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Selected
Writings by Sachi Sri Kantha
The Bandaranaikes from the House of Nilaperumal
by James T.Rutnam with Additional Notes
18 July 2002
[see also
Dr. James T. Rutnam
- One Hundred Tamils of 20th Century]
Front Note by Sachi Sri Kantha
The powerful Bandaranaike clan of Sri Lanka has
a noticeable presence in the internet. There is even a website
http://www.lk/swrd/ presenting the palatable details on the
Bandaranaikes. But unpalatable facts about the Bandaranaike clan
seems to be hidden from the internet audience. As such, I wish
to present to the readers a gem of a genealogical research paper
authored by one of my beloved mentors James Thevathasan Rutnam
(1905-1988) on the origins of Bandaranaike clan in the colonial
Ceylon. James Rutnam’s paper originally appeared in the Colombo
Tribune weekly of July 19, 1957 – forty five years ago. When
James Rutnam’s paper appeared in print, padre Bandaranaike
(1899-1959) was the prime minister of Ceylon. The above
mentioned website has not included James Rutnam’s paper in its
Bibliography section for obvious reasons.
I wonder
whether the Tamil name Nilaperumal from Tamil Nadu rings any
bell in the ears of the two leading members of the current
Bandaranaike generation, Chandrika and Anura. For their benefit,
I present the complete article of James Rutnam. Please note that
the reference to ‘Prime Minister’ in the article is to
S.W.R.D.Bandaranaike, the father of Chandrika. Rutnam’s subtle
pricks on the vainglorious Mudaliyar forefathers of Chandrika
and Anura Bandaranaike, who licked the boots of colonial White
masters for crumbs of medals and lands - as well as their
treachery against the Kandyan kingdom - deserve to pass into the
electronic database. Now, to James Rutnam’s description.
The House of Nilaperumal by James T.Rutnam
“Our prime minister’s direct male ancestor, of whose
connection some members of this family used to take pride in (see
e.g. Twentieth Century Impressions of Ceylon, edited by Arnold
Wright, 1907, p.525) was Nilaperumal, a Tamil from South India who
arrived in Ceylon in the late fifteenth or early sixteenth century.
He was described as a ‘High Priest’ of a temple in Ceylon. He was
the first Kapurala in his family of the Nawagomuwe Dewale, with the
fortunes of which the Bandaranaikes were long associated. Kakapuge
was a name which the family used to affect in the past. It is the
Sinhalese version of Nilaperumalage, the ge name of the
Bandaranayakes.
Don Francisco (Franciscus?) Dias Wijetunga
Bandaranayake, Mualiyar of the Hewagam Korale, who was born about
1720, was a direct descendant of the male line of Nilaperumal. He
was one of those who supplanted the ‘original Mudaliyars’, when the
latter ‘fled to Kandy’ in 1760 to join the Sinhalese in the struggle
between the Dutch and the Kandyan kingdom. The reward for this
defection was the office of Mudaliyar of the Four Pattus.
Francisco first married Dona Maria Perera. They had six sons and
four daughters. Their fourth son was Coenrad Pieter Dias
Bandaranayake Snr., a Maha Mudaliyar, who was the grandfather of
another Maha Mudaliyar of the same name (except for Pieter being
spelled Peter), who served under the British. Francisco’s fifth son
was Daniel Bandaranayake, Mohandiram of Siyane Korale. He was the
father of Don Solomon Dias Bandaranayake, Mudaliyar of Siyane
Korale.
Don Solomon married a granddaughter of Susanna
Scharff, who died on the 15th June 1781 and was buried in the Dutch
(formerly Portuguese) church in the Fort at the site of the present
Gordon Gardens, but whose tombstone now lies in the Wolvendhal Dutch
Reformed Church, Colombo. The Coat of Arms of the Scharff family is
engraved on this tombstone, the distinguishing mark of which is a
‘right arm holding a sabre’. This is part of the heraldic arms of
the Bandaranayakes. Susanna Scharff was a daughter of Lieutenant Jan
Christoffel Scharff, who served under the Dutch East India Company.
