Untitled Document
About the Book:
In 1728, the Ceylonese Chettiyar Nicolaas Ondaatje was sent
into exile to the Cape of Good hope where he died in 1737, only a few months
before the end of his term. All these years Nicolaas Ondaatje kept in contact
with his family and friends in Ceylon through letters in Tamil, Dutch and Sinhala.
His own letters are lost but those he received have been preserved. These letters
give an intimate picture of an early eighteenth-century elite Chettiyar community
in Ceylon employed by the Dutch East India Company. By contrast at the Cape
Nicolaas Ondaatje found himself in the company of the Free Blacks at the very
bottom of the social ladder.
Though as a convict he was allowed to move about freely, Ondaatje
had to provide his won source of income, making a modest living, first as a
doctor and trader and later as a home teacher. In the letters which are kept
in the archive in cape town, we have chanced upon a classic case of subaltern
history. Here we have a protagonist who has been denied a voice by the quirk
of the availability of historical documents, but whose situation comes through
in the concern his family and friends show for him in exile thousands of miles
away, over nine long years.
The letters give an excellent picture of the loyalty of the
Chettiyars to one of their own, of their unfailing Christian faith, and of their
meticulous account keeping. That we will never know what Nicolaas Ondaatje did
to deserve his long exile or how he died shortly before his term ended makes
his life history all the more poignant.
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