A Name for Every Chapter: Anagarika Dharmapala and Ceylonese Buddhist Revivalism

By Bhadrajee S. Hewage

Today, though there is no statue to Sri Devamitta Dhammapala, both Sri Lanka and India boast numerous statues of the famous Anagarika Dharmapala. Often portrayed in Sri Lankan historiography and public discourse as either a national hero or a fervent bigot, Dharmapala is instead described by Bhadrajee S. Hewage in terms of his thinking and attit

• Language: English
• Publisher: Sulochana Publishing
• Release date: Oct 3, 2020
• ISBN: 9781838222215

Bhadrajee S. Hewage

Bhadrajee S. Hewage is currently a postgraduate student at the University of Cambridge. He was elected to Phi Beta Kappa at Princeton University where he received an undergraduate degree in History summa cum laude along with minors in African Studies, Latin American Studies, and South Asian Studies.

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A NAME FOR EVERY CHAPTER:

Anagarika Dharmapala and Ceylonese Buddhist Revivalism

By

BHADRAJEE S. HEWAGE

2020

Cover image: Srimath Anagarika Dharmapala after entering the order of Buddhist Monks, by unknown, Wikipedia, Public Domain.

Published in the United Kingdom by Sulochana Publishing in arrangement with IngramSpark®, a Division of Ingram®

Copyright ©2020 by Bhadrajee S. Hewage

With the exception of the cover image, all rights are reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of either the author or publisher

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Typeset in Times New Roman

In memory of Kiriamma and Isabelle Clark-Decès

Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Don David Hewavitarane

Hewavitarane Dharmapala

Anagarika Dharmapala

Sri Devamitta Dhammapala

Conclusion

Epilogue: Dharmapala in Retrospect

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgements

This project, arising from an undergraduate thesis, would not have been possible without the contribution and support of many different individuals and institutions.

To the Shelby Cullom Davis Center: this book might simply have stayed at the idea stage if it were not for the funding received in the form of the Stone/Davis Prize. There is not enough gratitude that I can express for having received the opportunity to travel to Sri Lanka and to spend the summer conducting research in the company of family and friends.

To the staff at the National Archives and at the National Library in Cinnamon Gardens: thank you for allowing me unrestricted access to your collections. To the volunteers at the Maha Bodhi Society in Maradana: I may never have come across Dharmapala’s personal diary volumes without you. To my parents and sister who helped me to track down and to sift through misplaced diary volumes at the Society’s library: thank you for convincing me to let you come with me to Colombo from Kadawatha. To those at the American Institute for Lankan Studies and the International Centre for Ethnic Studies in Colombo: thank you for the many pointers and tips.

Thank you also to the resident monks at the Vijayananda temple in Galle without whom I may never have considered thinking about Dharmapala’s story as one of Buddhist revivalism. To historian K.M. De Silva: thank you for taking time out of your retirement to talk to me in Kandy about my plans for the thesis’s direction. To Princeton classmate Marisa De Silva: thank you for giving me the chance to meet your grandfather.

To Blake Grindon of the Princeton Writing Center, Abigail Sargent of the History Writing Group, and Julie Polhemus ’95: I am truly humbled to have received such detailed and critical feedback from you throughout the writing process.

To Jeremy Adelman, David Bell, Vera Candiani, Sir David Cannadine, Jacob Dlamini, Robert Karl, Emmanuel Kreike, Rosina Lozano, Will Schultz, Jack Tannous, and Kyla Young: I am so grateful for your support and guidance throughout my time at Princeton’s History Department. I have found a true intellectual family in the department, and I am deeply saddened to leave it behind. To the late Isabel Clarke-Decès: while we never did get to complete that Global Seminar, thank you, Professor, for convincing me to focus my studies on South Asia. To Mariana Bono, Mahiri Mwita, and Nataliya Yanchevskaya: thank you also for your instruction and mentorship over the years. I would simply not be in a position to write this book without all of you.

