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Ananda Coomaraswamy on Arts and Crafts:

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3 years ago

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A Review of Ayesha Wickramasinghe’s ‘The Dress of Women in Sri Lanka’ – part II

by Laleen Jayamanne
(Continued from yesterday)

Dr. Ayesha Wickramasinghe, with her technical skills and historical interests, appears to have heard Coomaraswamy’s implicit call to study the neglected crafts of Lanka, to look back at our traditions of dress, even as she is focused on the technological future of the craft with her students. As a contemporary designer, she is interested in developing new industrial techniques and materials suited to the 21st Century, with sustainability as a value. She has researched clothing and ornament to understand their forms and functions within a rapidly changing modern era, unlike the relatively stable era of pre-1815 Kandyan Kingdom, where the traditional crafts were practised as they were perennially, nourished by South Indian and indigenous craft practices and craftsmen. Despite its modest disclaimer, Coomaraswamy’s scholarship is peerless. Wickramasinghe on her part, dedicates her book to, ‘The unknown designers who have created clothing fashions of ancient Sri Lanka.’ She draws from a wide variety of sources including Coomaraswamy’s text and the handful of books on clothing and costume in Lanka and also from Lanka’s long history of art which includes temple paintings and stone sculpture. What she does with these sources is ingenious.

The book is broadly divided into six sections and a conclusion. The presentation begins with the variety in female ornamentation and textiles and then progresses chronologically. She shows examples of female dress sculpted on stone figures, from the Anuradhapura and Polonnaruwa periods and in temple paintings within the colonial era. A stone sculptural figure (Anuradhapura Museum), the life-size bronze of the Bodhisattva icon Tara (8th Century, British Museum), and a female Doratupala (13th Century) Dalada Maligava, Yapahuva, are all seen clad in very finely woven garments covering the lower part of the bodies, while the breasts are left uncovered. The more familiar Sigiriya frescoes are also presented. Perhaps with the Indian Hindu influence, the display of semi-clothed bodies is accepted and appreciated without the sense of shame endemic to the Christian European traditions of the colonisers, in relation to human flesh, and the body, burdened by the idea of ‘Original Sin’. Puritanical, Victorian patriarchal values are said to have been introduced to Lanka by the Christian English colonisers and consolidated by Lankan middle classes themselves, such as the influential nationalist and social reformer, Anagarika Dharmapala, who incorporated these values, according to the anthropologist Gananath Obeyesekera. He coined the astute phrase, ‘Protestant- Buddhism,’ to capture this phenomenon. More of this later.

Wickramasinghe takes account of the island’s geography, situated on trade routes, as a factor in its hybridised forms of dress. The topic of colonialism explores the Western influence on local upper-class women’s taste. The broad political theme of decolonisation of dress, emphasising ethnic differences, nationalism and dress among the Sinhala folk and dress among other groups, including the low caste, and very poor women of the Sakkiliya caste or Dalit women, are also presented. The final chapter deals with the period after 1977 when the economy was opened up to neo-liberal globalisation, which created a ‘free-trade zone’ to manufacture garments, to encourage foreign capital by providing cheap female labour.

Genesis of Art in Human Craft Labour

In the feudal 18th Century that Coomaraswamy studied, there was of course a hierarchical social structure, but even the most humble craftsman belonged to an integrated community. It is worth noting that he thought it worth publishing in the book a large number of songs kavi that crafts persons sang while working. In English, the word ‘yarn’ means both thread and also to tell a tale, as in ‘to spin a yarn’. These two examples indicate the vital fact of the link between the deep history of human craft skills and the creation and emergence of art itself (story-telling and song, for example), from these very craft practices, that is from human labour. This is the deep link between arts and crafts, like twins, linking the hand and the mouth, dance and song emerging from spinning and weaving. This is the very heart of his philosophical intuition of the integral links between craft, human labour and art. It is this civilisational loss which Coomaraswamy wrote about and documented and preserved for posterity, at the Boston Fine Art Museum in the US, where he was the curator of Indian, Persian and Islamic Art. He lived and worked in the US from 1917 until his death in 1947. He was forced to leave England because he spoke up against joining WWI and also against British colonial rule in India and Ceylon. His property was confiscated but America gave him refuge, where he published some of his major works.

