Tuesday, June 7, 2011

Ancient art of fighting and self defence in sri lanka (a.k.a Angampora)

When someone says the "Art of fighting", anyone will definitely get a picture of Chinese fighting techniques such as "Kung Fu" or "Thai-chi". If you are a fan of martial arts movies, you will also think of techniques such as "Samurai", "Aikido" or karate. All these arts of fighting involves either hand to hand combat or using weapons and they were primarily invented for self defense. Even if you look at the western world there are many techniques. What i am going to tell you now is a technique that is less known to the world, and kept as a closely guarded secret form of martial arts among ancient sri lankan islanders. The technique might share some of the weapons that is used in indian fighting techniques but most of it is unique to Sri Lanka. This sri lankan technique of fighting is called "Angampora" in sinhala language. This ancient form of fighting not only consist of hand to hand and weapon fighting, it also has ways of using mystical magical powers and energies to put down their opponents. According to what i have come across, angampora fighting technique is not thought to everyone but only to a chosen person can be a apprentice, the ancient masters feared that this lethal fighting method will fall in to wrong hands, So the apprentices are chosen carefully by doing a mystical ceremony to ensure that he or she has a heart of pure good. Even to this day, very small number of people still practice and keep the ancient tradition alive. Here are some pictures of angampora which i received, so i thought i would share it on my blog.

These pictures will show you some demonstrations of the practice as well as before the apprentices start their daily routine of practice, they begin it with a Buddhism oriented ceremony.

If you are interested in "Angampora" you can search for this sri lankan drama named "Dadubasnamanaya" which was shown in early 90's in sri lankan television. It will give a complete idea of what it is plus a deep story about two families who knows this technique of fighting and mastered it.
































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