i Sri Lanka at the Crossroads of History ii iii Sri Lanka at the Crossroads of History Edited by Zolta n Biedermann and Alan Strathern i v First published in 2017 by UCL Press University College London Gower Street London WC1E 6BT Available to download free: www.ucl.ac.uk/ ucl- press Text © Contributors, 2017 Images © Contributors and copyright holders named in the captions, 2017 A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from The British Library. This book is published under a Creative Common 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0). This license allows you to share, copy, distribute and transmit the work; to adapt the work and to make commercial use of the work providing attribution is made to the authors (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). Attribution should include the following information: Zoltán Biedermann and Alan Strathern (eds.), Sri Lanka at the Crossroads of History , London, UCL Press, 2017. https://doi.org/ 10.14324/111.9781911307822 Further details about CC BY licenses are available at http://creativecommons.org/ licenses/ ISBN: 978- 1- 911307- 83- 9 (Hbk.) ISBN: 978- 1- 911307- 84- 6 (Pbk.) ISBN: 978- 1- 911307- 82- 2 (PDF) ISBN: 978- 1- 911307- 81- 5 (epub) ISBN: 978- 1- 911307- 80- 8 (mobi) ISBN: 978- 1- 911307- 78- 5 (html) DOI: https://doi.org/10.14324/111.9781911307822 v v Acknowledgements The contents of this volume have emerged from a series of meetings, workshops and seminar panels organized by the American Institute of Sri Lankan Studies (AISLS) in Colombo, Madison, Boston and London between 2009 and 2012, and a large conference held at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH) in Cambridge in June 2011, organized by Sujit Sivasundaram and Alan Strathern with the support of the Trevelyan Fund, AISLS and CRASSH. Other organizations that supported meetings and encounters with the wider public include the London School of Economics, the Portuguese Centre for Global History (CHAM/NOVA) in Lisbon, the International Centre for Ethnic Studies (ICES) in Colombo and the Sri Lanka Foundation Institute. The meetings and workshops included papers from the modern period, but it has been decided to confine this volume to contributions on the period before 1850. We would like to reserve our biggest thanks for John Rogers, US Director of AISLS. Without his determination to nurture a new generation of scholars of Lankan history, this book simply would not exist. John has acted as a tremen- dously generous guide and advisor for many younger scholars coming through the ranks. Animating all the initiatives organized through AISLS was an insist- ence that the island’s past be brought into the main currents of the new global history and that foreign and locally based scholarship should be brought into a productive dialogue. Charles Hallisey was president of AISLS for much of this period and has been an important interlocutor, especially since too many of his thoughts resonating throughout this volume are not yet in print. Jonathan Spencer and Dennis McGilvray have given much valued support during their presidential terms at AISLS. Other established scholars whose encouragement has been important include Anne Blackburn, Chandra Richard de Silva and Nira Wickramasinghe. From a distance, Harshana Rambukwella, Jonathan Walters, John Clifford Holt, Jorge Flores, Nirmal Dewasiri, Ronit Ricci and Sandagomi Coperahewa have also all, in one way or another, accompanied the growth of this volume. Some Sri Lanka scholars, including Andrew Jarvis, Anna Winterbottom, Cenan Pirani and Nadeera Senerivatne, while not contributing to this volume, are currently completing projects that have fed into this book in various ways. The volume has benefited greatly from the advice and encouragement of two external readers, as well as the professionalism and support of Lara Speicher and Chris Penfold at UCL Press, and of Sarah Rendell and Victoria Chow on the production AcknowlEdgEmEntS vi v i team. We would also like to register our gratitude to the Jeffrey Fund at Brasenose College, for providing financial support for the use of images, to Justin Henry, for checking our use of diacritics throughout the volume, and to Deborah Philip for her hard work in compiling the bibliographies. Alan Strathern would like to thank Samanthi Dissanayake, Aril Strathern and Leela Strathern for their love and forbearance, and Nilmini Dissanayake for her constant help with Sinhala and things Sri Lankan. Zoltán Biedermann would like to thank Eva Nieto McAvoy and Hannah Biedermann Nieto for the many days and weeks of family life sacrificed to the study of a distant island – albeit one