by Alec Waugh
“When I came out here first,” my host explained, “just after World War I, I was assured in our London Office that if I worked reasonably hard I could retire at the age of fifty and settle down comfortably in England. I was lucky; I came out when you still could save. A young chap coming out to-day has all he can do to make ends meet.” He spoke quickly, as though he were in a hurry, as though a succession of problems was crowding in on him for his decision. His lean figure, his neat clothes, his short, trim moustache were self-expressive. He was working under heavy pressure, living under strict restraint. He was a not unfamiliar type, the Englishman who is resolved not to let ‘the tropics get him down’.
It was close on ten before the party finally broke up. Every quarter of an hour a fresh tray of canapés was offered. I could well understand why cocktail parties in Colombo are not followed by elaborate dinners. In the Galle Face Hotel, however, the evening was just beginning. A ship was in. Candlelit tables were on the lawn. On the marble dancing platform, as a backcloth to the band, was a large illuminated model of a liner. It was all very like a film, the sea and the stars, the women in their trailing skirts, the men in their short white jackets, the waiters with their long white skirts and tortoiseshell combs holding their hair in place. Everyone was gay. Eyes were bright, hands were being held. How many shipboard romances must not have come to flower in Colombo? Could the separateness of those two worlds—the Residents’ and the Tourists’—have been better exemplified, I thought, than by the contrast between the party that I had left and the party to which I had now returned: early hours for the men who had to work next morning and all-night dancing for those who were making the most of this one evening in the tropics.
Two days later I went up-country. I stayed there for a week, and during those seven days I came to realise that just as Ceylon is divided into three separate worlds, so is the world of the British residents subdivided into Up-country and Colombo.
Dambatene—the station for it is Haputale—though less than a hundred miles by road, stands five thousand feet above sea level and is a ten-hour train journey from Colombo. During the last half of the journey the whole feel of the landscape altered; I had no longer any sense of being in the tropics; there were no palm trees and little paddy. Instead there were rough jungle grass, grey-green rubber trees and long neat lines of low-pruned tea shrubs. With the soil showing red between them, it looked as though a gigantic comb had been dragged down the sides of the hills and across the valleys. The air grew colder every mile. First I closed one window, then the next. First I put on a coat and then a jersey. The change of altitude was so great that on my first night I passed right out, before dinner, half-way through my second highball. But it was not only the appearance of the landscape nor the chill in the air that made me feel I was entering a different planet. It was the whole way of life there that was different. I had exchanged the administrative atmosphere of desks and files and telephones for the pioneer’s contact with the soil.
The man who was to be my host—the superintendent of the Dambatene Group—had been described to me in Colombo as ‘a planter of the old school’. He was close on sixty, and I visualised that description in terms of hard drinking and hard swearing, a sagging paunch, food-stained clothing, and bloated features. He could not have been less like that. He was short and thin and dapper, with well-cut, well-chosen clothes that were just not brand new; he could have served as a model for the advertisement pages of Esquire, and though he was not abstemious, not by any means, he was invariably ready for his work next morning. All the same, it was easy to see what they had meant in Colombo by describing him as the ‘old school’ planter. He used the word nigger’ to describe his coolies. He shouted at his houseboys—of whom he had three in addition to a cook, several gardeners, and a maid for his wife—as though he were a sergeant-major dealing with an awkward squad. At the same time, there could be no question of the care he devoted to his coolies nor of the respect and regard in which they held him. He had had, moreover, the same cook and houseboys for six years.
He was shortly to retire and reviewed the prospect with some concern. “I’m afraid the old Hag and I will find England a little difficult at first. The cost of living and all that.” I thought that money was the least of the problems in adjustment that awaited him and strongly pressed the advantages of a small West Indian island.
I had been told in Colombo that I should feel up-country as though I had been transported to the nineteenth century, and, indeed, the life of the planter has not appreciably altered in essentials during fifty years. Then as now he is on duty all day long. He is up when it is still dark for muster-roll, and his day has not ended when the coolies have been dismissed to their lines at four o’clock. Another ninety minutes of book-work waits him. Apart from the general supervision in fields and factory, he has the welfare officer’s responsibilities of health and pay and of domestic problems. Sunday is the one free day; so that he can wake fresh for tennis, Saturday is not a big night up-country. Club-night, the only night when the club is open, is in the middle of the week, on Wednesday or on Thursday. I went to Banderawella for the mid-week evening of the Bow Club—so christened in the ’80s because archery was a more fashionable sport than tennis. The day began quietly enough with tea and tennis, but it was close on midnight before I dined. It was a considerably dimensioned kind of night. That is only once a week, however; ordinarily the planter does not have his first drink till he has bathed and changed, close upon half-past seven. Directly after dinner he goes to bed. He is asleep by ten.
