A Dutch Fiscal’s Murder

Nira Wickramasinghe

“The documents we read were not written for us.”
Martin Klein¹

There is an enduring belief in Sri Lanka that at some undetermined point in history “Kaffir” slaves rebelled, creating such havoc in Colombo that it led to them being severely suppressed and then confined to a ward of the city that then became known for posterity as Slave Island. The less well-known murder of the Dutch fiscal, Barent van der Swaan, and his wife by their Asian domestic slaves in Colombo in 1723 is intimately connected to this apocryphal story.² The reverberations of this violent event across three centuries offer a key to tracking shifts in the manner in which “slaves,” “blacks,” and “Kaffirs” were represented and their lives and deaths recorded during successive colonial and postcolonial regimes.

The term “Kaffir,” from the Portuguese word caffre, is borrowed, according to the Encyclopaedia of Islam, from the Arabic kafir, which originally meant obliterating or covering in verses in the Qur’an and later acquired the more general meaning of infidel or nonbeliever.³ It remains today as Kapiri in Sinhala and Kapili in Tamil, to qualify present-day Afro–Sri Lankans whose ancestors were believed to have been forcefully brought to the island as slaves and mercenaries by the Portuguese from various parts of the African continent. Exact lineages are difficult to trace as one has to rely on facts and figures given in colonial sources and vernacular literary works, where the strength, ferocity, and numbers of the enemy forces are often exaggerated in descriptions of battles. One can only assume that early Africans would have merged, over centuries, into the local population. African soldiers were brought to fight in the British Army during the Kandyan campaign in the nineteenth century. Records show that they were slaves purchased by the British in Goa and Bombay and brought to the island to be trained as soldiers. They served as free men in the Caffre Corps, later called the Third and Fourth Ceylon Regiment.⁴ Some Afro–Sri Lankans who today form a distinct community in Puttalam claim to be descendants of those soldiers from the Third Ceylon Regiment who were given land to settle on after retirement. Others believe their ancestors came from Kaffa in Ethiopia.⁵ This book, however, is not about the Kaffirs, who are commonly seen as an ethnographically distinct community associated with slavery and empire, but about enslaved people whose ambiguous origins take us to an interconnected Indian Ocean world made of a crucible of peoples from India, Sri Lanka, the East Indies, and Africa, men and women who shared a similar fate.

I suggest in this chapter that a metamorphosis happened in popular culture in the form of a gradual “blackening” of the slave in texts and in the collective memory of the people of Sri Lanka from the mid-nineteenth century onward through a merging of two initially distinct colonial categories of “slave” and “black.” This led to an erasure of the diversity of the origin of enslaved people and the equivalence of slave with African, a bias that academic history has until now failed to address.⁶ The history of men and women who were forcefully brought to Sri Lanka from the East Indies and India disappeared, replaced by a new, simplified history of slavery in Sri Lanka conceived as black/African (Kaffir) slavery that resonated with the dominant model of Atlantic slavery.

Another semantic phenomenon that has occurred in many places where violent colonial encounters shattered societies and touched Sri Lanka equally is the shift over time in the meaning of “black” and “blackness.” The meaning of the former term shriveled, shifting from an amorphous one of conquest in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries to one endowed with a sharp racial undertone, alongside the growth of racialised ideas about indigenous “oriental” peoples. In Sri Lanka until 1838, “blacks” encompassed Sinhalese, Tamils, Muslims, and other nonwhites. Blackness, like race, had no scientific pretensions until the late nineteenth century, as it was most often used as a category of classification in the early censuses and as a term of inferiority cast on all dominated peoples who simply looked different from the norm, the white male. Achille Mbembe reminds us of Frantz Fanon’s famous point that just as the figure of the black does not exist, neither does the white, both being fantasies of the imagination.⁷ The white was indeed little more than a fantasy of the European imagination that the West tried to naturalise and universalise. Yet ironically, while a century earlier blackness was forcefully contained in a racialised African identity, in the twentieth century blackness would free itself to become a radical claim and rallying point for political solidarity among peoples of African and Asian descent.⁸

This chapter begins with a foray into a hitherto unexplored event, the murder of a Dutch fiscal in eighteenth-century Colombo, in order to understand the processes at stake in the recording and memorialisation of enslaved people. What details are recorded and emphasised for posterity, and what is left out? I trace the fractured journey of the categories of slave, black, and Kaffir and inquire into the political and moral projects that were served by the resilience, disappearance, and metamorphosis of slaves and blacks in the nineteenth century. After piecing together existing data on the murder of 1723 and its afterlives, I explore the few sources that provide clues to the origin of slaves in the southern maritime region of the island and finally trace the journeys of the categories “slave” and “black” in the official colonial record.

Let us begin with the events recorded in recent popular guidebooks and travel writings that are purported to have happened in Slave Island, today a ward of Colombo, the capital city of Sri Lanka. Slave Island (fig. 1.1) is located directly south of the fort area, between the Colombo harbor and Beira Lake, where once stood a fortress built by the Portuguese and the Dutch as the center of power. The account written in 1984 by the reputed surveyor R. L. Brohier of the growth of the Kaffir slave population in Colombo and their violent rebellion remains the most detailed. Yet one searches in vain for archival sources or precise dates that sustain his story. Most present explanations of the events are found in popular writings that draw generously from Brohier’s account, often failing to cite its author.

Since he is considered reliable and has produced such a trail of followers, his rendering of the events needs to be cited at length:

The Kaffirs were trafficked from the East coast of Africa in the neighbourhood of Mozambique . . . they were used as mercenary troops, camp fellows and carriers. The Portuguese introduced the Kaffir to Ceylon about the year 1630 from their settlement at Goa on the coast of Malabar. The Dutch drew largely on this pool of labour to work under the overseers when they set out to build the citadel at Colombo.⁹

In Brohier’s account, slaves found in Sri Lanka’s southern maritime province were clearly and unambiguously Africans, who had been forcibly brought from Mozambique through Goa, the capital of the Portuguese viceroyalty in India. Furthermore, the momentous events leading to the death of the fiscal, Barent van der Swaan, are depicted as something much larger than a murder, since the language Brohier used is one of a large- scale slave insurrection and a conspiracy:

In the early years of the 18th century the Kaffir population of Colombo had grown to such numbers that it gave them a sense of their own strength. This enabled them to stage an insurrection in the citadel. Besides committing much violence in the streets to private property, they conspired and murdered the Fiscal, Barent van der Swaan, and his good wife, when they lay asleep. The details of the tragedy hold that the murderer, a Kaffir servant, had hidden under the bedstead, and when his master and mistress had turned into sleep crawled out behind them and using a dagger “with two unerring stabs sent them to eternity.” Eventually the Kaffir Insurrection was suppressed. The authorities thereafter decided that all the slave- labour working in the citadel must be regimented.¹⁰

Reading through Brohier’s account, it seemed to me curious that a slave insurrection of presumably large numbers of African slaves would go unnoticed or at least unreported by generations of professional historians who have written on Dutch rule in Sri Lanka.¹¹ Furthermore, the peculiar mix of vagueness (the absence of dates) and precision in the form of exact details (the dagger, the bedstead) in Brohier’s telling belongs more to the realm of myth than to that of professional history.

Curiosity pushed me into hunting for answers through a foray into a Dutch VOC archive that I was quite unfamiliar with. Colleagues recommended looking at the criminal case records in the form of criminal rolls of the period. The dating of the events was made possible by the conjuncture of the death of Governor Isaac Augustin Rumpf, which secondary sources confirmed as happening in June 1723. Rumpf’s funeral account by Francois Valentijn, published a few years later, did not make any reference to a large- scale “Kaffir” insurrection, although it did mention the unrest caused by cinnamon peelers that same year: “In this year the cinnamon peelers rose against us…. Also, in this year (1723) a rare event occurred when the fiscal, Barent van der Swaan, with his wife, was murdered by his slaves, unfortunately, in Colombo. Upon hearing this, his hon. passed away three days later, on the 11 of June 1723 (so people say) he died out of shock.”¹²

Interestingly, an account by R. G. Anthonisz, the government archivist, from 1906 tallies with Valentijn’s record of the event. Anthonisz writes that Rumpf, governor from 1716 to 1723, died suddenly from “a shock received on hearing of the assassination of the Fiscal Barent van der Swaan and his wife by their slaves.”¹³ He does not mention any instance of a slave rebellion.

