‘Colombo: Port of Call’ maps a place through its visitors

Ajay Kamalakaran’s ‘Colombo: Port of Call’ approaches the Sri Lankan capital the way seasoned travellers often do. It is not through guidebooks or itineraries, but through the memories of those who once paused there. The book gathers the impressions of fourteen remarkable visitors to Colombo. The names include the likes of Mahatma Gandhi, Arthur Conan Doyle, Anton Chekhov, Don Bradman, and dancer Jane Sherman. Their encounters with the port city form the scaffolding of a narrative that is as much about personalities as it is about place.

Colombo, in Kamalakaran’s telling, emerges as a city that has long stood at the crossroads of the Indian Ocean. The book’s time frame stretches back to the late nineteenth century (roughly from 1879 onward) when the port functioned as a crucial colonial maritime stopover. The reader witnesses, in the recollections of travellers and public figures, a harbour city that gradually shifts shape. The journey from a strategic colonial outpost servicing imperial networks to a more layered, modern capital with its own cultural rhythms is captured.

What gives the book its appeal is the way Colombo is refracted through these visiting figures. Each chapter captures not only what these travellers saw, but also how they saw it. The result is a collage of impressions. It is sometimes admiring, sometimes puzzled, occasionally critical, and so on. All these together sketch the character of a port city accustomed to receiving strangers. The reader encounters descriptions of local attire, distinctive hairstyles, and curious details such as the ‘tortoise shell combs’ that caught visitors’ attention. Familiar landmarks also surface repeatedly. The breezy promenade of Galle Face, for instance, or the famed Temple of the Tooth are some. These fragments of observation build a textured portrait of a city that has long fascinated outsiders.

For contemporary readers who associate Colombo largely with its ocean-front cafes and lively urban culture, the book offers an engaging backward glance. Kamalakaran’s narrative reminds us that the city’s cosmopolitan spirit did not emerge overnight. It is the product of centuries of maritime exchange. Ships, merchants, colonial officials, artists, and writers all passed through this harbour to leave behind fleeting but revealing traces in diaries, letters, and memoirs.

Not every account in the book celebrates Colombo unreservedly. Some visitors appear less enchanted. They have recorded details that strike them as mundane or even perplexing. Yet these less enthusiastic observations are not without value. If anything, they lend the narrative a degree of authenticity. A city, after all, is rarely experienced in identical ways by everyone who encounters it.

At times, one wonders whether arranging the personalities chronologically might have made the evolution of Colombo easier to follow. A more linear structure could have clarified how the city changed from one era to another. As it stands, the reader moves across time through individual portraits rather than through a continuous historical arc.

Yet this approach has its own charm. Kamalakaran appears less interested in writing a conventional history than in recovering moments. Some of these moments are brief and often overlooked episodes when travellers arrived in Colombo and left behind a vivid impression of the place. In doing so, the book reveals something equally intriguing about the visitors themselves. Their responses to the city, whether appreciative or ambivalent, illuminate aspects of their personalities as much as they describe Colombo.

The pleasure of the book lies partly in these rediscovered anecdotes. There is a quiet enthusiasm in Kamalakaran’s writing. It is probably because the author has enjoyed tracing these scattered historical fragments and then placing them alongside his own observations of the city today. The interplay between past impressions and present-day reflections gives the narrative its energy.

For readers drawn to stories that blend travel writing with historical discovery, ‘Colombo: Port of Call’ offers a rewarding read. It is a book best approached with the same curiosity that guides a traveller in an unfamiliar port. Rather than following the chapters in strict order, readers might find it equally satisfying to begin with whichever personality intrigues them most and allow Colombo to unfold, one visitor at a time.