Even for many who have not found it possible personally to visit Europe, education of a purely European type has become more easily accessible and has been sought with eagerness. This had led, in my opinion, not to the working of any marked transformation in the bulk of the population, but to the creation of, or, at any rate, to a great extension in the matter of numerical strength of, a class of natives which formerly was almost a negligible quantity.
[It] is precisely the acquisition of European ideas and the adoption of European in preference to Ceylonese civilisation that differentiates this class of Ceylonese from their countrymen...[and separates them] by a wide gulf from the majority of the native inhabitants of the Colony. Their ideas, their aspirations, their interests are distinctively their own, are all moulded upon European models, and are no longer those of the majority of their countrymen.
Thus wrote Governor Sir Henry McCallum in 1910, focussing attention on a very significant aspect of a half-century of rapid change, coinciding with the second half of the nineteenth century: the emergence of a new elite. He refers here to two of its most distinctive characteristics—that it was Western—educated, anglicized and hence alienated from the people. As an avowedly hostile critic of this elite, he caricatured it rather than drawing a true-to-life picture. It would have surprised him immensely to know that the three points he made about the elite—that it was a new elite, anglicized, Western-educated and alienated from the people—should have formed for decades the stock-in-trade of social scientists in their analysis of social and political change in Sri Lanka in the late nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century. (Not that these social scientists drew their inspiration from McCallum; they came to these conclusions on their own.) Yet, each of the points in this analysis was at best a half-truth.
In the years before 1832, the processes of social and economic change generated by the establishment of British rule had resulted in a renewal of the strength of the traditional elite as it adapted itself to the new environment. But in the second half of the nineteenth century, these same forces of change led, if not to the displacement of the traditional elite, at least to the emergence of challengers to their position who were mostly self-made men, eager to grasp the new economic opportunities open to Sri Lankans, and much more adept at doing so. If these self-made men emerged as challengers to the traditional elite, the British themselves attempted purposefully to dispense with the traditional elite. The establishment of a more bureaucratic form of government after the Colebrooke-Cameron reforms was motivated partly at least by a desire to reduce the influence and prestige of the mudaliy•rs and the Kandyan aristocracy in the administrative structure; but, as we have seen, they continued to be an integral element in the administration and an essential channel of communication between the British government and the people. Their inherited advantages survived despite a deliberate reduction of their powers, and there appears to have been no falling-off in the deference shown to them by the people, or in their influence over the people. Eventually, by the 1870s, the British themselves reversed this policy and introduced the diametrically opposite one of aristocratic resuscitation.
The traditional elite found it more difficult to maintain an economic superiority over other segments of the local population. This had largely been a function of their advantageous position as the principal landholders. With the remarkable success of coffee culture, local entrepreneurs began to accumulate wealth on an unprecedented scale, but here too the traditional elite was not entirely displaced. However, its challengers could compete effectually in all spheres of social and economic activity which the traditional elite had hitherto dominated. This was especially so in regard to ownership of lands in which it was soon left far behind. This happened also, though not to the same extent, in education and professional training. As in most societies, the traditional elite resented the new men most of all for their ostentatious emulation of the lifestyle which had hitherto been an attribute of hereditary status. But the new men could not be denied their place in the ranks of the elite. The established men still formed part, though very much a subordinate part, of the ‘governing elite’; their challengers grudgingly accommodated in the ‘non-governing’ sector of the elite, were aspirants for entry and acceptance in the lower rungs of the ‘governing elite’. Together, both groups formed a tiny segment of indigenous society which claimed or aspired to a position of superiority and a measure of influence over the rest of the community. They all shared, in a greater or lesser degree, the three main notions commonly associated with elite status: superiority, prestige and power. Although the established men were compelled to accommodate themselves to an expansion of the elite by the absorption of the new rich, the latter were very soon the dominant section in terms of number, wealth and education, and were in effect a new elite in which hereditary status was only one, and not necessarily the most significant, attribute of elite ranking.
