by
Gamini Seneviratne
‘Mandarins’ could refer to the officially adopted form of the Chinese language or to the fruit we all know. Here it refers to a term applied to the members of the Ceylon Civil Service (CCS) (and adopted somewhat scornfully by those who failed to join it). The Cambridge Dictionary puts it thus: ‘A person who has a very important job in the government, and who is sometimes considered to be too powerful’, and elaborates it in its application: It seems that true power lies with the Civil Service mandarins, rather than MPs and cabinet ministers.
Those days are gone, but not by the transfer of power to MPs and cabinet ministers whatever their number. True power now resides in the hands of kitchen cabinets, deliverers of election results, and of those whose wealth, mostly new-found, grows in a symbiotic relationship with their front men and women. The Cambridge Dictionary, again, defines that as ‘a relationship between two types of animal or plant in which each provides for the other the conditions necessary for its continued existence’. Figuratively, ordinary people who would ordinarily have been called ‘voters’ but have ceased to be anything of the kind are now spectators to this charade. So are many public servants who have taken refuge in silence. Others have succumbed to the lure of ‘the main chance’; perhaps they constitute a third presence in the carnival of animals. Most such are ‘plants’ anyway put to root in strategic locations in what used to be the Public Service.
It should be mentioned, too, that institutions that are named the Judiciary, the Armed Services and others including Parliament that are deemed to be the protectors of the law have been trashed in similar fashion.
The CCS, as it existed, was predicated on the colonial administration’s need to collect revenue, administer its rules / laws / enactments (make your pick) and to keep track of what was going on beyond the plantations it had established on the land of the villagers and the forests that served man and other animals also way beyond their borders.
Its members were required to ‘deal with’ meaning speak with the people in their own tongue. That requirement served not only to facilitate the administration of their laws; it served to bring back to decision makers unadulterated reports of mutterings that may jeopardize some aspect of their rule. For such purposes a make-over of the traditional system of administration under the King, with its Dissavas, Rate Mahattayas and Headmen, including Arachchis and Vidanes, sufficed. Side by side with that came new mechanisms to implement colonial imperatives.
The Land Settlement department provided cover for the big land grab and, next to the CCS men the ‘Settlement Officer’ enjoyed much prestige and clout. It’s no wonder he did: his job was to determine ‘title’ – not ‘right’ – to land between the people and the imperial ‘Crown’. Once that appropriation had been completed he was forbidden to inquire into ‘title’ to lands by then converted into plantations. The urban areas where the merchants had set up their business operations, mostly around Colombo, Kandy and Galle, were also deemed to fall outside his inquiries as to rightful ownership.
The Land Commissioner’s department had a somewhat different but an as important share in that exercise, – mostly in providing some kind of amelioration but also in administering the acquisition of private property for some ‘public purpose’.
Surveys were required to underpin all that and ‘Public Works’ covered other necessities – roads, buildings, irrigation. The railways stood on its own, as did the postal and in due time the telecommunication services. Health and education had their own establishments as did agriculture. The relationship of their officers with the CCS men, particularly Government Agents was one of a courteous deference to some kind of primus inter pares. With the war of 1939-45, problems relating to the production, the securing and the distribution of food brought new agencies into being and they functioned for the most part under CCS men.
Tea and rubber control, coconut and cocoa rehabilitation had a much longer existence their primary function being the protection and promotion of the plantations – which they in no sense ‘controlled’.
The ‘external affairs’ of this country were dealt with in London. Hardly any change in that but for more salaams over time to Washington D.C., Moscow, Beijing, New Delhi , hardly any to Islamabad, Bonn, Paris, Canberra, Ottawa – the fashion now seems to be for the Vatican, Bolivia, the Seychelles and such exotic places to merit strategic significance for us – am sure I’ve missed many.
When the need for more direct intervention by the government in the economy was perceived under the State Council and, more visibly, after 1948, and land development and the restoration of village tanks and anicuts, a fairer distribution of the paddy and other grains between the owner of the land and the tiller became evident more inescapable, new departments were set up with their own staff officers. In a formal sense so did food control, as well as cooperatives, marketing , cottage industries, social services etc.
The ‘Staff Officers’, roughly translated, PSC appointees, were paid a monthly salary of Rs. 320/- vis a vis 340/ for a CCS cadet, rising, for the latter, to 400/- – 450/- within a year and to 490/- in two years.
The disaffection of the ‘non-CCS’ administrators is understandable; that it made some bitter through life is sad. The prestige attached to the CCS is largely responsible for that. Such animus occurred too among some who took to vocations other than public administration; for some of them it may have been an escape from an intolerable sense of having been wronged. That scene has been portrayed in novels by Siri Gunasinghe, in stories /memoires by Somapala Gunadheera, P G Punchihewa, Tilak Chandrasekera and others, sometimes unwittingly. In a thumb-nail sketch of a pupil who had become an apprentice disa hamuduruvo Sarachchandra suggests why that could be so.
