Team Kitaab reviews Colombo: Port of Call by Ajay Kamalakaran (Penguin India, 2026), observing how its narrative is both reflective and resonant.
Ajay Kamalakaran’s Colombo: Port of Call unfolds at an easy, unhurried pace, much like a steamship journey. It is thoughtful and observant, lingering over the details of a world that once felt both expansive and closely connected. In revisiting Colombo during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Kamalakaran reconstructs an atmosphere of a port city suspended between imperial ambition and local complexity, between transit and transformation. The result is a work that is at once historical, anecdotal, and reflective. The writing is a literary collage of voices that reveals as much about those who passed through Colombo as it does about the island they briefly encountered.