‘Forget not your old country’: absence, identity, and marginalization in the practice and development of Sri Lankan Buddhism in Malaysia

Abstract

This article examines various linkages through which Sri Lankan diaspora communities in Malaysia sought and still seek meaning. Taking my cue from Engseng Ho’s work on the Hadrami in which he notes how absence shapes diasporic experiences, I investigate the constructive role that feelings of loss have played in the imagining and reimagining of the Sri Lankan community’s identity in Malaysia. More specifically, this article considers the role that particular sites of memory – Buddhist institutions, rituals, and cemeteries – play in the production of an ethnic and religious identity. Finally, I explore how such produced identities may become threatened by competing communities and by the nation state as well as how interreligious and interethnic alliances produced through temple networks provide the means by which state control could be challenged and feelings of marginalization overcome.