Distinct, braided, and parallel narratives appear to have emerged after the event. One that describes the event as a murder committed by domestic slaves, followed by the death of the governor evident after 1723, fades away as we move into the twentieth century, leaving some traces, as in a recent online resource that draws from uncited sources to explain the naming of Slave Island: “One night a slave of a Dutch household in the Fort had murdered an entire family. As a result, all the slaves in the Fort were lodged in huts just outside the Kasteel or Fort…. The slaves, after carrying water, firewood, and attending to janitorial work in the households in the Fort, were at the end of the day rowed to Slave Island every evening through steps of the Sally Port.”¹⁴ The narrative that came into existence in the nineteenth century about a murder and a rebellion of Kaffir slaves has spawned multiple avatars in contemporary popular culture.

The criminal rolls of 1723, however, do not refer to widespread disturbances or any other violent context and only give us a picture of the object of the court case, namely, the deaths of Barent van der Swaan and his wife, which are noted as horrific (gruvelijk). For the crime committed, twelve enslaved people, described as “slaves of van der Swaan,” were taken prisoner and charged in court for murder. Their names and ages are listed:

1. Kedoe   23 to 24 years
2. Scipio   22, 23
3. Lotty   19, 18
4. Wintura   26, 28
5. Titus   26
6. Tenna   24
7. Rake   22
8. Rande   20
9. Cong   17
10. Dana   12, 13
11. Clona   30, 31
12. Rosetta   12, 13

The most revealing information given is about the place of origin of these slaves (lijfeigenen), which was scribbled under their names. Contrary to the common perception of African/Kaffir slaves being involved in the violence, the fourth-named Wintura and seventh, Rake, were “Balinese” and “Christian,” while others were “born on the island of Timor and heathen (together) slaves.”¹⁵ VOC sources suggest quite categorically that those involved in the violence were not Kaffirs. Thus, by the late twentieth century, when Brohier wrote his seemingly authoritative book on Colombo, the origin of the slaves had undergone a metamorphosis, from East Indies, Balinese, and Timorese to a new identity as “Kaffirs.”

The term “Kaffir” (nonbeliever in Arabic), used by Arab slavers to refer to indigenous people of East, Central, and West Africa, was adopted by European colonisers to qualify various people from Africa and was never applied in Sri Lanka to people of Asian origin. Asian slaves appear in Dutch textual records under the generic term slaaven, while Africans are included in both the “slaaven” and “Kaffir” categories. The discrepancy between the story as it is recorded in the official VOC archive and its appearance in a new garb in a variety of published texts over three centuries brings to bear an unambiguous process of blackening of slaves. Blackening stains seeped into travel writing, contemporary popular histories, and public culture, leading to an overall loss of the complexity and historicity of the categories “slave” and “black” and at the same time a loss of a compassionate memory of slavery, an issue I will come back to in the final chapter.

Historical truths are understood here and sought out as “broad synthetic generalisations based on researched collections of individual facts. They may be wrong, but they are always amenable to verification by the methods of historical research.”¹⁶ What is significant to uncover as a historical endeavor is the way the Slave Island story and the origin of its protagonists acquired new meanings, as the events moved from the cloisters of academia epitomized by Anthonisz’s account to the realm of popular history illustrated by Brohier.

The VOC’s outposts at the Cape of Good Hope and in Mauritius are known to have been chiefly supplied with Asian slaves dispatched from Batavia or Colombo on the annual return fleets. From the fragmentary evidence available, the origins of enslaved people in Colombo were initially thought to be mainly from the Indian subcontinent – Coromandel, Tanjur, and Canara in South India – but there is evidence to suggest that from the 1660s, and especially after the fall of Makassar in 1667, slaves were also sourced from the Southeast Asian circuit encompassing Malaysia, Indonesia, New Guinea, and Southern Philippines.¹⁷ Among the 1,570 company-enslaved people in 1685 and 1,741 in 1697, as cited by Remco Raben, or the 5,500 slaves in 1688 estimated by Matthias van Rossum, one can ponder on how many were from Southeast Asia.¹⁸ Kate Ekama’s evidence for the late eighteenth century disturbs Gerrit Knaap’s view that most slaves in Colombo were purchased in South India in the late seventeenth century, although she warns that data on slave origins is very unreliable. Naming patterns and birthplace records suggest that many private and company slaves originated from Southeast Asia. This is most apparent in court cases and in records of the materiaalhuis (storage house, the old church in the castle) in Colombo, where deceased slaves were listed as “Bataviase” from Makassar, Ternate, Timor, and Boetin. This fact tallies with the origin of slaves who were involved in the fiscal’s murder in 1723. In the December 1775 materiaalhuis list of nineteen deceased slaves, for instance, ten originated from Southeast Asia, with reference made to Bugis, Makassar, Mangarij, Timor, and Sumbawa. All ten were transported through Batavia. Others were transported through Coromandel, Tuticorin, and Malabar.¹⁹

While the evidence is tentative and limited, it helps explain the presence of enslaved Malay-speaking people in the British archive of the early nineteenth century, as the case of Valentin in chapter 2 will show. The narrative of the sentencing and punishment meted to the prisoners described in the criminal rolls has, interestingly, never entered the public realm. Yet such a story could have been appropriated by the popular domain where, more than in academic history, tales of extreme violence, domination, and subjugation are often sought out.

Another metamorphosis happened in popular history: the violent punishment of prisoners by the colonial authorities became a story of a violent rebellion performed by an enraged crowd of Kaffir slaves. The prisoners, as reported in the criminal rolls (which unfortunately do not contain the court proceedings), pleaded guilty in different ways. Scipio, Wintura, Titus, and Rake prayed for forgiveness, Lotty asked to be hanged, and Tenna asked for pardon. The court declared that the main culprit was Kedoe. He and six of the accused identified as his accomplices would die for the crime they committed in the cruellest manner in order to deter others.²⁰ Kedoe as the leader was dragged to the execution place on a plank and bound to a cross by the executioner, who then scorched his bound arms, breasts, and thighs. Then he was cut open, his ear pulled out and his head cut off. The parts of his body and head were dragged around the citadel again and then hung on display with his head on a stick. The others would suffer a similar fate.²¹

Brohier’s account of the suppression of the “Kaffir insurrection” does not include any public execution but a decision on the part of public authorities that all slave labor must be regimented:

At the end of their days work in institution, or the households of the grandees in the Colombo of those days, they were massed on the “Kaffirs Veldt” and had to answer to a roll call. They were thereafter led along a narrow passage through the ramparts, called a “Sallypoort,” and ferried across the lake to what was a jagged peninsula which came to be miscalled on old maps Ijemenaing “Island.” They were concentrated here for the night in lines and shanties. Amid the changes of three centuries this name “Slave Island” has stood firm.²²

As in most mythographies, cause and effect and temporal moorings are nebulous.²³ Brohier’s narrative appears to merge a number of different events to create an explanation for the naming of the area as “Slave Island.” Another borrowing of details is in the description of the gruesome murder by “dagger,” which seems to be loosely inspired by another murder of a Dutch official by his slave at the end of the eighteenth century. In 1799 the last Dutch disava of Matara, Pieter Willem Ferdinand Adriaan van Schuler of Utrecht, as well as his wife, Wilhelmine Catharina Leembruggen, were both assassinated in their bed by a domestic slave. Anthonisz describes the events:

The slave having secreted himself in the sleeping chamber for the purpose, and who used his master’s own sword, which was hanging on the wall by the bed, for the perpetration of the deed. This he plunged deep into his victim’s breast; and the lady, on being stabbed in the abdomen as she seized the assassin to prevent his making his escape. The husband expired immediately, but the wife lingered long enough to be able to identify the miscreant and to secure his conviction and execution.²⁴

Thus, popular memory seems to have fused the two stories of murder by a slave. The reasons behind the naming of the area as Slave Island—in particular its connection with a slave rebellion that may not have actually happened—need further exploration.

