On an Unfamiliar Island: A Sri Lankanist Review of Banishment and Belonging; Review Essay of: Ronit Ricci, Banishment and Belonging: Exile and Diaspora in Sarandib, Lanka, and Ceylon. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. First South Asia edition 2020. 296 pp.

Abstract

Over the past two decades, historiography of Southern Asia has increasingly looked to the sea. This has yielded a robust sub-field of “Indian Ocean Studies,” illuminating cultural connections and exchanges over borders and boundaries, and emphasizing mobility across wind and wave as a means to think past “area studies” and other colonially inherited categories and conceptions of space. 1 Ronit Ricci’s recent book, Banishment and Belonging: Exile and Diaspora in Sarandib, Lanka, and Ceylon, represents the best fruits of such oceanic studies, tracking Javanese and Malay literary movements back and forth across the greater archipelago of the southern seas. In this way, the book takes Malay texts and people beyond the nationalized boundaries of “Malaysia,” moving over a number of island worlds, including Bali, Borneo, Java, Sulawesi, Sumatra, and of course Sri Lanka, the subtitle of the book indicating its importance in Malay imaginations of homeland and exile. While writing Malays into Sri Lankan history, Ricci acknowledges that she is not trained as a Sri Lankanist. Oceanic studies broadly conceived ultimately runs up against a scholar’s linguistic limits. So while Ricci’s analysis of Javanese and Malay sources is highly nuanced, she is unable to access local Lankan texts in the same first-hand manner to corroborate her argument.