Category Archives: British colonialism

November 21, 2014 · 7:49 am

The Poet Richard Murphy’s Account of Killings in the 1980s in Sri Lanka

Padraig Colman, Extracts from his “Rambling Ruminations of an Irishman in Sri Lanka,” at http://pcolman.wordpress.com/2014/11/20/richard-murphy-long-version/

MURPHY 2 ………. I was surprised to learn that Murphy spent a great deal of his childhood in Ceylon where his father, Sir William Lindsay Murphy was the last colonial Mayor of Colombo (and first Municipal Commissioner from 1937 to 1941). Richard was taken to Ceylon at the age of six weeks, having been born in a damp, decaying big house in the west of Ireland. The young Richard Murphy spent holidays in Diatalawa, which is not far from my home. After leaving Ceylon, Sir William succeeded the Duke of Windsor as Governor of the Bahamas. Continue reading →

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November 14, 2014 · 12:56 am

Histories

Michael Roberts,…..Being a reprint of an article with the same title printed in International Social Science Journal, 1997, vol. 49/153: pp. 373-385. This essay was written at short notice following an invitation from Michael Herzfeld.
captain cook miniature 

Captain Cook  in watercolour miniature from circa early 1780s

Pl 7 Azavedo Don Jeronimo de Azavedo in Ceilao
Captain Cook’s law:

Captain Cook figures in the stories related by several Aboriginal peoples in Australia. In rare cases he has been incorporated into their sacred tales of mythic origin. Among the Aboriginal people of the Victoria River Downs (VRD) region in the Northern Temtory he is a central figure in more straightforward narratives, where he is ‘understood to be the first white fellow to invade Australia’ and where his landing points and actions at specified locations along the coast of Australia are detailed (Rose, 1992, pp. 188-89). In these stories there is frequent reference to ‘Captain Cook‘s law’ – a representation which Debbie Bird Rose understands to indicate ‘the set of rules and the structured relationships’ to which the VRD Aboriginals have been subject for some time.

Read the full article Here  Continue reading →

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November 13, 2014 · 2:39 am

Roshan de Silva-Wijeyeratne interviewed about his researches

Roshan De Silva Wijeyeratne as AUTHOR OF THE MONTH for ROUTLEDGE

Nation plus ROSHAN DE S-W

1. How did you become interested in teaching Law? (Roshan de Silva Wijeyeratne is a Lecturer in Law at the Griffith Law School in Australia)

I planned on practicing law initially via a history degree (my real passion) but in the end I studied for an undergraduate law degree at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS). SOAS provided an environment which quickly set me on another path – that of teaching and research. I took a keen interest in comparative law and soon abandoned the idea of legal practice. I was introduced to anthropology during my Masters at the LSE and this has informed my approach to both thinking about law and teaching law, be it property law or the more esoteric subjects that I teach such as legal history and law and culture. Continue reading →

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November 10, 2014 · 1:44 pm

Photographs of Colonial Ceylon: A Treasure Trove straddling the Globe

Benita Stambler, The John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, Sarasota, Florida, USA, benita.stambler@ringling.org

As long-time readers of this blog may remember, I came to Sri Lanka in 2013 as part of my research on the photography of Ceylon. Finally, the results of my work are available on the website of the American Institute for Sri Lankan Studies (AISLS). In the document that I produced as a result of my work, A Guide to Locating Photographs of Colonial Ceylon, I have tried to locate all the individuals and institutions around the world that have collections and are willing to share them with the public, based on individual considerations. For access to the guide, see: http://www.aisls.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/Ceylon-photograph-guide-2014-edition.pdf

Roberts bridge of boats The Bridge of Boats across the Kelani Ganga   Continue reading →

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September 29, 2014 · 3:18 am

A Path to Nowhere: Jaffna to Colombo Railtrack, 1980s to 2009

 Michael Roberts

01- Jaffna Railway Station Jaffna Railway Station 2009 16-jaffna

Railway building in the British colonial period was one of imperial Britain’s great achievements (not entirely altruistic of course). From the time it was inaugurated on 1st August 1905 the railway from Jaffna to Colombo brought Jaffna Tamils to the epicentre of commercial, educational activity and penned doors to individual and familial advancement. As Wikipedia notes, the single track single line between Kankesanthurai and Vavuniya had 16 stations and 12 sub-stations .

Oral story-telling in Tamil circles among older generations must surely highlight the importance of the railway. For Sinhalese and Burghers and others of course the tales will be more wistful ones retailing their occasional sojourns among Tamil friends in the distant terrain of the Jaffna Peninsula. For the railwaymen, of course, whether Burgher, Eurasian, Tamil or Sinhala, the memories were deeper – “etched into their being” in the The Rhythm of the Wheels as Victor Melder called his cyclostyled magazine from the depths of Melbourne during the 1970s. Continue reading →

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September 18, 2014 · 9:21 am

Don Martino De Zilva Wickremasinghe (1865-1937) — Savant, Linguist and Epigraphist … with Notes about HCP Bell, Archaeologist (1851-1937)

Thiru Arumugam, courtesy of The Ceylankan, Journal 67, vol XVII:3, August 2014, pp. 18-22.

