Chapter Three – Some Pictures of the Past

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THERE ARE MOMENTS in modern Sri Lankan history, brief moments, minor moments that no one elsewhere is likely to have heard of, that cannot but fascinate us for the larger story they tell. They punctuate the past, like full stops or the beginnings of paragraphs in a book.

In Sri Lanka’s book we read about independence, the language law passed in 1956, the constitutions, the insurrection and the killing that came after it, the war. But one of the remarkable things about Sri Lankan history is how easy it is to read about all these things without ever making any connections among them. It sometimes seems that outsiders—and perhaps Sri Lankans, too—are even invited to read Sri Lankan history in this disjointed fashion. Perhaps it is part of the larger problem of what it means to be Sri Lankan. There is very little by way of a Sri Lankan story—a connected narrative by which Sri Lankans can understand their path into the present. This question of history is essential to understanding Sri Lanka as it is. Without an authentic past, one cannot imagine a future.

Any student of Sri Lankan history, even a foreigner and an amateur, is bound eventually to accumulate a list of small, telling moments, those passages that suggest how we might connect things into a longer story that has a meaning. Each such moment carries a lesson, an essential idea about its time—and then, perhaps, tells us something about our time. Because they are small moments, they can be like an unofficial history, telling a story that is not ordinarily told. They are also like snapshots kept in an album. We all have our own albums, and if they are well-kept albums, they can tell the same story in different ways.

One such moment for me, in my album, occurred in 1937, eleven years before independence. There is a photograph taken at the time that captures, in a single instant, a curious passage in history. In it, a large group of Ceylonese stand in what looks like a field of some kind. With one exception among those standing, a man in Western dress, all of the others standing together wear sarongs and white shirts. We can see only the heads of most of these people—the eyes and hair in many cases.

Two men are seated at the very front of the crowd. One is a handsome man in white trousers and street shoes, his legs crossed in a confident pose and his tortoise-shell glasses lending him a distinguished look. The other seated man is a Westerner. He looks a little like the young George Orwell—tousled hair, a narrow chin, a trimmed moustache.

The Westerner was a young Englishman named Mark Anthony Bracegirdle. Many Sri Lankans alive today will know this name. What is known as the Bracegirdle incident was significant at the time, and has found a small place in the history books, because it forced the colonial administration into a constitutional crisis. But this is not why people remember the case today. The Bracegirdle incident tells a far more interesting story—a story that concerns Sri Lanka today vastly more than a mostly forgotten legal ruling. Like all of these pictures of the past, this one has to do with public space.

Bracegirdle had arrived in Ceylon by way of Australia early in 1936 and had taken up a position as a superintendent at a tea plantation near the town of Matale. The late-1930s, as elsewhere, were a time of considerable leftist ferment in the British colony. Trade unions displayed signs of increasing political awareness and radicalization; Ceylonese workers, in general, were growing more conscious of themselves—and of their ability to influence political affairs. The year Bracegirdle arrived a leftist party known (then as now) as the Lanka Sama Samaja Party, or L. S. S. P., had established itself—the first such party in Ceylonese history.

This was Bracegirdle’s new milieu, and he, being a leftist himself, wasted little time before finding his place in it. He developed ties with the L. S. S. P., became active in the organization of unions among the plantation workers (courageously, we must say, given his position as a manager), and in March of 1937, at Nuwalapitiya, another estate town, this one high in the hills northeast of Kandy, spoke on a public platform against the owners and managers of the plantations. The owners and managers, he said, must be exposed for transgressing Ceylonese labor laws and for preventing unions from organizing, and the estate workers should support his efforts to expose them. It was apparently a fiery presentation.

The powerful planters, and soon enough much of the colonial establishment, were scandalized. Bracegirdle had transgressed. He had crossed a line one simply did not cross. A white man taking the side of estate workers against other white men? In public? This was unthinkable. Bracegirdle was dismissed from his superintendent’s position and, three months after he had spoken, received an order of deportation. It had been issued by the chief secretary, in cooperation with the chief of police.

Then began the trouble that comes down to us through history. Advocates in the L. S. S. P. sheltered Bracegirdle before he could be sent back to Britain. A group of Ceylonese attorneys, several of whom were politically active themselves, then challenged the legal basis of the deportation order. The case became something of a cause célèbre. Amid large demonstrations of popular support for Bracegirdle, the legal challenge went to the Supreme Court. And there the chief secretary’s order was overturned: Bracegirdle was found to have done nothing more than exercise his right to free speech.

