I am extremely happy to be here in the historic and timeless city of Kandy today on the occasion of the opening of the Awareness Seminar and Exhibition on Cultural Connectivity in the context of Sri Lanka, Celebrating Diversity, Shared Cultures and Intangible Heritage. I felicitate the Department of Archaeology of the University of Peradeniya and the UNESCO New Delhi Regional Office on this timely and extremely laudable initiative.

'Awareness, Connectivity, Diversity and Intangible Heritage'. Together, these words are trenchant in terms of the significance of their meaning. They encapsulate in their depth everything we would like the world to become. In another sense, they are the bedrock on which our sustainability as nations is founded. It is in this sense that the UNESCO Universal Declaration on Cultural Diversity of November 2001 states that culture is at the heart of contemporary debates about identity, social cohesion, and the development of the knowledge-based economy. The Declaration makes the significant point that cultural diversity widens the range of options available to everyone; it is one of the roots of development, understood not simply in terms of economic growth, but also as a means to achieve a more satisfactory intellectual, emotional, moral and spiritual existence.

Reading through the explanatory notes relating to the Conference, provided to me so kindly by Professor Sudarshan Seneviratne, I was struck by the observation contained therein that, and I quote, 'contraction of cultural spaces through globalization and the need to reorient the existing mindset from the narrow spectrum compartmentalized time, space and cultural rubric is an imperative'. Further, that archaeology and heritage studies are 'perhaps the best avenues that could rectify the process of cultural plurality and demythifying all forms of parochialisms in a scientific manner and place alternative histories before the next generation for a better and rational understanding of the past.' I could not help but agree with the observation made in the document that the 'mindset must be reoriented beyond the mono country and monoculture and be exposed to cross-regional and cross-cultural horizons.' And, that there is a need for a convergence of all stakeholders - the state, the private sector, school children, other professionals, the clergy and the public and international organizations in this exercise. That is what this current Seminar, the Exhibition and the connected activities set out to do, and I sincerely appreciate this noteworthy effort.

Some years ago, the Indian writer Amitav Ghosh talked in his Neelam Thiruchelvam Memorial Lecture in July 2001, of an 'archipelago of hope', creating those sanctuaries that remain 'stubbornly open to the flow of opinions, stubbornly hospitable to imagined enemies, stubbornly resistant to the floodwaters that seek to grind all forms of life into uniform grades of sand'. And here, in the many storied isle of Serendib, we must build those archipelagos of hope, regain that happiness, that insight, and allow ourselves to become whole again.

The interpretation of history is the subject of interminable debate in our societies, both in India and Sri Lanka. Through that interpretation we draw maps of the present and the future, and sometimes we encounter fault lines and fissures. Very often, as Salman Rushdie observes, we work with a 'broken glass', since in his words, 'we are not gods, but wounded creatures, cracked lenses, capable only of fractured perceptions. Partial beings in all the senses of that phrase.' The struggle of memory against forgetting, which Milan Kundera speaks of, is our constant companion.

We are constantly alerted by the more thoughtful and sensitive among us against the adoption of ghetto mentalities, which Rushdie calls the biggest elephant trap, and the pitfalls of defining ourselves within narrowly defined cultural frontiers. We must not go into internal exile, forgetting the world beyond, the connectivity that ties us to our common cultural space beyond the confines of imagined histories. We must open the universe a little more. Cross pollination of minds, ideas, the freedom of debate, the jousting of ideas - that should be our goal. It should be our goal not to create outsiders in our midst. Those inner frontiers within minds, those arterial blocks need to be cleared. Let us create what Carlos Fuentes called 'the privileged arena' in which great debates can be conducted.

What does the historical sense involve? To me, history is not just a construction of the past, it must create awareness of that collective heritage that is imprinted on our DNA, our bones as South Asians, that common heritage from Gandhara to Galle, that we are more than the sum of our many parts. T.S. Eliot, whom I will quote from more than once in these remarks, said '..the historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence, the historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order.' Furthermore, we must understand that the relationship between the past and the present is complex, and is not as simple as it seems, and neither can we compartmentalize this relationship in some fit of myopia.