It has long been usual to treat education as the key factor in the development of this new elite. But the starting point of an understanding of these processes of social change is the realization that the role of education in it was as complex as it was basically limited.1 It is important to remember that secondary education in Sri Lanka was a phenomenon of the late nineteenth century, beginning in 1869–70 with the implementation of some of the recommendations of the Morgan Committee’s report.2 From 1870, the formulation and, to a lesser extent, implementation of the education policy was in the hands of the Department of Public Instruction and its administrative head. Government resources were devoted largely to the spread of vernacular education, English education being left almost entirely to the missionaries. Elementary education itself was interpreted narrowly, on the lines envisaged for England by Lowe’s Revised Education Code of 1862, as something suited to the rural child whose horizon was limited to the confines of the village. In the 1880s, Charles Bruce, who drafted the Revised Education Code for the island at that time, argued that government policy should be directed at the extension of primary education to equip the village child for the ‘humble career which ordinarily lies before him’. The government’s interest in English education was confined to the maintenance of a few superior English schools—the Central Schools—which the Central School Commission had set up. The English and Anglo-Vernacular schools run by the government were closed down wherever there were missionary schools teaching in English in close proximity to them. The aim quite clearly was to restrict if not discourage entry to these schools. Bruce’s Revised Education Code made this quite explicit. The fees charged in these English schools were high enough to serve as an effective barrier to easy entry for most of those who aspired to such an education. These English secondary schools were nevertheless given pride of place in the island’s education system.
The last quarter of the nineteenth century was the heyday of denominational missionary education on the island. While the Department of Public Instruction directed schools through its codes, the missionary interests were undoubtedly the determining influence in educational expansion. The introduction of the grants-in-aid system had the effect of strengthening the influence of these interests, for, in deference to their wishes, the requirement of a conscience clause was omitted and grants were given for secular instruction, while little or nothing was done to curb the use of the educational process by missionaries for proselytization and for sectarian purposes. As in Britain after the Forster Act in 1870, the practice adopted by the Department of Public Instruction was one of supplementing the educational enterprise of religious bodies, in this instance the missionaries.
Despite these restrictive tendencies and despite the retrenchment adopted after the coffee crash in the late 1870s and early 1880s, there was sustained progress in the extension of educational facilities, and the increase in the number of schools was the largest seen since the establishment of British rule. In 1869, the last year of the School Commission, there were 140 schools with 8,751 pupils; by 1874, there were 838 schools and 1,178 in 1878, and the number of pupils increased correspondingly to 47,278 and 67,750 respectively. Nevertheless, the development was lop-sided. In terms of numbers, the increase was largely in vernacular schools. The quality of education in these schools was generally poor and the teachers were incompetent. The situation was worst in the more remote and backward areas. In 1883, for instance, two-thirds of the boys and five-sixths of the girls on the island had no education at all. As for attendance at school, the average for the island was one in thirty, but the range was from one in twenty-one in the Western Province to one in 222 in the North-central Province. In the coastal districts of the south-west, the North-western Province and the Northern Province, there was a lively interest in education.
The government and the missionaries were by no means the only school builders; wealthy philanthropists, especially the new rich, vied with each other in building schools. Most of these were established in the low country—in both Sinhalese and Tamil areas—where there was already a comprehensive and expanding network of schools run by the missionaries and the government. As a result of this pattern of growth, the low-country Sinhalese and the Tamils left the Kandyans far behind in education. The number of educated Kandyans in proportion to the Kandyan population was a fraction of the corresponding figure for the low-country Sinhalese and Tamils. It is hardly surprising that the dominance of the missionaries in the field of education should have been reflected in the disproportionate number of Christians among the elite groups. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Christians were well ahead of all other groups in literacy.
Despite the increase in the number of schools and pupils in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, those who had had the benefits of an English education remained very small. Nevertheless, their importance in society was far from negligible: by the middle of the nineteenth century there was already a small group of Sri Lankan civil servants and professional men, who came to enjoy higher salaries (and earnings) and greater prestige and were accorded higher precedence in official rankings than the mudaliy•rs or the Kandyan aristocracy.3 Within this group, the Burghers were disproportionate in their large numbers but by the last quarter of the nineteenth century they had begun to lose their predominance and were in the process of being overshadowed by the Sinhalese and Tamils.
As under the traditional Sinhalese system, government service carried status, prestige and authority, and for this reason the civil service—the higher bureaucracy—as the apex of the administrative structure was the object of ambition among the educated classes. Only slightly lower in terms of the status and the prestige they conferred were the professions—law, medicine and the (church) ministry, in that order. The greatest economic and social rewards were provided by the legal profession. At first it was the traditional elite—the Sinhalese establishment—which came to dominate it. A legal career became an attractive alternative for the sons of mudaliy•rs who could not be accommodated in the ranks of the lower bureaucracy. But precisely because it was the only route to the highest posts in government service (as illustrated by the careers of several scions of mudaliy•r families, but more appropriately by the success of the Burgher elite in the persons of Morgan and Grenier), the monopoly enjoyed by the mudaliy•r families soon ended. The children of the rising affluent men worked their way into this charmed circle. For them wealth had opened the way to better educational facilities within the island, to higher education, mainly in British universities, and professional qualifications in law at the Inns of Court. Many also obtained university education in Calcutta and Madras.
