Sunday Times 2
Birth of Bharatha Cultural Fellowship
View(s):Today will mark a milestone in the history of the minority communities of this country with the formal inauguration of Bharatha Cultural Fellowship in Colombo.
Scheduled to commence at 10 a.m. at the Sasakawa Cultural Centre at No. 4, 22nd Lane, (off Galle Road) Kollupitiya, the event is expected to gather the widely dispersed members of the once thriving community of traders and professionals in Sri Lanka.
Possessing cherished memories of luminaries of the calibre of I.X. Pereira a Minister in the pre independent State Council and John Rodrigo whom Premier Srimavo Bandaranaike selected as a nominated member in the then Parliament of Sri Lanka, the present generation is all set to reclaim its lost status. What once united the community in a strong bond was their Roman Catholic failth which the elders of the community claim to have been handed over to their ancesstors in the coastal stretch of South India by Saint Francis Xavier in the 16th Century. No wonder they boast of producing the first Latin – rite Bishop of India became justifiably theirs when Bishop Titus Roche took the purple mantle in the late 1930′s.
Currently the senior auxiliary prelate of Colombo the Most Rev. Dr. Emmanuel Fernando is the fifth bishop of the Bharatha people.
History relates how the Bharathas were encouraged to settle in Mannar in the 16th and 17th Century in large numbers by the Portuguese for pearl fishing activity and also to strengthen the Roman Catholic faith in a community already under threat from the Jaffna king Sangili
On the other hand Negombo has an unbroken and strongly bonded community of Bharathas who have staunchly preserved the cherished traditions of their forefathers in that part of the country.
The Colombo based Bharathas, however, have during the past several decades, gone through a stormy patch and have seen their identity dissolve owing to migration, mixed marriages and loss of their faith that once served to unite them.
It is under these complex circumstances that the new formation bearing the name Bharatha Cultural Fellowship – BCF has emerged to fill a much felt void.