Islanded: Britain, Sri Lanka, and the Bounds of an Indian Ocean Colony by Sujit Sivasundaram (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Islanded: Britain, Sri Lanka, and the Bounds of an Indian Ocean Colony by Sujit Sivasundaram Neilesh Bose Islanded: Britain, Sri Lanka, and the Bounds of an Indian Ocean Colony. By sujit sivasundaram. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013. 384 pp. $45.00 (cloth). Sri Lanka occupies a curious place in historiography as the island nation-state, just south of India, sits on the edges of South Asian, Southeast Asian, and Indian Ocean history. Sitting on the edges of regions that all feature their own distinctive historiographies blurs the fact that Sri Lanka holds complicated histories that display a crossroads of cultures and politics as well as a distinctive historical trajectory in the midst of many forces from elsewhere that became quickly domesticated. These forces from elsewhere include the long history of Buddhism, the long history of close political connections with southern India, the long history of Portuguese and Dutch trading settlements, and the somewhat shorter history of British company and crown rule. Independent Sri Lanka (1948–present) has inherited the politics of the public sphere, ethnicity, racial difference, and linguistic community that began in earnest during the nineteenth century. This historical context produces a challenge to write the history of Sri Lanka in a manner accessible to the nonspecialist scholar that would both enliven the sources of the Sri Lankan past and integrate those sources into broader debates about colonialism and the origins of present-day political institutions and cultural identities in Sri Lanka. Sujit Sivasundaram’s Islanded: Britain, Sri Lanka, and the Bounds of an Indian Ocean Colony promises to meet this challenge by providing a broad and analytically ambitious account of Sri Lanka’s political, cultural, and intellectual history in the period from the 1770s to the 1830s, the ascendancy of the British in Sri Lanka as well as India. Sivasundaram offers a thematic approach toward understanding the fall of the Kandy kingdom in 1815 accompanied by the rise of British power on the island as both a part of the broader history enveloping Southern Asia as well as a distinctively Sri Lankan experience. His goal is to “open up new ways of thinking about the consolidation of colonialism in South Asia” (p. 5) and to avoid dichotomies of kingdom and colonial state, indigenous and colonial, and highland and coastal in the history of Sri Lanka. Positioned as a response to the literature on the history of India’s transition into colonial rule, marked by an absolute rupture, Sivasundaram invites readers to consider terms like “recycling,” “islanding,” and “partitioning” that embody the transition to British rule from 1815 onward. Given that mainland India in 1815 was part of the East India Company and Lanka a crown colony, it was “through the colonial state that Lanka was repositioned in the ocean [End Page 222] as an island” (p. 14), so Sri Lanka was “islanded” and “partitioned” through a complex process that, unlike India’s 1947 partition, started at the beginning of British rule, not at the end of it. Furthermore, the process by which this occurred was due not only to British power, ideas, or agency, but, through British redefinition of “preexisting,” to Sri Lankan patterns of rule. As many readers of this book will be unable to assess Sivasundaram’s sources and Sri Lankan historiography through specialist lenses, this review will examine the book’s thematic usage of “islanding” and “partitioning” as well as discuss the strengths and challenges of this approach. Islanded’s introduction ends with a vignette about the travels along the road between Colombo (the seat of British power from 1815, on the southwestern coast) to Kandy, in the center of the island and the seat of the Kandyan kingdom. On this road in 1825, Governor Barnes accompanied a bishop, Rev. Heber from Calcutta, and the bishop’s wife on a journey to Colombo. Along the way, they encountered elaborately dressed Sri Lankan elites on the way to Kandy, who exchanged pleasantries with the traveling British procession. The pleasantries demonstrate for Sivasundaram how “it is striking that both British colonizers and Kandyan elites could use the new road like this, as a site for procession” (p. 26), and sets the stage for how...