 83 anti-Tamil pogrom. With such a complex history (where ethnicity, politics and religion are enmeshed in desire), the collective festive acts of healing perceptible in the Theru festival in Matale, makes it an iconic multi-ethnic event.

The unusual coexistence of feelings, sensations and emotions, of relaxation and extreme intensity (hanging on hooks, firewalking, trance states), and a continuum of moods between them helps one to observe (on YouTube again) how cultural syncretism comes into life when people mingle in an open way in a fully embodied, mindful, intimate and respectful manner, as in the Matale Theru festive milieu and atmosphere charged with incense, and song.

As Pandith Amaradeva once said, Lanka didn’t have melodic instruments to produce songs (melodies) until they were imported from India. Similarly, in the case of dance, we didn’t have a courtly or a temple tradition to generate classical dance idioms as in the case of Hindu Devadasi and the Persianised Islamic traditions of Moghul India. What we did have were the powerful therapeutic modes, the Kohomba Kankariya ritual, the 18 Sanniyas and daemon masks and the chanting, kavi and drumming. We also didn’t have a martial arts tradition as in Kerala, which contemporary Indian female choreographers have been drawing from in creating modern dance moves, empowering girls and women in India to learn to walk proudly, and defend themselves and enjoy it all as elephants do.

As I was concluding this I saw (on my friend Priyantha Fonseka’s Facebook) some of his clips of the recent Mihindu parade in Kandy celebrating the arrival of Buddhism in Lanka. He also wrote an entry describing the difference between the one he just saw with his children (going past his house) and the ones he remembered from his own childhood. He said, in the past the small perahara started from the temple school where children did kalagedi and lee-keli dances to the sound of drums. The centre piece was a float with statues of Mihindu Thero (son of Asoka), and Thisse as a boy poised to shoot a deer. Such is the parabolic scene of the introduction of avihimsa (non-violence) at the heart of the enlightening religion of Buddhism, to Lanka.

While this same float was there in the contemporary parade, Tisse was played by a real child. But marking a radical change, now there were transvestite and perhaps also transexual drummers and men in sarong and bandanas, drumming bright yellow metallic drums, setting the pace for an irresistible rhythmic walk. The last group were Kavadi dancers, both men and women, clad in red accompanied by a small orchestra of instruments including drums, cymbals, a small horn and even a saxophone (once an instrument prohibited on Radio Ceylon!). The women in bright red saris were balancing very high floral head dresses with ease as they danced. Priyantha concluded with a delightful anecdote. He said that two female spectators nearby began to move restlessly, one seated on her chair having let down her hair and other (having being invited), shooting right into the parade itself, dancing.

As a scholar of theatre, at Peradeniya University, interested in ‘audience participation,’ Priyantha observed that these two women were in their own way undoing the various defence mechanisms and taboos they (the Sinhala folk with their exclusivist ethno-religious identity) had created for themselves, to exclude ‘ethnic others’. It appears then that some of the finest manifestations, actions, of the Aragalaya have sent fresh shoots through the Lankan body politic as a cosmos-polis. Also, perhaps, the folk in Kandy, no doubt long familiar with the Matale Theru festival ethos, were well rehearsed emotionally to make such moves.

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Midweek Review

Gotabaya’s escape from Aragalaya mob in RTI spotlight

Published

4 days ago

2026/03/25

Sahan Weerasooriya

Crowds throng Janandhipathi Mandiraya after President Gotabaya Rajapaksa vacated the building on 9 July , 2022.

The Court of Appeal declared on 09 March, 2026: “On the facts currently before us, the application of the exemption contained in Section 5 (1) (b) (i) of the Act is unsustainable. There is a little logical connection between the requested statistics in this information request (that do not pertain to the personal details of individuals) and national security. We see that asserting that national security is at peril, is not a “blanket or unreviewable justification” for withholding information. It should be noted that any restriction must be strictly necessary, proportionate, and supported by a “demonstrable risk of serious harm to the State.” In the case in hand, the Petitioner failed to establish a clear nexus between the disclosure of naval voyage expenditures and any genuine prejudice to national security under Section 5(1)(a) of the Right to Information Act. In the absence of specific evidence, the reliance on security is characterised as a “generalised assertion or mere assertion” cannot be a panacea, we hold it is insufficient to meet the statutory threshold.”

