Features

Shared Sanctities

- REVIEW BY AVISHKA MARIO SENEWIRATNE

A few weeks ago, I embarked on a long journey from Colombo to Toronto, with a short transit in Doha. It was a long 16-hour journey by air. Though one may say that was “long”, in the good (or bad) old days, such a trip, including crossing the Atlantic would take weeks if not months. However, I carried one book with me, a tradition I keep even when I go on a 10-minute drive. The book that I carried this time was Hasini Haputhanthri’s and Sujeewa de Silva’s Shared Sancties, the revised and enlarged second edition.

With the very many books I have read over the years, especially on this genre of conserving and sharing a common ground for heritage, I found this work a moving and creative masterpiece that needs a closer attention. Hence, this comment or “review,” that would possibly draw upon my understanding of this work and my perspectives of how I see the writer build this much appreciative narrative.

Geopolitically and by history, Sri Lanka, is an island nation that has given abode to people of very many nations of both the Western and Eastern hemisphere.

Irrespective of how much the most arduous extremist may want to claim about racial purity, it is beyond any doubt that we are a perfectly mixed set of people that have a shared and common heritage.

For centuries, this land absorbed ideas, faiths, and artistic forms with a confidence modern Sri Lanka struggles to reclaim.

What makes this book compelling is not simply its content, but the way Hasini reanimates that forgotten spirit of confluence.

From the very beginning, she anchors her narrative in the history of movement—oceans, islands, and trade routes. Her encounter with the Nestorian Cross at a Buddhist pilgrimage site sets the tone: Sri Lanka’s past is rarely tidy, never strictly defined, and far more entangled than our schoolbooks suggest. In chapters like