An Inspiring Sri Lankan Anthropologist: Gananath Obeysekere
Source:Thuppahis
Laleen Jayamanne & Nammika Raby, in The Island, February 2025
“People were nourished by stories….” (Kathandarawalinne minissu jeewathwune) Gananath
“Man does not live by bread alone” Matthew 4:4
Dimuthu Saman Wettasinghe’s film Gananath Obeyesekere: In Search of Buddhist Conscienceopens with a bravura tracking shot moving past trees, water, a splash of saffron robes. These sunlit images are enfolded in a non-religious, rather melancholy male choral chant, but soon the singular voice of Professor Gananath Obeyesekere cuts through with a kind of Dionysian intensity. He tells us a story about Gauthama Buddha, as the camera encircles, at speed, what turns out to be the Kandy Lake. His tale is about a devastating war waged by the king of Kosla against the Sakya kingdom but of the Buddha’s unshakable belief that if folk get together and discuss matters in good faith (call it diplomacy), all wars could be averted. This carefully and deeply researched, imaginative, ‘Educational Film’ of 142 minutes, with its exhilaratingly dense overture and its subtle montage, is a loving tribute to an exemplary Lankan scholar/teacher and his life work (of some 70 years) as an internationally renowned Anthropologist.
The film shows Gananath’s empathetic ability to pay careful ethnographic attention to a variety of gendered states of mental distress and trauma and their traditional ritualised ecstatic expressions, especially with regard to women, well before some feminist scholars in the West began to be interested in the topic of ‘Women and Madness’ from a Freudian psychoanalytic perspective. Psychoanalytic theory became methodologically important for Feminist Film Theory, which I used in my doctoral thesis on ‘Female Representation in the Lankan cinema’.
A sequence in Dimuthu’s film focuses on the subject of Gananath’s book Medusa’s Hair: An Essay on Personal Symbols and Religious Experience, which is a case history of an old woman called Karunawathi Maniyo (mother). She appears with her thickly matted, long snake-like grey locks which, we are told, were created by her as a mode of existence, entailing a ritualised daily practice of puja at an altar, with images of the fierce Kali with fangs and Durga Ashuramardani (a divine figure of combat capable of violence and great power), to express and assuage her mental distress. However, I did not see an image of Pattini, the ‘good mother’, on her altar inscribed in Gananath’s work. In my villages the relationships based on landholding patterns were complicated by landless outsiders settled as colonists by the Government. In these villages I also observed the doctrine/thought vs practice dimensions of Buddhism with relation to rice cultivation.
This pilot project trained farmers to undertake off-farm income generation activities, and progressively undertake self- management of the canal network. Magallavava, the tank, dates to 276-303 AD, constructed by King Mahasena (according to historical records), and according to some villagers, by king Pandukabaya. According to local legend, during the time of Lord Buddha, a prince and princess from India heard of the plight of the drought ridden villagers and brought silver coins to build the anicut to Magallavava, hence the name Ridi Bendi. Gananath often told us, “history matters.
These experiences became teaching tools in the classroom at California State University, Long Beach. Gananath’s film Kataragama: The God for All Seasons (story of Kareem included), remained a favourite with our students at every level.
Isn’t it interesting Dr. Obeyesekere, you asked me to muddy my feet in the field and I ended up spending my career doing just that?”
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In Search of Buddhist Conscience
(Baudha Hurdasakshiya Soya) skilfully interweaves the multiple strands of Gananath’s life and work. They are: his family background in a village (his multi-lingual father, an Ayurvedic physician trained in Calcutta and writer, and an anti-colonial thinker, as was his maternal grandfather); his married life with Ranjini Ellepola and their profound shared ethic of education, love of language, a feel for the aesthetic and generous hospitality to students and friends; his robust education locally which made him fluently bilingual and in the US; discussions with a large number of scholars, including Gananath and Ranjini, and also a Pattini Kapumahattaya, providing illuminating, lively commentaries on his work; explication of a series of his key texts and their concepts across his very long career; a rich array of images (stills and film clips) from Gananth’s extensive ethnographic archive where we see a young Gananath in the field with his multi-ethnic research teams. The filmmaker Dharmasiri Bandaranayke’s ‘teacherly documentary voice-over’, synthesises some of the facts, which helps, as there is so much rich material and new ideas to take in. Because of the careful interweaving of these many strands through the montage and the long duration of the film overall, it has a relaxed tempo, but one also feels a sense of urgency, the urgency of the ‘search’ (for Gananath and these dedicated young filmmakers too), in the Lankan historical political context of cycles of organised state violence against Tamil people including the long civil war, since political Independence in 1948.
