Sport and Pastime in British Ceylon-by Michael Roberts
Source:Thuppahis
Michael Roberts, presenting an old unpubd article drafted in the 1990s ….with highlights being Today’s insertions
It is feasible to suggest that leisure activity blossomed in Europe in the course of the nineteenth century. As European society was re-ordered by the Industrial Revolution and the bourgeoisification of civilization (e.g. Elias 1978 and 1982), the aristocratic and popular pastimes of the previous centuries were taken over, modified and added to. Pastimes proliferated. In England, of course, these pastimes bore the imprint of class: one can speak broadly of working class pastimes and upper-class pastimes.
Several of these pastimes, whether card games, children’s table games, billiards or games on playing fields, were quickly subject to regulation by codification, and/or institutionalization in clubs and societies. The techniques and powers of rationality took over and organized leisure. A few decades after Jeremy Bentham and his disciples, e.g. Chadwick, proceeded to reorder the administrative and legal structure of Britain in the spirit of the Enlightenment, other individuals proceeded to codify games.
Take rugger and soccer for instance. They emerged in the nineteenth century and can be traced back to a whole class of folk games in Britain during the centuries fourteen to nineteen. These folk games were often played on a holy day and were often a ritualized fight (cf. ankeliya and pora pol). They were localized and varied: knappan, hood game, hurling and football (ffotebale in old English) were among the names that they were called. These games often had an unlimited number of participants, and included men and women, rich and poor, alike. They were wild, unruly affairs — individuals could split off, chew the cud, drink and return to the game. Carrying the ball and using sticks were not unknown in some local variations (Dunning and Sheard 1979: chap. 1).
While these folk practices appear to have gone into decline by 1800, they were taken up by the boys in the emerging public schools in the era 1750-1840. These public schools, that is, private fee levying schools, had not yet evolved into the form in which we know it today: viz. the classical mid-nineteenth century model. The senior boys ran their own affairs at this stage and had the edge in the continuing struggle with the principals and teachers. Their leisure activities included hunting, shooting and fishing; as well as the games of football, unwritten ritual practices which varied with each school, but which enabled the senior boys to dominate and control the junior boys. In brief, football at these schools was part of the prefect-fag system. The cult of manliness was an integral facet of these games. If some people think of rugger and hurling as they are played today as rough, one wonders how they would evaluate early nineteenth century football: at Rugby and Charterhouse the players wore iron-capped boots in order to make their “hacking” more effective! (Dunning and Sheard 1979: chap. 2).
Enter Thomas Arnold (1795-1842). As principal of Rugby School in the years 1828-42, Arnold was one of the pioneers in the moulding of the classical British public school. He set out to transform Rugby into a school for training Christian gentlemen. This meant control over the boys and the instilling of discipline and moral fibre. While banning such activities as hunting, he counterbalanced this by encouraging the existing team games of cricket and football activities (Dunning and Sheard 1979: 76-78; but contrast Mangan 1981: 14-16).
The school at Rugby was relatively low in the pecking order of public schools at this point of time. Dunning and Sheard suggest that this may have encouraged the boys of Rugby to develop a form of football peculiarly their own — with the emphasis on handling and carrying the ball rather than kicking. For this purpose, an oval ball was better than a round one. As their conventions in this game developed, at the Sixth Form levee in 1845, they were written in a pamphlet called The Laws of Football as Played at Rugby School. These laws were then ratified at the Bigside Levee on 7th September 1846 (Dunning and Sheard 1979: 91-92).
The story that rugby emerged from within football when William Webb Ellis caught the football and ran with it at Rugby in 1823, suggest Dunning and Sheard, is an origin myth. This story was invented in the 1880s and 1890s in the course of an institutional struggle in northern England (Dunning and Sheard 1979:60-61). It has gained wide credence (e.g. Encyclopaedia Americana, vol. 23:861). The fact remains that some early nineteenth century public schools allowed a restricted degree of handling the ball. It was at Rugby that this element became overwhelming. And where the rules were codified.
