Koggala and the Reclaimed Buddhist Utopia

Abstract

The village in Sri Lanka occupies, as it does in India, an important place in the local literatures. To the Sinhalese and Tamil imaginaries, the village has historically signified an ancient community, wrought into complex interaction by ties of family, kinship, caste, and occupation. Rural communities in Sri Lanka represent over 80 per cent of the country’s population and are often described as ‘enjoy[ing] traditional lifestyles, with temples, indigenous medical doctors, and farmers holding great cultural value in the life of the community’ (Ariyaratne 2004). Such Gesellschaft has, in particular, provided a powerful site for imagining a homeland for warring sides in the ethnonationalist strife that the Sinhalese-dominated Sri Lankan government (GOSL) on the one side, and various Tamil groups,¹ on the other side have been embroiled in.² To the Sinhalese and the Tamil communal imaginations, the village is an essential node of collectivity — as gama and kiramam respectively, social conscience finds one of its most dominant embodiments in village communities. In general, Sri Lankan writing in English — a young century-old phenomenon — has deployed the rural in a binarized way, veering between a ‘pastoral mode’ that Rajiva Wijesinha wryly calls ‘the village-well syndrome’ (27) or a full-blown dystopian vision where the defining reality is civil war.