National Trust lecture: Class and ethnic prejudice in Ceylon
View(s):Class and ethnic prejudice in 19th-20th Century Ceylon will be the subject of the lecture to be delivered by Dr. Michael Roberts in the Monthly Lecture Series of the National Trust – Sri Lanka. The lecture will be at the HNB Auditorium, 22nd Floor, HNB Towers, 479 T.B. Jayah Mawatha, Colombo 10 at 6.30 p.m. on Thursday, May 28.
This presentation is prompted by the book ‘People Inbetween’ (1989) and its Appendices…. and especially by the first chapter entitled “Pejorative Phrases: Sinhalese Perceptions of the Self through Images of the Burghers.” It summarizes Dr. Roberts’ ethnographic work among assorted informants during the 1980s mixed with general knowledge and anthropological principles to work out the processes of self-identification in the decades immediately preceding. It links these insights with historical information about class and ethnic interaction in colonial times — periods when the local populace was subject to the racial prejudices of the Dutch and the British.
The 19th century also witnessed several strands of challenge to British domination (among them that of Young Ceylon, 1850-52). One strand involved a vibrant-cum-virulent protest directed against the Westernisation of the Ceylonese people — with both the Burghers and the Westernised Sinhalese middle class as principal targets. Piyadasa Sirisena’s novels and politics epitomised this strand of ideology. In this thinking the deep distaste against mixing of blood embedded in principles of caste endogamy was fused with the distaste towards racial mixing introduced by the European colonials.
Michael Roberts was trained in history and the social sciences at Peradeniya University in Sri Lanka. His initial Ph.D work on agrarian policy took him into intellectual history as well as economic history and political economy. In the late 1960s he looked at the social base of the nationalist movement in British Ceylon and his researches moved him into social history – this involved a study of social mobility and elite formation. He was a key founder of the Ceylon Studies Seminar at Peradeniya.
His research crystallised in the four-volume Documents of the Ceylon National Congress (1977, Dept of National Archives) and the edited anthology Collective Identities (Marga, 1979).
He gained an Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship to Germany in 1975-76 and then secured a post at the Dept of Anthropology at the University of Adelaide. His researches in effect involved the deciphering of the life ways of the middle classes of modern Sri Lanka. His Caste Conflict and Elite Formation: The Rise of a Karava Elite in Sri Lanka, 1500-1931 (1982, CUP) is as much a product of Peradeniya as Adelaide, while People Inbetween (Sarvodaya, 1989) is about the middle classes of British Ceylon and the growth of Colombo city to hegemonic status.