Sat Mag
Notes on a scholarly class
By Uditha Devapriya
Note: Names of students have been changed to protect their identity
Nethum, 20, loves the guitar. He plays it well and, moreover, plays the clarinet well too. In 2018 he bought a Yamaha GL1 Guitalele – secretly, without telling his father. Back then he had dreams of starting a band, doing some gigs, earning some cash. So he started a group with some of his batch-mates, and began practices at a prominent studio on the outskirts of Colombo city. They got a couple of events – two birthday parties, of a friend and of another friend’s sister – not too long afterwards.
He had other dreams also. When I met him two weeks before he decided to buy the guitar, he divulged some of them. “I want to buy a big patch of land, a big house, in my village, and get away from Colombo,” he told me, the faintest of smiles flickering through a pained face. Why not Colombo, I asked. “Because I’m fed up of living in this city,” he replied.
Since he’d spent much, much more time here than there, in his hometown, I pressed him on. He said he wanted to take care of his brother, sister, mother, and ageing father. “I can’t do that over here.” Since he was studying Biology for his A Levels, I asked him whether he wanted to do all this while pursuing medicine. “No,” he said, a little hesitantly. “I want to be a guitarist, a musician.” His father, he hastened to add, wouldn’t like the idea. That is why those dreams had to be indulged from a distance. “I’ll tell him later.”
Dinindu, 18, loves to act and to write scripts. A member of the Drama Society at his school, he dreams of authoring his own Netflix series, the first in Sri Lanka. He is a fervent lover of superhero movies, though he tends to discriminate: Batman, yes, but not the Christopher Nolan trilogy; Justice League, yes, but preferably the upcoming Zack Snyder cut. He dislikes big budget epics, cheap comedies, and melodramatic romances. These, he explains to me, are not worth it. People want entertainment. They don’t really want to see life as it is lived, and lived through, onscreen. Thus he wants to try something new, different. Having chosen Commerce for his A Levels after realising Maths wasn’t his cup of tea, however, he finds it hard to balance his dreams with his family’s expectations.
Both Nethum and Dinindu came to Colombo after they turned 10. Having sat for the Grade Five Scholarship Exam, arguably the most touted and celebrated such exam in a student’s life (after the O Levels and A Levels), they had passed with flying colours, surpassing the cut off point by a considerable margin and securing a placement at a popular school. By dint of their results, they had gained admission to the most popular such institution in Colombo. It had been much cause for celebration.
Nethum, from Walasmulla, and Dinindu, from Matugama, had never seen the city before, except in textbooks and newspapers and on television. Since it was not practical to transit from Colombo to their hometown after school every day, they were both boarded at the school hostel. They are hence what most refer to as “Hostellers.” Except for the occasional visit home during holidays, they remain in Colombo, partly because of schoolwork but more importantly because of extra classes; in Sri Lanka, not even Poya days are taken as days of rest from private tuition. For these boys, then, Colombo has become home.
Introduced in 1948, the Scholarship Exam today strives to achieve two objectives. The first is the admission of students to popular, elite schools. The second, an often overlooked aim, is the provision of bursaries to bright but disadvantaged students. The brainchild of C. W. W. Kannangara, as well as of the Left, at its inception it also sought to add prestige to the newly established Central Colleges, which boasted of teachers, infrastructure, and facilities that exceed anything even elite schools possess today. Some of our most renowned intellectuals emerged from the Central College system. Its contribution to the post-1956 socio-political landscape, thus, cannot be denied. Neither can that of the Scholarship Exam.
The quality and content of the Exam has, to be sure, changed considerably since then. In 1969, it was rebranded as the Jathika Navodya Scholarship. Prior to 1995, it consisted of two papers: First Language (Sinhala or Tamil) and Mathematics. After officials restructured it in 1995, it tested students beyond just linguistic or mathematical proficiency, delving into such abilities as observation, prediction, translation, and perception. In its present form, it is seen as a stepping stone to popular elite schools, a point underscored by the state of degradation many Central Colleges have succumbed to. The Exam has thus turned into a competition, for which students are prepared from an early age.
Those who emerge at the top invariably get the best schools, and invariably, these happen to be far, far away, in the big cities: Galle, Kandy, Jaffna, and Colombo. Not surprisingly, the highest cut-off marks are for Colombo schools. No matter how far away you may be, if you get through, you try to go there. This is underscored by the fact that in Sri Lanka, where you study is seen as more important than what you study.
Ashani Abayasekara, in an impressive but sketchy research conducted three years ago, concluded as much. While national schools “account for the largest share of scholarship exam candidates, at 95%”, she noted that “only 79% of Grade 5 students in underprivileged provincial schools” write it. Meanwhile, only 36% of those who passed the cut-off mark qualified for the bursary (for students whose families earn an annual income of less than Rs 50,000), a paltry Rs 500 per month; “as a share of all Grade 5 students,” Abayasekara observed, “this amounts to a mere 3.6%.”
These findings are eye-opening, but certainly not surprising. I say that because, more often than not, positive discrimination programmes have a habit of benefitting those who do not really need such programmes; this is as relevant in Colombo as it is in Chicago. Conceived for the poor to bypass the handicap of poverty, the Scholarship Exam has therefore come to be associated with a more privileged lower middle class.