By Shamindra Ferdinando

The deployment of SLNS Gajabahu (P 626), an Advanced Offshore Patrol Vessel (AOPV), on the afternoon of 09 July, 2022, to move the then President Gotabaya Rajapaksa, being pursued by a violent aragalaya mob, to safety, from Colombo to Trincomalee, is in the news again.

The issue at hand is how much the deployment of the vessel cost the taxpayer. In response to the Right to Information (RTI) query, the Navy has declined to reveal the cost of the AOPV deployment, or those who were given safe passage to Trincomalee, on the basis of national security.

SLNS Gajabahu, formerly USCGC Sherman (WHEC-720), a United States Coast Guard Hamilton-class high endurance cutter, was transferred to the Sri Lanka Navy on 27 August, 2018, at Honolulu. The vessel was recommissioned 06 June, 2019, as SLNS Gajabahu (P626) during Maithripala Sirisena’s tenure as the President. (Last week, US Special Envoy for South and Central Asia, Sergio Gor, who was here to deliver a message to President Anura Kumara Dissanayake, in the company of Navy Chief of Staff Rear Admiral Damian Fernando, visited SLNS Gajabahu, at the Colombo port.)

What would have happened if the then Navy Chief, Vice Admiral Nishantha Ulugetenne (15 July, 2020, to 18 December, 2022) failed to swiftly respond to the threat on the President? Those who spearheaded the violent campaign may not have expected the President to flee Janadhipathi Mandiraya, as protestors breached its main gates, or believed the Navy would intervene amidst total collapse of the ‘ground defences.’ Ulugetenne accompanied the President to Trincomalee. Among the group were the then Brigadiers Mahinda Ranasinghe and Madura Wickramaratne (incumbent Commanding Officer of the Commando Regiment) as well as the President’s doctor.

The circumstances leading to the President and First Lady Ayoma Rajapaksa boarding SLNS Gajabahu should be examined taking into consideration (1) the killing of SLPP lawmaker Amarakeerthi Atukorale and his police bodyguard Jayantha Gunawardena by an Aragalaya mob, at Nittambuwa, on the afternoon of 09 May, 2022 (2) the Army, deployed to protect Janadhipathi Mandiraya, quite rightly refrained from firing at the violent mob (3) efforts made by the top Aragalaya leadership to compel the then Premier Ranil Wickremesinghe to quit. Subsequently, it emerged that pressure was brought on the President to remove Wickremesinghe to pave the way for Speaker Mahinda Yapa Abeywardena to become the President and lastly (4) arrest of Kegalle SSP K.B. Keerthirathna and three police constables over the killing of a protester at Rambukkana on 19 April, 2022. The police alleged that they opened fire to prevent a violent mob from setting a petrol bowser, barricaded across the railway line there, ablaze.

Now, swift action taken by the Navy, under extraordinary circumstances to prevent possible threat on the lives of the President and the First Lady, had been challenged. The writer felt the need to examine the evacuation of the President against the backdrop of an attempt to compare it with President Wickremesinghe’s visit to the University of Wolverhampton in September, 2023, to attend the awarding of an honorary professorship to his wife Prof. Maithri Wickremesinghe.

The 09 July intervention made by the Navy cannot be, in any way, compared with the public funds spent on any other President. It would be pertinent to mention that the President, fleeing Janadhipathi Mandiraya, and the withdrawal of the armed forces deployed there, happened almost simultaneously. Once a collective decision was made to vacate Janadhipathi Mandiraya, they didn’t have any other option than rushing to the Colombo harbor where SLNS Gajabahu was anchored.

