In early nineteenth century Sri Lanka, slave descent was still recorded through state institutional practices. All were disciplinary in a similar and explicit manner: court cases, police records, health/epidemic records, censuses, slave registers, thombos (land and school registers) were the privileged written loci where reference to slave descent appeared. In a parallel fashion this period witnessed a sharpening of boundaries between communities in the island and claim-making based on notions of purity, authenticity, and respectability. The context was one of a colonial state that was beginning to distribute entitlements to competing cultural/linguistic groups that aimed to present themselves as respectable and united social formations to their benefactors. Slave descent as an index of racial impurity became instrumentalized by aspiring elites to evict from their community-in-making elements that were deemed unsuitable to their ambitions as a community. Through the close reading of a constable’s list of inhabitants in the port city of Colombo, this paper will look at the place of impurity and respectability in elite ideas of community in contrast to subaltern ways of being that appear in the interstices of written texts.

Nira Wickramasinghe is Chair/Professor of Modern South Asian Studies at Leiden University and Program Chair in South and Southeast Asian studies. She has a D.Phil in modern history from the University of Oxford (1989). Before moving to Leiden, she was for 19 years a senior lecturer and professor in the Department of History at the University of Colombo, Sri Lanka. Her research centers on issues of belonging and everyday life under colonialism in Sri Lanka and the Indian Ocean. Some of her recent books include: Slave in a Palanquin. Colonial Servitude and Resistance in Sri Lanka (Columbia University Press 2020) – that was awarded the John F Richards 2021 Prize in South Asian History by the American Historical Association and more recently Monsoon Asia. A Reader on South and Southeast Asia (2023) co-edited with David Henley. She has been, inter alia, a Fellow at the Davis Center for Historical Studies at Princeton University, a British Academy Visiting Professor at the University of Oxford a Fulbright Senior Scholar at New York University, a fellow at the Gilder Lehman Center for Slavery Resistance and Abolition at Yale, and a member at the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. She is presently heading a large scale 4 year Dutch research foundation project called Forgotten Lineages: Afterlives of Dutch Slavery in the Indian Ocean World and writing a world history of cinnamon for St Martin’s Press (Macmillan).

Introduction by Giorgio Riello, Professor of Early Modern Global History at the European University Institute and the Principal Investigator of the ERC Advanced Project CAPASIA.