In striking contrast to the vigorous resistance offered by the Buddhist movement to the encroachments of Christianity in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the island’s formal politics lacked any sense of purpose and animation. The present chapter and the next will review the characteristic features of the politics of this phase in the country’s history and seek to analyse the causes of its tepidity. It is necessary first, however, to look briefly at the Legislative Council1 in the second half of the nineteenth century, since it was the focal point of political activity.
From its inception in 1833, there were two conflicting points of view on the essential purposes of the Ceylon Legislative Council. The Colonial Office looked upon it as a check on the governor, in the sense that it was an independent and fairly reliable source of information on the affairs of the colony to the Secretary of State, who would otherwise have been dependent for this on the governor alone; thus it served as a means of making Whitehall’s control over the colonial administration more effective. This indeed was what Colebrooke himself had in mind, but not what the Legislative Council was content to be. In retrospect it would seem that Colebrooke’s concept of the Legislative Council’s role was too restrictive; for the really remarkable feature of the Legislative Council was not so much the existence of an official majority as the presence of unofficials. The latter served to underline the validity of the comment that the ‘essential purpose of establishing a legislature has always been to give representation to the inhabitants of the dependency’. Implicit in this was the assumption that the acceptance of the principle of representation necessarily involved the acknowledgement also of the concept of the legislature as a representative legislature in embryo.
In the period 1833–70, the Crown Colony of Ceylon was the ‘constitutional pioneer’ of the non-European dependencies of the British empire;2 it had a more advanced constitution than all the others. From the outset the unofficial members of the Legislative Council and some of the newspapers of the day tended to look upon the Legislative Council as the local Parliament. The rapid development of representative institutions and, later, of responsible government in the settlement colonies seemed to indicate the future trend of events for Sri Lanka. The Colonial Office would not fundamentally change its view of the essential function of the Legislative Council; nevertheless, this did not stop the sporadic agitation within the colony for the transformation of the Legislative Council into a more representative body. During this period, its powers were enlarged on three separate occasions, but, neither singly nor together, did this amount to anything significant. There was no increase in the Council membership, nor was there a change in the mode of representation from nomination by the governor to election, direct or indirect. Unofficial representatives were appointed by the governor on a communal basis. This seemed both natural and logical because the whole point of the Council was to elicit knowledge of local conditions. The ratio was fixed by convention as three Europeans and one each from among the Sinhalese, Tamils and Burghers, although the nomination of Sri Lankans quite often deviated from this precise proportion. There was no nominee for the Muslims.
The constitutional practice in the empire was that as bodies capable of serving as electorates or constituencies developed, the system of sending unofficial members to the Legislative Council changed from nomination to election. This did not happen in Sri Lanka in the nineteenth century, but for the Europeans there was a limited advance in this direction with the governor consulting the Chamber of Commerce (established in 1839) and the Planters’ Association (established in 1854) in selecting unofficial members for nomination (it is not clear when this practice began). Among the Sri Lankans it became the practice to send petitions to the governor recommending nominations, but even this does not appear to have had much effect since nomination to the Sinhalese and Tamil seats was so often made from among the members of the same families. In the 1840s, Dr Christopher Elliott, who combined the practice of medicine with some remarkably outspoken journalism, led the agitation for a reform of the council to make it genuinely representative of the people at large,3 but the radicalism of his demands ensured their speedy rejection by the colonial authorities. Not till well into the twentieth century do we see again anything like the radical and democratic tones that Elliott so fearlessly demonstrated in the 1840s.
When pressure for a reform of the Legislative Council was revived in the 1850s, it came from the European merchants and planters on the island and from the Burghers—descendants of Dutch settlers and VOC officials who had made Sri Lanka their home. What they wanted above all else was an increase in unofficial representation in the Legislative Council. There was no enthusiasm for elected representation except on the basis of a very restricted franchise; in a Legislative Council reformed on this basis the planters and European merchants would gain an influential voice in the disbursement of the government’s contingent expenditure, if not control over it.
