Slave In a Palanquin

Author – Nira Wickramasinghe

Publisher – Thambapanni Academic Publishers

First Edition 2021

ISBN 978-624-5629-01-8

226 Pages

 

Nira Wickramasinghe uncovers the traces of slavery in the history and memory of the Indian Ocean world, exploring moments of revolt in the lives of enslaved people in the wake of abolition. A deeply interdisciplinary book with a focus on recovering subaltern resistance Slave in a Palanquin offers a vital new portrait of the local and transnational worlds of the colonial-era Asian slave trade in the Indian Ocean.

Slave in a Palanquin is one of the most remarkable and original works I have read on the history of the Indian Ocean. With her enormous scholarly gifts, Wickramasinghe endeavors to recover what she calls “fugitive lives,” a project that is as much as anything a meditation on the archive of slavery-its silences, fractures, and unexpected shards of illumination –

Sunil Amrith, author of Unruly Waters

Slave in a Palanquin is a deft exorcism of the specter of slavery for an island whose history is often simplistically cast in terms of colonizer and colonized, or Sinhala and Tamil. It is a model treatment of the diverse forms that slavery could take in the Indian Ocean world.

Michael Laffan, editor of Belonging Across the Bay of Bengal: Religious

Rites, Colonial Migrations, National Rights

At once humane, lucid, intelligent, and highly innovative, this is a masterly analysis of the various regimes of slavery in Sri Lanka under both Dutch and British colonial rule, their demise, and the reasons they were forgotten. Nira Wickramasinghe has produced a major work of comparative scholarship.

Robert Ross, author of The Borders of Race in Colonial South Africa:

The Kat River Settlement, 1829-1856

A compellingly important work by one of Sri Lanka’s best historians. Slave in a Palanquin challenges narratives of purity and authenticity on an island where murmurings about de scent are far too common but where memories of enslavement have been erased. By turning to forgotten records and traces, Wickramasinghe insists on the subaltern, the resistant and the particular. As the book proceeds, Sri Lanka moves into the center of key debates in world history about labor, memory, freedom, and power.

Sujit Sivasundaram, author of Islanded: Britain, Sri Lanka, and the Bounds of an Indian Ocean Colony

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

NIRA WICKRAMASINGHE is Chair Professor of Modern South Asian Studies at Leiden University. Her books include Metallic Modern: Everyday Machines in Colonial Sri Lanka (2014) and Sri Lanka in the Modern Age: A History (second edition, 2015).

Sri Lanka Edition: For sale in Sri Lanka only. Originally published by Columbia University Press, New York. Published in Sri Lanka under license by Tambapanni Academic Publishers

 

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