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The Twisted Histories of a Colombo Canal-By Sujit Sivasundaram Source:Historyworkshop This article is part of HWO’s series on The Political Environment. The series explores how environmental change has been created and contested in the past, and asks how this history might widen the scope of our political imagination in response to global ecological crisis today. You can read an introduction to the series here. The political environment can go missing in a neighbourhood one knows well, for the human eye is often blind. Close to where I grew up in Colombo, Sri Lanka, the Kirulapone Canal enters the sea at Wellawatte, a district in the south of the city, which – charmingly, but now without a correspondence to reality – translates from Sinhala as ‘sandy garden’. This district is also sometimes referred to as ‘Little Jaffna’: a reference to the city in the north of the island, a pressure point in the country’s civil ...