1Tourism imagery and narratives about destinations in the Global South are steeped in postcolonial binaries reinforced by the power imbalances within the global tourism industry. This paper explores how the construction of “Ceylon” by the British colonial imagination influences Sri Lanka’s portrayal as a travel destination, both past and present. Sri Lanka was a part of three European empires from the 16^th century until independence in 1948—Portuguese, Dutch, and British. The most common themes of the island’s representation as a travel destination originated during the British Ceylon era. The British colonial authorities initiated economic and institutional changes that exist to this day (Meegama, 2019: 25). The Waste Lands Ordinance of the 1840s transferred lands in the central and southwest regions to coffee planters, creating seismic societal changes, including large-scale migration of people, abandonment of traditional paddy farming and arts, mass arrival of indentured immigrant labour, and growth of urban centres (ibid.: 26-41).

2Against such a socio-economic backdrop, the British colonial authorities and imagination cultivated an image of “Ceylon” distinct from India. Sri Lanka was a Crown colony from the beginning, unlike India. By the 1830s, Sri Lanka was separated from India due to the competition between the Crown colony and the East India Company (Sivasundaram, 2013: 14). This “separateness” or “partitioning” created an entirely new identity and narrative framing. The colonial imagination represented “Ceylon” as a romanticized garden paradise that was very different from India. This disconnect from India also enabled a “different laboratory for forms of state-making” and produced a “distinct idea of space” that eventually gave rise to modern Sri Lanka (ibid.: 14-16; see also Sivasundaram, 2011: 123-140).

3Because of this colonial construction of “Ceylon”, the oldest travel themes to originate about the island were those of the garden, paradise, and jungle. These themes existed within Orientalist binaries. Even though Sri Lanka was romanticized, there also existed a dark, mysterious core in representations. During the early part of the 20^th century, Sri Lanka became a popular stopover route for travellers sailing from west to east. The colonial authorities established the island’s first Tourist Bureau in 1937 (Fernando et al., 2017: 253). According to Rapti Siriwardane-de Zoysa (2021: 77), many British and American production houses and cruise operators created travel imagery depicting Sri Lanka as “an islanded nodal tourist stopover en route to the Asia-Pacific, a fleck on the Indian Ocean where ‘summer never ends.’”

6There are several reasons for the continuation of established colonial era travel themes and imagery by Sri Lanka’s tourism authorities. Tourism, from the representation of travel destinations to the right of mobility, is an unequal industry shaped by centuries of European colonialism and the Global North (overwhelmingly Western)-South divide. Globally, the ability and right to travel freely are the luxuries of citizens from wealthier societies in North America, Europe, and a handful of countries in the Asia Pacific region. Annual ranking lists such as the Henley Passport Index capture the inequalities of global mobility and how mobility depends on passport power (Henley & Partners, 2023). Furthermore, there is widespread consensus among economists and policymakers that tourism in countries of the Global South can function as a key driver of economic development, increase foreign currency inflows to countries, create employment opportunities, and result in multifold benefits (Sahli and Nowak, 2007; Samimi et al., 2011). Countries of the Global South such as Sri Lanka are hence caught in a narrative cycle, as they have to promote established colonial era travel imagery because of economic dependence on and the need for tourism revenue from the Global North.

7However, narrative construction is not the sole domain of the Global North or the “Western gaze” anymore. Post-2009, Sri Lanka’s tourism authorities have addressed negative stereotypes in their attempt to market Sri Lanka as an attractive destination by portraying an upwardly mobile and modern country. Sri Lanka’s tourism authorities are not simply replicating colonial era travel imagery, they are actively un-making certain negative tropes and promoting a new idea of Sri Lanka—i.e., the “new” Sri Lanka—to the world. Furthermore, many Sri Lanka vloggers are producing travel videos that showcase the country’s attractions. The result is the rise of narratives from Sri Lanka that compete with established Western travel imagery. In this paper, I will predominantly use Edward W. Said’s writings from Orientalism (2003) and Culture and Imperialism (1994), and Sujit Sivasundaram’s writings (2011; 2013) that explore the construction of Ceylon by the British colonial imagination to textually analyze the content of photographs, travel films, writings, music videos, and posters featuring Sri Lanka to trace the parallels between past and present. The “Western gaze” persists owing to its long history of cultural domination, but increasingly, the “subaltern gaze” is shaping narratives.