Constitutional questions had been contentiously debated among colonial officials in Ceylon long before Bracegirdle ever took to a speaker’s platform. He had simply prompted another one, in his case having to do with the proper lines of administrative authority: Who had the power to issue a deportation order? This was the problem at the core of the legal fracas that ensued. As it turned out, the chief secretary had no such dispensation.

But the legal question is more or less forgotten, and it need not concern us here. Something much larger is expressed in the unfolding of the Bracegirdle case. And this is encapsulated in the most obvious of its facts: Colonized Ceylonese, using the law of their colonizer, had defended a colonist against the colonial administration. Then the colonized had won their case—won it in the highest colonial court. 
THIS SIMPLE, ENDURING fact tells us numerous things. It tells us about the place assigned to the rule of law in pre-independence Ceylon: a high place. It reveals to us the intersection of law, politics, and race. It is unthinkable that Bracegirdle would have had to defend himself against the planters and the colonial authorities had he spoken out politically but in support of someone other than Ceylonese workers. Would Ceylonese attorneys have defended him had he not spoken and sided as he did? Probably not. This goes to the larger point: Politics and class proved more important than race among Bracegirdle’s defenders. And the rule of law proved the most important point of all to everyone involved. This is to the credit, one must finally say, of both the colonized and the colonizers. In this case, at least, they all stood equally under the law, and those adjudicating did so blindly—that is, with disinterest, without reference to race, class, ethnicity, or origin. The case was an affirmation of public space and the consciousness of it among the Ceylonese.

Something else must be said about those involved who, beginning thirty-five years later, would be called Sri Lankans. It has to do with identity, with notions of “self” and “other.”

Those who defended Bracegirdle appear to have accepted certain values as being of universal validity. One of these was the rule of law, another was that justice is to be applied equally to all, and a third was a recognition, perfectly evident even if only implicit in their actions, of the concept of public space and how it can and should be occupied. None of these principles was discarded simply because, in their manifestation at the time, they were the principles of the colonizer. In recognizing them as universal, those who defended Bracegirdle had brought a question that would ordinarily have remained the business of the colonial elite down to ordinary people. In the course of things, the universal principles at issue were effectively spread throughout society. The Bracegirdle incident signaled a transformation in Ceylonese politics, though not everyone picked up the signal at the time.

Let us make one final point about Bracegirdle’s allies. In their defense of him they declined to participate in the designation of “self” and “other” that lay at the very core of the imperial era. This was the designation upon which Bracegirdle’s adversaries had acted. There were “we English” and there were “the Ceylonese”—others. The idea of “self” and “other” did not merely transcend law, although it did that. In the larger scheme of things the law governing the British simply did not apply to the Ceylonese. Their position outside of the law was part of their “otherness.” It was part of the victors’ triumph in the Bracegirdle case that they implicitly rejected this position, so stating as clearly as could ever be possible a belief in their equality.

Who were the people who had surrounded Mark Anthony Bracegirdle? This is an interesting question. N. M. Perera, Philip Gunawardena, Colvin de Silva: These were among the men in the photograph, and they were also among the educated few in pre-independence Ceylon. Many of Bracegirdle’s allies would go on to national prominence as legislators, lawyers, cabinet ministers, scholars. Perera led the opposition and served as mayor of Colombo and finance minister; de Silva was leader of the L. S. S. P. and a distinguished criminal lawyer. S. W. R. D. Bandaranaike, the future prime minister and founder of another party, spoke at a rally at Galle Face Green shortly before Bracegirdle’s deportation order was overturned; fifty thousand people had attended.

There is something almost mesmerizing about the little snapshot of Bracegirdle and his allies. It is a picture from another age—an age now lost to us, so it gives the feeling of looking across a great distance. And it captures something that is difficult to convey with a camera: It depicts the promise of another time. This promise is as palpable in the photograph as the faces, hair, and white sarongs of any of the men in it. And it, too, is lost to us, at least for now.