The difference may have been a few marks at the written exam and/or the interview. Some few of those who ‘failed’ would probably have been more productive / efficient than some few of those who ‘passed’. Among them were Donald Abeysinghe, V T Navaratne and P N M Fernando (Lumpy), all deceased, and Leelananda de Silva, yet here. Of those of an earlier generation, M Rajendra, Secretary to the Treasury and Head of the Public Service at the time (and, in my book, one of the finest public servants we have had), mentioned Robert Samarasekera as not just one such but as one who was outstanding. By the time the the Ceylon Administrative Service (CAS) was established he was somewhat spent for reasons other than his place in the public service; he declined preferment in some other field and opted to retire as Deputy Commissioner of Cooperative Development.
Some who joined the CCS would probably have been happier in academia. I skip my thoughts on the few who should have taken to some other vocation in which they may have flourished. Those who used / abused their official position and the attendant authority to promote caste, creed or ‘communal’ interests are known, though maybe not well enough. This note passes over them.
As happened, when the CAS absorbed officers of the CCS and of departmental services into one, barring a few senior and maybe vocal men from among the latter, the CCS officers were placed in the higher grades. Over time, aided by a perceptible difference, as a whole, in attitude to politicians between the two groups, and less so to innate ability, the non-CCS officers tended to obtain preferment. It is a pity that such a mindset should have persisted in those so afflicted and that it was spread among others, especially politicians. One result was that when Lalith Athulathmudali obtained President Jayewardene’s agreement to reconstitute the CAS / SLAS to include a’ Higher Administrative Service’ a la the CCS, most of the Ministers opposed it. There is no doubt that alarm bells had rung among them and those who had become their faithful / obedient servants.
History, or historical studies, are marked by the contributions made by many distinguished scholars from the CCS. We have had many historians of merit since the Venerable Mahanama and the authors of such works as the Rajavaliya. Among them are Paul E Pieris, Karl Goonewardena, Kingsley de Silva, Sinnappa Arasaratnam, Tikiri Abeysinghe, Leslie Gunawardena, Michael Roberts, C R de Silva, K Indrapala, and maybe a few other declared ‘historians’. S D Saparamadu of the CCS, whose discipline as a student was history, published or republished many books and articles in the Ceylon Historical Journal. His introductions to them are a major contribution to our perception of what had transpired at different times in our history.
The studies and annotations made by scholars of the first rank such as Ralph Pieris, S J Tambiah, Gananath Obeyesekere, S B de Silva and other social scientists tend to be disregarded as being a guide to the lessons that history offers. They are ‘non-historians’. I do not know of any social scientist or, indeed, of any scholar engaged in the study and exposition of the humanities whose work was not based on ‘history’.
Pre-eminent among the historians I mentioned was Paul E Pieris (Deraniyagala), whose judgment in the ‘Gampola Perehara Case’ was not the one desired by the Brits who, for over a hundred years had feared the Buddhists whose lives encapsulated our culture and economy. They were ‘the natural enemy’. Nothing new occurs in historical time. Several ‘minority’ groups which have been ‘empowered’ in recent years more openly than in Brit times, have now been empowered by the ‘sole super-power’ to discredit ‘Sinhalese Buddhists’ yet again.
The colonial administration’s response to the ‘unreliable’ Pieris was to ‘secure’ that CCS man into the strait jacket of the middle level judiciary (as Ponnambalam Arunachalam was into documenting births, marriages, deaths).
That’s happened many times since and some ‘reliables’ have done the dirty work.
There were colonial civil servants who wrote what might be called ‘History’, some of it significant /valuable. The writings / compositions of the spy, John D’Oyly, (including the ‘Kandyan Convention’ that gave the Brits a ‘written document’ to base their subsequent appropriations not only of our country but of our freedom), has enjoyed much good press. Others like the work of Dr. Marshall of a similar vintage as D’Oyly, have not. It is virtually unknown to our and to other professional historians that a book by J B Phear, a high-level colonial functionary, published in the late 19th century, ‘The Aryan Village in India & Ceylon’, was, as my niece Nadeera (a historian) showed me, the foundation of Karl Marx’s theory of an ‘Asiatic Mode of Production’.
CCS men have published stories, novels, memoirs that provide material for historians as an aid to understanding ‘what happened’.
Among them, Woolf’s story, Village in the Jungle, is the best known. His official diaries were published by Tisara Prakashakayo.
Other diaries remain unpublished except for extracts of those of the Government Agents of Ratnapura, by Malcolm Abeyratne and of Matale, used by Cyril Gamage. Some such diaries have been used by historians but such use has tended to be limited in focus and coverage; it is sad that such limited use of them has had to do with the limitations, some derived from the limits of their academic training, of our historians and of the role that politicians here and elsewhere have come to require them to play.
There have been several memoirs published by or for men of the CCS. One can understand the self-serving element in some, not all, such exercises. Among others, M Chandrasoma, whose writing definitively straddled fact and fiction, V L Wirasinghe, Bradman Weerakoon and M D D Pieris come to mind. K H J Wijayadasa has published collections of essays on well-defined themes. The latest, a felicitation for Leel Gunasekera, is a comprehensive account of the myriad fields in which he has conducted his public life. Leel’s true distinction, in my view, is in the ‘factions’ that he has written about the objects / victims of our system of district administration of some decades ago. I O K G Fernando’s memoir has just been put on internet.
It’s a long name, but MahaLingam Somasunderam, aka Jolly aka Macsoma, has propo
Courtesy:Sunday Island