medieval Pāli literary culture can be viewed as a form of qualified cosmopolitanism: one that advanced many of the cosmopolitan literary ideals of its time but also staunchly protected its exclusively Buddhist identity.

On how Pāli literature in medieval Sri Lanka responded to Sanskrit’s regional hegemony.

We describe three patients from different religious backgrounds in Sri Lanka whose possession states were strongly influenced by their religious beliefs. Patient A was a Buddhist who claimed to have special powers given by a local deity named Paththini. Patient B was a Catholic who experienced spirits around her whom she believed were sent by Satan. Patient C was a Muslim and believed she was possessed by spirits. The religious beliefs also influenced the help-seeking behaviour and the rituals or treatments to which they responded.

… as valuable as the familiar theoretical and conceptual languages of Euro-American landscape geography are, they also risk concealing a range of different aesthetics, social formations, and experiences that unfold in the non-Euro-American landscape. They risk dissimulating the politics of places as they are produced and lived contextually.

In the paper I work this argument through a critical engagement of the landscape architecture of Sri Lanka’s most famous tropical—modernist architect, Geoffrey Bawa; I specifically focus on his favorite, intensely choreographed, view at the estate Lunuganga on Sri Lanka’s south coast. As I show, while tools from the new cultural geography and beyond can help us to read this view as a classically modernist and apolitical landscape, a work of ‘art for art’s sake’, it is only a radically contextual familiarization with Sri Lankan society, politics, and history that can also reveal the landscape’s more subtle instantiation of a spatializing Sinhala-Buddhist hegemony.

The peoples of Sri Lanka have participated in far-flung trading networks, religious formations, and Asian and European empires for millennia. This interdisciplinary volume sets out to draw Sri Lanka into the field of Asian and Global History by showing how the latest wave of scholarship has explored the island as a ‘crossroads’, a place defined by its openness to movement across the Indian Ocean.

Experts in the history, archaeology, literature and art of the island from c.500 BCE to c.1850 CE use Lankan material to explore a number of pressing scholarly debates.

He legitimised the secularisation of the modern Sangha and its interpretation of Buddhism as exclusively Sinhala

… independence was perceived as an opportunity for a particular ethnic group

… a historically and contextually sensitive understanding of elite lay Buddhist women in Sri Lanka, bringing a “critical yet empathetic look” at their participation in ethno-nationalist Sinhala Buddhist hegemony