Religious Colombo: The Secret City Hiding in Plain Sight
Catherine M. West
Deakin University, Australia
cmwest@deakin.edu.au
Recommended Citation
West, C.M. (2018) Religious Colombo: The Secret City Hiding in Plain Sight. ColomboArts Biannual
Refereed Journal of Social Sciences and Humanities, II (4)
Available at: https://colomboarts.cmb.ac.lk/?p=416
West, C.M.
Religious Colombo: The Secret City
Hiding in Plain Sight
Deakin University
cmwest@deakin.edu.au
Abstract
experience. However, when we step outside on to the streets of Colombo religious experience
is obvious and ubiquitous. This project reviews the scholarly and anecdotal record and
compares it to the social and spatial life of the contemporary inner-city. As well as temples,
churches and mosques, the spatiality of religion extends to the street, markets and homes of the
city: religious experience is more than worship and sanctioned ritual. It is felt through all the
senses in Colombo. For example, the cool shade of a bo tree allowed to grow through the hot
pavement; the colours and styles of dress; the aromas and flavours of the richly syncretic
cuisine; small acts of kindness; and the sounds of observance: voices and instruments
connecting the humans, their material realm and the cosmological world. When religious
experience and innovation determine the spatial and the social to such a high degree, why is it
that
in the literature on Colombo, but also in urban studies more generally. Situational analysis of
the social formation, the urban environment and religious experience represents a way to move
past axiomatic views of religion, cities and their relationship. This study also reflects on how a
more anthropological understanding of the capital, Colombo, might offer alternative
perspectives of the nation and its complex social identity in the post-conflict era.
Keywords: Colombo, religion, social, spatial, urban
27
Introduction
There is a paradox contained within the title of this paper: religious Colombo. To many
people, cities and religion are not a natural, common-sense pairing. But why is this the
Colombo and the way in which it is discursively produced. The most obvious disjuncture
relates to religious experience. In the former context religion is inescapable, in the latter it
is barely appreciable. Walk down a Colombo street and you will see, hear and smell the
outward signs of religiosity: temples, incense, bells, statuary, offerings, food and clothing.
The rhythm of the city is unevenly but predictably driven by religious festivals such as
monthly Poya days, astrological observances, and the commemoration of the births, feats
and deaths of various saints, prophets and deities. As a common-place of day-to-day
Colombo life, religion is a promising entry point for understanding and analysing the city.
Yet, the way in which Colombo is discussed (verbally and textually) would suggest that
religion is of peripheral concern: it is minimized or elided altogether, in favour of economy
and politics. The metropolis is a spiritual void. There are historical epistemological
underpinnings for this bias, as well as some that are more specific to Colombo and Sri
Lanka.
This paper is part of a larger project which considers the relationship between religion, the
social formation, and the urban environment in Colombo, Sri Lanka.
In Colombo,
innovation is evident in the practice of four world religions: Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam
and Christianity. If meaningful social change is incubated at the level of ritual then people,
places, performances and relationships that involve ritual, such as those associated with
religious experience, are a rich site for revealing covert social structures and processes.
Kapferer (2013) sees ritual as indicati
spaces of existential knowledge and change. Following this logic, I link the situational
analysis of ritual to observations of the spatial and social practices of religion. This
combination of the extraordinary with the ordinary, sometimes unconscious, adherence to
nar
s (1902) analysis of
mystical religious experience. My emphasis is on the anthropology of religious practice and
28
(Schielke &
Debevec, 2012, p. 8). In a proudly religious society such as Sri Lanka, religious experience
is an overt agent in the human condition. This study looks to the contemporary urban world,
paying close attention to the ways in which the city changes religion and religion changes
the city.
What is the lived reality of Colombo?
The large physical presence of a city makes it a challenging object of ethnographic study.
