While founding the Ceylon Social Reform Society in 1905, Ananda Coomaraswamy talked of two essential pre-requisites that needed to be fulfilled before any social reform could be ushered in Ceylonian society.
First, the basis of the revitalization of society should be cultural pluralism. Hence, all Sri Lankans should be taught Sanskrit, Pali, Sinhala, and Tamil to truly appreciate their culture. And the understanding that Sri Lankan heritage could not be separated from the Indian one.
Second, what was ideally the requirement for modern times was the blending of the superior features of Eastern civilization with the best features of the West.
The philosophy behind this organization and its activities was to retrieve and rejuvenate the traditional society of Sri Lanka, embodied in the village communities that were untouched by what he called 'phony westernization'.
For him, an 'illiterate villager' personified the unbreakable bonds between nature, life, and a higher being. And what modernity/westernization had done was, to not only break this bond but also disfigure their relationships with each other.
R. Mahalakshmi, a Professor at JNU, discusses how she faced a peculiar challenge while teaching of the works of stalwarts like Coomaraswamy. Students refused to read him unmediated by the fashionistas of the art history world.
While these students offered sophisticated (yet empty) critiques of the apparently 'traditionalist' viewpoints of Coomaraswamy, they didn't seem to have any problem with Walter Benjamin, who in his work, proposed a similar worldview when it came to modernity and technology.
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