Anthropologist Gananath Obeyesekere had told his wife a few days prior to his passing on 25 March 2025, ‘I am going to the land of nothingness’. I doubt he was referring to one of his favourite poems, ‘The Wasteland’ by T.S. Eliot, parts of which he often recited by memory in many conversations. Rather, my sense is that he had in mind the Buddhist notion of nirvana, the end of suffering in the entangled cycle of death and rebirth at a moment he became aware of his impending end. After all, in addition to being one of the most erudite scholars of Buddhist practice in the world, he was also very familiar with its precepts, which he took seriously in life in the same way he would perceive theory and philosophy in academic work. Obeyesekere was not only an outstanding scholar but also a decent and fearless human being.
Given his lifelong unparalleled contribution to South Asian studies and global anthropology, his passing is not an occasion for mourning and sadness, but for celebration. From his first book, Land Tenure in Village Ceylon: A Sociological and Historical Study (1967) to his last major work, The Awakened Ones: Phenomenology of Visionary Experience (2012), he combined several essential elements which I believe are becoming increasingly rare even in his own discipline, social anthropology. That is, his arguments did not stem from abstract clinical theorisation not based on ground conditions; rather, it was extensive fieldwork, the thickness of ethnography and exhaustive reading across disciplines and genres that breathed life into his theory, categories, conceptualisations and their finetuning. It is not an exaggeration to suggest that he—perhaps more than any other South Asian scholar—played the most crucial role in bringing psychoanalysis squarely into the midst of ethnographic practice. This is clearly evident in Medusa’s Hair: An Essay on Personal Symbols and Religious Experience (1981) and The Cult of the Goddess Pattini (1984).
In the early 1990s, I was working with him at Princeton University as his Research Fellow, collecting archival and library material needed for his book, Cannibal Talk: The Man-Eating Myth and Human Sacrifice in the South Seas (2005). During this time, I had several conversations with him on the need to decolonise anthropology in terms of its dominant orientations, theory and methodological approaches, and to see what kind of knowledges from South Asia and elsewhere in the global South, including the abstract thinking of Theravada Buddhism, might make sense in reorienting anthropology. I was trying to suggest, whether we could speak to the world in a different idiom if we attempted such an approach. I doubt I ever used the word ‘decolonisation’ in these conversations. But at the time, despite the fact that Obeyesekere was very much a man of the Enlightenment and working well within the knowledge structures and limitations that both the Enlightenment and colonialism brought about, I thought there was much in his life that could allow him to be seen as a ‘kind of’ pioneering decolonial thinker, except when it came to the influential bodies of theory and philosophy that drove much of his work.
After all, he opted not to proceed to the United Kingdom for higher studies in the early 1960s, when it was the dominant fashion in colonial and post-colonial Ceylon, and opted for the United States instead. By his own admission, this was a decision rooted in his anti-colonial sentiment. His texts, Cannibal Talk and The Apotheosis of Captain Cook: European Mythmaking in the Pacific (1997), and the crux of his entire debate with Marshall Sahlins between 1985 and 1995 indicated his keenness to shift intellectual debates in favour of ‘natives’, be they Hawaiians, Fijians, Lankans or others, when he thought non-local knowledge systems were not doing justice towards understanding local experiences and histories.
It is also against this backdrop that one can see his contributions that significantly impacted the foundations of social anthropology, psychoanalysis and later the critique of coloniality with a steadfast refusal to let the histories of the world, particularly of its colonised regions, remain within the control of colonial adventurers and their descendants. It is in this context that one can understand three of his final books. These include The Doomed King: A Requiem for Sri Vikrama Rajasinha (2017), Stories and Histories: Sri Lankan Pasts and the Dilemmas of Narrative Representation (2019) and The Many Faces of the Kandyan Kingdom 1591–1765: Lessons for Our Time (2020). All these attempted to reinterpret the Sri Lankan past and rescue it simultaneously from colonial historiography and narrative conventions as well as recent local nationalist and exclusionist modes of seeing the past. However, he did not want to be labelled a decolonial thinker.
Obeyesekere’s work on Buddhist practices in Sri Lanka, his popular commentaries on institutionalised Buddhism’s implication in violence, as well as his antipathy towards the induction of very young children into the order of Buddhist monks, earned him considerable hostility in Sri Lanka’s sectarian politics. Much of this came from a situation where his serious work on Buddhism was not widely read or understood in Sri Lanka. In a sense, he was constantly in search of what might be called a ‘Buddhist conscience’¹1 in political and social conditions where that conscience was often marked by its absence in recent Sri Lankan politics.
