Sri Lanka’s first female surf club at Arugam Bay breaks gender norms

A girls’ surf team makes waves in Sri Lanka’s Arugam Bay, finding ways to break gender norms and turn the tide

“Want to hang out and surf with our club members?” — reads the message on its website. Not an unexpected pitch in one of Sri Lanka’s most popular tourist destinations, but the Arugam Bay Girls Surf Club is anything but ordinary.

Arugam Bay, located in Sri Lanka’s south-eastern Ampara district, is well known as the island’s surf capital. For years, it has been drawing scores of tourists from around the world and has hosted international surf contests. Until 2009, it was caught up in the country’s long civil war that caused much death and destruction in the island’s North and East.

Over the last few years, though, a local girls’ surfing team has been turning the tide.

WL Shamali Sanjaya, 36, was among the first women from the village along Sri Lanka’s stunningly scenic East coast, to take up surfing in 2011 with support from an American family based there at the time. It was not easy. “There was this view that this will not be suitable for a lady in our culture. Staying home, going to school — this was the general lifestyle,” she says, standing by the shore at Baby Surf Point, a well-known spot for beginners’ lessons. Despite showers the previous night, the morning sky looks clear. The sea, mirroring its perky shade of blue, is calm. Many tourists are paddling and warming up in the shallow waters, the waves seem welcoming.

Ampara is one of the few districts in Sri Lanka where a sizeable population of the country’s three main ethnicities, Sinhalese, Muslims and Tamils, live. The sight of a local woman carrying her surfboard and heading to the beach was not something residents were used to until some years ago. “Even in my family some did not like it. My ammamma (maternal grandmother) was a big source of support… I have managed to come this far only because of that,” says Shamali. “I knew I wasn’t doing anything wrong, so I did not have to fear anything or hide from anyone.”

Watching her, a few more Tamil and Sinhalese women signed up to learn to surf and by 2018, there was enough interest in the community to set up the Arugam Bay Girls Surf Club. In October 2018, it officially registered with the Surfing Federation of Sri Lanka as the country’s first female surf club. Today the club has 13 members, most of whom are certified instructors trained by international experts, with support from the Australian government.

Members including Shamali were afraid of the waves at first, but their eagerness would invariably beat their fear. Pulanthiran Nadhya had to cope with a lot of trauma before she found the strength to touch the surfing board a decade ago. She lost her mother in the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004 ­­— it severely impacted the island nation’s East coast, claiming several thousand lives — and was terrified of the sea after that. “I never went [to sea] even when my friends did. As time passed, I thought why should I fear these waves. If it was this wave that took away my mother, why don’t I fight it instead of fearing it, I told myself. I was really determined,” says Nadhya, 37, a mother of two daughters.