Cultural Encounters and Homoeroticism in Sri Lanka

Sex and Serendipity

Robert Aldrich

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317805281
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Indian & South Asian History
• Index: History

Ceylon, or Sri Lanka, was long known to travellers for its luxuriant landscapes, colourful temples and friendly inhabitants – the island once named Serendip. This book explores the sojourns of gay visitors from the late 1800s to the modern day, providing a history of homosexuality, travel and cultural encounter on the island.

The book offers profiles of major figures in Sri Lankan culture and of homosexual visitors, both famous and infamous, to the island. It discusses the experiences of sojourners including the Victorian social reformer Edward Carpenter and the German naturalist Ernst Haeckel, such British and American writers as Paul Bowles and Arthur C. Clarke, and the Australian painter Donald Friend. It also pays particular attention to Lionel Wendt, one of the most important modernist photographers outside Europe. For these figures, an erotic appreciation of young men whom they encountered mixed with interest in Sinhalese art, Buddhist and Hindu spirituality, and the flora and fauna of the island. Their experiences influenced modern writing, art and dance. Cultural influences moved in both directions, however, and Sri Lankans also found inspiration from abroad. The book argues that homosexuals played a major role in the transmission of cultural influences from Sri Lanka to the rest of the world, and from the wider world to this Indian Ocean island.

Providing an original analysis of gay cultures in Sri Lanka from Victorian encounters to the present day, this book is the first study of Sri Lanka as a site of gay travel. An excellent study of trans-national cultural exchange, sexuality and the relationships between them, it will be of interest to academics in the field of Asian Studies, Colonial History and Gay and Queer Studies.

1 Homoeroticism and colonial visitors in the Victorian Age

Travellers’ views

By the later nineteenth century, Ceylon was no terra incognita, and intending visitors or simply armchair travellers could consult a small shelf of books written over the past centuries that conjured up picturesque scenes of the island and its people. Landscapes, ruins and monumental buildings, animals and people had long filled accounts of voyages, the aspects of life so different from those of the visitors a focus of interest. The physiques and the apparel of native peoples generally excited the particular curiosity of travellers from abroad, and Ceylon proved no exception. Marco Polo, visiting in 1293, remarked that ‘both men and women go nearly in a state of nudity’, wearing only a cloth wrapped around their lower body. Later memoirists described the gold-threaded and jewel-encrusted regalia of the Kandyan king and the elaborate attire of the elite. They similarly never failed to note the succinct clothing of ordinary people, revealing bodies for the gaze of the Europeans, who often remarked on their slender, attractive figures. Christoph Schweitzer, a native of Württemberg and employee of the Dutch East India Company, for instance, told readers of his travelogue in 1676 that the Sinhalese men ‘are well shaped, part of a black, and part of yellowish complexion. The men have long straight hair and wear their beards very large.… They are generally very hairy upon their breasts, and they are very proud of it’. He added that the ‘Malabars’ (Tamils), too, ‘are all very well shaped and very black’.¹

In the 1680s the Englishman Robert Knox observed that noblemen wore calico doublets and lungis with coloured sashes, ornamented themselves with copper and silver rings, ‘and spruce young men do wear their hair long hanging down behind’.² Young men and women, he added, also wore flowers in their hair. The long dark hair of Ceylonese men, dressed with coconut oil, gathered in a chignon and held with a tortoiseshell comb, perhaps decorated with flowers, seemed to some observers unmanly, especially with the similarity of dress between men and women. As they painted word pictures of bodies and dress, the writers also speculated on morals and manners. Ever concerned about sexual practices and moral values, they occasionally dared to mention unnatural acts.

Though Knox reassuringly said that he did not hear of sodomy being practiced, he thought the morals of the native people lax, parents not objecting to their sons and daughters making bedfellows of each other. A woman ‘reckons her self as much obliged to the Man for his Company, as he does to her for hers’ – ‘I think they be all Whores’, he added disapprovingly. There were, however, no ‘Publick Whores’, and infidelity often led to the killing of guilty parties.³ He mentioned one sport, played only between men and out of the sight of women, which involved a competition with sticks. There was much rejoicing for the victor:

Which rejoycing is exprest by Dancing and Singing, and uttering such sordid beastly Expressions, together with Postures of their Bodies, as I omit to write them, as being their shame in acting, and would be mine in rehearsing. For he is at that time most renowned that behaves himself most shamelesly and beast-like.⁴

