Introduction: Querying the cosmopolitan in Sri Lankan history

[Full title: Introduction: Querying the cosmopolitan in Sri Lankan and Indian Ocean history]

[by Alan Strathern and Zoltán Biedermann]

A young man, proudly dressed up as a Roman legionary, has lowered his gaze to observe us–with a mix of wariness, curiosity and defiance, it seems (Figure 0.1). He is a part of a Catholic Passion play performed in the town of Negombo on Sri Lanka’s west coast. The wooden sword in his right hand is raised, the helmet and armour shine assertively even under the cloudy sky. Behind the man is a statue of Christ, hands tied, the symbol of a religion brought to Sri Lanka during one of the many moments of change triggered by more or less violent contacts established across the sea. There is in this single picture a multitude of worlds–an indication of the capability of Lankan society to adopt the foreign, but also to appropriate it, digest it, reinvent it and, if necessary, defy it. To throw light on the deeper history of such ambiguities is the main objective of this book.

The most striking development in history writing of the past decade or two has been the rise of world history, and the most common way of doing world history has been to pursue ‘connections’–the more unexpected the better. Societies and regions that were once studied independently are now increasingly being placed within flows of influence and conjunctures that extend across much larger geographies. If all historians write with one eye on the present, then evidently we feel globalization to be the essence of our present condition and the crucible of our history. Global connections are increasingly what we look into the even quite distant past to find.

Perhaps the region of the world in which premodern connectedness has been most gloriously apparent is that delimited by the Indian Ocean. In the port cities that emerged along its coastlines, from Zanzibar to Malacca through Aden, Kochi, Colombo and Kolkata, distant connections and cosmopolitan practices across linguistic and religious barriers were often simply a fact of life. Well before the arrival of the first European interlopers, a multitude of different peoples engaged in exploits of long-distance travel, trade and pilgrimage, and it was not only ports but also vast areas of the Asian mainland that interacted across the waters. Sri Lanka sits exactly at the centre of the Indian Ocean: an excellent laboratory, one might think, in which to test any ideas about the connected and the cosmopolitan. But it has barely been visible in the resurgence of world history. The primary purpose of this book is to begin the process of introducing Lankan material into the mainstream of these recent debates, which shall in turn help to reinvigorate the study of the history of the island itself.

If no man is an island according to the saying, historians are likely to add that no island is an island either. Islands are not by nature condemned to isolation. Before modern technologies suddenly speeded up land-b ased travel, the seas were often less a barrier to travel and communication than a vehicle for it. This placed many an island in a privileged position, and the navigational routes that connect Sri Lanka with East Africa, the Middle East and Southeast Asia are held to be among the oldest in the world. At the same time, the history of the island is one of continuous dialogue–and sometimes argument–with the mainland it almost touches but for the few miles of the Palk straits. One might say the same for those other large islands or archipelagos moored off the landmass of Eurasia: the British Isles and Japan. Each of these was profoundly shaped by waves of influence and immigration from the mainland and yet each too has a history of genuine insular-ity and separation from the world.

For interconnectedness and exposure to maritime trade do not in and by themselves produce cosmopolitanism. Long-distance connections may propel the circulation of goods, people and ideas, but they can by no means guarantee that those are absorbed into local cultures without also being detached from the wider world and made into something that is soon perceived as purely local. The possession of foreign artefacts, and even the mimicking of certain imported habits can go hand-i n-hand with profoundly parochial attitudes. As Ulf Hannerz put it, cosmopolitanism involves ‘an openness toward divergent cultural experiences […] but not simply as a matter of appreciation’.^[1] The tracing of connections may ultimately be a superficial exercise unless we achieve some deeper insights into how societies handle them.

We have therefore invited authors to reflect in detail on the mechanisms by which the supra-local was perceived, received and eff ected in Sri Lanka. What social and political forces have governed the recognition of the new as ‘foreign’, and determined whether it faced rejection, addition, adaptation, fusion or complete transformation? How do these logics operate over time (how does the exogenous become the indigenous)? Can objects themselves speak of the cosmopolitan or its opposites? We may know that Roman coins were dropped on Lankan soil 2,000 years ago, or that South Indian elements were present in medieval Buddhist architecture, or that Catholicism struck roots in the southwest of the island in the early modern period, or that Kandyan kingship borrowed artefacts and ideas from various other cultures. But what did–and what do–these things signify? For whose past exactly are they relevant, and in what ways? As Nicholas Thomas has noted about the local appropriation of European objects in the Pacific, ‘to say that black bottles were given does not tell us what was received’.^[2] It is, then, to further our understanding of how Sri Lanka received and participated in the foreign, and ultimately to identify the local conditions that support or undermine the ‘cosmopolitan’, that we have put together this book.

The problem of ‘cosmopolitanism’

Most definitions of cosmopolitanism turn on a transcendence of the local and the parochial in preference for overarching entities such as ‘humanity’ or ‘the world’.^[3] The cosmopolitan perspective exposes the arbitrariness of political and cultural boundaries, positing that the sole naturally given aspect binding people together is the fact that they are human. From the abundance of recent literature dedicated to it, one is led to conclude that ‘cosmopolitanism’ usually represents an object of desire, a programmatic viewpoint creating variations on the Kantian theme that postulates the entire human species as the only defensible moral category.^[4]

In the fields of philosophy, sociology and political science it is often used as an essentially normative term and is rarely held up even by its advocates as a precise concept.^[5] Most of us will be sympathetic to Diogenes’ much-c ited desire to be a ‘citizen of the world’.^[6] Prasenjit Duara defines cosmopolitanism as ‘the idea that all humans belong non-e xclusively to a single community’, which brings it close to other forms of universalism such as the Kantian or the Christian, but also notes that other theorists regard it as less impositional ‘because it is passed on practices of common living and belonging in the world’.^[7] This tension in the term between a potentially bullying universalism and a habitus of pragmatic tolerance returns repeatedly in attempts to define and use the concept, as we shall see.

Yet for historians the fight will inevitably unfold on two fronts, not just one. On the one hand, we face the danger of Sri Lanka being idealized as a neatly delimited realm of organically grown, unbroken ethnic and religious identity coinciding with Sinhalaness and Theravāda Buddhism–a community that sees itself as having survived precisely because it has repelled the forces of the foreign. To resist this is to call upon tendencies that have become common sense in scholarship for some time. Anthropologists have been insisting for generations on the undesirability of approaching any given culture or community as a simple organic whole, and geographers have been equally critical of any aprioristic approaches to naturally distinguishable spatial units such as landscapes, islands or continents. On the other hand, however, there is also a risk of romanticizing Sri Lanka as a wide-open Indian Ocean isle that only stiff ened into something more intransigent when it came under the yoke of European imperialism and its heir, global capitalism.^[8]

The present volume sits between the two extremes. The series of conferences, lectures and workshops from which it has emerged built emphatically on the perceived necessity of throwing light on the cosmopolitan in Sri Lanka’s past. Yet we have also asked our contributors to be alert to what can be at times an excessive tendency to reinvent the premodern past as the perfect reverse of modern discontents: cosmopolitanism instead of nationalism, tolerance instead of bigotry, religious fluidity instead of boundary insistence.

There is, in addition to the problems deriving from the normative nature of many theories of cosmopolitanism, also a more concrete and methodologically vexed issue for historians of the premodern world in particular. The cosmopolitan seems to have acquired significance as a silver lining beneath the dark clouds of modernity: if the latter brought the awful categories of race, ethnicity and nation, it also brought with it melting pots, global communications and expanded horizons. For the term to really make sense it has to shine against the foil of an assumed significance of locality, and easily the most domineering notions of inherently significant locality have been generated by the nation-s tate.^[9] In short, much of what makes the term ‘cosmopolitan’ meaningful is the promise it holds to liberate from the claims of the nation–but of course the nation itself is a product of a relatively recent past. So, what do we do when it comes to the times preceding the invention of the nation-state? What are the fundamental units against which the cosmopolitan can unfold? If we wish to use the concept for even the distant past without falling foul of anachronism, it is useful to distinguish between two quite distinct ways of being cosmopolitan.^[10] The first meaning is perhaps closest to the everyday sense of the word, invoking places and people that somehow contain within them a world of plurality. In essence, we are talking about a way of living or a fact of life, and it may be entirely un-reflected upon as such at the time of its happening. A cosmopolitan city is one in which diff erent tongues may be heard on the streets, and wares from distant parts of the world displayed by its merchants, in which a congeries of peoples has found a way of existing and thriving together. The locus where cosmopolitan attitudes unfold may be a town, a network of towns, or a territory–including perhaps Sri Lanka as a whole–but it will always remain relevant for our analysis to understand what ‘local’ frame precisely the cosmopolitan transcends, and in what ways it achieves this. This will be diff erent for each and every type of artefact under discussion, be it a certain type of ceramics or coins, an element of literary or artistic style, a religious belief or a political ritual.

