Given the recent political history of Sri Lanka, “displacement and exile” has been the central theme of several scholarly works on the country. They have dealt, at the macro level, with the experiences of the migrants and refugees who left the country during the three-decade-long civil war and, at the micro level, with the dislocation and relocation of the people within the country during the war and, importantly, after the end of the civil war in 2009.
Ronit Ricci's book Banishment and Belonging also deals with the theme of “displacement and exile,” but it stands out from the rest for several reasons. First, the book focuses on the community of Malays who were brought to the island by the Dutch in the late seventeenth century. The exiles, convicts, slaves, and soldiers were drawn from different parts of Indonesia but remained united by their experience and their struggle to maintain their culture and language in the distant land. It was through adherence to Islam and the Malay language that the disparate groups sustained their identity and culture even while living amid the Sinhalese and Tamils. Today's Sri Lanka was once called Sarandip and later Ceylon, the names providing meanings to the exploration of imaginings of space and time.
Second, the research is incredible and befitting a prize-winning author like Ricci, whose earlier work, Islam Translated, dealt with the impact of movements and languages in the different versions of the Book of One Thousand Questions.Footnote 1 Ricci constructs the life of the Malays in painstaking detail from Dutch, Arabic, Malay, and Javanese texts and manuscripts housed in the Netherlands, Indonesia, Malaysia, the United Kingdom, and Sri Lanka and from interviews with Sri Lankan Malays on the island. The latter are now part of the archives of the British Library.
Third, Ricci's work is placed within the framework of what geographer Doreen Massey reconceptualized as “simultaneity of stories-so-far” that is so relevant and significant in this age of globalization. The account of the physical and imaginary “space” in which Sri Lankan Malays live, which is shaped by the histories and imaginings of displacement, makes for compelling reading.
The book begins with an account of Malay writing in nineteenth-century Ceylon (chapter 2). The Malay Compendium, comprising mainly Arabic- and Malay-language texts belonging to the Saldin family, highlights the nature of the connections between the Malay community and the Arab world. Chapters 3, 4, and 5 are explorations of memories of Java. Chapter 3 draws from personal correspondence between the exiled Javanese royalty in the 1720s to establish the sense of loss and longing, while chapter 4 discusses, among other things, Javanese accounts of the exile and posthumous return of Amangkurat III in 1708 and Pangeran Arya Mangkunagara in 1753, indicating that the narratives followed the disempowerment of Javanese royalty. The account of anxieties of return of the exiles forms chapter 5, with the representations of women's voices adding a significant dimension.
Of special mention is chapter 6, which takes “the foundational Muslim tradition of Adam's banishment from Paradise and his fall in Sarandip as a starting point” (p. 125). According to Muslim tradition, the Prophet Adam was banished to Sarandip from Paradise by God for tasting the forbidden fruit. He landed on Nudh mountain, which is now known as Adam's Peak. This story is found in tenth- to twelfth-century Arab and Persian texts and in later Southeast Asian texts. The Malay community found parallels between its own exile and Adam's fall. This account is followed by an exploration of the Malays’ relatability to yet another discourse in religion, the banishment of Rama and Sita to the island in Hindu mythology (chapter 7). That the Malays continued to engage with the Ramayana even in the land of exile, while it held little significance for the other Muslims amid whom they lived, indicates that the plight of Adam and Sita must have resonated deeply with the exiles in the island.
Chapter 8 moves to the colonial era and focuses on the Malays’ military affiliations and the impact of it in the preservation of literary culture as also the narrative of the significant wars during the period from their perspective. This is built upon in the final chapter to establish the ways in which the Malays’ experiences have been documented in writing. Considering that the Malays form a miniscule portion of the population, their perspectives have remained on the fringes.
Simply put, Ricci's work is an exploration of spatial connections between the banished and the homes, people, and culture they left behind. It is an account of an exilic life across time, of hardship and struggle that revolved around imaginings of home and belongingness. Its brilliance, however, lies in the examination of the nomenclature in the context of the imaginings and experiences of the Malays. Sarandip, Lanka, and Ceylon serve as metaphors for imagining exile across space and time.
