Blog Archives

Travellers and traders: Muslims of Sri Lanka-By Uditha Devapriya Source:Island In 851 AD, an Arab merchant, called Soleyman, wrote an account of his travels to the island of Serendib. Impressionistic but insightful, it records the earliest known engagement of a Muslim with Sri Pada, also known as Samantukuta. Soleyman does not refer to Sri Pada as “aadam malayi”, the name we see in later Muslim reconstructions of the peak. Instead he calls it “Al-Rohoun”, which is what the ninth century Indian poet Rajasekhara used in the Balaramanaya. “Rohoun” was a corruption of Ruhuna, to which the area around the mountain belonged. Literary sources inform us that this was the term used, and preferred, by Arabs and Indians from that time. Around five centuries later, the scholar and traveller Ibn Batuta is reported to have climbed the peak. Patronised by the king of Jaffna, Batuta ascended the summit and came across ...

Random reflections on libraries-By Uditha Devapriya Source:Island There are two senses in which one “becomes” a book collector. The first is that of a hoarder, an undiscriminating bibliomaniac who empties shelf after shelf before the dust begins to settle. He indulges in a very few literary tastes, yet craves for more titles to add to his collection; as his library picks up in weight and the books overflow, he turns his other rooms into libraries. Not for one moment does he consider why he hoards much, while reading little. Perhaps, in some strange way, he gets his cue from Anatole France; when an admirer pored over his collection and asked whether he read all that he owned, the latter replied rather irately, “Not one-tenth of them”, adding, “I don’t suppose you use your Sèvres china every day?” ...

The last frontier: Fernand Braudel’s France-By Uditha Devapriya Source:Island. Fernand Braudel’s “The Identity of France, Volume I: History and Environment”, translated by Siân Reynolds. HarperPerennial, 432 pp., 1993. Since at least Jason and Odysseus, home has rarely been where the heart is. The Greek hero leaves everyone dear to him, in pursuit of a divine calling. In all those myths that immortalise him, his catharsis comes once he realises that home is more than just a geographic space: that it’s part of a cosmos spanning heaven and earth, between which he must serve as messenger and mediator. Contemporary intellectuals are no different: postmodern Odysseuses in their own right, they too traverse multiple worlds and mediate between them. ...