Modernity experienced at an everyday level
Nira Wickramasinghe has published an important work that moves readers’ attention towards an aspect of Sri Lanka’s history that is often neglected in historical works on Sri Lanka, namely how modernity was experienced at an everyday level under colonialism. Metallic Modern is written in a pleasant and playful manner. Yet it is a dense and serious book that touches upon the very nature of history writing and reworks our notions of time and place, of what makes an event important and what needs to be recorded for posterity. The richness and originality of this publication should not come as a surprise for those who are familiar with the author’s earlier works, all written in a style reminiscent of French social historians, where theory is never overbearing but insinuates itself in the narrative. Furthermore, in a period where Sri Lanka’s history is often assumed to be one single national narrative this book is a timely intervention to help put things into perspective.
Metallic Modern departs from conventional writings on the colonial history of Sri Lanka. By digging into new archives, visual, business, personal such as the police entry of a tailor called Pieterz in 1912, the Singer Papers in Wisconsin (USA), colonial records in Britain and newspaper advertisements in Sri Lanka, Wickramasinghe has beautifully captured the intersections of many histories; social, cultural, political and economic, criss-crossed by considerations of gender and religion, and most valuably, material and ideological histories, all in a single, small book. The style of writing and the way the materials are organized and presented, the way themes and objects reappear in chapters inadvertently, constantly challenge readers (in a positive way) to draw lines and connections.
In this book, the author has very successfully painted a picture of how non-elite groups in Sri Lanka encountered modernity most directly through their use and adoption of machines (i.e., sewing machines, gramophones, trams, bicycles and industrial equipment) and grew into modern day global consumers. Further, this book is very much a reflection on the ‘Sri Lanka modern’ that was, as the author argues “created out of the mould of consumerism and commodification”[5]. The story that is being told through the use of machines is multiscalar: it moves seamlessly from the self, to the streets of the city where in 1915 rioters began to use trams and bicycles, the Buddhist world and the world at large under the throes of a first globalization.
Metallic Modern is composed of an introduction, 8 short chapters and a conclusion. The beautiful illustrations used in the book, some of which are original sketches obtained from private collections, tell us a unique story as we sift through the pages. In the introduction, the author provides a dense theoretical and methodological discussion to place her chosen approach in the wider field of history writing. She situates the book in a wide terrain and engages with scholarship on empire, the Indian Ocean and global history. By doing so, the author intentionally snaps readers out of their familiar mental boundaries of the ‘island’ Ceylon and its history. Chapter 1 tells the story of the invention of the Singer sewing machine and investigates how it fashioned a market imaginary in the British Crown colony of Ceylon. This chapter offers a different take from that of economists and economic historians, who tend to dominate the history of industrial capitalism and consumption, and shows how and why ordinary colonized people consumed global products in the age of industrial capitalism. While lamenting about the lack of sufficient data to write a history of consumption in South Asia, the author deftly extracts anecdotes from the Singer archive in the USA to illuminate the story of colonized people as consumers. Chapter 3 of the book, entitled Paths to Buddhist Modern: From Siam to America, discusses how in colonial Sri Lanka, first a few men from Buddhist monastic communities and then larger and more diverse groups used ritual performances, language and travel to subvert the authority of the colonial state and in chapter 5, how Japan became the model of an Asian modern for people in colonial Sri Lanka.
Using the gramophone (chapter 4), and trams, cars and bicycles (chapter 6) the author compares and contrasts how in the crown colony of Ceylon, and in other colonized territories, modernity was practiced through machines. Chapter 7, entitled Tailor’s tale, machines in the home, provides an interesting account as to how material modernity entered ordinary homes. Although not explicitly stated, one of the main strengths of this chapter is the insights it offers into the gendered nature of modernity experienced and established in the crown colony through the sewing machine and the ‘job of the tailor’. Probing further into such questions along the gender-political-power intersections could have provided greater insights into history as ‘his-tory versus her-story’.
This book is academically rich, analytically sophisticated and full of insightful interpretations that make it a valuable source for scholars and students from multiple disciplines. It will also be a pleasant read for those who are simply curious about the dusty machines that sacredly and majestically occupy a small corner of their grandparents’ homes, still covered by a cloth.
Shyamika Jayasundara-Smits, Research Associate, International Institute of Social Studies, Erasmus University Rotterdam, The Netherlands