The attractions of a legal career were, no doubt, enhanced by the stringent restrictions on the employment of Sri Lankans in the higher bureaucracy. The unbending zeal with which the Ceylon Civil Service was maintained as a British and European preserve was the most persistent grievance of educated Sri Lankans. But the colonial administration on the island, as we have seen, resisted all pressures from the Colonial Office as well as from Sri Lankans to widen opportunities for the latter in the higher bureaucracy. It could be argued that these curbs on the entry of Sri Lankans into the civil service and the pattern of economic development on the island called for very limited facilities for higher and technical education. But, more important, both the colonial administration and the traditional elite viewed the expansion of educational facilities with little sympathy. If the British government’s antipathy was largely to English education and post-secondary institutions, the traditional elite’s opposition was much more comprehensive in scope. Thus J.P. Obeysekere, Sinhalese representative in the Legislative Council, who belonged to the hard core of the traditional elite, was among the strongest supporters of Bruce’s Revised Education Code when it came up for discussion in the Legislative Council. He castigated ignorant villagers, who, in his opinion, got into debt because of the fastidious notions of their English-educated children. And he argued forcefully for the imposition of the severest restrictions for entry to all schools, so that the children of the rural poor would be forced ‘to follow such avocations as they are fitted for by nature’. Obeysekere was giving candid expression to the views of his own social group and its fear that education, by widening intellectual horizons, would stimulate processes of social change which would almost certainly undermine their own privileged position in the country. The traditional elite realized that its challengers among the new rich had an enthusiasm for education which infected the rest of society. Moreover, the anglicized lifestyle of its members became an ideal of elite behaviour and one which was easily and readily emulated. The English schools were the nurseries of the anglicization process. The curricula of the public and grammar schools of nineteenth-century England were the models for the Colombo Academy and the prestigious English schools run by the missionaries, which concentrated mainly on the academic courses which were the prerequisite for higher education and entry to the professions. Thus, while access to English education was limited, it was nevertheless an important hallmark of elite status, although by no means its sole determinant. And as in all societies, the establishment was not inclined to welcome a broadening of the basis of the elite through an increase in its numbers.
From the point of view of the traditional elite and the government, the fact that there were only limited facilities for post-secondary and vocational education within the island had at least the advantage of keeping the number of aspirants to educated elite status small enough for them to be accommodated within the existing framework without much strain. Unemployment or even underemployment among men with a university or professional training was unheard of in late nineteenth-century Sri Lanka, and as we have seen, those who aspired to a university education needed to go to Britain or to India unless they were satisfied with the less attractive but less expensive alternative of an external degree of London University. The establishment of the Medical College and the Law College (in 1870 and 1874 respectively) helped to fill the gap somewhat, but there were no technical institutes on the island till well into the twentieth century. Thus, in striking contrast to the three presidencies in British India, education was not the prime determining factor in elite formation. The acquisition of an English education had the obvious advantage not only of enhancing an individual’s status and bolstering his self-confidence, but also of giving him easier access to the rulers of the day. The values inculcated by this process of education included a critical interest in political issues, even though this did not then extend to organized political activity directed against the colonial government. The homogeneity of the elite, such as it was, was based partly at least on its anglicized lifestyle, of which English education was a fundamental characteristic. The ‘insatiable anxiety to attain everything that is English’ did give the elite a common outlook on many matters, but the adoption of English ways and ‘luxuries and refinement of living’, which were previously unknown, did not cut them off completely from the local milieu.
British administrators believed that a huge gulf separated the educated few from the illiterate many; they failed to see the personal and social ties that enabled the elite to bridge it. An elite group is, by any standard of assessment, exclusive, but—as its critics among British officialdom seldom realized—the social influence of members of this elite, by which they set so much store, depended largely on the establishment and maintenance of close personal relations between them, as members of the elite, and the people among whom they lived, and their readiness or wish to communicate their values to them. The stronger such links, the greater the influence of the elite and the greater its ability to initiate—or thwart—change and to make new ideas acceptable to the community at large. Nor was communication of values always a one-way process, from the elite to the masses. On the contrary, the elite proved just as receptive to the pressure of traditional values immanent among the people as the latter themselves. Thus an English education and an anglicized lifestyle conferred no immunity against the virus of caste prejudice endemic in the country. Indeed, the English-educated were in the forefront of the acrimonious caste disputes that broke out among the Sinhalese in the late nineteenth century. Again, the leadership of the religious revival—Buddhist, Hindu and Muslim—in the same period was largely in the hands of a section of the English-educated and the wealthy if not affluent.
