Abstract:
Abstract: This paper is directed to discuss the ‘effective’aspect
of colonial knowledge in the discursive constructions of one of
the popular pilgrimage sites, Sri Pada in Sri Lanka. What the
author explores here is how different authoritative discourses
emerge about Sri Pada from the different colonial powers:
Portuguese (1505-1687), Dutch (1687-1896) and British (1896-
1948). Authoritative discourse on the ‘colonised’ was largely
produced through the agents of the colonial governments,
military personnel, Christian missionaries, philologists and
administrators. In this regard, Sri Pada, or Adam’s Peak as it
was called by colonial powers, was not exceptional. These
forms of knowledge production change with changes in the
practices of colonialism. In this respect, this paper investigates
what gets identified and counted by colonial authorised
knowledge as ‘Adam’s Peak’. Such an investigation is not
new to anthropology and the human sciences in general. A
large body of knowledge has been produced in the last two
decades to unpack ‘a particular construction of colonial
knowledge’ (Pels, 1997). However, a limitation in such an
analysis can be seen, because most of the ‘decolonising
projects’ in South Asia (India and Sri Lanka) have located their
fields of work and expertise in the 19th and 20th centuries to
unpack ‘British colonial knowledge production’ and they have
paid scanty attention to ‘pre-British knowledge production’;
for example, as far as India and Sri Lanka are concerned, the
Portuguese and the Dutch ‘colonial knowledge productions’.
A reasonably comprehensive understanding of culture, religion
and history of the various sub-continental regions in the early
18th century and before is a prerequisite for the understanding
of the transformations which the British instituted.
