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The show that explores what makes Sri Lanka Sri Lankan.
Love & Sex | In Arundel and Sri Lanka
Lovely as the Declaration of the Rights of Man is, it cannot legislate for everything, especially for those two things most travellers fear in the jungle – leaves and mosquitos.
Scientists tell us that if you are pregnant, wear dark clothes, drink alcohol, have Type O blood or steer towards the XXL section of the clothing shop, you are much more likely to be bitten by mosquitoes. Leeches are no less discriminating. Like Stinger surface-to-air missiles, they seek out those with especially high body temperatures; their tiny, fearfully precise sensory pores on the lookout for any passerby who is sweating more.
None of this should really surprise us, for we are mere slaves to what lies in front of us. Our brain processes a face in 100 milliseconds, our nose picks up on every scent and pheromone, and our ears instantly take in what the pitch of a voice tells us about another person.
And what our senses tell us, the chemistry of our brain then amplifies.
Dopamine & adrenaline flow, though – or don’t. Either way, it conditions our reaction. And if the signs are good, we can look forward to a nice bit of oxy-toxcy – that joyful release of oxytocin when you look at a friend, lover or better still, your dog full in the eyes.
Later, perhaps a few more nuanced factors shape attraction or non-attraction. Do you share their values, background, or interests? Is who you see kind and responsive? Can they make you laugh?
But not so long ago in Sri Lanka, all this paled by comparison with alternative methodologies. The bank account, the bloodline, and the views of family members were what decided the niceties of mutual attraction, with a little recruitment help from the odd classified advertisement. “Parents are looking for a suitable groom,” reads one recently spotted in a local paper: “for only daughter G/B, 45 yrs old, 5'3", fair, divorced after a short marriage & no children.”
Despite the global impact of Beyoncé and Jay-Z and other great swept-off-your-feet romances, parents still arrange a third of marriages in Sri Lanka.
It was horoscopes, matchmakers, and astrologers that people consulted – not their hearts. Family members and close friends were interrogated, and a list of possibilities was drawn up, with their past history, education level, and job prospects carefully assessed. Cross-cousins and distant relatives were most favoured to preserve caste and status.
An awkward full-family first meeting usually followed, and once things were rolling, it was hard for anyone involved to pull out. By then, anyway, negotiations over dowries and living arrangements were in full swing.
Different communities finessed the arrangements further. In rural areas, most marriages did not require a wedding ceremony or legal registration to become real. If the parents consented, the man and woman would just start living together. Even today, at least 10% of marriages start this way, especially on the north and east coast and in the Central Highlands.
How you marry depends on where you best belong. Whilst there has been a general marriage ordinance since 1907 that sets out the minimum age (18) and bans bigamy and incest if you choose to marry under the Kandyan law code diga and binna traditional forms of marriage are also recognised. In this, the wife moves to the husband’s family home, or the husband moves to the wife’s family home. That’s it. Job done. Muslims can also opt out, choosing instead to marry under the Muslim Personal Law, which allows the registration of a marriage of a girl from 12 years on, despite all attempts to move it on.
Yet from a Buddhist perspective, marriage is neither holy nor unholy; neither a religious duty nor a sacrament ordained in heaven. Instead, it is a personal and social obligation. Christians may gather “in the sight of God” to be joined together in “holy matrimony, which is an honourable estate, instituted of God in the time of man's innocency, signifying unto us the mystical union that is betwixt Christ and his Church,” but not so Buddhists here.
Instead, a Sri Lankan Buddhist merely couple walk onto an elevated platform, surrounded by family. Blessings of the most general and kindly variety are offered, betel leaves shared, a Pirith Nool – a sacred thread – binds the bride and groom's pinkie fingers, ceremonial water is poured, and rings are swapped.
