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The show that explores what makes Sri Lanka Sri Lankan.
In Colombo & Xanadu | Fearing Something Will Survive
Does the future have a past in Colombo?
I’ve exiled myself from the jungle for a few days, to remind myself just how perfect it is - and I wake gazing out over a wedge of Bierra Lake in Colombo. The Portuguese built this lake in the early 16th century, and since then, as is often the way with all good things, it has more than halved in size.
But it took its time about it. For centuries it was a magnet for mansions and secluded go-downs, for all the traffic and privileged living of a busy port city. But over time profit and progress marginalised it. Today property developers have reinvented its commercial utility. Innumerable indistinguishable skyscrapers fornicate around its edges, lit up at night with important strips of coloured neon that spell out the names of apartment blocks, busky restaurants and branded hotels.
With their glass-fronted sides and bustling balconies – even with the odd upper-level swimming pools- they give the town a scent of feral desirability, and reduce the old lake’s purpose to being merely a view.
But from my lookout I can also see something else, something altogether more finished, at least in mortal terms - a block of ancient warehouses and the crumbling remains of a giant colonial house.
The mansion and the warehouses stand side by side on a large, ridiculously valuable plot of land, shaded by vast maras and set on bleached lawns of purple-flowering trees.
Is it a simmering family row that has prevented this last capacious space in the city centre from being sold and turned into a concrete phoenix, like all the rest? A disputed will? Unexpected sentiment? Lost heirs? A developer who lost his money? An unpaid bribe? Whatever the reason, this almost-last dainty from at least 150 years ago reveals how much has already been lost.
That – and a ghostly black and gold shop sign on a building next to it – now violated by plastic hoardings and sheet glass. It read “Cargills, 1844,” the lost Harrods of Lanka.
As Colombo’s population grew from 28,000 in 1800 to 158,000 in 1901 to over 5 million in the metropolitan area today, it gobbled up the surrounding plantations: over 100,000 hectares of coconut plantations alone and, to the south, huge cinnamon plantations. Between a fifth and a quarter of the island's entire population live in the area, putting so much strain on resources that some decades ago the government sent itself into exile, demobbing to a small island in nearby Kotte. Here, with help from the late great Geoffrey Bawa, it constructed for itself a new parliament building on land that was once the capital Parâk ramabâhu VI, the last king to have government – albeit for a short time – the entire island.
The king was something of a poet; his reign prompted a Sinhalese literary explosion. His courtiers were much given to quoting messenger poetry to one another – or 'Sandesha Poetry ', so called, as the poems usually feature separated lovers.
One poem memorably describes life in what would much later become the new seat of government: “In black fumes of camphor,” it goes, “flutter rows of flags / Drums, bells, and conchs, their sound resounds / Lovely maidens chant Tamil hymns, heartening hearts.” But the chanting today is all done by politicians coming and going – though no longer in pricey imported cars, this perk being recently cancelled to the muted misery of many MPs.
Many plans have tried to keep track of the city. A garden city plan emerged in the 1920s to 30s, and countless others followed, but none could keep up with the city's galloping expansion. As it spread outward, it also turned in on itself, devouring streets and residential areas laid out with greater grace in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
Yet some structures have endured – like the old mansion that lies down there before me now on the banks of the shrunken lake. In yellow crumbling plaster and red bricks it seems to eviscerate the old worry – that even greater than the fear that nothing will survive, is that something will.
"The past,” observed the Sri Lankan writer Michelle De Kretser, “was not always past enough here.”
My doleful building, hanging on regardless, counts the cost of all that is lost. And what colossal amounts of gain await a payout. It occupies space that could accommodate at least 50 stacked apartments, sold at roughly 250 million rupees each. Soon enough, both it and its lovely mara trees will vanish, surrendering everything to the comforting hug of amnesia.
History’s greatest danger is that it risks being remembered. All too easily, it forgets that neglect, indifference, and interference must first decontaminate it before we can properly enjoy it.
And although it of course lives in so many things – culture, language, literature, law – it is most especially buildings that put it centrally in storage. And here, such buildings still litter the land, each a reminder that whatever else Sri Lanka might lack, it's certainly not history.
For such a small country, the island has a history that makes most developed nations look, at best, scrappy.
Sri Lankans were building mighty stone palaces and soaring stupas that dwarfed most pyramids when wattle and daub were the norm in London and Paris.
The island has been settled, resettled, and resettled over and over, reshaped by waves of people from across India; Portugal, Holland, and the UK; China, Malaysia, Java, and the Arabian Peninsula.
For most of the past 500 years, it was under colonial control, and for almost as long before that, it fractured into a series of warring Tamil and Sinhalese states. Go back further, and you'll encounter Anuradhapura, the magical capital of an island-wide kingdom for well over 2000 years. Or Sigiriya, the 8th wonder of Ancient Asia.
Sri Lanka’s history seems like a set of Russian dolls; inside each is another waiting to emerge, making what is complicated utterly Byzantine. "The Past is Never Dead,” said William Faulkner. “It's Not Even Past"
Measured against its ancient upcountry capitals, Anuradhapura, Sigiriya, Polonnaruwa, Kandy, Colombo is something of a junior; its history overlooked. Compared to them, it's rather laddish, a bit of a parvenu upstart, and yet, for all that, it has plenty of form, growing from an ancient port to an Arab trading centre to a colonial fortress.
Its most obvious roots may not be much more apparent than its Dutch architecture, but it has a most singular heart all of its own.
