Nishkala Suntharalingam Published online: 04 May 2023

South AsiaMulti-religiosity in Contemporary Sri Lanka: Innovation, Shared Spaces, Contestation
Mark P. Whitaker, Darini Rajasingham-Senanayake & Pathmanesan Sanmugeswaran (eds). Routledge, UK 2021. pp. 286. Maps. Notes. Index. Hb. £120.00. ISBN 9780367862343

This volume offers an in-depth and provocative glimpse of the complexity of Sri Lanka’s multi-religious heritage and its impacts. Chapters by established and emerging experts in the field, including Malathi De Alwis, Kalinga Tudor Silva, Dennis McGilvray, Sasikumar Balasundaram, and Alexander McKinley, describe the island’s deeply pluralistic religious traditions. They also raise questions about the overlapping influences of religious cultures, ethnicity and place and their responsiveness (or not) to external influences.

Three separate introductions by the editors are a refreshing acknowledgment of the intricacy of Sri Lanka’s religious landscape, its influences and impacts. They reflect the challenges faced by academics and policy makers in drafting a ‘diluted’ single narrative. Instead, each introduction provides an in-depth review of issues and approaches along with nuanced interpretation on the compiled essays. All three editors acknowledge ‘religiosity’ as a means of coping with life’s transitions, celebrations, disappointments, diseases, conflicts and violence and events such as birth and death, illness exams, marriage, divorce, the sense of the sacred, the auspicious and inauspicious”, in the words of Rajasingham-Senanayake. Additionally, they are cognizant of the challenges of navigating Sri Lanka’s pluralistic religious traditions, hybridity and inter-linkages in a country where ethnic tensions contributed to a 30-year civil war.

Whitaker considers three phenomena. Firstly, the ways that innovative religious practices and institutions achieved new public prominence after Sri Lanka’s civil war. Secondly, he highlights the notion of ‘innovative religiosity’ by looking at sacred sites held in common across Sri Lanka’s various religious groups, and thirdly he tries to gauge whether inter-religious tolerance is still possible in the wake of war and the continuing influence of populist Buddhist nationalism. Significantly, his essay draws attention to recent anthropological debates about the merits of comparative studies of religious practices while avoiding Eurocentric or universalistic notions/viewpoints, with the suggestion that a redirected focus across a religious field rather than simply looking up and down its named religiosities” is required.

Rajasingham-Senanayake raises provocative questions about historical and current geopolitical influences impacting the pluralistic religious culture of Sri Lanka, including its inter-mingling of religious practices. For her, the bombings of churches on Easter Sunday in 2019 by militants connected with the Islamic State group underline this complexity of what may be termed multi-religiosity in this strategically located island that is perennially at the cross hairs of great power geopolitical rivalry and their related soft power interventions  …  in the Indian ocean region”. She also draws attention to ways the civil war and its aftermath caused women to find spaces of expression and empowerment through piety and identification with Hindu goddesses associated with sakti (power). Several authors take up this issue in greater depth including Malathi De Alwis, Eva Ambos, and Mythri Jegathesan.

Sanmugeswaran focuses on post-civil war Hindu Tamil communities in the north and east of Sri Lanka. He contends that conventional ritual and bhakti (devotional) religious practices were altered by new intersections of a re-emergent Tamil Saivite ideology [worship of Shiva] and by new religious movements” sometimes imported from India as well as the diaspora. He asserts that some of these new practices were legitimised through the establishment of religious organisations in these areas, presumably supported by the diaspora and/or by India. His focus raises questions about similar alterations/interactions among other religious communities – Buddhist, Christian, and Muslim – during and after the civil war. Essays in the volume by Selvy Thiruchandran, Kalinga Tudor Silva, H.L. Seneveviratne as well by Whitaker and Sanmugeshwaran examine these transformations.

As a recently retired United Nations Political Affairs Advisor covering Asia and the Pacific, I found the volume illuminating. The case study approach, with its in-depth scholarship and perspectives, highlights the jagged edges of religion, politics and, most importantly, day-to-day life. The glimpses it provides of these interactions and innovative borrowings among Sri Lanka’s rank and file are encouraging, particularly in these unpredictable and turbulent times, both in the country and on the larger global stage. Similar challenges are apparent in other regions, including the former Yugoslavia, Myanmar, Nepal, India, Cambodia, Indonesia, and Malaysia where the plurality of religious cultures and traditions simmers under the surface. ‘Innovative religiosity’ would seem to be one coping mechanism in such situations. I recommend this volume to academics and policy makers, while encouraging similar approaches to examine other locales.

Nishkala Suntharalingam is an independent researcher. She retired in December 2022 from the United Nations; she was most recently a Political Affairs Advisor covering Asia and the Pacific.