Codification was a form of control and a form of rationalization. This rationalization, once diffused, encouraged standardization. It was, in these terms, a process of embourgeoisement (Dunning and Sheard 1979: 66ff, 83-85).
As the increasing number of public schoolboys entered the wider world, they diffused their games and the cult of athleticism (also see Mangan 1981) among the Victorian middle classes. And, in keeping with the rationality of capitalism, the games were duly standardized and institutionalized. The Football Association was formed in 1863 and the Rugby Football Union in 1871. Soccer and rugger had well and truly established themselves.
Both the inventiveness and commercial rationalization of games is indicated in the tale of another new game which appeared at this point of time, viz. tennis. Its inspiration came from a game called “court tennis” (also known as royale or real tennis, still played at idiosyncratic places such as Oxford!). An army officer, Walter Wingfield, adapted this game in 1873 so that it could be played, not indoors, but outside on grass. His court had an hourglass shape, 30 feet in breadth at the baseline and 21 feet at the centre, where the net began at 7 feet and dipped to 3 feet. The ball was made of rubber. He called the game Sphairistike. And, typically, took out a patent in 1874. At this point the Marylebone Cricket Club, yes the M.C.C., entered the scene and issued a set of rules, and converted the size of the court to its present rectangular shape. “Sphairistike” was too much of a tongue twister. So “lawn tennis” it became (Encyclopaedia Americana vol. 26: 490, 496).
The colonies provided an ample expanse for most of these games and practices to be introduced — over time, sometimes almost as soon as they were invented or formalized in Britain. The ruling classes in a colony had ample time for leisure (see Mrs. Griffith 1841-42). They had a bevy of servants to prepare the ground, to do the dirty work and to relieve them of household chores. The heat and humidity were “extremely irksome,” of course. But one could choose the time to play: around 5.00 p.m. if it was a game of exertion. And there were man-driven punkahs to fan you as you indulged in the cut and thrust of bridge.
Not all the European entertainments necessarily followed the Europeans to the colonies. To the best of our knowledge, a documentation of the British pastimes that did not take root in the colonies has not been attempted. One `candidate’ is the music hall frequented by the British working class in the cities in the nineteenth century (G. Stedman Jones, 1983:204ff, 222-235). I cannot think of an equivalent in the colonies: the closest may have been the mess rooms (if any) of the ordinary soldiers in the British regiments stationed on the island. This absence suggests that the leisure activities favoured by the colonialists were those of the upper and middle classes in Europe.
There was, of course, the brothel. In Europe this was a site and pastime for men from all classes. In the colonies the effort to sustain the honour of the “ruling race” by constituting itself as a noble `caste’ may has constricted the resort to brothels by the gentlemen in a colonial town. These towns were often like villages in their network of observation and gossip. One could not sully one’s caste by sneaking into a brothel. But brothels there were wherever the military regiments were stationed. They were even sponsored by the establishment, albeit quietly, as “licensed harlots.” Kenneth Ballhatchet’s Race, Sex and Class under the Raj: Imperial Attitudes and Their Critics (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1980) makes interesting reading: even illicit sex was thus institutionalized. Though we have not located similar evidence from Sri Lanka one can reasonably surmise that Colombo was not without its brothels.
The patterns in the implantation of British pastimes in the colonies varied. Not all were imported from Europe. Pig-sticking seems to have been a pastoral pastime in Central Asia and North India which was taken up and thus ‘created’ by the British in India. It did not take deep root in British Ceylon. And though polo was introduced to the island, it does not seem to have been received with enthusiasm by the indigenous middle classes. In contrast with the Caribbean islands and the main Indian cities, polo has quickly waned in independent Sri Lanka. It would appear that the men of Ceylon were ill at ease on horses. The seat of a horse (as distinct from a horse buggy) was not their favoured modus operandi. The car, and auto races, are a different matter: they have always had their enthusiasts. But that is a twentieth century pastime.
