Now Reading: Book review: Colombo: Port of Call explores colonial Ceylon
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Book review: Colombo: Port of Call explores colonial Ceylon
A new book by Ajay Kamalakaran, *Colombo: Port of Call*, stitches together travelogues of famous visitors to colonial Ceylon. Mark Twain, Arthur Conan Doyle, Anton Chekhov, and Mahatma Gandhi all feature. Twain…
The Story in Brief
A new book by Ajay Kamalakaran, *Colombo: Port of Call*, stitches together travelogues of famous visitors to colonial Ceylon. Mark Twain, Arthur Conan Doyle, Anton Chekhov, and Mahatma Gandhi all feature. Twain mocks Western clothes on locals. Gandhi, visiting in 1927, urged Sinhalese women to give up jewellery and wear khadi; one woman refused his autograph rather than promise. Kamalakaran also notes Gandhi's patronising tone: he called Lanka a 'glorified edition of India'. The book, published by Penguin at Rs 599, offers trivia and an impressionistic portrait of the late 19th and early 20th century.
Doyle, during his stay, believed in spiritualism and doubted the Temple of the Tooth's relic but accepted the Bodhi tree's history. The review highlights how these accounts reveal colonial attitudes and a lost world of steamships and British supremacy.
The Indian Opinion
The book review leans heavily on Gandhi's patronising remarks, but this is a selective reading. Gandhi was a product of his time, and his views on dress and simplicity were consistent. The real story here is how Western travellers, Twain, Doyle, held their own condescending views of Ceylon. Instead of only scolding Gandhi, we should ask: why are colonial travelogues still treated as authoritative windows into the past? The number of Western visitors who wrote about Ceylon in that period, easily over a hundred, would tell us more than this single curated set.
Source: frontline.thehindu.com
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