ABSTRACT
Ceylon, like Zanzibar, has a paradisal reputation linked to its strategic trading position in the Indian Ocean, as well as its concentration of precious stones and spices. If Zanzibar was the paradise of cloves and ivory, Ceylon is the paradise of rubies and cinnamon, the “Pearl upon the Brow of India,” the “Jewel Box of the Indian Ocean.” However, Ceylon is also singular in possessing a mythical site of origins, the mountain of Sri Pada, venerated by four major religions. The sixth-century Buddhist chronicle, the Mahavamsa, describes how Buddha landed on the mountain and found it inhabited by yakkas, or demons, as the aboriginals were described. He gave a mighty stamp upon the peak to scatter the yakkas, leaving behind the sacred imprint of his foot. For Muslims, this shallow impression belongs to Adam, the first man and prophet, who landed on one foot on the holy peak when he was cast out from Eden and granted refuge in the “paradise of Adam.” For Hindus, whose epic Ramayana narrates the flight of Rama to Sri Lanka, the footprint is that of the god Shiva. For early Portuguese Christians, the footprint was that of Adam or of St. Thomas, the first missionary to the subcontinent, and the mountain, Pico de Adam, was the gateway to Eden. In medieval accounts, Ceylon is imagined both as a religious site of origins
and as a land of material riches whose wealth is a sign of its sacred nature. Mandeville’s Travels conflates Ceylon with Taprobane, the Greco-Roman “Garden of Delights.”2 Borrowing Herodotus’s myth of the ants of Indus and situating the island between Prester John’s kingdom and the Earthly Paradise, Mandeville imagines Ceylon as a country of “good Christian men” and a treasure-land where giant ants harvest gold for humans.3 This fantasy of work-
free production in which a lower species labors for higher man reflects the conflation of the spiritual and the material which is a unique characteristic of the topos of Ceylon, distinguishing it from the Manichean emphasis surrounding Zanzibar, fair land/black coast, or from the crass materialism of El Dorado, city of gold. In Pali, the language of Buddhist ritual, the island was known as “Sinha-
lam,” or “place of jewels.”4 Early Chinese travelers praised the beauty of “Paoutchow,” the isle of gems, and attributed the sacred footmark to the first created man, “Pawn-koo,” claiming that the gemstones on the holy mountain were his crystallized tears. The fifth-century Chinese monk’s Fa-Hien’s Record of Buddhist Kingdoms described the arrival of Buddha in Ceylon as intercepting a prodigious trade in gemstones between Arab merchants and the island’s aborigines, sacralizing the “seven precious substances” so that they were no longer traded by “wicked nagas,” but used to create religious shrines. Medieval Arab sailors called the island “Tenerisim,” the isle of delight, and geographers such as Al-Mas’udi gave marvelous accounts of “Serendib’s” riches, inspiring the tale of Sinbad’s sixth voyage, in which Sinbad is shipwrecked and amazed by the goods and precious stones flung across the island’s shores. After great trials of thirst and starvation, Sinbad makes a raft, loads it with “rubies, emeralds, ambergris, rock-crystal, and rich stuffs,” and sails to rescue through a dark cave into a hidden kingdom of “blacks.”5 He is entertained by the king of Serendib, and makes a pilgrimage to the “place where Adam was confined after his banishment from Paradise,” before departing with his riches.6 As such, his fantastic journey into a hidden kingdom reflects the limits of Arab knowledge of the island and desire for its interior. Applying Peter Hulme’s argument that colonial discourse differs according
to temporality and geography, a central distinction can be made between colonial representations of Ceylon and America.7 Instead of erecting Edenic edifices of a “New” World, representations of the long-familiar Ceylon focus on acquisition and distribution of its known resources and access to its unknown interior: “The colonial form is based primarily on the control of trade, whether or not accompanied by a colonial administration.”8 Ceylon’s history was characterized by waves of mercantilism and partial colonization. Arab merchants were the first to colonize the coasts, setting up fortified trading posts in order to monopolize the spice and gem trade, as they had in East Africa. However, their influence remained primarily maritime, never extending to the interior, where the Sinhalese kingdom of Kandy lay concealed behind a dense belt of tropical jungle. The only entry was through mountain passes defended by thorn gates and sentries, through which only one man could pass at a time. In vain, the Arabs, Portuguese, and Dutch sent emissaries into the kingdom, but like their Spanish counterparts on quest for El Dorado, would-be conquistadors in search of “Conde Uva” perished of fever or wandered lost in the jungle. The Portuguese landed on the island in 1505 and wrested control of Galle
in 1587, erecting forts along the coast in the attempt to secure mercantile and
military dominance of Indian Ocean. The Lusophone colonial library proliferates with histories of “Ceilão.” João Ribeiro’s and Father Fernão de Queiroz’s monumental, encyclopedic works, The Historic Tragedy of the Island of Ceilão (1685), and The Temporal and Spiritual Conquest of Ceilão (1686) served as sourcebooks and literary models for subsequent colonial writers. Written retrospectively, they expressed profound nostalgia for the relinquished colony: de Queiroz mourns the loss of “the land of Eden,” attributing the Dutch conquest as “the arm of God… raised against the Portuguese” for their crimes against the Tamils.9 In 1640, the Dutch, empowered by the growing strength of the Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie, seized the Fort of St. Cruz at Galle and erected their own ramparts.10 However, like the Portuguese and the Arabs before them, they were unable to conquer the internal Kandyan kingdom and were forced to sign a treaty with the king of Kandy. Ceylon’s heart remained occult, a space which travelers longed to penetrate, like Sinbad, in hopes of accessing unimaginable riches and establishing dominion. The paradisal trope of Taprobane mapped this tabulae Asiae into the transnational imaginary of gold-lands. Europeans did not invent paradise myths of Ceylon on the eve of colonization, but rather, colonial desire was stimulated by fantasies produced by previous empires and mercantile interests. From the sixteenth century onwards, Anglophone representations of Ceylon as both a spiritual and a material paradise spurred the development of British colonial desire and the British East India Company.