Let us dwell further on the early pastimes. It would be erroneous to assume that they were all British imports. One can safely presume that the Portuguese and the Dutch introduced some of their pastimes into the island. Little research has been directed to this sphere. We have seen in People Inbetween that in the urban world of Dutch Ceylon there was much convivial visiting; and that musical evenings with caffrinha and chicoti were among the joyous pastimes (I: 38). In the latter activities those known as the Portuguese Burghers were especially adept and Van Dort’s brush has captured some of their creative practices (People Inbetween I:1).
In Sinhala nationalist folklore the Portuguese and Dutch are credited with having introduced arrack, and the excesses of drink, into the island. This is a dubious claim. Arrack and toddy were not unknown to the Sinhalese and the Tamils in pre-Western times or in the Kingdom of Kandy (Knox 1911: 214). However, addiction to drink does not seem to have been widespread and was frowned upon by Buddhist ethics. In contrast, alcoholic drink was part of the daily fare in Europe among all classes. And the Dutch and other Europeans in Dutch Ceylon became notorious for their love of drink (Knox 1911: 267).
Likewise, among and within the earliest social gatherings in British Ceylon, “booze” had a central role. When clubs eventually took root as an institutionalized site of conviviality, the bar became a central ‘pillar’ within these sites. In the Westernized world, then and now, such codewords as “booze” and “watering hole” generally evoke a sense of pleasure, something good. In contrast, to the new Sinhala nationalists of the Dharmapala-Sirisena era (People Inbetween I: 10-12, 104), such words carried terrible connotations: references to “the demon alcohol” (Dharmapala 1965: 479-84, 494-95, 501-21, espec. page 480) mark the degree to which this commodity was deemed an aberration.
British colonial folklore quickly developed around the convivial goings-on at two ‘salons’ in Colombo during the first decades of British rule: the Whist Club and the Quoit Club. These clubs attracted favourable comments from the Revd. Cordiner in a book published in 1807. The Quoit Club was the younger of the two clubs and consisted of 20 gentlemen, who assembled with their guest at their bungalow two miles south of the Fort once a week. Quoits was played from 5.30 a.m. to 8.00 a.m. and followed by breakfast (Cordiner 1983:45ff).
The Whist Club appears to have been originally known as the Cocoa-nut or borne that label as an alternative (Cordiner 1983:45; Brooke Elliot 1938:24). It was located at Mutwal near the seashore near the mouth of the Kelani Ganga. Cordiner presents this view of the club:
The club consists of twelve members, chosen from among the most respectable inhabitants of the place. They give dinners in rotation, and generally invite twelve strangers…. The entertainment is always liberal; and the assembly never fails to be animated with the highest share of convivial delight. The company repair to the villa about one o’clock in the afternoon, and play cards, read, or otherwise enjoy the country, until four when dinner is announced. At half past four, or at six o’clock, they rise from the table, make a circuit in their carriages, or on horse back, and reach their respective houses before it is dark.
Exclusivity, conviviality, repast and game was organized and routinized in this manner.
Besides such pastimes, among the earliest outdoor pastimes indulged in by both the ladies and gentlemen of genteel society were the walk and the ride. The ride could be on horseback or in carriage. In early colonial Colombo the cinnamon gardens along the area marked as “Marandahn” (extending into the present suburbs of Cinnamon Gardens, Borella and Bambalapitiya) was one of the favoured areas for a ride. So too was the seafront from the Fort to Mutwal. And, then, there was Galle Face Green.
Here lay a prime site for the beaux belles to walk, ride, eye each other, gossip and flirt. This activity was sometimes described as “eating the air” and was depicted in sketch and verse by Hamilton and Fasson in the 1880s, so that the Galle Face Green was rendered into
Colombo’s Park or Prater –
And here the world, starched, brushed and curled,
Appears at four or later.
In this fashion, and insofar as the Green became a site for military parades, and evening concerts by bands, Galle Face Green was, unintentionally but effectively, constructed into a site for symbolic display by the British, a locus of symbolic domination in its most insidiously powerful form (People Inbetween I: 103).
