KALYANI RAMNATH AND TAMARA FERNANDO

Writing straightforward narratives of slavery in the Indian Ocean, compared to the Atlantic, has proven difficult. The neat transition from slavery to wage labor is complicated by stories of indenture and other forms of bondage and unfreedom which predated the arrival of European empires. How have these debates evolved in the context of one island situated between the Bay of Bengal and the western Indian Ocean?

In popular memory, Sri Lanka has no history of slavery. Nira Wickramasinghe's latest book, Slave in a Palanquin, challenges this using Dutch and British archival records to point to the lives of thousands of enslaved persons including men and women from across the Indonesian archipelago, local Sinhalese, Muslims, and Tamils. In the following conversation, conducted over email, Nira Wickramasinghe speaks to historians Kalyani Ramnath and Tamara Fernando on what fragments of individual life histories we might recover from within a hostile archive to reconstruct the histories of the enslaved.

Intellectual Trajectory

Kalyani and Tamara: Slave in a Palanquin speaks both to Indian Ocean slavery and the history of slavery more generally. With regard to the former, your writing pushes us beyond describing “enslaved people as numbers in a maritime trade,” which, we might argue, characterized early studies on the Indian Ocean. Meanwhile, you cite from Black Atlantic and Slavery scholarship—for instance, Saidiya Hartman’s work. Can you tell us about the conceptual stakes/payoff of using Hartman in the Indian Ocean world?

Nira: Reading Hartman was an inspiration to write an entire book of critical history using singular lives as a way of entering a world. I had experimented with stories of individuals in two of my previous books but in Slave in a Palanquin the turn to what Hartman calls ‘storied articulation of ideas’ is deliberate and runs through my book. Hartman’s brilliant use of form through her critical fabulation approach is unparalleled. My approach is different in so far as I do not attempt to create a fictional narrative. I leave the lives of my protagonists in their incompleteness. Hartman’s writings are also inspiring in the way they bring past and present together in dialogue, which is something I have always abided by, though never as explicitly as in this book. I see much more cross-conversations happening between Black feminist scholarship and fields like plantation studies that have earlier been regionally closeted. The new work of Mythri Jegathesan is an excellent illustration. As is often the case, social anthropologists are more adventurous than historians!

When you mentioned numbers, there is of course, excellent and innovative scholarship being done on Indian Ocean slavery that goes far beyond a concern for enslaved people as numbers in a maritime trade. Yet numbers are always invoked because of the ‘tyranny of the Atlantic’ to add legitimacy to the field and to prevent it from being cast as a minor occurrence of little global significance. The Indian Ocean world still feels humble vis a vis the Atlantic! Michael Hertzfeld in another context has written cogently about numbers and value, the politics of ‘mereness’, and asked who and what defines what matters. At present, the Atlantic is still the reference point. When I use Black Atlantic and slavery scholarship, I am entering into conversation with a scholarship that has not yet taken note of the parallels, the correspondences, and resonances between Atlantic enslavement and Indian Ocean forms of slavery. Hopefully soon.

Kalyani and Tamara: One of your previous publications was a definitive overview of modern Sri Lankan history (Sri Lanka in the Modern Age: A History (Oxford University Press, 2015)). How did slavery feature in this earlier work? What, if anything, might this say about subaltern actors and genres of history writing?

Nira: Touché! Slavery is mentioned only once in that book when I refer to an 1835 enumeration of the population that uses the categories of whites, free blacks, and slaves. And I must confess I did not explain in any way what these categories meant beyond signaling inclusion and exclusion under colonial rule. But my intention in Sri Lanka in the Modern Age was to move away from a state-centric approach to history and focus instead on the making of communities, and claim-making by different groups based on a sense of belonging that could be ethnic or political. I also gave attention to what Fred Cooper describes as the ‘multiple agents, actions, forces and processes’ of historical explanations. Although the enslaved were not in the book, I consciously refrained from over-emphasizing the role of great individuals as agents of history while giving room to groups that are not present in mainstream history books. The character of the book is an overview, a sort of reference book, which made experimentation with form more difficult.