The second meaning of ‘cosmopolitan’ refers to a more profound and con-sciously cultivated sense of belonging to a world larger than the locality.^[11] Sheldon Pollock’s definition of cosmopolitanism refers to ways of ‘being translocal, of participating–and knowing one was participating–in cultural and political net-works that transcended the immediate community’.^[12] Strictly speaking, again, cosmopolitanism therefore operates as a relative term, because the nature of the ‘immediate community’ must shift depending on context. But the challenge here is not only to define what the ‘local’ may be from which cosmopolitan emerges. The much more diffi cult question is to what overarching principle or notion the cosmopolitan refers in the premodern period. What ‘world’ were cosmopolitans to refer to when there was not yet anything like the full picture of the globe as we now know it today? Pollock, again, speaks of a conscious participation of people within a very grand ecumene:^[13] the Sanskrit cosmopolis, a swathe of societies from Peshawar to Java that used Sanskrit literature to formulate their vision of the world. For much of Lankan history, its literati did indeed participate in this sphere of the imagination. They also, along with larger sectors of the population to varying degrees, participated in another ecumene of equivalent scale, historically connected with the Sanskrit cosmopolis: the world of Buddhism, or, at a more specific level, what Steven Collins referred to as the Pāli imaginaire.^[14] In much of the Indian Ocean, the Sanskrit and Buddhist ecumenes were then joined–in some cases, supplanted–by the arrival of an Arabic cosmopolis from 1200 to 1500.^[15] Recent work by Tilman Frasch and Anne Blackburn has shown how significant and enduring the interconnections among what Blackburn calls this ‘Southern Asian’ world were.^[16]

Note that this second understanding is not only distinct from the first form but is in some tension with it. For while the first form depends on heterogeneity, even within a rather small space such as a town, the second depends on a certain homogeneity as extending over a vast space. If we grant that, then all kinds of other self-conscious cultural spaces (Christendom, Islam) or political spaces (the Cōḻa Empire, the Portuguese Empire) could be included as cosmopolitan orders.

If we resist that conclusion, it may be because we insist that the term must entail the pragmatic toleration of the first definition and somehow avoid the dark side to the universalism lurking in the second.

Alternative approaches

By now, it should be clear that our focus on the problem of the ‘cosmopolitan’ is not an unequivocal endorsement of its conceptual utility but rather an invita-tion to consider it critically and explore alternatives. Scholars of Southeast Asia will quickly perceive that many of the issues raised here have been germane to the debate around what O. W. Wolters called localization.^[17] Reacting against the tendency to see the region as a passive recipient of cultural influence from more famous centres of civilization, Wolters was concerned to draw out how power-fully foreign (in this case mostly Indian) ideas were indigenized as they were integrated into Southeast Asian culture. For them to be accepted they ‘tended to be fractured and restated and therefore drained of their original significance’. This allowed them to become part, locally, of ‘new cultural “wholes”’.^[18] Existing power structures could thus benefit from fresh inputs without suffering disruption.

To be sure, localization may, as Pollock and Anthony Milner have alerted, end up transforming the host culture more profoundly and lastingly than Wolters believed.^[19] Not all the power is in the hands of those wishing to ‘localize’ the foreign for their own profit and sometimes the result is new political realities rather than the enhancement of old ones.^[20] But all this still clearly indicates that there are manifold mechanisms through which the exogenous may or may not re-configure the indigenous, and that much of this will depend on the agency of various groups locally seeking or resisting change.^[21] Recent studies of localization in Southeast Asia have underlined not only how complicated it is to ‘distinguish indigenous from foreign elements in the integrated cultures which eventu-ally emerged’ as Wang Gungwu put it early on; but also, how much localization depends on a range of complicating factors including ‘ecological diff erences, distance or proximity from a Great Tradition, elite and popular responses to spiritual needs, deeply rooted kinship structures, diff erent uses of rituals and regalia, processes of urbanization and, not least, technology and modes of production’.^[22]

In Sri Lankan studies, the work of Gananath Obeyesekere has often touched on issues of what could be described as ‘localization’, and his analyses of the processes of Sinhalacization and Buddhicization remain touchstones for any further research in this area.^[23] Indeed, both he and Stanley Tambiah, two of the most celebrated scholars produced by Sri Lanka, have tended to be concerned with the continuous and peaceful waves of immigration from the mainland and the processes by which they have been accommodated. In scholarship more broadly, recent conceptual preferences indicate a certain distaste for cultural asymmetry. In that vein the imagery of ‘centre’ and ‘periphery’ has dropped out of favour in order to acknowledge that cultural transmission tends to be complex and multidirectional. Terms such as ‘network’ and ‘circulation’ have therefore become popular instead.^[24] Emerging from the same semantic nimbus is the term ‘heterarchy’, which evokes situations in which diverse polities, often separated by great stretches of land and water, may yet share in some kind of sensation of common-ality.^[25] These centres may well be jostling among themselves for ways to achieve distinction and superior status, but no one of them has been acknowledged as the enduring and undisputed fount of authority and glamour.^[26]

Yet in a series of recent articles and conference papers, Marshall Sahlins has been concerned to draw out the exact ways in which communities have indeed been ready to perceive the cultural forms of other societies as worthy of imita-tion, however uncomfortable it may be for scholars today to follow them. One such process Sahlins refers to as ‘galactic mimesis’, whereby ‘the chiefs of satellite areas assume the political statuses, courtly styles, titles, and even genealogies of their superiors in the regional hierarchy’. This is ‘typically motivated by competition with immediate rivals in a given political field, who are thus trumped by the chief who goes beyond the shared structures of authority by adopting a politics of higher order’.^[27] Rivals are thus stimulated to draw on both the political and symbolic resources from beyond. One logic animating this process, also explored in the work of the anthropologist Mary W. Helms, is the ubiquitous tendency to attribute abnormal powers to exotic objects and agents.^[28]

Some of this is considered further in Strathern’s chapter (Chapter 11), which takes it for granted that premodern societies tend to exhibit a certain appetite for the foreign. What he terms the drivers of premodern elite ‘extraversion’ derived simply from a recognition that the foreign power may be a source of local strength. The most obvious advantages include the riches brought by trade and the military power promised by access to new alliances, mercenaries and weapons. Foreign trade may form a small amount of the overall economic life of the society while bestowing a disproportionate advantage on an elite that is able to funnel, control or even monopolize such activity. There are, however, some less obvious and more interesting aspects to this too, such as the symbolic struggle implicit in status stratification. Both Biedermann and Strathern have emphasized that Sri Lankan kings had been quite ready to signal their vassalage to outside powers before the Portuguese arrived, and that it was therefore no traumatic novelty to extend this to the Portuguese.^[29] But nor did this amount to some kind of handing over of sovereignty; it was rather seen as a means of enhancing their own internal authority within the island. Even those foreigners resident in the island–and therefore potentially a threat to royal authority–were liable instead to be seen as a counterweight to internal factions and movements that often assailed the kingship. The practice of employing a foreign bodyguard, for example, was in place for a long time before the sixteenth century, for good reason. Foreigners could be a practical necessity for a king, then, but they could also be an adornment of his court. The ideal of kingship in many societies across Asia retained a sort of imperial or quasi-universalist or even cosmopolitan quality insofar as it was considered to be enhanced by the multiplicity of peoples that acknowledged royal authority and majesty. What better way to enhance one’s dignity in local eyes than by demonstrating the way in which even foreign peoples clustered to your presence? Thus was domestic authority raised in esteem by a summoning of the exotic.

