Isle of Demons: The Saint of Bright Doors by Vajra Chandrasekera

Back in my long-lost youth, when I was running through the corpus of published science fiction like a hot knife through butter, the Nebula Award used to be the most coveted accolade in the field. Writers prized them because they represented the legitimate judgement of their peers: only published members of the leading SF authors’ club, the Science Fiction Writers of America, were eligible to vote for the nominated works, which were put up for recognition by their publishers just as Booker Prize nominees are today. Although a big-selling novel or other work certainly stood a better chance in the lists than a more obscure entry, the Nebulas were in no sense a popularity contest; they were taken, on the contrary, as an endorsement of quality imaginative writing, though not always of a conventional literary kind. To bag a Nebula was to be elevated to the high table of science fiction: winners over the years have included Dune (Frank Herbert), The Left Hand of Darkness (Ursula K. Le Guin), The Gods Themselves (Isaac Asimov), Rendezvous with Rama (Arthur C. Clarke) and American Gods (Neil Gaiman). Even people who never read science fiction are sure to recognize at least a few of those names.

       Nowadays, SWFA stands for ‘Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers Association’ and the number of eligible territories of publication has spread far beyond the USA. The field, therefore, is broader. Yet the Nebula still stands, as it always has, for quality writing in the ‘speculative’ genre. The Nebula for 2023, which went to The Saint of Bright Doors, a novel by a Lankan author named Vajra Chandrasekera, should therefore have been big, big news on our little island. Science fiction is hardly a stranger to our shores, after all; this country was home to one of the acknowledged giants of the field for over half a century. 

       Yet, to my astonishment, the book and its author were practically ignored. The contrast with the fuss made over Shehan Karunatilaka’s receipt of the 2022 Booker Prize was sharp and, to SF fans at least, cutting. Not that The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida didn’t deserve its Booker, or that its author’s subsequent celebrity is in any way disproportionate to his achievement; only that Chandrasekera has surely deserved more of his compatriots than a noncommittal 185-word notice in the Sunday Times Plus, which, as far as I have been able to find by googling, is all he got. This is, frankly, scandalous – regardless of whether The Saint of Bright Doors, his Nebula-winning novel, is any good or not.
       It is especially outrageous because, like The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida, The Saint of Bright Doors is a novel with a strong real-world point to make, one that bears on urgent and salient Lankan social and political issues. It does so less obviously than Karunatilaka’s book, but more polemically. The relevance is disguised by the setting of the novel, a kind of parallel-universe Lanka that many of us will not at first recognize as our own country. The use of some such disguise was sadly unavoidable, for freedom of expression, though protected under the Constitution of Sri Lanka, is in fact forbidden to anyone who wishes to confront what one of the characters in Bright Doors refers to as ‘the invisible laws and powers’ of his world – or, as he also calls them, devils: the demons that infest the collective psyche of our nation.
 

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What is this with Lankan authors and devils? The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida is full of rakshasayas and preteyas, bossing the dead about and plaguing the living. In The Saint of Bright Doors, too, ghastly-looking supernatural entities abound, and though only the central character, Fetter, can actually see them, everyone believes in their existence. In his home country of Acusdab, the favoured traditional medicine is what Lankans call devil-dancing: the shamanic ritual ‘exorcism’ of evil disease-causing spirits. Fetter doesn’t seem to think these rites have any curative effect, but the devils are there all the same, cavorting invisibly about the sick and the dying, fastened parasitically on to buildings to batten (presumably) on some psychic emanation produced by the people inside, or simply stalking through the streets of the city of Luriat on business of their own. One is forced to ask: is it only coincidence that the first two novels written in English by Lankans to win prestigious international literary prizes are chock-full of devils?
       To get the obvious out of the way, I don’t think Chandrasekera pinched the idea for his devils from Karunatilaka. Demons are common property and, in any case, he was already halfway through writing The Saint of Bright Doors when Chats with the Dead, the precursor of The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida, was published in mid-2020. I find it just as logical to conclude that, unbeknownst to each other, two Lankan writers dealing in their different ways with the same national nightmare inevitably found themselves channelling the common psychic wellsprings of their culture. Sinhalese folklore and the Buddhist jataka tradition are replete with asuras, rakshasas, ghouls and shapeshifting demons with magic powers. They’re all over the ancient Sinhalese chronicles, too: Kuveni, the jilted, vengeful yakkhini consort of Prince Vijaya in the ancient Sinhalese origin-story, stands at the head of a legion. The Mahavamsa gives this account of the coronation of Pandukabhaya, an early, pre-Buddhist king of Lanka:
 

He settled the yakkha Kalavela on the east side of the city, the yakkha Cittaraja at the lower end of the Abhaya tank. The slave-woman who had helped him in times past and was re-born of a yakkhini, the thankful (king) settled at the south gate of the City. Within the royal precincts he housed the yakkhini in the form of a mare. Year by year he had sacrificial offerings made to them and to other yakkhas; but on festival-days he sat with Cittaraja beside him on a seat of equal height, and having gods and men to dance before him, the king took his pleasure, in joyous and merry wise.*

 
Pandukabhaya, on the scant evidence of this paragraph (‘having gods and men to dance before him’), is traditionally considered the inventor of devil-dancing. But he himself is scarcely historical; he gets a brief, garbled mention in a fourth-century ce Pali work called the Dipavamsa but is otherwise known almost entirely from the Mahavamsa, which was composed about a thousand years after he is supposed to have lived. The roots of Lankan demonology are authentically prehistoric.
         Some modern commentators consider the Yakkhas to have been a population of Lankan indigenes who were all but wiped out by the Vijayan invaders and whose remnants were later absorbed into the Sinhalese population or became whom we now call Vedda people. There is plenty of evidence in the chronicles for some such occurrence, and it would certainly explain the later demonization of the Yakkhas (as justifying their effective genocide). But whether or not we give credence to this appalling theory, there’s no denying that devils, demons, witchcraft and possession have always featured disproportionately in Lankan mythology, folklore and faith. Consider the following passage, written over three centuries ago by a close, astute observer of the Sinhalese people:
 

And indeed it is sad to consider, how this poor People are subjected to the Devil, and they themselves acknowledge it their misery, saying their Countrey is so full of Devils, and evil Spirits, that unless in this manner they should adore them, they would be destroyed by them… 

     Their chief supplication they make to the Devil, as being God's instrument, sent to punish and afflict whom he pleaseth; as I have discoursed at large already.

