Features

The Hurs: A Criminalized Tribe in Pakistan

Published

5 years ago

2021/08/22

Sahan Weerasooriya

Meeting president-to-be of Afghanistan and an eight-hour drive to deliver a cake

by Jayantha Perera

From 1991 to 1996, I was the Socio-Economist of the World Bank’s Indus River Left Bank Outfall Drain Project in Sind Province of Pakistan. The Pakistan Government in 1994 proposed to the World Bank to build a reservoir in the swamp-filled depression called Makhi Dhand in central Sind. The project objectives were to encourage irrigated agriculture among scattered, mobile communities and to develop one of the most backward areas in Sind. The name of the proposed reservoir was Chortiari, and my task was to conduct a socio-economic survey among the affected communities and prepare a resettlement and income improvement plan.

In early 1995, Asraf Ghani, a resettlement specialist of the World Bank (who later became the President of Afghanistan), visited the project area on a mission. I met him at Sanghar, a local town not far from Makhi Dhand. Ghani had brought several pieces of hand-held GPS machines. I was mesmerized when he demonstrated how to use GPS to record houses, farms, small ponds, and patches of forest. The field team, Ghani, and I traveled to the Chortiari area by two four-wheel drive jeeps, mainly through high savannah grass.

Upon arrival, Ghani called an impromptu meeting in the shade of the only tall tree in the vicinity. From there, we could see only about ten meters because of the savannah grass that surrounded us. It was a sunny hot day. At two o’clock in the afternoon, the temperature was about 50 centigrade. I was afraid that I might catch the ‘laughing sickness’ – heat attack on jaw movements creating an impression of a laughing person. After the discussion, Ghani wanted to know roughly how many households would be affected by the reservoir. The local irrigation officials were clueless. Then he asked them how many families were in the settlement where we stood. The officials talked to each other but could not even provide an estimate. Ghani climbed the tree with his shoes and scanned the surrounding area. He came down and declared that the village where we were might have about 35 households (after the survey, the final tally of the affected households was 38). We spent an hour discussing the main topics of the socio-economic study and how to deal with non-titled farmers’ claims and absentee landlords in our survey.

After the meeting, I drove back to Hyderabad with Ghani. We discussed the history of Makhi Dhand and its role in various anti-colonial uprisings, its relationship with Afghanistan during the Kalifat movement in Sind. He was happy that he could help the most miserable and backward community in Makhi Dhand escape poverty and marginalized life. I told Ghani that I would stay in the project area with the field team for three weeks. He cautioned me to be safe from dacoits who kidnapped people for ransom.

Sir Edward Cox, in 1909 said that notorious criminals found refuge in its secret recesses because villagers were in sympathy with those ‘Robin Hoods’ and supplied food and other necessities. In 1995, Makhi Dhand had the same notoriety. Then it was known as the breeding ground of dacoits and other ‘miscreants.’ The households were scattered in far apart settlements, and settlers were subsistence farmers and herdsmen. There were no schools or a hospital in Makhi Dhand. The settlers had to go to the nearest town Sanghar for medical help.

The survey team stayed at a semi-abandoned guest house built in the 1890s. The house did not have doors or windows and was built on the principle of cross ventilation. There were two dirty punkas (cloth fans) hanging from the roof in a bedroom and dining area. A cook and a punka vallah (fan operator) arrived from Sanghar to serve us. The punka vallah was a lazy man and pulled the fans for us for about two hours just after dinner. As a result, we suffered through the night the unbearable heat, mosquitos, and other insects. The punka vallah disappeared soon at 10 pm and re-emerged only in the morning. The cook was a fine man with a Sindi cap and a well-preened large mustache. He dressed differently from the punka vallah. He served us parathas with fried okra and local fish for all three meals.

The survey team members were from Sanghar town and knew important personalities in the project area. One of them was the Pir, who lived in Chortiari. His name was Variyam Fakkir. Variyam told me that although people treated him as a Pir, he was only a second-tier Sufi saint who had not yet reached the full Pirhood. He was a religious and political leader. People in the area venerated him as a Sufi saint. He occupied a large land area in Chortiari, and his followers cultivated the land as his haris (tenants).

