A Procession, a Mosque and Weeks of Violence in Ceylon

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

In late May 1915 Muslim shopkeepers in Kandy attempted to block a Buddhist procession, tied to the Vesak festival, from passing a mosque with drumming and music, a longstanding point of friction the colonial government had itself tried to manage through noise regulation near mosques during prayer. The confrontation widened into sustained attacks on Muslim owned shops and property across the Central, Western and Sabaragamuwa provinces of British Ceylon, driven in part by Sinhalese resentment of the Muslim Moor trading minority's growing commercial position, and the violence continued into August 1915.

Governor Robert Chalmers's colonial government declared martial law and carried out summary trials and executions of Sinhalese suspects, several later shown to have had no connection to the violence, a response historians including Blackton treat as a serious overreaction that inflamed rather than calmed the situation. Several thousand Muslim owned shops and properties were destroyed before martial law brought the violence to an end by early August, and the executions, including that of the young cricketer and volunteer officer Henry Pedris after a court martial widely regarded as unjust, became a lasting grievance and an early rallying point for the Sinhalese nationalist movement that grew over the following decades.