When tourists tread the halls of Sri Lanka’s national museums or glance over the plaques at sites of historical significance, they are reading stories of the past. But whose? Who made that judgement of what is worth saving, worth memorialising, worth forgetting?
These questions form the crux of the study of colonial dependencies in heritage, a situation in which the structures, the methods, and the very categories under which we make sense of our past continue to be dominated by colonial powers even after political independence.
Sri Lanka, with its complex history of over four centuries of Portuguese, Dutch, and British colonisation, is a staggering example of how colonial heritages continue to delimit heritage discourses in postcolonial nations. Independent from 1948, the island nation has yet to break free from the intellectual paradigm of heritage management, from museum categorisations to conservation priorities, that remains firmly set in frameworks developed during colonialism.
The colonial venture was never just a question of political and economic dominance. It was also a question of epistemic domination, the power to determine what constitutes knowledge, history, and heritage. British colonial administrators, European archaeologists, and scholars created elaborate machineries for categorising and interpreting Sri Lanka’s past. They were not objective systems; they served specific colonial agendas.
A new relationship with the past
Although founded in 1890 with the purpose of preserving Sri Lankan heritage, the Department of Archaeology operated entirely within a colonial paradigm. British scholars determined which sites were suitable for excavation, how findings ought to be interpreted, and how the artefacts were to be displayed in museums, all through their own academic conventions centred on the rise and fall of classical civilisations. This lens focused interest on the Anuradhapura and Polonnaruwa Kingdoms.
What was marginalised by this approach? They were given scant attention. The religious ceremonies of the local communities, rich oral folklore, coastal culture traditions, Vedda lifestyles, and the cultures of the minor groups were short-changed.
At the time independence was gained, there was already a hierarchy: certain monuments, periods, and texts were scholarly and prestigious, and others peripheral manifestations of culture. A ruling elite decided on which aspects of heritage were studied, displayed, and valued, and the rationality of colonial society deliberately privileged certain types of culture and subordinated others.
The museum, that quintessentially modern institution, was imported into Sri Lanka as a colonial transplant. The Colombo National Museum, established in 1877, was modelled after European museums and reflected Victorian assumptions about how knowledge was to be classified and displayed. Objects were taken out of their life contexts and placed in glass cases with labels, arranged in accordance with European classification.
The majority of Sri Lankan museums retain this colonial structure today. Natural history galleries categorise the world into kingdoms and phyla in Linnaean terms. Ethnographic museums present ‘traditional culture’ as timeless and unchanging, frozen in a pre-modern past. Historical museums periodise Sri Lankan history in terms of foreign invasions and colonial occupation, implicitly suggesting that change and dynamism were external in origin while pre-colonial society was passive.
The concept of ‘heritage’ as something to be preserved, analysed, and displayed in specialist institutions is a Western Enlightenment product. Cultural continuity was secured in most Sri Lankan societies through living practice, oral tradition, and ritual performance rather than through institutional preservation. Colonial heritage apparatus imposed a new relationship with the past, mediated by institutions, specialists, and state bureaucracies.
Marginalising indigenous knowledge
Language also happens to be one of the most enduring colonial dependencies of Sri Lankan heritage.
Much of the initial archaeological and historical research on Sri Lanka was conducted by British scholars and published in English. These texts, by scholars such as James Emerson Tennent, Robert Knox, and later H.W. Codrington, continue to be cited as authorities. Their interpretations, developed through colonial-era assumptions and biases, remain embedded in contemporary heritage discourse.
British colonialism undermined Sri Lanka’s traditional social order directly by substituting English for local languages as the language of administration and power. The shift in language helped the colonialists to put their administrative system in place more effectively.
As English became the language of power and knowledge, Sri Lankan cultural heritage and local wisdom began to be filtered through the colonial lens, with indigenous knowledge systems marginalised and reinterpreted on British terms rather than valued on their own.
The dominance of English in heritage studies creates a few problems. To begin with, it advantages those who have had colonial language education, creating a class barrier to participation in heritage interpretation. Next, it makes complex concepts inherent in Sinhala, Tamil, or indigenous languages lost in translation. Then, it strengthens a mental geography where legitimation is from Western academic communities rather than from local communities.
Think of the charged language that remains: places/museum objects are ‘discovered/found’ by European explorers, even if local people had been aware of them for centuries.
The indigenous knowledge systems are referred to as ‘folklore’ while European record-keeping is termed ‘history.’ The ancient hydraulic projects are noted for being ‘surprisingly sophisticated,’ the surprise betokening a belief in indigenous technical unsophistication.
It is managed according to criteria defined by Western institutions. Derived from European traditions, specifically the 1964 Venice Charter post-war arguments on restoration, such principles have been handed down worldwide and, on many occasions, implemented in non-European contexts, which they suit least.
This has bred tensions in Sri Lanka. European conservation ideology stresses retaining historic fabric intact, restricting reconstruction, and distinctly separating new from old work. Yet, many Sri Lankan religious sites operate like living temples, where progressive renovation and rebuilding are a part of religious activity.
Do you preserve an ancient site as a ruined archaeological monument or keep it alive as a site of active community usage? The solution depends on whose heritage approach you accept.