How many of us are aware of the fact that Greek civilization was known originally to have roots in Egyptian, Semitic, and various other southern and eastern cultures, and that it was redesigned as 'Aryan' during the course of the nineteenth century, its Semitic and African roots either actively purged or hidden from view? So too, with our own histories, whether it is the linkage between southern India and Sri Lanka, or the fact that India's past before the Muslim invasions, was not merely Hindu, but strongly Buddhist and Jain for many centuries.

If there is a theory of liberation that we must internalize it is that culture, and all the ideologies that surround us, have what Edward Said called 'a complex genealogy'. We are liberated when we learn to be generous about these human realities of the cultures, the communities, the neighbourhoods which we populate. Let me quote from a beautiful passage from Said on this subject: 'No one today is purely one thing. Labels like Indian, or woman, or Muslim, or American are not more than starting-points...No one can deny the persisting continuities of long traditions, sustained habitations, national languages, and cultural geographies, but there seems no reason except fear and prejudice to keep insisting on their separation and distinctiveness, as if that was all human life was about. Survival is in fact about the connection between things, ... reality cannot be deprived of 'the other echoes [that] inhabit the garden'.

We can, as Ananda Coomaraswamy once noted, become windows on each other's past, our souls reflected in each other. This is particularly relevant when it comes to the case of India and Sri Lanka. I came across an article by the American naturalist, Dillon Ripley, the other day that referred to the age-old bridge between India and Ceylon, and the flora and fauna we share from Assam and the Brahmaputra basin through Kerala to Sri Lanka and the Malay Peninsula. This then is the story of convergence, or a step pyramid of coalescent histories, common origins and shared affinities. This is the history, the 'muffled footsteps' of which, to use the words of Rabindranath Tagore, beat in our blood. That convergence and the ability to speak of it, and speak beyond it, should be the source from which we draw our strength.

Each one of us then, is composed of many identities - our identity as members of pluralist societies. Shashi Tharoor once noted that India can only be spoken of in the plural. The pluralism of my country is confirmed by its history, its geography and by its ethnography. I believe that plurality of existence defines the civilizational ethos of Sri Lanka also, in a Sri Lankan sense, in a manner that is uniquely Sri Lankan. Like India, this country's is a map of many migrations, of wars lost and won, victor and vanquished, and ethnicities that have coexisted for centuries. Our uniqueness as countries derives from such plurality.

The idea and the vision of unity within diversity is the idea of India, it is, I believe, also the idea of Sri Lanka. And through this warp, we must introduce the weft of connectivity, of overlapping identities, to show that we are as Tagore once said, 'a confluence' of cultures. And this cloth has to be dyed in what else but communication. Communication that respects the distinctiveness of cultures, their heterogeneity. Here in your country, every community derives interesting facets to its own identity by the imprint of interaction with the other groups that reside on the island. And, that has come about through communication, through creative interaction, which results in each person possessing many, even myriad identities just as we Indians possess.

Amartya Sen notes that while we cannot live without history, we need not live in it either. Our faculties of reasoning, of exercising rational choice over what facets of history integrate rather than separate us, and understanding the numerous phases and epochs of history that have created the cultural space in which we live must operate constantly. Thus, the need for an inclusionary view of our identities - I am a born Malayalee, but my formative years were shaped faraway from my birthplace in places like Pune, Lucknow, and Aurangabad. I am married into a Tulu and Kannada speaking family from Udupi that traces their origin to a great migration of Kashmiri Brahmins who came down the west coast of India to escape military invasions in their place of origin. My own heritage is Nair, and matriarchal but I belong to a state that was almost the most globalized of all of India's regions, trading with the Levant, to which the Arabs, the Romans and the Portuguese came. From where do I draw my identity? From all these influences that have shaped my past and my present and which guide me to my future.

So let us hold fast, in spite of divisions and angularities, let us go on trying. Let me end with the words of T.S. Eliot - these lines are from The Dry Salvages:

'- Right action is freedom
From past and future also
For most of us, this is the aim
Never here to be realized;
Who are only undefeated
Because we have gone on trying'.

I thank you all.