BANISHMENT AND BELONGING

Author – Ronit Ricci

Publisher – Tambapanni Academic Publishers

ISBN 978-624-5529-02-5

283 Pages

Lanka, Ceylon, Sarandib: merely three disparate names for a single island? Perhaps. Yet the three diverge in the historical echoes, literary cultures, maps and memories they evoke, Names that have intersected and overlapped – in a treatise, a poem, a document – only to go their own ways. But despite different trajectories, all three are tied to narratives of banishment and exile. Ronit Ricci suggests that the island served as a concrete exilic site as well as a metaphor for imagining exile across religions, languages, space and time: Sarandib, where Adam was banished from Paradise: Lanka, where Sita languished in captivity, and Ceylon, faraway island of exile for Indonesian royalty under colonialism. Utilizing Malay manuscripts and documents from Sri Lanka, Javanese chronicles, and Dutch and British sources, Ricci explores histories and imaginings of displacement related to the island through a study of the Sri Lankan Malays and their connections to an exilic past.

“Challenging the boundaries that too often divide area studies, Ronit Ricci’s linguistic skills and path-breaking research historicize the Malay presence in contemporary Sri Lanka. Banishment and Belonging is a true tour de force”.      Barbara Watson Andaya, University of Hawai’i

Ronit Ricci has had to work, in her own words, with ‘fragments’, ‘echoes’ and ‘imagination’ to compose this fascinating history of longing and belonging in colonial Asia. It is a story based in formidable scholarship, yet told with grace and empathy.”  Jonathan Spencer, University of Edinburgh

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

RONIT RICCI is Sternberg-Tamir Chair in Comparative Cultures at Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Associate Professor of Asian Studies at Australian National University. She is the author of the multiple-prize-winning Islam Translated: Literature, Conversion, and the Arabic Cosmopolis of South and Southeast Asia (2011).

Sri Lanka Edition: For sale in Sri Lanka only. Originally published by Cambridge University Press Cambridge. Published in Sri Lanka under licence by Tambapanni Academic Publishers. The production of the book is supported by the American Institute of Lankan Studies

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