That the area was called Slave Island in connection with a past of slavery is not in doubt, but the nature of this connection and the dating of Brohier and others in his wake need to be scrutinized. A link between the name Slave Island and a violent Kaffir slave insurrection and its suppression in the early eighteenth century lingers on today in guidebooks and general works. A recent dictionary of historical places repeated the same formula:

South of the fort lies Slave Island, so called because of events that took place during the time of Dutch rule. The Portuguese had brought slaves from east Africa to Colombo in the early 17th century, and the Dutch retained them as servants. Near the beginning of the eighteenth century, the Africans violently revolted, killing some of their Dutch caretakers. After the insurrection was suppressed, the Dutch removed the rebels to a peninsula accessible only via the fort, and it is that peninsula that ever since has been known as Slave Island.²⁵

Earlier references to the “island of slaves” as the place where the Dutch company kept their slaves point, however, to an earlier date of naming in the eighteenth century. Catholic priests such as Father Manoel Miranda in his correspondence to the Superior of the Oratory at Goa in 1704 and 1707 already referred to “the island of slaves” where he began his mission and where there were two chapels.²⁶ Hence the naming of the peninsula most probably came from the fact that slaves employed by the VOC lived there at least since the early 1700s and seems to be unrelated to the murder of the fiscal in 1723 or any putative insurrection.

The term slaveneiland recurs in Dutch official documents in the mid- to late eighteenth century, as in the edict (plakaat) 307 of September 4, 1742, entitled Advertentie verbiedende om tussen zonsondergan en opgang op het lak van het slaveneiland te varen (Prohibition to sail on the lake of Slave Island between sunset and sunrise).²⁷ In the first British accounts there appears no reference to a Kaffir revolt in Colombo. In 1807 James Cordiner described Slave Island in a lucid and pragmatic fashion: “This peninsula divides the lake and receives the above appellation from having formerly been occupied by slaves, who were employed in the service of the Dutch government. The English on their arrival made it a station for the Malay regiment.”²⁸

Each writer focused on what interested them most. James Selkirk, a man of the church, saw the area as a religious center in 1844. No reference to a revolt of slaves seeps through: “A lake almost insulates the fort. In the centre of this lake is a tongue of land called Slave Island being the place where the Dutch used to keep their slaves. It now contains several good houses, one of which the most handsome and most pleasantly situated is the residence of the present Archdeacon of Colombo, the Venerable JMS Glenie.”²⁹

The events surrounding the murder of the fiscal point to the metamorphosis of an event over time and the dubious grounding on which authoritative knowledge of the name Slave Island rests. The deaths of de Swaan and his wife were caused by their domestic slaves, all originally from the East Indies, probably men and women who were in their employ in Kupang in West Timor, where de Swaan was the resident (opperhoofd) from 1717 to 1721. The slaves were brought to Colombo when their master was posted to Sri Lanka.³⁰ In 1723 the name Slave Island was already used for the place where the Dutch kept their company slaves. The equivalence between slave and African, which became internalised in the next centuries, did not work in the case of the fiscal’s murderers.

This does not mean that there had been no slaves of African origin or free Africans in Sri Lanka. Even if his numbers cannot be trusted, Ibn Battuta mentions the presence of five hundred Abyssinians in the service of the minister and admiral Jalasti in Colombo in the fourteenth century.³¹ Africans had fought in armies of the Portuguese and of the local kings of Sri Lanka, as testified in Sinhalese literary works such as the seventeenth-century war poems the Parangi Hatana (War of the Portuguese) and the Rajasiha Hatana (War of Rajasingha). The Dutch too used African slaves, acquired through privateers for hard labor in the port and fort as well as field labor in rice, cotton, and tobacco cultivation. There are, however, no records based on shipping lists or censuses of the number of African slaves during Dutch rule, apart from figures etched in reports of Dutch governors to their successors. The visual and judicial archives are more trustworthy. Africans together with slaves from India and the East Indies were employed as domestics in houses, as some Dutch paintings of Esaias Boursse testify.³² On a number of occasions African slaves appeared in court cases in the mid- and late eighteenth century, as prisoners such as Louison, an African slave from Mauritius, or as witnesses to crimes committed by other slaves.³³ Ten years after the murder of Barent van der Swaan, the former governor Jacob Christiaan Pielat warned the fiscal about trusting Kaffirs:

We cannot agree to the permanent appointment of two Kaffirs as assistants to the jailor for the guarding of the criminal prisoners. We consider that such an appointment should be made only in case of urgent necessity and even then, only temporarily; while they must never be allowed admittance to the prisoners alone but always in presence of the jailor, so as to prevent any conspiracies. The jailor alone must be held responsible, as the Kaffirs cannot be trusted.³⁴

The term “Kaffir” has had different semantic trajectories in Dutch and British colonial settings. Kaffir was a census category in Sri Lanka’s colonial censuses until 1911, but even as it disappeared from the bureaucratic language it continued to describe in popular culture a separate ethnic group of people of African descent. Unlike in South Africa, where Kaffir is today used as an offensive term to denigrate black people, in Sri Lanka the Sinhalese and Tamil usage of the term has no negative connotation. In South Africa during the early nineteenth century, the term would be used restrictively to qualify Xhosa people, while Khoikhoi and San, two other African ethnic groups, were referred to contemptuously as Hottentot and Bushman. The term Kaffir travelled to the metropole. The Xhosa wars from 1779 to 1880, fought between the Xhosa people and settlers of Dutch and British origin on the Eastern Frontier of the Cape of Good Hope, were unproblematically referred to as “Kaffir wars” in British parliamentary debates of the period.³⁵ Interestingly the term Kaffir, which once denoted “non-Muslims” at the Cape, later moved away from its original Islamic meaning and referred to slaves who performed police duties during the Dutch period.³⁶ Many Asians performed the function of “servants of justice” at the Cape, whereas in Batavia it was African slaves.³⁷ In Governor Pielat’s text referring to a Sri Lanka case, we might be dealing with a more fluid, non-racial notion of Kaffir that describes the function of executioner’s assistants or policeman and could also encompass convicts of many races, as in South Africa. Yet no other sources corroborate a broad, non-racial understanding of the term in Sri Lanka, which suggests a difference from the usage in Batavian or South African cases.³⁸

The presence of enslaved people in Sri Lanka is documented through different types of taxonomical exercises that were practiced during European rule in the maritime provinces. The archive of numbers where slaves appear is composed of censuses of the population of the island, Blue Books, and slave registers, the last enumeration being the kernel of the British intervention to gradually abolish slavery. There are moments when slaves who moved from one place to another were counted, but Indian Ocean slavery never yielded the type of lists of passengers on ships that became the norm in the late nineteenth-century indentured labour migration. Little is known, therefore, about the origin and journey by sea of enslaved peoples. There are only a few instances of captain’s logs, such as that of the ship Delaware, that refer to enslaved people in ships transiting in Sri Lanka. The voyage from Batavia to the Cape often with a transit in Galle or Colombo, is estimated to have taken seventy-eight days.³⁹ Many ships transported unfortunate unfree human beings under very difficult conditions as part of their cargo. The logbook of the Delaware refers to slaves only in quantities and as bodies, living or dead. On September 14, 1752, the ship was moored at Madras, and the captain’s log mentions carpenters working in the “slave rooms” on the ship. On October 15, fifteen slaves “belonging to the Honourable Company” were brought on board, and the ship was ready for sailing. Enroute another thirty women slaves and two children were collected. They had to face the brunt of a hurricane, after which one slave woman was found dead between decks on November 1. Later in November, as they approached Galle, the log stated that one of the slaves “is delivered of a girl.” On the morning of November 27 one of the enslaved women died.⁴⁰ In contrast to the practice in Atlantic slavery, where a slave gained a name in death owing to the need for accountability, her name and origin is not known or even mentioned.

The idea of inventorying populations was not a feature unique to the nineteenth century or to British rule, but under successive European powers, taxonomies obeyed a different logic. The Portuguese and Dutch had each ruled over the rich and populous maritime provinces of Sri Lanka for nearly 150 years, with far reaching social consequences.