To Allen Kong, Brandon Callegari, Nicholas Callegari, Nicholas Chen, Dominic Saunders, and Agnes Sze Robang: I wouldn’t be who I am today if it weren’t for you all. You have been there for me through the highs and lows of this project, and to you all I am eternally grateful.

And finally, to Michael Laffan: thank you for sticking with me throughout the entire writing process. I mean it. This project has come a long way since when we first met back in May 2019, and I am forever grateful to you for your guidance and feedback throughout. I will certainly miss our weekly discussions, and I hope you will too. It’s been a pleasure.

Oba samata bohoma stutiyi.

Introduction

What you’re attempting is a tough assignment, not many people know all that much about him…these religious topics, they get stuck deep in my throat.

¹

Almost two months before I met Sri Lanka’s most eminent historian K.M. De Silva, the Amaq news agency of the Islamic State terrorist group claimed responsibility for the Easter bombings of April 21, 2019 which claimed the lives of 259 Sri Lankans and foreigners. In addition to the bombings of three luxury hotels in the Colombo area, suicide bombers affiliated with the National Towheeth Jama’ath Muslim organization who had pledged allegiance to the Islamic State targeted Easter services in Colombo and the cities of Negombo and Batticaloa. At one of the churches attacked by the terrorists, St. Sebastian’s Catholic Church in the Catholic-majority city of Negombo, at least 110 churchgoers perished.² The following month, anti-Muslim riots instigated by Sinhalese mobs broke out in two provinces, resulting in the destruction of hundreds of businesses, homes, and mosques, and culminating in the resignation of nine Muslim ministers in June.³

Less than a week after the attacks took place, Gotabaya Rajapaksa, nicknamed the Terminator for his role as defense chief during Sri Lanka’s 26-year civil war against the Tamil Tigers militant group, announced his intention to run for president in the elections scheduled to be held later in the year. The younger brother of wartime president Mahinda Rajapaksa, Gota, as he is fondly known by his supporters, promised to stop the spread of Islamist extremism by rebuilding the intelligence service and surveilling citizens.⁴ Tackling the threat posed by religious fundamentalists and strengthening the security apparatus of the state ought to become key national priorities according to the former wartime minister.

Yet even before the Easter attacks, Sri Lankan Muslims had experienced constant incendiary rhetoric and sporadic violence at the hands of hardline Buddhist nationalist groups. Emerging in the decade which followed the conclusion of the civil war that had pitted the Buddhist-dominated Sri Lankan government against guerillas from a primarily Hindu ethnic group, Buddhist nationalists appeared to have found another target for their toxic vitriol. In the same month that witnessed the resignation of the Muslim ministers, one of Sri Lanka’s foremost Buddhist prelates, Warakagoda Sri Gnanarathana Thero, urged the island’s Buddhists not to patronize Muslim-owned establishments and restaurants and emphasized that Buddhists must protect themselves.⁵ In the upcoming presidential elections, this Islamophobic rhetoric seemed to serve a very clear political purpose of polarizing the electorate and demonizing the Muslim community in the eyes of the country’s Sinhalese Buddhist majority. Religion, it would appear, is a matter that gets stuck in the throats of many a Sri Lankan, much as it did in that of De Silva when I spoke with him in his Kandyan home in June 2019.

Political scientist Neil DeVotta believes that three factors explain the rise of Buddhist nationalism on the island today. First, the justification and encouragement of ethnoreligious violence as an unavoidable consequence of the ideological mythohistory crafted by Sinhalese Buddhists over two millennia. Second, colonial divide-and-conquer policies which heightened class, ethnic, and religious divisions. And third, the modernist challenges faced by Sri Lanka during the twentieth century.⁶ It is clear today that Sinhalese Buddhists have an overwhelming numerical superiority on the island. Yet, the presence of almost one billion Hindus in neighboring India, with its tens of millions of Tamils, the many hundreds of millions of Muslims in nearby states, and the dominance of Christianity in the West, have all seemingly combined to endow Buddhists with a siege mentality.⁷

