Treacherous terrain

Kandy at War: Indigenous Military Resistance to European Expansion in Sri Lanka, 1594-1919
By Channa Wickremesekera, Manohar, Rs 500

European expansion in Afro-Asia and the New World started in the 16th century. While Daniel Headrick emphasizes the role of technology to explain European dominance, others point to the military transformation of early modern age. Geoffrey Parker, in The Military Revolution, asserts that west European warfare was revolutionized after 1500. That, claims Parker, enabled the West to subdue the rest.

Recent historians like Jeremy Black and Patrick Malone have shown that European expansion in the non-European world was no cakewalk. Channa Wickremesekera looks at the resistance offered by Sri Lanka to Western invaders for more than two centuries.

Sri Lanka successively faced the Portuguese, Dutch and finally the British. By 1591, the Tamil kingdom of Jaffna collapsed before the onslaught of the Portuguese. But the Sinhalese kingdom of Kandy in the highlands of central Sri Lanka was able to oppose the Europeans till 1815. Kandy had a subsistence economy and no standing army. The king mobilized the peasants during emergencies. Wickremesekera attempts to explain how a small kingdom with limited demographic resources, minimal managerial assets and backward technology was able to oppose colonization.

The soldiers of Kandy had intimate knowledge of the terrain and moved without the elaborate baggage which usually encumbered an European army. So, they employed guerrilla tactics against the Europeans with devastating effect. Kandy was thickly forested and full of small winding tracks surrounded by hills. The terrain prevented the Portuguese and the Dutch from bringing heavy artillery. The thick foliage and big trees prevented linear deployment of the disciplined European infantry and volley firing ? techniques which gave the West decisive battlefield superiority over non-Western armies. Occasionally, the Portuguese and Dutch detachments lost their way in the jungles. The guerrillas of Kandy then used to shoot arrows at the porters accompanying the European detachments. When the porters fled, the European soldiers, without food and surrounded on all sides, surrendered. The climate of Sri Lanka too proved to much for the Europeans to bear.

In 1815, some nobles of Kandy rebelled and surrendered to the British. The author claims that even without internal rebellion, Kandy?s fall was inevitable. By the time the British intervened, the military balance had shifted decisively against Kandy. Continuous development of gunpowder weapons in 17th-century Europe meant that the British (after 1795) had access to Coehorn mortars which could be carried along the hilly forests of Kandy. Finally, unlike the Dutch and the Portuguese, the British could call upon the 100,000 strong disciplined and loyal Sepoy Army in India.

The book shows that to explain European expansion in the wider world, concentrating on western Europe is not enough. The resources of the non-European world too must be considered. Wickremesekera?s approach of synthesizing the changes in both Europe and Asia throws new light on the dialectics of Western intrusion and local oppositions.