The Making of Modern Ceylon

Author: S A Meegama

Reviewed By
Gamini Seneviratne

The title given above is one of two on the cover of this book by Dr. Ananda Meegama. The other is GUNS, TAVERNS and TEA SHOPS. He has left out the principal feature of British incursions into other people’s territories: PERFIDY. Perhaps he took that as a given.

In what is clearly a work that has taken much labour over a long period of time to accomplish, Dr. Meegama gives ‘academics’ everywhere, and professional historians in particular, a lesson in what true scholarship not just involves but literally means.

It is a matter for surprise that any of them would confess the conditioning that underpins their representation of ‘histories’ – as Dr. Michael Roberts recently did. The following remarks may be taken as a pointer to how ‘history’ comes to be constructed.

In Michael’s own account, the reports of ‘VE-Day’ had so affected him that they had brought tears to his eyes. But as he goes on it becomes evident that his is not just a childhood love for the Brits who controlled Koggala, it involved a reconstruction of the major events of that war. “The main reason”, he says, “for the collapse of the Hitler regime, was probably the disasters they faced in the east, in battling the USSR, though one must also note the weight brought to bear in both fronts by the entry of the USA –inclusive of its supplies to Russia”.

Well, that’s the first I have heard of the role of the USA in the decisive battles of Stalingrad in 1942 (shortly after the Japanese attack on the American Pacific fleet in Hawaii) – an extended encounter that signalled the defeat of Nazi Germany.

Naturally he does not attempt a reconstruction of atrocities, perpetrated by his heroes and he makes no mention of Hiroshima and Nagasaki – which happened 75 years ago. A new take on that horrendous crime was tried out last week: Truman’s grandson piped up with the notion that “grandpa had felt he had to do it”. But why Japan and why at a moment when it was ready to surrender? As was noted in Michael Ondaatje’s ‘The English Patient’, “they” ‘would not have dropped those atomic bombs on the primary enemies of ‘the Allies’ – Germany and Italy. The Japanese, after all, were mere “orientals”.

As his ‘findings’ on the Brits’ theft of our prosperous highlands (“waste lands”) would show, Dr. Roberts’ afore-mentioned bias extends to his ‘histories’ of atrocities committed by the Brits here. He has also ‘found’ around the time the Brits were intent on jailing the national leaders, D B Jayatilaka and others, that the Sinhalese were guilty of carrying out a “pogrom” on the Muslims. Such prejudice runs in the teeth of the judgement on the matter given by Dr. P E Peiris, a true historian cum judge. A brief account of that op by Jayantha Gunasekera, PC, appeared in a Sunday newspaper last month. Dr. Roberts is welcome to comment on that.

In the context of on-going exertions by the USA, to occupy Sri Lanka, it would be well at this point to recall the words of Franz Fanon: ” And, – this would serve to underline another fundamental truth articulated by him. It relates not only to the rationale given for “economic theory” that has long served the corporate appropriation of resources everywhere but more immediately to the rip-off being sought right here through the MCC and SOFA’s “in-your-throat” betrayals – “ With ‘the MCC the government of the robbed is required to make possible, approve and protect the robbery.

In that note on “VE Day” Michael also sketches some of his antecedents but they are such as would not quite fit a “Galle Burgher” such as Professor Lyn Ludowyk. Ludowyk retired to England (where he produced, on invitation, a standard text on “Understanding Shakespeare” as well as the definitive Cambridge editions of several plays by Shakespeare). What is relevant here however are his histories of his native land, beginning with ‘The Footprint of the Buddha’ and ‘The Story of Ceylon’ – accounts that have passed our professional history-writers by.

