Islanded: Britain, Sri Lanka, and the Bounds of an Indian Ocean Colony

by Sujit Sivasundaram

How did the British come to conquer South Asia in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries? Answers to this question usually start in northern India, neglecting the dramatic events that marked Britain’s contemporaneous subjugation of the island of Sri Lanka. In Islanded , Sujit Sivasundaram reconsiders the arrival of British rule in South Asia as a dynamic and unfinished process of territorialization and state building, revealing that the British colonial project was framed by the island’s traditions and maritime placement and built in part on the model they provided.

 

Using palm-leaf manuscripts from Sri Lanka to read the official colonial archive, Sivasundaram tells the story of two sets of islanders in combat and collaboration. He explores how the British organized the process of “islanding”: they aimed to create a separable unit of colonial governance and trade in keeping with conceptions of ethnology, culture, and geography. But rather than serving as a radical rupture, he reveals, islanding recycled traditions the British learned from Kandy, a kingdom in the Sri Lankan highlands whose customs—from strategies of war to views of nature—fascinated the British. Picking up a range of unusual themes, from migration, orientalism, and ethnography to botany, medicine, and education, Islanded is an engaging retelling of the advent of British rule.

Genres: History

384 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2013

About the author

Sujit Sivasundaram is a British Sri Lankan historian and academic. He is currently professor of world history at Gonville and Caius College, University of Cambridge.

Reviews

[Sharad Pandian · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an examination of multiple aspects of Sri Lanka during the first few decades of the 19th century, focusing on its colonization. Quick political background: The Dutch already occupied the Western coast, which the British then took over in 1796. After a failed attempt in 1803, in 1815 the Brits conquered the highland kingdom of Kandy in the Second Kandyan War.

Much of this book isn't new work, Sujit draws on a lot of secondary literature explicitly instead to bring analytical novelty to this topic. In particular, he focuses on how Lanka was "partitioned" (that is, separated from the Indian mainland symbolically and materially) and "islanded" (that is, made or attempted to make into a single political and cultural entity). Split into 8 chapters titled Peoples, Trade, Scholars, Sites, Gardens, Land, Medicine, and Publics, he shows how the British takeover was not a matter of radical break, but involved the strategic use and transformation of existing Dutch and Kandyan/Sri Lankan patterns, including its roads, rituals, institutions, personnel, etc. Neither Kandy or the British colony were hermetic entities that had to wipe out the past to exist, but were each motley entities.

One methodological novelty he introduces is to offset the problem of the abundance of British sources, which have predictably been depended on exclusively. To counter this, he (re)introduces “cross-contextualization, where the copious theories and archives of European scientific history are read alongside the more scarce material traces of non-European peoples." (173-174) In particular, he used palm-leaf texts, and is clear that "Such an enterprise should not count as an attempt to find the “indigenous” in these sources, but to come to the place of science in colonial transition from a diversity of points of view." (174)

As someone who knows very little about Sri Lanka but something about colonial Indian history, it was particularly fascinating to see how many trends in India manifest in Sri Lanka, despite their different political situations (India was run by the East India Company, Sri Lanka was a crown colony) - Orientalist scholars were convinced in both regions that the key to good governance lay in accessing the true history of the region and so launched surveys of the regions (these also collected information on resources). In both places, these surveys were headed by Brits, but used indigenous labour extensively for movement and to access/translate sources. Over time, this "orientalism" fades into Anglicism, where British institutions (in education, medicine, demographics, etc) are emphasized over the recovery and use of native knowledge (although as is emphasized, even this isn't a total replacement of one by the other, but a more complicated story).

One potential criticism I can see: Although Sujit points to how Alexander Johnston, the Sri Lankan surveyor, learnt mathematics from the Governor-General of India, Colin Mackenzie, he fails to point out that Mackenzie had just launched an extensive survey following the fall of the highland state of Mysore. (Also, Johnston will later be given the task of cataloguing Mackenzie's extensive artefacts, which still constitutes one of the largest collections in the British Library). It's connections like these that get missed out by the choice to consider Sri Landa alone, but this is something Sujit is certainly sensitive to:

It is important to underscore that this has not been a comparative history that has considered the colonial transition of Lanka in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries alongside those of India, Mauritius, and the Cape. Nor has it been a traditional connected history. It has kept the specifi city of the island alive, by taking it seriously for itself and by looking at it from multiple points of view from within and without.

This then is clearly a choice, but whether this leaves out too much is unclear.

Overall, there's so much fascinating material here, from thinking about how pilgrimages helped shape the idea of a single entity to how the Brits positioned themselves as the legitimate heirs to the Kandy kingdom using the protection and display of relics like the Buddha’s Tooth and the supposed revitalization of the abandoned holy site of Anuradhapura and ruined reservoirs. It's a fantastic resource, packing a massive amount of information for both novices and those well acquainted.

[Xiaoran Chen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Discussing the process lanka had been conceived and made as island. Evince academic training of author in history of science especially in chapters about garden and medicine. Well done in dealing with the status of lanka both in south asia subcontinent and indian ocean.