IN ONE SWIFT movement, Asoka swung his machete into the side of a tree and left the hooked blade lodged in its trunk. The Sri Lankan lotus farmer was in his late 40s, with dark, leathery skin, a graying soul patch and lips stained red from betel nut. He placed his phone in the branches and gestured to me to remove my shoes. The grass felt like rubber under my feet on that February morning. Mud oozed between my toes. “Pankaja,” I murmured to myself, “mud born.” It is one of over 40 words for the sacred lotus flower (Nelumbo nucifera) in Sanskrit. I rolled my corduroys up to my knees and we began to wade into the lake, which Asoka, whose full name is Y.G.W. Dissinayake, had rented for cultivation. The rising sun suffused the thin mist that hung over the water. We soon stood in several inches of soft mud and murky water, surrounded by a colony of lotuses. There were calyxes of faded pink, others in full bloom, with yellowish-white interiors and petals of translucent brightness, sheltered by broad, nodding leaves and curled, elliptical buds. Most beguiling of all was the fruiting receptacle. It looked like something that a spacecraft might have jettisoned as it breached the Earth’s atmosphere — a magical cup of unbelievable hardiness in whose waxy surface the beanlike seeds of the lotus lay embedded, with the power to fruit even after a thousand years.
Nelumbo — the scientific name for the genus of the sacred flower, first adopted by the French botanist Joseph Pitton de Tournefort in the early 18th century — is a Sinhalese word, and it was the lotus, in all its configurations, from physical flower to religious offering, cultural artifact to political emblem, that had brought me to Sri Lanka. I’d traveled 18 hours from New York to Colombo, this island country’s modern capital. From there, myself and Nayomi Apsara, a 44-year-old local filmmaker and poet who was my guide and translator, had driven five hours and 124 miles to the ancient capital of Anuradhapura, located amid the lakes and jungles of the north, where we met Asoka before dawn. The lake, where he leases his section for less than $100 a month, was 30 minutes from the city. Nayomi and I were in a rented car, Asoka in his white auto-rickshaw. We stopped to receive the blessings of a roadside Ganpati, the deity considered a remover of obstacles in both Buddhist Sri Lanka and Hindu India, where I’d grown up. In the half-light, bumping along a red-earth road, I saw that the land was full of water. We passed the hulking forms of trees, large portions of their trunks submerged in lakes, their canopies dark against the brightening sky. Cormorants and herons sunned themselves in the first rays of the morning. A rust-breasted jungle fowl strode along the edge of the water. We passed a sign that read, “Do not pick the flowers, the lake has been leased for cultivation.” A column of blue smoke rose from the paddies. The cement foundations of the village houses were brownish-red, their freshly swept front yards enclosed by trees whose flowers and fruits — banana, hibiscus, papaya — are used in ritual prayers, or puja, as well as for ornamentation and consumption. Outside one such house, painted a bright orange, Asoka’s landlords, an uncle and nephew in short-sleeved shirts and striped saramas (sarongs), greeted us. Then we followed the lotus farmer into the ooze.
“GROWING IN THE mud, and yet so clean, the lotus is a symbol of purity,” writes the Sri Lankan historian Ananda K. Coomaraswamy in his 1913 book “The Arts and Crafts of India & Ceylon.” The lotus pool, he continues, “with leaves and flowers in bud, widely opened and again dying down, is an image of the ebb and flow of human life (samsara).”
It’s amazing what a flower will tell you about a society, if you let it. In Sri Lanka, I wanted to follow the lotus out of the murk, where it was cultivated by men like Asoka, into shop stalls where enterprising sellers put it into the hands of devotees. I wanted to see it enter stone, transformed by the sculptor’s chisel into an ornament as commonplace as the egg-and-dart motif in classical Western architecture. It was a journey that would take me from Sri Lanka’s oldest capital, Anuradhapura, to its medieval seat of power, Polonnaruwa (66 miles south), then to Kandy (some 80 miles farther south), the island kingdom’s last royal capital, now a lakeside town of 1.5 million set among colonial-era tea plantations, rolling hills and rainforest. In each of these places, the signifier of kingship had been the possession of a sacred relic, a tooth of the Buddha, which had been spirited away from India in the hair ornament of a princess in the fourth century and now resided at the Temple of the Tooth (Sri Dalada Maligawa) in Kandy. Buddhism itself had come to the island from India in the third century B.C., and it was Theravada — the Way of the Elders in Pali, the language of Buddhist liturgy — that was practiced here, as in Myanmar, Cambodia and Thailand.
