Explore Colombo and the west coast
East of Fort, the helter-skelter bazaar district of the Pettah is Colombo’s most absorbing area, and feels quite unlike anywhere else in Sri Lanka. The crush and energy of the gridlocked streets, with merchandise piled high in tiny shops and on the pavements, holds an undeniable, chaotic fascination, although exploring can be a slow and rather exhausting process, made additionally perilous by the barrow boys and porters who charge through the crowds pulling or carrying huge loads and threatening the heads and limbs of unwary tourists.
Shops in the Pettah are still arranged in the traditional bazaar layout, with each street devoted to a different trade: Front Street, for example, is full of bags, suitcases and shoes; 1st Cross Street is devoted to hardware and electrical goods; 3rd Cross Street and Keyzer Street are stuffed with colourful fabrics, and so on. The wares on display are fairly mundane – unless you’re a big fan of Taiwanese household appliances or fake Barbie dolls – although traces of older and more colourful trades survive in places.
Unlike the rest of Colombo, the district retains a strongly Tamil (the name Pettah derives from the Tamil word pettai, meaning village) and Muslim flavour, as evidenced by its many pure veg and Muslim restaurants, quaint mosques, Hindu temples and colonial churches (many Sri Lankan Tamils are Christian rather than Hindu). Even the people look different here, with Tamil women in gorgeous saris, Muslim children dressed entirely in white and older men in brocaded skullcaps – a refreshing change from the boring skirts and shirts which pass muster in the rest of the city.
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Henry Steel Olcott: American Buddhist
Henry Steel Olcott: American Buddhist
On the south side of the Pettah, in front of Fort Railway Station, stands a statue of Henry Steel Olcott (1842–1907), perhaps the most influential foreigner in the modern history of Sri Lanka. Olcott was an American Buddhist and co-founder (with Madame Blavatsky, the celebrated Russian clairvoyant and spiritualist) of the Theosophical Society, a quasi-religious movement which set about promoting Asian philosophy in the West and reviving oriental spiritual traditions in the East, to protect them from the attacks of European missionary Christianity. The society’s utopian (if rather vague) objectives comprised a mixture of the scientific, the social, the spiritual and the downright bizarre: the mystical Madame Blavatsky, fount of the society’s more arcane tenets, believed that she had the ability to levitate, render herself invisible and communicate with the souls of the dead, as well as asserting that the Theosophical Society was run according to orders received from a group of “masters” – disembodied tutelary spirits who were believed to reside in Tibet.
In 1880, Blavatsky and Olcott arrived in Ceylon, formally embracing Buddhism and establishing the Buddhist Theosophical Society, which became one of the principal driving forces behind the remarkable worldwide spread of Buddhism during the twentieth century. Olcott spent many of his later years touring the island, organizing Buddhist schools and petitioning the British colonial authorities to respect Sri Lanka’s religious traditions, though his most visible legacy is the multicoloured Buddhist flag which he helped design, and which now decorates temples across the island.
