Ganga Rajinee Dissanayaka examines Sri Lankan ivory boxes, jewellery, and statues held in the Rijksmuseum and the Wereldmuseum in the Netherlands.
Today, heritage is less about the collection of physical objects and more about the collection of stories. Sigiriya is a rock formation in the dry zone; it becomes heritage when it comes to the story we create. The Lewke cannon, which was repatriated back to Sri Lanka from the Netherlands in 2023, is heritage because of the story that has been built around it.
The moment one accepts that the story is the heritage, one must realise the implications of it: whoever owns the story owns the economic, political, and emotional power of the heritage.
And here the truth of Sri Lanka, like most of the Global South, is that we own the objects, we own the soil, but the dominant narrative framework and the academic language for interpretation, museum taxonomy, and global media reach all continue to belong to other powers.
Consider the Department of Archaeology of Sri Lanka, whose establishment in 1890 was decided upon by colonial scholars who determined what was significant and how it should be understood.
It was only sites and narratives which made sense within the ‘rise-and-fall-of-civilisations’ framework of the European scholar that found their way into the canon; while Vedda cultures, coastal Muslim traders, Tamil ritual practices, and Catholic-Sinhalese syncretism could be studied ethnographically, none qualified as heritage.
The Colombo National Museum, founded in 1877, had its displays organised in accordance with a London Victorian model: glass cases, Linnaean classification, ethnographies in eternal past tense. Hardly anything has been changed in the last century and a half.
This is dependency at its most insidious. No gunboats. No tied lending programmes. Not even Schiller’s cultural imperialism in its most blatant sense. Merely the legacy of an inherited way of looking at things.