In the lake, with fish nibbling at my feet, Asoka showed me the tiny curled tip of the lotus leaf emerging from the water. “First the leaf comes out,” he said, “one leaf, one bud, and the flower blossoms in the shade of the leaf. It protects it, like a parasol.” He’d been here only the day before in his dinghy, harvesting some 1,700 flowers, 400 stems at a time. These he sold to the sellers in the precincts of the Ruwanwelisaya stupa in Anuradhapura for 40 rupees (13 cents) a stem. They in turn sold them to devotees for four or five times that amount.
Watching Asoka leaning down, measuring the calyx of one flower against the length of his forearm, showing me how to pluck its fibrous rough-napped stalk (never pull; it’s a swift back-and-forth motion, like breaking a chicken’s neck), I was reminded that this gentle matinal scene had been the site of sexual revelry the night before. The lotus flower, a great seductress who lives but three days, uses her subtle aquatic scent — which grows heavier by the hour through a process known as volatilization — to draw insects into her boudoir. As night falls, the petals close, trapping the hexapods within. “Encouraged by the warmth,” writes the British horticulturist Mark Griffiths in “The Lotus Quest: In Search of the Sacred Flower” (2009), “the hostages feed and frolic on a litter of pollen shed by the golden anthers. The oubliette becomes the scene of an orgy.” In the morning, the petals reopen, releasing the pollen-covered insects into the chill air. The shock of being so suddenly exposed makes them unable to tell morning from evening. So all around me now, drowsy six-legged sexual prisoners, in what Griffiths calls “a false dusk,” were in search of comfort in newly opened lotus pads, different from those in which they had spent the night, thereby acting as unsuspecting agents of dissemination.
Asoka swiped open the petals of one calyx like a man counting a wad of cash and showed me its white-tipped anthers and tiny yellow receptacle. There are dozens of varieties of lotus, he explained, but “what we have in this lake is a special one,” a variety known as siapat, or “hundred petaled.” He then broke open a fully mature receptacle to reveal the white, mealy texture of its bean-shaped seed, which tasted like almond flesh. Ahead of me, standing in several inches of mud and water, Nayomi (whose surname, Apsara, means “celestial nymph”) was posing with a pink lotus in her hair.
“It’s our flower, it’s our treasure,” Asoka said as we parted that morning, “and it’s a lot of people’s bread and butter. It only ever brings prosperity to a country,” he added pointedly, “never disparity.”
The lotus is indeed one of nature’s miracle plants, whose uses from root to flower are myriad. The rhizome is eaten in soups and stir-fries all over South and East Asia. Griffiths calls it “a natural chemical factory,” containing powerful antioxidants, oils, acids, alkaloids and vitamins that are anti-inflammatory. It’s used in Chinese and Ayurvedic medicine to treat stomach ailments in particular, but also fever and insomnia. The plant’s fibers produce a beautiful, sturdy fabric called lotus silk, while biomimetics researchers are studying the ability of its leaves to develop new kinds of paints and coatings with special antifouling properties.
Asoka took pride in the magical attributes of the lotus, even as he gestured to what had been the worst economic crisis in the island country’s modern history. Sri Lanka, or Ceylon, as it was known then, was a British colony from 1802 until 1948. The British were the last in a series of maritime empires — the Cholas, the Portuguese, the Dutch — who made incursions on Sri Lanka’s shores, testing the island nation’s special talent, shared by places like Japan, for assimilation and absorption while fiercely remaining itself. After independence, the new country had dreams of using its strategic position at the crossroads of sea trade to become an economic power, as Singapore would go on to be, but by 1983 it had been plunged into a civil war that would last three decades, drive a wedge between its Sinhalese majority and Tamil minority and set the stage for the authoritarian rule of two brothers, Mahinda and Gotabaya Rajapaksa, peddling their brand of ethnonationalist populism. They adopted the lotus calyx as the insignia for their Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna, or People’s Front. When I was last there in 2013, the Rajapaksas were riding a wave of Sinhalese triumphalism, having brought the war to a brutal end. Gotabaya was defense minister at the time. A decade later, his tenure as president had decimated the economy. In 2022, after massive shortages of fuel and other essentials, a popular revolt called the Aragalaya, meaning “struggle” in Sinhalese, had broken out, leading to his ouster (Mahinda, reappointed prime minister by his brother two years before, subsequently resigned), but Sri Lanka, despite the efforts of a new government to get the country back on its feet with a bailout from the International Monetary Fund, was still suffering. (This past September, in the nation’s first election since the economic collapse of 2022, voters chose the left-wing Anura Kumara Dissanayake as its new president.)