 
The words are from Robert Knox’s An Historical Relation of the Island Ceylon, a product of its author’s nineteen-year confinement on the island at the pleasure of the King of Kandy.† Other foreign authors, too, have written of the Lankan obsession with magic, charms and evil spirits. Few took these matters seriously, though some were credulously or cynically moved to pass on tales of dark apparitions and baneful mysteries that they had heard from the locals. Only the Protestant missionaries who began arriving in large numbers during the early British period – and who were far more prepared to believe in devils than the suave Oxford and Cambridge divines who administered the Church of England in Ceylon – took the diabolism of the natives seriously, writing fierce tracts against the popular practices of demon-worship (as they saw it), devil-dancing and magic. Interestingly, their hostility is echoed in The Buddhist Catechism, a work composed along well-worn Protestant lines by Henry Steel Olcott and taught to Buddhist children in government schools until the 1960s; but even this condemnation by one of the founders of modern Sinhalese Buddhism has failed to wean us away from our fascination with the dark side. A monograph on the subject published during the Victorian era – On Demonology & Witchcraft in Ceylon by Dandris de Silva Gooneratn – remains in print to this day. Our popular culture, too, is still haunted by devils.
       Hardly surprising, then, that the two most successful Lankan novelists of recent times have hit upon demons and their kin as a metaphor for the shadow-side of our national psyche. They were not the first to make the connexion: deviltry and demons have long served as a popular metaphor among artists, performers and writers portraying or commenting on recent history in the Sinhala arts. The late Gananath Obeyesekere, who published a number of important anthropological works on demonology, called demons ‘a class of cultural symbols which are invested with subjective significance in order to articulate psychological conflicts.’‡ They serve equally well, at times, for articulating political ones.
 

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I almost gave up on The Saint of Bright Doors though – twice. The first occasion arrived on p. 40 or so, when someone says to Fetter, the principal character, ‘But first, I need to tell you both a story.’ Oh god, I thought, not another bloody info-dump. 

       Info-dumps, as we fans call them, are the bane of science fiction and fantasy: long passages, often extending over chapters, in which the author supplies the reader with necessary facts about the exotic setting of their story (the ethnology and mythology of Middle-Earth in The Lord of the Rings, the strange ecology of the desert planet Arrakis in Dune), or explains some important scientific idea on which the plot hinges (such as the hypothetical faster-than light particles used to send messages back from the future in Gregory Benford’s Timescape). Info-dumps are not good writing in any genre – readers looking for a story don’t want to be lectured – but are better tolerated, for obvious reasons, in SF and fantasy than in the mainstream. The first five chapters of The Saint of Bright Doors had been almost purely narrative, bringing me up to speed with Fetter’s curriculum vitae and describing Luriat, the city where he has come to live. None of it had been particularly engaging or enlightening and, at the end of five chapters, I still had no idea where the story was going – or even what the story might be about. Fetter seemed to me like your typical rootless Generation X protagonist: conflicted, listless, uncommitted, opportunistic – and quite uninteresting to a reader from an older generation for whom the psychology of a fictional character is of greater importance than the character’s ‘feels’. Fetter has been brought up by his mother to murder his father, a famous cult leader, but has left his home in ‘the hinterlands’ and come to the big city to get away from all that (not that he affects to care much about it one way or another). As for Luriat, I couldn’t get any handle on it at all; it seemed to be one of those made-up generic locales one comes upon in too-artsy modernist and postmodernist fiction, a conurbation of words peopled by enigmatic beings doing unexplained and seemingly pointless things, like the House in Susannah Clarke’s Piranesi or the settings of some of China Mieville’s stories.
       After five eventless chapters of scene-setting, the promise of yet another info-dump was daunting. I stuck it out, though, and was rewarded for my efforts by the first properly drawn scene in the novel: Fetter, pretending to be someone else, accepts an invitation to dinner with some members of the Luriati elite, people far above his supposed station in life. I like dinner-party scenes, and was quite enjoying this one in spite of all the mysterious small talk about caste, religious cults and state corruption flying about above Fetter’s head, till he dropped a brick no-one in his situation could credibly have dropped: a gratuitous act of self-revelation concerning his identity that was, moreover, a confession of doings that, in Luriat, are considered criminal. Not the sort of thing an impostor at a posh dinner, already suffering from anxiety and social dislocation, would be likely to reveal, even after a couple of drinks. I flung the book away in annoyance, cynically wondering on what basis the SFWA could possibly have given it a Nebula.
       But they had, all the same; and this, to me, suggested that The Saint of Bright Doors might have merits of a different, less conventional kind. I learned from a quick trawl through the Goodreads site that many other readers had complained about the things that annoyed me – initial slowness, confusing descriptions, general disorientation – but some had persevered and ended up praising the book. This on its own wasn’t enough to make me want to go back to it, but then I found a review explaining that the point of departure for the plot is a rough blend of Buddhist lore and Sinhalese race-myth. ‘Fetter’, I learned, is Sanskrit for Rahula: the name the Buddha-to-be gave his infant son because he regarded the boy as the strongest of all the chains binding him to the wheel of existence. Fetter’s father, in The Saint of Bright Doors, is certainly not the Buddha, but he is the founder and head of a new religious cult with superficial resemblances to Buddhism that has become very popular in Fetter’s country. And Fetter’s mother, whom he refers to as Mother-of-Glory (a very rough gloss on Yashodara, the name of Prince Siddhartha’s wife), is not the devastated but ultimately reconciled bhikkhuni of Buddhist tradition but bears a far closer resemblance to the demon-queen Kuveni. His father, too, is more Prince Vijaya than Prince Siddhartha.
       With this helpful (but externally obtained) information, the earlier info-dumps began to make sense. Fetter and Luriat slowly slid into focus, though events, times and places remained confusing until I realised what an ingenious stratagem Chandrasekera has used to distinguish his parallel, fictional reality from the real world we live in. There are clues to it right from the beginning of the novel; we learn, for example, that ‘North Jambu’ food is very similar to ‘Luriati style’. I won’t say more for fear of spoiling the surprise, but keep an eye open for ‘the muddy lagoon of the singing fish’. Once this key is turned, other, incidental mysteries also reveal themselves: the name of an exclusive residential district of Luriat, for instance, becomes an obvious fantasy analogue of Cinnamon Gardens…
       Now that my mind’s eye had something to look at, I began reading with more interest and, soon enough, with pleasure. This lasted, more or less, all the way through the long, episodically unfolding denouement of the book, which commences eighty pages or so before the end. Things do get a bit messy after that; the reader senses the author’s grip weakening. He manages to hold it all together, though, long enough to deliver a series of credible action set-pieces that bring the story to a close. Personally, I felt that the overall effect was to disperse among several scenes the impact that one good strong climax should have produced, and the novel ends without fully unfolding its subtext. But neatly satisfactory endings are hard to pull off for a writer seeking to transcend genre and write a novel of anthropological insight and political criticism, which is what Vajra Chandrasekera has tried to do. Has he succeeded?

