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V. The Two Societies: a Study of Town Life in Nineteenth-Century Ceylon
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 December 2010
Abstract
The English-speaking society of nineteenth-century Colombo, as in other areas in Ceylon gradually acquiring an urban character, was composed of two main units—the European, and the native. Within both were intricate subdivisions, which 'Sampson Brown’ described in a comic sketch of 1842:
Glibb and I have had some rather long chats about the natives and their moral character. They certainly are a most repelling race: there's no making anything of them as yet, and I doubt if we ever shall…A native of one particular caste will not marry into or associate with another and so the whole race of them is split into small factions. This is bad enough say you, but…the white man's caste rages [sic] as widely and deeply as that of the Buddhist…In Ceylon you find the Burgher caste, the Civil caste, the Military caste, and the Mercantile caste, all little worlds distinct from each other, travelling in different orbits. They would not dine with each other, I suppose, if their existence depended on it.
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References
1 ‘Life in the Jungle, or Letters from a Planter to his Cousin in London', no. 6, Ceylon Magazine, vol. II, no. 17 (January 1842), 234.
2 Cf. L. F. Liesching, A Brief Account of Ceylon (Jaffna, 1861), p. 5, for a detailed description of Colombo in the sixties.
3 Dilke, C. W., Greater Britain (London, 1868), II, 172–3Google Scholar.
4 For one of the best early descriptions of a situation that needs little documentation, cf. Lord William Bentinck's observations on the subject, printed in the advertisement to Dubois's Description of the Character…of the People of India, quoted Mill, James, The History of British India (London 1817), I, preface, p. xxiGoogle Scholar. As late as 1882, Vereker M. Hamilton's illustration for Steward Fasson's verses on Galle Face ‘Colombo's “Park” or “Prater"—
And here the world, starched, brushed, and curled,
Appears at four or later’—
shows a colonial ‘world’ that is almost exclusively European. Natives figure mainly as coachmen, grooms, and vendors of sweetmeats. Cf. Fasson, and Hamilton, , Scenes in Ceylon (London, 1882)Google Scholar.
5 A. L. Lowell's study of the selection and training of colonial civil servants and H. Morse Stephens's account of Haileybury unite in stressing the effectiveness of the system in promoting a sense of fellowship among the men and an intellectual sympathy for oriental culture. Cf. Lowell, A. L., Colonial Civil Service (New York, 1900), pp. 3-112, 233–346Google Scholar. G. O. Trevelyan emphasizes the power of corporate traditions over the Civil Servant, in The Competition-Wallah (London, 1864), pp. 149–50Google Scholar. The Conservative traditions and orientalist training of the service did not begin to attract marked criticism until the sixties, when the authoritarian attitude recommended by liberals like James Mill to the rulers of India combined with early imperial sentiment to promote firmness and efficiency at the expense of the intellectual and sympathetic appreciation of oriental culture. Cf. Monier-Williams, M., An Elementary Grammar of the Sanskrit Language (London, 1846), preface, p. iiiGoogle Scholar, for a statement of the bases of the traditional Conservative position, and an analysis of the aspects of antiintellectualism current in Victorian society that were rising to challenge it.
6 Cf. Skinner, Major Thomas, Fifty Years in Ceylon: An Autobiography, ed. Skinner, Annie (London, 1891), pp. 187–8Google Scholar.
7 Cf. Major Thomas Skinner, ‘Memorandum with reference to the past and present Social Condition of the Native Population of Ceylon…referred to in…Evidence, before a Select Committee of the House of Commons, July 1849’, reprinted in Fifty Years (pp. 214-36), p. 217.
8 Quoted Alwis, James, Leisure Hours (Colombo, 1863), pp. 263–4Google Scholar, in the original Pāli. I am indebted to Dr R. M. Handurukande for this English translation. It was recorded in 1854 that the Buddhist priesthood bestowed its ‘benediction upon the British Governor at his Levees, as they had previously been wont to bestow it on solemn occasions upon their own Kings’, cf. Boake, Barcroft, A Brief Account of the Origin and Nature of the connexion between the British Government and the Idolatrous Systems of Religion Prevalent in the Island of Ceylon (Colombo, 1854), p. 91Google Scholar.
9 Skinner, , ‘Memorandum’, p. 233Google Scholar.
10 Sinhala Verse (Kavi), collected by the late Hugh Nevill, F.Z.S. (1869-1886), ed. Deraniyagala, P. E. P. (Ceylon, 1954-55), Part 1. P. 72Google Scholar.
