Mick Moore of Susssex University ** … with highlighting imposed within this essay by The Editor, Thuppahi
Richmond Castle is a large and elegant villa beautifully located in a wooded estate on a hill above the Kalu Ganga not far from Kalutara town. It was built at enormous expense between 1900 and 1910, by Padikara Mudali Nanayakkara Rajawasala Appuhamilage Don Arthur de Silva Wijesinghe Siriwardena, aka Arthur Silva, Mudaliyar. Were it located in the UK, it would be a major tourist attraction. It is however little visited or even known. One reason is that it has languished – and crumbled – for decades in the hands of the Public Trustee, who has neither the resources nor the incentive to promote or even maintain it. Arthur Silva left the property to the care of the Public Trustee in the expectation that a Trust would be established to manage it and the small boys orphanage attached. That has never happened.
I visited Richmond Castle recently for the first time. Let me explain why it piqued my interest. I am at the moment slowly writing on book on the governance of Sri Lanka since Independence. Every history has a pre-history. I am brushing up my general understanding of the deeper history of the island. Some aspects of my interpretation may become a little contentious. First, I argue that the deep impact of four centuries of Portuguese, Dutch and British rule over the Low Country and the Maritime Provinces has been downplayed in recent nationalist historiography. More controversially perhaps, I find it useful to view Sri Lanka from around the 1970s as suffering a similar kind of ‘rust belt’ de-industrialisation that we associate with the former manufacturing heartlands of the US, the UK and France.
Plantation production, especially of tea, has been conventionally perceived as a branch or the rural or agrarian economy. That is misleading. In terms of capital intensity, employment structures, the relentlessness of production and processing operations and the complexity and reach of management and ownership organisations, the plantation economy was essentially industrial. In the 1970s, Sri Lanka was not so much an agrarian country characterised by an original condition of underdevelopment as a post-industrial economy that had not yet found new sources of livelihood in the new global economy. To get a better understanding of its political economy, I find that it is often more useful to compare Sri Lanka to the UK than to, for example, India.
The research that I did in Sri Lanka in the 1970s and 1980s focused mainly on the small farm sector – i.e. the ‘peasantry’ that featured very strongly in the political imaginations of so many intellectuals, academics and ideologues at that time (Mick Moore, The State and Peasant Politics in Sri Lanka, Cambridge University Press, 1985). For the current book, I need to examine more closely the non-agricultural economy, the various elements of the employed proletariat, and, especially, the local capitalist class that developed in association with the British-dominated tea plantation economy. Michael Roberts’s excellent work on the Karava of course provides an essential base (Caste Conflict and Elite Formation: The Rise of a Karāva Elite in Sri Lanka, 1500–1931, Cambridge University Press, 1982.) There is however more to be said on other components of the early 20th century capitalist elite, and how it has succeeded in dominating national politics for so long.
Arthur Silva’s descendants are not part of that story of extended elite domination. He did not have any. The tourist guide narrative about Richmond Castle concludes on a note of tragedy. Arthur and his beautiful aristocratic wife, Clarice Matilda Maude Suriyabandara, longed for children, but she never bore any. The marriage broke up after 32 years. Arthur spent the remainder of his life in the Queen’s Hotel in Kandy, dying in 1947. He handed over Richmond Castle to the Public Trustee, with plans to establish a dedicated Trust that have not been implemented to this day.
For the purposes of my book, the stories of Arthur Silva and Richmond Castle can vividly illustrate the character of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century Ceylonese elite. After visiting the Castle, I began to search for more details. I was lucky enough to get very helpful responses from Michael, Prabath de Silva and KKS Perera. Here are some of the things that we seem to know for certain:
- Arthur’s father, Nanayakkarage Don Paulis Silva, was originally from the Baddegama area, and made his fortune around there and in Galle and Colombo. The main sources of his fortune were typical of other members of the elite: trade, plumbago mining, arrack distilling and plantations. One report says he was known as the ‘plumbago king’.
- He was a little untypical in using the name Silva despite being of Goigama caste. Further, he converted from Buddhism to Catholicism, despite Anglicanism being the more natural choice for someone of his wealth and status. He was a large-scale philanthropist, especially to Catholic causes, including St Joseph’s College in Colombo.
- Arthur was a devout Catholic. He attended St Joseph’s and later visited Rome to be knighted by the Pope.
- The family owned a number of large houses, including the famous Isabel Court that used to stand on the Galle Road at Kollupitiya.
- No expense was spared in building Richmond Castle. Arthur’s wedding, that took place soon after, was an incredibly lavish affair.