RESEARCH AND WRITING PROCESS

Kalyani and Tamara: You write eloquently about “blackness” and “slavery” in the archival material you encountered: “Blackening stains seeped into travel writing, contemporary popular histories, and public culture, leading to an overall loss of the complexity and historicity of the categories “slave” and “black” and at the same time a loss of a compassionate memory of slavery…” What was it like to work in the archives in Colombo and Kandy, reading these narratives, knowing that they had been completely erased from public memory? How does this book complicate questions of ‘race’ and ‘ethnicity’ in South Asia?

Nira: It was both exhilarating and disorienting to discover material that no one has ever referred to or used in scholarly work. I did not immediately understand what was going on in public culture regarding the memory of colonial slavery. But then it gradually dawned on me that through the blackening of the slave experience in Sri Lanka in the public realm, slaves were made equivalent to Africans and the entire possibility of enslavement of Asians dismissed beyond the realm of thought because it was too uncomfortable to deal with. This is not to deny the existence of men and women from different parts of Africa who were enslaved and brought to work in Sri Lanka by the Portuguese, Dutch, and English. But what struck me was the erasure of the Asian slave.

For me, the question is not so much about race or ethnicity but about difference and how social difference is conceived. Who validates boundaries, hierarchies, and for what? In whose interest is it to emphasize for instance religious or ethnic belonging over common humanity? My book uses the figure of the enslaved to question notions of authenticity and purity and to disrupt the presumption of singular origins which I think is the root of all communal violence in society.

Kalyani and Tamara: As you researched and wrote the book, you also collaborated with historians Marina Carter and Alicia Schrikker. Historians are often viewed as toiling in the archives alone, but your collaborative work presents a refreshing new model, particularly as the book works with both VOC and British archives and is written both as a history of Ceylon / Lanka and as a history of an Indian Ocean colony. What is the promise of scholarly collaboration for projects like this?

Nira: Collaborations between scholars are wonderful when they are not enforced by funding agencies. At present in the humanities, we are constantly urged to be interdisciplinary and to work as a team following the science model. I resist this impulse! In the two cases, you cited it was something that came quite naturally since Marina Carter who is a brilliant historian of Mauritius was asking the same sort of questions as me about Sri Lanka. With Alicia Schrikker, a VOC-period historian, our time periods and language ability were complementary, and this allowed a trans-imperial collaboration about issues of slavery and abolition. In both cases, we were friends from university days. This creates bonds based on trust and respect, which made working together a real pleasure.

place and historiography

Kalyani and Tamara: The lives in this book straddle many geographies: from Southeast Asia and the Indonesian archipelago in particular, onwards to the Cape Colony. How do area studies break down (South Asia/Southeast Asia) and how do their respective historiographies speak to these stories set in Lanka (and vice versa)?

Nira: Although my institutional location is in an Area studies Institute and my own chair is in Modern South Asian studies, I find a purely area studies paradigm in research or teaching stifling and unproductive. My degrees are all in modern history and before I came to Leiden University, I worked for 19 years in a history department. I also read very broadly, in anthropology, sociology, cultural theory and philosophy. So, it’s not surprising that my approach to research has never been determined by the orthodoxies of area, geography, and temporality. It’s always a question, a problematique that has made me create the boundaries in space and time of my research, in other words ‘invent an archive’ – as Ben Zachariah has written – that helps me find answers. For this, you need to de-familiarize the epistemologies inherent in normative scales of study and endorse a play in scales – Jean Revel’s Jeu d’echelle. This may take you to Cape Colony, Indonesia or India  and even to the Caribbean, not so much to compare – I am not particularly fond of comparative approaches – but to think with and through.

Kalyani and Tamara: Throughout the book (and in your earlier work), there are fascinating comparisons, connections, and convergences between Indian and Lankan historiography. In thinking about resistance and colonial-era petitioning, for example, you reference Ranajit Guha and Bhavani Raman. Could you talk more about this process?