On the way up to Anuradhapura, I’d stopped to see Jagath Weerasinghe, a painter and one of Sri Lanka’s most eminent art historians and archaeologists. Sitting in his studio outside of Colombo among paddy fields edged with coconut trees, the morning humidity already oppressive, I asked Weerasinghe why he thought the lotus in particular had emerged as the emblem and artifact of an entire culture, how it could be both a physical object, real and usable, profaned by commerce and exalted by prayer, as well as a motif that transcended its natural state.
“That’s a good question,” said Weerasinghe, who was nearly 70, with a dark beard and a balding head, before venturing, “The lotus, situated in mud and water, comes out of this dirty background to be extremely beautiful and pure. It opens with the sun. It’s almost like the story of Genesis. The origin of life. It has all the attributes to accommodate our idea of purity, but purity cannot be without its opposite. There’s a link between the two.”
The lotus has been co-opted not just by political parties in Sri Lanka but by those across the Palk Strait in India, too. The flower in full bloom is the insignia of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu supremacist Bharatiya Janata Party, or B.J.P. Yet everyday devotees (including Weerasinghe) are able to compartmentalize the invariable debasement that politics brings as they offer the sacred flower up to their gods. As with any icon that’s so many things to so many people, every detail of its use is pregnant with semiotic power.
I had grown up among a culture of flowers in India bequeathed to me by the women in my life. At dawn, my grandmother would have me collect the coral-stemmed harsinghar (Nyctanthes arbor-tristis) that had fallen to the ground overnight, and which she used in her morning prayers. My mother, if she’d been out to dinner, would bring home strings of jasmine from street sellers at traffic lights to lay in a silver tray at her bedside, their scent mixing with the delicious cold draft from the air-conditioner. We used gladioli for funerals and official occasions; the smell of white-and-yellow nargis (Narcissus poeticus) was inseparable to me from the onset of North Indian winter; I loathed the fat-faced orange marigolds, which were used in weddings and worship. In Varanasi, I had seen altars of flowers meticulously built in the sanctum sanctorum of temples and brought crashing down in a metaphor of impermanence. Flowers are threaded through every aspect of our life in India — our festivals, our seasons, our manners — but nothing is incidental, careless or devoid of meaning. One might, for instance, greet someone with a garland of flowers, but one would only garland the picture of someone who was dead. Within this highly mitigated language of flowers, the lotus is supreme. An idea, no less than a flower.
FLOWERS ARE ENDURING yet mutable symbols upon which our collective imagination inscribes meaning. The peony signified prosperity in Tang dynasty China; violets stood for virtue and purity in 19th-century Europe; the azalea represents feminine elegance and temperance in Japan. The transition of a natural entity such as the rose, the acanthus or the fleur-de-lis into a totem is essentially an authorless process in which an entire enterprise of sculptors, artisans, bards and poets, each working within tradition, express the cultural yearnings of a society. A naturally growing leaf or flower, an obscure motif from an older civilization, is elevated and transformed into the recognizable mark of what a society wishes most to express about itself, be it purity, power, fertility or regeneration. No single moment or inflection point defines this transformation; it’s rather the work of generations in which tradition, acting as the reservoir of many individual talents — the supreme artist, as it were — corrals and collects, lovingly nurturing what will one day be the defining mark of a society or culture.
The lotus first appeared in the subcontinent upon Indus Valley seals, circa 2600 to 1900 B.C., predating both Buddhism and Vedic Hinduism. The German Indologist Heinrich Zimmer, writing in the 1940s, conjectured that the flower personified a mother goddess — a sister of the Akkadian Ishtar, the Phoenician Astarte and the Egyptian Isis — who may herself have been an early depiction of Lakshmi, the Hindu goddess of prosperity. Zimmer postulated that with the arrival of the Aryans around 1900 B.C., Lakshmi was gradually unseated from her lotus pedestal, and other divinities from the Vedic pantheon, such as the demiurge, Brahma, were seated in her stead. As Vedic Hinduism took root in India, the lotus seat became the mark of divinity itself, expressed in Hindu-Buddhist cosmology by the idea that the gods are those whose feet do not have to touch the earth. Prajna-Paramita, the Buddhist goddess of enlightened wisdom, is personified as a lotus, while in the esoteric school of Tantric (or Trika) Buddhism, as widely practiced in Tibet, China and Mongolia, the heart lotus serves as a key iconographic tool for inner visualization. In the fire ritual of the Shingon tradition of Japan, the altar-hearth is shaped like a lotus.
