The story—because it is has not yet fully cohered into a “History”—exists in fragments. It lives, thus far, in people; in Facebook posts scrawled in the twilight hours of the morning; in the built environment; and in secret libraries which migrated from Church to neighborhood stall. Nevertheless, select scattered clues from the last half-century are arrayed on a table (or perhaps we prefer to call it a tavolino (Italian) or mēsaya (colloquial Sinhala)). These traces include a verb, a song, an empty house, and several books. They constitute, together, part of a history of twentieth-century dissent shared between Sri Lanka and Italy. They help us answer the broadest of human questions: what is it that we move away from, and what is it that we move towards?
Il verbo ~ “තනිකර [only] housework”
The Italian verb badare is generally translated as to care for, to look after, or to pay attention to. From badare we derive the occupational descriptor, badante, the label under which several of the 16,000 or so Sri Lankans, both men and women, clean homes and kitchens, wash dogs, and undertake elderly care in the southern Italian city of Naples. Naples is the most heavily and conspicuously “Sri Lankan” of Italy’s cities, where, alongside Ukrainians, Lankans vie for the largest migrant group, often working in the context of care work. Yet, the twentieth-century political and intellectual histories that bind a tropical Indian Ocean island and this Mediterranean port city remain profoundly understudied—some glimpses shine through in this essay. These histories are distinct from the histories of other South Asian and African communities in present-day Italy. The ties that bind them involve care, but not merely in the sense of carework as we now understand it, with its connotations of domestic servitude and labor. Instead, I suggest that thinking with care/badare offers also a much more all-encompassing, broader global politics of left-wing solidarity stretching through the sinews of Lanka’s 500-year-long history with the Catholic Church, into its youth revolutionary politics of the 1970s and into the crevices of the neoliberal economy that characterized the next five decades.
Il prete [the priest]
In October 1949, the young Lankan Jesuit priest Paul Caspersz left Colombo for Naples by boat. His early encounters with Jesuits took place among priests working at Saint Aloysius’ College in Galle in Southern Sri Lanka. This history fits within Lanka’s centuries-old encounters with both Jesuits and Catholicism, beginning in earnest with the Portuguese in the first decade of the fifteenth century. In the 1940s, however, Caspersz interacted with Italian rather than Iberian priests. He described, for instance, Father Luigi de Mattia (“young and very handsome, a foreigner, but sun-tanned enough to be taken for a Burgher [Lankan Euro-creole descendants]),” Francis Giglio, and, perhaps best known, then Principal of Saint Aloysius’ College, Vito Perniola (Caspersz, 2005, 43). Several Italian priests who returned to Naples, such as Armando de Burra, died “homesick for Sri Lanka.” Others, like Perniola, spent their life engaged in scholarly projects to document Lanka’s history of Catholicism (Perniola).
In the intellectual life of figures like Caspersz, the European and Lankan left collided. Upon his death in 2017, Caspersz was described as “radical” and “incendiary.” His convictions were, to some, “screaming violations of the spirit of Christianity”(Fonseka). This is perhaps to be expected of a Jesuit scholar-priest whose intellectual interlocutors included Marx and Che Guevara. His colleagues and co-religionists in Naples read Marx deeply and imbibed these views into liberation theology. Caspersz wrote of his God as “a human, a colonized and anti-imperialist human, a worker immensely concerned about the loss of human freedom and the oppression of the poor” (Caspersz 2005, 195). Crucially, for figures like Caspersz, Italy was more than a source of religious ordination—it was also a source of political ideas. In other words, the politics of care and attention stretched into questions of political economy, land tenure, and socialism. To reduce badante to “cleaner” is to miss these broader intellectual histories.
Volcano
For any of Napoli’s several thousand Lankans, a constant presence on the horizon is the towering form of Vesuvius. But there are other volcanos littered through Lankan-Italian relations. In 1971, the Sri Lankan Prime Minister Sirimavo Ratwatte Dias Bandaranaike warned in a speech given in parliament that a “terrible volcano” was about to erupt(Goonetileke). The radical leftist party the Janata Vimukti Peramuna (JVP) was created in 1969 by Patabendi Don Nandasiri Wijeweera (alias Rohanna Wijeweera). In March 1971, a bomb exploded on Marrs Hall at the University of Peradeniya (Wickramasinghe 243); 150 undergraduates were arrested and interrogated. In the ensuing years, several thousands of activists, policemen, and bystanders were imprisoned, tortured, and killed. Between 1970 and 1990 the JVP tried and failed twice to topple the ruling state of Sri Lanka. Before the Civil War began in 1983, these Marxist-Leninist youth uprisings were a “crisis unparalleled in [Ceylon’s] history,” described as “cataclysmic” or as a “gory symphony” (Warnapala). During this period from 1965 to 1970, the “rise of the radical left” (Wickramasinghe 242) found sympathizers in Southern Italy, and Catholic priests, such as Caspersz, were crucial in mediating escape and asylum for radicalized youth to Italy. The “terror” of the time from 1987 to 1990 is described by historians as years of “pain and suffering, broken people, parentless children, and bodiless funerals” (Warnapala). They were also years where places like Naples allowed for escape and asylum. The politics of care or badante extends beyond the home to accounts of shelter and solidarity.