Lankan Elephants and Ivory Crafts

I saw at the Boston Fine Art Museum an exquisitely carved little ivory box and was delighted to read that it was from Ceylon! Though indeed in his book Coomaraswamy says that the collection of ivory carvings is rather large in Lanka, whereas there is relatively very little ivory work in India. Then he goes on to say that the Hindus would have found working on a material from an animal source unacceptable, polluting. One wonders how a Buddhist country reconciled this, especially because Coomaraswamy says that tusked elephants were very rare in Lanka. Were the tusks taken from dead elephants, who by the way have long natural lives, and what of the huge tusks that are ceremonially such an integral part of contemporary Lankan Sinhala Nationalist State ceremonies and religious ritual? Learning this deep history, I find the tusk decoration rather grotesque, inhumane. We know that the English loved to go on shooting sprees killing Lankan wild animals, but then they left in 1947 and the profound Buddhist doctrine of Ahimsa (non-violence) toward all sentient life is not a Christian virtue.

Fashion Industry: Cheap Female Labour

Wickramasinghe goes on to say that the fashion industry in Lanka is now very large and provides employment for many women. Whether the young women get burnt out by very poor work conditions in the free trade zone, appears not to concern successive governments. According to the young trade union leader, labour lawyer and prominent political activist, Swasthika Arulingam, the garment workers have very few labour rights even now after over four decades.

However, a plethora of global styles and materials were made affordable as a result of the garment industry, democratising sartorial tastes and providing access to fashion to a large number of people across social classes. One can view the rather wide use of denim jeans by young women, as an example of equalising gendered dress through a unisex-garment. It would appear that traditional ideas of femininity are also being questioned by women through access to new forms of clothing, education in feminist ideas and politics and access to the internet which diminishes Lankan insularity.

Pop-Cultural Influence

Two unusual examples of dress innovation for comfort and style are presented in stills from two popular Sinhala films from the 1960s, which have now returned in newer styles. A popular star at the time, Jeevarani Kurukulasooriya, is seen lounging in a salwar kameez, while in Hithata Hitha (1965), Vijitha Mallika lounges stylishly in slacks and a top with a shirt collar, all in a single dark colour. The ‘60s are presented as an era when mini-skirts and bell-bottom pants and jeans became popular among the middle classes who enjoyed the freedom of movement and sense of fun these garments provided in feeling connected to the youth pop culture of the West seen in Hollywood films and fashion magazines. This was indeed part of my world along with that of my school friends during that period in Colombo. We also loved a frock called a Tent, which looked like one, where the body floated in the garment.

The Sari-Drama in Parliament

So, with this diverse, long Lankan sartorial history, it’s surprising to see the current controversy about the female dress mandated for Lankan school teachers, who are expected to wear either a sari or the upcountry Ohoriya to school. The ‘problem’ arose when a group of teachers decided recently to collectively flout this mandate by wearing comfortable clothes they thought were appropriate for their professional work. Among the photos they posted, there was a teacher wearing a smart salwar kameez, a set of clothes worn by Muslim women with the Dupatta shawl, and also a Kurta, again an elegant, uni-sex garment traditionally worn by men across North India, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Bangladesh, going further back to the ancient Persian Imperial era. It is a tailored garment, unlike the draped clothing of ancient India and Greece. During the Persian wars, they introduced the tailored garment to Classical Greece where both men and women wore draped clothing.

In the 19th Century, the highly influential Sinhala Buddhist social reformer, Anagarika Dharmapala expressed the following, says Wickramasinghe.

“Dharmapala stated that the Ohoriya and sari were the most suitable attire for Sri Lankan women. The morally acceptable dress covered the entire body with a proper blouse and a cloth ten riyans long.” (N. Wickramasinghe, Dressing the Colonised Body; Politics, Clothing and identity. New Delhi; Longman, 2003) p195.

