Sacred Geographies, Nationalism, and Space: Negotiating Colonial Praxis and Nationalist Visions in the Planning of Anuradhapura’s New Town
Creators: Sangapala Arachchige Don, Pradeep Dissanayake
Publisher: name: University of Alberta Library
Year: 2024

<p>Postcolonial urban landscapes are not only shaped by colonialism but also by nationalism and people’s spatial practices. The scholarship on colonial urban development and postcolonial urbanism is well established and has exposed the contested nature of postcolonial spatial experience. However, the relationship between nationalism and postcolonial planning, mainly how nationalism influences the formation of social spaces in these societies, remains unexplored. In this dissertation, I aim to address this gap in knowledge by delving into the creation of the first planned urban community in independent Ceylon (Sri Lanka since 1972) in Anuradhapura in 1949. Anuradhapura is a city that encompasses many spatial identities: a sacred city, a highly significant Buddhist pilgrimage destination, a historical site, the 2500-year-old original capital of the Sinhalese, a world heritage site, and the capital of an interior province. The development of a new planned town at Anuradhapura as the country became independent provides a unique lens through which to understand the intertwining of colonial praxis and nationalist politics. <br>
The contemporary debate on Anuradhapura as a postcolonial urban community and a dominant cultural symbol can be identified in two distinct discourses: social and planning. While the “social discourse” asserts that Anuradhapura’s cultural and religious centrality emerged in the 19th century because of the British colonial influence, the “planning discourse” focuses on the physical attributes of Anuradhapura’s new town plan, ignoring its thinking and ideology. These discourses have not deciphered how the new town planning project rejuvenated the nationalist historical and religious consciousness of Anuradhapura. Taking a social space perspective and contributing to the study of social space in Sri Lanka, this study addresses this knowledge gap between the social and physical, investigating the production of the Anuradhapura planning project and conceptualizing how nationalism is built into postcolonial spatial consciousness.<br>
I examined Anuradhapura’s new town planning initiative through archival and ethnographic fieldwork studies. My fieldwork during two immersive visits to Sri Lanka in 2017 and 2019 involved an extensive exploration of primary sources, including colonial government records, planning reports, and media coverage related to the planning project, primarily from Sri Lanka’s National Archives. Additionally, I conducted extensive fieldwork, interviewing planners, administrators, and residents of Anuradhapura to gain valuable insights into how policies, practices, and ideas shaped the new town’s planning scheme. <br>
The study demonstrates that colonial institutional practices and Sinhalese Buddhist nationalism of the late 19th century have significantly influenced the modern representation of Anuradhapura. The British colonials saw Anuradhapura as a ‘dead’ place, with ruins that needed excavation and preservation. Through archeology and cartography, the British (re) historicized Anuradhapura, turning it into a regional capital of the colony and endowing it with historical significance by the end of the 19th century. The revivalists aimed to geographically separate the sacred from the secular, making the demand for a new town in Anuradhapura driven by the influential Buddhist revival movement led by Anagarika Dharmapala and Walisinha Harischandra. In the mid-20th century, emerging nationalist political leaders like S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike politicized the revivalists’ demand for spatial separation by removing non-Buddhist practices from the site. The new town planning initiative opted to materialize the Sinhala-Buddhist national-spatial consciousness on the colonial geography. The study shows how Anuradhapura became the center of the Sinhala Buddhist universe in the context of colonialism, of which the capital was in Colombo, and the pre-colonial local sacred center, Kandy. It demonstrates that postcolonial spatial claims, relations, and perceptions did not emerge from colonialism or pre-colonial history through the nationalists’ struggle against and defeating colonial and Kandy’s dominance. Planning had been a decisive tool in spatializing nationalism in the late colonial nation. </p>