PORTUGAL
THE HIDDEN PRESENCE

When, in the early 16th century the Portuguese arrived in Ceylon, the impression they made on the Singalese is recorded in one of their historical texts:

And now it came to pass that in the Christian year 1522 A. D., in the month of April, a ship from Portugal arrived at Colombo, and information was brought to the king, that there was in the harbour a race of very white and beautiful people, who wear boots and hats of iron, and never stop in one place. They eat a sort of white stone and drink blood; and if they get a fish they give two or three ride in gold for it; and besides, they have guns with a noise louder than thunder, and a ball shot from one of them, after traversing a league, will break a castle of marble.

The "very white people" would stay in Sri Lanka for a hundred and fifty years, attracted by "the true and good Cinnamon.... [that] grows on the hillsides in bushes like bay trees." 2 The history of their presence in Sri Lanka was to be one of bloody wars, of intervention in the affairs of the local kingdoms, of shifting alliances and of the fanatic imposition of a foreign religion. But it would also be a history of interaction between cultures, to which the Portuguese contributed with the best in their own culture: a concern for education which led them to build schools all over the territories they controlled, an outlook remarkably free (for the times) of racial prejudice, intermarrying freely with the local population (provided the religious barrier had been overcome), a willingness to share their mores and traditions and at the same time to accept and assimilate some of the local ones.

In spite of a hundred and fifty years only very little material evidence remains in modern Sri Lanka.

Their forts, scattered all over the coastal regions: Colombo, Bentota, Galle, Matara, Negombo, Trincomalee, Batticaloa, Jaffna, Mannar, were either destroyed, built over or left to decay by the Dutch. Their churches and convents suffered the same fate. Their houses built, in the words of a Dutch traveller 3 who visited Colombo around 1650, "spacious, airy and high, with stone walls, as if meant to stand forever, according to the Portuguese manner of building", did not survive the ravages of time and it would be the Dutch domestic architecture that would become the oldest example of colonial building styles.

Of the Indo-Portuguese furniture, of which a wealth of specimens still survives in the museums of India and Portugal, nothing is left in Sri Lanka, and it would again be the Dutch furniture that was to endure. The same has to be said of the Ceylon-Portuguese art. Only a handful of religious images and even fewer non-religious items may be seen in the National Museum of Colombo. Of the crafts, the only one that seems to have persisted is the lace making tradition of the renda (Port. renda) and biralu (Port. bilro), often erroneously thought to have been introduced by the Dutch.

A hundred and fifty years have been completely obliterated. Only the carved padrão in the Gordon Gardens seems to bear witness to the Portuguese presence.

But if stones and wood, crosses and statues are gone, the Portuguese imprint in the history of Sri Lankan languages and culture was so strong that it managed to survive for centuries and may still be seen in our times. And this imprint was achieved not only during the Portuguese period, but even more strikingly after they left, during the Dutch domination of Ceylon.

The Portuguese went to the Orient to "win souls and riches"4, led by a belief that it was their mission to spread the word of the Christian God in the "pagan" lands of Asia. To achieve it they founded parish schools wherever they build a church, and in most instances, rather than learning the local language, taught theirs so that they could proceed with the religious instruction thus giving Christianity (or rather Catholicism) in the East a Portuguese expression.

The spread of the language was also achieved through mixed marriages. With a European population estimated at the beginning of the 16th century to be between a million and a million and a half inhabitants, the shortage of manpower, in contrast to the vast areas under their control, would in a very short time destroy the dream of an empire that spread across the oceans. The only feasible policy to obviate such a shortcoming was to create a loyal population, linked to them through religion, culture and blood. The perils of the long and hazardous sea voyages to the East, the climate, in places hostile to Europeans, the unsafe living conditions of the initial period, when war was a semi-permanent state in the territories they controlled, prevented any significant importation of Portuguese women into the Orient. Albuquerque was the first to establish and promote a policy of intermarriage, which would result in the establishment of a population of settlers, the Portuguese casados, the locally married men. On the shoulders of their offspring rested the hope of the continuity of the empire for centuries to come. The empire did not survive but the children of the casados were, to a great extent, responsible for the permanence of the Portuguese presence wherever it is still felt today.