Such fascination for bodies and behaviours continued through the centuries. John Davy, in an 1821 account, described the Ceylonese of the interior of the island as more diminutive in height than Europeans, but ‘clean-made and of neat muscle and small bone’, while as ‘for Indians’, by which he meant Tamils, they displayed ‘capacious chests and broad shoulders’. ‘Their features are commonly neat, and often handsome; their countenances are intelligent and animated’, he continued. ‘Nature has given them a liberal supply of hair, which they universally allow to grow on their face as well as their head, to considerable length, being of opinion that the beard does not deform, but improve the face’. Though he found local religion in many senses monstrous, Davy acknowledged – differing from Knox – that ‘It is certainly highly creditable to the Boodhaical religion that its morality is so good and uncontaminated with vice and licentiousness’. Men, however, were ‘great connoisseurs’ of the charms of the ‘often handsome’ Sinhalese women.⁵

Richard Wade Jenkins, an English planter writing in 1886, recalled how on arriving in the colony he was struck by the sight of ‘naked coolys [sic], men who seem to be all women’.⁶ Visitors persisted in commenting on the physical traits of Ceylonese men, though opinions differed on their attractiveness. Walter J. Clutterbuck, the remarkably inane author of an 1891 travelogue littered with racist comments about the ‘niggers’ and ‘coolies’, predictably noted the way Sinhalese men dressed their hair with oil, and spluttered rather off-handedly:

The only way a new-comer has of distinguishing between a young Singhalese man and a young girl is, that a man wears a comb, and a woman does not. After a stranger has been in Ceylon a short while, he discovers another difference – viz., that a Singhalese lad is very pretty and feminine-looking, while the young girls are short and exceedingly ugly.⁷

British visitors were not alone in their observations. The Frenchman Emile Cotteau, for example, after describing the sarong and long hair of boatmen, remarked on the ‘admirably formed torso of a fine bronze colour, [and] supple and well proportioned extremities’.⁸

British moralists, promoters and representatives of colonial authority in the island worried about the dangers to European men in the tropics, where the heat was thought to stimulate passions, but where the scarcity of white women made legitimate unions difficult. Loneliness and boredom, especially outstation and in remote postings, where a European’s only companionship on a plantation might be a houseboy, could drive the European to relations with native women – or worse. An 1880 commentator wrote of the weakness of some planters whose ‘moral principles have not been strong enough to enable [them] to resist temptations which a solitary life, distant from social amenities and religious restraints and privileges, has added force’.⁹ Manly resolve, Christian virtue and cold-showered continence provided weapons to fight against evil. Nevertheless, many European men notoriously took concubines, in Ceylon as elsewhere in the colonies, entering into informal liaisons that generally did not endure beyond the end of their tours of duty.

Not every writer, of course, proved purse-lipped and puritanical about the sexual pleasures on offer, though relatively few – especially the Victorians, who (officially) looked askance at indiscreet sexual adventures – confessed to their enjoyments. Writers with a homosexual or bisexual bent who drifted through Ceylon did not necessarily reveal their sexual urges or encounters, understandably so since homosexuality was regarded at home as sin, crime, illness and taboo. Sexual irregularities would have incurred inquisition and possible imprisonment, especially as British law codes regulating sexuality were imposed on the colonies in a Victorian age less tolerant of sexual shenanigans than earlier periods: stamping out vice, whether committed by natives or by colonisers lured into temptation, was part of the burden shouldered by white men.

Ceylon nevertheless provided a place where men of ambivalent or dissident desires might roam, experiencing and giving voice to an eroticised appreciation of the much vaunted attractiveness of local men. Two Victorian-era traveller-memoirists led the way. One was German, the other English; both, highly educated; both, middle-aged. Natural history was the province of the German, and Eastern spirituality an area of keen interest for the Englishman. One fulfilled a life-long desire to see the tropics in going to Ceylon, while the other planned a trip in large part because of a happenstance friendship with a Ceylonese in England. One was married and the father of children, though his account contains blatantly homoerotic aperçus; the other openly homosexual and a campaigner for homosexual emancipation.

