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3rd December 2000
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Book review

A loving historical portrayal of a birthplace 

Changing Face of Colombo (1505-1972) By R. L. Brohier. Reviewed by Richard Boyle

For a capital city of such considerable antiquity, and for one so rich in multi-cultural interaction, it is remarkable that R. L. Brohier's book remains the only major publication on the history of Colombo (although of course Carl Muller has given us a quasi-fictional version in recent years). Originally published in 1984 in a rather-too-small and somewhat ephemeral softcover edition, Changing Face of Colombo now makes a welcome reappearance in a larger and more durable hardcover edition. Besides, this edition is accompanied by the simultaneous publication of a Sinhala translation - an event of special importance.

Of French Huguenot descent, Richard Leslie Brohier was born in Colombo in 1892. He was educated at Royal College and started his long and illustrious career in the Survey Department in 1910. By 1946 he had risen to Assistant Surveyor General, a post he held until his premature retirement in 1950 to become, at the request of Prime Minister D. S. Senanayake, a member of the influential Gal Oya Development Board. 

Brohier's travels throughout the island in connection with his work and his exposure to the island's ancient civilisation - especially its hydraulic heritage - whetted the appetite of what was already an inquiring mind. Writing on the island's history and culture became an abiding passion. 

His major publications are The Golden Age of Military Adventure in Ceylon (1933), limited to 150 copies, his magnum opus Ancient Irrigation Works of Ceylon, published in three volumes (1934-35), Irrigation and Agriculture Colonisation in Ceylon (1941), The Gal Oya Project in Ceylon (1951), the cartographer's prerequisite, Land Maps and Surveys (with J. H. O. Paulusz), published in two volumes (1951), the traveller's favourite, Seeing Ceylon (1965), Furniture of the Dutch Period in Ceylon (1969), another traveller's favourite, Discovering Ceylon (1973), Food and the People (1975) and Links Between Sri Lanka and the Netherlands (1978). Changing Face of Colombo (1984) and The Golden Plains (1992) were published posthumously. 

Changing Face of Colombo consists of seven short chapters on the development of the city restricted to the Portuguese, Dutch and British colonial periods - and a little beyond. But it is as well to remember that the city's history goes back much further. Henry Yule's etymological researches of the 1880s revealed that Ibn Batuta (circa 1346) was the first to remark on Colombo: "We started for the city of Calenbou, one of the finest and largest cities of the island of Serendib. It is the residence of the Wazir Lord of the Sea (Hakim-al-Bahr), Jalasti, who has there about five hundred Abyssinians."

Brohier, however, necessarily begins with the accidental discovery of the island by the Portuguese in 1505, when a small fleet sheltered from a storm in Galle harbour and then proceeded, briefly, to Colombo. As Brohier relates, the Portuguese found a cosmopolitan settlement: "Apart from the Sinhala fisher-families who lived in the environs, there were Arabs who had come from the great mart at Ormuz, Marwaris, Bengalis and Burmans, and others from the coasts of Coromandel and Malabar." 

Twelve years later the Portuguese returned and requested the King of Kotte to allow them to construct a small factory on the coast for baling cinnamon and storing merchandise. Despite considerable apprehension, the King acceded. He had every reason to be concerned, for the Portuguese immediately erected a makeshift fortress and several years later built a three-mile long rampart cordoning off the area covered by today's Fort and Pettah. The deception was complete when upwards of two hundred guns began to menace the outside world from the breastworks, while inside a Portuguese commercial and ecclesiastical enclave flourished. 

In summing up the Portuguese period, Brohier draws attention to Colombo's rise as a centre of Portugal's brand of aggressive, proselytising colonialism: "Unhappily, this sixteenth century Colombo, an offspring of a community which was the most vigorous and most powerful unit in the world of the time, never actually experienced peace. She was built in a frenzy of fanatical zeal derived from the Catholic past of Europe, and moulded a symbol of supremacy, rancour and indignation against all men. She remained the hub of a mutually destructive war which raged almost without intermission for a century and a half between the Portuguese and an island monarchy sub-divided into petty fiefs." 

Brohier in his Introduction makes the point that Colombo was an accident of alien design inflicted on the islanders: "In a sense Colombo is a city forced on the peoples of Ceylon in spite of themselves. It was never a creation of their own making."

Two chapters are assigned to the depiction of the Colombo of Dutch times. The first tells how the Dutch wrested Colombo from the Portuguese after much bloodshed and a seven-month siege in 1655-6. The second, among other things, describes how the Dutch set about reconstructing the war-damaged fort. It was such a massive undertaking that after twenty years the fortifications were still incomplete. Work was curtailed for financial considerations and so it was that the Dutch fort turned out to be only one-third the size of its predecessor.