The names of the Scharff family are given in the
Journal of the Dutch Burgher Union, volume 8, page 6. J.C.Scharff
hailed from Sangerhausen, Upper Saxony, Thuringia, in Germany. He
married at Colombo on the 21st March 1731 a lady by the name of
Elizabeth de Saram. Susanne was baptized at Colombo on the 8th
December 1748, and married in Colombo on 4th November 1759, the
Rev.Henricus Philipsz (1733-1790), a Sinhalese Christian Minister of
the Dutch Reformed Church in Ceylon. An account of this Minister
appears in Dr.Bruyn’s History of the Reformed Church in the Dutch
East Indies, written in Dutch. He died on the 19th May 1790. His
tombstone now lies in the Wolvendhal Dutch Reformed Church, but not
by the side of hiw wife Susanna Scharff’s tombstone, by which
evidently it was originally erected at the Church in the Fort of
Colombo.
The Reverend H.Philipsz, who had his education in
Holland, was a learned and outstanding Christian scholar. He was a
son of a Maha Mudaliyar under the Dutch, and a grandson of a
schoolmaster of Cotta by the name of D.Philippe. Rev.Philpsz’s
brother Abraham Philipsz too was a Maha Mudaliyar under the Dutch.
(It was Abraham’s son Johannes Gottfried Philipsz, one of Chief
Justice Sir Alexander Johnston’s protégés and interpreters, who was
appointed the first Sinhalese Member of the Legislative Council of
Ceylon in 1834.) He died on the 4th July 1830.
It is interesting to note that Philipsz’s colleague,
A.Coomarasamy, a Tamil interpreter under the British who became the
first Tamil member of the same Legislative Council, was a son of
Arumugapillai, an immigrant from South India who came to Garudavil
in the Jaffna Peninsula. A.Coomarasamy was the father of Sir Muttu
Coomarasamy and Sellatchi, the mother of the Ponnambalam brothers,
Coomarasamy Ramanathan and Arunachalam.
I have with me a long
and somewhat obsequious letter written by Johannes Gottfried
Philipsz to Sir Alexander Johnston whom he addresses as ‘My Lord and
Protector’. I discovered this letter among the collection of the
Johnston Papers which I obtained in England in 1954.
It has
been said that Governor Maitland ‘feared’ the Mudaliyars. But the
word ‘fear’ in this context, apparently has been used in a special
sense and does not connote fear as we ordinarily understand it. For
the evidence of contemporary records shows that there was no class
of people in Ceylon so addicted to fawning, flattering and
sycophantising in its relationship with its masters as that of the
Mudaliyars. It must of course be borne in mind that the times in
which they lived were different to ours. There was no middle class.
There were the exploiters and the exploited, the foreign masters and
their native subjects, the rulers and the oppressed. Into this
pattern of political and economic society entered the Mudaliyar,
using all the craft and cunning, the art and artifice of the
adventurer and social climber, with his stock-in-trade of
jealousy-ridden hypocritical flattery and sneaky ways. Little wonder
then that we find most of the Mudaliyars were ‘professing
Christians’ because no one was qualified to hold office unless he
was a Christian. And little wonder too if the authorities saw
through this hypocrisy, and ‘feared’ the machinations of the enemy
within their gates.
In this connection Hugh Cleghorn’s
‘Minute’ or ‘Memorandum on the Administration of Justice and Revenue
in the Island of Ceylon under the Dutch Government’ (1799) at a
critical period of our history, at the very time when Dutch rule had
ended and British rule began, is worthy of note. Cleghorn observed:
‘If the poverty and indolence of the natives of this country were to
be traced to their true cause, these would be found to originate in
the insecurity of their little property which is at the mercy of the
Moodeliar. That few or no appeals have been made against his
decisions is to me a stronger proof of the dread of his oppression,
than of respect for his justice.’
Governor North too has left
for posterity his observations on the Mudaliyars, in his letter to
the Marquis Wellesley dated 27th October 1798, the original of which
is among the Wellesley Manuscripts in the Additional Manuscripts of
the British Museum in London. Governor North states:
‘The
Maha Moodliar is always resident near the person of the Governor. He
never sits down in my presence, nor appears before me in shoes, but
is in fact the Grand Vizier of Ceylon. Every order I give him is
immediately executed, and whatever takes place on the island is
communicated by him to me. The only pecuniary rewards which he and
the inferior Moodliars look to from the Government are small
accomodessans. Their great object is to gain marks of distinction,
such as sabres, gold chains, medals etc., of which they are highly
vain and by which the Dutch governors well knew how to secure their
attachment.’ (Journal of the Ceylon Branch of the Royal Asiatic
Society, New Series, volume 3, 1953, p.143n: 20)
The above is
a faithful contemporary description of things as they were. Although
these medal-collecting Mudaliyars went without shoes and bowed times
without number before their Governors, the Mudaliyars too, in their
own turn, exacted without any compunction or human consideration
whatsoever a cringing servility from the inarticulate masses of the
people between whom and the rulers they placed themselves as
permanent barriers. Indeed they would seem to have donned jackboots
when they went out and trampled on the rights of the dumb masses.