It is a good life and a healthy life, and it is comfortable to the extent that there is no servant and no housing problem. But it is strenuous, exacting, and exhausting. And it is not surprising that there should be, between the up-country planters and the Colombo ‘office wallahs’, the same atmosphere of potential friction that you find on a military campaign between the combat soldier and the staff. The planter does not consider that the manager on the coast realises his day-to-day problems with weather, coolies, and machinery, and the manager complains that the planter does not appreciate the problems of the coast—the long office hours of work with no siesta in the heavy heat, with a bare half-hour or so of exercise before dusk has fallen; an atmosphere of potential friction that is slightly exacerbated by the change of authority that has taken place during the last half century. In the early days, Colombo took its orders from up-country. The original pioneers came out, developed the soil and employed agents on the coast to ship their produce and, when they retired, to manage their estates. Their children, however, whom they had sent home to school, as often as not preferred to stay there, leaving the agents to take over the estates themselves, so that within a generation the power had passed from up-country to Colombo. It is the coast that gives the orders now.
Just as Ceylon is divided into three separate worlds, so is the resident’s world subdivided into up-country and Colombo. They meet amicably enough on fixed occasions, in August in Colombo for Governor’s Cup Week, and at Easter and Christmas at the hill-station of Nurewa Aliya. But they are separate, none the less.
In a similar way, I was to discover later, is the third world, of the Ceylonese themselves, subdivided by three races: the Sinhalese, the Tamils, and the Moors.
I met through friends in the American Embassy a Norwegian-born American engineer, who was supervising on behalf of the Ceylon Government an irrigation scheme undertaken by an American heavy construction company that would, by the damming of a river, irrigate 60,000 acres of paddy-fields. In his middle fifties he had sailed for California soon after World War I “to see what it was like”, resolving on the way, before he had set foot on American soil, to become a citizen. Panama decided him. He had wanted, he told me, “to be linked up with a people who could build a thing like the Canal”. In the course of a Saturday-night gala dinner we happened to sit next each other. Long before the band struck up ‘God Save the King’, he had invited me to see the project.
We were bound
for the eastern seaboard, a section that for several centuries had been neglected. During my stay at Dambatene I had been taken to the spur of land on which Lipton had built his shooting-box. It faces south. On a clear day you can see the sea, sixty miles away. In the middle distance I noticed a broad stretch of water. “That’s a tank,” my host informed me. “Once it watered the entire district. It’s abandoned now. All the dark stuff’s jungle. Rotten with malaria. There’s a Sinhalese proverb that before malaria came a cock could jump from roof to roof all the way from Hamvantota to Kandy. Look at it now.”
He explained to me what had happened.
When the Sinhalese first came south from India in the fifth century B.C., they landed in the north-east section, to find there an arid seaboard backed with mountains; they apparently never realised that beyond the mountains was a fertile region watered by a monsoon. In consequence, they irrigated their arid section with an elaborate system of great reservoirs now known as tanks. They had soon created a genuine, rich way of life; then, in the eleventh century, the invaders came, the Tamils to the north, the Moors to the east. Gradually the Sinhalese were driven back into the hills, destroying on a ‘scorched earth’ policy their irrigation system as they went; soon a great belt of malarious jungle guarded them. Then Europe came, the Portuguese first and next the Dutch; finally, in the Napoleonic Wars, the British, to capture the last Sinhalese stronghold, Kandy. By that time only the south-west quarter, which was protected by mountains and watered by the monsoon, was suitable for immediate development.
As I stood on that spur of hill, I could form an idea of the destruction that had been wrought by the successive invasions— Tamil and European. But it was not till I crossed the mountains and went over to the eastern seaboard that I realised its full extent. Mile stretched after derelict mile, acre after acre, with flocks of monkeys bounding across the roads and wild elephants emerging from the jungle to take their evening bath in the abandoned tanks.
We made the journey in easy stages. Ceylon is a good place to travel in by road. Every twenty or thirty miles a clean, well-serviced rest-house can supply a meal at any hour. The rest-house is a kind of club; local authorities and inspectors put up there on their tours of duty. My companion was a good mixer, with the American flair for getting quickly on to terms of .friendliness with strangers, and every evening after sunset we would sit, some half-dozen of us, round a table discussing, over a highball or a glass of beer, the island’s problems. I could hardly have had a better opportunity of meeting the Ceylonese. The fact that I was travelling with an American gave me a neutral status, and the particular project on which he was engaged provided a typical example of the kind of task that the new Government has set itself, it having been one of Ceylon’s previous complaints that the British had only exploited those districts which would pay quick dividends to the Imperial exchequer, neglecting those areas whose development would only benefit the local population. I learnt a lot during this trip of the spirit in which the Ceylonese are undertaking their new responsibilities. What struck me most were the things I did not find. I had expected that new officials would be self-assertive and self-important, quick to take offence, ready to stand upon their dignity, self-conscious of their new powers. They were nothing of the kind. They were quietly and impressively self-confident.
The atmosphere of a heavy-construction project is very similar to that of a military operation on lines of communication—the making of roads, the maintenance of vehicles, the draining of swamps, anti-malarial precautions, control of the local population, the building of camps, the welfare services, the rival claims of field and headquarters staff—they are both much the same. As I trailed around after my companion, I felt myself carried back six years, to the Persian Gulf, when American and British troops were hurrying through supplies to Russia. The general feeling here as there was of a new Allied Division taking over.
