Insight into indigenous Veddha community of Sri Lanka as peace bearers

This article marks our second feature this year promoting May as a month commemorating peace and trust; where one uniform manner in memorialising 18 May emerges, celebrating national unity, life and the right to mourn battlefield death of all beings

- BY SURYA VISHWA

GUNE Bandila Aththo and his brother Loku Bandila Aththo are members of the Rathugala-based Veddha community. They are in their early sixties but maintain a youthful visage. They can no longer hunt as their ancestors did in the adjoining wilderness and their children have moved away from the simple lifestyle of the forest. Cast into the monetary theatrics of modernity elders of the Veddha clans across the country have one commonality; being forced, coerced, lured or brainwashed into adopting the commercialisation that has ruined lives of city dwellers.

The Rathugala Aadi Vasi elders and youth like many of their brethren in other territories eke out a living being absorbed into the tourism industry. They perform the ancient rituals and dances as required by those that employ them. This provides these indigenous communities a much needed income and also links them to the flickering memory of how these rituals were once a sacred everyday reality. A reality that enabled them to be an authentic integral part of the eco system in its non-adulterated wholeness.

"They say we are not educated. That we are not civilised. Even our children think this. This is what they are taught in school. As for ourselves our school was the forest and this was so for our parents and grandparents. It is because of what we learnt from the forest that we cannot comprehend the need for killing in order to share the mother that is the earth," states the Rathugala Veddha community member Guna Bandila.

Vakarai was once an area in the East that was seriously impacted by the civil war. The Rathugala Veddhas although not very close in proximity to the area nevertheless did have a habit of travelling to the fringes of the forestry in the locale for activities such as extracting bees honey.