Reconciling to what we have done to earth, humanity and our Adi Vasis

Peace is to us all around in the forests that we served; the forest was the master, we were at its feet. Today we cannot enter it freely. There are laws and rules apparently to protect the forest from us. We are surrounded by this new world which we do not, to date, understand – Guna Bandila

By Surya Vishwa  

They sat there calmly. Wearing earth colour sarongs and with a cloth across their shoulder, at times they posed for photographs with bow and arrow. They were in the city of people who dressed so elegantly. People who smile in the busy city smile. People who identified with designer plastic greenery. People who considered concrete high rise buildings and luxury vehicles their soul. People who claim they were developed and educated. And who, desperately choking in the fumes of that education and development were hitting the coldest option in their air conditioner remote control, as the climate changed with their speed, convenience and their science and technology returned to haunt them. This is us. This is us to whom these simple human beings are a distant fantasy – probably like what natural trees, shrubs and rivers would be in the near future. 

Gune Bandila Aththo and his brother Loku Bandila Aththo were special guests at the travel and tourism event held at the BMICH last Saturday and Sunday (20 and 21 May). They had been invited by the Sri Lanka resort chain Thema Collection. The resort management purchases their bees honey and similar products and arranges for them to speak to guests interested about a way of life we have all forgotten.

As I sit to talk with them, facilitated by the Thema Collection team, at their Sancharaka Udawa tourism event stall at the BMICH, I begin by asking them about their particular Adi-Vasi lineage, given that the ancient aboriginal Veddha community of Sri Lanka has different ancestries depending on geographical location. The origin of the word Veddha in Sanskrit and Tamil relates to hunting and means hunter.

Gune Bandila Aththo and his brother Loku Bandila Aththi are middle aged members of the Rathugala aboriginal community. They are members of the seventh generation of the indigenous community from the Rathugala area.

“Our Aadi Vasi communities are spread across areas such as Dambana, Enanigala, Dalukkane, Pallebedda, Rathugala and Vakarai. 

When he mentions Vakarai which is in the East of Sri Lanka in the Batticaloa district, I ask him of the turbulent days the country saw before the armed conflict ended in 2009 which made the North-East a place of lament. Were the Veddha community affected? What did they think of such a civil war in the so called ‘civilised world’?

Gune Bandila Aththo smiles a gentle smile and adjusts his indigenous dialect into something close to Sinhala so I can understand and says, “Although the forests are not as before and we no longer can access freely whatever little jungle terrain we have which is our real home, we were always sheltered by fringes of wilderness that did not make us in anyway involved in such strife. Maybe the real wilderness was in our minds. We cannot understand such matters.”

At a time when words such as peace, reconciliation, justice, unity and oneness are being spoken in the modern world we thought it is apt to ask Guna Bandila to elaborate more on his views.

“Peace is to us all around in the forests that we served; the forest was the master, we were at its feet. Today we cannot enter it freely. There are laws and rules apparently to protect the forest from us. We are surrounded by this new world which we do not, to date, understand. We are reconciling to what our ancestors taught us that we are part of the cosmos and how this appears so different to what the modern world is telling us.”

“To us, the sun, moon, stars, waters of the rivers and streams, the soil and the mountain are all entities that reconcile our innermost being to a new birth every day. This was and is our peace. We worshiped these and they were sacred. The forest was our life and our death.”

“The animals of the forest and us were caught together in this tapestry. We both tested our wits against each other. We cannot eat as the civilised world does, animals reared in cages like children and then killed for meat. But the force of your civilised world is strong and some of us have changed.”

“We cannot understand killing or dying for the sake of race or religious identity. Maybe we are not educated enough that we cannot fathom it. We do not know how to comment on these matters. We only know that our world is different and that much of our world is faded away. The forests that I saw as a child are gone. Our children do not want to be like us. There are new rules that our forefathers had to gradually get used to. We are forced to adapt to making a living often similar to what the modern world holds as normal. We are trapped between what is ancient and what is alien to us.”

“As children we grew up adhering to our strict ethics which figured mostly in relation to hunting as well as survival in the wild. No animal eating or drinking or looking after their young or standing still could be hunted. No tree branch or twig or leaf or flower or fruit could be plucked without a solid reason and without asking permission first. We had rituals and practices for every small act of gathering unto us which belonged to the earth. Our food was of the earth and our medicine was of the earth. The earth was our benefactor and our sweat and blood and bones. The earth was not a conquest for us. We were its subjects.” 

“The mountains we revered. It is so long ago now. The future of our children is uncertain. We only hope they never learn to differentiate between human beings. For us all human beings belong to nature, the most supreme.”

Note: The Harmony Page has a process of previewing our content prior to publishing, with veterans of different professions, ethnicities and who hold differing social opinions. We carry out this process to ensure non bias, objectivity and serve the intended purpose of creating mind stimulating content. For this purpose we have set up a panel of such experts according to thematic areas.

We publish below a response received to the above article during the preview process by a now retired official who was attached to the River-Valley Development Board of Sri Lanka. He was an official connected to the Gal Oya Development project in the 1960s. We publish below verbatim his comment. He is today in his mid-eighties. We are honouring his request of anonymity. 

“Thank you very much for generating this article and sending it to me for preview. In the year 1961 I went with a few officials to the Sri Lankan Veddha aboriginal enclave in Dambana. We took some gifts as goodwill gestures. I remember I took a shirt. The strange thing is that the same sentiments were narrated by them as cited in this article. They were worried about the mass destruction of forests (for the Gal Oya Development Project) fearing for their future. They could not understand when we told them that the project was initiated for development. They did not understand the word ‘development.’ Now I wonder whether we who designed these policies ever understood what that word meant.”

“We did not understand what they uttered about the peaceful life they lived. Only around the 1970s I finally comprehended what they meant. I understand that the Harmony page of Weekend FT plans to focus a series on the knowledge they hold and I think you will be doing an important service for the country, and even the world, especially when we today see how nature has responded to man’s callous treatment of it over the years. Things would have been different if we had become like the Adi Vasis and learnt the values they live by, instead of trying to force our development concepts on them. At least our forests would have been saved and water would not be a luxury.”