Marriage Prejudices in Ceylon in Decades Past

A Well-travelled Sinhala Octogenarian**

Hi Michael, I am not sure whether people despised persons of mixed race. I really don’t think so by my own experience. However, when it came to marriage, it was an entirely different matter.

In my growing years I have heard the term Thuppahi, but I thought it
referred to low caste people, not to persons of mixed race. But what was apparent to me is that they, the people in the 1940’s and 50s’and even 60’s, did not permit mixed marriages. This was taboo.

Inter caste marriages were frowned on but only to a point. For instance, a Govi Man marrying a Karava girl was Ok but not the other way around. My first girlfriend was a Govi. I asked her why her parents were so against me.

She said because I was of a lower caste and she named it. At that time I
did not even know my caste. My sister married a person of lower caste but it did not cause a stir but it did upset some of my father’s  in laws.

When my aunt (mothers younger sister) wanted to marry a Burgher, there was pandemonium. Her brother was frothing mad. Nevertheless, her younger brother volunteered to give her away in marriage. His elder bother scuttled it. In the end my mother gave her away.

These intractable problems seem to have gone away nowadays particularly in the major towns. Not sure what it is in the countryside.

I don’t know for sure, but I do believe, that mixed marriages strengthens the physique of the people. It really produces very strong men and women. The mixture, particularly the colour of women, gives rise to beautiful women. Jamaica is a case in point. They have thus far produced four Miss Worlds.

Here are the four Miss Worlds Jamaica produced.

Tony Ann Singh, Miss World,  2019 ….Toni is From Indian stock mixed with black

 

 

 

 

 

Lisa Hanna is a mixture of a partial black women and Syrian/Lebanese man …. Miss World 1992

 

 

 

 Cindy Breakspere She is more white but has a stain of black in her

Joan CrawfordI am not sure but she looked more white ….. Miss World 1976

 

A NOTE

** My wife and I got to know this Karava gentleman in the West Indies in the late 1980s when we visited one of my nephews who was working there. He and his family have moved back to Colombo; and I had the pleasure of his company on a couple of occasions a few years back. This email letter was his amiable response to my circulation of the note on ethnic and caste prejudices embedded within the wielding of the epithet “Thuppahi” (also written as “Tuppahi”) – see https://thuppahis.com/why-thuppahi/.

Let me indicate and stress, here, that the brief explanation of the term Thuppahi within this Item is based on an extensive clarification of its usage in Sinhalese and in Sri Lankan society in the first chapter of the book PEOPLE INBETWEEN (1989, Sarvodaya Publishers) …. a chapter crafted by me during the course of extended stays in Lanka in the late 1980s.

Also note that the term was not confined to the Sinhala-speaking world because it has roots in the term “Topaz” and its variants that was deployed  in the sea-lanes and exchanges associated with the activities of the Portuguese in the Indian Ocean and along the Indian coasts. It is, thus, related to the term “dubash” which identifies those engaged in ship’s chandler services. It also describes a “translator” …. …….and a few Sinhala families with the ge name thuppahige were, indeed, translators.