Researching Sri Lankan and US History
15 May 2025This year, I was honored to be selected for the Quillian International Scholar Study Abroad Seminar in Sri Lanka.
Last year, Randolph was fortunate to host Sri Lankan scholar Sudesh Mantillake as our Quillian Visiting International Scholar. I got to know him over the course of the year—his office was just down the hall from mine—and I was especially impressed by his performance of Kandyan dance in February, an event attended by the Sri Lankan ambassador.
Throughout the spring, the Randolph delegation followed a rigorous preparation schedule. We attended weekly information sessions on Sri Lankan history, religion, culture, and food, and many of us visited the Sri Lankan Embassy in D.C.
I also used this time to begin researching historical connections between the U.S. and Sri Lanka.
The first thing I discovered was that Sudesh was not the first Sri Lankan to perform Kandyan dance at Randolph! The R-MWC newspaper, The Sun Dial, reported that two members of the Ceylon National Dancers performed here in 1962. When I showed the image to Sudesh, he was blown away—the male dancer had been one of his mentors!
That discovery led me to wonder: Had Sri Lanka played a role in American religious history?
I started with the 1932 Hocking Report, titled Re-Thinking Missions: A Laymen’s Inquiry After One Hundred Years. I had first encountered it in David Hollinger’s Protestants Abroad, which highlights its pivotal role in reshaping Protestant missions and American Protestantism more broadly.
As a former Global Mission Fellow of the United Methodist Church—here’s my blog and podcast from those years—this made total sense to me. It helped explain why I had such as radically different understanding of “mission” and a “missionary” than did evangelical Christians. In part, it’s because my tradition had been so influenced by the Hocking Report.
I discovered that the Laymen’s committee did indeed travel to Ceylon as part of their research. However, I wasn’t able to find any digitized sources detailing their time there. Ah the joys and challenges of doing social history…
A bit more internet digging led me to Howard Thurman as another possible link between American religious history and Sri Lanka.
I had read Thurman’s Jesus and the Disinherited in grad school and knew how deeply it had been shaped by his 1935 journey to India. During that trip, he met with Gandhi and helped forge a spiritual and intellectual link between Gandhian nonviolence and the American civil rights movement.
I also knew that his papers had been digitized through Boston University’s Howard Thurman Papers Project.
What I quickly discovered was that Thurman didn’t just travel to India—he also spent time in Ceylon (Sri Lanka) and Burma (Myanmar).
As I dug into his journal from his time in Ceylon, I began to see that Sri Lanka played a far more crucial role in shaping his ideas than I had realized.
I presented a paper on this research titled “Transformative Travel: Howard Thurman’s Pilgrimage to Ceylon and the Making of the U.S. Civil Rights Movement.”
Since I don’t anticipate publishing this research formally, I’m sharing the presentation text here.