But the heart is undergoing what amounts to open-heart surgery. The city is struggling to emerge from its history. It doesn’t really seem to know what to do about it. Money, progress, solutions to this and that problem all seem to demand the kind of recognition that only phoenixes can manage. But the past keeps getting in the way. So much of Colombo’s history still exists that it cannot be ignored, despite the construction boom back into the 70s and early 80s, when a number of forgettable developments sprouted here and there in the inner city.
The Civil War halted much construction, but now developers have moved back in, on a cloud of generous, discreet disbursements, and are going about their work like eager anaesthetists, obliterating the terrors and troubles of the past without ever confronting them.
Bit by bit, the old buildings are coming down; and with them the unremembered, unforgettable places where the city’s history occurred.
They say a country that forgets its past risks losing its future. But a good measure of early neglect helps preservation. And mindful neglect has become a popular strategy for dealing with Colombo’s history – and its buildings.
Often, the developers don’t need to bring in the bulldozers or face tiresome court appeals. Left unattended, many buildings conveniently collapse. This was the fate of the historic Colombo District Court Complex and of Cintra Lodge, which had stood for 1985 years on Galle Face Road. Just along from this stood Shamrock, the ancestral childhood home of Sri Lanka’s first Prime Minister, D.S. Senanayake. But no longer.
Gone too is Lalchand's Building, dating back to 1815, as well as the lovely two-storey shopping complex, the De Soysa Building on Slave Island, built in the 1870s. It partially collapsed in 2021 and was then cleared away to make room for high-rises. High-rises too claim the stunning pink colonial Army Medical Corps Officers' Mess.
Scores of private houses, mansions, civic buildings and old commercial enterprises have all vanished in the past 20 years. Numerous old dormitory buildings and complexes have been torn down. On Java Street & Slave Island alone, almost 600 vintage homes and neighbourhood blocks in the historic Malay quarter were bulldozed to make way for a Tata Housing residential township
Most of the old social clubs are gone too. They struggled to find much purpose in the new world, and only a few remain: the usually empty Colombo Club, standing awkwardly on the grounds of the breezeblock Taj Samudra Hotel, and the 1913 Dutch Burgher Union. Only the sports clubs thrive: the Gymkhana Club; the Cricket, Rowing, and Golf Clubs; and the Colombo Swimming Club, which had a new road unexpectedly sever part of its pool.
Ever fond of cars, the city council has an unshakable love for roads, with an eccentric dedication to making more space for traffic jams. And of course where new roads go, old trees come down. In the past 25 years, alone, the Colombo district has lost almost 4000 hectares of tree cover.
In their place, sloping towers rise through humid skies:
Altair, a twin-tower high-rise in Colombo 2 that apes Abu Dhabi’s Capital Gate, or the Veer Towers in Las Vegas, to name but a few modish wallflowers.
Galle Face Green sprouts rows of high-rises competing with one another like a fresh set of flashy dentures.
There’s One Colombo, a luxury concrete splinter slated to be South Asia's future tallest tower; the 53 floors of Tri-Zen City; 47 floors of a Grand Hyatt mixed-use skyscraper in Colombo 3, 24 floors in Orion City Tower, 42 floors in a high-rise called Mon Vie – and countless others with such names as Ceylex, Pearl, Vauxhall, Marina and Ru.
Hiranya Peiris, the Sri Lankan astrophysicist, noted: “A vacuum bubble could have been the first event in the history of our universe.” Certainly, the vacuous look and feel of much of this architecture mutely begs the city to return to its earliest origins.
And then, of course, there is the glitzy monolith of all monoliths - Port City Colombo, a 269-hectare sea reclamation project sticking out from the north end of the city. Like all the other low-level islands around the world, not least in the Persian Gulf, it waits with grim patience for the sea-level rise climate scientists project, which varies from 1 to 9 feet.
This entirely new area of the city boasts, somewhat sexistly, several “master planned zones.”
At its centre, of course, is a financial district glittering with international corporations; a marina with berths for 200 luxury yachts; several themed residential areas with varying levels of affordability, from the very high to the where-did-you-get-the-money-for-that level; and scores more shopping malls, hotels, and restaurants.
Looking at the plans – for all of this has yet to be built – you realise this new area will offer its inhabitants the unexpected comfort of allowing them to feel that they could be anywhere in the world. Its insipid me-too architecture has as much to do with Colombo, its history and culture, as a chocolate chip muffin has in a Lahore curry house.
But fret not. When built, Port City will at least offer the perfect spot to sit down and take stock of all that has happened to Colombo; a time to pull out your battered copy of Coleridge, who believed in architecture that made infinity manageable, and read quietly to yourself his great unfinished poem “Kubla Khan” -
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
So twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers were girdled round;
And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;
And here were forests ancient as the hills,
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.
.
But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted
Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!
A savage place! as holy and enchanted
As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon-lover!
And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,
As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,
A mighty fountain momently was forced:
Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst
Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,
Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher’s flail:
And mid these dancing rocks at once and ever
It flung up momently the sacred river.
Five miles meandering with a mazy motion
Through wood and dale the sacred river ran,
Then reached the caverns measureless to man,
And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean;
And ’mid this tumult Kubla heard from far
Ancestral voices prophesying war!
The shadow of the dome of pleasure
Floated midway on the waves;
Where was heard the mingled measure
From the fountain and the caves.
It was a miracle of rare device,
A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!
.
A damsel with a dulcimer
In a vision once I saw:
It was an Abyssinian maid
And on her dulcimer she played,
Singing of Mount Abora.
Could I revive within me
Her symphony and song,
To such a deep delight ’twould win me,
That with music loud and long,
I would build that dome in air,
That sunny dome! those caves of ice!
And all who heard should see them there,
And all should cry, Beware! Beware!
His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread
For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise.