Gananath Obeyesekere, ‘Between the Portuguese and the Nāyakas: the many faces of the Kandyan Kingdom, 1591–1765.’ In: Biedermann, Z and Strathern, A. In the words of Gananath Obeyesekere: “The interplay between the local and the foreign is not simply a phenomenon of Nāyaka rule but existed in different shapes and forms in Lankan history and, one might even add, in the history of other nations.” 3 Other scholars seek to place Sri Lankan history, and that of the kingdom of Kandy in particular, in a global history perspective. In the case of Sri Lanka, for example, various views of essentialised ethnic identity and cultural uniqueness play a major part in social and academic debates. Thorough knowledge and consideration of regional historiographical debates is therefore vital. In practice, the research shows that this socio-political context is usually less straightforward than would appear at first sight. In this contribution, however, we will discuss the broader relevance of this interdisciplinary and multilateral research.Ī broader approach to the question of provenance, which includes a biographical approach to the object and gives space for reflection on the changing socio-political context in which the object acquired meaning, allows for a more inclusive academic approach. The reports can be downloaded here: a summary-overview of the research results see also: Randima Attygalle, "Solving the Mystery of Kandyan Artifacts", Daily FT, Colombo, 8 April 2022: The detailed reconstruction of the object histories and the conclusions regarding their provenance that we drew are available open access. In the course of the project, more experts were involved to help us solve very specific questions, ranging from, for example, the dating of the cannon’s copper by Arie Pappot of the Rijksmuseum to the assessments of the mechanics of the Maha Thuwaku’s flint lock by Philip Tom. Meanwhile, Doreen van den Boogaart and I joined the team as historians on behalf of the NIOD. Ganga Dissanayake from Kelaniya University and Senarath Wickramasinghe and Chamikara Pilapitiya on behalf of the Colombo National Museum. The main collaborators from Sri Lanka were Prof. Piecing these clues together thus became a truly collective effort, where experts joined in from different corners of the world. Along the way, we realized that it was not only the archives but also the objects themselves that carried clues and traces of their historical journey. In hindsight, this turned out to be a very important decision. Such questions, after all, tend to gravitate towards archival research, and in this case towards Dutch-language documentation kept in the Netherlands, to which Sri Lankan colleagues had little access. The work-package was designed as a collaborative and interdisciplinary project, which meant that it reached beyond the narrow historical provenance question of when and how an object ended up in a certain collection. See also: Niels Mathijssen, 'Een Westerse worsteling met goede bedoelingen', De Groene Amsterdammer, 25 March 2020. Koloniale collecties en teruggave in de lage landen. One of these objects, the embellished ceremonial cannon, plays a pivotal role in current restitution debates and Dutch and Sri Lankan journalists and scholars have been critical about earlier collaborative research initiatives. The Sri Lanka work-package of PPROCE revolved around six objects which were assumed to have been spoils of the Kandyan-Dutch war 1762-1766. However, we ended up disclosing the histories of these objects by doing much more than that. Our task was to review the existing knowledge and to search for additional archival traces that would allow us to reconstruct the trail of these objects from the Kandyan Kingdom into the collection of the Dutch Stadholder (which later became the basis of the collection of the Rijksmuseum). In other cases, such as with the Maha Thuwakku, there was actually no concrete information available that linked these objects to the war. However, in some cases, such as with the cannon, conflicting stories about provenance circulated. The object information at the Rijksmuseum already told us that that all six were part of the spoils of the Kandyan-Dutch war from 1762-66. At first sight, the provenance of these objects was clear.
These six objects are displayed in the Rijksmuseum: a richly decorated ceremonial cannon, two kasthāné, a dagger, and two large wall guns or Maha Thuwakku. Among the 50 objects researched by the PPROCE research team, six were of Sri Lankan origin.
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