The people were forced to approach these recently exalted brown
slave-drivers, using the most self-degrading and abject terms of
address. A relic of this barbarism could still be detected in
certain households, happily fast disappearing, the members of which
deluded themselves into believing that they had sprung from a
high-born, low-country Sinhalese aristocracy which we now know was
neither high born, nor Sinhalese. Some of these misguided souls
still insist on being addressed as hamu by their servants.
Handsomely well are these servants paid for this performance.
Unfortunately, the nouveaux riches and members of the other rival
social groups and castes (which the earlier hamus despised) too
appear to have entered into this competitive trade of self-laudatory
hamu-making, with disastrous results to all contestants. Hence the
slow disappearance of the hamu in the present social set-up.
As in other feudal societies the Ceylonese masses of the time had no
rights. Generally, they were led, like dumb-driven cattle. When the
Madras dubashes made themselves obnoxious during the brief period
when the East Indian Company administered Ceylon from Madras, the
displaced loyal Mudaliyars seized the opportunity to whip up a
feeling among the people that after all the known devil was better
than the unknown.
There were, however, Mudaliyars and Mudaliyars. The Philipszes
had a tradition of learning inherited from their humble, nonetheless
much esteemed, pedagogic origins, and a consequential understanding
of true human values. They were also fortified by genuinely
religious Christian convictions, unlike most of their fellows who
were bogus Christians who sold their consciences for messes of
pottage. With these qualities ingrained in their character, the
Philipszes contributed not a little to raise the tone of the small
coterie of courtiers that danced attendance, albeit barefooted,
round the gubernatorial throne. In this tradition of public service,
which was born apparently of the best in East and West and which
distinguished the Philipszes that has enriched the blood and lent
luster to the lineage of our Prime Minister.
The Rev.Henricus
Philpsz and Susanna Scharff were the parents of some eight children,
the eldest of whom was also a Christian Minister by the name of
Rev.Gerardus Philipsz. There is reference to him in Cordiner’s
Ceylon, volume 1, page 88. He married Johanna Adriana, the eleventh
child of Petrus Van Dort, son of Cornelius Van Dort and his wife
Johanna Paulusz. Johanna Adriana Van Dort’s brother, Leonhard Van
Dort was the father of Johannes Van Dort, whose son was the well
known artist J.L.K.Dort. Some of the sketches done by J.L.K.Van Dort
were recently published by Lady Hildas Pieries, wife of Sir Paul
Pieris. The sixth child of Susanna Scharff and the Rev.Henricus
Philipsz, Johanna Elizabeth Philpsz, was born in 1772 and married on
the 15th September 1799, Diederich Wilhelm Spittel, the father of
Gerardus Adrian Spittel, whose son Frederick George Spittel was the
father of our well-known surgeon and author Richard Lionel Spittel.
Diederich Wilhelm Spittel’s father John Lourens Spittel also came
like the Scharffs from Germany, from Weimar in Saxony.
Another daughter of Susanna Scharff, her third child, by the name of
Cornelia Henrica (Henrietta?) married firstly at Colombo on the 27th
July 1789, Adolph Martin Heyman, an Ensign in the Dutch Service, a
native of Leuwenstein. A silver tobacco box belonging to this lady,
with the name ‘Heyman’ inscribed on it was in the possession of Sir
Paul E.Pieris. This lady lost her husband sometime afterwards and
married secondly Christoffel de Saram, Fourth Maha Mudaliyar, the
holder of a new office then created by the British to exalt their
interpreter who worked in the office of the Commissioner of Revenue.
A son of this union was Johannes Henricus de Saram, who at the age
of fourteen was taken by Governor Maitland to England in 1811, to
study for the Christian ministry. He was described in a letter by
his companion Balthazar de Saram, a member of a different family of
Saram, as one attuned by family upbringing to western ways and
habits, ‘having been from his infancy reared up in his own family
whose only deviation from the manners, language and costume of the
Dutch was his father’s native dress’. I have seen his correspondence
in the original at the Public Record Office in London. Cornelia
Henrica (Henrietta) de Saram, nee Philipsz, who died on the 9th
April 1824, is also commemorated by a tombstone at the Dutch
Reformed Church at Wolvendhal.
