All the objects in the gallery were produced for Colonial Ceylon (now Sri Lanka); most of the objects in the display cases were produced in Colonial Ceylon.
This guide, keyed alphabetically to the letters that appear on the cases, provides commentary on the exhibits. Manuscript numbers in this text and in the cases correspond to the appendix. This guide is published in an unusual format, necessitating an unusual form of reading, because it emulates the palm leaf manuscript, the heart of this exhibition. This ancient form of the book was responsible for the preservation of virtually all the knowledge produced in the classical Indic world, which ranged over two thousand years and over most of Central, South and Southeast Asia. The earliest historical record of book-making in this vast expanse concerns a pious Sri Lankan Buddhist king (1stc., B.C.), who had a group of monks record the Buddha's teachings in books lest some part of it, formerly preserved orally, be somehow lost. In a climate particularly unfriendly to the lastingness of books, this long-standing dedication to the preservation of book learning generated great armies of Sri Lankan monks copiously copying and recopying these manuscripts from that time until the nineteenth century, when the palm leaf manuscript tradition was literally brought to a halt by British-introduced printing and codex book-binding (as in the typical Western book: pages sewn into boards along their left edges and flipped to the left when reading).
Most of the manuscripts exhibited here belong to that time, the nineteenth century, when stringing palm leaves together as books was fast becoming archaic, an activity of stubborn traditionalists or rural peasants, but not of the resident British overlords and the Colonial elite they nurtured. Yet even then, outside Western and Westernizing circles, and certainly prior to the nineteenth century, this book form was the body of the entirety of Buddhist literature. And the palm leaf manuscript format was not reserved for Buddhist texts. Palm leaf manuscripts recorded the entire range of knowledges, from scientific and medical treatises to court poetry and literary theory; they recorded accounts and balances, magical spells and recipes, royal decrees and correspondence -- anything that goes in a book. And palm leaf manuscripts were but one traditional art form within a wide range that still survived in Colonial Ceylon.
The nineteenth century was a watershed in these indigenous artistic traditions because printing was likewise but one in an entire range of dislocating "civilizing" contributions which the British made to indigenous cultures. Military skill alone did not allow the British to conquer and maintain control over the entire Island, thereby succeeding (in the years 1815-1947) where Portuguese and Dutch armies (from 1505 to 1796) had failed. Instead, the British conquered and controlled Ceylon with more sophisticated and insidious weapons. They conquered through economic monopoly; diplomacy and espionage; "divide and conquer" creation of class, regional and ethnic strife; British education, law, political structure, and cricket. This exhibit highlights perhaps the most insidious of these: the British conquered through representation of the colonized. They made and published images -- drawings, photographs, maps, ethnographies, travel guides, stereo views and postcards -- of and about the lives and occupations, the knowledges and books, of the millions of Sri Lankans whom those few white thousands commanded. These images captured the people; they constructed and illustrated and marketed socio-political roles into which those millions simultaneously were yoked. Imperial zoology. And "the natives" constituted but one of Ceylon's many interesting views.
Postcards and parallel representations intentionally tried to essentialize, and commodify, the place: its beauty, its repugnance, its charm, its comforts, its riches, its otherness. The photographers who created these images were themselves Europeans, looking at the Island through Western eyes. Their task was to define essences for a market of Western consumers. Western residents and visitors in Ceylon were to buy their products as keepsakes, or send them to loved ones in the Victorian parlours back home who, viewing them and reading them, were meant to see what there was to be seen in Ceylon. Yet the coming and going of these images was more complex than this, for most of these representations were manufactured in the West, then sent back to Ceylon before returning again to the West as souvenirs of Eastern travel. Though Europeans seldom appear in the images -- perhaps their presence would have spoiled the exotica -- they always are lurking there, behind the camera. In every scene we see, at the very moment in which we are seeing it, the great exotic oddity is the European photographer himself, setting up his camera obscura and posing the shot in that paddy field where peasants are otherwise trying to get the rice harvested before wild elephants get it, or in that shop where the photographic spectacle is intruding on a chatty chew of betel. These representations, postcards and stereo views and the like, which are fairly easy to find in the United States or England, are rare and precious in Sri Lanka because they were not for Sri Lankans; they were about Sri Lankans. In the Victorian parlour, white hands adjusted the stereoscope.
These Colonialist representations cannot be exhibited alone, which would allow them to be taken at face value as though the myopic image-making of the imperialists truly exhausted the whole of Colonial Ceylon. The palm leaf manuscripts and other artefacts are exhibited alongside them as a constant if incomplete reminder that however much those peasants or shop-goers may indeed have talked and laughed about the spectacle over supper, it hardly constituted the essence of their lives. And yet, neither can these palm leaf manuscripts, dislocated from the traditions of material culture and learning which produced them, be exhibited alone. The Western representations are exhibited alongside them to remind us that they were produced in a colonial situation, which undermined the cultural and intellectual traditions sustaining this bookform, and because of which these manuscripts were finally abandoned to the black markets of Colombo and Kandy, where most of them were rescued. This exhibition juxtaposes Western representation with the products and possessions of the represented. Only taken together, in their very juxtaposition, do these artefacts of Colonial Ceylon begin to evoke the whole from which they survive.