Book review: Nira Wickramasinghe,Slave in a Palanquin: Colonial Servitude and Resistance in Sri Lanka

With Slave in a Palanquin, Nira Wickramasinghe has given us one of the freshest and most original works to appear in Sri Lankan history in decades. Although, in one reading, this could be thought of as a contribution to a very well-worked theme—the creation and long-term implications of different colonial classifications of persons—it is quite unlike other work in that genre, for two reasons. Firstly, the classification in question is of certain persons as ‘slaves’, a topic barely mentioned in the Sri Lankan histories of the period. Secondly, and again in contrast to, for example, classifications by ‘race’ or ethnicity, the memory of slavery has almost no presence in the popular imagination in the present. In Sri Lanka, Marx’s ‘dead weight of the past’ can often seem nightmarish in its inescapability, and the apparent absence of slavery from (most of) the contentious politics of ethnic claim and counterclaim seems to have given Wickramasinghe a welcome freedom to explore new questions in new ways. The result is a beautifully written book, with a beguiling lightness of tone, despite the sophisticated theoretical points it makes on its way.

In Sri Lanka, at the time of the hand-over from Dutch to British control at the close of the eighteenth century, there were three significant clusters of slaves: in Colombo, in Kandy and in the Jaffna peninsula. Wickramasinghe does not deal with the Kandyan case, but instead concentrates on Colombo and its environs, where slavery had been shaped by Dutch legal and economic regimes, and slaves were, as often as not, from elsewhere in the Dutch Indian Ocean, and Jaffna, where a group of service castes found themselves legally defined as slaves. Jaffna also stands out because of the sheer numbers involved, and the continued presence of groups known to be tainted by their history of unfreedom into the present.

Wickramasinghe makes intelligent use of colonial efforts to record and document the incidence of slavery but makes it clear that sources like slave registers are frustratingly mute when it comes to the lived experience of those marked as slaves. For this, she has to turn to whatever sources she can find: Petitions to the colonial authorities and court records in which slaves are mentioned, often in passing but occasionally as the focus of a criminal or civil case. Even these sources yield no more than fragments, leaving Wickramasinghe to fill out the necessary context herself, and sometimes infer what it must have been like to have been this person in this particular predicament. This interpretive license is sensitively exercised and rarely feels forced (as it often did in some of the once-burgeoning literature on resistance). And, as she points out more than once, even the absence of solid historical traces is part of the problem she wants to evoke, which is how to summon up the texture of lives seemingly writ in water.

The book starts with the murder of a Dutch fiscal and his family by their slaves in 1723. Unable to find more of a substance about the murder itself, Wickramasinghe instead traces the subtle shifts by which this event turns into a popular myth about a rising by African slaves, which in turn explains the etymology of the area of central Colombo still known as Slave Island. The fact that there is no record of a rising around the 1723 murder, and that the slaves in question were almost certainly not African, is the start of a story in which over time slavery gets re-imagined in increasingly stark racialised idioms. The subtlety of the analysis also introduces an important sub-theme, which is of indeterminacy. The book evokes a society in transition, as Dutch rule gives way to British rule, and as the British shifted oversight of Sri Lanka from the East India Company to the Colonial Office. Meanwhile this was also a period in which slavery itself was under increasing abolitionist pressure, although ‘abolition’, as Wickramasinghe makes clear, was less straightforward a process than might be assumed. And the biggest ‘ethnic’ category of slave-owners in Colombo, those described as ‘Burghers’, contains its own internal taxonomic contradictions as Burghers argue about degrees of purity within a population defined by its history of mixed breeding.

Individual histories of unfreedom linger and taint lives, as in the sad story of a Muslim of former slave background whose community refuses to allow him to celebrate the circumcision of his son because of his lack of respectability. Wickramasinghe conjures up some evocative metaphors for the elusive presence of slavery in popular consciousness. Yet there are themes explored in the later chapters which seem to point to important—and more overt—historiographical threads. The attempt to persuade former slaves from the Jaffna peninsula to work their personal passage to freedom through public works on the canal system around Chilaw connects the reader to long-standing historical debates about labour shortages in the colonial economy, and the moves taken to address them. The link between caste and slavery in the north begs a more extended discussion of Rupa Viswanath’s important argument grounding Dalit identity in histories of unfree labour in South India. But it is hardly a damning criticism to suggest that the book is provocative enough to leave the reader wanting more. Nira Wickramasinghe has provided us with genuinely path-breaking scholarship. It is now up to others to explore some of the paths she has sketched in this excellent book.