As a student of Sanskrit, the lingua franca of the elite in ancient India, I had encountered the flower as the source of endless tropes and metaphors but, rereading one of my favorite plays — “Malati and Madhava” by the eighth-century A.D. dramatist Bhavabhuti — I lost count of the number of times it appears. There are “the dark lotuses” of the protagonist’s eyes and “breasts pale as a fresh-cut lotus stalk”; there’s the “fragile lotus thread of hope” and the “tormented beauty of her limbs, like a lotus beneath the strong caress of the sun.” For me, as a cultural Hindu, no creation story is more powerful than that of lotus-naveled Vishnu, the god of preservation, asleep on a cosmic ocean after the dissolution of the world. He rests upon the Snake of Residue with his wife and consort, Lakshmi, at his feet. Eons roll by and the waters gradually heat with regenerative energy, or tapas. Then, like the rainbow in Genesis signifying the promise of rebirth, a lotus calyx sprouts from Vishnu’s navel. Its petals open to reveal Brahma, the creator, who sets about making the world anew.
Weerasinghe was naturally irreverent but, when he spoke of his love of visiting the sacred Bodhi tree at Anuradhapura with a single white lotus, all irony disappeared. “All of a sudden,” he said, “this stupid Marxist becomes part of a huge history, a tradition, a larger community. I feel like I belong.” He described the Rajapaksas’ appropriation of the flower as sacrilegious: “They’re exploiting our cultural identity.”
LATER THAT AFTERNOON, the dull mesmeric drone of chanting in Pali pierced the permanent air of afternoon that hung over the Sanctuary at Tissawewa, an old colonial-era hotel, near the Ruwanwelisaya stupa, where Nayomi and I were staying. It was a place of sloping red-tiled roofs and planters’ chairs in open arcades of whitewashed pillars. There were peacocks in glossy-leaved Indian almond trees in the garden. The sapping heat was of a piece with the aura created around the stupa by the chanting. It didn’t so much call you to prayer as envelop you in its atmosphere.
We drove a few miles to the stupa, where hundreds of worshipers, in their austere white, were streaming toward that great reliquary mound. It was over 20 centuries old, though newly whitewashed, a giant satin Buddhist flag (blue, yellow, red, white and orange) wrapped about its waist like a belt. The sight of its immense stone hemisphere rising out of the surrounding forest put one in mind of 19th-century scenes of archaeological discovery. The templegoers, each bearing a cornucopia of flowers, approached the stupa by a causeway, lit a lamp in a glass gazebo on the left, then proceeded forward, made their offering of flowers, circled the shrine and were subsumed in an air of chanting and contemplation. Each was a free-ranging particle, dancing about in quantum chaos until brought into the orbit of the stupa, and each gave a picture of modern Sri Lanka. There was Damintha, a 52-year-old sergeant major who’d served in the Sri Lankan army from 1992 to 2012 and lost an eye in a grenade attack. He was there with his wife, bearing bowls of jasmine and pink lotus, grateful that the war was over and that the once-heavy security presence around the stupa was gone. There was Dematulawa Sugathasiri, the 40-year-old head monk of a nearby monastery. He stood among a group of younger monks in burgundy robes, ranging in age from 12 to 21, carrying lilac switches of long-stemmed water hyacinths. “When Siddhartha attained nirvana,” Sugathasiri explained, “he spent seven weeks meditating on different things, of which the sixth was the lotus. Siddhartha walked as soon as he was born … even though his mother stood under a different tree, it was lotuses that bloomed as he took his first seven steps.”