Negotiations of power and culture over the long term

If there is a politics of cultural asymmetry to consider, then it also remains to study in more detail the cultural implications of political asymmetry. This is in order to engage properly with the arguments of Sheldon Pollock whose work is among the most important theorizations of premodern South and Southeast Asia to have emerged in recent decades. For Pollock too, the concept of ‘cosmopolitanism’ promises to convey a sense of community or commonality that is not structured by any particular kinds of power relationship.^[30] Indeed, his theoretical instincts are always to problematize any straightforward equation between culture and power. In developing his theoretical reflections on the extraordinary expansion of Sanskrit, therefore, Pollock has been concerned to underline that it was not the by-product of some Sanskrit-peddling empire. It was thus not analogous to the way that Latin carried all before it under the auspices of Rome–and, to some extent, we may add, Portuguese, Dutch and English under the auspices of their respective empires. Pollock points out that adopters of the Sanskrit literary culture used it not to acknowledge the superiority of India as a centre but to reconfigure their own sense of centrality in more impressive terms: thus an endless string of self-conceived centres, each an axis mundi replete with its Mount Meru, could unfold.^[31] This is a vision of the Sanskrit cosmopolis free not only from empire, but also from the strident universalism of religion: Pollock is concerned with the expansion of a literary culture above all rather than with Hinduism.

And it is free from ethnicity. By means of an unusually sustained comparative project, Pollock sets out to show that the European and the Indic realms embarked on entirely diff erent paths of identity creation. In both regions, a glamorous language of high culture, Latin or Sanskrit, gave way to the increasing use of the vernacular for literary production. However, in the European case this fuelled the rise of ethnic and then national sentiments that had been embedded in the Latin imagination from the start, while the Sanskrit imaginaire allowed no such fantasies to take root. Instead the result was ‘vernacular polities’ that concerned themselves with dynastic rather than communal politics.

The chapters assembled here tend to suggest that it would be wrong to overlook the strong and obvious associations between the projection of power and the force of cultural attraction more widely–a relationship once encapsulated in the term ‘civilization’. In what follows we shall sketch some of the ways that the expansion of external power–either sensed, threatened or actually experienced–may do both at the same time. The case of Sri Lanka is intriguing, in the first place, for how early the vernacular was promoted into a vehicle for literary culture, at a time when the Sanskrit and Pāli cosmopoli continued to exert a profound influ ence.^[32] This fits Victor Lieberman’s observation that vernacularization tended to occur first in those regions on the periphery of the older centres from which the universal languages diff used.^[33] Sinhala script attained what is essentially its mod ern form in the eighth century, a development that suggests, according to Charles Hallisey, that ‘the recognition of Sinhala as a language capable of literature was markedly new as a social phenomenon’.^[34] The crucial aspect here is that we see a vernacular language bound up with a cosmopolitan culture of writing and, vice versa, a cosmopolitan culture of writing appropriated for the consolidation of a vernacular language. The graffiti from the Sigiriya site of that era indicates that a surprising variety of laypeople were making vigorous use of the language’s writ-ten potential.^[35] By the turn of the millennium, literary Sinhala had well and truly arrived.^[36]

We find one of the earliest poetic invocations of the island of Lanka in a poem from the tenth century, in which she is personified as a beautiful woman, her blue clothes the surrounding ocean.^[37] This poem, embedded within a Pāli commentary, conveys a markedly Sanskrit sensibility and shares with Cōḻa texts a play on the eroticization and feminization of the land.^[38] But it was also primar ily about Lanka, not the wider world. When King Parākramabāhu II wrote the Kavsilumina (the Crest-Gem of Poetry), an epic poem that set the template for the poetic tradition in Sinhala thereafter, he was showing how well Sinhala could exemplify classical Sanskrit aesthetic norms–but of course he was employing the vernacular idiom, and not the one that had formed the cosmopolis.^[39] As Charles Hallisey has put it, ‘elites in medieval Sri Lanka simultaneously participated in and resisted absorption in “the Sanskrit cosmopolis”’.^[40]

This is a good place then to register a simple if vaguely paradoxical point: that vigorous participation–forced or unforced–in wider transregional flows may be precisely what allows a society or polity to fully conceive of its own local identity. To take a better-known and later phenomenon, the briefest consideration of the diff usion of nationalism will indicate how extremely rapid borrowing and imitation often stand in the service of separation, autonomy and hostility.

Indeed, it can be argued that it was the experience of the Cōḻa imperium that helped crystallize certain features of Lankan political ideology, which then endured for most of the second millennium.^[41] This was in part simply by providing an external foe against which collective spirits could be mobilized–and the identity-f orming power of alterity was to be extensively demonstrated in Sri Lanka throughout the centuries.^[42] It has been argued, in this vein, that later Portuguese ideas of nationhood and Christianity came to infiltrate local understandings in the late sixteenth century, stiff ening indigenous feelings about their ethnic and religious opposition to the intruders.^[43] But more subtly and no less powerfully, Cōḻa visions of what a king should be influenced the Sinhalese reassertion of sov ereignty. The dramatic impact of Cōḻa overlordship on Lankan royal culture is obvious to anyone visiting the ruins of Polonnaruva today. We very much regret that it has not been possible to include a chapter on Tamil cosmopolitanism in this volume, although several of our contributors do refer to it. But we can at least acknowledge that the South Indian world also formed a zone of high culture that Lankan elites could aspire to and provided the most significant body of royal peers that Lankan elites sought to emulate and surpass.

When subsequent Lankan kings, for example, referred to themselves as cakravartis, they may have been indicating their status as ‘supreme overlords’ in the Cōḻa manner rather than referring back to its original Pāli Buddhist con ception.^[44] Incidentally, both the Sanskrit and Pāli concepts of the cakravartin appealed to a cosmopolitan vision, a realm of infinite extension, created out of sheer political might but rich in cosmological import. And yet in late medieval Sri Lanka it slipped into usage as a particularly emphatic way of referring to a bounded conception: the universe had shrunk to the island itself.^[45] To be a cakravarti came to mean to have conquered the four quarters of the island, to have captured the most authoritative capital and to be subject to no higher power. This was a mental template for the political unification of a delimited space.^[46]

In the sphere of religion, the sense of Lanka’s divine specialness, its unique role in the advance of the Buddhist dispensation, is in one sense a profound act of localization. Thus was a universal religion originating thousands of miles to the north rooted in the very soil of Tambapaṇṇi (one can only speculate whether a similar process could have occurred with Islam or Catholicism). That in turn became something that could be adopted by Southeast Asian kings who then became liable to insist on their own special protective relationship to the authen-tic teachings of Buddha. In other words, extensive participation in the Pāli ecumene hardly stood in the way of the formation of local aggrandizement, while glorifications of the local could themselves be rapidly disseminated in the wider ecumene. Nor should political designs over areas beyond the island be seen as something inherently antagonistic to the development of patriotic or indigenist sentiments. Once again, a quick glance at the better-known history of modern European imperialism will indicate how sprawling imperial ambitions may easily sit with trenchant domestic patriotism.

The two unifier-hero kings of Lankan history who are such vivid symbols of the nationalist imagination today, Parākramabāhus I (r. 1153–86) and VI (r. circa 1411–67), combined domestic consolidation with an outlook that prized both cosmopolitan pluralism within and a projection of glamour without. What happened to Buddhism is very telling. Both kings were magnificent patrons and promoters of Buddhism, seeking to at once dignify, enhance, control and order the Sangha, which in turn rendered Lanka a magnet for monks and pilgrims from beyond its shores. Yet each reign is notable too for the way in which diverse other cults, gods, ideas and ritual specialists were brought into the embrace of the Buddhist establishment, whether they be Mahāyāna images of the bodhisattva, popular forms of astrology, or Brahmanic ritual and dharmaśātric norms. As John Holt has it, Sinhala kingship ‘tended to become ever more eclectic in its symbolic expression, more composite or aggregate in its ideology and appeal’.^[47] This was at once an opening to the cosmopolitan and a politically interested domestication of it.

