The Road to Peradeniya: An Autobiography

"Not many people living today have heard of Ivor Jennings, either in Britain or in Sri Lanka, but I think he was probably the most important foreigner to have an influence on Sri Lanka in the 20th century, and his story is largely unsung. He came in 1941. Again, his is an interesting biography. He grew up fairly poor in a non-conformist family in Bristol. He was raised with those non-conformist virtues of hard work, thrift and self-improvement through education. He was a scholarship boy and ended up where I taught much later: he was a professor of constitutional law at a very young age at the LSE in the 1930s. Then he came to Ceylon, which was the making of him. Over the course of almost 15 years, not only did he turn the University College of Ceylon—what he called a “Government cram-shop”—into one of the finest universities in Asia, but he also published prolifically on the law, politics and the economy of Ceylon. He was a leading player politically in the runup to independence because he effectively wrote Ceylon’s first constitution, which is known as the Soulbury Constitution. It’s named after the commission that was set up to turn Ceylon from a colony into a dominion, but it should be called the Jennings Constitution because it’s his draft with minor amendments that became the constitution of Ceylon for the first 24 years after independence. So, Jennings is important for all those reasons. The book is called The Road to Peradeniya. Now, for tourists who have been to Sri Lanka, Peradeniya will ring a bell because it’s on the tourist trail. The Royal Botanical Gardens are sited at Peradeniya, which is about 10 miles from the hill capital of Kandy. Lord Mountbatten had his headquarters for South East Asia Command there during the Second World War. But, for me, Peradeniya is its university campus, which has a wonderful setting. I’ve seen many university campuses and I can hardly think of one to rival Peradeniya for its sheer loveliness. Ivor Jennings laid the groundwork for it in the early 1940s, in wartime, in the Meda Oya valley with the Hantane ridge of hills in the distance. He wrote 200 pages of delegated legislation to make sure it came to life after the war and he was its first vice-chancellor. “It’s a heaven-and-hell country, engulfed and consumed by its own extremes” The Road to Peradeniya is his memoir of his upbringing and career before he came to Ceylon, and then of his time in Ceylon until the early 1950s. He wrote it intending to raise funds for a new art gallery for the university, but it languished in his archive. His last official position was as vice-chancellor of the University of Cambridge, and he died in 1965. This memoir was discovered gathering dust in his archive and published in the mid-1990s, by a former librarian of Peradeniya University, the university Ivor Jennings founded. The book is of interest, for me, for several reasons. It gives us a sense of where Ivor Jennings came from and what made him tick. Now he was clearly a rather dour workaholic. He had many Knox-like characteristics. He believed in the virtue of hard work, of resourcefulness. Most Ceylonese exasperated him because they were too laid back. He was self-made, while the elite he interacted with came from gilded families: they didn’t need to work for a living. When they retired for their gins and tonics come five or six o’clock in the evening, he would repair to his study to do his writing. The book’s tone is razor-sharp, the sentences are short and simple. It’s quite unlike most South Asian writing, especially literary writing, which is luxuriant, with these very long meandering sentences full of big words. His style is quite the opposite. It’s plain, and often dripping with condescension and sometimes rather cruel mockery of the people he has to deal with. He’s especially scathing of the political class, though he makes two exceptions: for Oliver Goonetilleke who became the Governor-General of Ceylon, and for Ceylon’s founding father D. S. Senanayake, the country’s first prime minister, for whom he wrote that constitution I told you about. But as for the rest—a phrase which sticks in my mind—he calls them “the Bloomsbury Boys of Cinnamon Gardens”. Cinnamon Gardens is the Chelsea or Mayfair of Colombo, where the beautiful people live, people who never had to work for a living, who inherited their houses and estates as well as the leadership of Ceylon in the run-up to independence and afterwards. He has a very low view of most of them, as well as of the undergraduate politicians he met in student union politics when he was vice-chancellor. He thought the British taught them to be capable talkers in English. They parroted cliches and slogans. They had a sense of entitlement. They took themselves very seriously. Their egos were bloated and their language bloviated, but they were incapable of—these are my words, not his—organizing a piss up in a brewery. He thought them rather venal characters who had a lot of potential for bribery and nepotism. And he thought they might ruin Ceylon, as it then was, in its post-independence years. He was writing this in the early 1950s, when there was so much complacency about Ceylon. The experts at the time predicted a golden future for Ceylon, as they did for Burma and the Philippines—but not for places like South Korea or Singapore. I think it started to go horribly wrong soon after Jennings left in 1955. There was a crucial election in 1956 when the leading politician of the time, S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike—who was subsequently assassinated by a Buddhist monk—played the language card, Sinhala First, ‘Sinhala Only’ as he called it. Then Sinhala became the exclusive official national language at the expense of Tamil and English. Arguably, Ceylon, later Sri Lanka, went downhill from there. What’s striking is Jennings’s sense of foreboding, even when he was writing in those peaceful times. He thought that maybe there was something unpleasant lurking around the corner, though not his own constitution. He was too complacent about that, even though the safeguards for minorities were pretty weak. His constitution relied very much on the right people running Sri Lanka, but that didn’t last. The political class did ruin Ceylon, later Sri Lanka, with the help of Buddhist monks and many other contributory factors besides. In terms of what he says in the book, the only thing I would change in updating it, almost 70 years on, is that when he was thinking of the political class of his time, it was dominated by what the contemporary journalist Tarzie Vittachi called ‘the brown sahib’. These were very anglicized, rather deracinated members of the local elite, whose mother tongue was English. They went to Oxford and Cambridge and spoke Sinhalese to the lower orders, starting with their servants, as well as to their constituents, but not among each other. That gave way, gradually by the 1980s, to what I call the ‘Sinhala Big Man’ in my book. So the political elite of Sri Lanka today is dominated by Big Men who largely come from outside Colombo, as is the case with the present Rajapaksa dynasty that rules Sri Lanka. Their mother tongue is Sinhala and their English isn’t that good. They’re much more populist. They have more of a connection with the small-town bourgeoisie. But in terms of their dictatorial instincts, their corruption, their nepotism, that’s all there in The Road to Peradeniya."