By Ari Ariyaratne –

August 2026 marks the 102nd birth anniversary of Vidya Jyothi Dr. Raja de Silva, the pioneering scientist and former Commissioner of Archaeology (1967–1979) who radically transformed Sri Lanka’s historiographical landscape. Originally trained as a chemist, Dr. de Silva famously saved the vandalized Sigiriya frescoes in 1967 alongside Italian conservator Luciano Maranzi. 

Yet, his greatest contribution to South Asian scholarship was his fearless intellectual iconoclasm (Ariyaratne 2024). By approaching ancient monuments with strict empirical skepticism, he exposed a profound systemic issue in heritage management: the uncritical reliance on ancient literary texts over physical, material evidence. To understand his revolutionary re-interpretation of Sigiriya, one must first trace how text-based biases historically erased or distorted archaeological realities across wider South Asia.

The Ethnographic Turn: Monuments as Political “Texts”

Modern anthropologists seek to shift the focus away from treating ancient structures as static monuments. Instead, they use an ethnographic approach to analyze monuments as “texts” that are constantly manipulated at local and national levels to construct state-sanctioned historical narratives while deliberately silencing multilayered or minority histories (Ray 2019). To parse these deep-seated biases, scholars employ tools like the ‘Invention of Tradition’, which explains how medieval and modern texts retrospectively construct ‘ancient’ cultural practices or narratives to project a sense of unchanging continuity (Hobsbawm & Ranger 1983).

Crucially, ancient texts represent the worldview of a minuscule, literate elite—such as scribes, priests, and monks—who possessed the exclusive power to preserve records. Conversely, the archaeological record reflects the lived, physical reality of the broader populace. When an ancient chronicle completely omits a complex layout, anthropologists treat the text not as objective historical fact, but as an artifact of political projects designed to establish cultural hegemony.

Literary Myth vs. Archaeological Reality: The Omission of Harappa

For thousands of years, the dominant literary tradition of India maintained that South Asian civilization began in the rural, pastoral Ganges plains. This worldview relied heavily on the oldest Sanskrit texts, such as the Ṛgveda, which celebrated the deconstruction of walled cities, praising the god Indra as Purandara or ‘Destroyer of Forts.’

The ideological bias of these chronicles toward the Iron Age Vedic Period in northern India—and their total omission of the Bronze Age Indus Valley Civilization—effectively obscured the existence of highly centralized, non-Vedic, urban, and maritime-trading populations. It was not until the 1920s, when micro-stratigraphy and field archaeologists excavated Harappa, that the world realized a sprawling, literate, urban superpower had existed prior to the composition of the Vedic texts. The chronicles did not explicitly lie; rather, their profound cultural and religious bias ensured that an entire urban civilization was culturally delegitimized and forgotten by the literary record (Singh 2008).

Sectarian Politics in Buddhist Historiography: Edicts vs. Chronicles

Even within Buddhism itself, different sects heavily manipulated chronicles to downplay rivals, mimicking the structural tension between the Theravāda (Pali for ‘The Doctrine of the Elders’) and Mahāyāna (Sanskrit for ‘The Great Vehicle’) traditions. The northern Sanskrit text Divyāvadāna (‘The Heavenly Stories’), specifically its chapter the Aśokāvadāna (‘The Narrative of Aśoka’), records the life of the Mauryan Emperor Ashoka, as does the southern Pali chronicle, the Mahāvaṃsa. However, because these texts belonged to competing monastic lineages, they constructed radically different narratives to assert their own sectarian authority.

The Mahāvaṃsa claims Ashoka converted to Buddhism through a Theravāda monk named Nyagrodha and focuses entirely on the emperor’s sending of his son, Mahinda, to Sri Lanka (Laṅkā). Conversely, the northern Sanskrit texts completely ignore the Sri Lankan mission, crediting Ashoka’s conversion to a different monk named Upagupta. When James Prinsep deciphered Ashoka’s Rock and Pillar Edicts in the 1830s, historians gained direct access to the monarch’s actual contemporary voice. The edicts revealed that Ashoka’s Dhamma was a broad, pluralistic ethical code aimed at civic harmony, actively promoting tolerance for non-Buddhist groups like the Ājīvikas and Brahmins. In contrast, ancient monastic chronicles had profoundly romanticized and distorted Ashoka’s reign, portraying him as a fierce sectarian zealot who exclusively funded their specific monasteries (Strong 1983).