By the time of Parākramabāhu VI, the Indian Ocean was witnessing the cre ation of another vast cultural sphere beyond the Sanskrit and the Pāli: the Arabic or Muslim ‘cosmopolis’, particularly brought to our attention by Ronit Ricci’s recent book.^[48] This also was borne not on the back of a single empire but rather seaborne trade–yet it certainly involved the exercise of political and commercial power. Sri Lanka was bound to participate to some extent in the wider Islamic commercial conjuncture because it was the principal source for a world-desired spice, cinnamon, as well as other products such as rubies and elephants.^[49] The new importance of seaborne trade certainly had some political repercussions in Sri Lanka as it was partly responsible for the movement of political gravity to the southwest from the thirteenth century. However, unlike in insular Southeast Asia or parts of South India, it did not give rise to essentially independent port cities nor eclipse agrarian-based states.^[50] In that sense, Sri Lanka looks more like main land Southeast Asia, where Theravāda Buddhist polities retained pre-eminence and control of ports. There are only one or two signs that Muslim groups may have been ready to translate commercial into political might in Sri Lanka, as in the seizure of Chilaw by a Muslim chief from Palayakayal at the beginning of the sixteenth century.^[51] By this time the Māppiḷas had begun to play an important part in internal politics of the island, as well as in the patterns of its external rela-tions with India, until they were defeated by the Portuguese in the 1530s.^[52] It is possible then that the rise of Islam to political pre-eminence in Sri Lanka was curtailed by the rising influence of the Portuguese. But in general, Muslim groups of diverse origin–some of them long settled, some much less integrated–were intent on dominating the seaborne trade that passed through the major ports of Lanka, rather than reaching for power inland.^[53] More importantly, the Buddhist and Hindu rulers of Sri Lanka never once indicated that they might countenance conversion to Islam, unlike their counterparts in island Southeast Asia.

What happens, however, if we evoke the language of cosmopolitanism when referring to the cultural and ethnic heritage left by the waves of European colonialism? This deserves to become a topic of wider debate. New connec-tions to Portuguese-speaking, ethnically often quite diverse communities across the Indian Ocean were one of the first things to emerge from the extension of Portuguese interests to the Sea of Ceylon shortly after 1500. On the fringes of the official empire, informal communities of Portuguese merchants established–or reinforced, or reinvented–links between the ports of Sri Lanka and those of the Bay of Bengal and the Arabian Sea. This vast commercial and social network–what Sanjay Subrahmanyam has called the Portuguese ‘shadow empire’–was porous and disjointed, and indeed it may well be that in some ways it was no coherent network at all.^[54] But it allowed for the ports of Sri Lanka to link up with a wider, global network of Portuguese traders stretching from Bahia to Macao, and even, starting in the late sixteenth century with the Iberian Union of Crowns under Philip II, from the Caribbean to Japan.^[55] Escaping as they often did the formal structures of power put in place by the Iberian authorities, the private Portuguese and their descendants exerted their influence in ways that are partly comparable to the practices of other Indian Ocean diasporas. They often practised a pragmatic cosmopolitanism that resonated with three or four interconnected, sometimes conflicting, forms of early modern globalization: the Lusophone (which could include non-Catholics), the Catholic (which could include non-Lusophones), the early capitalist and the Iberian imperial.

It would be all too comfortable to simply dismiss the process by which Sri Lanka became a part of early modern global empires as essentially un-cosmopolitan because the element of power was more directly and formally expressed than in the cultural diff usions theorized by Pollock and Ricci. To be sure, there are evident diff erences between Catholic universalism and Islamic universalism, the roots of which extend further back than the defeat of Erasmianism in mid-sixteenth-century Iberia. There certainly were very different attitudes towards religious heterogeneity between Islamic and Catholic empires, the latter labouring for mass conversion at an unprecedented scale. But we also need to beware of perpetuating simplistic assertions about early modern European political culture when writing global history. At the very least, imperial formations can, while being deeply repressive on a number of levels, still be conducive to cosmopolitan prac-tices at others. Lisbon and Goa, while irradiating imperial power and hosting such profoundly coercive institutions as the Tribunal of the Inquisition, were also global ports where diverse ethnic and linguistic communities engaged in long-distance trade, intensive cultural exchanges and knowledge transfers. Catholicism indeed constituted a cosmopolitan zone in the second sense as defined above. Conversion entailed not only cultural adaptations that allowed groups and individuals with very diverse backgrounds to participate in global commerce and communication. It also triggered a legal attachment to the empire that allowed converts to make use of its tribunals on a theoretically level, global playing field. The limitations and conditions of conversion in an environment of violent imperial expansion are evident, and there is no reason to downplay them. But to what extent Asians did come to feel a part of a wider Catholic cosmopolis after converting, and how they may have contributed to the way it functioned, is largely to be studied.^[56]

Even what we know about the establishment of European colonial rule as such, starting in Sri Lanka in the final decade of the sixteenth century, leaves much space for discussion with regard to the significance of connections and cosmopolitan practices. New institutions such as the Municipal Council of Colombo mimicked similar bodies scattered across the globe from Lisbon and Bahia to Goa and Macao.^[57] The people who built them were often only Portuguese in the widest sense of the word. These were instances of participation in an early global cosmopolitan sphere of urban institutions–and it may well be worth emphasizing the importance of cities as forms of political organization in the pre-nation-state world–that remains poorly understood. Other, more overtly coercive imperial organizations set up their quarters in the island and, while often serving the purpose of suppressing resistance to a deeper integration after conquest, also ended up supporting the movement of people and ideas.^[58] Similar questions arise, naturally, from the history of the two subsequent colonial invasions, the Dutch and the British.

How we weigh up the global against the local in all this will always depend to some extent on how we feel about associations between culture and political violence in general. Some may feel that the term ‘cosmopolitanism’ is too innocent for the realities of power and coercion created by seventeenth-to nineteenth-century European imperialism. Walter D. Mignolo has sought, in his studies on Iberian expansion, to place globalization and Christian universalism in a diff erent category to cosmopolitanism, given that ‘globalization is a set of designs to manage the world while cosmopolitanism is a set of projects toward planetary con-viviality’.^[59] But can we really distinguish so clearly between the two? Mignolo’s comment is a remarkable reflection of how much the language of cosmopolitan-ism balks at the reality of power, and how much it retains a normative charge in scholarly discussion.

Sri Lankan historiography

The present volume brings together the most recent research on premodern Sri Lanka, but it naturally builds on much scholarship from earlier decades. Previous historical writing on Sri Lanka has by no means ignored the manifold ways in which Sri Lanka has been shaped by outside forces over centuries, and in which Lanka left its imprint on Asia in return.^[60] The prestigious role played by the Sinhalese in the much larger story of Buddhism, for example, constitutes one instance of cosmopolitan radiation that has never really receded from con-sciousness in the island. The first volume of Sri Lanka’s most ‘offi cial’ history, The University of Ceylon History of Ceylon, published in 1959, had chapters on the development of Buddhism in India and under Aśoka, on the Sangnam age in Tamilnad, and on the development of Pallavas, Pāṇḍyas and Cōḻas in Southern India. This said, the latter names are also resonant in the Lankan imagination for their violent eruptions. In terms of the dominant form of political history, outsiders have often appeared in the threatening guise of invading elites, as Sri Lanka’s ‘golden age’ of Anurādhapura was disrupted by invasions from the fifth century onwards.^[61] From then on Lankan kingdoms were engaged in complex diplomatic and military manoeuvres with the dynasties of Southern India and even became subject to Cōḻa suzerainty in the last years of the first millennium. Military power, it must be added, sometimes flowed the other way, too: when the island was uni fied under the Sinhalese king Parākramabāhu I, he sent an army to the mainland to assist a Pāṇḍyan ruler against the Cōḻas in 1169. A few years previously, he had sent an invasion force to Burma, which captured two port towns there.

Clearly, invasions, migrations and other incoming and outgoing movements of people and ideas could not be ignored in any discussion of Lanka’s past, even in its golden age. However, in general, the historiographical project of the post-independence years was to furnish the new nation-state of Sri Lanka (changing its name from Ceylon in 1972) with its own past as a distinctive entity. This was natural: it was the model for history-writing everywhere and there remains great value in taking the island as the focus for analysis. Over the 1980s, as it became clear that the past was being mobilized to fight political battles amid the strife of the armed ethnic conflict (1983–2009), international academia became more concerned to complicate and undermine its simplistic deployments in the name of ethnic and nationalist projects. The island of Sri Lanka remained the unit of study but what was emphasized was its internal pluralism at any point in time and its discontinuities over time.^[62] One principal source of controversy for these debates was the question of the chronology of Sinhala ethnic consciousness.^[63] Intent on disrupting the anachronisms inherent in nationalist thinking, and influenced by post-Orientalist interpretations of the power of British colonialism to order local knowledge, it became common for a while, especially among Western historians of Sri Lanka, to argue that Sinhala ethnicity was a modern fabrication, could only ever have been a modern phenomenon.^[64] In recent years, however, some scholars have again sought to push the history of Sinhala ethnicity further back in time, while maintaining a distance from the nationalist agenda.^[65] This question is germane to the themes of this book, and while readers will find that it is by no means the organizing problem, the interpretive fluctuations it has gone through over the decades are symptomatic of the challenges we attempt to address when engaging with Sri Lanka’s connected (or not so connected) history as a whole.