It is hard to tell where this picture was taken. One imagines it was shot somewhere near one of the tea estates and that the men behind those prominently in the front were estate workers—almost certainly Tamils, almost certainly illiterate, very certainly poor. Whether or not this is so, the promise caught in that instant is interesting to consider. Bracegirdle’s allies—those in the picture and many others—had been educated and had risen under the British. And they seemed to stand for the emergence of a lively, secular political culture in the nation that was soon to be. They suggested that a rational continuity between the colonial and post-colonial orders was both possible and desirable. The future lay in them. It was they who would run the institutions given to Ceylon by the departing British. And they would make those institutions work for the multitude of Ceylonese who stood behind them. They would lead the Ceylonese into the public sphere, the public space of their new nation. They would speak for them and show them how to use their own voices. They would ignore the differences between people—Sinhalese, Tamil, white, Muslim—and they would erase the great gap between the center (Colombo) and the periphery (the rest of Ceylon). All this can be found in the photograph.

So it was part of the elite of colonial Ceylon who drew to Bracegirdle’s side. And it is amid the ruins of their early promise, so evident during the months of the Bracegirdle incident, that Sri Lankans still live.

THERE IS A PHOTOGRAPH, given to me by a friend, of a British warship. It shows a Colony class cruiser somewhere at sea and sailing at speed, for the white water of a wake streams outward from its hull.

H. M. S. Newfoundland, launched in 1941 and commissioned a year later, had a long and varied career, much of it in the Pacific. It took part in the Allied campaign against the Japanese mainland and was present in Tokyo Bay when Douglas MacArthur, the noted American commander, accepted Japan’s surrender aboard the U. S. S. Missouri in September of 1945. It then helped repatriate British and Commonwealth prisoners of war in the Pacific theater.

After the war the Newfoundland was refitted and sent back to Asia. It would eventually be used to shell the jungles during the British campaign known as the Emergency in what is now Malaysia. That was in 1954, and the Newfoundland would have been fairly fresh from Ceylon, for a year earlier the ship played a curious role in the island’s first serious social and political crisis since independence.

THE STORY OF THE NEWFOUNDLAND in Ceylon begins in 1952. Ceylon celebrated the fourth anniversary of its sovereignty that year. The United National Party, which had been launched by a conservative segment of the Ceylonese elite shortly before independence, had governed for all of those years, led by Don Stephen Senanayake, Ceylon’s first prime minister—the D. S. immortalized in one of the statues near Galle Face Green. Senanayake enjoyed a considerable fortune that derived from the graphite mines on estates that he had inherited. He was fond of mimicking the habits of the English—their mannerisms if not their highest ideals.

As the founding prime minister he quickly turned government into a kind of family business. Senanayake himself was also minister of defense and foreign affairs. His son, Dudley, was agriculture minister; his nephew, John Lionel Kotalawala, was commerce minister, and his cousin J. R. Jayewardene, the future president, held the finance portfolio. One of the first important acts of this family enterprise came in a series of three bills enacted in 1948 and 1949. These laws effectively disenfranchised Tamils working on the tea estates in central Ceylon. These people (then as now) worked in very poor conditions, but as a political constituency they may have threatened Sinhala predominance in the Kandy district. These were among the people Mark Anthony Bracegirdle had sought to defend and to give a voice by encouraging them to organize. There were roughly seven hundred thousand such Tamils on the plantations and in the cities; Ceylon’s population at the time was seven million. A little more than a year after independence, ten percent of the population lost their voices altogether: They became foreigners.

D. S. Senanayake died suddenly in early 1952—not so oddly, perhaps, while participating in an English-style equestrian event. A political clash then broke out over who was to succeed him. It pitted Dudley Senanayake against John Kotalawala. Once again not so oddly, the British governor-general, Lord Soulbury, intervened, arbitrated among the U. N. P.’s factions, and tipped his hand in the younger Senanayake’s favor. At forty-one, Dudley became independent Ceylon’s second prime minister.

By this time the governing U. N. P. had been nicknamed “the uncle-nephew party.” Nonetheless, it was returned handily in elections Dudley Senanayake called in mid-1952. A certain mythology had grown up around the U. N. P. by then. It may have been shot through with nepotism and an aping kind of Anglophilia, but it could advertise itself, four years into independence, as the party of expertise, of competence, of knowing what was best.

The younger Senanayake’s party made many promises during the 1952 campaign, but his was to be a brief prime ministership (though not his last). Senanayake now faced what his ministers considered a crisis. Real or imagined, it was of a kind that would become familiar in the developing world—a balance-of-payments crisis. As it would elsewhere many times, it proved the government’s undoing.