In the mid-19th century, Pir Wazir claimed that he was a direct descendant of holy men in Arabia. They were the members of the Sufi faction of Islam. He organized the residents in Makhi Dhand and Thar Pakar desert into a close-knit brotherhood called Jamiat. The Jamiat had two tiers: salims – the ordinary people who venerated the Pir and depended on him for their subsistence; second, farqis – diehard Pir followers who formed an anti-colonial revolutionary group called ‘Hur.’ Hur membership in the early 20th century spread to Thar Pakar desert, Maharashtra, Rajasthan, and Bengal. At that time, devoted landowners and big cattle herders in rural Sind supported the movement. Such supporters were known as khalifas.

Variyam’s great grand uncle in the 1910s and his grand uncle in the 1940s had led the Hur revolts against the British and served long jail sentences. His grand-uncle, Pir Pagaro, went to the gallows in 1943 for high treason. After the Independence of Pakistan, salims and farqis joined together, dropped their resistance to the state, and became settled farmers and cattle herders. Variyam became a strong ‘vote bank.’ No regional or national political party could ignore him in local and general elections.

The residents in the Chortiari project area were proud people. They delighted in talking about their past adventures and bravery, including their century-long resistance (1850 to 1948) to British administration, especially to its Police and armed forces. The residents ascribed their current rampant poverty and marginalized status to the imposition of the Criminalized Tribes Ordinance in 1871. The British used the law and its regulations to control the Hur movement, restrict residents’ freedom, control Pirs, and destroy their property, crops, and animals.

After sunset we lay on charpoys (cots) in Variyam’s compound and listened to his breathtaking stories while drinking hot tea and munching local sweets. We were happy to lie down on charpoys (cots) with rough hemp ropes interwoven into small squares to enjoy the cool desert breeze. After sunset, the compound was dark and we could not see each other. I was scared of dacoits and I thought that they would emerge from the tall grass to kidnap us. Variyam assured us that nothing would happen to us because we were his guests.

In the evenings, a giant comet covered a part of the dark sky. Variyam interpreted its presence as a bad omen and predicted that India might attack Pakistan. He wanted to know when the Chotiari reservoir would be built. Variyam lamented that the construction of the tank would wipe out old archeological ruins and the thick forest cover that sustains local communities for many centuries. He wanted to know our “genuine” thoughts about the proposed reservoir. He told us that he could stop the project overnight by calling his followers to boycott the survey. He laughingly said that dacoits might kidnap me for a ransom of Rs one million because that was the prize the dacoits would demand for a kidnapped foreigner.

I explained to Variyam that when irrigation water is supplied from the reservoir, the people could form into settled agricultural communities. Irrigation water supplies would enable them to cultivate at least two crops a year, giving them a regular household income throughout the year. As part of the project, I told him that basic facilities such as roads, schools, and hospitals would be constructed. Each evening, he repeated his concerns about the state encroachment into the Hur territory. He explained that the British established permanent settlements under the 1871 Act by bringing loyal tribes and communities from Punjab, Rajasthan, and Bengal. In addition, the movement of original inhabitants was restricted, and army posts were erected to supervise them. In some locations, villagers were relocated into new settlements. They could not leave without a pass, and the army roll-called twice daily to check their movements. The justification for such draconian rules was to prevent evil characters from visiting the rebellious Hurs. He wondered whether the same would happen to the Hurs with the World Bank project.

Variyam loved to dramatize from his charpoy how his grand-uncle, as a 12-year boy, led the Hur uprising in the 1930s. In the 1920s, the British found it difficult to maintain law and order in Makhi Dhand. His grand-uncle and followers openly challenged the British rule in Sind. He imitated how the cannons boomed and the sound of firing machine guns. The Delhi Government dispatched platoons of soldiers to Sind to control chaos and Hur attacks on Police stations and government offices. The young Piro Pagaro organized his followers in Thar Pakar and in central Sind and continued to harass the government until the British captured him in 1927. Ali Jinnah, a famous lawyer from Bombay (the future founding father of Pakistan), defended him at a session court in Karachi. He pointed out to the judge that with the imposed draconian laws, the Hur people could not live in Makhi Dhand as ‘human beings.’ The court sentenced the young man to eight years in prison.