Today, the past continues to be drawn upon in Sri Lanka, as in many other parts of the world, for the purposes of shaping group sentiment and asserting group claims, and these have not ceased with the conclusion of civil war.^[66] There remains indeed a general sensitivity towards ‘foreign interference’ in the past and in the present, whether that is suspected as emanating from the neighbouring behemoth of India or the more distant ex-hegemon of Europe or ‘the West’. This is understandable, perhaps, if we appreciate that Sri Lanka has one of the longest histories of subjection to European imperial appetites anywhere in the world, with periods of influence and outright rule by the Portuguese (1506–1656), Dutch (1636–1796) and British (1796–1947).^[67] It would be disingenuous to express the hope that this book will be easily received by those who advocate such a position, and that it will not have political resonances. In the current climate, broaching the question of the relationship between Lanka and the wider world cannot but have political implications.

Nevertheless, it is worth underlining that this book is not designed to make a political intervention by assuming that ‘cosmopolitanism’ is the only appropriate organizing principle for considering the island’s past. If Sri Lanka is being dragged into world history, and the history of the wider world pushed into Sri Lanka, that is because such is the direction in which historical writing in general is heading. In Europe itself, ‘Eurocentrism’ of various sorts has come under sustained attack. Old categories, old problems are dying; new ones are pushing through the cracks. We are not, of course, suggesting that ‘Lankocentrism’ is in any way equivalent to the centre-periphery bias grounded in Europe’s imperial heritage. But the new methodologies of world history deserve to be experimented with for Lanka as for any other place. That is, then, the politics of this book: not to impose ‘cosmopolitanism’ as the new orthodoxy, but to promote its critical discussion in Sri Lanka and among historians who may wish to engage in genuinely open debate on a wider scale.

The chapters

In the opening contribution to this volume, Robin Coningham, Mark Manuel, Christopher Davis and Prishanta Gunawardhana look for clues to the cosmopolitan in the material evidence from ancient Lanka. In doing so they provide us with an up-to-date assessment of the latest archaeological findings. After an overview of how issues of identity, ethnicity and migration have been treated in archaeological writing, the chapter explores the themes of Indian Ocean trade, pilgrimage, religious patronage and urbanism, in each case setting the broad lines of narrative from the textual sources alongside what excavations have revealed. As well as drawing out Lanka’s connectivity to the wider world, the authors are concerned to show the extent of internal heterogeneity (particularly in social and religious terms). Among the conventional narratives that are questioned along the way is a depiction of a comparatively ‘pure’ Buddhist culture in the Anurādhapura period that was subject to Indian and ‘Hindu’ influences in the Polonnaruva period. Nevertheless, the great importance of Buddhism as an institutional presence outside the towns in the first millennium ce is heavily underlined.

Rebecca Darley’s chapter provides a critique of a tendency in the literature on the ancient and early medieval periods of Lankan history towards ‘implicit cosmopolitanism’, that is, a celebration of far-reaching connectivity as a self-evident sign of cosmopolitan practices. Darley off ers a forensic examination of coinage evidence in particular, but also a critical reading of the much-cited Christian Topography, a sixth-century anonymous text often attributed to Kosmas Indikopleustes, and a reassessment of the findings of port archaeology. In this area, where there are so few scholars with relevant expertise, it is easy for conclusions to circulate unexamined. The central issue here is just how extensive and far-reaching Lanka’s participation in seaborne trade was in this early period. New thinking on this question will have implications for many further areas of enquiry, such as whether the rise of Anurādhapura was propelled by seaborne trade or the harnessing of agrarian resources. While Darley questions the grand narrative of connectivity in many ways, she does find that there was a well attested upsurge in connections to the West in the mid-fifth to sixth centuries ce.

Tilman Frasch’s contribution allows us to see Sri Lanka not as a receptacle for influences washing up on its shores but as the transmitter of a Pāli worldview that would come to form a cosmopolis stretching across to mainland Southeast Asia. At the same time, it is concerned to decentre Lanka somewhat by showing how for a time Bagan established itself as the most secure and fruitful centre of the Theravāda world, and to pluralize Lankan Buddhism, by showing how the Mahāvihāra version struggled against and sometimes lost out to other monastic centres in the first millennium. Unlike Pollock’s presentation of the Sanskrit cosmopolis, however, this was an ecumene explicitly founded upon the importance of the preservation and expansion of a religious tradition. This meant that Lankan Buddhists participated in a religious culture that stretched across the Bay of Bengal and beyond, swept by common currents of millenarian anxiety, and united by the transference of ordination lineages and even the occasional council, such as the convergence of monks on Lanka in the 1420s. This was, in fact a brief flowering, for political fragmentation after Parākramabāhu VI and the arrival of the Portuguese in 1506 led to a precipitous decline in Lanka’s centrality within the Theravāda world. This chapter thus also underlines how closely the cultural primacy of any one polity was associated with the political strength of its kings.

Alastair Gornall and Justin Henry explore the tensions that issued from the reception of Sanskrit literary theory by Lankan scholar monks working in Pāli in the early second millennium. They show how the tremendous prestige of Sanskrit high culture and its insistence on the moral significance of the aesthetic sphere becomes evident in works on Pāli poetics that were written from the twelfth cen tury. To judge by the anxious note sounded in some of the Pāli texts, this was felt as a real intellectual challenge. The same texts indicate that the Sanskritic vision was, in another sense, profoundly resisted and transformed: the Pāli Buddhist ethical framework remained dominant, most visibly in its deprecation of eroti-cism. And yet there was another discourse, which breaks out in Pāli kāvya, in which not only the erotic, but also the martial and royal were unproblematically glamourized. Dealing carefully with difficult issues of reception, the authors fin-ish by comparing the Pāli ecumene and the Sanskrit cosmopolis.

Stephen Berkwitz’s analysis of the genre of Sinhala sandeśa poetry from the twelfth to the sixteenth century provides us with an apposite case study of how to think about the relationship between the local and the cosmopolitan. His analysis of how local authors sought to ‘adopt the prestige of a cosmopolitan cultural order while asserting the distinctive value of an indigenous one’ could stand as a literary equivalent to the way that Indic deities were both localized and Buddhicized. In some ways, the chapter serves as an illustration of Pollock’s vernacularization thesis, although Berkwitz draws out some distinctive ways in which Sinhala poets shaped the genre in a way that rejected–perhaps even consciously–aspects of the Sanskrit model. Most interestingly, the Sinhala sandeśa poems were very explicitly concerned with the themes of kingship and religion: their function is the glamorization of royal power and its territorial expression, and they take the form of appeals to the gods for the protections of kings and the Buddhist sāsana. Berkwitz’s emphasis on the erotic quality of the poems–in which the evocation of female bodies is not a function of the romantic gaze but the natural accompaniment to virile royal power–presents an intriguing counterpoint to Gornall and Henry’s arguments. Diff erent genres allow the expression of diff erent sensibilities, we may conclude: a principle that could equally be extended to contrasting the lack of interest in xenophobic and ethnic sensations in the sandeśa with their appearance in the haṭanas.

Sujatha Arundathi Meegama presents an innovative art historical approach to Sri Lanka’s convoluted sixteenth-century transition to early colonial rule. Bridging a deeply rooted gap in the study of diff erent artistic genres, Meegama brings together the architectural remains of early modern buildings in Sri Lanka (most of which are in ruins) with the ivory caskets produced in the island during that same period (most of which are now in European and American collections). She argues that, while the participation of Lankan artists including masons, carvers and architects in a wider South Asian sphere of visual culture cannot be denied, the notion of ‘influence’ is in urgent need of replacement by a more inclusive concept such as ‘appropriation’. As she shows in her compelling analysis of certain visual elements of the caskets traditionally disregarded by European art historians as merely decorative, Lankan artists and patrons made highly elaborate, consciously construed and persuasive choices to convey complex messages about the relationship between Lanka and the outer world. Such choices call, as Meegama argues, to be read in a wider context of global artistic transfers.