This is an encapsulation of a ‘Protestant-Buddhist’ sentiment identified by Obeyesekera, referred to earlier. It appears then that in linking morality with forms of dress, some Sinhala male attitudes to women’s clothing are still stuck in the puritanical and patriarchal mores of the 19th Century English Victorian era. Besides the Dalit women who did the municipal labour of sweeping streets and cleaning public toilets and the Malaiyahi women who plucked tea would not have been able to afford the stipulated 10 riyan. But then he was not addressing them!

Women in a Teachers’ Trade Union have calmly and rationally explained to the public that they wanted the freedom to wear garments of their choice to the schools in which they teach, clothes that combine comfort and professional decorum. They have said clearly that to mandate the sari for teachers is an unreasonable rule. Its cost, its considerable upkeep and lack of ease of movement in scrambling onto packed buses have made some of them choose to wear garments they deem suitable for their workplace which combine comfort and ease. It would appear that some men fear that their ability to control women is at risk. Dress is a powerful means of expression of a sense of freedom and comfort of self-enjoyment in ease of movement. This is amply demonstrated in the history of the Western Women’s Movements of the 20th Century. The teachers who question the sari mandate do not dislike the sari or Ohoriya – how could one, when the two garments are mostly so beautiful, for the right occasion and time? But Lankan women will decide when they would like to wear it and how exactly to drape it and the way in which they will style their hair and blouses.

Women’s Dress and Resistance to Patriarchy

Coincidentally, Ayesha Wickramasinghe’s book provides a timely synoptic vision of the diversity of Lankan women’s dress across the ages, at this very moment of an important feminist act of political resistance, within the wider ongoing political struggle in Lanka. Lankan teachers and other professionals with a social conscience have repeatedly highlighted how the current economic crisis is affecting poor young school students’ ability to learn, or even attend school because of the cost of travel, lack of proper clothes and shoes and even food. As many say, these are the matters that need to be addressed urgently in parliament. If ignorant men invoke the ‘sanctity of Sinhala- Buddhist tradition’ against western influence, sitting in a Westminster style Democratic parliament, one could rhetorically ask, which Buddhist traditions, because there are several and the many Taras are clad in marvellous clothes and ornaments in Tibet and Nepal, in the Mahayana traditions of meditation.

Guru-Shishya-Parampara in Lanka

Because I have chosen to frame my account of Ayesha’s book on The Dress of Women in Sri Lanka with Ananda Coomaraswamy’s book on Mediaeval Sinhalese Arts and Crafts, I would like to conclude with a few personal thoughts about this most gifted of scholars. Of mixed parentage, with an English mother, on his father’s side he comes from one of the most illustrious Jaffna Tamil families of Lanka. His father, Sir Muttu Coomaraswamy (who died when Ananda was just three), had two brilliant nephews, Arunachalam Ponnambalam and Arunachalam Ramanadan, who played major public roles in colonial Ceylon. Two halls of residence at Peradeniya University are named after them. Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy’s very name (a serendipitous combination of Sinhala, English and Tamil), appears now, more than ever, as a beacon of light to contemporary Lankan scholarship. His profound work admonishes us not to delimit Lankan humanities research within a narrow Sinhala-Buddhist- Nationalist, supremacist-ideology of art and politics, but rather, to widen our perspectives by understanding the rich diversity of cultures, languages and religions of Lanka which includes its many traditions of dress. Ananda had hoped to spend his last years in his beloved India as a Sanyasi, but he died suddenly of a heart attack, in his Japanese garden in New England, beside his Brazilian wife. His ashes, it is said, were released into the Ganga but some of it set afloat in a river in Lanka.


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Features

Ranking public services with AI — A roadmap to reviving institutions like SriLankan Airlines

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20 hours ago

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2026/03/13

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Efficacy measures an organisation’s capacity to achieve its mission and intended outcomes under planned or optimal conditions. It differs from efficiency, which focuses on achieving objectives with minimal resources, and effectiveness, which evaluates results in real-world conditions. Today, modern AI tools, using publicly available data, enable objective assessment of the efficacy of Sri Lanka’s government institutions.

