Politics in the Robe: Reverend Batuwangala Rahula’s expedient use of allegory and symbolism

This article is a study of how a Buddhist monk-author wrote against several dominant ideological standpoints in Sri Lanka during and after the war between the Sri Lankan state and the Tamil militants. Five books, written in the decade after the war which lasted from 1983 to 2009, are briefly analyzed here, while one novel, Ran karanduwa, is given special focus in this article. This text is used to elucidate, with examples, the figurative ways by which Reverend Rahula manages to give sharp political commentaries on socio-cultural, economic and religious issues in his fiction. Given the exclusivist nationalistic thought and the role religion played in it during this particular decade, these viewpoints would have not been easy for a Buddhist monk to express. Analysis of the fiction shows that he has managed this feat by using figurative language very heavily in his work, especially allegory and symbolism, which can more easily deflect detection when the subject matter holds ideology not widely accepted in a particular society. The article examines what Reverend Rahula critiqued and how he did so in the postwar context of Sri Lanka.