Growing up Sinhala and Buddhist in Sri Lanka, one cannot but be familiar with Anagarika Dharmapala (1864–1933). As many of us have known as a matter of quotidian socialization, Dharmapala was the preeminent spokesperson and activist of Sri Lanka's Buddhist revivalism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and, as a result, he was the most significant cultural hero of the Sinhala Buddhists (the country's ethno-religious majority) in the modern period. Within the prism of the interethnic conflict involving the Sinhalas and Tamils, which dominated postcolonial politics in the country, and the resultant civil war, which engulfed Sri Lanka for thirty years, Dharmapala is revered by the Sinhalas, while he is seen as a divisive and chauvinist figure by ethno-religious others as well as much of the formal social science scholarship on him. Clearly, some aspects of his local politics and particularly his rhetoric support this view. But this...

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