Experimental Aesthetics and Enchanted Ecologies: Reimagining Sri Lankan Photography by Dr. Edwin Coomasaru

Kandyan musician Amunugama Suramba is mid-movement. He beats a wooden double-headed gata beraya drum, worn around his waist, playing a song with sacred Buddhist associations. He stands on a grassy ridge, the low-angle perspective framing his figure against a dramatic sky. Modernist photographer Lionel Wendt’s (1900-44) black-and-white gelatin silver print, Suramba drumming (c.1933-44), is part of a new group show of modern and contemporary Sri Lankan photography at Jhaveri Contemporary in Mumbai. Exhibited alongside Wendt are Cassie Machado (b.1982) and Vasantha Yogananthan (b.1985), all three of whom have both Sri Lankan and European ancestry, transnationalism having shaped the lives and practices of each. Photography itself can be traced back to 1840s Sri Lanka, its first century almost exclusively in service of colonial rule, depicting essentialised ethnographic types or picturesque landscapes ripe for exploitation. Wendt, Machado, and Yogananthan’s experimental aesthetics, by contrast, have sought to challenge the medium’s imperial history. Yogananthan’s series A Myth of Two Souls (2013-2021) is a contemporary retelling of the Ramayana, an ancient Indian epic text written in stages between the seventh and third centuries BCE. Machado’s body of photograms, When Colours Return Home to Light (2024), is an imaginative collaboration with Wendt: employing some of the novel techniques he pioneered, to explore present-day South and Southeast Asian diasporic identities in Europe.

Wendt encountered modernist art while living in London between 1919-24, taking up photography from c.1933 after returning to Sri Lanka, engaging with European avant-garde aesthetics while also celebrating the island’s heritage. Suramba accompanied Wendt to the UK’s capital in 1934 to record the soundtrack for filmmaker Basil Wright’s documentary Song of Ceylon (1934), a poetic critique of British colonialism (1796-1948), which was by then nearing its end. Wendt championed Kandyan dance as part of a larger early-twentiethcentury cultural renaissance in Sri Lanka, following art historian Ananda Coomaraswamy’s book Medieval Sinhalese Art (1908), which condemned Western imperialism and celebrated Kandyan craft. Kandy was a Sinhalese kingdom ruled in its final decades by Tamil monarchs, who practiced Hinduism and patronised Buddhism. The region, with its own subsistence-based communal land practices and ring of defensive forests, was the very last territory to be conquered by Europeans in 1815: uniting the island into a single polity for the first time in modern history. Suramba drumming has deep significance for Sri Lanka, as does Wendt’s practice as a whole, created during a pivotal period of societal transformation. The introduction of universal suffrage and elected representatives in 1931 sparked a series of social changes: expansion of basic medical care and rice subsidies, repairs to ancient irrigation works, the redistribution of land, and support for local food production. Wendt’s portrayal of Sri Lanka during this time can be read through the concept of abundance: an idea taken from the island’s folklore, in which the land is invested with spiritual knowledge and used sustainably, with collective access to resources. He photographed flora that held significant religious associations, such as lotus flowers or banyan trees, as well as the cultures and customs of communities living off the land. Capturing Kandyan performance, Suramba drumming stages aspects of the island’s ritual practices as symbolic sources of opposition to colonialism, even though Wendt used an artform associated with imperialism and implicated in environmentally-damaging mining. When Wendt’s photogravures were posthumously published in Ceylon (1950), the book’s introduction claimed Sri Lankans ‘living in traditional ways, had not become alienated from [their] environment’. But British colonialism had replaced common land, the source of mythic belief and subsistence living, with mass-crop plantations that extracted wealth back to the UK. Underlying economic or social structures established by the British have endured since independence, with the 1930s political settlement unravelled in subsequent decades. Ceylon’s multiethnic celebration of the island, documenting Hindu temples and Buddhist craft, was both of its time and also imagined a future Sri Lanka that has yet to pass. The island’s various ethnic groups pre-existed but were institutionalised under the British; divide-and-rule tactics continued to serve elite interests after independence, with civil war (1983-2009) fought largely between state-backed Sinhalese and separatist Tamil armed Wendt encountered modernist art while living in London between 1919-24, taking up photography from c.1933 after returning to Sri Lanka, engaging with European avant-garde aesthetics while also celebrating the island’s heritage. Suramba accompanied Wendt to the UK’s capital in 1934 to record the soundtrack for filmmaker Basil Wright’s documentary Song of Ceylon (1934), a poetic critique of British colonialism (1796-1948), which was by then nearing its end. Wendt championed Kandyan dance as part of a larger early-twentiethcentury cultural renaissance in Sri Lanka, following art historian Ananda Coomaraswamy’s book Medieval Sinhalese Art (1908), which condemned Western imperialism and celebrated Kandyan craft. Kandy was a Sinhalese kingdom ruled in its final decades by Tamil monarchs, who practiced Hinduism and patronised Buddhism.5 The region, with its own subsistence-based communal land practices and ring of defensive forests, was the very last territory to be conquered by Europeans in 1815: uniting the island into a single polity for the first time in modern history. Suramba drumming has deep significance for Sri Lanka, as does Wendt’s practice as a whole, created during a pivotal period of societal transformation. The introduction of universal suffrage and elected representatives in 1931 sparked a series of social changes: expansion of basic medical care and rice subsidies, repairs to ancient irrigation works, the redistribution of land, and support for local food production.

Wendt’s portrayal of Sri Lanka during this time can be read through the concept of abundance: an idea taken from the island’s folklore, in which the land is invested with spiritual knowledge and used sustainably, with collective access to resources. He photographed flora that held significant religious associations, such as lotus flowers or banyan trees, as well as the cultures and customs of communities living off the land. Capturing Kandyan performance, Suramba drumming stages aspects of the island’s ritual practices as symbolic sources of opposition to colonialism, even though Wendt used an artform associated with imperialism and implicated in environmentally-damaging mining. When Wendt’s photogravures were posthumously published in Ceylon (1950), the book’s introduction claimed Sri Lankans ‘living in traditional ways, had not become alienated from [their] environment’. But British colonialism had replaced common land, the source of mythic belief and subsistence living, with mass-crop plantations that extracted wealth back to the UK. Underlying economic or social structures established by the British have endured since independence, with the 1930s political settlement unravelled in subsequent decades. Ceylon’s multiethnic celebration of the island, documenting Hindu temples and Buddhist craft, was both of its time and also imagined a future Sri Lanka that has yet to pass.

The island’s various ethnic groups pre-existed but were institutionalised under the British; divide-and-rule tactics continued to serve elite interests after independence, with civil war (1983-2009) fought largely between state-backed Sinhalese and separatist Tamil armed groups. As a result of ethnic conflict and social unrest, large numbers of Sri Lankans have relocated to Europe since 1948. Yogananthan and Machado are part of this diaspora, having been born and resident in either the UK or France, both with mixed-race backgrounds like Wendt. If Wendt’s photographic work between c.1933-44 reflected and represented a cultural moment of Sri Lankan collective politics against colonialism, Yogananthan and Machado’s artworks in the exhibition were made at a very different time: a decade of economic crisis, climate change, social division, and protest movements between the early 2010s and 2020s. But like Wendt before them, Yogananthan and Machado have imagined enchanted landscapes or unbound identities, all three having set out to challenge the ethnographic or environmentallyexploitative imperial legacy of photography in Sri Lanka. As Wendt did decades earlier, Yogananthan and Machado both document their historical moment, as well as conjuring otherworldly possibilities for places or peoples in a present perhaps yet to exist.

On display at Jhaveri Contemporary are images first published in Yogananthan’s photobooks from the series A Myth of Two Souls: Exile (2017), Howling Winds (2019), and Amma (2021). Yogananthan has described the project as operating in a surreal space between fiction and reality. Photographed along north or eastern Sri Lankan and south Indian coastlines, Howling Winds offers a poetic reinterpretation of a chapter of the Ramayana in which Rama searches for his wife Sita, who has been kidnapped by the Lankan king Ravana. Writer Arshia Sattar translated ancient poet Valmiki’s version of the mythic epic tale for Howling Winds: in the text Rama orders hundreds of thousands of animals from all around the world to build a bridge across the Gulf of Mannar, made of forest wood and mountain peaks, in an area where a chain of natural limestone shoals exist between the two land masses.16 This passage is symbolically suggested by Yogananthan’s Crossing the Sea (2018): a photograph of a fresco housed in Trincomalee’s Hindu Koneswaram Temple, which was restored in 1952 after its previous building was destroyed by Portuguese colonialists in 1622-24, with earliest records relating to the spiritual site dating from the sixth century BCE. A crack in the wall runs down the right-hand side of the image, the painted surface depicting three small boats as a series of cream and red brushstrokes against a pale blue sea, framed by rocks rising from the water and the outline of mountains emerging from wispy clouds on the horizon.

Koneswaram Temple has long associations with both Rama and Ravana, as well as also having been a religious destination in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries for monarchs of the Sinhalese kingdom of Kotte. A poetic tradition of the Ramayana itself dates back to the fifth century or earlier in Sri Lanka, with considerable development from the 1300s when an independent Tamil kingdom of Jaffna emerged and migration from south India shaped the island’s culture – contributing to Buddhist architecture, agricultural rituals, and the Sinhala language.18 For centuries, Sri Lankan Tamil and Buddhist readers have reimagined Ravana from evil spirit to the island’s mythic ancestor. From the late 1800s in particular, both Buddhist and Tamil groups have reinterpreted Ravana to make claims about their own respective indigeneity to Sri Lanka. But during and after the civil war, both Tamils and Buddhists also weaponised Ravana rhetoric to serve militaristic worldviews.21 Scholars have identified the 2010s as a decade in which the island was searching for a new collective story in the wake of the conflict, with Ravana having the potential to symbolise a source of shared heritage.22 Composed of photographs primarily taken between 2013- 19, Yogananthan’s A Myth of Two Souls speculatively proposes the Ramayana as a centuries-old cultural interface between southern India and Sri Lanka, albeit one with a long contested history.

Yogananthan’s efforts to trace connections between the island and subcontinent recall Coomaraswamy’s Medieval Sinhalese Art, published over a century earlier. Coomaraswamy argued that ‘Sinhalese art is essentially Indian, but possesses this especial interest, that it is in many ways of an earlier character, and more truly Hindu – though Buddhist in intention, – than any Indian art surviving on the mainland’. Whether or not this analysis is strictly speaking true, Coomaraswamy’s attempt to find a shared aesthetic heritage was part of a larger project to resist British rule. Resident for part of his life in the UK, also with a mixedrace background, Coomaraswamy had no interest in essentialising ethnic identities in ways that served colonial domination over the island. It is not known if Coomaraswamy influenced Wendt directly, but both operated in an overlapping cultural climate with shared intellectual concerns. Representations of and relations to the natural environment are an important aspect of Medieval Sinhalese Art, which claimed eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Sri Lankan craft ‘was the art of a people for whom husbandry was the most honourable of all occupations, amongst whom the landless man was a nobody, and whose ploughmen spoke as elegantly as courtiers’. Wendt also celebrated agricultural or subsistence practices that for him symbolised opposition to colonial mass-crop plantations.

In Wendt’s Sailing a Boat (c.1933-44), a sun-lit ship glides towards a sandy shore from a distance, recalling Ceylon’s photogravures of fishing and small-scale coastal economies. Yogananthan’s Looking For Love (2018), also on display in the exhibition, depicts a fisherman standing on the shore in Mannar as he untangles catch from his nets. As with Wendt, Yogananthan draws on local mythic knowledge and reverence for the natural world to picture enchanted lands, unlike colonial photography which used the medium as a form of documentary evidence to record ethnographic types and environmental extraction. Where Wendt employed small Rolleiflex and wide-angle or telephoto Leica equipment, Yogananthan has used large file or medium film format cameras, with the results digitised and then produced as colour inkjet prints.25 Little is known about Wendt’s relationship with his models, a subject of scholarly speculation, but Yogananthan sought collaborative conversations about the composition with his sitters – inviting them to look through the lens and suggest their own poses.26 For When Colours Return Home to Light, Machado placed a similar dialogue at the centre of her practice. Conceived of as an engagement with Wendt’s innovative techniques almost a century earlier, Machado met her subjects in various ways: through an open call, the Centre Mandapa in Paris, friends’ contacts, or even in public.

When Colours Return Home to Light is a series of life-size photograms, depicting members of the South and Southeast Asian diaspora in Paris, where the portraits were created. Photograms are images made without a camera: Machado’s sitters and sensitive paper are both momentarily exposed to light in the studio, the final image capturing silhouettes in brilliant white. The artworks themselves are produced as silver prints, similar to Wendt’s own photographic materials in the 1930s-40s. Machado’s participants are all connected to forms of cultural representation as either broadcasters, models, artists, or dancers. She spent considerable time with each before and after entering the studio: listening to stories of their lives and kinship networks, reflecting on histories of empire and its legacies in the present. One participant, who runs a podcast on South Asian identities and culture, stands with her knees crossed and outstretched hands upturned in When Colours Return Home to Light V. Machado created a series of deliberate light leaks while making the piece: strips of reddish orange static spill across the figure and pale green background, marking traces of time passing. Such an interplay between figuration and abstraction can also be found in Wendt and Yogananthan’s work, each playing with and undermining photography’s reputation for documentary evidence or stable record for scientific knowledge systems.