It is all relatively straightforward, even if “they had lived,” wrote the Sri Lankan writer Ashok Ferry, “ down the road from each other as children. Every day they walked home from school hand in hand; they were childhood sweethearts, they were best friends. And when they came of age, in the time-honoured Sri Lankan tradition they were given in marriage. To other people.”
If the proof of the pudding is to be found in the results, then at first glance things look – well, pretty stable really, at least compared to the West. Two-thirds of the population are married, well above the 50% and below in the West, and barely 2% of marriages end in divorce compared to 50% in the developed world. Cohabitation, the West’s view of what was once called courtship, is very rare here, love match or not.
Yet, in our post-Barbie global world, all this is changing here – and changing fast. Registered marriages have fallen by nearly 28%. Higher living costs and decades of economic uncertainty have led couples to marry later. And love matches, of course, are the norm, especially in urban areas. The time of oxy tocy, divorce, and waiting for the One now hangs over the land like a new moon, promising who-knows-what. “ I will wait patiently for you,” observed the Sri Lankan writer Gajaman Noona, “but can I be so sure of the workings of the god of love?“
Perhaps she is right to be suspicious. Perhaps this is all just a shoal of red herrings. Whether looking into love, marriage, and attraction in Sri Lanka, Yankton, South Dakota, or Little Tew in deepest Oxfordshire, it's too easy to think it’s a binary choice: either Barbara Cartland and the big forever-forever, or stern pre-arranged contracts in which couples unite like micro-corporations.
A more existentialist view would have it: “We’re born alone, we live alone, we die alone. Only through our love and friendship can we create the illusion for the moment that we’re not alone.”
This is cold comfort to both camps, though perhaps, like all great ideas, it's because it is most likely to offend everyone that it is most likely to be right.
It certainly puts the damper on that classic view of life – the one bound by blood and marriage; that prefers conformity (sexual and gender) and takes a pitying view of anyone who does not fit the mould.
It is unlikely to appeal much to romantics either, or to Socrates, who lives at the heart of all apple-pie romantic manifestations. In Plato’s recollection of his opinion on love in The Symposium, the great philosopher is said to have taught his eager audience that “each of us is a 'matching half' of a human whole… and each of us is always seeking the half that matches him." Without a partner, we are practically headless chickens. Not for Socrates the credo of Sartre, Camus, or Nietzsche
It may be that all are put in their pedantic place by a writer whose books have yet to experience even a modest sales surge here in Sri Lanka - Armistead Maupin. A Californian atheist who now lives in Clapham and hangs out at the Belle Vue pub, Maupin's view of society and relationships is set out in a series of marvellous novels, Tales of the City.
At its centre stands Mrs Madrigal, surrounded like a sun in splendour by her “logical” family. This collection of souls includes Michael "Mouse" Tolliver and his husband, Ben; Brian, a one-time singles-bar habitué, and his adopted bisexual daughter, Shawna; Mary Ann Singleton; DeDe and D'or, an inter-racial lesbian couple; Jake Greenleaf, a young transgender caretaker; Mona Ramsey; and Mother Mucca, owner of the Blue Moon Lodge brothel in Winnemucca, Nevada. They are bound by choice, respect, and, most of all, shared survival. It is their individuality that counts; and their shared love.
Sri Lankan variants of Mrs Madrigal and her logical family exist everywhere in Sri Lanka, though any time they get too showy, a hefty choir of theros, often assisted by Sri Lanka’s only cardinal, a flog-the-child-to-make-him-good sort of priest, come together to demand instant government action. Vague as the specifics of any demands are, they are usually accompanied by such words as “stop,” “ban,” and “outlaw.” Brave organisations like Equal Ground, led by a Boudica-meets-Grace-Kelley type of lady, Rosanna Flamer-Caldera, give individuals, said one observer, “the space to stand up tall and be proud of who and what they are.”
