Authenticity, Decolonization, and the Nation

In the late twentieth century, many writers observed that the cultural imaginary of nationalism appears ancient and “hoary,” but that from a critical historical perspective it is thoroughly modern (Gellner Reference Gellner1983; Hobsbawm and Ranger Reference Hobsbawm and Ranger1983; Kedourie Reference Kedourie1966). This scholarship was instrumental in deconstructing nationalist myth-making, but it was not so helpful in understanding how or why authenticity remains an integral part of nationalist discourse. For Sri Lanka, much work has been done on how visions of a grand civilizational past and a pastoral ideal based on paddy cultivation have informed the Sinhala nationalist imaginary from the late nineteenth century up to the present (Kemper Reference Kemper1991; Moore Reference Moore1985, Reference Moore, Brow and Weeramunda1992; Rogers Reference Rogers and Spencer1990; Samaraweera Reference Samaraweera1981; Spencer Reference Spencer and Spencer1990). This scholarly literature explores the multifaceted ways in which this imaginary operates and how it provides a cultural (and at times intellectual) framework for Sinhala nationalist politics, both at the level of the elite and among other social strata.

Partha Chatterjee (Reference Chatterjee1993), drawing upon Bengali Hindu examples, has suggested that the primacy of culture in anti-colonial nationalism is due to a structural feature where a clear-cut public-private dichotomy is drawn and nationalism constructs the private as an authentic “inner” domain. As will be apparent, it is difficult to sustain the notion of a clear public-private dichotomy in relation to Sri Lanka given the thoroughly anglicized nature of Sri Lankan elite political figures like Bandaranaike. However, Chatterjee's general point about the importance of culture in the nationalist imaginary is a useful one. It allows us to see culture as integral, rather than ancillary, to the nationalist political imagination. It also allows us to see how authenticity is fashioned in relation to contemporary concerns. Chatterjee's public-private dichotomy shows how the Indian nationalist elite negotiated a position that was at once modern and ancient—a position that Bandaranaike too sought, though with different nuances and inflections. Arguably this is also related to what Benedict Anderson (Reference Anderson1998) calls the “spectre of comparisons.” For many nationalists, Europe functioned as a cultural, political, and economic model, and whenever they looked at their own societies there was an almost involuntary movement toward comparison with Europe. This is what Dipesh Chakrabarty (Reference Chakrabarty2000) argues is the way in which an abstract notion of “Europe” functions as a universal marker or referent in relation to non-Western societies. For Bandaranaike, and many other nationalist thinkers in Sri Lanka, the invocation of “Europe” produces a sense of insecurity vis-à-vis their perceived lack of modernity. However, in India, this process of comparison led, in some instances, to a more substantive and deeper engagement with the concepts of the nation-state and modernity, and produced more distinct alternatives, such as Gandhi's or Tagore's critiques of modernity. In Sri Lanka, this has been less visible, especially in the political sphere. However, after independence, the nation-state and broader discourses of modernity prevailed in India as well as in Sri Lanka.

A Brief Note on Bandaranaike's Political Career

S. W. R. D. Bandaranaike was born to wealth and privilege in colonial Ceylon on January 8, 1899. His name carries traces of his colonial lineage, with two of his names deriving from his godfather and the then governor of Ceylon, Sir Joseph West Ridgeway (Manor Reference Manor1989, 14). His extended family, like his father, was anglophile (Gooneratne Reference Gooneratne1986), unlike for instance the Nehru family in India, which maintained a kind of public-private dichotomy between an Anglicized exterior and a more “traditional” domestic life (Holden Reference Holden2008, 88). Bandaranaike entered Christ Church College, Oxford, in 1919, where he excelled reading classics and law and by becoming the secretary of the prestigious Oxford Union. On his return to Ceylon, and against his father's wishes, he entered politics, first as a municipal councilor in 1926 and later in the State Council as a member of the Ceylon National Congress (CNC). Although the CNC played a significant role in Bandaranaike's political life, he fashioned himself as someone within but also critical of its conservative political culture. He projected himself as an anti-colonial political figure heralding a transition from a collaborationist colonial-elite led political system to an independent, democratic system of governance. He was one of the first political figures to adopt “native” dress, and after he learned Sinhala he often used the language to address public gatherings. In the 1930s, he converted to Buddhism. All three of these “marks” of authenticity, however, remained somewhat abstract and academic for Bandaranaike, and while they may have made him appear more “radical” and authentic than many other national politicians, he was very much part of the political class, which had little connection with the people it claimed to represent.

