A Tale of Two Islands

Anne M. Blackburn

As long as I have studied Buddhism and Southern Asia, Gananath Obeyesekere has been a guide and interlocutor, always through his powerful writings, and sometimes in person. Though we are all missing Professor Gananath greatly since his death, it is heartening that so much powerful work lives on.

I first met Professor Gananath at Princeton in 1987 to discuss plans for post-graduate studies.  Before that, probably in 1985, one of my Swarthmore College faculty, Professor Steven Piker, assigned us Medusa’s Hair (1981), which became part of my introduction to thinking about religion and ritual in Sri Lanka.

‘Protestant Buddhism’
And then towards the end of my first degree, Professor Donald Swearer assigned us Professor Gananath’s famous article, “Religious Symbolism and Political Change in Ceylon” (1970), a piece that launched a multi-decade debate on whether and how we should use the term “Protestant Buddhism” in studies of 19^th– and 20^th-century Sri Lanka. Professor Gananath may have been both amused and bemused that the term gained such a foothold. But perhaps he was not troubled by this.

In any event, the idea of “Protestant Buddhism” was further reinforced by the valuable (1976) work by Professor Kitsiri Malalgoda, Buddhism in Sinhalese Society, 1750-1900, and then by Buddhism Transformed (1989) co-authored by Professor Gananath and Professor Richard Gombrich. That work was published just as I began post-graduate studies, and it remained something of a “pebble in my shoe”, stimulating my own thinking, until I completed work on Locations of Buddhism (2010).

Myth and myth variations
Looking back, I would say that even better for my formation as a scholar was Professor Gananath’s The Work of Culture (1990), elegantly written and argued; and published as a substantial expansion and revision of  his 1982 Lewis Henry Morgan Lectures at the University of Rochester (USA). I was already beginning to feel myself moving towards historical analyses of Buddhist and other Sri Lankan textual materials, and towards that end Professor Gananath’s arguments about “myth” and “myth variations” seemed generative. His ideas suggested ways of thinking about how celebrated narratives of places and persons in the premodern history of Sri Lanka had been multivocal and dynamic, such that a core narrative and cluster of characters took different forms at different moments.

In The Work of Culture, Professor Gananath wrote: “Structuralism dechronologizes narrative. The idea of debate, or the hidden discourse that underlies myth variations, helps restore the historical dimensions of myth” (128).  And, a bit later: “…myth not only provokes a debate by its very existence, but it also embodies the sedimentation of past debates, a dialogue if you will with the tradition’s perception of its past” (130).

I took this statement that “myth embodies the sedimentation of past debates” as an invitation to read premodern narrative materials from Lanka (and other areas of later interest to me in premodern Tai, Mon, and Burmese locations) from a particular perspective. As I understood it, this was an invitation to become aware that a long-lasting narrative showing multiple narrative variations and changing emphases across time (for instance, tales of the deities, or perhaps a jātaka tale, or a royal biographical episode—think of Professor Gananath’s work on both Gajabāhu and Duṭṭhagāmani) was a narrative that suggested its own history, its history of being called into the telling at a particular moment in time.

Sometimes we would be able to read the narrative, and around the narrative in other related sources, to see what work a particular iteration of narrative (a “myth variation” in Obeyesekere’s terms) might have been doing. Or to put it another way, and closer to the psychoanalytic dimensions of Professor Gananath’s work, we might begin to understand, or at least have a glimpse of, the preoccupations undergirding this or that narrative form.

‘Captain Cook debates’
At around the same time I was thinking through “myth as the sedimentation of debate” while studying at the University of Chicago, we were actually caught up in another debate, this one also related to Professor Gananath’s historical-theoretical projects.

This was the era of the “Captain Cook debates” between Professor Gananath (The Apotheosis of Captain Cook, 1992) and Professor Marshall Sahlins (How “Natives” Think, 1995). Sentiments ran high amongst scholars working in South Asia studies, since Professor Gananath’s arguments were felt to have implications for our understanding of other societies beyond the Pacific Islands that had also been drawn into colonial ambitions and extractions. In the 1990s, as scholars of South Asia studies grappled with the post-Orientalist turn, historical-anthropological arguments about rationality and representation resonated powerfully.

Collaborative travel and research
Colleagues writing in the Polity magazine memorial for Professor Gananath have already remarked on  his passion for travel and research, with years spent moving around Sri Lanka in research and exploration. Of course, the manuscripts and oral narratives encountered by Professor Gananath on these travels informed many publications, including those he wrote related to the Kandyan Kingdom and the Vanni.

