The two decades surveyed in this chapter were years of economic stagnation. This was the result of a contraction in world trade because of the World War of 1914–19 and then the economic dislocation in Europe in the 1920s, followed by the Great Depression of the late 1920s and early 1930s. Tropical trade, in general, had expanded in volume at an average annual rate of 3.6 per cent in the period 1883–1913; between 1913 and 1929 it dropped to 3.1 per cent (thereafter falling sharply to 1.5 per cent). Thus the whole of the interwar period was an unusually prolonged recession for the tropical colonies. The growth rate of their national income, as well that of the productive capacity of their economies, declined noticeably. The plantation sector of Sri Lanka’s economy reflected this trend.1
Rubber fared better, with the outbreak of war and in wartime conditions, than tea and coconut.2 Although the boom conditions of 1904–10 did not continue and prices fell from 5s 6d a pound in 1910 to 4s 6d in 1911 and 1s 11d at the outbreak of war, they were sufficiently remunerative to keep the industry buoyant. Indeed, there was a substantial increase in exports, which actually doubled between 1912 and 1914. Moreover, the restrictions on shipping, which adversely affected coconut and tea, did not affect rubber and there was no serious dislocation of market arrangements. As for tea, the market ceased to be buoyant with the outbreak of war, and in wartime conditions, especially because the British government imposed controls on tea exports from India and Sri Lanka, as well as fixing prices. But peace brought problems for both tea and rubber.
When the British government released the reserve stocks of tea which had been built up during the war, hopes that improved shipping conditions and removal of wartime restraints would result in a return of the prosperity the tea industry in Sri Lanka had enjoyed just before the war, were shown to have been too sanguine: by 1920, the prices of the commoner varieties of tea had dropped sharply. Similarly, while the rubber industry began to adjust itself to normal demand conditions, the stocks of rubber which had accumulated in the producing countries tended to depress prices. Under the stimulus of wartime conditions, the area under rubber had expanded between 1914 and 1918 by 10,117 hectares. This was sustained over the years 1918–20 when a further 12,950 hectares were added. Prices fell by 1921 to 7d a pound, which was well below the costs of production for most rubber producers. Worse still, as a result of the expansion in the area under rubber, production increased in the next decade, thus accentuating the fall in prices.
Tea producers in India and Sri Lanka, the main areas of tea production, responded to the hard times with voluntary restrictions on production and this almost immediately had the desired effect. Prices improved and indeed these new schemes of restriction worked so well that by 1926 the principle of restriction itself was abandoned. In the period 1920–30 the area under tea production expanded by 21,448 hectares, but this recovery proved to be shortlived. Teas from India and Sri Lanka lost the preferential duty they had enjoyed over competitors in the London market, to the great and immediate advantage of teas from the Dutch East Indies. The tea industry had hardly adjusted itself to this loss of its competitive edge when the Great Depression reduced demand and prices even more drastically. The situation was aggravated in the early 1930s when the new plantations that had been opened in the previous decade came into production. At this time the supply of tea was far outstripping demand.
Voluntary restriction of output in the rubber industry was less effective than the cognate process in tea. Only the bigger and more commercially viable producers were anxious for restrictions and the smaller firms and smallholders were reluctant to join in such schemes. Although the Colonial Office would not yield to insistent demands from the larger producers to have restrictions on production imposed on the whole industry, the British government nevertheless stirred itself to some action with regard to the formulation of a comprehensive scheme to restrict production, but the obstacle this time was that the Netherlands would not join in it. Eventually, a scheme applicable to British Malaya and Sri Lanka, the principal sources from which the empire obtained its supplies of rubber, was devised—the ‘Stevenson Scheme’—and was in force from 1922 till 1928. This was the first attempt to regulate the production and supply of rubber. Its flexibility contributed to its success, and it certainly led to an increase in prices. By 1924–25 the price of a pound of rubber had risen to 2s 3d. But these improved prices did not survive the onslaught of the Great Depression, which had a more severe impact on rubber than on tea. (It would appear that under the stimulus of relatively attractive prices in the mid- and late 1920s there had been an extension of the area under rubber by 38 per cent, most of it in the Dutch East Indies.) By 1930, the price of rubber was a mere 5 5/16d. In 1932, it had sunk even lower—to 2 5/16d.