Earl Grey in the early 1850s had stated the case against the establishment of representative institutions in a colony like Sri Lanka: ‘If they were to be established in such a form as to confer power upon the great body of the people, it must be obvious that the experiment would be attended with great danger, or rather with the certainty of failure.’4 This, no doubt, was his answer to the demands of men like Elliott. But his rejection of the claims of the planters was if anything more forthright:
If...the system of representation were so contrived as to exclude the bulk of the native population from real power, in order to vest it in the hands of the European minority, an exceedingly narrow oligarchy would be created.... Were a representative Assembly constituted in Ceylon, which should possess the powers usually entrusted to such a body, and in which the European merchants and planters and their agents had the ascendancy, it can hardly be supposed that narrow views of class interests would not exercise greater influence on the legislation of the colony than a comprehensive consideration of the general good.... 5
Successive Secretaries of State merely expanded on these themes, particularly the second one, when demands were made in the 1860s and 1870s for a reform of the Legislative Council. Nor were the colony’s governors more receptive to demands for constitutional reform: they made much of the fact that there was no agitation from the people at large for an elective system of representation and argued that since it was impossible to establish any legislature representative of the mass of the population, the prevailing pattern of administration should remain unchanged. Governor Gregory, for example, despite his strong liberal inclinations and his initiation of reform in every other sphere, remained unenthusiastic over the liberalization of the constitution. He was, in fact, an unabashed advocate of the view that the powers of the governor needed to be conserved as they were and, if possible, strengthened. The implication was that these powers would be used not for the protection of any merely sectional interests but for the welfare of the people at large. There was, besides, the presumption that any political concessions by way of a reform of the constitution must be preceded by, and could only be justified by, a substantial improvement in education and literacy in the island’s population.
The rationale for masterly inactivity in regard to the constitutional structure came under purposeful attack in two pamphlets published in 1876–77 in which the author William Digby, a British journalist resident on the island, made a cogently argued case for the introduction of representative institutions in Sri Lanka.6 For the first time since the days of Elliott, the case for constitutional reform was securely based on liberal ideology, but without the radical flourishes which Elliott had engaged in. Digby’s pamphlets proved enormously influential not indeed for any immediate consequences in the way of extracting concessions from the government, but because the main arguments he advanced were to be used again and again over the next four decades by political activists on the island in their agitation for constitutional reform. The point he made was that since 1833, when the constitution had been introduced, there had been a transformation of the economy through the astonishing success of coffee culture. This was reflected in the flourishing state of the island’s revenue in rapid and far-reaching social change, especially in the expansion of the education system and literacy, and indeed in every sphere except the constitutional and political. The case for reform was thus the simple one of harmonizing the island’s constitution with the advances achieved in its economy and revenue system and in education and literacy. Whitehall’s insensitivity to a reform of Sri Lanka’s constitution became even more illogical when some of Britain’s other tropical colonies, smaller than Sri Lanka in area and population, and far behind it in regard to the economy, revenue, education and literacy, were granted constitutions well in advance of hers. Had Digby’s arguments been set out by a Sri Lankan it would have marked the beginning of a new era; as it was, the fatal flaw was precisely the fact that they were not. There was no demand from Sri Lankans themselves for representative government and the colonial government of the day made the most of this.
Sri Lanka’s role as the constitutional pioneer of the non-European dependencies lasted less than fifty years after 1833. By the end of the nineteenth century, colonies like Jamaica, Mauritius and Trinidad were far ahead in constitutional development.
In the non-white dependencies a constitutional problem had emerged: the beginning of a conflict between Britain’s willingness to meet local demands for greater political influence and her determination to retain political control. To have fully conceded the colonial demand for representative government would have seriously weakened Crown control, yet the complete rejection of such demands was difficult if not impossible. Jamaica was the pioneer in constitutional growth and by the early 1880s three concessions had been made there: the introduction of elected members into the Legislative Council; the grant of a provisional elected majority and a veto on financial proposals which could be exercised by any six of the elected members, subject to the overriding power of the governor. Concessions based on the Jamaican model were introduced in Mauritius, but over a much longer period. The reforms in Jamaica had a more immediate impact on Trinidad, where changes were introduced in the period 1887–93.
