Features

GLIMPSES OF COLONIAL CEYLON (1935 – 1947)

Published

1 year ago

2025/04/6

This is not meant to be a history of the colonial years, but rather a cherry-picking of childhood memories for their quaintness rather than for their historical truth, for socio-cultural insights rather than for historical facts. I can only touch on some cultural oddities of the English-speaking middleclass of those times, since I knew no other. Likewise, I can write only of the last years of colonial rule, since I lived through no others. I write as ‘an old man in a hurry’, because at the age of 88 years, I doubt that there will be others left to recount these tales.

Imperial Blessings

I remember as a small boy at Royal Prep, how excited we were about the visit of the Duke of Gloucester! It must have been around 1935, and I must have been around 6-7 years old. The brother of the King of England (George V) was actually going to visit us in Ceylon! We were all dressed up in our school uniforms and armed with little British flags. We had to stand, kneel or sit, according to our height, on benches lined along decorated Thurstan Road, along which the Duke’s motorcade was to pass. How thrilled we were when the Duke graciously acknowledged our cheers! Although this now seems absurd, it remains etched in the memory of a six-year old, even at the age of 88!

The War Years (World War II: 1939-45)

The war years weighed heavily on the whole country. Except for the LSSP and Communist Party, most Ceylonese political parties, the State Council and the people supported the British war effort, agonizing over our colonizer’s losses in Europe, as well as the repeated bombing of Britain. We seemed unaware or unafraid of the Japanese entry into the war, based on the claims of the British and re-echoed more arrogantly by General McArthur (who was in charge of the American Command in the Pacific) that they would make short shrift of the Japanese, whom they caricatured as inept, short-sighted, with protruding teeth and short legs!

The eastern defence for the British was concentrated in Singapore, which they considered impregnable. Their house of cards collapsed when the Japanese marched through Indo-China and knifed through the Malay Peninsula to take Singapore from the north by land, while the British guns were pointed out to sea! This caused the British to fall back on Ceylon as their main defence against the Japanese, with the HQ of Admiral Lord Mountbatten, the Supreme Allied Commander being based in Ceylon, in the Peradeniya Botanical Gardens, no less.

Buildings were taken over by the British Army, including Royal College. The whole Race Course as well as the Royal and University grounds was taken over for an airbase for the British fighter planes. Since Royal College had to share classrooms with the University, some classes were actually held on the University grounds under the shade of the wings of the Hurricane fighters and their camouflage nets, with me among them.

The price of all commodities rose, while the shelves of most shops were bare. Food was scarce: so a ‘Grow More Food Campaign’ was started. Since rice imports were not possible from war-torn Asia, there was an increased dependence on wheat flour from Canada and the U.S. This brought about a change in dietary habits, incorporating wheat flour in the form of bread and string-hoppers made of American piti into our diet – which persists even to this day.

There were some socio-cultural changes too. These were caused mainly by the large influx of British and allied troops, whose massive numbers and different socio-cultural habits induced subtle changes in the middle-class culture of that time. Of these, I shall describe only one, because it is the most amusing. Accompanying the many British soldiers and sailors came the British ‘Wrens’ (part of the Royal Navy), which soon resulted in British couples cuddling and fondling each other in public on our beaches.

Although this was shocking to the Ceylonese society of those days, it was greatly appreciated by the adolescent schoolboys of that time. ‘Kapping’, a euphemism for voyeurism, became a popular past-time for schoolboys from Colpetty to Mt. Lavinia, who enjoyed seeing such overt sexual activity. I recently read a book by a former school boy (who later became a Professor of English Literature in a leading British University), whose greatest exploit was to make off with the knickers (as they were called in those days) of a Wren, when she was too busy to notice!

Christmas Cheer!

As a Christian living in a mainly Buddhist country, I am now amazed at the fuss that was made over Xmas in those days. It was a fuss in which all middle-class communities, Christian, Buddhist, Hindu and Muslim participated, evincing a heart-warming give-and-take between the different communities and cultures. Even in Malaysia today, the Muslims have an ‘open house’ for all their neighbours and friends on Hari-Raya, while the Hindus reciprocate on Deepavali, and the Chinese on their New Year.

The determining factor in Ceylon in those days was obviously the privileged position of Christianity under the British; but it was the cultural override that was most visible. In fact, I even remember singing Christmas Carols in Royal Prep, along with Buddhist and Hindu boys, which should never have been allowed in a government-run secular school. I remember even more culturally determined events. We sang songs during World War II, such as ‘I’m Dreaming of a White Christmas’, ending with the wish that ‘All Your Christmases be White!’ And just to make sure, our middle-class families would put white cotton wool on their Christmas Trees to simulate snow! As seen before, this represented more a cultural domination rather than mere colonial rule.