Figures of enslaved people in the island dating from the Portuguese period and later accounts remained vague and anecdotal and mostly absent. A listing, for instance, referred to the Colombo population in terms of 900 families of “noble citizens” (moradores nobres) and some 1,500 other “Portuguese” families of artisans and merchants around 1650.⁴¹ Slaves were not mentioned. Neither did they appear in the Portuguese land registers (tombos) of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, since such registers recorded only landowners and potential taxpayers.⁴² The Dutch left various numbered accounts of the population, but with such differences that there remains much room for interpretation. There is thus considerable variation in the estimates of scholars and contemporary witnesses as to the number of slaves in the maritime provinces in the employ of the Dutch VOC or privateers. Remco Raben suggests that by April 1661 approximately ten thousand company and private slaves were working as cultivators on the land in southwestern Sri Lanka that Governor van Goens wanted to develop.⁴³ Other sources suggest lower figures for enslaved men, women, and children as company slaves in Colombo in the seventeenth century, but these figures, albeit tentative, give us an insight into the extent of slavery in the society of the day.⁴⁴ The sketches of Jan Brandes show us enslaved people in Dutch homes working as domestics, artisans, or cooks. A household in Colombo could have up to ten slaves working in various capacities.⁴⁵

During the Dutch administration, a first census of the population of Colombo was held in 1684 that counted only the free Christians that encompassed four population groups, categorised as Dutch, Castiz (born of European parents), Mestizo, and Toepass. The last two categories comprised people of mixed descent. Other lesser humans, considered heathens, which included Sinhalese, Muslims, Tamils, and slaves of various origins, were left out. In 1694 a census of Colombo counted and divided the population into two categories: “Free” and “Slaves.” The census revealed that over 50 percent of the population was enslaved.⁴⁶ Slaves played a crucial economic function in Colombo as in other VOC territories, and the census reflected the rulers’ concern for an appraisal of the availability of labour. VOC officials were heavily dependent on slave labour for all matters, from domestic work – in 1694, 74.8 percent of Dutch households had slaves — to construction and public works.⁴⁷ Unsurprisingly, it was the governor of Ceylon, Thomas van Rhee, who was the largest slaveholder in the Colombo castle, with forty slaves, but in the town the widow of the commander of Malabar (Jaffna), Isaak van Dielen, held sixty slaves.⁴⁸ Ekama estimates the number of slaves labouring for the company in 1771 as amounting to 784, but in the absence of a census the figure is only tentative.⁴⁹ Numbers fell in the eighteenth century owing to the decline in a demand for labour, the return of Sinhalese people who worked the land as fulfilment of their caste obligations, and the company’s preference for hiring private slaves rather than owning them as an economizing measure.⁵⁰ In 1789, by order of Governor Van de Graaf, the first census was made in Sri Lanka, covering all inhabitants in the Dutch East India Company, that is, the maritime provinces, and the population of free and enslaved enumerated was estimated at 817,000.⁵¹ Before this census there had been other forms of counting people for specific purposes. Indigenous land records on ola leaf (lekam miti) and later Portuguese tombos had surveyed lands and were directly tied to the issue of taxation or service rather than to an interest in counting and categorizing population groups. In contrast, Dutch tombos of the late eighteenth century, though designed to provide a detailed inventory of land ownership, yielded some information on the composition of the population in villages in Galle, Colombo, and Jaffna districts. However, the temporal disparity in the registration of villages failed to provide “a credible census figure of individuals and holdings.”⁵² Moreover, the Dutch were only faintly interested in analysing or classifying the island’s population, and one looks in vain for accounts of writers of the period that describe in detail the people of Sri Lanka, apart from Philippus Baldaeus’s early account and Francois Valentijn’s later one in 1726. Yet both drew extensively (if without attribution) on the work of others, so there might have been descriptions in reports or manuscripts.

Baldaeus gives a detailed description of the inhabitants of Jaffna, whom he observed in his capacity as a Dutch minister who had learned Tamil and spent a number of years in the area: “In Ceylon are divers clans, or Families as well as on the Coast of Coromandel. The Generation of the Bellales is the chiefest here since Christianity has been introduced, the Brahmans challenging the first rank among the Pagans.”⁵³ Valentijn’s account that gives precedence to the Sinhalese in the Kandyan kingdom is not, however, based on a first-hand encounter with the peoples of the island: “The inhabitants,” wrote Valentijn, “are in part Cingalese, in part Bedas or Weddas, but besides these there are also Moors, Malabars (already referred to) and very many Portuguese, Dutch, some English and French who are prisoners of the Emperor (King of Kandy).”⁵⁴ In both cases enslaved peoples were not referred to.

The division of the people into Sinhalese, Malabars (Tamils), and Moors was visible in the day-to-day bureaucratic accounts of the Dutch alongside the use of caste-like categories. Yet while these accounts did employ quantification, they differed from enumerations of the nineteenth century that followed a different rationale insofar as they led to a redirection of certain indigenous practices by affirming the value of particular forms of identity and consequent bodily distinctions. The colonial administrator E. B. Denham acknowledged this difference in 1911 when he wrote that “the Dutch were not ignorant of the value of censuses, but they regarded them as merely useful for taxation purpose.”⁵⁵

The term “black” was commonly found in accounts of Europeans from the seventeenth century to describe people whose complexion was considered dark. Egidius Daalmans, a Belgian physician who wrote his impressions of Cape of Good Hope and Sri Lanka in 1687, uses the term to qualify “Cingalese” or “blacks of Ceylon.”⁵⁶ There is also evidence that it was commonly used by the Dutch in Sri Lanka to qualify the subject peoples. The Dutch used the epithet kakkerlak for Portuguese descendants in the maritime provinces whose appearance was closer to that of the natives.⁵⁷ A graveyard in Galle divided into four parts points to the taxonomy based on colour, religion, and freedom that prevailed: the inner churchyard was reserved for European Christians, and probably also mestizos considered European enough, while the outer graveyard was subdivided into three sections: one for black (swarte) Christians both free and unfree, one for free non-Christians, and one for enslaved non-Christians.⁵⁸

The parallels between pre-British VOC taxonomies in colonies such as the Cape and Sri Lanka have seldom been foregrounded. The term “free black” is an obvious case in point. In Cape Town there is a curious and riveting story that goes back to the late eighteenth century about a “free black” called Coridon “of Ceylon” who was, it is believed, the first Muslim to own property in the Cape of Good Hope, then a Dutch colony. Intriguingly, the term “free black,” used to describe Coridon, a man who was once enslaved and then freed in Cape Colony – just like the Dutch-inflected “Moor” and “Kaffir” as an occupation – finds its way across the Indian Ocean into censuses and enumerations of people in Sri Lanka until 1838. These terms hint at a more general mobility or resonance of words and their shifting meanings from one colonial territory to another, from metropole to colony, and reflect an empire-wide episteme of unstable racial taxonomies. “Free black” could thus be found as a descriptor not only in the Americas, the Caribbean, and Africa but also in Indian Ocean territories and in Britain, but it carried different meanings in different locations. While in South Africa it qualified a person who had overcome his captive self, the slave, and was free, in Sri Lanka free blacks were Sinhalese, Tamils, or Muslims who were neither slaves nor whites. Outside South Africa few people would know that in 1794 it was a manumitted slave of Salie van de Kaap, the free black called Coridon of Ceylon, who owned the property on Dorp Street in Cape on which the Auwal mosque still stands today. The mosque is recognised as the first one established in the country. ‘Abdullah bin Qadi Abd al Salam, later known as Tuan Guru, born in 1712 and the son of a qadi, was a regal cleric from Tidore in the Ternate Islands of Indonesia and was appointed as its first imam. In 1793 Tuan Guru established a madrasa that operated from a warehouse attached to the home of Coridon in Dorp Street.⁵⁹

While popular knowledge recognises the geographical origins of Coridon as an undeniable fact through his description as being “of Ceylon,” there is actually no evidence that he was born in Sri Lanka. It is far more likely that he, like many others, simply passed through a port of Sri Lanka before making the long voyage to the Cape of Good Hope. Yet many historians hold up written records of the colonial bureaucracy as testaments of a retrievable past made of the lives of men whose origins remain uncertain.⁶⁰ If Coridon’s origins are opaque, they matter less than the story they symbolise. Coridon’s incomplete and uncertain journey from Sri Lanka to the Cape is not only exemplary of that of thousands of other lives, it also brings to light the connections that existed between places. In the Cape and Sri Lanka, two former VOC territories that became British crown colonies in the early nineteenth century, there were resonances in the mode of ordering subjects using place and race as markers in the eighteenth century that continued in other forms during British rule. One can see at times an official focus on the individual as a colonial subject: at others or simultaneously, a desire for sharpening difference through the delimitation of broad collectives with ascribed common features such as colour (whites and blacks) and people enjoying more or less liberty (free and enslaved).