populated by elephants, which made the endeavour more appealing. The editors both wish to remember Ira Unamboowe, Executive Director of the Colombo centre of AISLS from 2004 until her untimely death in 2015. Her warmth, intelligence, generosity and fine sense of humour helped countless scholars from around the world through challenging times in Sri Lanka, and shall remain with us for many more years to come. v i i vii Contents List of figures ix Notes on contributors xi Introduction: Querying the cosmopolitan in Sri Lankan and Indian Ocean history 1 Alan Strathern and Zoltán Biedermann 1 Archaeology and cosmopolitanism in early historic and medieval Sri Lanka 19 Robin Coningham, Mark Manuel, Christopher Davis and Prishanta Gunawardhana 2 ‘Implicit cosmopolitanism’ and the commercial role of ancient Lanka 44 Rebecca R. Darley 3 A P ā li cosmopolis? Sri Lanka and the Therav ā da Buddhist ecumene, c. 500– 1500 66 Tilman Frasch 4 Beautifully moral: cosmopolitan issues in medieval P ā li literary theory 77 Alastair Gornall and Justin Henry 5 Sinhala sand ēś a poetry in a cosmopolitan context 94 Stephen C. Berkwitz 6 The local and the global: the multiple visual worlds of ivory carvers in early modern Sri Lanka 113 Sujatha Arundathi Meegama 7 Cosmopolitan converts: the politics of Lankan exile in the Portuguese Empire 141 Zoltán Biedermann 8 Between the Portuguese and the N ā yakas: the many faces of the Kandyan Kingdom, 1591–1765 161 Gananath Obeyesekere contEntS viii v i i i 9 Through the lens of slavery: Dutch Sri Lanka in the eighteenth century 178 Alicia Schrikker and Kate J. Ekama 10 Cosmopolitanism and indigeneity in four violent years: the fall of the kingdom of Kandy and the Great Rebellion revisited 194 Sujit Sivasundaram 11 The digestion of the foreign in Lankan history, c. 500– 1818 216 Alan Strathern Notes 239 Bibliography 301 Index 332 i x ix List of figures Fig. 0.1 A Sri Lankan Catholic dressed up as a Roman legionnaire at a Passion Play, Negombo, mid-1980s, photograph by Dominic Sansoni. xiv Fig. 1.1 Tamil inscription at the Atadage, Sacred Quadrangle, Polonnaruva, authors’ photograph. 25 Fig. 1.2 Urinal stone at one of the Western Monasteries, Anur ā dhapura, authors’ photograph. 33 Fig. 1.3 St ū pas at Delft, authors’ photograph. 34 Fig. 1.4 St ū pas at Kantarodai, authors’ photograph. 35 Fig. 1.5 Rock carved images at Buduruwagala, Monaragala District, authors’ photograph. 36 Fig. 1.6 Terracotta figurine fragments from the site of Nikawewa (D339), including a depiction of a human face (right) and an anthropomorphic phallus (left), authors’ photograph. 38 Fig. 1.7 Appliqué tri śū la on a pottery rim sherd from site Kalahagala (S360) in the hinterland of Polonnaruva, found during the 2016 field season of the Polonnaruva Archaeological and Anthropological Research Project, authors’ photograph. 41 Fig. 1.8 Head from a Buddha image rededicated as an image of Ayanayake, Anur ā dhapura hinterland, authors’ photograph. 42 Fig. 2.1 Gold solidus of Theodosius II, minted in Constantinople, Barber Institute of Fine Arts, Birmingham, LR489 (Whitting No. G522). 53 Fig. 2.2 Gold solidus of Theoderic I of Italy, struck in the name of Anastasius, probably in Italy, Barber Institute of Fine Arts, Birmingham, VV07 (Whitting No. G520). 53 Fig. 2.3 Gold solidus of Maurice Tiberius, struck in Constantinople, Barber Institute of Fine Arts, Birmingham, B1767 (Whitting No. 518). 54 Fig. 2.4 Gold solidus of Valentinian III, struck in Ravenna, Barber Institute of Fine Arts, Birmingham, LR540 (Whitting No. G521). 55 Fig. 2.5 Gold solidus of Theodosius II, struck in Thessaloniki, Barber Institute of Fine Arts, Birmingham, LR482 (Whitting No. G519). 56 Fig. 6.1 ‘R ā m ā ya ṇ a casket’, front panel, Sri Lanka, mid-sixteenth century, KHM-Museumsverband, Wien, Inventory no. KK 4743. 117 liSt of figurES x x Fig. 6.2 ‘Robinson casket’, Sri Lanka, probably K ōṭṭ e, mid- sixteenth century, © Victoria and Albert Museum, London, Inventory no. IS.41– 1980. 117 Fig. 6.3 ‘Coronation casket’, K ōṭṭ e, c.1541, Schatzkammer der Residenz, Munich, Inventory no. 1241. 118 Fig. 6.4 Casket, front panel, Sri Lanka, mid- to late sixteenth century, photograph © Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Accession no. 1993.29. 119 Fig. 6.5 Basement moulding, Bärän ḍ i K ō vil, S ī t ā vaka, mid- sixteenth century, author’s photograph. 119 Fig. 6.6 ‘Peradeniya casket’, back panel, Sri Lanka, mid-sixteenth century, The Senarat Paranavitana Teaching and Research Museum, Department of Archaeology, University of Peradeniya, author’s photograph. 121 Fig. 6.7 Casket, lateral panel (left), K ōṭṭ e, 1540s, Schatzkammer der Residenz, Munich, Inventory no. 1242. 