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Island Stories: The Sri Lanka Podcast

Island Stories: The Sri Lanka Podcast

By: The Ceylon Press
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 From elephants to sapphires, tea to cricket, Island Stories: The Sri Lanka Podcast explores a remote and secret Eden to discover the stories behind the things that make Sri Lanka, Sri Lankan. 2024 The Ceylon Press Politics & Government Social Sciences Travel Writing & Commentary
Episodes
  • Sigiriya & The Party That Lasted 22 Years

    Sigiriya & The Party That Lasted 22 Years
    Aug 16 2025
    This episode is dedicated to the party that lasted for 22 years. Now regarded as little more than ruins atop a rock that offers a magnificent view, Sigiriya is undoubtedly one of ancient Asia’s Seven Great Wonders; albeit one that wears its wonders with clandestine dignity. Its moment of destruction coincides most neatly with the date most historians give for the ending of the ancient world itself – 500 CE, for just 5 years beforehand that the ancient world itself had come crashing to a bloody end around the base of this 1000-foot mountain in central Sri Lanka in 495 CE. With it ended one of the most notorious parties the world had yet enjoyed, one that, at 22 years, totally out lasted even Cleopatra’s Feast. The party was Gatsbyesque in its exuberant excess. More opulent than the Rothschild’s surrealist ball of 1972; more majestic than the Shah of Iran’s 2,500-year dynastic celebrations the year before, this party, like the ancient world itself, raced to its corporeal end with all the aplomb of the last serving of the last martini on board the Titanic. Of course, 500 CE is little more than a marker, a slender signal, a humble and iconic rounded-up figure that has been invented by historians eager to bring closure to the world of the Romans and Greeks, the Pharaohs, Assyrians, Hittie, Persians, or Han. But the date has stuck. Thereafter follows the medieval age, the early modern age. And the later early modern age; even the later modern age, and our own post-modern age, an age shorn of parties, or glamour, decadent or otherwise. Sri Lanka’s 22-year end-of-history party followed exactly the dates of the reign of one of its most outrageous kings, an equatorial Nero with mesmeric hints, like the best of expensive wines, of other things - Vlad the Impaler; Nebuchadnezzar, Louis XIV. In joy, as Mark Twain observed, is sorrow - and Kashyapa, king, party giver, gourmand, and libertine, knew that his moment of doom was due to come sooner rather than later. Gazing across the plains from his high fortress walls in Sigiriya, he would have been presciently aware that his brother would eventually arrive to stop all the fun. And so he did. Commanding a specially recruited mercenary army from nearby India, Moggallana had come to take back what he considered his by right – the throne. The legitimate son of Dhatusena, one of the country’s greatest kings, as his heir, Moggallana would have looked forward to a reign of plenty after this father had chased the occupying Dravidian Tamils from the kingdom, and rebuilt the country, tank by tank, temple by temple. It was years of milk and honey (or Kittel) he had in mind – not penurious exile. But it was not to be. His half-brother, Kashyapa played family politics with a cardsharp’s skills. He out manoeuvred his brother, and, with the help of the head of army, deposed his father, Dhatusena. Had things ended there we may never have heard of Kashyapa. He would just have been yet another one of the island’s numerous coup d'état kings. But with Oedipean or Macbethian instincts, Kashyapa went further. Much further. He began by entombing his father alive in his palace walls. For so distinguished a king, to be reduced to mere bricks and mortar was a shocking way to end a reign. And, to escape the widespread disapprobation this would have created, Kashyapa abandoned his capital of Anuradhapura in much the same way as Tiberius had abandoned Rome for Capri; and headed for Sigiriya. Its like, anywhere in Aisia, was probably not seen again until the Kangxi Emperor built the Gardens of Perfect Brightness in the Old Summer Palace, outside Peking some twelve hundred years later, in 1707. A capital for just one reign, Sigiriya was a cross between the Tivoli, Akhenaten’s Amarna, and the Brighton Pavilion. It enjoyed every last innovation and refinement available – and there were many. The fortress itself sits atop a massive lump of granite - a hardened, much reduced magma plug – all that is left of an extinct volcano. Lost in forests, inhabited by hermits monks between the third century BCE and the first century CE, it was exposed by colossal landslides and then selected by Kashyapa as the location of a new fortress capital in 477 CE. Much of it is hard to identify today but, in its day, it set new standards for urban planning, the royal bastion surrounded by an elaborately laid out outer city, with a final circle of three types of gardens around it: water, terraced, and boulder gardens - 3 km in length and nearly 1 km in width, flanking its famous rock citadel. Ponds, pavilions, fountains and cut pools made up the water gardens. More naturalistic gardens were created around massive boulders that mimicked an artless park with long winding pathways to saunter down. Brick staircases and limestone steps led up to more formal terraced gardens. Across it all stretch double moats and triple ramparts, defendable gateways, and steps ...
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    30 mins
  • Gods & Ghosts: A Tour of Secret Trincomalee

