Colonial Knowledge and Human Classification in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Sri Lanka

In 18^th century Sri Lanka, Dutch officials and writers took little notice of disjunctions between ideas of human difference found in the East India Company’s varied administrative practices and those found in Dutch language discourses aimed primarily at Company officials and other elites in the Netherlands and Batavia.  The two realms sometimes impinged upon each other, but the lack of an authoritative scheme was of no concern.  Direct Sri Lankan efforts to shape Dutch knowledge focused primarily on the notions that underlay specific administrative practices.  After 1796, when the British replaced the Dutch, they attempted to draw on and extend pre-existing Dutch knowledge.  At first, the British too were comfortable working within multiple systems of human classification, and Sri Lankans seeking to influence British knowledge continued to focus on specific concerns.  Beginning in the 1830s, however, British perceptions of Sri Lanka were shaped strongly by new discourses that assigned race, religion and caste distinct roles that differed from those put forward in India.  From the beginning, Sri Lankans participated in the construction of this colonial sociology, which many scholars see as constituting the origins of modern identity politics.  However, although the new discourses impinged upon entrenched administrative knowledge, they did not sweep it away.  Regional and contingent forms of human classification, though sometimes deliberately obscured in official and elite discourses, continued to play an important role in colonial administration, and their details continued to form the subjects of debates among both officials and Sri Lankans.  Scholarly efforts to assess the history of social classification and knowledge in 18^th and 19^th century Sri Lanka need to assess both realms – general discourses and administrative practice.  They also need to investigate the changing ways in which each realm impinged upon the other.