by Rajan Philips

“You may not be interested in the world order-but it is interested in you,” opines The Economist in its latest lead editorial, entitled “Dealing with the Don.” It is about America’s new Godfather, aka Don Corleone, aka Donald Trump, and the blitzkrieg beginning of his second presidential term that is causing, what the editorial calls, “the rupture of the post-1945 order.” It may be that the post 1945 order has run its course and needs a radical overhaul. But not for the reasons that seem to be motivating President Trump, and certainly not for whatever endgame he has in his mercurial mind. More than anything, in his second term Trump is presiding over America’s implosion into chaos and its spillover onto the world at large. It is super power devolving into super chaos.

Whether or not the world order is interested in Sri Lanka, the island country is in a fortuitously good place while other countries and polities are caught up in one way or another in the global waves emanating from the American vortex. Being small as island countries go, to recall Bishop Lakshaman Wickremesinghe’s felicitous phrase, has its benefits. There was a time, in the 1970s, when Ernst Friedrich Schumacher visited Sri Lanka touting his new, and over time very popular, book, “Small Is Beautiful: Economics As If People Mattered,” which included a chapter on “Buddhist Economics;” the island’s socialist intellectuals quietly laughed at him.

But the concept – small is beautiful – struck a chord in more ways and places than one. It strikes for Sri Lanka now quite meaningfully as people in bigger countries are struggling to make sense of Trump and to avoid being hit by debris from his erratic executive orders. Sri Lanka has had its ordeals – too severe and too many of them, in fact, for its size and endowments. Yet after a tumultuous overthrow of a government that had gone awry, the people have helped themselves to a new government that for all its innocence in governance is a perfect fit for a small country caught in the topsy turvy world of Donald Trump. For all its shortcomings, the NPP government has shown a remarkable restraint in the rhetoric of foreign policy, a temptation that almost none of its predecessors were able to resist. It is wise to be non-aligned without the rhetoric of non-alignment.

It could also be argued that there is nothing remarkable about showing restraint to Trump, because every government in the world is showing not merely restraint but are even faking deference to avoid the pain of whiplash Trump tariffs. It does not matter whether you are neighbours like Canada and Mexico, or if you are separated by oceans, like China and India. Europe is picked on with disdain. Africa is irrelevant and the Middle East could be managed with the Israeli military doing Washington’s bidding. Only Russia is spared, with inexplicable deference shown to Vladimir Putin. Only China has simply said that it is ready for any war, trade or any other, that Trump might be fancying.

White House or Fight House

The first leader of any other country not to fake deference to Trump and not fail to call out his Vice President, the insufferable JD Vance, is Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. He paid the price for it by being bundled out of the White House last Friday. Taking turns to insult and humiliate their Ukrainian guest, the American President and Vice President accused Zelensky of being disrespectful and ungrateful to their country while also accusing him of showing a preference for the Biden Admisnistration. Contentious meetings using colourful language do take place between word leaders and their teams, but they are always behind closed doors and spicy details come out years later in retirement memoirs for historical amusement. What happened in Washington last Friday was unprecedented; but, true to form, Trump called it “good for TV” – the be-all and end-all of his persona.

As usual, Trump’s Republican loyalists have been praising their fearless leader and his VP for standing up for their country, as if America needs some standing up to the beleaguered leader of a battered country. Trump’s main pique against Zelensky was the latter’s first refusal to sign a ransom agreement bartering away in perpetuity Ukraine’s critical minerals for half a billion dollars without any assurance for Ukraine’s security. A modified agreement was then drafted and Zelinsky flew to Washington for its signing last Friday. But things went off script as Zelensky chose to speak his mind. A return visit is now being planned for next week, with Zelensky going to Washington accompanied by French President Macron and British Prime Minister Starmer to show respect to the Don.

The Economist sees a new hierarchy in a new world order that are in the making. Number one, apparently, is America. The second tier below belongs to countries with resource endowments and unaccountable leaders – Russia, China, and Saudi Arabia. And the third rung goes to the old West of Europe and erstwhile American allies and longstanding neighbours like Canada. The unmentioned are the rest even though India looms from the shadows, too populous to ignore.

Sri Lanka can stay where it is unseen and hopefully untouched by reciprocal tariffs. And the opposition can make noise for the recall of the current Ambassador from Colombo to Washington. That will eventually happen but not due to any local political noises. The UNHRC like all of UN might be in a quandary. But the Council is going through the motions in Geneva and the government is playing its part. The real answer to the proceedings in Geneva could and should come out of genuine changes at home. A systematic and retroactive crack down to eradicate the country’s criminal infrastructure, and nationally inspired political change whether it comes through Clean Sri Lanka or a New Constitution, or both.

