Research

Buddhist Lineage and Maritime Diplomacy in 18th Century Kandy and Ayutthaya

My 2024 Ph.D. dissertation at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, Dangerous Friendships: Making and Unmaking Maritime Buddhist Connection in Eighteenth-Century Southern Asia, my 2022 article in Itinerario: Journal of Imperial and Global Interactions, and my first book manuscript in progress jointly examine the ways Buddhist monks and courtiers of the mid and late eighteenth-century Laṅkān Kandyan and Siamese Ayutthayan Kingdoms engaged one another in initially friendly religious diplomacy mediated by the economic and commercial ambition of the Dutch East Company’s governors, merchants, and seafarers. This engagement led to the restoration of Kandy’s declining Buddhist male Buddhist monastic lineage with the importation of long-sought Ayutthayan monks who arrived on Dutch ships in 1753.

I argue that mid-eighteenth century maritime religious and diplomatic connectivity—together with its disintegration—between the South Indian Nāyakkar, Śrī Laṅkān Kandyan, and Siamese Ayutthayan Kingdoms was marked not only by forms of institutional power and loyalty wielded by representatives of European colonial trading corporations, Southern Asian courts, and their religious saṅghas, but especially by the often-perilous itineraries of personal ambition between the agents of these institutions who called one another “friend,” but whose friendships made life more dangerous. The Buddhist monks and envoys who crossed and transgressed hazardous monsoon oceans on Dutch ships in search of amicable religious connectivity not only faced, but exacerbated, forms of economic, political, and especially religious disintegration and danger, leaving in the wake of their journeys durable imprints on the modern and contemporary trajectories of Śrī Laṅkān and Thai nationhood together with ongoing disputes about caste, ethnicity, race, religion, and the multicultural politics of belonging.

Here, a religious ritual of protection and veneration performed by seafaring monks during a monsoon storm in the middle of the ocean becomes a microcosm for the exchange of religious and political power as well as the moral and soteriological preoccupations of Buddhist travelers in Bay of Bengal. While there is a substantive Buddhist studies and historical literature charting forms of religious connectivity between mainland Southeast Asia and Laṅkā in the first millennium and in the more modern and contemporary periods, little work has been done to reconstruct the hazardous itineraries of shifting institutional loyalty and personal ambition in a late eighteenth-century world characterized by political and economic disintegration, war, and the enduring centrality of religious lineage to the legacies of indigenous as well as colonial state power.

This project argues that maritime Buddhist diplomacy in the eighteenth-century was characterized by the co-constitutive elements of friendship and danger. The dangers included physical dangers associated with oceangoing travel, but also political dangers resulting from connectivity with other polities and their religious orders, as well as European colonial merchants, all of whom jointly made possible multiple forms of political intrigue and the potential for violent destabilization. In other words, friendship and danger worked hand-in-hand in that the forging of friendship across perilous waters not only necessitated danger in the form of shipwrecks, violent storms, diplomatic crises, and illness, violence, and death experienced in the midst of maritime travel, but also intensified danger in the form of political rebellion, hoped-for puppet kings, and new forms of economic exploitation in the midst—and as the very agents—of regime change and war.

How did initially and ostensibly friendly religious connectivity give rise to these circumstances? By examining why the VOC mediated, and later exploited, Buddhist diplomacy in the context of its commercial and political ambition together with that of Buddhist monks and monarchs, I demonstrate that while my archive of mid-eighteenth-century Buddhist diplomacy is one of friendship between monastic saṅghas and their royal patrons separated by the hazardous sea, these were dangerous friendships. Between the 1740s and 1760s, Buddhist maritime connectivity gave rise to destabilizing, fraught, and consequential forms of disintegration, rather than networked connectivity as previous scholars of Indian Ocean Buddhism have asserted. Śrī Laṅkān Kandyan and Siamese Ayutthayan Buddhist monks, envoys, courtiers, kings, and princes, together with the VOC’s governors, merchants, soldiers, sailors, and spies engaged one another in complex, tendentious, and ultimately short-lived projects of connected religious diplomacy motivated by each party’s changing economic, political, and religious demands, desires, and projections of power.

While they called one another “friend,” they destroyed as much as they built. In the wake of their journeys, crossings, transgressions, and destabilizations in the name of and sometimes despite religious connectivity, they charted new forms of affiliation and belonging, built new templates for merging religious and political power, and occasioned the disintegration of those templates. Along the way, they created unprecedented opportunities for the Dutch company to experiment with both mollifying, and later seeking to replace, indigenous monarchs who ran afoul of their balance sheets and trade quotas precisely because its governors and merchants came to appreciate the centrality of Buddhist lineage to the exercise and legitimacy of political power. In other words, as the VOC became the agents of religious exchange, it also learned to exploit it for its own purposes.

