Battle of Vijithapura was one of the Warfare good articles, but it has been removed from the list. There are suggestions below for improving the article to meet the good article criteria. Once these issues have been addressed, the article can be renominated. Editors may also seek a reassessment of the decision if they believe there was a mistake. | |||||||||||||
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A fact from this article appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the "Did you know?" column on November 12, 2009. The text of the entry was: Did you know ... that the army of Dutthagamani captured Vijithapura after a four month siege by attacking it simultaneously from four directions? | |||||||||||||
Current status: Delisted good article |
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Reviewer: Sturmvogel 66 (talk) 23:38, 19 December 2009 (UTC) GA review – see WP:WIAGA for criteria
Thanks for the review, Sturmvogel 66 :) ≈ Chamal talk ¤ 00:58, 20 December 2009 (UTC)
It is against this background [of the ruler of Anuradhapura being among the many suzerains of the land] that the campaigns of Dutthagamni which form an integral and important element in the Sinhala ideology, particularly in more recent times, have to be examined.
In the Mahavamsa, Elara, against whom Dutthagamni waged his war, was the ruler of the whole of northern Sri Lanka and members of Dutthagamni's lineage had been rulers of the entire Rohana kingdom eversince Mahanaga established his power at Mahagama. Dutthagamni is presented as waging war in the interest of Buddhism. His campaigns culminate dramatically with the capture of Anuradhapura after a duel fought in accordance with the kshatriya rules of chivalry. Thus a Buddhist prince of the Sinhala dynasty who ruled over the southern principality conquers the northern principality ruled by a Tamil who, though known for his just rule, was yet a man of "false beliefs."
This view of the chroniclers has influenced modern historical writings, and the chauvinist Sinhala writings have picked on these campaigns as representing the exemplary victorious war waged by the Sinhalese against the Tamils. However, even the author of the Mahavamsa, who was obviously transposing to an earlier period conditions more typical of his own times, found it difficult to reconcile material available in his sources with this anachronistic picture he was trying to present. Some information in the Mahavamsa itself suggests that not all the people who fought against Dutthagamni were Tamils. For instance, Nandhimitta, a general in Dutthagamni's army, is said to have had an uncle who was a general serving Elara. Though the Mahavamsa tried to present Dutthagamni as the ruler of a unified Rohana fighting against the sole ruler of the northern plains, it is evident that the sources used by the chronicler carried accounts of Dutthagamni fighting against thirty-two different rulers.
As the present writer has printed out previously, the most plausible explanation of the available evidence is that Dutthagamani was a powerful military leader who unified the island for the first time after fighting against several independent principalities. His campaigns do not appear to represent a Sinhala-Tamil confrontation.
The controversial epic of Dutugemunu (Pali: Dutthagamini), is perhaps the best-known narrative concerning the much-contested ancient Sri Lankan polity. The earliest version is found in the Mahavamsa and purports to be an account of events that occurred in the late second century BCE.
— Dharmakirti, Devarakkhita Jayabahu (2011). "The Saga of Dutugemunu". In Holt, John Clifford (ed.). The Sri Lanka Reader: History, Culture, Politics. London: Duke University Press. p. 30.
In both the Dipavamsa and the Mahavamsa, Elara although a Hindu is accorded the status of a righteous king who ruled "justly" and "wisely" (Kemper, 1991: 61), but in the Pujavaliya he has descended to the status of an unrighteous king who destroyed Buddhist monasteries. In the Pali literature, Magha is memorialized for the destruction he caused and is projected as a Mara (anti-Buddha) type figure — it is this historical experience of Magha that almost certainly accounts for Elara’s descent to unrighteousness.
A more profound descent in Elara’s status is recorded in the seventeenth-century text, the Rajavaliya, a discourse on the history of Sinhalese Buddhist kingship up to the arrival of the Portuguese. In the Rajavaliya (Lineage of Kings), Elara and his followers are equated with the rampaging hordes of Mara. This descent of Elara to the status of the absolutely demonic must be seen in the light of the social trauma initiated with the coming of the European powers and the Dutch expulsion of the Portuguese by 1656.
— De Silva Wijeyeratne, Roshan (1996-09-01). "Ambivalence, Contingency and the Failure of Exclusion: the Ontological Schema of the 1972 Constitution of the Republic of Sri Lanka". Social & Legal Studies. 5 (3): 378. doi:10.1177/096466399600500305. ISSN 0964-6639.
The texts cannot be reduced merely to the context in which they were written or to the ontological principles underlying mythic construction. They are ideological in the sense in which I use the word; that is, the events of a lived social and political reality are selected to achieve their significance in accordance with an ontology which, in its turn, gains force and meaning in a world of flesh and blood.
No independent notability. TrangaBellam (talk) 20:48, 25 October 2021 (UTC)