Zoltán Biedermann explores the largely overlooked movement of Lankans who, from the medieval through the early modern period, took strategic refuge overseas, generally in order to escape from unfavourable political conditions in the island and obtain support for their own power building projects. The history of these exiles, resonances of which can be found in the chapters by Gananath Obeyesekere and Sujit Sivasundaram, is traceable through the classic Lankan chronicles, but only becomes fully discernible after the appearance of the Portuguese in the early sixteenth century with their abundant production of written sources. From the 1540s, Biedermann shows, exile in the Portuguese outposts of South India became gradually associated for Lankan princes with conversion to Catholicism. From the turn of the seventeenth century, when the Iberian authorities engaged in the full military conquest of the island, the exile of Lankan throne pretenders in the Portuguese Empire became increasingly definitive. The stories of the men and women who spent the rest of their lives in Goa or Lisbon have rarely been told, but deserve to be reintegrated into the fabric of Sri Lankan history as a whole. They also provide ample ground for discussions about the possibilities of being cosmopolitan in repressive imperial contexts.

Gananath Obeyesekere will remain an inspiration to future generations working not only on Sri Lankan anthropology and history but on many of the themes of this volume more generally. Among the abiding themes of his work have been the vexed nature of identity construction, the cultural construal of the foreigner, and the relationship between the universal and the local in interpret-ing human behaviour.^[68] In many ways, his career has been marked by the spirit of global history avant la lettre. This is not just because his work has ranged widely in geographical terms, but because a profound comparative sensibility has under-pinned his reflections.^[69] Moreover, Lanka’s relationship with the mainland has also been a longstanding concern of his, which means that he has long been pursuing a form of connected history too. He returns to this theme in his chapter for this volume, which explores the cosmopolitan culture of the Kandyan court during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with an emphasis on the complex politics around the adoption of foreign practices. This chapter demonstrates the intensity of Kandyan–South Indian relations and reveals the quasi-pendular movement, in the mountain kingdom, between the habitus of embracing and rejecting the foreign.

Alicia Schrikker and Kate Ekama off er a novel insight into the world of slavery in eighteenth-century Sri Lanka. On the basis of Dutch court records, they throw light on the cosmopolitan cultural and social practices of slaves brought from the Malay world to coastal ports such as Colombo, Galle and Jaff na. The authors discuss, on the one hand, how such sources can enrich our understanding of the various existing practices of bonded labour in Sri Lanka. On the other hand, they suggest that the Dutch legal sphere–including texts, tribunals and intensive negotiations at the local level regarding the application of Dutch VOC laws–can be understood as a cosmopolis in its own right. Schrikker and Ekama explore the clash between rigid Dutch notions of slavery as the complete opposite of freedom, on the one hand, and longstanding notions of caste, hierarchy and unfree labour in Jaff na society, on the other. They thus off er a promising window into the early modern history of Jaffna, a region that has been suffering from historiographical neglect in recent decades.

Sujit Sivasundaram engages with the complex transition to British rule. He explores archival, in part unpublished, materials from the four crucial years of 1815–18 to ask questions about continuity and change. As he shows, no clear lines can be drawn, and the picture as we have known it so far requires substantial qualifications. Above all, a clear-cut contrast between cosmopolitanism and ethnicity can be ruled out. Any consideration of the conquest of the Kandyan highlands and their integration into British imperial structures and discourses will necessarily have to take into account the way British observers reacted to what Sivasundaram calls ‘local cosmopolitanism’, and local elites responded to the supra-local realities of empire. In the jigsaw puzzle of Lankan politics at the transition to the modern period, the process of imperial ‘islanding’ played as crucial a role as indigenous notions of ethnicity and cosmopolitan diversity.

In the last chapter, Alan Strathern sets out to provide a panoramic perspective on the development of ‘ethnic’ group emotion and its relationship with dynastic rule over the long term of Lankan history. He does so through three distinct parts, which all have some comparative element. The first and longest part off ers an examination of how the case of Sri Lanka obstructs Sheldon Pollock’s theorization of the contrasting politics of ethnic and religious identity in premodern South Asia and Europe. Medieval Europe is thus the reference point here, implicitly or explicitly. Strathern argues that Lanka shows signs of both ethnic feeling and ‘Providentialist’ forms of political legitimation, in ways that are comparable to European developments. The second part explores the paradoxical manner in which ethnic emotion may coincide with ‘stranger kingship’ or an insistence on the non-domestic qualities of the ruling dynasty. At issue here is what he refers to as ‘elite extraversion’ rather than ‘cosmopolitanism’. The final part is chronologically comparative, and explores the ways in which Lankan society responded to the imperial presence in the Portuguese and early British periods, focusing on a grammar of rebellion that is evident in both 1590–1650 and 1815–18.

Footnotes and references:

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[1]:

Ulf Hannerz, ‘Cosmopolitanism,’ in A Companion to the Anthropology of Politics, ed. David Nugent and Joan Vincent (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), 70.

[2]:

Nicholas Thomas, Entangled Objects: Exchange, Material Culture, and Colonialism in the Pacific (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 108.

[3]:

See among the most helpful overviews, Gillian Brook, ‘Cosmopolitanism,’ in The Oxford Handbook of World Philosophy, ed. William Edelglass and Jay L. Garfield (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 582–95; J. Binnie, J. J. Holloway, S. Millington, and C. Young, ‘Cosmopolitanism,’ in International Encyclopedia of Human Geography, ed. R. Kitchin and N. Thrift (Oxford: Elsevier, 2009), 307–1 3, and Hannerz, ‘Cosmpolitanism’.

[4]:

See, for example Robert Fine, Cosmopolitanism (London: Routledge, 2007).

[5]:

Indeed, the extent to which it is both normative and imprecise is summed up wonderfully by Carol Breckenridge, Sheldon Pollock, Homi K. Bhabha and Dipesh Chakrabarty in Cosmopolitanism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 1: ‘specifying cosmopolitanism positively and definitely is an uncosmopolitan thing to do.’

[6]:

As in ‘human beings [should] have equal moral and political obligations to each other based solely on their humanity, without reference to state citizenship, national identity, religious affi liation, ethnicity, or place of birth’? Gareth Wallace Brown, ‘Cosmopolitanism,’ in The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics, 3rd edn, ed. Iain McMillan and Alistair McLean (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).

[7]:

Prasenjit Duara, The Crisis of Global Modernity: Asian Traditions and a Sustainable Future (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 20, emphasis in original.

[8]:

See for example Akhil Gupta, ‘Globalization and Difference: Cosmopolitanism before the Nation- State,’ Transforming Cultures e-Journal 3, 2 (2008), 1–20.

[9]:

Of course other forms–the rural, the popular, the regional–have also played a role.

[10]:

This is not quite to propose a catalogue of ‘types’ of cosmopolitanism, as we wish to safeguard the relational nature of the concept and refrain from essentializing it. Some types discussed in the literature include ‘elite cosmopolitanism’, ‘aesthetic cosmopolitanism’, ‘everyday cosmopolitanism’, as well as ‘exclusionary’ versus ‘inclusionary cosmopolitanism’, or even ‘cosmopolitan communitarism’. See Steven Vertovec and Robin Cohen, eds., Conceiving Cosmopolitanism: Theory, Context, Practice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 1–22.

[11]:

Naturally, these types of cosmopolitanism often converge in practice: a great port city may be cosmopolitan both insofar as it is a teeming microcosm of the wider world, and insofar as it participates in a grander macrocosm.

[12]:

Sheldon Pollock, The Language of the Gods in the World of Men: Sanskrit, Culture, and Power in Premodern India (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2009), 10.

[13]:

Pollock, Language of the Gods, 14.

[14]:

Steven Collins, Nirvana and other Buddhist Felicities: Utopias of the Pali imaginaire (Cambridge University Press, 1998). Pollock, Language of the Gods, 387, also refers to this as ‘a second cosmopolitan cultural formation’.

[15]:

Kenneth R. Hall, ‘Ports-of-Trade, Maritime Diasporas, and Networks of Trade and Cultural Integration in the Bay of Bengal Region of the Indian Ocean: c. 1300–1500,’ Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 53, 1–2 (2009), 109–45; Ronit Ricci, Islam Translated: Literature, Conversion, and the Arabic Cosmopolis of South and Southeast Asia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011).