When released from prison in 1936, Pir Pagaro rekindled the revolutionary zest among his followers and declared war against the British. The British declared martial law in 1942 and introduced the ‘Special Hur Act’ to deal with ‘miscreants’ under the martial law. Variyam told us that the army and the air force did not spare even their pots and pans after dynamiting and looting their communities. They raided their cattle and goats and stole their gold jewelry. He could not continue his talk as he was distraught, and on several occasions, he wiped his eyes with his shawl. He told us with a broken voice that the British hanged the Pir in 1943 at the Hyderabad jail with several other Hur leaders.

We walked to village settlements with a local guide through tall savannah grass. At some settlements, there were only three or four households. They were poor and hardly had any food at home. Questions about their income, expenditure, and livelihoods did not make sense to them. Most residents wanted to believe that they were pastoralists who moved from one place to another with their cattle. They pointed out that the idea of land ownership is alien to their culture.

Most villagers first refused to talk to us, but when we told them that we were their Pir’s friends, they accepted us and responded to our questions. A man told us not to waste time visiting houses because each household had the same story of poverty, discrimination, and wounded pride. Several old people were waiting for the second coming of Pir Pagaro, who sacrificed his life to redeem the Hurs from their agony and destitution. In that context, they were worried about development programs that the project planned to start in the area with the involvement of the state and the World Bank. One man told us that a descendant of Pir Pagaro in the future would bring sweeping changes including independence and economic prosperity to Makhi Dhand. He opined our patchwork of development might betray his grand plan.

The government officials, who had refused to join the survey, told us that the residents including Variyam did not own any land in the area. The British had confiscated all Hur land under martial law in the early 1940s. In this context, they queried why the state should compensate for the land taken from Hurs for the reservoir. This was the critical issue that I had to deal with in formulating the resettlement and income improvement plan.

One day, I completed an interview with a family before four pm in a remote settlement. I waited with the translator for other team members to return to walk back to the guest house about seven miles from that location. Two unknown young men emerged from the forest and walked towards us. They talked to the translator for a few minutes. Then they approached me and asked what was I doing in their settlement? The translator translated the question and winked at me. I did not know why he winked at me. I told them that we were doing a survey before building a reservoir in the area to irrigate their fields.

One man raised his voice and asked me, “have you obtained our permission to build a tank on our land?”

“Yes, we have already talked to your Pir and several settlers, and they think the project would be beneficial for them,” I told him.

“But you did not talk to us about the reservoir?” He retorted.

“It is our plan to talk to all households before planning the reservoir,” I told him.

The two men talked again with the translator.

The translator told me, “please be careful with these two fellows. They can harm us.”

I smiled and asked him, “where are their guns if they are dacoits?”

My response annoyed the translator. He talked to the two men again. All three laughed, and one man went to a nearby hut and came back with an AK-47 rifle.

The translator told me, “didn’t I tell you to be careful. Now they have an AK-47 rifle. They can take us whereever they wanted to go. Especially they might like to take you with them to get a ransom.”

Fortunately, at that time, the other team members returned. One of them recognized one of the two men. They talked to each other and shook hands. Before leaving us, the gunmen told me through the translator, “do not roam in our area after two pm.” I asked him why. The translator said that “dacoits get active then, and you might meet them on the road as you did this afternoon.”

I told Variyam about my encounter with the dacoits. He thought for a minute. In a sad voice, he said to me that “the problem with my people is their impatience and foolishness in making enemies from outside.” He asked me not to report the incident to the Police or to the officials at Sangar or Hyderabad. He reassured us that no one would harm us while we were in Makhi Dand. In the same evening, he organized a musical party for us and served delicious food. The songs focused on Hurs’ bravery, purity of Sufism, the pan-regional spread of the Hur brotherhood. Sometimes, the singer cried and waited for the audience to respond to his wailing.

I sat next to Variyam, and he told me how his father organized similar evenings and got a special cake from Bombay called ‘Bombay cake’ for such occasions. He vividly remembered the cake. It had a generous sprinkle of dried raisins on top of it and its crust was thick and hard. He said that he had not seen a Bombay cake for about 30 years. He asked me to get a Bombay cake for him. I asked a friend in Bombay to bring a Bombay cake for me when he visited his uncle in Karachi. After three months, my friend delivered a Bombay cake to my residence in Hyderabad.

