Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Sri Lanka’s ancient, almost lost martial art

atlasobscura.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 119 posts

Re: Sri Lanka’s ancient, almost lost martial art

#11

Post by wtmt »

throwmaway99 wrote: post #3

As a Sri Lankan it breaks my heart whenever this type of topic is brought up, the amount of damage colonizers including the British did to my country, my culture is just heart wrenching. How the British and other colonizers go unpunished for all what they have done not just to my country, but to so many other countries in the past is just unbelievable. But on a more positive side, more and more Sri Lankans are starti…

> How the British and other colonizers go unpunished for all what they have done

It’s rare for such large scale oppressors to be punished in their times.

Do you see parallels with what the majority Sinhalese in Sri Lanka has done to the minority Tamil population for decades?

Re: Sri Lanka’s ancient, almost lost martial art

#12

Post by joe_the_user »

While all the damages of the British occupation of Sri Lanka and elsewhere is terrible, I believe banning martial has been common the world over, especially before the modern era.

I think various Chinese rulers as well as the Maoist banned some martial arts, Russia banned everything but Sambo in the Soviet era, Capoeira was developed in Brazil as a "secret martial art", martial arts were banned in Okinawan at one point (home of Karate and related arts).

Being an oral tradition, martial arts tend to be always fracturing and in danger of dying out. Source: lots of martial arts contacts plus I practice an art known seriously to only one other person I know of in the world.

Re: Sri Lanka’s ancient, almost lost martial art

#13

Post by chakkepolja »

publicola1990 wrote: post #5
throwmaway99 wrote: post #3

As a Sri Lankan it breaks my heart whenever this type of topic is brought up, the amount of damage colonizers including the British did to my country, my culture is just heart wrenching. How the British and other colonizers go unpunished for all what they have done not just to my country, but to so many other countries in the past is just unbelievable. But on a more positive side, more and more Sri Lankans are starti…

Not related to the article, but would you be able to comment on why Sinhala is classified as an Indo-European language, rather than as a Dravidian language?

Some tales tell that Sinhalese were Buddhists from somewhere near modern day Bengal who fled to avoid persecution.

Re: Sri Lanka’s ancient, almost lost martial art

#14

Post by chakkepolja »

joe_the_user wrote: post #12

While all the damages of the British occupation of Sri Lanka and elsewhere is terrible, I believe banning martial has been common the world over, especially before the modern era. I think various Chinese rulers as well as the Maoist banned some martial arts, Russia banned everything but Sambo in the Soviet era, Capoeira was developed in Brazil as a "secret martial art", martial arts were banned in Okinawan at one poi…

It's comparable to gun control, except that it kills the traditions of undocumented martial arts. But the people in power don't care about that.

Re: Sri Lanka’s ancient, almost lost martial art

#15

Post by chakkepolja »

cmrajan wrote: post #2

I could see close parallels with ancient martial art Kalaripayattu [1] practiced in southern Indian state of Kerala. It's very popular and still being practiced there [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalaripayattu

weapons as well, such as Urumi seem to be common to both.

Re: Sri Lanka’s ancient, almost lost martial art

#16

Post by chakkepolja »

One sad thing about these ancient martial arts is, they were great for the battle conditions of the ancient era, but they were not sufficiently improved for modern situations.

I don't know much about angampora in particular, but Kalaripayattu (which is a related martial art from Kerala) has sadly become more of a performing art than martial art these days.

Re: Sri Lanka’s ancient, almost lost martial art

#17

Post by joe_the_user »

chakkepolja wrote: post #14
joe_the_user wrote: post #12

While all the damages of the British occupation of Sri Lanka and elsewhere is terrible, I believe banning martial has been common the world over, especially before the modern era. I think various Chinese rulers as well as the Maoist banned some martial arts, Russia banned everything but Sambo in the Soviet era, Capoeira was developed in Brazil as a "secret martial art", martial arts were banned in Okinawan at one poi…

It's comparable to gun control, except that it kills the traditions of undocumented martial arts. But the people in power don't care about that.

Yes, I was just going to add the similarity to gun control.

But I'd also add that the urge for control isn't limited to states. When these arts were valuable, masters would be selective and kind of abusive, about who they let learn the secrets. The long, seemingly pointless exercises one had to go through to learn obscure art X were basically tests of loyalty and efforts to instill loyalty.

Re: Sri Lanka’s ancient, almost lost martial art

#18

Post by throwmaway99 »

wtmt wrote: post #11
throwmaway99 wrote: post #3

As a Sri Lankan it breaks my heart whenever this type of topic is brought up, the amount of damage colonizers including the British did to my country, my culture is just heart wrenching. How the British and other colonizers go unpunished for all what they have done not just to my country, but to so many other countries in the past is just unbelievable. But on a more positive side, more and more Sri Lankans are starti…

> How the British and other colonizers go unpunished for all what they have done It’s rare for such large scale oppressors to be punished in their times. Do you see parallels with what the majority Sinhalese in Sri Lanka has done to the minority Tamil population for decades?

Yes and no. The civil war that waged in Sri Lanka was something really complicated, where at one point it was hard to choose who was right or wrong in the conflict.

As far as I know the Sinhalese started the whole civil war but the LTTE escalated the situation where they were committing atrocities I cannon't write on a forum like this. And mind you, both sides committed some pretty messed up atrocities.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberation_Tigers_of_Tamil_Eel...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_attacks_on_civilians_a...

After the war ended despite what's been told in international media, as a Sri Lankan who represent an ethnic minority there I can say I feel safer now, people have seem to forgotten about the war to some extend and there's a lot of healing that is being done (no thanks to the government though) personally I remember a time when we took different buses to school/work even if we were all heading in the same direction incase one of the busses were attacked by the terrorists we wont lose both parents in the family. There was a lot of mistrust and a lot of divide among everyone even in school you had different ethnic groups hanging out with their own ethnicity. But now we have a more diverse groups of friends we have businessmen, politicians and other elites in society that represent different ethnic groups.

There's a lot of improvements to be made, but I think we as a nation have done really well to rebuild after being enemies for over 30 years.

----

and as for the parallels I haven't heard of stories where the ltte or the army forcing sons to rape their mothers after salting the earth of an entire town like the way the British did. What the British did was wipe out our culture, our history and basically taking away what made Sri Lankan's unique.

Re: Sri Lanka’s ancient, almost lost martial art

#19

Post by stryan »

Angampora is a fascinating martial art, but while British colonialism is/was a scourge across the world there's little evidence that they actually banned the martial art. While I generally don't like to use reddit posts as sources, this one[0] is well researched enough and includes its (long list of) sources that I figured it counts.

[0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/badhistory/comments/kh9gfb/the_brit...

Re: Sri Lanka’s ancient, almost lost martial art

#20

Post by throwmaway99 »

cmrajan wrote: post #2

I could see close parallels with ancient martial art Kalaripayattu [1] practiced in southern Indian state of Kerala. It's very popular and still being practiced there [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalaripayattu

I am not surprised. Sri Lanka shares a lot of culture and history with India. Afterall one of the origin stories of sri lanka is king Vijaya was banished from India and sailed to Sri Lanka where he met the locals then and established the kingdom that later became Sri Lanka.

When I am working abroad and miss home food and I can't find a Sri Lankan shop, I often substitute it with Kerala food, which I believe some of our main dishes are inspired from. Both Kerala food and Sri Lankan food makes heavy use of coconut milk in preparing their dishes.

Post reply on HN