Trump’s Achilles Heels

There is also a new hierarchy in the making within America, and that could ultimately prove to be the Achilles heel of the Trump presidency. The world can only watch and wait. At the top are President Trump and First Buddy Musk. The hegemon and the henchman. There are cracks yet between the two, but few checks are emerging. After weeks of nonstop savaging of the US institutions of government and foreign aid by Elon Musk and his handful of laptop storm troopers going by the name of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), there are signs of slowdown and rethinking. Not surprisingly.

Achieving efficiency in government is always a necessary and laudable goal. President Clinton eliminated about 400,000 jobs during his presidency, but that took several months of effort and selectivity spearheaded by Vice President Al Gore. Not some buddy like Musk. Musk’s method is to be random and reckless, and that has created chaos and the need to recall retrenched employees in essential services. A second reason for the slowdown is growing judicial restiveness towards Musk’s operations.

In a small but not insignificant setback to the Administration, the Supreme Cout by a 5-4 majority sided with a Federal District Judge who had ordered the Trump Administration to lift the funding freeze on USAID operations that Trump had imposed on his very first day in office. The judge’s order was for the government to pay for projects and contractors whose work had been completed, and payment approved, before Trump assumed office.

The constitutional question as to whether Trump has the authority to override laws and disband institutions like the USAID, just on an executive whim, is still being battled in lower federal courts. The Trump team’s expectation is to let the cases go to the Supreme Court and ultimately get a favourable verdict from highest court with its 6-3 conservative majority.

The setback this week was on an appeal that Trump rushed to have the Supreme Court stop the lower court order to make payment for completed work some of which involved humanitarian relief operations. Delayed payments and non-payment to subcontractors has been Trump’s modus operandi in his real estate business. Musk did that with employees at Twitter before he turned it into X. They were extending their method to government’s contractual payments.

The case drew attention with Oxfam that gets no money from USAID, joining other agency plaintiffs against the government cuts. A remarkable nugget about the case is the District Judge who ordered the government to pay for completed work. His name is Amir Ali, a 40 year old Arab-Canadian-American. Born in Kingston, Canada, he completed a degree in Software Engineering at the University of Waterloo, and went on to do Law at Harvard. He made a quick name as a civil rights and constitutional lawyer, winning over half dozen cases he argued before the Supreme Court, and winning over even conservative judges.

Obviously, Ali and other judges who are ruling against Trump have got their detractors and their share of threats. That reportedly includes a reportedly racist taunt by Musk that Ali should be doing software engineering instead of helping non-existent NGOs receiving government payments. That is America. There is room for Amir Ali just as there is room for Elon Musk. Who prevails depends on the day of the week. Literally, for as Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said, when asked by a reporter about his handling his battles with Trump over tariffs, “It’s Thursday!”

Tariffs are another area where Trump is mercurially insistent but is being forced to reverse course from one day to another. He arbitrarily imposed a flat 25% tariffs on all imports from Canada and Mexico, in addition to further taxes on steel and aluminum imports. All in clear violation of the free trade agreement between the three countries, which Trump renegotiated and signed on during his first term.

Prime Minister Trudeau called Trump’s tariffs a trade war that is aimed to cripple the Canadian economy and ultimately achieve the annexation of Canada as the 51st state of America. Trump has been obsessively musing about annexing Canada ever since he started his second term, in addition to his musings over Gaza, Greenland and the Panama Canal. But the annexation talk has riled up Canadians across the political spectrum and at every social level.

The federal and provincial governments in Canada are all on board for retaliatory tariffs against American goods until Trump removes the tariff threat altogether. And the Canadian public is gung ho about boycotting American goods and ceasing travel to America as tourists. The Trump Administration may not have quite expected the Canadian backlash, which comes on top of market turbulence and investor panic within America. The upshot has been almost daily announcement of tariffs and their withdrawals the next day – with a face saving pause until a future date.

There is no one actually in support of tariffs, in America or anywhere, except Trump himself. His cabinet of lackeys have no backbone to tell him what they really think about the idea, and so they are left to soften the blow by securing postponements from the Don. April 2 is the next date to watch for universally reciprocal tariffs that Trump has so far threatened to impose against all countries. Sri Lanka will have to be watchful, but there is still too much time left for Trump to change his mind multiple times. There is no point on betting on what he is going to do next. It is better to enjoy being small and not caught in the crossfire.

