Travels in Sri Lanka: Trincomalee's Indian Feel

We came to Trincomalee, a port town on the east coast of Sri Lanka, to lie on one of its sandy, relatively unpopulated beaches, and snorkel. While our former travels had taken us only to Sinhalese Buddhist-majority sites (in general, this group makes up 70% 0f the Sri Lankan population), Trincomalee is mostly Hindu Tamil and was the site of much fighting during the Tamil War that only ended two years ago.

While the place does not bear visible marks of those battles, we were told there is a significant incursion of the Buddhist religion, with giant Buddhas being put up right next to Hindu shrines.

We visited Koneswaram Temple, the site of an ancient Shiva Lingam temple built on the spot where Rawana (the legendary demon king of Lanka)'s palace stood and thus one of the most holy places in the Hindu tradition. When the Portuguese invaded Sri Lanka in the early 17th century (their century-long incursion was ended by the Dutch), they destroyed the whole temple and threw it the sea, building a fort on the remains. The science fiction diver Arthur C. Clarke, who also happened to be one of the earliest scuba divers and spent most of his life in Sri Lanka, found the lingam in the sea near the coast on one of his dives in the 1950s and brought it up. Since then, a modern temple has been built to house the lingam, and the place is now the site of pilgrimage.

However, the Sinhalese built a huge, concrete Buddha right next to the temple, just to show the Hindu minority what's what. (The Sinhalese claim that the ancient temple was actually Buddhist, not Hindu). Incidentally, Sri Lanka is the only country in the world we could think of that has a truly militant and violent form of Buddhist worship.

And here, on this holy Hindu spot, was our re-introduction to India: instead of the pensive Buddhist shrines, the hustle, the bustle, the dirt all again, the coconut husks, and the crazy colors.