Among the latter were the Jesuit Priest, Fr. S G Perera’s purported “History of Ceylon for Schools” designed to plant versions of his choice in the mind of schoolchildren. The primary object of such work was a continuation of the account

I had a kind of encounter with what I think was his final work, “Ceylon Today and Yesterday” by Dr.G C Mendis a historian, highly regarded by the fraternity who covered ‘Ceylon’ from its early days through to British times. Barely out of school and recruited to the publishing department of Lake House as a proof-reader my duties soon came to include ancillary tasks such as checking translations Sinhala-English / English-Sinhala. The head of that department was E P Mendis, the author’s brother and he paid me the high complement of asking me for my comments on that work. I pointed out several instances of Dr. Mendis’s Anglo-Christian bias in his account of both our yesterday’ and ‘today’ which he came to amend before publication.

Dr. Meegama specialized in statistics and in its applications in economics and econometrics. This work retains a bit of the overlay of the shibboleths that govern those fields of a bankrupt academia and have served the pervasive project of ‘capitalist’ exploitation of the resources of the world.

Another of Dr. Meegama’s books had covered Famine, Fevers and Fears: The State and Disease in British Colonial Sri Lanka – a subject that receives due attention in the present work as well.

As this book makes clear, ‘the making of modern Ceylon’ involved the destruction of peasant agriculture, the plunder of the temples, the denudation of our forests and the spread of a general culture of lawlessness. Sound familiar? Today we have the monstrous intrusion mis-named ‘tourism’ which is provably as rapacious and destructive of native life and well-being as the colonialism of the years covered in this book contrived to impose on us. The following poem by David Craig, who was on the staff at Peradeniya and was not long after to become Professor of Creative Writing at Lancaster, outlines that process. It appeared in the Heinemann collection of ‘Poems from India, Sri Lanka, Malaysia and Singapore’, under ‘Sri Lanka’.

‘The Country’

And such a beautiful country – not too hot,

Not too big, not like India.

You hardly see a beggar – are there any?’

And the beaches (unspoilt) and the palm trees –

Paddy fields run round the contours,

Water shines on the terraces.

Or climb to the cool resort where rich Victorians clipped

A perfectly British golf course out of the scrub,

Carving the joint on Sunday and watering the rose-garden.

How did they pay for it all? The country paid for it,

The red soil bled for it, the wounds

Still glare among the tea bushes.

The top-soil ebbs away to the sea,

Rivers that sparkled in the chronicles

Skulk in their pools like coffee-dregs.

Speaking of the ruthless rise of the British East India Company William Dalrymple outlines it thus: “The East India Company was established in London in the time of Shakespeare and from the 1700s it created the greatest corporate takeover of all time. Seeking to dominate the global trade in spices, textiles and eventually opium, a group of white men eventually became the military and political rulers of India. They ruled over hundreds of millions of people, and because they were a public company, they felt no responsibility to the people they ‘governed’, only to their London shareholders.

Eventually they created famine, chaos and bled the country dry.”

‘The ‘historical record’ is fed by many voices, some of which are used by those who write them up. While Dalrymple is accepted as a historian by persons who claim such accreditation for themselves, Mark Tully, another long-time resident in India is evidently not. Of Tully’s No Full Stops in India’, The Independent, UK, took recourse to 19^th century notions of ‘orientalism’, thus: “Tully’s profound knowledge and sympathy – unravels a few of the more bewildering and enchanting mysteries of the subcontinent”.

Dr. Meegama’s commentary joins the work of such a distinguished scholar as Ralph Peiris (“Asian Development Styles” et al), the narratives of such as P E Pieris, Tennakone Vimalananda, and the analyses advanced by S B D de Silva and Gerald Peiris.

Above all, Dr. Meegama has brought to our attention (that of lay persons and scholars alike) the primary records in the language of administration in ‘Modern Ceylon’, English. I was also pleased to find in it mention of The C. L. Wickremasinghe Collection of Manuscripts Relating to the Traditionary Customs of Nuwara Kalāviya. Those manuscripts were of accounts of traditional customs and oral histories gathered through Village Headmen, Vel Vidanes and the like by the then Government Agent (and the first such native CCS officer) of the North Central Province.

All in all, one would be grateful to Dr. Meegama for pointing the way to the making of a People’s History of ‘Modern’ Ceylon of the quality and orientation of Howard Zinn’s ‘People’s History of the United States’.