This piece accompanies Lara Wijesuriya’s article ‘Go Home Banda’: Sri Lanka, Statue Politics, and the 2022 Protests recently published in History Workshop Journal 97.
Close your eyes and imagine a strip of green, then a strip of blue, then the sky above that. Now imagine kites all across the sky, and people scattered across the green. Add some umbrellas along the divide between the green and blue strips, and some colourful carts dotted here and there. Now you have a fair picture of Galle Face Green in Colombo, Sri Lanka. Or, to be more accurate, a picture of pre-2024 Galle Face Green, because since February of this year, the carts have been removed from the picture. Before February, the isso vadai vendors were an important part of the space; eating an isso vadai – a gram-based fried snack topped with prawns – was a major part of the Galle Face experience. Following Independence Day celebrations this year, however, the vendors were forced to take their carts elsewhere after being prevented from coming back to the green. Galle Face, one of the most important public spaces in Colombo, is defined by the people who use it and the state that orders it. I will trace how the public and the state have shaped this public space since independence.
Galle Face is a promontory just south of the Colombo Fort. Used as a racecourse at one point, it became a public promenade during the 19th century. At one end is the colonial-era Galle Face Hotel, at the other, the Presidential Secretariat and many of Colombo’s hotels. Along the side of it was the Colombo Club and a very few other buildings; now newer hotels and a mall line the side of the road. The number 100 bus (Moratuwa to Fort) runs along the Galle Road here. The other side of Galle Face dips down to a rocky and polluted strip of beach, which in turn dips down into the Indian Ocean.
As a public space, Galle Face is given shape and character by the people who use it. During the COVID-19 lockdowns, the Green was completely free of people for almost the first time in living memory. The grass grew well, and a joke went round that Galle Face was actually Green for the first time. The pelicans on the nearby Beira Lake and the ubiquitous crows were sometimes the only living things to be seen in the area. But as soon as the lockdowns lifted, the people of Colombo were back. The usual life of Galle Face follows a certain pattern- a few people wandering around during the day, a steady trickle coming in towards evening, and loads of people on public holidays. This is the place to fly kites, enjoy the sea views, have a picnic, eat isso vadai and ice cream, and have some umbrella-sponsored privacy during a date. This daily life is shaped by what people want and use public spaces for; if we didn’t want all these things of a public space or wanted more, then the space would contract and expand to suit the people who make it.
In addition to this daily life, Galle Face has been a focal point during specific moments in Sri Lanka’s history. Until the 1980s, the Parliament met in a building at the end of Galle Face (now the Presidential Secretariat). This made the Green the perfect place to stage demonstrations against the government- the most iconic of these demonstrations being the 1956 satyagraha organized by the Ilangkai Tamil Arasu Katchchi (ITAK) against the passing of SWRD Bandaranaike’s Sinhala Only Act, which discriminated against minority Tamil-speakers and was a contributing factor to the thirty year war. During the closed economy of the 1960s and 70s, thousands of women, including my grandmother, lined up at Galle Face to collect their rations of cloth (orange, smelling of kerosene, that my then 6-year-old uncle refused to wear). In the aftermath of the 2004 tsunami, collection centres for dry rations and other relief were set up at Galle Face. Galle Face was also chosen as being the best site to accommodate the thousands of people who camped overnight to attend Pope Francis’ Mass during the 2015 papal visit.
Most recently in collective memory, Galle Face served as the space of the protest village that was set up during the anti-government protests of 2022. Protestors pitched tents and gradually built up a whole village from April to August of 2022, including kitchens, a library, a cinema, a people’s university, a solar-powered charging station, and many more. The whole space was made even more public than it had been before ─ not necessarily always in a positive way, as occasionally protestors decided that different rules applied within the village than outside. In one incident, police who entered the village to investigate a theft were told by protestors that they had no jurisdiction within the space. The government’s role of law enforcement was replaced by a sort of people’s court, and the thief was sentenced to hard work in the kitchen tents. This incident of the people taking on the functions of the state seems to mark a point at which the public moves beyond an amorphous mass and takes its first steps towards the regulations and order of a state. In other words, imagining the public and the state as part of a cycle, the space of Galle Face became so much a space of the people that it became once more regulated and circumscribed.
The state plays a big role in the creation and maintenance of public spaces ─ Galle Face did not organically become such a focal point but was developed as a public promenade. The buildings around Galle Face, and even the coastline itself, have changed rapidly during the post-independence period. While people decide how a public space should be by being in it, the state has the power to decide whether the people get to be there at all ─ as the COVID-19 lockdowns show. The power to ban certain people from the space, as happened to the isso vadai vendors, also rests firmly with the state.
As part of the state’s recent push to ‘gentrify’ Colombo, a series of concrete stalls were built within the last five years. Vendors of isso vadai and soft drinks were encouraged to set up shop there, but many were unable to afford the down payments needed for the stalls. This led to the incident I described earlier, when the itinerant isso vadai carts, formerly all over Galle Face, were banned from coming back.
The state can also physically change the appearance of the space. In 1939, the cenotaph commemorating the fallen of the First World War, that had stood on a slight hill overlooking Galle Face for sixteen years, was removed by the government, stating concerns that Japanese aircraft would use it as a landmark in the event of a raid. This cenotaph now stands near the Public Library, and the slope on which it stood remained empty for the next thirty years until the erection of the Bandaranaike statue.
In 1976, Colombo was gearing up to host the 5th Non-Aligned Summit for heads of state of those newly-independent countries which formed the ‘Third World’ bloc against the Eastern and Western blocs of the Cold War world. Just in time for the summit, Sri Lanka was sent the gift of a statue of former Prime Minister SWRD Bandaranaike by the USSR (famously not a member of the Non-Aligned Movement).
In a recent article for HWJ, I discussed how protestors during the 2022 protests engaged with this statue of SWRD Bandaranaike. Towering over the tents and placards of the protest village, Bandaranaike’s statue symbolized the state, the troubled history and legacies of post-independent politics, and also served as a highly visible landmark. Protestors reacted to these symbols and engaged with the statue in ways that reveal the perceptions and problems current during the protests. This engagement is just one wave in the sea of people that laps at Galle Face and shapes the space. Other overlapping waves of the state cross these waves of the people to counter and balance movements and use of the public space that is Galle Face. Like all urban public spaces, the physical space of Galle Face is created and changed by the tides and flow of the people and the state.
