Tradition, modernity and elite formation
How Western theosophists shaped modern Sri Lanka
The 2016 Marie Musaeus Higgins–Peter de Abrew Memorial Oration was delivered by Manisha Gunasekera, Sri Lannka’s Ambassador to the Republic of Korea, on the subject of “Tradition, modernity and elite formation: How Western theosophists shaped modern Sri Lanka”. Below are extracts of her speech. When I was about 16, and having my own battle reading the Odyssey, my father advised me to read the Iliad first. Pointing to a copy of the great epic in his own modest but eclectic library, he would say, “This is more readable, and should be read before the Odyssey”. On another occasion, he guided me through my reading of a simplified version of Geiger’s Mahawamsa.
My father was a simple man. His family was from the deep south and belonged to the local intelligentsia. He never went to university due to economic pressures. But he was one of the most educated men I had the good fortune to meet, well versed in literature, the classics, politics, and brilliant in mathematics. The answer lies in an examination of the Western theosophists’ modernisation project in the late 19th and early 20th century Sri Lanka.
My father was a product of Mahinda College, Galle, a leading Buddhist theosophical school established in 1892. This story is intrinsically linked to a particular socio-political milieu in 19th century Sri Lanka. It goes back to the British colonial era and the Christian missionary project of civilising the “natives” through proselytising. The period we examine is roughly from the 1830s to the 1930s.
The early-19th century growth of the Evangelical movement in England coincided with the expansion of the British empire. The Christian missionaries established themselves in Sri Lanka. The colonial Government created a two-tier education system. It included fee levying English medium schools assisted by the State, which were Christian missionary schools catering to Christian students and a few upper class Buddhists that formed a minority; and non-fee levying vernacular schools teaching in Sinhala or Tamil which did not receive State support and were open to the non-Christian majority in Sri Lanka. The missionary schools largely imparted a Western classical education in English, with the leading Anglican schools such as S. Thomas’ College-Mount Lavinia, Trinity College–Kandy, modeled on English public schools.
The missionaries wielded much influence in education, and in conflict of interest, held senior positions in the administration of education in government. Educational reforms of 1865 which recommended a policy of basic vernacular education for the masses, resulted in the closure of many English schools by 1880. This effectively handed over the monopoly of imparting an English education to missionary schools, which expanded to meet the demand, thereby creating a small elite group of the indigenous emerging middle class who were harnessed in service of the empire. As a result, religion emerged as a means of social mobili- Marie Musaeus Higgins–Peter de Abrew Memorial Oration. ty and class distinction.
With State assistance, missionary schools expanded and reached nearly a 1,000 in 1890. This asymmetry in modern education along religious lines is evident in the fact that, “In 1899, of the 1,963 aided schools, only 120 were Buddhist controlled, while 1,082 were Christian controlled,” and in 1901 literacy among Buddhist, Muslim and Hindu men was under 35%, whereas it was 55.2% among Christian men; and it was 5.5% among women of other religions, contrasting with 30% among Christian women.
In this backdrop, in New York, the Theosophical Society was set up in 1875 by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky and Henry Steele Olcott, two radical liberal intellectuals from Russia and America, as a direct critique of the Christian missionary project. The theosophists were opposed to established Christian dogma. They aimed to form a nucleus of universal brotherhood by “unveiling” the great religious philosophies of the East to the Western world.
Edward Said in his work “Orientalism” (1979) demonstrates that the relationship between Occident and Orient is one of power, of domination, of a complex hegemony. The theosophist view of the Orient was Saidian, in that they perceived the East as the romantic “Other”, the cradle of civilisation and repository of the great Eastern philosophies including Buddhism and Hinduism, with which they identified. But it differed from what Said in their view of the East and West as two equal and complementary halves of a whole, i.e., the West with its science and modernism, and the east with its ancient philosophies of universal truth. This perception of equality subverted traditional power relations between Occident and Orient, and by extension the imperialist project.
While the Christian movement flourished with State sanction from early-19th century, Buddhism was going through its own process of revival with the establishment of two new Buddhist Orders of Amarapura (1799) and Ramanna (1864), and with the formation of new Buddhist monastic institutions. These developments enlivened the contemporary polemical debate within Buddhism. The arrival of Blavatsky and Olcott in Sri Lanka in 1880 which led to the formation of the Buddhist Theosophical Society of Ceylon (BTS), coincided with and was catalysed by the very public polemical debates between Evangelical Christianity and Buddhism, which culminated in the great Panadura debate of 1873 that catapulted Migettuwatte Gunanada Thera to international fame. Olcott and Blavatsky on their arrival declared themselves to be Buddhists, and became in Olcott’s own words “the first white champions” of the Buddhist revivalist movement in Ceylon.
