Review Article

Ethno-nationalist Social Change

48(3) 459–465
Tourism in South Asia © CSD 2018
SAGE Publications
sagepub.in/home.nav
DOI: 10.1177/0049085718781595
http://journals.sagepub.com/home/sch

Sasanka Parera, Warzone Tourism in Sri Lanka: Tales from Darker Places in
Paradise. New Delhi: SAGE Publications, 2016, pp. 256, `750, ISBN: 93515
09222.

The most prevalent narrative about modern tourists frames them as seekers of
shallow and contrived experiences (Barthes, 1972[1957]). This is often contrasted
with travel undertaken before tourism transformed into an industry. Early
travellers are typically depicted to be undertaking arduous and often uncomfortable
journeys to seek meaningful experiences, such as the quest for knowledge or
spiritual satiation.
While this categorisation of modern tourism and pre-modern travel may serve
the analytical purpose to examine changes in the modes and nature of travel
throughout history; the question of motivation that spurs travellers on to choose
specific destinations is very complex and seems to defy this categorisation.
This essay has been triggered by an engaged reading of Sasanka Parera’s book,
Warzone Tourism in Sri Lanka: Tales from Darker Places in Paradise which is
not only a pioneering contribution to a sociological study of tourism in South Asia
but also marks a departure from the extant literature in considering modern
tourist activity also as being undertaken in pursuance of meaning, for crystallising
collective memory and performing ethno-nationalism.

Tourism as Memory Work

The book is based on the ethnography of travellers from southern Sri Lanka to the
war-affected north during the period of ceasefire in the Sri Lankan Civil War
between 2002 and 2005, and later after the end of the civil war in 2009. The
travels mostly were a combination of pilgrimage and memorialisation. Southern
tourists in their travels to impoverished and war torn areas are essentially under-
taking the work needed for the creation of a public remembrance of a narrative
while simultaneously ‘inventing’ this narrative as they ‘remembered’ it.
Tourism, therefore, is a testimony to the fact that members of national
communities do not rely only on memory to engage with the past. They actively
create it through ‘work’ even if it is only a performative function. Pierre Nora
(2002) explains that this need, or rather a ‘duty to remember’, is mandated by
460 / Ghazala Jamil Social Change 48(3)

widely prevailing uncertainty regarding the future. He notes that a proliferation

of institutions that are associated with the preservation of material remnants
of the past, and development of technologies that allow for preserving the past
have also resulted in an ‘acceleration of history’ which further heightens this
obligation to remember.
A bulk of tourists on the war tourism trail were Sinhalese but there were also
some Tamils from southern Sri Lanka and the Tamil diaspora from Europe, US
and southern India. Parera focusses his attention on the Sinhalese traveller perhaps
because while it is expected that the vanquished minority, the Tamil Hindu tourist,
will be sombre in their memory work, the Sinhalese tourist would not ordinarily be
thought of being serious, reverential about the broader Hindu cultural landscape of
north Sri Lanka. But, as Parera shows, unlike the stereotype of the modern tourist,
the elderly Sinhalese tourists undertake these trips not just for leisure—their travels
entail doing memory work and shaping the landscape through a majoritarian gaze.
Their gaze on war memorials propped up by the state or on the sites devastated
by war is also to establish an aversion to dying for a meaningless or an abhorrent
cause (Rowlands, 1999). The issue of ‘tourist gaze’ (Urry, 1990) is important because
Parera shows how ‘war and extreme articulations of nationalism are among the
many factors that might create such conditions for standardisation of both sight and
gaze, and finally the resultant discourse as well’ (2016, p. 6).
It is confounding that the south–north tourist mobility began in Sri Lanka in
periods proximate to the war, and perhaps it is this which makes it clear that tourist
activity does not preclude an enthno-nationalist hostility. If anything, tourism, in
fact, is spurred by conflicting claims over heritage and memory. Victor-driven
(Sinhala) ethno-nationalist tourism is geared towards erasure of the vanquished
(Tamil) experience and provides a perspective on the civil war. Focussing on
the contestations over heritage in Sri Lanka, Anoma Pieris affirms this when she
states, ‘In Sri Lanka, traditional religious pilgrimages reinforce a communal
Buddhist worldview, claiming the national geography as a host to Buddhism,
while individualized narratives of commemoration at war memorials defensively
assert Sinhala-Buddhist politics’ (2014, p. 266).

