Harendra Alwis, presenting the “Speech Dr Martin Wickramasinghe as Chief Guest at the Trinity College Kandy Prize Giving of 1971″
On the seventh of February 1971, Trinity College, Kandy held its ninety-ninth Prize Giving. Lakshman Wickremesinghe, Bishop of Kurunegala, took the chair. The chief guest was an eighty-year-old man from Koggala who had had less than five years of village schooling, who had left home at fourteen to look for work, and who had taught himself English well enough to read Darwin, Freud, Malinowski and Berriedale Keith — and well enough, more remarkably, to leave the language alone when he came to write. He had by then written Gamperaliya and Viragaya. He was the moral centre of Sinhala imagination. He had come to the great missionary school in the hills to defend the memory of a ScMMartin Wickremasngheottish missionary who had died eight years earlier in 1963.
Martin Wickremasinghe
Fraser and his wife
A mere eight weeks after this speech was delivered, boys not much older than the ones sitting in front of him would be attacking police stations with shotguns and home-made bombs.
But the defence he had come to make was not a small one. By 1971 the charge against A. G. Fraser — principal of Trinity from 1904 to 1924, and no more the founder of the school than Wickramasinghe was the founder of the Sinhala novel — had settled into national common sense that any charge against the pupils of the school must be laid at the foot of its greatest Principal, and that charge was that he had taught Trinity’s boys to despise their own language and to ape the English.
Wickramasinghe stood up and said it was a myth. He was the last man in Ceylon who needed to curry favour with a Christian missionary school, and the first whose word on the subject would be believed. He spent it saying plainly what he knew.
- G. Fraser and his wife Beatrice at the 30th Anniversary celebrations of Achimota School which he founded.
What he says in Fraser’s defence is, on its own terms, correct and finely observed. The imitators on English culture were not manufactured at Trinity; they were delivered to Trinity and any number of missionary schools that collectively produced Sri Lanka’s middle class, ready-made, by families who had bought costume and mistaken it for an education. His evidence is a young Trinitian, newly apprenticed to Baur & Co., borrowing a rupee from him and taking care to specify that he intended to buy soap with it, and that it must come from Cargills. It is a superb piece of observation — the whole comprador class in a cake of soap — and Wickramasinghe draws exactly the right conclusion from it: that the fault lay with a middle class which had absorbed the externals of English life without troubling to reach the literature underneath, and which was therefore neither English nor anything else.
He is right about much else too, and unfashionably brave about it. He distinguishes nationalism from chauvinism and refuses to let the second hide inside the first. He attacks the revivalist monks to their faces, and observes that Buddhism has always contained two cultures, the ascetic and the lay, and that the present confusion is a consequence of monks trying to impose the first upon the second. He turns the Buddha against Sri Lanka’s Buddhist revivalists, pointing out that the Buddha invented, in the same century as the Greeks, a tradition whose whole content was the criticism of tradition — a formulation he takes, without acknowledgement, from Popper, and which is the strongest philosophical card in the speech. He attacks the Sanskritising pandits who were then manufacturing scientific terminology in languages they did not speak for a science they did not practise, and holds up George and Muriel Beadle’s The Language of Life as the counter example to be folowed where genetics is taught by a Nobel laureate, in language a schoolboy could follow. And he predicts, with eight weeks to spare, that the students will rise.
But look at how the speech is built. “I surmised.” “I thought.” “I believe.” “I think.” “Must have failed.“ The hedges are everywhere, and they are honest, and the honesty is disarming. What they conceal is that the speech’s historical foundation is almost entirely guesswork. Wickramasinghe reasons the way a novelist reasons — excavating the most telling detail, and extrapolating outward to construct a whole world out of it. A boy asks for a rupee, and from that rupee is deduced the class composition of a school, the cultural failure of two decades, and the defeat of a principal. It is a magnificent instrument. It is also, when pointed at an archive, a very poor microscope.