Overall defences in and around Janadhipathi Mandiraya crumbled as crowds surged in the absence of an effective strategy to thwart them. As we recall the law enforcers (both military and police) simply did nothing to halt the advance of the mob right into Janadhipathi Mandiraya, as people, like the then US Ambassador Julie Chung, openly prevailed on the hapless administration not to act against, what she repeatedly termed, ‘peaceful protesters’, even after they, in a pre-planned operation, meticulously burnt down more than hundred properties of government politicos and loyalists, across the country, on 9/10 May, 2022. So they were, on the whole, the proverbial wolves in sheep’s clothing working with the Western regime change project here as was previously done in places like Libya and Iraq and more recently in neighbouring countries like Pakistan, Bangladesh and Nepal to install pliant governments.

After the 9/10 incidents, President Rajapaksa replaced the Commander of the Army, General Shavendra Silva, with Lt. Gen. Vikum Liyanage.

RTI query

M. R. Ali of Kalmuinai, in terms of Section 34 of the Right to Information Act No. 12 of 2016 (read with Article 138), has sought information, in September 2022, regarding the deployment of SLNS Gajabahu. The Navy rejected the request in November 2022, citing Section 5(1)(b)(i) of the RTI Act, which relates to information that could harm national security or defence. Obviously, the release of information, sought by that particular RTI, couldn’t undermine national security. No one can find fault with Ali’s decision to appeal to the RTI Commission against the position taken up by the Navy.

Following hearings in 2023, the Commission issued a split decision on 29 August, 2023. The RTI Commission upheld the Navy’s refusal to disclose items 1 through 5 and item 8, but directed the Navy to release the information for items 6 and 7, specifically, the cost of the travel and who paid for it.

However, the Navy has moved the Court of Appeal against the RTI directive to release the cost of the travel and who paid for it. Having examined the case in its entirety, the Court of Appeal held that the Navy, being the Public Authority responsible for the deployment of the vessel, had failed to prove how they could receive protection under 5(1)(b)(i) of the Right to Information Act. The Court of Appeal affirmed the order dated 29/08/2023 of the Right to Information Commission. The Court dismissed the appeal without costs. The bench consisted of R. Gurusinghe J and Dr. Sumudu Premachandra J.

There hadn’t been a similar case previously. The Navy, for some strange reason, failed to highlight that the failure on their part to act swiftly and decisively during the 09 July, 2022, violence that directly threatened the lives of the President and the First Lady, thwarted a possible catastrophic situation.

The action taken by the Navy should be discussed, taking into consideration the failure on the part of the Army and Police to save the lives of MP Atukorale and his police bodyguard. No less a person than retired Rear Admiral and former Public Security Minister Sarath Weerasekera alleged, both in and outside Parliament, that the Army failed to respond, though troops were present in Nittambuwa at the time of the incident. Had the Navy hesitated to evacuate the President and the First Lady the country may have ended up with another case similar to that of lawmaker Atukorale’s killing.

The Gampaha High Court, on 11 February, 2026, sentenced 12 persons to death for the killing of Atukorale and his security officer Gunawardena.

Let me stress that the costs of presidential travel have been released in terms of the RTI Act. The deployment of SLNS Gajabahu, at that time, has to be examined, taking into account the eruption of Aragalaya outside President Rajapaksa’s private residence at Pangiriwatte, Mirihana, on the night of 31 March, 2022, evacuation of the resigned Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapaksa from Temple Trees, after protesters breached the main gate on 10 May, 2010, and the JVP/JBB-led attempt to storm Parliament on 13 July, 2022. Mahinda Rajapaksa and wife Shiranthi took refuge at the Trincomalee Navy base, chosen by Gotabaya Rajapaksa as sanctuary a few months later.

US Ambassador Julie Chung tweeted that Washington condemned “the violence against peaceful protestors” and called on the Sri Lankan “government to conduct a full investigation, including the arrest and prosecution of anyone who incited violence.”

The US fully backed the violent protest campaign while the direct involvement of India in the regime change project later transpired. As far as the writer is aware, this particular request is the only RTI query pertaining to Aragalaya. Evacuation of Mahinda Rajapaksa took place in the wake of a foolish decision taken at Temple Trees to unleash violence on Galle Face protesters, who were also besieging Temple Trees.

