‘And you know which half!’ – Blok and Dino on our public school elite

By Uditha Devapriya

Beneath the bulging eyes, the wide open grin, the unyielding sarcasm, and the unsparing voice lies another Gehan Blok. In a recent interview Blok let him out. Meandering from work to life, he spoke of how his stand-up routines have sought and got inspiration from the way Sri Lankans live and the way they plan and order their (mostly boring) affairs.

Blok’s comedy isn’t on the same level that Dino Corera’s or Pasan Ranaweera’s or Dominic Kellar’s is, but it’s a class on its own. He’s unforgiving when he has to, which is most of the time. No sacred cow misses his radar: he looks at it, cuts it open, and reveals the emptiness inside. At times you feel he is right. At others, you know he is. Like all comedians, when he makes fun of one milieu another milieu laughs with him, and when the laugh is on them all, they don’t laugh; they quieten down, nursing wounded pride.

Nowhere is this truer than his pillorying of the most sacred of all cows among the middle-class in Sri Lanka, what school you went to. It’s a not so big elephant in the room, and in his interview, Blok chose to talk about why he picks on it so frequently. He correctly observed that in Sri Lanka, one’s school credentials often become vital to one’s career success. Blok argued it shouldn’t. That, I suppose, is one reason why he talks and jokes about and picks on school pride regularly, and why people love him so much for it.

For make no mistake, he does talk about it regularly. No Gehan Blok routine is or would be complete without him picking on one school or the other. Invariably this happens to be either of the two big schools in Colombo. Ridiculing their sense of self-worth, he charts their past in terms of the leaders they produced (who happen to be most of the leaders this we have had), and points at what he sees as their present plight (not so illustrious). I don’t know whether Blok has read Tarzie Vittachchi’s The Brown Sahib or its sequel The Brown Sahib Revisited, but he comes a little close to Vittachchi’s unrelenting sarcasm.

On the cover of the 1987 Penguin edition of The Brown Sahib Revisited, three cartoon figures embody the themes of the book: a waiter clad in a turban serving drinks, his eyes wide shut; a stout gentleman smoking a pipe, looking away at his friend at the table; and the friend at the table, a tie-and-coat Oxbridge-type tellingly smirking at the reader. The third person looks awfully like Felix Dias Bandaranaike, who at the time of the book’s publication had been deprived of his civic rights along with his aunt- the former Prime Minister. The resemblance is uncanny, not least because his tie sports blue and gold (Felix attended Royal College). In any case, for whatever the sketch is worth, it prepares us for what lies inside: a scathing overview of the rise of the Westernised elite.

If Vittachchi pillories the Royal-Thomian colonial elite, Blok pillories the Royal-Thomian postcolonial elite. I have written about this specific postcolonial elite to The Island, though I didn’t get about explaining who they are. Blok doesn’t bother explaining who they are in his skits either; he leaves the task of identifying them to his audience.

He picks on the most discernible hallmarks of the big schools: their crests, their mottos, and of course their most distinguished old boys and old girls. He pricks balloons and demolishes most of the urban myths surrounding them, but for every audience he infuriates he makes another laugh. At the end of the day, it’s the Royal-Thomian crowd he dissects the most. To my mind he does it better than many social scientists in showing us how the milieu it caters and panders to has evolved in one sense, and hasn’t in another.

Public schools, there and here One of the most curious contradictions of the Industrial Revolution in Britain was that while it shattered one set of pre-capitalist social relations, it entrenched another. Writers on both sides of the spectrum, from Eric Hobsbawm to Fareed Zakaria, have conjectured that what kept Britain from consolidating its gains in the revolution were its public schools. Hobsbawm claimed that they produced an actively “anti-intellectual, anti-scientific, games-dominated” vision which bred hostility to the very reforms that had fuelled industrialisation. Unsuited to any revolution, let alone an industrial one, by the late 18th and early 19th centuries these enclaves had sunk deeply in their own feudalised structures.

It certainly is ironic that much of the innovation that drove British industry was forged by non-public schoolboys: John Kay, Samuel Crompton, James Watt, Richard Arkwright, and George Stephenson all either remained illiterates for much of their childhood or didn’t get a formal education. Zakaria pinpoints this as one of the reasons why the United States, with its emphasis on industrial education, easily surpassed Britain from the latter part of the 19th century. To put it very simply, unlike in Britain schools and universities in the US privileged science and technology over the classics. “Nothing,” wrote Charles Darwin, “could have been worse for the development of my mind than [my school], as it was strictly classical, nothing else being taught except a little ancient geography and history.”

