The legacy of Anagarika Dharmapala

Vinod MOONESINGHE

In assessing the historical contribution of Anagarika Dharmapala, it is necessary to bear in mind the times and milieu in which he existed, although he was in many ways ahead of his time. He was born Hewavitarne Don David on September 17, 1864. His father, Hewavitarne Don Carolis was from a family of well-to-do peasants from Hittetiya in Matara District; his uncle Ven Atthadassi, was the chief incumbent of the village Vihara.

His maternal grandfather was Andiris Perera Dharmagunawardena, a bourgeois lay leader of the Buddhist revival, who funded the Vidyodaya Buddhist and Oriental College and who supported Ven Hikkaduwe Sri Sumangala.

Sri Lanka was then under the imperialist jackboot; ordinary people were treated as second-class citizens in their own country, their belief system as primitive superstition: in the words of Bishop Heber’s hymn, ‘the heathen in his blindness bows down to wood and stone.’ The Whites kept themselves to themselves. Reading the literature of the time, they might have been living in Europe, except for the tropical fauna and flora - and the occasional intrusion of ‘a native’, generally a minion of some variety or a picturesque villager.

Colonial administration

The indigenous officers of the Native Department of the colonial administration, together with their extended families constituted a thin, mainly ‘high-caste’, Anglican feudal stratum which aped the masters and formed a buffer between the Whites and the ‘natives’. When the Theosophists Colonel Henry Olcott and Madame Helena Blavatsky arrived in 1880, it was sensational: they treated the ‘natives’ as not merely human beings, but as equals.

Impressed by the erudition of the Buddhist orators at the Buddhist-Christian debates, they treated the locals as their intellectual equals as well. They founded the Buddhist Theosophical Society, with Dharmagunawardena as president, and other members of the nascent Sinhalese Buddhist bourgeoisie on the board. This was not some obscurationist, fundamentalist cult: it was at the cutting edge of modern social thinking, promoting the education of women and their liberation from restrictive Victorian values. Its foreign theosophist counterparts included women’s rights campaigners Annie Besant and Anna Kingsford.

Foreign domination

The liberating atmosphere of theosophy influenced Don David, who changed his name to Hewavitarne Dharmapala (and promoted the use of Indian names). He was later to devise the national dress and also the ‘lama saree’ for young girls. His mother, Mallika was the first person to wear his new-fangled ‘low-country Osariya’.

Dharmapala’s thinking was underpinned by four factors: his devotion to Buddhism, which he helped clear of much superstitious clutter; his love for his country, which he wanted to modernise; his dislike of foreign domination; and his compassion for the common people. His nationalism, common to his cross-caste bourgeois circles, was influenced by the ‘Aryan’ theories introduced by the British to justify their own rule.

He promoted a modern, pan-Sinhala identity, in order to fight casteism, and unite the Sinhalese. Dharmapala was impressed by the way Japan had resisted imperialist domination and modernised, keeping its cultural roots. He wished Sri Lanka to emulate the Asiatic powerhouse’s example of industrialism, and started the Hewavitarne Textile Training School at Rajagiriya, sending his choice for principal, U.B. Dolapihilla to Japan for training.

With the help of Mary Foster of Hawai’i, he built the first free Ayurvedic hospital in Sri Lanka, the Foster-Robinson Clinic. He also attempted to spread education among the ordinary people, opening more than a hundred schools. Dharmapala’s attitude to women was not backward and Victorian. His female relatives played a prominent role in the Women’s Education Society, the first women’s organisation in modern Sri Lanka and ancestor of the feminist movement.

Social values

Dharmapala was involved in advancing women’s education and in the revival of the Women’s Sangha. He brought two American Buddhist women, Sister Sanghamitta (Countess Miranda Canavarro) and Sister Padmavati (Catherine Shearer of Boston) to preside over the Sanghamitta Upasakaramaya and the girls’ school of the same name.

In 1906, Ananda Coomarswamy founded the Ceylon Social Reform Society, to preserve and revive traditional social values, customs and arts and crafts, and dedicated itself to discouraging ‘the thoughtless imitation of unsuitable European habits and custom’.

Dharmapala was active in this liberal organisation, along with fellow Buddhists such as Peter de Abrew and Europeans such as Marie Musaeus Higgins and Annie Besant. They gave leadership to the emerging (mainly Buddhist) Sinhala-educated petit bourgeois intelligentsia, many of whom had been involved in strikes and agitation.

This group, which included Buddhist monks, journalists, poets, Ayurvedic physicians, teachers and traders, had hitherto not had a voice. Dharmapala also inspired the proletariat and poor farmers.

When he toured the island in his bullock cart (later in his motor-caravan), his audiences were mainly poor peasant and workers. He was considered an extremist by the conservative bourgeois Sinhalese Buddhist elite. They drove him out of the Temperance society and later, using the newspapers of DR Wijewardena, out of the country. However, his social and political legacy was to be their nemesis.

Political upheaval

He inspired a generation of young radicals such as Philip Gunawardena, NM Perera and SA Wickremasinghe, who led the socialist movement shortly after his demise in 1933 and took on his mantle of radical anti-imperialism and anti-feudal modernism. Colvin R de Silva, for example, said that Dharmapala’s words radicalised him. The socialists prospered on the ground prepared by Dharmapala: the support for the Left came from the areas where his message had penetrated. The great Hartal of 1953 was most effective in the Dharmapala heartland, from the Hewagam Korale in Colombo District down to Akuressa in Matara.

The proletariat, in alliance with the petit bourgeoisie and farmers were to be the driving force behind the political upheaval of 1956. It was these sections of the population who had been awakened by Dharmapala a half-century before. Today, Dharmapala’s ideology must be adapted to our contemporary reality, discarding the trammels of his era, much as he modernised the Sinhalese Buddhist creed then. Embracing other ethnic groups, it could be the basis of a modern Sri Lankan nationalism within a global culture.