As the institutions of an education in English, whether library, private tutory, denominational school or government-run school, were set up and extended, the leisure practices of the British were inculcated among the indigenous peoples who entered these domains. By the 1830s and 1840s one sees the beginnings of an indigenous middle class, at that stage made up mostly of elite Burgher families, Sinhala, Tamil and Colombo Chetty ‘aristocrats’ and the occasional merchant (People Inbetween I: 26-27, 49-71, 227-31). As plantation capitalism was extended and the opportunities for socio-economic advancement expanded (Mendis 1952 and Roberts 1979), the indigenous bourgeoisie and the overlapping category, the indigenous middle class, expanded apace. It was among these elements of the population, many of them becoming urban residents, that the life style, values and leisure activities of the British notables in Sri Lanka were diffused the most strongly.
The process of diffusion was encouraged by the fact that a few families quickly gained the wherewithal to send their sons to school or to the inn-of-court in England, or to holiday in England and Europe (People Inbetween I: 61). On their return to the island, they were “England Returned” — a truly powerful status.
Perhaps the most influential site for the implantation of the British gentleman’s games was the secondary school modelled on the British public-school system. It should be noted that this system was not quite in place in Britain in the early nineteenth century. That is, while its rudiments were in place and while several famous schools have histories that go back into previous centuries, the classical form of the public school system evolved in the nineteenth century under the `tutelage’ of such men as G.E.L. Cotton, Edward Thring, H.H. Almond and Thomas Arnold (e.g. see Mangan 1981). The games of rugger, soccer, hockey and cricket became important facets of their curricula, one means of honing the competitive edge and developing character and manliness. Later in the nineteenth century, Baden Powell et al added scouting to these processes of character building.
Concomitantly with such explicit ways in which the British consciously imparted their values within their colonies (Stokes 1959; Bearce 1961; Kumar 1963), the social hierarchy of any colony encouraged the diffusion of their practices. Hierarchy was writ large in India and Sri Lanka even before the Westerners invited themselves in and asserted their dominance. As the dominating class in British Ceylon, the British (that is, the leading stratum of British) became an overarching stratum layered along the peak of society. Rendering themselves hierarchical and rendered hierarchical, embellishing their dominance with the pomp and circumstance of symbolic domination and the modalities of the colour bar, the British notables became a model for emulation. The motive force of emulating those at the top, therefore, stimulated the adoption of British sports and pastimes.
This said, the fact remains that many of these leisured activities were fun. Fun is catching. As tennis, carrom, monopoly, cycling, golf and whatever were invented somewhere, then imported to British Ceylon and avidly enjoyed by the British notables, the indigenous middle class began to enjoy these pastimes with the same enthusiasm.
The latter statement is indicative of the class limitations in the diffusion of these lifeways. The working class and peasantry did not take up all these practices. Indeed, in the boondocks, out bush, in places such as Mankulam, Weli Oya, Nikaweratiya and Monaragala, it is likely that most of these pastimes were of little moment till recent decades—though card playing and the board game of carrom may conceivably have been diffused more widely.
Among the working class in and around the principal towns and along the roadways, however, there was some exposure to these practices.Within this constituency only some pastimes became popular: soccer, volleyball, carrom, some card games and watching horse racing (with its gambling). In the urban centres some members of the labouring poor also enjoyed watching cricket (see Plate 58). And cricket itself was adopted in its modified form of tennis ball cricket. While such indigenous games as gudu, buhu keliya and panoha continued in the villages and urban by-lanes (Moscrop 1911), they seem to have waned in their incidence and hold on the new generations in the twentieth century. The rise of linguistic nationalism and the re-creation of “tradition” in the twentieth century has not been marked by an effort to revive these folk practices (barring the ‘games’ as ankeliya and pora pol pursued at gammaduva ceremonies).
The manner in which the indigenous people of all classes and ethnic groups were drawn to the king of sports, horse racing, is striking. Horse races commenced at an early date in British Ceylon, even before cricket. The first races were run at Galle Face Green in the 1820s (Foenander 1924:1-2; Van Dort 1919:60-61 and Lewis 1920). In time, these races became a regular event. They were dovetailed to coincide with the Christian, British calendar. There was an orgy of horse racing, ballroom dancing and garden parties during the Easter Season, the August Season and the Christmas Season. Chronology, space and leisure became intertwined as heightened moments. The heightening honed in on the urban centres of Colombo, Kandy or Galle. During these seasons British planters descended on these towns in droves.