What he does with Fraser’s own words give it away. He quotes the famous sentence — “a thorough knowledge of the mother tongue is indispensable to true culture or real thinking power” — and he takes it, as he says, from a speech by the sitting principal, Lionel Fernando. He never went to the source. Had he walked across the main hall to the school library, he would have found the sentence sitting inside a paragraph that would have transformed his speech. Fraser’s 1908 report begins with his shock at finding senior boys who could neither read nor write Sinhala or Tamil, and at a school in which any boy who spoke his own language was thrashed for it. It observes that teaching in a language the child cannot yet think in reduces education to memory work, and that when Latin and Greek are added to English history and English readers, “the situation became Gilbertian.” And it then announces the remedy: Latin made optional, the hours given to Greek given instead to book-keeping and shorthand, the vernaculars made compulsory for all — and, by the following year, large and well-equipped laboratories, chemical, physical and biological, with the new sciences to be introduced “whilst keeping them related and founded on the vernaculars.”
Founded on the vernaculars. In 1908, in a Kandyan school, with the mercantile firms howling for English clerks, Fraser had already welded together the two things that Wickramasinghe, in 1971, holds apart and cannot yet join. Fraser did not merely announce it. That same year he recruited a Cambridge scientist, Norman Campbell, who arrived in Colombo in November 1908, toured the laboratories at the Colombo Academy (Royal College) for advice, and had Trinity’s own laboratories constructed by December 1909. Campbell’s first report says that the two objects towards which the science teaching should bend are medicine and agriculture, and that Trinity might frame a course in nature study “which could be used in the village schools throughout Ceylon.” The school Wickramasinghe was addressing had a farmers’ club, a workshop, and a staff paper drafted in 1928 — J. McLeod Campbell’s private Survey — insisting that “the divorce between scientific thought and constructional activity and invention is unnatural,” and asking, forty-three years before Wickramasinghe asked it, whether the vernacular in which science was to be taught would be the language people actually spoke or a literary Sinhala “as remote from it as Chaucer is from us“.
So when the old man reaches his peroration and swings, as though onto a new and foreign subject, from culture to technology, and closes on Churchill’s wartime line about the future belonging to scientific nations, he is standing on ground that had been broken sixty-three years earlier by the man he had come to praise, and he does not know it. Ironoically, neither does the school, who had already begun to valorise Fraser but had already all but forgotten what he saw, foresaw and shaped an entire school to do something about it.
The same want of reading produces his one flat error of fact. “Fraser’s attempt to introduce Sinhalese to Trinity College must have failed,” he says, “because of the opposition of parents.” But it did not fail. The opposition was real and it was vicious, and not an insignificant of it came from parents. But it came chiefly from elsewhere: from the Colombo missionary schools and the Ceylon Educational Association, and even the nationalists who called Fraser’s boys “mentally decrepit” and called Fraser himself “anti-native,” “bribed,” “a conspirator,” and a man training his pupils to be “hewers of wood and drawers of water”; and from Buddhist polemicists, who described Trinity as a hot-house where innocent Buddhist boys were slaughtered by diplomatic propaganda. And yet, Fraser held. Perhaps at first thanks to his pedigree, but later undoubtedly by the strength of his own record. By 1922 Valesca Reimann was reporting that this particular form of opposition had long since died down, that many of the reforms had been adopted, that education in Ceylon had not collapsed, and that keen opponents had in many cases become converts. Under Stopford in the 1930s the vernaculars became not merely subjects but a medium of instruction. And fifty years on, the state itself adopted the policy. Fraser did not lose. He won — and the reason Wickramasinghe cannot see this is that the victory had been so thoroughly championed by so many including former opponents, that it no longer looked like Fraser’s.
