Ronit Ricci. Banishment and Belonging

Over the past years, Ronit Ricci has done sterling service in coordinating the location and digitization of numerous Southeast Asian manuscripts held in private collections on Sri Lanka—known variously and interchangeably as Lanka, Ceylon, or the Arabic Sarandib, itself derived from an older Indic form. With Banishment and Belonging: Exile and Diaspora in Sarandib, Lanka and Ceylon she has added a formidable study of Javanese and Malay language imaginings on and of an island that was a crossroads in the Indian Ocean. Certainly, there was long confusion among classical authors as to where to place Lanka, with Arab geographers linking its history both to the fall of Adam and to the vast archipelago to the east. When that archipelago fell largely under Dutch control by the eighteenth century, such links were restaged as the coasts of Lanka became a site of deposition for the VOC regime and its allies, particularly from the Javanese court of Mataram. With their defeat of the Dutch on Ceylon in 1796, the British would halt the importation of such exilic bodies, recruiting soldiers from the Malay Peninsula, though they gladly absorbed many previously in Dutch ranks, often Bugis or Madurese. Hereafter the peoples once known to the Sinhalese as Ja, like the Southeast Asian pan-ethnonym Jawa, were increasingly labeled as Malays, which was the identity that some descendants hold on to today as one of the smallest of the island’s minorities. Lacking the official representation they once had, and increasingly speaking other languages, they cling to their history, nicely evoked by Ricci.

Ancient history · Archaeology · Archipelago · Cartography · Ceylon · Diaspora · Ethnology · Fell · Genealogy · Geography · Linguistics · Malay · Peninsula · Sociology · Sri lanka · Asian Studies and History · Gender Studies · Global Maritime and Colonial Histories · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History