122 Fig. 6.8 Casket, lateral panel (left), Sri Lanka, mid- to late sixteenth century, photograph © Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Accession no. 1993.29. 123 Fig. 6.9 Ga ḍ al ā de ṇ iya R ā jamah ā Vih ā raya, 1344 ce, author’s photograph. 124 Fig. 6.10 Ś iva Dev ā le No. 1, Polonnaruva, eleventh or twelfth century, author’s photograph. 124 Fig. 6.11 ‘Robinson casket’, back panel, Sri Lanka, probably K ōṭṭ e, mid-sixteenth century, © Victoria and Albert Museum, London, Inventory no. IS.41–1980. 126 Fig. 6.12 Tree of Jesse on the ‘Robinson casket’, lateral panel (right), Sri Lanka, probably K ōṭṭ e, mid- sixteenth century, © Victoria and Albert Museum, London, Inventory no. IS.41–1980. 127 Fig. 6.13 Tree of Jesse from the Book of Hours of Thielmann Kerver, Paris, c. 1507, Collection Paulus Swaen Auctions. 128 Fig. 6.14 Kalpavrksha / Kalpalata (auspicious vines) on the ‘Robinson casket’, lateral panel (left), Sri Lanka, probably K ōṭṭ e, mid- sixteenth century, © Victoria and Albert Museum, London, Inventory no. IS.41–1980. 129 Fig. 6.15 Casket, lid, Sri Lanka, mid- to late sixteenth century, photograph © Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Accession no. 1993.29. 134 Fig. 6.16 Casket, back panel, Sri Lanka, mid- to late sixteenth century, photograph © Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Accession no. 1993.29. 135 Fig. 6.17 ‘Coronation casket’, lid, K ōṭṭ e, c. 1541, Schatzkammer der Residenz, Munich, Inventory no. 1241. 135 Fig. 6.18 Galapatha Rajamaha Vih ā ra, Bentota, fourteenth or fifteenth century, author’s photograph. 136 Fig. 7.1 Royal escutcheon of Prince Dom João of Kandy, Museu Arqueológico do Carmo, Lisbon, Inventory no. ESC221, author’s photograph. 151 x i xi Notes on contributors Stephen C. Berkwitz is Professor and Department Head of Religious Studies at Missouri State University. He is the author of Buddhist Poetry and Colonialism: Alagiyavanna and the Portuguese in Sri Lanka (Oxford University Press, 2013) and other publications on Buddhist literature and culture in Sri Lanka. His current research interests include notions of Buddhist kingship and medieval writings on the B ō dhi tree. Zoltán Biedermann is Head of Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Studies at University College London. He is the author of The Portuguese in Sri Lanka and South India (Harrassowitz, 2014), Soqotra: Geschichte einer christlichen Insel (Harrassowitz, 2007), the Historical Atlas of the Persian Gulf (Brepols, 2007), and numerous articles and book chapters on the history of European expansion and knowledge exchange in the Indian Ocean region. He is currently finishing a monograph on the Portuguese involvement in Sri Lanka before 1600. Robin Coningham holds the 2014 UNESCO Chair in Archaeological Ethics and Practice in Cultural Heritage at Durham University, UK. Conducting fieldwork across South and Central Asia in Bangladesh, Nepal, Iran and Pakistan, his inves- tigations in Sri Lanka at Trench ASW2 in Anur ā dhapura have refined early historic chronologies and understandings of the region’s second urbanization, the genesis of Indian Ocean trade and the archaeology of early Buddhism. His recent fieldwork in Sri Lanka was as co-Director of the Arts and Humanities Research Council (UK)- funded Anur ā dhapura Project. He also directs the Polonnaruva Archaeological and Anthropological Research Project with Professor Prishanta Gunawardhana. Rebecca R. Darley is Lecturer in Medieval History at Birkbeck, University of London. She completed her PhD on ‘Indo-Byzantine Exchange, 4th–7th Centuries: A Global History’ at the University of Birmingham, UK, in 2014 and is currently converting this into a monograph on the role of long-distance trade in the western Indian Ocean in Late Antiquity. She has published articles and book chapters on the discovery and use of Roman and Byzantine coins in South India and the role of money in constructing social and political identity in the early Middle Ages. Christopher Davis is a UNESCO Chair Research Associate in the Department of Archaeology, Durham University, UK. He completed his Arts and Humanities Council (UK)-sponsored PhD at Durham, investigating the economic and social notES on contriButorS xii x i i roles of Buddhist monastic institutions in the hinterland of Anur ā dhapura through an analysis of archaeological, epigraphic and ethnographic evidence. He has par- ticipated in archaeological projects in Nepal, Bangladesh, Iran and Cambodia and was a member of the Anur ā dhapura (Sri Lanka) Project as well as the current Polonnaruva Archaeological and Anthropological Research Project. Kate J. Ekama is