In the only extended political biography of Bandaranaike, James Manor (Reference Manor1989) reads this turn to authenticity as significantly influenced by an oedipal conflict with his anglophile father. Manor's account of Bandaranaike, while providing comprehensive coverage of his life and the political context he operated in, needs to be supplemented. Manor's study is written in the tradition of political biography, which places prominent, powerful, and often elite individuals as focal points in the political dynamics of a society, and the discursive forces that shaped Bandaranaike are less visible. The problem of elite leaders being portrayed as dominant agents of change, especially in decolonizing contexts, is amplified because of their visibility and accessibility in terms of the available archival material related to them. However, by shifting the focus from the individual per se to larger discourses within and against which Bandaranaike fashioned his self-identity, it is possible to see him as someone who functioned within a framework of nationalist authenticity over which he had little control. The locations within and through which he sought to authenticate himself delineate what he identified as authenticity and also how his notions of authenticity may not have always resonated with conceptions of the authentic among other elite and non-elite groups on the island.

In 1936, Bandaranaike formed his own movement, the Sinhala Maha Sabha (SMS), which was based ostensibly on Fabian ideals of gradual socialist reform but received little grassroots backing. The formation of the SMS happened in a context where universal franchise had been granted in 1931, creating a need for elite politicians to engage in popular politics. The fact that Bandaranaike chose to form a movement based on Sinhala majority identity suggests that he had some awareness of growing Sinhala identity consciousness in the country outside of his elite political circle, but this was a vague grasp of the many shades and nuances of this rising Sinhala consciousness, which expressed itself in multiple ways. In 1946, like most CNC politicians, Bandaranaike joined the newly formed United National Party (UNP), and in 1948 he became a member of independent Ceylon's first cabinet.

Following a series of bitter disputes with the UNP leadership over socioeconomic reforms, Bandaranaike formed the Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP) in 1951 (De Silva Reference De Silva1981, 517). Prior to this, in 1943, when there was no proper political party system operating in the country, and there was no compulsion for politically mobilizing the “people,” Bandaranaike supported parity status for the Tamil and Sinhala languages. Within this clannish political culture, the quasi-feudal elite could easily form inter-ethnic alliances (DeVotta Reference DeVotta2009, 39). Bandaranaike began adopting a more visibly pro-Sinhala nationalist stance with the formation of the SLFP in 1951 but only supported the “Sinhala-only” policy, whereby Sinhala would become the sole official language of the country, as the 1956 election approached (62). This policy was justified by the view that the Sinhalese were the majority and were the “authentic” inhabitants of the island, given their history and that more than any other community they had suffered economic, cultural, and social deprivation under colonialism.

Bandaranaike became prime minister in 1956, after his SLFP-led alliance won the general election with a campaign that emphasized Sinhala and Buddhist interests and symbols. Following the disastrous enactment of the policy making Sinhala the sole official language of the country, resulting in riots in June 1956, Bandaranaike attempted to make political concessions through a failed pact with S. J. V. Chelvanayagam, the leader of the Federal Party, the leading Ceylon Tamil political party at that time. Despite these tensions, Bandaranaike pushed ahead with a policy of decolonization, closing British naval and air bases and adopting a nonaligned foreign policy. Domestically he initiated various welfare programs, but many of these were blocked, leading to disillusionment among his moderate left-wing supporters. At the same time, hardline Sinhala nationalists who expected a radical cultural transformation also found the pace of change too slow. In 1958, riots broke out again and emergency law had to be declared (Vittachi Reference Vittachi1958). By this time, Bandaranaike had lost credibility on all sides (Manor Reference Manor1989, 254–318). In 1959, he was shot and killed by a Buddhist monk.

After his death, Bandaranaike became something of a legend and a martyr. Sinhala nationalists see 1956 as a pivotal moment when a comprador elite was displaced and the true sons of the soils managed to gain at least a tenuous political foothold in a system of governance that had long excluded them. Much policymaking by Sinhala-dominated governments in Sri Lanka post-1956 has been implicitly or explicitly targeted at “correcting” these perceived historical injustices (Barrow Reference Barrow2014). For Tamil nationalists, 1956 and Bandaranaike represent a watershed moment of political and cultural marginalization in the newly formed nation-state. Bandaranaike's legacy, however, even within Sinhala nationalist discourse, has remained somewhat ambiguous. His clear anglicized identity has prevented him from being appropriated as a folk nationalist hero. But at the same time, Bandaranaike is too important a figure to be left out of the Sinhala nationalist narrative. As I will explore in the concluding section of this paper, Sinhala nationalist discourse sometimes adopts Bandaranaike as someone who instinctively tapped into an organic and transcendental Sinhala authenticity. However, this appropriation is suffused with irony, as in fact Bandaranaike's writing shows he was someone who labored hard to fashion an idea of authenticity, which exposes the constructed nature of this discourse of nationalist authenticity in general.

Bandaranaike's Oxford Memoirs—Conquering the Metropolis and Nationalist Awakenings

“Before I am their equal, I must first be their superior” (Bandaranaike Reference Bandaranaike1963, 14).