Nira: My dear friend Robert Ross who read a very early draft of my book told me upon reading it: ‘it’s lucky for you people wrote petitions!’ And he’s right, a very large part of the sources in this book are petitions written by ordinary people to the colonial state because the petition was then the essential mode of political address, and hearing them was central to the art of rule. I have always been fascinated by the petition since I read R. Guha’s work on rebellion in my student days, and in fact, I wrote an entire article in French (2006) on the petition as a double-edged mode of political action, ‘objet de controle, objet de dissidence’. I argued that the petition played a ubiquitous role both as an instrument of dissent for the people who wished to protest without destabilizing the existing rule and as an instrument of control for the British. The petition, then, reveals the presence of a dense and heterogeneous time in the colony where the times of the modern—of the quasi-citizen – and the pre-modern – of populations – were coeval. Bhavani Raman’s luminous work on the way Madras petitions served as a vehicle for the idea of law as equity, but a sense of equity that was layered by other meanings of justice is particularly useful. It directed me towards reading the petition as a performance of respectability and as a text containing multiple registers of language, form and conventions.

Kalyani and Tamara: Throughout the book, you refer to passing to other islands including Jamaica, Mauritius, Trinidad, and the Mascarene Islands. Is there a connection between slavery, indenture, and islands in the colonial imagination that you want to highlight? If this is a deliberate framing, could you say a little bit more about its stakes?

Nira: This is a question I have not really thought about much, so I guess it is not a deliberate framing. Other scholars have written about islands as sites of experimentation for seafaring imperial powers. I would err towards caution in creating an equivalence between islands in different parts of the world that have witnessed very different historical trajectories. On the other hand, shorelines and coastal areas are spaces that have braided indigenous, migrant, and colonial peoples and cultures more so than hinterlands and there is something in the multilingual bricolage of interconnected cultures that is quite unique to societies that are defined by the sea. 

reading / method

Kalyani and Tamara: You write: “It is in court cases and reports on court proceedings that these voices can be heard, albeit faintly. The layered nature of the colonial archive and the possibilities it offers in reading echoes and whispers and silences have been explored in a rich body of work that is an inspiration to force the archive and capture the precarity of Selestina’s life.” Legal records and law reports are often viewed with suspicion because they are seen to be mediated, making it impossible for historians to read / hear their actors speaking in their own voice. You show us how this mediation / translation is not a drawback, but a “fissure” or “silence” in the archive that you interrogate. How did you treat the challenge of mediation / translation?

Nira: How should one write about an individual such as Selestina without betraying her? How can one read a text while acknowledging both the constructed nature of a ‘free individual’ and the sense of human agency that is there, in every single person? When I read in the archive the various accounts of Selestina’s case to understand her story, what I looked at first, were the stakes and motivations in the construction, relation, and eventual outcome of the story. All participants – Selestina, her owner, the police official, the witnesses had different stakes according to which they interpreted and evaluated their situation and enacted it accordingly. Each one of them – even Selestina hurt and violated as she was – was able to weave a coherent narrative. To find it, one needs to make the effort of identifying and deciphering it, keeping in mind that social beings are multiple and inhabit shifting contexts.

Kalyani and Tamara: Slave in a Palanquin contains many meditations on the nature of the archive: a repository that you describe alternatively as “hostile”; one “of law and violence”; comprised of “traces” and “elisions”. Can you reflect a little bit on the limits and possibilities of historical methodology in light of these comments, in particular, when it comes to reading histories of subaltern or enslaved persons? What is a “decolonial reading of archival traces”?

Nira: Over the years, the decades even that I have been researching and writing, this question has been my central preoccupation and I feel now that despite the crisis of representation in the humanities, in spite of calls to a complete dissolution of the subject, even to a complete silencing, thick historical ethnographies are possible as long as they reveal the ambiguities and ambivalences in the social acts of subaltern persons. A sharp historian can look at multiple texts and read them in conversation, and in collision with each other. She can uncover the multiple layers of meanings in for instance, a claim for justice or equity. Texture and detail are the keys. A decolonial reading of archival traces would entail humbling previously accepted and validated truths about certain events; it would entail listening to non-normative voices and going further than identifying silences, it would mean un-silencing histories that are marginalized in the narration of the nation and its institutions. So decolonial reading is a step towards epistemic plurality.

Kalyani and Tamara: This is a book that is about silences. Silences that appear as what Michele-Rolf Trouillot famously described as silencing as an active verb: “one ‘silences’ a fact or an individual as a silencer silences a gun.” The conclusion posits that the late nineteenth and early twentieth-century consolidation of Tamil, Sinhalese, Burger, or Malay identity helped erase the slave from the collective consciousness. To what extent is this a story in which all parties are culpable: not only those who reaped the material/capital gains of enslaved labor but also those who created new identities with little room for ambiguity?