a Doctoral Researcher in History at Leiden University within the NWO-funded project ‘Challenging Monopolies, Building Global Empires in the Early Modern Period’. She researches slavery under the Dutch East India Company in the Indian Ocean World, focusing on Sri Lanka and the Cape. Her MA thesis was entitled ‘Slavery in Dutch Colombo: A Social History’ (Leiden University, 2012) and she has published on slave runaways from the VOC Cape. She is currently examin- ing manumission of slaves and related litigation in eighteenth-century Colombo. Tilman Frasch is Reader in Asian History at Manchester Metropolitan University. Specializing in Myanmar history and Therav ā da Buddhist Studies, he has published several articles on early Sri Lankan history, the Buddhist chronicles and the Therav ā da Buddhist ecumene during the first two millennia of the Buddhist calendar. Alastair Gornall gained his PhD in South Asian Studies from the University of Cambridge in 2012. He is currently an Assistant Professor in the Humanities at the Singapore University of Technology and Design and a Research Associate at SOAS, University of London. His research focuses on the intellectual and cultural history of Buddhism in premodern and modern South and Southeast Asia. He is in the final stages of writing a book on the social history of P ā li literature in late medieval Sri Lanka. Prishanta Gunawardhana is the Director-General of the Central Cultural Fund, Ministry of Education, Government of Sri Lanka, and is Professor of Archaeology at the University of Kelaniya, as well as being a board member of the Sri Lanka Council of Archaeologists. He has written widely on the archaeology of Sri Lanka in more than fifty articles, chapters and books, including Buddhist Monasteries Towards Urbanism in Southern Sri Lanka (2009). He was a Co-Director of the Arts and Humanities Research Council (UK)-funded hinterland survey around Anur ā dhapura, and is Co- Director of the Polonnaruva Archaeological and Anthropological Research Project. Justin Henry is a PhD Candidate in the History of Religions at the University of Chicago Divinity School. He is the recipient of a Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Fellowship in Buddhist Studies, and currently teaches in the Department of Theology at Loyola University Chicago. He has spent several years in Sri Lanka studying P ā li, Sinhala and Tamil religious literature, and in 2008–9 was Visiting Research Fellow in the Department of Linguistics at Kelaniya University. Mark Manuel is a UNESCO Chair Research Fellow in the Department of Archaeology, Durham University, UK. He has worked extensively in India, Sri Lanka, Nepal and Bangladesh, as well as in Iran and Egypt. As a landscape archaeologist, he focuses on the relationship between urban and non-urban xiii notES on contriButorS x i i i communities, and how cultural landscapes develop. He has recorded hundreds of new sites and has developed a system of archaeological risk mapping to identify heritage that is at most risk from modern development. He worked extensively on the Anur ā dhapura (Sri Lanka) Project and is a Field Director on the Polonnaruva Archaeological and Anthropological Research Project. Sujatha Arundathi Meegama is Assistant Professor at the School of Art, Design, and Media, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. She received her MA in East Asian Studies from Stanford University and her PhD in History of Art from the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of several forthcoming articles that question the simplistic oppositional binaries of South Indian versus Sri Lankan, Hindu versus Buddhist, and Dravidian versus Sinhalese art. She is currently preparing a book under the working title of Connected Temples: Patrons, Artisans, and Deities of Buddhist and Hindu Temples in Sri Lanka Gananath Obeyesekere is Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at Princeton University. He is the author of eight books and more than a hundred articles, some in Japanese, Turkish, Polish and Sinhala, published during his long intel- lectual career. Among his many awards is the Thomas Huxley Memorial Medal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (2003) and the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Society for Psychological Anthropology (2011). His most recent published work is entitled The Awakened Ones: Phenomenology of Visionary Experience (Columbia University Press, 2012). He is now engaged in a new book on the last king of Sri Lanka deposed by the British in 1815 with the title The Doomed King: A Requiem for Sri Vikrama Rajasinha Alicia Schrikker is Assistant Professor at the Institute