ABSTRACT

Although revisions to the Sri Lankan constitution in 1972 and 1978 respectively were notable for the ways that they, first, accorded Buddhism the foremost place amongst Sri Lanka's other religions. Second, they offered it special protection in the national polity, the country still to this day professes a notional secularism through its commitment to parliamentary democracy and political modernity. A closer look at the parliament building itself, however, reveals more clearly the forms of neither religious, nor entirely secular, sacred modernity that Bawa has built at Kotte. Buddhism then is mobilized not as a 'religion', or religious influence, but instead as an ornamental facet of the broader effort to historiographically realign the nation-state in and with its own native modernity. A rooted Sinhala ethnos intractably linked to a historical narrative of Buddhist practice was part of this anti-colonial modernity. That is part of this space's sacred modernity.