We need sound policies in Sri Lanka

Modified from an article published in the Sunday Times Sri Lanka, January 2018:

Whereas there is legislation governing sound pollution in Sri Lanka including from religious sources, its enforcement is rather limited, especially outside Colombo.  It is heartening to witness the present government appearing to enforce curbs on religious noise, blasting across the airways, or at least allowing the police to exercise their legal powers, but more action is desperately needed if Sri Lanka is to join the community of civilized nations.

In most of the developed world, countries like Singapore and now China, religious amplified sound pollution in particular (ASP) is either a thing of the past or was never permitted in the first place.  The un-amplified bells of Big Ben still ring naturally from London’s Westminster but don’t carry much beyond that; they’re rightly celebrated by BBC news broadcasts.  One of the largest mosques in Europe dominates Harrow but there certainly isn’t any ASP from there; bedrooms in Harrow are quiet enough at night to be used as professional sound recording studios.  In the Western world, it was never the done thing to have loudspeakers on behalf of religious events except at a local scale and regulatory frameworks have prevented ASP including from immigrant communities such as Muslims or Buddhists.  Temporary volubility is allowed, but under licence.  Man-made “natural” sounds including bells or drumming, such as the morning tom-toms at Kandy would have been commonplace in Sri Lanka throughout its two thousand odd years of high civilisation.  It is only since the 1970s in particular that ASP in particular has become a serious problem, threatening sanity and environmental resilience.  During the 1960’s in Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew was requested permission that religious places of worship may make loudspeaker broadcasts, but foreseeing technological advances such as the spread of radio and comparing notes with places like the UK, he wisely refused.  Throughout China including parts of Mongolia in recent months, loudspeaker ASP has been banned and loudspeakers are being torn down.  Places of religious worship continue to have the capacity to broadcast through radio and today, smartphones.

Sound pollution is a growing menace in many developing countries including Sri Lanka and the religious elements exacerbate the issue.  Countries with better regulatory frameworks and environmental legislation such as Costa Rica fare a lot better, indeed Costa Rica is ranked one of the happiest in the world.  In Thailand as in many other countries it is not the custom for traffic to horn loudly as in Sri Lanka except in warning.  The unnecessary proliferation in sound is a cultural as well as legislative thing.  Perhaps Sri Lankans enjoy loud noise more than Thais or English, even if it can increase stress and impair hearing?  – The trouble is that noise levels are increasing and out of control thanks to rising population and the increasing availability of loudspeakers in a free-for-all capacity for anyone, especially a rabble, those with power or religious authority to make increasingly whimsical exhibitions of popularity at a level that is difficult for ordinary people to cope with as they struggle to live their lives and seek a little bit of peace in their busy schedules.

I was recently at Gampola around Ambuluwawa where there is a road construction project.  During the day, the machinery was quite loud but one could just about cope.  By five PM it became peaceful enough to consider take a long country walk but I was dismayed that a few minutes after I started walking, the local temple chose to blast pirith throughout the valley not for 10 or 15 minutes but for an entire hour.  Just when I wanted to listen to the beleaguered birds at song, I was being forced to listen to chanting via loudspeakers, crackling the air like an endless buzz about my ears.  These walls of noise are no longer produced to quite the level they were once allowed in Colombo, but in Kandy, ordinary folk have often to put up with it at least twice a day or more.  Every new temple and mosque potentially equates to new sets of loudspeakers and the same thing being amplified at about the same time, each centre clamouring to outdo the other.  Tourists may climb a hill or mountain in relative peace, but at the summit they hear a welter of religious ASP and bakery vans with their endlessly repeated, mechanical tunes.

Despite arguments to the contrary, neither Buddhism nor Islam (the Christians seem more restrained) among other traditions ever had scriptural authority to generate ASP given that electric loudspeakers did not exist when they were written.  It would be fine for imams or monks to shout across the bows as it were in their ordinary voice as intended, but the loudspeakers have really made this into a mentally and morally taxing situation. As a recent report by the Buddhist Publication Society (BPS) in Kandy states:

“Western Buddhists who are visiting Buddhist countries in Asia for the first time are surprised on how noisy the environment is due to the blatant use of loudspeakers. They are even more surprised when discovering that a lot, if not most, of the noise is coming from Buddhist temples. Religious institutions of any kind, all attempting to assert their importance over others, are known to be noisy … The Uposatha or observance days, when Buddhist laypeople come to the monasteries and take the eight precepts, are often the noisiest days because of the five-precept chanting and sermons blared over loudspeakers.”

It’s ironic as it is actually difficult to meditate or pray properly when associated with ASP.  The Buddha didn’t take kindly to noise.  As the BPS report makes clear:

“The Buddha was living at Sávatthì… six bhikkhus [made] a loud, great sound. People looked down upon it, complained, became irritated: ’How can the sons of the Sakyan go among the houses making a loud, great sound?!’ [The Buddha came … said:] ’Foolish men, how can you go among the houses making a loud, great sound?! It will not lead to faith in those who have no faith; it will not lead to the increase [in numbers] of those who have faith’… [and he laid down the training rule:] ’I shall go quietly in inhabited areas, this is a training to be done.”’

Buddhist temples are major sources of ASP in Sri Lanka.  This may be justified when a monk may be delivering a speech but a great deal of the ASP is pre-recorded, often put out by the smaller temples struggling to establish a sort of hegemony or draw support.  Despite much of this being against the Vinaya, many lay Buddhists have been convinced that it is an aspect of Buddhist practice.  In the more developed Muslim countries such as in the United Arab Emirates and Malaysia, mosques cannot make an unregulated storm of sound that rises from the belly of the city at dawn, dusk and other times (as sometimes seems to happen from Kandy).  The call to prayer can indeed be pleasant as president Obama once noted “one of the prettiest sounds on Earth at sunset” especially when it is done at moderate volume.

Village Sri Lankans have told me how they cannot protest the deafening emanations from their local temples that disturb sleep, study and exam revision as they could be accused of being against their culture.  Since many now note the problem, it is time to be decisive with policing at least existing legislation before creating new laws.  Many Buddhists and Muslims would privately if not publicly support the regulation of ASP and it would add to communal harmony, something that Lee Kwan Yew was wise to.  It is not the place of this article to detail the existing legislation in Sri Lanka, the enforcement of which is rather tepid outside Colombo – but if the tourism and the economy of the country is to benefit then it is extremely important to enforce legislation so that town and country alike, especially including national parks are not affected by ASP, especially from religious sources and that we may still be able to hear the noises of elephants, leopards, bears, jackals and the multitudes of birds and insects that the Island is blessed with. If by some miracle, Sri Lanka moves to levels of auditory peace experienced before the twentieth century (and progress may be faster than appears with the increasing use of quiet electric vehicles), then legislation should not only cover religion (as enforced in most developed countries), but public excesses including fireworks, bakery/ice cream vans and vehicle horns.  Sound policies would act at multiple levels on the basis of licencing (with allowances for temporary noise during special occasions or a higher priority religious site), more curfews on noise between dusk, night and dawn, the taxation or regulation on the sale and distribution of loudspeakers and more power to the people to prosecute breaches of the peace.  

I was so relieved at Gampola when it rained, the divine sounds of nature thwarting the local temple’s clamour. I’d much prefer to hear my own prayers and those of barbets, bulbuls, babblers and crickets, and even imams and monks at their own pitch rather than through loudspeakers.  We really cannot afford anymore to be patronised to in these regards by ignorant religious leaders given they have no sanction.  Sounds at mountain summits should not reflect emanations of man made sound pollution from below.  We need sound policies.