To overcome this problem of scale, this project focusses on Narahenpita/ Thimbirigasyaya,
an inner-city area seven kilometres from the city centre. Field work was conducted over a
twelve-month period in 2016 and 2017, primarily in a three square-kilometre site, which
forms the geographical basis for an extended case study. The research design aims to
encompass as much of the contemporary social and spatial reality of the field site as
possible. I participated in minor and major rituals of personal, national and cosmological
significance. Living at the centre of the field site meant that even the most ordinary events,
such as shopping at the local market or walking my daughter to school, formed part of my
observations.
-lingual research assistants I did indeed
learn the names of many dogs. More importantly, I met Sri Lankans of diverse backgrounds
and recorded their life experiences via surveys, formal and informal interviews. This
methodology placed me squarely inside what De Certeau (1984) calls
and the built and natural environments of Colombo.
I supplemented this sensory and familial world with maps, aerial surveys, news and social
media. I also collected data (primary and secondary) on a range of governmental, religious
and private institutions. Before the 1970s, the field site was a sparsely-populated swampy
section of the city fringe. In less than fifty years it has become a fast-paced commercial and
residential zone, its proximity to the city driving up demand for property and services. The
intertwined threads of society, space, and religion that nurture city-wide change and growth
are condensed in the recent history of this geographically limited area. My initial review of
s
contemporary urban world than in other settings, so I looked to the field site to see how
urban religion operates in practice. The site soon revealed some interesting possibilities.
29
Sometimes the city conceals its religious spaces. After months of hearing rumours about
the existence of a Hindu kovil (temple) in a street where there appeared to be none, my
Tamil-speaking research assistant found a small shrine to Naga Amman, an incarnation of
the mother goddess, behind a dark red curtain at the end of a walkway on the third floor of
an apartment block. The custodians live in the adjacent apartment. They recounted how
they receive instructions from Amman through dreams and feelings; and how their Hindu,
Buddhist, Christian and Muslim neighbours have been cured, achieved good exam results
or been relieved of bad spirits after paying homage at this shrine. For all its aesthetic
ordinariness, the history and function of the kovil is deeply mystical and social. If it is
hierarchically inferior to other kovils it has a none-the-less integral role in the relationship
between the residents, deities and their cosmological systems. Its location, invisible from
the street, was no deterrent to its success or reputed power. In the field site there are two
other small public kovils (although these are visible to passers-by) and one official kovil
(that is, it is registered with the Department of Hindu Affairs). The fact that a place or
practice can remain anonymous among the dense population and buildings of the city is
particularly urban, yet urban religion is not necessarily typified by this feature.
The scale and footprint of religious institutions can vary enormously. I collected data on
four Pentecostal-charismatic Christian organisations in the field site. The largest is a church
building that fits 5000 people, hosts lectures from international speakers and offers
vocational training courses. It also has a book shop, offices and meeting rooms for staff and
volunteers. Starting as a prayer circle, this group held services in progressively larger
venues in the inner city (a home, a horse stables, a nightclub, an old embassy building)
before they purchased newly released canal-side land from the government in 1991 on
which they built their current headquarters. According to the Assembly of God website, the
church had a membership of ten thousand when its senior minister passed away in
November 2018 (De
Silva, 2018).
The second group holds their services in the
Bandaranaike Memorial International Conference Hall. For a recent ministry-related fiveday course, this organisation hired an exclusive venue in a Cinnamon Gardens restaurant
and entertainment strip, usually frequented by wealthy foreigners and the local elite. With
no permanent church building, they rely on a sophisticated social media presence to unify
spatially and socially bound to the adjacent community. I attended services at these
30
churches, where a room in or next to the residence of the devotees or minister is set aside
for religious ceremony. Both had less than fifty attendees and were found through word-ofmouth and by tracing the narrow laneways of the wattes (densely populated low-income
areas). There may be more of these house-churches in the field site, but without speaking
to the right people they remain invisible. As well as these Pentecostal-charismatic churches,
the field site also has an Anglican cathedral and a Catholic church. The variance in size and
nature of these churches suggests that the city affords a range of localities for religious
practice, even within a single religious tradition.
In this case they range from the
spectacular, through to the virtual and the domestic.
