Portuguese Encounters with Sri Lanka and the Maldives. Translated Texts from the Age of the Discoveries

It is one of the paradoxes of Sri Lankan history that the bulk of the historical source material for the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was written in the language of the island’s first European occupiers, the Portuguese. Letters, reports, surveys and chronicles were produced assiduously by the newcomers to reflect upon the realities encountered in Sri Lanka, as in so many other places. It has thus become common for Sri Lankanists interested in the Early Modern period to engage with Portuguese texts. As a consequence, making such texts available in English translation has been one of the priorities of scholars working on the subject since the glory days of the Journal of the Ceylon Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society in the late nineteenth century and the Ceylon Antiquary and Literary Register in the 1910s-30s. Amongst the most significant English translations of Portuguese sources are Father Gabriel Perera’s version of Fernão de Queiroz’s Temporal and Spiritual Conquest of Ceylon (Colombo, 1930) and Vito Perniola’s three volumes of sources in The Catholic Church in Sri Lanka – The Portuguese Period (Dehiwala, 1989-91).