![]() ![]() This shift is explicable insofar as the fourteenth century corresponded to increased South Indian influence in Sri Lanka, in the context of (1) the emerging independent Tamil kingdom of Jaffna (2) a change in composition among the ruling elites of the island’s southwest (with two prominent royal families of this era being of Malayali extraction) and (3) at the level of the overall demographics of the island, with Sri Lanka’s south and southwest absorbing a sizeable influx of immigrants from the southern subcontinent from the fourteenth century onwards. While there appears to have been a tradition of composition of poetry related to the Ramayana in literate circles from quite early on in Sri Lanka (most famously attested in Kumaradasa’s fifth-century Janakiharana), it is not until the fourteenth century that we begin to see a sizeable impression of the Ramayana in Sri Lanka (in Sinhala Buddhist folklore, literature and temple life in particular). 1 Largely overlooked however has been the routine presence of Ramayana characters, imagery and narrative motifs in Sinhala Buddhist poetry and historical works, in the architecture and ritual life of Buddhist viharas (temples), as well as in the myths associated with the founding of some of Sri Lanka’s most significant Hindu temples. To date, scholarship addressing this question has focused on the absence of the Ramayana in Sri Lanka, with a number of contentions having been put forward to account for the exclusion of the epic from the island’s Pali chronicles. It is a subject of some curiosity, then, that Sri Lanka-perhaps the very ‘Lanka’ which figures so centrally in the epic-should not have a version of its own. Valmiki’s) iteration, and often reflecting their own ideals of justice, heroism and religious community. In addition to the many vernacular Hindu iterations of the Ramayana, Jains, Sikhs, Mughals, Thai and Lao Buddhists, and various tribal groups all have their own versions of the story, often with significant deviations from the ‘standard’ (i.e. Famous throughout the region as an epic narrative and encyclopedia of ancient lore, the Ramayana serves as a basic idiom through which South and Southeast Asians understand and express their past. ![]()
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