Distinguishing “Moors” and “Tamils” in the Early Modern Bay of Bengal

Abstract

Within Sri Lankan identity discourses, the category of the “Moor” appears as the greatest anomaly. In contrast to labels such as “Sinhala” and “Tamil”, that seem easily definable as “linguistic” or “ethnic” identities, the term “Moor” ostensibly encodes primarily “religious” difference, and therefore seems superfluous and even illegitimate in relation to the other categories. The emergence of this anomaly is commonly linked to the political interests of the Muslim elites in Colombo, Kandy and southern Ceylon in the late nineteenth century. Yet while the emergence of the “Sri Lankan Moor” in modern identity discourses is indeed closely connected to these elite interests, the use of “Moors” as an ethnic label and its distinction from “Tamils” has a far longer and more complex history. In this presentation, I will argue that from at least the late sixteenth century onwards, ethnic categorization in Muslim texts composed in Tamil developed in tandem with Catholic-Portuguese and Protestant-Dutch discourses in their deployment of terms such as “Muslim”, “Moor”, “Tamil”, and “Gentile”. In contrast to later categorization, the unclear boundaries between “global”, universalist uses of these terms and more local ones allowed both colonial powers and Tamil-speaking Muslims alike to deploy these terms productively in a region ranging from South India and Ceylon to Southeast Asia.