GLIMPSES OF COLONIAL CEYLON (1935 – 1947)

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)