Religion, Space and Conflict in Sri Lanka

Colonial and Postcolonial Contexts

Elizabeth J. Harris

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781351400756
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Ethnic Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Space is dynamic, political and a cause of conflict. It bears the weight of human dreams and fears. Conflict is caused not only by spatial exclusivism but also by an inclusivism that seeks harmony through subordinating the particularity of the Other to the world view of the majority.

This book uses the lens of space to examine inter-religious and inter-communal conflict in colonial and post-colonial Sri Lanka, demonstrating that the colonial can shed light on the post-colonial, particularly on post-war developments, post-May 2009, when Buddhist symbolism was controversially developed in the former, largely non-Buddhist, war zones. Using the concepts of exclusivism and inclusivist subordination, the book analyses the different imaginaries or world views that were present in colonial and post-1948 Sri Lanka, with particular reference to the ethnic or religious Other, and how these were expressed in space, influenced one another and engendered conflict. The book's use of insights from human geography, peace studies and secular iterations of the theology of religions breaks new ground, as does its narrative technique, which prioritizes voices from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and the author's fieldwork and personal observation in the twenty first.

Through utilizing past and contemporary reflections on lived experience, informed by diverse religious world views, the book offers new insights into Sri Lanka's past and present. It will be of interest to an interdisciplinary audience in the fields of colonial and postcolonial studies; war and peace studies; security studies; religious studies; the study of religion; Buddhist Studies, mission studies, South Asian and Sri Lankan studies.

Part I

The British colonial period

1 The spatial component of the Sri Lankan Buddhist imaginary 1590s to 1815

The mythic reason [for Sinhala attachment to the land of Sri Lanka] is that this [Sri Lanka] was the dream land of the Buddha himself.… This was the land where finally the religion of the Buddha was going to be at peace in its Theravāda original form. Constantly there were attempts to sort of get rid of this – annihilate this through invasions and the worst of it all were the three European invasions.

(Fieldwork interview with Jaya)

This quote from one from my fieldwork interviews offers an imaginary that pictures the whole island of Sri Lanka as the possession of both the Buddha and the Sinhala people. It is an envisioning that seems to stretch back to words such as these from the Rājāvaliya, which imply that the Buddha had a unique relationship with Sri Lanka:

And, moreover, from amongst the god-chiefs of the 10,000 worlds, Buddha called the god Ṣakra, who had the care of this blessed Sakwaḷa, and gave the illustrious island of Laṇká into his charge; he also entrusted Prince Vijaya [mythical founder of the Sinhala people believed to have arrived in Sri Lanka on the day the Buddha died] to his care, giving him protective water and thread. The island of Laṇká he entrusted to the god Upulvan; and departed this life.

(The Rājāvaliya; Gunasekera 1954: 15)

This chapter first examines what we know of Sinhala Buddhist consciousness in the Kandyan Kingdom, after it emerged as the bearer and landscaper of Sinhala Buddhist identity in the 1590s, before turning to one example – the poetry of Alagiyavanna Mukaveṭi as examined by Berkwitz – to illustrate models of Sinhala Buddhist consciousness under the Portuguese. Lastly, I comment on the beginning of British rule. My focus is the attribution of meaning to the land of Sri Lanka, and the cosmology, narratives and sense of Sinhalaness that lay behind it, particularly with reference to the inclusion or exclusion of the Other. Key to this is representation of the past, particularly of the Vijaya myth, the founding myth of the Sinhala people, and Sinhala dynastic culture, and the link between both and the land of Sri Lanka (Coomaraswamy 2000: 27–28). To use Kemper’s words, Sinhala consciousness concerns ‘the presence of the past’ in each era of the country’s history (Kemper 1991: 2).

Sinhala Buddhist consciousness in the Kandyan Kingdom (1590s–1815)

In examining Sinhala Buddhist consciousness during the Kandyan Kingdom, I align myself with those who have argued for the existence of a developed sense of difference between Self and Other in the Sinhala Buddhist community, Otherness being constituted not only through ethnicity and religion but also through markers of identity such as caste. In stating this, I am not arguing for a Sinhala Buddhist nationalism at this time, although I agree with Kemper that ‘something – whether one calls it a set of identities, beliefs or practices, a discourse, a relationship between king and clerics – was there, ready to be transformed’ into something like nationalism (Kemper 1991: 17). Rather, I am arguing for a sense of Sinhalaness at this time. Michael Roberts has given us the most comprehensive account of this, contesting studies by post-colonial scholars such as Nissan and Stirrat (Nissan and Stirrat 1987) and Spencer (Spencer 1990), who argued that strong ethnic differentiation was a modernist political development, dependent on the ruptures brought by colonialism (Roberts 2004: 8–10). However, Roberts drew on several earlier works that argued that the apparent porousness of boundaries between different religious practices and ethnic groups in the Kandyan Kingdom was underpinned by the enforcement of a strict hierarchy of the sacred, played out in space, or what I term in this monograph, inclusivist subordination. I turn to these and other complementary perspectives before examining Roberts’s argument in more detail.

