From Sarandib, via Lanka, to Ceylon: Exile and Memory in the Colonial Age

Part of the Ronald and Janette Gatty Lecture Series

Ronit Ricci, Department of Asian Studies and Religion, Hebrew University of Jerusalem

The small, Indian Ocean island known as Sarandib, Lanka, and Ceylon was a site of banishment throughout the 18th century for members of royal families, convicts, servants and others sent there from across the Indonesian archipelago. Descendants of these exiles who remained on the island continued to speak and write in Malay, the archipelago's lingua franca, and to adhere to a collective Muslim identity for several centuries and into the present. The talkconsiders if and how earlier religious and literary traditions of banishment tied to the island -those of Adam's fall from paradise to Sarandib and Sita's abduction to Lanka in the Ramayana -played a role in shaping the experiences of the exiles and their descendants.