Re-Exploring the Links ─ History and Constructed Histories Between Portugal and Sri Lanka

Presented at the December 2005 conference, these papers address the little-studied relationship of Portugal and Sri Lanka. Sri Lanka became a figure in the political imagination of Portugal when King Manuel I wrote of it in 1499. Explorers and missionaries followed suit, and even as late as the 1850s the Portuguese followed their dreams of possessing paradise with Sri Lanka. These papers cover the imaginary component of the relationship, including the presence of the Portuguese in indigenous chronicles war poems and the presence of the indigenous in Portuguese literatures, conflict and interaction in the conversion of Sri Lankan rulers under the Portuguese from Buddhism, and the state and religion under the Dutch in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and the construction and representation of heritage in texts and maps and in religious architecture and art. The closing papers detail language and ethnicity in traveling burghers' accounts of Sri Lanka. Annotation ©2007 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)