Evening fell, and the floodlights came on. Dimithi Nimatha, a 30-year-old woman who lived near the stupa, was engaged in the performance of an extraordinary offering. On a stone table, 24 pink lotuses were arranged in three rows on a bed of yellow petals, with 24 lamps on heart-shaped plates. The number was important: It represented the 24 conditions for the existence of reality as outlined by the Buddha, such as simultaneity, contiguity, association and disassociation. As Nimatha spoke, I marveled at the unabashed intellectuality of Buddhism. It felt to me in that moment like the only truly adult religion, almost as if the works of Schopenhauer or Kant had been made the basis of a creed. “When Buddhism declines,” Nimatha said, peering at us out of bifocal glasses, “these conditions are lost, so we are performing this puja in order to sustain them.”
Outside, the commerce of flowers was underway. Sameera and Sunetra, a brother-sister duo in their 30s, had quite literally cornered the market with their shop near the entrance to the stupa. Sameera had dark, tattooed arms and wore a tweed cap over his thick, curly hair. “It’s a good business,” he said, flashing me a smile of crowded teeth as he swiped open the petals of a lotus. When I asked him where his flowers came from, he said offhandedly, “Everywhere,” but in fact he meant a triangle of deep forest and lakes, stretching south from Anuradhapura to the ancient cave temples of Dambulla and the medieval capital of Polonnaruwa. The trade is informal, hardly even on the radar of the Agriculture Ministry, which gave no subsidies to lotus farmers, but there is a distinct supply chain comprising men like Asoka (one of Sameera and Sunetra’s suppliers), like so many individual flowers held together by a submarine network of roots. On the outskirts of Anuradhapura, I met Indika Dilhani, a 42-year-old mother who ran a lotus stall by the side of the highway. She worked from 5:30 a.m. to 9 p.m., earning as little as the equivalent of $6.50 on a good day in order to provide for her son and husband, who’d been paralyzed after a motorcycle accident in 2017.
“I have suffered because of the sins of a previous life,” she said with the casual fatalism of those who believe in the transmigration of the soul — though not in its permanence, which the Buddha famously eschewed in his doctrine of anatta, or “nonself” — “but I believe that selling lotuses, even if a business, will bring me good karma, and my next life will be better.”
IF THERE’S ONE flower with which the lotus has historically been confused, in art and literature as well as in science, it’s the waterlily (Nymphaea). It makes sense that the two aquatic flowers — in a nice symmetry, the waterlily is Sri Lanka’s national flower, while the lotus is India’s — would seem like near cousins but, interestingly, Griffiths tells us, modern DNA studies have shown that the lotus’s “closest living relations” are not waterlilies at all, or even other aquatic plants, but rather plane trees and Southern Hemisphere shrubs, such as banksia, embothrium and protea. On my last visit to Sri Lanka, I had seen what I thought were lotuses in cave paintings in Sigiriya, a fifth-century rock fortress where Weerasinghe is the director of archaeology, but he corrected me, then gave a fascinating explanation: They were too realistic. The lotus, once it had entered stone, would have been too invested with meaning, too codified and stylized to be depicted as realistically as the flowers in Sigiriya, which were mere flowers subject to the individual artist’s fancy. Asian art, Weerasinghe explained, did not have what he called the “mimesis problem.” “They did not want to create the world as it looked,” he added. “If a statue of Venus were to come alive, we’d say, ‘Come on, get dressed,’” Weerasinghe said, making a contrast with Greco-Roman art, “but if the [goddess] Tara [a fierce embodiment of the female principle, a Buddhist Kali] were to come alive, you’d run away.” Weerasinghe advised that I go to Polonnaruwa instead, where I’d see firsthand how much room for innovation was permitted the traditional artist working within the constraints of form and mindful of what had gone before (parampara, “tradition” in Sanskrit, literally implies continuity), and how much was too much.
The drive to Polonnaruwa took us through dense forest where wild elephants ambled along the side of the road, flocks of butterflies at their feet. Everywhere was water, and wherever there was water there were colonies of lotuses growing in the shallows. The heat had made entire towns retreat behind sharply delineated margins of shadow. Women carried parasols, and darkness lingered heavily beneath deep eaves. Mosquito nets in pastel colors hung from the corrugated roofs of shops like toys over a cradle, and brightly colored signs, the Sinhalese letters crammed into small rectangles, added to the garishness of the day.