Defence Secretary retired General Kamal Gunaratne told a hastily arranged media conference that the former Prime Minister was at the Naval Dockyard in Trincomalee. The media quoted him as having said: “He will be there for a few more days. We will provide him with whatever security he needs and for as long as he wants.” Mahinda Rajapaksa remained in Trincomalee for over a week before attending Parliament.

Navy’s dilemma

Gotabaya

At the time information was sought under the RTI Act, Ulugetenne served as the Commander of the Navy. Vice Admiral Priyantha Perera succeeded Ulugetenne on 18 December, 2022. Following VA Perera’s retirement on 31 December, 2024, President Anura Kumara Dissanayake brought in the incumbent Kanchana Banagoda, as the 26th Commander of the Navy.

On the basis of the RTI query that dealt with the deployment of SLNS Gajabahu to evacuate President Gotabaya Rajapaksa and First Lady Ayoma, one can seek information regarding the expenditure incurred by Air Force in flying Mahinda Rajapaksa and his wife from Colombo to Trincomalee and back, as well, as Gotabaya Rajapaksa, his wife and two bodyguards leaving the country on Air Force AN 32 on 13 July, 2022. On the following day, they flew to Singapore on a Saudi flight.

Ali, in his representations, stressed that his objective hadn’t been to determine the legality of the Navy’s actions but to exercise his right as a citizen and taxpayer to oversee public spending. He questioned the failure on the part of the Navy to explain as to how revelation of specific information would “directly and reasonably” harm national security. In spite of the RTI Commission directive, the Navy refrained from answering two specific questions as mentioned by justice Dr. Sumudu Premachandra. Question number (6) How much money did the Sri Lanka Navy spent for the travel of former President Gotabhaya Rajapaksha in this ship? And (Question 7) Who paid this money? When did they pay?

Both the RTI Commission and Court of Appeal quite rightly rejected the Navy’s position that the revelation of cost of the deployment of vessels poses a significant threat to national security. That claim was based on the assertion that such financial data could allow third parties to calculate sensitive operational details, such as a ship’s speed, fuel consumption, and operational range. The Navy claimed that the disclosure of sensitive information could reveal supply dependencies, logistics constraints, and fueling locations, making the vessels vulnerable to sabotage or economic warfare.

The Navy sought protection of RTI Act’s section 5(1)(b)(i). Following is the relevant section: “(b) disclosure of such information– (i) would undermine the defence of the State or its territorial integrity or national security;”

The Navy appears to be in a bind over the RTI move for obvious reasons. With the ultimate beneficiary of Aragalaya at the helm, the Navy would find it extremely difficult to explain the circumstances SLNS Gajabahu was deployed against the backdrop of direct threat on the lives of the then incumbent President and the First Lady. The truth is desperate action taken by the Navy saved the life of the President and his wife. That is the undeniable truth. But, the current political environment may not be conducive to say so. What a pathetic situation in which the powers that be lacked the courage to lucidly explain a particular situation. As stressed in the Supreme Court judgment of November 2023, the Rajapaksa brothers – including two ex-Presidents – were guilty of triggering the country’s worst financial crisis by mishandling the economy.

In a majority verdict on petitions filed by academics and civil rights activists, a five-judge bench ruled that the respondents, who all later resigned or were sacked, had violated public trust. The regime change project took advantage of the attack ordered by Temple Trees on 09 May, 2009, on Galle Face protesters, to unleash pre-planned violence on ruling party politicians and loyalists.

If not for the courageous decision taken by Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe, in spite of his private residence, at Kollupitiya, being set ablaze by protesters on the night of 09 July, 2022, to order the military to thwart the JVP/JJB march on Parliament, two days later, and evict protesters from Galle Face soon after Parliament elected him the President on 20 July, 2022, saved the country from anarchy. Although Wickremesinghe, without restraints, encouraged Aragalaya, he quickly became the bulwark against the anti-State project that threatened to overwhelm the political party system.

