On sleeping dictionaries and the Planters’ Raj

S. Pathiravitana

Here’s a new one on dictionaries, which I bet you have not heard before! A friend in Canada tells me that he picked this from a book published in the USA, titled, ‘Round The Tea Totum - When Sri Lanka was Ceylon’, by Dr. David Ebbels, who worked for some six years as an assistant manager on a tea estate:

And this is what Dr David Ebbels says: “Of course, in pioneering days (and for some considerable time thereafter) many, if not most, planters learned their Tamil or Sinhala with the aid of live-in local mistresses universally known as ‘sleeping dictionaries’.

Local language

Although this was often encouraged by the girl’s family, who derived financial and other benefits from the arrangement, and was a much pleasanter way of learning the local language than battling with a dry textbook; the pressures of colonial society gradually made this method socially unacceptable.

Thereafter, although sleeping dictionaries did not entirely vanish from young planters’ households, they were not overtly paraded and certainly had to be concealed from one’s PD”. [PD-Peria Dorai].

This art of doing what the planters wanted to do was extended over many areas of estate work, so much so the planters (all whites) had, so to say, run a powerful Planters’Raj, which was answerable only to itself.

This was of course in colonial times and the planters derived their power from the shareholders of the estates who lived in England and who were powerful enough to tell the colonial government run by their own kind where they got off.

This interesting state of affairs flashed through my mind after hearing about the ‘sleeping dictionaries’ and the experience of an American doctor Victor Heiser.

He had been sent to Ceylon by the Rockefeller Foundation on a mercy mission to stop the spread of diseases like malaria and hookworm in tropical countries, but found the powerful Planters’ Raj objecting to this intervention!

The Rockefeller Foundation was founded in 1913. It was soon after that it sent Dr Heiser, who had some experience in controlling such diseases in the Philippines, to see what he could do to check the spread of hookworm in Ceylon.

Hookworm was widespread in the estates which had been opened up recently and to control the disease one would have to start from the estates. You would think that both the planters and the Ceylon government would be relieved by this generous intervention by the Rockefeller Foundation’s mercy mission, but this is not really what happened.

Hostility

From the beginning there was hostility on the part of both the planters and the government against this American intervention. The reason why the Rockefeller Foundation chose Ceylon for their mercy mission is told by Dr Victor Heiser, the man who led the mission.

“Because of its economic prosperity, Ceylon was looked upon in the East as a prize colony, although many serpents flourished in this Garden of Eden the hookworm infestation was heavy and widespread.

If we could prove the importance and the practicability of a hookworm campaign, funds would be available to carry on the work, and the already existing health service would provide the machinery.

A second reason for concentrating on Ceylon was that other British colonies would try to emulate it, and hence a successful campaign there would serve as an entering wedge elsewhere in the Orient.”.

Caught in dilemma

Dr. Heiser’s fond dreams, however, were soon shattered by the Planters’Raj taking up the position that outsiders, including the Health Department of the government, prodding their noses into sanitation problems on the estates had no business there as this was their private reserve.

In fact when the India Office in London threatened to stop the supply of Indian labour to the estates in Ceylon if sanitation was not attended to, the planting interests rallied round by advancing plausible answers relating to how this would affect their business and softened the India Office threats.

Dr. Heiser was caught in a pretty dilemma. He had to tackle the resistance to his project from two quarters. One was the Planters’Raj and the other was the government’s Health Services with whose cooperation the Rockefeller Foundation had insisted the project should be implemented.

Dr Heiser decided to tackle the government’s Health Services first. He called on its head, a Dr Rutherford, and posed his first question and this was the dialogue that followed.

“What’s the present hookworm situation in Ceylon,” Heiser asked him.

“It’s frightful,” was the prompt answer..

“Why should that be? You have laws enough to cover any action you take, haven’t you?”

“Yes, we have. But the tea planting interests are all powerful, and they are opposed to taking adequate measures against hookworm. We issue a regulation. They get it suspended. We’re helpless.”

“Would you have any objections to a survey made under the Rockefeller Foundation - supposing it could be arranged with the Planters.”

“Not at all, provided your men operated under our Health Services.”

Victory

Dr. Heiser congratulated himself on his victory in his first encounter. And now for the second. That same evening he was lucky enough to meet the Chairman of the Estate Agents’ Association who represented the absentee landlords of England who also had a strong voice in local politics.

At the first opportunity Heiser asked him about the opposition from the planters to the hookworm project. “You are jolly well right,” the Chairman told him and he mentioned the trouble they had when only a rumour was spread about a plague scare and how the labourers fled when the health inspectors came to inoculate them.

“We are not going to have a lot of health fellows crashing into our affairs,” and told him what would happen if they allowed them to come in on a hookworm project, “All our labourers would run away leaving no one to harvest our tea and rubber.. No. No health business for us.”

He gently reminded the man how if a muck raking journalist were to get hold of this story and splash it in some British paper that “could make your action look like Belgian atrocities. Here you are, rich Englishmen - sacrificing thousands of lives just to get your tea harvested,”

Agreed

That quietened the Chairman and he agreed to talk when Heiser suggested, “Let’s look at this as a business proposition. How much does it cost you to bring a labourer from Madras?” Finally, Heiser got round to proving to him that the expenses involved in bringing a hundred thousand labourers every year could be halved if the Rockefeller project goes into action.

The winning point, which was the point that went home, was that eliminating hookworm meant that estate women would no longer be anaemic and would be healthy enough to produce the needed labour for the estates.

There was one last obstacle, however, and that was the Governor, Sir Thomas Chalmers himself who had to permit the Rockefeller Foundation to start its work. And the Governor had already announced that he did not want any “Yankee men or Yankee methods; Ceylon was capable of running its own affairs.”

But the Planters’ Raj with its London backing was too formidable a foe for Sir Thomas Chalmers to tackle. And he gave in. That was how powerful the Planters’ Raj was.

Argument

To cut a long story short the Rockefeller project turned out to be a success. After the estates were cleared of hookworm, Heiser attempted to clean up the surrounding villages as well. But he came a cropper when he faced formidable opposition from local Vedaralas and the Muslims.

The Vedaralas’ objections to their traditional forms of vermifuge were dismissed by Heiser as not being scientific and ridiculed their methods by saying mischievously that the treatment given by the Vedarala was that “his method of treatment was determined by counting the number of buttons on the coat of the first man he met.”

But the Muslim argument could not be easily rebutted. You can judge for yourself from the following dialogue: A doctor from the Heslth Unit would approach a Muslim with a list of questions: “What’s your death rate?” he would begin.

“It is the will of Allah that all die; some die young, some old.”

‘What’s your number of births?”

“Allah alone can say.”

“Is your water safe and potable?”

“History records no deaths from thirst.?

“What is the hygienic condition of your village?”

“Allah sent Mohammed who proved the truth with fire and sword. Now lamb of the West, cease your questioning. It can do you or others no good.”