The other major religions also offer a range of places and ways in which to experience their
practice. As the religion of the majority, Buddhism is conspicuous in Colombo. The blue,
yellow, red, white and orange stripes of the Buddhist flag punctuate the visual landscape.
There are twenty formal Buddhist venues in the field site, ranging from sprawling temple
complexes with national profiles and international funding, to modest structures that are
maintained solely by devotees. There are countless locations that are not temples but are
none-the-less Buddhist. There are shrines at intersections and at the entrance of large
buildings, where visitors make a brief observance with flowers, prayers or incense arranged
e and shop shrines, where the Buddha may
be joined by a favourite deity, such as Ganesha; bo trees with coins wrapped in white cloth
tied to their branches; meditation centres; Ayurvedic health clinics (run by the Maha Bodhi
Society, for example); political sites such as the All Ceylon Buddhist Congress; shops that
sell Buddhist books, images and paraphernalia; memorials to Buddhist leaders and the
increasingly ubiquitous statues of the Buddha. This variety in the spatial expression of a
religious tradition strikes me as being a particularly urban phenomenon, as the sheer volume
of devotees and resources is necessarily greater in the city. It also suggests that urban
religion is not diminished due to a lack of availability or visibility of religious sites. My
second hypothesis was that religious experience is less revered in the city, yet my field data
showed that urban religion is practiced in earnest.
My method for developing contacts and insights within the Muslim community illustrates
how religion is respected and taken seriously in the city. After initial difficulty in finding
31
y group held at an air-conditioned 100-seat lecture theatre.
I
interviewed participants, many of whom suggested other sites and people of interest in the
area. I was invited to monthly volunteering sessions, where we packed essential items (rice,
salt, flour etc.) for a foodbank program. I interviewed the board members, staff and residents
of an orphanage and hostel; and the moulavis and devotees from three mosques within the
field site. As this network snowballed, I met researchers and teachers from three Islamic
Slave Island and interviewed the moulavi and manager at another famous Colombo mosque.
This broad range of people shared stories of their personal and family histories as well as
their views on marriage, schools, money, world affairs, the city, politics, pilgrimage,
mysticism, ritual, food, gender, the hijab and more. Just as I found in the other religious
traditions, there was a significant degree of dedication to the educational, spiritual and moral
practices associated with their religion, across the social spectrum: people take religion
seriously in the city.
It is important to note that this does not suggest homogeneity. Not every individual, family
or street is equally zealous or committed. Colombo residents tend to dress, eat, meet and
act in ways that speak of their religious heritage, although these markers are not necessarily
distinct from habits and tendencies related to ethnicity, language or regional cultural
practices. This complexity of identity is analogous to the character of Sri Lankan food.
Although it is generally like South Indian cuisine, there are specific variations that relate to
religious observance, socio-economic status, family tradition, regional differences and so
on. For example, paripu (a dahl made of orange lentils) is prepared by virtually all Sri
Lankan households but can have different accompaniments (roti, rice, meat or vegetable
curries, sambals, salads), texture (dry or soupy), degrees of spiciness, garnish (fried onions,
fresh/roasted chilies, curry leaves) and ingredients (a little or a lot of coconut milk; with or
without garlic, mustard seeds, cinnamon etc.). Paripu is quintessentially Sri Lankan yet a
standard recipe is elusive. Particularly in Colombo, the multi-religious, multi-ethnic, multilanguage community similarly denies standardisation. However, religion observance stands
out as a common theme. In over sixty formal interviews, I met only one atheist. In many
hundreds of informal interviews, I met one threepractice and instead claimed a particularly austere form of communism as his personal
lodestone. They both passionately denied the existence of god, illustrating the gravity of
32
religion in their lives, not its absence. The lived reality of Colombo is one where religious
experience is highly diverse, taken seriously, visible, available and folded in to the fabric of
everyday life. So where does the image of Colombo as un-religious come from?
What is discursive Colombo?
