The Island That Floated Away: The Ceylon Press History of Sri Lanka 2 cover art

The Island That Floated Away: The Ceylon Press History of Sri Lanka 2

The Island That Floated Away: The Ceylon Press History of Sri Lanka 2

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 Rusty, derelict, and irresistibly optically challenged, the old Talaimannar Lighthouse is a gratifyingly improbable key to unlocking the start of Sri Lanka’s recorded history. It presents an even more unlikely clue to explain the profound differences the island shows compared to the rest of the world. Heraclitus, the weeping philosopher, with his fondness for the paradoxical, noted that “the hidden harmony is better than the obvious.” Indeed, the well-concealed harmony of this much mistreated lighthouse offers as good a set of clues as a historian is ever likely to find anywhere else on the island. Despite its unmistakable presence and purpose, there is little truly obvious about a lighthouse such as this that no longer works. One of a necklace of lighthouses built to help ships avoid disaster, the old Talaimannar Lighthouse marks the start of Adam’s Bridge at its Sri Lankan end. Erected sometime after 1850, it rises, with hearty inelegance, like a cooking pot on stilts, “a black skeleton steel tower 113 feet in height,” noted one observer in 1931, one of the last to witness how its once burning fire blazed a red warning to those few ships incautious enough to risk sailing nearby. Twenty-three other lighthouses dot the country’s coastline, fourteen still active. Most are early twentieth century constructions, solid Edwardian, or First World War structures built with such consummate skill as to survive with resolute determination into the present day, despite monsoons, tsunamis, and decades of pounding surf, alleviated by minimal maintenance and the gathering indifference of most citizens, more agreeably distracted by the greater celebrity of architecture offering penthouses in downtown Colombo or glittering air conditioned shopping malls in previously blameless ancient towns. A few, like Beruwala Lighthouse, Kovilan Point Lighthouse or the Little and the Great Basses Reef Lighthouses, off the coast at Yala, are accessible only by sea. Two of the oldest, dating back to 1863, stand guard over the deep-water harbour at Trincomalee: Foul Point Lighthouse and Round Island Lighthouse, with a third, the 1857 Old Colombo Lighthouse, left peering with myopic despondency through a muddle of unremarkable modern buildings towards an ocean now almost invisible. Others, like Sangaman Kanda Point Lighthouse, have been so shattered by nature as to be reduced to mere stumps. The tallest and still active – at 49 metres - is at Dondra Head on the southern tip of the island, an edifice improbably constructed from rocks imported from Scotland and Cornwall. The most famous is the 1939 lighthouse at Galle. However, the 1928 Batticaloa Lighthouse, the dizzily patterned one at Hambantota or Oluvil Lighthouse - the only one to date from after Independence - might all offer winning challenges to that accolade. Pause briefly for but the merest hint of thought, and it is, of course, no great surprise that so small a nation should boast so great a range and number of lighthouses. Like lonely exclamation marks finally given a voice of their own, these lofty beacons beat out a ghostly metronomic refrain that states, with unmissable clarity, the first and most profound reason why Sri Lanka is as it is. This is an island. That is what those lonely lighthouses declaim. An island, capacious, yes; nevertheless, a single island; a piece of land unattached to anything else or a mere part of a string of other infant islands that make up an archipelago. And that fact – more than any other – has determined the country’s character; for “islands,” as Richard Dawkins remarked, “are natural workshops of evolution.” Of course, from Barbados to Singapore, there are many other island nations. Cuba may be twice Sri Lanka’s land mass, but its population is half, a disproportionality shared by Iceland, Ireland, and New Zealand. Madagascar and Taiwan have populations similar to Sri Lanka’s, but are either much larger or much smaller in land area. Only Japan and the UK are island nations that far outstrip Sri Lanka in landmass and population. This may seem to be immaterially semantic – but a closer inspection shows just how deep the differences go, and, in so doing, make up the character of an island like no other. But of all its many peers, Talaimannar, much battered in the civil war and now finding a modest following amongst kitesurfers, remains the country’s most significant beacon, for it is precisely here where Sri Lanka, in appearing to touch India, runs out into the sea and disappears. From the Indian side, its infrequent visitors are mildly surprised to learn that the lighthouse is not part of the Indian mainland. Or, if not geographically, then at least politically or culturally. Or environmentally. Or perhaps linguistically. But it is not. It is none of those things. In fact, the closer you look, the greater the differences. However much help the Old Talaimannar Lighthouse was ...
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