Among key public bodies, the Supreme Court of Sri Lanka emerges as the most efficacious, outperforming the Department of Inland Revenue, Sri Lanka Customs, the Election Commission, and Parliament. In the financial and regulatory sector, the Central Bank of Sri Lanka (CBSL) ranks highest, ahead of the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Public Utilities Commission, the Telecommunications Regulatory Commission, the Insurance Regulatory Commission, and the Sri Lanka Standards Institution.

Among state-owned enterprises, the Sri Lanka Ports Authority (SLPA) leads in efficacy, followed by Bank of Ceylon and People’s Bank. Other institutions assessed included the State Pharmaceuticals Corporation, the National Water Supply and Drainage Board, the Ceylon Electricity Board, the Ceylon Petroleum Corporation, and the Sri Lanka Transport Board. At the lower end of the spectrum were Lanka Sathosa and Sri Lankan Airlines, highlighting a critical challenge for the national economy.

Sri Lankan Airlines, consistently ranked at the bottom, has long been a financial drain. Despite successive governments’ reform attempts, sustainable solutions remain elusive.

Globally, the most profitable airlines operate as highly integrated, technology-enabled ecosystems rather than as fragmented departments. Operations, finance, fleet management, route planning, engineering, marketing, and customer service are closely coordinated, sharing real-time data to maximise efficiency, safety, and profitability.

The challenge for Sri Lankan Airlines is structural. Its operations are fragmented, overly hierarchical, and poorly aligned. Simply replacing the CEO or senior leadership will not address these deep-seated weaknesses. What the airline needs is a cohesive, integrated organisational ecosystem that leverages technology for cross-functional planning and real-time decision-making.

The government must urgently consider restructuring Sri Lankan Airlines to encourage:

=Joint planning across operational divisions

=Data-driven, evidence-based decision-making

=Continuous cross-functional consultation

=Collaborative strategic decisions on route rationalisation, fleet renewal, partnerships, and cost management, rather than exclusive top-down mandates

Sustainable reform requires systemic change. Without modernised organisational structures, stronger accountability, and aligned incentives across divisions, financial recovery will remain out of reach. An integrated, performance-oriented model offers the most realistic path to operational efficiency and long-term viability.

Reforming loss-making institutions like Sri Lankan Airlines is not merely a matter of leadership change — it is a structural overhaul essential to ensuring these entities contribute productively to the national economy rather than remain perpetual burdens.

By Chula Goonasekera – Citizen Analyst

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Features

Why Pi Day?

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20 hours ago

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2026/03/13

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International Day of Mathematics falls tomorrow

The approximate value of Pi (π) is 3.14 in mathematics. Therefore, the day 14 March is celebrated as the Pi Day. In 2019, UNESCO proclaimed 14 March as the International Day of Mathematics.

Ancient Babylonians and Egyptians figured out that the circumference of a circle is slightly more than three times its diameter. But they could not come up with an exact value for this ratio although they knew that it is a constant. This constant was later named as π which is a letter in the Greek alphabet.

Archimedes

It was the Greek mathematician Archimedes (250 BC) who was able to find an upper bound and a lower bound for this constant. He drew a circle of diameter one unit and drew hexagons inside and outside the circle such that the sides of each hexagon touch the sides of the circle. In mathematics the circle passing through all vertices of a polygon is called a ‘circumcircle’ and the largest circle that fits inside a polygon tangent to all its sides is called an ‘incircle’. The total length of the smaller hexagon then becomes the lower bound of π and the length of the hexagon outside the circle is the upper bound. He realised that by increasing the number of sides of the polygon can make the bounds get closer to the value of Pi and increased the number of sides to 12,24,48 and 60. He argued that by increasing the number of sides will ultimately result in obtaining the original circle, thereby laying the foundation for the theory of limits. He ended up with the lower bound as 22/7 and the upper bound 223/71. He could not continue his research as his hometown Syracuse was invaded by Romans and was killed by one of the soldiers. His last words were ‘do not disturb my circles’, perhaps a reference to his continuing efforts to find the value of π to a greater accuracy.

