After more than 200 years, the Dutch Government has returned six Kandyan artefacts to Sri Lanka. These include, a recent report confirms, “a golden and a silver kasthãné or sabre, a golden knife, two maha thuwakku or wall guns, and Lewke Disave’s cannon”. Their return follows an international provenance research which folded up last December.
Perhaps the most valid and pertinent comment at the event came from Department of National Museums Director General Sanuja Kasthuriarachchi. Speaking after the signing of the transfer agreement, she noted that it was “heartening to see these cultural symbols which mirror the cleverness of Sri Lankan artisans… reclaiming their due pride of place”.
Perhaps because we have been conditioned to respond to the sensational, the larger than life, the ceremony did not dominate news headlines. But it should have. The transfer marks yet another point in a long-running debate. Should these artefacts be returned or should they remain in museums far removed from their place of origin?
I believe that they should be returned, for a simple reason: these items were not appropriated; they were taken away, looted. As Shashi Tharoor has aptly reminded us, the word ‘loot’ itself is deeply embedded in European colonialism. Against that backdrop, it is not just fair by the formerly colonised, it is also incumbent on the former colonisers, to return these artefacts.
Thwarting emergence of anti-imperialist movement
Kasthuriarachchi’s comment underlies another important point, namely that these artefacts are a reminder of what our civilisation once had. In the popular discourse, Sri Lanka is typically described as a trade entrepot, an economy built and dependent on trade with other countries. This was not always the case.
While claims of the island being the granary of the East are, at one level, far-fetched – at least in its modern history, Sri Lanka has never been able to produce enough food for itself – it is equally far-fetched to claim that Sri Lanka had no industries of its own.
As scholars like Kumari Jayawardena have observed, Sri Lanka had a thriving boatbuilding culture, along with other industries. Because these were dependent on State patronage, once successive European powers took over, they came under the control and patronage of Western mercantilist economic interests.
As Vinod Moonesinghe has noted in an essay on trade in ancient Sri Lanka, commerce that had been conducted “for the benefit of all” took on a totally different dimension with the advent of Western colonial expansion. Western governments, in effect, became the sole buyers and sellers of local merchandise, placing restrictions on private trade but at the same time enabling other minor ventures like carpentry and renting.
Kumari Jayawardena makes the point that these interventions ultimately thwarted the emergence of a labour market, “a concomitant if not a prerequisite of capitalist production”. Notwithstanding debates about whether these interventions constituted capitalism – a notion articulated by world systems theorists – it cannot be denied that they constrained economic activity.
This logic, as it stood, transformed under the British, specifically during the 1830s, when colonial authorities laid the foundation for a plantation economy. Ostensibly driven by the market, the plantation economic model depended as much on State patronage as it did on the initiative of private merchants and traders. The colonial State, for instance, controlled access to credit, forcing the local bourgeoisie to turn to foreign usurers and in effect pitting them against the latter.
Again, as Jayawardena has noted, these interventions prevented the emergence of a proper anti-imperialist movement. Since the local bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie confronted foreign and minority groups on a daily basis, they saw these groups in a much more antagonistic light than they did the colonial authorities.
Confronting a colonial past
When Colombo-based commentators, who should know better, bemoan Sri Lanka’s inability to transform into a modern nation-state and contend that the British failed in this task, they imply that the colonial bureaucracy envisioned that transformation as their objective. This was very far from the case.
European powers bequeathed to the country a civil service and a public sector, but these were hardly reflective of the needs of the country. Statistics from the 1940s and 1950s – as recorded by The Ceylon Economist – show that a multitude of people suffered from landlessness and chronic poverty. This is hardly in line with assertions that Sri Lanka had by 1948 become nearly as developed as Japan and Singapore.
We should not, of course, blame Europe for all the problems facing us today. But demands for reparations and for the restoration of stolen artefacts are not symbolic gestures, they are embedded in historical realities, in struggles that have yet to end.
Recent events in Africa show that colonialism, in the classic sense, has never really finished. Colonialism may have been succeeded by neocolonialism, but something of the old ideology remains, compelling the West to view certain regions as theirs. In a piece to Foreign Policy, Howard French puts it well: in countries like Gabon and Cameroon, he observes that “the West, led by France, has been far too complicit in a lack of social and democratic progress”.
I think the recent transfer of artefacts by the Dutch Government should force us to revisit certain histories, to reflect on them, so as to make sense of where we are and, more importantly, where we may have been. Colonialism, like racism, is a fact from which neither the colonised nor the coloniser can retreat; it confronts us every day. This is not to say that there are easy fixes to the problems of colonialism, because there aren’t any.
Yet until the Global South stands straight and demands at least a bare minimum of what it has lost to the ravages of European imperialism, until it reclaims what is due to it, we may never see an end to those problems. The structural imbalances of the world may not be solely due to 200 years of colonialism, but those 200 years have had an impact on these imbalances. Until we acknowledge this, we run the risk of becoming revisionists.
(The writer is a freelance columnist who can be reached at udakdev1@gmail.com. He is the Chief International Relations Analyst at Factum, an Asia-Pacific focused foreign policy think tank based in Colombo and accessible via www.factum.lk)