LIFE IN BRITISH CEYLON – 1850 TO 1950:
SOCIAL HISTORY THROUGH CHITTY FAMILY PALIMPSESTS
Social histories bring history to life when they draw on voices from the past. Memoirs, letters, and photographs will enliven a historical narrative about a bygone Ceylon that evokes nostalgia. The period in question is the century between1850 and1950. The talk will be quartered into an introduction, a section on the period 1850-1900, another on the period 1900-1950, and a reflective conclusion. The introduction will provide a framework that tracks the speaker’s perspective as it evolved from his schoolboy days in Kandy to his life as a university professor in Sydney. The talk will offer an account about ancestors who arrived on the island during the reign of Rajasinha II as King of Kandy. Commentary will be made in the talk about what constituted the Chetties who formed the Colombo Chetty community in Dutch times and how they differed from other Chetty groups. A section on the period 1850-1900 will throw light on the lives and times of Christian Chitty and his French Huguenot wife Matilda (Mitzi) Augusta Morel and their nine children. The section on the period 1900-1950 will address the lives and times of the children of Christian and Matilda who married Colombo Chetties, Dutch Burghers, Kandyan Sinhalese, and Tamils. Hitherto unpublished research on the family offers insights on how a land-owning family negotiated a changing colonial reality in the two periods. The closing section will reflect on changing lifestyles and attitudes to westernisation and politics. Broad themes addressed will include education, economic interests, political participation, and social life.
The speaker will discuss familial strategies of seeking betterment or preservation of lifestyles through different avenues, including land-owning, planting, education and the professions and the civil service. In the first period, the establishment of Law College in 1874 in Hulftsdorp led to a burgeoning of this profession. Several products of Law College decided to participate in the new elected legislatures of the 20th C. Dutch Burghers who, Tennent noted in 1859, had “risen in eminence at the Bar and occupied the highest positions on the Bench”, were followed by Sinhalese and Tamils. Early in the Twentieth Century, the Spanish Flu pandemic and two World Wars hurt landowners, and emphasised the value of the professions and civil service. Another experience discussed in the talk, is the abandonment of Kotahena in favour of Cinnamon Gardens by families of note.
Research that informs this talk draws on data collected in video interviews in the early 1980s, articles and books, Ceylon Almanacs, Ceylon Law Reports, Ceylon Government Gazettes, church records, Ferguson’s Directories, the Journal of the Dutch Burgher Union, The Journal of the Ceylon Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland, Kabristan Archives, letters, maps, memoirs and recollections, obituaries, photographs, and video-recordings.