Epistemological colonial dependence
The colonial conservation strategy also privileges monumental over intangible culture. Funds and information are directed towards the maintenance of stone temples and colonial buildings while traditional craft, performance traditions, and agricultural knowledge receive less institutional attention.
This privileges the West over a written document or material culture-based approach, preferring knowledge held in the body over written knowledge, and orally transmitted over written knowledge.
The most pernicious form of colonial dependence is epistemological, the issue of who is legitimate to interpret the past. In the colonial era, European academicians asserted such legitimacy through their allegedly scientific methods of scholarship.
Following liberation, interpretation of heritage at the national level remains in the hands of urban, English-educated elites trained in Western academic traditions. Traditional communities, particularly rural ones and marginalised communities, are usually left out of the decision-making on heritage.
After independence, Sri Lankan law and local administration frameworks have not systematically incorporated processes for reflecting local viewpoints on the management of heritage. Community oral histories are not given credence, being considered as untrustworthy; their own traditions are perceived as threats to conservation, not as heritage per se.
If a village people have managed a shrine for generations, yet archaeologists pronounce it a site of considerable antiquity requiring ‘proper’ management, then that people’s relationship with that place is subordinated to expert authority.
It is especially true for disputes over sacred places. Whom do you consult on what Sigiriya does or did represent; archaeologists who consider it a fifth century fortress-palace, Buddhist monks for whom it was a monastery site, or local communities with their own legends and traditions?
Today, institutional authority lies with specialists educated according to Western, professional techniques, while community perspectives fight for attention. Or else, visionaries of Sri Lankan culture risk being deflected by colonial client, ideologically driven representatives.
Decolonising heritage
Colonial dependencies in heritage are reinforced by economic structures. International tourism, a major revenue source, is marketed through narratives that emphasise ancient Buddhist kingdoms and colonial-era charm, the aspects of Sri Lankan heritage most legible to Western tourists. This creates economic incentives to maintain colonial-era interpretive frameworks.
Identification of such colonial dependencies is the beginning of a decolonising of heritage. This does not entail a spurning of all things Western or a return to some supposed pre-colonial purity, but rather a critical reflection on whose interests are being maintained through current practices of heritage, and a combination of space for other ways.
Some of the strategies that have resulted from worldwide processes of decolonisation include widening definitions of heritage from monuments towards intangible heritage, traditions of knowledge, and everyday culture practice; putting communities at the centre of decisions over heritage using participatory processes; facilitating scholarship on heritage using local languages; returning colonial-era collection items and involving communities concerning sacred items; critically examining museum exhibits and refashioning explanatory materials to respect a range of viewpoints; training heritage specialists to notice and challenge colonial protocols; and creating indigenous approaches to doing research that respect oral testimony, embodied knowledge, and non-Western approaches to knowledge.
Some of the Sri Lankan institutions have already begun this work, pushing for inclusive modes of responding to the island’s ethnic and religious diversity. Community-based projects at sites such as Batticaloa have highlighted local community histories oftentimes overlooked within national histories. Research challenging exclusively archaeological modes of explaining religious sites has questioned them as well.
But much remains yet to be done. True decolonisation entails not merely a case of importing diverse voices into entrenched processes but a call radical enough to question what counts as heritage, whose history matters, and who deserves to narrate history.
The question ‘who controls the story of the past?’ is ultimately a question about power in the present. For so long as Sri Lanka’s histories of culture remain bound on colonial terms institutionally, methodologically, linguistically, and conceptually, the nation remains, in crucial ways, intellectually colonised.
Decolonising heritage is synonymous with wider fights for epistemic justice, the communities’ right to create and authenticate knowledge on their own terms. Decolonising is about acknowledging that there are several legitimate ways of grasping the past, that academic knowledge does not supersede experience, and, at its essence, heritage belongs to communities, not experts or institutions.
The colonial powers might have abandoned Sri Lanka decades ago, but their inheritance remains imprinted on the invisible frameworks that dictate how we perceive ourselves. Identification of such dependencies and contesting them is not just indispensable for intellectual honesty but for the building of a just, inclusive society that is genuinely decolonised.
We need to pose ourselves a question: are we genuinely recording and presenting indigenous knowledge worldwide as valuable heritage, or are we eroding it by seeing it entirely through the prism of the English-speaking Western world?
This is our moment of breaking out of colonial ways of thinking so that our heritage, our indigenous traditions, are depicted worldwide true to their form, academically, artistically, and culturally. If we, on the other hand, stay caught up within a colonial mentality of dependence, the worldwide knowledge community will still treat Sri Lanka just as an erstwhile colony, not as a civilisation with its own intellectual and cultural sovereignty.
The past may be history, but the power to tell it is hugely alive, and contested. Who will be writing the next decades of Sri Lankan history? The answer to that won’t just determine how history is remembered, but how the future is perceived.
(The writer is an ethnographer and art historian specialising in material culture, critical museum studies, and participatory research methodologies. As a member of Provenance Research on Objects of the Colonial Era (PPROCE), Netherlands and Dutch Research Council (NWO) committees, she engages with repatriation and decolonisation debates. She currently holds a NIAS-NIOD-KITLV Research Fellowship in the Netherlands)
(The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect the official position of this publication)