Surveying our evolution post- 1948, every prospect can only displease, a landscape of ruts left of failed plans and schemes of the various governments, a malformed junkyard of shattered hopes and broken promises. We remember these governments in their days of power; vainglorious, sanctimonious and gaudy. Their big talk: they had ‘gifted’ free education, free health, five-star democracy, public honesty and sterling leadership to the people. These words still echo, rehashed in new terms by the succeeding Sri Lankan politics; fundamental rights, a good life, digitisation, and transparency.
Bravado and eventual failure, a repeating theme.
Passing time has clarified their highfalutin claims. Every statistic gives the lie to the empty boasts; our leaders stand denuded today, their incapabilities and above all the triviality of their personalities now in plain sight. On all these given parameters (education, health, democracy), our neighbouring countries have overtaken us. We had a head start, and that lasted until these other countries organised themselves. Our standards now lag behind; this third decade of the 21st century, we operate with a mid-20th century mindset; Statist, bureaucratic and corrupt!
Today, anybody who can afford the cost, will educate the children overseas, while Singapore or India are the preferred medical destinations, even for the Minister for Health. A damnable vote of no confidence on his own responsibility! The parliamentarians have probably covered themselves (the cover paid for with public money) insurance policies that provide medical services in expensive Singapore hospitals.
The loss of faith on the part of our youth is made plain by the throng at the Passport Office.
In some quarters, it is fashionable to advance the proposition that leaders of an earlier era, soon after independence, were superior to the present crop of politicians. There are reasons to consider this; they have had an education in English; thus, a wide world opened for them. They read the texts in the original language, lessening the inevitable inaccuracies and the confusions that occur when books and ideas of a different civilisation are translated. They also enjoyed the advantage of observing firsthand how institutions are run; the required integrity, maintaining high standards, report writing and accounts keeping.
Yet, it was not a genuine conversion, only a superficial mimic. A pretension that worked to the advantage of the mimic while its practice carried some weight. With every passing year these institutions/concepts lose their vigor, receding into a mere formalistic exercise. Centuries of isolated social evolution in a small, barely noticed country, distant from the imperial power in every sense, cannot be turned sharply by a brief interlude of an occupation.
For the present-day Sri Lankans, the character of their early independence leaders remains mainly unknowable. Most of what is written about this era are panegyric, subjective interpretations by interested parties or hack writers. Looking at the sorry state of the country, its overall failure, the attempt to portray that era as an epic, makes no sense.
I have in my possession two books which may help shed some light on the kind of leadership this country had in these years: ‘From the Third World to the First’, by the legendary Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore, an astute observer of men and events ( It is noteworthy that no Sri Lankan leader has written books on his life and career. Even if an attempt was made, in all probability it would turn out to be a facile self-justification), the other is ‘The Brown Sahib’ by our own Tarzie Vittachi, a well-regarded writer/editor in the 1950s and 60s.
Two writers above flattering or ingratiating themselves with their subject.
I will produce random extracts from their writings from which the reader may draw his conclusions.
Lee Kuan Yew
During his defining career, Lee Kuan Yew visited and met Several Sri Lankan leaders.
‘SWRD Bandaranaike was a brown ‘pukka sahib’, English educated and born a Christian, he had decided on nativism and converted to Buddhism. A dapper little man, articulate, and he spoke as if he was still in the Oxford Union Debating Society!’ (1956)
(A life-long state of immaturity, perhaps reflected even in the melee called ‘big matches’, re-enacting teenage diversions preferred over adult)
Felix Bandaranaike, a controversial politician of 1960s and 70s, was the ’eminence grise’ in the Sirimavo Bandaranaike Government. Thrown into political wilderness by the UNP sweep of 1977, spurned by his own political party, in the later years of his life I believe he became a lay preacher. ‘Felix was bright but not profound. He claimed the good fortune of geography and history had blessed Ceylon with peace and security so that only 2.5% of the Budget was spent on Defence!’ Felix Bandaranaike did not live to see the military conflagration that engulfed the country later.
In 1966 Lee Kuan Yew met Prime Minister Dudley Senanayake. ‘He was a gentle if resigned and fatalistic elderly man’ They had a round of Golf at the Colombo Golf Club. The Prime Minister apologised for the encroaching squatter huts and the goats and cows on the fairways. Yew also visited Nuwara Eliya, staying at the ‘Lodge’, former British Governor’s hill residence. ‘It was dilapidated. Once upon a time it must have been well maintained’, ‘the tea plantations were in a deplorable condition. The locals who had been promoted were not as good supervisors as their British predecessors’
‘J. R. Jayewardene wanted to start an airline because he believed it was a symbol of progress. Singapore Airlines employed a Sri Lankan captain. Would I release him? But how could an airline pilot run an airline?’
A later President even though his retired tea planter brother-in-law could turn around the ruinous airline!