Orientalist Binaries and Representations of the “Other”

8Orientalism, the concept introduced by literary critic Edward Said, refers to the imaginary Western conceptions of the East or the “Orient” created by and for the West to justify the domination of the East; it underpins the power imbalance between the West and the rest of the world today, particularly the Global South (Said, 2003). This Palestinian American professor (ibid.: 41-46) describes orientalism as a form of “intellectual power” that compartmentalized the West and the East, giving rise to several Orientalist binaries. The “Orient” was backward, passive, eccentric, sensual, exotic, and suspicious; the West was advanced, active, rational, peaceful, and trustworthy (ibid.: 49). The “Orient” was always silent while the West projected power over it (ibid.: 94-95). Moreover (ibid.: 210-293), modern Orientalism has a “liberal veneer”; non-Western people (or the “Other”) cultures and economies are studied to understand them better, yet non-Western people can only represent themselves in a limited way. Today’s “diluted” Orientalism asserts that the West and the East are systematically different; the East cannot represent itself, so Western representations are inevitable; and fundamentally the East is either to be feared or controlled (ibid.: 300-301). In his book Culture and Imperialism, Said discusses the cultural interconnections between the East and the West. The old relationship between the colonizer and colonized now exists as the relationship between the Global North and South; representations of non-Westerners continue to exist within an imperial context (Said, 1994: 1-66).

9Scholars studying tourism marketing material have used Said’s work to critique the fundamental Orientalist and hierarchical nature of the modern global tourism industry. Compartmentalization of the non-Western “Other” and the West is the norm; the “Other” is passive while Western travellers and tour operators write the narratives for them. John Nightengale (2019) writes that representation of tourist destinations divides the world into the “consumerist West” and the “homogenized East,” with the world interpreted through the “Western gaze.” These representations reduce the host countries of the Global South to a series of repetitive images (ibid.). In their article “The Contradictory Politics of the Right to Travel,” Raoul V. Bianchi, Marcus L. Stephenson, and Kevin Hannam (2020: 292) explain that participating in tourism is “unevenly distributed, ambiguous and contested,” with border politicizations and racial profiling. Travellers from the Global North are “empowered tourists,” whereas travellers from the Global South are “disempowered Others” required to apply for tourist visas (ibid.). According to Cara Aitchison (2001: 135), people and places of the Global South exist as “pleasure products” for the consumption of tourists from the Global North. The tourism industry promotes “colonial consumption” that is reinforced through the language, images, and discourse of tourist brochures (ibid.: 140), while tourism marketing relies on the promotion of “difference” and the representation of the “desirable Other” for its very sustenance (ibid.: 139). Geographies and the hosts of the Global South are depicted as “pure and authentic” rather than ever evolving places (ibid.: 140). One study that examined tourism marketing material produced in North America identified three myths (Echtner and Prasad, 2003: 669). The first is that of the unchanged, where Global South countries always exist in the past—reduced to relics of old civilizations (ibid.: 669). The second is the myth of the unrestrained, usually applied to luxurious island getaways or “paradise” (ibid.: 672), and the third is the myth of the uncivilized, remote places encountering “primitive” cultures and people (ibid.: 675).

