Colombo: Port of Call

I was pleasantly surprised to be invited to the launch of a book by an Indian writer recording visits to Colombo, evidently a labour of love by someone fascinated by this country and the range of visitors it hosted in the heyday of the British empire.

- BY AJAY KAMALAKARAN

The first visit chronologically that it deals with was that of the American philanthropist Andrew Carnegie, in 1879. He in fact landed in Galle, though in his introduction Kamalakaran explains how the port of Colombo was developed during this period so that it soon became practically the only harbour used by passenger liners.

The first visit described in the book was that of the Thai prince Chakrabongse who came here in 1896. He was the son of King Chulalongkorn, and was just 13-years old when he came, on his way to school in England. There are touching extracts from his letters to his father, to whom he seems to have been very close, though he was his 40th child.

He was treated with honours by the British government, and had a meeting with Governor Havelock, in Kandy where the Governor had gone to arrange for a ball in celebration of Queen Victoria's 77th birthday. But of course the main purpose of his visit to Kandy was to visit the Temple of the Tooth, though he was not impressed by the temple, which was crowded, nor by the Tooth, which he was allowed to view.

The following year his father arrived, and also went to Kandy, but felt insulted by the manner in which he was received. This is recorded also in another book I had just read, Locations of Buddhism: Colonialism and Modernity in Sri Lanka, by an American scholar, Anne M Blackburn. That suggests that the brusque refusal by ‘a Kandyan aristocrat by the name of Panobokke’ to let him touch the tooth led to bad feeling. He took back the gifts he had brought, and this put paid to the efforts of Blackburn’s main protagonist Hikkaduwe Sumangala and other monks to get the Thai king involved in the administration of Buddhist orders in Ceylon.

Blackburn notes that it is possible Panabokke’s insult was deliberate, since the Kandyan aristocracy wanted no challenge to their domination of Buddhist orders.