The Ambivalence of Freedom: Slaves in Jaffna, Sri Lanka, in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries

Abstract

This article discusses slavery and the lives of enslaved people in Jaffna, northern Sri Lanka, under Dutch and British rule. It argues that by sanctioning and tapping into a perceived local practice of slavery and legally constituting slaves, Dutch colonial rulers further strengthened the power of the dominant caste Vellalar over their subordinates. This was done through processes of registration, legal codification, and litigation. For some enslaved people, however, bureaucratization provided grounds for negotiation and resistance, as well as the potential to take control over their individual lives. British rule that took over areas controlled by the Dutch East India Company or Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie—first in the guise of the East India Company (1796–1802), then under the Crown (1802–1948)—introduced a number of measures, acts, and incentives to dismantle slavery as it was practiced on the island. This article draws from Dutch and early British period petitions, court records, commission reports, and slave registers to interrogate the discourse of freedom that permeated the British abolition of slavery from 1806 to 1844 and suggests that in Jaffna after abolition there remained bondage in freedom.

Black Feminist Plots before the Plantationocene and Anthropology's “Regional Closets”

“…Methodologically, Black feminists teach me to see the nourishment and creativity of Seetai's plot as an active and central story in northern Malaiyaka Tamils’ ongoing struggle for justice under postwar conditions of landlessness, caste oppression, and socioeconomic marginality on unowned lands. This dispersed community's “unfreedoms” have longer, deeper histories in the context of African and Indian Ocean enslavement and indentured labor and coolie labor in and beyond Sri Lanka (Li 2017; Lowe 2015; Wickramasinghe and Schrikker 2019) but also exhibit current materialities of lost freedoms—what Ruth Wilson Gilmore calls “the loss of the power to plan (to have some sense of how to secure the future)” (2007, 175). My task is to track the plantation form as it breathes and operates in relation to and potentially outside the spatiotemporal grids of intelligibility put forth by regimes of postwar development, human rights, and transitional justice, and to examine how emergent assemblages (Li 2007) and long‐standing practices of carceral “sitings” and “fixes” (Gilmore 2007) of work and life take hold.…”

Classifications at Work: Social Categories and Dutch Bureaucracy in Colonial Sri Lanka

“…16Jayasuriya, “Trading on a Thalassic Network”; Schrikker and Ekama, “Through the Lens of Slavery”; Ricci, Banishment and Belonging ; Wickramasinghe and Schrikker, “The Ambivalence of Freedom”; Schrikker and Wickramasinghe, Being a Slave; Wickramasinghe, Slave in a Palanquin.…”

Pokéwalking in the City: Pokémon GO and the Ludic Geographies of Digital Capitalism, A View from Jaffna, Sri Lanka

“…What I could not immediately perceive, I later learned was that these streets were lined with Dalit households, a group of communities that have historically been treated as slave castes in Jaffna (see Wickramasinghe and Schrikker 2019). That is, even though many of these families would be classified as part of the local middle class (Durné 2008), this was not a "good" part of town.…”