Between 2002 and 2005 and then after 2010, Sri Lanka saw a unique kind of travel undertaken by Sinhala tourists - from the southern parts of the country to its northern warzones and this is the subject of a new book.
This became possible as a direct consequence of the conditions created by Sri Lanka's civil war as well as its cessation, and the landscapes of memory along with the emotions of politics and nationalism that these situations created, says Sasanka Perera, Dean (Faculty of Social Sciences) at the South Asian University here.
His book "Warzone Tourism in Sri Lanka: Tales from Darker Places in Paradise" is an ethnographic study on internal travel analysed through the perspectives of Sinhala tourists.
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Published by Sage, it explores travellers' narratives that reflect the experiences and interactions of those going to northern Sri Lanka, and argues that the discourses that emerge are not simply based on leisure and innocence of travel.
Rather, they have much to do with the 30-year civil war in Sri Lanka and how it has impacted the inter-ethnic relations in the country, creating two mutually antagonistic forms of nationalism - Tamil and Sinhala.
"In this context, the book specifically deals with internal travel and tourism in Sri Lanka in two distinct phases: the first between 2002 and 2005 when a ceasefire between the Sri Lankan government and the LTTE was in operation, and the second was after 2010 when the civil war had ended and the major roads to the north were opened to enable civilian travel without restrictions," Perera says.
He writes the book as a travel narrative as well as a preliminary ethnography of travel.
According to him, warzone tourist travel in general has
structural features in common with conventional pilgrimages.
In any event, this genre of travel makes more contextual sense when situated within wider structures of meaning which informs dominant ideas of travel in the broader Sinhala cultural contexts which people have come to perceive on the basis of pre-existing traditions and practices, he says.
"On one level, these travels were undertaken within a meaning of pilgrimage in the Buddhist scheme of things, which itself had undergone tremendous transformation over hundreds of years.
"The traditional sense of pilgrimage is usually brought to contemporary Sinhala consciousness through long-term practice as well as via narratives from ancient historical texts written in Pali such as the 'wamsas', temple paintings and images crystallised in the Sinhala language verse literature of the 1400s written during Kotte Period known as sandesa kavya," Perera writes.
He argues that people travelled to satisfy their curiosity about what the war had brought as well as to see a part of the country that had been inaccessible for a long time.
"That long-term inaccessibility had meant that pre-war sites of interest, most of which were religious sites, had not been accessible to people for a long time. It is precisely due to this latter reason that pilgrim sites invariably became a part of most people's standard itinerary during both phases," the author says.