A German scientist in Ceylon

When he set sail for Ceylon in 1879, Ernst Haeckel, who held degrees in medicine and natural science, was a distinguished forty-eight-year-old professor at the University of Jena. He had already carried out research, primarily on sea creatures such as zoophytes and protozoa, in the Mediterranean and the waters off the Canary Islands, and was the author of impressive scientific papers and a monograph on the corals of the Arabian coast. He was also well known for his endorsement of Darwin’s theories of evolution and natural selection. In an account of his stay in Ceylon, he revealed that at a young age ‘a voyage in the tropics became the goal of my most eager desires’ (Ch. 1), and now that wish came to fruition. In good academic fashion, Haeckel prepared his trip carefully, reading everything he could find about Ceylon, training himself to use a camera and a gun, putting together a kit of no fewer than sixteen trunks and cases of books, scientific materials for specimen collections, photographic equipment, sketch-books, and a stock of inexpensive prints to present to those whom he might encounter. In an effort that would resonate with present-day university expectations, he secured funding from the grand ducal government of Weimar (though, disappointingly, the Berlin Academy turned down his request for a grant). He was armed, too, in good Victorian fashion, with letters of introduction to the colonial governor and a list of notables.¹⁰

Indische Reisebriefe records Haeckel’s six-month journey and stay in Ceylon, the good professor never missing a chance to give readers little lectures about the workings of the ship on which he travelled, the passengers on board, social life and the food served, and the ports – Brindisi, Port-Said, Aden, Bombay – at which the Helios called. The chapters on Ceylon detail Haeckel’s meanderings around the island and visits to planters, though he found the sacred Buddhist temple in Kandy less fascinating than he had anticipated, and he lacked enough interest in archaeology to venture to the historical triangle of Sigiriya, Polonnaruwa and Anuradhapura. However, he enthused endlessly about the beauty and wealth of Ceylon’s nature, plants, animals (terrestrial and maritime) and people. Haeckel concentrated his writing on the six weeks that he spent doing research on the south coast, at Weligama, where he set up a laboratory and workroom in a government rest-house. For Haeckel, Ceylon was a paradise, a natural Eden, an ‘island of wonders’. He busily collected specimens, examining them under his microscope, dissecting, preserving and packing them into his cases, fighting against the heat and humidity to safeguard his collection. Never wasting a spare moment, he spent his leisure sketching, exploring and searching out contacts with his Ceylonese neighbours. On occasion, he went hunting, though generally for specimens or food rather than trophies – he savoured Ceylonese cuisine, surprising his cook with his enjoyment of hot curries, even when concocted of snake or monkey.

Haeckel commented on the characteristics of ‘the naked brown figures’ among whom he lived just as he did on the features of animals and plants. He noted, as did other visitors, the fashion in which Ceylonese men kept their hair long and oiled, which ‘gives them a curiously feminine appearance, which is increased by their slender and fragile proportions’ (Ch. 3). He returned several times in his memoir to the ‘singularly slender and feminine character of the limbs which is so conspicuous in the Cinghalese men’, contrasting their physiques with those of the darker-skinned, ‘sinewy’, ‘tall and graceful’ Tamils: ‘the general proportions’ of a Tamil’s physique ‘correspond so nearly with the artistic standard of beauty that the Dravida [Dravidians] cannot be included among the inferior races of humanity – on the contrary, many specimens come remarkably near to the Greek ideal’. This was but one of several comparisons Haeckel made between Ceylonese men and the Greek statues that provided the yardstick of masculine beauty for such classically trained men as the German. As he wandered among the tea plantations, where the simple loincloths of the Tamil labourers conveniently ‘afford ample opportunities for admiring the beauty of their forms’, he mused: ‘How much better might a sculptor here study the true beauty and proportion of the human form among these naturally developed models, than in the life-schools of European academies’ (Ch. 15).

Haeckel took on four servants in Weligama (which he called Belligam), where he nicknamed the keeper of the rest-house where he lodged ‘Socrates’, as he reminded Haeckel of a well-known bust of the philosopher with his turned-up nose, keen eyes, thick lips and beard. ‘It really seemed as though I should be pursued by the familiar aspects of classical antiquity from the first moment of my arrival at my idyllic home’, he recounted, as Haeckel painted an evocative portrait of another of his retainers:

For, as Socrates led me up the steps into the open central hall of the rest-house, I saw before me, with uplifted arms in an attitude of prayer, a beautiful naked, brown figure, which could be...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 Homoeroticism and colonial visitors in the Victorian Age
• 2 Spirituality, sex and scandals in turn-of-the-century Ceylon
• 3 The Count de Mauny and the Gardens of Taprobane
• 4 Modern art and the homoerotic photographs of Lionel Wendt
• 5 Bevis and Geoffrey Bawa, Donald Friend and their friends
• 6 Sojourners and the seduction of Ceylon
• 7 Painting men
• 8 Gay Lanka?
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index