Nira: The history of enslavement signals the fallacy of identities as they are conceived in Sri Lanka by the majority as well as the minorities. I mention in my book this repressed fear of any hint of creole pasts that disturb the comforting certainty of being and belonging and queries the idea of unique roots. So, I’m drawn towards a glissantian embrace of identity-as-relation. But it’s not really about culpability or pointing fingers, but about self-reflection and acting upon situations that can be remedied. I find very useful Michael Rothberg’s notion of ‘implicated subjects’, these are subjects who inherit regimes of domination without originating or controlling such regimes. We are all ‘implicated subjects’ to some degree or another.

Kalyani and Tamara: What is the political economy of slavery? The Chapter on Chilaw suggests that motivation was entirely based on “exigencies” i.e. shortages in supply which needed to be plugged rather than other ideological factors. Are there drawbacks to this approach?

Nira: It’s interesting that you ask me this question because I always fear that my work lacks grounding in political economy – it has been critiqued on those lines! The ground reality was that in the early British period there was a constant need for labour in the public works, and a constant dearth that led to all kinds of strategies that were tested and tried, including a pioneer corps, enlisting prisoners and making use of the abolition procedures as a means of securing a regular supply from Jaffna. Moral and reformist ideas behind this scheme of freedom in exchange of labour are not visible in the correspondence I accessed. This scheme quantified freedom in terms of work hours and aptitude for labour, and accepted monetary value for being a free man. It completely naturalized the idea that enslaved human bodies were commodities. The emancipated slaves were listed with names and numbers, and their purchase value from the proprietor varied according to the caste they belonged to.

Kalyani and Tamara: You frame the narratives in Slave in a Palanquin as one about “resistance” against colonial servitude. “Resistance” here is not just escaping from the enslaver, also “…infanticide as protest, flight interrupted by murder, [and] appeals to colonial justice.” Could you talk a bit about why you chose to frame these narratives as “resistance”?

Nira: Resistance is no longer very much in favor among scholars and I understand the critique, if one is to take resistance as the other side of domination; I still find it useful as a frame to capture the way power operates in all forms of relationships and acts; so I take resistance with all its ambivalence and as made of variegated transformative processes, not as a single, intentional act. In my work it can be performative as in the case of the emancipated slave who wants his son to be circumcised and uses the courtroom and the petition as ways of staging his freedom; it can also be full of ambivalence when the emancipated slave appeals to both colonial justice and ‘custom’ since his dream is to be accepted as a fully-fledged member of the Moor community. So there’s accommodation and resistance between local people and Europeans. We need to understand people’s own concepts of equity and asymmetry because there is a web of articulations where dominated and dominating groups interact. The way I frame resistance is not as opposition, but as Sherry Ortner encouraged us to think as creative and transformative actions of social beings who have their own ideas about justice, right and wrong orders.

Kalyani and Tamara: One of the most fascinating narratives in the book is the eponymous Slave in a Palanquin, Cander Wayreven, who was punished for traveling in his master’s palanquin. You write about encountering the palanquin itself, as well as the archival records relating to the dispute. It often happened in battles around material culture — a palanquin, jewelry — the existing power structures were challenged by people at the bottom of the hierarchy. Is this emphasis on material culture a means of writing a history of caste in Lanka?

Nira: That’s a great question, yes, in general I feel a turn to material culture and spatial politics would be called for in a number of histories including caste. The chapter on Jaffna shows that by acting in a certain way – traveling in a palanquin or wearing gold jewelry in public at the feast at Nallur temple – people at the bottom of the hierarchy claimed for themselves honors that had until then been denied to them. I show how members of underprivileged groups, cognizant of the reluctance of the local authorities to go against Vellalar privilege, try to get direct redress from the governor in Colombo. It is really interesting that a  group of Nalavars try to obtain the right for their women to wear earrings by appealing to the Governors as tax paying subjects – because they paid the tax on jewels. So paradoxically being taxed even without representation in an oppressive colonial situation was a ritual of affirmation. It was a way for underprivileged groups to assert their individual freedom as subjects of the state through a direct relation with its representative outside the parameters of custom. I am yet to read anything recent on the Temple Entry crisis in the 1960s…

Kalyani and Tamara: This narrative complicates not only histories of slavery but also of labor. “The nineteenth-century reality of labor in Sri Lanka as uneven and irregular temporal sequencing of a variety of modes of labor organization,” you write, muddying notions of colonial class formation and the rise of working-class consciousness. Can you reflect a little bit about what it does to hold indenture, slavery, rajakariya [corvee labor], wage work, and caste-based service in the same frame?