Colombo has received surprisingly little academic analysis in the English language. This
absence becomes more pronounced when seeking works that also address religion. There
are few English language monographs about Colombo, with the following exceptions:
(1984)
(1995)
Colombo: a critical introspection which depicts the city as the
,
fault line
(2012, p. 8)
(1980, 1998) on the port of Colombo provide a detailed, but topic-specific history. There
(1999) inter-disciplinary
discussion of society and space. There are chapters (Roberts, Raheem, & Colin-Thomé,
1989; Thiranagama, 2011) and journal articles (Perera, 2002; Sivasundaram, 2017 to name
a few) which piece together a mosaic of Colombo. As useful as these contributions are,
holistic analysis of the city is lacking. There is a developed anthropological literature on
(Jayawardena, 2000; Peebles, 1991; Roberts, 1982, for example). However, there is no
anthropological treatise that takes Colombo as its main subject.
I found little that acknowledges the primacy of religion in shaping the history and future of
the city. Journal articles by Bastin (2016), McKinley (2016) and Obeyesekere (1970) are
Buddhism transformed (1988) and Abeysekar
Colors of the robe (2002) both discuss, in
part, Buddhist practice in Colombo. However, these texts focus on how urban modernity
shapes Buddhism, and less on how religion shapes Colombo. Wijesuriya (2012) paints
religion and irrationality as the twin
modern city that should know better. Publications by the Colombo Municipal Council tend
to provide a light, touristy perspective of religion in Colombo, with colourful photos or
descriptions of harmonious religious diversity (Corea, 1988; Hulugalle, 1965). Colombo
often appears as the setting in English-language fiction, but it is rarely depicted as a religious
space. For Muller, Colombo
33
place where religious practice is hypocrisy (1995, p. 452). In a quick sample of other fiction,
Colombo is a utilitarian site of the economy (Selvadurai, 1998, pp. 11,12), quasi-Western
(De Kretser, 2003), nostalgic (Ondaatje, 1984), socially competitive (Ferrey, 2009, 2012),
political (Ratnayake, 2013; Sivanandan, 1997) and a place where the class, ethnic and
religious differences within Sinhala nationalism collide (Gooneratne, 2009). In a similar
vein to the non-fiction bias, the Colombo of fiction is rarely determined by religious
experience.
This tendency not to acknowledge Colombo as religious extends to other printed materials,
conversations and everyday perceptions of the relative importance of religion in the country
versus the city. For example, the most current Survey Department map of my field site
showed about 50% of the religious institutions. The list of religious sites held at the
Thimbirigasyaya Divisional Secretariat was only marginally more accurate. This indicates
the rapidity of spatial change and the limitations of government resources, but also cultural
priorities. During the period of constitutional crisis in October/ November 2018, politicians
seeking validation of their decisions, or confirmation of their legally shaky roles, made
rushed pilgrimages to Kandy. They sought blessings from the sangha (Buddhist clergy) at
the Dalada Maligawa: a
During the most widely celebrated national holiday (Sinhala and Tamil New Year) Colombo
is deserted. Multi-lane roads that usually host a semi-permanent traffic jam transform in to
the grounds for semi-permanent street-cricket matches. The rituals of annual renewal are
associated with the village, rather than the city (although, on the contrary, perhaps these
urban cricket matches may be on their way to joining the canon of ritual). In conversation
with Colombo residents, Colombo is depicted as morally bankrupt: people have no scruples;
et in
the same conversation you will soon know their religious heritage, practices and moral
outlook: they
are both broadly under-represented, hence a lacuna in the Anglophone understanding of
about religious experience. However, when we walk outside it slaps us in the face.
.
What is a city?
This myopic view of urban religion is not restricted to Sri Lanka but is related, in part, to
34
As many cities (Colombo, for example) grew in stature following 16th century European
maritime exploration, there is a tendency to depict them in print within the terms and
interests of the Enlightenment and its antecedents. In the 20th century this largely secular
analysis became the axiomatic lens through which the city (and many other objects) came
to be viewed, including a de-emphasis of religion and the transcendent, with a concurrent
privileging of positivism and political economy.
