Coloniality Encounters: Ballet
Chitrasena as Mandadi Raala in Karadiya Ever since I started engaging with the study of coloniality and the whole decolonial movement, including thinkers such as Walter Mignolo, my eyes are being opened to how coloniality played in my own life. Pulling together a series of anecdotes that reflect my own lived experience . This is the first. Ballet Born into an elitist anglicised and Christian Ceylonese family I grew up in that rarefied bubble that was Colombo society, oblivious to how our colonial history had shaped my life and those around me. At my grandparents’ extended family home in Cinnamon gardens, we spoke English among the family, and in Sinhala to the servants, though I do have an early recollection of Isabel Nanny who conversed with me in English. She always wore a soft white osariya that contrasted starkly with her dark skin but that is as much as I can recall of her. She was the exception. In the servants quarters (where admittedly I as the only child in the hou