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It would depend, I suppose, on whom you asked. Science-fiction and fantasy readers enjoy the work of constructing their own imaginary visuals out of verbal materials supplied by authors; much of the pleasure of reading in these genres is derived from this activity, and authors particularly adept at providing the raw materials are celebrated as ‘world-builders’ capable of inventing credible, consistent and appealing imaginary settings for their stories. Herbert, LeGuin and Clarke were famous for this, as were many other SF writers like Brian Aldiss, Larry Niven, Robert Silverberg and Gene Wolfe. I suppose Mieville and Neal Stephenson are the present-day masters. The most famous world-builder of all was, of course, J.R.R. Tolkein, who wasn’t a science-fiction writer at all.
       This being the case, it probably didn’t matter to many of Vajra Chandrasekera’s readers in the USA (where the book has sold remarkably well), or in other parts of the world, that the setting he has created is so foreign to them as to be positively alien; they would easily have adapted it to their own limitations of knowledge and taste. Quite a few of the settings are comfortably international anyway: generic apartment blocks and crumbling shopping malls are common enough anywhere in the world. The most brilliantly imagined setting of all, an entire country that seems to have been turned into a concentration or refugee camp, could be sited anywhere in the humid tropical zones of Planet Earth. All this is fine, but what doesn’t really gel is where exactly on the stream of real or imagined history Luriat, Fetter’s homeland of Acusdab, and Fetter himself are floating. In spite of all the present-day buildings and technology, they seem unmoored, somehow. And while this may not affect a reader’s enjoyment of the novel, it does make it hard to work out what it really is about. Overseas reviews, amateur and professional alike, are full of the most amusing confusion. Here’s a typical one from the Goodreads web site:
 

…a story about creating vs consuming, about how capitalism is slowly (or quickly even) consuming us all regardless of what we are creating. how money is allocated to religions vs how money is allocated to science. how people care so much more about their individualism than communities

 
Fiddlesticks. The Saint of Bright Doors is about none of those things, which are just contemporary American conundrums that the reviewer thinks are important. You can see how someone used to thinking in such parochial terms might not be able to grasp Chandrasekera’s novel in any other way. The foreign readers who have understood that the novel is ‘a take on (another universe’s) Buddhism, Sri Lanka-flavoured’ as a more perceptive reviewer put it, may understand better. However, they may not find the novel to have such resonance with their own lives and cultures. Then again, it scarcely matters, does it, so long as they enjoy it? A book is not what its author writes but what its readers read.
       For Lankans, the difficulty is more subtle. Fetter’s world is full of familiar elements. We recognize some of the scenery – the ominous devil-drums, the devil-dances and the perahera elements, as well as the pervasive corruption at every social level, the ethnic and caste hatreds promoted in the name of religion, the regular pogroms. We perceive the religious and ethnic correspondences. But Luriat is not particularly evocative of Colombo – to me it came to feel more like a city in southern India – and other settings, too, are indistinct. A reviewer on Goodreads opined that the part set in the concentration-camp country reminded them of the Sundarbans sequence in Midnight’s Children. That’s not a bad comparison, in a glancing kind of way.
       The thing is, you don’t (at least I didn’t) read The Saint of Bright Doors as a Lankan story. I don’t think Vajra Chandrasekera really means you to. He has tried to create something more universal using Lanka as his template. This, of course, is a thing any ambitious writer of any nationality might want to do. Luriat and Acusdab and the great open prison-camp through which Fetter wanders are not recognisably Lankan in the way that Shehan Karunatilaka’s Colombo unmistakably is; but neither are they meant to be. Then again, there are some pretty clear correspondences. Your mileage, as people still say sometimes, may vary.
       I enjoyed The Saint of Bright Doors. Not nearly as much as I’ve enjoyed the great past Nebula winners, but they’re an impossible act to follow. Besides, I’m out of sympathy with contemporary writing nowadays; the only new fiction I can really bear to read since Martin Amis died is other top-table British literary stuff from the likes of William Boyd and Ian McEwan – writers my own age who are slipping past their game anyway. Most of today’s novels seem to be concerned with people and subjects in which I have not the slightest interest, and seem to be written by people who have thrown out their moral compasses with the rubbish and haven’t done much reading either, at least not within what you might once have called the established canon. Chandrasekera is an exception; he’s put in the work, that’s for sure, and his values, moral and literary, are of a rather old-fashioned kind. I like that. 
       His principal readership, though, should be among his own generation. It’s a pity The Saint of Bright Doors hasn’t made much of an impression in its author’s home country. I suspect the reasons for that are more than instrumental happenstance; this is not a book of which the majoritarian ethnocratic tendency in this country could approve, especially as it features bloodthirsty monkish villains with strangely familiar names like Ripening Wisdom and Shining Jewel of Truth. It’s a pity; the book, on its merits, deserves to be far more widely read, and I doubt that it would make any sociopolitical waves if it were. It’s a little too oblique for that. I think Chandrasekera was aiming at something more timeless, more general, anyway. It will be a few years before anyone can tell whether he’s hit the mark or not, but I did enjoy his book.
       And the Bright Doors? A pretty conceit; never mind about them.