The coconut industry, was, if anything, worse off than either tea or rubber in these decades.
If the interwar decades were a period of stagnation in plantation agriculture, they marked a revival of interest in peasant agriculture and irrigation. There was no link between these two developments. Indeed, at the beginning of the period of our survey it seemed as though stagnation would affect the peasant sector as well. The establishment of the Irrigation Department in 1900 was not the breakthrough to greater investment of resources in irrigation which it was expected to be. Instead, within a few years all investment in major new irrigation projects was suspended and the department restricted itself to the servicing of existing projects. Even the inauguration of the Department of Agriculture in 1912—established with the primary objective of introducing the peasant to more scientific agricultural practices—did not at first, or indeed for a long time, mark a significant new departure in the government’s attitude to peasant agriculture. The wartime disruption of food imports and the massive food production drive organized as a result changed all that. There was now a distinct revival of interest in peasant agriculture and irrigation. It coincided too with a greater interest in peasant agriculture on the part of indigenous politicians.3
Inextricably linked with this was a renewal of interest in the development of the dry zone. For Sri Lankan politicians of the day the dry zone conjured up visions of a revival of past glories and—at a more practical and realistic level—of achieving ‘a more even balance of population’. British officials had fewer illusions. They were all too aware of the enormous problems involved in developing the dry zone, but in the years after 1914, with food supplies from traditional sources drastically curtailed, they turned to the dry zone for an immediate solution to an urgent problem—an increased supply of food from within the island. One interesting feature of this renewed interest in the dry zone was the attempt to force the pace of development by resorting to commercial firms using techniques of production perfected in wet-zone plantation agriculture. Proprietors and managers of wet-zone plantations regarded increased production of rice through capitalist agriculture in the dry zone as a practical solution to the problem of breaking away from dependence on imported rice to feed their workers. They sought to use immigrant Indian labour on these projects, both as hired hands and prospective settlers. (Sri Lankan politicians were greatly perturbed by this and deeply resented it, for they looked upon the dry zone as the birthright of the Sinhalese.) In 1919, a group of Sri Lankan capitalists established the Minneriya Development Company in an effort to begin food production in the Polonnaruva district in the region served by the Minneriya Tank. When this venture collapsed, it was taken over by the Sinhala Mah•jana Sabh• which sought to establish a colony at Nachchaduva. This latter project was as idealistic in outlook as it was practical in its objectives, but the resources available in terms of finance and of technical and managerial skills were totally inadequate for a pioneering venture of this size. None of these capitalist ventures, indigenous or British, showed any signs of success, and once conditions returned to normal, that is, when imports came in without difficulty, the interest of British capitalists in the dry zone evaporated. Indigenous capitalists did not persist either.
This revival of interest in the dry zone did have some immediate beneficial effects. First, after nearly two decades there was an expansion of the area under irrigation in the dry zone by about 8,094 hectares. Had the government of the day not pointedly ignored some of the more innovative recommendations of the Food Supply Committee of 1920, much more would have been achieved. This committee had recommended that the Irrigation Department should not in future be regarded as being primarily a revenue-earning branch of the administration and, more important, that its operations should no longer be assessed on the basis of commercial profit. It was also recommended that the improvement of means of communication should precede rather than follow the development of a district. (The most formidable obstacle to the development of the dry zone was malaria, and the North-central Province, for instance, consisted of isolated malaria-stricken villages with very little in the way of road or rail communication.) None of these proposals was adopted. Second, the wartime disruption of food imports and the post-war inflation (and food scarcities) concentrated the minds of politicians and officials as never before on the need to develop the island’s food resources so as to make it self-sufficient in rice. From this stemmed an increasing willingness on the part of the government to liberalize the system of alienating Crown lands in order to accommodate the peasants: the prevailing land legislation and regulations governing the sale of Crown lands had been under regular attack from Sri Lankan politicians on the grounds that they benefited the capitalist developer at the expense of the peasantry. It is against this background that one needs to view the work of C.V. Brayne, an extraordinarily imaginative British official who began experimenting, in the 1920s, with a new tenurial system in the Batticaloa district. Under this scheme—the peasant proprietor system, as it was called—allottees of Crown lands were carefully selected and were granted a leasehold tenure. The crucial restriction on the right of ownership was the prohibition on alienation by sale or mortgage without official authority. This restricted tenure gave the leaseholder most of the advantages of ownership, but the government retained the right to eject those who proved unsatisfactory. Once its viability was successfully demonstrated in the Batticaloa district, it was introduced into the Matara district in 1925 and thereafter into the Hambantota district as well.
