Sinhala Poetry and Early Modernity in Comparative Perspective

The focus of my comments is the production of poetry in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century in Sri Lanka’s low-country, an area of the island which had been under European rule since the early seventeenth century.  What we see is the preservation of genres, with competition between poets being the key to an “economy of prestige” that had defined Sinhala literary culture for several centuries.  Ironically, it was Kandy, the kingdom beyond colonial control, which saw a pronounced rupture its literary culture and what had gone before, the result of a mid-eighteenth century shift in the organization of monastic education from the teacher-student model to a curriculum-based system that did not include poetry.  It seems that poets in the low country, deprived of royal patronage, found sponsorship among new groups that had benefited from the colonial economy.  Thus ‘early modern’ social change allowed poets to act on the dispositions to conservatism that had long been constitutive of Sinhala literary cultures.  Through comparison with literary cultures elsewhere in South and Southeast Asia, I will consider the extent to which the conservatism of literary culture in Sri Lanka, perpetuated independently of state institutions, can help us reconsider the idea of the “last stand of Asian autonomies” in early modern Asia.