This concerns the revised syllabuses (2002) for the External Degree Programme of the University of Sri Jayawardanapura. According to this document there are four English medium subjects that may be offered for the First Examination in Arts, viz.

English I English Literature

English II English Language

English III Classical Literature

English IV ELT Methodology

I wish to draw the attention of all those who recognize and respect the basic right of the Sinhala majority of this country to assert and perpetuate their ethnic and cultural identity, a right that the other communities also enjoy, to the inclusion of The Mahavansa (Chapters VI - XIV) translated by W. Geiger as a prescribed text for Paper II under English III - Classical Literature. The prescription of The Mahavansa for this exam is nothing wrong, but what is objectionable is its classification as mythology!

To explain this a little further, Paper II under Classical Literature is sub-titled "An Introduction to Mythology". The obviously half-baked English ‘scholars’ who drew up this syllabus have also prescribed Herdotus’ Histories and Thucydides’ The Pelopennesian War among other similar texts under "Greek and Roman History’’ for Paper II of the same subject (ie English III - Classical Literature) for the B.A. General Degree Part II. So, for these malicious anti-Sinhala ersatz academics’ The Mahavansa is pure mythology, but the works of Herodotus, Thucydides and others history.

Now the truth is that as history The Mahavansa is not totally is fiction. Much of it/corroborated by epigraphical and literary evidence, although it clearly contains occasional poetic embellishments. The validity of the Greek and Latin works prescribed as history is much more tenuous than that of The Mahavansa because their authors have given freer rein to imagination. Yet to the warped ‘judgement’ of the Sri Jayawardanapura ‘professors ‘ (ie of racism, not of English or Classics) Herodotus is a serious historian, but Mahanama, the author of The Mahavansa, is a frivolous mythopoeist.

They seem to imply that the Sinhalese who built up such a marvelous civilization in this island have no provable history, and that their past is only a myth. It is a cruel irony inflicted on the Sinhala people that the University of Sri Jayawardanapura which developed from the Vidyodaya Pirivena, one of the two pioneer seats of oriental learning and centres of patriotic awakening, now harbours this kind of cynical mythomaniacs who want to obliterate our history by degrading it as just mythology.
W. Ranaweera
Kandy