11 Cf. Jennings, and Tambiah, , The Dominion of Ceylon (London, 1952), p. 263Google Scholar.
12 Osborne, a missionary, wrote of the 1818 rebellion that ‘we have every reason to expect this is a judgement to a Christian Nation for their iniquity. The Chief Civilian Servant in Kandy has for a long time been a worshipper of Budhu, & Gen. Jackson told me & Mr Erskine that Mr D. was a Budhite. He takes off his Shoes & offers flowers &c. &c. to Budhu. Will not a Holy God visit for these things ?’ (Osborne to J. Benson, Trincomalee, 4 March 1818, Methodist Mission Society Records/11 A/1817-1836.)
13 Cf. Letters to Ceylon 1814-1824, ed. Pieris, P. E. (Cambridge, 1938)Google Scholar, especially Mrs Bridget D'Oyly's letters to her son.
14 Cf. SirTennent, James Emerson, Ceylon (London, 1859), 1, 313Google Scholar.
15 Skinner, , Fifty Years, p. 249Google Scholar.
16 Woolf, Leonard Sidney, Growing. An Autobiography of the Years 1904-1911 (London, 1961), pp. 180, 225Google Scholar.
17 Cf. SirD'Oyly, John, A Sketch of the Constitution of the Kandyan Kingdom (1832); new ed. Colombo, 1929)Google Scholar.
18 Cf. Woolf, L. S., The Village in the Jungle (London, 1913)Google Scholar.
10 Sydney Smith referred to Captain Robert Percival's Ceylon as being ‘such an account as a plain military man of diligence and common sense might be expected to compose; and narratives like these we must not despise. To military men we have been, and must be, indebted for our first acquaintance with the interior of many countries. Conquest has explored more than ever curiosity has done; and the path for science has been commonly opened by the sword’ ( Essays Social and Political, London, 1877, p. 278)Google ScholarPubMed.
20 Lt.-Col. Campbell, James, Excursions, Adventures, and Field-Sports in Ceylon (2 vols., London, 1843), 11, 19Google Scholar.
21 Cf. Fifty Years, p. 136.
22 Ibid. p. 57.
23 Ibid.
24 Cf. Orwell, George, Shooting an Elephant (1936) in Selected Essays, Penguin Books, 1960), pp. 95–6Google Scholar: ‘I perceived in this moment that when the white man turns tyrant, it is his own freedom that he destroys. He becomes a sort of hollow, posing dummy, the conventionalized figure of a sahib. For it is the condition of his rule that he shall spend his life in trying to impress the “natives", and so in every crisis he has got to do what the natives expect of him. He wears a mask, and his face grows to fit it… A sahib has got to act like a sahib; he has got to appear resolute, to know his own mind and do definite things... My whole life, every white man's life in the East, was one long struggle not to be laughed at.’
26 Being part of an intellectual, scholarly tradition imparted an element to the services that did much, in the words of SirMaine, Henry, ‘to abate national prejudices’, cf. Lectures on the Early History of Institutions (London, 1875), pp. 18–19Google Scholar. Some idea of the other side of the picture can be obtained from Calladine, George, The Diary of Colour-Serjeant George Calladine, 19th Foot, 1793-1&37, ed. Ferrar, M. L. (London, 1922)Google Scholar. See especially the poem Calladine composed on sentry duty during the uprising of 1818, p. 63. Also p. 74.
26 Barlow to the bishop of London, Pavilion, Kandy, 27 July 1826, SPG/FP/i, 284-285.
27 Skinner, , ‘Memorandum’, p. 222Google Scholar. Others noted, however, that ‘as a class, the body of emigrants was more than ordinarily aristocratic’ (Tennent, op. cit. n, 231). Planting was evidently considered a respectable pursuit for younger sons of English upper-class families. Fasson's improvident ‘John Folingsby, Bart.’ is presented as saying to his son Adolphus:
Sir Jellaby Jingle and Admiral Sneeze
Have each got a son in Ceylon.
If I stand you five thousand, you can, if you please,
Make a fortune. Come, say, are you on? (Op. cit.)