It is important to remember that although the theosophists significantly catalysed the Buddhist revivalist movement, the tide of Buddhist revival had already commenced within the country. It is, however, in the sphere of modern education that the theosophist legacy is most revered and visible today.
Olcott and the Western theosophists lost no time in addressing the lacunae in education among the majority population in Ceylon. They established Buddhist schools in the capitals of key provinces. The first of these founded by Olcott was Ananda College, Colombo, which started in 1886 as a night school for boys to teach English. The others were Dharmaraja College, Kandy (1887); Maliyadeva College, Kurunegala (1888); Mahinda College, Galle (1892); and Musaeus College, Colombo (1893). These were followed decades later by Sri Sumangala Boys’ School, Panadura (1909); Visakha Buddhist Girls’ School, Colombo (1917); Rahula College, Matara (1923); Sri Sumangala Girls’ School, Panadura (1923); Nalanda College, Colombo (1925); Ananda Balika, Colombo (1925); Sujatha Vidyalaya, Matara (1929); and Mahamaya Vidyalaya, Kandy (1932). Some 200 schools were established by the theosophists, and their supporters, several of which became leading Buddhist schools in the island.
An area which has direct relevance to the theosophist modernisation project, is the high educational credentials and liberal intellectual milieu of the Western theosophists who undertook Buddhist education in Sri Lanka. This resulted in their imparting a premium education. The BTS led by Olcott required the Western men and women who came to Ceylon to teach to be academically qualified, and to be familiar with the Oriental philosophies. Musaeus Higgins herself was a theosophist and the daughter of a High Court Judge in Germany, and having graduated from University, had obtained the title of Frau Professor.
These teachers, who Olcott and his team recruited from several continents, were able to impart a high quality education and engender liberal and at times socialist ideas among their students. Thus, by establishing several English medium schools based on Western liberal curricula, amalgamated with the teaching of Buddhism, local history and language, the theosophists made available a modern education combined with tradition. The modern education imparted was equivalent in quality to the education provided by the best of missionary schools. Given the unique formula, these schools succeeded in nurturing a sense of dignity, self-confidence and national consciousness among a colonised people. This was the generation which was to later play a significant role in the many faceted national movement of Sri Lanka.
Theosophists being averse to Christian religious dogma and seeking a universal truth connecting the great Eastern philosophies, did not in turn encourage the establishment of a Buddhist dogma in the schools they formed. The theosophists emphasised “a general education”, by which was meant a modern education along the Western liberal tradition. Education in these schools was therefore not confined to Buddhist students alone. Peter de Abrew wrote in the theosophist magazine soon after the formation of Musaeus, “that the school shall be entirely undenominational, as by adopting that method I shall be enabled to benefit all my country women without distinction of creed…”. Like the missionary schools, the theosophical schools embraced the protestant work ethic.
The theosophists also retooled Buddhism to make it modern. They de-ritualised Buddhism from the indigenous folk tradition and presented a lucid version distilled from translations. Many of the eminent Orientalist scholars who translated Pali Buddhist texts were themselves theosophists.
Thus, the strengths of the Western world of science, industrialisation and modernity and its social and other habits were imparted by the theosophists in the schools they built, coupled with the teaching of Sri Lankan histo- ry, Buddhist philosophy, indigenous arts, culture, and even the sciences. As a result, these schools emerged as secular, inclusive and modern centres of learning catering to an emerging middle class who desired to embrace modern values. Herein lies the cosmopolitanism of the theosophist project which delicately balanced itself between tradition and modernity. It is to the credit of the theosophists that Sri Lanka through the tribulations of its nation building process in the 20th and 21st centuries, did not inherit from its pre-independence times a religious conflict.
Women’s education in Sri Lanka in modern times originated first through the demand for English educated modern wives for the boys of the emerging middle class. Similar imperatives drove the establishment of the missionary girls’ schools, starting with the first Girls’ Boarding School in Uduvil, Jaffna in 1824, and later, the theosophist Buddhist girls’ schools of Sangamitta and Musaeus in Colombo in the 1890s. The original aim was to impart a finishing school type of education needed to nurture good wives and mothers, modelled on victorian womanhood.