Sometimes these cultural norms rode on the back of religion, going back even to Portuguese times. Living in Rome for thirty years, I discovered that Catholics in the countries of Southern Europe had a tendency to bury their dead into the side of a hill, as if in shelves going into the hillside. I was surprised to find recently that a bereaved Catholic family in Sri Lanka, in the absence of a hill in the flat sandy soil of Wennappuwa, had built a big underground vault in order to construct a vertical wall into which they could slide (laterally) their dead. They had in effect created a mountain out of a mole hill, just in order to follow the cultural (not religious) customs of the Portuguese of 500 years ago! Thus, we all carry some cultural baggage from our colonial past.

Colonial Cultural Legacies in Other Countries

In my later travels abroad, I had the chance to see the same thing on a wider scale. When visiting Japan in 1963, I was greeted with giant-sized posters at every street corner of Marlon Brando with his prominent nose and of Rita Hayworth with her lovely long legs. This was in effect a ‘beauty’ cultural message to the conquered Japanese people. Consequently, Japanese who could afford were running to get nose jobs and breast implants done in order to proximate the American standards of beauty.

A silly story from South-East Asia illustrates this even better. In the early 1960s during my travels in Asia, I could always make out the difference between a Malaysian, a Filipino and an Indonesian, despite the fact that they all shared the same physiognomic characteristics of the Malay race. Amazed at my own unerring, know-all accuracy, I began to wonder from where I had acquired this wonderful gift. It was only later that I realized that I was telling them apart only by the externalities of their colonially derived cultures. I recognized the Filipino from his American crew-cut, the Malaysian from his clipped mustache (a tribute both to Islam and to the stiff British upper lip), and the Indonesian by his batik shirt, all of which were colonially determined!

Trousers Make a ‘Mahattaya’

I always wore trousers and was always addressed as ‘Mahattaya’ or ‘Sir’ in Ceylon in the 1940s-60s, especially by anyone clad in a sarong. I took this title for granted – and even wanted my money back if I was not so addressed! But it was not long before I realized that it was NOT the wearing of trousers that had made me a ‘Mahattaya’. The trousers only marked me as belonging to the English-speaking ‘elite’, which is what entitled me to wear trousers in the first place! On the contrary, if one could not speak English, one would never presume to wear trousers! The equation went something like this: wearing trousers = English-speaking = higher class or Mahattaya. The trousers were a badge of honour, defining you as belonging to the English-speaking elite, which gave you the ‘right’ to wear trousers and to be addressed as ‘Mahattaya’!

I was to see the absurdity of this equation, applied in the same way but in a different country. When attending an international conference in Delhi in 1959, the Second Secretary at the Ceylon High Commission in Delhi, kindly offered to give me a ride to the meeting. But having lost our way, my friend drew up to a cyclist, a simple man wearing the long trousers/pantaloons worn by north Indians, with the intention of asking him the way.

My friend spoke in English, but the man replied in Hindi, saying (probably) that he could not understand English, and went on repeating the same. Exasperated and annoyed, my Embassy friend turned to me and said: ‘This b……r is pretending to know English when he clearly doesn’t!’ The poor man had been going about his business, in no way PRETENDING THAT HE KNEW ENGLISH, but was falsely accused of doing so. The problem was obviously in the mind of the Ceylonese beholder, who had assumed that the man knew English only because he had ‘dared’ to wear trousers!

(Next week: The downplaying of our national languages: the advantages of English)

(Excerpted from Fallen Leaves, an anthology of memoirs by LC Arulpragasam)

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Features

The hard challenge of clinching a political settlement in the Middle East

Published

16 hours ago

2026/07/23

Sahan Weerasooriya

Bruised hearts: Displaced Palestinian civilians in the Gaza.(Photo by Mustafa Hassona/Anadolu via Getty Images)

Despite some sections of the Trump administration persisting with the view that the possibility could not be entirely ruled out of there being a diplomatic solution to the current US-Iran hostilities in West Asia, the skeptic could not be blamed for thinking otherwise. The intensity, scale and frequency of the tit-for-tat strikes by the antagonists over the past few days against selected military targets and civilian infrastructure in particular in West Asia make the adoption of this stance excusable.

