An online book talk by Prof. Nira Wickramasinghe at Leiden University, who is the author of Slave in a Palanquin: Colonial Servitude and Resistance in Sri Lanka, organised by the Leiden Centre for Indian Ocean Studies, was held on 25 February.
This is the first of a new series of book talks organised by the Leiden Centre for Indian Ocean Studies (Leiden University, KITLV/Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies, and IIAS).
Wickramasinghe is Chair Professor of Modern South Asian Studies at Leiden University. Her other books include Metallic Modern: Everyday Machines in Colonial Sri Lanka (2014) and Sri Lanka in the Modern Age: A History (second edition, 2015).
Her latest book Slave in a Palanquin: Colonial Servitude and Resistance in Sri Lanka explains that for hundreds of years, the island of Sri Lanka was a crucial stopover for people and goods in the Indian Ocean. For the Dutch East India Company, it was also a crossroads in the Indian Ocean slave trade.
Slavery was present in multiple forms in Sri Lanka – then Ceylon – when the British conquered the island in the late 18th Century and began to gradually abolish slavery. Yet, the continued presence of enslaved people in Sri Lanka in the 19th Century has practically vanished from collective memory in both the Sinhalese and Tamil communities.
‘Slave in a Palanquin’
In the webinar, Wickramasinghe uncovers the traces of slavery in the history and memory of the Indian Ocean world, exploring moments of revolt in the lives of enslaved people in the wake of abolition. The book Slave in a Palanquin: Colonial Servitude and Resistance in Sri Lanka tells the stories of Wayreven, the slave who travelled in the palanquin of his master; Selestina, accused of killing her child; Rawothan, who sought permission for his son to be circumcised; and others, enslaved or emancipated, who challenged their status.
Drawing on legal cases, petitions, and other colonial records to recover individual voices and quotidian moments, Wickramasinghe offers a meditation on the archive of slavery. She examines how colour-based racial thinking gave way to more nuanced debates about identity, complicating conceptions of blackness and racialisation.
Wickramasinghe noted that Slave in a Palanquin: Colonial Servitude and Resistance in Sri Lanka is a deeply interdisciplinary book with a focus on recovering subaltern resistance that offers a vital new portrait of the local and transnational worlds of the colonial-era Asian slave trade in the Indian Ocean.
Themes
Some of the underlying themes of her book, Wickremasinghe explained, were the archive of slavery detailing the practices, names, and statistics; the comparative and connected histories of the cape; East Indies, India, and the Caribbean; and intuitive work including a storied articulation of ideas.
Speaking about the cover of the book, Wickramasinghe noted that it is very special, adding: “It is based on a sketch by my mother, with whom I travelled to Jaffna some years ago.” She went on to elaborate on why she started the book with the question: What condition must exist for men and women to cease to accept their lives as they are? “I try to answer this question by relating the lives of enslaved men and women who carved a moral self for themselves by resisting what they perceived as injustice.”
She went on to say that it’s the story of a place and its connected world during the late 18th and early 19th Centuries when the ordinary lives of individuals virtually burst into the archives. “In many ways, this book deals with the perennial issue of tracing lives from a hostile archive. It takes the shape of a descent into what was considered as ordinary,” she explained.
Wickramasinghe concluded that this is not a book about the abolition of slavery, which is a topic that has spawned a rich and variegated body of global scholarship, but rather it is about the battles against adversity during this period, and the battles of individual slaves were not seen as capable of moral atonomy.
Slave in a Palanquin: Colonial Servitude and Resistance in Sri Lanka can be purchased on Amazon to find out more about the lives of slaves in Sri Lanka.