Obviously, during Wickremesinghe’s tenure as the President, the SLPP, that accommodated the UNP leader as the Head of State, appeared to have turned a blind eye to the RTI query. Had the SLPP done so, it could have captured public attention, thereby making an attempt to influence all involved. In fact, the case never received media attention until journalist and Attorney-at-Law Nayana Tharanga Gamage, in his regular online programme, dealt with the issues at hand.

Before leaving Janadhipathi Mandiraya, the President has warned the military top brass, and the IGP, to prevent the destruction of the historic building. However, no sooner, the President left, the military top brass vacated the building leaving protesters an easy opportunity to take control. They held Janadhipathi Mandiraya until Gotabaya Rajapaksa resigned on 14 July 2022 to pave the way for Ranil Wickremesinghe to become the President.

It would be pertinent to mention that President Gotabaya Rajapaksa only moved into the Presidential Palace (Janadhipathi Mandiraya) after massive protest outside his Pangiriwatte private residence on 31 March, 2022, underscored his vulnerability for an attack.

Midweek Review

Village tank cascades, great river quartet and Cyclone Ditwah

Published

4 days ago

2026/03/25

Sahan Weerasooriya

This past November and December Ditwah showed us how dark, eerie and haunting catastrophes cyclones can be. Past generations have suffered as shown in 1911, the Canberra Times reporting the great flood of Ceylon on December 30 of that year. It killed 200 people and left over 300,000 homeless. Half century later, on December 25, 1957, a nameless cyclone brought severe rain to the North Central Province (NCP), and the Nachchaduwa reservoir breached, unloading its full power of volume into Malwatu Oya, a mid-level river flowing through the city of Anuradhapura, nearly washing away its colonial-era bridge near the Lion Tower. A cyclone paid a visit to the Eastern Coast of Sri Lanka on November 17-23, 1978.

Half a century later, Ditwah came with swagger.

Quartet of Rivers

Cyclone Ditwah unleashed disaster and tragedy, terrorising every breath of hundreds of thousands of people. These cyclones come spaced by a generation or two. How the Great River Quartet of Mahaweli, Kelani, Kalu, and Walawe, and their attendant mid-level streams, behaved before Ditwah masks the reality that they are not the loving and smiling beauties poets claim them to be. During the Ditwah visit, our river Quartet showed its true colours in plain sight when wave after wave of chocolate rage pushed uprooted forests creasing islands of floating debris and crashed onto bridges, shattering their potency into pieces. These rivers are nothing more than a bunch of evil reincarnations cloaked in ruinous intentions.

The River Quartet and its mates woke up to the first thunder of Ditwah. They carried away villages, people, property, herds of cattle, and wild elephants to the depths of the Indian Ocean. While we continue to dig out the dead buried in muddy mountainsides, dislodged from their moorings during this flood of biblical proportions, how our rivers, streams, and, particularly, the village tanks handled the pressure on their own will be the core of many future discussions.

The destruction and tragedy caused by this water hurt all of us in many ways. But we all wish they were only a fleeting dream. Sadly, though, the real-life sight of the pulverised railway bridge at Peradeniya is not a dream. This section of the rail line was stripped of its modesty and laid bare. It hung in the air, literally, like strands of an abandoned spider’s web on a wet Kandyan morning. It was a reminder to us that running water is a masked devil and should not be considered inviting. It can unleash the misery with a chilling ending no one wants to experience in a lifetime.

Tank Cascade Systems (TCS)

Although the Ditwah cyclone covered Sri Lanka from top to bottom with equal fury, the mountainous areas and floodplains of our River Quartet surrendered soon. However, the village tanks in the Dry Zone – Northern, North Central, Northeast, and Eastern provinces – weathered that onslaught, sustaining only manageable damage. They collectively mitigated the damage caused by over 200 mm of rain that fell across the catchment areas they represented. Thus, the tank, the precious possession of the village, deserves to be titled as a real beauty.

