In Sri Lanka, during last year's aragalaya, or people's struggle, the concept of the gama or village in Sinhala, came to the forefront of political discourse. Gota Go Gama on the Galle Face Green in Colombo, demanding that President Gotabaya Rajapaksa resign amid a dire economic crisis, not only became the main site of resistance but also came to represent an anarchistic revolutionary movement. Many other Gota Go villages emerged elsewhere in the country as well.
At the height of the aragalaya, Colombo's Gota Go Gama site had its own library, a makeshift movie theater called Tear Gas Cinema, and a "people's university" where local academics engaged in conversations and debates. There were even attempts at farming on the site. A food supply chain emerged almost organically to keep the protesters fed. Gota Go Gama began to function as an organic and self-sufficient entity, almost like a syndicate. Despite the movement's failure to articulate a concrete vision for the future of the country, many protesters at the site were utopians. They longed for a future free of corruption, racism, sexism and even capitalism, although they had no clear plan to achieve this ideal. Thus, the Gota Go Village – and it is of great importance that it was a "village" – was anarchistic, utopian and also syndicalist.
The village has long been a powerful trope in the Sinhalese Buddhist consciousness, and was presented as such in Sri Lanka's nationalist political vision throughout the 20th century and till today. It represents an idealised, utopian past that Sri Lankans must strive to recover. Arguably, this bucolic utopianism has been a catalyst for politico-historical progress in the country. The aragalaya – which was also, after a fashion, "village"-centred – can be understood as part of this trend.
Utopianism in the Sri Lankan case has been reoriented to strive towards a nationalist purpose – a nationalist and Sinhalese Buddhist utopia. The much-critiqued concept of gama, pansala, wava, yaya – or the village, temple, irrigation tank and paddy field – is the quintessential summation of utopianism in the Sri Lankan context. The social anthropologist Stanley Jeyaraja Tambiah, in Buddhism Betrayed?, claims that this concept emerges from the work of Martin Wickramasinghe, a leading Sri Lankan Sinhalese Buddhist writer of the twentieth century. Along with Wickramasinghe, the cultural critic and philosopher Ananda Coomaraswamy should also be considered a leading proponent of Sri Lankan agrarian utopianism. Wickramasinghe and Coomaraswamy are among the most influential Sri Lankan intellectuals of the last century, and their role in shaping the Sri Lankan national consciousness cannot be understated.