During VOC rule, the term “black” (zwart) was equally used in Cape Colony for all manumitted slaves, exiles, and convicts who could be from Asian as well as African origin.⁶¹ For this reason free blacks or manumitted slaves described as “of Ceylon” in Cape records are virtually impossible to identify by ethnicity or birthplace because they generally have only one name, together with the “origin tag.” African, Malagasy, Indian, or Indonesian were all considered “Zwarten” at the Cape.⁶² The term “black” was a former Dutch racial qualification for their entire empire in Asia and Africa. In nineteenth-century Sri Lanka the British understanding of the term was similarly inclusive of all non-white, non-enslaved colonised people, thus encompassing Sinhalese, Tamils, and Muslims alike. Yet it is difficult to imagine how the VOC ideas of blackness that pervaded in Sri Lanka would have been transmitted to British colonial officials who took over governing the colony and influenced their perception of difference. It is more likely that ideas of skin colour and blackness were already influential in Britain from the late eighteenth century onward and travelled to the colonies from the metropole. Moreover, difference in colour as a social category was a feature in the British Caribbean in the early nineteenth century, where no other colonial powers had preceded the British. As early as in 1799 the first governor of Ceylon, Frederick North, as he set foot in Sri Lanka, identified “different orders of inhabitants,” and among the Burghers, a category of “Black Christians.”⁶³

The emergence and disappearance of the slave as a category of identity in Sri Lanka is an intriguing feature that has until now not been scrutinised.⁶⁴ The slave as a category figures in the prehistory of the British census of Sri Lanka alongside many incongruous other categories that include large, all-encompassing terms. These terms contrasted with the flurry of social formations in the island that orientalist scholars and many colonial administrators in the island had observed and recognised during the same period. From afar, race in the guise of euphemisms such as black and white was the prism through which the population was seen and regulated from the metropole, even if the colonial state was a racial formation that “marked differences by other names.”⁶⁵ Even with the waning of slavery as an institution, the absent figure of race structured the rule of colonial difference separating coloniser and colonised until the end of colonial rule. As slavery declined and more complex orientalist constructions of culture acquired prominence among rulers and elites, colour-based racial categories “black” and “white” gave way to cultural-linguistic formations that first included Burghers, Sinhalese, Tamils, and Moors and later extended to other social groups.

Radically different notions of the people of the island circulated among administrators and officials in London who were often responsible for designing the enumerations. They also shifted in time and varied according to the instrument of rule. Officials on the ground attempted to carefully produce gazetteers and administrative reports from first hand observation. They were often overwhelmed by what they encountered – the different “castes,” “races,” “mixed races,” “half castes,” “religions,” “languages,” and “classes of people” that Robert Percival described in 1803 with their own “manners, customs and language.”⁶⁶ This led to a tendency to flatten difference. The penchant for gaining knowledge of the non-European world by making the unfamiliar familiar by reading it through grids of intelligibility was a common feature of most colonial regimes. Some of the census categories emerged from this logic. The seemingly illogical and confused categories reflect the multiple understandings of social difference that prevailed among officials in London as well as among administrators of the British state who were sent to Sri Lanka to govern on its behalf.⁶⁷ Alongside this tendency to simplify, there were other trends that led to a more localised reading of social difference.

The lives and work of men such as Frederick North, Eudelin de Jonville, Antonio Bertolacci, John D’Oyly, and Alexander Johnston suggest that many colonial administrators in Sri Lanka were aware that the people they ruled did not fall into the simple color-coded categories of the censuses. Efforts at understanding the culture and customs of the peoples were visible in important policies enacted in the first two decades of the nineteenth century with regard, in particular, to the protection of Buddhism and to the extension of jury duty to local peoples in criminal cases where Europeans were not tried. These measures that recognized difference based on ethnicity, region, and religion were coeval with census operations.

When Frederick North, the first governor of Sri Lanka, embarked in London on the Brunswick in 1798 to sail to Bombay, he was accompanied by an exceptionally gifted group of men speaking a number of languages and bearing expertise in a variety of fields. Among them was Eudelin de Jonville, clerk for natural history and agriculture, who would write in French the first account on the island under the British, Some Notions About the Island of Ceylon. Jonville sent a rough draft of his manuscript to the board of the East India Company as early as 1801 and never ceased to share his ideas with his paymasters, making many attempts at publishing his account but in vain. The account contains many glaring misconceptions, especially on the “religion of the Boudho,” but it also conveys the eagerness that prevailed during the early nineteenth century, when the spirit of the Enlightenment easily merged with romantic notions, to understand the people of Sri Lanka, and the sense of curiosity that existed regarding the customs of the Sinhalese of the Low Country and Kandy.⁶⁸ Bertolacci, who came on the same ship with him and became controller general of customs and later acting civil auditor, divides the inhabitants of the island into “four distinct nations”: “Ceylonese Proper,” “Malabars or Hindoos,” “Moors,” and “Vedas.”⁶⁹

The two most prominent orientalists of the early nineteenth century were John D’Oyly, a key figure in the annexation of the kingdom of Kandy in 1815, and Alexander Johnston, who served as the island’s third chief justice from 1811 to 1819. Both men and those who gravitated around them were intrigued by the cultures they encountered and made efforts to learn the vernacular languages. D’Oyly, who had been instructed by the high priest of Matara, Karatota Kirti Sri Dhammarama, excelled in Sinhala and became the chief translator to the government. He drafted the Act of Settlement after the fall of the kingdom of Kandy to the British in 1815, in which occurs the phrase “The religion of Boodhoo…is declared inviolable.” William Tolfrey, who worked under D’Oyly in Kandy, translated the Bible into Sinhala and was the first Briton to master Pali.⁷⁰ Johnston’s lineage prepared him for an exceptional career as a colonial official. He had encountered the most renowned orientalists of India while growing up in Madura, where his father was paymaster, and during his time in Sri Lanka studied with great care the customs and laws of the indigenous people. He believed in the capacity of the natives to dispense judgment and reason. Thus, he was instrumental in introducing a Charter of Justice, which among other things introduced the jury system to the “natives of Ceylon.” According to article 11 of the charter, the collectors were directed to prepare “lists of all persons resident in their Districts who by their Character and condition may be deemed qualified to sit upon juries distinguishing them into their respective Classes and casts.”⁷¹ Writing about this measure later on, Johnston referred to the grantee of this new right as “half caste Native” and “every other native of the country to whatever caste or religious persuasion he might belong.”⁷²
The exoticising gaze of the early orientalists on what they perceived as the different communities and castes of the island had little bearing on the making of categories of classification in the early censuses, where the rule of “colonial difference” founded on race and colour still prevailed. Yet the recognition of groups based on language, caste, ethnicity, and religion in other affairs of the state, such as at the judiciary, lends credence to studies that adhere to a more multidimensional notion of difference in the colonial sphere.⁷³ Clearly, as far as governance was concerned, the grid of colonial power traversed the social order in its entirety rather than in binary terms.⁷⁴ The notion of blackness and the more complex reading of difference by orientalist scholar-administrators permeated in an uneven manner societies and bureaucracies in the metropole and the colonies.