Bandaranaike's “Memories of Oxford” was a serialized miniature autobiography published in the Ceylon Causerie magazine between 1933 and 1935.Footnote ¹ The memoirs were written at a time when Bandaranaike was struggling to establish himself as a significant presence in Ceylonese politics as a member of the CNC. Styled after the Indian National Congress, this elite body of politicians was politically far more conservative and loosely organized than its Indian counterpart.

When suffrage was being deliberated in 1927 by the Donoughmore Commission—appointed to make recommendations for constitutional reform—a CNC delegation, of which Bandaranaike was a member, argued that voting should be limited on the basis of income, a literacy test, or property, depending on gender. Only the charismatic labor leader A. E. Gunasinhe clamored for suffrage for the working classes (De Silva Reference De Silva1981, 418–21).

The memoirs were published following a brief, overtly Gandhian phase in Bandaranaike's political life. He adopted “native” dress, advocated civil disobedience, and promoted the adoption of a pastoral, non-modern lifestyle. These moves gained little traction among his conservative peers, however, and Bandaranaike abandoned this project, retaining only the “native” dress (Manor Reference Manor1989, 98–10). The desire to project an authentic image through dress suggests that Bandaranaike was conscious of and felt the need to participate in what Nira Wickramasinghe (Reference Wickramasinghe2006, 92–111) calls “dressing and caring for the authentic body,” which was part of a larger late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century effort to create an authentic public image for Sinhala men and women. But Bandaranaike's adoption of native dress remains at the level of a change in an outward marker rather than a substantive change in political culture—mirrored in the larger political milieu he operated in and reflected in the values described in his Oxford memoirs.

Placed within this context, Bandaranaike's memoirs can be seen as a guarded document that serves multiple purposes. At one level, they establish his credentials within the conservative political culture of the time as a man steeped in British gentlemanly values, and someone who had gained the prestigious position of secretary of the Oxford Union. At the same time, the memoirs try to place Bandaranaike within the currents of the decolonizing discourse of the time—an attempt, which a critical reading of the memoirs demonstrates, that is undermined because of its appeal to British values and its unwillingness to go beyond a superficial critique of elite British culture.

Three themes dominate the memoirs: how Bandaranaike overcame the racially biased insularity of Oxbridge society; his ambiguous position vis-à-vis other colonized people, particularly Indians; and the emergence of his own nationalist consciousness. The memoirs begin with a sense of cultural and class-based dislocation. Unable to find lodging on campus, Bandaranaike lodges with the Bateses, a lower middle-class family: “Oh! The horror of that sitting-room. Drab, dreary, smug—two smug porcelain figures on the mantelpiece with a square box in the centre, smugly pretending to be a clock…” (Bandaranaike Reference Bandaranaike1963, 7). This description, with its disdain for lower middle-class life, suggests how Bandaranaike identifies himself as equal to the British upper classes. However, he is unable to effortlessly enter into the inner circles of Oxbridge, as he would have been able to do back in elite Colombo.

Bandaranaike recognizes the inherent racism of elite Oxbridge society, but never names it as such:

This is the closest Bandaranaike comes to a substantive critique of the Oxford ethos and British culture. However, to openly admit to his exclusion on racial grounds seems to be something too threatening to Bandaranaike's self-identity. What the memoirs instead do is to demonstrate how Bandaranaike overcomes his marginalization not by contesting but by affirming a code of British “gentlemanly” values, which allows him to claim equivalence: “Before I am their equal I must first be their superior” (14). He presents gentlemanly values as a universal discourse that can transcend the unnamed or unnamable racial bar:

This is unlike a typical anti-colonial critique, which would attempt to construct the nationalist thinkers’ culture as a superior foil to British culture and yet again reflects the conservative Sri Lankan sociocultural milieu. However, in attempting to appeal to a gentlemanly code, traces of a masculinist reaction to the feminization of colonized people within colonial discourse can be discerned (Nandy Reference Nandy1983). The rhetoric of Anagarika Dharmapala, a Sinhala Buddhist religious reformer who was active in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, carried overtones of such a masculine discourse—projecting the Sinhalese as a historically virile and technologically advanced people descending from Aryan racial stock (Guruge Reference Guruge[1965] 1991, 481–82). John Kotelawala, the father of Sir John Kotelawala, the third prime minister of Sri Lanka, and the man who Bandaranaike succeeded in 1956, was a more aggressive example of this hyper masculinity. Kotelawala was known for his physical altercations with locals and Englishmen and is sometimes portrayed as an anti-colonial folk hero in popular culture.Footnote ² Dharmapala used to uphold Kotelawala as a role model and spoke admiringly of his antics during public speeches (Gulawatta Reference Gulawatta2010).