We must remember that many of the eminent theosophist women who worked in South Asia such as Annie Besant, Henrietta Muller, Charlotte Despard, Margaret Cousins, Florence Farr and Annie Preston, were also suffragettes and some were socialist feminists, who had fought for the rights of women in Europe. Despite their feminism in Europe, many of these theosophist women, like their missionary sisters before them, subscribed to gender stereotypes in acknowledging the special value of educating women in nation building in South Asia. Most notable among these is Annie Besant, who expounded a traditional notion of womanhood in South Asia, perceiving women as mothers, wives, daughters and repositories of culture, while espousing a radical feminism in Europe.
Despite these limitations placed on female education, the liberal intellectual background, the latent feminism and sheer dedication of these early women educationists, among whom Marie Musaeus Higgins is prominent, combined with the modern curricula they introduced, resulted in the girls’ schools emerging as centres of excellence and producing students who were to take up teaching and other important professions in public life, thus subverting traditional gender roles.
The theosophist schools thus established were taken to new heights by Sri Lankan educationists who took over the management of these schools in the 1920s and the 1930s, including personalities such as D.B. Jayatilake. Notable among these is P. de S. Kularatne who made Ananda the leading school it is today. Kularatne also established many other leading Buddhist schools including Nalanda, Ananda Balika, Moratuwa Vidyalaya, Dharmapala Vidyalaya, and was the Principal of Dharmaraja.
Incidentally, many of the prominent Western, Indian and local educationists who took over from the theosophists from the 1920s were women. They include Hilda Westbrook Kularatne, Bertha Rodgers Ratwatte, Doreen Wickremasinghe, Clara Motwani, Susan George Pulimood, Soma Pujita Goonewardena, and Sujatha Nimalasuriya, among others.
These educationists and national leaders worked tirelessly to recruit children from the emerging middle class to the Buddhist schools they formed, in order to enhance their influence and sustainability. Even in 1933, Clara Motwani found “Visakha a somewhat demoralized school”… “With the exception of a few brave pioneers,…., Buddhist parents preferred to send their children to the fashionable missionary institutions”. My mother has a childhood memory of how Lady Sarah de Soysa, the leading spirit in the founding of Mahamaya, walked into her home in Kandy to persuade her parents to admit their two elder daughters of school-going age to Mahamaya. The girl children of the de Abrew family, despite their wealth and social standing, were admitted to Musaeus. Agnes Helena Wijewardena, the daughter of a wealthy merchant and mother of President J.R. Jayawardena was educated at Musaeus. So was LSSP firebrand Vivienne Goonewardene, of the left-wing Goonewardene family. The theosophical schools therefore also served an elite. It was mainly the urban middle class and the village intelligentsia with influence that could access these schools.
In Martin Wickramasinghe’s epic Gamperaliya which is set in the historical period we are discussing here, we find Tissa, the only son of the village gentry, being packed off to an Ingresi Iskole in the south, while his two elder sisters continue their insular vernacular education. In our collective memory Ingresi Iskole, a relic from our past, still emotes a superior Western education and upward social mobility. This, then, is the legacy of the great theosophists who chipped away at the stranglehold on power and social status by the colonial government and the Christian missionaries, by providing the people with an alternative means of social mobility through education.
However, even by 1931, the time of the Donoughmore Constitution and the introduction of universal franchise, English education largely remained the privilege of the elite. Additionally, until the introduction of free education in 1946, most of these schools were fee levying.
It therefore took the revolutionary reforms of C.W.W. Kannangara, the first Minister of Education in Ceylon’s State Council, to make education truly accessible to the masses. They were the twin reforms of free education adopted in the legislature in 1946; and the formation in the 1940s of well-equipped, secondary co-educational schools in the English medium in the districts out of Colombo, termed Central Schools, modelled on leading Colombo schools, to provide a premium education to gifted but less privileged students from rural areas. Kannagara, in a sense replicated the theosophist experiment in a much larger scale.
The impact of Kannangara reforms was immediate. Sri Lanka in the 1960s, with free education, high literacy and free health care emerged as a model welfare State with a high Human Development Index (HDI) comparable to developed countries, which is sustained to date. The country also benefited from the circular effects of female education and free education, which positively impacted on planning smaller families and educating both boy and girl children without discrimination.
Today, we may have come full circle. There is much being said about the deterioration in quality of education in general, following the crisis in education from the 1970s. There is the sense that the State has failed in delivering public goods in the form of a quality education, and a lack of trust in gaining future benefits and social mobility if one were to go through the State system of education. If there is one lesson we can draw from the theosophists’ modernisation drive in education, it is of the need to set the bar high, and to maintain quality in education.
(The full text of this oration, delivered at Musaeus College on July 30, 2016, can be found in our website
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