A study of the Ceylon Malays, one of Sri Lanka's smaller ethnic minorities, written in English by Tuan M. Zameer Careem, himself a Sri Lankan Malay and, at the time of writing, a medical student. The approach is anthropological: the community is described from the inside, through its way of life, rather than summarised from the outside as a footnote to the island's larger communal histories.
The book traces the community across several centuries of settlement in Ceylon, and through the successive colonial administrations — Portuguese, Dutch and British — under which that settlement took shape. Careem distinguishes the arrivals by period and origin. The first Malays reached Ceylon during Dutch rule, coming from Celebes, Java and Sumatra. A second group arrived under the British, drawn largely from what is now Malaysia and consisting mainly of soldiers. The distinction matters to how the community understood itself afterwards, and the narrative follows both strands.
Alongside that history sits a detailed account of traditions, customs and rituals. This is the part of the book that gives it its weight: observances, practices and social forms recorded in detail by a writer with access to them, set down in English for readers who may have no other route into the material. The title itself is a Malay word for brotherhood and kinship, which indicates the register Careem is working in — the community as a set of relationships and inherited obligations, not simply a demographic category.
It will interest readers following the history of Sri Lanka's minorities, students of the island's colonial period and the population movements it set in motion, and anyone with family or scholarly connections to the Malay diaspora across the Indian Ocean. Members of the community itself, in Sri Lanka and abroad, are an obvious audience; so are readers in Malaysia and Indonesia curious about where the Archipelago's people ended up and what became of them.
Published in Colombo by Godage International Publishers, an established Sri Lankan house issuing work in Sinhala and English. Books of this kind — detailed, locally published accounts of a particular Sri Lankan community, written by someone belonging to it — are rarely carried outside the island, which is reason enough to secure a copy when one is to hand.
- Author: Tuan M Zameer Careem
- Publisher: Godage International Publishers
- Published: 2016
- Language: English
- Pages: 458
- ISBN: 9789553069047
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