Sri Lanka had enjoyed a positive balance in its external trade accounts in the first years after independence. In 1952 this changed. The Korean war had driven up the price of rice by creating shortages in commodity markets, and this had a considerable impact in Ceylon. Ceylon subsidized the domestic rice price. This seems to have been a point of pride across the board. The Ceylon Daily News, a government-owned newspaper of the kind one often finds among the developing world’s media, called the rice subsidy “one of the most notable social welfare measures of independent Ceylon.” But the subsidy had become more expensive—accounting, according to some published figures, for twenty percent of the national budget. By 1952 the government was spending about 160 million rupees a year on the rice subsidy. The trade account that year had swung from a surplus of 345 million rupees to a deficit of 205 million—roughly the equivalent of the subsidy.

At this time the finance minister was taking advice from the World Bank. And with the bank’s guidance, Jayewardene (who, as president, was later to preside over an extensive privatization campaign) introduced a budget that proved decisive far beyond the government’s accounts. It eliminated not only the rice subsidy but also the midday meal schoolchildren were provided without charge. It raised sugar prices and increased postal rates and train fares. All this would affect Ceylon’s poor disproportionately. In today’s terminology, the budget was regressive.

“As long as the sun and moon last, the price of a measure of rice will be twenty-five cents,” the U. N. P.’s Sinhala-language newspaper, Siyarata, declared during the 1952 election campaign. The promise had helped the party get re-elected. But Jayewardene’s budget, introduced in 1953, sent prices to seventy cents a measure (which was about a pound).

The public reaction was swift. Government officials and The Ceylon Daily News had a favorite term for what followed: They called it hooliganism. The populist parties used another term, a word heard often during India’s independence struggle. They called it hartal.

HARTAL COMES FROM GUJARATI, the language of the state in western India. It means, literally translated, “everything closes.” It can designate either a day of mourning or a day of protest, but it had taken on a political tint during India’s struggle for independence. Ceylonese had never used this term before 1953—nor have they since. Colvin de Silva—the man seated next to Bracegirdle in the earlier photograph—explained it in Sinhala as similar to a nonagathey, a time before the Sinhala and Tamil new year when everyone stops working. It meant, in anyone else’s terms, a general strike. And it betokened a lesson Ceylonese seem to have learned from India about ordinary people entering public space and the effect such an act can have.

The hartal took place on August 12, 1953, and lasted a single day. The accounts of its effectiveness vary greatly, especially the contemporary accounts. “The sanity and good sense of the great majority of citizens of this country has [sic] been demonstrated already in their refusal to back the call for a political strike today,” The Ceylon Daily News said in an editorial on August 12th—a little too swiftly, perhaps. Then Samasamajist, the English-language weekly of the L. S. S. P., which was published two days later: “August 12th marks the beginning of a new stage in the history of the mass movement of this country. That day saw the heroism and solidarity of the masses in common struggle.”

In hindsight, nobody seems to have got it right. But certain things are beyond dispute. Actions of some kind occurred in every province. Shops closed and transport was paralyzed in Colombo and other cities. At least nine people (some accounts say twelve, one says thirteen) died when shoot-to-kill orders were issued, all of them participants in the hartal. Invoking legislation enacted by the colonial administration—a resort so familiar in the former colonies as to be both astonishing and tiresome at the same time—the government declared a state of emergency.

Now we return to our photograph, for on the day of the strike Dudley Senanayake was forced, or in any case found it prudent, to convene his cabinet not in government offices but aboard the Newfoundland, which was anchored in Colombo’s harbour. Opposition accounts of the hartal say the government “was forced into hiding.” The official accounts I have seen rarely mention either the Newfoundland or the cabinet meeting held on board.

The hartal has echoed down through Ceylon’s (and then Sri Lanka’s) history. Senanayake was forced to resign two months afterward, and his relative and former rival, John Kotalawala, took over from him. But the hartal had destroyed the U. N. P.’s image as the one and only serious party in independent Ceylon. Three years later S. W. R. D. Bandaranaike led the Sri Lanka Freedom Party, a party of conservative social democrats, to power, breaking the U. N. P.’s monopoly. Riding the populist wave, Bandaranaike appealed to the basest instincts of an insecure majority. Hence the main plank in his platform was “Sinhala only” as a national language. It worked, needless to say. He then went on to push through the language law—a measure that, I would argue, stands as the most tragic mistake and betrayal of principle in all of Sri Lanka’s history as an independent nation.

