Lewke's Cannon: A Visual and Political Dialogue Captured in Gold and Silver

Abstract

The Lewke cannon was one of the selected items in the Pilot Project Provenance Research on Objects of the Colonial Era launched in 2019. This cannon has gained attention globally because of its unique and unmatched decorations. While its history of being looted from the palace of Kandy has been recorded by various historians, very little attention has been given to the actual decoration on the cannon. This article shows that the decoration and inscription on the outer surface of the cannon were applied as a gift from the prominent Sri Lankan figure Lewke to King Sri Vijaya Rajasinha of Kandy in 1745-46 and as such represents an internal political moment in the Kandyan kingdom. The research into the cannon brings to the fore the Sri Lankan craftsmanship of this eighteenth-century South Asian region. While ancient Lankan motifs have been applied, the craftsmen were able to emphasize the motifs already present in the bronze cast from the seventeenth-century Netherlands, amongst which Lankan emblems, as well as adapt their motifs to better suit the decoration already present. In all, this contribution shows how an analysis of the decoration and the inscription provides us with new insight into the mid-eighteenth-century Sri Lankan social-political and cultural context, while at the same time revealing a global history of cultural diplomacy.