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Foundation for cultural tourism
THE SRI Lankan Deputy High Commission in Madras, actively promoting Sri Lankan culture in the city after several years of keeping a low profile, celebrated Vesak - Buddha Purnima - recently with a week of lectures by one of the Island's leading archaeologists and academicians, Sudharshan Seneviratne. Professor of Archaeology at the University of Peradeniya, Sri Lanka's mother university, Seneviratne has several connections with Madras, not the least being the fact that during the ten years he spent from 1970 at Jawaharlal Nehru University and in South India, his gurus were S. Gopal, R. Champalakshmi and K. Meenakshi, all from Tamil Nadu. He did much work at the library of the Theosophical Society and paid homage to its founder, Col. Henry Steele Olcott, who also founded the Buddhist Theosophical Society in Colombo, helped revive the religion in Ceylon, designed its flag and founded Buddhist schools in the Island as an alternative to the Western public school-type schools that had thrived till then, the first of them, Seneviratne's alma mater, Ananda College.
Seneviratne's Vesak Commemorative Lecture, `The Philosophical and Social Role of Early Buddhism in South India,' an erudite focus on the period 3 B.C. to 3 A.D. rather left me at the post, but on the morrow the discussion on cultural heritage management, an absorbing description of the laying of a solid foundation for cultural tourism in Sri Lanka, was more my cup of tea. Held at the University of Madras, I was only sorry to see no one from the Government's Departments of Tourism and Archaeology, even if it was a holiday. It, however, provided those from the University a window into how Sri Lankan academia, producing about 50 archaeologists a year, has developed a pragmatic curriculum that links archaeology, history and tourism in an opportunity for those graduates.
What is happening in Sri Lanka in the development of its Cultural Triangle - the ancient capitals of Anuradhapura, Polonnaruwa, Sigiriya, Dambulla and Kandy - under a $30 million UNESCO-Sri Lanka government project is something those connected with tourism, archaeology and academia in Tamil Nadu should visit and study. Under the project, four universities have each been allotted one or two of six major sites, where their students of archaeology and history work with the Government Archaeology Department, architects and engineers in recording the riches of the site, digging at the excavations, helping with the restoration or preservation of these World Heritage monuments, as well as with the site management. The students are getting the kind of practical and job-oriented experience no university in India gives and Sri Lanka, in turn, gets a Cultural Triangle that will before long become a major tourism destination with sufficient trained personnel to not only manage it but provide visitors something more than a gossipy tourist guide-led experience.
Prof. Seneviratne's Peradeniya team has been working on perhaps the most awesome of the sites, the Jetavanarama monastery whose dagoba (stupa) is the largest brick monument in the world. This 400-foot tall stupa of 62 million large bricks is not only the world's largest stupa but is also the tallest Buddhist structure. It has been said if 100 brickmakers had worked 250 years a day, they would have needed 25 years to make all the bricks the Jetavanarama needed. This awesome "wonder of brick building technology" was raised on the site of the famed Nandana Gardens where Mahinda, from the Kingdom of Asoka, preached his first sermon in Lanka when he brought Buddhism to the Island in 270 B.C. For students to learn and work on such a historic site is to get from them a commitment to a field of endeavour that few in India will embrace in the same fashion.
S. MUTHIAH
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