28 Cf. Pieris, Ralph, ‘Society and Ideology in Ceylon during a “Time of Troubles” 1795-1850’, 3 parts, University of Ceylon Review, IX, no. 3 (07 1951), 171—85Google Scholar; IX, no. 4 (October 1951), 266—79; X, no. 1 (January 1952), pp. 79—102. Pieris analyses the ideological background of the landsales of the thirties and forties in especial detail. Cf. also I. Driesen, H. van den, ‘Plantation Agriculture and Land-Sales Policy in Ceylon—The First Phase 1836-1886, part 2, University of Ceylon Review, XIV, nos. 1 and 2 (01 and 04 1956), 6–25Google Scholar. Also ‘Land Sales Policy and Some Aspects of the Problem of Tenure 1836–1886, part 2, University of Ceylon Review, XV, nos. 1 and 2 (01 and 04 1957), 36–52Google Scholar.
29 At least two writers found the planter a worthy subject for verse. William Skeen presented him as a modern Knight of the Round Table in The Knuckles and Other Poems (Colombo, 1868)Google Scholar. Some of the same elements are present in Fasson's treatment of the unpolished but admirably direct manners of the hunting planter:
No smirking ceremony here!
No dainty social form!
With bold and pitiless attack
The groaning board they storm;
The pie's crisp ramparts quickly fall
Beneath the glittering blade;
The loaf's proud head, with brown crust crowned
Soon in the dust is laid. (A Hunting Morning, op. cit.)
30 The planters’ attitude to the natives drew ironic comment from Dilke, cf. Greater Britain (London, 1868), n, 182Google ScholarPubMed. Trevelyan noted a similar phenomenon in India, and put it down to the lack of educated and sensitive men in the planting community, and to the essentially commercial relationship existing between the native and the planter or merchant, cf. The Competition-Wallah (London, 1864), pp. 446–7, 305Google Scholar.
31 John Capper, born 1814, helped to edit an English weekly, The Mining and Steam Navigation Gazette, before he arrived in Ceylon in 1837, as assistant to the firm of Ackland and Boyd. He edited the Ceylon Magazine (1840—42), returned to Britain after 1848, and contributed sketches of Ceylon Life to Dickens's Household Words, and became sub-editor of The Globe. He returned to Ceylon in 1858, bought the Ceylon Times and edited a satiric paper entitled Muniandi (1869-71). Alastair Mackenzie Ferguson (1816-92) published his early poems in the Inverness Courier, and arrived in Ceylon under the patronage of Governor Stewart Mackenzie in 1837. Between 1837 and 1846, when he became the Observer's assistant-editor, he was successively in business, planting, a customs officer, and acting magistrate in Jaffna. In 1850 he succeeded Dr Christopher Elliot as editor of the Observer. William Knighton (1823—89) planted in the coffee districts before editing the Ceylon Herald, and writing Forest Life in Ceylon, his two-volume novel, in 1854.
32 Ceylon, II, 156-7.
33 See Digby, William, Forty Years of Official and Unofficial Life in an Oriental Crown Colony (The Life of Sir Richard Morgan) (2 vols., London, 1879)Google Scholar, for a good contemporary account of the Burghers b y an observant and impartial journalist. Cf. Liesching, op. cit. pp. 26-7, for a description of the growing attachment among Burghers to an English way of life. As late as 1854, however, Charles Lorenz found it strange, when visiting Holland, ‘how the decorations in the house, the curious brass lanterns in the passage, the brass screen work in the fire screen, the foot stools, the social manner of the people, and the Zuiker Brood on the table all so strikingly reminded me of Home—Home—Home. It was as vivid a reproduction of Grandmother's House… as possible’ (Journal of the Dutch Burgher Union of Ceylon, XIV, no. 2, 10 1924, p. 57)Google Scholar.
34 The first requests for an English school had come from the Burgher community. In 1835 Joseph Marsh informed the secretary of the Church Missionary Society that ‘a great number of the most respectable people’ of Maradana had petitioned the governor against his removal from Colombo, where he had opened a private Academy in Hill Street for their children. He added that he had been requested by the same people to open ‘a female school. The names of nearly 60 girls that are ready to attend have been sent to me’ (Marsh to D. Coates, Colombo, 30 November 1835, CMS/C.CE/O.61). The enthusiasm of the Burghers for women's education contrasts sharply with th e prejudice among Sinhalese parents ‘against having their Girls taught to read… The ill use they fear the Girls will make of learning in holding epistolary correspondence with the men will not at all be counterballanced [sic] by the good they will derive from it ‘(Hume to J. Taylor, Matura, 28 August 1820, MMS/11A/1820-1822). As late as 1874 J. Nicholson protested that Christian education had no t reached the ‘high-born donnas’ of the old Matara families, most of which were ‘darkly, densely, totally heathen on me female side’ (Nicholson to Boyce, Matara, 27 November 1874, MMS/1X/1875-1876). The Tamils were no t quite as backward as the Sinhalese in the matter of women's education; English education for women prospered earlier an d better in Jaffna than in the South, for missionary attempts to regenerate the Tamils were directed through the conversion and education of women. Cf. Minnie Hastings Harrison, Uduvil 1824.-1924 (Tellippalai, 1925), for the history of one of th e oldest girls’ schools in Asia. Th e ‘Jaffna Female Seminary’, a model of women's education in 1864, provided ‘a complete English education’, with ‘accomplishments’ that included French, Drawing, Music, Needlework, and the making of artificial flowers (Walter J. Sendall, Report upon Aided and Other Schools in the District of Jaffna 1864, MMS/VIII/1858-1867).
