Historians like Romilla Thappar are biased to the core and are Hindu bashing persons. I saw her article on The Hindu, in which she asserts that the Lanka mentioned in the epic Ramayana is not the present SriLanka. In her article she conveniently omits the places mentioned in Ramayana in far south, for instance, Sabarimala in Kerala, where Sabari(who was given salvation by Lord , Ram) lived ,Rameswaram in Tamil Nadu which is the starting point of the sethu(bridge) where Lord Rama installed a Shiva Linga and worshipped. River Pampa, which flowed alongside the Monkey Kingdom of Kishkintha . Also there is no mention of the Srilankan epic Mahavamsa dating back to 200 years before the time of Asoka the Mauryan, during the times of King Vijaya of Lanka. The ancient capital of Sri Lanka was Anuradhapura. There is definitely sanskrit names and influences in the island before the times of Emperor Asoka and also mention of Lanka in Mahavamsa which narrates the history of the island before Asoka's times. Just because King Vijaya (500 BCE?) named the island Tamraparni and in one Asokan inscription the island was called Tamraparni one cannot conclude that the island's name was Tamraparni and not Lanka. So people who blame some historians as biased and proponents of Hindutwa must know the real face of these kind of Hindu bashing historians too.