The cake was large. It was nicely wrapped in a box. My friend told me that the cake would stay fresh for two weeks as a ‘dry’ cake. Purkahn, my driver, and I drove eight hours with the cake to Chortiari. Variyam was delighted to see me and the cake. We ate a small piece of the cake, and I saw tears in his eyes. He wanted me to come back to Chortiari so that he could tell me the whole story of the Hurs. I promised that I would visit him again, and left his house with a feeling of respect and gratitude.

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Features

From the missing to the missing truth and beyond

Published

11 hours ago

2026/09/1

Sahan Weerasooriya

A file photo of Foreign Minister Vijitha Heath addressing the UNHRC.

by Jehan Perera

The government is preparing to meet the challenge of the UN Human Rights Council next month. A Sri Lankan delegation led by Foreign Minister Vijitha Herath is expected to attend the 63rd session of the UNHRC in Geneva, where the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights will present a written update on Sri Lanka. The government has already submitted its response to the advance version of the report prepared by the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights. The Foreign Minister, accompanied by officials from Colombo and Sri Lanka’s Permanent Mission in Geneva, is expected to explain the progress made on reconciliation, accountability and human rights. This is therefore an important moment for the government. It is an opportunity not merely to defend its record but to make new commitments.

The government has been criticised, as were its predecessors, for the manner in which it has dealt with past human rights violations, especially those connected with the thirty year war. The vexed issue of thousands of missing persons remains at the centre of this criticism. The government has sought to strengthen the Office on Missing Persons by providing it with additional staff and resources. It has also given support to the excavations at the Chemmani mass grave. Justice and National Integration Minister Harshana Nanayakkara has told Parliament that the government has allocated Rs. 57 million for the excavations and related legal work, though that figure has not been set against the cost of comparable forensic operations elsewhere.

The government also took the significant step of holding a national event in Jaffna to mark the International Day of the Victims of Enforced Disappearances. Minister Harshana Nanayakkara attended the event together with the Chairman of the Office on Missing Persons (OMP), Mahesh Katulanda, and other senior officials and political representatives. Their presence was meant to demonstrate the government’s commitment to addressing the issue. But on the victims’ side there is continuing dissatisfaction. The commemoration in Jaffna was met by a protest outside the District Secretariat, organised by families of the disappeared, who demanded to know what happened to relatives who, according to their accounts, surrendered to or were taken away by the military and were never heard from again.

Jaffna Protests

The protests in Jaffna are a reminder of the gap that remains between what the government is trying to do and what the victims expect. For these families, compensation and death certificates are not substitutes for knowing what actually happened to those they lost. The protests, and the police action taken against some of those who demonstrated, were reported by the international and Tamil media and by international human rights organisations, and overshadowed much of what the government had hoped to showcase at the Jaffna event. The OMP’s mandate is to establish the fate and whereabouts of missing persons, clarify the circumstances in which they went missing, and provide redress and assistance to their families. Accordingly, it has sought to verify complaints, remove duplicate entries, encourage people who have not yet made complaints to come forward, and facilitate compensation and other forms of assistance. The families of victims expect the OMP to do more to clarify the circumstances in which their loved ones went missing. An example would be the disappearance of 158 displaced Tamil persons from the Eastern University campus in Vantharumoolai, Batticaloa District, who were rounded up and forcibly removed in front of thousands of other similarly displaced persons, including the officer in charge Prof T Jayasingam.

The government has also increased the support available to families of the missing, and says it is accelerating the OMP’s investigations. But the scale of what remains undone is stark. There are around 11,000 complaints remaining to be investigated, according to the Justice Minister, while the OMP has reported that final information has been established in only 31 cases, communicated privately to the families concerned. On the government’s own figures, that puts the clearance rate for establishing fate and whereabouts at well under one percent of the outstanding caseload. There is a limit to what the OMP can do even with more resources and time. Its mandate is primarily to establish the fate and whereabouts of individual missing persons. It was not intended to produce the comprehensive, public account of the past that victims and the country as a whole require.

