Philip Baldaeus Didn’t See A Big Ethnic Difference In Ceylon
Dr. Laksiri Fernando
Both Robert Knox and Philip Baldaeus are important in studying and understanding the history, people and culture of Ceylon in the 17th century, with possible insights for today, but the scholars have so far given less attention to Baldaeus than to Knox for various reasons. Baldaeus was a Protestant Priest who came to the country as a missionary when the Dutch were taking over the Maritime Provinces from the Portuguese. He probably came to Ceylon in 1657 and left the country in 1665. In between, he was also in Malabar and Coromandel for missionary work.
His “A Description of the Great and Most Famous Isle of Ceylon,” of 162 pages and 52 short chapters, was part of a larger work of 829 pages on “Malabar, Coromandel and Ceylon,” published in 1671in Amsterdam, in fact ten years before Robert Knox’s book, and translated and published in English in 1703 from High Dutch. The main focus of the historical description, of course from his official point of view, was Raja Singa II. Nevertheless, it traces the history from the arrival of the Portuguese and gives a fair description of diplomacy and political intrigues and the treatises between the Dutch and the Kandyan King/s. There are also important details about the conventions, state structures and political customs of what he has called the ‘Empire of Ceylon.’ While some of these details might be of interest to political analysts who grapple with the issues of devolution today, the focus of this article is on some of his comments on the Sinhalese, the Tamils and also the Muslims as ethnic or national groups from a reconciliation point of view.
Robert Knox gave an elaborate description of society, family, occupations, customs and religion, among other matters, of what he called the Chingulays (Sinhalese) in his An Historical Relation of the Island of Ceylon in East-Indies (1681) as he was living in Kandy areas for 19 years. He commented on the Tamils or Malabars as he had roamed around some parts of Vanni but he was not well aware of Jafnapatnam. (It should be noted that Malabars is the term many European writers used to describe the Tamils both in South India and Ceylon until the 19th century). This gap is filled by Philip Baldaeus with greater clarity, however, one need to keep in mind that by this time the Jaffna society had largely been Christianised which he admits and explains. Baldaeus lived both in Jaffna and Galle; and in Jaffna he learned Tamil and even translated the Lord’s Prayer into Tamil.