Kandy: a landscaped, hierarchical polity

Duncan, a human geographer, was the first contemporary scholar to subject the city of Kandy, when capital of an independent kingdom, to spatial analysis. Its landscape, he argued, ‘was designed to be read as a testimony of the kings’ responsibility as the guardians of Buddhism and to impress the people of the kingdom with the legitimacy and power of their rulers’, as well as the role of the gods. Its ‘symbolic layout’ and its religious symbols, therefore, were ‘metonyms for the power and celestial splendour of the gods’ (Duncan 1990: 59) and mirrored the design of the cosmos. In other words, the relationship between the Buddha, the king and the gods was communicated and enacted through landscaped space, the king as mediator between the gods and the people, and protector of the Buddha’s presence through his relics.¹ Duncan’s study, in effect, argued that the city of Kandy was spatially organized to evoke a cosmic pattern of unity, control and subordination, flowing from the king and the gods, who lay under the ultimate authority of the Buddha. This pattern was mirrored in lay devotional practice, which honoured the Buddha as bearer of ultimate truth and the gods, as mundane protectors, capable of granting mundane blessings.

Duncan’s detailed examination of the Äsala Perahära demonstrates that ritual reinforced this spatial landscaping and devotional practice, visually presenting the King as both the god Śakra and a cakravartin (Pāli: Cakkavatti), a wheel-turning Buddhist monarch (Duncan 1990: 132–133). After the tooth relic was inserted into the ceremony in the eighteenth century, the representatives of the dēvāles came after those from the Daḷadā Māligāva (Duncan 1990: 128–139).

This cosmically endorsed model of progressive subordination was mirrored in the city’s governance in what Tambiah termed a ‘galactic polity’. This ‘polity’, according to Tambiah, was one in which the social and political processes of the state could be inclusive of minorities and immigrants, but only if they were capable of being ‘incorporated within the larger [Buddhist] cosmological and economic framework’ (Tambiah 1992: 175). I concur. To use my own terminology, Tamils, Christians, Muslims, Śaivites and the powers worshipped by these groups, were tolerated and respected through a subordinating inclusivism, within a predominantly Buddhist framework. If these groups were willing to accept this positioning, a serviceable harmony and unity was possible.

The importance of unity at mundane and cosmic levels in the Sinhala Buddhist imaginary has been examined by both Daniel and De Silva Wijeratne, who drew on Bruce Kapferer’s work (Daniel 1996: 28; De Silva Wijeratne 2014: 25). Kapferer, in the late-twentieth century, pioneered the academic rehabilitation of exorcist ceremonies in Sri Lanka, through his argument that curative exorcism concerned the re-structuring of consciousness so that order and harmony replaced disorder (Kapferer 1997: 39). And the harmony to which he referred was one in which both deities and demons were subordinated to the Buddha through a ‘re-hierarchialization’ (Kapferer 1997: 291). Daniel, therefore, stressed fear of fragmentation in Sinhala Buddhist consciousness. Fragmentation was chaos and chaos was the antithesis of harmony and a ‘hierarchical and holistic (Buddhist) state’ (Daniel 1996: 28). One major implication of this is that porous boundaries between religious identities within the Sinhala Buddhist imaginary, before 1815, could not exist within a completely equal playing field. Consciousness was structured to include hierarchy and this hierarchy was the bastion against fragmentation.

Roberts’s study of Sinhala consciousness in the Kandyan Kingdom is complex and I simplify it considerably. At one level, he argued that the Sinhala language itself possessed within it a deeply embedded ‘inside-outside’ metaphor (Roberts 2004: 30), which could variously be applied to caste, village belonging, low country (pāta rata) versus high country (uda rata), and to the foreigner, the enemy or the stranger (Roberts 2004: 31–32). Roberts explained, ‘I am referring here to what can be called a “segmentary form” in language-pattern that is like a Chinese box and has a confederative structure of successive inclusions, or exclusions’ (Roberts 2004: 31). At this linguistic level, the boundaries between Self and Other were real but could be permeable and context-dependent.