* Geiger, W. (trans.), Mahavamsa. Oxford University Press (1912).

† Knox, R., An Historical Relation of the Island of Ceylon in the East-Indies, London, 1681, Royal Society.

‡ Obeyesekere, G, Medusa’s Hair: An Essay on Personal Symbols and Religious Experience. Chicago, 1981, University of Chicago Press. 

The Devil & Dandris Gooneratne

Demonology & Witchcraft in Ceylon

Dandris de Silva Gooneratne

My copy of this miniature masterpiece was gifted to me by my old friend Creon Corea not long before his premature death in 2006. On the title page, he inscribed to me a humorous warning: when reading, don’t let the demon in you come out.          

       I’m ashamed to say I did nothing to disturb the demon for almost twenty years. I only took up the book when I realised that reading it would be useful to the review of Vajra Chandrasekera’s Nebula Award-winning novel, The Saint of Bright Doors, that I am currently writing. I wish now that I’d read it before reviewing Shehan Karunatilaka’s The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida: judging by some of the beings and scenes appearing therein, he too seems to have drawn fairly heavily on Gooneratne.

But not necessarily. Both these authors are Sinhalese – as of course was Gooneratne – so perhaps all three were just dipping into the mutual well of folklore. Perhaps not even consciously; for I, too, am part Sinhalese, and reading On Demonology & Witchcraft in Ceylon revealed to me that I have done much the same myself in stories that I have written, without even realising it. In an old novelette titled ‘In the Dark’, for example, a comically lust-crazed demon dwelling in the narrow space separating two huge boulders in the middle of a jungle manifests its desires nationwide in the form of a growing cloud of darkness. I had thought both the dwelling-space and the atramentous shroud my own inventions, but I found them in Gooneratne all the same, along with sundry other material that had somehow invaded my fiction here and there. If I were superstitious, I could easily conclude that all four of us – Gooneratne, Karunatilaka, Chandrasekera and I – were being insensibly manipulated by demonic ethno-chthonic forces. Or – to put it in (very slightly) more respectable language – yielding to drives arising out of the cultural collective unconscious. Well – if so, then my fellow writers have responded in far greater strength and detail than I ever have. Perhaps they’re more Sinhalese, whatever that means, than I, but I think it might be safer simply to assume that they’ve read Gooneratne. Does a cultural group even have a collective unconscious? A question I leave to you, good reader, since I am not at all competent to answer it.

 

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On Demonology… is a short book, originally published as a monograph in the Journal of the Ceylon Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society in 1885. My 1998 reprint runs to only 120 pages, rather closely typeset. There are seven chapters: a general introduction to the subject, a kind of demon-directory in which many of the fiends encountered by Maali Almeida in the afterlife take their bows, and descriptions of how these beings, which in Sinhalese folklore are the instigators of all disease and much death, live and go about their diabolical business. This is followed by chapters on the so-called ‘devil-dances’ (ritual exorcisms or, as Chandrasekera more aptly describes them in his novel, hostage negotiations), incantations, charms and other methods by which the demons may be thwarted and even bound to a human’s will. There is a lot of material in these chapters: Gooneratne not only describes the ceremonies in great detail but also explains their alleged meaning and discourses on their origins – though he admits that the rites are so tortuous, confusing and numerous (tradition puts the number of charms alone at 240,000) that their provenance is impossible to untangle. 

       The final chapter, ‘Dreadful Consequences of a belief in Demon Influences’, is an indictment of the superstition. The author notes the prevalence of family feuds and social violence (up to and including murder), as well as the unusual frequency of madness and episodes of mass hysteria, among Sinhalese village-dwellers. Such occurrences, he says, are regularly attributable to demonic superstition. I am not so sure; common human passions – lust, avarice, envy and resentment of others, a thirst for vengeance, paranoia – find an outlet in superstition, but that isn’t where they come from. Feuds and quarrels break out among rural villagers all over the world, whether or not they have any extraordinary belief in demonic powers. 

