An Historical Relation of the Island Ceylon

"I think Robert Knox has a good claim to be the most important foreigner who lived in Sri Lanka in its recorded history because of this book. It’s still very readable and captures very vividly the politics, culture, and landscapes of the Kandyan kingdom in the central highlands of Sri Lanka in the middle of the 17th century. Knox was in captivity there for 19 years and the book is all the more remarkable because he wrote the first version in one go on the ship back from Batavia (what is now Jakarta) to London, completely from memory, because in captivity he never had access to pen and paper. A lot of accounts of that period, and in the centuries afterwards, were either made up or plagiarized or both. In his case, most of it has been corroborated by historical research. It’s fairly accurate, and indeed was used as a key reference by colonialists who had their eye on Ceylon in the 18th century, especially the British. The author himself is absolutely fascinating. He led as varied a life as one could imagine. He took to sea early. He was on his father’s trading ship, the Anne , on its way to Fort St. George in Madras (occupied by the British at the time) when it lost its mast somewhere off the east coast of Ceylon and ran aground. He and his shipmates were captured by soldiers of the Kingdom of Kandy and taken inland to the hill capital and held captive there. His father died after the first year, and many of his other shipmates succumbed to drink and malaria. A few of them made it back to the mother country eventually. For Knox, acquiring a copy of a King James Bible was top of the agenda. That was the only book he had: he read it and quotes from it assiduously. He says he took an oath of celibacy. He was relentlessly resourceful. He built his own houses, did market gardening and animal husbandry, knitted cloth caps, and walked around the kingdom as a pedlar. The reason he couldn’t escape is because the Central Highlands have a ring of mountains around them, a natural frontier. In those days it was covered by jungle and wild animals and was without roads. All the while Knox was observing very keenly and plotting his escape, which he eventually managed in 1680, through the animal-infested jungle to Dutch controlled territory, and eventually he made his way back to London. The book became an instant bestseller. I think its wider legacy—going beyond what it has to say about the Sri Lanka and the Kandyan kingdom of the time—is that in all probability, Knox was the model for Daniel Defoe ‘s Robinson Crusoe . The setting was somewhere else and the man who was stranded on a desert island was Alexander Selkirk. But we know that Defoe read that first edition of Knox’s book and was highly taken by it. When it comes to the descriptions of the resourcefulness of Robinson Crusoe, that’s Knox, not Alexander Selkirk. For me, of central interest is what Knox has to say about the Kandyan kingdom of the time—and it’s not just of historical interest. It resonates with what goes on in politics and culture in Sri Lanka today. I quote some of the relevant passages in my book. Knox refers to the king of the time, Rajasinghe II, as an absolute tyrant. He indulged in wanton cruelty, invented methods of torture and had absolutely no regard for people’s human rights as we would nowadays call them. He threw people in jail at the drop of a hat, there was no real rule of law, and the justice administered by the nobility was for sale. Much of that rings true in Sri Lankan politics today. Kandyan society was highly caste-riven at the time. The king was the only person allowed to sit on a stool with a high back and only the nobility could sit on stools. Everybody else had to sit on the floor. Now, that’s not how quite how things work in the Central Province of Sri Lanka today, where the hill capital of Kandy is located, but it’s still probably the most conservative part of Sinhala Sri Lanka. Knox refers to the people worshipping a whole range of gods. They’re idolaters and pagans, he says, and the Buddha but one great god in the pantheon. That hasn’t changed very much. One thing that has changed is that Knox, with that observant eye of his, notices how the Kandyan king and the nobility and indeed ordinary people, are very tolerant of people of other religions. The king gave refuge to Muslims and Christians who fled persecution, first by the Portuguese, then by the Dutch. The last three kings of Kandy—before the British conquered the place—were actually Tamil Hindus from the south of India. They became ardent defenders of Sinhala Buddhism as that was their source of legitimacy, but they continued to import Hindu brides from South India who kept their religion. There were also Tamil merchants in the ancient pre-Kandyan kingdoms of Anuradhapura and Polonnaruwa, there Tamil was a court language because it was a trade language, and Brahmins officiated at court. During the Kandyan kingdom, there were waves of migration of artisans from what is now Kerala and Tamil Nadu who were Tamils and Hindus. So there was an incredible amount of religious tolerance and syncretism that took place along with everything else. That’s a legacy of Sinhala Buddhism that’s been erased from current thinking and indeed current historical memory."