[16]:

Tilman Frasch, ‘1456: The Making of a Buddhist Ecumene in the Bay of Bengal,’ in Pelagic Passageways: The Northern Bay of Bengal World before Colonialism, ed. Rila Mukherjee (Delhi: Primus, 2011), 383–405; Anne M. Blackburn, ‘Buddhist Connections in the Indian Ocean: Changes in Monastic Mobility, 1000–1500,’ Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 58, 3 (2015), 237–66.

[17]:

O. W. Wolters, Early Southeast Asia: Selected Essays, ed. Craig J. Reynolds (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008). Hence we might consider that the local and the supra-local each functions as centric and peripheral at the same time.

[18]:

O. W. Wolters, History, Culture, and Region in Southeast Asian Perspectives, revised edition (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999), 55. A number of mostly literary examples are given on pp. 58–6 7.

[19]:

Sheldon Pollock, ‘The Cosmopolitan Vernacular,’ Journal of Asian Studies 57, 1 (1998), 33; Anthony Milner, The Malays (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008), 38.

[20]:

Wang Gungwu, ‘Introduction,’ in Southeast Asia in the 9th to 14th Centuries, ed. David G. Marr and Anthony C. Milner (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 1986), xv.

[21]:

See Milner, The Malays, 38.

[22]:

Wang, ‘Introduction’, xv.

[23]:

Stanley Tambiah, Buddhism Betrayed? Religion, Politics and Violence in Sri Lanka (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 145, refers to a ‘standard South Asian mode of diff erentially incorporating into an existing society sectarian or alien minorities: inferiorize them and place them in a subordinate position in the hierarchy’. See also Gananath Obeyesekere, ‘Buddhism, Nationhood and Cultural Identity: A Question of Fundamentals,’ in Fundamentalisms Comprehended, ed. Martin E. Marty and R. Scott Appleby (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 231–5 6 and ‘On Buddhist Identity in Sri Lanka,’ in Ethnic Identity: Creation, Conflict and Accommodation, ed. Lola Romanucci-R ossi and George A. de Vos (London: Mayfield, 1995), 222–41.

[24]:

See Daud Ali, ‘Connected Histories? Regional Historiography and Theories of Cultural Contact between Early South and Southeast Asia,’ in Islamic Connections: Muslim Societies in South and Southeast Asia, ed. R. Michael Feener and Terenjit Sevea (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2009), 1–24 and ‘The Early Inscriptions of Indonesia and the Problem of the Sanskrit Cosmopolis,’ in Early Interactions between South and Southeast Asia: Reflections on Cross-Cultural Exchange, ed. Pierre-Yves Manguin, A. Mani and Geoff Wade (New Delhi and Singapore: Manohar and Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2011), 277–97. In this volume, also see the introduction by Manguin, and Peter Skilling, ‘Buddhism and the Circulation of Ritual in Early Peninsular Southeast Asia,’ 371–8 4.

[25]:

Hall, ‘Ports-of-Trade’, 114, off ers the following definition: ‘A heterarchy is defined as including horizontally linked equitable urban centers that shared common goals, acknowledged the political independence of its “members,” and included multiple networked power centers that had diff erent levels of connectivity, and were based upon some degree of acknowledged cultural homogeneity.’

[26]:

Anthony Reid uses ‘cosmopolis’ to refer to such relations where once a centre had achieved special authority (e.g. Malacca), but not yet configured an empire proper; see Hall, ‘Ports-o f-Trade’, 115.

[27]:

Marshall Sahlins, ‘The Stranger-Kingship of the Mexica,’ unpublished paper, 14. As he puts it, ‘[t] he peoples concerned have been well aware of these gradients of power and sophistication–can we not say, these diff erences of “civilization”?’

[28]:

Mary W. Helms, Ulysses’ Sail: An Ethnographic Odyssey of Power, Knowledge, and Geographical Distance (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988).

[29]:

Alan Strathern, Kingship and Conversion in Sixteenth-Century Sri Lanka. Portuguese Imperialism in a Buddhist Land (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007) and Zoltán Biedermann, ‘The Matrioshka Principle and How it was Overcome: Portuguese and Habsburg Attitudes toward Imperial Authority in Sri Lanka and the Responses of the Rulers of Kotte (1506–1656),’ Journal of Early Modern History 13, 4 (2009), 265–310.

[30]:

Sheldon Pollock, ‘Cosmopolitan and Vernacular in History,’ Public Culture 12, 3 (2000), 26, has it that the Sanskrit cosmopolis was formed by the ‘circulation of traders, literati, religious professionals, and freelance adventurers. Coercion, cooptation, juridical control, and even persuasion are nowhere in evidence’.

[31]:

Pollock, Language of the Gods, 572.

[32]:

Indeed the Sanskrit cosmopolis even had an Indian Summer in the modern (late colonial) period, as discussed in Mark Ravinder Frost, ‘Cosmopolitan Fragments from a Splintered Isle: “Ceylonese” Nationalism in Late-Colonial Sri Lanka,’ in Ethnicities, Diasporas and Grounded Cosmopolitanisms in Asia. Proceedings of the Asia Research Institute Workshop (Singapore: Asia Research Institute, 2004), 59–69.

[33]:

Victor Lieberman, Strange Parallels. Southeast Asia in Global Context, c. 800–1 830, Vol. 2, Mainland Mirrors: Europe, Japan, China, South Asia, and the Islands (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).

[34]:

Charles Hallisey, ‘Works and Persons in Sinhala Literary Culture,’ in Literary Cultures in History: Reconstructions from South Asia, ed. Sheldon Pollock (Berkeley and Los Angeles: California University Press, 2003), 695–96.

[35]:

According to R. A. L. H. Gunawardana, Historiography in a Time of Ethnic Conflict: Construction of the Past in Contemporary Sri Lanka (Colombo: Social Scientists’ Association, 1995), 14, Sinhala arrives as ‘a clearly distinguishable linguistic form’ in the eighth and ninth centuries. Pollock, ‘Cosmopolitan and Vernacular in History’, places the arrival of Sinhala vernacular culture in the ninth century.

[36]:

Hallisey, ‘Works and Persons’, 691.

[37]:

Jonathan S. Walters, ‘Lovely Lady Lanka: A Tenth-Century Depiction,’ Sri Lanka Journal of the Humanities 39 (1993), 45–56; Sheldon Pollock, ‘India in the Vernacular Millennium: Literary Culture and Polity, 1000–1500,’ Daedalus 127 (1998), 41–74.

[38]:

See Daud Ali, ‘Royal Eulogy as World History: Re-t hinking Copper-plate Inscriptions in Cōḻa India,’ in Querying the Medieval: Texts and the History of Practices in South Asia, ed. Ronald Inden, Jonathan Walters and Daud Ali (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 210–12.

[39]:

Stephen C. Berkwitz, Buddhist Poetry and Colonialism. Alagiyavanna and the Portuguese in Sri Lanka (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 34; W. R. McAlpine and M. B. Ariyapala, The Crest-Gem of Poetry (Dehiwala: Tisara Prakasakayo, 1990).

[40]:

Hallisey, ‘Works and Persons’, 697. According to Hallisey, Sinhalese authors ‘combined a profound appreciation for the vision of the literary found in Sanskrit literary culture with a resolute resistance to the encroachment of Sanskrit language on the forms of Sinhala used for poetry’ (ibid., 694).

[41]:

Alan Strathern, ‘Sri Lanka in the Long Early Modern Period: Its Place in a Comparative Theory of Second Millennium Eurasian History,’ Modern Asian Studies 43 (2009), 809–64.

[42]:

See Lieberman, Strange Parallels, Vol. 2 for more on the importance of external force in defining ethnicity.

[43]:

Alan Strathern, ‘Treachery and Ethnicity in Portuguese Representations of Sri Lanka,’ in Engaging Colonial Knowledge: Reading European Archives in World History, ed. Ricardo Roque and Kim Wagner (New York: Palgrave, 2012), 217–34.

[44]:

On the title ‘Kālinga Wheel-Turning Monarch (cakravartin)’ see Jonathan Walters, ‘Buddhist History: The Sri Lankan Pali Vaṃsas and their Commentary,’ in Querying the Medieval. Texts and the History of Practices in South Asia, ed. Ronald Inden, Jonathan Walters and Daud Ali (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 145. Also see John C. Holt, The Buddhist Visnu: Religious Transformation, Politics, and Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 41–42, and S. Pathmanathan, ‘South India and Sri Lanka, AD 1450–1650: Political, Commercial and Cultural Relations,’ Journal of Tamil Studies 21 (1982), 36–57.

