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Family sagas and a peek at Victorian Ceylon’s westernised bourgeoisie – By Yomal Senerath-Yapa     Source: Sunday Times  Few voices of the early 19th Century bourgeois Ceylonese have survived straight from the horse’s mouth to-date. Who were this new elite? What were those first English-educated generations like? How did Macaulay’s “class of people who can act as intermediaries between us and the millions we govern- English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and intellect” fit in? Many answers are woven into this book. It shows how Hannadige Jeronis Pieris and his clansmen from Moratuwa, canny and blessed with the Midas touch, burst out as compradors; how they flourished in baroque neo-walawwas in Colombo to rival English stately homes where, as that old saying goes, they ‘fed British royalty on gold plate’. It would seem apt that author, historian Michael Roberts, would have chosen personal letters by Jeronis (also uncle and mentor ...