Between Colombo and the Cape:
Letters in Tamil, Dutch and Sinhala Sent to Nicolaas Ondaatje
1728-1737.
Herman Tieken
New Delhi: Manohar Publishers and Distributors, 2015
The book under review is a study of 71 letters received by Nicholaas Ondaatje, a Tamil practitioner of native medicine who was exiled to Cape Town for some act of misdemeanor by the Dutch East India Company (VOC) which capture Ceylon in 1654. Nicholaas was sentenced to spend 10 years on Robben Island and he seems to have worked out a fairly comfortable stay for himself at Cape Town.
The judicial order sentencing him has been lost, but some documents of the case has survived and the editor has pieced together a fairly complete picture of the life of this individual in exile. There are few non western sources for the study of the social history of the early eighteenth century and the letters in this book are certainly an important source of documentation. In Pondicherry we have the journal of the dubash, Ananda Ranga Pillai, a diary which offers insight into the emerging consciousness of individuality and self identity.
The family of this Nicholaas Ondaatje was of Tamil origin and the name seems to have been a Dutch rendering of a Tamil name, Ontacci, a contraction of the name, ukantacci, a sub sect of the Chetti community. It appears that this group was originally dealing in salt and later shifted to trading in pearls. As a convert to the religion of the Dutch, a member of the Reformed Dutch Church, Nicholaas Ondaatje was accused of changing the date for the celebration of the Holy Communion. Nicholaas was able to communicate in three languages--Tamil, Dutch, and Sinhala. Of the 71 letters received by him when he was in exile 64 were in Tamil, 6 in Dutch and only one in Sinhala. The letters essentially were from his family, an extended kin network consisting of maternal and paternal uncles, cousins, brothers and sisters. Interestingly, the corespondents were all males leading to the suspicion the female literacy was rather low. the 71 letters were from 29 individuals most of whom can be identified as members of the family of Nicholaas.
Nicholaas seems to have carried on some sort of trading activity while he was in Cape town and most of his letters deal with the commodities that he traded. Requests for cloth were frequent and the source of the cloth could only be from South India, the Coromandel coast. Cloth was shipped to Ceylon from Nagapattinam which was under the Dutch at this time and Tranquebar which was under the Danish East India Company. An interesting point that comes across in the letters is the request for seeds from Sri Lanka. In one particular case, Nicholaas even requested a slave to be sent so that he could be sold in the Cape slave market and money realized. This is a rare instance of an Asian being involved in the nefarious slave trade.
This is an interesting book and historians interested in the history of the eighteenth century will find this book interesting.
Letters in Tamil, Dutch and Sinhala Sent to Nicolaas Ondaatje
1728-1737.
Herman TiekenNew Delhi: Manohar Publishers and Distributors, 2015
The book under review is a study of 71 letters received by Nicholaas Ondaatje, a Tamil practitioner of native medicine who was exiled to Cape Town for some act of misdemeanor by the Dutch East India Company (VOC) which capture Ceylon in 1654. Nicholaas was sentenced to spend 10 years on Robben Island and he seems to have worked out a fairly comfortable stay for himself at Cape Town.
The judicial order sentencing him has been lost, but some documents of the case has survived and the editor has pieced together a fairly complete picture of the life of this individual in exile. There are few non western sources for the study of the social history of the early eighteenth century and the letters in this book are certainly an important source of documentation. In Pondicherry we have the journal of the dubash, Ananda Ranga Pillai, a diary which offers insight into the emerging consciousness of individuality and self identity.
The family of this Nicholaas Ondaatje was of Tamil origin and the name seems to have been a Dutch rendering of a Tamil name, Ontacci, a contraction of the name, ukantacci, a sub sect of the Chetti community. It appears that this group was originally dealing in salt and later shifted to trading in pearls. As a convert to the religion of the Dutch, a member of the Reformed Dutch Church, Nicholaas Ondaatje was accused of changing the date for the celebration of the Holy Communion. Nicholaas was able to communicate in three languages--Tamil, Dutch, and Sinhala. Of the 71 letters received by him when he was in exile 64 were in Tamil, 6 in Dutch and only one in Sinhala. The letters essentially were from his family, an extended kin network consisting of maternal and paternal uncles, cousins, brothers and sisters. Interestingly, the corespondents were all males leading to the suspicion the female literacy was rather low. the 71 letters were from 29 individuals most of whom can be identified as members of the family of Nicholaas.
Nicholaas seems to have carried on some sort of trading activity while he was in Cape town and most of his letters deal with the commodities that he traded. Requests for cloth were frequent and the source of the cloth could only be from South India, the Coromandel coast. Cloth was shipped to Ceylon from Nagapattinam which was under the Dutch at this time and Tranquebar which was under the Danish East India Company. An interesting point that comes across in the letters is the request for seeds from Sri Lanka. In one particular case, Nicholaas even requested a slave to be sent so that he could be sold in the Cape slave market and money realized. This is a rare instance of an Asian being involved in the nefarious slave trade.
This is an interesting book and historians interested in the history of the eighteenth century will find this book interesting.
