Banished Indonesians: Experiences of Colonial Exile in Sri Lanka
Event details
Indonesia Study Group
Date & time
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Join in-person: McDonald Room, Menzies Library, 2 McDonald Place, Australian National University
Join online: bit.ly/isg_canberra (Webinar ID: 850 4235 3685; Passcode: 029070)
About the Seminar
The small, Indian Ocean island known as Sarandib, Lanka, and Ceylon was a site of banishment throughout the 18th century for members of royal families, convicts, servants and others sent there from across the Indonesian archipelago. Descendants of these exiles who remained on the island continued to speak and write in Malay, the archipelago’s lingua franca, and to adhere to a collective Muslim identity for several centuries and into the present. The talk considers if and how earlier religious and literary traditions of banishment tied to the island - those of Adam’s fall from paradise to Sarandib and Sinta’s abduction to Lanka – played a role in the lives of the early exiles and their descendants.
About Ronit Ricci
Ronit Ricci is a Professor in the departments of Asian Studies and Comparative Religion at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and affiliated with the School of Culture, History and Language at ANU where she is happy to spend two months every winter. Her research interests include Javanese and Malay manuscript cultures, Translation Studies, and Islamic literatures of South and Southeast Asia. She is developing the new field of Indonesian Studies in Israel. Her current research project, funded by the European Research Council, explores interlinear translations from across the Indonesian-Malay world from multiple perspectives.
This seminar will not be recorded.
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