English and national development in Sri Lanka

English did not come to Sri Lanka just as an international language for us to avail ourselves to its international and technical value but as a part of colonialism that subjugated us for 150 years. Hence, it has brought us in its wake shackles that are more insidious and pervasive than its benefits as window to the world.

The most pervasive effect of colonialism is the transformation of the natives in colonies where the subject's language, values, beliefs and civilized ethos gets consigned to the barrows reducing them to a state of nincompoops. Further it identifies and promotes social dichotomies among the subjects to prevent unity among the subjects. Those are necessary pre requisites for the furtherance of subjugation.

Administrative power

When Col. Olcott arrived in this country in 1880 he was much moved by the unjust practices perpetrated on the benign majority by an unscrupulous minority who wielded administrative power. Sensing that the days of the centuries old Sinhala Buddhist civilization that formed the mainstream Ceylonese ethos was numbered, he took to the cause of the majority as his own 'calling' in life and established the Buddhist Theosophist Society (BTS) to resuscitate the Sinhala Buddhist psyche in this country.

Hence the first casualty of colonialism is the national psyche and once subjugated the subjects gets reduced to morons incapable of differentiating what is beneficial and what is not in the long run. In fact the effects of this mental subjugation could be such that you become a devotee of all that is colonialism defending even its most pernicious and enslaving characteristics.

National development and economic growth are not necessarily the same as national development is a term that embodies wider development of a nation's resources to reach optimum physical quality of life of its people whereas economic growth is limited to growth in some sectors of the economy. When the British left we had economic growth in the plantation sector but we were perilously in need of national development. As English was the official language, our literacy rate at the time should be taken as 6.3 percent (competence in English) and our national life expectancy was only 45 years.

Ancestral house

Only those who lived in the 50s will know what poverty there was in this country and in my earliest recollections in the 60s I could remember that there were enough people hanging around our ancestral house in Kegalle just for a plate of rice. Most of the children still did not go to school and there were enough urchins to run the errands. In fact those were the days that we supplied all our relations and friends in Colombo with their requirement of domestic servants.

In 1953, when the price of rice went up by 25 cents there had been a riot which cost nine lives and that was some reflection of the economic status of the average Ceylonese after independence. Our economy came quite closed to being called 'banana republic' as we were dependent on the export of three raw plantation products for the country's economic sustenance.

It was in this milieu that the Government of 1956 introduced popular reforms to empower the people towards development by making them stakeholders in national development and the Language bill was a part of those reforms.

It is difficult to understand how a bill that was intended restore the rights of the majority with a reasonable use of the minority language should run into the type of controversy it eventually did. But the reality at the time was that the Language bill affected the interest of the 6.3 percent Anglicized minority in this country and it was this minority that just could not adopt themselves to this change and thus they vilified the Swabasha bill. Even though this was 6.3 percent of the country's population they controlled almost 90 percent of the country's affairs in all possible areas such as administration, commerce, plantation, banking, forces, judiciary, media and education. But since they could not resist popular reforms on any other tenable grounds they clambered on the 'grievance theory' propelled by Chelvanayagam and Co. and took up the position that the 'Language bill was dividing the nation'. Thus with the power of this elite, the Language bill that was intended to empower the people and integrate the nation got mired in controversy and in an unfinished debate.

Asylum seekers

At independence a section of Ceylonese had migrated abroad due to their possible cultural alienation becoming asylum seekers in the West and they formed the nucleus of Ceylonese Diaspora.

This eventually got converted in to a 'Tamil Diaspora' with more Tamils migrating due to the loss of their privileges in the transformation from colonialism to independence.

The Tamil leaders who were aspiring to become the heirs to the Ceylonese throne at independence, having realized their limits in a democratic milieu, exacerbated this position with propaganda aided and abated by the vestiges of colonial interests. It was a fact that the Language Bill affected the Tamils but it was not because they were Tamils but because they constituted the majority in the administration and professions at the time.

Mercantile sector spearheaded by the Agency houses rejected the Language Bill in toto and refused to employ the Swabasha educated affectively closing 70 percent of the employment opportunities available in Sri Lanka to the vernacular.

This attitude was adopted more out of the need to protect their English educated kith and kin than out of any practical difficulty because in a situation where the customers and the suppliers of these institutions deal in Sinhala there was no plausible reason to recruit staff with 100 percent emphasis in English.

Commercial sector

Institutes like the People's Bank and the Sri Lanka Insurance Corporation were initiated and they conducted their affairs in Sinhala disproving the reservations expressed by 'reputed' people in the commercial sector. Buoyed by their success the Government established more Corporations that accommodated the vernacular but with the recent spate of privatization they fell in line with mercantile 'ethics' thereby nullifying the effects brought about by the Language Act in emancipating the masses.

Thus we see that the most pernicious threats to national development in independent Sri Lanka, the LTTE and the JVP, to be the results of social dichotomies enacted by colonialism.

Colonialism of Sri Lanka is an irreversible fact hence its baggage is a reality that we Sri Lankans have to live with, but the fact that the country is now independent is also equally irreversible and hence the need for social inclusion is a reality that all sections of the country has to accept. The problem therefore is not in English as a language but in the attempts made by this English educated colonial baggage in their attempts to prevent the liberation of masses to achieve national development after independence. [email protected]