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Abstract
After three hundred years of militant, anti-colonial resistance, in 1803, the last independent monarchy in Sri Lanka waged its final successful campaign against the British. Though it would take another twelve years for the British to capture the Kandyan king, British failures in the battle of 1803 served as a turning point in England’s approach to colonialism in Sri Lanka. By mobilizing what Sujit Sivasundaram calls “counter-revolutionary” tactics in the Indian Ocean, the British not only spread its empire but also erased a long history of indigenous resistance. For a number of reasons, the histories of Sri Lankan and Kandyan anti-colonialism have received relatively little scholarly attention. The battle of 1803 opens a window into Lanka’s notions of itself as a globally-engaged kingdom. This essay investigates the history of the battle through the lens of one African soldier – a man named Joseph Fernando – who purportedly worked as the Kandyan king’s “chief executioner.” Through close reading of documents pertaining to the events of 1803, the essay contends that while Fernando himself is likely British propaganda, he nevertheless speaks to the island’s indigenous cosmopolitanism.
Acknowledgment
I wish to thank Isuri Anuradha Caldera and Chandula Arsakulasooriya for their research and translation assistance in Colombo. Additionally, the staff at the Colombo National Archives was invaluable. Finally, the archival travel for this trip was supported by a Presidential Summer Incentive Award at the University of North Georgia.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Sivasundaram, Waves Across the South, 2020, 235 (Sivasundaram Citation2020).
2 Space does not permit me to explore the convergence of Sivasundaram’s work in Waves and Christina Sharpe’s notion of the wake from In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Both authors explore how colonized and enslaved communities work from maritime margins against systems of oppression. I invoke this phrase with Sharpe’s work in mind. Also, see Sivasundaram (Citation2013) for a discussion of how the British attempted to isolate Sri Lanka by partitioning it from India.
3 See Obeyesekere for a focused analysis on how “master spy” and British administrator in Ceylon, John D’Oyly, orchestrated a campaign of misinformation aiming to turn Sri Lankans – especially Kandyans – against their own king (Obeyesekere Citation2017).
4 In this quote, Sivasundaram is discussing revolutionary activities in the Cape Town colony. But he offers numerous accounts of indigenous resistance that were at once local and internationally engaged, just like the communities of the Atlantic whose activities during the 18th–19th centuries gave the Age of Revolutions its name.
5 The significance of the designation “kaffir” in Sri Lanka is complex. On the one hand, according to De Silva Jayasuriya in “Identifying Africans in Asia: What’s in a Name?”, the term “kaffir,” though a racial slur in southern Africa, does not carry a negative connotation in Sri Lanka (Citation2006). She argues that Afro-Sri Lankan communities self-identify as kaffirs. On the other hand, as Jayawardene convincingly shows, Afro-Sri Lankans contend with significant social inequalities produced by their experiences of “racialized casteism.” She demonstrates how European colonialism reworked notions of identity in South Asia and produced systems of subjection that continue to impact Afro-Sri Lankans today (Citation2016).
6 Both Cordiner (Citation1807) and Greeving (republished in 1918) named the king’s African troops as the group responsible for the deaths of British soldiers.
7 Nearly all accounts of the 1803 conflict claim that Malay troops working for the British convinced the commanding officer to surrender and blame others for deserting to the Kandyan king.
8 The term “chief executioner” comes from an article published in 1848, text analyzed in depth at the end of the current essay. Geoffrey Powell and Shihan de Silva Jayasuriya, both prominent scholars of Sri Lankan history, have cited the example of Joseph Fernando in several studies.
9 For comprehensive discussions of the factors that distinguish the Indian Ocean and Atlantic Ocean diasporas, see Paul Zeleza (Citation2005) and Omar Ali (Citation2011).
10 Like Wickremeratne (Citation2012), I question the British use of the term massacre. As will be shown, the details of the events of June 1803 are difficult to confirm, and there is reason to question the accuracy of accounts of the killing of British troops. I alternate between Wickremeratne’s term – killings – and the most-commonly used term in British sources – massacre – because the latter reflects the colonial motive in retelling the story of this conflict.
11 This incident is typically called “the arecanut dispute.”
12 See Powell (Citation1973, 94–113) for a detailed description of the ill-suited British uniforms and weapons and Wickremesekera (2004) for equally informative descriptions of the mobility of the Kandyan levies and of the lightweight cannon invented by the Kandyans, called the kodituwakkuwa.
13 For nine years, the British administration on the island made a show of being tormented by Davie’s ongoing imprisonment but made little effort to rescue him, either by force or through negotiation.
14 The degree to which Kandyans saw the breaking of the truce as dishonorable is unclear, but their actions can hardly be considered unjustified. After all, each of the colonial forces purposely mislead Kandyans when negotiating contracts. The British were just the most recent to promise to return lands taken from the Kandyans by the Dutch only to refuse to follow through (or even to remove such clauses from the English versions of the contract). See De Silva, C. (1965), Vol I.
15 Wickremesekera notes that the Kandyans defeated large Portuguese armies three times and Dutch armies twice. Powell argues that the Sinhalese used the same tactics against all three European powers, and his description of the Dutch campaign of 1765 is surprisingly similar to that of the 1803 battle.