Together, the very title ‘In Search of Buddhist Conscience’ and the melancholy chant (not a gatha but playing with its sonic memory, given the mise-en-scene of the iconic Temple of the Tooth, Dalada Maligawa glimpsed in the background), which opens the film, suggest a ‘loss’. A loss of conscience, the loss of a Buddhist conscience which was once robust in Lanka as manifested in the expansive, tolerant folk traditions, presented as incontrovertible ethnographic evidence. The film examines Gananath’s anthropological work as an intellectual (historical, ethnographic, theoretical, and yes, aesthetic) reclamation of the syncretic richness of the Buddhist and Hindu folk traditions as they intersected in all their hybrid multiplicity and presents the multi-ethnic folk of Lanka, both men and especially the women, who embodied their values so vibrantly, eloquently, intransigently and therefore unforgettably.
I am blown away by the suggestive power of this film for possible research on the Lankan folk archives of the Tamil Hindu traditions and what may be called an inclusive, vital, Buddhist folk imaginary, and material culture, through Gananath’s scholarship. One learns about Lanka’s deep cultural connections with South India from the ethnographic record as analysed and theorised by Gananath. For a lapsed Roman Catholic like me, the film is a profound revelation about my country of birth where I lived my first 23 years. Walter Benjamin wrote his essay ‘The Story Teller’ at a moment in Western modernity when the richly diverse European oral traditions were long gone and yet his essay, shot through with melancholy, catches light like a little gem every now and then, depending on how and why one might reread it under the pressure of the present moment baring down like a tonne of bricks, obliterating a future, inconceivable without a sense of a deep past, linked to legends, stories, ‘folk lore’ of the people. The film indicates that much of what the film dramatizes is now archival material, the living traditions mostly lost in processes of modernisation and westernisation of Buddhism itself. However, Gananath is no melancholy European Jewish intellectual like Walter Benjamin.
The ’dramatis persona’ ‘Gananath’ who comes across in Dimuthu’s film is an intellectual whose scholarly and indeed existential understanding of the tragedy of our post-independence etho-nationalist history, has not dampened his irrepressible sense of humour and a feel for the comic in public life and in the Lecture Theatre. After all, Dionysus presided over the genres of tragedy, comedy and the Satyr plays in the Civic Theatre Festival in Athens, the City Dionysia. And I have no doubt that Gananth has read his favourite thinker Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy in the Spirit of Music. But then Gananath has also imbibed the theatrical comic ribald humour and delight in high farce from our robust folk rituals. Two walls of his beautiful home in Kandy are shown decorated with a rare collection of comic-grotesque-scary folk masks (of the Sannyas and Demons) of Lanka, awaiting a museum that would house them. There is a precious group photo of Anthropologists at the famous Folk Art Museum in Bali, in Ubud, where a young Gananath is seen in the company of the legendary Margret Mead and others. I saw a Lankan Demon mask there when I visited the museum and now imagine that Gananath probably arranged for that demon to join his South Asian ‘na yakku’ (kith and kin demons) – this phrase in Sinhala makes me crack up! Gananath has brought both intensity and laughter into the intellectual arena of the academic lecture, making his pedagogic style unforgettable. This film is also a testament to that evanescent, spirited performance of a singular modern Lankan ‘guru’, in the sense of mentor who incites students to learn to think for themselves and strike a path of their own. By his own example he teaches us the irresistible art of critical thinking.
