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Hot on the trail of a dying art

17 Jul 2021

  •  Reza Akram on his photo documentary of Sri Lanka’s hidden martial art angampora

As a creative person, you never know when inspiration is going to strike. It could be the most random and unexpected thing that sets you on something akin to a path of no return. In photographer Reza Akram’s case, inspiration struck one unremarkable afternoon at a friend’s when he saw their computer screensaver. The screensaver showed people (Sri Lankans) doing what looked like martial arts, and martial arts it was. An ancient Sri Lankan martial art called angampora, that his friend had learned about from a colleague who was a practitioner of the art.

[caption id="attachment_150020" align="aligncenter" width="632"] Traditional combat takes place amidst the rhythm of ancient Sinhala war drums[/caption]

That random afternoon at a friend’s took Reza on a seven-year journey researching and documenting this ancient martial art that once thrived across Sri Lanka. To explain angampora, it is an ancient Sri Lankan martial art that is believed to have been created in a time of legend some 30,000 years ago. It is a science of combat that combines unarmed and armed combat, deadly pressure-point attacks, meditation, and esoteric practices that have their roots in a time far before history can recall. The movement of angampora is graceful, strong, and, in the wrong situation, deadly. 

Reza’s pursuit of angampora and his skill as a photographer led him to develop the coffee table book Angampora: A Nation's Legacy in Pictures, written by Deshamanya Ajantha Mahanthaarachchi, photographed by Reza, and published by Oceans and Continents Sri Lanka. The book is the first of its kind in the world to compile a comprehensive visual record of combat techniques, secret rituals, and ancient artefacts of this ancient art to narrate a story about a hidden cultural heritage never seen or heard by the world before. 

 From junior shutterbug to long-format photographer

For most of his life, starting at age 12 as a boy scout, photography was just a hobby and it wasn’t until Reza began working in advertising as a young adult at what is now Dentsu Grant that his interest in photography began to grow professionally. Being exposed to commercial photography and how photographers worked, from composing pictures to art direction to backgrounds to models (as well as how photographers get paid), Reza took a back seat just absorbing the process, before deciding at 22 to take that leap and just start out as a photographer. Working as an assistant under veteran photographers Chris Burgess and Devaka Seneviratne, Reza honed his skill until Devaka put him in charge of his own shoot (a 10-day shoot for an NGO) and told him he was ready to strike out on his own. Going freelance, Reza also enrolled at AOD (Academy of Design) seeking formal training and studying for a certificate in photography. 

“The highlight of studying at AOD was that I got to know what I was good at shooting, which is photo essays,” Reza said. “Photo essays are not a single picture, but multiple pictures explaining a story. I focused mainly on photo essays and documentary work, I call it long-format photography.” 

Reza then threw himself into photography completely, working to carve out a space for himself in the Sri Lankan photography ecosystem. 

Discovering the ancient art of angampora

[caption id="attachment_150016" align="alignright" width="433"] Since the distant past, women too practiced angampora in the same capacity as men[/caption]

While Reza discovering angampora was accidental, he had been on the lookout for a personal project at the time. He’d been told that good stories came to people entirely unexpectedly and randomly, and this was what happened when he saw his friend’s screensaver. “I had never heard about angampora,” Reza said, adding: “Even though I had studied and lived in Sri Lanka all my life, I hadn’t heard about this ancient martial art. My curiosity jumped in, and I wanted to meet these people.” 

Meeting the people practising angampora took six months, not for any special reason, but simply because life got in the way of Reza and his friend making the trip. Interestingly, the community practising angampora was based not in a remote rural location, but in the outskirts of Colombo, in Kaduwela, a place that gets its name for being one of the last strongholds of the Kotte Kingdom. 

It wasn’t Reza’s intention going in to create a book on the art of angampora; to him it was only a personal project, and he photographed the angampora practitioners on and off for about three years, just taking pictures and experimenting, eventually progressing to shooting them continuously. “I didn’t even know why I was shooting them, I wasn’t putting them online or anything, there was only Flickr and Facebook then and Instagram didn’t exist yet. I was just shooting.”

