by Vindhya Buthpitiya

This essay by Vindhya Buthpitiya is the result of her research supported by the inaugural Eidolon Grant, awarded in 2024. Studio East: Everyday Photography and the Militarisation of Leisure in Trincomalee traces how Trincomalee, a port city on the northeast coast of Sri Lanka, has been shaped through photography.

---

Introduction

Located on a peninsular cusp reaching out to Koddiyar Bay in Sri Lanka’s north-eastern coast, Trincomalee (திருக்கோணமலை | ත්‍රිකුණාමළය) is a port town of intersecting occupations – past and present.^[1]

This essay examines these competing occupations through a foray into past and present photography of place. I show how Trincomalee, as a place, has been configured through its topographic, spatial, social, economic, (geo)political formations and interactions, as well as its photographic history. Here the town is both the subject and site of everyday photographic practices. These considerations are invariably ensnared with empire. European colonialism and its architectures and infrastructures of militarisation, warfare, tourism and leisure were subsequently absorbed into the workings of the postcolonial Sri Lankan state and armed forces. These aspects remain integral to the geographical imaginary of Trincomalee. Such a vexed history of place-making emphasises Trincomalee’s continued, multiple and contested significance – historical, martial, religious, touristic, national and geopolitical. I have paid specific attention to developing the historical and cultural foundations of the place of Trincomalee due to the scarcity of relevant historical, anthropological and photographic scholarship on the subject. This vital scaffolding will allow the present to be adequately contextualised, but also importantly, chart the continuities of (post)colonial violence, and visualisations of place through photography which are central to this essay. While the history of photographic practice in Sri Lanka is of colonial origin, this account centres the work of local studios to think through the negotiations of power made visible through everyday image-making.

The island of Lanka or Ilankai was substantially colonised by the Portuguese (1505–1658), the Dutch (1640–1796) and the British (1796–1948). In the postcolonial period, Ceylon (Sri Lanka since 1972) experienced pervasive political unrest and conflict spanning multiple episodes of ethnic and anti-minority violence, two anti-state insurrections led by the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna or JVP (1971 and 1987–1989), civil war (1983–2009) fought between the Sinhalese majority-government and the Tamil militancy led predominantly by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) centred on a demand for Tamil Eelam, an independent Tamil nation-state in the north and east, punctuated by the horrors of the “peace keeping operation” by the Indian Peace Keeping Force (IPKF) (1987–1990) and the Indian Ocean Tsunami which caused over 35,000 deaths in one fell swoop.^[2] In more recent years, the island underwent the devastating effects of a coordinated terror attack, the 2019 Easter Sunday Bombings, undertaken by the National Thowheeth Jama'ath (NTJ), a group with suspected ties to the Islamic State (IS) and the severe effects of economic collapse leading to a mass public uprising known as the Janatha Aragalaya (2022). Such a status quo of political instability and crisis has normalised penetrating militarisation in spectacular and elusive forms throughout the island.

Sri Lanka has built its economy around tourism since the British colonial period, where the sector is regularly conveyed and treated as the panacea to its stubborn economic troubles. Tourism has also been central to why its enduring political distresses have been glossed over through a language of “peace,” “reconciliation” and “development.” Such interventions have consistently allowed the state to reconfigure narratives of political violence and the history of conflicts in its favour. The aim, as Peiris notes, was “to attract ‘Western’ tourists to the island’s hotels and resorts,” where “the ‘tourist’ was a person of relative affluence for whom the island’s culture was packaged and represented and whose experience of the island was insulated in gated enclaves.”^[3] However, following the end of the war, “domestic travellers were categorised as tourists” where the island’s formerly Tamil LTTE-held north and east was opened up for recreation, pilgrimage and militarised memorialisation, transforming “the previously inaccessible conflict zone became a new cultural tourism frontier.”^[4] In Trincomalee, the fraught formations of place and community are inextricable from these persistent, compounded violences, which continue to be felt intensely. In the postwar period, bloodied and brutalised by many decades of communal violence among the resident Muslim, Tamil, and Sinhalese communities, internecine hostilities, and state and insurgent combat and terror, Trincomalee today is a place of tranquillity forced by the entwined assertions of tourism and militarisation.

This essay is an attempt to examine the encountering, making and altering of the imaginary of the place of Trincomalee through associated photographic visualisations and practices. This is to ask, what might the everyday photography of place allow us to understand about place-making? The amalgamation of military and tourism in Sri Lanka is deeply rooted in the British colonial project, and everyday photographic practices offer important insights into this association. The medium is integral to the picturing of place, in how it is seen, remembered, mythologised, and imagined and making the world more visually and conceptually accessible.^[5] In this framing, geography and photography are positioned as interlaced “ways of seeing” which inform the construction and negotiation of notions of space and place, landscape and identity and their material and symbolic dimensions bound up with both power and resistance.^[6] Similarly, photography is a long-established instrument of both empire and war.^[7] It is just as inseparable from travel and tourism, which are imbricated in the imperatives and aesthetics of colonial exploration, and the dogged inequalities and disparities of race and geography.^[8] As Picard and Robinson point out, “the ‘holiday snap’ is a moment of revelation on the global power of the visual and is implicated, often unknowingly, in a connecting to, and the creation of the ‘outside’ world and the ‘other’.”^[9]

I explore the connective infrastructures and visual economies of colonialism, militarisation and leisure in the place of Trincomalee towards understanding the shapes occupation takes in postwar Sri Lanka. To this end, I consider two strands of everyday photography, extending from early to mid-twentieth-century postcard images produced by colonial-era photography studios, typically for the benefit of members and affiliates of the British military stationed in or visiting Trincomalee, in conversation with the labours and aspirations of Tamil studio practitioners who have worked through the armed conflict and its aftermath. Based on archival research, and ethnographic fieldwork undertaken in January 2025, I reflect on how these infrastructural and visual sedimentations and continuities of coloniality, militarism, occupation and violence might be grasped through the everyday photography of and from Trincomalee. 