The lotus was ubiquitous that afternoon in Polonnaruwa. It ran like connective tissue through the 12th-century temple complex of age-blackened Buddhas, red earth and large-leaved verdure, its ubiquity reminding me of how frequently I had encountered it in Sanskrit poetry. It appeared now as a decorative motif edging the semicircular moonstones outside temples whose facades had fallen away, now as a seal of sorts, stamped into the capital of a pillar. To have been so recently with the physical flower and to see it here, a feature of architecture, was to understand the process of paring down and simplification that made it possible for the essence of a living thing to be enshrined in stone.
At Polonnaruwa, one felt the creativity of the individual artist chafe against the strictures of form. Like a medieval bard composing a sonnet, the sculptor found ways to push the limits, threading a course between continuity and cliché. At first glance, an ordinary raised stone platform, known as the Nissankalata Mandapa and built in the late 12th century, appeared to be just another ruined temple, open to the sky with a stupa at its center. Closer, one saw the playfulness that had inspired its columns, which were undulating lotus stalks draped in tendrils, with full-blown flowers for capitals. At the neelum pokuna (or “lotus pond”) located some distance from the main complex down a desolate tree-lined road, the sculptors seemed to have taken a special meta-pleasure in using the shape of the eight-petaled lotus, with eight sinking tiers, as a framing device for a pond that, though dry now, would once have been full of the sacred flowers.
It was evening when we arrived in Kandy, after a four-hour drive out of the forests and lakes of the north. The town’s lights, strewn over the darkening valley, were visible through an opening in the hills. In the morning, percussive drumming from the Temple of the Tooth resounded through the streets. Kandy Lake was green, trimmed with flowering trees and a low crenelated wall, known as a cloud wall, pierced with small, triangular alcoves for oil lamps.
The Temple of the Tooth is a vast complex on many floors, with many subsidiary shrines and a library of manuscripts. Once again we were greeted with an endless stream of pilgrims in white. Outside, Nayomi informed me that worshipers pledged a specific number of lotuses related to specific asks but, as I talked to them, the ask was heartbreakingly the same: Everyone wanted to get away from the blighted island. Anoma Nilangani, a 54-year-old mother and the wife of an English teacher, had made a vow five months ago that if her job as a housemaid in Bahrain came through, she would return to the temple and make an offering of 54 white lotuses. She was with her 15-year-old son, giving thanks to the Buddha for letting her escape Sri Lanka. There was 30-year-old Ishani, in a striking white sari, with nine lotuses, expressing gratitude that her husband had found a job as a restaurant manager in Malaysia. On my flight to Colombo a few days earlier, I had sat next to Ushan, who worked at a seatbelt factory in Romania. In excruciating detail, he walked me through a laundry list of all the things — a house, a car, fuel — that he would never have been able to afford if he’d lived in Sri Lanka. It was why he had taken a factory job in a faraway country, unable to communicate with the people around him. Sri Lanka was hemorrhaging its young, educated work force and, in a strange irony, it was the flower that the Rajapaksas had chosen as their emblem that was now the messenger of their ravages.
In Kandy, I stayed with Channa Daswatte, a friend — and a mentee of the great Sri Lankan architect Geoffrey Bawa — who took me on a tour of lotuses in the lesser-known temples surrounding the town. “It’s obscenely pervasive,” Daswatte said, pointing to the flower as a space filler, white lotuses on a red ground, at the 14th-century Lankathilaka Viharaya Temple, then at the keystone of what he described as “an arch of prosperity.” Hindu gods lurked in the shadows behind a golden Buddha, denoting an easy syncretism between the two religions. He held out a cloth mat in the shape of a lotus, which he conjectured would have become commonplace with the arrival of Singer sewing machines in the late 19th century — modern means by which people could express their ancient affection for the flower. Daswatte recalled that as chairperson of the Geoffrey Bawa Trust he had held an exhibition in 2019 marking Bawa’s centenary and had commissioned work from Chandraguptha Thenuwara, one of Sri Lanka’s best-known contemporary artists. Thenuwara used his commission to create a subversive two-faced lotus, in which he worked in images from the authoritarian rule of the Rajapaksas — the dreaded white vans that disappeared the regime’s critics, the brutal slum clearance described as beautification. As Daswatte spoke, I realized that the semiotic game of appropriating powerful symbols like the lotus and imbuing them with fresh meaning is never truly concluded — and, moreover, two can play at it, just as the Stars and Stripes can simultaneously be the preserve of a modern artist like Jasper Johns, as well as the field to which the public imagination returns again and again, sometimes working a blue line into its stars and spangles in support of law enforcement, other times turning it red, black and green, as the artist David Hammons did to create his Pan-African flag, or just hanging it upside down in a bipartisan gesture of protest. Thenuwara similarly had reclaimed the cherished Sri Lankan flower from the Rajapaksas. “It’s the lotus,” Daswatte said of the series Thenuwara had made, “but what is it hiding?”
