SASC Colloquium: The Plaint of an Emancipated Slave, Colombo 1826, Nira Wickramasinghe

In 1826, Rawothan, a resident of Colombo in the British Crown Colony of Ceylon/Sri Lanka applied to the Muslim headman of the district of Colombo to obtain permission that his son be circumcised. This spawned a war of reports, petitions and complaints, one of which went up to the governor of Ceylon, others to three successive collectors of Colombo and to a court case filed by Rawothan in the provincial court. The issue was that Rawothan was ‘of slave extraction’ and thus not eligible to perform ‘such honorary ceremonies the respectable Moors are only entitled to perform’. This paper is based on the correspondence of over two years between British officials and a group of men who describe themselves as ‘respectable Moors’ as well as reports regarding the court action brought about by Rawothan. These unique documents record a human story of revolt motivated by a strongly felt sense of injustice. It is through entering in play that Rawothan challenged the denial of equality meted by his community. The colonial state and the legal system were less perceived as potential instruments of justice than as a stage to make claims for social equality in a public arena.
Nira Wickramasinghe, is Chair/Professor of Modern South Asian Studies at Leiden University. Before taking up the chair at Leiden, she taught for 19 years in the Department of History at the University of Colombo. Her most recent books are Slave in a Palanquin. Colonial Servitude and Resistance in Sri Lanka (New York: Columbia University Press 2020). Sri Lanka in the Modern Age. A History (New York: Oxford University Press 2015) and Metallic Modern. Everyday Machines in Colonial Sri Lanka (Oxford: Berghahn Press 2014).