for History, Leiden University. She is the author of Dutch and British Colonial Intervention in Sri Lanka, 1780–1815 (Brill, 2007). Her work focuses on colonial relations in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Indian Ocean world. She has published various articles on colonial disaster management in Indonesia and colonial legal practice in Sri Lanka. Sujit Sivasundaram is Reader in World History at the University of Cambridge, Fellow in History at Gonville and Caius College and Co-Editor of The Historical Journal . His recent book on Sri Lanka is Islanded: Britain, Sri Lanka and the Bounds of an Indian Ocean Colony (University of Chicago Press, 2013). His work on Sri Lanka has appeared in journals including The American Historical Review and Past and Present , and he is currently working on a book on the age of revolu- tions in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. Alan Strathern is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Oxford and Tutor and Fellow in History at Brasenose College. He is the author of Kingship and Conversion in Sixteenth-Century Sri Lanka: Portuguese Imperialism in a Buddhist Land (Cambridge University Press, 2007), and numerous journal arti- cles and book chapters. He is currently writing a comparative analysis of ruler conversions to monotheism in world history, with case studies including Central Africa, Oceania, Japan and Thailand. newgenprepdf x i v Fig. 0.1 A Sri Lankan Catholic dressed up as a Roman legionnaire at a Passion Play, Negombo, mid-1980, photograph by Dominic Sansoni. 1 1 Introduction: Querying the cosmopolitan in Sri Lankan and Indian Ocean history Alan Strathern and Zoltán Biedermann A young man, proudly dressed up as a Roman legionary, has lowered his gaze to observe us – with a mix of wariness, curiosity and defiance, it seems (Figure 0.1). He is a part of a Catholic Passion play performed in the town of Negombo on Sri Lanka’s west coast. The wooden sword in his right hand is raised, the helmet and armour shine assertively even under the cloudy sky. Behind the man is a statue of Christ, hands tied, the symbol of a religion brought to Sri Lanka during one of the many moments of change triggered by more or less violent contacts established across the sea. There is in this single picture a multitude of worlds – an indication of the capability of Lankan society to adopt the foreign, but also to appropriate it, digest it, reinvent it and, if necessary, defy it. To throw light on the deeper history of such ambiguities is the main objective of this book. The most striking development in history writing of the past decade or two has been the rise of world history, and the most common way of doing world his- tory has been to pursue ‘connections’ – the more unexpected the better. Societies and regions that were once studied independently are now increasingly being placed within flows of influence and conjunctures that extend across much larger geographies. If all historians write with one eye on the present, then evidently we feel globalization to be the essence of our present condition and the crucible of our history. Global connections are increasingly what we look into the even quite distant past to find. Perhaps the region of the world in which premodern connectedness has been most gloriously apparent is that delimited by the Indian Ocean. In the port cities that emerged along its coastlines, from Zanzibar to Malacca through Aden, Kochi, Colombo and Kolkata, distant connections and cosmopolitan prac- tices across linguistic and religious barriers were often simply a fact of life. Well before the arrival of the first European interlopers, a multitude of different peo- ples engaged in exploits of long-distance travel, trade and pilgrimage, and it was not only ports but also vast areas of the Asian mainland that interacted across Sri lAnkA At tHE croSSroAdS of HiStorY 2 2 the waters. Sri Lanka sits exactly at the centre of the Indian Ocean: an excellent laboratory, one might think, in which to test any ideas about the connected and the cosmopolitan. But it has barely been visible in the resurgence of world history. The primary purpose of this book is to begin the process of introducing Lankan material into the mainstream of these recent debates, which shall in turn help to reinvigorate the study of the history of the island itself. If no man is an island according to the saying, historians are likely to add that no island is an island either. Islands are not by nature condemned to isola- tion. Before modern technologies suddenly speeded up land-based travel, the seas were often less a barrier to travel and communication than a