If the internalization of gentlemanly values brings Bandaranaike closer to Oxbridge society, it also places him in an ambiguous relationship with Indians and with other anti-colonial discourses of the time. Within the debates of the Oxford Union, Bandaranaike regularly represented an Indian position—a role that he seems to have welcomed because it allowed him to claim a transnational, anti-colonial stance.Footnote ³ As Bandaranaike (Reference Bandaranaike1963, 46) notes: “I … interpreted the problems of that country [India] in terms of those of my own.” Privately though, Bandaranaike seems to have abhorred Indian social life at Oxford. This distaste seems to have been a product of his elitism and insecurity about being marginalized on the basis of race or color. In his memoirs, Indians are presented as culturally deracinated victims, and Bandaranaike notes that he actively kept away from their social functions (47). The memoirs portray a man who seems to have privately remained an anglophile while publicly cultivating a persona of anti-colonialism.

The memoirs end with a sudden, almost cheesy and melodramatic invocation of a nationalist mission, not anticipated by the narrative. Standing upon Magdalen Bridge, on the very route that the narrative earlier records as the site where his decision to prevail over Oxbridge society was made, Bandaranaike reflects that his “life's mission” lies in his homeland. The idyllic English scene from the bridge is juxtaposed with a harsher reality of home, and he declares: “My country, my people. Aye, it was there my work lay, and Oxford had revealed to me my life's mission” (59).

A footnote to the Oxford memoirs is a very short story Bandaranaike published in the Island Review in 1926, a year after he returned from Oxford. The tension between a private anglophile self and a public anti-colonial persona, evident in the memoirs, is foreshadowed in this story. In the story, simply entitled “Kandy Perahera,” a young protagonist, John Ratnaike, is watching the annual pageant (perahera) of the Temple of the Tooth in Kandy—the repository of one of the most important Buddhist relics in Sri Lanka. John, an anglicized youth, watches the pageant from the balcony of the Queen's Hotel, an exclusive vantage point, while he and his friends play cards. While gazing at the pageant, John experiences a moment similar to Bandaranaike on Magdalen Bridge—the pageant disappears from view and he is drawn into the glorious Sinhala culture he believes the pageant signifies. He also begins to identify himself with the “common” people at street level. He is dragged back from this reverie when his friends at the card table call him and he finds himself tugging at his shirt—an outward marker of his westernization. The story ends here, and the anonymous editors of Bandaranaike's (Reference Bandaranaike1963, 466) Speeches and Writings note: “It is believed that Mr. Bandaranaike was writing about himself in this story.” The narrative illustrates how Bandaranaike approaches authenticity. Unable to project or claim authenticity as something inherent to his self-identity, but at the same time operating in a discourse that saw authenticity as something natural and transcendental, he looks for authenticity in various outward markers in culture and history.

A similar theme is echoed in less autobiographical terms in his short story “The Mystery of the Missing Candidate” (467–90), where an aristocratic man who enters politics suddenly disappears close to an election, unable to contend with the populist demands placed on him. He is later found seeking refuge in a Buddhist hermitage, wanting to renounce his wealth and anglicized privilege. In some ways, the ambivalence of the two protagonists in these short stories is a metaphor for elite Sri Lankan politics—the lack of an intimate understanding of the people is substituted by a romanticized and essentialist notion of culture and how people ought to be.

The turn to the indigenous in Bandaranaike, however, suggests that he was aware of growing Sinhala and Buddhist identity consciousness among intermediate elite groups. Anagarika Dharmapala, for instance, campaigned for Buddhist revival along with his protégé Walisinha Harischandra during the late nineteenth century. As Dharmadasa (Reference Dharmadasa1992, 117–25) notes, much of this revival activity was tied to the innovative use of the print medium, and there was an exponential growth of Sinhala periodicals from the 1860s to the 1890s. There were also parallel movements, as mentioned earlier, in constructing local authenticity in dress, vernacular education, images of the past, and theatre (Wickramasinghe Reference Wickramasinghe2006, 73–111). Like Dharmapala and Harischandra, many were also bilingual, and a significant portion of their ideas appeared in print in English. It is possible that Bandaranaike read their work, in addition to reading about Dharmapala and Sinhala and Buddhist activism in the English press. There is also anecdotal evidence that Bandaranaike may have listened to Dharmapala speaking in public (Herath Reference Herath2011).

While Bandaranaike and other elite figures may have been aware of these trends, they seem to have had little direct contact with them. However, whether they encountered Dharmapala or his ideas directly or not, there is a certain degree of discursive congruence between the elite imagination of a glorious Sinhala past and how others from a different social stratum, such as Dharmapala, saw the country's past and authenticity. The difference is that the elites were contesting on the same terrain but trying to project themselves as the legitimate guardians and inheritors of this authenticity.

