ABSTRACT
Post-war retellings of the origin story of the establishment of the Sinhala ethno-linguistic community or “race” (jāthīya) serve to challenge concurrent exclusionary notions of community inscribed in the Mahāvamsa mytho-history. Many scholars have remarked how the Mahāvamsa origin myth validates Sinhala Buddhist exceptionalism, and in so doing shores up an anti-pluralistic ethos in Sri Lanka. In the post-war period, ethno-religious exclusivist triumphalism resurged in new forms that targeted religious minorities. This anti-minority sentiment intensified in an over-generalized way against Muslims after the 2019 Easter Sunday attacks. Against a backdrop of such religious conflicts, this chapter examines two innovative retellings of the Vijaya and Kuweni myth authored by artists and lay religious practitioners, which emerged within the Sinhala public sphere at war’s end. The revised tales and iconography of Sinhala origin discursively suggest a conciliatory approach, particularly with respect to Tamil Hindus and “pre-Buddhist” indigenes. These artistic and ritual renderings stand to defy the singularity of claims found within the account of historical and mythic Mahāvamsa that, in its standard rendering, has served to denigrate cultural mixing, miscegenation, and that otherwise symbolically devalues the possibility for amity between the diverse peoples who constitute Sri Lanka’s wider national heritage.