       More persuasively, Gooneratne enumerates the dreadful inconveniences that superstitions of this kind impose on daily life. The odd taciturnity of Sinhalese at social gatherings, a trait noted by Robert Knox and many subsequent observers, is herein explained: demons are believed to be attracted to places where ‘the noise of loud voices is continually heard.’ He lists no less than twenty such demon-haunted loci, from the conventional – wells, crossroads, graveyards, deserted houses – to the bizarre: places used for washing clothes, wood-apple groves and locations ‘where there are two rocks close to each other.’ All such places are best avoided, even at the price of a long, sweaty detour; but if one is obliged to pass by or visit them, then certain spells and warding-rituals have to be performed, often several times over. These spells and rituals exactly resemble the gesticulations and mutterings of someone suffering from obsessive-compulsive disorder, and are just as wasteful of the performer’s time and energy. Things are worse still for someone ‘struck’ or possessed by a demon: the victim enters a state called tanikama, ‘aloneness’, in which they behave as though they have been declared tabu, isolating themselves from others, often running away from home, and slowly wasting away.*

       The worst consequence of all, according to Gooneratne, is the thraldom these superstitions impose on the minds of the people. When trying to ‘convince a demon-worshipper of the absurdity of his beliefs,’ he notes, the chief obstacle one encounters is

 

…a sort of mental apathy, an unenquiring, contented and lethargic state of mind, satisfied with what it is, and incurious or indifferent to learn anything new – a state of mind in which the man sometimes mechanically acquiesces in all that you say, and admits the force and truth of your arguments, without however his reason being at all convinced or his feelings affected.

 

While this state of mind is proverbially common among the Sinhalese – we even have a special name for such people, lindé gembo or frogs in the well – I’m not at all sure that it is produced by a belief in devils, charms and spells. Anywhere you go in the world, you will find people who display the same complacent impermeability to new ideas. You see it among cult members, the narrowly religious, political ideologues and conspiracy theorists, but you don’t really have to look that far; it is widespread, too, among the unthinkingly loyal and the incurably sentimental, a sort of self-brainwashing. It seems to me that Gooneratne was getting his causes mixed up with his effects here; surely it is one’s existing cast of mind that enables one to embrace and feel comfortable with irrational and foolish ideas, rather than the ideas acting upon the mind to change it; but perhaps it is different when the ideas are absorbed in childhood.

       Yet these beliefs, for all the irrational fear they inspire and the encumbrances they impose upon daily life, do appear to have some practical use. Chapter V of On Demonology… contains a long list of diseases and calamities that demons and black magicians are said to inflict on humans, and against which charms are said to be efficacious. Interestingly, most of them are what we should describe as mental illnesses: episodes of mania, fits of rage, outbursts of abusive language, ‘swoons’, anorexia, amnesia, the urge to run away from home and various manifestations of demonic possession. In such cases the devil-dances, charms and rituals can easily be viewed as psychiatric interventions, often quite effective and arguably less damaging to the patient than being locked up in an institution or dosed with the SSRIs and other poisons used by modern science to treat the mentally unwell.

       But though most of the examples of alleged demonic activity described by Gooneratne are cases of this kind (and the rest are easily explained without invoking supernatural forces), the rituals of Sinhalese devil-worship and witchcraft were and still are used regularly in attempts to treat physical illnesses, especially in cases that have been declared terminal by modern doctors. The sounds of devil-drums are not uncommonly heard among the more prosperous residential suburbs of Colombo, testifying that some hapless victim of advanced cancer or multiple organ failure is being tormented through their final hours by desperate relatives (or creditors) seeking to restore them to health by driving the demons out. The devil-doctors, as Chandrasekera calls them, are still in business. 

 

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There is nothing in the least superstitious about On Demonology & Witchcraft in Ceylon. If the author seems to be credulous about anything, it is the primacy of reason and the desirability of Western-style progress. 

       Born in 1827 in the coastal village of Waskaduwa about 40km south of Colombo, Dandris de Silva Gooneratne was baptized at the local Anglican chapel. In those days, baptism was not carried out solely for religious reasons; in a holdover from Dutch law, which the British at first perpetuated, a certificate of baptism was required when, later in life, one wished to register one’s marriage, make a will or carry out any other legal proceeding. Knowing this, the author of a JCBRAS paper on Gooneratne, published in 2008,† not only assumes that Gooneratne’s baptism was of this utilitarian kind but that he was in fact a Buddhist, going so far as to take issue with earlier historians who state otherwise. The scholar rests his assumption on a long-ago declaration by Gooneratne’s nephew that his uncle quit his second term of employment at the Colombo Academy (the present Royal College) because he ‘could not see eye to eye with the Principal regarding certain religious matters.’

       Gooneratne may well indeed have left the Academy for ‘religious’ reasons. His first job, too, had been as a junior teacher there; he had attended the school as a student and was later offered a place on the staff. He did not stay long on that occasion either – and his next job was that of acting secretary to James Chapman, the first Anglican Bishop of Colombo. This was not a position that would or could have been filled by any Buddhist. Nor, in fact, was his next job after that, which was master of the town school at Madampe, a sizeable community near Puttalam. At this time, all matters relating to Ceylon’s schools were in the hands of the Central Schools Commission, which was dominated by Christian clerics, and no-one who was not a practising Christian could hope for any kind of appointment from it.

