ABSTRACT
This is a prospectus for an environmentally attentive strand of Sri Lankan studies. It studies how outsiders as well as indigenous peoples narrated the island in different forms over long time, cartographic, textual and embodied. It then places colonial modes of natural knowledge within the ecology and intellectual culture of the island. It seeks, finally, to critique the boundary of the human and the non-human and to create more space for animal histories in the study of Sri Lanka. In all, it is an attempt to stretch the traditional definition of the ‘environment’ of Sri Lanka, away from the usual topics of the plantation complex and deforestation or of discourses of nature, a vital agenda at a time of environmental emergency.
