Buddhism, Gender, and the Language Order of Early Second Millennium Sri Lanka

Existing scholarship on Sri Lankan history has tended to assume that Pali—the liturgical and scholastic language of Theravāda Buddhism—was also always the language of royal prestige it later became. In this colloquium, I present a revised history of the premodern Sri Lankan “language order,” in which I draw on inscriptional data to make three key interventions. First, I identify a distinct genre of Sinhala-language inscriptional practice, emerging in the ninth century, which cannot be explained away as mere imitation of Sanskrit praśasti inscriptions. Second, I document the increasing use of Tamil and Sanskrit—often dismissed as alien and non-Buddhist languages—in royal inscriptions from the early second millennium kingdom of Poḷonnaruva. Finally, I show that Pali appears only late in the inscriptional record and, notably, is initially employed only by royal consorts, not ruling monarchs. Together, these interventions challenge our received wisdom on the interplay of religion, gender, and transculturality in the formation of Sri Lankan Buddhist culture. This is event is hosted with the Buddhist Studies Chair, HCTS.