DeDe and D'or or Mouse Tolliver and his husband Ben would find standing up here a little more challenging than in San Francisco or even India, for here homosexuality has yet to be fully decriminalised. But curiously, a Sri Lankan Jake Greenleaf might find life more tolerable, for being transgender here is not illegal. Individuals can legally change their gender, though the process is lengthy, bureaucratic, and intrusive.
But legal niceties aside, discrimination, harassment, hate speech, and arbitrary police activities put a premium of endurance on being different. And although it is much easier to live an alternative life, doing so outside Colombo or other big urban centres, or in social groups that are not exclusively young, is rarely as trouble-free as a walk in the park. The pressure to marry and shut up grows all the stronger, and existential concerns about whether relationships are ultimately just about fooling yourself into thinking you are not alone become academic.
Love strikes us all, and if we are truly fortunate, we find a true and endearing friendship, one that overcomes the initial hump of sexual chemistry, which, like rocket fuel, powers everything at the start but soon leaves the missile dependent on other things for traction.
As in Mrs Madrical’s logical family, the line between love and friendship is so blurred it becomes meaningless. Not for her brood the fate of the hapless protagonist in Michael Ondaatje's English Patient, who fell in love only to be disassembled. Nor need they live like the couple in Rani Manicka’s novel The Rice Mother: “we are like the two halves of a pair of garden shears, my man and me, joined at the hip, forever sniping at each other."
Sri Lankan social norms are certainly changing, and with them the expectations couples have as they form relationships. And perhaps some might be ever so slightly and randomly inspired b y what can be found half a world away in Chichester, a blameless English market town close to the English Channel. For here lies that most remarkable of original couples, an earl and countess, remembered by Philip Larkin in his 1956 poem “An Arundel Tomb.” The poem was written in the very same year the Bandaranaike government in Sri Lanka passed the Sinhala Only language act and triggered a civil war. But no such state of civil war seems to have blighted this medieval couple who die in the late thirteen hundreds.
Side by side,” the poem begins,
“their faces blurred,
The earl and countess lie in stone,
Their proper habits vaguely shown
As jointed armour, stiffened pleat,
And that faint hint of the absurd—
The little dogs under their feet.
Such plainness of the pre-baroque
Hardly involves the eye, until
It meets his left-hand gauntlet, still
Clasped empty in the other; and
One sees, with a sharp tender shock,
His hand withdrawn, holding her hand.
They would not think to lie so long.
Such faithfulness in effigy
Was just a detail friends would see:
A sculptor’s sweet commissioned grace
Thrown off in helping to prolong
The Latin names around the base.
They would not guess how early in
Their supine stationary voyage
The air would change to soundless damage,
Turn the old tenantry away;
How soon succeeding eyes begin
To look, not read. Rigidly they
Persisted, linked, through lengths and breadths
Of time. Snow fell, undated. Light
Each summer thronged the glass. A bright
Litter of birdcalls strewed the same
Bone-riddled ground. And up the paths
The endless altered people came,
Washing at their identity.
Now, helpless in the hollow of
An unarmorial age, a trough
Of smoke in slow suspended skeins
Above their scrap of history,
Only an attitude remains:
Time has transfigured them into
Untruth. The stone fidelity
They hardly meant has come to be
Their final blazon, and to prove
Our almost-instinct almost true:
What will survive of us is love.”
It is Larkin at his most irritating genius. Even as you conclude one lovely safe thing, you overturn it, the worm of doubt wriggling its inconvenient truth. For the “almost-instinct" that is "almost true," tells us that love does not conquer death, and the gesture of hand-holding was undoubtedly more due to friendship and custom than something that Elizabeth Bennet might have hoped for from her Mr Darcy.
Only one marginally similar statue of a couple from ancient times still exists in Sri Lanka, carved around the 6th century CE at the Isurumuniya Viharaya in Anuradhapura. It is said to depict Prince Saliya, the son of King Dutugemunu, and Asokamala, a lower-caste Chandala maiden for whom the prince famously renounced his claim to the royal throne. They are depicted seated, the women on the man’s lap, legs entwined, their hands offering an uncertain wave to the outside world.