(Pre)occupations

Renowned for its pristine beaches, calm waters studded with fringes of vivid coral reef and marine life, magnificent offshore pods of blue whales and a remarkable all-seasons natural harbour, one of the largest in the world, Trincomalee’s history stretches back to the earliest accounts of the island.

The ancient port, known long ago as Gokanna, is claimed to have been in use since 400 BCE, drawing seafarers from India, East Asia, the Middle East, Africa and Europe. It remains a noteworthy site of Hindu worship, with Chola inscriptions from circa 900 CE affirming the lively social, economic, political, cultural and spiritual life of early Tamil settlements in the region.^[10] Central to this is the Koneswaram Temple, built atop the Konesar Malai headland, which looks over land and sea. The complex, helmed at present by a towering, pastel peach-skinned statue of the god Shiva, the cosmic destroyer, is believed to have at one time comprised a magnificent thousand-pillared hall, attracting pilgrims from far and wide for centuries.^[11] Its earliest history remains the subject of historical and archaeological dispute between Sinhalese and Tamil nationalists. Ethno-nationalist claims over the region have been exacerbated by state-sponsored colonisation schemes which have been in place since the 1930s, rooted in British colonial interest in reviving the island’s vast, ancient agricultural irrigation system. These endeavours cannot be decoupled from the postcolonial state’s archaeology and development-focused initiatives, becoming through the twentieth century “a matter of particular urgency for Sinhalese nationalist Politicians.”^[12]

Following independence, the expansion to the colonisation schemes favouring Sinhalese farmers led to major shifts in the demographic composition of the region, resulting in explosive ethnic tensions including the anti-Tamil pogrom of 1956.^[13] The Sri Lankan state continues to reconfigure and invent sites of Buddhist import in the island’s north and east as part of its reassertion of ethnicised historical and territorial claims over parts of the island inhabited predominantly by Tamil and Muslim communities. Resident Tamils describe this as a process of “Sinhalisation,” pointing to the militarisation and occupation of the desired Tamil homeland through its incorporation into a Sinhala Buddhist nationalist visual, material, infrastructural and heritage landscape. Archaeology as the basis for ethnicised sovereign claims of territorial integrity as a Sri Lankan state project cannot be separated from its foundations in British colonial governance.^[14] Comparably, Trincomalee’s material and symbolic history cannot be disentangled from colonisation and interwoven militarisation. 

The small, bustling Trincomalee main town, shared by Muslims, Tamils and Sinhalese, is crisscrossed with streets inscribed in the names of its multiple inheritances. As signalled by the eponymous China Bay, the town is also home to a tiny, but long-established community of Chinese migrants from China and Penang in now Malaysia brought in by the Portuguese, Dutch and British as labourers. Evidence of this presence through the 20^th century as traders have been captured in unattributed colonial commercial and snap photography (see Fig. 1). Trincomalee is corralled in by centuries-old colonial battlements, built out of the rubble of the old Koneswaram Temple, which according to local legend has stood for three millennia. By 1619, after King Senarat of Kandy ceded the area by treaty to the Danish, the Danish East India Company had arrived in Trincomalee setting up camp in the temple with a view to fortify the peninsula before being violently ousted by the Portuguese who had annexed and established dominance over the island’s various kingdoms. Koneswaram was attacked, pillaged and destroyed on the 14^th of April 1622 by General Constantino de Sá de Noronha, with its idols thrown over the edge of the cliff into the sea and its wealth stolen.^[15] The temple’s famed pillars were used to construct what was known as the Fort of Triquillimale (eventually renamed as Fort Fredrick by the British) armed with mounted artillery seized from the Danish fleet.^[16] Trincomalee was drastically shaped and impacted by the tumult of the numerous wars among European imperial powers, and little is known or documented about their no doubt sweeping and turbulent effects on the local communities. The Fort was eventually captured by and contentiously traded hands among the Dutch, the French and eventually the British who wrested control of the colony from the Batavian Republic through a military campaign, “The Invasion of Ceylon,” between 1795–1796 and full administrative and territorial control until 1948.

Figure 1.
Chinese Funeral, Trincomalee. Publisher and Date Unknown. Author’s Collection.

The Koneswaram Temple, in its current incarnation, was only rebuilt in 1963, following the 1950 discovery of various remains including bronze idols buried by fleeing priests (Fig. 2).^[17] Trincomalee remains overwhelmingly demarcated by numerous colonially instituted fortifications now utilised by the Sri Lankan armed forces. The architectural groundworks of past invasions and occupations are embedded and distinguished in the townscape merged into the machinations of ongoing occupation. Prominent among these are the “Trincomalee Garrison,” an assembly of military bases which include at present various security forces’ division headquarters and detachments, the eastern naval and air force commands, as well as the dockyard, naval and air force training academies, a naval hospital and the China Bay airport, military-run museums including the Naval Museum, the Naval and Maritime History Museum, the Orr’s Hill Army Museum and even a Navy Underwater Dive Museum. Constructed in partnership with the Tokyo Cement Group and advertised as an “eco-tourism project,” the museum showcases submerged gunboats, canons, and colonial-era wreckage and contemporary sculptures demonstrating the history of Trincomalee transformed into an artificial reef rendering the area inaccessible to local fishermen. It echoes in its “aesthetic” formulation the colonial violence enacted upon the Koneswaram Temple, the ruins of which remain submerged at Swami Rock beyond Ravana’s Cleft. These heritage-oriented creations are principally aimed at postwar domestic tourists from southern Sri Lanka, and travellers from abroad. Beyond this, the district is hemmed in by sprawling reserves of monsoon and riverine forests. At a southwestern estuary located between Kinniya and Mutur, the Mahaweli, Sri Lanka’s longest and most vital river, flows into the Indian Ocean. A large population of wild spotted deer amble and graze freely through the city as they have for centuries. Trincomalee’s current occupation, assembled out of and expanding upon violent, colonial spatial, material and symbolic sedimentations, takes the shape of ubiquitous militarisation, intensely prevalent across Sri Lanka’s predominantly Tamil and Muslim north and east after the end of the war in 2009.^[18]

Figure 2.
Mural of the Koneswaram Temple, Trincomalee, January 2025. Photograph by Vindhya Buthpitiya.

