‘Forget not your old country’: absence, identity, and marginalization in the practice and development of Sri Lankan Buddhism in Malaysia

Abstract

This article examines various linkages through which Sri Lankan diaspora communities in Malaysia sought and still seek meaning. Taking my cue from Engseng Ho’s work on the Hadrami in which he notes how absence shapes diasporic experiences, I investigate the constructive role that feelings of loss have played in the imagining and reimagining of the Sri Lankan community’s identity in Malaysia. More specifically, this article considers the role that particular sites of memory – Buddhist institutions, rituals, and cemeteries – play in the production of an ethnic and religious identity. Finally, I explore how such produced identities may become threatened by competing communities and by the nation state as well as how interreligious and interethnic alliances produced through temple networks provide the means by which state control could be challenged and feelings of marginalization overcome.

Keywords:

• Sinhalese
• Sri Lanka
• Malaya
• Malaysia
• absence
• diaspora
• marginality
• Buddhism
• burial practices
• collective memory
• caste and class
• ethnicity

Acknowledgements

An earlier version of this article was presented at National University of Singapore as part of the Migration and Religion Research Clusters within the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. I benefitted from numerous comments and suggestions that followed the present–ation as well as from further conversations with Irving Chan Johnson and Pattana Kitiarsa. I also acknowledge the very helpful reviewer’s comments that has not only strengthened this article but has encouraged me to think differently about my longer term project on Theravada Buddhism in Malaysia. Finally, I would like to thank Rajesh Rai who encouraged me to submit an article to South Asian Diaspora, as well as Monica Smith and Rodney Sebastian who made my earlier visit to National University of Singapore possible.

Notes

1. Not surprisingly, under the Dutch East India Company, convicts from Malaya were sent to Sri Lanka where they were imprisoned.

2. Dispatch from Straits Settlements to Secretary of State, No. 307, 24 September 1887; cited in Raja Singam (1968, p. 29f.).

3. Currently (2010), there are two Thai temples in Kuala Lumpur: Wat Meh Liew (est. 1929) and the much larger royal‐sponsored temple, Wat Chetawan (est. 1957). While S.N. Arseculeratne (1991, p. 154) notes that the former temple was established by a Chinese woman who married a Sinhalese man, temple records indicate that the woman was Thai (personal communication, Phrakhru Sirik Panjavud, head monk of Wat Meh Liew). Kedah, Kelantan, Perlis and Terengganu belonged to Thailand prior to 1909; thus, there are many Thai communities (and Thai temples) there (see Ismail 1983, 1990). There were a number of Sinhalese living in Kelantan and Kedah during the nineteenth and early twentieth century, and some Sinhalese men married Thai wives (see Arseculeratne 1991, p. 131).

4. Between the founding of the temple in Brickfields and the one in Sentul, a Sri Lanka temple was established in Penang in 1914 when a Sri Lankan monk – Ven. Pemaratana—en route from Sri Lanka to Thailand via Singapore, decided to stop over in Penang for a few days. During his stay at the Batu Lanchang Hokkien Cemetery, he preached sermons and several within the Sinhalese and Chinese communities asked him to set up a temple on the island (see Indaratana et al. 2004). There is another temple in Malaysia that has some connections to Sri Lanka: Seck Kia Eenh (Lord Buddha’s Monastery) in Melaka. This temple, however, is Mahayana in origin. With the arrival of the temple’s first resident monk – Ven. Ananda Mangala – from Sri Lanka in 1963, Theravada Buddhism and Pali chanting was introduced. Today, the temple blends Mahayana and Theravada Buddhism and remains under the administration of a Sri Lankan monk (see Tan Kim See 2010).

5. This is discussed in the temple’s history, The Sri Lanka Buddhist Temple: A Historical Overview, 1900–2000 (Anon 2000b; see also Anon 2000a and 1991).

6. See, especially, Halbwachs (1992, chap. 6). In another of Halbwach’s works, The Collective Memory, he writes ‘While the collective memory endures and draws strength from its base in a coherent body of people, it is individuals as group members who remember … . Every collective memory requires the support of a group delimited in space and time’ (1950, pp. 48, 84, cited in Coser 1992, p. 22).

7. In the 70th Anniversary of the Sri Lanka Buddhist Temple, 1991 it is noted that Ven. Siriniwasa began teaching Sinhala language classes at the temple as early as the 1920s.

8. This ritual is described in Gombrich (1971) – see also Keyes (1983).

9. This statement, ‘Forget not your old country (wuwang guguo)’, is inscribed on one of the boulders in the gardens of the famous Kek Lok Si temple in Penang. It was written by Kang Youwei who encouraged the Chinese community in Malaysia to remember their own roots and ethnic identity (see DeBernardi 2004, p. 24).

10. Writing about similar biases among the Sinhalese of Singapore, Y.D. Ong (2005, p. 55) notes that ‘When Sinhalese Buddhists arrived in Singapore, they kept to their caste groups. Each caste tended to support monks from its own Nikaya but monks from different Nikayas did come together for communal and religious celebrations’.