vehicle for it. This placed many an island in a privileged position, and the navigational routes that connect Sri Lanka with East Africa, the Middle East and Southeast Asia are held to be among the oldest in the world. At the same time, the history of the island is one of continuous dialogue – and sometimes argument – with the mainland it almost touches but for the few miles of the Palk straits. One might say the same for those other large islands or archipelagos moored off the landmass of Eurasia: the British Isles and Japan. Each of these was profoundly shaped by waves of influence and immigration from the mainland and yet each too has a history of genuine insular- ity and separation from the world. For interconnectedness and exposure to maritime trade do not in and by themselves produce cosmopolitanism. Long-distance connections may propel the circulation of goods, people and ideas, but they can by no means guarantee that those are absorbed into local cultures without also being detached from the wider world and made into something that is soon perceived as purely local. The pos- session of foreign artefacts, and even the mimicking of certain imported habits can go hand-in-hand with profoundly parochial attitudes. As Ulf Hannerz put it, cosmopolitanism involves ‘an openness toward divergent cultural experiences [...] but not simply as a matter of appreciation’. 1 The tracing of connections may ultimately be a superficial exercise unless we achieve some deeper insights into how societies handle them. We have therefore invited authors to reflect in detail on the mechanisms by which the supra-local was perceived, received and effected in Sri Lanka. What social and political forces have governed the recognition of the new as ‘foreign’, and determined whether it faced rejection, addition, adaptation, fusion or com- plete transformation? How do these logics operate over time (how does the exogenous become the indigenous)? Can objects themselves speak of the cosmo- politan or its opposites? We may know that Roman coins were dropped on Lankan soil 2,000 years ago, or that South Indian elements were present in medieval Buddhist architecture, or that Catholicism struck roots in the southwest of the island in the early modern period, or that Kandyan kingship borrowed artefacts and ideas from various other cultures. But what did – and what do – these things signify? For whose past exactly are they relevant, and in what ways? As Nicholas Thomas has noted about the local appropriation of European objects in the Pacific, ‘to say that black bottles were given does not tell us what was received’. 2 It is, then, 3 QuErYing tHE coSmopolitAn in HiStorY 3 to further our understanding of how Sri Lanka received and participated in the foreign, and ultimately to identify the local conditions that support or undermine the ‘cosmopolitan’, that we have put together this book. The problem of ‘cosmopolitanism’ Most definitions of cosmopolitanism turn on a transcendence of the local and the parochial in preference for overarching entities such as ‘humanity’ or ‘the world’. 3 The cosmopolitan perspective exposes the arbitrariness of political and cultural boundaries, positing that the sole naturally given aspect binding people together is the fact that they are human. From the abundance of recent literature dedicated to it, one is led to conclude that ‘cosmopolitanism’ usually represents an object of desire, a programmatic viewpoint creating variations on the Kantian theme that postulates the entire human species as the only defensible moral category. 4 In the fields of philosophy, sociology and political science it is often used as an essentially normative term and is rarely held up even by its advocates as a precise concept. 5 Most of us will be sympathetic to Diogenes’ much-cited desire to be a ‘citizen of the world’. 6 Prasenjit Duara defines cosmopolitanism as ‘the idea that all humans belong non-exclusively to a single community’, which brings it close to other forms of universalism such as the Kantian or the Christian, but also notes that other theorists regard it as less impositional ‘because it is passed on practices of common living and belonging in the world’. 