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The show that explores what makes Sri Lanka Sri Lankan.
The Bogeyman I Meeting Monsters in Sri Lanka
What might make you scream loudest in the lonesome depths of a long Sri Lankan night?
Fear has many mothers.
There are any number of phobias to get you going - though Social Phobia – that fear of being judged in social settings- probably heads the pack.
There is also a growing cohort of popular emotional worries. Fear of failure, of the unknown, of rejection, abandonment, and under-recognition.
But the gold standard fears, the best of the bunch by far, are the primal ones. Fear of being trapped or paralysed. Of being mutilated - and the Goliath of all fears – the extinction fear of annihilation
The nicest fear by far is recreational fear. Safe in your own special space, you can divert your survival instincts into fun. You can pet the monsters.
Whilst no one yet born has shown any reluctance to raise their own monsters before them, they are at least homegrown, foisted in the primordial soup of one's own idle unconsciousness. A drill sergeant would merely get on with it; you’ve only yourself to blame.
It’s the ones that come from without – not within – that are really to be feared. And here Sri Lanka enjoys a febrile club of fiends and devils to challenge all others.
They don't feature on sightseeing maps, nor are you likely to encounter them in the country’s ever busier clubs and restaurants, but they're well worth getting to know if you really want to get under the skin of life here. As Susan Sontag put it, “I haven't been everywhere, but it's on my list.”
And near the top of the list on this island is undoubtedly the Goni Billa – known more colloquially as gunny-sack monster or kidnapper.
There are no agreed depictions of him, but he is often pictured as a tall, dark creature standing on two legs, with a mane of black hair, Marilyn Monroe-esque red lips, and a long red tongue dripping with some liquid you would be wise not to inquire too deeply about.
Like most sack kidnappers - the label being largely interchangeable with any number of sack siblings in other countries – the Goni Billa was the go-to tool for frustrated parents bent on getting their errant children to do something they would rather not.
Behave badly, the warning would go, and the Goni Billa will come in the night and snatch you away in his gunny sack.
Historians date the monster to around 100 CE and, with plausible arguments, link it to a rather unsatisfactory period in Indo-Sri Lankan relations.
South Asia was then being rocked by the antics of Karikala the Great, the grandest of the early Chola kings of South India. Committed to safeguarding his growing kingdom's food security, the king sought to irrigate a vast new tract of arid land, but to do so he needed to build a canal and dam, and for that he required labour.
For this, the king turned his gaze south, invaded Sri Lanka, then, under the ineffective rule of Vankana sika Tissa – literally “crooked-nose Tissa,” and carried off some 12,000 Sinhalese prisoners of war. His efforts paid off; a massive 1,000-foot-long, 60-foot-high dam was built, and a great canal was cut to move water. The king's side reward was to be remembered forever in Sri Lankan folklore as the kidnapper, or bag snatcher.
And there he stuck, transformed forever into a scare weapon for parents, until 1987, when his name took on something altogether new, a much more horrifying meaning – one that has led to the term Goni Billa being largely discounted for the purposes of mere child discipline.
For in 1987 Sri Lanka was rocked by a second wave of Marxist-Leninist insurrections; and this one, like the first barely 10 years earlier, almost brought the government to collapse.
The rebellion was driven as much by objections to the Colombo government's peace accord with India to calm the civil war in the north of the island as by rage over unemployment and economic injustice, especially among the young.
No one has yet credibly counted the casualties in this conflict, but estimates are well into the 6-figure range. As paramilitary groups took over enforcing what they thought ought to be government policy, masked informants were used to identify possible JVP members. Inevitably, given the masked face, the informants were called the Goni Billa. With a nod from the Goni Billa, the JVP suspect would be dispatched for interrogation, and all too often, permanent disappearance.
Since then, the phrase has been coined to describe any politically motivated threat politicians make to scare the public into their way of thinking. After the Easter bombings, when the Muslim minority endured significant harassment, it was even used to denigrate Muslim women who wore the face-covering abaya. Small wonder, then, that Sri Lankan parents have largely stopped using the phrase with their children.
Growing up across the Palk Straits in nearby Madras, I had my own local version of the Goni Billa – the Poochandi or bogyman. “Crossing seven seas, crossing seven mountains, the Poochandi will come, the Poochandi will come.”