These changes were not a steady application of carefully thought-out principles, nor were they part of a long-term progress towards responsible government. The Colonial Office favoured constitutional reform on the grounds of administrative expediency as a response to the strength of local demand and agitation. In its preoccupation with immediate administrative problems, it tended to underestimate the full implications of these changes and their effect on other colonies. Despite the fact that in all these changes the basic principle (one of expediency) of the Crown retaining the ultimate power not only to veto but to pass legislation was maintained intact, politicians in other colonies saw only the advances made, and in the context of the Crown Colony system in the tropical colonies of the period, these seemed substantial indeed. The prevalent view was that the reforms introduced in Jamaica and Mauritius had made the grant of similar concessions elsewhere inevitable, but after 1886 attitudes at the Colonial Office hardened against constitutional reform. When the plantocracy of Trinidad succeeded in extracting similar reforms, Lord Selborne, Joseph Chamberlain’s parliamentary undersecretary at the Colonial Office, declared in 1895 that these would not be an example to ‘the empire at large’. He had been told that ‘mutterings of a similar agitation [had] been heard from Hong Kong and Ceylon’ and he hastened to warn that there were ‘very grave objections to any divergence from the pure Crown Colony in the case of [these two Colonies]’.7
The contrast between Sri Lanka’s static constitution and the reforms introduced in Jamaica, Mauritius and Trinidad led some contemporary observers of its political scene to attribute the difference to the absence there of a class of wealthy European settlers which had led the successful agitation in the West Indies and Mauritius. But this explanation is too facile, even though it was true that the European planters and merchants in Sri Lanka were all birds of passage and not permanent settlers with an abiding interest, that is, they were not a true plantocracy. More important, it overlooks some important distinctions between Mauritius and the West Indian islands of Jamaica and Trinidad, on the one hand, and British Sri Lanka on the other. The first three were plantation colonies proper and the last was not, even though its economy was dominated by the plantations. Moreover, the situation in Sri Lanka was far more complex because of its large indigenous population and its indigenous elite. Thus the comparative quiescence of the island’s public life in the last quarter of the nineteenth century and the lack of a persistent agitation for reform of the constitution is to be explained by the diffidence of the indigenous elite, in particular the Sinhalese.
The Sinhalese representatives in the Legislative Council, far from taking the lead in the pressure for reform of the constitution, showed little interest in it, when they were not adamantly opposed to any change at all. Buddhist activists may have filled this void in leadership, but apart from a somewhat hesitant claim for a member to represent Buddhist interests—the Sinhalese members in the Legislative Council had invariably been Protestant Christians—they did not attach much importance to the wider problem of constitutional reform. They showed very little interest in the active opposition led by sections of the Sinhalese elite against the objectionable features of the system of representation for the Sinhalese in the Legislative Council, namely, that nominees to the Sinhalese seat came, with one exception, from one family group. In 1878, the first challenge to this ‘family compact’ appeared when it became necessary to fill the vacancy caused by the death of James Alwis. The contender on this occasion was William Goonetileke, a Goyigama scholar and lawyer, who made no claims to ‘first-class’ status, but the vacancy was filled by J.P. Obeysekere, yet another member of the family to which James Alwis belonged. When the position fell vacant again in 1881, the competition assumed a new dimension—a non-Goyigama challenge to the ‘first-class’ Goyigama monopoly of the Sinhalese seat. From now on, political activity became an aspect of the caste rivalry which was such a prominent feature in Sinhalese society at this time.
In 1882, the Ceylon Agricultural Association was formed at the instance of C.H. de Soysa, the wealthiest of the Kar•va entrepreneurs, primarily to safeguard the interests of the indigenous planters, and in 1888, when the Sinhalese seat was vacant once again, it was converted into the Ceylon National Association. Political activity on this occasion was much more than the conventional and decorous jostling to catch the governor’s eye for nomination. It was altogether more purposeful, with the emerging elite, spearheaded by the affluent Kar•vas, seeking to give greater momentum to their pressure for recognition by institutionalizing it into a distinctly political organization which was something more than a merely temporary platform for advancing an individual’s claims. The formation of the Ceylon National Association, and the agitation which it led for constitutional reform, appeared to herald the beginnings of political initiatives of a far-reaching nature. Gordon was sufficiently perturbed to set about devising a scheme to foil the activists. Two additional unofficial seats in the Legislative Council were created in 1889, thus seeming to acknowledge the strength and reasonableness of the pressure for the enlargement of the Legislative Council, but these were allotted for the representation of the Kandyans and Muslims—two groups that had shown no serious interest in the agitation for constitutional reform. The non-Goyigama Sinhalese, under the leadership of the Kar•vas who had led the agitation, got nothing from it, but Gordon, anxious to conciliate another set of activists (the Buddhist movement), expressed the hope that the Kandyan member should be a Buddhist and a spokesman for Buddhist opinion.
