Reporting on veiled prejudice

Conversations on the ground provide the kind of nuance that social media debates lack

In 2018, a school in Sri Lanka’s Trincomalee district, a multi-ethnic city on the island’s eastern coast, grabbed rare national attention. A group of Hindu teachers and parents of children going to the school . Agitators slammed the teachers for choosing to shift from an earlier practice of wearing the saree along with a headscarf to the full-length, often black, gown that many Sri Lankan Muslim women have been wearing for decades now.

I visited the school weeks later, when the tensions had died down a bit, to report on the story. I interviewed the school head, among others, to try and understand how the controversy had erupted. In wearing the abaya to school, did the teachers violate an official dress code? Or was it a convention they were changing? Why were the Hindu teachers and parents so offended by the attire? How did the school management, government education department and the local community respond?

The recent , and the rage and violence around it, took me back to this story.