The eminent historian Arno Mayer once enumerated the characteristics of the lower middle class: they earn their living by work “that is not pre-eminently manual labour”; by objective criteria of income, wealth, and education, they fit into neither the lower nor the upper class; they are conscious of being neither the one nor the other, “but aspire upward”; they tend to be individualistic in their pursuit of upward mobility; they can be easily co-opted by/into the upper class; they do their utmost to improve the lot of their children; they are fearful of falling down to lower class status; and they get together as a group to agitate for political reforms only when they face the threat of collective impoverishment.
The Sri Lankan lower middle class, of which I am a member, bears out these characteristics well. But that is beside my point. The vast majority of the Grade Five Scholarship holders hail from this milieu. In terms of their origins and their aspirations, they are part and parcel of, and also opposed to, that crowd. And no other section of this group displays this paradoxical attitude, to their own social conditioning, better than the Hostellers.
Ostensibly distanced from their roots, yet not cut off from them, the Hostellers live in a world of their own. Popular schools in Sri Lanka are invariably associated with traditions, habits, and beliefs; the Hostellers, a subset within the larger student body, are viewed as laying claim to their own traditions, habits, and beliefs. The stereotype almost always is of them being more intelligent, athletic, enduring. “The result,” said one boy as I questioned him, “is that compared with other students, we’re more likely to be taken into co-curricular and extra-curricular activities.” From Literary Societies to Debating Clubs, from Cadetting to Scouting, they hence figure in quite prominently.
That explains Nethum’s love for music and Dinidu’s love for drama. It also explains their intense desire to get into these fields once they leave school. Largely because their parents don’t loom over them like those of non-Hostellers, they consider themselves free to follow their aspirations, and just dream on. Yet the pressure to conform to elderly expectations becomes all the more stronger because of, and not despite, that: freed temporarily from parental supervision, many of them tend to neglect their studies – ironically what got them into these schools in the first place – as they climb up the ladder. “We procrastinate, almost always,” Mithila, 20, explained to me.
“We think, ‘We’re the Scholars, we got in because we are thought of as special’, and walk the hard yards slowly.”
By the time they realise they’ve walked a little too slowly, of course, it’s too late. “The pressure comes on gradually,” Mithila added. “We occupy ourselves so much with club and society work that at times we have to lie to our mothers and fathers.” At this point, parents get worried: in the worst case, “they take us out of the Hostel and board us in a room or an annexe in Colombo, so that we can concentrate better on studies.”
Of course, the clash isn’t just between their aspirations and the aspirations of their elders. It’s also between their culture and the culture they now find themselves in.
Born in Kurunegala, Chathuja, 22, used to be the butt end of his friends’ jokes. “When I first came here,” he told me, grinning, “I had to get rid of my regional dialect. It’s not that they looked down on me. It’s just that even those from other villages, and especially those from Colombo, thought the way I spoke strange and peculiar.” While he managed to lose his dialect, to the extent that he can’t recall it now, not all students abandon such quirks: Himal, 20, hails from Ambalangoda, and he relapses to village argot whenever he phones home. “I just take care not to use it here,” he grinned at me.
This does not mean these boys surrender themselves completely to the world they move to. Far from it: they both accept and reject the new urban world and its culture. Most of them, for instance, admit to their biggest handicap, lack of fluency in English, but many of them, as Dinindu told me, feel that English isn’t everything. “We speak it only when it is needed.” This is unlike the anglicised crowd AND the urban middle class Sinhala crowd, to most of whom proficiency in the language has become a must have cosmetic.
Dinindu remembered one time when he and other Grade Five Scholars (Hostellers as well as non-Hostellers) were put into a class with English medium students. He remembered the tastes that set them apart from the latter. “They were always poring over Goosebumps, Enid Blyton, and Tintin. In terms of what we were reading, in our language, they seemed rather infantile to me.” What did his set read at that point? Translations of Russian novels and Guy de Maupassant short stories, plus the entire repertory of prabuddha (profound) Sinhala literature: not just Martin Wickramasinghe, but also more recent writers, including Mahinda Prasad Masimbula. “I’m not saying we were superior to the English speaking kids. It’s just that they seemed below the level, in English, that we were in, in Sinhala.”
The most vivid contrast between their lower middle class “subaltern” backgrounds and the backgrounds of the elite crowd that used to, and still, attend elite institutions, came to me the other day from Mithila. An Old Boy had attended an event as the Chief Guest, and had given a speech. The speech had centred on that evergreen concern of the anglicised elite: the deterioration of norms, values, and principles (of the anglicised elite, that is). Students shout too much; they have turned ruffians; they don’t wear Western attire as well as they used to. To cut a long story short, Mithila listened in, and had a laugh with his friends. “That speech,” he described it to me, “was the most antiquated tripe I’d ever heard.”
Somehow, somewhere, I feel that sentiment has gained ground among Mithila’s friends. Paraphrasing Tennyson, the old order here has indeed changed. And how.
The writer can be reached at udakdev1@gmail.com