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Tales of the Land: British Geography and Kandyan Resistance in Sri Lanka, c. 1803–1850

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 January 2007

SUJIT SIVASUNDARAM
SUJIT SIVASUNDARAM
Affiliation:
Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge
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Abstract

British expansion in Sri Lanka was halted by the mountains in the centre of the island. The kings of Kandy guarded knowledge about topography and this led in part to the British army's defeat of 1803. Within the Kandyan kingdom, boundary books and verses provide evidence of a vibrant tradition of oral knowledge about the land, linked with piety and history. When the British took control of the interior in 1815 Governor Barnes urged the necessity of a road to Kandy in order to open up the hills. Surveys were vital to this road and surveying was posited as a rational and heroic science. However, the British continued to rely on local knowledge in planning public works; they surveyed ruined tanks in the north-central provinces. British expansion therefore witnessed both competition and cooperation between different orders of knowledge. There were multiple encounters between knowledge, empire and the land.

Type
Research Article
Information
Modern Asian Studies , Volume 41 , Issue 5 , September 2007 , pp. 925 - 965
Copyright
2007 Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

This paper arises from a larger project on the environmental history of British colonisation in Sri Lanka. An earlier version was presented to the Imperial History Research Seminar at the Institute of Historical Research, London and the Commonwealth and Overseas Seminar, Cambridge. I thank participants for their comments. In particular I wish to thank David Arnold, Chris Bayly, Mike Lewis and Alan Strathern for their advice.