Ceylon had then, at the time of the Dutch conquest, a native population which had, in the coastal areas, been converted to Catholicism in significant numbers.

The sea-coast round about the Island was formerly under their power and government, and so held for many years in which time many of the natives became Christians, and learned the Portuguese tongue.

Robert Knox (1680)5

It also had a population of mixed blood, whose language and culture were of Portuguese extraction.

When the Dutch replaced the Portuguese in the East they faced exactly the same problems: a shortage of manpower to control and settle their newly acquired colonies and a shortage of available Dutch women, who came to the East in sparse numbers, since the same factors of risk applied to them.

Less prone to racially mixed marriages than the Portuguese, the Dutch had a much smaller pool from which to choose their wives. Their requirements,: Christian faith and European blood, left them with only one community whose women they were willing to marry: the Creole community which the Portuguese had left behind.

... in the towns and strongholds which the Dutch took from the Portuguese there were... a large number of Portuguese women, both of pure and mixed descent, with whom many of the Dutch intermarried... 6

The Dutch seemed to have realized very early that if they wanted to establish a Dutch colony in Ceylon, their potential wives would have to come from this group.

After the fall of Colombo the Dutch would not allow the female relatives of the Portuguese, who had fled to the Kandyan kingdom, to join their men.

... within a couple of months of the capture of Colombo, some hundred and fifty Dutchmen contracted marriages with women from Colombo. 7

The "Portuguese" women brought with them their native tongue, the creolized Portuguese which had become by then the lingua franca all over the Island. Valentyn relays the outburst of Vimala Dharma Suriya, ruler of the Kandyan kingdom, irritated by the behaviour of Sebalt de Wert, telling his men: "Mara isto can" (bind this dog).

[Portuguese was] the language of fashion. It was spoken in the court of Kandy. It came so naturally to Dona Catherina that, according to Baldeus, she spoke Portuguese on her death-bed. It was in Portuguese that her son, Rájasinha, conversed with foreigners and corresponded with the Dutch... 8

A German traveller who visited Ceylon in 1680 mentions a Mistize woman

... a widow, by name Branco da Costa, whose Father had been a Portuguese and her mother a Cingulayan [...] Her first husband was a substantial Free Merchant at Columbo, call'd Jan Christiansen. [...] She spoke no Dutch, but Portuguese and Cingalaish, which were her Father's and Mother's languages. 9

They brought their language, a Creole Portuguese, into their new homes and with it a Creole culture, part Portuguese, part Asian, a composite of the maternal and paternal cultures. This language soon became the language of the Dutch households. Servants and slaves spoke it with their masters. The children, raised by their Creole mothers and the Creole speaking slaves, acquired it as a first language. The linguistic subversion of the Dutch colony became a reality.

When, after this, from time to time, Dutch men and women arrived from Europe, they were in their turn compelled to learn the prevailing language, a language the acquisition of which was rendered remarkably easy by its liquid sounds, its freedom from grammatical restraints, and the facility with which it lent itself to the absorption of words from other languages. 10

The cultural subversion took place in the same subtle way. The Ceylon Portuguese culture, a synthesis of the Asian elements of the Sri Lankan culture and the Portuguese model infiltrated the Dutch colonial culture. Another German traveller Johann Christoph Wolf (1750-1769) describes a tea party in Jaffna:

On arrival the ladies kiss each other which they do twice, pressing mouth to mouth, and holding the breath firmly at the same time. This kissing they call in the Portuguese language... (Chera Boca), which means to smell the mouth. During this formality each lady or Miss has in her mouth betel, mixed with sweet smelling things, such as cardamom, katsihunde and gattiganeber. [...] After this business, tea [...] served in as many cups as there are persons present, is offered on a large salver (called bandese)... 11

Louis Nell12 discusses the origin of the Ceylonese culinary dishes described by Captain Percival in 1797. Most of the terms are either Singalese or Portuguese, only a few are Dutch. The Portuguese tempradu, frikadela, curry-sekku, empada and pecipada, sambola, laterias, fios, paunkook, and leveriya are wrongly attributed to the Dutch influence by Percival, who having tasted them in the Dutch households assumed they were Dutch.