[45]:

See K. W. Goonewardena, ‘Kingship in XVIIth Century Sri Lanka: Some Concepts, Ceremonies and Other Practices,’ Sri Lanka Journal of the Humanities 3 (1977), 1–32. This seems to be consonant with Pollock’s account of the shift to the cosmopolitan vernacular (Language of the Gods, 386–90).

[46]:

Goonewardena, ‘Kingship in XVIIth Century Sri Lanka’, 13.

[47]:

Holt, Buddhist Visnu, 35.

[48]:

Ricci, Islam Translated. Also see Lorna Dewaraja, ‘Muslim Merchants and Pilgrims in Sarandib c.900–1500 AD,’ in Sri Lanka and the Silk Road of the Sea, ed. S. Bandaranayake, L. Dewaraja, R. Silva and K. D. G. Wimalratne (Colombo: The Sri Lanka National Fund for UNESCO and Central Cultural Fund, 1990), 191–8.

[49]:

See Sebastian Prange, ‘Like Banners on the Sea: Muslim Trade Networks and Islamization in Malabar and Maritime Southeast Asia,’ in Islamic Connections: Muslim Societies in South and Southeast Asia, ed. R. Michael Feener and Terenjit Sevea (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2009), 25–47, for a comparison of Malabar and Southeast Asia.

[50]:

C. R. de Silva, ‘Sri Lanka in the Early Sixteenth Century: Political Conditions,’ in University of Peradeniya History of Sri Lanka, Vol. 2, ed. K. M. De Silva (Peradeniya: University of Peradeniya, 1995), 12–13. Also see Hall, ‘Ports-of-Trade’, 134 on Ibn Battuta.

[51]:

De Silva, ‘Sri Lanka in the Early Sixteenth Century’, 13.

[52]:

On the Māppiḷa-Portuguese wars, see Jorge M. Flores, Os Portugueses e o Mar de Ceilão. Trato, diplomacia e guerra, 1498–1543 (Lisbon: Cosmos, 1998).

[53]:

They included Arabs, Berbers, Persians and then increasingly South Asian Muslims such as Gujaratis and Tamil groups, and also Malays. R. A. L. H. Gunawardana, ‘Seaways to Sielediba: Changing patterns of Navigation in the Indian Ocean and their impact on precolonial Sri Lanka,’ in Sri Lanka and the Silk Road of the Sea, 32; Sirima Kiribamune, ‘Muslims and Trade of the Arabian Sea with Special Reference to Sri Lanka from the Birth of Islam to the Fifteenth century,’ ibid., 180; Dewaraja, ‘Muslim Merchants’; Hall, ‘Ports-of-Trade’, 133.

[54]:

On the ‘shadow empire’ see Sanjay Subrahmanyam, The Political Economy of Commerce: Southern India, 1500–1650 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). It could be that it only appears as a unit of analysis for us because it has produced sources in a written Western language that–however scarce and scattered–made it into European archives. The definition of the Portuguese Empire as a network, now commonplace, goes back to Luís Filipe Thomaz, De Ceuta a Timor, 2nd edn (Lisbon: Difel, 1994), 210.

[55]:

Serge Gruzinski, Les quatre parties du monde. Histoire d’une mondialisation (Paris: La Martinière, 2004).

[56]:

The most comprehensive study to date is Ângela Barreto Xavier, A Invenção de Goa. Poder Imperial e Conversões Culturais, Séculos XVI e XVII (Lisbon: Imprensa de Ciências Sociais, 2008).

[57]:

Zoltan Biedermann, ‘Colombo versus Cannanore: Contrasting Structures of Two Early Colonial Port Cities in South Asia,’ Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 53, 2 (2009), 413–59; Charles R. Boxer, Portuguese Society in the Tropics: The Municipal Councils of Goa, Macao, Bahia and Luanda (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1965).

[58]:

On the political, administrative and religious framework established in Sri Lanka after 1594, see Tikiri Abeyasinghe, Portuguese Rule in Ceylon 1594–1612 (Colombo: Lake House, 1966) and C. R. de Silva, The Portuguese in Ceylon 1617–1638 (Colombo: H.W. Cave, 1972).

[59]:

Walter D. Mignolo, ‘The Many Faces of Cosmo-P olis: Border Thinking and Critical Cosmopolitanism,’ Public Culture 12, 3 (2000), 721.

[60]:

Sri Lanka and the Silk Road of the Sea brings together some useful articles exploring such interactions. Walters, ‘Buddhist History’ is an important text for the earlier period that always places Lankan phenomena within a wider South Asian field. See also the essays of Tilman Frasch, ‘Buddha’s Tooth Relic: Contesting Rituals and the Early State in Sri Lanka’, in Ritual Dynamics and the Science of Ritual, ed. Axel Michaels, Vol. 3, State, Power and Violence, ed. Marko Kitts et al. (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2010), 647–64 and ‘1456: The Making of a Buddhist Ecumene’. Among the many examples of postwar scholarship, two may be mentioned here: Senake Bandaranayake, ‘Approaches to the External Factor in Sri Lanka’s Historical Formation,’ in Continuities and Transformations: Studies in Sri Lankan Archaeology and History (Colombo: Social Scientists’ Association, 2012), 91–120 (originally published in 1974), and Amaradasa Liyanagamage, State, Society and Religion in Premodern Sri Lanka (Colombo: Social Scientists’ Association, 2008).

[61]:

Previous to this the only major influx of foreign troops was when King Abhayanaga brought over an army from India in the third century ce.

[62]:

Jonathan Spencer, ed., Sri Lanka: History and the Roots of Conflict (London: Routledge, 1990). See Alan Strathern, ‘Theoretical Approaches to Sri Lankan History and the Early Portuguese Period,’ Modern Asian Studies 38 (2004), 189–226, on the opposition between ‘traditionalist’ and ‘historicist’ approaches.

[63]:

See the discussion of the debate between R. A. L. H Gunawardana and K. N. O Dharmadasa as discussed in Strathern’s Chapter 11 in this volume.

[64]:

See Michael Roberts, ‘Ethnicity after Said: Post-Orientalist Failures in Comprehending the Kandyan Period of Lankan History,’ Ethnic Studies Report 19 (2001), 69–98.

[65]:

Michael Roberts, Sinhala Consciousness in the Kandyan period, 1590s–1815 (Colombo: Vijitha Yapa, 2004); Strathern, ‘Treachery and Ethnicity’.

[66]:

For recent reflections on the political salience of history, see Nira Wickramasinghe, Producing the Present: History and Heritage in Post-War Patriotic Sri Lanka, ICES Research Paper 2 (Colombo: International Centre for Ethnic Studies, 2012), and Nirmal Ranjith Dewasiri, ‘History’ after the War: Historical Consciousness in the Collective Sinhala-Buddhist Psyche in Post-War Sri Lanka, ICES Research Paper 9 (Colombo: International Centre for Ethnic Studies, 2013).

[67]:

As just one example, we could take a recent book published on the Portuguese mission of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries by Gaston Perera, The Portuguese Missionary in 16th and 17th Century Ceylon. The Spiritual Conquest (Colombo: Vijitha Yapa, 2009). The tone adopted is akin to a document investigating a war crime. The Portuguese are presented as simply impelled by an ‘innate right to exterminate other nations’ (3); they have launched a psycho-spiritual attack on the cultural fabric of Lanka every bit as devastating to the vulnerable Buddhist nation as their malign political projections. See reviews by Biedermann in eJournal of Portuguese History 8, 1 (2010) and Strathern in The Journal of Asian Studies 70 (2011), 287–89.

[68]:

A few examples are: Richard F. Gombrich and Gananath Obeyesekere, Buddhism Transformed: Religious Change in Sri Lanka (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988); Gananath Obeyesekere, The Work of Culture: Symbolic Transformation in Psychoanalysis and Anthropology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990); Gananath Obeyesekere, The Apotheosis of Captain Cook: European Mythmaking in the Pacific (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992);

[69]:

This is most obvious in Gananath Obeyesekere, Imagining Karma. Ethical Transformation in Amerindian, Buddhist, and Greek Rebirth (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2002) and The Awakened Ones: Phenomenology of Visionary Experience (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012).