Gordon’s reforms of 1889 incorporated another innovation—all unofficials were henceforth to be nominated for a five-year term. Hitherto nomination had been for an undefined period, with the governor retaining the right of suspension or dismissal. This right was never exercised and nomination was effectively for life. The innovation of a fixed term was bound—and perhaps intended—to curb the independence of unofficial members, especially because there was the prospect of renomination for another term. What it did indicate was that the hostility to constitutional reforms was not confined to a desire to thwart the ambitions of the Kar•vas. Nomination for a five-year term had one unexpected consequence. Aspirants to nomination had more—and regular—opportunities to advance their claims and a five-year cycle of political activity developed, rising to a crescendo just when a member’s term of office was due to end. But there was no change in the nature of the agitation, so far as the Sinhalese were concerned, for these regular campaigns to catch the governor’s eye for nomination to the legislature were no more than exercises in caste rivalry.
But these campaigns too made little impression on the colonial administration. Nor was there a more favourable outcome when the candidate whose claims were sponsored had very impressive credentials. Ever since his return from Cambridge and Lincoln’s Inn in 1887, James Pieris had been regarded as a young man marked out by virtue of a brilliant academic career (a double-first and the presidency of the union at Cambridge) and marriage to an heiress (the daughter of Jacob de Mel) for a path-breaking career in politics. In 1900, his claims to represent the Sinhalese in the legislature were advocated through petitions and well-attended public meetings in many parts of the island. Similar public meetings were held in support of the claims of S.C. Obeysekere, who was nominated. The same process of agitation was repeated in 1905 when the seat fell vacant again, and again Pieris was a candidate, but S.C. Obeysekere was renominated. Both in 1900 and 1905, James Pieris had been sponsored by Kar•va interests as their candidate. By 1905, the Kar•va challenge was not limited to an attempt to repudiate the claims of the ‘first-class’ Goyigamas to represent the Sinhalese in the Legislative Council. The conspicuous affluence of a wide and powerful section of the Kar•va community made them sufficiently self-confident to question the claims of the Goyigama caste to superior status. They went on to stake a claim for a separate seat for the Kar•va caste in the Legislative Council. Although numerically they were much smaller than the Goyigamas, they could see no basic contradiction between the pursuit of their sectional interests as a caste group and the identification of these interests with broadly democratic principles. They also saw no irony in the attempt to equate the advancement of Kar•va caste interests with the progress and welfare of the wider Sri Lankan community. From 1905 onwards they became the driving force behind demands for the introduction of the elective principle to the colony. They must have realized that the Kar•va lead in education and wealth could be converted into political influence of a substantial order if the elective principle were accepted with property and educational qualifications.8 They could thus put an end to the domination of Sri Lankan public life by the ‘first-class’ Goyigama and yet at the same time lend an air of respectability to the pursuit of their own sectional interests by parading as the champions of political reform and enlightened social progress. Nevertheless, their political ambitions were almost as narrowly limited as those of the ‘first-class’ Goyigama establishment whom they sought to displace.