Even though no enemy forces breached the Dutch defences of Colombo, Brohier relates an incident in which an elephant crossed the Beira Lake and entered the fort through one of the gates - near the Regal Cinema - having torn off the arm of one sentry and dashing another to death. The elephant proceeded to terrorise the inhabitants of the fort until it was driven into the sea near Galle Face. The Governor ordered the capture of the animal, and so some Maldivians ventured out in a boat, secured the animal with ropes, and hauled it onto the Galle Road three-quarters of a mile south of the fort. Once on land, though, the elephant broke loose and took flight into the jungle.

Brohier uses this incident to illustrate the topographical condition of the outskirts of eighteenth century Colombo. Hemmed in by jungle on three sides, the fort was an intrusion not recognised by the wild animal population. Colombo even had its own elephant stockade located close to the golf course. As Brohier laments, the inhabitants of the fort "had no cause to make long journeys to see wild life as the citizen or tourist does today."

Moving on to British times, Brohier mentions Ralph Fitch, the first Englishman known to have landed in Ceylon (1589) and the first to refer to Colombo in writing. It is a pity that the author does not reproduce this quotation - "The king is called Raja, and is of great force; for he cometh to Columbo, which is the place where the Portugals have their fort" - and indeed other seminal references down the centuries. One that comes to mind is by Robert Percival, the first Englishman to write of Colombo (1803) after its transfer to British rule. 

Although Brohier quotes Percival on the subject of British Colombo several times, he does not include the following reference, which provides an indication of the city's extent and continuing cosmopolitan nature at the dawn of the nineteenth century: "Columbo taken all together is, for its size, one of the most populous places in India. There is no part of the world where so many different languages are spoken, or which contains such a mixture of nations, manners, and religions."

One chapter is almost entirely devoted to the story of the extraordinary piece of espionage carried out by the Scottish university professor, Hugh Cleghorn, which resulted in the relatively bloodless capitulation of Dutch Colombo to the British in 1796. Another chapter deals with facets of Colombo in the early period of British rule, while a third describes Colombo's topography of the first half of the nineteenth century. 

The final chapter finds Brohier in his element, describing with flair through his grandfather's eyes the various colourful communities - in particular the Burghers - that made up the population of Colombo in early British times. In a most successful evocation of the atmosphere of Old Colombo he provides glimpses of their festivals, such as the Muslim procession of Muharram known to the British as Hobson-Jobson, the vendors that supplied the inhabitants with essential services, and other intriguing aspects of life.

Changing Face of Colombo was first published several years after Brohier's death. That it was published at all is largely due to the resolve of Brohier's daughter Deloraine, who describes in the Postscript her urgent quest to find a missing page of the manuscript with the printer's deadline fast approaching. In order to give a visual (and in particular an architectural) dimension to the text, Ms. Brohier requested art historian Ismeth Raheem to assemble a series of paintings and photographs of Colombo from the period in question to form a separate but complementary section to the book. 

Called Views of Colombo, this Addendum contains twenty-two plates, each with a copious explanatory note by Raheem. The oldest, dated 1518, is an early Portuguese map of the fortress and factory of Colombo, while the most recent is an 1890 photograph of Cargill's department store. Some are well-known, especially the watercolours of Andrew Nicholl and J. L. K. van Dort, which can be seen at the National Museum and have been reproduced in a number of publications. Others, such as a view of King's Street (1848), painted by Hippolyte Silvaf, and an early photograph of Wolfendaal Church, are from private collections and in consequence not so familiar. 

Twenty-eight years on from the end of the period circumscribed by Changing Face of Colombo - and even just 16 years after the book's initial publication - the title is infused with a certain irony not intended by the author. While Colombo has witnessed a few swift but mercifully partial changes over the past 500 years, never has there been the level of frenzied landscape-altering construction typical of recent decades. The rate of change is so rapid that the infrequent Colombo voyager is likely to discover that within a matter of months, characteristic landmarks, indeed whole streets, have been erased and replaced by a featureless wasteland of tinted glass and nightmarish-coloured concrete. 

"Yet the city contrives to achieve beauty in its own way in spite of everything," Brohier remarks in his Introduction on the comparatively benign 1960s-style development of Colombo. I doubt if he would write in such positive fashion in the year 2000, when the city has become hell-bent on achieving wholesale ugliness. Changing Face of Colombo is a loving portrayal of a birthplace by a writer of great sensibility who has a phenomenal grasp of history.

The second edition of the book is an improvement on the first in many respects. I have already mentioned its greater size. This makes for easier reading and permits the magnification of several of Brohier's maps and their legends within the text that were previously indecipherable. Another discernible enhancement is in the typesetting. 

While Changing Face of Colombo does not have the depth of Ancient Irrigation Works of Ceylon or the breadth of Seeing Ceylon and Discovering Ceylon - the book is too sketchy and anecdotal to be among Brohier's best - it does bear all the hallmarks of his compelling writing. 

Future commentators will no doubt view Brohier as one of the vital twentieth century interpreters of Sri Lanka's history and culture. The immediate concern is that his writings should be made available in the early twenty-first century to a new generation of readers. Hopefully, Changing Face of Colombo will pave the way for many other bilingual reprints of Brohier's works. Therein may lie the ultimate importance of this publication.

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