In 1927 came the most important decision of all—the appointment of an important Land Commission by the then governor of the colony, Sir Hugh Clifford. It was recognition that the time had come for a comprehensive reappraisal of land policy. Among its members were some of the more prominent unofficial elected Legislative Councillors, the most notable being D.S. Senanayake, now a rising star of the island’s political leadership and beginning his association with a sphere of activity which he was to dominate from 1931 until his death in 1952. Brayne himself was a member of the commission. It sat for two years and after an exhaustive study of the subject, made detailed and far-reaching recommendations in a series of reports. It strongly endorsed Brayne’s initiative in the new tenurial arrangements which formed the basis of the peasant proprietor system. It unhesitatingly adopted the then current notion—supported by Clifford and D.S. Senanayake alike—that the preservation of the peasantry as a social group should form the basis of the new land policy. Among the major recommendations was that in future the alienation of Crown lands should be centralized and regulated through a special officer, the commissioner of lands, and that allocations should be made according to the needs of the government and the people, with the peasants having priority. Perhaps the most far-reaching recommendations concerned the tenure of lands alienated by the government: outright grants, leases under the peasant proprietor system (which had already proved its worth) and a new tenurial system under which alienation by the grantee by sale or mortgage would be severely restricted, with lands passing on the death of the original grantee to a nominated successor or heir-at-law.
As for colonization, the commission recommended that prospective colonists should be carefully selected, and while some form of financial assistance would be provided, self-help should be made the guiding factor. Reflecting the views of the government, the commission concluded that on the whole the problem of land hunger and congestion could be solved within the wet zone in close proximity to the problem areas.4 The almost total failure of attempts at colonization in the dry zone in this period appeared to justify the low priority which officials attached to the dry zone in their calculations. All in all, the recommendations of the Land Commission constituted a fundamental change in British land policy in Sri Lanka and a calculated reversal of trends that had been in force since the mid-nineteenth century.
There was a very close link between the reappraisal of land policy and the question of population pressure on existing resources of land. In 1927, Sir Hugh Clifford had quoted with relish Bacon’s aphorism ‘The true greatness of a state consisteth essentially in population and breed of men’ to which he coupled a line of more recent provenance: ‘An increasing population is one of the most certain signs of the well-being of a community’.5 He went on to show that between the mid-nineteenth century and the census of 1921 there had been ‘a truly phenomenal increase of population...in the space of seventy years’ from 1.73 to 4.50 million. The point he was making was that ‘nothing approaching it could conceivably have occurred had not the indigenous inhabitants of this island enjoyed during that period—which synchronises, be it noted, with the greatest expansion of its agricultural enterprises in its history—not only peace and security, but a very large measure of material prosperity’.6 A truly extraordinary increase of population there had indeed been, even if one would not endorse Clifford’s contention that there had been ‘a very large measure of material prosperity’ as well. According to the census of 1901, the island’s population had reached 3.56 million. The rate of increase over the first decade of the century was thus 15.2 per cent (to 4.11 million); in the next decade it dropped to 9.6 per cent (4.50 million in 1921); but between 1921 and 1931 it accelerated again to 18 per cent (5.31 million). As a result, there were throughout these years expressions of concern (from Sri Lankan politicians and British officials alike, including Clifford himself) at overpopulation in parts of the wet zone, especially on the south-west coast.
