By Premakumara de Silva –

Prof. Premakumara de Silva

In this book Neena Mahadev, an anthropologist and Sri Lankan expert explores the contesting efforts of Buddhist nationalists and Christian evangelists to reshape Sri Lanka’s religious, economic, and political landscapes. Mahadev recounts how modernist and traditionalist Theravāda Buddhists, Pentecostal newcomers, long-established Christian denominations, local deity and spirit cults, and the innovations of mavericks intermingle in Sri Lanka’s multi-religious public sphere. Karma and Grace examines the nationalist anxieties that have grown alongside intensifying millennial urgencies as Theravada Buddhist revivalists seek to retain and Christian evangelists express hopes to newly carve out sovereign religious domains. Through vivid ethnography and keen observations of media events, the book explores these competing aspirations, techniques of political mobilization in the war and post-war eras when various religious agents were embroiled in effort to redraw the lines of conflict and belonging in Sri Lanka.

By Neena Mahadev, Published by Columbia University Press, New York – 2023, 336 Pages, List Price: $35.00, ISBN: 9780231205290

This book contains six chapters, along with an introduction and brief epilogue. Chapter One introduces the stakes of Buddhist–Christian tensions in contemporary Sri Lanka, traced through narratives of conspiracy theories, conversions, and economic crises. Chapter Two provides a detailed study of the ostensible tension between Karma and Grace, by attending to the insufficient logics of gift-giving, particularly Buddhist dana against Christian charity. Chapter Three focuses on Pentecostal beliefs in the miraculous everyday divine presence, while Chapter Four attempts to analyze Roman Catholics interventions and the emergence of evangelical Catholicism. Chapter Five detailed out Buddhist re-orientations towards the salvific possibilities of the Bodhisattva Maitreya. Chapter Six provides, perhaps, the most refined ethnographical detail of tracing ‘Ordinary Biographies of Converts, Apostates, and Dual Belongers’ in ways which remix and complicate themes introduced in earlier chapters. It shows how ordinary Buddhists and Christians converts find a number of small ways to mitigate conflict and simply persist in the experiment of living together.

The book is setting out to contribute to scholarly literature on nationalism and evangelism, rapture and cultural continuity, religious media and mediation, and most importantly the negotiated nature of pluralism in a multi-religious context in contemporary Sri Lanka. The book vividly explains how Pentecostal Christian evangelists publicize their faith and explores how “the Good News” (suba aranchiya) promises the immediacy of Christ’s gift of grace is received among Buddhist disbelievers who conceive of the attainment of nirvana as requiring many lifetimes of deep moral labour or meritorious karma. It theorizes the presences and liveliness entailed by Buddhism and Christianity as rival forms of religiosity while exploring the conditions of possibilities for religious pluralism in postwar and millennial Sri Lanka. Despite overarching intensifications of anti-pluralistic religious politics, the possibility of accommodating religious differences have been presented with detailed ethnographical examples. The ethnography illuminates how Buddhists and Christians, even those who are interpolated by exclusivists’ forms of religiosity, manage to mitigate interreligious antagonisms. Several chapters of the book demonstrates how interreligious competition creates a field that generates not only of antagonism but also possibilities for diversification of religious movements and forms that allow plurality to flourish even in the face of ever-rearticulating conflicts. Therefore, the book finds not just familiar hostilities but unexpected convergences in the present religious landscape in Sri Lanka. It also demonstrates how Christians and Buddhists undertake complex negotiations to ensure social peace across religious divides. This contribution is most welcomed to Sri Lankan studies and is well-structured and beautifully written as it combines a comprehensive critical assessment of the literature and debates on anthropology of religion and inter-religiosity in contemporary Sri Lanka.

Karma and Grace will be of obvious interest to any scholars of Sri Lanka; of the anthropology of religion; religious pluralism and of religious tensions in general. On top of that I must mention that the book has won the most prestigious book prizes this year including the Clifford Geertz Prize in the Anthropology of Religion of Society for the Anthropology of Religion in the American Anthropological Association (AAA).