As we taxied into Colombo’s Bandaranaike International Airport at an unearthly hour, I couldn’t help being baffled by the fact that an international flight had lasted a mere hour, much shorter than one from Chennai to New Delhi. I should have carried fewer magazines. Note to self: Next time, carry one magazine and not six!
Yes, there will be a next time. For Colombo has joined the ranks of my favourite cities in the world.
In succession the Portuguese, Dutch, and British ruled Sri Lanka from the 16th century till 1948, when it gained independence, and have left their individual stamp on Colombo’s cultural heritage. And it was the architectural remains of the city’s colonial past that were the highlight of my trip here.
On our first day in the city, around 11 a.m., we were shepherded into the portico of the Dutch Hospital, a prominent landmark. We were received by Mark Forbes, our guide through Old Colombo, and a group of Australian tourists. Mark, a ‘Dutch-Burgher’ and Colombo native, has hosted walks in the island-state’s capital for several years under the Colombo City Walks banner.
The Dutch Hospital is a mustard-coloured structure surrounded by a courtyard, built around 1680, and reminiscent of the Nalukettu style of the Mattancherry or Dutch Palace in Kerala. Given its proximity to the harbour, the hospital was frequented by seafarers of all sorts, including officers, merchants and slaves.
In and around The Hospital today houses restaurants, cafés and boutique stores. A bystander told us that on Friday nights the precinct turned into Colombo’s version of New Delhi’s Hauz Khas Village, where the young, carefree and moneyed party till the wee hours.
En route, on Chatham Street, we spotted the Old Colombo Lighthouse. No longer operational, it functions as a clock tower. The clock tower was built in 1865 during British rule, and its clock was manufactured by the same company which was behind London’s Big Ben.
Our next stop was the Central Bank’s Economic and Currency Museum. The top half of the building’s white-pillared façade is grey, with the rest a Cambridge blue. The currency section is a labyrinth of large ceiling-to-floor panels dotted with coins and colourful currency notes in hues of pink, blue, yellow and green. The notes, with vivid depictions of daily life in Sri Lanka, looked more like tourist pamphlets than money! The curator brought out the museum’s prized possession: a currency detector.
Mark showed us how a note’s artwork turned fluorescent green under the scanner — a sign of its legitimacy.
After oohing and aahing over an ostentatious chandelier and trekking up a never-ending spiral staircase, we found ourselves on the bank’s terrace. From there we had a panoramic view of the cityscape, with the sea, container ships and fishing boats on one side, and a colony of colonial buildings, a drab military base-camp, a collection of vibrantly-coloured shanties and skyscrapers, on the other. Each scene appeared to represent a different period in history. From Colombo’s past as a bustling port city, its colonial character, and the ethnic conflict that tore the country apart, to the years of rehabilitation that followed and its present desire to be modern and Western.
Once we were on the road again, the blazing afternoon sun beat down on us as we made our way through pockets of dense human traffic.Back on Chatham Street. Mark pointed to a large building. Beige with age and mould in the crevices, its entrance is flanked by two decorative columns on either side. It was the Del Mel Building. Mark informed us that the music video for the British rock band Duran Duran’s famous song Hungry Like a Wolf was filmed in its Pagoda Tea Room restaurant, once the haunt of the city’s elite. We cut across to York Street and arrived at a bright red-brick building with white stone facings — Miller’s Department Store. Its brass signage and weathered wooden cases transported us to a time when department stores “dispensed drugs, toilet requisites, perfumery and optical goods”, as its plaque at the entrance said.
We continued our walk on to Queen Street and halted outside HSBC Bank. Mark drew our attention to a large embossed logo in the bank’s stairwell. It showed three men with their backs to us, wearing conical hats, and standing beside an open trunk of jewels. In the logo’s foreground were large wooden cases that represented the opium freighted in and out of Shanghai during the Opium Wars. This image was later replaced with the red hexagonal symbol we see as the bank’s logo today.
Sensory overload On the opposite side, on Lotus Street, stood a giant, Soviet-style, grey sculpture, of a hand holding a rotary telephone mouthpiece bursting out from the ground beneath. It looked resplendent and self-assured in its absurdity. I was pleased that the city had a sense of humour
Our last stop was the Grand Oriental Hotel. Once a mansion of the Dutch Governor and military barracks, the hotel came into being in 1870 under the patronage of the British Governor Robert Wilmot Horton and architect R. Smith. In 1954, the property was handed over to the Bank of Ceylon and re-designed by well-known architect Geoffrey Bawa. The hotel had the distinction of being the first building in Colombo to have an electric elevator. In its heyday, it played host to many a soiree of the rich and famous.
Its high-profile past seems a far cry from its present condition. Its exterior has all the trappings of a heritage property comparable with New Delhi’s Connaught Place. But its crumbling insides, wilting wallpaper, worn-out upholstery, dimly lit corridors and creaking doors had all seen better days.
Upon our exit from the hotel, a concoction of sights, sounds and smells hit us. We were in Peta market. A single-lane street ran along a row of makeshift-stalls selling a range of goods. From freshly fried malu maris (banana-sized peppers), confectionery, made-in-China knock-offs: bags, shoes and electronics to lottery tickets, books, utensils and rolls of fabrics. All it takes is perseverance and patience to find anything under the sun here. We made our way through the market’s winding streets, surrounded by clamour of seafood hawkers, zealous honking interspersed with the azan booming from a nearby speaker and the chatter of men and women in Sinhala with a smattering of English, as they went about their business.
While the city’s old buildings looked like images out of a postcard series on European cities in the 18{+t}{+h} century, the chaos of day-to-day life reminded us that we were still in South Asia. We passed a slew of colonial buildings some recently white-washed, others still under renovation. Mark said this was part of a citywide refurbishment drive undertaken by the Government, with the assistance of the Defence and Naval services.
Embracing its past On the cusp of a renewed Westernisation, the city still fervently holds on to the relics of its colonial past, unlike metros such as Chennai (its Mount Road in the early 19th century bore a striking resemblance to Colombo’s Fort area) that have long-ago razed most of their older buildings to make way for concrete high rises. Instead of choosing to go on a rampage to do away with the old, most buildings in Fort and in greater Colombo have been renovated. A structure was seldom broken down, irrespective of its size and historical significance, unless it was completely unsalvageable. The old never made way for the new; it was reclaimed, and exists side by side with the new chrome and glass skyscrapers.
Colombo is undertaking its journey of modernisation while maintaining a modicum of restraint, perhaps out of respect for its history. I wish more cities would take this route.
The comfort of the familiar is ever alluring and I am thus secure in the knowledge that the city will continue to have these sights and sounds, the things I had begun to love about it, on my next trip here.
Stay in the city The Taj Samudra, Colombo, recently re-opened its doors after extensive renovation costing $20 million. The property overlooks the scenic Galle Face Green and the Indian Ocean, and is located in the heart of the city. The Taj retains its colonial style annex, called the Crystal building, that houses four banquet halls. For the global traveller, a stay here offers a value proposition in terms of the property’s proximity to business centres and major tourist attractions in the city.