11. Personal communication with Vijaya Samarawickrama on 9 July 2010. Several lay people I spoke to said that under its current administration, the Brickfields temple – with its current ambitious welfare agenda – favors wealthy patrons. Venerable Ananda Mangala (1977, p. 119) also noted that one of the former head monks of the Sentul temple – Ven. Dhammeswara – was known as ‘the missionary of the middle‐classes’.

12. By 1928, for instance, several Theravāda temples in Penang already began celebrating the Chinese new year and by 1948, ‘there were more Chinese Buddhist devotees at all these Theravāda temples [on the island of Penang] than the Thais, Sri Lankans or Burmese’ (Liow 1989, p. 62).

13. In general, the level of English is much lower at Thai temples with the monks there largely catering to the Thai and Thai–Chinese communities in Malaysia. For a further discussion of Thai Buddhism in Malaysia, see Ismail (1990, 1983) and Johnson (2008).

14. Because of feelings of religious disenchantment as a result of the sangha being restricted to goyigama, members of the three principal lower castes of the southwest coast – the Karāva (fisher), Durāva (toddy tapper) and Salāgama (cinnamon peeler) – were able to use their increased economic status to challenge, to some degree, the high caste hegemony by importing new ordination lineages from Burma in 1799 (Amarapura Nikāya) and in 1864 (Rāmañña Nikāya).

15. The system of temple‐ownership in Sri Lanka – particularly monks owning temples with large tracts of land that is leased out to farmers – has sometimes been viewed as rupturing the delicate monk–patron relationship by creating a class of land‐owning monastics who are no longer dependent on the laity for their requisites (see, for instance, Evers 1972, p. 16, Gunawardana 1979, and Bechert 1970). At the same time, however, there are also some benefits that result from monks owning temples. As several laypeople in Sri Lanka mentioned to me, monks who own temples are more likely to take a leadership role and to be committed to the temple’s development (Samuels 2010, p. 105).

16. The Sinhala governing board at Bodhi Lankarama Buddhist Temple in Taiping made sweeping changes by opening up membership to devotees of all ethnic backgrounds in 1999 and by amending the temple’s bye‐laws to allow non‐Sinhalese to occupy places on the temple’s governing board. Since that time, the ‘office bearers and committee members of Taiping Bodi Langka Ram Buddhist Association have predominantly been Chinese’ (see http://www.bodhilankarama.net/History/History.htm for more detail). With much smaller Sri Lankan communities in Penang and Melaka, Mahindarama Temple (Penang) and Seck Kia Eenh (Melaka) have had to rely on the support and governance of the Chinese community from the very beginning. Today, there are no Sri Lankans on the management committee of either temple.

17. There are two instances in the history of the Sasana Abhiwurdhi Wardhana Society in which a non‐Sinhala person was a patron of the Society: once in 1948 with the appointment of L.Y. Swee (who was also Vice‐President of the Society from 1935 to 1948) and another in 1969 with the appointment of Teh Thean Choo. Another non‐Sinhalese person to sit on the Society’s board of trustees was Yeoh Cheng Hock who served as Treasurer from 1935 to 1948 (see de Silva 1998, p. 363f.). With regard to Sentul’s Board of Advisors, see 70th Anniversary of the Sri Lanka Buddhist Temple, 1991 (Anon 1991).

18. The Sinhala‐only policies of the Sentul temple governing board – Siri Jayanti Association – has, in fact, had negative repercussions for the Association’s current President, Mervyn Weerasena. For instance, before retiring from the Royal Malaysian Police, Weerasena was accused of being a racist. The claimant argued that as Weerasena is a President of an Association that bars the participation of certain ethnic groups, he is not fit to be a civil servant. Although Weerasena claims that the charges actually came from a jealous Sinhalese patron of the temple, the fact that he was encouraged to step down as the Association’s President until he retired from the police force suggests that the current bye‐laws are not regarded as being fair and open (personal communication, Mervyn Weerasena, June 2010).

19. Venerable Dhammaratana became the head monk of Buddhist Maha Vihara in Brickfields in 2006 when the previous head monk, Ven. Dhammananda passed away. While Dhammananda was still alive, Ven. Dhammaratana created the Ti‐Ratana Welfare Society which ran several of the temples social service projects.

20. Since the 1980s, a number of community Buddhist centres and associations (e.g. Buddhist Gem Fellowship, Subang Jaya Buddhist Association, Bandar Utama Buddhist Society, Shah Alam Buddhist Centre, and so on) have been formed with the goal of bringing Buddhism from the temple into the community. Many of the community centres’ founders were earlier students of Ven. Dhammananda and, according to some of them, were encouraged by him to create these local centres. This is discussed in Ananda Fong’s (1999) article; see also Liow (1999) titled ‘The Millennium Challenge’.

21. This is quoted in Arseculeratne (1991, p. 168).

22. The effects of such policies on minority communities are discussed in DeBernardi (2004). The Rukunegara is further discussed in Gan (1980) and Ariffin Omar (1980).

23. The organization, which was established in 1983, was later expanded into the Malaysian Consultative Council of Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, Sikhism and Taoism in 2006.