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0 0 0 0 Dying Traditions and Living Culture in the Up-country of Sri Lanka
Dr. Daniel Bass [dbass6@fau.edu], Assistant Professor of Anthropology & Religious Studies, Lynn University
In this presentation, I analyze different forms and transformations of the Hindu folk drama, Kaman Kuttu, in the central highlands, or up-country, of Sri Lanka. Up-country Tamils are descendents of migrants from South India, who came to Sri Lanka between the 1830s and 1930s to work on tea, coffee and rubber plantations. I explore the slow death of this ritual drama, local intellectuals justifications for its preservation, and one mans attempts to modernize it.
Despite numerous hardships, this marginalized minority community has developed a distinct ethnic identity and a normalized, but still tenuous, position in modern Sri Lankas often violent ethnic politics. Up-country Tamil elites--politicians, trade union leaders, religious leaders, academics, and especially NGO workers--have been critical to this process, through their self-conscious formulations of defining and refining community identity and culture. With the active involvement of these culture workers, what is imagined to be traditional, authentic Up-country Tamil culture has been objectified, preserved, embodied and performed in the diaspora. Up-country Tamil culture workers tend to have good intentions of maintaining seemingly dying cultural practices, but in doing so, these aspects of Up-country Tamil culture are themselves transformed.
I argue that Kaman Kuttu is actually not that critical to Up-country Tamil culture, or else it would not be a dying tradition. I compare the performance of Kaman Kuttu on a remote tea plantation with the development of a modernized version performed by school children. Significant portions of Kaman Kuttu, including deities embodiment in entranced actors, have gotten lost in the translation from religiously themed recreation to educational, ethnically identified entertainment. In preserving this ritual folk drama, culture workers have fundamentally altered it, turning it into a cultural artifact of Up-country Tamil tradition and heritage, rather than an artistic ritual of Hindu devotion.
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