10Similar Orientalist binaries are present in travel representations of Sri Lanka. Western accounts about the country, both colonial and contemporary, acknowledge its topographic beauty while simultaneously highlighting the exotic, primitive, and dangerous. An aspect of the island always exists in the past (unchanged and stagnant) despite modern developments, and the country’s civil war is persistently mentioned in Western travel accounts of Sri Lanka. In the next section, I will explore the history behind the origins of the garden, paradise, and jungle themes, and how they became entrenched in the popular imagination through early travel films, photographs, posters, and music videos.

A Tropical Garden Paradise with a Dark Core

11The British found themselves in possession of the entire island following the defeat of the Kingdom of Kandy in 1815. Sivasundaram (2011: 123) believes that an “island’s distinctive boundaries between sea and land make it particularly prone to imagined escapisms and entrapments.” Islands have been metaphorically associated with ideas of Eden, utopia, arcadias, and prisons. Building a “little England” on an island was a particular preoccupation (ibid.: 123). Sivasundaram (ibid.: 130) writes: “political control and botanising went hand-in-hand,” adding that the colonial imagination depicted Sri Lanka’s low-lying coastal areas and inland hilly areas in different ways as they were topographically different (ibid.: 142). The coconut tree became a natural icon of the coastal areas; written accounts about Sri Lanka during these times expressed romantic and picturesque associations with the sighting of coconut trees (ibid.: 136-139). The inland areas, filled with hills and valleys, became the sites for establishing the ideal botanical garden and “little England” (ibid.: 129-140). Access to the Kingdom of Kandy, with its cooler climate, provided the British authorities with the opportunity to establish the botanical garden in Peradeniya. The Kandyan monarchies were prolific gardeners, and the imperial botanizing project was one which saw the appropriation of Kandyan knowledge about the natural environment (ibid.: 126-127). The hill station of Nuwara Eliya became the site of “little England” and the natural icon of the inland hilly areas of Sri Lanka. Its representation contrasted sharply with the representation of the tropicality of the coastal areas with coconut trees (ibid.: 139-140).

12Colombo, the commercial capital, was also represented as the “Garden City of the East”‘ from the beginning of the 20^th century (Perera, 2008). Most notably, the Scottish Orientalist and town planner Patrick Geddes drew plans to preserve what he saw as the rural spirit of Sri Lanka within the city. He noted that people appreciated flowers and gardens and his city plan centred on creating an urban garden (Wahab-Salman, 2021). Thus, these are the beginnings of the depiction of Sri Lanka as a romanticized garden and a tropical paradise.

The spirit of the jungle is in the village, and in the people who live in it. They are simple, sullen, silent men. In their faces you can see plainly the fear and hardship of their lives. They are very near to the animals which live in the jungle around them. They look at you with the melancholy and patient stupidity of the buffalo in their eyes, or the cunning of the jackal. And there is in them the blind anger of the jungle, the ferocity of the leopard and the sudden fury of the bear.

14In Woolf’s novel, the “jungle” is a metaphor for Sri Lanka and its inhabitants, a dark and dangerous land.

15The emergence of these defining themes that are associated with Sri Lanka as a travel destination also coincided with the rise of landscape photography. Orientalist ideas that originated in written accounts, paintings, and literature found new mediums with technological advancements. From the second half of the 19^th century onward, there was photography; in the 20^th century, it expanded to films. Early travel photography functioned as an important tool for imagining, visualizing, and presenting imperial ideas of non-Western lands (Ryan, 1997: 45-47). Commercial travel photographers (such as Samuel Bourne in Northern India and John Thomson in China) approached their photography expeditions with the zeal of explorers. These photographers wanted to capture previously unphotographed landscapes and deliver picturesque imagery. The works of Bourne and Thomson presented landscapes within the confines of the colonial imagination (ibid.: 49-70). For example, Bourne sought to recreate English scenery using Indian landscapes (ibid.: 50), whereas Thomson photographed infrastructure such as the Port of Shanghai to show the benefits of British civilization on the Chinese landscape (ibid.: 67).

