Contested conjugality? Sinhalese marriage practices in Eighteenth-Century Dutch colonial Sri Lanka

© Belin. Tous droits réservés pour tous pays. Dutch colonial Sri Lanka in the eighteenth century offers a unique opportunity to study the dynamics of colonial control of everyday family life. This article focuses on the Dutch registration of Sinhalese marriage practices, which we know from scattered sources to have been strikingly different from what the Calvinist Dutch deemed appropriate, with cohabitation before marriage, easy divorce and polygamy. To study how conjugality was defined and contested by both Dutch and Sinhalese alike, this article first analyses the so-called thombo registration (a complex combination of census, cadastre and genealogy) of about 200 villages, which offers a unique perspective on Sinhalese family life. What categories were used by local census takers to label alternative forms of marital status, and to what extent could the Sinhalese influence or resist their categorisation according to hierarchies of family, caste and feudal labour relations? Two inheritance conflicts within Sinhalese families brought before the Dutch colonial law courts are analysed to determine if and how the Dutch legal definitions of marriage played their part in everyday colonial life. Although Calvinist morality contested certain Sinhalese marriage practices, colonial administrators and lawyers had to be practical to run the colony as efficiently as possible. profit trumped principles, as the Dutch were dependent on the proper fulfilment and transmission of traditional labour services attached to land. In practice, therefore, they seem to have accepted many of the traditional family arrangements of the Sinhalese. yet the court cases show that some Sinhalese were willing to cleverly adopt the Dutch marriage ideal and use the Dutch administration to improve their individual position, not in the least against their own kin. Conjugal traditions in eighteenth-century Sri Lanka were thus contested by both the Dutch and the Sinhalese.

Publication year:2018

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