COLOMBO, Sri Lanka — On a set of wooden panels outside St. Peter’s Church in Colombo’s historic district, a timeline lists each of the parish’s vicars since its founding in 1815. At the beginning, the list of names is distinctly British: Twisleton, Glenie, Kelley, Boyd. In the 1950s, however, Portuguese names like de Sousa begin to appear.
If the plaque were to be taken as a historical source, it would seem plausible to conclude that the British arrived in Sri Lanka before the Portuguese. In fact, the opposite is true — the Portuguese first came ashore on the island at the beginning of the sixteenth century, whereas the British showed up over two hundred years later.
The names de Sousa and de Saram listed on the panel are not those of Europeans who came to Sri Lanka. Instead, they are Sri Lankans whose names reflect a much earlier history; one closely connected to the century and a half of Portuguese presence in Sri Lanka that began at the turn of the sixteenth century.
I spent this afternoon at the Colombo National Museum, an expansive collection of artifacts including sculptures, paintings, and religious icons that spans the island’s history from the ancient to the present. Meandering through fifteen different rooms, each of which contained enough artifacts itself to merit a trip to the museum, I kept my eyes peeled for mentions of the Portuguese in Sri Lanka, which they referred to as Ceilão (Ceylon).
The first thing that caught my eye in the museum was not a mention of Portugal, but of the medieval period. In my academic experience, the term “medieval” is often a frame of reference best applied to the European continent to describe the thousand year period between the fall of the Roman Empire and the Renaissance.
On the wall text in an exhibit about Buddhist art, however, was a description of the “tradition of Buddhist mural painting of the early medieval period.” Far from the art galleries of Europe, museum curators in Sri Lanka seem to be actively incorporating the language of the Middle Ages to situate cultural production and historical events (I found several more references to the medieval throughout the museum).
I was surprised to see the term applied beyond Europe to describe Sri Lanka in its own right, not just situate an event in a manner easier to comprehend for Western visitors. It seemed that the word “medieval” was actively being used to categorize the island’s art into an appropriate chronology; whether that is a helpful or even accurate level is beyond the pale of my analytical capabilities.
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