Let me introduce the village tanks systems our engineering ancestors built with sophistication and ingenuity, a force like Ditwah hardly made a dent in groups of these tanks called Tank Cascade Systems (TDS). Many of the village tanks in the Dry Zone, covering 60% of Sri Lanka’s land area, stand in groups of TDS, separated as individual bodies of water but sharing water from one or more dedicated ephemeral streams. R.W. Ievers, the Government agent for North Central Province in the 1890s, noted that these tanks were the result of “one thousand years of experiment and experience,” and “ancient tank builders took advantage of the flat and undulating topography of the NCP to make chains of tanks in the valleys.” Colonial Irrigation Engineers of the early 20th century also recognised this uniqueness. Still, they could not connect the dots to provide a comprehensive definition for this major appurtenance of the village.

Although these tanks appear to be segregated ecosystems, a closer look at the peneplain topographic map of Sri Lanka shows that each stream feeding them ultimately flows into a larger reservoir or river, jointly or independently influencing the mechanics of regional water use and debouching patterns. This character is the spirit of the dictum of King Parakramabahu centuries earlier: “let not a single drop of water go to waste into the sea without being used by people.” Villagers knew that each tank in their meso-catchment area was related to other tanks on the stream it was in ensuring maximised use of water.

With their embodied wisdom, our ancestors centuries ago configured the placement of individual tanks that shared water from a catchment area. But not until 1985, following a careful autopsy of the pattern of these small tanks in the Dry Zone, Professor Madduma Bandara noticed a distinctive intrinsic relationship within each group of tanks. He called a group of such tanks a Cascade of Tanks. He wrote, “a (tank) cascade is a connected series of tanks organized within a micro-catchment of the Dry Zone landscape, storing, conveying, and utilising water from an ephemeral rivulet.” In short, it is a “series of tanks located in succession one below the other.” Dr. M.U.A. Tennakoon shared the names of the villagers in Nuwarakalaviya used for this configuration of tanks: Ellangawa. On a map, these tanks appear as hanging on a string. Thus, Ellangawa can be a portmanteau, a blend, of these two words.

There are over 475 such cascading tank groups in the Dry Zone. On average, each cascade typically supports four tanks. One cascade, Toruwewa, near Kekirawa, has 12 tanks. According to Professor Madduma Bandara, a cascade of tanks held about 20-30% of the water falling on its catchment area. As I will show later in this essay, the tank cascades behave like buddies in good times and bad times. By undertaking to build a vascular structure to collect, conserve, and share water with communities along the stream path, our ancestors forewarned of the consequences of failing to undertake such micro-projects where they chose to live. The following are a villager’s thoughts on how to retool this concept to mitigate the potential for damage from excess water flow in a larger river system.

To villagers, their tank is royalty. Its water is their lapis lazuli. Therefore, they often embroidered the title of the village with the suffix wewa (tank) or kulam (tank, in Tamil), indicating the close connection between the two. It is the village’s foremost provider and is interdependent. That is why we have the saying, “the village is the tank, and the tank is the village.”

A study in 1954/55 found that there were 16,000 tanks in Sri Lanka, of which over 12,500 were operational. Out-of-commission tanks were those that fell into disuse after the original settlers abandoned them for a host of reasons, such as a breach in the bund, fear of plague or disease, or superstition. Collectively, they supply water to an area larger than the combined area of the fields served by the major irrigation reservoirs in the country at the time.

In some villages, an additional tank called olagama, with its own acreage of fields, receives water from the same stream or from another feeder stream which joins the principal stream above or below the main tank. In the event the main tank is disabled, often the olagama tank can serve as the alternate water source for their fields.

Cultural and Engineering

A graphical representation of the tank cascade system. Image courtesy of IUCN Sri Lanka.

A tank cascade is also an engineering undertaking. But village tank builders were not engineers with gold-trimmed diplomas. They were ordinary folks, endowed with generations of collective wisdom, including titbits on the physics of water, its speed, and its cruelty. Village pioneers responsible for starting the construction of the tank bund, gam bendeema, placed the first lump of earth after marking off home sites, not immediately below the future bund, but slightly towards one end of it, in the area called gammedda, or the elevated area the bund links to, gamgoda.