He retired from Princeton in 2000. Nevertheless, he did not retire from research, reading and writing until very late in life. In the 2000s, he was involved in a phase of long-term fieldwork among the Veddas, the Sri Lankan Adivasis. By then, he was in his 70s. When I visited him in his field site in Bibile in the Uva Province of Sri Lanka in September 2007 with two of my former students, Dr Jagath Pathirage and Dr Chandra Lekamarachchi, amidst our own fieldwork, clad in a lungi and a T-shirt, he was resting with his assistants in very basic conditions. We were impressed that his advanced age could not deter him from engaging in active field research in rather difficult conditions, or make a dent in his thinking and oratory skills.
1 Adapted from Dimuthu Saman Wettasinghe’s 2024 documentary film, Gananath Obeyesekere: In Search of Buddhist Conscience.
The field conversations with him contributed immensely to rethinking our own work in the subject area, including the symbolic interpretations of the Adivasi participation in the procession known as the Maha Perahera at the nearby Buddhist temple, the Mahiyanganana Raja Maha Vihara.
Later, when this phase of fieldwork was coming to an end, he wrote to me with the request to ensure that the work was completed as a book based on his notes and conversations with his field assistant and wife in the event of his death. He did not want anything to be left incomplete. I assured him that he would be able to do this himself, and if, for some reason, he could not, I would do as he wished. Happily, he completed the work and a few others written at this time, all of which were published in Sri Lanka, unlike his better-known and celebrated earlier work. He had also given his daughter, my cousin, specific instructions on how I, along with another relative, should light his funeral pyre, after circumambulating the coffin thrice counterclockwise. All this is part of Buddhist funeral rites. But true to form, he was not taking any chances.
Compared to the scholar, global thinker and South Asianist, very little is known publicly about Obeyesekere, the person. This is mostly because he was a very private person. Personally, he played a crucial role in convincing me to rethink—successfully—the crude religio-nationalist thinking my generation inherited by virtue of living in Sri Lanka from the 1960s onwards and its education system. He also managed to turn me in the direction of examining carefully the political and social fallout of the institutionalisation of political violence as a means of governance in Sri Lanka after 1977, which many citizens did not see for what it was. It is also in this context that he played an important role in helping several younger academics, including me, to find our way to other regions in the world where higher education could become a means of unlearning and intellectual emancipation. For me, finding that space in the United States in the mid-1980s with his help had a considerable impact on charting my own future academic trajectory.
It was my association with him at a very young age that also introduced me to a specific cultural take on life that became important later. It was through him I came to know of the modernist Sri Lankan painter George Keyt and his work, as well as the lives and works of both Pablo Picasso and Edgar Degas, the former through the originals on his walls and the latter by way of museum quality prints acquired on his travels, some of which he had gifted to my parents.
I hope present and future generations will not cease to remember his unparalleled contributions to social anthropology in general and understanding Sri Lanka and our region in particular.
As I celebrate his life, work and the enduring influence he had on me, it would only be befitting to bid him farewell with the following Pali stanza he knew well:
Aniccā vata saṅkhārā,
Uppādavayadhammino,
Uppajjitvā nirujjhanti,
Tesaṁ vūpasamo sukhō ti²
[Impermanent truly are compounded things (conditionings), by nature arising and passing away. Having arisen when they are extinguished (with insight), their eradication brings happiness.]
2 ‘The Story About King Mahāsudassana (Mahāsudassanajātaka)’ [Ja 95], https:// ancient-buddhist-texts.net/English-Texts/Jataka-Verses/095.htm. Accessed on 19 May 2025.
REFERENCES
Obeyesekere, Gananath. 1967. Land Tenure in Village Ceylon: A Sociological and Historical Study. London: Cambridge University Press.
———. 1981. Medusa’s Hair: An Essay on Personal Symbols and Religious Experience. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
———. 1984. The Cult of the Goddess Pattini. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
———. 1997. The Apotheosis of Captain Cook: European Mythmaking in the Pacific. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
———. 2005. Cannibal Talk: The Man-Eating Myth and Human Sacrifice in the South Seas. Berkeley: University of California Press.
———. 2012. The Awakened Ones: Phenomenology of Visionary Experience. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 2017. The Doomed King: A Requiem for Sri Vikrama Rajasinha. Colombo: Sailfish.
———. 2019. Stories and Histories: Sri Lankan Pasts and the Dilemmas of Narrative Representation. Nugegoda: Sarasavi Publishers.
———. 2020. The Many Faces of the Kandyan Kingdom 1591–1765: Lessons for Our Time. Colombo: Bay Owl Press.
Colombo Institute, Kalapaluwawa, Sasanka Perera
Rajagiriya, Sri Lanka
E-mail: chairman@colomboinstitute.lk