Key to Roberts’s argument, however, was that this metaphor co-existed with an imaginary that envisioned the entire island of Sri Lanka as Sinhalē, as belonging to the Sinhala people, with the Kandyan Kingdom at the centre, such that it could rightly be called the Kingdom of Sinhalē (Roberts 2004: 13 and 54).² Roberts argued that this did not mean that the kings of Kandy administered the whole island. They administered part of it³ and the term Sinhalē was sometimes used in this more restricted sense (Roberts 2004: 56). Alongside this sense, however, was one that encompassed the entire territory of the island, through the motif of homage. If what could be considered homage was offered to the kings of Kandy from the outer parts of the country, an essentially subordinating action, then this was seen as affirming the sovereignty of Kandy over the whole. A ‘tributary overlordship’ was in operation (Roberts 2004: 71) and, in the Sinhala imaginary, such overlordship signified that Kandy remained the cosmic centre of the island, led by a god-king, who was governed by Buddhism. Even the Dutch, Roberts argued, accepted for pragmatic reasons the role of ‘vassal’ in its dealings with the Kandyan Kingdom, whilst retaining its administrative and commercial power over the maritime areas (Roberts 2004: 59 and 69–70). Roberts cites a letter sent to the Dutch by Rājasinha II in the 1650s, soon after they had ousted the Portuguese, stating that all ‘the black people of this my island of Ceilao, wheresoever they may be, [are] my vassals by right’ (Roberts 2004: 78). Obeyesekere offers evidence that the British also, before 1815, could refer to the Kandyan country as Sinhalē (Obeyesekere 2017: 54) but to return to Roberts, he later added, ‘The Sinhalaness of the Sinhala rulers was an incorporative form of collective consciousness either assimilating others or encompassing others (for instance the Yon and the Muslims) into the hierarchical order of their society as distinct categories’ (Roberts 2004: 114). Significantly, the totally Other that could not easily be subordinated was likely to be cast as demonic. Both Roberts and de Silva Wijeratne find evidence that Tamils could be placed in this category as a source of potential fragmentation (Roberts 2004: 134; De Silva Wijeratne 2014: 42–44).

The creation of unity through inclusivist subordination and hierarchy can clearly be seen in Roberts’s ‘tributary overlordship’, which embodied a subordinating, spatial division between centre and periphery, and between Self and Other, held together by a narrative of harmony that was maintained through ritual, art, homage, pilgrimage and the idea of Sinhalaness. This imaginary was reinforced, as Obeyesekere has shown, with reference to the last Kandyan king, by ‘royal circuits’, gaman māligāva (lit. palace for journeying), through which the king travelled to selected territories, asserting his symbolic authority through offering gifts and building temporary or more permanent palaces (Obeyesekere 2017: 153–157).

Behind this was an even more deeply embedded envisioning, informed by the vaṃsa tradition – that the whole island and the Buddha were symbolically one. Kemper’s words are apposite:

For the Mahāvaṃsa, the locale is the island itself which becomes, in a way at once literal and metaphoric, the ground on which the story unfolds, for it is here that unity is realized.… Recall that when the yakās gave the island to the Buddha, they gave it to him wholecloth, leaving no place for themselves.… The Vaṃsatthappakāsini (A Pali Commentary on the Mahāvaṃsa) asserts the unity between the Buddha and the island even more strongly … the Buddha’s body and the island are symbolically one.

(Kemper 1991: 52)

In Chapter 5 of this book, I contest the view that the chronicles were ‘discovered’ by western orientalists such as George Turnour. Although a Sinhala version of the Mahāvaṃsa was only published in the 1930s after English translations (Obeyesekere 1994: 31), the narratives within the chronicles were present in other forms, for instance in dance, temple murals, chants and rituals (Sivasundaram 2007), in the teaching given to lay people by the monastic Sangha and pilgrimage. Reed’s study of the Kohomba Kankariya dance is important. Its primary focus is nineteenth- and twentieth-century adaptations but the dance had a much older provenance, having been ‘the most important ritual in Kandyan villages’ (Reed 2010: 24). Its narrative underpinning is the iconic Mahāvaṃsa narrative of Vijaya/Kuveni. One of the ‘comic dramas’ that Reed found in its modern iteration involved a priest from South India being trained to speak correct Sinhala, ‘demonstrating that he must learn to assimilate to the dominant culture’ (Reed 2010: 26). There is no reason to believe that such interludes were absent from dances held before the end of the Kandyan Kingdom, particularly since it embodies the trope of subordination that was landscaped into its geography. It confirms De Silva Wijeratne’s argument touched on ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright page
• Table of Contents
• Map of Sri Lanka
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction
• PART I The British colonial period
• PART II The post-colonial period
• Concluding thoughts
• Selective glossary
• Selective timeline
• Index