Urban social theory was heavily
influenced by Marxist sociological models. For example, the ecological perspective of the
Chicago School (for example Park, Burgess, & Janowitz, 2012 (1925))
(1991
(1974))
(Harvey, 2001, 2013; Sassen, 2008)
(2000) consideration of contemporary
socio-economic networks and flows and their potential disruptions. Cities in general, and
perhaps Colombo in particular, are characterised by the kinds of concerns that came along
with the European colonial project: extraction of resources, utilization of land, control of
the population, and a Christian ethos which was progressively submerged within secularism.
As post-colonial scholarship shows, the departure of the colonisers does not represent a
straight-forward excision of their ideological legacy.
There are differences between academic disciplines in the way that they approach urban
religion. Within the discipline of anthropology, where one might expect to find more
concerted attention paid to religious experience, the urban (Low, 1996) and the religious
(Boddy & Lambek, 2014) are often studied independently, rather than as paired phenomena,
available evidence seems to support its falsity or at least suggest a fruitful area of further
research (Hansen, 2014; Narayanan, 2016). Kong (2001, 2010) has called for her discipline,
human geography, to recognize the salience of religion and consider it an essential part of
research in to how humans inhabit space. In the 21st century scholars have paid greater
attention to cities outside of Europe and the United States (Mayaram, 2009; Ong, 2011;
Simone, 2010). Analysing the Global South within its own terms follows the trajectory that
political scientist Jayadeva Uyangoda (2018) describes as the paradigmatic movement from
post-colonial to decolonial and Southern Theory. This has the potential to problematize the
overreach of the West and, I suggest, the secular. Yet, bottom-up perspectives from the
Global South have not, so far, generated any significant challenges to the way cities and
35
religion are documented and deconstructed in the social sciences: the corpus of material on
Colombo is still dominated by political economy. The anthropological perspective seeks to
see the whole human and from this I extrapolate that it also seeks to see the whole city. In
this sense, it is salient to bring religion in to the way that we think, write and talk about the
city. In this brief survey of how the concept of the city has been studied over time, we can
see that the urban is often separated from religion in scholarly writing, which relates to the
broader attitudes and representations from outside of academia.
The paradox of urban religion in the field site
There are ramifications to the lack of recognition of Colombo as a place where religious
experience happens.
With this incongruity between lived and discursive realities,
opportunities are missed, blind-spots remain, perspectives are skewed, and the story of the
city and the nation is partially told. Rodman (1992) exhorts researchers to attend to the
That is, the social relations around ethnicity, gender, caste and class have material effects.
The field data collected in Colombo suggests that this theory makes no sense without the
recognition of religion as an important element of social diversity and connection. The
small street where I lived in Narahenpita was mainly occupied by long-established multistory houses with enclosed gardens and garages. Immediately across Thimbirigasyaya Rd,
there is a one-lane alley, often lined with three-wheelers, that has densely packed, less
permanently-built houses. As I came to know the area, it became clear that many of the
drivers, maids and cooks who worked in the first street, lived in the second: social and
economic factors were expressed in the spatial arrangement. A nearby Catholic church
attracted parishioners from both streets and scheduled their activities around the three
: English, Sinhala and Tamil. The church fathers were intent on
integrating the groups to mitigate differences of socio-economic status, and the annual feast
day procession was a good example of how this was achieved. Yet a class divide persisted.
An elderly parishioner, Evelyn, disparaged the haughty behaviour and attitudes of the
English-speaking elites by calling th
there were positive aspects to the spatial proximity of the church groups.
The health professionals, largely from the English-speaking cohort, provided free clinics for
the poor (mainly from the Sinhala and Tamil-speaking groups) at least twice a year,
36
attracting up to one thousand visitors in a day. The patients were offered diabetes tests,
psychological assessments, heart checks, skin examinations and gynaecological
consultations; they took home medications, equipment and advice. More than three hundred
patients visited the eye clinic on the day that I observed. Although I saw similar programs
advertised by NGOs and government health promotions, I felt that many of the issues that
the patients presented with on that day may well have remained unresolved without the
is service filled a gap that exists between free (but timeconsuming and fragmentary) government health care and the considerably more expensive
private health sector. The three language groups live and worship in close proximity, but a
significant socio-economic distance sometimes hardens language and other cultural
differences.
church community was charitable, but also reiterated social boundaries and positioned the
English-speaking group as morally superior as they walked in Jesus-theby healing the downtrodden. In theory, the health camp brought the congregation together,
but it also made differences, in class for example, more visible. This vignette alerts us to
the salience of religious practice in the social formation at the community level.
