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Memory, modernity and history: the landscapes of Geoffrey Bawa in Sri Lanka, 1948–1998

This cross-disciplinary and critically-located article makes an innovative contribution to knowledge and understanding of contemporary South Asian design and landscape studies. The article discusses this particular landscape as a site of memory and a place where modernity and history are negotiated. It examines the production of modernity in Sri Lanka during the period immediately after independence and, through the process of design and experimentation in the shaping of the landscape, negotiation of the island’s relationship to colonial and pre-colonial histories. The article suggests that this landscape is a site where colonial histories and vernacular traditions re-staged or re-presented the modern in contemporary Sri Lanka. Although focusing on a specific location, the article sheds new light on wider cultural concerns that are of direct relevance to debates at the present time in Sri Lanka about contested aspects of cultural production in the aftermath of a civil war and Sri Lanka’s relation to its previous histories. These include the coming into being of a newly independent nation, that nation’s relationship with its own distant, pre-colonial past as well as recent colonial history and the post-colonial present. The article is significant also for the manner in which it contributes to the ‘spatial turn’ in South Asian studies and uses the case study landscape as a vehicle to examine and critique the spatial imagination in a decolonizing South Asian country. By deploying the landscape as a case study and through a close ‘reading’ of that place, the article re-inserts the local into global networks of design and cultural production. It sheds new light on current debates about the island’s histories as legitimating ethno-religious narratives and more broadly contributes to the development of transnational histories of design.