Abstract:
The "Panadura debate" Panadura Vaadaya in the nineteenth century between the
Christians and Buddhists was central to the anti-colonial struggle in the cultural sphere.
It was the culmination of protests against the crude methods of suppression against the
local culture employed by respectively the Portuguese, the Dutch and the British over
nearly 400 years. This cultural liberationist movement has been deliberately distorted by
a recent set of writers. These writers include Obeyesekere, Gombrich, Kapferer,
Roberts, Tambiah, H.L. Seneviratne, C. R. de Silva and Kumari Jayawardene. Some of
them have associated the debates with the contemporary Western discourse on
fundamentalism -triggered by the Western fear of the Muslims. This paper summarizes
the social background to the Panadura Vaadaya, its global context (within a time non
Western classical literature and learning was coming into Western discourse) and global
role (as part of the sensitizing process in the West to the existence of sophisticated
discourses outside Christianity). The paper puts into contemporary global context and
global role the interpretations of these latter writers. The writers engaging in distorting
the anti colonial content help processes of recolonisation operating in the country.
