From the 35th Conference on South Asia - University of Wisconsin:
http://southasiaconference.wisc.edu/

Pieris, Anoma
The Messenger Birds of Jayawardhanapura: Evaluating Early National
Consciousness

During the 15th and 16th centuries the capital city of
Jayawardhanapura, Kotte, in Sri Lanka emerged as the
center of Sinhalese literary efflorescence. It was also the starting
point for a colonizing project that would
unify the island under Sinhala Buddhist kingship by incorporating the
northern Tamil kingdom of Jaffna. This
paper uses the Sandesha Kavyas, message poems that traced the journeys
of birds across the island's
landscape to map the political geography of the Sinhala State. Modeled
on the Mega Duta, these poems
carved a path from the kingdom's capital to its periphery as its bird
messengers journeyed across forests,
fields, rivers, over port cities, and remote places of worship until
they delivered the message to incumbent
monks in specific Buddhist temples. Its history was circulated through
Ola leaf manuscripts, an early form of
print capitalism, painstakingly copied by junior monks in village
temples and recited in the oral tradition.
Embedded in these narratives was a pre-colonial national consciousness
constructed against an ethnic
other. Using familiar theories of nationalism as its starting point
this paper examines the nature of Sinhala
and Tamil ethnic identity during the Kotte period evaluating arguments
of ethnic hybridity against ideas of
racial difference.