Sunday Times 2
Understanding the history of Roman-Dutch law in Sri Lanka
View(s):Lawmaking in Dutch Sri Lanka: Navigating Pluralities in a Colonial Society by Dr Nadeera Rupesinghe will be launched on Monday, July 22 at the auditorium of the National Archives, No. 7, Philip Gunewardena Mawatha at 4 pm. The launch is open to the public.
The book is published by Tambapanni Academic Publishers and the discussion that follows the launch by the author with Prof Dinesha Samararatne and Dr Gehan Goonetilleke is also open to everyone.
Dr. Rupesinghe is Director General of the Sri Lanka National Archives. She studied history at the University of Colombo and obtained her PhD in History from Leiden University in 2016 as a Teaching and Research Assistant and was also a Postdoctoral Researcher at the same university, positions funded by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research.
Lawmaking in Dutch Sri Lanka marks a break in understanding the history of Roman-Dutch law in Sri Lanka. Methodologically, it challenges socio-legal studies that concentrate on major jurisdictional conflicts alone, emphasizing the lived experience of everyday practices of judicial forums. It uncovers the navigation of plural practices in the Landraad, a judicial forum set up by the Dutch East India Company in seventeenth-century Sri Lanka. A choice of laws came into play in that forum, which was significant at varying degrees for different areas of the law, such as evidence, inheritance, land, and marriage law.
While there was inevitable conflict, the local normative order was as much a social fact for the early colonial rulers as Roman-Dutch law. This is contrary to the received wisdom of the ages that Roman-Dutch law was imposed on the Sinhalese of the maritime provinces under Dutch control. When translated into everyday lives, such adoption of plural practices could rebound on coloniser and colonised in unexpected ways, revealing the complexities of colonial law in practice.
Originally published by Leiden University Press, the American Institute for Lankan Studies assisted in producing this Sri Lankan edition.
Prof Paul Halliday of the University of Virginia said of the book: “Future scholars of eighteenth-century Sri Lankan law and social history will want to make this one of the first books they read. Rupesinghe’s account of litigation in the Landraad provides a goldmine of information about that court’s remarkable archive, its personnel and procedures, and the often humble people who asked it to settle their disputes. She uses this archive to reconstruct a rich social world, and along the way, gives us wonderful stories about landholding, social and family relations, and so much more.”
Prof Sujit Sivasundaram of University of Cambridge said: “This book tackles an important and neglected field of interest not only to scholars of Sri Lanka but also to legal historians of the early modern world and to those interested in empires in Asia. With gripping detail and dense attention to individuals and places, Rupesinghe recovers how local communities faced, moulded and changed the law in Galle, in southern Lanka. The situational judging and the specific circumstances of land, family and religion which framed this encounter between subjects and the law is handled with great sensitivity and nuance. A mature piece of archival work which will become a cornerstone in the growing literature on Dutch Sri Lanka.”