In 2015, the government headed by President Maithripala Sirisena and Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe committed itself to establishing such a commission as part of a comprehensive approach to dealing with Sri Lanka’s past. Human Rights Council Resolution 30/1, which the government co-sponsored, specifically welcomed the proposed establishment of a “commission for truth, justice, reconciliation and non-recurrence”, together with an Office on Missing Persons and an Office for Reparations. However, the commitment to a truth-seeking mechanism was never fulfilled. The government should consider setting one up now. There is a growing feeling among Tamil people in the North and East that the government is failing to deliver on promises that are important to them. On issues important to them, they feel this is once again a Sinhala-dominated government like all the ones that came before.

Establish Truth

For the past two years the government has been concentrating on problems that it deems are important to the country as a whole such as the economy, development, poverty alleviation and corruption and criminality. However, the government needs to demonstrate that national unity means addressing the concerns of all communities, including those whose wounds from the war remain unhealed. Some of its own institutions have begun to act on this. The Office for National Unity and Reconciliation recently staged a drama entitled From Yakaweva to Nandikadal, depicting relationships between people that transcend the destruction caused by war. The drama portrayed the sufferings as well as the prejudices on both sides of the divide, from the Kebithigollewa bus bombing to the final days of the war around the Nandikadal lagoon. Its central message is that without forgiveness there cannot be reconciliation.

Particularly moving was the fact that the actors themselves came from families touched by the violence on both sides. The son of an LTTE Black Tiger leader and the daughter of an Army officer were among those who performed, alongside others who had experienced and survived some of the sites of carnage. The fact that a state institution is taking this message of reconciliation forward is itself a testament to the government’s openness to dealing with the past. A government institution can reach a population far larger than any civil society campaign could reach on its own, simply because the machinery of the state is so much more extensive. It is in this context that the government needs to give serious thought to setting up a Truth and Reconciliation Commission as the next step in the truth-seeking process. Special care will need to be taken to ensure that those who are appointed are not only politically non-partisan, but are acceptable to all the communities.

A Truth and Reconciliation Commission cannot by itself resolve all the wounds of the past. Nor can it replace criminal investigations or judicial proceedings where these are necessary. But it can provide something that existing institutions cannot provide on their own. This would be a comprehensive national process through which victims can be heard and the truth can be established. The general population needs to understand what happened, so that the country can begin to acknowledge its past without passing it on indefinitely to future generations. The government has already taken several steps. It is supporting the search for the truth at Chemmani. It has begun reaching out to families of the disappeared. Its own institutions are producing messages of reconciliation. But these are still not delivering the results that the victims and their families want. The next step should be to bring these efforts together to begin the journey from the missing to the missing truth, and from there to comprehensive justice.

Features

The long road to educating Sri Lanka’s Bhikkhunis

Published

11 hours ago

2026/09/1

Sahan Weerasooriya

Bhikkunis: Image courtesy Buddhist Society of South Asia

A robe without recognition:

by Anushka Kahandagamage

Education is the right of every child. Yet somewhere between childhood and the robe, that right becomes precarious for many Buddhist women in Sri Lanka, threatening not only their social standing, but their fundamental access to learning and the institutional discrimination they face. This piece is not about Buddhist disciplinary rules, which discriminates women, rather about how the state’s refusal to fully recognise bhikkhunis as bhikkhunis quietly determines what they are, and are not, permitted to learn.

Unlike dasasil mathas, who occupy a distinct and unofficial category within Buddhist renunciation, bhikkhunis belong to a formally ordained order recognised within Buddhist monastic tradition itself. Dasa sil mata means ‘ten-precept mother.’ They are women who observe the ten precepts (rather than the fuller Vinaya) and live a renunciant, celibate life, often in robes, but formal ordination has not translated into formal recognition by the state. Even after a Supreme Court ruling affirmed their right to be identified as bhikkhunis on their National Identity Cards, many still do not hold one. This stems from the hesitation of the male-dominated Buddhist hierarchy to recognise these women as part of the Theravada tradition, specifically refusing to validate their higher ordination. The identity card lists her title as Dasa Sil Mata. The ruling exists on paper, but they are still waiting for their identity cards. This is not a small bureaucratic oversight. It is the first link in a longer chain, one that reaches, eventually, into the classroom.

