Martin Wickramasinghe (1890-1976), often called the Bard of Sri Lanka, had a long writing career spanning many decades and was also concerned with the dynamics of the changing village in Ceylon (as Sri Lanka was called until 1972). Along with Ediraweera Sarachandra, Wickramasinghe was at the forefront of literary realism in the 20^th century: his book Landmarks of Sinhalese Literature (1948) established a pioneering model of criticism for social realism that was to influence several writers for many decades in Sri Lanka. It was a model that tied in with Wickramasinghe's anti-colonial politics and one of the central essays in Landmarks was on The Jātakas upon which Wickramasinghe drew in order to examine the modes of realistic writing that he felt best represented Ceylonese life and culture. And yet, it is a curious paradox that, in his own novels, Wickramasinghe never employed the kind of realism he extolled in The Jātakas, taking for his own model the psychological realism of European masters, especially the Russians. What explains this paradoxical approach to social realism as a representational mode? Indeed, how does one examine the question of Wickramasinghe's literary style which straddles the European and the Ceylonese? This article explores Wickramasinghe’s own discussion of specific Jātaka tales in order to understand what constituted for him the locus vivendi of Sinhala literature in the middle of the last century. It is a template that provides a compelling counterpoint to the adaptive examples one finds in India, where The Jātakas remained at the peripheries of the question of realism. Instead, in Indian literatures (in English as well as Hindi and Malayalam, two of the more established vernacular languages), realism took on very different functions. This article attempts to create an orbital reading of these multiple traditions bearing upon the pivotal legacies of The Jātakas.