by Padma Edirisinghe - The Island
Right now we are all obsessed with the various aspects of the Channel 4 programme. But to say ‘WE are all" obsessed is an exaggeration. There are thousands of Lankans who go about their daily business, entangled in the tentacles of COL, minus the haziest idea of this topic.
So to say that the whole island is obsessed with Robert Knox is an exaggeration. It is mostly our writers with an overdose of sensitivity who cannot forget this white man who was a prisoner in the Kandyan kingdom for 19 years way back in the 17th the Century when Rasingh Deiyo (Rajasinghe 11) ruled in the hills wedged between two western powers. There were two pieces on him recently in ‘The Island’ and I decided to add a third, especially since Tissa Devendra has mentioned Eladatta.
That reminded me. I have been to Eladatta myself years back, not to trace Knox’s roots, but in search of my ID card that I had lost in a public vehicle. As you may have guessed, I got a letter from a person in Eladatta that my ID was in his possession and would I come……. Actually, I was living at Gampola then and in fact had already written pieces on Knox in Lugumdeniya. But not Eladatta.
moreEladatta by the way, is a picturesque highland village with blue green hilly ranges soaring and ebbing.
The good man who had picked up my ID and had written to me, happened to be a school teacher. Of course, keeping to Lankan hospitality, he offered me not only the lost ID but a cup of tea and then we had a chit—chat on this and that. Then he asked whether I would like to see the site where Robert Knox lived.
Actually, though I had forgotten all about the famed writer embroiled in the task of locating the village, my ears just straightened like the proverbial rabbit’s at this.
Just the stuff that excites the typical Sri Lankan writer — man or woman. He led me to the site and left as he had some other errand to attend to. It was just an ordinary house where a woman was struggling with her little children, while the man was away. Actually, it was the site where this ‘Mahaththaya’ had lived, she asserted. The house was recently built, she added. Of course, it was superfluous to be informed that no house built in the 17th Century could go on up to now.
I asked her about the authenticity of the historical fact that Knox lived here.
It is the legend in the village, she said. "Hama thanama thiyana kata kathawa." Passages from the famous ‘Historical Relations’ floated before me. They told the reader, of a house Knox built later at Eladatte, where the entry of women was taboo. By this time, other white men
captured along with him were married to Sinhala women. So, while inviting the men the celibate man had forbidden them visiting him with their Sinhala wives!
Except for his mother and a girl (I will introduce by and by) Knox, the misogynist he was, just despised women.
The kids of the woman talking to me, all under six or seven were howling to distract their mother’s attention from me and I also felt it ludicrous to tell all that to her. She could not even pronounce his name and kept on calling him the ‘Sudu mahaththaya’ as though he had lived here recently. She even spoke of some strange coins she had found once while digging in the garden. The kids had misplaced them, she said. No wonder. She keeps them on her toes alright. But she was sure that they belonged to the white gentleman.
I remembered the girl Knox had selected to look after him in his old age. The methodical man that Knox was, he had endowed his property in Lanka to her and after his release had sent presents to her through random couriers. So, I was letting loose my imagination to bracket this mother of screaming kids or her husband into the line of Maria’s descendents.
So I asked whether she knew one Maria.
Maria, she said.
"Yes. She was a girl born to a village woman and begot by one of his ‘Sudu’ friends and Knox had taken a liking to her, and given his property to her."
"Maria? "Never heard of her. Never seen her. But imagine our women marrying these ‘mahattayas’?
Anyway, her imagination too was running riot. But I had to have a dig at her for saying that she had never seen this Maria, probably christened by that foreign name by a white Christian father wed to a Sinhala Buddhist woman.
"Very funny. How can you see her? She lived here about 300 to 400 years ago."
"Ah! Then how to see her? No lady?" She said in such a matter—of—fact way, that I was itching to shake her out of her stupidity. So finally, everything plummeted to zero again. But now, reading all the stuff on Knox, I wish I had pursued the land deeds of this terrain. For what? To ascertain facts about this valiant man who defied all odds and went back to his own country after 19 years and even went on to write a great book that garnered international readership. Talk of rising from the Dead or from Near Dead, to achieve great feats.
He became a Sea Emperor later, captaining ships carrying slaves from Africa to other countries, forgetting the fact that he was once in bondage in an Asian country.