Bandaranaike staging the Kandy Perahera as a site of authenticity, in this context, is no accident. Sri Lankan orientalist scholars such as Ananda Coomaraswamy idealized Kandyan Sinhala identity as authentic compared to so-called “low country” Sinhalese, who, due to colonization of the maritime areas of the island, were seen as more culturally “corrupted” (Brow Reference Brow1999). As Wickramasinghe (Reference Wickramasinghe2006, 94) argues, multiple discourses of authenticity with different temporal and spatial coordinates coexisted in early twentieth-century Sri Lanka, and this is indeed the case today as well. This points to the inconsistency and mobility of the discourse of authenticity in Bandaranaike's thought as well—shifting from the distant past to more recent times and also finding anchorage in different locations.

Gandhi, the Village, and Authenticity

In 1933, Bandaranaike wrote “The Spinning Wheel and the Paddy Field,” a pamphlet on indigenous economic and social revitalization (Bandaranaike Reference Bandaranaike1963, 550–609). The village of antiquity is imagined in this project as an idealized vision of precolonial harmony: a site of economic self-sufficiency and moral order and one in which the elite politician sees himself as the custodian of morality and culture—a widespread view among the anglicized elite and one shared by Sinhala-educated intermediate elites and colonial officials in late nineteenth-century Sri Lanka (Moore Reference Moore1985). The colonial officials, however, in turn saw themselves as custodians who could protect the peasantry from the greedy elites.

The overtly Gandhian inspiration for this project is evident in the iconic image of the spinning wheel, which he sees as a symbol of self-sufficiency obtained through the growth of local industry. Bandaranaike explores the potential for a homegrown cotton industry in Sri Lanka and proposes the dry zone of Sri Lanka as a possible site for cotton cultivation. The symbol of the chakra or spinning wheel, however, is not only about local industry but about an ethic of living anchored in a pastoral culture.

Alongside this overarching Gandhian vision, however, are local discourses, such as the origin myth of the Sinhala people in which they are seen as descendants of a truant northern Indian Aryan prince named Vijaya, and the consciousness that Sri Lanka possessed a sophisticated hydraulic civilization and a flourishing paddy-based agricultural economy in antiquity. The idea of authenticity that emerges here is both transnational, in drawing upon Gandhi, but also “local” in how it invokes Sri Lankan history. But this notion of authenticity is abstract and romantic rather than “immediate” and “real,” and the recourse to Gandhi suggests the paucity of imagination.

Bandaranaike approaches his main thesis through a critique of what are seen as Western models of development. His narrative links capitalism, industrialism, and colonialism as intimately connected processes that produce social disintegration. The alternative offered to this bleak industrial future is what he presents as a critical return to tradition: “We are only too well aware of the tendency to praise unduly … the conditions of life in the distant past” (Bandaranaike Reference Bandaranaike1963, 553). But despite this call for critical awareness, the narrative invokes a romantic vision of the past. Bandaranaike draws upon Sinhala mytho-history, influenced by the nineteenth-century translation into English of the Mahavamsa, a sixth-century Buddhist chronicle, which was cited extensively by figures like Anagarika Dharmapala in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Blackburn Reference Blackburn2010, 71–78; Dharmapala Reference Dharmapala and Wright1907, 285–86).

To argue that spinning was an organic part of Sri Lankan culture, he uses the figure of Kuveni—the local Yaksha princess who helps conquer her people and become ruler of Sri Lanka, and who according to the chronicle was spinning yarn when Vijaya first encounters her. Bandaranaike associates spinning with an ethics of precolonial existence centered on a stereotypical elite view of village life:

The idea of village revitalization, based on an idealized pastoral vision of the village as organic order, was, however, not something unique to Bandaranaike. D. S. Senanayake—independent Sri Lanka's first prime minister and the man Bandaranaike had a strained relationship with throughout his political career—carried out the restoration and expansion of ancient irrigation works alongside farmer resettlement schemes that drew upon historical images of an ancient hydraulic civilization (Gunawardana Reference Gunawardana1971). Furthermore, there has been remarkable consistency in how the twentieth-century Sri Lankan elite has looked at the peasantry and village life from a custodial or tutelary perspective (Moore Reference Moore1985). The idealized historical imaginary that informed such an attitude has had negative impacts on policymaking because it propagated misconceptions about the economic and social structure of the peasantry (Moore Reference Moore1985, 3, 117–71; Samaraweera Reference Samaraweera1981).