In Colombo, the flower had also been the subject of an exhibition at the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Sri Lanka that had closed several months before I arrived. On my last day in the country, I sat with Sandev Handy, one of the museum’s curators, at a coffee shop outside its entrance. Handy, in his early 30s, was all in black, with white sneakers and a thick black beard. The exhibition included a captivating painting of lotuses by the Sri Lankan artist Senaka Senanayake, who returned to the flower as a subject over his lifetime. Referring to a range of media (a literary magazine, a novel, a stamp), Handy walked me through the way the metaphor of the lotus had come to be laden with postcolonial significance. “Who’s included in the mud, who’s included in the lotus?” Handy asked rhetorically. Was this ancient symbol of regeneration rising out of the miring mud of colonial history? Handy was keen to point out that assertions of purity are rarely benign. In places like Sri Lanka and India, the rediscovery of a precolonial self had given way to an ethnonationalism of which the lotus was once again the defining symbol.
Then Handy showed me a photograph by the contemporary artist Abdul Halik Azeez, who goes by Halik, of a girl with smiling eyes standing in the wreckage of her recently “beautified” community. She holds a mirror in her hands, reflecting the 1,155-foot-high Lotus Tower in Colombo — a Rajapaksa-era construction. I’d seen it on my first day in the Sri Lankan capital. It has a garish green stem and a bulbous pink head, a self-serving landmark, all steel, concrete and glass, that dominates the Colombo skyline and vacuously changes color at night.
I spent my final hours in Colombo in Halik’s house in the gentrifying suburb of Rajagiriya. The fluorescent tube-lit room was full of books on feminism, neoliberalism and art; a jackfruit tree outside was laden with its spike-covered bounty. In February 2018, when Halik had taken his iconic image in a neighborhood close to the Lotus Tower that was in the process of being demolished, the Rajapaksas’ hold on power could not have seemed more secure. “The lotus tower,” Halik said, “is one of the primary symbols the state came up with to convince itself of the possibility of [Colombo] becoming a world-class city.” Halik, having witnessed his country buried in debt, criticized the neoliberal tendency to try to instill unrealistic aspirations in the populations of developing countries. Four years later, the Rajapaksas were gone, but the tower stood as proof not just of their hubris but of the kind of debt-laden populism that had brought the island nation to its knees, its ports ransomed out to the Chinese for decades to come. In analyzing the politicized lotus as a symbol in the Rajapaksa era, Halik said a lot depends on where and in what form it appears. In my lifetime, I had seen the once-beloved likeness of the monkey god Hanuman acquire a threatening militarized character when it began to appear in black and saffron on the backs of auto-rickshaws in Indian cities, heralding the arrival of the Modi era. Halik said that the Sri Lankan lion had undergone a similar transformation, becoming synonymous with the ethnonationalism of the Rajapaksas. The lotus, he felt, had been spared the same fate, even as Halik had seen his own image of Rajapaksa hubris acquire a different color in light of their downfall. “It travels,” Halik said, revealing what’s true of symbols in general, “and it acquires a kind of currency that’s beyond your control.”
I left the island before dawn. Dark bodies of water at whose edges grew the sacred flower lay beneath me. Now at 4 a.m., a time of inner contemplation known as the Hour of Brahma, I imagined the first touch of morning spreading over the tear-shaped island. In my mind’s eye, I saw thousands of lotus buds opening, releasing groggy, pollen-covered insects into the cold air of a new day. How wild it was that we, human beings, had inserted ourselves into these daily rituals. What is the culture of flowers if not the human imagination, full of whimsy and ingenuity, insinuating itself into the lives of these vegetal entities? The lotus especially was the supreme flight of fancy. In the everyday routine of this aquatic flower, an entire culture had found spiritual expression. In the opening and closing of its petals at first and last light, we had seen intimations of our own mortality — samsara, the cycle of creation and decay — and, in the sight of it resplendent over a bed of nourishing mud, we had recognized our longing to rise above the muck of our lives.
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