Ladies and gentlemen, let me welcome all of you to the second edition of our ‘Book Talk’ series.
I am Priyanga Wickramasinghe, Consul General of Sri Lanka in Mumbai.
I explained the rationale for this book talk series at the first such event at which some of you were present. I believe that diplomacy is not only about how international relations are conducted in the formal and conventional sense. It is also about how modes of culture that may vary from creative literature to academic texts, films to theatre and visual arts more generally could become a more creative avenue for conversations in a world that is becoming increasingly stressful.
So, as a diplomat with an interest in how soft diplomacy works, I am keen to see how Ajay Kamalakaran’s book opens doors to other readings about what has come to Sri Lanka through harbours and other gateways as well as what has come from Colombo and Sri Lanka to the world. That is, how people, objects and ideas move and often take root in new locations.
My sense is, Colombo: Port of Call allows for this opening, and I want to travel through that doorway which Ajay has flung open.
But let me first begin by what the book is in my own understanding. It is for sure a very readable and non-linear journey through Sri Lanka’s commercial capital, Colombo across time, combining two important elements: these are historical reportage and personal observation and commentary.
It moves away from the narrative formats and language styles usually adopted by genres of academic history which tend to be somewhat dry despite the knowledge they might present. This book in contrast is a social and cultural biography of Colombo touched and shaped by multiple dynamics including colonization, trade, and migration.
It is also about the evolution of Colombo from the status of a strategic colonial outpost to a bustling modern city. Ajay does something that is often forgotten in contemporary times. That is, he outlines the city’s cosmopolitan personality, highlighting its diverse communities that have made it their home over time all of whom have left an indelible mark on its architecture, spatial formations and social fabric. If one forgets the reference to Colombo for a moment and allows imagination to run a bit wild and blur the specifics but dwell on the generalities, it might as well be a description of Mumbai. People often forget how similar these places are except in size and complexity. I will leave it to other panelists and Ajay himself to talk about in detail what the book actually says.
But Colombo is not only a port of call. It is also a gateway through which people and objects left. It would be interesting to see a book that narrates this inverse story. Sri Lankan businessman P.S. Jayasinghe established in Mumbai in 1943 India’s earliest and best-known press for scholarly works, Asia Publishing House which published well-known texts such as Jawaharlal Nehru’s A Bunch of Old Letters and Rabindranath Tagore’s Towards Universal Man. Sri Lankan modernist painter George Keyt came to Mumbai through Colombo where he held his first international solo exhibition at the Convocation Hall at University of Bombay in 1947. His time in Mumbai had a lasting effect on his work. Sri Lankan cultural activist Anil de Silva who along with well-known Indian writer Mulk Raj Anand and others founded the Mumbai-based cultural magazine Marg in 1946. These are simply a handful of people whose travel to the world from Colombo made a difference in their times and in their contexts. And there are many more. I was wondering if there is a story in these histories too in the same way Colombo: Port of Call narrates its story.
What about objects and practices that came from Sri Lanka and went there as well, in the same way that people did. But objects and practices came and went with people too. I have been told more than once that the very iconic Kerala parotta originated in Sri Lanka before being brought to Tamil Nadu and later popularized in Kerala. Initially it was supposed to have been introduced to coastal Tamil Nadu as ‘Ceylon Parotta’ by migrant workers, later evolving into the flaky Malabar version. Sri Lanka’s noodle-like indiappa and pancake-like appa known in Kerala and Tamil Nadu as indiappam and appam respectively perhaps came to us from those two Indian states. What Sri Lankans referred to as ‘bombai loonu’ meaning big onions, ‘kochchi’ meaning a very specific version of green chilli and ‘kolikuttu’, a specific variety of plantains perhaps came from the Indian cities of Bombay (Mumbai), Kochi and Calicut which still bear their sounds in the Sinhala names. Perhaps initially these things came to my country through colonial period trade.
I was wondering as I was reading through Ajay’s book, if we can narrate social and migratory histories by looking at the way these foods travelled and established themselves in places like Lanka as essential aspects of both local cuisine and languages. I don’t see much difference between these inanimate things and the characters in Ajay’s book. But for them to narrate the past and tell stories, we have to bring them and the trajectories of their travels to life. Perhaps there is another book here that will allow us to see the ways in which South Asian histories have been intertwined in interesting ways much of which we may have forgotten by now.
