Politics keeping Lanka from helping Tibet

A FREEDOM fighter, he was known as Tibet Jathika S Mahinda, though his original name was Tasilmgal. He came to Sri Lanka from the Sikkim-Tibet region in 1912 as a 14-year-old destitute.

He preferred to identify with Tibet instead of Sikkim because Tibet was better known among Sri Lankans. Ordained as a Buddhist monk of the Theravada tradition after his arrival in Sri Lanka, he mastered the local language and woke the sleeping Sinhala masses up by his powerful poetry which promised them hope and galvanised them into action. This monk from Tibet saw how the Sri Lankan culture and tradition were being swallowed by the fast-spreading western way of life and how the Sinhala Buddhists being converted to Christianity by missionaries from the West.

With his poetic idiom, S Mahinda, a socialist at heart, told the Sri Lankans in general and the Buddhists in particular that the local culture and the tradition were much richer and more meaningful than what was being imposed on them by the colonialists.

Tibet Jathika S Mahinda – meaning S Mahinda the Tibet national – was indeed a true Sri Lankan national hero at a time when our efforts to gain freedom, not by violent means but by negotiations with the Brits, were led by the West-aping men in top hats and tailcoats.

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