Ceylon in the Jubilee Year
Ceylon in the Jubilee Year

Author: John Ferguson

Publisher: Asian Educational Services

Published: 1994

Total Pages: 458

ISBN-13: 9788120609631

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With An Account Of The Progress Made Since 1803, And Of The Present Condition Of Its Agricultural And Commercial Enterprises; The Resources Awaiting Development By Capitalists And The Unequalled Attractions Offered To Visitors.

Ceylon and the Portuguese, 1505-1658
Ceylon and the Portuguese, 1505-1658

Author: Paulus Edward Pieris

Publisher: Asian Educational Services

Published: 1999

Total Pages: 326

ISBN-13: 9788120613720

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The Story Of The Portuguese In Ceylon Is Of More Than Local Interest, For It Depicts For Us A Characteristic Phase Of The Beginning Of European Expansion In The East. A Hundred And Fifty Three Years After The Portuguese First Landed In Ceylon They Were Expelled From The Country, Leaving The Gloomy Word Failure Writ Large Over All Their Actions. That However Was Not All, For They Left The Sinhalese A Broken Race, With Their Ancient Civilization Brought Ot The Verge Of Ruin, And Their Scheme Of Life Well-Nigh Destroyed.

Sri Lanka in the Modern Age
Sri Lanka in the Modern Age

Author: Nira Wickramasinghe

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2015-03

Total Pages: 476

ISBN-13: 0190225793

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On the ethnic relations and politics in post 1978 Sri Lanka.

The Buddha's Tooth
The Buddha's Tooth

Author: John S. Strong

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2021-10-22

Total Pages: 366

ISBN-13: 022680187X

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John S. Strong unravels the storm of influences shaping the received narratives of two iconic sacred objects. Bodily relics such as hairs, teeth, fingernails, pieces of bone—supposedly from the Buddha himself—have long served as objects of veneration for many Buddhists. Unsurprisingly, when Western colonial powers subjugated populations in South Asia, they used, manipulated, redefined, and even destroyed these objects to exert control. In The Buddha’s Tooth, John S. Strong examines Western stories, from the sixteenth to the twentieth century, surrounding two significant Sri Lankan sacred objects to illuminate and concretize colonial attitudes toward Asian religions. First, he analyzes a tale about the Portuguese capture and public destruction, in the mid-sixteenth century, of a tooth later identified as a relic of the Buddha. Second, he switches gears to look at the nineteenth-century saga of British dealings with another tooth relic of the Buddha—the famous Daḷadā enshrined in a temple in Kandy—from 1815, when it was taken over by English forces, to 1954, when it was visited by Queen Elizabeth II. As Strong reveals, the stories of both the Portuguese tooth and the Kandyan tooth reflect nascent and developing Western understandings of Buddhism, realizations of the cosmopolitan nature of the tooth, and tensions between secular and religious interests.

Queen Victoria
Queen Victoria

Author: Michael Ledger-Lomas

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2021-04-08

Total Pages: 362

ISBN-13: 0191068004

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This biography evokes the pervasive importance of religion to Queen Victoria's life but also that life's centrality to the religion of Victorians around the globe. The first comprehensive exploration of Victoria's religiosity, it shows how moments in her life—from her accession to her marriage and her successive bereavements—enlarged how she defined and lived her faith. It portrays a woman who had simple convictions but a complex identity that suited her multinational Kingdom: a determined Anglican who preferred Presbyterian Scotland; an ardent Protestant who revered her husband's Lutheran homeland but became sympathetic towards Roman Catholicism and Islam; a moralizing believer in the religion of the home who scorned Sabbatarianism. Drawing on a systematic reading of her journals and a rich selection of manuscripts from British and German archives, Michael Ledger-Lomas sheds new light not just on Victoria's private beliefs but also on her activity as a monarch, who wielded her powers energetically in questions of church and state. Unlike a conventional biography, this book interweaves its account of Victoria's life with a panoramic survey of what religious communities made of it. It shows how different churches and world religions expressed an emotional identification with their Queen and Empress, turning her into an embodiment of their different and often rival conceptions of what her Empire ought to be. The result is a fresh vision of a familiar life, which also explains why monarchy and religion remained close allies in the nineteenth-century British world.