An account of the Malay community of Sri Lanka, written from within it. Tuan M. Zameer Careem, a Sri Lankan Malay who was a medical student when he wrote it, approaches his own community anthropologically: who the Ceylon Malays are, how they came to the island, and how they have lived here since.
The history runs back several centuries. The first Malays arrived during the period of Dutch rule, coming from Celebes, Java and Sumatra. A second group, largely soldiers, came from what is now Malaysia under the British. Careem follows the community through the successive colonial presences on the island — Portuguese, Dutch and British — and traces what that layered history left behind in a minority population that has remained distinct while living among the Sinhalese, Tamil and Moor communities around it.
A substantial part of the book is given to traditions, customs and rituals, treated in detail rather than summarised. The chapters work through the social and cultural life of the community at length, which is what gives the book its size; this is a revised and enlarged version of Careem's earlier work on the subject, and it is thorough rather than brisk.
The Ceylon Malays are a small population and comparatively little has been written about them at this length in English. That is the gap the book addresses. It was noticed on publication — the Sunday Observer reviewed the revised edition and described it as an insight into the way of life of an ethnic minority whose presence in Sri Lanka is older than most casual accounts suggest.
Readers who will get the most from it are those with a direct interest in Sri Lanka's ethnic and cultural composition: people researching the island's minority communities, Malays in Sri Lanka and in the wider region looking for a record of their own background, students of colonial-era migration in the Indian Ocean, and general readers who want to understand a community they may know only as a name. Some familiarity with Sri Lankan history helps but is not assumed.
It is written in English and published by Godage International Publishers, an established Colombo house issuing work in English and Sinhala, with a long-standing interest in Sri Lankan history, culture and the island's communities. The tone throughout is descriptive and documentary — Careem is setting down what the community is and where it came from, with the attentiveness of someone recording a tradition he belongs to.
- Author: Tuan M. Zameer Careem
- Publisher: Godage International Publishers
- Language: English
- Pages: 722
- ISBN: 9789553082022
Browse the rest of our book collection.
