It took a refugee from Nazi Germany, with an interest in economics and Buddhism, to note the singular connection between two of the most apparent characteristics that distinguish Sri Lanka. “Small,” remarked E. F. Schumacher in his eponymous book in 1973, “is beautiful.” It was economics, rather than Sri Lanka, that Schumacher had in mind, but, as with all seismic observations, his simple statement lent a formative new way to understand previously inexpressible truths....
It took a refugee from Nazi Germany, with an interest in economics and Buddhism, to note the singular connection between two of the most apparent characteristics that distinguish Sri Lanka.
“Small,” remarked E. F. Schumacher in his eponymous book in 1973, “is beautiful.”
It was economics, rather than Sri Lanka, that Schumacher had in mind, but, as with all seismic observations, his simple statement lent a formative new way to understand previously inexpressible truths.
Sri Lanka is both small and beautiful. So small, in fact, that it could fit into India 50 times, into Britain almost 4 times, or even into Peru nearly 20 times, its nearest neighbour, Tamil Nadu, could accommodate it twice over, with land to spare. Head a little further north, and 10 times as many people crowd into nearby Pakistan, or six more into Bangladesh.
Schumacher’s only other book, published on his deathbed in 1977, “A Guide for the Perplexed”, is a study of how humans live in the world – but it could easily have lent its title to a mandatory guidebook for issue to every person who passes through Bandaranaike Airport, citizen or guest, VIP or economic migrant.
For little about the island is straightforward, despite or because of its size and beauty. Confronting it for the first time is like encountering Rubik’s Cube for the first time, that infamous multi-coloured rotating brick toy whose coloured ends seem so easy to organise into blocks. The outcome, though satisfying and apparently almost effortless, remains virtually impossible to achieve.
Just below the surface of almost everything on the island, and simmering with delight, richness, chaos, or just plain thwarting befuddlement, lies the complexity of what is quite possibly the most byzantine and bewitching country in the world.
The more you see, the more you wonder. Why?
Why, for example, make a simple presidential election quote so convoluted and full of enough own-goal traps to risk making the spoiled votes equal to the good ones? The 2024 presidential election brought almost 40 candidates forward for a preferential-style vote so complex that the Election Commission had to issue a 200-word note on how to correctly mark the ballot paper.
But perhaps this is to worry unnecessarily, for the country’s political system has, as horse riders might note, plenty of form. By 1978, when the current constitution was adopted, it had already enjoyed three earlier ones, roughly one every 16 years. Now regulated by this, its second constitution since independence, Sri Lanka possesses a governing document of such elastic resilience that it has undergone an average of one significant amendment every second year and has still survived.
Such political robustness is nothing less than what should be expected of an island whose circuitous history meanders through over 2,500 recorded years to take in at least 12 former capital cities, as many, if not more, kingdoms, and 300 recorded kings, some half of whom were estimated to have murdered the other half. Conundrums, reversals and the sudden appearance of polar partisan opposites have riotously followed almost every step of that wild journey. The kings eventually made way for the world’s first elected female head of a modern state when, in July 1960, Sirimavo Bandaranaike was elected Prime Minister. Yet in 2018, a new President reimposed a four-decade-long ban on women buying alcohol.
Given that barely 6% of the country’s supreme law-making body, its parliament, is filled with female MPs, this institutional sexism is understandable – but to fully explain it, one needs to look little further than the fact that just under a fifth of all MPs have just one A-level to their credit. But there’s much more to the rule of law than exams. Should parliament depress you, look to the country’s Supreme Court, a focused and resilient body that has thwarted attempted coups and power grabs through the decades.
“Do I contradict myself?” asked the American poet, Walt Whitman. “Very well then, I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.).
And so too does Sri Lanka.
Despite Nobel Prize-winning scientists, Booker Prize-winning writers, and architects who have profoundly reshaped how people live across the tropical world, its best universities barely scrape into the top 1,000 worldwide, with a pedagogy that deliberately fails almost half its students.
Honest domestic consumers eager to pay their electricity bill must first correctly guess which of 8 categories they fit into before they can pay up, proof, if ever it was needed, that here at least there is little pleasure to be had in being a consumer. Used car prices have more than doubled in the past few years, and at any given time, eggs, onions, rice, milk powder, or even turmeric have entered an Alice-in-Wonderland world, priced well out of reach of ordinary people.
Yet still the kiribath is made. This dish, of coconut-flavoured milk rice, is unique to the island, the muse behind Anuradhapura’s Kiribath Stupa, a monument of almost unimaginable antiquity that was once said to house the sacred tooth relic itself: the left Canine tooth of Gautama Buddha. The snack itself never fails to delight, a comfort food that pushes Butter Chicken, Shepherd's Pie, spaghetti or chocolate brownies to the back of any gourmet’s fridge - yet seems but a demure option in a national cuisine enriched by visitors that stayed too long - Portuguese love cakes, Dutch lamprais, Lisbon pumpkin preserve, deliciously crispy yellow deep-fried Amsterdam koekjes, Tamil dosas, idlis and vada, roast paan, Keralan hoppers, English fish cutlets, Christmas cake, brown Windsor soup or tea itself.
Given the island’s history, it is no surprise that so many national resources should be devoted to the health care of its people. The remains of at least five ancient hospitals are found among Anuradhapura's oldest ruins, and with them the tantalising Brahmi inscriptions of two physicians from the second century BCE.
King after king built and enlarged the hospitals across the land and endowed them with revenue. One even built a hall for several hundred patients, each to be attended to by a slave. The third-century CE king, Buddhadasa, was so committed to health that he even took to doctoring himself, curing snakes and monks alike.
Today, the nation’s free universal Western health care system is among the best in South Asia. Even so, patients, feeling some degree of illness, need first to self-diagnose before electing to see the correct doctor, praying all the time, as they hobble towards the hospital, that they are heading towards the proper cure – a fate that eluded a recent government minister who fell ill after spectacularly drinking a ‘miracle’ COVID potion, concocted by a man who claimed to have received its recipe from Hindu goddess of destruction, Kali.
Even so, it competes head-to-head with traditional medicine. In village after village, town after town, the ancient medical practices of the land are easily accessible, endorsed by the government, and supported by their own doctors, ministries, training, teaching, and hospitals, curing and alleviating the suffering of thousands of people daily.
Nothing is really what it see...