When we attempt to source the originator of this modern expression of Sinhalese Buddhist nationalism, the name of Anagarika Dharmapala crops up repeatedly. Indeed, DeVotta considers Dharmapala its father.⁸ In the preface to a 1965 collection of Dharmapala's essays, letters, and speeches compiled by Ananda Guruge, then Prime Minister Dudley Senanayake remarked how in addition to resuscitating Buddhism and Sinhalese culture after more than three centuries of colonial domination, [h]is other outstanding contribution was an unswerving loyalty to the nationalist movement and the nationalist cause.⁹ On the release of a commemorative postage stamp of Dharmapala in 2014, former Indian president Pranab Mukherjee also described Dharmapala not only as a pioneer in the revival of Indian Buddhism but as one of the founding contributors of Sinhalese Buddhist nationalism.¹⁰ Here emerges the image of Dharmapala as an anti-colonial hero who forms an organic connection to an authentic Sinhalese past. However, as renowned anthropologist Gananath Obeyesekere observes, greatness is never a one-sided phenomenon but invariably possesses a darker side.¹¹

This darker side emerges in the interpretation of Dharmapala as a symbol of nativist and exclusivist Sinhalese supremacy. As Senanayake and Mukherjee previously noted, Dharmapala indeed became a foundational figure in the narrative of Sri Lanka’s cultural and national revival. However, this aspect of Dharmapala’s legacy came at a real price to the island’s minority communities. Writing in the Colombo Telegraph in 2017, Charles Sarvan laments that Dharmapala has had, and still exerts an unfortunate influence on Sinhalese Buddhist beliefs and attitudes vis-à-vis minority groups – at a very painful cost to the latter.¹² Certainly we must not forget the abrasive and divisive harsh rhetoric of Dharmapala who explicitly listed the enemies of the Sinhalese people in his diaries as Bombay wallas, Cochins, Moslems, Tamils, [and] S. Indian Tamils¹³ and complained in 1915 that [t]he Muhammedan, an alien people who in the early part of the 19th century were common traders, by Shylockian methods became prosperous like the Jews.¹⁴

In fact, Dharmapala’s anti-Semitic remark came at time when such Western-born slurs had gained greater currency. Just one year earlier, in 1914, another Buddhist, Siam’s King Vajiravudh (Rama VI), wrote in a Thai-language newspaper that if one were given a choice between the Jews and the Chinese, it would be hard to choose between them …. And I have no doubt at all that some day we shall see terrifying and blood-curdling events in the countries in which the ‘Jews of the East’ preside.¹⁵ However, as in the case of King Vajiravudh, concentrating on Dharmapala’s harsh rhetoric alone obscures the life of a complicated individual. As The Island notes, focusing on [Dharmapala’s] local harsh rhetoric can only be understood as a very partial and thoroughly incomplete biographical mapping of the life of a complex character.¹⁶ Imagined in Sri Lanka today as either a committed Sinhalese nationalist or a xenophobic bigot, it is little wonder that, according to Dharmapala’s Sinhalese biographer David Karunaratna, Dharmapala wondered what his critics would make of him after his death.¹⁷

Indeed, it is difficult to write about modern Sri Lanka today without referencing the life and times of Dharmapala. After his 1933 death as Sri Devamitta Dhammapala at the Buddhist holy site of Sarnath in northern India, his ashes were brought to Colombo and carried on a two-mile journey from the city’s Fort railway station to the local headquarters of the Maha Bodhi Society. As anthropologist Steven Kemper describes, the procession of mourners which followed the casket containing his ashes stretched half of the route’s distance. Dharmapala’s status on the island of his birth has in fact only grown since his passing. By 1979, 12 statues of Dharmapala had been erected across the nation, and today several streets have been dedicated in his memory in cities such as Anuradhapura, Galle, Kandy, and Matara.¹⁸ India, too, has three statues of Dharmapala, which have been erected at Sarnath, at College Square in Kolkata, and at Bodh Gaya in Bihar, where the historical Buddha is believed to have been enlightened.¹⁹

But before analyzing what critics made of Dharmapala after his death, we must first explore the world