       The ‘religious matters’ on which Gooneratne and the principal of the Academy could not see eye to eye were, in fact, almost certainly Christian – on both sides. The principal, a forcefully dogmatic and quarrelsome clergyman named Barcroft Boake, belonged to a strongly Protestant, indeed unbendingly Calvinist, faction within the Church of England; he was an implacable enemy of Bishop Chapman, Gooneratne’s subsequent employer, whose attachment to the High Church principles of the Oxford Movement was so strong as to make him almost an Anglo-Catholic. Divisions within Anglicanism had broadened almost to schism by the middle of the nineteenth century, and Boake and Chapman were on opposite sides of the divide; the two men carried out a bitter feud all through Chapman’s episcopacy.‡ Gooneratne, who had come under Chapman’s wing as his secretary and owed his subsequent career largely to the bishop, may also have been persuaded toward the High Church view – or perhaps he had merely happened, on some unhappy occasion, to utter a favourable word about the bishop or his Oxford ideas in the principal’s hearing. For a man like Boake, this could have well been transgression enough to merit the sack.

       Whatever the truth of this, the perspective of the author of On Demonology… is that of a rational, modern man who might be a Buddhist, a Christian, or even an atheist. The explanations he advances for the phenomenon of demonic possession are psychological ones, and he presents them in the popular-scientific jargon of his times: hysteria, Mesmerism, ‘the cataleptic trance’ and so on. There is plenty about Buddhism in his book, for the folklore of demon-worship contains many references to the Buddha and Buddhist tradition, but though never less than respectful when dealing with this subject, he never reveals the faintest trace of Buddhist belief. He is writing, you suspect, for his fellow-members of the Ceylon Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, nearly all of whom were European, and at whose meetings he first presented this book as a series of lectures.

 

❦

 

Gooneratne, in fact, was one of those liminal figures who once operated at the interface between native and colonial cultures all over the world, and whose writings often display greater understanding of the processes and consequences of cultural interpenetration than the work of scholars and administrators who dwell in one culture while they pronounce upon and make determinations for another. The tragedy is that the liminalists’ contribution is often poorly known, discounted due to prejudice or simply failing to find publication. In the case of Ceylon, Gooneratne suggests, the British entirely failed to understand the Sinhalese national character because they remained largely ignorant of and contemptuous toward what they called ‘devil-worship’, making no effort to educate people out of it and declining even to make a serious study of it. They knew about it, of course, but they vastly underestimated its importance in the culture.

 

A series of writers… have, at different periods during the last 200 years, given to the public the results of their enquiries and experience in matters connected to this Island: yet none of them seem to have perceived, in any adequate degree, the extraordinary amount of gross superstition which prevails among the people of whose manners, customs and history they professed to treat… They do not appear to have been fully aware of the extraordinary degree of influence they exercise over the mind of the Sinhalese. (Ch. I)

 

Hence many an Englishman is led to believe that Demon Worship has not at present a firm hold of the minds of a portion of the people, and that it is upheld among the few merely because custom or habit has made it familiar to them. Nothing can be more erroneous than this opinion; for so far from a portion of the people being indifferent to Demon Worship from the conviction that it is an absurdity, we believe there is not (excepting 4 or 5 hundred well educated men in the whole Island) one Singhalese man who believes in anything more firmly than in Demonism. (Ch. VII)

 

Failing to perceive this, and noting the easy adaptability of the Sinhalese to European habits and manners (a phenomenon by no means confined to the English-speaking elite), the British focused on the Buddhist side of the national psyche and failed take enough notice of its dark twin. Only the fervently appalled Protestant missionaries inveighed against ‘charms and devil-dancing’, but their warnings rarely penetrated the complacency of the colonial authorities or the establishment of the Church of England in Ceylon, who did not believe in diabolism and regarded the missionaries as hysterical ‘enthusiasts’. 

       And this raises a tantalising question. What if it had? Would the British attitude toward Ceylon and the Ceylonese have altered in any material way? Might it, perhaps, have drawn aside the arras of Occidentalization that hid from them the timeless superstitions and hatreds that drove their subjects, and exposed the dark alcove in which the old demons of race and creed and caste had secreted themselves? And would they, then, have been so keen to move us forward so quickly along the path to national independence?

       On Demonology… was published in 1885, even as the Sinhalese Buddhist Revival of the late nineteenth century was raising Sinhalese nationalist consciousness and making it inseparable from Buddhism. Among the central texts of that revival was a catechism§ that continued to be taught to Sinhalese children in Buddhist schools until at least the 1960s. It warns unequivocally against belief in ‘charms, incantations, the observance of lucky hours and devil-dancing,’ stating that ‘they are positively repugnant to [the] fundamental principles’ of Buddhism and referring the catechumen to the Brahmajala-Sutta, where ‘the Buddha has categorically described these and other superstitions as pagan, mean and spurious.’ Might we not expect that the rise to dominance of such a reforming strain of Buddhism among the Sinhalese, one that sets itself explicitly against demon-worship and witchcraft, has reduced the potency of belief in demons, charms and other superstitions over the past century-and-a-half?

       Looking about me, the answer seems to be clear enough. I must say that it comes as a blessed relief to find another driving force besides misunderstood and twisted Buddhism with which to associate the horrors that have comprised the history of our country since independence. Certainly I am far from the first to perceive the connection: a number of artists, authors and dramatists working in the Sinhala cultural stream have produced powerful works about our recent past that employ demons, demon-worship and human sacrifice as their central metaphors. It happens in English, too, as the successes of Shehan Karunatilaka and Vajra Chandrasekera both testify.

NOTES

* Gooneratne’s account tallies closely with descriptions of the tabu state given in Freud’s Totem & Taboo, which was published almost thirty years after On Demonology…

† Gunaratna, K. Locana, ‘Dandris de Silva Gunaratna [sic]: Recalling His Times & Some Landmarks in His Career.’ Colombo, JCBRAS New Series, Vol. 54 (2008).

‡ Interested readers are referred to Chs. 7 & 9 of my history of St Thomas’s College, Thomia (Colombo, 2025, Lazari Press).