18Ceylon (Travel Film Archive, 2014), a Travelcade film produced in 1941, has whimsical background music in contrast to The Song of Ceylon. A substantial portion of the film is devoted to showcasing the Vedda community (in Sri Lanka), which the narrator describes as “the most mysterious people in all the races of man” and one of the “lost tribes of civilization.” This film portrays the Vedda community as childlike and primitive, mocking their bare bodies, yet despite this, they are “handsome and intelligent.” It highlights the modernity of Colombo, tea estates that are described as “forests of tea trees,” ancient architecture in Kandy, water buffaloes, and gem mining. The film ends with the sentence that Ceylon is “an island of untold riches and ancient kings, of scenic charm and a lost tribe of bronze Apollos who fight with wild beasts for control of the jungle” (ibid.).

19Flight to Ceylon (Periscope Film, 2021), by the American production company Dudley Pictures Corporation in the early 1950s, begins with the narrator describing Sri Lanka as a “fabulous isle” and a “land of paradise and paradox.” The camera lingers on scenes of elephants, snake charmers, trains, beaches, the architecture of ancient kingdoms, the Sigiriya rock, local handicrafts, tea estates, gem mining, rubber tapping, coconuts, and Kandyan dancers whose performance is described as “strange and primitive.” The film focuses on the contexts of paradise and paradox throughout its narrative. It describes Colombo as a progressive city, a place where “yesterday meets today.” But the narrator asserts that there is “always that other Ceylon, strange and mystic island of the past” (ibid.).

21The following year saw the beginning of Sri Lanka’s civil war. Tourism arrivals were low and there was little interest in Sri Lanka as a travel destination during the next three decades (Fernando, 2016: 92). Tourist arrivals increased from 2002 to 2006 during the years of the ceasefire, though not significantly (ibid.: 91). A local advertising agency produced a travel video titled Small Island Big Trip (J Walter Thompson Sri Lanka Showreel, 2015) during that time of which topographic versatility and the natural beauty of the island were the focal points, as it entirely features aerial footage of beaches, hills, waterfalls, rivers, ancient architecture, and wildlife. However, with the start of the final stage of the civil war in 2006, Sri Lanka could not sustain tourist arrivals.

The “New” Sri Lanka

23Western travel accounts have recycled repetitive imagery from the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries for the 21^st century. There are some new images too—street cricket, kite flying in Colombo, the cuisine, divers at Galle Fort, and urban regeneration. The primitive, childlike natives of the past are today’s friendly and resilient people. A common thread in all these narratives is the persistence of the “dark core”—the civil war. Today’s Sri Lanka continues to be a garden, jungle, and paradise damaged.

24For example, the Australian television channel SBS Food produced a programme titled My Sri Lanka with Peter Kuruvita (Kuruvita, 2011) featuring a chef with Sri Lankan heritage. The programme promotes Sri Lanka as “a land of stunning tastes,” “a land of friends and laughter,” and “a land of magical memories” (ibid.). In “Sri Lanka: Island in the Storm,” an article published in The Guardian, Ruaridh Nicoll (2013) writes: “Of course, the country is so popular because on the surface it doesn’t feel as if it’s emerging from slaughter. Now, outside the car window, Sri Lanka seems like a garden gone mad.” In “A Voyage into Sri Lanka’s Forgotten Jungle Lands,” an article published in The Telegraph, Mike MacEacheran (2021) writes: “Sri Lanka has long been renowned for its hospitality, but there has been darkness to this lightness over the past few years.” Conflicting images of Colombo are also emerging. In Western travel accounts, Colombo is a mass of contradictions; it is a mess but there is regeneration. For example, John Gimlette’s travelogue Elephant Complex: Travels in Sri Lanka (2016) dwells on the chaotic nature of Colombo, stating that the metropolis belongs in Lewis Carroll’s novel Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. The Economist (2016) produced Discover Colombo: Travel in the Fastest-growing City in the World that foregrounds the cuisine, upscale restaurants, and a fashion show while stating: “A visit right now will reveal a place forging a new identity before your very eyes.”