That coast (that is, the Western Province and the Southern Province without the Hambantota district) retained its position as the most densely populated area containing, during much of this period, at least two-fifths of the country’s whole population. Within that region, population density was greatest in the strip, extending about 11.3 km into the interior that covered the coastline from Negombo to Matara. The Colombo district proper accounted for nearly one-fifth and Colombo city one-twentieth of the island’s population. The hill country plantation districts (the Central Province, Uva and Sabaragamuva) showed peaks and troughs in population growth corresponding to the fortunes of the tea and rubber industries.7 The Central Province, for instance, showed a growth rate of 32.8 per cent between 1921 and 1931, the highest since the decade 1891–1901 when it had been 31.3 per cent. Uva and Sabaragamuva recorded high growth rates throughout the period, generally over 20 per cent per decade, with only a slight drop in 1911–21. The dry zone (excluding the Jaffna peninsula and the narrow east coast), covering more than half the land area of the island, was relatively sparsely populated. It contained less than one-fifth of the population and this did not significantly change in the early twentieth century. The Northern and Eastern Provinces recorded a growth rate of less than 10 per cent up to 1931, while the lowest rate was in the North-central Province, less than 1 per cent in the period 1921–31. The Kurunegala district of the North-western Province accounted for nearly 40 per cent of the population of the entire dry zone and the proportion was maintained if not increased during much of this period. This reflected its importance as one of the main coconut-producing areas of the island. In much of the dry zone, the most formidable constraint on economic development and population growth was malaria, especially in the North-central Province and the Vanni areas of the North-western Province and the Northern Province.
With increasing population growth, overall density of population rose from 54 per sq. km in 1901 to 102 in the mid-1940s, with marked regional variations in density, which ranged in 1901 from over 500 in the Colombo district to less than 50 in most of the dry zone areas. There was no significant change in this pattern in the early twentieth century. Despite this rapid growth in population it remained predominantly rural in all parts of the island, including the south-west coast and the Colombo district.
One important facet of this process of population growth attracted more attention than others at this time—population pressure had reached the point where the land resources of the wet zone were incapable of sustaining peasant agriculture against the competition of the plantations for land. This was most acutely felt in the rubber- and coconut-producing areas of the Western Province and the Southern Province. The coconut-producing areas of the Kurunegala district in the intermediate and dry zones were also beginning to feel the pressure, as indeed were the tea- and rubber-producing areas of the hill country. By this time the plantations were spreading in regions above the 1,066.8m contour where there was either no village population or only a very sparse and scattered one. But within a decade or so after the establishment of plantations there, pressure on land resources followed, on account of both the need for expansion of the plantations and the requirements of the villagers in the periphery of the plantations—some of whom were attracted to these remote areas because of the opportunities for work available on the estates.
One other feature of population growth needs to be mentioned. By the beginning of the twentieth century there was, in and around the city of Colombo, a mainly Sinhalese and Buddhist working class, small in comparison with the plantation proletariat (of Indian workers) but growing in numbers. Most of its members were employed in the transport industry and in the port of Colombo. Among them the most vocal and best-organized group consisted of the railway workers, especially those in the railway workshop in Colombo. There was also an important Indian element, but these Indian workers were largely unskilled, and performed the menial and unpleasant tasks of street cleaning, garbage collection and sanitation.8 All of them—Sinhalese and Indian, skilled and unskilled—faced poor wages and hard working conditions without the benefit of the labour legislation that afforded a modicum of protection and security to the plantation workers. The rates of pay varied with the skills involved, but they were generally low, hours of work were long and conditions of work were hard and unpleasant, with little or no job security. The living standards of the working population, which were already deplorably poor, deteriorated still further with the steadily increasing inflationary pressures of the first decade of the twentieth century.
The clamour for better wages and improved working conditions which ensued provided a powerful stimulus to trade union activity and was the decisive breakthrough to the organization of a trade union movement and the politicization of Colombo’s working class. The focal point of this agitation and discontent was the railway, with its solid core of skilled workers in its main workshops in the city, who could be organized for agitation and strike action with comparative ease, unlike the more dispersed and smaller groups elsewhere who were generally less well paid and who, more often than not, endured working conditions no less rigorous than those of the railway workers. Nevertheless, the unprecedented labour unrest of this period and the agitation for betterment of the working population’s conditions of life reflected a heightening of trade union consciousness more than an awakening of any cohesive sense of class identity.9
In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the colonial government had taken the initiative in adopting a variety of welfare measures on behalf of immigrant workers directed at improving working conditions on the plantations as well as facilitating their travel to the estates on their way from India and back after their spell of work was over for the year. One reason for these welfare measures was the need to conciliate the Indian government with regard to the well-being of these workers; in any case, it was politic to adopt them to ensure a regular supply of labour and encourage the immigrants to remain on the plantations as more or less permanent settlers. Among the rudimentary welfare measures adopted were free housing (never more than shacks, however) and medical facilities. Not that working conditions on the plantations were anything other than hard or wages much above subsistence level, but by the beginning of the twentieth century this trend towards welfare measures for the Indian plantation workers was well established, and it continued and was expanded in the early twentieth century. On the best estates the Indian workers and their families received free medical treatment and hospitalization; schools were established for their children and at these schools free meals were provided for the pupils.