§ Olcott, H.S., The Buddhist Catechism, ‘certified by the Ven. Hikkaduwe Sumangala of the Southern Buddhist Chapter.’ Colombo, Varanasi, London etc., 1902ff (numerous publishers in Lanka and overseas).

From Hippo, with Love

Confessions 

St Augustine

This is, apparently, the world’s first autobiography. The parts of the narrative that deal with the author’s personal and emotional life are both well told and historically interesting, not to say fascinating. Augustine was also one of the greatest ancient post-Classical philosophers, and I was impressed by his ability to communicate difficult ideas lucidly.

    I’m not religious, so that aspect of the book was less important to me than it would be to most readers. I am interested in theodicy, but I found Augustine’s rather unsatisfactory – the usual Catholic position of blaming everything on human free will and error without tangling with the real questions about the power and goodness of God that are raised by the existence of evil. Augustine says evil isn’t a substance in its own right but simply the absence of good, or more accurately the absence of some good; in other words, evil as such doesn’t really exist. All things are good to God, he explains, but some things are less than perfectly good. All this is very neatly laid out but the logical contradictions are not addressed or even, it seemed to me, noticed.

    What I’d been hoping for most from this book was some insight regarding how an intelligent person (as Augustine most certainly was, though his true genius lay elsewhere) could appease or silence their intellect in order to accept the logical and moral contradictions of Christian belief. I have seen it happen to people in real life, and it always looks to me like self-betrayal, essentially giving up on oneself and settling for the easy option – like that bit in Watership Down where some of the escaped rabbits grow weary of the hardships of life in the wild and decide to return to the farm (and certain slaughter at the hands of the farmer).

    What I’d been hoping for most from this book was some insight regarding how an intelligent person (as Augustine most certainly was, though his true genius lay elsewhere) could appease or silence their intellect in order to accept the logical and moral contradictions of Christian belief. I have seen it happen to people in real life, and it always looks to me like self-betrayal, essentially giving up on oneself and settling for the easy option – like that bit in Watership Down where some of the escaped rabbits grow weary of the hardships of life in the wild and decide to return to the farm (and certain slaughter at the hands of the farmer). But in this regard, I was thoroughly disappointed by the Confessions; all the author has to say on the subject is that the Word of God supersedes all other knowledge and renders all intellectual questions irrelevant. I’ve heard that line before and I’m afraid it does not convince me.

    As for the man himself, he always did believe in God, in one form or another, so this question never troubled him. His quest was not for God but for a religion that could meet his intellectual and psychological needs. As the narrative approached the moment of his conversion I grew quite excited, waiting for the big intellectual denouement, but the whole thing came and went in a welter of emotive description and heartfelt praise, like the climactic scene of a romance novel, without a single intelligent word said about what I really wanted to understand.

    At this point I rather lost interest in the good father’s story. The investigation of time in Book XI is impressive, certainly for someone writing in an era lacking accurate timepieces; Augustine could probably have been persuaded agree with Einstein that ‘the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.’ I skipped most of Book XII, in which the author seems to take to task those who interpret the Bible symbolically before doing, as far as I could see, exactly the same. I skipped the last book, XIII, completely.
    I wish I knew of a critical analysis or review of the Confessions for non-religious readers, written from a secular, essentially philosophical and historical perspective. If anyone knows of such a thing, please tell me about it. I want to read it – so long as it’s not too long-winded.

Digital Dualism

When people project their thoughts along what even we greybeards no longer call the Information Superhighway, nuance and subtlety seem to get left behind in the parking lot. Our opinions and responses, even with regard to the most complex ideas and issues, are reduced to brutally opposed binaries: for vs against, men vs women, Left vs Right, us vs them, good vs evil. We act as though each of us is all one thing or another, as if where we stand on any issue completely defines who we are.

    Conceptual binaries are, of course, an essential part of our human mental equipment, but they’re far from being the whole toolkit. Nothing, to coin a phrase, is all black or white. The world is a messy, complicated place, infinitely varied in all its aspects, and human beings are evidently the messiest and most complicated things that exist in it. Binaries, therefore, useful though they are for the operations of logic, cannot even begin to describe us. Binaries are just endpoints on the spectrum of all possible measurements some physical, economic, social or psychological variable. Sometimes we can look at these variables as being made up of relevant binaries added together in different proportions, the way you get varying shades of grey by mixing black and white in differing proportions. But however it is these intermediate positions are defined or arrived at, most of us – when offline, at least – are willing to acknowledge their existence. We don’t normally think of the world and its inhabitants as being all one way or the other, with nothing in between: not unless we’re idiots, or fanatics.

    But when we get on the internet, and particularly (though by no means exclusively) on social media, all that subtlety and nuance, all those insights into how complicated life is, how conflicted people are, how difficult and often illogical our behaviour and in particular our moral choices can be, and how much allowance for all this one should make when dealing with others – all these suddenly seem to vanish. If anyone disagrees with us, they’re The Enemy, to be opposed, argued with, trolled, gulled, ridiculed, insulted and beaten back into the digital undergrowth with every resource at our disposal. We scarcely notice that in projecting this kind of extremism on to our opponents, we make extremists of ourselves too; by pushing them into one corner we inevitably force ourselves into the opposite one, and never even notice that we’re doing it.
    As someone who does most of his communicating these days through the internet, I have had reason to think a lot about this. Most of my thinking so far has centred on the frailties of human nature, particularly my own, and I am happy to report that, by trying to understand those I communicate with on the internet better as people, I have become a less argumentative (and at times abrasive) interlocutor than I used to be. But I’m no saint, and am still liable to lose my equanimity from time to time when confronted by people with whom I disagree, especially if they lack what I regard as courtesy or are trying to sell me something.

