My colonial history

Just before I left the UK my grandfather gave me a small piece of card on which was written ‘Gilbert Cooper, Troup Estate’. He explained that one strand of our family used to be tea planters in Ceylon

Shortly after settling into the geography department at Peradeniya I went to visit the map room. This contains a complete edition of the 1 inch: 1 mile collection produced by the Ceylon Survey Office in the 1950’s – still perhaps the most comprehensive maps to be found of this country. I borrowed the sheets covering the tea country and after poring over them for a couple of hours located Troup Estate up in the hills near Talawakale.

 

Gilbert Cooper lies four generations back up my tortuous family tree. I won’t bore you with the genealogical connection, but he came to Ceylon in the 1840s at the height of the empire hoping to make his fortune as a planter. Using domesticated elephants he cleared a patch of jungle in hills and planted coffee. Coffee never really took off in Ceylon and his crop has soon wiped out by a pest. He returned to England a broken man. Having gathered some more capital he soon returned to the plantation, replacing the diseased coffee plants with tea bushes.

Tea proved much more suited to the climate and, safely protected by British trade controls, his crop flourished. He established the Troup estate and built a large tea factory and a classic tea bungalow with manicured lawns, flower beds and a very British pond. With his wife he lived the hard and adventurous life of a colonial planter. Their nearest neighbours lived several miles away down bone-rattling roads. Trips to school, to the shops and or to ‘the club’ involved lengthy journeys and a great deal of time was spent at home with the gin.

Adams Peak

Adams Peak is Sri Lanka’s holiest mountain and is claimed by most of the country’s religions as the site where Adam/Buddha/Shiva/St Thomas came to earth. Every good Buddhist is expected to make a pilgrimage to its peak at least once in their life. It is a stiff climb. 

Although the central highlands of Sri Lanka rise to over 2500 metres, there are few distinct peaks. The one exception to this is Adams Peak, which rises like a mini-Matterhorn out of the surrounding tree-clad slopes. You can drive pretty close to the summit but it is still a steep climb to the top. The peak has been a site of pilgrimage for over a thousand years and there is now a well maintained set of over 4500 steps that take you to the top.

The climb is traditionally done in the dark to allow the pilgrim to witness the sunrise from the peak and to return again before the heat of the day. The path is well-lit by ugly strip lights which ascend in the darkness blending confusingly with the stars, so at times it looks like the path goes on for ever up into the heavens. In fact climbing in the dark is best as you can’t see how much further you have to go. 

We set off at 2.30am at a brisk pace and were soon sweating and panting as the path climbed relentlessly upwards. We passed several hundred people on the way up in varying degrees of physical fitness. Some of the more frail looked like they had been climbing for days and it was moving to see hunched women in their 70’s in flip-flops being assisted by several generations of their family.

Sri Lankan time

In my conversations with volunteers and fellow Westerners here one theme that keeps emerging is people’s different experiences of Sri Lankan time and productivity.

Time in Sri Lanka is very fluid. Deadlines, appointments and timetables shift and pass. Apart from the remarkably punctual train service, it is rare that things start or finish on time or that people turn up at a predetermined moment. Few people have diaries and I reckon on about a 30% success rate with my research appointments. This fluidity affects productivity as well and I am pleased with accomplishing in a day what in the UK would normally take me an hour or two.

For the British colonials who arrived to govern the country in the mid-nineteenth century, this laissez-faire attitude was a consistent cause of frustration and indignation. The Singhalese were quickly stereotyped as lazy, simple and uncivilised. As with other forms of cultural difference, open-ended Singhalese temporalities were taken as a sign of backwardness in need of prompt remediation.

Victorian engineers erected a series of ugly clock-towers at major intersections and town centres in the country in a vain effort to instil punctuality and a national consciousness of clock time. The clocks still work, though they rarely show the correct time and their bells toll at peculiar hours. The promptness they were designed to engender never materialised, though the pleasant squares within which the clocks stand do provide useful spaces for idling.

Sinharaja rainforest

Sinharaja is the last remaining stand of rainforest in Sri Lanka, it is but a fragment of the forests that previously covered the island but the excess of life it contains is still impressive.

On a recent road trip around the hill country we stopped off at Sinharaja – perched in the southern foothills. Thanks to the inimitable Rough Guide we were put onto the jovial Palitha Ratnayake, who runs a local guesthouse and provides guided tours of the reserve. Sinharaja is dense and only accessible by foot and it soon became clear to us why a good guide was invaluable. 

Despite having read and written extensively about biodiversity over the last seven years, I realised on entering the forest that I had never really seen the density and diversity of wild life that inspires tropical conservation biologists. Sri Lanka is a lively place but the wealth of living forms increased tenfold within this teeming sanctuary. As we left the tea plantations that buffer the forest, the canopy closed over us. Like an eclipse the sky darkened and as the light receded so the smells and noises increased.

The air was filled with the rich and putrid odour of rotting vegetation, punctuated by the sickly sweet aroma of vivid flowers. High up in the canopy monkeys laughed their haunting belly laughs, myriad birds chirruped, craked and trilled, while tree-frogs gasped and croaked. On either side of the narrow path unseen creepy-crawlies crept and crawled with sinister rustlings.