(Excerpted from Rendering Unto Caesar, by Bradman Weerakoon)

In April 1971, there occurred the JVP insurrection which assumed significant proportions in the Ampara district. Rohana Wijeweera, the leader of the JVP at the time, had been arrested in Ampara, at the bus-stand a few months earlier and was in remand in far-away Jaffna. However, the cells he had initiated in the district schools, specially those with selected teachers and some of the best of the senior students continued to thrive — in Ampara those following science subjects were very active specially in the predominantly Sinhala areas.

On the night of April 4, 1971, the police station at Uhana — five miles away from where we lived — was attacked by a band of JVP militants. Shooting and grenade throwing had continued on both sides for or about two hours and some policemen suffered injuries. One JVP cadre had been killed and the police had seen others who were injured being carried away by the raiding party. As soon as the news was conveyed to me at daybreak, I motored up to Uhana and had my first sight of a dead militant.

He was a strong, strapping lad of about 20 years, dressed in a dark blue uniform. His body was still lying on the lawn of the police station grounds awaiting the post mortem. It had not been moved, and the weapon – a .303 rifle was lying by his side. His Che Guvera blue cap had fallen off and blood from the bullet hole in his forehead stained his face. I would never forget my first sight of the encounter of young militant against the state.

The police reacted very effectively in raiding the JVP hideouts in the jungles and I saw a group of captured students and a science teacher at the Maha Vidyalaya in Ampara being brought into the kachcheri cowering in the police jeep. The ‘boys’ had been camping out in the forest for a few days and appeared very dispirited and downcast having been badly assaulted.

Down towards the bottom of the district on the Moneragala border, a local JVP leader had set himself up as ‘Siyambalanduwa Castro’. His forte was the hijacking of government lorries laden with produce from the Eastern province bound for Badulla. Bags of rice and coconuts from Akkaraipattu were the main items of his brigandry. Soon, I had one of the cooperative department lorry drivers producing to me an official-looking receipt duly signed and sealed by ‘Castro’ which declared that the JVP had taken the twenty bags of rice being carried in lorry number such and such. It stated that the bags had been requisitioned at a time of emergency and acute food shortage for distribution to the poor. The driver should not be held responsible for any loss.

I gave the benefit of doubt to the lorry driver and absolved him from causing any loss to the state. I kept Castro’s receipt with me for a while as a memento of those stirring days of the beginning of the movement for the liberation of the poor of Uva.

The counter-action against the JVP uprising was intensive for the first month or so. Then in the month of May, there came an amnesty in which many thousands of young men and women surrendered. They were incarcerated, several, for quite some time. Many stories were later circulated about the number of young persons killed and the methods used by the military and the police in extracting information. My office and home became a place where anxious parents came to relate their tales of woe.

One morning, I was awakened by the sounds of heavy sobbing outside my gate. It was Jayawickrema of Uhana, whose house was a few yards away from the police station that had been attacked. He said his young son, Mihira, aged 23 had been taken in for questioning by the police and had been assaulted throughout the night. Jayawickrema had gone to the station and spoken to Weerasena, the OIC, who he knew well, but the OIC had denied that Mihira was taken in.

Later Jayawickrema found out that his son and three other boys had been taken away in a van to Batticaloa. I had the story inquired into and found that young Jayawickrema had indeed been taken in, beaten up badly and taken to the Batticaloa Hospital. On the way he had succumbed to his severe injuries. He had thereafter, been cremated in the Batticaloa cemetery. Old Jayawickrema was completely devastated and consoling him proved exceedingly difficult. He remained a constant friend until he passed away a few years ago.

Other stories also began to come from the colonies about police brutality. One that was particularly haunting was that of a group of youngsters from the 26 Colony shot in the presence of others as an example of what would be the fate of those who rebelled against the state. One of the mothers, whom we also began to know quite well, lost her mind on the death of her two sons and spent most of her time thereafter around the Buddangala Arannya where we used to meet her.

Once those who had surrendered came in, I was asked to find accommodation for about a thousand of them in Ampara. The only available site I had was the Malwatte Farm which was five miles away on the road to Samanthurai. I had earlier denuded the farm of all its goats and poultry, having to cater to the insatiable demands of the police for meat, when supplies stopped coming in from outside.

I sought authority from no one for my actions in dealing with an emergency but was certain I could adequately explain this to the government audit, if ever that were to arise. I remembered that Sir Oliver Goonetillake, when he was the Civil Defence Commissioner in war time, had done all manner of similar things and had had apparently 999 audit queries against him. I thought that if he could get away with it and yet go on to become governor-general, what had I to worry about?

