Vilpaththuwa Lyrics by Chitral Somapala

An eagle tearing flesh from the living,
elephant calves, gentle as a temple,
guarding our Sinhala land from a three-wheeler,
we are driven out of Wilpattu.

What is this craving that eats away Wilpattu?
A trail of dust running on without a breath,
a life… a bit of greatness,
a plot of land, a house, every tree and leaf.
From Wilpattu……….
to a sheet of fire………ee…..
From Wilpattu……….
to a sheet of fire………ee…..

Wild creatures now wander through the city,
the great forest, and the nation too, are ablaze,
even at the roadside the bodhisattvas reached their end,
Wilpattu, cut and cut, fenced and carved away.
What is this craving that eats away Wilpattu?
A trail of dust running on without a breath,
a life… a bit of greatness,
a plot of land, a house, every tree and leaf.
From Wilpattu……….
to a sheet of fire………ee…..
From Wilpattu……….
to a sheet of fire………ee…..

This is a protest song about Wilpattu, Sri Lanka’s largest and oldest national park, a vast stretch of dry-zone forest in the north that is home to leopards, elephants, and the chain of natural lakes (the “willus”) that give the park its name. The song is the cry of the forest and its animals against the clearing and parceling out of that protected land, and the greed the singer sees behind it.

The opening lines drop you straight into the violence of it. An eagle tearing flesh from something still alive is the forest being stripped while it still breathes, and against that he sets the tenderness of elephant calves, “gentle as a temple,” to remind you what is being lost. The image of guarding the land from a three-wheeler is bitter and ordinary at once: the small, everyday Sri Lankan trying to protect something far bigger than himself, while bulldozers and powerful interests do the cutting. By the fourth line the animals, and with them the singer, are simply “driven out.”

The heart of the song is the question in the chorus: what is this craving that eats away Wilpattu? He answers it with the small, human wants that add up to the destruction, a plot of land, a house, a little status, “a bit of greatness,” every tree and leaf claimed by someone. It is the hunger for land and standing, “running on without a breath,” that turns a forest into cleared ground. Then comes the wordplay the whole song turns on. In Sinhala “Wilpattu” and “Ginipattu” sound almost the same, but “gini” means fire, so the park’s own name is twisted into “a sheet of fire.” Wilpattu becomes a burning thing.

The last verse carries the loss to its end. Wild animals wander into the city because they have nowhere left, the great forest and the nation itself are spoken of as one thing on fire, and at the roadside “the bodhisattvas reached their end,” a Buddhist way of saying the gentle creatures died on the new roads, their deaths given the dignity of beings on the path to enlightenment. Wilpattu is “cut and cut, fenced and carved away.” What the listener is left holding is grief and anger at once, the sense that in clearing a forest for land and houses we are setting fire to something sacred, and to ourselves.