This diversion of political energies to caste competition was self-defeating. At a time when the British administration in the colony had embarked on a deliberate policy of propping up the Goyigama establishment, the Kar•vas were engaged in a futile exercise. The passion and zeal their campaigns aroused were all to no purpose. In fact, their campaign had a negative effect for it resulted in dividing the Sinhalese elite rather than uniting it in a common struggle against the British. It would have been evident that Goyigama support was essential for any concerted political movement to make an impact. Without it the minority castes on their own could make little headway in their political agitation and their demands for reform could always be dismissed as the agitation of a small clique not representative of the people. The Kar•va challengers of the goyigama establishment were men of some achievement if not distinction, most being lawyers, but the colonial government on the island would not depart from its practice of appointing ‘first-class’ Goyigamas to represent the Sinhalese. No doubt this practice had hardened almost to a convention, but there was more to it than that: what counted was a family tradition of loyal service to the British in the office of principal mudaliy•r, notwithstanding mediocre intellectual talents. The traditional elite, because of greater willingness to serve as collaborators, would have its uses to the colonial administration as a counterweight to the brash and affluent Kar•va-dominated capitalist groups organized in the Ceylon Agricultural Association and its successor, the Ceylon National Association.
In the last decade of the nineteenth century and the opening years of the twentieth century, formal politics in Sri Lanka were remarkably passive, even stagnant or immobile—of which the transformation which took place in the Ceylon National Association is an excellent illustration. By 1885, the early promise of political initiatives had withered away and the controlling influence within it was with men who had no interest in political or constitutional reform. When some of its younger members sought to convert it into an organization modelled on the Indian National Congress and indeed to adopt the title of Ceylon National Congress, they were thwarted with consummate ease by those in control of it. The Ceylon National Association, in fact, scrupulously avoided involvement in political activity. It would not associate itself with the temperance movement either. However, it had one solid achievement to its credit: its notable contribution to the successful campaign for the abolition of the grain taxes. One may cite even more striking evidence of the quiescence of the elite and in particular the Sinhalese elite. In 1902, on the occasion of King Edward VII’s coronation, John Ferguson, owner-editor of the Ceylon Observer9 and one of the unofficial European representatives in the Legislative Council, took the lead in seeking to organize a public meeting or a conference to secure the adoption of a resolution or memorial on the reform of the constitution. He received little support from the prominent public figures of the day. ‘The Sinhalese are our great difficulty’, he complained. ‘[S.C.] Obeysekere objects to elections and James Pieris (as D[istrict] J[udge] in embryo) has not replied at all.... They would not trust power to their countrymen....’ In 1904, he moved a resolution in the Legislative Council urging the creation of an additional seat for the low country Sinhalese, but this motion lapsed for want of a seconder. The Sinhalese representative at this time was S.C. Obeysekere and his hostility to this proposal was as implacable as it was undisguised.
Obeysekere at least was consistent. The reluctance of James Pieris to support Ferguson’s initiative in 1902 seems inexplicable in view of the fact that just two years earlier he had staked a claim to the nomination to the Sinhalese seat. What his reasons were we do not, and may never, know, but Ferguson was apparently convinced that the diffidence sprang from his aspiration to an important post in the judiciary. If that was indeed true, Pieris was typical of the elite of his day which showed greater interest in pressing for Ceylonization of the higher bureaucracy and the judiciary than in constitutional reform as such. This was not a case of distorted priorities, as it would seem at first, for the higher bureaucracy was till very much the elective government of the island. James Pieris, the reluctant politician, typified the Sinhalese elite of his day in other ways as well, especially in the preference for commerce and plantation agriculture over politics. By the last quarter of the nineteenth century, its stake in plantation agriculture, trade and commerce was becoming increasingly substantial. Sinhalese entrepreneurs were making fortunes in liquor, plumbago, coconut and rubber. The wealthy and educated Sinhalese—those whose educational and social background fitted them for a role of leadership in politics (and who, in fact, resented the dominance of public life by the ‘first-class’ Goyigamas)—were engrossed in commercial ventures, often to the neglect of their professional activities. James Pieris, for instance, practised as a lawyer, but his heart at this time was in business and plantation agriculture. There was also the case of Dr H.M. (later Sir Marcus) Fernando, who was to be in the forefront of political activity in the early twentieth century. His academic record as a medical student at London University was exceptionally distinguished, but on his return to the island his medical practice took second place to plantation agriculture, before being abandoned altogether. No wonder then that there was a lack of ‘real downright earnestness in political agitation’ and that the more committed advocates of reform should have deplored the fact that the potential leaders of the elite preferred their economic interests to political activity. Indeed, a British newspaper of the day commented: ‘Ceylon is one of those happy possessions of the British Crown.... While other countries make a noise in the world, Ceylon makes money.’10
At this time, moreover, the economic interests of these wealthy Sinhalese entrepreneurs were not in competition with those of British commercial interests on the island and certainly much less so than was the case with their Indian counterparts in most parts of that subcontinent. In plantation agriculture, Sri Lankan and European interests were complementary rather than competitive. There were no influential and wealthy indigenous groups with investments in banking or shipping; nor were there any large industries controlled by Sinhalese entrepreneurs. As for commerce, although the Sri Lankan share was on the increase, it was still very much in the shadow of British and Indian business houses and was never in strong competition with them. The result was that when (in the first decade of the twentieth century) these entrepreneurs did eventually make their way into the political arena, they showed themselves to be very conservative in outlook, deeply appreciative of the British connection and quite concerned not to stir up the sort of agitation that had erupted in parts of British India.