The continuing hostilities render the mentioning of the MOU signed between the warring parties in mid-June a laughable matter. While it could very well be that the foes are wishing privately for a cessation of hostilities before long, what seems to be uppermost on their minds right now is to negotiate with each other from a position of strength. This strategy compels them to incapacitate each other militarily to the extent possible, lest they have to concede too much to each other during negotiations. Hence the stepped-up hostilities.

However, even on the question of there being a negotiated political settlement in the West Asian theatre in the longer term, the skeptic could come to be seen as scoring over the optimist. Developments on the ground account for this.

At the time of writing Israel’s Netanyahu government is going ahead in fairly care-free fashion with the establishment of more Jewish settlements in the Gaza and the West Bank, and it’s all happening under the apparently complacent gaze of the US. In fact, some quarters estimate that Israel is in control of some 65% of the Gaza Strip. Ethnic cleansing, that is, is being drastically stepped-up.

Accordingly, in terms of the power relations of West Asia, the world is almost back to the status quo of the late forties of the last century when the state of Israel was established and the Palestinians were reduced to a microscopic minority in the land they came to inhabit. Therefore, even the impartial observer would be compelled to ask: ‘Will a negotiated peace be ever possible in the Middle East?’

The humanist in the observer would prefer to answer this question in the affirmative and it is indeed the ideal stance to adopt considering the staggering human and material costs of the conflict. But the way ahead to peace could be expected to be highly hazardous and arduous. Among other odds, it would also prove an uphill endeavour to win minds and hearts.

The US’ Trump administration would need to be counted out in this pursuit. This is on account of the fact that it has been far too wayward in its management of West Asian affairs in particular over the past couple of years. Given its unpredictable character it is a matter for conjecture whether it could be counted on to live up to its commitments.

Moreover, Israel could be expected to ‘go it alone’ in the Middle East regardless of whether US help is coming or otherwise. It has indicated as much in recent times and Israel could be doubted on this score only at the doubter’s peril. Because time and again Israel has demonstrated that it could steadfastly defend its interests even single-handedly in the Middle East. History bears this out.

However, a durable alliance with the US would stand Israel in good stead. On the matter of military and intelligence assistance, for example, the US’s help proved invaluable for Israel in the past and going forward this is bound to be so as well. Moreover, it is unlikely that the Trump administration would give up on Israel, considering that a strong Israel is crucial for the furtherance of the US’ strategic and economic interests in West Asia.

But whether the above factors would have a considerable bearing on the question of working out a durable solution to the West Asian tangle is an entirely different matter. Israel, as in the case of the Palestinian enclaves, is acutely security conscious and would need to satisfy itself fully that it could live in a security environment that would guarantee its complete safety, going forward.

The Middle East is badly in need of another peace effort on the lines of the Oslo Accords of the mid-nineties that brought the key actors together and helped hammer out a solution that addressed some of their notable concerns. To be sure, that process did not prove to be the ideal answer to the tangle, but it yielded some respite to the region and drove home that one-time sworn foes could indeed negotiate with a degree of success. The West Bank authority, although falling short of fulfilling some key Palestinian aspirations, is testimony that a degree of success is possible if the intent is right.

Given the current realities of West Asia, peace-making is bound to be an uphill challenge. The violence faced in recent times by the Palestinian community, in particular, has been nothing less than mind-numbing. Merciless has been the violence visited on them by the Israeli side. In such circumstances, durable peace in the region could smack of an idealist’s dream.

Nevertheless, there needs to be urgently, a meeting of minds over the divides. The US would need to be counted out as an honest broker in bringing the sides together but the rest of the West would do well to step up to the challenge.

In this exercise the onus would be on the world’s democracies to take the initiative and doggedly stay the course. An acceptable combination would be the EU and the UN. Given their credentials, the main sides in West Asia ought to find them the least controversial.

Even if the relevant institutional and political arrangements could be shored up to take a reconciliation process forward, winning hearts and minds for the peace drive would prove a grueling challenge. Over the past few years in particular tens of thousands of hearts and minds on both sides of the divide have been bruised badly in the runaway murderous violence that has come to define the Middle East.

These badly scarred personalities would need to experience healing without much delay. It is therefore a multi-faceted challenge that is at hand. Since wide-ranging expertise would be needed in the healing process, people’s participation in peace-making, ranging over the divides, would need to be made a durable reality. It will be a time for enthroning humanity and ensuring the rejection of all forms of violence and coercion.