A Name Withheld

In Sri Lanka, there are 827 pirivenas, traditional monastic colleges that have, for centuries, served as the primary institutions of Buddhist education. Of these, only 12 are dedicated to female renunciants at all, and of those 12, just five serve fully ordained nuns specifically. The imbalance is stark on its face: 827 institutions for monks, five for fully ordained nuns. But the discrimination here is not only a matter of numbers, but it is also written into the very language used to name these institutions. Monks’ schools are called pirivena, a term carrying centuries of institutional weight, historical continuity, and state recognition under Sri Lanka’s education laws. Bhikkhunis’ schools, by contrast, are not called pirivenas at all. They are designated Buddha Sravika Meheni Adhyapana Ayathanaya (Institute for the Education of Buddha’s Female Disciples), a separate, parallel term that, however similar in function, withholds from bhikkhuni institutions the same legal and institutional status that the word ‘pirivena’ confers. Since there are ten-precept mothers, the institutes have not given the same name as the pirivena and lack the official as well as social recognition they deserve.

A Pattern a Century in the Making

Following the decline of the Buddhist nun (bhikkhuni) order after the Polonnaruwa period, the first woman to be robed again was ordained in 1905 as a dasasil matha. Although dasasil mathas have long served important religious and societal roles, they have historically lacked access to formal education. Unfortunately, today also, this pattern continuous to exist. Education, in this context, is never just about literacy or dhamma study. It is the currency of religious authority. A bhikkhuni denied equivalent education or educated in an institution the state refuses to name a pirivena, is denied that religious authority. She may know the Tipitaka as well as any monk yet will lack the institutional stamp that would make a lay community trust her reading of it. It was not indifference from the public; it was the accumulated effect of a system that has spent centuries teaching devotees, implicitly, that a woman’s robe does not carry the same weight as a man.

The female renunciants, both dasasil mathas and bhikkunis, although they wear robes, have not been regarded as individuals capable of comprehending or preaching dhamma, simply because they are women. This is most visible in education, the pirivena system, developed historically to train bhikkhus, offered dasasil mathas and bhikkunis no equivalent institutional pathway, no comparable curriculum, certification, or state recognition. This exclusion is notable because it runs counter to Sri Lanka’s broader educational trends, where women have historically outnumbered men in general university enrolment, the gap here is specific to monastic/religious education rather than a reflection of wider societal restrictions on women’s schooling. The country’s National Education Commission Policy has a section on Pirivena education. However, it does not address the education of Buddhist nuns, nor does it mention nuns within the policy. I recently learned that the policy was being reviewed, with a committee appointed by the Ministry of Education, scheduled to begin the review on the 1^st of September. This presents an important opportunity to raise the issue of nuns’ education and advocate for its inclusion in the revised policy.

The monks and nuns’ education institutes are funded by the government, which allocates only 5,000–6,000 LKR per student for the entire year. This sum is grossly inadequate to cover even basic institutional needs, accommodation, food, learning materials, and the maintenance of the physical premises, let alone to support any meaningful expansion of the curriculum. With this level of funding, these education institutes are struggling to sustain themselves, and many are forced to rely almost entirely on external support simply to remain operational. This is where the disparity becomes most visible. As female renunciants have historically not been taken seriously, regarded neither as authoritative teachers of dhamma nor as figures worthy of the same reverence extended to their male counterparts, their education centres receive far fewer lay offerings than those for male renunciants. The result is a widening resource gap that mirrors and reinforces the very discrimination that caused it. Underfunded institutions produce fewer well-trained female scholars, which in turn reinforces the perception that female renunciants are less capable, a perception that then justifies continued underinvestment. Without deliberate intervention, either through equitable government allocation or targeted lay support, this cycle is likely to persist rather than resolve on its own.

Sitting Alone at the Bo Tree

I was at Jaya Sri Maha Bodhi in Anuradhapura, where a few monks sat preaching in the shade of the Bo Tree, each surrounded by small clusters of lay devotees. Nearby, I noticed a few female Buddhist renunciants, though I could not immediately tell whether they were bhikkhunîs or dasasil mathas, since visually, in their robes and demeanour, they appeared indistinguishable to an outside observer. Most of them sat alone, without the small crowds of devotees gathered around the monks nearby. This, too, is not incidental. Because women cannot enter the sâsana through the same pathway to ordination, available to men, many Buddhist female renunciants remain dasasil mathas, a status that carries the appearance of monastic life without its legitamised spiritual standing. They observe the 10 precepts, wear robes, and live in renunciation, yet occupy a lower, unofficial rung in the religious hierarchy, one that grants them neither the ordination lineage nor the institutional recognition given to monks. However, in June last year, the Supreme Court of Sri Lanka delivered a landmark majority ruling in SC/FR/218/2013, affirming that fully ordained Buddhist nuns have the fundamental right to use the title ‘Bhikkhuni’ on their National Identity Cards, legally recognising the de facto existence of the Bhikkhuni Sanga.