The paradox of urban religion in Colombo: past, present and future
A
-day society and space. Kelaniya, now
part of greater Colombo, features as one of the places visited by Gautama Buddha.
Similarly, Sri Pada (another site visited by the Buddha) was used as a landmark by early
ocean navigators to locate the West coast of Sri Lanka, with Colombo being the most
convenient anchorage for those wishing to access the sacred mountain. The Mahavamsa
records these visits and locations, suggesting that Colombo was at least functionally
significant when the Buddha was alive, around 500 BCE. As a popular, canonical living
document of the Sinhala Buddhist polity, the Mahavamsa, regardless of its historical
accuracy, conditions the spatial history of the city. Stone inscriptions, maps
journals note Colombo as a settlement frequented by traders from India, China, Africa and
the Middle East. Some of the earliest stone inscriptions are written in Tamil, which is the
le about the relations between India
and Sri Lanka, as Tamil was the lingua franca of trade, as well as the language of South
India. However, combined with archaeological evidence, Indian historical sources and the
proximity of the land masses, it is safe to assume a long history of Hinduism in Sri Lanka,
and in Colombo as a trading port. With the advent of Islam in the 7th century and increasing
37
Indian Ocean trade, descriptions of Colombo as a trading settlement with a large Muslim
presence, begin to emerge in the 10th century. Mosques were one of the features noted by
the Portuguese when they landed there at the beginning of the 16 th century.
The
development of the city up to this time was inextricably linked to Hinduism, Buddhism and
Islam.
From 1505 through to independence from the British in 1948, the influence of Christianity
became increasingly central to Colombo. This occurred through the proselytising of
missionaries; policies of the colonial governments (such as the Dutch and Portuguese
insistence that all employees convert to Catholicism and the Dutch Reformed Church,
respectively); and through subtler social mores that were adopted by the local population.
As the capital of Portuguese, Dutch and British Ceylon, Colombo was transformed through
its contact with Europe. By the time Ceylon reclaimed its independence, the foundations of
capitalism and democracy (and their concomitants) were firmly established. By 1956 the
growing Sinhala Buddhist nationalist movement used its majoritarian power to overtake the
Christian faction of parliamentary politics, which had been influential under the British
(Obeyesekere, 1970). The independent nation of Ceylon initially maintained its capital in
Colombo. However, following changes to the name (Sri Lanka) and constitution of the
nation, the political capital moved to Sri Jayawardenepura in 1982. Although still in the
Colombo area, the relocation of the parliament had strong symbolic import (Perera, 1999).
Rather than the seat of government remaining in a colonial building surrounded by the multireligious, multi-ethnic history of the Colombo port, this new space was a locally-designed
to rule the island before the arrival of European colonialism and Christianity.
The spatial nature of Colombo was highly
religious imperatives after independence in 1948. Nearly fifty years ago, Obeyesekere
observed that the cityscape was being transformed and that for all intents and purposes
(1970, p. 44). He describes the novelty of large
Buddha statues, images of the Sinhala lion, publicly displayed Buddhist aphorisms and flags
appearing to territorialise the city. The political shift toward Sinhala Buddhist nationalism
has been represented in the urban landscape through modest and grand gestures. The Jathika
Pola in Narahenpita is an example of Buddhicisation at work on a local level. The market
38
was established on this site in 1978 on undeveloped government land: its name suggesting
that it is intended for the people and nation. Four Buddhist temples, a meditation centre and
an Ayurvedic clinic were granted land surrounding the pola in the following decade,
creating a new enclave of Buddhist activity. On a grander scale, Perera (2005, pp. 247, 248)
argues that in relocating the capital to Kotte, and proposing to re-house the Dalada Maligawa
cient lineage of Buddhism in Sri Lanka
,
and urban developments such as the pola, I suggest that the process of Buddhicising urban
space was escalating in the 1970s. As such, Jayewardene was utilizing a popular trope, as
much as displaying a sense of precarity. Bastin (2016, p. 109)
saturation of urban space with Buddhism has sometimes included deliberate inclusion of
non-Buddhist practices, but only on its own terms.
