A Short History of Ceylon

The flight from Mumbai to Colombo is two and a half hours. Not long enough to sleep properly, too short to watch a film. I had a window seat, a coffee, and a gap in my knowledge that had been nagging at me since I booked the trip: I knew almost nothing about Sri Lanka’s history. So I read.

What follows is the rough outline of what I learned at 35,000 feet, checked for accuracy once I was back on the ground.

The ancient kingdoms

The island has been continuously settled for more than two millennia. The earliest Sinhalese kingdom, Anuradhapura, dominated the northern plains from around the 3rd century BCE to the 10th century CE, and the ruins of its temples and reservoirs are still among the most impressive archaeological sites in Asia. After a period of conflict and shifting power, a second great kingdom centred on Polonnaruwa rose in the 11th century. By the 13th century that too had declined, and the centre of power gradually moved south and inland.

Buddhism arrived from India in the 3rd century BCE, according to tradition brought by Mahinda, a son of the Mauryan emperor Ashoka. It has been the dominant religion of the Sinhalese majority ever since. The earliest Buddhist texts in Sri Lanka, known as the Pali Canon, date to around 29 BCE. The island became an important centre of Buddhist scholarship and pilgrimage, a role it still holds.

The Portuguese, 1505 to 1658

The first Europeans arrived almost by accident. Lourenço de Almeida, a Portuguese explorer, reached the island in 1505 and found it divided into several competing kingdoms. The Portuguese were primarily interested in trade, and in particular in cinnamon, which grew here and almost nowhere else. They built a fort at Colombo in 1517 and gradually extended their control over the coastal areas, converting significant numbers of the coastal population to Catholicism. The interior, and the highland kingdom of Kandy in particular, they never managed to subdue.

The Dutch, 1658 to 1796

The Kandyan king, looking for allies against the Portuguese, invited the Dutch East India Company in. This proved to be a transaction of limited wisdom. The Dutch defeated the Portuguese and took Colombo in 1656, and by 1660 controlled the entire coast except Kandy. They proved a harder colonial master than the Portuguese: taxes were heavier, and they persecuted the Catholic population left behind by their predecessors, though they left Buddhists, Hindus and Muslims alone. The Dutch left a lasting cultural mark: a mixed Dutch-Sri Lankan community, known as Burghers, whose descendants are still part of Sri Lankan society.

The British, 1796 to 1948

The British arrived for reasons that had little to do with Ceylon directly. During the French Revolutionary Wars, France took control of the Netherlands, and the British, concerned about a French-controlled island on the sea route to India, moved in and took the Dutch coastal territories in 1796 with barely any resistance. In 1802, the Treaty of Amiens formally made Ceylon a British Crown Colony.

Kandy, which had survived Portuguese and Dutch rule, fell in 1815. An internal power struggle between the Kandyan king and his own chiefs gave the British the opening they needed. The Kandyan Convention, signed that year, ended over two thousand years of Sinhalese monarchy. The whole island was now under a single European administration for the first time.

The economic transformation was considerable. Coffee was the first plantation crop, spreading across the hill country from the 1830s. In the 1870s a leaf disease destroyed virtually the entire coffee crop in a few years, and the planters switched to tea. That shift turned out rather well for everyone involved in selling it. British planters brought large numbers of Tamil workers from southern India to work the estates, a migration that created a distinct Tamil community in the highlands whose status and citizenship rights would become one of the most contested questions in Sri Lanka’s post-independence history.

Independence and after

Ceylon became independent on 4 February 1948, a transition that was, by the standards of decolonisation elsewhere, relatively orderly. It became a republic in 1972 and changed its name to Sri Lanka. The decades that followed were marked by ethnic tension between the Sinhalese majority and the Tamil minority, which by 1983 had escalated into a civil war between the government and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. That war lasted 26 years and ended in 2009 with a government military victory. The scars, economic and human, are still present.

Two and a half hours is not long enough to do justice to three thousand years, but it was enough to land in Colombo with some sense of what I was looking at. The Dutch Hospital precinct, the Independence Memorial Hall, the fort district, the Tamil tea workers in the hill country: none of it needed explaining from scratch after that flight.

It helps to do the reading before you arrive. Or at least on the way.

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