7 This tension in the term between a potentially bullying universalism and a habitus of pragmatic tolerance returns repeatedly in attempts to define and use the concept, as we shall see. Yet for historians the fight will inevitably unfold on two fronts, not just one. On the one hand, we face the danger of Sri Lanka being idealized as a neatly delimited realm of organically grown, unbroken ethnic and religious identity coinciding with Sinhalaness and Therav ā da Buddhism – a community that sees itself as having survived precisely because it has repelled the forces of the for- eign. To resist this is to call upon tendencies that have become common sense in scholarship for some time. Anthropologists have been insisting for generations on the undesirability of approaching any given culture or community as a sim- ple organic whole, and geographers have been equally critical of any aprioristic approaches to naturally distinguishable spatial units such as landscapes, islands or continents. On the other hand, however, there is also a risk of romanticizing Sri Lanka as a wide-open Indian Ocean isle that only stiffened into something more intransigent when it came under the yoke of European imperialism and its heir, global capitalism. 8 The present volume sits between the two extremes. The series of confer- ences, lectures and workshops from which it has emerged built emphatically on the perceived necessity of throwing light on the cosmopolitan in Sri Lanka’s past. Yet we have also asked our contributors to be alert to what can be at times an excessive tendency to reinvent the premodern past as the perfect reverse of Sri lAnkA At tHE croSSroAdS of HiStorY 4 4 modern discontents: cosmopolitanism instead of nationalism, tolerance instead of bigotry, religious fluidity instead of boundary insistence. There is, in addition to the problems deriving from the normative nature of many theories of cosmopolitanism, also a more concrete and methodologically vexed issue for historians of the premodern world in particular. The cosmopol- itan seems to have acquired significance as a silver lining beneath the dark clouds of modernity: if the latter brought the awful categories of race, ethnicity and nation, it also brought with it melting pots, global communications and expanded horizons. For the term to really make sense it has to shine against the foil of an assumed significance of locality, and easily the most domineering notions of inherently significant locality have been generated by the nation-state. 9 In short, much of what makes the term ‘cosmopolitan’ meaningful is the promise it holds to liberate from the claims of the nation – but of course the nation itself is a product of a relatively recent past. So, what do we do when it comes to the times preceding the invention of the nation-state? What are the fundamental units against which the cosmopolitan can unfold? If we wish to use the concept for even the distant past without falling foul of anachronism, it is useful to distinguish between two quite distinct ways of being cosmopolitan 10 The first meaning is perhaps closest to the everyday sense of the word, invoking places and people that somehow contain within them a world of plurality. In essence, we are talking about a way of living or a fact of life, and it may be entirely un-reflected upon as such at the time of its happening. A cosmo- politan city is one in which different tongues may be heard on the streets, and wares from distant parts of the world displayed by its merchants, in which a con- geries of peoples has found a way of existing and thriving together. The locus where cosmopolitan attitudes unfold may be a town, a network of towns, or a territory – including perhaps Sri Lanka as a whole – but it will always remain rele- vant for our analysis to understand what ‘local’ frame precisely the cosmopolitan transcends, and in what ways it achieves this. This will be different for each and every type of artefact under discussion, be it a certain type of ceramics or coins, an element of literary or artistic style, a religious belief or a political ritual. The second meaning of ‘cosmopolitan’ refers to a more profound and con- sciously cultivated sense of belonging to a world larger than the locality. 11 Sheldon Pollock’s definition of cosmopolitanism refers to ways of ‘being translocal, of participating – and knowing one was participating – in cultural and political net- works that transcended the immediate community’. 12 Strictly speaking, again, cosmopolitanism therefore operates as a relative term, because the nature of the ‘immediate community’ must shift depending on context. But the challenge here is not only to define what the ‘local’ may be from which cosmopolitan emerges. The much more difficult question is to what overarching principle or notion the cosmopolitan refers in the premodern period. What ‘world’ were cosmopolitans to refer to when there was not yet anything like the full picture of the globe as we now know it today? Pollock, again, speaks of a conscious participation of people within a very grand ecumene: 13 the Sanskrit cosmopolis, a swathe of societies