The Mystery of SRI SHETRA (Pyu city)
Dr. Uday Dokras su-se.academia.edu
The Mystery of SRI SHETRA (Pyu city)
This essay discusses the religious experience of Srividya practices at Devipuram in Andhra Pradesh, South India, based on ethnographic studies conducted in 2014 and 2015. A summary of phenomena described by Amritanandanatha Saraswati in his memoirs situates the background. Interviews with three disciples of Amritananda probe their visionary experiences, practical methodologies and relationships with the Goddess. An inter-textual study of interviews, memoirs and narratives helps identify a theme of vision and embodiment—in particular, the aniconic graphic form of the Goddess, the Sriyantra, which is experienced as embodied within the practitioner.

When we read and hear about Colombo, Sri Lanka, we don’t often read and hear about religion experience. However, when we step outside on to the streets of Colombo religious experience is obvious and ubiquitous. This project reviews the scholarly and anecdotal record and compares it to the social and spatial life of the contemporary inner-city. As well as temples, churches and mosques, the spatiality of religion extends to the street, markets and homes of the city: religious experience is more than worship and sanctioned ritual. It is felt through all the senses in Colombo. For example, the cool shade of a bo tree allowed to grow through the hot pavement; the colours and styles of dress; the aromas and flavours of the richly syncretic cuisine; small acts of kindness; and the sounds of observance: voices and instruments connecting the humans, their material realm and the cosmological world. When religious experience and innovation determine the spatial and the social to such a high degree, why is it that history does not acknowledge their presence? This blindness to ‘urban religion’ is evident in the literature on Colombo, but also in urban studies more generally. Situational analysis of the social formation, the urban environment and religious experience represents a way to move past axiomatic views of religion, cities and their relationship. This study also reflects on how a more anthropological understanding of the capital, Colombo, might offer alternative perspectives of the nation and its complex social identity in the post-conflict era.

I have just written a paper on Palembang which was an important Srivijay City, some say its capital. It could also have been a place near the capital Srivijaypura, later on assuming importance. This is its continuation. (https://www.academia.edu/85725561/ SRIVIJAYPURA_The_Capital_of_the_SRIVIJAY_EMPIRE_Palembang) Srivijaya empire, maritime and commercial kingdom that flourished between the 7th and the 13th centuries, largely in what is now Indonesia. The kingdom originated in Palembang on the island of Sumatra and soon extended its influence and controlled the Strait of Malacca. Srivijaya's power was based on its control of international sea trade. It established trade relations not only with the states in the Malay Archipelago but also with China and India.