Some Right Royal Reflections
A (somewhat) personal account of how one public school in Sri Lanka has become an unlikely marker of the many social transitions since independence.
Since 2023, I have been writing books, most of them to do with public figures and institutions, and with colonial Sri Lankan history.
It goes without saying that these have all entailed a fair amount of research. This in turn has, naturally, made it necessary to hire research assistants. I can’t say I’m complaining here: from about one assistant per project, I have now progressed to three or four, with two volunteers for good measure.
Moreover, over the last two years, I have, despite myself, put together what I can only describe as a makeshift but dependable cohort of researchers. They have different interests: some are more interested in historical research, others are more adept at transcribing interviews, still others superb at doing the rounds at the National Archives. They are bright, but tend to be fiercely, and justifiably, individualistic in their interests and ambitions.
Which is another way of saying there is very little that brings them together. Except in one curious and intriguing aspect — most of them studied at Royal College.
There is, however, no real mystery here: as I have noted elsewhere, a curious set of coincidences, mostly to do with my journalism, led me to befriend a number of these fellows many, many years ago, when I was much younger. By the time I came of age, so to speak, they also had come of age. As I took them in for my projects one by one, they introduced me to their friends and networks, which have guaranteed another set of research assistants for the next round of projects.
The first of these was Uthpala — on whom I have written more than once. At the time — this was in 2020 — he had just begun his A Level years. With him came Nimsara and Themira. I have written about Nimsara, and mentioned Themira in an article I wrote not long ago on the Royal College Hostel Day of 2022.
Uthpala and Nimsara were hardly the first in this set I met. There were others before them. I have written that the first of these was Kithmina, but this isn’t exactly true. The first of them, whom I met, even wrote on, but never got to work with, was Vimuth Dewmina: a boxer, and in 2018, Deputy Head Prefect of the Hostel.
It was in 2018 that Vimuth introduced me to Manusha: someone I have not written on in full but whom I have been working with at a stretch since late 2023 on all the book projects and commissions I got from that point.
I have at present around three or four book projects going, and all of them have involved Manusha in some form or the other. Dependable, friendly, but brutally honest when he has to be, he has become a frequent accomplice, not just a reliable assistant but also, as I have noted before, one of the finest, safest, and friendliest drivers and guides you can find in Sri Lanka.
I meet Vimuth on and off again, often at Big Matches and rugby encounters, hardly if at all elsewhere. Fervently studious, he remains quietly committed and loyal as ever in his friendships. We met after a long time in 2023, at that year’s Royal Thomian — the first I ever attended — where, inebriated though most of us were, we found time to reflect on the world that was before Covid-19 and the trauma of 2022.
That match also reconnected me after two long years with Kithmina, who, again like most of us bar none — or bar me and Supun Jayasinghe — was at his inebriated best, walking around, helping himself to several sips of this and that, putting his arms around long-lost friends, and trying to get teetotallers like me to share his revelry, though to no avail.
That year’s RoyTho passed by eventfully — with the Royalists regaining its winning streak after many years and the Thomians losing it needlessly on the final day. Though I despaired of the cricket after some time — I share Richard Simon’s sentiment in not giving “an all-girl softball team captain’s toss” for the game — I found in much of the conversations some room for reflection — broadly on the match, and more specifically on the subcultures that define the world around it.
Royalists and Thomians would, at the drop of a hat, strenuously claim there is nothing that divides them culturally and socially from one another. Of course they would: that is the founding myth of the Royal Thomian, and as far as elite public-school mentalities in Sri Lanka go, there is much truth in what they say.
But I think there is also truth in the differences that Royalists and Thomians, in their more patriotic moments, claim for themselves — for both sensible and not-so-sensible reasons. Through all those fair-weather friends I have made at Royal — most of them hostellers — I have come to see, from their perspective, the differences they take pride in when asserting their identity vis-à-vis their rivals.
For obvious reasons I will not delve into the more risqué of these, but will focus on the most important among them: that of diversity.
Speaking as a student of history, specifically colonial history, I find Royal College to be one of the few colonial era institutions in Sri Lanka that have responded, however imperfectly, to changing times. To be sure, it had no say in this: as the premier public school in the country, it had to go along with the flow, so to speak, regardless of the political dispensation in the country.
Unlike private missionary schools, it lacked the initiative to fight back, and so, made the transition from colonial to post-colonial institution much better, and more smoothly, than did denominational schools, which, for reasons their principals and wardens found perfectly justifiable, fought against that transition.
Sri Lanka since independence has seen a great deal of progress on almost all social indicators, and none more perceptibly than on health and education. Our public institutions, regardless of how imperfectly they function today, have been more ready than institutions elsewhere in responding and adapting to change.
Perhaps that was what compelled E. A. Nugawela, in the late 1940s or early 1950s — I can’t remember what year — to observe that the milieu of the parents of those entering Royal had changed beyond recognition. Nugawela was Education Minister at the time, and was himself a Royalist, so he obviously knew what he was saying.
Although Royal has, for the longest possible time, been at the receiving end of jibes from those who see in all this a deterioration in standards within its student population — most notably what is pointed out as a lack of proficiency in English — I find in these developments reason for celebration.
To be sure, there is a world or two of difference between Royal College and, say, Ibbagamuwa Central, which has none of the facilities that elite schools have or can aspire to in Sri Lanka. And yet, even within these limits, it’s safe to say that schools like Royal have been markers of the progress we have clinched since independence, however flawed that progress has been.
If this has made Royal a category unto itself, the Hostel at Royal — which has had quite a history — has become a category within a category, a subculture that only confirms how adaptable the school has been to social change.
Most of the residents at the Hostel came from schools and villages hundreds of miles away from Colombo, who entered Royal through the Grade V Scholarship Exam — a byproduct of the Kannangara reforms. In one sense, they have their feet in two worlds: the one they hail from and the one they are transplanted to.
I have worked with many of these boys on my projects over the last eight years, and I have seen, first-hand, how they adapt from one world to the next. This is not, to be sure, an easy transition, but it is one they have been compelled to make.
I have dwelt at length on these transitions in my pieces on Uthpala, Nimsara, and Supun, all of whom, in their own way, had to find themselves, discover who they were and what they were good at, as they mingled with a totally unfamiliar, somewhat alien crowd at their new school.
Speaking for myself, I think I have been fortunate in meeting and working with these boys, in trying to mentor them and ending up being mentored and taught by them. I am not sure why some throw jibes at them for not being proficient in English, but I know how much I owe them, over the last few years, for my own (as yet imperfect) knowledge of all things local and cultural, which my (English, Western, and “international”) education had long distanced me from.
I realise this is a debt that cannot easily be repaid, except perhaps by acknowledging that I have not come across a more diverse and interesting crowd than these fellows — something one should be grateful for, I am sure.