Even today if one looks at the index of a Sri Lankan cookbook, such as the Ceylon Daily News Cookery Book, one will find that the Indo-Portuguese dishes persist in the culinary tradition of Sri Lanka: brinjal curry, bolo de coco, bolo folhado, boroa, foguete, pentefrito, padre curry, lime pickle temprado, aluva, dodol, laddu, sambol, prawn blachang, are all dishes that are the result of the happy combination of Portuguese and Eastern traditions which the Portuguese spread all over Asia.

Faced with cultural subversion from within, defeated in their own homes by the enemy they had expelled from the Island, the Dutch tried to eradicate the mark left by the Portuguese at least in what concerned the language. The Dutch Governor van Goen sentenced, in a Placaat of November 16th 1695, all the slaves who would not learn Dutch, to have their heads shaven and their masters fined so that "entire families, in particular the young children would come to learn the language of their fathers" and so that "the name and memory of our enemies be forgotten and ours perpetuated".13

Another Dutch governor was more realistic:

The Portuguese language is an easy language to speak and easy to learn. That is the reason why we cannot prevent the slaves brought here from Arakan, who never heard a word of Portuguese (and indeed our own children) from taking to that language in preference to all other languages and making it their own. 14

The use of the Portuguese Creole continued even during the British period. The Dutch Burghers, their Portuguese ancestry forgotten, continued for a few generations to keep it as the language of the home. Mr. Anthonisz describes a Dutch Burgher family in his diary Stam Boek, in which a conversation of a father with his dying daughter is reported: "The whole conversation was in Portuguese!" exclaims Mr. Anthonisz15. It would soon, though, be replaced by English.

The Portuguese Creole survived also as a lingua franca. Several British accounts of the Island: Percival (1797), Cordiner (1807) and Tennent (1859), all mention the need for the traveller to learn the "corrupt Portuguese" which was still in use all over the coast:

Already the language of the Dutch, which they thought to extend by penal enactments, has ceased to be spoken by their direct descendents, whilst a corrupt Portuguese is to the present day the vernacular of the middle classes in every town of importance.

Sir James Emerson Tennent16

Several glossaries and grammars of Ceylon Portuguese were published during the 19th century, futher evidence of the survival of the language: Berrenger (1811), Callaway (1818, 1820, 1823), Fox(1818,1819,1821,1823,1859)and the religious literature of the British missionaries was all published in Ceylon Creole Portuguese. The printing presses of the Wesleyan Mission turned out hundreds of books of prayers, sermons, catechisms, translations of the Old and the New Testament, all written in the Ceylon Creole. The British had come to realize, just as the Dutch did before them, that the propagation of their faith would be better achieved through the lingua franca.

The widespread use of the Creole in Colombo during the 19th century justified the publication of several periodicals in the language: Bom Novas ( 1869) published in Colombo; O Bruffador (1883-1899) in Colombo; The Independent Catholic and The Parish Paper (1895) with some texts in Ceylon-Portuguese; Voz de verdade (1870-1916) in Galle and with some issues published in Colombo.

The Dutch Burghers were not the only ones to have Ceylon Portuguese as their native language. It was the language of a community who claimed a direct Portuguese ancestry: the "Portuguese" mechanics of Ceylon. Given the status of Burghers by the Dutch, artisans for the most part, they came to be known as mechanics. Tennent mentions them in his Ceylon, an Account of the Island:

The majority of the Portuguese descendants consist of impoverished artisans and domestics and some few of them are successfully engaged in trades and professions. 17

The privileged status they enjoyed during the Portuguese period had been lost for ever. Their stubborn adherence to the Catholic faith had made them the target of reprisals by the Dutch, preventing their access to more rewarding and prestigious professions. Those who could, claimed the status of Dutch Burghers. Those who could not entered an almost unbreakable cycle of low occupations and poverty. The appellation Portuguese Burgher became synonymous with low class.

