Shared Sanctities: Exploring Sri Lanka’s Sacred Spaces
Photo courtesy of Tsem Rinpoche
A few weeks ago I embarked on a 16 hour journey by air from Colombo to Toronto. I carried one book with me, a tradition I keep even when I go on a 10 minute drive. The book I had this time was Hasini Haputhanthri’s and Sujeewa de Silva’s Shared Sanctities, the revised and enlarged second edition.
With the very many books I have read over the years, especially on this genre of conserving and sharing a common ground for heritage, I found this work a moving and creative masterpiece that needs a closer attention. Hence this review, that would possibly draw upon my understanding of this work and my perspectives of how I see the writer, build this much appreciative narrative.
Geopolitically and by history Sri Lanka is an island nation that has given abode to people of many nations of both the Western and Eastern hemisphere. Irrespective of how much the most arduous extremist may want to claim about racial purity, it is beyond any doubt that we are a perfectly mixed set of people that have a shared and common heritage.
For centuries this land absorbed ideas, faiths and artistic forms with a confidence modern Sri Lanka struggles to reclaim. What makes this book compelling is not simply its content but the way Hasini reanimates that forgotten spirit of confluence.
From the beginning she anchors her narrative in the history of movement – oceans, islands and trade routes. Her encounter with the Nestorian Cross at a Buddhist pilgrimage site sets the tone: Sri Lanka’s past is rarely tidy, never strictly defined, and far more entangled than our schoolbooks suggest. In chapters like Greater World: Islands, Oceans and Beyond, she places the island firmly on the maritime highways of the ancient world, illustrating how ships, ideas and communities shaped our art, architecture and ritual practices long before the arrival of the Portuguese or the shadow of the British Empire.
One of my favorite extracts from the book is the following: “We never quite realize that the history we learn in school is ‘land-locked’. No one thinks that history ever happened out there at sea. This is possibly because history was held hostage by post-colonial nationalisms, where their scopes was defined by newly drawn ‘national borders’. Oceans were nationalized too, but to a lesser extent than the land. After all, there are no ‘sons of the sea’; only ‘sons of the soil’!”
This is where the book excels. Hasini does not merely describe syncretism; she allows the reader to stand inside it. Nalanda Gedige, that enigmatic fusion of Hindu and Buddhist symbolism, becomes not only a monument but a question – one that challenges our obsessive need to categorize heritage into neat ethnic boxes. Throughout, she nudges us to accept that ambiguity itself is part of our inheritance.
Her exploration of Polonnaruwa in Temple as Museum; Religion as Art is one of the book’s finest sections. The Tivanka Image House, with its Hindu architectural frame sheltering a towering Buddha and 11th century murals, becomes a living example of artistic and spiritual dialogue. Hasini’s prose here is sharp and almost lyrical, reminding us that the ancient capital was not merely a seat of kings but a sanctuary shaped by multiple hands and imaginations. This chapter lifts Polonnaruwa out of its familiar postcard frame and restores its true complexity. While the world knows the calm grandeur of Gal Vihara, Hasini turns our gaze to the island’s deeper layers of confluence – Hindu shrines, South Indian – inspired bronzes and the evocative Tivanka Image House with its medieval murals. Her storytelling blends archaeology, art history and memory, reminding us that Polonnaruwa was never a singular Buddhist space but a sanctuary shaped by movement, borrowing and imagination. Through her eyes, the city becomes a living museum where faith, artistry and cultural inheritance coexist in quiet, powerful harmony.
The chapters set in Kandy extend this idea into the colonial and modern eras. The architectural blend in the Trinity College Chapel, enhanced by David Paynter’s iconic murals, stands beside the Embekke Devale’s mythical carvings, each revealing the layered identities of a kingdom negotiating faith, power and art. Hasini’s ability to weave these strands across centuries without losing focus is one of her strongest gifts.
A Tale of Two Masjids is equally evocative. The contrast between Galle’s coastal Jumma Meeran Mosque and the flamboyant Red Masjid in Pettah becomes a meditation on how Islam, too, adapted, absorbed and reshaped itself within the island’s cosmopolitan spaces. Hasini reminds us that these structures are more than architecture; they are arguments in brick and mortar for coexistence.
The Blonde Behind the Buddha is a richly textured meditation on Karagampitiya’s layered spiritual world, where colonial memory, Buddhist devotion and artistic hybridity collide. Moving from art historian Maria Graham’s gaze to the quiet enigmas of the temple’s murals, the chapter beautifully captures how European motifs seeped into a deeply Sinhala-Buddhist universe. The mysterious blonde figure becomes a metaphor for cultural intrusion and adaptation, revealing a faith that survives not by purity but by transformation.
City of Gods is one of the most evocative chapters in Shared Sanctities, stitching together maritime history, sacred geography and memory with impressive ease. Tenavaram emerges not merely as a ruined shrine on the southern tip of the island but as a cosmopolitan temple-city where peacocks from Sandesha poetry, merchants from Sumatra, Tamil Brahmins, Sinhala kings and Ming admirals all intersect. Hasini handles maps, Tevaram, chronicles and colonial violence without losing the lyrical, almost cinematic quality of her prose. Especially powerful is the tracing of Tenavaram’s afterlives from Pancha Ishvaram lore to the blue god Upulvan and the half-forgotten lingam and Nandi that still haunt the site.
The later chapters, the shifting representation of women in temple art, push the narrative into cultural politics. Here, Hasini confronts how colonial morality attempted to tame the female body and how nationalist revivalism reshaped identity, dress and artistic convention. Her reflections on the transformation from sensuous murals to demure, Victorianised figures are particularly striking and reveal how power quietly negotiates aesthetics.
Ultimately, Shared Sanctities is not just a catalogue of syncretic sites. It is a gentle but firm challenge to monolithic histories. The book urges us to discard the rigid frameworks that have dominated Sri Lankan historical discourse and to embrace a narrative that is layered, porous and proudly plural. Supported by Sujeewa de Silva’s superb photography and the accompanying documentaries, this volume becomes both an academic resource and a heartfelt tribute to an island that once thrived on openness.
Hasini’s account is both compelling and wonderfully lucid; anyone with even a half curious mind will find it hard to put this book down once they begin. She writes with a distinctly romantic overtone yet never loses control of a tightly argued, historically grounded narrative – a balance many would struggle to maintain when dealing with such a wide and complex constellation of syncretic shrines in Sri Lanka. Her prose at times recalls the best of H. W. Cave and William Skeen, those early chroniclers of Ceylon’s landscapes and sanctities, whose work quietly shaped our understanding of the island’s cultural memory.
Her careful use of both well-known and lesser-known sources gives the book real scholarly weight without becoming dry. The visual layer provided by Sujeewa de Silva’s photographs – the murals, façades, statues and architectural details – is not ornamental but essential. His images do not merely illustrate; they converse with the text and for a reader less inclined to long passages of prose, they offer an inviting, almost meditative way into the material. His craft deserves warm praise.
If a third edition is ever contemplated, a closer engagement with Donald Stadtner’s Sacred Sites of Sri Lanka would be valuable as it offers complementary readings of some of these spaces. But that is a suggestion at the margins. For me, reading Shared Sanctities on an otherwise monotonous, long haul flight was an unexpected delight. It is a book that should be read by anyone who wishes to grasp the essence of the Sri Lankan story, a story still very much being written.