It is well worth recalling that quite a few of these research travels were collaborative, undertaken with talented scholars based in Sri Lanka.  The one I know the most about was undertaken by Professor Emeritus Ananda Tissa Kumara (recently retired from the University of Colombo’s Department of Sinhala) in collaboration with Professor Gananath. This resulted in the publication of valuable works in genres such as kadayim poth, viththi poth, and sub-regionally specific narrative histories.  Many of these were published by Godage Bookshop in 2005, and I can still remember the excitement of going to the bookshop in search of them. Editing and publishing such materials was a gift to future scholars.

Scholar-Teacher-Colleague
Apart from our brief initial meeting, for years I knew Professor Gananath only through his writings. Yet, as I began to spend more time in Sri Lanka, and also to engage with Sri Lankan universities and materials more and more in research, Professor Gananath grew more present to me as a scholar-teacher-colleague. I can still remember vividly attending a lecture by Professor Gananath in the mid-1990s at the University of Peradeniya. At that time, thanks to the kind and wise mentoring of Professor Charles Hallisey, it was my honour to study with the late Professor P. B. Meegaskumbura, who helped guide part of my doctoral research. That lecture at Peradeniya was my first glimpse of Professor Gananath on the stage, embodying his restless, humorous, and incisive mind.

Eventually, Professor Gananath and I had some direct intellectual connection, partly owing to my doctoral dissertation and first book focused on Ven. Väliviṭa Saraṇaṃkara and the era of King Kīrtī Śrī Rājasinha. Professor Gananath’s support of my work as an emerging academic was deeply heartening. Though I believe Professor Gananath thought I had underplayed in my own publications the involvement of Ven. Väliviṭa in the plot against Kīrtī Śrī, perhaps we implicitly agreed to disagree. Kandyan history was of great interest to Professor Gananath, who continued to engage richly with Kandyan court materials for decades, including through the powerful work, The Doomed King (2017) and his essays on Kandy’s cosmopolitan culture.

In the early 2000s, and probably after 2005, I had the wonderful chance to be acquainted personally with Dr. Ranjini Obeyesekere, a tremendous scholar of historical and contemporary Sinhala literature, and of Sri Lanka’s Buddhist history. I had relied upon Dr. Ranjini’s translations and essays already for some years at that point, regularly assigning Jewels of the Doctrine (1991) and Portraits of Buddhist Women (2001) in my teaching. Conversations with Dr. Ranjini made the years of my Colombo research on Ven. Hikkaḍuvē much brighter, and I always looked forward to her company. Some of these conversations took place as Dr. Ranjini was at work on the massive project translating Sinhala jātakas (The Revered Book of Five Hundred and Fifty Jātaka Stories, 2012).

It is really thanks to Dr. Ranjini that I came to socialise with her and Professor Gananath, who sometimes joined our conversations. I remember with gratitude and affection the moments shared with them on two islands: Sri Lanka and Manhattan.

Anne M. Blackburn is the Old Dominion Foundation Professor in the Humanities in the Department of Asian Studies at Cornell University; and author most recently of Buddhist-inflected Sovereignties Across the Indian Ocean Arena, A Pali Arena, 1200-1550 (University of Hawai’i Press, Honolulu, 2024).

Photo credit: Ranjini Obeyesekere

References

Blackburn, Anne M. (2010). Locations of Buddhism: Colonialism and Modernity in Sri Lanka. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Gombrich, Richard, and Gananath Obeyesekere. (1988). Buddhism Transformed: Religious Change in Sri Lanka.  Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Malalgoda, Kitsiri. (1976). Buddhism In Sinhalese Society 1750 1900: A Study Of Religious Revival & Change. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.

Obeyesekere, Gananath. (2017). The Doomed King: A Requiem for Sri Vikrama Rajasinha. Colombo: Sailfish.

Obeyesekere, Gananath. (1992). The Apotheosis of Captain Cook: European Mythmaking in the Pacific. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Obeyesekere, Gananath. (1990). The Work of Culture: Symbolic Transformations in Psychoanalysis and Anthropology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Obeyesekere, Gananath. (1981). Medusa’s Hair: An Essay on Personal Symbols and Religious Experience. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Obeyesekere, Gananath. (1970). “Religious Symbolism and Political Change in Ceylon”. Modern Ceylon Studies, 1 (1): 43-63.

Obeyesekere, Ranjini (Ed.). (2012). The Revered Book of Five Hundred and Fifty Jātaka Stories, Translated from the 14^th Century Sinhala Version. Colombo: M. D. Gunasena.

Obeyesekere, Ranjini. (Trans.). (2001). Portraits of Buddhist Women: Stories from the Saddharmaratnāvaliya. Albany: State University of New York Press.

Obeyesekere, Ranjini. (Trans.). (1991). Jewels of the Doctrine: Stories of the Saddharma Ratnāvaliya. Albany: State University of New York Press.

Sahlins, Marshall. (1995). How “Natives” Think: About Captain Cook, For Example. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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