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PART TWO
Women’s Mental Health: Trance/Dance in Folk Rituals
The lecture Namika heard on ‘pregnancy cravings’ (dola duka) among peasant women in a particular village, is one of Gananath’s earliest pieces of research which shows his turn of mind, originality, in taking seriously a compelling female desire which may not have been treated in the scholarly arena with the gravity and seriousness that it warranted. I associate a certain sense of cultural embarrassment on hearing the term ‘dola duka’ in Sinhala back in the day when a pregnant relative of mine craved to eat pieces from a freshly baked (navun) clay pot with its special fragrance. The film shows Gananath’s empathetic ability to pay careful ethnographic attention to a variety of gendered states of mental distress and trauma and their traditional ritualised ecstatic expressions, especially with regard to women, well before some feminist scholars in the West began to be interested in the topic of ‘Women and Madness’ from a Freudian psychoanalytic perspective. Psychoanalytic theory became methodologically important for Feminist Film Theory, which I used in my doctoral thesis on ‘Female Representation in the Lankan cinema’.
A sequence in Dimuthu’s film focuses on the subject of Gananath’s book Medusa’s Hair: An Essay on Personal Symbols and Religious Experience, which is a case history of an old woman called Karunawathi Maniyo (mother). She appears with her thickly matted, long snake-like grey locks which, we are told, were created by her as a mode of existence, entailing a ritualised daily practice of puja at an altar, with images of the fierce Kali with fangs and Durga Ashuramardani (a divine figure of combat capable of violence and great power), to express and assuage her mental distress. However, I did not see an image of Pattini, the ‘good mother’, on her altar.
It is worth noting that both Kali and Durga are not maternal figures and though they were incorporated into the Brahminical Hinduism, they have no consorts and were in origin folk goddesses, according to the historian of ancient India, D. D. Kosambi. It is worth remembering that the first feminist press in English, in India was called ‘Kali for Women’! There is here an evident externalisation of an unusual desire, intelligible within Karunawathi Manio’s social class/group and as such, acceptance of her idiosyncratic behaviour and appearance. It is impossible to imagine such a Medusa-like scary treatment of hair in a middle-class milieu.
Again, there are images of a possessed young woman, Nawala Maniyo, who participates in an exorcist ritual in a trance, eyes glistening between strands of her long tresses masking her face. This reminds me of Gananath’s extraordinarily gripping Case Study, ‘Psycho-Cultural Exegesis of a Case of Spirit Possession in Sri Lanka,’ which we dramatised for the soundtrack of my film A Song of Ceylon (Australian Film Commission, Sydney: 1985). Again, as an ethnographer he demonstrates how the Sinhala-Buddhist folk culture provided symbolic means of collective, public, theatricalised, somatic, expression of profound individual trauma registered in the unconscious of the young possessed woman, Somawathi, and the therapeutic value of these public, social forms of physical expression.
In the early 20th Century Vienna, the Neurologist Sigmund Freud treated young bourgeoise female patients suffering from a new pathology named ‘Hysteria,’ which in turn led him to postulate a theory of the Unconscious and to develop his ‘Talking Cure’ through ‘free-association’, to assuage mental pain. This however was in a privatised and personalised setting in his study; the female patient lying down on a couch speaking in a ‘stream of consciousness’ mode, with Dr Freud as the silent listener, his gaze averted. Freud’s case studies of these patients are also gripping reading, like a 19th Century novel, and they are also ‘ethnographic’ psychoanalytic interpretations of the pathology named Hysteria, a new medical category which entered the Diagnostic Manual.
A portrait sculpture of Prof. Gananath Obeysekera by Prof. Sarath Chandrajueewa
In contrast, while deeply interested and trained in psychoanalytic theory and methodology at the University of Washington, Seattle, by European specialists, Gananath appreciated and powerfully theorised the public, social nature of Exorcist Rituals (Bali Thovil) and other such therapeutic practices.
Further, he showed how the rituals, based on folk beliefs, were imaginative, performative public events with an ‘audience’ participating in them and their importance as witnesses, for the cure. In these, the female ‘patient’ or woman possessed of demons danced to drum beats in ecstatic trance, resisting through spirited dialogue, the Exorcist (Kattadirala), who embodied patriarchal authority and even physical violence. In these rituals the possessed woman is given a public arena to play (dance) in, and while the ritual has a familiar cultural ‘script’ so to speak, the possessed woman has every chance to improvise and play as she desires or as the demons (all male) possessing her desire.
It is clear through this work that, contra psychoanalysis, the unconscious is not structured like a language and the repressed is insighted to find expression through trance-dance and vocal expression which go against traditional notions of femininity. In ecstatic states the patient is animated by drum beats that touch her nervous system directly and thus the entire body, revealing deep registers of affective trauma, that a purely static, talking cure (while lying down on, what became, that famous couch, now preserved in the Freud Museum in London) could not possibly do.
