Listening to Songs about Bees in Nineteenth-Century Ceylon: Hugh Nevill and the Hugh Nevill Collection

by Tom Peterson
School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), Univesity of London

It is fairly well known that, in London, there is a major collection of Sinhala olas. To be more precise, within The Hugh Nevill Collection of Sinhalese Manuscripts at the British Library, there are 2,224 of them. They have been in London since 1897, the year that Hugh Nevill (1847–1897), a British Civil Servant, collector, and scholar in Ceylon, returned to Europe. Today, most of Nevill’s objects and manuscripts are split between the British Museum and the British Library.

The manuscripts in the collection are all at least 120 years old, but many of them are significantly older. They are also incredibly rare, and some are unique. The Nevill Collection is the largest archive of Sinhala manuscripts anywhere in the world outside of Sri Lanka, and it presents us with a critical and unmatched archive for studying the social histories of the country.

Because of the incredible number of incredibly old and rare olas, perhaps understandably, people generally focus on the olas in Nevill’s collection: so much so that it is usually thought of as being a collection of Sinhala olas. But, as an ethnomusicologist, of particular interest to me are the lyrical texts in the collection, of which there are several thousand. These texts tell a more complicated story. Aside from the lyrics in his remarkable ola collection, the British Library holds reems of Nevill’s paper folios, often neglected, and many of these also contain songs.

These tend to relate to Nevill’s studies of folklore and devotional practice in Ceylon, two major and often overlapping themes of his scholarship and collection. In order to collect his lyrics, Nevill and his associates journeyed to meet with people who knew the songs they sought, listened to them sing, and transcribed what they heard onto paper, sometimes with transliterations and descriptions of the songs and their performance practices.

These transcriptions offer us a chance to listen in to an echo of Sri Lanka’s past, a moment of musical aurality transcribed and recorded with the technology available at the time. While the value of Nevill’s olas is well known, we are only just starting to use Nevill’s paper folios for studying Sri Lanka’s history; and the number, rarity, and formation of these transcriptions present a source of enormous potential for such a study.

The songs that Nevill transcribed himself draw us to another misconception about the Nevill Collection: that it is ‘Sinhalese’. True, the vast, vast majority of Nevill’s olas are written in Sinhala script (two are written in Telugu, while one is written in Tamil). But there is no such imbalance in Nevill’s paper folios. In fact, there is a more-or-less equal representation of Ceylon’s population among his own transcriptions.

Why would the compositions of his ola and paper collections be so different? My forthcoming thesis addresses this question in detail. But, for now, we can say that this equality broadly reflects Nevill’s interests and opinions. Unlike many of his peers in the colonial administration, Nevill was not interested in discursively distinguishing Ceylon from India (in fact, he is known to have drawn connections between the two, particularly with South India).

Nor was he more interested in Sinhala culture than any other. Instead, Nevill was of the opinion that all of Ceylon’s population were ‘Dravidian’ and had arrived in Ceylon from a progenitive community in ‘Dravida’, which he equated to Chaldea, a region in the south of modern-day Iraq.

However doubtful the Chaldean origins of Sri Lanka’s population may be, Nevill’s Dravida theory informed much of his scholarship and is revealed in the title of his journal: The Taprobanian: A Dravidian Journal of Oriental Studies in and around Ceylon, in Natural History, Archæology, Philology, History, &c. It therefore follows that he did not distinguish which community was ‘more’ or ‘less’ Sri Lankan, or which community was ‘more’ or ‘less’ interesting or worthy of study, but instead paid equal attention to Ceylon’s population, an approach that is reflected in his paper folios and scholarship.