We turned Malwatte Farm into a really effective rehabilitation center. Of course, the camp was heavily guarded and encircled with barbed wire and sentry points and looked like something out of an album of a prison camp in World War 11. But I was determined to make the inmates feel that they were to be rehabilitated and not imprisoned. I got them gifts of sports equipment and books from the local Rotary Club and some reconditioned two-wheel tractors from the department of agriculture which, along with the farm equipment, the boys began to use for their work on the farm. I used to drop by as often as I could to chat with them along with Esala, my 10-year-old son who became quite a favourite with the `boys’ since he was, as they said, the GA’s son and not the ASP’S son.

One day the camp inmates approached me and inquired if they could have a monk to visit them preferably on a Poya Day as some of them wanted to observe ‘sil’. This, I thought was such a good idea, that I prevailed upon the Nayake Priest of the Ampara Temple to come along with me to the camp and give a sermon to the inmates. It was a wonderful occasion when on that full moon night of Poson, the camp took on a most peaceful appearance and the boys used their bed sheets sewn together as ‘pavada’ which they laid for the priest to walk on to the platform from which he delivered a very appropriate sermon.

The atmosphere and the faces of the devout young men were indescribable. During that whole year there was only one case of a break out, when one night, a group of four boys had tunneled their way under the barbed wire fence and got away under the noses of the sentries.

Ampara Gets a CO

After the initial shock of the attack on the Uhana police station had been withstood and the police had mobilized their own defences however inadequately, the government imposed a coordinating officer for the district. He was a young Lieutenant Commander, Fernando, of the Navy who wanted to make a big impression. He migrated to Australia soon after his Ampara assignment. The coordinating officer had his own methods of imposing his leadership over me.

He set himself up at the Kondawattuwan Circuit Bungalow and had it ringed round by several concentric circles of armed sentries. It was very impressive. Consequently, it was quite an effort even to pay a call on him. I was received with great formality and courtesy but made to undergo quite an ordeal entering his fortress. My official driver, poor Weerasekera, was made to halt the car at least a 100 yards away from the entrance and wa1k.30 paces with his hands raised high above his head. It was only on his completely satisfying the sentries that he was indeed the driver of the GA that we were able to proceed inside. All this after informing them of my time of arrival in advance!

My own defence tactics were much more primitive. All I had were my faithful kachcheri staff officers: Piyadasa Liyanaarachi, U G Jayasinghe, Lakshman Perera, S B Niyangoda, A P Dainis, and the late Ananda Herath. They were duly mobilized and served with distinction as my personal bodyguards and doing night duty protecting the residency, smartly dressed in multi-coloured sarong and short-sleeved banian.

Damayanthi was persuaded to accommodate them, some on beds and some on camp cots, and feed us all for about three weeks at the residency. They provided great companionship and some much-needed good humour during a time of danger. Padmaseela de Silva — one of the braver ones — volunteered to act as the outdoor watchman choosing as a look-out point the hood of the balcony, which was, as he himself made out, both safe and from where he could not be seen. Everything went well for a couple of nights until Dainis going out for a ‘call of nature’ early one morning heard sounds of loud snoring. He discovered it came from Padmaseela, fast asleep and with his ancient 12 bore shot-gun, recently borrowed from the kachcheri, lying snugly by his side.

By Uditha Devapriya

In November last year, the American Institute for Sri Lankan Studies (AISLS) organised a joint lecture on Ananda Coomaraswamy at the International Centre for Ethnic Studies (ICES). Dr Janice Leoshko, of the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Austin, Texas, and Dr Laura Weinstein, of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, spoke of the man, his life, and his work. They also reflected on the many paradoxes and contradictions underlying his views on the art, culture, and society of India and Sri Lanka.

I must confess I know too little about art history to comment with any kind of authority. Yet I know it is not an exact science. Coomaraswamy is perhaps the best example of this: he was at once an empiricist working within a scientific framework – as his work as a minerologist in early 20th century Sri Lanka demonstrates – and an indefatigable utopian – as his writings on Asian art and philosophy show. As Senake Bandaranayake correctly puts it, he was this country’s first real art historian; his magnum opus, Mediaeval Sinhalese Art (1908), remains as authoritative as ever for scholars in the field.