A. G. Fraser and his wife Beatrice at the 30th Anniversary celebrations of Achimota School which he founded.
Which brings us to the letter that is missing from his speech. Fraser’s word was always plural: the vernaculars. Sinhala and Tamil and Sanskrit, introduced together, in one scheme, in one school, under a roof that held seventeen nationalities, with Ceylon History taught from Blaze’s textbook to boys of every community — a shared past, not a Sinhala one. Wickramasinghe’s word is singular. “An integrated independent community,” he says, “implies a language, culture and tradition of their own.” A language. Tamils appear once in the entire speech, as “Jaffna educationists,” and they appear as a technical illustration of how one might teach engineering. He hunts chauvinism through every paragraph, and he catches it in the monks and the revivalists and the socialist parties — and then he leaves standing, untouched, the single premise from which chauvinism grows, which is that a nation is a people with a language. The Sinhala Only Act was fifteen years old. He is trying to rescue the vernacular from the men who had turned it into a knife, and he goes to Fraser for a warrant, and he takes the plank and leaves the architecture that had made the plank safe.
On culture and technology, he deserves a better hearing than he usually gets, and then a harder one. His conception of culture is not the museum-keeper’s. It is closer to Popper than to Herder: culture as response, as adaptation, as the environment a child grows up in and absorbs, as a community continuously changing, as the Buddha and the Greeks inventing traditions of self-correction. That is precisely why he can flay the revivalists — because they are trying to embalm a thing whose nature is to move. And he was right, in 1971, to turn his face towards science. The schools of Ceylon were then producing arts graduates for a civil service that could not employ them, in a world that was containerising, transistorising and feeding itself on new grain. His gaze was in the right direction.
But watch where he sets his instruments down. He knows — he says it beautifully — that English is not a neutral medium: that a Ceylonese who masters English literature does not thereby acquire English culture, because culture is history and environment and weather; that what the English borrowed from Greece and China and India they recreated; that a Shakespearean scholar with no soil under him can only be derivative. He carries this whole apparatus of cultural criticism to the door of the laboratory, and there he puts it down. English is a culture. Science, apparently, is cargo. It is a thing that can be poured, once the glossary is fixed, into a vessel that will remain itself. He never asks what genetics in plain Sinhala will do to a village that has it. He never asks what technology requires in order to exist at all — not a glossary but laboratories, workshops, industries, capital patient enough to wait a generation, a market willing to pay for skill, and a culture that can bear to be contradicted by its own instruments. He asks for the fruit and does not plant the tree.
And beneath that omission lies the larger one. There is no economy anywhere in this speech. He sees the unemployed graduate; he says, with terrible accuracy, that a bad degree is now worse than none. He sees the comrade who becomes a bureaucrat and the firm that hires the hungry to sell its goods. And then he explains all of it culturally — bureaucratic inheritance, paternal attitudes, monkish revivalism, unhealthy cultural conflict — and prescribes, as remedy, discipline in a changing culture and better science textbooks. Eight weeks later the young men rose, and they were not the uprooted. They were the rooted: Sinhala-educated, village-formed, the very cohort his prescription had already produced. Some of them had read him. They rose because their country and its rusted and leaking educational apparatus had made them literate in a way that left them with nothing whatever to do in a world that has left them for another age.
He built his indictment of English education around a gecko: a boy at Royal who could not name, in either language, the little creature crossing the wall in front of him. It is a perfect image, and it holds one more turn than he gave it. A gecko is the thing that lives in the house and is never seen by the people who live there. Fraser’s actual scheme — laboratories founded on the vernaculars, a farm, a workshop, a plural curriculum, and a demonstrated victory over the very opposition Wickramasinghe assumed had killed it — was on the wall of Trinity in 1924. If what was left of it in February 1971 was a faded, scribbled over version of it on a hidden ally, there were whispers of it in print, in the school’s own archive for a man of his intellect to find, sixty feet from where he stood. He had come to rediscover a version of it for himself and praise it, but he could not find the original hidden in plain sight on a rarely visited shelf.
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