Dimuthu brings all this out lucidly, not only with the questions he poses to Gananath but also by placing the relevant photographs or clips within the interview sequences themselves. This montage technique of placing carefully chosen stills and clips from Gananath’s very extensive ethnographic archive, interspersed with the ‘Talking Heads’ interviews, makes the film very lively and watchable. It also teaches us something about the complex theoretical ideas Gananath worked with in an accessible way because of his powers of ‘scientific’ rigorous ethnographic observation, tempered by a Buddhist Humanist empathy and engaging style of writing so rare in scholarship.
Perhaps the film would encourage young scholars to read Gananath’s writing as Dimuthu did even before he entered the University. And I hope it encourages the translation of at least some of his major work. The film is significant in this sense, too, because Gananath did not accept the orthodoxy in his field and questioned received methodologies and theories. His critical mind is truly dazzling in its generosity of spirit and sense of curiosity even so late in his retirement. We hear him say, ‘Even now (then in his 80s, soon to be 95!), I am learning something new every day in the Uva-Wellassa area’ and exhorts us also to make that a goal. Yes, let’s!
Gananath’s use of the idea of the unconscious, via Freudian Psychoanalysis, in his ethnographic theorisation of rituals was enabling methodologically. It provided a key theoretical concept for understanding the actions performed by men and women under immense mental and physical duress, which went against the mandated gender norms of the traditional culture. I remember in the 1980s how Gananath was severely criticised by Marxists for ‘indulging in and validating superstitious folk beliefs and practices’ among the so called, ‘ignorant peasantry’.
The whole nexus of folk beliefs and cultural practices, including aspects of Hinduism, and their integral articulation with Buddhism, practiced as a popular religion with rituals and dramatic enactments by these rural communities was dismissed in a simplistic rationalist critique, as myth, hence false. But what has survived time, as an anthropologically cogent theoretical analysis based on meticulous, imaginative ethnographic work, is Gananath’s central argument about the hybrid, generous, inclusive nature of Buddhism as a religion, practiced in the robust, open folk traditions, by the peasantry. Dinidu gives considerable time to Dr Kumudu Kusum Kumara, who explains Gananath’s very detailed, complex argument and research with clarity and imagination in the film.
Buddhist Humanism or ‘Protestant Buddhism’
Kumudu explains the significance of Gananath’s formulation of the concept of ‘Protestant Buddhism’ introduced by the Theosophist Colonel Olcott in the 19th Century, who schooled the Buddhist revivalist Anagarika Dharmapala in constituting a Sinhala-Buddhist Catechism based on the Thripitakaya (the canonical Buddhist text), fit for school children in Daham Pasal modelled on Sunday School for Christian kids. He explains how this was a rationalising, westernising move, following Max Weber’s thinking here. Gananath’s brilliant coinage ‘Protestant Buddhism’, which was also strongly aligned with the Nationalist Anti-Colonial Movement, rationalised religious practices making them exclusive. A Victorian-English-Protestant-Puritanism thus entered Buddhism in Lanka, making it more akin to Protestantism in Europe which had a very severe moral code. Thereby the inclusive flexibility of the Buddhist folk tradition with its humour and sense of play, is lost along with, crucially, the story-telling tradition based on the Jataka Tales of the Buddha’s many rebirths, parables about ethical behaviour towards all living beings.
With this loss, we are told, the tradition of Buddhist Humanism, with its values of compassion as exemplified in these stories teaming with natural life and animals, too, also disappeared. Further, through this loss the ethical values nurturing and sustaining ‘a Buddhist Conscience’ were also lost, he argues. We are shown (via images), how the painterly folk tradition in Temple Murals and the literary sources, song, poetry (kavi), trance-dance, drumming, dramatic enactments within the folk traditions (as distinct from the official chronicles of the Mahavamsa and Deepawams), offered an alternative vision of Buddhism as practiced by the peasantry.
