Serendipitous Translations

"This volume brings together a singular collection of translated texts that illuminate the entangled histories of Lanka and the Islamic world across the Indian Ocean. Preceded by concise commentaries, these fragments—spanning the medieval to the postcolonial—offer readers snippets of a world rarely assembled in one place. The choice to center Islamic-Lankan interactions is methodologically astute as it allows for an engagement with a multilingual archive—Arabic, Ottoman Turkish, Tamil, Malay, Dhivehi, Urdu, and Sinhala—that resists the pull of Eurocentric historical frames. Instead, what emerges is a composite portrait of Lanka, situated within broader oceanic circulations of people, texts, and religious imaginaries. This is a book that invites readers not only to rethink the place of Lanka in Indian Ocean history but also to reflect on the ways in which histories are told, translated, and archived." - Nira Wickramasinghe, Leiden University, author of Slave in a Palanquin: Colonial Servitude and Resistance in Sri Lanka

"Serendipitous Translations pushes open a new door onto Sri Lanka’s past—and a polyglot array of voices emerge. Building on welcome moves to explore non-European traditions of travel literature, this volume presents the accounts of a succession of Muslim visitors to its shores but also stands as a real contribution to the history of Islam in Sri Lanka. It is also a beautiful sourcebook for the study of Indian Ocean cosmopolitanism." - Alan Strathern, University of Oxford, author of Converting Rulers: Global Patterns 1450-1850

"Serendipitous Translations will significantly assist scholarly work in a burgeoning area—that is, the study of Sri Lanka, namely the island's status in the Islamicate World. It will be of value to those who consider Sri Lanka's connections around trade, migration, and religious ideas in the Indian Ocean region. It will also provide secure source evidence and rigorous scholarship for the consolidation of Muslim communities’ sense of deep belonging and rootedness in Sri Lanka today. These were communities which were not singular or homogenous, but rather people demonstrating richly variegated traditions of migration and residence through and on the island." - Sujit Sivasundaram, University of Cambridge, author of Waves across the South: A New History of Revolution and Empire