Empire and the Making of Salubrious Places

As Pieris observes, “Colonial tourism in British Ceylon took two forms – palatial urban hotels typically financed and maintained by private entrepreneurs and provincial government rest houses and circuit bungalows that accommodated colonial agents and administrators on tour.”^[19] In the context of Trincomalee, I draw attention to how colonial military infrastructure was habitually paired with spaces of rest and relaxation for servicemen and their family members, with dedicated holiday bungalows often occupying prime locations and scenic views, leisure facilities, and hotels being constructed in the vicinity. Especially during times of combat, these were framed as palliative, embedded into the needs and restorative functions of convalescence and recovery in keeping with British sensibilities of the “sea cure.”^[20] For example, the Bentota Beach Hotel in the south-western coast of Sri Lanka was built on the site of an old Portuguese fort. While part of the complex fell into disuse during the Dutch period, it was partially converted into a rest house for officers traveling between Galle and Colombo and subsequently redeveloped into “salubrious place in which to spend holidays with friends and family” and became integrated into the postcolonial state’s ambitions for a tourist economy through its reinvention into the first national holiday resort by one of the island’s star architects, Geoffrey Bawa, and his firm Edwards, Reid & Begg.^[21] Similarly, in Trincomalee, the Welcombe Hotel in Orr’s Hill, named after a hotel in Stratford-upon-Avon, England, was established in 1937 in the early years of the Second World War by British entrepreneur M. S. Milne having obtained permission from the headquarters of the Trincomalee-based East Indian Naval Squadron.^[22] During this time of heightened military activity stimulated by the Second World War, the hotel rapidly became a popular venue among expatriates, tourists and British Naval families serving in the Trincomalee base.^[23] The hotel still operates today, having been refurbished in 2003 during the brief ceasefire agreement between the Sri Lankan government and the LTTE.

The trajectory of militarisation folded into martial leisure, especially for high-ranking officers, and tourism in prime locations across the island continues today and has expanded in the aftermath of the civil war, especially in the north and east. As an interlocutor revealed, new constructions carried out by those employed by the armed forces also relied on compulsory salary contributions from personnel with the promise of future subsidisation and prestige. The Sri Lankan military boosted their pursuits in the tourism sector by opening hotels and operating various connected activities including building, maintenance, the management of museums and monuments, hotels, restaurants and food services, salons, transportation, adventure and excursion services among others. This serves as an expedient way to avoid demobilisation and a potential unemployment crisis given that the military is one of the largest employers on the island.^[24] This has also included the conversion of a variety of colonial strongholds and prisons into hospitality venues, resorts as in the examples of Fort Hammenhiel in Jaffna and the Bogambara Prison in Kandy.^[25] Such involvements remain heavily criticised due to ongoing expansion to militarisation and impacts on local livelihoods and employment opportunities for residents, and the lack of transparency around operations and profits, as well as the wider socio-economic effects on local Tamil and Muslim communities who are regularly persecuted by the armed forces.^[26] It is this colonially-established interweaving of tourism and militarism which foregrounds photography and the visualisations and geographical imagination the medium consolidates. Such power dynamics perpetuated through occupation and infrastructures of militarisation and leisure together with interlinked place-making and ways of seeing are reproduced and socialised through image-making. Trincomalee appeared prolifically in the visual-material forms of colonial albums, postcards, cigarette cards and even postage stamps, positioning as a site of particular importance to the British Empire as a picturesque military asset. Photography, thus, serves as a generative means to examine the continuities of direct and structural violence and occupation in Trincomalee. 

War and the Place of Trincomalee

Through enduring spatial-material markers and configurations, Trincomalee’s social, geopolitical and photographic history and present are marked by invasion, occupation and colonisation. Foremostly, as still evident today, European and principally British colonialism and its overlaid architectures and infrastructures of militarisation, warfare, tourism and leisure characterise the anglicised nomenclature, toponymy and built environment of the town. Historically, these landmarks and the striking natural landscape were the principal subjects of surviving colonial photography of the region. These are preserved in their local circulation as picture postcards, now often reproduced and displayed locally alongside colonial maps and illustrations as nostalgic ephemera in tourist-focused locations including local state and military-sponsored museums. While Ceylon gained Dominion status in 1948, Britain’s post-imperial military relationship with the island continued. The use of air and sea bases was consolidated through the United Kingdom-Ceylon Defence Agreement (1947–1957) established as a condition of the island’s independence as the country was viewed as “vital to the defence of the Empire-Commonwealth in the Cold War due to its geostrategic position.”^[27] The colonially-founded Volunteer Corps (1861) and subsequent Ceylon Defence Force (1910) along with the various volunteer corps and reserves, which were variously active in the Second Boer War in South Africa and the First and Second World Wars as well as being mobilised against the 1947 General Strike which was tied to the wider movement for independence from British rule, became the basis for the postcolonial state’s new armed forces and interlinked regime of securitisation.^[28] Trincomalee, noted for its strategic consequence to the British as it permitted the control of Indian Ocean sea lane as well as maintaining communications with East Asia and Australia, was bombed by the Japanese in 1942 during the Second World War in what was known as the “Indian Ocean Raid.” The photography of this period, in the form of picture postcards, militaria, and everyday images captured by members of the British armed forces and their resident or visiting families and friends, continues to haunt its placeness. Britain’s involvement in Sri Lanka did not end with independence or the Ceylon Defence Agreement. Unofficially, Britain’s mercenaries, known as the Keenie Meenie Services (KMS), were also involved in security operations supporting the Sri Lankan military and credibly alleged to have perpetrated war crimes against Tamils during the armed conflict. As Miller and MacNamara document, Richard Holworthy, Britain’s former defence attaché and KMS liaison observed how grenades placed in wine glasses (to prevent explosion until they hit the ground) were dropped by helicopter crews, noting “I know this was happening because when I went to Trincomalee [air force base] one day and had lunch there and there were no wine glasses at all – the whole bloody lot had been dropped on the Tamils with grenades inside them.”^[29]

