Published with license by Koninklijke Brill nv | doi:./-bja
© Jessica A. Albrecht, | ISSN: -(print) - (online)
Religion and Gender () –
brill.com/rag
The Politics within the Histories We Write
Postcolonial Narrations of the Past in the Realm of Religion, Gender,
and Education in Colonial Sri Lanka
Jessica A. Albrecht | orcid: ---
University of Bonn, Bonn, Germany
jessica_albrecht@gmx.de
Received 11 March 2023 | Accepted 15 December 2023 |
Published online 4 March 2024
Abstract
This article is a case study of Musaeus College, Colombo, especially its colonial past
and the postcolonial histories written about it and its founder, Marie Musaeus Hig-
gins. Marie Higgins, the founder of the school, is not only celebrated within the school,
but also throughout the country as the mother of girls’ education. Strikingly, being a
white woman coming from ‘the West’ to establish this school as well as some vernacu-
lar village schools and a teachers’ training college, is not criticised within postcolonial
Sri Lanka as other imperial remains are. This article will look at exactly this opposi-
tion between the memory of Higgins today and the historical sources to illuminate the
ways in which a present-day narration of the past is used to construct a postcolonial
Buddhist-Sri Lankan identity within which contemporary issues of racialised religion
are obscured by Buddhist nationalism.
Keywords
white feminism – race – Sri Lanka – memory – girl’s education