Pilgrimage as Tourism
On numerous occasions Parera’s ethnographic account reveals that while heritage
creation and preservation (for tourism) is essentially a nationalist project, it is
inevitably a neoliberal one too. It is commoditised and emptied of authenticity but
still a route to pursue meaning when faced with anxiety. As such, in the semantic
field set up by two contemporary concentrations of power, namely, capitalism and
modern nation-state, the distinction between travel and tourism gets so blurred
that when one undertakes a journey, only tourism remains. It is this semantic field
that requires a reframing of pilgrimage as tourism.
In the era when global capitalism is ubiquitous in almost all human activity,
pilgrimage too could not have remained untouched by it. The idea that tourism
is something trivial and even profane, while pilgrimage is sacred and sublime,
gets undermined when the performance of pilgrimage becomes an enactment
 Ethno-nationalist Tourism in South Asia / 461

of anxieties induced by globalisation—a prominent manifestation of which is

ethno-nationalism.
Thanatourism or dark tourism of grief and death, or war tourism, as Parera
prefers it, imparts certain seriousness to the enterprise of travel. This is also true for
the religious pilgrim. In South Asia, pilgrimage has historically been a primary and
socially honourable motivation for travel. The serious earnestness, or even sacred
motivations of the poor undertaking these journeys oblige them to eke out their
meagre savings and forgo precious earnings. In his book titled, From Pilgrimage to
Packaged Tours: Travel and Tourism in the Third World, Gladstone (2005) points
out that while domestic tourists outnumber international tourists everywhere, in
the Third World countries the gap is in the fold of a thousand to one. But there is a
tendency among researchers and even governments to extend the label of ‘tourists’
only to those who have a higher capacity to spend and consume, ignoring this big
segment of domestic tourists. While the spending capacity of the domestic tourists
is miniscule when compared with international travellers, Gladstone interestingly
highlights that the annual figure of domestic tourists in India alone is comparable
to all tourists put together the world over, and that a bulk of these are travelling to
pilgrimage centres such as Vrindavan and Pushkar.
The union and state ministries of tourism in India are commercially developing
and advertising Buddhist circuits, the Sikh Guru circuit and Sufi tourism
circuits. While these illustrations are a testimony to the potential of the domestic
tourist, there is also an indication of the commercial importance and political
positioning of cross-border religious pilgrimage in the region. Sikh religious sites
in Pakistan, frequented by Indian Sikhs, are quite well maintained (Toppa, 2017).
Controversies related to the Haj subsidy and Amarnath Yatra, also show amply
that religious pilgrimage has a bearing on national and nationalist narratives.
Through deciding travel routes—picking or eliminating sites—the tourist mounts
a montage of personalised narrative of competitive victimhood and aggression.
This process is mediated by the territoriality of ethno-nationalism. Remembering
and forgetting parts of history in a subjectively selective process aids this narrative
weaving. The old ritualised, well-traversed routes are re-invented through the
changing motivations and performatives of the pilgrims. The routes emerge as
pathways to assert new religiosity in an ethno-nationalist garb, while, on the other
hand, the infrastructure in and around the sites themselves undergo transformation
powered, paradoxically and simultaneously, by processes of neoliberalism on the
one hand, and nationalist urbanisation on the other. The recent re-development of
the Golden Temple complex in Amritsar is a case in point (Dutt, 2016). Amritsar
is also seeing a simultaneous interest in memorialisation and museumisation of
Partition violence and trauma.
Vikash Singh (2017) in his book, Uprising of the Fools: Pilgrimage as Moral
Protest in Contemporary India takes issue with political scientists and sociologists
for having largely ignored pilgrimages into an unresearched rubric within the
studies of religion and globalisation. He claims to have found hardly any proof
to call his pilgrim subjects religious nationalists, and relies upon what he terms
‘idiom of performance’ for a more substantive representation of self. His insistence
that these two possibilities are contrarian and mutually exclusive is very curious.
462 / Ghazala Jamil Social Change 48(3)