We learn that in the folk tradition Dutthagamini repented killing Elare the Tamil king and conscience struck, he attempted reparation and contrition, unlike the patricidal king Kashyapa who escaped into a hedonist life in the rock fortress of Sigiriya. Kumudu says that Gananath argued his case by reading the folk archive, of images on Temple walls and anonymous folk texts (Panthis Kolmura, a large corpus of 35 long poems, some of which he translated and also sang, Kadaym poth or Boundry texts and Vitti poth or Event books), which were authorless and title less work of the people, for the people and by the people. The film helps us to understand that it is this folk tradition, cultivating empathy and an ethical conscience, a capacity to be contrite, that has been lost within the post-independent ethno-nationalist version of official Protestant-Sinhala-Buddhism, with state patronage. This imported ideology of the English speaking coloniser is then presented as the ‘pure original Buddhism’ shorn of local superstition, hybrid folk tales and beliefs and rituals, rejected as ‘unBuddhist’. Indologists in turn supported this rationalising move of creating a ‘pure, original Buddhism’.
A Case Study
Kareem, a young Muslim man hangs on hooks (attached to a swing-like structure on wheels in a religious procession), as penance at the Kataragama Hindu festival and is also seen dancing in a trance. Gananath explains in his Case Study of Kareem that he was imprisoned in 1961 for assisting in the Army Coup against the Government. One wonders how a humble young Muslim cook got caught up in and imprisoned for a foolish Coup staged by a select group of English-speaking bourgeois gentlemen of Colombo, who were all high up in the armed forces of that era. Daughters of three of these officials who were arrested and served sentences were close friends of mine in school during this time, which heightens a sense of the absurdity of this poor man’s plight. Gananath’s case study of his childhood revealed an authoritarian paternal figure who instilled fear in him. However, he seemed serene and happy in the photographs taken with Gananath after the ritual and even when swinging from the ritual hooks.
Here, I would like to cite Arjun Appadurai’s review of Gananath’s magnum opus, The Cult of the Goddess Pattini because it is not readily available to those outside the academy.
“This is a book of unusual scope, quality, and scholarly significance. Ostensibly a description and analysis of a single cult in Sri Lanka, it is in fact a major symbolic, psychological, and ethno-historical study of practical religion in Sri Lanka, and of the relationship of that island to Indic culture and society. It is the product of two decades of field research by Sri Lanka’s most distinguished anthropological interpreter, and its combination of textual analysis, ethnographic sensitivity, and methodological catholicity makes it something of a blockbuster”.
Dimuthu informed me that Gananath studied six different traditions of the Pattini Cult, starting in the 1950s. Dimuthu and his research team went looking for the priests of each of these traditions named in his book and found that they had died but they did meet a student of Yahonis Pattini Mahattaya of the Rabaliya tradition and of Podi Mahaththaya, H. D. Edwin Pattini Mahatthaya, who is now the only living informant of Gananath’s Pattini research. Edwin Pattini Mahattaya performed aspects of the Pattini Cult for Gananath at his request for the sake of photo documenting it for his book. His son Tilak is seen dancing as Pattini in the Dimuthu’s film. Seeing him becoming Pattini (after his ritual investiture), even in an all too short clip, is among the high points of this film for me, because we see a profound metamorphosis of this young male ritual dancer into a female archetype, Pattini, the only Mother goddess of Lanka, in an inspired rhythmic play with codes of gender and beyond to reach an ecstatic body and spirit – words fail me. What we can also see is the profound gestural, rhythmic, spiritual transmission of this syncretic tradition across generations, across the abyss of death itself.
Pattini’s origins are in Kannagi, a heroic human figure from the Tamil Epic Silappadikaram, who is worshiped as a mother goddess, Kannagi-Amman, in India and in the East coast of Lanka by Tamils who still observe matrilineal descent (a system of tracing kinship through a person’s female ancestors), according to Gananath. The significance of this for gender and family relationships would be of particular interest to feminists. There is a large modern Bronze statue celebrating Kannagi in Chennai, India and colourful plaster ones and paintings in Hindu temples in Lanka, seen carrying her iconic anklet. (To be concluded)
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NB: Laleen and Nammika have presented two striking photographs of Gananath and then of Ranjini and Gananath which convey the vibrancy of their personalities — a vibrancy that I can attest to via many many interactions at Peradeniya and Kandy as well as the occasional one in USA orat international conferences. Unfortunately, my computer malware blocked these ISLAND versions. I would like some friend to copy and send the PIX in some usable form.