Engineering of a tank cascade has a cultural underpinning. It is founded on the feeling of solidarity among the villages along an ephemeral stream. In practice, it was a wholesome area with small communities of kin below each tank sorting out their own affairs without much intervention of the ruling class. For example, during heavy rains, each village in the chain communicated with the villages below the volume in its tank and the projected flow of the stream. When the tank reached its capacity and water began to spill over the spillway, the village below must take measures to protect its tank bund. If it breached, villagers up and down the cascade helped each other repair it.

They were aware that an earthen dam was susceptible to failure, so they used their own town-planning ideas. They avoided building residential zones directly under the stream’s path, generally at the midpoint of the dam. Instead, they built their triumvirate of life – tank, field, and dagoba (stupa) – keeping safety and practicality in mind. Dagoba was always on a higher ground, never supported by beams on a stream bank like what Ditwah revealed recently. We now know what happens to dagobas built on sagging beams by deceptively serenading riverbanks when thunder waters and unworldly debris came down hand in hand.

From top to bottom, the Tank Cascade showed the engineering instinct of the builders and accessory parts that helped its smooth functioning. There was the Olagama and Kulu Wewa associated with a system. Tank builders had an idea of the volume of water a given stream would bring in a year. In conjunction with this, the bunds of the Olagama and Kulu Wewa are built small. In contrast, the bunds of the tanks that formed the lower rung of the cascade are relatively larger. The idea behind this was that, in the event of a breach in an upstream tank, the downstream tanks could withstand an unexpected influx of water.

During the Ditwah’s death dance, the Mahaweli River did not have this luxury as it marched downstream from Kotmale dam. There were not enough dams to tame this river, and its beastly nature was allowed to run wild until it was too late for many.

The embodied imprints of experience inherited from their ancestors’ helped villagers design the tank’s physical attributes. In general, a tank supplied by this stream had a dam of a size proportional to the amount of water it could store for the fields. Later, as the village added families and field acreage increased, villagers raised the bund and the spillway to meet increased storage capacity. This simple practice guarded against eventualities like uncontrollable floods between villages. Excess water was allowed to flow through the sluice gate and the spillway, reducing the pressure on the bund. Had we applied this fundamental practice on a proportional scale to a large stream, i.e., oya or river, it would have lessened the destruction during a major rainstorm, ilk of which Ditwah brought.

With my experience living in a village with its tank, part of a TCS of five tanks, I wish large rivers like the Mahaweli had a few small-scale dams or partial diversions mimicking a rudimentary TCS so that the Railway Bridge at Peradeniya could have avoided the wrath of hell and high-water bringing muck and debris along its 46 km descent from Kotmale, where its lone dam is. I am glad I have company here. Professor Madduma Bandara noted 40 years ago, “much water flows through drainage lines due mainly to the absence of a village tank-type storage system.” Mahaweli turned out to be that drainage line this past November, holding hands, sadly, though, jubilantly, with the designs of Ditwah. Recently, former Head of Geo-Engineering at Peradeniya University, Udeni Bandara Amarasinghe, highlighted the importance of building reservoirs on other rivers to control floods like those we experienced recently.

Check Dams & Macroscopic Control

Within the TCS, the check dams, Kulu Wewa or Kele Wewa – forest tanks above a working tank held back sediments generated by upstream denudation. They controlled the volume and water entering the main tank. Kulu Wewa provided water for wild animals and checked their tendency to raid crops below the main tank. The difference between Kulu Wewa and Olagama was that, because of its topographical location, Kulu Wewa was occasionally used as a source of water for crops when the main tank below it became inoperable due to a breach or was undergoing repairs or used up its water early.

Based on these definitions, each working tank in the TCS also acted like a check dam for the one below it. Furthermore, if a tank in the cascade ran out of water, other tanks in the cascade stepped in. They linked up with the tanks above through temporary canals made by extending an existing minor canal, wella, or the wagala, excess water pan, of an upstream field.

The tank bund tamed and kept in check the three attributes of a stream – water velocity, volume, and its destructive power. By damming the stream, the villagers broke fueling momentum of it. They rerouted it via the spillway at the end of the bund, a form of recycling. Water from some spillways is diverted along a large niyara-like (field ridge) lesser dam, built along the wanatha (flanks) of the field, until it empties into the atrophied stream below the field.