The time came when Reza decided to stage some pictures to tell a more thorough story, and he began looking for nice Sri Lankan locations that could communicate the backstory of angampora; this first series of staged pictures was some 13 images that Reza put on his Behance (an online portfolio platform for creatives), where the story he was telling of unrecognised national heritage and art was picked up by The Huffington Post (now HuffPost) and then featured in about 30 different languages over 100 other platforms. This illustrated the global appeal of angampora and made Reza realise that what he was working on was more than just a personal project, and this led to the birth of Angampora: A Nation's Legacy in Pictures. “As a photographer, it is important to have publications under your name, to do exhibitions, that sort of thing,” Reza said. “I felt that this was a good time in my career to have a book out there. Truthfully, it was more of a career choice that led me to proceed with the book.” 

With proof of concept established by how the world had responded to his work already, Reza reached out to partners to help with the publishing of a book telling the angampora story, with the Sri Lanka Army, Sri Lanka Navy, Sri Lanka Air Force, Brandix Lanka Ltd., Q&E Advertising, Dimo Lanka, and Aitken Spence Printing coming together as partners to bring Angampora: A Nation's Legacy in Pictures to life. For initial funding, Reza crowdfunded, with over 115 people crowdfunding the book and helping kick off the project. 

Telling the angampora story in print

 As an example of long-format photography and photo documentary, Reza knew Angampora: A Nation's Legacy in Pictures had to be very visual, and he approached telling the story of angampora first through its history – through cave paintings, painted cloth, and other depictions of angampora through history – before progressing to show how it has been kept alive, the art itself, and how people practice it. “Honestly, the chapters for the book came from people who were curious about angampora and the questions they would ask me: what this history was, how do you start practising, what about female angampora fighters, stuff like that.” 

An interesting point of note is that this very ancient martial art was gender-neutral, with women playing a big part in ancient Sri Lankan stories featuring angampora. There were lots of female angampora fighters and even female generals. 

In visual language for Angampora: A Nation's Legacy in Pictures, Reza wanted to give all the imagery a timeless feel, where people wouldn’t be able to tell when it was shot. “Giving them that nostalgic feeling was one of the main things, and I achieved it through art direction, from the locations I shot in, and from trying to understand and recreate situations as they were.” 

The tenets of the art of angampora itself also played a part in how the visuals looked. Angampora plays a lot with shadows and darkness, with practitioners walking and working in the shadows and not being seen, somewhat akin to how we perceive ninjas today. This element of shadows played a part in how Reza chose to light his pictures, as well as showing the speed and strength of angampora through capturing the fast-moving actions of the craft. 

The most challenging thing about putting together Angampora: A Nation's Legacy in Pictures' was the research, with Reza sharing that finding people and artefacts was a nightmare, explaining how when looking for a man who did the traditional leopard dance (which is the dance that bears the most resemblance to angampora), they found that there was only one person still alive who could do this dance, and people weren’t even sure if he was still alive. In the end, it was through a lucky chance that a mutual friend, who worked at a bank in Balangoda and happened to have met this dancer when he visited, that Reza was eventually able to track him down. 

There was also a similar challenge with tracking down artefacts because there’s no one standard reference for artefacts. You might be explaining and asking someone about a flag, for instance, but people may never know which flag it is you’re talking about because they know it by a different name or have interpreted the symbols in the flag differently. “It was like an Indiana Jones movie,” Reza said. “You might stumble upon one thing and then another, and then stumble on another person and a clue and just keep going. It took seven years for this book to come together, and 28,000 pictures, approximately 715 of which made it into the final book.”

 The responsibility of creatives to keep our heritage alive

 Angampora’s decline began in 1818 when the British outlawed and, according to stories passed down among practitioners, discreetly executed people who practised angampora because they saw the art as a threat to British rule. Reza shared that practitioners were smart enough to begin disguising angampora as dance, and in this under-the-radar way, kept the craft alive, telling the British they were dancing and not, in fact, practising a forbidden martial art.

Despite that, today, angampora is still a largely unknown and unseen part of Sri Lankan culture and at great risk. Take, for instance, the leopard dancer Reza tracked down, the only person still alive doing the leopard dance. What happens when he is no longer with us? 

This is where Reza shared that creatives have an invaluable role to play. Not just for things like angampora, but all our heritage crafts and trades. “Creatives have a big responsibility on their shoulders because they can create awareness in a way that consumers can consume, not just locally, but internationally. Look at how China is famous for kung fu. It’s from martial arts movies.

 

“One art form being used to preserve other artforms.”

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