By Udara Soysa –

Udara Soysa

In Colombo: Port of Call, Ajay Kamalakaran restores a forgotten capital to the center of the world

In an age when cities compete for global relevance through skylines and statistics, it takes a particular kind of writer to remind us that a city’s greatest power may lie in its past. In Colombo: Port of Call, Ajay Kamalakaran performs an act of historical reclamation, returning Sri Lanka’s capital to the place it once occupied at the crossroads of empire, commerce, faith, and imagination. This is not simply a book about Colombo. It is a book about movement — about ships cutting across monsoon waters, about passengers leaning over deck rails in anticipation, about lives that intersected, however briefly, at a harbor that once ranked among the most important in the world.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, before jet engines flattened geography and before tourism became algorithmic, Colombo was indispensable. Steamships sailing between Europe and Asia paused here to refuel, replenish, and recalibrate. The Suez Canal had redrawn global trade routes, and Colombo emerged as a vital hinge between East and West. It was, as one contemporary observer described it, a “halfway house around the world.”

Kamalakaran seizes upon this moment in history and animates it through a gallery of remarkable visitors. Among those who disembarked at Colombo’s port were figures whose names would shape literature, politics, sport, and culture. Mark Twain arrived and found enchantment in the island’s tropical splendor. Anton Chekhov passed through, absorbing impressions of a paradise filtered through imperial hierarchies. Don Bradman paused on his way to cricketing immortality. M. K. Gandhi made his only visit to Ceylon, engaging with diaspora communities and political realities beneath the colonial façade. Even the future Japanese emperor Hirohito experienced Colombo’s ceremonial hospitality.

These episodes could have been treated as historical curiosities. In lesser hands, they might have become a series of loosely connected anecdotes. But Kamalakaran approaches them differently. Each chapter becomes a prism through which Colombo itself is refracted. The city is not backdrop; it is protagonist.

The author’s research is meticulous. Drawing from archival letters, travelogues, colonial newspapers, shipping records, and memoirs, he reconstructs scenes with cinematic clarity. One can almost hear monsoon waves crashing against the newly constructed breakwater, a marvel of British engineering that helped transform Colombo into a year-round harbor. Horse-drawn carriages rattle toward Galle Face Green, where ocean winds cooled colonial evenings. The Grand Oriental Hotel bustles with travelers swapping stories from Bombay, Marseille, and Yokohama. Pettah’s markets thrum with Tamil, Sinhala, Arabic, and English voices, the scent of cinnamon and tea mingling in humid air.

Yet what distinguishes Colombo: Port of Call from nostalgic imperial histories is its moral steadiness. Kamalakaran does not romanticize colonial rule, even as he reconstructs its aesthetic. He acknowledges the racial hierarchies and exclusions embedded within the imperial order. Travelers who wrote glowingly of sunsets and scenery often overlooked — or accepted — the structures of inequality that made their journeys possible. The author’s refusal to indulge in uncomplicated nostalgia gives the book both credibility and depth.

The result is a layered portrait of a city shaped by successive waves of influence: Arab traders who anchored there centuries earlier; Portuguese fortifications; Dutch canals; British railways and administrative reforms; American missionaries; Indian diaspora merchants. Colombo becomes a living archive of overlapping worlds. Its Fort and Pettah districts are rendered not merely as neighborhoods but as palimpsests — spaces where architecture, language, and commerce testify to global entanglements.

One of the book’s quiet strengths is its sensitivity to transience. Many of the figures who passed through Colombo stayed only days, sometimes mere hours. Yet Kamalakaran argues, implicitly and persuasively, that brief encounters matter. A port city exerts influence not by permanence but by passage. It shapes impressions, refracts assumptions, and inserts itself into diaries and memories that travel onward.

There is also something deeply contemporary about this project. Modern Colombo is often perceived as a gateway — a transit point for beach-bound tourists or a stopover en route to elsewhere. By resurrecting its steamship-era prominence, Kamalakaran challenges this diminished perception. He reminds readers that for decades, Colombo was not peripheral but central, not marginal but strategic. It was a place where global currents converged before dispersing again.

In doing so, he offers more than history. He offers perspective.

In a world once again defined by shifting geopolitical alliances, maritime routes, and economic corridors, the story of Colombo’s rise and transformation feels unexpectedly relevant. Ports are returning to prominence in global imagination. Sea lanes matter anew. And cities that once mediated empire now navigate postcolonial realities, economic reinvention, and national identity.

Kamalakaran’s prose is clear and controlled, allowing the archival voices he cites to shine without overwhelming the narrative. He balances anecdote with analysis, color with context. The pacing mirrors the rhythm of steamship travel itself — deliberate, immersive, attentive to detail.

By the book’s end, Colombo emerges not simply as a historical setting but as a character with agency and endurance. Empires have receded, political orders have shifted, economic crises have come and gone. Yet the essence of the port — its openness, its multiplicity, its capacity to absorb and reinterpret global currents — persists.

Colombo: Port of Call is an elegant reminder that history does not reside solely in capitals of power or battlefields of change. It resides in harbors, in hotels, in railway stations, in fleeting conversations between strangers who happen to share a shoreline for a moment.

In restoring Colombo to its rightful place in the narrative of global modernity, Ajay Kamalakaran has written more than a local history. He has written a meditation on connection — on the way cities shape journeys and journeys shape memory.

And in doing so, he ensures that the port where the world once paused will not be forgotten again.