Features

Amazing Thailand …right here in Colombo

Published

16 hours ago

2026/07/23

Sahan Weerasooriya

For many Sri Lankans, Thailand is the go-to holiday — beaches, temples, food, and that famous warm hospitality.

In fact, I’ve been to Amazing Thailand 24 times myself, and was honoured with the Friends of Thailand International Media Award by the Tourism Authority of Thailand for promoting Thai tourism.

The good news I have for you today is that you don’t even need a passport to get a taste of Amazing Thailand.

The Royal Thai Embassy, in Colombo, is bringing a vibrant slice of Thailand, to the city of Colombo, with Thai Festival 2026 — a cultural experience like never before.

Whether you are an avid enthusiast of Thai culture, a total novice, or simply just interested in exploring foreign cultures, Thai Festival 2026 is going to be the perfect opportunity for you to get more than just a glimpse into one of the most celebrated cultural heritages in South East Asia. And ENTRANCE IS FREE.

The festival will be held on the 1st and 2nd of August, 2026, at Siam Nivasa, 43, C.W.W. Kannangara Mawatha, Colombo 7, and the East Parking Area, of the Colombo Municipal Council, from 11:00am to 5:00pm.

Both days will be full of live entertainment, and dispersed throughout with Thai cultural displays, including exhilarating traditional dance performances and breathtaking Muay Thai demonstrations.

Exploring art and craft specific to Thailand, tasting irresistible authentic Thai cuisine, and playing arcade games, are just a few more fun-filled events available for visitors at the festival premises.

An array of Thai products will also be available for purchase.

While at the festival, you will find Sri Lankan Alumni from Thai universities sharing their experiences with you and willing to answer any questions you might have, related to studying abroad in Thailand.

You can also register for the Muay Thai workshop that will be happening on the 7th and 8th of August, 2026, in Colombo.

Irresistible authentic Thai cuisine

Visitors can also stand a chance to win traditional Thai souvenirs, get exclusive photo opportunities, and, the big one — to enter the raffle draw, at the end of each day, for the grand prize of an all-inclusive round trip to Thailand.

Be sure to avail yourself of this exceptional opportunity and add a cultural spin to your weekend.

To keep up with the latest updates on Thai Festival 2026, head over to the Thai Festival official social media pages.

The Royal Thai Embassy in Colombo official webpage:

https://colombo.thaiembassy.org

Official social media:

Facebook: @RTEColombo

Instagram: @thaiembassysrilanka

Thai Festival official social media:

Facebook: Thai Festival in Colombo

Instagram: @thaifestival_colombo

TikTok: @thaifestival.incolombo

Features

Thicker, stronger hair …

Published

16 hours ago

2026/07/23

Sahan Weerasooriya

Hair fall, in this heat, can be so frustrating, and noticing a thin patch is even more worrying. The good news is … yes, with a little care and kitchen ingredients, you can nourish your scalp and support healthy regrowth.

Try these four easy home remedies … even our grandmothers trusted:

* Coconut Oil and Curry Leaves Tonic:

Warm 04 tablespoons of coconut oil, with a handful of curry leaves, till the leaves turn black. Cool, strain, and massage into scalp 02-03 times a week. Leave for 01 hour, or overnight.

Why:

Coconut oil deeply nourishes, while curry leaves help strengthen roots and add shine.

* Onion Juice for Spot Treatment:

With cotton, dab the juice of 01 small onion, directly on the thin/bald patches. Leave for 20-30 minutes, and then wash with a mild shampoo. Use twice a week.

Why:

Rich in sulfur, onion juice helps boost blood circulation to the scalp.

* Aloe Vera and Castor Oil Mask:

Mix 02 tablespoons of fresh aloe vera gel and 01 tablespoon castor oil and apply to the scalp, focusing on thinning areas. Leave for 45 minutes, and then rinse with cool water.

Why:

Aloe vera soothes the scalp, while castor oil coats hair to make it look thicker.

* Fenugreek and Curd Strengthening Pack:

You will need 02 tablespoons fenugreek seeds, soaked overnight, and 02 tablespoons plain curd.

Grind to a paste, apply to scalp for 30 minutes, and then wash.

Why:

Fenugreek strengthens strands and reduces breakage.

Extra Tips for Healthy Hair:

Avoid tight hairstyles that pull on the scalp.

Eat iron and protein rich foods: greens, dhal, eggs, fish.

Use lukewarm water, not hot.

Be gentle when brushing and drying.