    More and more often, though, I’m beginning to wonder whether these polarities and divisions, these regular online revelations of what must surely be our worst selves to the whole wide world, are entirely our fault. I am becoming convinced that the playing-field on which we perform, like the buttress inside an Eton fives court, is affecting the rules of the game.

✸

How could that be? Here is what I think may be the matter. 

    Computers and the internet are products of digital technology, and digital technology is based on binary logic: ones and zeroes. A computer is basically nothing but a huge arrangement of switches, and each of these switches can have only two positions: ON and OFF – or, as it might be, 1 and 0, or YES and NO. All the logical operations of a computer, even the most complex and abstract, are nothing but a series of brute binary choices: this way or that way, accept or reject, true or false, yes or no. No middle ground.

    Is it coincidence, then, that our surrender to computers and the internet seems to have made us start thinking of all human questions in terms of reductive binaries, just as all problems are reduced, inside a computer, to a series of Boolean logical functions? Is it too big a stretch to think that the apparent inevitability of either total disagreement or total agreement that we find on the internet – this idiot tendency to view everything in the world as a collection of binary qualities or traits – good or evil, Left or Right, for or against – is at least partly determined by the very structure of the machines we use and the specific, highly reductive logic by which they operate? Is it possible that much of the disagreement and misunderstanding that arises when people communicate via the internet could be arising, somehow, from the very digital infrastructure that makes it all possible?

    And will it get worse as digital technology infiltrates every aspect of the world we live in? In some countries (though not, of course, in dear old Ceylon) the infiltration is almost complete. What kind of monsters shall we have become by the time it is fully accomplished? Will civilization itself still be left standing? Look at how divisions in politics, society and the global community of nations have accelerated and been exacerbated since the internet became a public utility. Look, for God’s sake, at what has happened to the United States of America...

    I am neither a philosopher nor a computer scientist. If some member of either profession – or, for that matter, any profession – could suggest a mechanism by which this digital duality might be transmitted from the infrastructure to its users, I should be very grateful indeed. And if they can show me why it can’t – show me, that is, where I am wrong, and set me straight – I would be more grateful still. Only try not to make your argument too straightforwardly black and white, or coming over the internet as it probably will, I am all too likely to disagree, reject it, and insult you into the bargain.

Hill-Country Cosmopolis

The Many Faces of the Kandyan Kingdom

by Gananath Obeyesekere

In this slender but fact-filled volume, the author presents an alternative and, to my mind, more truthful view of the Kingdom of Kandy in its heyday than the perspective afforded by modern Lankan historians and scholars. The latter must, of course, hew closely to Sinhalese-Buddhist ‘nationalist’ orthodoxy if they hope to obtain academic publication or preferment in our country. The effect of this censorious regime on national life has been stifling, not only in the study of history but in every intellectual and cultural field from fine art to marine archaeology. Music, perhaps, has suffered most grievously of all.

    Gananath Obeyesekere fought this ethno-political orthodoxy all his life. His weapons were academic brilliance and social eminence, and though he could never have hoped to win, he did much to keep open a space, albeit a cruelly limited one, in which Lankans who cherish reason and tolerance may carry on their work and feel free to speak their minds. Who still defends that space, who will help keep it open now that his powerful example is no more?

§

In the view of the orthodoxy, the Kandyan Kingdom throve whenever it was a strict Buddhist theocracy that piously rejected foreign and secular influences, and was finally laid low when it could no longer resist these external forces and alien conspiracies. Obeyesekere challenges this narrative, whose principal champion in recent years was the late Prof. Lorna Dewaraja, countering many of her claims with evidence to show that Kandy was never a strict Buddhist theocracy but, for most of its history, a sophisticated multicultural polity in which people of many races and religions lived together amicably and whose kings, while remaining ‘good Buddhists’, were tolerant and even accepting of other cultures and faiths. Those kings, moreover, were educated cosmopolites with a well-documented taste for sellam – that is, recreations of a decidedly erotic and decadent nature – good Buddhists though they may have been.

    Obeyesekere blames the rise of what, elsewhere, he famously dubbed ‘Protestant Buddhism’ for the capture and confinement of modern Sinhalese thought and culture, which has created this distorted ‘nationalist’ view of the Kandyan past and of Lankan history in general. Though one may sympathize with his thesis, it is quite hard for the non-expert to judge how well he makes his case in this particular book. Yet even a lay person – one, at least, who has spent some time on the study of human nature – can see that the Kandyan polity Obeyesekere evokes in his book is a far more realistic and credible conception than the artificial, clearly idealised entity imagined by the nativist orthodoxy.

    This book, one of the last that Obeysesekere wrote, is certainly not one of his major works. Apart from being, as I say, rather slender, it is perhaps a little too selective in its presentation of material, often causing this reader to wonder what, if any, the evidence for the other side of the argument might be. It also bears those telltales of an elderly scholar’s work, sloppy self-editing and a tendency to gloss over matters that, while familiar to the author through decades of study, may demand more explanation for the benefit of his readers than he has remembered to provide.

    A much more serious editorial error is that of context. This book can only make sense as an extension of Gananath Obeysekere’s body of historical work and his long, largely personal effort to counteract, through his great scholarship and eminent reputation, the damage that propagandists and ideologues have done to Lankans’ knowledge and interpretation of their own history. Sadly, no effort has been made, either by the author or the publisher, to make this connexion explicit. As a result, the book begins and ends somewhat mysteriously, with no scene-setting in the introduction and no thematic conclusion at the end; and none of the publicity for it that I have seen makes any mention of its true context. Perhaps someone has been playing it safe. For those of us who know Obeyesekere’s work this is not a fatal flaw, but readers who come to this book knowing little or nothing of his record will surely be mystified, and very likely bored.