But is everything we are told about Richmond House true, or is there an element of mythmaking? It is plausible that Arthur imported two shiploads of teak wood directly from Burma for its construction, and imported all the tiles and stained glass. It is less plausible that absolutely all the building materials were imported. Some of the accounts of the lifestyle also a bit exaggerated. Did Arthur really maintain a permanent staff of 50 entertainers to amuse his guests?
One of the more interesting legends concerns the design of the house. The tourist guide will tell you that Arthur was at school in England with Raja Rajeswara Sethupathi, Maharaja of Ramnad (in Tamil Nadu). On returning from England, he visited the Maharaja and was so impressed by his (new or newish) palace, designed by a British architect, that he, Arthur, requested a copy of the plans so that he could construct an exact replica. The Maharaja would not agree. So, Arthur later paid a second visit to Ramnad, taking with him two Ceylonese architects who quietly recorded the whole design, and then replicated the palace on the banks of the Kalu Ganga.
Attempts to check other sources for this story can be confusing. There is one item in the Daily News of 2018 – Restoring a castle, remembering its owner | Daily News – that identifies the inspiration as the palace the Maharaja of Okraman, in Calcutta. Since ‘Okraman’ simply sounds wrong, and there is no other evidence of that any such maharaja ever existed, we can conclude that this is simple error. ChatGPT points to the palace of the Maharaja of Bharatpur in Rajasthan. That seems totally implausible. Bharatpur is a massive palace by a lake built in c18th. It bears no detectable resemblance to Richmond Castle. It is however a very high end hotel. ChatGPT’s responses are generated statistically. We can assume that it identified Bharatpur because that is the word that most frequently appears alongside ‘Maharaja’ and ‘palace’ in the texts that it searches.
There is no reason to doubt that, whether it was Arthur or people around him who first articulated the story of copying the design of the Maharaja’s palace, that the reference was to Ramnad. Arthur and the Maharaja of Ramnad had been to school together. But was Richmond Castle actually a copy of anything? I doubt it.
Again, it looks nothing like any of those parts of the Ramnad/Ramanathapuram Maharaja’s palace that are pictured on the web. That really is a palace. Richmond Castle is a large villa. The interior woodwork of the grand hall in Richmond Castle is, as the guide points out, Kandyan inspired.
The building itself is sometimes labelled as Edwardian. Another description is a mixture of Dutch Greek and Roman. It is a melange, albeit quite a pleasant melange, of different architectural styles – not unlike many country houses built in Britain in the Edwardian era. And there is a timing problem. Arthur was born in 1889. The construction of Richmond Castle began around 1900, when he was only about 11 years old. It was completed in 1910, the year of his marriage to Clarice. Arthur’s father died in 1901. He had previously been described as owning a country estate and a teak bungalow outside Kalutara. Perhaps he played a bigger role in commissioning Richmond Castle than his heir wanted to admit?
There are some very impressive elements to the design of Richmond Castle, including an underfloor cooling system that captured the breezes and funnelled them into the ground floor rooms. Had the house not been well designed, it would probably have fallen completely apart by now. But it is hard to believe that the design owes much to any Maharaja’s palace. We can however imagine why Arthur might have been tempted to assert such a connection. At school in Britain, he would likely have discovered how arrivistes into the economic elite would be teased and disparaged for their ‘new money’ until they had purchased a big house and a country estate and bedded down sufficiently into the landowning life-style that they became ‘old money’ and could join in disparaging the next generation of ‘new money’. The ancestors of Raja Rajeswara Sethupathi had acquired Ramnad kingdom (later a zamindari estate) by conquest and ruled it for several centuries. From the perspective of the British upper classes, Indian zamindars and Princes were authentic landowning aristocrats. Arthur’s money was new. His father had made it in trade. Arthur clearly loved a good show. He possibly gave in to a natural temptation to claim that his own large Edwardian villa was descended from a real Maharaja’s palace.
Additional sources:
http://www.worldgenweb.org/lkawgw/gen3175.html
Restoring a castle, remembering its owner | Daily News
Mick Moore
7 January 2024
END
** EDITORIAL NOTE from Michael Roberts
I have known Mick Moore since the early 1970s. He participated in the Conference on “Agriculture in the Economic Development of Sri Lanka” organised by the Ceylon Studies Seminar of Peradeniya University and held at Gannoruwa in August 1974 ………………………………………… (see https://catalogue.nla.gov.au/catalog/379636). It was probably then, as I recall, that he stayed at our house in the Peradeniya Campus; and it must have been in the summer of 1976 that Mick and his wife lodged me in their home inalong the coast of Sussex when I was on a visit to UK for a number of academic engagements.
ALSO SEE
Mick Moore: The State and Peasant Politics in Sri Lanka. Cambridge University Press. 2008 ISBN 9780521047760
