by Tyron Devotta
By any measure, Chevan Daniel is best known as a media professional. As head of the media umbrella that includes Sirasa, Shakthi & News 1st under the Capital Maharaja Organisation, he has spent decades shaping how Sri Lankans consume news, current affairs and entertainment.
But away from the studios and newsroom, Daniel inhabits a quieter, more contemplative space. Here, he is an investigator of Sri Lanka’s forgotten past—particularly those strands of history that lie outside the neat timelines of textbooks and official chronicles. It is from this vantage point that he turns his attention to one of the island’s most contested figures: Ravana.
A Civilization We Barely Acknowledge
“For some reason,” Daniel says, “Sri Lankan historians and archaeologists seem almost embarrassed to speak about what could be called a Ravana civilization.”
That hesitation, he argues, reveals a deeper problem. Sri Lanka’s history (as it is commonly taught) is narrow, political, and incomplete. It privileges certain origin stories while quietly discarding others. The result is a civilisational narrative that begins too late and explains too little.
“We are told our civilisation began a few thousand years ago, essentially with Vijaya,” Daniel notes. “That alone should trouble us. It discounts, almost casually, the existence of rich and complex cultures that must have existed long before. This fact is acknowledged in the Mahavamsa as well.”
The Politics of History
Daniel is careful not to frame this as a conspiracy, but as a pattern. Across the world, history has often been written to serve power—colonial power, religious authority, or ancient political legitimacy. Heroes and villains are selected, inconvenient details ignored.
To illustrate this, he points beyond Sri Lanka. “We all grew up believing the pyramids of Egypt were tombs,” he says. “Yet no confirmed royal mummy has ever been found inside a pyramid. Recent muon tomography and other non-invasive geophysical survey techniques, including limited ground-penetrating radar and micro-gravimetric studies, have revealed previously unknown internal voids and density anomalies within and beneath some pyramids—findings that significantly complicate the conventional narrative”.
“If such extensively studied Egyptian history and archaeology can still be so misunderstood,” Daniel asks, “why are we so certain we’ve understood our own?”
The Fragility of Archaeological Certainty
This is where Daniel’s critique sharpens. Modern archaeology, he argues, often projects confidence that its methods do not always justify.
“I once asked a very senior archaeologist how Sigiriya was dated to the 5th century AD,” he recalls. “The answer rested largely on a combination of literary sources, pottery typology, and stylistic analysis of the frescoes. While these are accepted archaeological tools, they remain interpretive—raising important questions about how confidently we date structures of such scale and sophistication.”Across the island—from massive stone canals in the east to the layered complexity of ancient stupas; Daniel sees engineering feats that defy easy explanation. Stones cut with extraordinary precision. Water systems spanning hundreds of kilometres. Architectural complexity that appears excessive if these were merely cultural monuments or royal residences.
“Not having answers doesn’t mean we assign them arbitrarily to 1,000 or 2,000 years ago,” he says. “That’s just another form of guesswork we’ve resigned ourselves to accept.”
Ravana as More Than One Man
When asked directly whether Ravana was a single historical figure, Daniel pauses.
“I don’t believe an understanding of Ravana should be limited to a single individual by that name,” he says. “Perhaps it’s wiser to think of it as part of a lost civilization whose memory survives in Lankas folklore, cultural tradition, myths & legends.”
Much of what is “known” about Ravana comes from the Ramayana, yet Daniel points out that there are hundreds of versions of that epic, transmitted orally across centuries. The version most familiar today is only one among many.
“With each retelling, stories shift,” he says. “What we have now is a heavily edited, highly moralised version of a legend that probably doesn’t resemble the origin story itself.”
Oral Tradition vs. Cold Logic
This brings us to a persistent impasse: the tension between oral tradition and empirical science. Archaeology demands evidence. Folklore offers memory.
“The problem,” Daniel argues, “is that archaeology may not yet possess the conceptual tools to recognise technologies or knowledge systems fundamentally different from our own. We often attempt to explain what we do not fully understand using frameworks that were never designed for such complexity. That is why I remain unconvinced by overly tidy explanations for monuments like the great pyramids — explanations that reduce extraordinary achievements to purely brute-force methods.”
That equation is beginning to change. LiDAR has already revealed entire urban systems hidden beneath forests in South America and Asia, while advances in scanning and AI-assisted analysis are opening lines of inquiry unthinkable even a decade ago. “We’re likely to face not just new questions,” Daniel says, “but uncomfortable answers—answers that force us to rewrite what we thought we knew.”
A Shared, Connected Past
Daniel believes this re-examination has implications far beyond academia. Sri Lanka’s modern divisions, ethnic, religious, political —appear increasingly absurd when viewed against a deeper civilisational backdrop.
“Ravana appears as a deity in traditions in both the North and the South,” he notes, pointing to rituals in Jaffna and the deep south alike. “This suggests a shared cultural inheritance. Not division.”
If Sri Lankans can accept that their roots lie in a complex, multi-ethnic civilisation that long predates later arrivals and rigid identities, Daniel believes it could change how the country understands itself.
“Our story hasn’t been told,” he says, simply, “because we don’t yet know it.”
What remains, then, is not a definitive answer to who, or what, Ravana was, but an invitation: to question inherited certainties, to bridge science and tradition, and to approach Sri Lanka’s past not as a closed book, but as a living, unfinished inquiry.
Chevan Daniel is a senior media professional and the head of the media umbrella of the Capital Maharaja Organisation, which includes News 1st, one of Sri Lanka’s most influential multimedia news platforms. With decades of experience in journalism, broadcasting, and media leadership, he has played a central role in shaping contemporary news culture in the country.
Beyond his public-facing media career, Daniel is a deeply private researcher of Sri Lanka’s long and largely unexplored civilisational history. His interests lie particularly in pre-Vijayan Sri Lanka, ancient water and irrigation systems, folklore, and the layers of cultural memory that survive outside formal historical narratives. He is especially drawn to regions traditionally associated with the Ravana legacy, where myth, oral tradition, landscape, and lived culture intersect.
Daniel spends much of his personal time in the foothills of Lakegala, in a village long embedded in Ravana-related folklore. There, he adopts an observational approach rather than an investigative one—listening to local narratives, studying the environment, and allowing landscape and silence to inform his understanding of the past. His engagement with history is shaped as much by ecology and lived tradition as by texts and theory.
Through his writing, conversations, and quiet fieldwork, Chevan Daniel advocates for a more open-minded re-examination of Sri Lanka’s past—one that acknowledges the limits of current archaeological certainty, respects oral tradition, and recognizes the island as the product of a far older, interconnected civilisation than commonly acknowledged.