Indian servants and Ayahs who lived in Britain in the eighteenth century were commonly referred to as “negro” or as “black.” It was not uncommon to hear about “a black man from Bengal,” “a black Indian boy,” or an “East Indian Black from Bombay” who had been brought over from India to work in the households of former East India Company officials.⁷⁵ To what extent these words indexed an inarticulate colour prejudice rather than a developed racial ideology is difficult to ascertain. Roxann Wheeler speaks of the “fluid articulation of human variety” and the “elasticity of race” in the eighteenth century. In particular, she warns against anachronistic and essentialist understandings of “race” as a set of fixed physical characteristics and suggests that diversity of human behaviour and religious and cultural traits were more important as markers of difference than differences in colour.⁷⁶ The presence of Africans in Britain was visible after the conquest of the New World, and they were seen serving in the court as trumpeters, or in the mansions of the gentry as pages or laundry maids. Rich planters, officers on slave ships, and seamen returned to Britain with African slaves.⁷⁷ When one looks beyond the statements of theorists of race and turns to the way race was practiced in late eighteenth-century Britain, the picture that emerges is somewhat different. The contrast between the eighteenth century and nineteenth century appears to be overstated. Later bigots could build on exclusionist and colour-inflected policies of the earlier century. This is not to deny the break that occurred in the nineteenth century, when social status and religion ceased to be so explicitly important to Britons as the English increasingly constructed an imperial cosmology whereby skin colour came to distinguish ruler from ruled.⁷⁸ In the first half of the nineteenth century, blacks were as ill-defined as a few decades before, when the plight of seamen originating in the American or Asian territories who had served on merchant ships or in the Royal Navy and were roaming without means in London led to the creation in 1786 of a Committee for the Relief of Black Poor by Jonas Hanway. This included all dark-skinned indigents, lascars from Mozambique to Malaya and Indian servants who totalled about ten thousand persons in London and other port cities.⁷⁹ This number increased with the arrival of free Americans after the American Revolution. Thus, when the censuses for the colonies were being created at the very moment Britain was living its troubled transition to a society without slaves, blacks defined as non-whites were already a familiar and inferior social group in the metropole. It is therefore not surprising that in British India and Sri Lanka the term “black” was used to describe Indians or Sinhalese and to label spatially segregated areas, as in the white town and black town of Madras and Colombo, where the British called the Pettah, the native area at the outer fringe, the black town.⁸⁰ Robert Percival explained in 1805 that the term “black town” came “from its being chiefly inhabited by black merchants and tradespeople.”⁸¹ Thus by the early nineteenth century the terms white and black seemed naturalized by British colonial officials on the ground.

It is in the late nineteenth-century imperial world that the term “blacks” ceased to loosely encompass all non-whites and become reserved for Africans, and Africa was constructed as the other that needed to be civilized and uplifted. The belief in British superiority became the norm, as well as the acceptance of the cultural inferiority of all those with black skins.⁸² A recent work on the census has argued that racial classification played a significant part in the way British people understood their empire, in contrast with German and Austrian predominant concerns with linguistic and cultural differences. For the British, the world was seen as one where different races competed, and in England this included a fear of Irish and Scottish immigration.⁸³ These ideas were then applied to the colonies. According to Christopher Anthony, throughout the British colonies the decennial metropolitan census initiated in 1801 and the U.S. enumeration conducted since 1790 served as models.⁸⁴ The first U.S. enumeration, for instance, made a distinction between whites, “all other free persons,” and slaves, thus building a racial classification into a scheme that was initiated to determine who was free and hence taxable.⁸⁵ The framing of difference along the lines of whites, others, and slaves obeyed a logic unique to the United States. Yet it showed family resemblances with the language in use in Britain and its colonies.

The census in colonised territories has generally been described as an instrument of rule in authoritative works dealing with colonialism and empire. What made it unique among other forms of statistical inquiry was its prerogative to gather information about a single territory. This could be a nation, as in Britain with the census of 1801, or a colony, such as Sri Lanka in the Census of 1824, which covered for the first time all the provinces under British rule, including the Kandyan provinces.

The enmeshing of knowledge and control has been the subject of a vast, multi-layered, and vigorously debated scholarship on colonial knowledge, power, technologies of rule, and governmentality that I will only briefly deal with here. The argument that the census stood as a document whose manifest rhetoric was technical but whose subtext was disciplinary is indeed a well-established one.⁸⁶ The gist of it is that the act of enumerating subjects living in newly conquered territories was conceived as a guide for rulers to deal with their subjects by acquiring knowledge of the number of potential bodies that could be taxed or used for war and labour. The disciplinary argument, however, is less convincing in the early nineteenth century when methods of collecting data in Sri Lanka were amateurish and categories used in censuses to divide the “natives” were of a transient nature. In Sri Lanka the first British endeavours to count the governed were only a little more systematic than those of their premodern predecessors, the Portuguese and Dutch, and remained characterised by an appearance of factuality that hid the fiction of categories. As in other colonial territories, the process of gathering statistical information was often fudged by informants, enumerators, and commissioners.⁸⁷ Although the census was a policy requirement made in the metropolis, it depended on numerous intermediaries for its implementation. Pragmatic reasons guided the process of enumerating peoples in Sri Lanka as in other colonies. Early race-based enumerations contrasted with the later ones insofar as the clear-cut categories based on colour and level of freedom were less protean in nature and conveyed less of an impression of confusion and ambiguity. There was some uncanny logic and order to the racialised view of society of the early nineteenth century. These early classifications were partly devised in London by ill-informed officials sitting in the Colonial Office who applied a single template to all crown colonies. They were not mirrors of society but rather revealed much about the interests and power relations of the counter and counted.⁸⁸ In this instance the census was partly answering a need that came from outside the colony: that of British parliamentarians eager to assess the success of amelioration policies with regard to the abolition of slavery in Sri Lanka, in contrast to the relative failure to end slavery in India. The presence of the slave as a category of census from 1814 to 1838 could be explained by an interest in numbers as evidence.

When a census was taken in 1814, there was still one independent Sinhalese kingdom in the hills of Kandy that remained, ruled by a dynasty that descended from South Indian Nayakkars. Antonio Bertolacci, a civil servant under Governor North, had undertaken a survey of the population of the maritime provinces between 1808 and 1810 based on food consumption and estimated the population at 700,000.⁸⁹ These were, however, uncertain times for the British, who were still not in full control of the island. In the census taken a few years later, in 1814, the population enumerated did not exceed 492,000, a much lower figure that has been explained by the incidence of a serious famine in the years 1811– 1813.⁹⁰ Bertolacci himself mentions repeated droughts in those years that were detrimental to the cultivation of rice and led to famine and distemper, especially in the district of Matara.⁹¹

The General Abstract of the Population of the Maritime Districts of the Island of Ceylon in 1814 divided districts into ethnolinguistic regions, namely, Singalese districts that included Colombo, Caltura, Galle, Hambantotte, Chilaw, and Malabar, and Tamil districts including Batticaloam, Trincomalee, Jaffnapatam, Delft, Vanni, and Mannar. The categories used to classify the population of the Colombo district into collectivities are religions and “casts.” Under the latter, however, one finds a variety of groups, ranging from ethnic groups such as Cingalese, Malabars, and Europeans to occupational groups including blacksmiths, wood-cutters, and barbers. In this long list of casts appear the two distinct categories of “free slaves” (numbering 209), and “slaves” (857). The enumeration in the Galle district only includes “free slaves,” while in the Batticaloa district there were two different categories, “slaves” (92), and “Kovilan Slaves of the Pagoda” (477). This group probably accounted for slaves of Vellalas (the highest caste among the Tamils) working in the temples. In the Trincomalee district yet another variation could be found, with two categories, “slaves” (70) and “Dutch Company Slaves” (30).⁹² The slave was thus omnipresent in this early census.

After the 1818 and 1821 acts of gradual emancipation of children of slaves, counting slaves and their opposite, free people or “free blacks,” acquired an additional function apart from that of offering the colonial government a picture of the peoples it was ruling, according to their occupation and their ability to be deployed for labour. Figures were indeed of crucial importance for the gradual abolition of slavery to be charted and proven by abolitionists before their many opponents in the British Parliament. Lt. Col. Colebrooke’s report of 1831 upon the administration of the government of Ceylon, which was invoked in a parliamentary paper of 1838, testifies to the importance of census numbers as verifiable evidence: “Personal slavery, however is nearly extinct in the Cingalese provinces, but it still exists among the Malabars in the northern districts of Ceylon. The number of slaves in the district of Jaffna, according to the returns of  1824, was 15,350. The number of domestic slaves throughout the maritime provinces does not exceed 1,000.”⁹³

In the 1824 census mentioned in the parliamentary paper, slave categories are included in even more detail than in 1814. Descendants of slaves number 221; free slaves, 1,115; and slaves, 17,538, including 15,341 entered as slaves among the “Covias, Nalluas, and Pallas of Jaffna,” 18 as “slaves of the Burghers,” and 78 as “formerly slaves of the late Dutch government.”⁹⁴ In the Colombo district, 610 slaves were listed separately according to gender and age (above or below puberty). The census also provides intriguing variations on the slave status of people: “descendants of slaves” are listed as numbering 221; “free slaves,” 577; and “slaves,” 610. The Galle district contains the same categories and includes a “Memorandum of the Slaves and Free Slaves,” clearly emphasizing the importance of this classification.⁹⁵

