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A school, the people and a chapter of our history
With a fist full of rice - Buddhist Women and the making of Mahamaya Girls College by Indrani Meegama. Reviewed by Tilak A. Gunawardhana
Histories can have a variety of themes and purposes. They can be national histories, regional histories, histories confined to specific periods, histories of movements, ideas and institutions. Their accounts of events spread over a period of time, or analyses of backgrounds of such events or their relationships to economic, political, or social changes is the substance of history.

Meegama's present work is a history of a school relating it to a definite social milieu, and recounting its beginnings, growth and development. It also includes accounts of certain key personalities of the period and their preoccupations. It is not the usual history of a school isolated from its social background, or the forces that gave it a shape and meaning. Here the author has attempted a well researched history which derives its significance from its intimate connection with our national history beginning during British colonial times and ending when we enter the mainstream of global changes as an independent nation with a specific identity.

The author has not only probed the background as a historian, but has also highlighted conflicts that arose at a personal level that were a part of the struggle to establish the first higher educational institution for girls in Kandy. In this account she has brought together facts that the normal academic historian would have overlooked or ignored. Whereas historical writing in its infancy assigned a dominant place to the individual, modern historical writing has underplayed or even ignored the role of the individual and replacing the main actors with "forces" and "movements".

Some histories in modern times specially those written by Marxists or those influenced by them have made the role of the individual insignificant and replaced him by impersonal forces.

Meegama in her wisdom has neither underestimated the leading role of personalities nor totally ignored the social forces operating at the time of the founding of Mahamaya. She is at pains to take fully into account the rise of the Buddhist nationalist movement against the colonial masters, and within that context has detailed the indefatigable efforts of a handful of motivated individuals imbued with a sense of our long and glorious history, and the social imperatives of that period.

Meegama has done important research following others like Kumari Jayawardena of a slightly earlier vintage, who devoted her efforts to an unraveling of trade union activity as a precursor to political activity with a general nationalist agenda.

In a short review of this nature, a full discussion of the contribution of the much ignored scattered Buddhist revivalist movement and the individuals involved who sacrificed their time and money and worked with dedication and courage is not possible. Persons of the calibre of Sarah De Soysa who was not even born in Kandy, were a supremely significant example. She, supported by Sir Bennet Soysa, her husband who entered national politics later, almost single- handed took steps to found Mahamaya in Kandy, the first Buddhist girls school to provide children in the Kandyan area with a collegiate education.

Even though she was subsequently sidelined due to her temperament and her clashes with the British born principal appointed by the board of management following the departure of Mrs. Hilda Kularatne, her great contribution to the upliftment of women in Kandy cannot be underestimated. Hers was a pivotal role in circumstances that were not merely destructive of our ancient Buddhist heritage, but presenting the danger of the replacement of that culture we had nurtured for 2,500 years by another one quite alien.

The work before us by Mrs. Meegama is an invaluable contribution to the knowledge we have of our struggles as a nation against the occupying power during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A great deal of historical writing has been done covering the fall of the Sinhala Raj and our submission to the British, but a big gap had been left by most historians in dealing with the particular period that Meegama has handled in this book with rare virtuosity.

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