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Published - April 10, 2026 07:00 am IST
A view of Colombo Port City. | Photo Credit: Getty Images
Several people within and outside Sri Lanka have sought to tell the island’s story, including its many troubled chapters in history. But there are always more stories to tell. To appreciate the country’s current position, both in terms of geopolitical significance and developmental aspirations, it becomes necessary to understand how the capital Colombo, as we know it today, came to be.
Ajay Kamalakaran’s Colombo: Port of Call takes us through a range of impressions of Colombo and Sri Lanka, as seen and experienced by 14 international celebrities and travellers, who visited or transited the island at a time when steamships and sea travel were the norm.
How many of us would have known that Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes, was a spiritual seeker who chose to write his essays on the subject out of Colombo in 1921? Or heard about Mahatma Gandhi shocking Colombo’s elite women by asking them to give up their jewellery and help their “sisters in the plantations”, working and living in “hideous conditions”, as is mentioned in his secretary Mahadev Desai’s book With Gandhiji in Ceylon (1928)?
A striking aspect of Kamalakaran’s work is the diversity of the sources he draws on — the ‘Notes’ at the end of the book run into 20 pages, listing the references he uses — building on visitors’ stories to give readers a good glimpse into their time on the island. Reading Kiwi journalist Nelle Scanlan almost a century ago, for instance, offers a fascinating peek into the scenes unfolding at the Colombo Port when Gandhi arrived in Sri Lanka. “Gandhi is the most vital figure in India today,” she wrote in 1927, capturing his weight as a freedom fighter, along with the buzz in Ceylon. Scanlan described him as a “man of nearly 60 years, white-clad, with large dark eyes — eyes of a dreamer yet penetrating in their intensity”.
In another chapter examining Don Bradman’s “brief halts” in Colombo, readers get a glimpse of the cricket craze in Sri Lanka nearly a century ago. Writing in The Sydney Morning Herald about this visit in 1930, Bradman notes: “The people were most enthusiastic, and they had infinitely more than a nodding acquaintance with the game.” Even today, an imposing full-length picture of Bradman adorns the wall of the pub at Colombo’s Tamil Union sports club that adjoins the P. Sara Oval, where Bradman once played.
American writer Mark Twain, who was on a tour to revive his financial fortunes, arrived in Ceylon on January 13, 1896, as his steamer Oceana called at the Colombo port. His arrival was well noticed and recorded, including by The Ceylon Observer, which reported on Twain’s “unenviable position of not knowing where to lay his head for the night,” with all the city’s best hotels fully booked at the time. Kamalakaran’s little observations are delightful, like his suggestion that the American writer likely saw saris for the first time in Ceylon. “Sometimes a woman’s whole dress was but a scarf wound about her person and her head,” Twain would write of his visit.
While most visitors would eventually take to Colombo’s charm and its people’s warmth, not everyone’s first impression was great. Teenaged American dancer Jane Sherman, who was touring Asia with the Denishawn School of Dance for 15 months, stopped in Ceylon after visiting India. She did not enjoy the ferry from Dhanushkodi in Tamil Nadu to Thalaimannar in northern Sri Lanka. “At sunset of the third day, we boarded a boat for Ceylon and arrived, after two hours in a violent lightning storm, to board another ghastly second-class train for Colombo,” she wrote to her mother. But her opinion of the island would soon change, as is evident from her subsequent letter to her mother from Kandy, where she speaks of her train journey “through gorgeous tropical scenery — cinnamon and clove trees and tea and palms.” She appears to have been relieved after experiencing harsh heat in India. “I’ve never seen a land with so much water — such a relief after dry, dusty India,” she would go on to add in the letter.
The author has put in much effort to capture elements of Colombo’s urban history, and more broadly of Sri Lanka, in fair detail, reflecting his own fondness for and enduring interest in the island, which he has been regularly visiting for around two decades now. The pace of the book is uneven, and a little slow at times, especially when Kamalakaran strays into the preceding or subsequent travels of the visitors who broke their journey at the island. It is perhaps deliberate, so the readers can feel the unhurried rhythm of sea travel where Colombo is a stop, and not always the destination.
The Hindu Sunday Magazine / Literary Review / literary greats / non-fiction / books and literature / books and publishing / Sri Lanka
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