The reforms spawned by the Colebrooke-Cameron Commission (1829– 1830) endorsed free labour and conceded a form of representation through the nomination of unofficial members in a newly formed Legislative Council, a forum for discussion of legislative matters, to local elites of different communities—Low Country Sinhalese, Tamil, and Burgher. Thus, from then on, communities began to be identified racially in the “enumerable sense,” in contrast to the previous decades where there was a flurry of categories. The Ceylon Almanac of 1838 indicates that in a census of the population taken that year that did not cover the entire island, leaving out regions such as the Seven Korales, Nuwarakalawiya, and Bintenna, the population, counted and categorised, was estimated at 1,241,825 persons. These types of figures that were regularly published in almanacs and Blue Books were based on headmen’s returns and birth and death registers.⁹⁶ Their doubtful accuracy was compounded by the fact that many people fled instead of submitting themselves to counts as they feared taxation as a consequence. The final appearance of the slave as a category of census and official classification was in 1838. By that time slavery had been abolished in the rest of the empire except in India, Sri Lanka, and St. Helena, and the commissioners of Eastern Inquiry had published the Colebrooke-Cameron Report, generally read as a key moment in the country’s encounter with modernity.⁹⁷

For historians of colonialism, the truth of numbers is less important than the mirror, even partial and warped, that the census holds on a colonial understanding of indigenous society. The difference from India is striking. Intriguingly, in sharp contrast to similar enumerations in gazetteers and early censuses held in India during the nineteenth century where caste and occupation were the markers, in Sri Lanka the census categories until 1838 were not only based on skin color (whites and blacks) but also indexed freedom or lack of freedom.⁹⁸

In a practical sense, the arrival of notions of white and black conjoined with slaves and free blacks in the bureaucratic language of Sri Lanka during British rule could be linked to a template that was being applied to the empire at large and began with the Blue Books in 1822. The colonial Blue Books appear to have originated in a request from the Commons Select Committee of Finance in 1817 for returns of offices in the colonies. A book asking for the return of statistical information was first sent to each governor in 1822; this seems to have increased to three blank books by 1828. Lord Bathurst was the colonial secretary who inaugurated the issue of Blue Books on colonial affairs for all the colonies from 1822 onward that purported to give for each colony “a species of comprehensive budget.”⁹⁹ A colonial publication succinctly summed up the history of Blue Books:

The Colonial Office, in Downing Street, has received annually for a series of years a “Blue Book” in manuscript from each Colony, containing a variety of commercial, financial, ecclesiastical, and general information for the use of Government. The “Blue Books” were commenced about the year 1828. Three blank books, with ruled columns and printed headings, are sent to each Colony every year; the blank columns are filled in by returns from the different departments, under the authority of the Colonial Secretary in each settlement; these returns are then sent in duplicate to Downing Street, and one of the three copies is retained in the Colony for the use of the Governor.¹⁰⁰

In Sri Lanka, as in other British colonies such as Grenada or British Guiana, the population section of these annually produced colonial Blue Books of the early nineteenth century referred to “White,” “Free Black” or “Free Coloured,” and “Slave.”¹⁰¹ These were the printed headings that formed a common grid of legibility to deal with the diverse peoples under British rule. This empire-wide system constituted a forerunner of the modern, scientifically conducted censuses, but this uniformity was lost after the 1840s when each colony sought an individual form of categorization.¹⁰²

On page 127 of the Blue Book of 1825, the governor would read this directive sent to him from London: “Insert population according to last census, and if none has ever been taken according to the last means of information that may be accessible.”¹⁰³ These orders were diligently followed. The figures in the Blue Book of 1827 were based on the first official census that was made in 1824 under Governor Edward Barnes. They set the stage for a division of the people into imperial categories based on skin colour and freedom.

In the enumeration of 1838, the final one where slaves were counted, blacks could be either “free” or slaves, unlike whites, who by definition enjoyed freedom.¹⁰⁴ As the nineteenth century proceeded, the grid of the table began to form the core of census reports and supported all official missives from Colombo to London discussing the matter of slavery.¹⁰⁵ With the table, a taxonomy was produced together with a hierarchy and positions of things or people in relation to each other. The idea of certain groups being the numerical proportion of a whole (the total) was a new and revolutionary concept. The table brought legitimacy to figures that were far from reliable.

Table 1.1 Population of Sri Lanka Based on Ceylon Almanac of 1838

For censuses carried out in the 1820s and 1830s, the count of slaves in households was based on headmen’s returns. How was information collected? Were enslaved people spoken to? If the head of household was indigenous to the island, as the main informant, did his answers reflect the variety of words and meanings that existed in the vernacular languages for “slave”? The Sinhalese-English Dictionary of 1830, compiled under government patronage by William Tolfrey with the help of two local informants, Cornelis de Saram and Don Jacobus Dias Bandaranaike, and taken on by Rev. Benjamin Clough upon the death of Tolfrey, lists a variety of words that are translated as slave, which brings into light the vagueness and pliable nature of the category:¹⁰⁶

Bhritiya: servant, slave
Cheti: female servant or slave
Das: slave, skill, ability, sight, seeing
Dasaya: slave, bond servant
Desi: female slave
Goyu: freckle, slave
Karmakara: hired labor, servant, name of Yama, regent of the dead, slave
Kella: female slave, little girl, lass
Midya: female slave
Parichara: guard, attendant, companion, slave, servant
Pataraturu: slave, bond servant, menial, dependent
Pessa: servant, slave
Piliyana: slave, dependent, servant, menial
Sevakaya: slave, servant, menial
Vidupa: slave, servant, menial
Wala: a slave, dependent¹⁰⁷

The words dasaya and pataraturu convey most sharply the idea of being bonded rather than working as a free (nidahas) servant in a household. Yet other words, such as pessa or vidupa, suggest an overlap between the status of slave and servant, which might have had some bearing on census figures. These words reflect, as in the Indian case, “the range of labour arrangements that could be termed slavery, each involving slightly different patterns of servitude and ownership.”¹⁰⁸ Trust in numbers and figures among British officials was not a constant, and the imperfection of the data was clearly acknowledged. In 1838 the extraordinary variations of the number of slaves in the statements of the population caused some anxiety in Justice Jeremie, who read them as a sign that slaves had been imported to the island. But this interpretation was quickly dismissed by Governor R. W. Horton, who claimed that “such statements are of no authority and are compiled from very imperfect data.”¹⁰⁹

The flourishing of census making and enumeration in Europe arose amid the context of the rise of statistics and new tools of analysis. Interestingly, it was at Haileybury, home to the East India College, that census-making officials and enumerators for the British Empire were trained in statistics.¹¹⁰ The census had many genealogies. In Norbert Peabody’s argument, the genesis of Indian census categories and modes of knowing based on caste can be traced to enumerations of households taken in the kingdom of Marwar between 1658 and 1664 under the direction of the kingdom’s home minister. It was, he suggests, not a purely European episteme since colonial discourses often built on indigenous ones.¹¹¹ His argument challenges a long tradition of scholarly production on the census in India and Sri Lanka that foregrounds its unique generative feature. The census of India, in B. S. Cohn’s seminal work, in particular, is shown not only casting an external gaze but also creating many of the social forms, as categories of practice through a process of classifying and objectifying.¹¹² Arjun Appadurai has referred to the “colonial imaginaire” produced by these inaccurate and unscientific “colonial body counts.” “Numbers,” he contends, “gradually became… part of the illusion of bureaucratic control and a key to a colonial imaginaire in which countable abstractions, both of people and of resources created the sense of a controllable indigenous reality.”¹¹³

In retrospect, and in contradistinction to the view on the modern census (1871), a very different argument could be made with relation to the early British modes of enumeration in Sri Lanka. In India, caste, in spite of the absence of any form of consensus on caste or caste hierarchies, became entrenched and the norm. In Sri Lanka, however, there was a much longer phase of experimentation, contest, and flurry of categories. In fact, the census categories that were in use in the early decades of the nineteenth century completely disappeared, to be replaced by others that remained, nonetheless, equivocal.