Simultaneously, by controlling the release of water through two sluice gates on the bund, goda and mada horowwa, and directing it to the two flanks of the field, ihala and pahala wanatha, villagers succeeded in tamping down the pressure on the bund. Water from the neutered stream is thus redirected from all three exit points. It must now continue its journey along the wagala, to which field units (liyadi) also empty their excess water. This water is called wel pahu wathura.

After going through this process, the momentum of the ephemeral stream water is passive by the time it reaches the tanks in the lower parts of the cascade, often a kilometer or two downstream. This way, a line of tanks along the stream’s axis now shares the responsibility of holding back its full potential, limiting its ability to cause damage.

Such a break of momentum was lacking in the Four Great River Quartet and their lesser cousins. For the long-term solution to prevent damage from future cousins of Ditwah, we must consider this ingenious water-control method for rivers on a macroscopical scale.

Reservoirs

1957 and 2025 Cyclones Flood Marks written above window and below on the wall of a house by the banks of the Malwatu Oya in Anuradhapura.

As Ditwah-type floods occurred in 1911, 1957, 1978, and 2025, with a bit of luck, we can expect to have a few more decades of recess to work on cascading edifices along rivers, such as dams or diversions, before the next flood comes with roguish intentions. The Accelerated Mahaweli Diversion Program (AMDP), started in 1978, took 30 years to complete and now has over a dozen reservoirs between Kandy and the Dry Zone coastal belt, holding back its might. These reservoirs held their ground while Ditwah rained hell, so consulting the TCS’s ingenuity, though seems antiquated, is a good investment.

As soon as Cyclone Ditwah began to make noise, word spread that releasing water from a few of them on the Mahaweli and Kelani rivers could have made a difference. The problem with the Kelani River basin in Western Province and the Mahaweli basin in Central Province above Kandy is that, despite their combined population being nine times that of the NCP, they only have six reservoirs. On the contrary, the NCP has twice as much in the lower Mahaweli River basin, built under the AMDP. Furthermore, the NCP also has many ancient reservoirs it inherited from our ancestors. A string (cascade) of large reservoirs or minor dams in the hill country could have helped break the river’s energy which it accumulated along the way. G.T. Dharmasena, an irrigation engineer, had already raised the idea of “reorienting the operational approach of major reservoirs operators under extreme events, where flood control becomes a vital function.”

Unique Epitaphs for the Cyclones

The processes discussed above could have prevented the destruction of the railway track at the Peradeniya bridge, the image of which now stands like a pictorial epitaph to the malicious visit of the Ditwah and a reminder to us, “what if…?” or “what next…?”

As mentioned at the beginning of this essay, when the 1957 Cyclone dropped heavy rain on the NCP, a Railway Department employee at Anuradhapura made an exceptional effort to keep the memory of that saga for posterity with an epitaph still visible 70 years later. This person memorialised his near escape from the Malwatu Oya flood. As the river roared past over the railing of the bridge near the Lion Pillar roundabout, this employee, probably trapped in his two-storied house near the roundabout, day-stamped the visit of the flood with a red line on the wall of his house to mark the height it reached to trap him.

Three meters from the ground, right between two archtop windows facing the road to Sri Maha Bodhi, he wrote, “Flood level” in Sinhala, Tamil, and English. Right below it, at the end of the faded line, he added, “1957-12-25.”

As Cyclone Ditwah came along, the current resident of the house was not going to break this seven-decade-old tradition. After the flood receded this time, this duty-bound resident drew a line in blue ink and wrote at its end, ‘2025-11-28’, his contributing epitaph reminding us of infamous day Ditwah showed her might by driving the river off its banks. (See picture)

He added a coda to his epitaph – the numeral “8” in 28 is written in bold!

Lokubanda Tillakaratne is the author of Rata Sabhawa of Nuwarakalaviya: Judicature in a Princely Province – An Ethnographical and Historical Reading (2023).

by LOKUBANDA
TILLAKARATNE