Title: A tale of resistance: The story of the arrival of the Portuguese in Sri Lanka
Abstract: This essay decodes a sixteenth century folktale which records the Sinhalese reaction to the arrival of the first Portuguese. Where the historiography kas interpreted this tale as benign wonderment in the face of exotica, a piecemeal deconstruction of the allegorical clues in the ‘story is utilised to reveal how the Sinhalese linked ike Portuguese with demons and with Vasavarti Mārayā, the arch enemy of the Buddha. In this fashion the Portuguese and the Christian sacrament of communion were represented as dangerous, disordering forces. The piecemeal reinterpretation of this short text, however, must be overlaid by a holistic perspective and the realisation that its rendering in oral form enabled its purveyors to lace the story with a satirical flavour: so that the Portuguese and Catholicism are, like demons, rendered both disordering and comic, dangerous and inferior—thus ultimately controllable. In contending in this manner that the folktale is an act of nationalist opposition, the article is designed as an attack on the positivisl empiricism which pervades the island's historiography and shuts out imaginative reconstructions which are worked out by penetrating the subjective world of the ancient texts.
Publication Year: 1989
Publication Date: 1989-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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Cited By Count: 8
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