In this spirit, I want to briefly draw your attention to some of the Vedda songs in the Nevill Collection, as well as how Nevill collected and theorised them. In an article on the Veddas, Nevill included a short subsection titled “Bee-hunters’ songs”, in which he gave two songs “sung by Vaeddas when collecting the combs of the large black “bambara“ or “bumbeli” bee, from the cliffs against which they attach their hives”. While on vacation in 1887, Nevill visited Vedda communities in Walimbe Hela, or ‘Friar’s Hood’, and transcribed, translated, and described one of their songs as follows:

Raja Omangaliya

Me guruwara ammâ mô

Kâpana yanyâyi

Rang kende elannyâyi

Rang kâdu elannyâyi

Bâlanno tawa duwagana

Warêwu mâge kuda nangimô

Rang kenden bassalâ

Me guru hela ammâ mô

Dun pallayen pannâla

Rang kaduwen kapâla

Hang pallaye damâla

Me mullen iyôden genôden

Rang kusayen niwara yanamo

Wara nangi!

Oh Omangali Raja!

These venerable mothers

I am going to eat;

I will suspend the gold ladder,

I will suspend the gold sword,

The youngsters too hastening,

Come my little sweetheart!

Having descended by the gold ladder,

These venerable hill mothers

Having driven off with the incense pail,

Having cut with the gold sword,

Having put into the leather pail,

When all these are brought up,

Finishing (what is) in the golden pot,

Let us go,

Come sweetheart.

I have here translated nangi “sweetheart,” as this is the exact sense. It is here used to indicate the bee-hunter’s young wife, or the cousin he is entitled to marry on her reaching the right age. It means “younger sister” [in Sinhala], but has no such sense to the Vaedda. The Omangali Raja probably alludes to Omanegala of Lower Bintenne, especially sacred to Gale Bandára or the Rock God. The bees are alluded to with excessive respect as the venerable mothers.

Nevill’s transcription of these lyrics encapsulates not only the devotional cosmology associated by nineteenth-century Veddas between honey collection and singing, but also a moment of song and listening shared between Nevill and a Vedda who was willing to share the song with him.

During his 1887 vacation, Nevill also visited Veddas in Omane Gala and collected another Bee-hunters’ song:

Maehi-keli Waniyâ

Gal naewili Waniyâ

Maehi kelanne mahi urâl

Hinâ-maten keli kôpayen

Oppu ganawâ tobâ deyiyen…

Oh Lord of the Bees!

Oh Lord of the Rock!

Honeycombs of honey bee,

With laughter and with merriness,

I offer them to Thee…

After each line [the singer] threw a little honey, the first cut from the cliff, to the Spirit of the Rock, and then proceeded to take the rest of the combs. He told me that it was an ancient custom his ancestors followed, called “paeni adina yádinda,” or to “charm the drawing of honey.”

Nevill’s bee-hunters’ songs show how, for Veddas in Omane Gala and Walimbe Hela, singing, metaphysics, and gathering honey formed part of a single act. This is also how Nevill theorised and presented their songs: as sources for understanding peoples’ lives and devotional worlds in nineteenth-century Ceylon, the study of which drove much of his collection. Such insights are littered throughout Nevill’s collection and scholarship, which provide us with fascinating and unique opportunities to learn about musical practices in Sri Lanka’s past, about how song was entangled in people’s lives. These opportunities are not limited to the olas and Sinhala texts in the Nevill Collection, but instead cover a whole range of the island’s social history.

The Nevill Collection is remarkable and exciting from the perspective of studying Sri Lanka’s past. This is particularly true because of how musical the collection is, a reading that stands in sharp contrast against the myth that Sri Lankan musical culture is somehow lacking. This aspect also illustrates how Nevill’s scholarship and collection can nuance how we think about musical interactions between colonial administrators and Ceylon’s population in the nineteenth century: interactions that scholars have shown to be overwhelmingly biased against music in Ceylon and yet instrumental for modern readings of Sri Lanka’s musical histories and cultures.

My thesis, which will be submitted this summer, considers at length the Nevill Collection as an archive of Sri Lanka’s musical history, exploring the musical qualities of its contents, Nevill’s theoretical framework, his collecting practices and associates, the internal logic of the collection, and the afterlives of its songs, revealing a rich musical history in Sri Lanka and a critical source for its study (as well as some nice songs about bees).

(tompeterson.ethnomusicology@gmail.com)