SRI LANKA
JEWEL IN THE OCEAN
o
ancient mariners, Sri Lanka was Ratnadipa, the land of
gems. By about the fifth century BC peoples from northern
India had settled on the island. Legends mention the name
of their leader, prince Vijaya. The settlers were called Sihalas--'people
of the Lion'--because Vijaya's father was actually believed
to have been a lion. Within four centuries most of the islanders
had accepted Buddhism, and from 67 until 993 C.E. the city
of Anuradhapura was the political and religious centre of
the island. Giant reservoirs were built for irrigation. However,
it was not rice, but rather cinnamon and the elephant trade
that attracted Western traders. To control the Sri Lankan
cinnamon trade, the VOC conquered
the port town of Colombo from the Portuguese in 1656 and there
established its largest colonial settlement in Asia save Batavia
(Jakarta).

The Sinhalese name of a specific
tree, Calamba, gave the city of Colombo its name
and coat of arms
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A Faustian Bargain
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1638, Raja Singa II of Kandy granted the VOC
a trade monopoly on cinnamon in return for military assistance
in the struggle with the Portuguese on Sri Lanka. Twenty years
later, Dutch power had replaced the Portuguese as the ruler
of maritime Lanka, as well as the narrow straits between Sri
Lanka and the Indian mainland. Then, in time-honoured tradition,
the VOC held onto large tracts of
land--most of coastal Sri Lanka, as it happened--as remuneration
for unpayable debts. By the end of the 18th century, the VOC
exercised direct rule in the coastal area over more than 350,000
Sinhalese and Tamils who peeled more than half a million pounds
of cinnamon annually for the Company. The VOC
administration entrenched itself firmly in Jaffna, Gale, Colombo,
and countless villages in the countryside.
Although the treaty of 1638 did not give the VOC
the legal right to the coastal territories, it severely diminished
the state of Kandy's sovereignty, and it resulted in an exclusive
Dutch monopoly in the cinnamon trade that deprived the islanders
of their most important cash crop. Furthermore, the VOC
tried to become the main elephant exporter and the sole importer
of cloth to the island as well. After taking over most of
the Catholic churches of the island, the VOC
actively promoted Dutch Reformed Protestantism, which was
only countered by continuing Catholic missions from Portuguese
Goa and finally a revival of Buddhism during the second half
of the eighteenth century. Only a tiny fraction of the large
corpus of archival information available has been explored
thus far to study
Dutch -Sri Lankan interactions. Unfortunately, few documents
from the great Kingdom of Kandy itself have survived. When
used in concert with extant Sinhala and Tamil literary works,
VOC records provide much information
on - to borrow the words of a Sri Lankan historian - 'the
rich and variegated history of the island . a history which
not only helps us to understand how people lived in the past,
but also explains many of the attitudes, policies and aspirations
of the people who live there in the present day.'

Coat of Arms of the VOC
establishments on Ceylon, c. 1719.
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