The colonial architectures and infrastructures of the state, military, tourism and leisure became wholly integrated into the Sri Lankan armed forces and police and reinforced through ethnic conflict and decades of civil war. Trincomalee was profoundly affected by the war between the Sri Lankan armed forces and the Tamil militancy, and devastated by several grievous massacres. The Sri Lankan civil war is widely held to have begun with the episode of mass anti-Tamil violence known as “Black July” precipitated by a series of reprisal attacks in Jaffna.^[30] However, in Trincomalee, often overlooked in this narration of the beginning of the war, attacks and arson organised by Sinhalese mobs and members of the security forces started as early as the 2^nd of June with assaults on Tamil fishermen and the burning of their boats, followed by two months of continuous attacks bleeding into the events of the July pogrom.^[31] While the number of casualties cannot be confirmed with any certainty, twenty-seven people are believed to have been killed and hundreds of Tamil homes, businesses and places of worship were destroyed. Notably, in July 1983, 150 sailors from the Trincomalee Naval Base tore through the town destroying 175 properties.^[32] Trincomalee’s experiences of severe and protracted political and communal violence and conflict only escalated from the numerous large-scale displacements and massacres of 1985 to a number of mass killings of Tamils by the Sri Lankan military and home guards through the war years. Little photographic evidence of this violence exists in wider circulation, nor are they memorialised in the postwar landscape’s emphasis on the town’s aestheticised history and colonial legacy. Here, built heritage, colonial and postcolonial, are stripped of violence and aestheticised through tourist-oriented militarisation and museumification, and photographic production and circulation. Although it functions as a resort town with the revival and establishment of luxury tourist accommodations accompanied by state-sponsored “beautification” initiatives to improve public spaces including tourist-friendly parks and promenades, the town gives the distinctly forlorn air of a place that never quite recovered from the shock of the intense violence it has experienced.

Trincomalee’s military worth to the postcolonial Sri Lankan state continued due to its status as the island’s largest naval base (SLN Tissa) and naval and maritime academy spread out over 800-900 acres of land where 6,000-8,000 Navy personnel and their families reside.^[33] The location consequently became a key target of the Tamil militancy during the civil war. As the International Truth and Justice Project has documented, “In 2008–2009 in SLN Tissa alone, there were 108 security and surveillance checkpoints across the main base and peninsula, with hi-tech Israeli cameras providing panoramic surveillance capacity, manned by about 300 sailors, calling in every 30 minutes to a team of about 15 sailors in the security office.”^[34] Occupations are also thus globally entangled through the technologies of surveillance and oppression. Examining the context of the Israeli occupation of Palestine, Tawil-Souri describes checkpoints as constituting a constellation of spatial and temporal technics of control.^[35] Similarly, in Trincomalee, integrated cameras and their image-making capacities conjure the surveillance-oriented capabilities of photo/videographic media intended to record, but also regulate and deter the movement of locals, deemed suspect on account of their ethnicity, and any potential transgressions which threaten state-determined territorial sovereignty. The bearing of this pervasive securitisation on the residents’ lives and a context of everyday, ethnicised violence cannot be overstated and lingers in the postwar. This is further located against the established practices of colonial photography described in the next section. Landscape and infrastructure as photographic genres then also enable a temporal suspension of place, in aesthetic and optimal function, offering a visual basis for ongoing forms of political exclusion and structural violence. The end of the war has eased civilian movement through the town, but it remains visibly defined by its military infrastructure which has become integrated into tourist itineraries of the town. The spatial-material presence erected on Sri Lanka’s fraught (post)colonial past and interlinked present militarised control over this locale, effectively walls in the town of Trincomalee and its diverse residents. In more recent years, “gun site,” consisting of three colonial artillery points mounted on fortifications connected to an adjacent munitions bunker situated in the jungle-covered hills of Trincomalee naval base, has been utilised as an underground detention and torture complex administered by Naval Intelligence.^[36] It is incriminated in the case of the “Trinco 11,” eleven men who were abducted and forcibly disappeared by the Navy in 2008 and 2009.^[37]

Photography and the Militarisation of Leisure

Although northern Sri Lanka has been insistently ignored in the canon of the island’s photographic history, its prominence for the claimed arrival and development of photography cannot be overestimated and warrants far greater attention. On account of the long durée of conflict and challenges to access, archives and documentation of the region’s photographers and their practice have been largely neglected in the scholarship. While Falconer suggests that Jaffna and northern Sri Lanka more broadly were inconsequential to the development of photography on the island given its isolation, even in time and war fragmented archives the vibrancy of practice is evident.^[38] Jaffna’s studio photographers have been extraordinarily committed to preserving the oral history of photography in the Jaffna peninsula which they claim to be the birthplace of photography on the island following its introduction by American missionaries as early as the 1850s.^[39]While Jaffna appears relatively sparsely in commercial photography produced by colonial-period studios in Colombo owned by Europeans, and Ceylonese including notably A. W. Andrée, numerous photographic postcard views of Trincomalee circulated in no small part due to the large European presence in the region (Fig. 3).^[40] This is further evidenced by the production of photographic postcards by local businesses involved in the supply of general goods including J. M. S. Miranda and Brothers and S. E. Abdul Rasool’s General Stores in Trincomalee, which was unusual outside of Colombo, Kandy and a few major towns where the major commercial studios and their regional branches were active (Fig. 4). The example of S. E. Abdul Rasool also highlights the little-known, documented and recognised activity of Muslim photographic practitioners, studios and publishers in early-mid 20^th century Ceylon. Photographic postcards produced by local practitioners do not deviate from their colonial templates, likely in keeping their European consumers in mind. The photographic postcards which feature in this essay cannot be precisely dated but can be broadly ascribed to the early decades of the 20^th century when postcard publishing was at its peak unless otherwise stated. The original captions on all postcards featured have been used without alteration. 

