From where did Ceylon get its name?

by S. Pathiravitana

Many more countries than India, Burma and Sri Lanka have started changing their names. The headline I saw in a knowledgeable American newspaper, the International Herald Tribune, claimed that India leads in the 'name changing and respelling of names.' But this is not quite true. I think it was Ceylon that took the first bold step to change herself into Sri Lanka nearly 36 years ago, discarding fears of losing any commercial or any other advantages she already had. If my memory is correct it was the late Maitripala Senanayake who initiated the move for the change. Poor Ceylon, being only a dot on the world map, it couldn't have mattered to the rest of the world whether we were Ceylon or Sri Lanka, to judge by the publicity that Bangalore is enjoying just now for merely contemplating whether it should call itself Bengaluru or not.

Tongue twister

Obviously, Bengaluru may have been a tongue twister to the notoriously incompetent Englishmen, unskilled in pronouncing foreign names. While they were in occupation of India the Bengalureans and the rest of India may have been too intimidated by the British presence to raise their satyagraha flag. But now some Indians seem to resent the changes that have been made already like Madras into Chennai. No less a person than the man who is aspiring to be the next head of the United Nations, Shashi Thakoor, has pleaded, "The weather will be just as sultry in Chennai as it used to be in Madras. Are we Indians so insecure in our independence that we still need to prove to ourselves that we are free?" That observation is bound to help him win the hearts of the Western half of our planet to put himself into the topmost seat in the UN.

Not only with Bengaluru, the Englishman also had this problem with Yangong too. When he wanted to know the capital city of Burma, he was told it was Yangong, but as usual he heard it as Rangoon, and Rangoon it was until the other day when the Myanmar government, which had already stopped calling itself Burma, put it to right. The poor understanding of our former colonial masters is revealed by a story narrated in popular lore of how Negombo got its name. The colonial master, as he was passing through this town one day, got interested in knowing the name of this location. So he had asked a passer by for its name. Just at that moment they heard the sound of a dog barking. The passer by, not understanding the white man's lingo, thought he wanted to know why the dog was barking. So he told him that the dog was just barking, or as we say it in Sinhala, Nikam Buranawa. Nikam buranawa was noted down in the diary of our colonial master as Negombo.

He has christened us with a good many names like that, the most striking of them being Kandy by which most Americans are left mystified why such a beautiful city in this country has been named after a mere sweet spelt with true English eccentricity with a K. If ever the people of Kandy desire that she should be re-named then they have two choices. One is Maha Nuwara, which the non-English speaking people already use. Or there is the more mellifluous name that figures in a popular song sung so enchantingly by Amita Vedisingha beginning. 'Senkadagala...'

We have escaped rather narrowly from the near Anglicisation of some names like Hambantota and Bentota, which in the days of British occupation even some of our Anglophiles were getting used to calling them Hambantot and Bentot. There are some Sinhala scholars who think that Colombo should revert to its original name of Kolamba . Even Heydt, a German adventurer who worked for the Dutch in Ceylon, quotes an English author Sir [John] Chardin, who Heydt found very accurate when saying that Colombo gets its name "from a certain tree of the sort called by natives 'Ambo', which bears the mango fruit; but this tree never bears fruit, but only leaves, called by the natives 'Cola' so that they have attached to this tree the name 'Cola-Amba .'" Of course, Colombus had nothing to do with it. But Cola Amba does not mean, in this context, a mango tree. says Arisen Ahubudu, it means a port - from kola 'edge'' and 'amba ' water, in other words a 'water's edge.'

Galle, I think is a standing outrage, when it is simply Gaalla in the native tongue and has nothing to do with either the Gauls or General de Gaulle. The Galle Fort is beautiful in its own way and the name should remind the viewer that it stands on solid rock. There are a few other hangovers from our colonial past that are now either dying or still trying to hang on like, for instance, the four Ks. I have not heard for sometime Kurunegala being pronounced Kerneygaul. Aspiring English speakers were not sure once upon a time whether to sound it the Sinhala way or the Anglicised way. But I find that Kegalle catches some locals in two minds even now. Some still say Kaygaul while others are faithful to the Sinhala style. And Kalutara, nobody says Kalchura now.

Kolamba 7

As for Kollupitiya, I think the residents over there, who adjoin Kolamba 7, prefer to be known as residing in Colpetty. There seems to be a fifty-fifty vote for Colpetty. As you can see, name changing seems to be as bad as name calling. With the British, it even seems to be a bad habit. Leaving alone what they have done to their colonies, they don't seem to be able to keep their hands off the names of their neighbours' towns and cities, too The 'eau' in Eau de Cologne, for instance, was discovered in Koeln in Germany, but the English language has made us believe that it comes from France. As for Muenchen, which is the German name for Munich, the then international community signed an appeasement pact with another Prabhakaran called Hitler to appease his thirst for German expansion. But as we now know, it took a world war to eliminate the man whose appeasement could never be appeased.

Name changing has, however, been going on throughout history. Sravasti one of the many Buddhist sites is now Sahet-Mahet. As the Buddha observed wisely, nothing under the sun is everlasting. In the West, Byzantium the fond city to which the poet Yeats wished so much to sail to, has undergone many changes. It was re-named Constantinople after the Roman Emperor Constantine (326 A.D.), but with the Ottomans extending their power over that region, it became Istanbul by which Constantinople was superseded and out of this transformation a prize winning song, Istanbul is not Constantinople, was composed by a couple of American singers in the recent Fifties. Africa is now lining up for a change of names with Pretoria soon giving way to Tshwane - a Boer leader giving way to an African leader. That being a long story I'll keep it for another day

The change of name from Ceylon to Sri Lanka doesn't seem to have brought us much luck. Soon after the name change, the doors to an open economy were opened by one who called himself the first elected President of the country. The first things the first President did was to announce that he was inviting the robber barons to, what else, but rob the country. Then came corruption, followed by crime, an invasion of heroin, prostitution, child prostitution and terrorism.

It is difficult to believe that a simple name change could bring up all these foibles. Which makes me wonder if the original name of our country was retained, a name under which our magnificent civilisation survived for two millenia, could we have averted what we have let loose today?

Sir Paul Pieris, in his last great work Sinhale and the Patriots, carried on the fly leaf of his book an epigraph, a pathetic plea made by the Kandyan Chiefs in 1834 to the British government, long after the defeat of the 1818 rebellion, .to retain the original name of this country. Britain ignored the request.

Had the British, by any chance, accepted the plea of the Kandyan Chiefs, we may not be facing the problems we are posed with right now.

However, a mere change of name now is not likely to reverse what is happening. So, just for the record let me put down the research of two scholars, Paranavitana and Nicholas in their work A Concise History of Ceylon, on the name by which this country was always known.

According to the 'Christian Topography' of Cosmos Indicopleustes, a work of the sixth century AD "it contains a somewhat lengthy account of the Island of Taprobane and its sea-borne trade. Cosmas says that the pagans called it Taprobane and the Indians Sielediba (Sihaladipa) and that it was a great resort of ships of many countries" (p 10 A concise History) "Ptolemy calls Ceylon, 'the Island of Taprobane which was formerly called Simondou and now Salike.' "(p 9 A Concise History). And again"...it is recorded that in the year 361 an Embassy from Serendivi (Ceylon) was received by Emperor Julian; the Arabian form, Serendib of the name of Ceylon, had already gained currency in the West" (ibid p 9). .

When the name Serendib was brought to the West by Arab traders the Europeans pronounced it in different ways - Seylon, Zeilon and finally Ceylon all derived from the original name Sihaladipa .