The problem was that while Britain’s economy transformed in the 18th century, it did so with an education system which survived those changes. That system was more suited to a pre-capitalist society where, as Durkheim wrote in his doctoral dissertation (The Division of Labour in Society), occupational choices remained few and far between, compared with a society in which industrialisation and specialisation ran apace. In other words it was more suited to the European colonies: it required as an impetus the trifurcation of society into a white officialdom, a dependent bourgeoisie, and a depressed peasantry.

S. B. D. de Silva challenged the prevailing view that the colonial economy (such as the one that came to be in place in Sri Lanka) operated on a dichotomy between a traditional and a modern sector (i.e. between agricultural enclaves and plantations) simply because the pre-capitalist nature of the plantations put into question their modernity: they were more semi-feudal, and they required a stunted bourgeoisie. Such a bourgeoisie required a whole new social structure amenable to their way of life.

The public school system devised in 14th century England and antiquated in 18th century Britain thus proved to be a perfect fit in 19th century British Ceylon. From these institutions evolved Vittachchi’s brown sahibs. Dependent in the truest sense of the term, they realised that their fortunes were inextricably linked to the diktats of British officialdom.

On the other hand, they were not totally cut off from rural society: in order to enforce their authority over the latter, they needed to be linked to it. They were Janus-faced, more tilted to their Western half than their local half; “an admixture in which the Western ingredients preponderated,” as Michael Roberts wrote of Jeronis Pieris. Educated in English, they made every attempt to prevent the peasantry from graduating beyond an elementary education, forcing them “to follow such avocations as they are fitted for by nature.”

In the 1880s around the time of intense reform in England, for instance, J. P. Obeyesekere stood up in the Legislative Council and castigated villagers who racked up debts to send their children to English schools. The solution, Obeyesekere surmised, was to set the entry requirements to these schools so high that only a select few could get in. Half a century later, however, the enactment of various reforms would make it impossible to keep those debt racking villagers from obtaining an English education for their children.

Public school elites, then and now

The subjects of Vittachchi’s ridicule, scorn, and derision cropped up in this era. The leaders who would take the mantle from the British after independence were all born in the shadow of the British Empire, as I pointed out in my Midweek Review column this week. What I did not point out there was that these leaders reacted differently, reflecting the complexity of their class conditioning, to the oncoming, inevitable demise of the Empire.

Some, like D. S. Senanayake, lobbied for moderate reform while lobbying against reforms of the sort envisaged by Cabinet colleagues such as C. W. W. Kannangara and A. Ratnayake, and the Marxists. Others, like S. W. R. D. Bandaranaike, teetered between (Gladstonian) Liberal ideals and their colonial upbringing, a contradiction that Gunadasa Amarasekara, in his essays on Bandaranaike, has explored. Still others, like J. R. Jayewardene, made use of whatever was in vogue at the time and launched themselves on to the political stage. That they came from the same stock, the colonial elite, did not hinder them from responding to the swelling currents of public opinion in diverse, different ways.

I have been writing here of the public school elite vis-à-vis Vittachchi leaving out the public school elite vis-à-vis Gehan Blok. Surprisingly, the most illuminating insight about the latter came, not from Blok, but from Dino Corera. In a skit two years ago at Temple Trees, Corera joked about the intricacies of Colombo’s public schools and the leaders they produced. The usual names were mentioned. No one was spared.

Suddenly he dropped a bombshell: dwelling on the irony of S. W. R. D. Bandaranaike, a product of Sri Lanka’s foremost Anglicised elite, coming up with the Sinhala Only Act, he drew a distinction between Bandaranaike’s school and its rival that to me was not so much classist as it was revealing of the changes in the social landscape which have transpired in one institution and haven’t so much in the other. “Speaking in English,” he said, referring to the students of one school, “is the one thing they do better than you guys.” He laced it: the canteen staff of that school operated in English better than half the population of the other. Then he delivered the rimshot: “And you know which half!”

I have written on this other half before, and I think it’s a cultural contradiction unparalleled by any other in Sri Lanka that our public schools should accommodate a milieu that does not communicate in English, yet embrace a tradition mired in Western values and iconography. Owing to the tumults of socio-political change, they have incorporated within their premises a milieu they would have kept out of their gates a century ago.

Together this milieu forms the crest of the new public school elite that’s become the butt-end of Blok’s and Corera’s jokes. They are the descendants of Vittachchi’s brown sahibs: a middle-class cum petty bourgeoisie celebrating Western values and looking up to the pro-Western ideals of the Opposition while adhering to a rough anything-but-Western ethic and belief system that they associate with the governing party. So far no social scientist has, to my mind, explored this contradiction. It is to Blok’s credit, and to Corera’s also, that they’ve tread where the best equipped anthropologist hasn’t. So far.

The writer can be reached at udakdev1@gmail.com