While Singh is cognisant of the literature establishing the surge in religious

practise globally, he denies any express link between the surge in Kanwar
pilgrimage and the rise of Hindu nationalism in India—both occurring during the
same period.
As Singh travels with his pilgrim subjects, he burdens his observations with
an ideological project of establishing the cultural innocence of the Kanwar
pilgrims (bhole, or the innocent ones) ignoring that throughout the history of
the emergence of the modern nation-state in the Third World, national identities
were partially forged through mass religious pilgrimage made possible by the
colonial development of mass transit systems, mainly railways, and facilitated
through bureaucratic machinery. It is noteworthy that the popularity of the
Kanwar pilgrimage increased only very recently because the requirement that
men make the journey on foot prohibits the use of a mass transit system but the
increased majoritarian tilt in administration made them bend over backwards to
accommodate these rowdy pilgrims in the name of managing the nuisance created
by them during the pilgrimage period.
While Parera’s account of experiences of tourist from majority Sinhala
community is phenomenological, Singh’s account of majority Hindu community
members undertaking the journey is largely psychoanalytical. Singh focusses
squarely on ‘dream work’, or the manner in which desires and anxieties regarding
the pilgrim’s individual ‘self’ are expressed in the journey. While the poor working
men who mostly undertake Kanwar pilgrimage may be oppressed, thereby
allowing Singh to read a protest or resistance in their journey, they are at the
same time expressing their majoritarian Hindu identity through their journey and
receiving recognition for this expression.

War Memorialisation and Invention

of Political Pilgrimage
In his account, Parera puts a lot of stress on the distinction between the two periods
of tourism. The difference is significant because in the first phase of tourism
during the official ceasefire the war continued sporadically in the remote outposts
adding an element of real danger, discomfort, and hence adventure to the tourists’
enterprise. More significant was the occasional presence of the Liberation Tigers
of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) representatives at the sites who also told their own stories
of heroism. These LTTE representatives were gone in the second phase and a
Sinhalese-Buddhist official narrative was geared towards reclaiming territory lost
to LTTE. The narrative toed the line of Sinhalese anxiety that Buddhist sites in the
Tamil-dominated north had been Hinduised or obliterated by the LTTE.
The Sinhalese tourists visiting the Buddhist Dambakola Patuna Temple in
Madagal, which was newly constructed by the Sri Lankan Navy, perform an
‘authentication’ of the claims of a historical continuity of an invented Buddhist
legacy. The absence of any archaeological evidence became to them the evidence
of a Tamilian-Hindu erasure of Buddhist culture in the north. The Sri Lankan
Navy’s ‘adoption’ of this Buddhist temple was also an indication of the state’s
 Ethno-nationalist Tourism in South Asia / 463