Machado, in particular, gestures to and challenges images of essentialised ethnographic types created by colonial photographers in Sri Lanka as a means of instrumentalising ethnic identities. In Charles Scowen’s studio portraits produced in Kandy during the 1880s, for example, stiff figures pose in rigid postures while wearing traditional clothing. The photographs’ titles make it clear that each is meant to represent a generalised character: Malay Girl, Sinhalese Headman, Chettiar Man. 29 By contrast, When Colours Return Home to Light does not set out to produce an identifiable visual encyclopaedia for the purposes of imperial rule. Machado is not invested in producing a recognisable library of the South or Southeast Asian diaspora. Instead, When Colours Return Home to Light draws attention to ways in which representation itself is often both politically and aesthetically staged, while refusing to reify racial stereotypes which have long rested on scopic regimes of surveillance. Eighteenth-century botanists first developed race as a conceptual system of inherited hierarchical identity to serve white supremacy, using plant knowledge to order the world’s inhabitants.European colonialism manufactured modern ideas of race, sexuality, gender: legislating kinship structures or erotic practices to radically intervene in land relations.31 Photography historically played a role in this process, a legacy Machado works to unravel.

When Colours Return Home to Light VII is a portrait of a professional Mohiniyattam dancer: he poses with one arm raised, forefinger pointing at his forehead, feet raised on the tip of his toes, crossed legs outlined by the curves of his clothing. The performance in ceremonial attire recalls Wendt’s Suramba drumming, while the composition evokes his studio works like Man with printed sarong (c.1933-44). Aesthetic connections can also be drawn with the framing and ritual dress of Yogananthan’s Demigod (2019). Capturing its silhouette against a deep red background, When Colours Return Home to Light VII reflects on histories of mythic movement in Kerala, where the dance originates: a southern region of India on the Malabar Coast near Sri Lanka, first unified as a state in 1956. Writing in the 1980s, dancer Bharati Shivaji described Mohiniyattam’s circular movements as akin to ‘ceaseless waves of the ocean’ or ‘endless coconut trees swaying in the breeze’.32 Scholars have noted that the performative gestures symbolically dramatize birds, flowers, or paddy leaves of Kerala’s landscapes. But the Hindu artform itself has also changed considerably over hundreds of years. Long associated with female dancers, until the early twentieth century Mohiniyattam was connected to practices of polyandrous marriage and matrilineal inheritance, linked to the Nayar rice-cultivating caste who often administered or owned large lands.

But from the 1940s, Nayar men employed in British bureaucracy abolished communal property and instituted monogamous marriage, reforming matrilineal customs. Mohiniyattam itself faced colonial restrictions from 1931-38, although a ban was partially repealed in 1940 and new law clarified in 1941.36 Indian dance practices were widely suppressed under British rule for supposedly promoting immoral forms of femininity, with some Indian nationalist reformers criticising Mohiniyattam on similarly conservative grounds. Mohiniyattam’s reconstruction from the 1930s onwards, connected to larger Indian independence movements, was based on a chaste and demure portrayal of womanhood deemed more appropriate for post-colonial nationbuilding projects.In drawing on the history of Mohiniyattam with a male dancer, Machado critically considers ways in which gender has historically been a site of imperial or anti-colonial struggles in South Asia, an experience that would have been all too familiar for Wendt: his queer portraits of Sri Lankan men taken at a time in which homosexuality had been outlawed by the British as ‘against the order of nature’.With such a supposed natural order largely shaped by European science for imperial ends, sociologist Asoka Bandarage has called for a re-enchantment of the natural world in response to currentday climate breakdown in Sri Lanka.

When Colours Return Home to Light takes its title from an essay published by Nigerian-British poet Ben Okri in 2011, a critique of European Enlightenment myths. ‘Fascism, the slave trade, and genocide have grown out of the need to master the forces of nature … And the domination of the world’, he writes.41 The poet condemns imperial environmental practices, which enclosed common lands and persecuted indigenous beliefs, shaped by a scientific drive to exploit natural resources. Okri’s words resonate with the artworks on display: each artist in the show implicates South Asian ritual customs in environmental histories, conjuring visions that exist between material reality and otherworldly myths. Challenging photography’s colonial role in reproducing ecological extraction or ethnographic stereotypes – Wendt, Machado, and Yogananthan all offer an expansive and unbounded idea of identity in the context of Sri Lanka. Rather than reinforcing exclusive ethnic categories, Wendt traced connections between Hindu and Buddhist cultures, while Machado and Yogananthan situate the island’s aesthetics in relation to either the Indian subcontinent or South and Southeast Asian diaspora in Europe. Marking a century since Wendt’s return to Sri Lanka in 1924 after encountering European modernism in London, the exhibition considers how two distinct and different historical moments shaped the experimental practices of three artists who have each reimagined Sri Lankan photography.

Dr. Edwin Coomasaru, 2024
Commissioned to accompany the exhibit Bridge to Lanka, Lionel Wendt, Cassie Machado, Vasantha Yoganathan, Jhaveri Contemporary, Mumbai, India July 2024

Link to download full pdf and full essay footnotes.