And during the hot season the British colonial elites gathered at the hill station at Nuwara Eliya. The “hill station” was an institution in all Britain’s tropical colonies. Nuwara Eliya, at 6000 odd feet, was “discovered” by Governor Edward Barnes in the 1820s and popularized by the adventurer Samuel Baker in the 1840s (Baker 1891:13-53). It quickly became the colony’s hill station, where British “high society” assembled during the hot season of March-April — to escape from the “unbearable heat” in Colombo, there to regale and display themselves, gossip, flirt and ‘fun.’ This was, we suspect, an exclusive racial domain into which few of the indigenous middle class dared venture till well into the twentieth century.
As these remarks indicate, horse racing was also taken to the hill station and to the provincial towns of Galle and Kandy. The races at Galle were conducted on the esplanade fronting the fort, till the Colombo Turf Club and the Galle Gymkhana Club got together to build the Boosa Racecourse in 1922. In Kandy the races were run at the Peradeniya Golf Club.
Because the early races at Galle Face Green were conducted on the open and relatively unstructured space of Galle Face Green, they attracted a large audience, a motley crowd that included significant numbers from the working class. In their different ways, Plate 28, Van Dort’s exquisite sketches and James de Alwis’s ornate Sinhalese poem provide us with a glimpse of the exotic scenario provided by race day at Galle Face Green during the nineteenth century (Van Dort 1919; Lewis 1920; People Inbetween I: 28 and Alwis 1863). It was not till 1893 or thereabouts that the Turf Club moved to the extensive and more class and race-structured premises of the new racecourse off Reid Avenue in Cinnamon Gardens.
Besides bridge and other indoor pastimes, the walk, riding, horse racing and cricket, one of the earliest pastimes among the British males was that of hunting and shooting. The majority of Britons in the island at the outset were military men. A good part of the south west was still clothed in forest and scrub; and sparsely populated (the districts of Tangalle, Galle, Colombo and Chilaw only recorded a population of 352,635 Sinhalese in 1824-27). Early Britons went elk hunting in the cinnamon plantations south of the fort (today’s Cinnamon Gardens) or in Mount Lavinia’s immediate hinterland.
Likewise, as the roads were developed and the early coffee and sugar plantations were established in the 1820s and 1830s, and then as the massive ‘development programme’ of capitalist plantations opened up the central highlands, the island’s game was encountered. And decimated. People nowadays may find it astounding, but areas like Bulatgamuwa, Dickoya, Dimbula, Maskeliya, Pussellawa et cetera were heavily forested; and were populated by deer, sambhur (“elk”), elephants and leopards. The early coffee planters went on day walks, or rides, to shoot elephants or deer, and return for lunch.
The ‘scion’ of the elephant shooters was Captain Thomas William Rogers. He is reputed to have killed over 1200 elephants in the course of his short career (Tennent 1859, II: 323), roaming not only in the central highlands, but also into the eastern jungles of Uva and the Eastern Province in order to add to his tally. That he himself was struck down by lightning at Haputale Pass on the 7th June 1845 when he was only 41 years old (Lewis 1913:357-9) was deemed, by some, to be a sign of displeasure exercised by the gods. Presumably Kataragama, Murugan or Siva rather than the Christian god.
The exemplary Christians of that day, British and European, saw no wrong in this work, this sport. Hunting and shooting was fun, but tough fun — a demanding terrain involving risk, determination, hardiness, steady aim and courage (see Baker 1854 and Storey 1907). Tallying one’s kills was proof of these virtues. So too was the photograph (Plate 59) displaying one’s kills, stuffed, suitably mounted and `aesthetically’ composed. Such photographs were very common in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Before that, one only had a count and perhaps the odd sketch. The new technology of photography (itself a pastime for some) could now confirm the tales.
