Sumana SAPARAMADU

Do you listen to or read about the war in the North or look at the small map that is often published with the news? The map gives the location of the places mentioned in the news, like the towns taken over by the army, or the region or division of the district where the fighting took place.

If you haven’t done it so far, please do so after you read this; at least look closely at the little map. In every map you will see one or two places with names ending in kulam.

Some place names ending in Kulam I collected from recent newspapers are given separately at the end of this article. These places are all in the Mannar, Vavuniya and Kilinochchi districts while the last is in the Trincomalee district.

What is Kulam? Kulam has two meanings; one is family, clan; the other is pond or natural lake. The meaning differs with the letter ‘l’ used. In Sinhala and Tamil, there are different letters for the

different sounds of ‘l’. Sinhala has two letters and Tamil three.

These place names, so many in number, show that a large number of hamlets in this dry zone originated as settlements around ponds or natural water-holes.

A historical work in Sinhala, the Rajavaliya says people going in search of a place to settle down, and build a new home, often stopped near a water-hole or pond, put up shelters and stayed put.

The settlement was named after the pond or water-hole, with a word added in front to give the hamlet an identity. Puliyankulam can be translated as ‘Tamarind pond’. The original settlers would have called the pond near their new home, the ‘Kulam near the tamarind tree’ and in course of time, it became plain ‘Puliyankulam’, just as the ebony trees around a pond gave that pond and hamlet the name Karuwalagas wewa. Mankulam can be translated as deer pond. This pond would have been frequented by deer.

This vast area north of Anuradhapura, a good part of the old Raja Rata, was a fertile plain under paddy cultivation. In fact, one part of the region, that abound the Giant’s Tank, is known as the Rice Bowl.

There must have been acres and acres of paddy fields, with small lakes or ponds (Kulam/wewa) shimmering in the sunlight and little hamlets around them.

Basawakkulama, our first tank

Place names ending in kulam are found not only in the districts mentioned earlier. There are ‘Kulams’ in the Puttalam and Anuradhapura districts too, but the name ends with a vowel. Kulam becomes Kulama. Here are some examples:

Sangattikulama - Puttalam district

Settikulama - Mannar district

Sippikulama - Anuradhapura district

Ulukkulama - ” ”

Galkulama - ” ”

Bulankulama ” ”

Even the first tank built by our kings, Abhaya Vaapi or Abhaya Wewa built by King Pandukabhaya, is now known as Basawakkulama.

I cannot say for certain how and when some Sinhala place names got Tamil names, like Weligama becoming Vallikamam and Sunugama becoming Chunakam (both in the Jaffna peninsula).

Many of the settlements by ponds in the Northern Province must have had Sinhala names. Not only place names and tank names, even names of some rivers have alternate Tamil names. Malwatu Oya, as it flaws through the Mannar district to the sea, is known as Aravi Aaru.

This was the name marked in the maps in textbooks used in schools when Sri Lanka was a colony in the British Empire.