Abeysekara, Ananda …. presenting a synopsis of an article with the same title presented in the web journal Academia …………………. https://www.academia.edu/116523255/Buddhism_Politics_and_Criticism_in_a_Time_of_Struggle_in_Sri_Lanka
As I have argued elsewhere (Abeysekara 2002), the relation between religion and politics changes in historical debates. Debates themselves are forms of “criticism” in that debates change the questions of who and what constitute the parameters of religion and politics.[1] In that sense, I want to think about how the relation between religion, politics, and the state became the subject of debate during postwar Sri Lanka and ask what such a debate may say about our postcolonial politics and democracy itself.
The Sandahiru Saya under construction
I look at a form of “religious criticism” of the Rajapaksa state and its construction of a massive “Buddhist stupa” called Sandahiru Saya in the ancient capital of Anuradhapura. The Sandahiru Saya project was started by President Mahinda Rajapaksa in 2010, in the aftermath of the war against the separatist LTTE (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam), and it was completed in 2021 by President Gotabaya Rajapaksa. I situate my discussion of the religious criticism of Sandahiru Saya and the state against the backdrop of the aragalaya mass protests against the Rajapaksa government in 2022.
The religious criticism is not made in the sense of vivecanaya, the language sometimes used to refer to the condemnations of polAll Usersitical matters; the religious criticism is made in the form of “making a statement without fear” (baya natuva prakasayak karanava) about politics and the state. I will argue that the forms of power and authority supposed by the religious criticism are different from those of the political criticism of politics, if you will, which animated the aragalaya protests.
The religious criticism is reasoned against the background of the discursive, embodied tradition of Buddhism that requires distinct practices of authority, discipline, power, and hierarchy. On the other hand, the political criticism was animated by the now universal language of “political corruption” that is not easily anchored in a tradition; and the translation of the aragalaya protests themselves into the concept of “struggle” makes it more difficult to situate the language of corruption in a tradition. That is to say, the forms of power (i.e., the “capacities”) that the religious critique supposes for its authority are not the same as those assumed by the secular political criticisms that guided the protests. As scholars have argued, the secular and religious conceptions of power concern very different forms of time, tradition, and life because the practices that sustain them are different.[2]
I thank C.R. De Silva and Joseph Walser for their comments on the paper. Quentin Skinner, Sandagomi Coperahewa, Alastair Gornal, Gamini Keerawella, H. L. Seneviratne, Amal Jayawardane, and Alexander McKinley kindly answered some of my questions.
END NOTES
[1] Note that mine is not the same as the argument about the “interconnection” or “intersection” between religion and politics.
[2] For some notable examples of the literature on this topic, see Asad (1993, 2004, 2015) and Mahmood (2016). My own work (2019, 2022) has also taken on some of these question.
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ALSO NOTE
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandahiru_Seya
https://archives.dailynews.lk/2012/12/17/news20.asp
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