On July 30, 1953, as opposition parties (though not Bandaranaike’s S. L. F. P.) were organizing the hartal and as Senanayake was refusing calls for a fresh election to determine the subsidy issue, the budget that brought Ceylon to a political crisis was the subject of a lengthy legislative debate. The minutes of this session make interesting reading, dull and windy as most parliamentary locution may seem so long after it is delivered. There appear to have been few first-rate economic minds present in the legislature that day; Finance Minister Jayewardene, however one may rate his intellectual competence, was absent altogether. Nonetheless, one listens by way of the written record as opposition lawmakers struggle dutifully through the figures and the thinking behind the budget policy, point by point, to reach some fundamental truths.

Taken in context, the external deficit could not be called a crisis: No nation anywhere can reasonably expect to balance its trade accounts on a year-to-year basis. Equally, there was no logical connection between the deficit and the subsidy—and therefore no reason, other than ideology of the kind for which the World Bank was soon to be noted, for countering the deficit by dropping the subsidy. The deficit and the subsidy happened to coincide roughly in size, but this is hardly a sound argument for the government’s decision.

These were the issues engaged. What comes through all the words most poignantly, however, is something never explicitly stated: a deep frustration and a conviction that, five years after independence, Ceylon had already begun to go wrong. We detect in the legislative record a growing resentment that the economy of independent Ceylon was so little different from the economy of colonial Ceylon. Its tilt had not altered. It served the same small elite—and excluded the same large majority. And the emotions this prompted were subtly as evident in parliament that day as they were to be, not so subtly, two weeks later on the street.

WHAT ACTUALLY HAPPENED in the summer of 1953? How shall we understand these events? What do we see when we gaze at the photograph of the Newfoundland and imagine the Ceylonese cabinet gathered somewhere in its officers’ quarters because it was fearful of remaining among the very people it governed? These questions are especially interesting when we place the picture of the Newfoundland next to the snapshot of Bracegirdle and his friends. We may assume they are roughly sixteen years apart, these two images. In between came independence.

The elite of Ceylon missed an essential point in those intervening years. To make a nation modern it is essential to begin with the actual conditions in which the un-modern live. This requires the leadership to turn all the inherited machinery of the colony to a new purpose. It is the only argument that can be made—the gradualist argument—in support of continuity between the old regime and the new.

To ignore this essential point is to embark on a false modernization—a mistake made over and over in the developing world. This was the shah of Iran’s mistake. He ignored the great majority of Iranians and set about modernizing a tiny elite in Tehran. Similar mistakes were common across Africa all through the era of independence.

It was also Sri Lanka’s mistake. The idea of a nation that served its people—all of them, according to their expressed wishes—was articulated as a matter of political expedience, for nothing less would do as a stated national purpose. But this idea was never put into practice. The result was soon enough called neocolonialism.

Neocolonialism involves a complex psychology that is important to grasp. One must not minimize the political, economic, and class dimensions of it. But beyond these, it is based on a kind of impersonation of the colonizer. Imitating the British, Ceylon’s elite made ordinary Ceylonese an “other.” They assumed the same alienation from their own people—the same complex of “self” and “other”—as the British had lived by. In the end this meant being alienated from oneself, a stranger to oneself, and it is only a simple step on to recognize the self-contempt of the Ceylonese elite, albeit an unconscious self-contempt: To have contempt for ordinary Ceylonese was at some level to have contempt for oneself as Ceylonese, surely. This state of mind is, once again, familiar across the developing world. It is still perfectly evident in Sri Lanka today.

There is, finally, the recurring matter of public space. One of the curious things about the hartal and the Newfoundland is how clear the events of that day were in this respect. The Ceylonese surprised themselves on the day of the hartal—this comes through in many accounts of it. They discovered something of who they were, or could be. Many Ceylonese entered public space in a dramatic, not to say historical, fashion. They became, in a phrase, political beings for the first time. This appears to have caused the governing elite to conclude that they had to vacate public space for their safety. In effect, public space was occupied in Ceylon in a way it had never been, which perhaps justifies the thoughts of a new historic phase expressed at the time by the opposition.

This question of public space will return again and again, for it lies at the core of what has happened in Sri Lanka, from the earliest days of independence until our own.