The close corollary to the idea of village revitalization is paddy cultivation, which is the other main axis of Bandaranaike's Gandhian program. Though paddy cultivation was a significant and long-established agricultural practice in Sri Lanka, it was not, as Mick Moore (Reference Moore1985, 87, 117) argues, as prevalent as Bandaranaike and others in the political elite thought. He also suggests that the elite promoted paddy cultivation not primarily because it would benefit the peasantry financially but because it was associated with an idea of precolonial rural harmony.Footnote ⁴

The nationalist elite's preoccupation with a glorious narrative of the past is again strongly visible in Bandaranaike's writing. This is apparent in how Bandaranaike writes of King Parakramabahu I, whose reign is believed to have been one of agricultural excellence (De Silva Reference De Silva1981, 68–69). Bandaranaike calls it the “Golden Age of Lanka, [when] rice was exported to foreign lands as well” (Bandaranaike Reference Bandaranaike1963, 593). Sinhala politicians in the post-independence era have drawn upon the cultural capital of these historical images, both to invoke a sense of pride in the Sinhala past and to project themselves as continuing the legacy of ancient kings. While Bandaranaike never found the opportunity to implement a development program drawn directly from perceptions of the ancient past—the agriculture and irrigation ministerial portfolios were jealously guarded by D. S. Senanayake (Manor Reference Manor1989)—the historical imagination at work in his writing is similar.

Buddhism, Rationalism, and National Identity

A somewhat different relationship to authenticity emerges in Bandaranaike's writings on Buddhism. On the one hand, there is a cosmopolitan rationalist understanding of Buddhism that has little to do with local authenticity. On the other hand, there is Buddhism as Sinhala cultural heritage. The negotiation between these two understandings of Buddhism again reflects the tension in Bandaranaike's life between his anglicized background and his need for a public, decolonized persona.

Buddhism has played a significant role in the formation of the modern Sri Lankan nation-state. In nineteenth-century Sri Lanka, nascent nationalist ideas were closely connected to Buddhist revivalist activity (Blackburn Reference Blackburn2010; Malalgoda Reference Malalgoda1976; Obeyesekere Reference Obeyesekere and Roberts1979; Roberts Reference Roberts1997). The Mahavamsa narrative that links the arrival of Prince Vijaya in Sri Lanka with the Buddha's death, and the idea that the Buddha bequeathed a legacy to the Sinhala people as protectors of Buddhism, played an important role in the late nineteenth-century Sinhala imagination (Dharmapala Reference Dharmapala and Wright1907, 285–86). However, the strong political correlation between Sinhala nationalism and Buddhism is a later twentieth-century phenomenon.

Given the relatively more politically charged nature of Buddhism in the 1930s, Bandaranaike's conversion to Buddhism was seen at the time (Bond Reference Bond1988, 91–93), and is still assessed, as a politically opportunistic move (DeVotta Reference DeVotta2004, 60). This is partly because Bandaranaike's conversion was part of a pattern of elite conversions to Buddhism spurred by the granting of universal franchise based on the recommendations of the Donoughmore Commission. Such converts were derisively called “Donoughmore Buddhists” (Ames Reference Ames1963). The history of Bandaranaike's extended family, which had changed religious persuasion with successive colonial rulers (Portuguese, Dutch, and British), probably added to this public perception (Gooneratne Reference Gooneratne1986, 3–6).

However, this view is overly simplistic, because Bandaranaike's writings on Buddhism reveal a more complex dynamic. Given the mytho-historical significance of Buddhism to Sinhala nationalism, one could expect to see this as a dominant theme in Bandaranaike's writing, but it is not so. Buddhism as Sinhala legacy is present, but it is almost always counterweighed by a much stronger discourse on Buddhism as a personal spiritual quest that can accommodate a rationalist outlook—though the idea of a rationalist Buddhism can also have nationalist implications. In his writing, a dialectic between an ethno-culturally grounded idea of Buddhism and a rationalist, universalist understanding of Buddhism is apparent, even though his later actions in the public arena shaped the institutionalization of Sinhala Buddhist nationalism more than those of any other political figure before him.

Bandaranaike's dominant conception of Buddhism is of a rationalist, ethical discourse faith or philosophy that operates as a spiritual complement to modern life. This idea of Buddhism is something that was available to Bandaranaike through what can be called the nineteenth-century rationalist appropriation of Buddhism, when Western scholarship encountered Buddhism and began to see it as a rational scientific discourse, though not necessarily coeval with modern scientific rationality (Hallisey Reference Hallisey and Lopez1995; Lopez Reference Lopez1995; McMahan Reference McMahan2008).

In an article written in the early 1930s entitled “Why I Became a Buddhist,”Footnote ⁵ Bandaranaike seeks to explain his choice of religion—with a certain reluctance, “…because a man's religious convictions are surely … matters he shrinks from exposing and parading before the public gaze” (Bandaranaike Reference Bandaranaike1963, 287). Yet in his public role as a national leader, this public-private distinction collapses and private choices are invested with larger public import. Bandaranaike observes that he wrote the article in response to numerous requests to address the issue of why he became Buddhist.