Before he left England, the
young Christian Minister, the Rev.Johannes Henricus de Saram,
married a European lady by the name of Frances Treherne. The
marriage was solemnized in London in the Church of the parish of
St.Martin-in-the-Fields on the 9th June 1820. It was this young
man’s sister Cornelia, a grand-daughter of Susanna Scharff, who
married Don Solomon Dias Bandaranayake, Mudaliyar of Siyane Korale.
Don Solomon’s branch of the family of Bandaranayake from now
onwards appear to spell its name as Bandaranaike. Don Solomon lived
to a ripe old age. It should be recorded here that he was a great
servant of the British Crown. It was this Solomon Dias Bandaranaike
who received a government grant of one hundred and eighty acres of
land. He was also the recipient of a medal from Governor Brownrigg
with the citation ‘as a reward for eminent service during the
Kandian Rebellion A.D. 1818’. A patriot of perfidious Albion,
forsooth. Don Solomon’s photograph appeared in volume 2 of Tennent’s
Ceylon. He died on 15th September 1859.
Don Solomon’s
daughter Susan Elizabeth, a direct descendant of Nilaperumal and
Scharff, was married to John Martinus Pieris. Of this union was born
the well-known historian and author of several books on Sinhalese
families, Sir Paul E.Pieris. Sir Paul’s grandfather Johan Louis
Pieris was the mace-bearer at the Supreme Court, when it was
presided over by the Great Chief Justice, Sir Alexander Johnston.
Johan Louis Pieris was the son of Wilhelmus Pieris, who died on the
24th August 1816. Wilhelmus Pieris’s father was Louis Pieris, a
proponent in the Dutch Reformed Church. Louis Pieris had a brother
Dernigellege Pauloe Pieris Samarasinghe. Louis Pieris’s father
Manuel (?) hailed from Attidiya near Colombo. He was a member of the
lascarins (Sinhalese foot-soldiers) under the Dutch, and was the
recipient of several parveni lands as a reward for his services. He
(Manuel?) had a brother by the name of Dernigellege Joan (John)
Fernando, whose grandson Abraham Pieris was also a proponent in the
Dutch Reformed Church (see Dutch Hoofd Thombo under village Attidiya
of the Pallepattu of the Salpitty Korale, vol.8 fol.177-178, and the
Land Thombo, vol.3, fol.198; see also Ambalangoda School Thombo File
7291 p.1a, quoted by E.Reimers in his Dutch Parish Registers of
Ceylon, Colombo, 1950).
Don Solomon’s son, Don Christoffel
Henricus Dias Bandaranaike, who was born in 1826, succeeded his
father. He married a kinswoman, Anna Florentina Philipsz, daughter
of Phillipsz Gysbertus Panditaratne, and grand-daughter of Johannes
Gottfried Phillipsz, whose family had by then adopted for general
use the cognomen Panditaratne. To this couple was begotten an only
son who later became famous in the service of successive British
governors. He has recorded an account of his intimate associations
with Kings, Princes, Dukes and Governors and men and women
distinguished in various orders of Chivalry, in his autobiography,
Remembered Yesterdays. But unfortunately, his book does not make us
any the wiser to his own family story. With remarkable extravagance
of language he styled himself Sir Don Solomon Dias Bandaranaike,
Knight Commander of the Most Distinguished Order of St.Michael and
St.George.
To this Christian Knight of St.George, a scion of the House of
Nilaperumal and a cadet of the families of Phillipsz and Scharff,
was born Solomon West Ridgeway Dias Bandaranaike, our present Prime
Minister, who has determined for himself a new course in Ceylon
history, having divested himself of the habits and habiliments and
religion of his own immediate forebears. Well may it be said that he
has the blood of all the major communities of this island. Well may
we hope for a new Sri Lanka which would breed a race of true
Ceylonese – of which he would be our unchallenged leader. Well had
the sage Rabindranath Tagore declared in his profound wisdom, ‘Unity
lies in the current of blood and not in the torrent of words’.”
