Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Sunil S Amrith's
Crossing the Bay of Bengal: The Furies of Nature and the Fortunes of Mi-
grants
tells the human, economic and environmental history of the bay whose 'western
gateway' was once Ceylon.
The British
The British initially viewed Sri Lanka in strategic terms, and considered the eastern har-
bour of Trincomalee as a counter to French influence in India. After the French took over
the Netherlands in 1794, the pragmatic Dutch ceded Sri Lanka to the British for 'protec-
tion' in 1796. The British moved quickly, making the island a colony in 1802 and finally
taking over Kandy in 1815. Three years later, the first unified administration of the island
by a European power was established.
The British conquest unsettled many Sinhalese, who believed that only the custodians of
the tooth relic had the right to rule the land. Their apprehension was somewhat relieved
when a senior monk removed the tooth relic from the Temple of the Sacred Tooth Relic,
thereby securing it (and the island's symbolic sovereignty) for the Sinhalese people.
Sinhalese angst grew further when British settlers began arriving in the 1830s. Coffee
and rubber were largely replaced by tea from the 1870s, and the island's demographic mix
was profoundly altered with an influx of Tamil labourers - so called 'Plantation Tamils' -
from South India. (These 'Plantation Tamils' were - and still are - separated by geo-
graphy, history and caste from the Jaffna Tamils.) Tamil settlers from the North made their
way south to Colombo, while Sinhalese headed to Jaffna. British colonisation set the is-
land in a demographic flux.
Sir James Emerson Tennent's affable nature shines through in his honest and descriptive
writing about 19th-century Sri Lanka, now serialised at
www.lankaweb.com/news/fea-