Figure 3.
Postcard views of Trincomalee: 1. “Fort Frederick from A.G.A’s Bungalow, Trincomalie, Ceylon. Postcard by Plate Ceylon, 2. View on Road below Walls, Trincomalie, Ceylon. Postcard by Plate Ceylon, 3, Trincomalie, Ceylon. Publisher Unknown. Author’s Collection.

Figure 4.
J. M. S. Miranda & Bros. Establishment, Trincomalie, Ceylon (Date Unknown). Author’s Collection.

Even though “native type” photographs were extremely common, images from Trincomalee produced by a range of Ceylonese studios including European-run A. W. Plate, Skeen Photo, Raphael Tuck and Son and the locally-owned S. E. Abdul Rasool’s, predominantly focused on the landscape and colonial buildings including Fort Fredrick, the Trincomalee Rest House, the Royal Navy Sick Quarters, views of and from the Naval Hospital, the harbour populated by steamboats, the dockyard, the naval yard, the police station, the courts, various colonial residences and the magnificent views they afforded (Fig. 5).^[41] Such images of colonial buildings and hotels were not uncommon in the context of British Ceylon, however, the emphasis on the architecture and infrastructure of military is of particular prominence in the example of Trincomalee. These visuals emphasise the interwoven presence of militarisation, leisure and convalescence pointing to their importance in how the place of Trincomalee was pictured and thus formed out of these photographic productions and circulations. In these images, residents, usually fishermen, appear in barely discernible silhouette form. Themes of labour and servitude also emerge here, which extend to expectations placed on photographers during the civil war as will be discussed in the ensuing sections. Many of these buildings survive to this day due to their absorption into the postcolonial state-military apparatus.

Figure 5.
Military infrastructure in colonial Trincomalee: 1. Fort Frederick Gate, inside Fort, Trincomalie Ceylon. Plate Ltd. Colombo, 2. Naval Hospital, Trincomalie. Plate & Co. Ceylon, 3. Dockyard Gates, Trincomalie, Ceylon. Plate Ltd., Colombo. Author’s Collection.

Figure 6.
“The Evergreen Tamby of Trinco Rest House,” Postcard by Raphael Tuck and Son and S. E. Abdul Rasool. Author’s Collection.

An early 20^th century “native type” photographic postcard produced by Raphael Tuck and Son with copyright retained by S. E. Abdul Rasool identified as a “Naval and Military Contractor, Trinco (Ceylon)” signals the imbrication of photography studios with the colonial British military presence (Fig. 6). The image shows an unnamed elderly Tamil man in a chequered turban wearing heavy gold earrings and dressed immaculately in a white achkan jacket and sarong. He gazes into the camera, his expression suspended between resignation and disbelief, standing next to a chair and holding an umbrella against the backdrop of a pillared veranda. The caption identifies the man as “The Evergreen Tamby of Trincomalee Guest House.” The Tamil term Tamby refers to “younger brother,” but was used derogatively by colonisers to refer to labourers, typically adult men infantilised through the diminutive despite their age (akin to “houseboy”). As Wettimuny points out, the British eventually adapted the term to describe usually Muslim, itinerant traders and later Muslims in general.^[42] The composition and captioning of the image potently invoke the logics of the colonial subjugation of native Ceylonese; an elderly man referred to as “Tamby,” permanently ascribed as an “evergreen” servant of colonial holidaymakers and pictured outside the resthouse he labours at. He stands beside a chair probably intended for guests, which he likely would not have been permitted to sit on. The umbrella gestures towards his availability to aid in perpetuity as “Evergreen Tamby” by holding it over a guest’s head rather than his own. Not only were visiting Europeans able to obtain a memento of place but the visualised subordination of locals who waited on them. 

Beyond such located portraiture which exoticises and asserts subservience directly embedded in the infrastructures of militarised leisure, there is little else signalling native life except for Hindu temples, obscured individuals in the presence of colonial officers and crowds of worshippers and a “dhobi” or washer pond, which were occasionally featured (Fig. 7). At present, the thinly palmyra-ringed “dhoby tank” flanking Sandy Bay Road has fallen out of use likely on account of its forced proximity to the fenced off property occupied by the sprawling naval base.  Arguably photographic postcards showcasing the colonial-built environment, produced for the benefit of Europeans passing through the town for work or vacation, directly exemplify and visualise occupation with an emphasis on Britain’s imperial power to reinvent the landscape. Today, such postcards circulate along with personal images and albums of British soldiers in a collectors’ market, part militaria and part colonial and world war ephemera which continue to be preserved and consumed through collectors’ markets in Europe, North America and Australia. An extensive literature exists pointing to the ideological functions of colonial photography and image-making practices, especially in positioning colonies as ripe for investment and extraction.^[43] In the example of Ceylon, the island was repeatedly framed as an Edenic jewel which filled Britain’s teacups and satiated imperial fantasies of encountering if not conquering paradise. These determined the arc of the country’s postcolonial economy in decades to come – a vision to which the country still strives to conform at the cost of its own citizen’s exploitation, especially in the plantation and tourism sectors. Their continued circulation and economic value point to their potency in stirring the geographic imagination. Tourist images of postwar Trincomalee rarely diverge from this colonially instituted template of militarised leisure.

Figure 7.
1. Hindu Temple, Trincomalie. Postcard by Se. E. Abdul Rasool, General Merchant, Trincomalie, Ceylon) 2. Dhoby Pond Trincomalie, Ceylon. Postcard by Plate and Co. 3. Swamy Rock Temple, Trincomalie. J. A. de Jong, Raphael Tuck and Sons’ PHOTOTYPE Series. Author’s Collection.

The Trinco Studio

In contrast to Jaffna, where an oral history of photography was preserved and relayed by elder photographers, Trincomalee’s photographic history is a silence which might only be filled out with colonial photographic fragments. Perhaps it is the town’s repeated and violent encounters with colonial and postcolonial violence that have left its photographers untethered from a comparable chronicle of photography’s arrival, practice and lineages of learning.^[44]When I visited Trincomalee in January 2025, around twenty-one “government-authorised” photography studios were in operation in the district. A vast majority of these are concentrated in the town and owned by Tamil photographers. As far as I could ascertain, the town’s oldest studios date back to the 1960s, run by second-generation practitioners who have dutifully carried forward the wishes of their fathers amidst great hardship exacerbated by the vagaries of war and economy, suffering periods of involuntary displacement and property and equipment damage caused by the armed conflict.^[45] For these photographers, the future seemed less certain with capable family members having left the country due to war and the challenges of keeping up with sophisticated digitalised demands. “There is too much technology now,” Thiru, an elder photographer suggested succinctly. 

