Gaston Perera is known for his historical novels of the Portuguese period; his first foray into history proper was Kandy Fights the Portuguese: A Military History of Kandyan Resistance (Colombo: Vijitha Yapa, 2007), a detailed and helpful consideration of military matters during the 1594–1638 period. Unencumbered by any intrusive political agenda, it was more concerned with describing axes than with grinding them. The present book, however, announces itself as falling “quite unashamedly, into the ‘nationalist interpretation of history’ strand,” in contrast to “Western historiographical fashions” (p. xi). It is also, self-confessedly, the work of an amateur and clearly has a popular audience in mind. It is not straightforward, then, to establish the fair criteria by which to review it because it simply does not have the same aims as current professional history writing. Its primary objective is less to understand the past on its own terms than to hold to account the attempts by the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Portuguese to Christianize Sri Lanka. The tone of the book is therefore as if a terrible crime has been committed, and we need to investigate how it was done and by whom.
The book can be read as a case study of the limits to what can be achieved by reading through the relevant primary sources in translation without much background or participation in broader historical scholarship. What does the working historian feel the lack of? Above all, a sense of context, the mental lives that produced these sources and the political struggles they reflect, but also thoroughgoing source criticism, an appreciation of chronological change, and, least of all, certain scholarly habits of citation.
The book opens with an account of European ideology, which means their “innate right to exterminate other nations” (p. 3), and moves on to consider how missionaries were recruited, trained, and paid, focusing on all that was shabby or sordid (although this does include a useful reminder of how ill equipped in local languages the Franciscans in Sri Lanka were), before discussing the various “strategies” such as top-down conversion and the use of force—all the dirty tricks that conned and pressured the Sinhalese into submission.
On the concept of conversion, Perera tells us that what it “‘really is in the Christian sense” is the internalization of belief (p. 207). He illustrates this with a quotation from Alessandro Valignano about the role of the “workings of the Holy Spirit,” which Perera takes to mean internal spirituality. In fact, it is a reference to the activities of God on Earth, and this providential interpretation of how conversion happens could render concerns for interior motivations redundant. Indeed, the sacramental quality of baptism as a vehicle for divine grace helps explain why some missionaries took a rather blasé view of prebaptismal instruction. Perera refers to this suggestion of mine, but discounts it because he cannot find any missionaries explicitly articulating it in the Sri Lanka documents. This understanding of baptism was a basic feature of Catholic doctrine that would hardly need rehearsing in correspondence, while the connection with conversion methods was made by a learned preacher in Goa, Diogo de Borba in the 1540s, for example. To be sure, the sufficiency of baptism in conversion was controversial, but what is not grasped here is that the question of conversion was not a settled “fact” but an inherently ambiguous notion which could be interpreted variously in the light of different strands of the Christian tradition.
The author instead advances another explanation: that the missionaries came to adopt a more “cynical” and lax approach to conversion methods out of despair once they had failed to convert the island's royalty. Yet this approach cannot have been fundamentally a product of Sri Lankan vicissitudes, simply because it is found across the world in the early to mid-sixteenth century—most notably in Mexico, where the Franciscans were baptizing in the hundreds and thousands. Context is all. Only once or twice does the author get snarled up in the sequence of events on the island, as occurs with the chronology of events around the affairs of the Kotte princes 1543–45 (which may account for his mistaken belief that no previous account has “exposed the missionary attempts to dethrone Bhuvanekabahu” [p. xi] by replacing him with the convert princes).
Although Sri Lankans may understandably get fed up with this sort of academic pronouncement from afar, it is difficult not to read this work as a testimony to contemporary sensitivities. What comes through most strongly is a sense of Christianity as a threat. There is an extraordinary consistency of diction, with every aspect of the encounter reduced to the language of war: batterings, blitzkriegs, and bombardments. Thus, the spectacle of mass baptisms becomes “psy-ops weapons” used to “weaken resistance in the battle for souls” (p. 334). While it may at least serve as a corrective to accounts that ignore the ugly operations of power behind the dissemination of faith, we are instead faced with a monotonous moral landscape in which religious change in and of itself is a kind of destructive evil. This is a striking document of the politicization of Sri Lankan history, spurred by the unfortunate controversies over the quincentenary of the Portuguese arrival in 2005.