It is fashionable in Ceylon for all the [European] descendents, Burghers as they call them here, to pass as Dutch descendents, but from the Dutch, with only a few exceptions, they have not the name, the colour, or even the language, that no one here can speak! On the contrary all use the low Portuguese -- the Portuguese Creole at home. However people call Portuguese Burghers or micos (mechanics) some humble artisans, in general illiterate and black, sometimes do not even have a Portuguese name.

Tavares de Mello, (1912). 18

It is outside the scope of this article to discuss the psycho-sociological issues relevant to the range of the definition of Burgher. Of interest here is that Ceylon Creole Portuguese was the language of the home of both the Portuguese and the Dutch Burgher communities. It still is the native language of the Portuguese Creole communities of Trincomalee and Batticaloa and of several small pockets in towns along the coast, though in a clear path to extinction.

Of particular interest is that through the role played by Portuguese Creole used for centuries as a lingua franca, and through the existence of the Portuguese Creole communities, the influence of Portugal in the Sri Lankan languages and cultures was maintained and reinforced long after the Portuguese left.

The musical tradition of the "Mechanics" is now part of Sri Lankan folk music: their Chikothi and Cafferina link Sri Lanka and the Sri Lankan Creoles to other Asian cultures, through the Portuguese Creole communities of Macau, Indonesia, Malaysia and India. The Cafferina in particular links them to East Africa through the African influences that came to the Creole music with the Sri Lankan Kaffirs.

The languages of Sri Lanka too, are witnesses to the hidden presence of Portugal: Tamil and Singalese both show in their vocabulary a deep influence of Portuguese, both from the Portuguese period and from the contact with the Portuguese Creole communities who, even if they still remember their Portuguese ancestry, have always shared with the other communities a deep pride in being Sri Lankans.

SOME WORDS OF PORTUGUESE ORIGIN IN THE LANGUAGES OF SRI LANKA

Note: This list follows HETTIARATCHI (1965) for the Sinhala words and PRAKASAR (1919) for the Tamil ones.

BIBLIOGRAPHY OF STUDIES ON THE

INFLUENCE OF PORTUGUESE

BUULTJENS. A. E. (1885-6). "On Some Portuguese Words Commonly Used by the Sinhalese," The Orientalist 2:214-218.

CALLAWAY. Rev. John. (1823c). A philological miscellany: consisting of words etymologized; allowable synonymies associated; and apparent ones distinguished, with an appendix, containing, Pronunciation directed; European words current in Cingalese; and Cingalese words resembling words of other languages. Colombo: The Wesleyan Mission Press. Xi, [1], 96 p.

CHELLIAH. J. V. 1936. "Portuguese words in Tamil," Ceylon Spectator 1 (22): 276-277.

ANON. (1869). Glossary of Native words. Colombo: Imprensa Nacional do Ceylão.

ANON. (1904). Glossary of Native, Foreign and Anglicized Words occuring in official correspondence and other documents. Colombo: Imprensa Nacional do Ceylão. July 1904.

GUNASEKARA. Abraham Mendia. (1891). A Comprehensive Grammar of the Sinhalese Language, adapted for the use of English readers and prescribed for the Civil Service Examination. Colombo: G. J. A. Skeen. XIV, 516 p.

--(1962). Colombo: Sri Lanka Sahitya Mandalaya. XVI,516 p.

HETTIARATCHI. D. E. (1965). "Influence of the Portuguese on the Sinhalese language," Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society (Ceylon) 9 (2): 229-238.

MENDIS. Wilfred. (1941). "Influx of Portuguese vocables in the Sinhalese language," Young Ceylon 10 (3): 50; 10 (5): 105-111.

MUDALIYAR. Sabaratna S. (1910). "Relics of the Portuguese Rule in Jaffna," CALR 5:12-15.

NELL. Louis. (1888-89a). "An explanatory list of Portuguese words adopted by the Sinhalese." The Orientalist Ⅲ: 41-56.