16 As Richard B. Allen asserts, there are considerable “difficulties [in] distinguishing ‘free’ from ‘unfree’ labour during an era that witnessed the demise of the legal British and French slave trades, the abolition of slavery in the British and French empires, and the emergence of a purported ‘new system of slavery’ that led to the migration of millions of indentured African, Asian, and other non-European labourers throughout the colonial plantation world and beyond during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries” (2012, 1–2). Scholars working at the convergence of studies of enslavement and the Age of Revolutions have expanded notions of abolition to consider the ways that historically marginalized people shaped abolitionist movements (and much earlier than historians originally thought). See: Allen (2009 and 2012); (Sivasundarum’s Waves, chapter 8); Røge, Citation2016; and Khan, 2021. Also, see edited collections (Allen, Citation2022; and Harms, Freamon and Blight, Citation2013) for studies of slavery, abolition and supposedly “free” labor across the Indian Ocean.
17 De Silva Jayasuriya has published extensively on Afro-Sri Lankan culture. A useful overview of her work can be found in African Identity in Asia (2009) and of the field in De Silva Jayasuriya and Pankhurst (De Silva and Pankhurst Citation2003).
18 These include: Milhanage Joannes, Mohamed Gani, Corporal Barnsley, Sergeant John Albert Theon, Hendrick Van Senden, Assistant Surgeon Greeving, and three servants to Muttusamy. Wickremeratne (Citation2012) reviews most of these accounts, undermining their credibility. Examining the accounts of English-speaking soldiers, he makes a compelling case that much of what the men claim to have witnessed in person was actually “hearsay.” He also questions the reliability of the narrative given the mental and physical state of the escaped soldiers, many of whom were badly injured or sick, exhausted, dehydrated and starving from traveling on foot. Finally, he rightly casts doubt on the validity of testimonies of Sinhalese or Malay soldiers rendered in English. Pointing out that it was likely they did not speak much English, Wickremeratne calls attention to the influence of the translator.
19 Obeyesekere (Citation2017) provides translations by Udaya Meddegama and Punchi Bandara Meegaskumbura of relevant sections of the poem. Sri Vikrama is said to have shouted at the British soldiers “‘This is what you get by invading our land,’” and the poem claims that the pain of defeat “removed from…the British forces…all desire for war” (358).
20 Although the gender of the author is unknown, I have elected to use male pronouns to identify the person who was most likely male, given gender roles in the British empire at the time.
21 Colombo National Archives. Despatches from the Governor to the Secretary of State for the Colonies, 1798–1948. “Despatch January 1804.” CNA will be used to refer to the Colombo National Archives in all other footnotes.
22 ibid, “Despatch 10 March 1808”; “Letter to Hobart 18 February 1806”.
23 De Silva Jayasuriya.
24 CNA, ibid, 18 February 1806.
25 Several avenues exist for determining the authenticity of the story about Joseph Fernando. My research shows that the National Archives in Colombo do not have records of British pension recipients in the 1840s (or before that). Nevertheless, the private letters of Governor Torrington (republished in De Silva, 1965) discuss the government’s pension payments to soldiers. He laments the financial burden of having to pay pensions to those who aren’t benefitting the colony, reaffirming the conclusion that the administration would not have looked favorably upon the claim that Fernando lived on a pension. It may also be possible to locate records of Fernando’s life in the records of St. Anthony’s Cathedral, the Catholic Church in Kandy, as the article names a priest who was, in fact, stationed there at the time of publication. A third line of inquiry would be to investigate census records for Ceylon, which the British began collecting in the 1820s. Each of these research avenues would undoubtedly provide more context for the experience of Africans and their descendants in Sri Lanka at the beginning of the British period.
26 This was hardly the first attempt by Kandyans to reinstate the independent monarchy. As James Tennant noted in 1850, “there ha[d] been on the average one such movement [to retake the throne] in every six years” since the British occupation of Kandy in 1815 (quoted in Gott Citation2011, 402).
27 Reprinted in De Silva, K.M. 1965, 99.
28 Forbes, quoted in Gott, 401.
29 De Silva, K.M. (De Silva Citation1965) presents one of the most thorough and informed views on the 1848 “Rebellion” in his introduction to the edited volume of letters between Viscount Torrington and Lord Earl Grey. Few sources detail the administration’s attempt to find the overall cause of the protests, including Elliott’s role, as well as this text.
30 De Silva, K.M. 82.
31 One must not elide the complexity of Sri Lankan or Indian Ocean culture(s) in search of success narratives, and this essay does not argue that ethnic conflict only existed because of European influence. The debate about the behavior of Sri Vikrama Rajasinha from 1805–1815 continues to the present day, with some parties arguing that the many textual references to the king’s actions across British and Sri Lankan sources testify to history’s critical judgement of him. On the other hand, some scholars aptly demonstrate that all of these texts were potentially corrupted by the British colonial agenda, which “demonised Vikrama as foreign, corrupt, alcoholic and sadistic” (Aldrich Citation2018, 49). Gananath Obeysekere challenges the demonization of Sri Vikrama in The Doomed King (2016), and Upali C. Wikremeratne explores in detail how purposefully deceptive British texts shaped the discourse around the last Sri Lankan monarchy in Hearsay and Versions (2012).
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Melissa Schindler
Melissa Schindler is Assistant Professor in the Department of English. Her research focuses on literatures and cultures of the African diaspora.