“There were many studios before, but everything is closed now because there is no one to run them anymore. Everyone has gone,” Chelva, a long-term resident of Trincomalee remembered. “There is no one to do this work now but in those days there was Eastern Studio, Kasi Studio on Dockyard Road. He [Kasi Studio’s founder] started back when my father was working, but the shop got damaged during the piracchanai kalam (times of trouble) in the 1990s. The shop was burned. He went to Canada after that. He came back once and met me. No one is here now. Everyone has gone outside (the country). With Eastern Studio, the father did the work and the son took over, but then there was no one so they closed down.” The second wave of the town’s established studios emerged in the early 1990s, followed by more recent businesses set up by younger, aspiring photographers who have invested in the lucrative potentials of new digital camera equipment offering a range of services covering life events including birthdays, puberty ceremonies, engagements and weddings for locals and returning members of the Tamil diaspora.

Trincomalee’s beaches offer a scenic backdrop for such undertakings, but the town’s (post)colonial military infrastructure lurks in the background, embedded, much like the ubiquitous militarisation impacting the town’s residents, in personal photographs. Photographers regularly shepherd and direct couples on the town’s municipal beach at sunset (Fig. 8). It is in many ways a performance of recreation in an environment that is heavily scrutinised and both scenic views and sites of leisure are controlled and afford privileged access by way of the armed forces or luxury tourism. Picturesque locations and their photographable scenery which have become “emblematic” of Trincomalee remain inaccessible to ordinary residents of the town especially if they are Tamils or Muslims who are perpetually at risk where the military presence is concerned. Public photography might also be denied on account of potential security implications.

Figure 8.
A Pre-Wedding Shoot at Trincomalee Beach, January 2025. Photographs by Vindhya Buthpitiya.

For everyday, cost-effective portraiture sought out for family photographs or to be submitted to marriage brokers, most studios offer the option of hand-painted backdrops (Fig. 9 & 10). While these have fallen out of fashion in favour of the possibilities permitted by photo editing software permitting sitters to be transported through photography to real and fantastical destinations of choice, the vivid sceneries of backdrop painters’ imagination remain in use, but perhaps might also enable a brief but essential chance to escape the ever-looming infrastructures of state and military (Fig. 9).^[46] In many ways, where the town is backdrop for the competing claims of tourism and militarisation, studios remain some of the only spaces where the town’s residents can picture themselves freely.

Figure 9.
Trincomalee Studio Interiors, January 2025. Photographs by Vindhya Buthpitiya.

Figure 10.
Trincomalee studio backdrops, January 2025. Photographs by Vindhya Buthpitiya.

Famously striking settings such as Marble Beach, Coral Cove, Elephant Point and Sober Island are either administered by the armed forces requiring special entry permission or integrated into new military-sponsored tourism and leisure developments such as the Sober Island Resort and Marble Beach Air Force Resort, and the various opulent bungalows and residences reserved for high-ranking personnel. The colonial origins of such ventures are ever-present, pointing to an unending practice of occupation which denies residents access. For example, the 175-acre Sober Island, a striking assemblage of pristine jungle and beaches, first occupied by the French and known as “Île du Soleil” (Island of the Sun) and fought over by the Dutch and the British, was developed by the British in the 1920s. It acted as a transit station for troops and was fortified with heavy artillery and underground ammunition storage during the Second World War to defend against Japan. As its publicity materials proclaiming a “glorious history” read, “the island is not merely touristic in appeal but contain relics of a bygone era magnifying its appeal as a much sought after destination. There are French graves, Second World War gun positions, underground ammunition storage complexes and many more symbols of British occupation.”^[47] Here, colonial invasion and occupation are not critiqued but appropriated and transformed into the substance of tourist appeal, underpinning continued militarised leisure and occupation. This situation permits indispensable insight into the formation of the postcolonial state in Sri Lanka as one that cannot be unravelled from its colonial formation and controlling logics and mechanisms of governance through suppression. These exclusive resorts and leisure spaces are accessible to military officials and their guests as well as paying tourists for vacation, recreation and the celebration of life events. They can benefit from not only their amenities but also access an empire’s eye view of a captured landscape. 

During the war, Trincomalee’s Tamil photographers were also regularly summoned by competing military actors: the members of the government forces and the LTTE. They were taken to the bases and security enclosures to photograph military events and celebrations. Here the intersection of militarised leisure and photography takes on further resonance which echoes the colonial emphasis of this essay, especially in its role in both the subjugation and denigration of locals whose services are called upon in “service” of an oppressive presence and apparatus. Military personnel’s recreational and festive activities are photographed for institutional and personal documentation purposes.

Kanaganayakam, a now-retired photographer who worked in Trincomalee through the 1980s and 1990s, reflected on these requests. To him, accommodating these asks was an essential demonstration of his personal commitment and respect to his line of work as a photographer, and the friendly relationships with sympathetic Sinhalese residents and even military personnel within the vexed space and time of communal violence and war within an ethnically-diverse community. “In Trincomalee, we grew up with Sinhala boys. Many of them died. If there was ever a problem brewing they would run and come and tell us not to come to that area. We must not lie, they were our friends, and they were good boys. But they are no more. For the studio, business was very good then. The wartime was ‘okay’ for us, but the situation became very difficult when they burned down all the shops when the troubles became worse. We left then and stayed with family elsewhere and then came back wondering what to do because the shop had been burned. I went abroad after that. The situation was not good, but we were more afraid than anything else because of everything people were saying. Maybe I should have stayed.” Here an “okay” uttered in English was a gesture to not much more than survival.

