“Dhuma” – by Poornima Jayasinghe

A multi-sensory, interdisciplinary offering of smoke, memory, and resistance

 

At the Maha Stupa’s Pahan Poojawa, the ritual offering of oil lamps, I stood in stillness, watching flames flicker into dusk. What moved me was not only the ritual itself, but the slow, reverent gestures, and the breath of something far older than memory.

 

In that breath, in that land, I encountered two ancient trees:

Mee (Madhuca longifolia) and Thelabu (Sterculia foetida).

 

More than flora, they are timekeepers, witnesses to generations of reverence, rupture, and resistance. Once held sacred, later marginalized by colonial extraction and postcolonial development, they embody a layered and contested legacy.

 

Dhuma is not an elegy, it is a re-listening.

 

It is a multi-sensory, interdisciplinary installation that explores how plants encode cultural memory, spiritual meaning, and ecological resistance. It invites a critical re-encounter with Sri Lanka’s landscapes, not as untouched relics of a romanticized past, but as living terrains shaped by ritual, regulation, and adaptation.

 

Centered around Mee and Thelabu, Dhuma weaves together four interlinked historical narratives:

• Stone edicts from the 9th and 10th centuries CE—including those issued under King Sena II—prohibited the felling of Mee and other trees. Violators faced fines or were forced into irrigation labor.

• A poetic tale of King Dutugemunu, the Thelabu tree, and Swarapali, who is said to have lived in a Thelabu tree at the site of today’s Ruwanwelisaya.

• A British colonial directive from the early 1800s sanctioned the widespread destruction of land during the violent suppression of the Uva-Wellassa uprising.

• A 1960s Green Revolution document encouraged clearing Mee trees to ‘modernize’ paddy fields.

 

These texts are gradually obscured by smoke and ash, rising from a lamp crafted from a Thelabu pod and Mee tree oil, echoing materials once used in sacred rites. As the scent thickens the air, linear history begins to blur.