My ayah chanted this frequently to make me more biddable. She even added several extra features guaranteed to enhance his menace.
He was, she convinced me, a half-human, half-river monster, damp and rather green, and he lived beneath the bed. In my mutinous mind he was forever there, waiting to grab my bare ankles as I came to bed; to pull me through the window and across the dark city into the stinking river nearby. Terror lay always within reach.
And ensuring that terror is always to hand, Sri Lanka’s Goni Billa has a sizable family of like-minded fiends. Although the Goni Billa hints at blood, he does not swim in it as a great monster should.
Instead, Sri Lanka relies on its other great demon, the Riri Yaka who, like may bad things in Sri Lanka is seen as originating from India.
Like most monsters, the Riri Yaka is found lurking near graveyards, his appearance making him nightmarishly unforgettable. He has 4 arms, a monkey's face, and blood-red skin to match his bloodshot eyes.
His particular malign speciality is to give humans a range of blood-related illnesses, including haemorrhages and such dreadful sufferings as the Sri Lankan poet Anne Ranasinghe might have had in mind when she wrote – “I tell her what I know / Is not true, that life / Is always better than death”.
Two other island monsters dedicate themselves almost exclusively to women.
The black prince – the Kalu Kuma raya – could come straight from the pages of a torrid one-rupee romance. Sporting a crown, glittering in jewels, this particular dark lord also wears a rich set of very royal clothes and is impressively handsome, albeit in a rather caddish way. He preys on young women, brides and new mothers. Most illnesses caused by pregnancy are put down to him, but also a range of other feminine complications.
Historians have traced his lineage back to Prince Nilaya, fathered on the wrong side of the blanket by King Gotabhaya, one of Anuradhapura's more severe rulers. For him, as for Frank Sinatra, everything had be done “my way.” Certainly he brooked no nonsense from his offspring, and the prince, coming off the worst in a paternal power struggle, took his own life, returning, understandably disgruntled, to the land of his birth to continue to cause trouble.
Kinduri – the second woman-only monster – is a marginally less harmful ghost who wanders villages disguised as a pregnant woman, knocking on doors. If the door is answered by another woman, she simply vanishes, but should the man of the house open the door, she will, of course, kill him.
There are no real-life examples of this sort of extreme feminism unless you count the case of Valerie Solanas, founder of the Society for Cutting Up Men. She famously shot and critically wounded Andy Warhol at his New York studio in 1968. Warhol survived the encounter, proving true what the Sri Lankan writer Michael Ondaatje noted in The English Patient: "Nothing will kill you, my friend. You are pure carbon."
But Sri Lanka’s most fearsome monster is the Maha Sona.
This demon also lurks around graveyards, a giant who lost his head in a fight with another giant and replaced it with a bear’s head, though it's sometimes shown as a tiger.
Fortified by an army of 30,000 lesser demons, the Maha Sona has a wide range of life-terminating skills, including killing humans with his hand, leaving behind an embossed mark on their flesh. For him, as for the Sri Lankan writer Suren De Saram, “‘Everything’s just a distraction from death.” His marksmanship inspired the Sri Lankan Army's Long Range Reconnaissance Patrol units who are nicknamed the "Maha Sohon Brigade.”
But the Maha Sona’s disease-spreading skill is the thing to most fear. He is held responsible for most outbreaks of cholera and dysentery.
He can also possess people – a skill which demands the immediate attention of professional exorcists. In these ceremonies, the exorcist dresses up as the Maha Sona, dances, and conducts a series of well-honed exorcisms to free the tormented soul.
The monster has an impeccable pedigree, mentioned as one of the 10 great giant soldiers at King Duttha Gamani's right hand when he raised an army to kill the Chola king Elara, who had invaded Sri Lanka from India and ruled from Anuradhapura with the wisest council.
