brand logo

Rediscovering Sri Lanka with Dr. Razeen Sally and Capt. Elmo Jayawardena: A webinar event by the British Council

10 May 2021

The British Council held the May edition of their “In Conversation With” series, titled “Rediscovering Sri Lanka”, with Dr. Razeen Sally and Capt. Elmo Jayawardena on 8 May, speaking about Sri Lankan history, lore, and their personal experiences and perspectives. Dr. Sally chatted with Capt. Jayawardena and the British Council at length on his 2019 novel Return To Sri Lanka: Travels in a Paradoxical Island, a mix of memoir and travelogue documenting his travels around Sri Lanka over nearly two decades. Dr. Sally was born to a Sri Lankan Muslim father and a Welsh mother. He grew up in Colombo and completed his later schooling and university studies in the UK. His academic and advisory work has taken him around the world, with Sri Lanka at the back of his mind for nearly 30 years, but in his early 40s, he felt Sri Lanka calling him back for the first time since childhood, which was what led to his travels around Sri Lanka and Return To Sri Lanka: Travels in a Paradoxical Island. As a memoir-travelogue hybrid, he explained that Return To Sri Lanka: Travels in a Paradoxical Island includes both bits of his own history as well as Sri Lanka’s history, and also includes composite maps of Sri Lanka from various times in history as well as maps of his own travels around the island to illustrate his travels and what he saw. Photos too are a mix of personal and travel, including unusual photos like a view of the famous Mount Lavinia Hotel in the 1970s before much of its present sea-facing facade was built (Dr. Sally’s father ran the hotel in the 70s) as well as photos of destinations from all around Sri Lanka, from the popular destinations to those off the beaten track. Part of Return To Sri Lanka: Travels in a Paradoxical Island’s unique charm is how Dr. Sally approaches Sri Lankan history through his own experience of being half-British, half-Sri Lankan – and by extensions, half-insider, half-outsider – providing a unique perspective to Sri Lanka and its history. Dr. Sally shared that while he is not a historian, a lot of what is out together in the book is from professional historians and memoirists as well as historical sources like Mahavamsa, and that through Return To Sri Lanka: Travels in a Paradoxical Island, he tries to present the history of Sri Lanka to a general audience in an interesting way, emphasising that what he knows of Sri Lanka’s history, he knows through reading and learning on the ground through his travels. Sharing with the audience his biggest takeaway from Sri Lanka’s complex and colourful history, Dr. Sally said Sri Lanka’s history has helped him better understand paradoxes, explaining Sri Lanka in itself is a very complex paradox, being a beautiful country that thoroughly charms outsiders while also having an astonishing record of violence, not just in the recent past, but going all the way back into history. Dr. Sally also said that Sri Lanka is a puzzling paradox of amazing mixing and matching of different peoples and ethnicities. From old royalty importing Tamil Hindu brides to Sri Lanka to brahmin priests in Sri Lankan royal courts to the Hindu, Muslim, and Christian traders at ancient ports like Polonnaruwa to Mahayana Buddhism mixed into Theravada Buddhism to the maritime trade that brought Arabs, Christians, and other traders to our shores to the western cultures that colonised the island, Sri Lanka is a very culturally diverse country, with paradox again coming in from the backlash to that diversity from different factions like Buddhist purists, the self-isolating nature of Jaffna Hinduism, myths of the Burghers, the race myths of Muslim, and, more recently, fundamentalist Islam. Dr. Sally emphasises that much of this cultural paradox is not new, with much of it preceding Sri Lanka’s very complicated, layered, and turbulent history. Culture is just one of Sri Lanka’s paradoxes. Another is travel, as Dr. Sally noted that in general, foreigners appreciate Sri Lanka greatly on the first impression while many locals don’t because it is taken for granted, adding that he couldn’t think of any other place in the world of comparable size that has as much stunning variety as Sri Lanka. On putting Return To Sri Lanka: Travels in a Paradoxical Island together, Dr. Sally shared that the final book was the result of several drafts with his editor pushing him to make the work more descriptive and to use a personal voice, approaching his travel more as a writer and less as a professor. In how Dr. Sally provides historical context to his travels, through juxtaposing his own present-day travel with historical context – he alternates between the present and the past, either referencing moments from his childhood or a point in history – Dr. Sally said that this wasn’t how the book was initially intended to come together, but as he went on travelling and writing, he came to realise that this form of proving historical context helped explain Sri Lanka’s complexities and paradoxes before, as this is not something one can understand simply by looking at the present. Speaking on one of his most memorable travel moments, Dr. Sally shared that there was an abundance of these moments, but one moment that stands out took place after he had published Return To Sri Lanka: Travels in a Paradoxical Island – a visit to Thanthirimale on the road between Anuradhapura and Mannar. Thanthirimale was a key Buddhist temple and monastic site in the North during ancient times because of its location on a key travel and trade route, which in the present day is a very calm and peaceful place provided you are not visiting on a Poya or other festival day. Answering a question from the audience on where Dr. Sally, as a traveller and global citizen who has lived in Sri Lanka, the UK, and Singapore over the course of his life, considers home, he said this wasn’t an easy question to answer and was one that had changed over the years, especially identifying as someone who has always felt half-insider, half-outsider regardless of which country he was living on. However, at present he does consider Sri Lanka to be his home, although Dr. Sally said this wasn’t a 100% feeling because of his half-insider, half-outsider nature.


More News..