Previous scholars of Buddhist history, together with historians employing global and connected methodologies, have located the broad pattern of episodic monastic connection between Śrī Laṅkā and mainland Southeast Asia throughout the second millennium as evidence of a durable form of networked connectivity, placing the mid-eighteenth century case as but one data point in a Braudelian longue durée of religious diplomacy between Indian Ocean Buddhist polities. While this project does not dispute this characterization, it also refuses to adopt such a lengthy view. Instead, I set my sights on a more micro-level approach to the journeys of individual monks, envoys, royals, and sailors navigating a sometimes harmonious, often dangerous, and always changing world of initially friendly diplomacy in the 1740s and 1750s, which both necessitated the acceptance of certain inherent dangers of maritime travel in the late age of sail, and created the conditions for a violent devolution in relations as both Kandy and Ayutthaya headed toward separate wars in the 1760s in which the idiosyncratic friendships between disaffected and power-hungry monks, courtiers, and spies (as much as infantrymen, governors, and kings) were the primary agents of danger and disintegration.

In other words, I argue that their friendships were dangerous in two different respects: I show how friendship necessitated various forms of danger, and then demonstrate that friendship and diplomatic connectivity created the conditions of possibility for a range of dangerous and sometimes-violent political destabilizations. First, the forging of friendship across the early modern Bay of Bengal necessitated the danger of putting Buddhist diplomacy in the hands of European intermediaries, the many dangers of traveling the open seas, and the dangers of utilizing Buddhist lineage as a tool of economic and political triangulation by self-consciously foreign-derived kings. Second, friendship made life more dangerous. With the arrival in Kandy of ordination-granting monks from the heart of Siam came unprecedented opportunities for ambitious courtiers, monks, and Dutch governors to ally themselves in unexpected ways and undermine the templates of political power and sovereignty so critical to the legitimacy of Kandy’s self-consciously foreign-derived kings.

Sodomy and Sexual Normativity in Early Modern Dutch Indian Ocean Empires

In a second long-range book project provisionally titled Stomme Zonden: Queer Sexualities and Other “Unspeakable Sins” in Early Modern Dutch Asia, I propose to examine forms of same-sex and non-normative sexual desire in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century maritime empires of the Dutch East India Company. My initial case studies will draw on the company’s archives in Indonesia, Japan, Thailand, the Netherlands, and the U.K. concerning the 1644 trial of the administrator and chronicler Joost Schouten in Batavia, and the 1725 marooning of the soldier Leendert Hasenbosch on Ascension Island at the nexus of diverse forms of sexual and gender pluralism in the Southern Indian, Siamese, Laṅkān, Japanese and Indo-Malay societies within and adjacent to the company’s territories.

My broader archival investigation will encompass the detailed trial records, diaries, and testimonies of a range of early modern queer subjects of the Dutch company accused of and punished for engaging in sodomy and other non-normative sexual acts at sea and on land alongside the diverse forms of sexual subjectivity in South and Southeast Asian societies. I will also analyze these events in the context of ongoing discussions about sexual ethics in European theological and legal communities—including, for instance, the Utrecht sodomy trials of 1730. With incidents and stories of queer sexuality spanning the Bay of Bengal and South China Sea, a vast trove of court records, travelogues, ships’ records, and everyday correspondence remains under explored. My research will chart the itineraries of belonging and dislocation, desire and sexuality, punishment and state carcerality, as well as the peripatetic lives and fortunes of queer early modern South Asian, Southeast Asian, and Dutch people crossing and transgressing the boundaries of legally- and theologically-inflected forms of sexual and gender normativity.

While there has been exciting research in recent years concerning queer sexuality at the intersection of colonial power and religious and theological debates in the early modern world, little of this work has been focused on the Indian Ocean, and less still engages the imbrications of sodomy at sea and on land in South and Southeast Asian societies with the Dutch East India Company’s exacting mediation of everyday life in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Numerous studies exist concerning same-sex desire in early modern Europe and the Atlantic World, and in modern and contemporary Asia, but far less work has been done to reconstruct both the power dynamics and public perceptions of queer sexuality between Dutch East Indiamen and Southern Asian people in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, nor the circulations, transgressions, migrations, and especially power relations that characterized and resulted from these contacts.

Gender, Buddhism, and Bhikkhunī Ordination in Contemporary Sri Lanka

My 2016 master’s thesis at the University of Colorado Boulder, Global Networks, Local Aspirations: Gender, Lineage, and Localization in Sri Lanka’s Bhikkhunī Ordination Dispute, utilized ethnographic methods to analyze arguments for and against disputed higher ordinations for women in contemporary Sri Lankan Buddhist monastic lineages and in transnational Theravāda monastic traditions more broadly alongside contemporary mobilizations to revive the contested higher-ordination for women Buddhist monastics in Sri Lanka (“nuns” known as bhikkhunīs). The thesis was adapted into my first peer–reviewed journal article, published in Buddhist Studies Review in 2019.

My research uncovered some of the emerging, gendered contexts in which these high profile international and local debates about Buddhism and gendered piety become operable, even exploited and appropriated, for nationalist and xenophobic purposes. While there are separate bodies of literature examining controversies about women’s ordination in Buddhist monasticism as well as Buddhist nationalism in South and Southeast Asia, this was the first study to reveal how these phenomena are co-constitutive. During my research, I discovered that many of the male monastic advocates for women’s ordination articulate their support in terms of gendered Islamophobic and nationalist ideologies which in turn serve to legitimize and operationalize Buddhist women’s piety to construct and bolster forms of ethno-religious majoritarianism.