Wawlanta Maliga ~ Palaces for Bats
Today, the moment of political exile is far from most migrants’ minds. The stories that characterized migration in the 1970s and 1980s are not those of the present. Most Lankan migrants to Italy come from a coherent socio-spatial entity—the “Catholic belt” stretching northwards along the coast from Colombo through Negombo, Wennappuwa, and Chilaw. The effects of this migration leave a definite mark on the Lankan landscape—several coastal towns boast a “punchi Italia”(Sinhala: little Italy) of lavish houses built with Italy-derived funds. Yet, as one recent Facebook post by an account self-styled as “Italian Guy” explains, these lavish houses often become mere “palaces for bats” (Sin.: wawlanta maliga) as their owners are trapped in cycles of ever-increasing debt, unable to return to Sri Lanka, leaving their homes abandoned [fig. 1]. Dreams of economic advancement and its impact on the landscape still invoke care and attention, disrepair and abandonment.
Figure 1: The White Elephants one strives to build over your entire life.
සින්දුව [the song]
Dhanapala Udawatta’s Sinhala pop song Man Italiye Thaniwuna (2014) is both sacred route poem and a song of heartbreak and yearning. Its first verse memorializes in Sinhala “Syracuse, Sicily, Genoa, Messina, Verona,” sites that, like a lover, deceived him and caused heartbreak. The second describes Italy’s sacred sites and their beauty: the holy waters in Padua; a Marian sanctuary in Montichiari, Brescia; dreams at the Vatican. The song slips into the kinds of borrowings so common to a city like Naples: “Pronto (Italian) man italiye thaniwuna (Sinhala),” an easy syncretism that borrows loosely at this level of greetings and pleasantries that are integrated into street-level interactions whether these are between African, Asian, or Neapolitan city dwellers. In this preliminary meditation, I have suggested that Lankan-Italian histories of dissent share more than syncreticism between words. They are also intertwined religious, political, and intellectual histories. If we return to the verb with which we began, then, can we expand badare beyond its associations of domestic labor to a broader politics of care and attention? “A Catholic priest, a Marxist activist, and an aspiring homeowner walk into a bar…” Friends remark that this research project sounds like the start of a bad joke. Or perhaps it is a scattered tale of global dissent and its myriad interconnected histories.
Tamara Fernando is an assistant professor in the history of the global south at SUNY Stony Brook, New York.
Works Cited
Caspersz, Paul, “Memories that persist and hopes that never die” The Aloysian (Aloysius College Galle, year unknown), Princeton University Digital Repository Collection: Dissidents and Activists in Sri Lanka, 1960 to 1990s, Collection of Paul Caspersz, Folder 44.
Caspersz, Paul. A New Culture for a New Society: Collected Writings 1945–2005. Sri Lanka: Kandy Satyodara Centre, 2005.
Fonseka, Carlo. “Paul Caspersz—The Radical Priest.” Review of A New Culture for a New Society: Collected Writings 1945–2005, by Paul Caspersz. Sunday Island (Upali Newspapers Ltd.), April 16, 2019. https://dpul.princeton.edu/catalog/a337b818-39c6-4a10-a31f-28b669835dae?utm_source=copilot.com.
Goonetileke, H. A. I. The April 1971 Insurrection in Ceylon: A Select Bibliography (July 1971) (C.R.S.R. Belgium, July 1973).
Perniola, V. The Catholic Church in Sri Lanka (Tisara Prakasakayo, 1983-2019), 19 volumes
Warnapala, W.A. Wiswa, “Sri Lanka in 1972: Tension and Change,” Asian Survey 13, no. 2 (1973): 217. Qtd. In Goonetileke, April 1971. Wickramasinghe, Nira. Sri Lanka in the Modern Age: A History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014.