I wondered how Ajay selected his characters, all of whom are historical figures. They are the ones who bring to life their times and what they saw in Colombo. I understand the inclusion of well-known figures such as Urabi Pasha, Prince Hirohito, Andrew Carnegie, Arthur Conan Doyle, Mark Twain, Don Bradman, Mary Carpenter, M.K. Gandhi, and Anton Chekhov. But it is not clear to me the rationale for including lesser-known travelers such as Esper Ukhtomsky, Nicholas Roerich, Prince Chakrabongse Bhuvanath, Jules Leclercq, and Jane Sherman. Is it because the historical information available on them and what they say and saw add more colour to the text that Ajay has crafted?
I am also curious as to why I do not meet in the pages of the book some iconic figures who also came to Lanka through Colombo at different times. These include Jawaharlal Nehru’ s multiple visits in 1931, 1939, 1947, 1957 and 1962; Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara’s visit to Sri Lanka in 1959 and Marshal Tito’s visit in 1959 to discuss the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) and then again in 1976 to attend the 5th NAM summit. Rabindranath Tagore visited Sri Lanka three times in 1922, 1928, and 1934. Pablo Neruda, was in Lanka between 1929 and 1930 during his so-called ‘Luminous Solitude’ period about which much has been written too. This is only a handful of visitors I do not meet within the pages in Ajay’s book. While an author has the absolute freedom to make such choices, I am keen to know what the methodology for selection was. I can also see potential for another volume through which different takes on our country might be further expanded and offered to readers.
Coming back to what is in the book, Ajay captures well the color and life of specific neighborhoods, from the buzzling commercial life of Fort to the chaotic but functional personality of Pettah to the tree-lined and green areas of Cinnamon Gardens. But what he describes is not a flat nostalgic and rosy picture. He delves into the city’s unhappy moments and scars too touching upon the impact of the civil war and the fast-paced urban transformations of the 21st century which are also essential parts of my own life.
Coming from a languages and humanities background prior to joining the Foreign Service, I can see Ajay’s language is highly accessible, marked by a sensible journalistic clarity and an affectionate, yet clearly objective, tone. I can see from his description that Sri Lanka for Ajay is not just a place to write about, but more importantly a place he is clearly fond of, which reminds me of my own affection towards Mumbai as if it’s a more complex reliving of Colombo itself.
I will conclude by using a Sri Lankan example of food as a metaphor to capture the spirit of Ajay’s book. It is like a delightful platter of what we call ‘shorteats’, meaning mouth-watering snacks one can eat as one wishes without any specific order. Ajay’s book does not have to be read in a linear fashion. You can begin from the end or middle and read as you wish. In the end, like a good meal of ‘shorteats’, it will keep you satisfied. It is an interesting and thoughtful take on my city. It treats the city not simply as just another location, but as a living, breathing place with its own very specific character.
Let me now introduce very briefly our panelists for today.
Kalpana Swaminathan is an award-winning writer from Mumbai. She is best known for her 'Lalli' detective novels. She also writes with Ishrat Syed as Kalpish Ratna. Swaminathan and Syed are both surgeons. Together they have published more than 20 books. Swaminathan won the 2009 Vodafone Crossword Book Award (Fiction) for Venus Crossing: Twelve Stories of Transit.
Gautam Pemmaraju is a Mumbai-based writer, researcher and filmmaker, and creative consultant. He has directed the film 'A Tongue Untied: The Story of Dakhani.' His upcoming book 'One Man Against an Empire: M. N. Roy, British Intelligence and the Colonial Surveillance State' will be published in the UK in November 2026.
Ajay Kamalakaran is a journalist, writer and linguist, based in Mumbai. He has lived in the United States and Russia and has been a regular traveller to Sri Lanka since 2003. Ajay is the author of Globetrotting for Love and Other Stories from Sakhalin Island and A Week in the Life of Svitlana. His articles regularly appear in Scroll, Russia Beyond, Open, Manorama Online, National Geographic Traveller and other publications.
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