One of the most potent forces in elite formation in nineteenth-century Sri Lanka was the rapid economic growth which followed upon the successful establishment and expansion of coffee culture. The plantation sector of the Sri Lankan economy was larger in relation to the traditional sector than in most tropical colonies. At every stage in the development of plantation agriculture, segments of the indigenous population participated in it. Local capitalists, as we have seen, had a share in coffee and tea, were rather better represented in rubber, and were predominant in coconut and (overwhelmingly so) in cinnamon, which survived as a minor crop. Sri Lankans obtained a far larger share in the export trade than hitherto. In short, the indigenous planters, capitalists, smallholders and peasants played a much more prominent role in plantation agriculture than did their counterparts in most tropical colonies in Asia.
Again some of the services on the plantations and specialized functions were performed almost entirely by the Sinhalese. These included the clearing of the forests for the establishment of plantations and the transport of produce from the plantations to the ports. Till the introduction of the railway, transport was very much a Sinhalese monopoly as regards both the labour and the ownership of the carts. British planters and agency houses made several efforts to bring the transport of coffee under their control and to break the hold of the Sinhalese on this enterprise, but none of their ventures so much as got off to a start. Sinhalese expertise in transport, developed through the bullock carts in the coffee era, flourished in the first half of the twentieth century in a domination of road transport—both motor buses and lorries.
Several Sinhalese families made large fortunes in the mining, processing and export of graphite in the late nineteenth century. Two other profitable fields of investment were toll rents of bridges and ferries on the main highways (these rents declined in importance after the railway was built) and, most importantly, the arrack monopoly: entrepreneurship in the arrack trade was by far the most profitable of these ventures. Urban property was greatly sought after and must have helped consolidate the economic foundations of several families. John Ferguson, a perceptive observer of the contemporary scene, was struck by the increasing prosperity of the small and influential class of Ceylonese capitalists and the conspicuous consumption in which they indulged:
There are a considerable number of wealthy native gentlemen enriched by trade and agriculture within British times and nearby all the property in large towns as well as extensive planted areas belong to them.... In nothing is the increase of wealth among the natives more seen in the Western, Central and Southern Provinces than in the number of horses and carriages, now owned by them. Thirty or forty years ago, to see a Ceylonese own a conveyance of his own was rare indeed; now the number of Burghers, Sinhalese and Tamils driving their own carriages in the towns especially, is very remarkable.4
There existed neither income tax, land tax nor death duties,5 so that fortunes could be amassed without any effective fiscal restraints.
The economic base expanded, the number of Ceylonese capitalists increased and the more affluent among them were eager and aggressive aspirants to elite status. As a result, the traditional elite’s primacy as the most affluent group in indigenous society was at stake. The first area of competition was landownership and in this the traditional elite was able to hold its own for a while. In the years after 1832, with the abolition of the land grant system and the introduction of the sale of wastelands by the state through a system of auctions, land became accessible to all classes in society, thus effectively removing landownership as an exclusive attribute of elite status. In the early stages, a section of the Goyigama mudaliy•rs emerged as the main beneficiaries of the new system when they converted their landholdings into commercially viable plantations and kept increasing the acreages they controlled. But their dominance in this sphere was short-lived for the Kar•va of Moratuva soon overtook them and they—the Goyigama—were left far behind by other Sri Lankan landowners as well, as the acquisition of land became a channel of upward social mobility for the new rich. British policy on Crown land affected all land on the island and not merely the plantations and the villages in their neighbourhood. And for Sri Lanka as a whole, during much of the second half of the nineteenth century, a greater proportion of Crown land was purchased by Sri Lankans or non-Europeans than by European planters.
Within a decade or two of the successful establishment of coffee culture, the really extensive tracts of plantations in the hands of Sri Lankans were controlled by the new rich, among whom the Kar•vas were the pacesetters.6 To a great extent the fortunes of Moratuva could be traced directly to a single family group closely related to pioneers who had established themselves in the early years of the coffee industry. By the middle of the century the de Soysas of Moratuva were clearly the most affluent Sri Lankan family and over the next few decades their fortunes continued to expand. Even the collapse of the coffee industry hardly altered them, for their investments were spread over a wide range of interests, including the liquor trade and urban property. The Revd R.S. Spence-Hardy, writing in 1864, described the development of Moratuva thus:
The description of the place given fifty years ago, ‘wretchedly poor,’ is no longer applicable. A young bride married a few months ago, was dowered with a richer portion than ever princess of Ceylon carried over to any of the courts of the continent. There is scarcely an estate in the island that has not contributed to the wealth of Morotto [Moratuva].... The profits of arrack farms have been greater, but more questionable sources of revenue; and much wealth has been gained by farming tolls and ferries.7
It has been estimated that in the period 1877–97, the profits from the arrack trade in the hands of the Moratuva Kar•vas, who dominated this trade, was as much as Rs 30 million, unequally distributed among the renters.8 Thus by the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the Kar•vas were what the Sal•gamas had been in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the most dynamic and assertive of the non-Goyigama castes, except that the affluence of the Kar•va leadership was on a scale that had no parallel in the past.
