Not long ago, I boarded a Sri Lankan Airlines flight at Katunayake International Airport in Colombo, bound for London Heathrow. I had been on a short visit from the UK, one of the aims of which was to discuss draft sections of this book with colleagues and friends in Colombo. The politics of Sri Lanka's nature was very much on my mind. It was the front cover of the Sri Lankan Airlines in-flight magazine, Serendib, that first caught my attention: a high-resolution photograph of a wild leopard in Ruhuna National Park drinking from a water pool. Beneath was a list of features inside the magazine, which, in w hat seemed a striking and fortuitous coincidence, read like a partial reflection of the contents of this manuscript. As well as a feature on leopard spotting in Ruhuna, there was an article on Geoffrey Bawa's garden retreat Lunuganga, another on tropical modern architecture, as well as a feature on Sri Lanka's network of national nature reserves. There were more nature pieces as well, including a feature on the wildlife photographer Chitral Jayatileke, and a guide to Blue Whale watching in Sri Lanka.

I should not have been surprised by Serendib's contents. As I stressed in the introduction to this book, nature is something of on obsession in Sri Lanka. Like most in-flight magazines of national air carriers, the magazine seems to take as one its aims the promotion of Sri Lanka to tourists and travellers alike. Sri Lanka's wildlife, nature, and its tropical environmental aesthetics - as the Editorial to that issue put it, the ‘harmony that exists in [its] nature’ (Peaple 2009: 4) - are some of the country's most marketable and alluring assets. And accordingly Sri Lanka makes strong claims about the history of its natural assets and the harmonizing aesthetics they afford. For example, the title of the feature in Serendib on the country's network of nature reserves asks, with some rhetorical panache: ‘Sri Lanka's Wildlife Parks: Were these the world's first wildlife reserves?’ In answer to this question, the piece begins with a familiar legend in Sri Lankan wildlife and conservation discourse.

Sacred Modernity argues how everyday non-secular experiences of the natural world in Sri Lanka perpetuate ethno-religious identitarian narratives. It demonstrates the relationships between spaces of nature and environment and an ongoing aesthetic and spatial constitution of power and the political in which Theravada Buddhism is centrally implicated. To do this, the book works consecutively through two in-depth case studies, both of which are prominent sites through which Sri Lankan nature and environment are commodified: first, the country's most famous national park, Ruhuna (Yala), and second, its post-1950s modernist environmental architecture, 'tropical modernism'. By engaging these sites, the book reveals how commonplace historical understandings as well as commonplace material negotiations of the seductions of Sri Lankan nature are never far from the continued production of a post-independent national identity marked ethnically as Sinhalese and religiously as Buddhist. In the Sri Lankan context this minoritizes Tamil, Muslim and Christian non-Sinhala difference in the nation-state's natural, environmental and historical order of things. To make this argument, the book writes against the grain of Eurocentric social scientific understandings of the concepts 'nature' and 'religion'. It argues that these concepts and their implicit binary mobilizations of nature/culture and the sacred/secular respectively, struggle to make visible the pervasive ways that Buddhism - thought instead as a 'structure of feeling' or aesthetics - simultaneously naturalizes and ethnicizes the fabric of the national in contemporary Sri Lanka. Sacred Modernity shows the care and postcolonial methodological sensitivity required to understand how 'nature' and 'religion' might be thought through non-EuroAmerican field contexts, especially those in South Asia.