The Sri Lanka Reader: History, Culture, Politics

"Of all the books I’ve read on Sri Lankan history, this is the one that I found best in terms of a sweeping overview of a blend of history, politics and culture, from many different angles and authors—as opposed to having, say, a textbook by one author. There is a rather good textbook on the history of Sri Lanka by Professor K.M. de Silva . That’s the one most people go to, especially if they’re not specialist historians. But for an introduction that’s erudite and not superficial, The Sri Lanka Reader is the one I would go to. It came out about 10 years ago. It’s edited by John Holt, who is now emeritus professor at Bowdoin College in Maine. He’s a specialist on Buddhism and its relationship to Sinhala culture and has a long association with Sri Lanka. What he’s put together in this book are these very accessible short excerpts that cover the whole range of history—about 2,500 years of it—taking us all the way to the end of the Civil War in 2009. Some of the authors are long dead, some still living. The very first entry, in the section on ancient and medieval history, is from the Mahavamsa , the national epic. It translates from the Sinhala as ‘Great Chronicle.’ There are many chronicles, but this is the one that’s really elevated to Olympian status. It was written by a leading monk, Mahanama Thera, in the fifth century CE, most probably. He was the abbot of one of the three main monasteries in the capital city of Anuradhapura and an uncle of a king. The Mahavamsa is very tendentious. It presents about 1,000 years of history, up until the fifth century CE, with Theravada Buddhism and Sinhala kingship and the alliance between the two in the foreground. Its style is what we would today probably call ‘magical realism’. The Buddha flew three times—before the age of flying machines—from North India to Sri Lanka. He said on his deathbed that Sri Lanka would be the cradle of his religion after his death. The founder of the Sinhala race, Vijaya, was the issue of the union between a lion and an Indian princess, and so on. There is also a short account from Ibn Battuta’s travels on his stay in the 14th century, and a fifth-century account from a Chinese pilgrim monk, Faxian, about his visit to the Anuradhapura kingdom. “I can’t think of anywhere else…where you have as much variety of people, cultures, flora, fauna, and landscapes” Then there is a long middle section on the colonial encounter, which was roughly 150 years of Portugal, 150 years of the Netherlands, and 150 years of the British before independence in 1948. It’s probably the longest colonial encounter of any country in Asia. I suppose my favourite entry in the book is from Leonard Woolf’s memoirs. He was in the Ceylon civil service for seven years in the early 1900s, and married the more famous Virginia when he returned to London. He was much more interested in the locals than he was in what he considered to be rather boring and pompous fellow colonial officials and their families. He wrote a marvelous novel, The Village in the Jungle , which is still famous in Sri Lanka. His second volume of memoirs, Growing , is set in the Ceylon of the period just over a century ago. The Sri Lanka Reader ends with a short “Political Epilogue,” taking account of the end of the Civil War. The leading entry is by an eminent Sri Lankan journalist, Lasantha Wickrematunge, who wrote an editorial in his paper, the Sunday Leader, predicting his murder at the hands of the government. He criticized the government mercilessly, because of human rights violations and corruption, with the instruction that the article was to be published in the event of his murder. It was published on January 11th, 2009. So the book covers a very, very broad spectrum and is highly readable. Buddhism in Sri Lanka, whether you’re writing a travel memoir, as I did, or a history or current affairs book, is the proverbial elephant in the room. You can’t avoid it. Ethnic Sinhalese are roughly three-quarters of the population, and about two-thirds of the population are Sinhala Buddhists (other Sinhalese being mainly Christian). The long laborious process of writing a book got me much deeper into Buddhism in Sri Lanka than I ever did as a child and got me to go into the history of it. What you see today is a ritualistic, almost pagan worship because Sinhala Buddhists tend to worship a whole range of gods and spirits with the Buddha as the central character in the pantheon. This has little to do with original Buddhism. That’s combined with a Buddhism that, particularly since independence, has become highly politicized and involved with money and business, including lots of shady characters. It drives a chauvinist, supremacist, even racist political agenda. So that’s the Buddhism that the observer sees on the surface. The origins of this go back to the founding of Buddhism in Sri Lanka, because when Buddhism came, sometime in the third century BCE, it was linked to Sinhala kings in the Anuradhapura kingdom from the outset. That political connection has always been there and was only interrupted during the colonial encounters with the Portuguese, Dutch and British. It was then restored with independence. It was Theravada Buddhism which really got anchored in Sri Lanka and came to monopolize Sinhala Buddhism. It tends to be doctrinally very conservative, without much evolution over 2000 years or more. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter The paradox is that for most of this time, Buddhism in Sri Lanka tolerated other religions, and there was a lot of syncretism. If you go to a Buddhist temple in Sri Lanka today, you will see Buddha statues worshipped alongside Hindu gods without worshipers thinking anything of it. You will see a lot of Hindu influence, particularly from Shaivite Hinduism in South India, which most Tamils in Sri Lanka practise. There are also Mahayana influences—because Mahayana coexisted with Theravada probably for the best part of 1,000 years before Theravada erased formal Mahayana religious orders and worship. But the kind of political Buddhism we have in Sri Lanka today is much more exclusive, supremacist and discriminatory against other religions and their communities. While it has some historical precedents, this is more of a modern phenomenon. It’s mainly a feature of how a Buddhist revival that took place as a backlash against British rule in the late 19th century, went from being culturally expressive to politically expressive. As it acquired more of a political patina, especially with independence, it became wound up with a Sinhala Buddhist political agenda, largely directed against ‘others’. The others started off being elite Christians, and then became Tamils and now, more recently, especially with the Easter Sunday bombings in 2019, it’s Muslims. It’s all incredibly complicated but it’s not something that started the day before yesterday."