A Closed Loop

Social discrimination and educational discrimination feed each other in a closed loop. Because bhikkhunis have fewer, less recognised institutions, fewer are formally trained to a standard the public recognises. Because fewer are recognised as authoritative teachers, fewer devotees seek them out or support them. Because they attract fewer devotees, the education institutions of female renunciants remain under-resourced and easy to overlook in state budgets and in popular imagination alike. A dasasil matha or bhikkhuni without an active following also lacks the economic support that following brings, since in Sri Lanka’s monastic economy, devotees are patrons as much as students. The precarity is not only spiritual or bureaucratic; it is material, and it compounds across a lifetime spent in robes.

Until bhikkhunis’ education is named, funded, and recognised on the same terms as that of bhikkhus, this will remain a story not only about missing ID cards or under-resourced schools, but about an education system that continues to decide, quietly and continuously, which students are worth investing in. Education was supposed to be the one place where the women can speak for themselves, instead, for these women, it has become just another place where women have to ask permission to be heard.

(Anushka is a Sociologist who is working on contemporary Buddhist movements. She was formerly attached to the University of Colombo)

Kuppi is a politics and pedagogy happening on the margins of the lecture hall that parodies, subverts, and simultaneously reaffirms social hierarchies.

Features

‘Memories of Milton – Live in Concert’ to enchant Dubai

Published

11 hours ago

2026/09/1

Sahan Weerasooriya

Seven Notes: Doing it in Dubai

Sri Lankan music knows no borders. Wherever our people go, our melodies follow — and our musicians make sure of it.

From Qatar’s Exit, to Melbourne’s EBONY, to Toronto’s Ceymphony, and Dubai’s Seven Notes, Sri Lankan bands abroad continue to keep the community connected to home, through song.

In July, Rajiv Sebastian set the Dubai stage alight with the band Seven Notes, creating an unforgettable night for Sri Lankans in the UAE. And the live-wire behind that magic? Niluk Uswaththa of Seven Notes.

Well, Niluk says he isn’t stopping there.

Now, Dubai is preparing for something truly special — ‘Memories of Milton – Live in Concert’, a grand musical tribute to one of Sri Lanka’s most beloved voices: Milton Mallawarachchi.

For more than a decade, Milton Mallawarachchi was a trending force in Sri Lankan music. With nearly 850 songs and over 35 albums to his name, he gave us melodies that became the soundtrack to our lives — songs of love, longing, and life itself.

On Saturday, 26th September 2026, from 8:00 PM to 3:00 AM, the Mercure Hotel, Al Barsha Heights, Dubai, will transform into a space of nostalgia.

Ranil Mallawarachchi; Carrying forward his father’s legacy / Yenuli Neriah

With the spotlight on Ranil Mallawarachchi — Milton’s eldest son, carrying forward his father’s legacy — along with Yenuli Neriah and Tharaka, the evening will certainly bring Milton’s timeless classics back to life … on one stage.

Seven Notes will do the needful, providing the live music that made Dubai dance before.

According to Niluk, this isn’t just a concert.

“It’s designed as a nostalgic musical journey — to bring cherished memories and beloved songs back to life,” he says.

And he promises: 26th September will be a night to remember.

In fact, Niluk Uswaththa has become a driving force for Sri Lankan entertainment in Dubai.

Through Seven Notes, he ensures the community always has something special to look forward to — especially when it comes to music that feels like home.

The success of these overseas shows naturally raises one big question back in Sri Lanka.

Yes, music lovers, in Sri Lanka, are keen to know whether the Seven Notes band will pop up in Colombo, sometime soon, for a live performance?

Music lovers, island-wide, will be watching … and waiting!