35 SirTennent, James Emerson, Christianity in Ceylon (London, 1850), p. 178Google Scholar.
86 The English-educated Ceylonese formed a very small minority of the total population, and to this minority the Burghers contributed the most. At the 1911 census, over 75 per cent of the Burghers were literate in English. Cf. Tambiah, S. J., ‘Ethnic Representation in Ceylon's Higher Administrative Services 1870-1946’, in University of Ceylon Review, XIII, nos. 2 and 3 (04 and 06 1955), 113–34Google Scholar. ‘The literacy among low-country Sinhalese—more westernized than the Kandyan—was very low… The Ceylon Tamils, though a little superior in this respect to the low-country Sinhalese, fell very far short of the Burghers’ (pp. 128-9).
37 Quoted Alwis, James, Memoirs and Desultory Writings (Colombo, 1878), p. 1Google Scholar. Under Lorenz's editorship the Examiner represented ‘the Ceylonese’, and not an exclusively Burgher interest (cf. Digby, op. cit. 1, 40).
38 Tennent's description of colonial society in the fifties suggests its sensitivity to missionary influence, cf. Ceylon, II, 158-9.
39 As time went on, the periodicals grew less delicate. In 1869 Muniandi's comment on contemporary proposals for the Disestablishment of the Church of England in Ceylon was to print a ‘memorial’ as from the Colonial Chaplains, protesting their selfless bestowal of ‘the chaste pleasure of their genial society at tea-meetings, and their mild influence at croquet-parties’, and their constant endeavour ‘to secure the approval of the Governor and his Executive, the attachment of the chief administrators of colonial affairs, and the awe of the lower classes of the community’ (Muniandi, 1, no. 5, 14 August 1869).
40 Robert Carver to the Methodist Missionary Society Committee, Trincomalee, 29 December 1818, in Extracts from Quarterly Letters, MMS/I A/1817-1820.
41 Benjamin Clough to Dr Clark. 27 Semember 1814. MMS/I A/1814-1817.
42 ’J. K.’, ‘Some reflections on “The Jaffna Tamil“’, in The Friend, 2nd ser., I (June 1870), 66-7.
43 J. Lynch to the Methodist Missionary Committee, Jaffhapatam, 9 September 1814, MMS/I A/1814-1817.
44 Callaway to Joseph Taylor, Colombo, 9 October 1820, MMS/II A/1818-1821.
46 Clough warned headquarters in 1814 that the Ceylon missionary had to ‘mix with two Classes of people; the first is English Gentlemen all of whom have had a Classical education. And sometimes he will have to contend with a little fashionable D—ism, delivered in rather a pretty manner. The other Class is the Natives who though they are Strangers to the corruptions of Europe… have… received educations which he will find it his duty to counteract’ (Clough to Dr Clark, 27 September 1814, MMS/I A/1814-1817).
46 A. Stead to the Methodist Missionary Committee, Trincomalee, 9 August 1820, MMS/II A/1818-1821. Cf. Pieris, Ralph (ed.), ‘The Brodie Papers on Sinhalese Folk-Religion’, University of Ceylon Review, XI, no. 2 (04 1953), 110–28Google Scholar, with John Callaway's preface to Yakkun Nattanazva (London, 1829)Google Scholar. A. O. Brodie's individual approach was unique even among laymen.
