A slender but fact-filled volume whose author clearly intends to present an alternative and 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 present-day Sinhalese-Buddhist ‘nationalist’ orthodoxy if they hope to obtain academic publication or preferment in this country.
In the view of this 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 orthodoxy, whose principal champion in recent years was the late Prof. Lorna Dewaraja, countering many of her claims with evidences 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 the case for it 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.
Gananath Obeyesekere, who until his death last month was regarded as perhaps the most eminent of all Lankan scholars and intellectuals, fought against this propagandization of history all his life. This book, one of the last he 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, poor 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 seen fit to provide.
The 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; none of the publicity for it that I have seen makes any mention of its true context, either. 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.