The reality of colonial rule was, however, an uncontested relation of power where the rulers exerted coercion over the indigenous peoples of the land, encompassed in the racial term “free blacks” to distinguish them from the category of slaves. In the Sri Lankan case, the necessity of counting the enslaved population kept alive the category of free blacks until the late 1830s.

On August 13, 1838, Governor J. A. Stewart Mackenzie sent the secretary to the colonies, Lord Glenelg, a missive with numbers of slaves formally manumitted since the meeting of the Legislative Council on June 28, 1838, the number of slaves registered under Ordinance No. 3 1837, and a return of the number of slaves according to the latest census. The census of 1838 and its categories of classification clearly served a distinct function: that of charting, in the words of the governor himself, the “happy advance to abolition of slavery in the island.”¹¹⁴

After the slave disappeared as an identifiable social entity, the orientalist idea that the social body was an aggregation of collective and communal bodies would gradually gain ground, as it already informed the first forms of political representation based on group difference granted to the islanders in the 1830s following the Colebrooke-Cameron reforms.

The slave register, unlike the census and Blue Book, offers data about named individuals rather than groups. The most comprehensive registers are those of 1818–1832, but there are earlier slave registers in the British period that have been either destroyed or lost in the process of creating an archive. In 1798 Brigadier General de Meuron, who exerted military power over Sri Lanka after the Dutch capitulation, recommended the gradual abolition of slavery and the establishment of a register to secure to proprietors of slaves their property subject to a certain tax. Private property – which included slaves – had been guaranteed in all the capitulations. Governor North issued a proclamation in 1801 according to which all slaves were to be produced with their bonds and registered by May 1, 1802, or else they would be considered free. Governor Maitland, his successor, ordered the registration of slaves within four months of his regulation of August 14, 1806. There were delays, however, and the registration was never completed. The Maitland registers have never been read or cited in the historiography of the island. In 1818 two new regulations (nos. 9 and 10) were passed in Sri Lanka, which led, inter alia, to the creation of a registry of slaves in all areas of the maritime provinces. The registers for the northern districts of the island, where the majority of slaves lived, were divided into two kinds: those for domestic slaves and those for Nalavar, Pallar, and Coviyar slaves, who were indigenous to the island. The slaves listed in the registers of the southern districts were city dwellers who worked in homes as domestics or artisans and whose ancestors generally came from other VOC territories. Their names offer some insight, although very tentative, into the possible origin of the slaves.

In the slave registers for the Colombo district, for instance, different clusters of names appear: slaves who were given names from classical mythology, others who were given biblical names, names from the months of the year or days of the week, and Dutch or European sounding names. A fair number of slaves had names that were clearly Asian in origin, even when written down phonetically by the hesitant hand of a British official. These names, which take us back to those slaves who died in the pillory in 1723, merit some mention.¹¹⁵

Sri Lanka Names
Caronchy, Rascowella, Pooncha (3), Apu, Araliya, Kediramere, Champokke (2) (Champika ?), Mootowa, Caloewa (kalu), Pantchi, Suman (Saman)

India
Apu, Sarvel (Sharvil), Mallati (Malathi) (2)

Malay
Lucho (Lucu), Achamatus (2), (Ahmatus), Bentan (Bintan), Zamida, Ontong (Untung), Teija (Teja), Pooncha (3), (Puncak), Norifah (2), Zuraidah (2), Sele (Sallay/Salih), Champokke (3), (Cempaka), Seewa (2), (Sewa), Muskin (Miskin), Andika, Mawar, Jelek, Melati (2), Nuufiah/Nofiah, Norifsa (Norfizah), Seya (Zaidah), Suman (Saman), Satu

Javanese
Sewo

Balinese
Puto (Putu), Bugu, Lakaay (Lakaag), Lafoor

North India
Zulfia, Seema, Zamida, Assani (Asani), Packreen (Pakhreen), Kutheria, Afsana, Afsen (Afshin), Jafar

Tamil
Kethan, Ayyapan, Jehel Covia, Sinne Pulle, Letchemi (2), (Latcumi), Moettoe (2), (Muthu), Namasivagam, Savery Mooto, Sinnacathy (Sinnakutty)

Muslim Tamil
Mootoosamat (Muthu Samath)

Malayali
Karuppa (2), Calle Cottal, Arathi, Cutthoor Kitto, Palliadal (Palliyadiyil), Narapore Patcha, Markan (Marakkan)

The limited data from slave registers suggests a predominantly South and Southeast Asian origin of around 10 percent of the names. Allowing slaves to keep their birth names is a unique phenomenon that is not found in slave registers of other Indian Ocean colonies. The vast majority of slave names in the registers, however, are unidentifiable in terms of origin. In the majority of cases, slaves were renamed in a dehumanising act of erasure. James Scott has famously argued that a significant aspect of maintaining relations of domination consists of the symbolization of domination by demonstrations and enactments of power, such as erasing the past of a person through renaming and cutting family ties.¹¹⁶ Renaming was essential to enforcing domination and creating powerlessness. “Slaves differed from other human beings,” writes Orlando Patterson, “in that they were not allowed freely to integrate the experience of their ancestors into their lives, to inform their understanding of social reality with the inherited meanings of the natural forebears, or to anchor the living in any conscious community of memory.”¹¹⁷ The trajectory of the notion of blackness, the metamorphosis of the Indonesians accused of killing a Dutch fiscal into African Kaffir rebels, is understandable only in relation to the shifting official and popular perceptions of slavery in the long nineteenth century.

Over the first half of the nineteenth century, the census was a bureaucratic instrument that charted the collective through the delimitation of people along colour lines and a simple grid that separated free and unfree peoples. Its purpose was both disciplinary, insofar as it was used by colonial functionaries on the ground to rule their subjects by extracting taxes from them, and justificatory, as it provided numerical data crucial to negotiations with their interlocutors in the metropole.¹¹⁸ It was, for instance, possible to use numbers to suggest initiating reforms in the labour regime or for parliamentarians in London to add fuel to their campaign for the abolition of slavery in the empire by arguing that slave labour was still a significant feature in the island. Numbers provided evidence in spite of their often dubious accuracy. The disappearance of the slave, black, white, and free black as categories of enumeration firmly entrenched the transformation “of the census as an instrument of taxes to an instrument of knowledge.”¹¹⁹

Reading the enumerations of the early nineteenth century along the grain allows a reflection on the xenologies of the day and on what determined the choice of unstable taxonomies based on colour and freedom and what led to their end. The presence of the categories of blacks and slaves stems from different and connected anxieties of a new colonial power in the island: the establishment of firm and uncrossable boundaries between colonizer (white) and colonized (free blacks), defined in a binary, must be conceived as deeply connected to the imperial demand for charting the successful decline of slavery.

The life and death of categories reflect, as this chapter has shown, what is at stake at a particular moment in time: in this case, the necessity for colonial officials to manage the transition from slavery to its abolition. The disappearance of the categories of slave and free blacks saw the appearance of racialised categories to describe the various collectivities that formed the subject population of the crown colony. With the formal and definitive Ordinance of Abolition of 1844, the category of slave began to fade from the memory of people in the island and undergo the metamorphosis or blackening described in the first part of this chapter.

In the popular realm, however, notions of slave and black travelled in time, acquiring their own garbs of meaning. Slaves were increasingly associated with Africans, as memories and records of slaves hailing from other parts of the colonial world faded away. The term “black” has a similar history as “slave,” disappearing from public documents in the 1830s but remaining as an invisible signifier until the departure of the British from the island. As late as 1942 a Sri Lankan mutineer against British rule in the military settlement of the Cocos Islands explained his motive for mutineering in terms of a war between blacks and whites.¹²⁰

The next chapters will explore the lives of individual slaves in Sri Lanka through a range of documents where the enslaved is a name or belongs to a collective, where she sometimes has a monetary value attached to her, and where, on occasion, she appears alongside a master whose life is given some prominence. These stories will bring to light the partial nature of our knowledge of events and people of the past and the logic of the procedures through which information is collected, stored, conserved, and utilized as well as memorialized or forgotten.