It often happens that the unplanned, unpremeditated part of a trip proves to be in the last analysis the most profitable. Galoya had been no part of my programme when I left England. Indeed, I had never heard of it. But by that luckily made friendship with the American engineer I got an insight not only into what Ceylon was in process of becoming but of what she had once been. I saw the great reservoirs of water, the immense medieval tanks that are now being brought back into use; in addition, I saw the ruins of Polonnaruwa, the twelfth-century capital. That was the high spot of my trip.
They are unlike any ruins that I have seen. They are not impressive in the way that Baalbeck is, or the Acropolis. You do not get from them the feeling that here flowered a culture higher than anything that we may know again. Nor are they impressive in the way that Stonehenge is, or the Pyramids. You do not find yourself wondering how on earth they did it. No, they are not impressive in those ways. They have instead the last things that you would expect to find in a ruined city, charm and intimacy.
I reached Polonnaruwa in the early evening, an hour or so after sunset. I had left the engineer behind me at Galoya. I had eaten on the train. I was the only visitor at the guest-house. I sat out on the verandah with a drink. It was very quiet. The crows which maintain such a din at Kandy and Colombo were, if present, silent. Gradually my eyes became accustomed to the darkness, gradually I became aware of reflected objects, almost at my feet. Gradually I became aware that the rest-house had been built on the very edge of a vast lake. Later a waxing moon came up. Surrounded by those vague blurred distances, I felt as though I were in a yacht.
Next morning I asked where the ruins were. The steward stretched out his arms, sideways and inclusively. “All round,” he said. They cover, indeed, an area of several miles. There are temples and palaces and pavilions. There is a large royal bath, and there is a smaller one, built in the shape of a full-blown eight-petalled lotus. There are several traditional dagabas—solid hemispherical structures on a circular platform, surmounted by a conical spire that enshrines sacred relics. One of those, the Vatadage, is extremely beautiful; it consists of two circular terraces, elaborately carved with concentric circles of pillars and squatting Buddhas facing the four entrances. Near by is a rock-hewn shrine containing three huge Buddhas, one seated, one standing, and one recumbent. There is also a Siva temple containing a surprisingly realistic replica of the chief object of Hindu veneration.
For five hundred years Polonnaruwa lay buried by the jungle. Old though it is, however, I could not see it merely as the survival of a way of life now obsolete.
A few days earlier I had spent the week-end at Kandy. It was the night of the full moon. The Temple of the Tooth was lit with electric bulbs. Outside was a long row of stalls for the sale of candles and little beds of flowers, white and orange, arranged on cardboard circles that the devout could carry between their hands. The steps leading to the temple were lined with wailing cripples. The courts within were heavy with frangipane. At every candle-lit shrine were little beds of flowers, with kneeling figures bent low before their offering. It was touching and it was beautiful.
The atmosphere among the ruins of Polonnaruwa was identical. Early though it was that I took my walk there, already several little groups in their saris and long white skirts were moving from one temple to the next. They had come not as sightseers but as worshippers. They had no flowers, but they had brought their candles. The rock-hewn Buddhas had the same significance for them as the Buddhas in Kandy and in Kelanya; the same significance, moreover, that they had held for the men who had hewn them out eight centuries before. There was a direct continuity of worship, a direct continuity of faith and ritual. The Sinhalese whom I had seen carrying their little beds of flowers to their shrines at Kandy were not only the descendants of, but the same people as the ancestors who had built this city.
Three worlds that do not mix; and those worlds subdivided into their separate sections, up-country and Colombo for the Europeans, Sinhalese and Moors and Tamils for the Ceylonese, with those subdivisions very often redivided, particularly in the case of the Sinhalese who ha
ve an elaborate caste system, with origins going back to the days of the first settlements which still prohibits inter-marriage between castes—divisions and subdivisions and redivisions; yet at the same time it is the charm, it is the miracle of Ceylon that those different worlds, and different subdivisions, should amicably coexist side by side in this small island on terms of more than amity—of genuine fellow feeling.
I was present for the Independence Day celebrations. One of its most impressive features was the relay marathon that had been arranged from the four corners of the island, each runner bringing the same message of goodwill in a different language—Tamil, Sinhalese, Arabic, and English. All along the way the runners were cheered and welcomed by the villagers; finally they arrived running side by side into the arena. The messages were read out, then the Prime Minister, D. S. Senanayake, placed them ceremonially in a satin wood box, scattered jewels—the local sapphire— over them, and laid them in the foundation-stone of the memorial building. That ceremony was very typical of Ceylon—of four peoples living there as one.
Right through the island there is a sense of friendliness. Nowhere in the tropics have I found it easier to meet the local population upon equal terms. My last days in Colombo were spent almost exclusively in feminine Sinhalese society. She was thirty-two, married but temporarily separated from her husband. When I met her first at dinner I was not sure whether it would be ‘correct’ for a member of the Karawa class to appear alone in public with an Englishman, so instead of ringing her up next morning, I sent her round a note asking whether she would rather I arranged a party instead of as if we were in New York or London, she would have preferred … She replied that she was not bound by any such conventions.