The only venturesome and articulate political organization among the Sinhalese was a regional body, the Chilaw Association, composed largely of wealthy landowners, organized and led by the Corea brothers. The impetus to its formation stemmed from an agitation to have the west coast railway link extended from Negombo to Chilaw and Puttalam in the north-west, the heart of the coconut triangle, where plantation agriculture was dominated by the Sri Lanka elite. The association spearheaded the opposition to the Wastelands Ordinance of 1897, the avowed purpose in this campaign being the defence of the interests of the Sinhalese peasants against what were regarded as the reprehensible features of this item of legislation. More important—unlike the moribund Ceylon National Association—it made political agitation the central feature of its activities in its attempt to focus attention on the need to introduce the elective principle for the representation of native interests in the Legislative Council. But even this agitation was restrained and narrowly elitist in concept. It bore no comparison to the broad-based temperance movement which derived its remarkable vitality from its appeal to the people at large.
With the disinclination of the Sinhalese to take the lead in formal political agitation, it was left to men like Ferguson and, more significantly, the Tamils, to assume the initiative. The energy and enterprise displayed by the Tamil elite was a sharp contrast to the political inertia of their Sinhalese counterparts. ‘The intellectual and political activity noticeable among the Tamils’, a local newspaper commented in 1889, ‘is a favourable sign of the times.... The intellectual activity of Tamils of the rising generation has reacted on those of other communities.... In matters political it is gratifying to notice their activity.’11 The Tamils had been admirably served by their representatives in the Legislative Council since the days of Sir Muttu Coomaraswamy, who was succeeded in the seat by his nephews, the brothers Ramanathan and Coomaraswamy, while a third brother, Arunachalam, was a distinguished career civil servant who kept up a lively interest in political issues, though this position prevented him from giving public expression to these views or taking an initiative in politics. It was at Arunachalam’s urging that Ferguson endeavoured to call a meeting or conference of public men to adopt a memorial on constitutional reform in 1902, utilizing the occasion of Edward VII’s coronation. Ferguson accommodated Arunachalam by publishing two pseudonymous letters written by him in his newspaper the Ceylon Observer in early June 1902, making out a clearly argued case for political reform. In an editorial note, Ferguson strongly supported the claims made in these letters. Arunachalam’s letters were in a sense an expansion of the arguments Digby had set out in his pamphlets in 1876–77. Digby’s influence on Arunachalam was unmistakable and strong—they were close friends and maintained a long and interesting correspondence on political reforms.