Three non-Goyigama castes, the Kar•va, Sal•gama and Dur•va, provided a disproportionate number of men whose success in plantation agriculture, trade and commerce had left them far richer than the generality of the traditional elite. Unlike the latter, they had no contempt for trade, but, on the contrary, took it up with zest. More significantly, land was to them potential plantation property, or real estate—a commodity of trade to be bought and sold dispassionately like any other. They had no sentimental attachment to paddy cultivation, which carried status but brought very little in terms of economic returns on investment. Since the most assertive and affluent segments of the new capitalist class were members of these castes, in particular the Kar•va caste, elite competition also became very much a matter of caste rivalry. The Kar•vas, as the most affluent of them all and the largest non-Goyigama group numerically in the low country, grew sufficiently self-confident to set out a claim for the top position in the caste hierarchy displacing the Goyigamas. This claim they supported with elaborate and fanciful theories of caste origin based on myth and distorted historical tradition. They were followed in this by the Sal•gamas and others, with equally extravagant claims to pride of place in the caste hierarchy. When this happened, the Goyigamas—the traditional elite as well as the rising men of wealth and education—closed ranks to defend their long-accepted status as the most ‘honourable’ of the castes (just as paddy cultivation was the most ‘honourable’ vocation) and their position at the apex of the caste structure.
In the last quarter of the century, the Goyigama elite received unexpected support from the colonial administration in Sri Lanka in the person of Governor Gordon. Although the latter was primarily interested in buttressing the traditional elite, he was not averse to extending this assistance on a caste basis to Goyigamas of all categories whenever they were challenged by competitors from other castes. This policy was continued by his successors, over the next two decades at least. One result of this, it must be emphasized, was the reassertion of caste as an element in elite status, but this succeeded only in preventing the elimination of the traditional elite in the administrative structure, particularly in its lower rungs. Its displacement in terms of wealth and education could not be checked by gubernatorial fiat. It was impossible to rebut a claim to elite status earned by wealth or education (or a combination of these) even when it was not based on caste privilege and hereditary position. Among the traditional elite, it was the Kandyan group whose displacement was almost total. They were far behind in education, and very few extended their modest landholdings substantially or converted them into plantations. Traditional agriculture was their forte, but there were no fortunes to be made in it and the returns on investment in this sphere were meagre. To a greater extent than the mudaliy•rs of the low country, the Kandyan elite hankered after headmen’s posts and the trappings of the past. Gregory did them more harm than good by bringing them in from the cold and into a junior partnership in the colonial administration, for in the long run this proved a dead end. Kandyan representation within the capitalist class was miniscule if not non-existent.
The fact that the colonial administration threw the weight of its influence into helping the traditional elite, in what appeared to be an unequal battle with more resourceful newcomers, did not put an end to caste-based elite competition in public life, but served to intensify this competition as the Kar•vas campaigned to gain a position in public life commensurate with their remarkable, if new-found, affluence. There was still competition in education, philanthropy, for mudaliy•rships (the title of mudaliy•r divorced from the traditional system was used as an official ‘honour’ for other groups as well), for places in the higher bureaucracy as well as for all posts in government service. But the struggle was keenest in the periodic campaigns to catch the governor’s eye for nomination to the Legislative Council. By the 1890s, on each occasion when the Sinhalese seat was vacant, the Kar•vas would organize public campaigns to get their candidate nominated, but to no avail.
Thus by the end of the nineteenth century, the elite had expanded in numbers, but while still quite heterogeneous, neither the common outlook nurtured by an English education nor its anglicized lifestyle gave it much more than a superficial cohesion. Nevertheless, whatever their origins, once members of the elite had consolidated their fortunes as such, they became members of a single class, an elite representative of, but not synonymous with, the capitalist class. This class situation, much more than education or an anglicized lifestyle, provided for a degree of homogeneity in the elite. But the community of interest engendered by class was shattered by the divisive effects of caste loyalties. In the next chapter, another point of conflict, though not such an intense or deep-rooted one at this time as caste, will be discussed—namely religion. One divisive force had not yet emerged—ethnicity—and there were few signs of it. Elite conflict on a caste basis absorbed energies which might have been more profitably engaged in political organization and political activity on a national level.