Decolonizing Sigiriya: Dr. de Silva’s Monastic Iconoclasm

It is precisely within this broader historiographical battlefield—mirroring the erasure of the Indus Valley and the sectarian distortion of Ashoka—that Dr. Raja de Silva launched his most iconoclastic critique against the orthodox history of Sigiriya. For over a century, colonial and nationalist archaeology accepted the southern Pali chronicle, the Cūḷavaṃsa, as absolute truth, framing the massive granite rock as the secular, fifth-century pleasure palace fortress of the patricide King Kassapa I.

Drawing on his background in chemical analysis and material conservation, Dr. de Silva exposed this dominant narrative as an ideological invention. He demonstrated that the site completely lacked the structural layouts of a functional royal capital or defensive citadel. Instead, it featured the unmistakable architecture of a massive, multi-layered Mahāyāna-Theravāda monastic complex that existed centuries before and after Kassapa’s brief 18-year reign.

Just as the Mahāvaṃsa suppressed Ashoka’s pluralistic Dhamma, its authors intentionally downplayed the presence of non-orthodox Mahāyāna lineages in Sri Lanka. By comparing the iconic frescoes to the sacred art of the Ajanta caves in India, Dr. de Silva brilliantly demonstrated that the painted damsels were not secular concubines or queens, but representations of the Goddess Tārā, the great Mahāyāna saviouress. In doing so, he rescued Sigiriya from the confines of an ancient royal melodrama, restoring it to its rightful place as a sacred landscape of profound, cosmopolitan devotion (De Silva 2002).

An Enduring Legacy of Principled Scepticism

Two years after his passing, Dr. Raja de Silva’s intellectual legacy remains an indispensable beacon for decolonial archaeology in South Asia. His work proved that ancient texts are not transparent windows into the past, but highly curated political artifacts designed to establish cultural hegemony.

By validating material evidence over narrative romance, his life’s work proved that true patriotism does not lie in defending state-sanctioned historical myths, but in interrogating them with scientific rigor. On his 102nd birth anniversary, as scholars increasingly adopt material-first approaches to South Asian heritage, Dr. de Silva’s iconoclastic spirit stands thoroughly vindicated. He did not merely preserve the physical stones of Sri Lanka’s heritage; he bequeathed to subsequent generations the intellectual tools to liberate the past from the biases of its chroniclers.

References Cited:

Ariyaratne, Ari 2024, Dr. Rājā de Silva – Pioneer Conserver, Engaging Interpreter, and Bold Defender. In Kurukulasuriya, Uvindu (ed), Raja de Silva: Centenarian Extraordinaire. 2024. 

De Silva, Raja. Sigiriya and Its Significance: A Mahāyāna- Theravāda Buddhist Monastery. Nawala, Colombo, Sri Lanka: Bibliotheque/Aitken Spence. 2002. 

Hobsbawm, Eric, and Terence Ranger, eds. The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1983.

Ray, Himanshu Prabha. Decolonizing Heritage in South Asia: The Global, the National and the Transnational. New Delhi, India: Routledge. 2019.

Singh, Upinder.  A History of Ancient and Early Medieval India: From the Stone Age to the 12^th Century. New Delhi, India: Pearson Education. 2008.

Strong, John S. The Legend of King Aśoka: A Study and Translation of the Aśokāvadāna. Princeton, NJ, USA: Princeton University Press. 1983.

*The writer is an anthropologist and the author of Key Concepts of Cultural Anthropology (Second Edition, Dubuque, IA, USA: Kendall-Hunt Publishing, 2026).