“The LTTE would also ask people to take photos and videos for their uses and that caused problems with the army.” While generally treated professionally by the military, these also became occasions of harassment, verbal humiliation and the denial of payment as the armed conflict escalated. “We were called to take pictures at many army programmes.” Here “programmes” refer to a range of usually official and unofficial social events and gatherings held within the bases. “It was very difficult for us. They would come and take us to this camp and that camp. We don’t know what is on their minds.” In the context of widespread arbitrary arrest and abduction by the security forces informing a regime of state terror weaponised against citizens, an old anxiety tempered by nervous laughter emerges in Kanaganayagam’s tone. “Of course, they don’t also respect us. Sometimes the ‘big people’ [senior officers] will come and ask who we are, and what we’re doing there. As soon as they are told we are Tamil they put us to a side – another room somewhere. When they hear our [Tamil] names, it’s enough. Their faces will change. We also feel some kind of way then and wonder why we came. Like that, there were many difficulties. There are also nice people. ‘Super’ people who will call us and give us food after the event, even before they eat. There are also bad people. Sometimes they force you to close the shop and go even when you tell them you are not able to because there is no one else to cover. One time they took me to a camp some distance away for something but afterwards, they took the film rolls off me, even though the agreement was that I would develop it. They just dropped me off outside in the middle of nowhere in the night. They did give money but said there was no need to ‘wash’ [develop] the film. When things like that happened, I think maybe I escaped something. What can you do? We cannot betray our profession. It’s work we have now done for generations. They take you and then belittle you, ask if you want Eelam, and when I say no, sir I don’t want (in Sinhala) – see there is something vithyasam [different meaning untoward or even ominous] about what they ask and the way they ask that. They replied with bad words [sexually violent innuendo]. Even their own drivers would say when they drop you off, look at how they are speaking to you after years of knowing and associating with you. It was only one or two people, but that was enough.” What is unspoken here is also the worry for safety, where “one or two bad people” could mean life or death, where detainment and torture by the security forces is widespread. Even so, those like Chelva, Thiru and Kanaganayagam persisted in their profession, out of a regularly expressed sense of obligation even though they were also anxious about the future especially where family members were uninterested in taking over the business. 

Parting Words

As this essay showed, Sri Lanka’s state-sponsored (post)war heritage apparatus sustains a twofold practice of militarised leisure and aestheticised militarisation by building on the colonial construction and securitisation of Trincomalee and the attendant visual, spatial, architectural and infrastructural ordering and geographical imaginary of place, pointing to the violence of overlaid occupations which residents continue to endure. However, within such a context of ongoing disquiets about personal and political futures and safety, photography studios offer insight into lives erased from an official history of photography.

At present, as is commonplace in Jaffna’s studios, the older, more established studios focus on facilitating citizen registration services which require identity photography to obtain National Identity Cards (compulsory for all adults and essential for movement through a securitised terrain) and passports, while newer studios provide more elaborated services such as outdoor photo shoots and creative digital editing. With the digitalisation of registration processes, studios must register with the Department for Registration of Persons and the Department of Emigration and Immigration which give them access to “Photo Studio Solution” or “Photo Studio Client” software enabling compliance checks and the direct transmission of digital images for the processing of identity documents. While this type of photography is not lucrative for studios, they are integral to their necessity and everyday business with tens of clients arriving through the day to obtain headshots for identity documents and other bureaucratic needs including job applications. In January 2025, the conversations around these images were one of anxiety, especially for those who were looking to secure employment overseas, especially in the Arab Gulf and Middle East, due to a national shortage in passports precipitated during the 2022 economic crisis.^[48] Studio photographers traded in insight and advice, providing estimates for timeframes and instruction on workarounds to obtain priority appointments in the capital Colombo without waiting for what was anticipated to be months. Other daily studio business included the production and modification of images typically for the purpose of display, whether memorial portraits or elaborate individual or family photograph composites for local and diasporic clients who send images via mobile messaging applications. Supplementary services such as the design of wedding cards and invitations are also undertaken. However, their client base is noticeably diverse, with a steady stream of Tamil, Sinhalese and Muslim residents trickling through all the studios I visited.

Despite the photographers’ anxieties located against a history and present of the everyday violence of occupation, their services, creative interventions and guidance were sought after by everyone from elderly parents who arrived at the studio with WhatsApp images of their grandchildren abroad to be transformed into collages for framings, job seekers looking to obtain a passport, young couples with cinematic visions for engagement and wedding shoots or their young children’s birthday parties, and even mourners reaching out for assistance with creating memorial portraits of late loved ones. Trincomalee’s photographers are ever sincere, warm and present with their services and advice to members of the community. 

