Perspective of the Moment: Murals at Gotami Viharaya

By Uditha Devapriya

Commissioned in 1939 and completed a year later, the murals at Gotami Viharaya in Borella represent a high point of 20th century Buddhist temple art. Painted at a time of world war, they occupy a world away from the art décor, art nouveau, and rococo styles that had come to prevail in Buddhist temples. Borrowing from the past, they also subvert its tropes. Rooted in tradition and convention, they are also bold and modernist.

The Viharaya was constructed in 1925 on land owned by Lady Apollonia de Soysa. The mother of Sir James Peiris, Lady de Soysa belonged to the colonial elite in British Ceylon. By inheritance and marriage, her family was connected to some of the most important figures in 20th century Sri Lanka, who played a major role in rejuvenating the country’s culture. Lady de Soysa’s grandson, Harold Peiris, devoted much of his life to these efforts, while his cousin Harry Pieris went on to become a leading national painter.

It was against this backdrop that Peiris persuaded his brother-in-law George Keyt to paint the murals at the Gotami Viharaya. Keyt did not accept a payment for the commission, though his benefactors provided him with the material: one report indicates the paint alone cost Rs 35,000, a huge sum back then.

By now, George Keyt had fully abandoned his Anglican upbringing. Renouncing his middle-class inheritance, he had first attempted to enter the path of a Buddhist monk. He then began contributing to arguably the most seminal Buddhist publication in the country, The Buddhist Annual of Ceylon. Over the next few years he drew sketches from the life of the Buddha, the Jataka Stories, and classical Sinhala texts, for other publications, including the Ceylon Daily News Vesak Number and Observer Annual.

In her book Buddha to Krishna: Life and Times of George Keyt, Yashodhara Dalmia contends that in all this, Keyt was shaped by the growing tide of Buddhist nationalism.

This is a fairly accurate observation. But it reduces Keyt to a passive receptacle, a byproduct of various external developments. Keyt’s response to the Buddhist revival was radical, for it represented an affirmation of an ancient tradition. Yet at the same time, as Dalmia notes, he did not let the revivalism of his time dictate his conception of art. The sketches he drew for The Buddhist Annual, which predict his paintings for the Gotami Viharaya, are at one level respectful of the characters they portray. Yet they are also bold and innovative. The painter regards his subjects with justifiable awe. But he does not deify them.

Queen Mahamaya at Rest. Web Image.

Keyt’s sketches in the 1920s and 1930s are evocative of the figures of the celebrated British painter and sculptor Eric Gill. By the late 1930s, however, he has grown fascinated with the curve, a hallmark of traditional Sinhalese painting. Most of his sketches from this period, featured in publications like the Daily News Vesak Number and the Observer Annual, are well-rounded and well curved. This is especially so of his female figures.

One sketch, of Mahamaya Devi sleeping on her bed, stands out in particular. Languid and relaxed, she is well poised even at rest. Though only a sketch, we can almost imagine the colour of her flesh, the thoughts on her mind.

Dalmia notes that Keyt did not come up with preliminary sketches of the murals at the Gotami Viharaya. This may be because he had done them many times before, elsewhere. The sketch of Mahamaya Devi at rest, for instance, predicts his portrait of her in the temple. Such parallels underlie a sustained evolution in his career.

For these reasons, we cannot comment on the Gotami Viharaya murals in isolation. They must be placed in their context. From the soft, languid figures of Siddhartha, his wife Yasodhara, and his disciples and associates, to the writhing, contorted figures of Mara and his army, Keyt exhibits a grasp of multiple styles.

More than anything, one notices an attempt at humanising his characters. Unlike traditional Kandyan temple art, the murals at Gotami Viharaya are lifelike, certainly life-sized. Yet they are hardly larger than life. Tellingly, Keyt chose not to include the suvisi vivarana and sath satiya, episodes that follow the Buddha’s attainment of Enlightenment.

By contrast, the artist dehumanises Mara and his army. They are made to stand apart from the rest, and we are made to see them as such. They are the “Other”, and as such exist away and apart from his other figures and depictions.

Lionel Wendt liked the original sketches that Keyt drew, and suggested that he leave them in that form. Wendt had seen Keyt’s sketches Keyt in the 1930s and may have felt the murals would look more distinctive as sketches. Keyt, however, insisted on painting them in colour. In his choice of colours, he departed from convention: he made the whites and greens more prominent, balancing them against the reds, yellows, and browns.

In other words, he was ready to do away with convention, but not to the point of rupturing with them completely. This somewhat ambivalent attitude epitomised most of the 43 Group, a point Qadri Ismail brings up in his critique of that artistic collective.

“The most celebrated members of that male institution – Keyt, Wendt, Justin Däraniyagala, [Ivan] Peries – produced stunning, innovative work and, as is now well known, the group itself determinedly introduced modernist painting to Sri Lanka in the face of powerful opposition from a conservative, realist, colonial art establishment. However, it is also necessary to insist, from the perspective of our moment, that the group’s staging of Sri Lanka in its artistic production… was profoundly complicitous with both orientalism and the problematic of Sinhala nationalism.”

When first shown the outlines of the murals, we are told the monks at the Viharaya raised concerns over their depiction of female sensuality. Unlike most murals, Keyt had chosen not to feature fair-skinned women in his panels: almost all of them are brown-skinned. At one level, that represents an attempt to de-exoticize the South Asian woman, something Dalmia emphasises in her book.

Yet at another level, it betrays his fantasies and his obsessions about that specific feminine type. It is possible that in all these paintings Keyt was evoking his wife, Pilawela Menike, who occupied his life and dominated his passions.

In other words, in a pattern reminiscent of most of the other members of the 43 Group, Keyt’s radical conception of art was tempered by a somewhat conservative counterpoint, be it in his choice of colour or his mode of representation.

From the perspective of their moment (or the moment of their perspective?), of course, these murals do represent a break with tradition, and they should be discussed, praised, or critiqued in that light. But perhaps owing to their inability to go beyond the visual confines of the medium they worked in, the 43 Group became, as Ismail notes, “complicitous” both with nationalism and, ironic as it may sound, orientalism.

There is nothing overtly orientalist about the murals, of course. Yet in the female figures which adorn these walls, there is an attempt, however vague or slight, to translate his obsession with dark-skinned women into a definitive form. This, we believe, may explain his reluctance to leave the murals in sketch outline: he knew, and not wrongly, that they would lose their character if not in colour.

Today the Gotami Viharaya stands on the side of a residential road in Borella. Keyt’s murals, on walls designed by the British architect Andrew Boyd, contrast sharply with the buduge, which features murals more in line with conventional 20th century styles.

George Keyt’s contribution to the Buddhist revival, as a writer, a poet, and a painter, comes out beautifully in these panels. They reflect his abilities, and no doubt also his limitations. Yashodhara Dalmia describes the Viharaya as “perhaps the second most visited monument after Sigiriya.” Yet today it stands in isolation from its surroundings in Colombo, indeed from the rest of the country. That is a pity, for at the temple we discern a high point not just in Sri Lankan, but also South Asian and Asian art.

Uditha Devapriya is a writer, researcher, and analyst based in Sri Lanka who contributes to a number of publications on topics such as history, art and culture, politics, and foreign policy. He can be reached at udakdev1@gmail.com