The Temple of the Tooth, in the morning light of Kandy. Built in the early 18th century as a royal palace for Vira Narendra Sinha, the last Sinhalese king, it was converted into a temple to house the Tooth Relic of the Buddha. The moat and the octagonal Paththirippuwa pavilion were added in 1802 by Sri Vickrama Rajasingha, the last king of Kandy. Designed by the royal architect, Devendra Moolacharya, the pavilion’s eight points were meant to radiate from the king as he displayed the Tooth Relic to the crowds below, reinforcing his position at the centre of the world. The name Paththirippuwa comes from the Tamil words, parthu (meaning ‘to see’) and irippu (to be ‘seated’), and together sound like ‘to sit and see’, and many take this as evidence that Tamil was in fact the lingua franca of the Lankan aristocracy. After the British seized Kandy in 1815, the Paththirippuwa was converted into an oriental library, and thus it remains today, housing the temple’s collection of Buddhist palm leaf manuscripts and books. Shot for the New York Times in December 2018.
The Aluth Maligawa Entrance, Temple of the Tooth, Kandy. Sri Lanka, October 2018.Shermaine Willis and Anuradha Perera, for Ashraff Associates and The Radh, Kandy.
A thammettama drummer plays during a musical ceremony on the lower floor of the temple’s main shrine. The twin thammettama are traditional Sri Lankan drums, played with curved sticks called kadippuwa, in Sinhalese. Hewisi is a form of religious music once reserved for use by Kandyan royal decree. Today, hewisi is still used almost exclusively in Buddhist ceremonies, and is seen as an offering in itself.Shot on assignment for The New York Times in December 2018.
My presentation last week to the Photographic Society of Sri Lanka‘s Street & Travel Group, conducted live on Zoom. Thank you, Nilan Herath and the PSSL for inviting me, and to everyone who turned up for it. For those of you who couldn’t, here’s the full presentation, minus the subsequent discussion.
Son of the Morning Light 