---

---

<sup>References

Balendra, W. (1953). Trincomalie bronzes. Tamil Culture, 2(2), 176–198.
Barnes, R. (2022). ‘In the mutual interest’: the making and breaking of the United Kingdom-Ceylon Defence Agreement, 1947–1957. The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 50(6), 1093–1122. https://doi.org/10.1080/03086534.2022.2084932
Brothers, C. (1997). War and photography: a cultural history. Routledge.
Buthpitiya, V. (2019). ‘Paradise’ in Missing Pictures: A Brief and Incomplete History of Sri Lankan Photography. History Workshop.https://www.historyworkshop.org.uk/empire-decolonisation/paradise-in-missing-pictures-a-brief-and-incomplete-history-of-sri-lankan-photography/
Buthpitiya, V. (2022a). Elsewheres and otherworlds in the wake of war. In Language is Migrant (pp. 158–163). Colomboscope.
Buthpitiya, V. (2022b). Naveena Camera: A Photo Essay. Dastavezi | the Audio-Visual South Asia, 4.https://doi.org/10.11588/dasta.2022.1.19131
Ceylon Guide. (2020). The Welcombe Hotel Trincomalee. Ceylon Guide. https://ceylon.guide/2020/06/07/welcombe-hotel-trincomalee/
Clarke, A. C. (1964). Ceylon and the underwater archaeologist. Expedition, Spring, 18–21.
Darcey, J. (2018, May 23). Doctors and the English seaside. Wellcome Collection. https://wellcomecollection.org/stories/doctors-and-the-english-seaside
Dissanayaka, T. D. S. A. (1983). The agony of Sri Lanka: an in-depth account of the racial riots of 1983. Swastika Press.
Dissanayake, T. B. (2007). 1947 General strike, Ceylon (Sri Lanka). The Island.http://www.island.lk/2007/07/15/features2.html
Ellis, R. (2005). When holidaying here was a genteel affair. The Sunday Times. https://www.sundaytimes.lk/160605/plus/when-holidaying-here-was-a-genteel-affair-196304.html
Ellis, R. (2013). Staying in prison! The Sunday Times.https://www.sundaytimes.lk/130303/plus/staying-in-prison-35095.html
Falconer, J. (2008). Ceylon. In Hannavy J. (Ed.), Encyclopaedia of nineteenth century photography (pp. 286–287). Routledge.
Gunasingham, S. (1979). The Tamils and Trincomalee. Aseervatham Press.
Human Rights Watch. (2018). “Why can’t we go home?”: military occupation of land in Sri Lanka.https://www.hrw.org/report/2018/10/09/why-cant-we-go-home/military-occupation-land-sri-lanka
Hyndman, J. (2015). The securitisation of Sri Lankan tourism in the absence of peace. Stability: International Journal of Security and Development, 4(1). https://doi.org/10.5334/sta.fa
Hyndman, P. (1988). Sri Lanka: serendipity under siege . Spokesman Books.
International Truth and Justice Project (ITJP). (2016). Silenced: survivors of torture and sexual violence in 2015. https://itjpsl.com/assets/Silenced-jan-2016.pdf
International Truth and Justice Project (ITJP). (2019). The Sri Lankan Navy: a collective blind eye. International Truth and Justice Project. https://www.itjpsl.com/assets/press/ITJP_navy_reportFinal-SINGLES.pdf
Jackson, A. (2017). Ceylon’s home front during the second world war. In Crowley, M. J. & Trudgen Dawson, S. (Eds.), Home Fronts—Britain and the Empire at War, 1939–45 (pp. 111–129). Boydell & Brewer.
Jeganathan, P. (2009). Authorising history, ordering land: The conquest of Anuradhapura. In Jeganathan, P. & Ismail, Q. (Eds.), Unmaking the Nation: The Politics of Identity and History in Modern Sri Lanka (2nd ed., pp. 157–173). Social Scientists’ Association and South Focus Press. (Original work published 1995).
Kadirgamar, A. (2013). The question of militarisation in post-war Sri Lanka. Economic and Political Weekly, 48(7), 42–46. https://www.jstor.org/stable/23391306
Miller, P., & Macnamara, L. (2020, October 8). Keenie Meenie – Britain’s private army. Declassified UK. https://www.declassifieduk.org/keenie-meenie-britains-private-army/
Murray, N. (1984). The state against the Tamils. Race & Class, 26(1), 97–109. https://doi.org/10.1177/030639688402600107
Pathmanathan, S. (2019). Tamil inscriptions in Sri Lanka—Volume 1. Kumaran Book House.
Peebles, P. (1990). Colonization and ethnic conflict in the dry zone of Sri Lanka. The Journal of Asian Studies, 49(1), 30–55.
Pieris, A. (2023). Decolonising leisurescapes: Sri Lanka’s aesthetically integrated resort designs. In Bozdogˇan, S., Pyla, P., & Phokaides P. (Eds.), Coastal Architectures and Politics of Tourism: Leisurescapes in the Global Sunbelt (pp. 19–35). Routledge.
Saturday Review. (1983). Trinco tension during curfew continues: bombs flung at MP’s house. Saturday Review, 2(23), 1.
Schwartz, J. M., & Ryan, J. R. (Eds.). (2003). Picturing place: photography and the geographical imagination (2nd ed.). Routledge.
Sober Island Resort—the hotel. (n.d.). Retrieved 25 June 2025, from https://soberislandresort.lk/the-hotel.html
Sri Lanka Campaign. (2022). Militarisation in Sri Lanka part 1: The military and the economy. Sri Lanka Campaign. https://srilankacampaign.org/militarisation-in-sri-lanka-part-1-the-military-and-the-economy/
Studio Times. (1983). The handbook for the Ceylon traveller (2nd ed.). Studio Times.
Sunday Observer Magazine. (2004, August 15). Experience Trincomalee with Welcombe Hotel. Sunday Observer Magazine. http://archives.sundayobserver.lk/2004/08/15/bus19.html
Tambiah, S. J. (1986). Sri Lanka—ethnic fratricide and the dismantling of democracy. University Chicago Press.
Tambiah, S. J. (1992). Buddhism betrayed? Religion, politics, and violence in Sri Lanka. University Chicago Press.
Tamil Times. (1983, August). June diary of atrocities in Trincomalee. Tamil Times, 10.
Tawil-Souri, H. (2017). Checkpoint time. Qui Parle, 26(2), 383–422. https://doi.org/10.1215/10418385-4208442
Tennekoon, N. S. (1988). Rituals of development: the accelerated Mahaväli Development Program of Sri Lanka.American Ethnologist, 15(2), 294–310. https://doi.org/10.1525/ae.1988.15.2.02a00060
Venugopal, R. (2011). The politics of market reform at a time of civil war: military fiscalism in Sri Lanka. Economic and Political Weekly, 46(49), 67–75.
Verick, S. (2023). Sri Lanka’s Labour Market during the Economic Crisis of 2022-2023. International Labour Organisation. https://www.ilo.org/publications/sri-lankas-labour-market-during-economic-crisis-2022-2023#:~:text=At%20the%20same%20time%2C%20out%20migration%20of,indicating%20a%20shift%20to%20external%20job%20opportunities.
Wettimuny, S. (2020). The colonial history of Islamophobic slurs in Sri Lanka. History Workshop.https://www.historyworkshop.org.uk/empire-decolonisation/colonial-history-islamophobia/</sup>