None of the Sinhalese representatives of this period—the last quarter of the nineteenth century—matched the intellectual dynamism, independence of outlook and political maturity of Ramanathan and his brother, Coomaraswamy. The one exception was James Alwis, but even he lacked vision in many spheres of activity, most notably religion. As a staunch Anglican he would do nothing for the Buddhists; this task fell by default on Ramanathan, and his services to the Buddhist cause elicited a fulsome tribute from the leading Buddhist journal of the day, the Sarasavi Sandaresa in 1899. ‘[Ramanathan]’, it asserted, ‘not only looks after the welfare of his own constituents, but also all matters connected with various interests on the island.... It might well be said, judging from the active part he has taken, and the amount of time and labour he has devoted to questions on Council affecting the Sinhalese alone, that he was their representative.... The Buddhists owe Mr Ramanathan a deep debt of gratitude. His interest in the question of the Vesak holiday and the Buddhist Temporalities Bill...and a host of other services towards Buddhism have endeared him immensely to the Buddhists of Ceylon.’12 Then again there was the question of the grain taxes. James Alwis gave unstinted support in the Legislative Council to the perpetuation of these taxes. It required the entry of the first Kandyan member Panabokke to give expression to the views of the Sinhalese peasantry on this issue. But all along Ramanathan had been critical of these taxes and he played a leading role in the successful agitation for their abolition.
Coomaraswamy, his elder brother, and successor to the Tamil seat, had neither Ramanathan’s flair for dramatic gesture nor his eloquence, but he was nevertheless a man of strong convictions and sturdy independence, qualities which the government of the day did not always appreciate. Coomaraswamy was the first of the nominees under the new system of fixed-term appointments to feel the sting of the gubernatorial whip. When his term of office ended in 1889, he was not renominated. Instead his place in the council went to W.G. Rockwood, a non-Vell•la, and lest this be regarded as a change of heart by the government on caste, the old family compact retained its hold on the Sinhalese seat. As we have seen, S.C. Obeyesekere was nominated in 1900 and then renominated in 1905 (and again thereafter as well). What Rockwood’s nomination signified was that the essential condition for renomination was unstinted support for the status quo as seen by the British and that any hint of independence merited a reproof. With the appointment of Rockwood and subsequently of Kanagasabhai as Tamil representatives, the Sri Lankan unofficials in the Legislative Council all reached a comfortably even level of mediocrity in intellect and conservatism in outlook; all of them were unimaginative men who showed not the slightest interest in political reform. But until 1898, the Tamil representatives had taken an independent line within the Legislative Council and quite often the lead in national politics as well. The Tamils’ penchant for political activism attracted unfriendly criticism at the Colonial Office as well. A senior official gave expression to this attitude by commenting that ‘the Tamils in Ceylon are the most intriguing section of the population’.13
The economic resources of the Tamil areas were much more limited than those of the wet zone and although there were Tamils with investments in plantations and trade, in this they hardly matched low-country Sinhalese. The educated Tamils turned to the professions and to service in the bureaucracy, especially in the lower clerical grades. Literacy in English was higher in Jaffna than elsewhere on the island and educated Tamils found that positions in the bureaucracy were outnumbered by those who aspired to them. Emigration to Colombo for employment was an established feature of life in Jaffna, as too was the brain drain—the steady flow of educated Tamils to the Federated Malay States and the trickle to East Africa in search of clerical and technical posts and teaching assignments. But by the end of the nineteenth century this emigration was drawing to a close because such opportunities were becoming increasingly scarce. It came to an end in the 1920s. What remained was internal migration to the Sinhalese areas where the competition for clerical posts intensified the rivalry between the Tamils and the Burghers, who had for so long been dominant in this form of employment. Here there was no competition between the Tamils and the Sinhalese—unemployment among the educated was not yet a serious problem for the latter.
Tamil students had long been accustomed to going across to India, particularly the Madras Presidency, for their university education. They absorbed the political influences at work in India and on their return sought to stimulate political activity on the island on the lines of Indian political movements.14 The receptivity of the Tamils to the stimulus of Indian nationalism was strengthened by the fact that the Tamil elite, despite its passion for an English education, was much less anglicized than its Sinhalese counterparts. This held true for Tamil Christians as much as for the Hindus. Besides, the Tamil lead in politics was sustained over the first two decades of the twentieth century.
One last point. At this stage in the island’s development ethnicity was not a divisive factor. A local journal commented in 1899 that ‘among the different races to be found in Ceylon, the existing relations are perhaps far more cordial than...in any other British dependency in the East’.15 The divisive forces were religion and caste, especially the latter, and these caused divisions among the Sinhalese themselves rather than dividing the Sinhalese from the other ethnic and religious groups on the island.