The ways musicians conceive of and categorize musical rhythms can directly influence the way they perform them. The up-country (“Kandyan”) drumming tradition of central Sri Lanka serves as a vivid example of how the spread and transformation of rhythm concepts has been enabled by particular social histories, and of how these changing concepts of rhythm have influenced the ways in which the music has been performed.

In this article, I analyze the metrically flexible frameworks of rhythmic contours that were employed by up-country performers prior to the twentieth century. I do this by relying on the writings of nationalist musicologists who were critical of earlier practices, and by comparing these accounts with a variety of conceptual rhythmic phenomena found throughout the Indian subcontinent. Given the long history of social interactions between Sri Lanka and India, I argue that there is much to be gained from analyzing Sri Lankan traditional musics in broader South Asian contexts. I also show how present-day understandings of up-country drumming rhythms as metric cycles have their roots in mid-twentieth century cultural reform movements, and how ideological motivations have inspired these particular modes of rhythmic theorizing. I contextualize this in terms of anti-colonial Indian cultural nationalism, and in terms of the academic theorizing that accompanied the revivals of indigenous performing arts. By focussing on structural concepts of rhythm, rather than on the surface rhythms of sung melodies or drumming, I uncover a trend across South Asia of flexible rhythmic concepts moving towards more rigidly defined rhythmic categories during the colonial and post-colonial twentieth century.