close identification with one religion. Another site frequently included in the
tourists’ itinerary—an LTTE cemetery—was essentially a site of curiosity for
the Sinhalese when compared to the sombre reflection and painful tributes by
Tamil tourists and locals.
Parera highlights the political act in being a Sinhalese tourist visiting these
sites. It was not only that they were participating in ‘reclaiming’ their Buddhist
legacy from Hindus, but they were also simultaneously being confronted by the
reality of destruction of war which disrupted the majoritarian discourse of ‘Sinhala
Nationalism that many of the travellers would have been discursive partner of’
(Parera, 2016, p. 64).
While tourist consumption contributes to commodification and selective
erasure of local culture and subaltern history, there always lurks a potential that a
majoritarian discourse may be punctured or challenged through the deviation in
the routine performance by tourists. Parera’s analysis gives us some indications
and conceptual tools to examine other contemporary tourist experiences of
contesting memorialisation of wars and other political pilgrimages.
Eleanor Zelliot (2011) calls three annual events in Maharashtra—journeys and
gatherings of dalits at the site in Nagpur where Ambedkar converted to Buddhism,
the stupa over his ashes in Mumbai on Dadar beach, and the Bhima Koregon
British war memorial obelisk near Pune—‘pilgrimages’ because they ‘reinforce
the meaning and power of the Ambedkar movement’ (p. 1).
The commemoration of the conversion and death of Ambedkar have been
big events and gatherings, but according to Zelliot’s estimates, the beginning of
the Koregaon commemoration may be marked around 30 years before the 2018
anti-dalit violence at the site. She says that although the event was not publicised
beyond the Ambedkarite groups, the gathering was slowly becoming larger over
the years. Describing it she says, ‘The combination of militancy, religion and
politics is strange but understandable. Groups of women chant Buddhist chants in
Pali. Young men and children trace the names of Mahars on the pillar’ (ibid., p. 5).
One of Zelliot’s informants told her that dalits visiting Mumbai for the Chaitya
Bhoomi pilgrimage on 6 December also visit the Fort area of Mumbai and the
Chattrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangralaya (earlier called the Prince of Wales
Museum). The Buddhist art on display in the museum was the main attraction for
them but, he further told her that ‘they also wander through the museum as if to
claim all ancient India as their own’ (ibid., p. 4).
Indicating a political economic angle to the iconisation of Ambedkar, Teltumbde
(2017) analyses the growing popularity of travelling to Chaitya Bhoomi,
Ambedkar’s cremation site in Mumbai and other Ambedkar memorials. He pegs his
estimate of people making such journeys at ‘over 5 million every year, consuming
`500 crore’ (p. 10). According to him, the valorisation of the Mahar soldiers in the
British army in the battle against the Peshwa being an anti-caste discrimination
action was a myth and he links the phenomenon of such memorialisation to the
failure of Ambedkarite movements to confront the limitation of politics based
only on caste identity. Other commentators (Thakur & Moharana, 2018) point to
the significance of Ambedkar’s excavation and invocation in 1927, of the memory
of the 1818 anti-Peshwa war fought by Mahars and the place of pride this memory
has in the collective consciousness of the neo-Buddhist Mahars.
464 / Ghazala Jamil Social Change 48(3)

The violent attack of the Hindu right on the pilgrims gathered at the Koregaon
obelisk also generated a controversy on whether it was ‘anti-national’ of dalits
to commemorate an event celebrating British victory over an ‘Indian’ ruler. A
public debate ensued on the history of various ‘Indian’ rulers aligning with British
forces to fight other ‘Indian’ rulers, which criticised the ‘mainstream Hindu upper
caste nationalist discourse’ (ibid., p. 13) not only for selectively forgetting history,
but also for fabricating convenient history. Dalits have countered this mostly by
asserting an even more primordial claim to India and being its first inhabitants or
moolniwasi. The Buddhist heritage of various historical sites is being ‘recovered’
and asserted through Buddhist tourism and heritage conservation activism as a
mode of strengthening the claim of being ‘first users’.
For now, it can be safely speculated that Bhima Koregaon’s anti-Peshwa war
memorial will only grow as a site of interest. It remains to be seen how competing
nationalisms will play out or resolve their differences. The performance by Dalit
pilgrim-tourists will have to contend not only with the Hindu nationalist discourse
but also with the landscape changes the site will go through because of increasing
commercial interest and possibly intervention by state agencies to develop facilities
for tourists.

Conclusion
This essay indicates a few directions in which a perspective that examines
ethno-nationalist mobilities and their commodification can reap rich results.
The question of ethno-religious tourism is especially important in South Asia
because of the unfinished nature of nation-building projects in South Asian states
owing to these ethno-religious tensions. These tensions produce shadows over the
very questions of national citizenship in the region where nationalism not only
becomes the opposite of pacifism in cross-border relationships but it remains as
cause of social strife, violence, and even civil war along ethno-religious lines.
Warzone Tourism in Sri Lanka is positioned at the unlikely frontier of conflict
studies and tourism studies. The existence of many long-ritualised journeys
induced by ethno-nationalism in South Asia which remain yet uncharted by
academic researchers makes the future of research in this genre very exciting.

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Ghazala Jamil
Assistant Professor
Centre for the Study of Law and Governance
Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi
ghazalajamil@gmail.com