If art history is not exact, then it follows that art historians are not infallible. Coomaraswamy certainly was not. This is what Dr Leoshko has tried to address in her book on the man, Making a Canon: Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, Sri Lanka, and the Place of Buddhist Art (University of Chicago Press). The point Dr Leoshko emphasised in her speech at the ICES is not whether Coomaraswamy was correct about Indian art or Sri Lankan art, but rather what perspective he adopted when making his observations on them. Once we ascertain that perspective, everything, or almost everything, becomes clear.

Like other “national-minded” intellectual figures from Ceylon, Coomaraswamy both rebelled against the colonial framework of his time and was constrained by that framework. He did not spurn all things Western, but saw Asian art as superior to anything he had witnessed in Europe. His greatest contribution, in this regard, was his valorisation of Kandyan art, at a time when it had fallen into neglect. As Bandaranayake comments, British officials focused more on places like Anuradhapura and Polonnaruwa as it was in line with the colonial project: to these officials, they were hallmarks of a once great civilisation, and in devoting their energies to them, they could legitimise their power.

Kandyan art, by contrast, bore all the marks of a decadent civilisation. That decadence was the basis, if not justification, for British rule in the country: after all, had it been as strong and durable a civilisation like Anuradhapura, it would not have fallen into their hands in the first place. Thus, throughout the 19th century, neither administrators nor Western travellers focused much on the art and culture of the region. In exploring it and recording, in minute detail, its society, Coomaraswamy filled a gap.

However, in rejecting colonial historiographies in one way, he subscribed to them in another. He repudiated the Eurocentrism so fashionable in his time. Yet he projected an Indocentric worldview in his writings on Sri Lankan art. There is no other reason why he compared the murals of Buddhist temples in Kandy with the miniature art of Bharhut: a comparison which scholars critiqued as anachronistic.

Ananda Coomaraswamy

Though he has been credited for rescuing Kandyan artisans from anonymity, Coomaraswamy saw their work as a diffusion, or a borrowing, at most. He exhibited a tendency to attribute the achievements of one society to those of another: the same colonial perspective he so heartily rejected. He “rescued” Kandyan artisans by attributing to them an individuality that the colonial project had denied it. Yet paradoxically, he denied them an agency of their own. Thus, he called Kandyan art a “folk art”, a perception that was to persist until the likes of Senake Bandaranayake (The Rock and Wall Paintings of Sri Lanka) and SinhaRaja Tammita-Delgoda (Ridi Vihare: The Flowering of Kandyan Art) critiqued it.

To be sure, and to be fair, Coomaraswamy did not limit such perspectives to his writings on Sri Lankan art. When studying Indian art, he projected the same biases and prejudices. As Dr Weinstein so bluntly argued in her speech, he was reluctant to consider “Muhammadan art” as indigenous to India. It was as though only Hindu art, with its celebration of many-limbed gods and monsters, could rank as “authentic” Indian art.

If Coomaraswamy saw Hindu art as the only authentic Indian art, and if he saw Kandyan art as a diffusion of Hindu art, it is only natural that, in his later years, he would try to achieve a philosophical synthesis between Hinduism and Buddhism – abandoning his earlier project of a synthesis of Eastern and Western philosophy. Not being a scholar of Buddhism, still less a devotee of the faith, I cannot comment on whether he succeeded in this, except to point to an essay by Martin Wickramasinghe (“The Spiritual Development of a Nationalist”) which praises Coomaraswamy’s efforts at reviving Sinhala culture and critiques his comparisons of Hindu and Buddhist tenets – specifically, Brahman and Nirvana.

When judging the man, of course, we must remind ourselves that he was both a product of his time, and, as Dr Leoshko emphasises, a radical for his time. He eviscerated European colonialism’s impact on the societies of the East in a way no other Ceylonese intellectual had, or for that matter could. But in doing so, he fell into a morass of contradictions, both valorising Sinhalese art while denying it the agency that it needed.

Senake Bandaranayake’s critique is perhaps the most relevant: that Coomaraswamy failed to see the concrete material conditions that had made the art of his country possible. Regi Siriwardena, in the bluntest assessment of the man, contended that, unlike William Morris, he channelled his utopianism into a vigorous defence of an imagined, precolonial past. Whereas Morris devoted his energies to radical ends, Coomaraswamy receded to a romantic utopianism detached from the realities of his time. Morris worked with the realisation that past was prologue. For Coomaraswamy, it could only be an end in itself.

Uditha Devapriya is a regular commentator on history, art and culture, politics, and foreign policy who can be reached at udakdev1@gmail.com. Together with Uthpala Wijesuriya, he heads U & U, an informal art and culture research collective.