Bandaranaike begins by chronicling how Christianity is an ascribed heritage for him. He suggests that the religion was never appealing to him because of the restrictions placed on individual freedom by an authoritative and distant God figure: “While acquiring for Christ a sort of personal affection as towards a kind elder brother … I never was able to attain a conception of God” (Bandaranaike Reference Bandaranaike1963, 288). The narrative suggests that his intuitive ambiguity about Christianity in childhood hardened into a rational skepticism at Oxford when he encountered various rational critiques of theism. He refers to Bernard Shaw's The Black Girl in Search of God Footnote ⁶ (1932) and agrees with its interpretation that the idea of God evolved historically in conjunction with successive stages of human civilization. But at the same time, Bandaranaike makes the familiar argument that religion is necessary because it provides the necessary moral counterbalance to the power of human intellect. He posits this as a dilemma: the idea of a supernatural God figure is problematic because it can be seen as a human construct, but the denial of God does not obviate the need for religion. The resolution for Bandaranaike lies in a rationalist conception of Buddhism: “[In Buddhist] doctrine … there is no need for man to be dependent on the will of God…. It is left to me to say that the Buddha Dhamma [doctrine] has emerged triumphant from the test of my reasoning” (290–91).

This rationalist view of Buddhism can, however, have nationalist implications because upholding such a view allows Sinhala Buddhists to position themselves as the inheritors of a national legacy that is “modern” and “progressive.” If one major feature of colonialism was the denial of coevalness (Fabian Reference Fabian1983), anti-colonial thinkers constantly looked for various strategies to claim coevality or strategies through which they can counter an evolutionary time-scale where non-Western societies are seen as anachronistic in relation to the West. Dharmapala, for instance, consistently presented Buddhism as a scientific discourse in opposition to Christianity, which he argued was based on superstition (Guruge Reference Guruge[1965] 1991, 3–22). This is similar to Bandaranaike's dichotomous view of Christianity as theistic and Buddhism as rational. This was also enabled by an explicit association between science and Buddhism emerging at the time (McMahan Reference McMahan2004). For nationalist thinkers like Dharmapala, Buddhism was a discourse that helped give the nation a place in the world order—given what they saw as Buddhism's intrinsic relationship to Sri Lanka. This is not so explicitly articulated in Bandaranaike's writings, but it shows how the idea of rationalist-Buddhism can be appropriated and also be nestled within a Sinhala nationalist outlook.

A more ambiguous position regarding Buddhism and its relationship to Sri Lanka emerges in a national address Bandaranaike made on Vesak Day in 1953, three years prior to his ascension to power on a Sinhala Buddhist political platform, at a time when a sense of Sinhala Buddhist millennialism was emerging in anticipation of the Buddha Jayanthi or 2,500th anniversary of the Buddha's passing, which also fell in 1956 (De Silva Reference De Silva1981, 501–2). Vesak is considered by Buddhists, particularly Theravada Buddhists, as a crucial day on the Buddhist calendar because the Buddha's birth, enlightenment, and death are thought to have occurred on this day. For some Sinhala Buddhists, it holds a further ethno-cultural relevance because, according to the Mahavamsa, Prince Vijaya arrived in Sri Lanka on the day of the Buddha's death. These ideas are sometimes reproduced in scholarship as well. Historian K. M. de Silva (Reference De Silva1981, 4), for instance, is skeptical of the chronicle's chronology. Yet he argues that there is an ideological importance to how the Mahavamsa synchronizes Vijaya's arrival and the Buddha's death and thereby provides subtle historiographic legitimacy to the idea of a millennia-old Sinhala collective consciousness.

Bandaranaike's opening words in the radio broadcast move from the universal to the particular:

If the passage above moves from a universal Buddhism to a more particularistic one, the entire speech itself oscillates between these polarities. Having invoked the narrative of the Sinhala Buddhist past, Bandaranaike does not dwell upon the historical or particularistic relevance of the religion to the Sinhala community. Instead he embarks on an explication based on the kind of rationalist understanding of the religion expressed in the articles cited above. But at the end of the speech, there is movement from the universal/rationalist aspect to the more particularistic, and then once again back to the universal. Bandaranaike, in a reformist tone, exhorts a return to the doctrinal basis of the religion. Such a return, argues Bandaranaike,

Buddhism is once again identified in terms of its relevance to a particular group—the Sinhala race. However, the race would benefit not simply because the Buddha blessed it but because of the universal value of the doctrine, such as the principle of compassion. Thus, paradoxically, embracing the Buddhist ideal would lead to the transcendence of the very idea of “race,” which is posited as synonymous with “nationality.” For as the words at the end of the passage suggest, the Buddhist “prayer” for happiness and health is for all human beings and not limited to a particular community—such a limitation could be read as a violation of the religion's ethical principles. Arguably all religions have this universal-particular dichotomy. But read within Sri Lanka's specific ethno-religious history, and articulated by a political leader who is clearly aware of its political significance, this example of the universal-particularist dynamic suggests a man who is trying to present himself as both transnational and nationalist.Footnote ⁷ While this is a position Bandaranaike can sustain rhetorically, it is something he failed to do so politically. Bandaranaike's implementation of the Sinhala-only policy and the Sinhala Buddhist movement he courted in order to gain power had repercussions that are still felt in contemporary Sri Lanka.