Thiru photoThiru Arumugam

Don Martino De Zilva Wickremasinghe was born in the Southern Province in 1865. He passed away in 1937. He was educated at Richmond College, Galle, which was originally called ‘The Galle School’. It was founded on 25 July 1814 by the Weslyan Methodist Missionaries and is the oldest English medium school in the country. Although he did not have a Bachelor’s degree, Wickremasinghe was appointed Lecturer in Tamil and Telugu by the University of Oxford. Subsequently he became Head of the Dravidian Department, University of London. He lectured at the School of Oriental Studies, University of London which was renamed in 1938 as the School of Oriental and African Studies. It has been described as the world’s leading Institution for the study of Asia, Africa and the Middle-East. The jewel in its crown is the Library with over a million volumes. Wickremasinghe was completely fluent in the following languages and lectured in most of them at University level: English, German, Sinhala, Tamil, Malayalam, Telugu, Sanskrit, Pali and Prakrit.

Wickremasinghe photo2 a grainy image of Wickramasinghe taken in London in 1899

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June 11, 2014 · 3:49 am

India rejects Cultivated English. Modi’s Gujarati and Hindi swamps the old school tie

Sanjay Subramanian, courtesy of the New York Review of Books, where the title reads “India after English?”

india after english--NYRB A scene at Calcutta in mid-May 2014 —Pic by Piyal Adhikary/epa/Corbis

In the days since the decisive victory of Narendra Modi and his conservative Bharatiya Janata Party in India’s national election, many Indian commentators have perceived a turning point in Indian politics. Modi’s critics sense, in his sweeping mandate, an ominous revival of Hindu nationalism; his supporters maintain that he won because of his robust economic record in Gujarat, where he was Chief Minister from 2001 to 2014. Few on either side, though, dispute that Modi’s political rise signals, in part, a rejection by voters of India’s traditional political elite. Continue reading →

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June 9, 2014 · 9:59 am

History-Making in Lanka: Problems

Michael Roberts … re-presentation of an article that appeared initially in http://www.federalidea.com in April 2008 and is presented here with minor refinements.**

Central themes in the understanding of Sri Lanka’s recent as well ancient history have been fashioned by two occupational categories, namely, schoolteachers and politicians. The school teachers of the first 75 years of the twentieth century were mostly well-meaning personnel trained in the British empiricist traditions. Their tendency was to regard history as a collection of undisputed facts that could be juxtaposed along a chronological line. There was limited attention to the interpretive dimensions of the trade and the potential for debates around these interpretations. This heritage has been implanted in recent decades by what masquerades as an educational system (where I suspect that in practice it is a process of rote-learning that is now twisted by pliant teachers in each language stream to suit ethnic claims).

44-a classroom and its teacher a classroom in the 19th century

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June 4, 2014 · 1:20 pm

Leonard Woolf’s forgotten Sri Lankan novel

BBC and Nick Rankin

The Bloomsbury Group and Sri Lanka are rarely spoken of in the same breath, but that is partly because Leonard Woolf’s groundbreaking first novel, The Village in the Jungle, is unjustly ignored, argues writer and broadcaster Nick Rankin.

WOOLF AT HOME--_getty624She was born Virginia Stephen, daughter of the Victorian bookman Sir Leslie Stephen, but when she married in 1912, her name changed to Virginia Woolf, and she went on to become the best-known woman writer of the 20th Century. Her lesser-known husband, Leonard Woolf, however, wrote and published a novel first. That almost forgotten book, first published in 1913, is called The Village in the Jungle and it is a remarkable work because it is the first novel in English literature to be written from the indigenous point of view rather than the coloniser’s. It’s not a book about the white chaps at the club who run the show, but about those at the very bottom of the imperial heap, the black and brown fellows who don’t even know they’re part of an Empire, but who just survive day by day, hand to mouth, as slash-and-burn agriculturalists. Continue reading →

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May 28, 2014 · 2:29 pm

Leonard Woolf: His Political Vision – From Innocent Imperialist to Pragmatic Internationalist

Jane Russell & Ruth Allaun**

leonard Woolf 11 Leonard Woolf went off to Ceylon in 1904 as innocent as a present-day wannabe writer who goes off globe-trotting in search of adventure and creative sustenance in his “gap “year. Woolf joined the Ceylon Civil Service (CCS) because he needed a respected pensionable job which would satisfy his family’s requirements, yet also feed his imagination and make him interestingly exotic to his Cambridge friends. It was a happy accident (the very definition of serendipity) which brought him to Ceylon. Both gained immeasurably.

But if Cadet Woolf cut a shine in his green collars at welcome parties in Colombo, he didn’t reckon on the dark and miserable side to his job – the “dirty work of empire” as Orwell called it – of supervising floggings, hangings, and the taking of witness statements from the nearly dead. Continue reading →

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