Given the propensity of Anduraupura kings to kill one another, the prince’s banishment probably saved his life and the couple seemed to have lived out a useful life on the remote Galgiriya Mountain farming- a royal exile that the profligate Edward VIII might have been more useful inspired by.
It wasn’t until January 1, 1885, that Sri Lanka became particular about alternative lifestyles, for on that date the colonial British government passed Ordinance No. 2 of the Sri Lankan Penal Code, Section 365, which in the excited tones of the legislators criminalised "carnal intercourse against the order of nature."
Ironically, one of the first culprits was Britain's own military governor, Major-General Sir Hector Macdonald. Fighting Mac," as he was known, had risen through the ranks from a private due to his heroism in the Boer War before fetching up as army head in Sri Lanka.
Found to have enjoyed a string of gay encounters with local men, he was ordered back to London by Edward VII but shot himself before his court-martial. Given that the king’s eldest son, Prince Albert, was often having to be bailed out from arrest from gay brothels around London’s Cleveland Street, you might have hoped the king would have been more sympathetic, given his own libidinous nature.
Much more understanding is to be found in bromances depicted in Sri Lanka two great ancient chronicles, the Mahavamsa and Culavamsa, and whilst the ancient Buddhist texts forbade monks any kind of sex (except, it seems, masturbation), they took particular care to exclude any lay person from such strictures.
Indeed, one section of the authoritative Pali Canon – the pandaka - takes special care not to censure lay people for an impressive range of alternative sexual practices, including, rather thoughtfully, the Pakka paṇḍaka – namely that state of arousal that fluctuates with the phases of the moon. Among those ancient kings thought to have been susceptible to such lunar influence were King Buwanekabahu III of Kotte, King Rajasinghe II, the warrior king of Kandy who expelled the Portuguese, and Vira Narendra Sinha, the last Sinhalese King of Kandy.
For them, as indeed for most pre-colonial Sri Lankan marriage and sex, still less marriage and friendship were entirely separate things. Rigid gender norms were notably absent. Tolerance and compassion marked how relationships were accepted, and importance was instead placed on a tantric intertwining of spirituality, sexuality, and mindfulness.
Nevertheless, this did not stop some notable sexual headlines, including Queen Anula, who murdered a string of serial lovers, King Kashyapa, whose harem can still be seen depicted on the walls of the Sigiriya Frescoes and orgiastically minded aristocrats, if the erotic 8th-century carvings at Nalanda Gedige are to be credited.
This detachment of sex from love, and of love from romance, gives marriages a greater chance of enduring; and of special friendships providing the shared joy, trust, and mutual support that marriages are supposed to uniquely offer. “When you are a decade into a marriage, sex is a bit like making a risotto,” said Romesh Ranganathan: “a lot of the time you really can't be arsed.”
Ancient, or at least pre-colonial, Lanka has much more that is useful to say about anything of this than the Love and Sex columns of the London Guardian and their voluble ilk. And love, of the sort but rarely seen out West, except perhaps in Larkin’s Arundel Tomb, need no longer present itself as a terrible pothole of the kind celebrated by the Christian rock band, Hillsong United, whose 2000 United Live - Best Friend album crooned coquettishly:
My saving grace, my endless love
Deeper and deeper
I'm falling in love with You
My one desire, my only truth
Deeper and deeper
I'm falling in love with You
Changeable as the relationship norms are now becoming on this island, they may yet be influenced more by the pre-colonial past and avoid repeating the honey traps that bait the rest of what passes for sophisticated society. It is remarkable that once you set aside all those instant indicators of attraction, you begin to notice, as Mother Theresa remarked, that "the world is full of good people.” Even a few very special ones - those as satisfying as the slapping of the sea against sand, that gives you that deep correction in your heart against all the passages of time.