Donald Stadtner’s Sacred Sites of Sri Lanka
Photo courtesy of viacation
It is not proper to begin a book review on an autobiographical note but in this case I make an exception. I first met Don Stadtner, author of Sacred Sites of Sri Lanka, through an email in 2020. He had read an article of mine and questioned me about it. I can’t remember what the article was but I remember being struck by his enthusiasm. In one of his first emails, he mentioned that he was writing a book and that it was about some cultural sites in Sri Lanka.
Don and I finally met in 2024 when I was in San Francisco. Six months later he came to Sri Lanka to launch the book he was writing when we first connected.
Five years is a long time but here it is. Sacred Sites of Sri Lanka, as deceptively self-explanatory a title as there can ever be, has hit the shelves. In addition to being a concise account of various historical places in the country, it is also a visual feast. The book came out in August and since then has been read widely but has not been as widely reviewed.
The book requires deep reflection and thought. It is not a coffee table book on the art and history of Sri Lanka; that kind of book has been written many times by many people over the last decades. Stadtner’s study is of a different calibre and part of its charm lies in how it resists easy categorisation.
Stadtner’s approach is not easy to grasp. His essays work on at least three levels. First, they are a visual narrative and exposition of various cultural sites. Second, they explore the different contestations and claims on those sites by different ethnic and religious groups. Third, they debunk some of the more prevalent myths associated with them.
The author is clearly mesmerised by these sites but he does not allow himself to be carried away. As a result, Sacred Sites of Sri Lanka is both descriptive and anti-romantic: an unusual combination which recommends it well. Stadtner goes to great lengths to question and challenge the falsifications surrounding these sites. What he is concerned about is why they have become sacred today and what makes them sacred in the first place.
Stadtner mentions five qualities inherent to the sites that he explores in his book. First, they are associated with miracles. Second, they “operate in a world with porous boundaries.” Third, worshippers have to believe that prayers and material offerings will “advance their welfare.” Fourth, they are dynamic. The first three are self-explanatory; the fourth is not so easy to figure out. One of the more insightful things we learn in this book is how certain sites were associated with certain relics but how those relics lost their status over time. A good example here is the Buddha’s alms bowl. Stadtner writes that it was paired with the tooth relic for centuries but today “it is all but forgotten.”
But perhaps the most important criterion that makes any site sacred is popularity. As the author observes, hardly any Sri Lanka has not heard of the origin stories of places like Kataragama. The chapter on Kataragama, incidentally, is the most wide ranging in the book, not least because every other community here has some claim on it. This has given rise to some rather interesting contradictions. For instance, while Kataragama is associated with Dutugemunu, the Sinhalese king celebrated for having killed the “Tamil” pretender Elara, some would find it amusing, if ironical, that before setting out to defeat his rival, he sought the blessings of Kataragama deviyo, a Hindu god.
Our collective histories are dotted with such ironies and we would do well to learn them as we set out to discover our past. Unfortunately, we are a long way from such an ideal. If the state of our textbooks should tell us anything, it is that we need to be much more critical of our history. What Stadtner does with his book is to bring us closer to such a conception of the past where social groups mingled freely with one another and identified themselves in relation, not in opposition, to one another. This doubtless may not sit in well with popular historiographers but it should be a critical component of the education and syllabus reforms which are now being promoted by civil society and the government.
Fundamentally, Sacred Sites of Sri Lanka is an anti-romantic book that sits in somewhere between a serious academic study and a coffee table book. Although much smaller and more concise than a coffee table book, it is also more accessible and less jargon laden than a scholarly publication. This is what best explains Stadtner’s aim in his work: he wants to reach out to as wide an audience as possible without pandering to popular notions of history. His approach can be summed up by a quote from Richard Gombrich and Gananath Obeyesekere, which he uses in his introduction. “[The] past is continually remade to suit the present.”
The quotation aligns with what Senake Bandaranayake once wrote about the artistic traditions of Sri Lanka, that they are “… as much a comment on our perceptions of that tradition and the historical trajectory that produced it, as they are indicators and reflections of our contemporary moment.”
