Indigenising the Colonial City: Late 19th-century Colombo and its Landscape

Abstract

This paper is concerned with the indigenisation of Colombo and the transformation of the city from an exclusive domain of colonial power to a milieu which supported Ceylonese social and cultural practices. It investigates the shifting indigenous response to the colonisation of Colombo, from challenging to indigenising the city between the 1860s and the 1880s. The paper approaches indigenisation from a 'reverse-Orientalist' perspective that focuses on the landscape produced by the emergence of national elite, the revival of Buddhism and processes of naturalisation and migration. It demonstrates that indigenisation was integral to colonialism, which simultaneously instigated the Westernisation of subjects and the indigenisation of social and spatial structures. The resulting multilayered landscape, negotiated between imposing colonial structures and Ceylonese cultural practices, was characterised by irony, mimicry, ambivalence, liminality and hybridity.