Keerimalai, Unwalled: Poetic Ethnography and Sacred Geography in Northern Sri Lanka

This paper presents “Keerimalai, Unwalled” as a poetic ethnography that documents the layered cultural, mythological, and ritual significance of Keerimalai, a sacred site in northern Sri Lanka. Composed in strict iambic pentameter and heroic couplets, the poem blends personal testimony, fieldwork observation, and Saivite cosmology to explore themes of healing, caste rupture, and gendered myth. Drawing on Tamil oral tradition and canonical texts such as the Suta Samhita and Dhakshina Kailaya Puranam, the poem functions as epistemological evidence—where verse becomes a vessel for cultural memory and ritual cadence. The study contributes to postwar and postcolonial ethnography by reclaiming Tamil ritual spaces and voices marginalized by conflict, caste, and institutional neglect. It affirms that poetry, when grounded in lived experience and formal discipline, can serve as a legitimate scholarly method bridging art and analysis.