Archimedes can be considered as the father of geometry. His contributions revolutionised geometry and his methods anticipated integral calculus. He invented the pulley and the hydraulic screw for drawing water from a well. He also discovered the law of hydrostatics. He formulated the law of levers which states that a smaller weight placed farther from a pivot can balance a much heavier weight closer to it. He famously said “Give me a lever long enough and a place to stand and I will move the earth”.

Mathematicians have found many expressions for π as a sum of infinite series that converge to its value. One such famous series is the Leibniz Series found in 1674 by the German mathematician Gottfried Leibniz, which is given below.

π = 4 ( 1 – 1/3 + 1/5 – 1/7 + 1/9 – ………….)

The Indian mathematical genius Ramanujan came up with a magnificent formula in 1910. The short form of the formula is as follows.

π = 9801/(1103 √8)

For practical applications an approximation is sufficient. Even NASA uses only the approximation 3.141592653589793 for its interplanetary navigation calculations.

It is not just an interesting and curious number. It is used for calculations in navigation, encryption, space exploration, video game development and even in medicine. As π is fundamental to spherical geometry, it is at the heart of positioning systems in GPS navigations. It also contributes significantly to cybersecurity. As it is an irrational number it is an excellent foundation for generating randomness required in encryption and securing communications. In the medical field, it helps to calculate blood flow rates and pressure differentials. In diagnostic tools such as CT scans and MRI, pi is an important component in mathematical algorithms and signal processing techniques.

This elegant, never-ending number demonstrates how mathematics transforms into practical applications that shape our world. The possibilities of what it can do are infinite as the number itself. It has become a symbol of beauty and complexity in mathematics. “It matters little who first arrives at an idea, rather what is significant is how far that idea can go.” said Sophie Germain.

Mathematics fans are intrigued by this irrational number and attempt to calculate it as far as they can. In March 2022, Emma Haruka Iwao of Japan calculated it to 100 trillion decimal places in Google Cloud. It had taken 157 days. The Guinness World Record for reciting the number from memory is held by Rajveer Meena of India for 70000 decimal places over 10 hours.

Happy Pi Day!

The author is a senior examiner of the International Baccalaureate in the UK and an educational consultant at the Overseas School of Colombo.

by R N A de Silva

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Features

Sheer rise of Realpolitik making the world see the brink

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2 days ago

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2026/03/12

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A combined US-Israel attack on Iran.(BBC)

The recent humanly costly torpedoing of an Iranian naval vessel in Sri Lanka’s Exclusive Economic Zone by a US submarine has raised a number of issues of great importance to international political discourse and law that call for elucidation. It is best that enlightened commentary is brought to bear in such discussions because at present misleading and uninformed speculation on questions arising from the incident are being aired by particularly jingoistic politicians of Sri Lanka’s South which could prove deleterious.

As matters stand, there seems to be no credible evidence that the Indian state was aware of the impending torpedoing of the Iranian vessel but these acerbic-tongued politicians of Sri Lanka’s South would have the local public believe that the tragedy was triggered with India’s connivance. Likewise, India is accused of ‘embroiling’ Sri Lanka in the incident on account of seemingly having prior knowledge of it and not warning Sri Lanka about the impending disaster.

It is plain that a process is once again afoot to raise anti-India hysteria in Sri Lanka. An obligation is cast on the Sri Lankan government to ensure that incendiary speculation of the above kind is defeated and India-Sri Lanka relations are prevented from being in any way harmed. Proactive measures are needed by the Sri Lankan government and well meaning quarters to ensure that public discourse in such matters have a factual and rational basis. ‘Knowledge gaps’ could prove hazardous.