Curiously, in one small part of the south near Galle, the Maha Sona is seen with great kindness; the exorcists believe he is not inherently evil, but a creature that needs healing, not banishment. Their tactic is to joke with him and play cards as they go about their business and they claim that the suffering parent would be quite well in the morning. Sadly, most of these exorcists from the Berawaya caste died in the 2004 tsunami, so this is exorcist sub-strain is now almost extinct.,
It was perhaps a tiger-headed version of the maha sona that troubled me whenever I stayed at the Ooty Club over the sea in the Indian Nilgiris. Ooty sits within rolling blue hills, amidst sprawling dak bungalows, tribal villages, the rambling homes of retired colonels and administrators, mansions of ancient families from Madras, Mysore and Bangalore, lush botanical gardens, the fox hunt, trout streams, tea plantations.
Very few tigers still inhabit its hills – the last one being killed in 2014 after a gap of many decades, blamed for devouring three women, a man, and several buffaloes over a two-week gourmet rampage.
Tigers of any sort, demon or otherwise were the last thing on the minds of the ladies sitting in the club, drinking gin, playing mahjong, golfing, and hunting - though the foxes had long since been eaten by jackals.
Yet all around the club walls hung enormous tiger pelts, creating a terrifying morning rite of passage as I moved from bedroom to breakfast, passing through a taxidermist's delight.
Head down and moving at speed, I endured my daily tribulation until one day, the club secretary spotted me. The secretary – something of a secret exorcist – had a pelt brought down for me to touch. I gazed into its marble eyes, noticed white fly eggs hatching across the pelt's surface, and – of course - overcame my fear.
The club was built on sacred land belonging to the remarkable matrilineal Todas, a tribe that lives in enchanted thatched conical houses, speaks a language quite separate from anything else, and wears wraps of fantastic embroidery.
As a culture, they have much to offer the rest of the world, not least Sri Lanka, shivering with demon fear – for the Toda have no concept whatsoever of malevolent devils. Their animistic world is populated only by good things, kindly ancestors, hundreds of nature-associated deities, and sacred, well-meaning buffaloes.
They have much to teach the last of Sri Lanka’s monsters, the Kola Sanni, a creature so spiteful it created 18 sub-demons to make people suffer more.
This particular monster is the supreme king of illnesses, unexpectedly born at the very moment when his mother was executed for suspected adultery.
Given such a start, the infant had little chance of turning out right. To survive, the Kola Sanni ate his mother, and to avenge her, created 18 disease-bearing demons. As the myths put it, it took all the persuasive powers of Lord Buddha to convince the Kola Sanni to permit exorcisms that might repair the devastation caused by his 18 little ogres.
Out of this threat emerged the country's famous Sanni Yakuma Rituals. These all-night affairs are still prevalent today - in the south and west of the island.
Each of the 18 demons is responsible for a specific illness.
There is one each for insanity of the spiritual or non-spiritual variety, and one each for delirium and insanity. Deafness, dumbness, and blindness all have their own monsters. Fevers, flatulence, epilepsy, and lameness also merit their own dismal ogre, as does vomiting, worms, boils and bilious diseases. Epidemics of all sorts fall under the remit of just one: the Deva Sanniya. Bad dreams about snakes have a devil all to themselves- the Naga Sanniya
But no survey of monsters would be complete without a brief mention of Sri Lanka’s more recent devils. And as the country emerges from the less obvious consequences of its civil war, it is much more able to confront these more literal, real–time, non–mythical monsters - its mafia mobsters.
These are – or are now increasingly “were” – creators of fear - random underworld killers, financed by drug trafficking, and secured by criminal protection rackets.
With a civil war to worry about, it is no surprise that such crime syndicates spread, most memorably depicted in the Booker-winning The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida, quite possibly the best novel ever to have won that prize.
Yet today the villains are encountering very invigorated police and legal proceedings, with notable crooks being fetched back from Dubai, Oman, Nepal, Malaysia and winkled out of upcountry hideouts to face court and lengthy imprisonment. 'We will,” said the country’s President, Anura Dissanayake, recently, “completely dismantle the links between organised crime networks and politics.'
But they are ghouls with legs of clay by comparison.
Long before the last of them are locked up, people will have forgotten them. They never had the glamorous, terrifying names of the true monsters of myth either, preferring monikers such as Imtiaz, the slippery banana; Disabled Upali; Kumara Eggplant; and Whitey Suda. As Lord Buddha is said to have said – “Three things can not hide for long: the Moon, the Sun and the Truth.”