-
war promotion of the annual Hindu Vel festival. The Vel parade, which traverses the coast
from the Pettah to Bambalapitiya, now includes Kandyan dancers, and halts to greet the
President and his wife at their official residence en route. Buddhism was thoroughly
entrenched in the political, social and physical urban landscape in the decades following
independence.
Buddhicisation in the post war era has continued apace. One of the Buddhist temples near
the pola, mentioned above, produces fibre glass images of the Buddha and architectural
forms (dagäbas, archways, statues of deities) on a commercial basis. Expertly designed by
the chief monk (who has formal training in art and design) and manufactured by a small onsite factory, the products are created cheaply enough to be accessible to all, yet of a high
enough quality to attract national and international customers. Some of the smaller items
are sold in a shop in the pola. This literal proliferation of the Buddha image and the close
connection between the temple and the concerns of a commercial fibre-glass business are a
continuation of practices of Buddhism that Obeyesekere saw, in 1970, as very new, urban
and aligned with the political shift toward Sinhala Buddhist dominance. In 2011, two years
after the cessation of civil conflict, he writes that Buddha images have continued to
accumulate in Colombo, and with that, they have become more closely associated with the
worldly realm (more laukika than lokattara) (2011).
Denying the religious nature of Colombo entails a reduced capacity to gain a balanced
39
perspective of the past, assess the present and consider the future. My field work in 2016
and 2017 concurs
that the Buddha image is ubiquitous in
Colombo. Buddhicisation also takes the form of replacing poor, largely non-Buddhist
residential areas with commercial or government edifices (Amarasuriya & Spencer, 2015);
by repaint
dagäba-
space with images of lions and the Buddhist flag. It is also apparent in changes to the public
relationship between Buddhism and politics, such as the use of temple grounds for political
meetings (for example Abhayaramaya Viharaya on Thimbirigasyaya Mw) and the strict
apportioning of religious representation at ceremonial events, where one Christian priest,
one Brahmin priest and one Muslim representative are joined by many more Buddhist
monks, expressing a numerical correlation with the population of the nation (70.2%
Buddhist, 12.6% Hindu, 9.7% Muslim and 7.4% Christian at the last census).
The
mysterious shrouding of religious Colombo has meant that these changes to public space
and behaviour have occurred with little analysis or critique.
Conclusion
By examining a theoretical contradiction, urban religion, and suggesting ways in which it
plays out in the material world of Colombo I have sought to draw attention to a lacuna in
the anthropological study of Sri Lanka and perhaps in the social sciences more broadly.
When a phenomenon such as urban religion is under-represented or actively omitted from
scholarship, the difference between discursive Colombo and its lived reality is the result.
These fissures and conundrums are a rich field in which to mine for new perspectives on
familiar problems; to review axiomatic histories and to think about the future. Colombo is
ideologically, socially, and spatially constituted in religious experience. By taking religious
Colombo as its subject, this research reorients the imagination of urban scholarship. It also
invites further discussion regarding the transmission, syncretisation and revitalisation of
religion in urban spaces. Colombo is a primate city: more central and significant to the life
of the nation than any other city. I
world and the place where the movement of people, ideas and capital coalesce. Further
study of urban religion in Colombo may provide fresh opportunities for the analysis of the
complex social identity of the nation, which were central to the civil war and still burn bright
in the post-conflict environment.
Political economy is a useful empirical basis for
understanding the urban, but it illuminates a part, not the whole. Including the conditions
40
of religious experience, its social and spatial expression, leads toward a more comprehensive
anthropological vision of the present and future city.
References
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