Meanwhile, there could be no doubt that Sri Lanka’s sovereignty was violated by the US because the sinking of the Iranian vessel took place in Sri Lanka’s Exclusive Economic Zone. While there is no international decrying of the incident, and this is to be regretted, Sri Lanka’s helplessness and small player status would enable the US to ‘get away with it’.

Could anything be done by the international community to hold the US to account over the act of lawlessness in question? None is the answer at present. This is because in the current ‘Global Disorder’ major powers could commit the gravest international irregularities with impunity. As the threadbare cliché declares, ‘Might is Right’….. or so it seems.

Unfortunately, the UN could only merely verbally denounce any violations of International Law by the world’s foremost powers. It cannot use countervailing force against violators of the law, for example, on account of the divided nature of the UN Security Council, whose permanent members have shown incapability of seeing eye-to-eye on grave matters relating to International Law and order over the decades.

The foregoing considerations could force the conclusion on uncritical sections that Political Realism or Realpolitik has won out in the end. A basic premise of the school of thought known as Political Realism is that power or force wielded by states and international actors determine the shape, direction and substance of international relations. This school stands in marked contrast to political idealists who essentially proclaim that moral norms and values determine the nature of local and international politics.

While, British political scientist Thomas Hobbes, for instance, was a proponent of Political Realism, political idealism has its roots in the teachings of Socrates, Plato and latterly Friedrich Hegel of Germany, to name just few such notables.

On the face of it, therefore, there is no getting way from the conclusion that coercive force is the deciding factor in international politics. If this were not so, US President Donald Trump in collaboration with Israeli Rightist Premier Benjamin Natanyahu could not have wielded the ‘big stick’, so to speak, on Iran, killed its Supreme Head of State, terrorized the Iranian public and gone ‘scot-free’. That is, currently, the US’ impunity seems to be limitless.

Moreover, the evidence is that the Western bloc is reuniting in the face of Iran’s threats to stymie the flow of oil from West Asia to the rest of the world. The recent G7 summit witnessed a coming together of the foremost powers of the global North to ensure that the West does not suffer grave negative consequences from any future blocking of western oil supplies.

Meanwhile, Israel is having a ‘free run’ of the Middle East, so to speak, picking out perceived adversarial powers, such as Lebanon, and militarily neutralizing them; once again with impunity. On the other hand, Iran has been bringing under assault, with no questions asked, Gulf states that are seen as allying with the US and Israel. West Asia is facing a compounded crisis and International Law seems to be helplessly silent.

Wittingly or unwittingly, matters at the heart of International Law and peace are being obfuscated by some pro-Trump administration commentators meanwhile. For example, retired US Navy Captain Brent Sadler has cited Article 51 of the UN Charter, which provides for the right to self or collective self-defence of UN member states in the face of armed attacks, as justifying the US sinking of the Iranian vessel (See page 2 of The Island of March 10, 2026). But the Article makes it clear that such measures could be resorted to by UN members only ‘ if an armed attack occurs’ against them and under no other circumstances. But no such thing happened in the incident in question and the US acted under a sheer threat perception.

Clearly, the US has violated the Article through its action and has once again demonstrated its tendency to arbitrarily use military might. The general drift of Sadler’s thinking is that in the face of pressing national priorities, obligations of a state under International Law could be side-stepped. This is a sure recipe for international anarchy because in such a policy environment states could pursue their national interests, irrespective of their merits, disregarding in the process their obligations towards the international community.

Moreover, Article 51 repeatedly reiterates the authority of the UN Security Council and the obligation of those states that act in self-defence to report to the Council and be guided by it. Sadler, therefore, could be said to have cited the Article very selectively, whereas, right along member states’ commitments to the UNSC are stressed.

However, it is beyond doubt that international anarchy has strengthened its grip over the world. While the US set destabilizing precedents after the crumbling of the Cold War that paved the way for the current anarchic situation, Russia further aggravated these degenerative trends through its invasion of Ukraine. Stepping back from anarchy has thus emerged as the prime challenge for the world community.

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