    Gods & Ghosts: A Tour of Secret Trincomalee
    Aug 16 2025
    Gods, Ghosts & and the faintest haunting of historical whispers of what was and - just about - still is, is the subject of this podcast, which delves beneath Trincomalee on Sri Lanka’s eastern seaboard. Haunted might be too strong a word for Trincomalee – but by any measure the town like the country has more than its fairly allocated measure of ghosts. And plenty of gods as well: all of them centre stage; stage left, stage right. Indeed, rarely, if ever, off stage. Not least Buddhism itself, the foremost and complex creed that is little different now to when it first arrived on the island in 236 BCE. From the ten-headed demon king Ravana of Lanka, to the country’s founding father, a terrorizing prince descended from lions, the island’s very earliest creation myths feature a multitude of alarming divinities. Set beside them, the animist and ancestral sprits of the island’s original inhabitants, the Vedda, feature with almost kindly comfort. Kindness might be said to have been in short supply with much of what followed: the demanding Catholic dogmas of the early Portuguese invaders, the innumerable Hindu gods of the Tamils, the strict protestant god of the Dutch, and his Anglican iteration; the rigorous god of Islam – albeit with a more forgiving spirit among the Malay moors. And all are present in distant Trincomalee. But for a place so abundantly represented on any map, Trincomalee itself remains oddly invisible. It is not what it seems, a small town of passing consequence. Like a true aristocrat, it wears it reputation with uttermost modesty, restrained as crown of sapphires under a hoodie. The great eastern port of the ancient kings, a later key link in the chain of European wars fought from 1652 to the downfall of Napoleon that turned South Asia British, it holds its history with absolute discretion, noticeable only if you look amongst its graves and within some of its almost vanished communities; in the scared walls of temples and buildings linked to the passage of its many gods, its forgotten kings and even great artists – all symbolised by the rare birds that flock to an overlooked lagoons north of the town. Whilst Sri Lankans and tourists alike cluster around the south coast, and a few choice parts of the centre of the island, barely any make it to this part of the east coast. Once part of the Rajarata, the homeland of the first island kings, Trincomalee and the east slowly became ever more isolated as the island’s development surged around the western seaboard, the hill country, and the far south. The modern world pushed it even further to a back seat - thirty years of civil war, a tsunami, and the troubled new decades of the twenty first century, years marked so extravagantly by the fact that it was an island off the town that was selected as one of the only remote safe spots to house a prime minster, toppled by the 2022 Aragalaya that saw so much old government swept aside. Two main roads lead into the town – the A12 from Anuradhapura, and the A6 from Dambulla, both skirting a large wildlife park, whilst a third, the A15 leads towards the coastal villages of the south. None bring with them that dawning sense of bleak certainty that you are approaching an urban centre. There are no outlying suburbs or factory sites to speak of. Optimistic half-built retail outlets, busted petrol stations, billboards proclaiming glittering but affordable developments of villas and family homes: all are missing. A beautiful sparse and dry landscape borders the roads, ceding very occasionally to almost green forests. A most untwenty first century silence grows as you cut through the countryside, arriving, almost without notice at Trincomalee itself. And almost immediately you find yourself driving along an esplanade, the sea on one side and a graveyard of miniature and broken architectural wonders on the other. Within it, most unexpectedly lies a monument connected to the world’s greatest novelist: Jane Austen, for the cemetery contains the grave of her favourite brother, Charles Austen - her “own particular little brother,” and the model for the manly and caring character of William Price in Mansfield Park.Etched indelibly across a wide rectangle of granite read the words “Sacred to the memory of His Excellency C.J. Austen, Esq., Champion of the Most Honourable Military Order of the Bath, Rear Admiral of the Red and Commander-in-Chief of Her Majesty’s Naval Forces on the East India and China Station, Rear Admiral Charles Austen CB. Died off Prome, while in command of the Naval Expedition on the river Irrawaddy against the Burmese Forces, aged 73 years.” Outliving his more famous sister by decades, Charles was an euthanistic reader of novels – especially hers; and it is perhaps no little accident that the brother of so great a writer should lie in gentle comfort here on an island whose contemporary writers have so recently burst like ...
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    31 mins
  • Escape: The Sri Lankan Reading List