25Sri Lankan produced tourism marketing material is an example of the country’s efforts to forge its new identity. Sri Lanka’s government and tourism authorities believe that tourism can play a role in economic development (Fernando et al., 2013). SLTDA launched Sri Lanka’s first global tourism marketing campaign with the tagline Sri Lanka, Wonder of Asia in 2011 (Fernando, 2016: 91). Marketing itself as the “Wonder of Asia” involved addressing negative perceptions, especially considering the contentious nature of the civil war’s end. Similar to Western travel accounts, Sri Lankan produced marketing material uses the old themes of garden, paradise (though not paradise damaged), and jungle, mixing old and new travel imagery. The first video produced under the tagline Sri Lanka, Wonder of Asia (Sri Lanka Tourism, 2012) largely focuses on topographic versatility, culture, civilization, and wildlife.

28These travel vloggers market the sheer “ordinariness” of Sri Lanka and its people—rather than the “Otherness” that characterizes Western travel narratives of the country. Sri Lankan travel vloggers decentralize travel narratives and portray the country as it is. They do not necessarily foreground established travel imagery or consciously centre their content on the themes of garden, jungle, and paradise—rather, they provide personal anecdotes of their experiences and take viewers on less travelled paths. Studies on tourism marketing about destinations in the Global South explore how the “Othering” and exoticization are an intrinsic part of constructing “authenticity” about these destinations (Aitchison, 2001; Echtner and Prasad, 2003; Bandyopadhyay, 2009; Caton and Santos, 2009; Korpela, 2010). Travel vloggers of the Global South, however, now provide alternative constructions of “authenticity.” Competing narratives of Sri Lanka and “authenticity” are emerging. Entrenched narratives and constructions of “authenticity” produced by the “Western gaze” now exist with those produced by the “subaltern gaze” marketed to travellers of a new era.

Conclusion

33Europe dominated over 85% of land in the world at the height of European imperialism (Said, 1994: 6-8). The modern world, inheritor of colonial legacies, is one where power is concentrated in the Global North. This power imbalance determines mobility, passport politics, and the global tourism industry. Tourism marketing material lies within these intersections of politics, economy, and culture. This paper discussed how Orientalist representations of the past inform the representations of today by analyzing the content of tourism marketing material produced by both Western and Sri Lankan sources. The British colonial authorities’ need to study the natural environment of Sri Lanka and project political power over the island resulted in imagining the country in specific ways. The coastal areas became a romantic, coconut tree-filled paradise, whereas the internal hilly areas were depicted as a garden, while The Village in the Jungle added the idea of the dark, mysterious jungles of Sri Lanka to the popular (colonial) imagination. However, among the dominance of the “Western gaze” and what Said (2003) described as “diluted Orientalism,” there is a “subaltern gaze.” Sri Lanka’s tourism authorities and travel vloggers are actively rewriting narratives about the “new” Sri Lanka. The “subaltern gaze” showcases a country that has evolved. Geopolitical and economic changes define the contemporary world. Cultural products from many parts of the world—for example, India’s Bollywood, Nigeria’s and South Korea’s cultural industries, Turkey’s Dizi, Latin America’s Telenovelas, Chinese-owned social media platform TikTok to name a few—are also competing with Western cultural hegemony. As power imbalances influence tourism representations, these decisive changes are bound to influence emerging travel narratives just as colonial era Orientalism imagined the lands conquered through certain binaries. It is now nearly a hundred years since the creation of the first travel films about Sri Lanka, over fifty years since Sri Lanka’s tourism authorities realized the economic potential of tourism, and forty years since iconic music videos were filmed in the country. Orientalist images and themes of garden, paradise, and jungle continue to endure in various forms. Today, as the country lies on the cusp of further national and global transformation, these themes are Sri Lanka’s to adapt on its own terms to create new travel narratives.