Post-script by Sachi Sri Kantha
One of S.W.R.D.Bandaranaike’s nieces and academic
Yasmine Gooneratne nee Bandaranaike wrote a readable book, Relative
Merits: A Personal Memoir of the Bandaranaike Family of Sri Lanka
(C.Hurst & Co, London, 1986). I quote the following two paragraphs
from its foreword, entitled, ‘Ancestors’.
“…an Indian officer
‘of high standing’ who, serving under the Kings of Kandy and bearing
the name Neela Perumal, was made high priest of the Temple of the
God Saman, and commanded to take the name of Nayaka Pandaram (Chief
Record Keeper) in 1454. If this tradition has truth in, we may
surmise that the Indian name of Nayaka Pandaram came in time to
adopt the form of Pandara Nayaka. By the time it had turned into the
Sinhalese Bandaranaike, the Hinduism of its bearers had been
replaced by Buddhism; just as we know, from written genealogical
records dating back to the early seventeenth century, that Buddhism
was itself replaced in the family by Christianity in its Catholic
and later in its Protestant forms. However, the occupations of
scribe seems to have descended in the family down the centuries,
together with a tradition of service to the Court.
The
pandaram of India are a Brahman sub-caste of genealogists and
keepers of Court and family records, and the retinues of Indian
princesses who came to the island in early times, to be married to a
King or Prince in Kandy, must have included many such among the
‘nobles as well as commoners duly absorbed in the vast statecraft of
the Kingdom and in the hierarchy of the Court and palace personnel’.
From very early times Mantai, or Mantota, had been the port of
entrance to arrivals in Sri Lanka from South India…” (pages 3-4)
Yasmine Gooneratne had cited the original research of James Rutnam
in her bibliography. But unlike Rutnam, she has presented a soothing
positive spin on the mind set of her ancestor Mudaliyars who served
the colonial Dutch and British masters by converting to Christianity
to grab lands from the Sinhalese commoners. I also find her job
description of her ancestral Sinhalese Mudaliyar class in the 17th
to 19th centuries as far from accurate. In one ornamental paragraph
of the same foreword on her ancestors, Yasmine Gooneratne has
written:
“The title of Mudaliyar seems to have distinguished
leaders of groups of fighting men from a particular district who
shared common bonds of caste. Such leaders, by virtue of their place
in the social structure of their time and country, were necessarily
influential in their ancestral villages. They were able soldiers and
resourceful diplomats, accustomed to be first among equals, and
would probably have had a long and well-known tradition of family
loyalty to their sovereign. The military duties traditionally
carried out by them were continued during the intermittent warfare
that marked the period of Portuguese rule in the island. At the
close of that period, the role of the Mudaliyars was still military
in character, but the confidence of their superior officers and the
experience they had gained in participating in the administration of
what had been, in fact, a military regime, together with their new
interests as landlords and cultivators of large tracts of property,
are all factors likely to have made them ready for administrative
responsibility.” (page 6)
One should note that Yasmine
Gooneratne has not identified the caste name in the first sentence
of the above paragraph. Politically correct indeed. Paying obeisance
to one’s ancestors is a time-honored practice among the Orientals.
But, exaggerating and embellishing the roles played by one’s
ancestors is hardly acceptable in academic research. The Sinhalese
Mudaliyar class was no “able soldiers and resourceful diplomats”.
Rather, they were cowardly weather-vanes, political turn-coats and
servile fart-catchers to the colonial masters of Ceylon. It is also
a puzzle for me, how come the descendants of Nilaperumal, a pandaram
Brahman sub-caste, demoted themselves to ‘fighting men’ of military
caste (?) in a few centuries.
If I’m not wrong, Yasmine
Gooneratne is a specialist in English literature and not in Tamil
literature. In the glossary she has provided at the end of her book,
she has described the term ‘Mudaliyar, Modeliar’ as a Sinhalese word
referring to Sinhalese official of high rank. The origin of the now
commonly used Sinhalese terms Mudaliyar and Mudalaali lies in the
Tamil root word, Mudal, which means capital in terms of ‘property
wealth’ and not ‘the seat of government’. Thus, the word Mudaliyar
refers to a person endowed with capital wealth, and Mudalaali (Mudal
= capital; Aali = ruler) refers to a person who rules the capital
wealth. ‘Number One’ person is another variant of the Tamil root
Mudal. Thus, it could have meant ‘Number One’ fart catcher of the
‘sovereign’, and not reflected any of the military merits attributed
to the Mudaliyar class by Yasmine Gooneratne. |
