“As I was coming away, a wild buffalo came to gore me. Afterwards, loosening the buffalo’s two horns [I brought them away]. These indeed are the two horns.” He told her all the matters.
Then his mother said, “Son, except that you have said that word to me, do not say it for anyone else to hear;” and having cooked several kinds of cakes, and milk-rice, gave them to Hiṭihāmi the Giant to eat.
North-western Province.
This story differs from nearly all the others in being almost certainly based on a considerable statum of fact. Apparently, it is the exaggerated tradition about a very strong man who defeated a celebrated Indian wrestler at Kandy. The story also gives more details concerning the village cultivations than any others I have met with.
Perhaps it is not the only record of this Hiṭihāmi. Among the names of the deified chiefs of ancient times, termed Baṇḍāra, there is one called Hiṭi Baṇḍāra, who is said to have lived at a village called Gōkaraella, twelve miles north-east of Kurunāegala. It is possible that he is the hero of this story; but as the names of the villages are different there is considerable doubt regarding it. There was a village called Andara-waewa (in the Wanni Hat-pattu district of the North-western Province) which was abandoned some centuries ago, the field and village tank having become overgrown with jungle and forest.
As Kandy was founded early in the fourteenth century, according to the manuscript Pradhāna nuwarawal, the story may record events of the fourteenth, fifteenth, or possibly the sixteenth century, A.D.
[1] Kurahan, the Tamil kurakkan, the Indian rāgi (Eleusine coracana). [↑]
[2] A temporary rice-field made inside a village tank, at the edge of the water, after it has lowered considerably and left a tract of rich land exposed. Heavy crops are obtained from such fields, but they involve much labour, as the water for irrigating them must be raised from the level of that in the tank. [↑]