Nira: In the last decade, there is globally a move to look at these various forms of labor surplus appropriation – especially slavery and indenture – in the same frame rather than as separate chapters, less so in Sri Lanka but we are getting there, with inter alia, the work of Matthias van Rossum on corvee labor that looks at the creative recasting of local forms of bondage into slavery and service to the VOC by the Sālāgamas. Overlapping regimes of labor extraction in the nineteenth century are fascinating areas where more work is surely needed using new tropes to understand the way laboring bodies were commodified, ritualized, and how they, in turn, reacted to these strategies. These were all forms of bonded labour that did not miraculously disappear with the Colebrooke-Cameron reforms.

on public history

Kalyani and Tamara: In the US and British academy, there has been a push towards incorporating and investigating histories of slavery more prominently. In Indian and Lankan historiography, much attention has historically been directed towards peasant resistance and plantation labor. Does the political climate of the day shape the intellectual trajectories of historians?

Nira: Yes, it does but only for historians who engage with the present, with what Veena Das describes as the ‘multiple duration folded in the now’. In my case, the political climate has certainly induced a sense of urgency to look at specific issues; it has sometimes invited me to write differently for a broader readership or to devote more time to express something that I felt needed to be said. There have been critical continuities, in my work, the theme of understanding difference, the way political claims are made, why they are made along particular lines at particular moments? You could say that all my work goes back to these building blocks.

Kalyani and Tamara: In the end, the book is quite concerned with public history and collective memory: it forces us to ask why Sri Lankans do not talk about slavery. Would you like to see the insights from the book be presented and circulated in other forms? What is your vision for what this broader public engagement might look like?

Nira: I hope it forces Sri Lankans to shed some of their certitudes and begin to ask who validates the type of knowledge that is made public and for what purpose. The issue I am flagging in Slave in a Palanquin is not really why Sri Lankans do not talk about slavery. The slave is a prism, an aperture. I would like this book to open up a conversation on why people hold on to certain histories based on authenticity and purity and feel threatened or challenged by the possibility of things being messy. As social beings, we should truly embrace messiness.

In the Netherlands, my work has had quite a lot of traction. I co-wrote a chapter (in Dutch) for a volume on Amsterdam’s involvement in slavery, commissioned by the municipality that describes the Dutch involvement in the 17th-18th centuries in procuring slaves from South Asia for Batavia, and the Cape. The book is triggering a lot of reactions. Asian slavery has been made visible to a host of people who had no idea about it. But I always stress that there is more to colonialism and one should not equate slavery and colonialism. There will be two exhibitions on slavery and colonialism at the Rijksmuseum and the Tropenmuseum where my input is regularly sought out and where Sri Lanka will figure alongside the other VOC territories. So, seamlessly, things are happening!

- Interviewed over email by Tamara Fernando and Kalyani Ramnath
March 2021

Nira Wickramasinghe is Chair Professor of Modern South Asian Studies at Leiden University. Her books include Metallic Modern: Everyday Machines in Colonial Sri Lanka (2014) and Sri Lanka in the Modern Age: A History (second edition, 2015).

Kalyani Ramnath is a lawyer and historian, working on a history of law, migration, citizenship, and decolonization in South and Southeast Asia drawing on research in India, Sri Lanka, Myanmar, and Singapore. She received her PhD in History from Princeton University and holds law degrees from the Yale Law School and the National Law School of India University. At present, she is a Prize Fellow in Economics, History, and Politics at the Center for History and Economics at Harvard University.

Tamara Fernando is a historian working on the nineteenth and twentieth-century environmental history of the Indian Ocean, framed through the story of natural pearling in the Persian Gulf, Ceylon (Sri Lanka), and Burma (Myanmar). Her research is forthcoming in Past & Present. She is currently completing her Ph.D. in History at Cambridge University. From October 2021 she will be a Past & Present Fellow at the Institute of Historical Research in London.

*Editorial assistance by Tara Giangrande