‘It was flattering to have Sri Lanka model their country after Singapore. They announced that they would adopt the Singapore-style Area Licencing scheme to reduce traffic entering the city. But it did not work. They started a housing program in 1982 based on ours, but there was no financing’
‘Jayewardene retired in 1988, a tired man. He had run out of solutions’
Tarzie Vittachi
A well-regarded journalist, Tarzie Vittachi had a ring side view of the frolics and the follies of our early decades of independence (The Brown Sahib-1962)
‘Take away the sing-song intonation of the Brown Sahib and you will believe that he is a product of one of the British public schools. His vocabulary is fairly extensive, his tastes are carefully cultivated, his values conform to the British public-school tradition and his manners are as good or as bad as those of the average educated Briton.’
‘His bathroom is out of a lush home-decorator’s journal. His proudest boast is that he has a bathroom for every bedroom, and a ‘bidet’ for every bathroom’
‘The highest honour available was a knighthood. On every New Year’s morning and on the birthday of the Queen so many knights were created that they would have to eat buffett at Arthur’s round table! An Englishman had to risk this life repeatedly during the war to win recognition. The road to knighthood was long, narrow and straight. It took a Don Bradmon to earn a knighthood for Cricket and a John Gielgud for his contribution to drama.
Did the Commonwealth Relations Office never realise that knighthoods were showering down in South Asia faster than the autumn leaves in Vallambrosa? They all knew.
But the new Dominions were extremely sensitive to any flights from London.
On one or two occasions a British Governor tried to whisper a word or two about the necessity of maintaining high standards of capacity and dignity in the Honours List. He asked tentatively whether it would not be advisable to drop Mr. Distiller, Mr. Hotelier and Mr. Pill-Pusher’s nominations for knighthoods since their unsavoury reputations had penetrated even the Government House?
He must have wished he had never spoken. The devastating retort was ‘Do you want to go back to doing your own washing-up in South Kensington?’
‘Bandaranaike was a classmate of Anthony Eden at Oxford. That entitled him to a great deal of respect for his frequent ‘obiter dicta’ on global politics- not because he had shown any practical skill in applying his knowledge, or any will to apply his theoretical appreciation of the laws of governing but rather because he being an Oxford man was entitled to special attention. There were people who even claimed for Bandaranaike that he was of a higher intellectual stature than big brother Nehru because Bandaranaike hailed from Oxford, an older and therefore more cultured than Nehru’s Cambridge’
On a black-tie occasion at the Delhi Gymkhana Club Tarzie Vittachi met an Indian ‘Black Knight’ with a manner both pompous and affable.
‘When were you up, my boy’ asked the Indian Black Knight
‘Beg pardon?’ I said, dimly aware I was getting out of my social depth.
‘You must have been up about the same time as my nephew,’ said the Black Knight
I still did not catch on.
‘He was at Balliol, of course’ he explained.
With clear eyes Vittachi took in the watershed of 1956, the fun and the frolics included.
‘In Ceylon the dam burst in 1956, washing the regime of Rt.Hon. Sir John Kotalawala CH, KCMG, and its attitudes into a limbo. When the Bandaranayake Government romped into office the entire Cabinet insisted on being sworn in wearing national dress with a blue bandolero’
‘A Sinhalese newspaper ran a story about a provincial cultural society resolving to campaign for making Sinhalese the official language of the United Nations. The editor, with no hint of the sardonic, rated the story big enough for a major headline.’
‘Bandaranaike was a popularly elected Asian Prime Minister trying to preserve his Party’s incredibly inept parliamentary sway, with the cost of living soaring every hour, his industrial and agricultural plans swamped in apathy, incompetence and corruption’
And some things never change.
National mendicancy- ‘The begging bowl and the out-stretched palm have been symbols of the Orient for over 2000 years. But they have always been symbolic of individual penury. In the first decades of independence mendicancy has been raised to national scale’
The words- sometimes in English, mainly in Sinhala, they keep coming- ‘nation building too often been distorted by excessive passion and diffused by magniloquent but meaningless verbiage, Bandaranaike was adept at this’
To play the roles; ‘Prime Minister’, ‘Member of Parliament’, ‘Head of Department’, ‘Policeman’, in fact all so called high positions, there are plenty of zestful volunteers. We almost forget that these roles evolved and were defined in a very dissimilar culture. In addition to their legal definitions, these roles are validated by certain assumptions and carry certain connotations which are primarily unwritten. In their absences, the role (the position) becomes a caricature.
Brown Sahib or the brown plebeian, who may deliver?
Karl Marx suggested that history repeats, first as tragedy and then farce. In Sri Lanka, the sequence could well be a reverse, first the farce and then the tragedy.
Two sides of the same coin? Surely, in their nature, beliefs and capabilities, there are more commonalities than differences between them.
As the nation continues on its anguished search for the ‘Sugar-Candy Mountain’, we are reminded of the last paragraph of George Orwell’s immortal ‘Animal Farm’.
‘Twelve voices were shouting in anger, and they were all alike. No question, now, what had happened to the faces of the pigs. The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.’