    Escape: The Sri Lankan Reading List
    Aug 16 2025
    Books to escape with is the subject of today’s podcast. Stretched between the pleasure gardens of the bishops of London and the $300 million Fulham Football Club, once owned by the disgraced sexual predator Mohamed Al Fayed, Alphabet City is West London’s new Knightsbridge. From south to north, its streets are laid out with an intimidating, if inexact, alphabetical order. Its “exquisite array of Victorian and Edwardian homes,” claims its principal estate agent, “infuse the neighbourhood with a timeless architectural appeal.” One house in one street stands out, the J. K. Rowling of the area, confident, plush, sophisticated, discriminating; and flush with Sauvignon Blanc. For in D for “Doneraile Street,” is where one of London’s most agreeable book group meets. Membership is by invitation only and its invitations are as infrequent as dry days in Wales. There are more famous book groups - Daunts, for example or the Literary Lounge Book Club. But none so naughtily notorious as this. Blissfully undemocratic, it seethes behind silk curtains and French shutters; its gardens giving out to imported fig trees and olives; its tables glittering with canapes of citrus-cured seabass on blinis. But for months it has been the centre of reckless disagreements and tormented tiffs – for its members struggled with that eternal book club question: which book to read next. Their discussions, like Middle Eastern peace negotiations, were marred by insurmountable differences - until, that is, they hit upon a winning solution, proposed by a member who had just returned from holiday in Kandy. Stick with novels from Sri Lanka, she said. And so, somewhat unexpectedly, they did. Harmony upon harmony has followed, it seems, like the notes of a celestial harp. And so it could for you too – for this guide offers a similar and blameless escape route to pleasure. It presents a list of books that is long enough to keep you going for a good long time. A year at least. Time enough to give up the day job; and move your grocery shopping to online deliveries only. The unexpected books included in this guide will take you into all the most comforting and familiar of genres. But it will then upturn them with the most unexpected of settings, perspectives, voices, and approaches as if you’ve found a trove of mille-feuille in a Dunkin’ Doughnuts Drive Through. Suprise, delight, glee – that is barely the half of it. For the books assembled here are as much a travelogue for the body as for the mind; a history of recent world as well as a picture of worlds to come – or even worlds that are framed forever in the most necessary of Forevers, like psychedelic carnivals or enchanted forests. Needed they most certainly are. The merest glance tells you that the mainstream literary world has slipped into an odd torpor. As literary agents in London and New York whip their submissions into shape; and tease them through the hoops, auctions, and cheque books of commissioning editors at Frankfurt, you may be forgiven for thinking that reading contemporary fiction is similar to eating a custard cream biscuit. It’s nice enough. But it’s as predictable as a dollop of AI creative writing. Sri Lanka presents the opportunity to slip out of this literary listlessness. Through, why, you may disputatiously ask; why Sri Lanka? Why not another other of the world’s 200 odd countries? Surely you can formulate a reading list for any country in the world. Or can you? Few other countries are currently creating such a wealth of world class literature as is Sri Lanka. Sri Lanka’s contemporary writers have burst like firecrackers over world fiction. Try just a few; and you will see. But which few? Of its multitude of authors and books, which ones should you start with? This guide brings together many of the best – all, in one sense or another, Sri Lankan. Most were born on the island; others left, often part of the diaspora created by civil war and corruption. But whether now in Canada and Australia, the UK, or New Zealand, each has written a novel only a Sri Lankan could, bringing humour, a unique sensibility and a sharp, ironic eye to the themes that preoccupy every great novel - from war, sex, fashion, addiction and love to loss, pets, the jungle, fame, fortune, bankruptcy. And, of course, family; for in Sri Lanka, as almost nowhere else, the family really does come - inconveniently, beautifully, reassuringly, alarmingly - first. The story starts relatively late, for although many inspired novels were written in the first half of the twentieth century, it was not until the 1960s that a trenchant new sensibility began to shape and flavour Sri Lanka’s fiction. A band of new writers emerged for whom little was out of bounds - from the incipient civil war, belief, ethnicity, and feminism to gender, ...
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    20 mins
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