Preserving the Burgher identity

J. B. Muller

Community : Samuel Johnson is credited with saying: "He's got the mooky end of the stick" in reference to someone completely misunderstanding something-in this case, Patrick Jayasuriya of Kandy (CDN Thursday, September 20, 2007).

Does a proposal to the leaders of the Sri Lankan Burgher Community to arrest the decline in the numbers of the Burghers represent a racist mindset as alleged? Let me be crystal clear about my stance vis-...-vis the Burghers and their problems in a covertly xenophobic polity.

The Burghers are not and have never been a 'race' in the familiar definition of that word.

The word 'Burgher' means the citizen of a town (burg) and designated a class of people during the Dutch Era (1656-1796) who were known as 'vrijburgers' or Free Burghers, i.e., not Company servants employed by the United East India Company.

It was the British who applied this word to a distinct class of people of European descent and mixed origin-a heterogeneous group-different from the Sinhalese, Tamils, Moors, Malays, Kaffirs, and other communities inhabiting the Maritime Provinces they seized from Dutch control.

By virtue of their substantially mixed origin they coalesced to form One distinct community of people with a culture that is a synthesis of European culture in its broadest sense and of elements of Oriental culture made up of several different threads, i.e., Sinhala Buddhist, Tamil Hindu, Moor and Malay Islamic [Muslim] cultures.

The weft and the weave of all these threads go to make up the tapestry of the unique Sri Lankan Burgher culture.

As the late (and great) Dr. R. L. Brohier defined the Burghers, they are a "ethno-socio-cultural group" unique to Sri Lanka possessing elements of various ethnicities, social factors, and an amalgam of cultures.

They are not a religious group like the Muslims. However, they are substantially (though not entirely) Christian, members of its sundry and various denominations, sects, and cults. There were notable Buddhists such as A.E. Buultjens, Egerton C. Baptist, and Alec Robertson and diehard atheists like P. B. G. Keuneman.

The Burghers do not subscribe to the Aryan racial myth propounded by Eugen Fischer, Arthur Joseph C"mte de Gobineau and Houston Stewart Chamberlain and find that discredited theory utterly repugnant.

The Burghers have never been White supremacists and quite bereft of racial prejudice, have married into every other community on this Island-Sinhalese, Tamils, Moors, Malays, Bohras, Parsees, Sindhis, and Chinese-and they do not entertain caste prejudices or respect other man-made social boundaries universal to other indigenous communities.

The 'Burghers' did not arrive here speaking Dutch. The Community had its genesis with the Iberian settlers who married local women (irrespective of caste or social status) and became casados or married settlers.

Their languages were Portuguese, Spanish, and Latin and they quickly learned Sinhala and Tamil with their clergy compiling the first bi-lingual dictionaries and glossaries. The motley crew of Europeans led by the Dutch arrived here approximately 100 years later and married into the casado families, thus establishing the root-stock of the emerging community later to be known as 'Burghers.'

The Burghers did not 'pick up' English. The British authorities in power after 1796 mandatorily required them to learn and use English. Ordinarily, Portugues baixo or Creole Portuguese was spoken in all Burgher homes in preference to Dutch.

The Burghers, bowing to the inevitable, adopted English as their Mother Tongue at the beginning of the 19th century and displayed a greater proficiency in that language than the British would like to admit!

The Burghers never had a problem in using the indigenous languages and not a few of them took first place in passing in Sinhala language in the Civil Service examinations.

Those who served in the North and the East and in the plantation districts could speak Tamil fluently.

However, when Sinhala chauvinism raised its head after the 1931 Donoughmore constitution was introduced, many educated and cultured Burghers thought it best to emigrate (as did educated and cultured Sinhalese, Tamils, Moors, and Malays) to more conducive environments overseas, creating, in the process, the worldwide Diaspora of 'was-Burghers.'.

Let me be emphatic, even vehemently emphatic, about one thing: There are no Burghers in Australia, Britain, Canada, Israel, Netherlands, New Zealand, South Africa, or the United States. Only the original migrants were so.

Their children have adopted the nationality of the countries of domicile and are being rapidly assimilated into those multicultural polities. This is why it is important for the only Burghers in the world to preserve their unique identity within the overarching Sri Lankan nationality.

I have never disputed the fact that ALL the other communities inhabiting this island have been good to the Burghers and vice versa. As a distinct community we Burghers could be justly proud of our record of extremely cordial and open-minded race relations that cross all ethnic, social, religious, and linguistic boundaries without distinction.

All are our good friends and we Burghers have no chips on our shoulders, no axes to grind, no hang-ups-those all appear to originate from uninformed and bigoted individuals with a mammoth inferiority complex.

For the record: My wife is a Low-country Sinhalese from Galle; of my five children-three daughters and two sons-the three girls are married to Kandyan Sinhalese; my eldest son is married to a girl whose father is Malay and mother Burgher; my second son is married to a girl whose father is a Low-country Sinhalese and mother a Tamil or recent Indian origin.

My grandchildren in the paternal line are Burghers; my grandchildren in the maternal line are all Sinhalese. Does any of this make me an Aryan supremacist or a neo-Nazi? Perhaps Jayasuriya has not read my article: "My good friends, the Sinhalese," also published in the 'Daily News' and available on the Internet. Or my book: "The Burghers".

Read these for your enlightenment-and, anyway, you missed the true focus of my article: It was on educating Burgher children before increasing numbers because the community has more than enough caught in the Poverty Trap.

To quote from my article: "Advocating larger families would certainly beg the question of how to support a larger family when Burghers are (like everyone else) battling with an ever rising cost-of-living? The answer to that lies in better training for better-paid employment and in being competitive in the sense of doing better things with the resources we already possess.

"As mentioned earlier, the key to increasing Burgher numbers is first, education and training and second, getting in the bedroom and working [with renewed zeal] on what needs to be done and deriving a lot of pleasure in the process"