47 Clough to Dr Clark, 27 September 1814, MMS/I A/1814-1817.
48 Hardy to the Methodist Missionary Committee, Negombo, 30 April 1842, MMS/VI/1841-1842.
49 Hardy to the Methodist Missionary Committee, Colpetty, 14 February 1865, MMS/VIII/1863-1867.
50 Callaway to Richard Watson, Matura, 5 May 1817, MMS/I A/1814-1817.
51 Fox to R. Watson, Caltura, 4 April 1818, MMS/I A/1817-1819.
52 A. Stead, Journal, Point Pedro, 17 July 1821, MMS/II A/1818-1821.
53 Skeen, op. cit. pp. 89-90.
54 D. J. Gogerly to Elijah Hoole, Colombo, 15 March 1858, MMS/VIII/1858-1863.
66 When Andrew Kessen, a young Methodist missionary, joined the staff of the government-run Colombo Academy, he found ‘it is no ordinary trial of a young man's principles & firmness to be surrounded by very high Church men—to hear his ordination unhesitatingly declared invalid—& to be despised & disregarded accordingly’ (Kessen to the Methodist Missionary Committee, Colombo, 13 September 1842, MMS/vi/1841-1842). Gogerly heard with some uneasiness of Bishop Chapman's innovations at St Peter's Church—’ The Pulpit, I am informed… is to be altered and made octangular for the purpose of turning about in it. All these things indicate the Man’ (Gogerly to Elijah Hoole, Colpetty, 17 November 1845, MMS/VI/1845). When the licences of C.M.S. missionaries were withdrawn by Bishop Copleston in 1876, Nicholson declared the issue to be ‘not a mere difference of opinion, or an accidental clashing of zealous partisans; but the great battle of Evangelical versus Catholic principles, introduced into the Mission Field’ (J. Nicholson to Punshon, Matara, 19 August 1876, MMS/IX/1875-1876).
68 Sectarianism and different kinds of religious persecution had been judged by the Sinhalese since Portuguese times, by traditional Buddhist standards of religious tolerance. As late as the mid-century, Tennent affirmed that ‘a serious obstacle to the acceptance of reformed Christianity by the Singhalese Buddhists has arisen from the distinctions and differences between the various churches by those ministers it has been successively offered to them’ (‘Christianity in Ceylon’, p. 195).
57 The names of a few Ceylonese appear in the list of members. Cf. Ceylon Antiquary, VIII (1922-23), 73-91, 166-82, 262-83, 347-55, for an account of the Society, in ‘In Ceylon a Century ago: The Proceedings of the Ceylon Literary and Agricultural Society; with Notes by T. Petch’.
58 Percival to the Methodist Missionary Committee, Jaffna, 31 December 1836, MMS/II A/ 1817-1836.
69 John Scott to Elijah Hoole, Mutwal, Colombo, n.d., received 19 April 1859, MMS/VIII/1858-1863.
60 MS. diaries of Edmund Rowland Gooneratne, Atapattu Mudaliyar of Galle 1861-68, entry of 15 October 1861: ‘Edward bade me go and hear Sir E. Creasy's Lecture this evening …went and paid 2s. each at the door and went upstairs... at ½ past 4 Creasy came and began he quoted several passages and first touched upon Mediaeval and then modern, and condemning it showed the objections raised to it as early as the 18th century when Kingdoms boasted as owning the subject.’
61 CBRAS Journal, 1, no. 1 (1845), Rules.
62 Ibid. p. 3. Stark's address was delivered on 1 May 1845.
63 The first patron of the C.B.R.A.S. was the governor, Sir Colin Campbell, and two of its four vice-patrons were Bishop Chapman and Sir James Emerson Tennent. Its vice-president was John Gibson Mac Vicar, author of a treatise on The Beautiful, the Picturesque, and the Sublime; its treasurer was John Capper, and its secretary William Knighton, who published his History of Ceylon that year.
64 The Introduction to Alwis's Sidath Sangarawa is based on two papers originally read before the C.B.R.A.S. in 1850, the first of which was a retort to Hardy's provocative paper on The Language and Literature of the Singhalese, read in November 1846. A fairly close association between Alwis and Knighton can be conjectured from certain references in their works, cf. Alwis, Attanagaluvansa (1866), preface, pp. xci-xcii, and compare the character of ‘Marandhan’ in Knighton's novel; cf. a footnote to the Sidath Sangarawa, pp. 227—8, referring to a young European who improved his Sinhalese by conversing with the fish and vegetable vendors of Colombo, and compare Forest-Life (1854), 1, 15. The C.B.R.A.S. library contained, in 1846, James Mill's History of British India in eight volumes; Mill's attitudes are reflected in Tennent's histories, which acknowledge the aid of Gogerly, Hardy, and Alwis, all prominent members of the C.B.R.A.S.