In 1912, the Legislative Council approved an ordinance which permitted a greater degree of inspection, by government officials, of sanitary conditions on the plantations. At the same time, the process of recruiting Indian labour was made more efficient. A Ceylon Labour Commission had been established in 1904 to tap the labour potential of the districts of south India which traditionally supplied Sri Lanka with plantation workers. In 1923, provision was made through an ordinance for a common fund to meet the costs of recruiting unskilled labour. Moreover, immigrant plantation workers had been exempted from the unpopular and irksome poll tax, to which the local population was subject. Then in 1927 came a Minimum Wage Ordinance, the most notable of these welfare measures of the early twentieth century. Under its terms, the wages payable to the various categories of Indian plantation workers were set out and wage boards were established for that purpose. It was also made obligatory for planters to make specified quantities of rice available at subsidised rates to their Indian workers, thus converting an established practice into a statutory requirement.10
The colonial government’s labour legislation was, in fact, exclusively concerned with immigrant Indian workers, in particular those on plantations, who in consequence received statutory benefits denied to their indigenous counterparts. One important trend in the agitation of the Sri Lankan working class in the 1920s was pressure to win for themselves the statutory benefits enjoyed by immigrant labour but from which they had been excluded. Sri Lankan politicians, ‘constitutionalist’ and radical alike, were resentful of the privileged position of Indian plantation workers in regard to the rudimentary welfare benefits that existed at that time. Thus in the debate on the Minimum Wage Ordinance in the Legislative Council, some of Sri Lanka’s leading politicians, including D.S. Senanayake, pointedly referred to this and expressed their disappointment at the fact that the indigenous working class was deprived of the benefits of this measure. Faced with this charge of discrimination the controller of Indian immigrant labour stated that this ordinance had been introduced at the request of, and under pressure from, the Indian government. He added—and here he was either surprisingly oblivious to developments in and around Colombo, or cynically disingenuous—that the special treatment accorded to Indian plantation workers was because this sector of the working population alone was ‘organised’.
Although in the early 1920s, immigrant workers joined the indigenous working class in trade union agitation under Goonesinha’s leadership, this linkage was limited to Indian workers in and around Colombo and no consistent attempt was made to unionize the plantation workers, much less to mobilize them in support of strike action by the more militant urban workers. Indeed, even this limited alliance between immigrant and indigenous urban labour groups did not blossom into unity of action sustained over any great length of time, for when conditions became harder in the late 1920s, the temptation to treat the former as competitors of the latter was too strong to resist, and the working class on the island remained divided into two separate and mutually suspicious if not hostile groups.11
In K. Natesa Iyer, an erstwhile colleague of Goonesinha’s in trade union activity, the Indian workers soon found an effective leader. From organizing the Indian workers in Colombo, Natesa Iyer extended his activities into the much wider field of the plantations, where he played a pioneering role in organizing the plantation workers. But his success in both these areas of activity was achieved at the expense of widening the gulf between the indigenous and immigrant sectors of the working class.
We turn next to the field of education.12 By the first decade of the twentieth century the denominational system, still very much the dominant influence in education, was facing strong criticism from the Buddhist movement, from which there was now a demand that in education the state should assume the main responsibility. There was also agitation for the introduction of a ‘conscience clause’ to prevent Christian organizations from using schools as a convenient machinery for proselytization. The Wace Commission of 1905 did recommend a ‘conscience clause’, but missionary interests succeeded in weakening its effect when it was introduced by throwing the responsibility for invoking it on the individual student (and parent). Thus the ‘conscience clause’ became a negative measure rather than the positive one which critics of the missionaries demanded and about the merits of which the Wace Commission had been convinced.
