ABSTRACT
Sri Lanka is a land of many migrations, constituted by people from many diasporas – Indian, Arab, Chinese, European. Strategically situated at the intersection of major Asian trade routes, east and west, before the age of the jet engine and the arrival of the modern nation-state in the region, its ports provided sanctuary to travellers and trading communities plying back and forth from China to the subcontinent to Europe and the Middle East for centuries. From the early 1500s the island was colonized by competing European empires, starting with the Portuguese, then the Dutch, and finally the British, for about 150 years apiece, until independence in 1948. The travellers, visitors and colonizers were to leave behind an island of hybrid histories and ambivalent legacies. Sri Lanka, then Ceylon, was romanticized in the anthropological imagination and literature that dwelt extensively on the diversity of its inhabitants and their co-existence – until the pogrom of July 1983, which sharply divided the island’s two dominant communities. Since then the migrant routes of the Sinhalas and Tamils have been all but forgotten amidst a spiralling armed conflict, post-colonial nation-state building, and proliferating nationalist inventions of ‘pure’ ethnic identity and tradition.