--(1888-89b). "An explanatory list of Dutch words adopted by the Sinhalese." The Orientalist Ⅲ: 133-144.

PERERA. S. G. (1922). "Portuguese Influence on Sinhalese Speech." CARL 8, part I: 45-60; part Ⅱ: 124-44.

PERERA. B. J. (1950). "The Portuguese and Sinhalese Culture. Blue and White. St. Josephs College Magazine (Colombo): 46-47.

PETER. W. L. A. Don. (1978). Education in Sri Lanka under the Portuguese. Colombo: The Colombo Catholic Press. 342 p.

PRAKASAR. S. Gnana. (1919). "Portuguese in Tamil." CALR 5 (2): 70-77.

SANNASGALA. P. B. (1976). A study of Sinhala vocables of Dutch origin, with appendices of Portuguese and Malay/Javanese. Colombo: The Netherlands-Alumni Association of Sri Lanka. XI, 131, [1]p.

WOODHOUSE. Edmund. (1885-86). "Influence of the Portuguese and the Dutch languages on the Sinhalese and the Tamil," The Orientalist 1 (1885): 223; 2 (1886): 155-158.

NOTES

1Rajavali -- Upham's version, p. 278.

2Duarte Barbosa (c. 1519) O Livro de Duarte Barbosa. Lisbon: Real Academia das Sciencias, 1812 (lst ed.). The quote is taken from the English translation, 1989 edition: New Delhi and Madras: A. E. S., vol. II, p 112.

3Vouter (Gautier) Schouten (1676) Oost-Indische voyagie. Amsterdam, quoted by L. J. Gratien (1923) "Colombo in the 17th century," C. A. & L. R. VIII (4): 287.

4João de Barros, Da Asia IX, Cap. 21.

5Knox. Robert 1681. An historical relation of the island of Ceylon. London: Royal Society. Quoted from the 1981 edition, Colombo: M. D. Gunasena & Co. Ltd. p. 257.

6R. G. Anthonisz (1908) "The Disuse of the Dutch Language in Ceylon," JDBUC 1 (1): 30.

7K. W. Goonewardena (1959) "A Netherlands in Ceylon: Dutch Attempts to Found a Colony during the First Quarter of their Power in Ceylon." Ceylon Journal of Historical and Social Studies 2(2): 226.

8 S. G. Perera (1922) "Portuguese Influence on Sinhalese Speech." Ceylon Antiquary and Literary Register, vol*(1):47.

9Roland Raven-Hart (comp. e trad). (1953). Germans in Dutch Ceylon. Colombo: National Museum of Ceylon Translation Series. P. 74.

10Anthonisz Op. cit., p. 30

11D. W. I. (1895). "A Tea Party in Jaffna", Monthly Literary Register and Notes and Queries for Ceylon III (3): 67.

12Louis Nell (1889). "The Archeology of Eurasian Gastronomy." The Orientalist (Bombay), III (1888-89): 161-167.

13Goonewardena, op. cit., p. 241/242.

14Ibid., p. 242.

15Anthonisz, op, cit., p. 31.

16Sir James Emerson Tennent (1859). Ceylon, an Account of the Island, Physical, Historical and Topographical. London. Quoted from the 1977 edition, Colombo: Tisara Prakasakayo Ltd., p. 61-62.

17 Ibid., p. 671.

18Tavares de Melho, in a panel discussion that followed P. E. Pieris conference "O Ceylão Portuguez no princípio do sec. XVII." O Oriente Portuguez, XI (1912): 71. Author's translation.

"É moda em Ceilão de todos os descendentes, burghers como se lhes chama lá, passarem por descendentes hollandeses, de quem, salvo rara excepção, não possuem o nome, cor, nem mesmo a língua que aqui ninguem sabe falar! usando pelo contrário todos em família o portuguez basso-- crioulo portuguez. Porém taxam de Portuguese burghers ou micós (mechanicos) uns humildes profissionais, em geral illetrados e pretos, que ás vezes nem appelidos portuguezes possuem."

*Lecturer in the Linguistics Department of the Universidade Nova de Lisboa.