Banishment and Belonging: Exile and Diaspora in Sarandib, Lanka and Ceylon (Asian Connections)
Cambridge University Press, 11/21/2019
EAN 9781108727242, ISBN10: 1108727247
Paperback, 298 pages, 22.9 x 15.2 x 1.7 cm
Language: English
Lanka, Ceylon, Sarandib: merely three disparate names for a single island? Perhaps. Yet the three diverge in the historical echoes, literary cultures, maps and memories they evoke. Names that have intersected and overlapped - in a treatise, a poem, a document - only to go their own ways. But despite different trajectories, all three are tied to narratives of banishment and exile. Ronit Ricci suggests that the island served as a concrete exilic site as well as a metaphor for imagining exile across religions, languages, space and time: Sarandib, where Adam was banished from Paradise; Lanka, where Sita languished in captivity; and Ceylon, faraway island of exile for Indonesian royalty under colonialism. Utilising Malay manuscripts and documents from Sri Lanka, Javanese chronicles, and Dutch and British sources, Ricci explores histories and imaginings of displacement related to the island through a study of the Sri Lankan Malays and their connections to an exilic past.
1. Introduction
2. Diasporic crossing
Malay writing in nineteenth-century Ceylon
3. Remembering Java
4. 'Ceyloned'
the view from the other shore
5. Exilic journeys in time, place and writing
6. Nabi Adam
the paradigmatic exile
7. Banishment and inter-religious encounters
a Malay Ramayana
8. Ceylon Malays
military and literary paths
9. Malay writing in Ceylon
roots and routes
Glossary.