However, among the missionaries themselves there was a perceptible weakening of support for the denominational system. The Methodists and Anglicans were lukewarm and were inclined to accept a less influential role for the state in education, but there was no general support for this from all missionary groups and especially from the Roman Catholics. They realized that the alternative to the denominational system would be state control of education and this they objected to most vehemently. Thus from the 1990s, the Roman Catholics took the lead in the defence of the status quo in education.
For a brief period in the early 1920s, the denominational system and the missionary interests in education seemed to be in danger from a most unlikely source—the colonial government under Governor Manning. First of all, the Education Ordinance of 1920 extended the negative conscience clause to English-medium schools. At the same time, Manning announced his intention of withdrawing grants from any denominational school in which the majority of students did not belong to the denomination that ran it. But this change of policy did not survive the end of Manning’s tenure of office. However, Buddhists and Hindus, now better represented in the Legislative Council than before, continued their agitation for a positive conscience clause; in 1929 the MacRae Commission recommended its adoption but once more missionary organizations successfully resisted its implementation. Thus by 1931, the denominational system had survived without much change and the missionaries were still very much in control of education.
Nevertheless, there had been a significant increase in the number of government schools in the decade 1920–30: from 919 to 1,490, while proportionately the increase in the number of mission schools was much less—up to 2,502 from 2,122. This latter was an indication of a definite check to the expansion of the missionary school system and the beginning of a policy of consolidation in which the missionary interest concentrated on improvements to existing schools rather than building new ones.
The division between a privileged minority of English—medium schools and a mass of vernacular schools was perpetuated throughout this period. There were three types of schools: vernacular, Anglo-vernacular (bilingual) and English schools. The government’s policy was one of promoting mass vernacular education—education was compulsory between the ages of five and fourteen—and with this in view the vernacular schools levied no fees. Vernacular education aimed at importing ‘basic instruction for living in a community with very limited horizons’ and any curricular innovations were directed towards this end. The number of students in schools increased to 4,41,372 in 1925 and 5,39,755 in 1930 or nearly half the school-age population. There was, as a result, a noticeable improvement in the rate of literacy in general,13 and the gap in this regard between the Christian minority and the adherents of other religions narrowed quite considerably. At the same time, the proportion of children in school to the total population increased in each province. However, vernacular education was very much the poor relation: the abler and better-off students escaped from vernacular schools at the earliest opportunity, for social mobility and economic advancement were alike dependent on the acquisition of an English education.
The Anglo-vernacular schools sought to occupy the no-man’s-land between the much sought after English–medium schools and the rather utilitarian vernacular ones. They taught in the local languages in the mornings and in English in the afternoons. These schools were no great success, as was evident from the very slow increase in their number—from twenty-eight schools in 1900 to forty-six in 1930.
The English-medium schools—the sector of the educational system with most prestige—were organized at two not very clearly demarcated levels, elementary and secondary. The former was rather restricted in scope and catered mainly to those in search of white-collar employment, while the latter offered a varied and much more sophisticated curriculum aimed at preparing students for higher education in British universities and for the professions. The English-medium schools were few in number and all of them levied fees. The content of education in almost all schools, but more particularly the English-medium ones, had a strong literary bias, the natural result on the one hand of the transfer of British educational practice to the colonies—and emulation of the British grammar school tradition—and on the other, of the more mundane business of finance. It was much cheaper to provide such an education than a technical or scientific training.
In the late nineteenth century, little or no progress had been made with regard to agricultural, technical and commercial education. Institutions established to teach these subjects had either all failed by the end of the century or barely survived, while attempts made to bring these subjects into the regular school curricula had failed too. In 1901, a school garden scheme was introduced into the vernacular schools in an avowed bid to give a more practical bias to teaching in them; these school gardens received a government grant in 1911 and elementary textbooks in agriculture were published. Yet at the end of our period, less than a third of the vernacular schools had school gardens and agricultural training had not been integrated into the general curriculum of the schools. The results of the efforts to introduce industrial training in some primary schools after 1916 were even more limited.
