Introduction

In 2009, the British Association for the Study of Religions (BASR) chose the theme of sacred geographies for their annual conference. I gave an unpublished paper entitled ‘Sacred Landscapes and the Gaze of the Colonizer: A Case Study of Sri Lanka’ drawing on archival material familiar to me (Harris 1993; Harris 2006) but from the new perspective of space and the sacred. I argued that the shifting models of British power in the island conditioned different attitudes to sacred landscapes, from an almost obsessive wish to label and measure them, when the colonial project was in an uncertain infancy, to romantic lyricism, imaginative reconstruction of Sri Lanka’s past and a marketing of the picturesque, when power was secure and the island became an elite visitor destination. As a counterpoint throughout the century, however, adding multiplicity to the colonial gaze, was the evangelical missionary attitude, which saw the demonic hiding within the island’s ‘heathen’ sacred space.