Little England & the ’Flu

Population trend for Sri Lanka showing population loss due to

the influenza pandemic of 1918–1919.

Some years ago, I wrote a short story called ‘Little England’, set in the tea-planting districts of Ceylon not long after Independence. These districts lie high among the central hills of Lanka; in pre-colonial times they were barely settled. The British ‘opened them up’, chopping down the ancient cloud-forests that clothed the mountains and planting coffee in their place. Later, when coffee succumbed to a blight, they turned to tea, which ended up being even more successful.

The planters lived in palatial isolation in their estate ‘bungalows’ among the hills. Although they were furnished with every convenience and luxury colonial civilization could provide, access was difficult. There was only one railway line, running from Kandy to Badulla, and the roads that connected the plantations, which were often privately built and maintained, were narrow, winding and terribly dangerous. Since these roads were always climbing up and down steep hills, one verge was usually bordered by a cliffside while the other gave, unfenced, upon an abyss. Mist and fog often made visibility poor, even by day; at night it was worse, and so many planters died on the way home after a boozy evening at ‘the club’ that the fraternity had a term for it: ‘he went into the tea.’ Other hazards included frequent landslides (‘earthslips’) and rockfalls. A breakdown meant exposure to leeches and poisonous snakes, and some districts were home to bears or leopards. Help, if one needed it, was usually available at the nearest estate factory or bungalow – but that, more often than not, would be miles away.

This was just how the planters liked it. Up in their mountain fastnesses, they were largely insulated from the grubby realities of life in the populous Crown Colony of Ceylon. Since their plantations were worked by resident indentured labourers originally imported from South India and their business dealings were entirely with other Europeans, they rarely had occasion for intercourse with the ‘real’ natives of Ceylon – the Sinhalese, Tamils and other races who had inhabited the island for centuries or millennia. The ‘Indian Tamil’ labourers employed on their estates – whose freedom of movement was severely curtailed and whom the native population shunned in any case – were just as isolated. And conversely, few native Ceylonese ever had occasion to visit the hill country beyond the purlieus of Kandy and the Kelani Valley, where numerous Sinhalese and Muslim villages had existed since pre-colonial times.

Thus a strange, artificially self-sufficient society grew up among the hills of Ceylon – a world that some called ‘Little England’. It had absolutely nothing in common with the rest of the island. Its tiny towns (essentially hamlets glorified by the presence of a government administrative office or kaccheri) featured European-style houses set in European-looking gardens, stone churches in Gothic Revival style and picturesque shops and post offices that might have been transported wholesale from a village high street in the Cotswolds. In contrast to the rest of Ceylon, which was populous, hot and insanitary, Little England was cool, sparsely inhabited and spotless. The tea-plantations were neat and trim, while the factory buildings, ‘coolie lines’ and bungalows exhibited that peculiar appearance common to colonial commercial enterprises, an odd combination of domestic cosiness and quasi-military spit and polish.

The capital of Little England was Nuwara Eliya, a high-altitude resort with golf links, a scenic artificial lake and becks stocked with imported trout for the delectation of British anglers and gourmets. In the late nineteenth century the government would move there during the hot season, just as the Imperial Indian government would move to Simla. ‘Newralia’, together with a few isolated clubs among the tea-bushes, supplied the planters and their long-suffering wives with all the human intercourse they permitted themselves; apart from a few expeditions to Colombo during the Christmas and racing seasons, they tended to stay put on their plantations.

So much is common knowledge to all Ceylonese and even a few Sri Lankans, but few now recall just how isolated this plantocratic Elysium was in the days of its pomp. This was brought home to me afresh while reading, recently, a scientific paper about the spread of influenza in Ceylon during the great worldwide epidemic of the disease that followed the First World War.

In their paper The Influenza Pandemic of 1918–1919 in Sri Lanka: its Demographic Cost, Timing, and Propagation, S. Chandra and D. Sarathchandra note that the spread of influenza through Ceylon after its first appearance was not ‘wave-like’ and uniform as in other countries. Instead, the disease spread across the whole island except for the tea-growing districts of Little England. It was only after a second vector of infection arrived, apparently not through the Port of Colombo like the first but via Talaimannar, the port at which indentured labourers from India were landed in Ceylon, that the epidemic reached the hill country. 

The analysis of peak mortality also reveals a penomenon that is distinctive for Sri Lanka. That is, while the epidemic in the north and south of the island peaked in the autumn of 1918, it was not until a few months later, in the spring of 1919, that a number of districts in the central part of the island experienced their peak mortality. This point, which is noted by Langford and Storey, suggests a relative isolation of populations in the central districts of the island from the north and the south, as well as the isolation of the north and the south from each other. This is in stark contrast with the pattern observed elsewhere, where the disease moved wavelike across entire countries. 

In other words, Little England was so isolated that its inhabitants were practically living in quarantine.

By the 1960s, the period in which my short story is set, this isolation was less rigid than it had been, and perhaps half the planters on the estates were Ceylonese – usually members of the Anglophone colonial elite who modelled their manners, views and attitudes on their British predecessors and looked upon national independence as on a tragedy – but the hills of Ceylon were still Little England. Travelling into the tea districts, one left behind the chaos, poverty and deprivation of independent Ceylon; it was like going back in time. Of course, that past time, the colonial era, was one of subjugation and frustration for Ceylonese and cruel exploitation and misery for ‘Indian’ estate workers; the gentility and bucolic prettiness of the tea districts were a façade behind which a great deal of ugliness lay hidden. For all that, the charms of Little England are undeniable: thousands of present-day Sri Lankans still travel to the hill country on holiday or excursion every year, seeking to recapture some of the atmosphere of the past. More often than not, they schedule their journeys for the same season as did the British governors of yore. 

What they encounter scarcely resembles the Little England of my own boyhood, let alone that of the days before independence. The hill country is no longer a world apart. The picture-postcard towns have been modernized and uglified, the tea factories are decrepit, the tea-bushes overgrown and unkempt. But since most people’s idea of the past comprises a fantastic collage of present-day media images and a few half-forgotten nuggets of history learned in school, they are more or less satisfied. They fit what they see into the myths they believe, and are content.