Conclusion: Authenticity's Postcolonial Afterlife

Bandaranaike's unresolved turn to authenticity reflects a larger dilemma in elite political culture in Sri Lanka. Early in his political career, he sought authenticity by claiming racial coevality with the British upper classes. Subsequently the focus shifts to a kind of Gandhian organicity and critique of modernity. In Buddhism, Bandaranaike seems to combine the two—a discourse that provides anchorage in a sense of hoary authenticity but at the same time access to a rationalist, modern outlook. Faced with the necessity to engage in mass-based politics in a decolonizing context, elite Sinhala politicians turned to what they saw as a common cultural heritage they shared with the people. In essence though, this was an idealized vision of culture fashioned in the nexus between colonial knowledge production and its appropriation by nationalist thinkers. The movement toward authenticity also remains, as in the perahera short story and its protagonist's removal of his shirt, at the level of a change in external markers. One could, if somewhat unkindly, argue that Bandaranaike adopted native dress but cognitively and affectively remained anglophile—inflected by a sense of cosmopolitan decolonization.

It is, ironically, however, as part of the idea of a transcendental Sinhala collective consciousness that Bandaranaike as postcolonial martyr becomes important to later developments in Sinhala nationalist discourse. Gunadasa Amarasekara—one of the intellectual architects of possibly the most effective and intellectually rigorous expression of Sinhala nationalist thinking, the jathika chintanaya movement (loosely translating as national consciousness/philosophy), which emerged in the late 1970s—argues in a monograph entitled Anagarika Dhamapala Maaksvaadida? (Is Anagarika Dhamapala Marxist?) that Bandaranaike instinctively tapped into a millennia-old Sinhala Buddhist consciousness (Amarasekara Reference Amarasekara1980). Amarasekara makes this claim in constructing a grand teleology of postcolonial Sinhala nationalist revival in which Anagarika Dharmapala, the early twentieth-century religious reformer, is the founder father figure and Bandaranaike his successor who politically and institutionally actualizes (if only partially) what Dharmapala expressed as a cultural critique.

One of the reasons Amarasekara is able to make this claim is because the so-called “revolution” of 1956—led by what Sinhala nationalist discourse refers to as the pancha maha bala wega (the five great forces) comprised of sangha, weda, govi, guru, and kamkaru (Buddhist priests, native doctors, farmers, teachers, and workers)—is popularly characterized as the resurgence of an authentic Sinhala sociocultural ethos long suppressed by colonialism. As Spencer (Reference Spencer, Shore and Nugent2002, 91–100) notes, 1956 remains an understudied phenomenon in Sri Lankan scholarship. It is this scholarly void that Amarasekara is exploiting to promote his vision of a transcendental Sinhala consciousness that extends virtually unchanged from precolonial to postcolonial times. However, as Spencer further argues, the processes through which this idea of an essential Sinhala identity are disseminated are complex and the pancha maha bala wega were intermediary agents that carried certain metropolitan notions about an idealized Sinhala culture and history to rural communities. In that sense, what Amarasekara sees as an organic discourse is no less constructed than the discourse of authenticity in Bandaranaike—but less visible as a construct because its agents are more “local” and “organic” than Bandaranaike.

There is irony here in that Bandaranaike, who struggled to fashion a notion of authenticity, is shown to be tapping into an organic sense of the authentic and at the same time this very “organic” authenticity itself is a myth. This irony is , however, very much a part of the reality of the postcolonial afterlife of authenticity. Sinhala nationalism, like other nationalisms based on a precolonial cultural imaginary, such Hindutva in India, is a prisoner to this imagination. This story of the constant shaping and reshaping of authenticity, however, points to an intimate relationship between nationalism and the notion of authenticity. While it is easy to argue that Bandaranaike “used” or “exploited” authenticity, what is clear is that he was shaped and dominated by this discourse as well. A question that this article cannot address but that needs further probing is as to whether authenticity resonates with some affective human desire for sense of self, and whether such an affective desire informs authenticity's statist and political staying power—this in turn would lead to a more nuanced understanding of nationalist discourse and its contours.