Or the fisherman’s story. Fishing and angling was among the sports added to the Ceylon man’s repertoire of recreation. Here, patience and skill of a different order were at a premium.
Perhaps because of the force of Buddhist ethics, perhaps for other reasons, as sport, neither hunting or fishing ever took hold of the Ceylonese middle class man’s imagination to the same extent as cricket, soccer, rugger, horse racing, tennis and table tennis. There were several enthusiasts to be sure. But they numbered a few. And, significantly, they seem to have mostly been Burghers. That is, if we exclude the large number of villagers in the interior for whom the shooting of elephants was an issue of crop protection and the shooting of deer a source of food.
Not all the leisure activities favoured by the British men and by the indigenous middle-class males were centred on sweat, brawn and pluck. From the very outset, the reading rooms in the Fort, housed initially at ???, were a site of intense activity. It was here that the British newspapers with the latest news from Europe were located for the British public in the colony. Here lay one centre of topical discussion (see the vignettes in People Inbetween I: 57, 95, 147).
The emerging literati among the indigeneous peoples and those Europeans who were becoming indigenized as “Burghers” quickly adopted this pastime and its instituional form. Libraries sprang up in the principal urban centres during the course of the nineteenth century. One of the first of these was the Colombo Pettah Library, which was initiated in 1829. Its early Committee members included a few Britons, but were overwhelmingly Burgher. Initially, in an extension of the Dutch racial prejudices of the old eighteenth century order, fortified by the prejudices of the British, “natives” were excluded from this institution at the start.
This colour bar quickly drew sharp criticism in the mid nineteenth century from a new generation of Burghers who had been metamorphosed into Ceylonese (People Inbetween I: 153). Here, then, was a new vanguard: posing a challenge to the old order, and to the racial arrogance of the British in Ceylon, at the same time that they embodied so many elements of Britishness and/or Anglophilia (see People Inbetween Volume I for substantiation of these themes).
Beginning with the remarkable expressions voiced by the Young Ceylon circle in the 1850s, manifestations of Ceylonese nationalism (as distinct from Sinhalese nationalism) were revealed in numerous ways in subsequent generations – and especially from the 1890s or so. Such representations were not confined to pamphlet, newspaper and political memoranda; or on the public platform. They extended to the brawny actions of educated young toughs, such as Dannister Perera Abeywardena and John Kotelawala, who beat up arrogant Britons who cast disparaging remarks (People Inbetween I, 1989: 120). And there also was the aesthetic skill and the guile of cricketers who outmaneuvered the Brits at their very own games of cricket and tennis.
Cricket, being a team game, was one of the earliest arenas in which a nationalist challenge to European supremacy was expressed. Since the competition inherent in games was regarded by the British as proper, a good show, it was more feasible for the young anti-colonial aspirations to express themselves in this arena than within the domain of politics — where a questioning of the British raj in the late nineteenth century would generate the charge of “sedition,” a no-no in the British lexicon.
Thus, in the year 1887 the leading Ceylonese cricket club, the Colts (all Burghers) took on the local Europeans, that is, the Colombo Cricket Club, in a match that aroused “unusual interest.” From 1888 this became an annual feature, what was known as a “test match.” From 1905 this test was formally referred to as the European-Ceylonese match. Throughout, as in the 1880s, these contests were regarded as tests of honour and strength (Foenander 1924 and People Inbetween I: 121-22).
This was nationalism on the playing field. By the 1920s the games had become one-sided, unlike the field of politics. The Europeans were regularly pulverized.
No comprehensive history of the colonial order can be written that neglects the socio-political dimensions of cricket, whether in British times or in the post-colonial world today. Ashis Nandy’s The Tao of Cricket: On Games of Destiny and the Destiny of Games(New York: Viking, 1989), Scyld Berry’s CricketWallah, Ramachandra Guha’s Wickets in the East (OUP, 1992) and Spin and Other Turns, Mike Coward’s Beyond the Bazaarand Richard Cashman’s writings are important ‘trig points’ in surveys of this field.