66 Among the periodicals taken by the Colombo Pettah Library at various times between 1802 and 1887 were the Edinburgh Review, the Quarterly British Review, the Cornhill Magazine and the Nineteenth Century Magazine (Colombo Pettah Library Catalogue, 1906). Periodicals listed in the 1883 catalogue of James Alwis's library include the Gentleman's Magazine, Blackwood's, the Edinburgh Review, the Dublin University Magazine, the Westminster and Foreign Quarterly Review, and the Illustrated London News.
68 The first history of Ceylon to be published in the nineteenth century—The History of Ceylon, from the earliest period to the year MDCCCXV by ‘Philalethes’ (London, 1817)—had subjoined a reprint of Knox's seventeenth-century Historical Relation, to answer a demand for detailed information that arose after Britain's acquisition of Kandyan territory in 1815.
67 Purchas His Pilgrimage, or Relations of the World and the Religions Observed in All Ages and places discovered, from the Creation unto this present. In Foure Partes. By Samuel Purchas, Minister at Estwood in Essex (London, 1613), p. 458Google Scholar.
68 Cf. Froude, J. A., Oceana (London, 1886), p. 12.Google ScholarCf. Macaulay, T. B., The Government of India (1833), Works, vol. 8, p. 121Google Scholar. Even when the question of separatism was debated in the sixties, in Parliament and outside ‘it was in nine cases out of ten impossible to secure attention to colonial affairs’, Bodelsen, C. A., Studies in Mid-Victorian Imperialism (Kjobenhavn, 1924), p. 41Google Scholar.
69 The application of Canadian and Indian experience to such a political problem as the partitioning of Africa has been recently discussed by Robinson, R. and Gallagher, J. in Africa and the Victorians (London, 1961)Google Scholar.
70 The British government in Ceylon was committed to the protection of Buddhist property and the patronage of Buddhist ceremonies by Clause 5 of the Convention, which laid down that ‘The Religion of Buddha, professed by the Chiefs and Inhabitants of these Provinces, is declared inviolable, and its Rites, Ministers, and Places of Worship are to be maintained and protected’ (quoted Bennett, op. cit. appendix, p. box). The government's protection of Buddhism was a source of perpetual irritation to missionaries and Church people in Ceylon. It even roused Wilberforce, cf. Wilberforce, R. I. and Wilberforce, S., Life of William Wilberforce (London, 1838), III, 379–80Google Scholar.
71 Dispatch of 13 April 1847, quoted Boake, op. cit. p. 31.
72 Maria Jane Jewsbury, a friend of Mrs Hemans, wrote with sentimental nostalgia of the island's ‘romantic’ beauty in 1829, in ‘A Remembered Scene’, Lays of Leisure Hours (London, 1829), pp. 147–9Google Scholar. Two interpretations of the Ceylon scene that suited very different tastes were Bizet's Pearl Fishers and Hannah More's The Feast of Freedom, a playlet in verse dedicated to Sir Alexander Johnstone. Mrs. Reginald Heber, visiting Ceylon with her husband in 1824, allowed her imagination to suggest that the mountains of the interior’ were crowned with ruins’, and indulged in nostalgic reminiscence of Llangollen and Wynnstay, cf. Heber, Bishop Reginald, Narrative of a Journey (London, 1828), pp. 242–3Google Scholar.
78 Clough to J. James, Colombo, 24 September 1828. MMS/IV/1827-1829.
74 Fox to J. Taylor, Caltura, 27 February 1819. MMS/I A/1817-1820.
75 The collection in Alwis's Library of ‘Works on Ceylon’ included the Travels of Marco Polo, Knox's Historical Relation, the works of ‘Philalethes’, Percival, James Cordiner, Davy, Forbes, Campbell, Selkirk, ‘Sampson Brown’, Marshall, Bennett, Pridham, Tennent, Sirr, Baker, Barrow, Capper, Bishop Heber, Skeen, Casie Chitty, Ferguson, and R. S. Hardy. He also possessed Dilke's Greater Britain, and both Knighton's books about Ceylon, besides a large collection of Royal Asiatic Society papers (Catalogue of 1883). His collection may have been unusually large for a private gentleman, and its completeness was the result of his special interests. But these books (which were expensive) were also available in the public libraries, and some (notably the works of Tennent) were to be found in most upper-class Ceylonese homes.