When a School of Tropical Agriculture was established at the Royal Botanical Gardens at Peradeniya in 1916, there were high hopes of a real breakthrough in tertiary education. But within six years this institution was downgraded and two farm schools were established, one at Peradeniya, as a successor to the School of Tropical Agriculture, and another in Jaffna: these provided a two-year agriculture course in English, and a one-year course in Sinhalese and Tamil. The Technical School (later, the Ceylon Technical College) established in Colombo in 1894 offered training in engineering and surveying to technical officers in government departments. Private firms gave practical technical and craft training schemes on their own. But all these together did not amount to anything like a sound basis for successful departure into a scheme of tertiary education, even in the restricted field of technical instruction; nor did they provide a really satisfactory counterweight to the predominantly literary bias of the general school curricula.
Projects for a general overhaul of the education system figured prominently in the early twentieth century. Before the First World War, there were two notable reports on education, the Bridge and the Macleod Reports. The first of these was the more avant-garde in outlook and in its recommendations, which were that (i) the mother tongue be the medium of education in elementary grades in all schools; (ii) that a local examination should replace the Cambridge examinations and a local university should be the apex of the educational system; (iii) that a departure from the overwhelming literary bias in curricula should be made; and that (iv) there should be very strict restrictions on entry to secondary education. Not all these recommendations were novel but those that were tended to arouse the suspicion and opposition of both the missionary interests and the leadership of the reform movement, for different reasons. Each of these sets of critics had, in its own way, much greater influence on the Macleod Report, which came out against both local languages and local examinations; its commitment to a university was less than wholehearted. The upshot was that the Education Code of 1914 reorganized education on more efficient lines but with as little disturbance as possible to the status quo. There were no major reforms in education over the next fifteen years.
One of the more constructive achievements of this period was in regard to higher education. In contrast to British India, Sri Lanka had no university and students needed to go abroad for a university education or to take the external examinations conducted by London University. By the last quarter of the nineteenth century there was pressure from the island’s elite for the establishment of a university and by the 1900s this agitation had developed into what came to be known as the ‘university movement’. The early ‘nationalists’ regarded a university as essential to ‘national existence’ and vital for the purpose of arresting the ‘process of denationalization’. The two outstanding figures in the ‘university movement’ were the great Orientalist, Ananda Coomaraswamy and Sir Ponnambalam Arunachalam. The major premise of their case for a Sri Lankan university was that external examinations conducted by British universities were a poor substitute for a real university education in an indigenous university.
It was taken for granted that the initiative for the establishment of a university on the island should come from the state, which would also provide all or most of the finances, but the attitude of the British government to a university in Sri Lanka was lukewarm when it was not ambivalent. In the early stages it regarded the project as something which should be ‘cautiously but firmly encouraged’.14 However, when the pressures for the establishment of a university increased, there were second thoughts: ‘We must avoid the dictates of noisy impetuosity and rhetorical exaggeration, and guard above all things against flooding the country with “failed BAs”.’15 But it was impolitic to oppose it openly and when a subcommittee of the Legislative Council—appointed to consider this question—recommended in 1912 that a university be established in the new buildings of the Royal College in Colombo, the country’s premier government secondary school, the recommendation received the endorsement of the government. Only in 1921, however, was it implemented. Partly, these delays were the inevitable consequences of the outbreak of the war; questions relating to the nature of the university and its site needed to be resolved; but in any case this was not treated as something warranting high priority. What emerged in 1921 was much less than the university for which Coomaraswamy and Arunachalam had agitated; it was a ‘University College’ affiliated to the University of London which would prepare students for the examinations of that university. From the beginning the University College in Colombo was treated as no more than a halfway house to a national university. The legislation necessary for this transformation was ready by 1925, when it was caught up in a prolonged controversy over the best possible site for the university, which was eventually resolved only in 1938. The choice was between a site (or sites) in Colombo and one in or near Kandy.16 By 1927, the Legislative Council had decided in favour of a site in Kandy and resolved too that the university should be ‘unitary and residential’. A draft constitution for it was ready by 1930, but a dozen more years were to pass before the University of Ceylon was established and nearly ten years after that till it was moved to Peradeniya near Kandy. In the meantime, the existence of the University College, established in 1921, was artificially prolonged till 1942.