Burghers with Their Belts Unbuckled

Life Under the Palms: The Sublime World of the Anti-Colonialist Jacob Haafner

By Paul van der Velde

Trans. Liesbeth Bennink

In 1926, a translation of Reize te voet door het eiland Ceilon (Travels on Foot through the Island of Ceylon) by Jacob Haafner was serialized in the Journal of the Dutch Burgher Union. The translators, L.A. Prins and J.R. Toussaint, included in their work several passages critical of British rule in India that had been left out of the original (1821) English translation of Haafner’s book. The Twenties were a period of intense political ferment in colonial Ceylon, and the author’s fulminations against the British were very much the point of the project.

Paul van der Velde’s biography of Haafner for general readers, translated into English by Liesbeth Bennink for the National University of Singapore Press, goes further. Generously quoting Haafner’s animadversions against Europeans in the Indies (a good half of the book consists of quotes from Haafner’s own works), it describes its subject as an ‘anti-colonialist’. This is, to say the least, a questionable judgement, for Jacob Haafner’s career in the Indies was typical of an eighteenth-century European imperialist in every respect. No evidence is offered in this book to show that he was philosophically or morally opposed to the European colonial project as such; he merely objected, as many others did, to its rapacity. Haafner endorsed the French possession of the isle of Mauritius and argued urgently in print against the cession of Ceylon to Britain at the Treaty of Amiens; in later life, finding himself short of funds, he tried vigorously (but unsuccessfully) to obtain a position with the successor of the bankrupt Dutch East India Company, his old employer. These are not the actions of an anti-colonialist.

The argument need not concern us overly. To the Sri Lankan reader, what is most interesting about Haafner’s account of his sojourn in ‘Ceilon’ is his portrayal of the rank and file of Dutch colonial society in the island, in particular the lives of the mixties or mestizos. Most writing on Sri Lanka from this period is found in official or ecclesiastical records, or in accounts of the country produced by retired officials and ecclesiastics. In such works, we catch only fleeting glimpses of the large, disorderly but thriving society of lower-class Europeans and half-castes struggling to make their fortunes under the rule of the VOC and find their way back ‘home’ (an ever-diminishing prospect) before drink, debt and tropical disease ended their careers for good. 

Such was the society to which Haafner, by natural inclination, gravitated. He admired and envied the carefree lives of these men, with their native common-law wives and half-caste, barefoot children. He loved the informality of their manners and the laxity of their morals; he also shared their taste for ‘Portuguese’ dance music, hot curries, round-the-clock half-undress and all-day drinking. Despite having ‘gone native’ with a vengeance, many of these unbuttoned imperialists were still in the employ of the Dutch East India Company, though others were vrije burgers who had set up as settlers and traders on their own account. They were, in either case, the ancestors of the Dutch Burghers of Sri Lanka, and Haafner’s frank portrayal will make uncomfortable reading for some of their present-day descendants.

We followed the sergeant to his hut and met a large company... four young girls, three mestizo women with their husbands sitting under a large tamarind tree in front of the door and entertaining themselves with the sound of an Indian zither embellishing their voices. The sergeant told me that he gave a family party on the occasion of his daughter’s visit.

Much bibulous revelry ensues. In his cups, the ‘sergeant’ reveals to his guests

that he was only a corporal with the pay of a sergeant, with six Topass soldiers under his command, and that his work consisted only of monitoring a few salt pans that were situated before the village and the collection of fees and taxes for the VOC... he was called Jan Voet, and his father and grandfather had spent their entire lives at this [same] post.

In a different place, he describes a former VOC soldier, now down on his luck in Jaffna:

He spoke a mixture of broken Dutch and High German, lavishly laced with cursing and in the accent of Strasbourg... He was married to four women in different cities in Europe [and] as far as he knew they were all still alive when he left for the East... [In Nagapatnam] he had married his fifth wife, a black Roman Catholic girl from the pariah caste. She was a pretty thing and worked as a maid for a European woman named Barbara...

We are a world away, here, from the tidy, spotlessly European genealogies that shared the pages of the JDBU with Haafner’s book.

Jacob Haafner did not spend much time in Sri Lanka and it cannot be said that he knew the country well. The portions of his work quoted here are full of geographical and historical errors, which are reproduced without comment by his biographer. Most are relatively minor, but a reference to ‘the Vanni’, whom Haafner calls ‘the native inhabitants of the island,’ is likely to raise a few hackles. Haafner probably means the Vanniyar, a South Indian caste who first arrived in Lanka in historical times and settled in the largely forested no-man’s-land between the areas of Sinhalese and Tamil settlement that is now known as the Vanni. Errors of this kind do the credibility of his biographer no favours.

*     *     *

It’s good to see the National University of Singapore Press building up a historical and cultural catalogue aimed at non-academic readers, similar to the exemplary catalogues of Western academic publishers like the Oxford University Press. The educational duties of a national university go beyond the mere instruction of those formally enrolled as students, and producing material for general audiences that is both entertaining and informative is surely an important part of their work. Going by this book, however, Singapore still has some room for improvement. The geographical and historical errors mentioned here are admittedly Haafner’s own, yet van der Velde should have taken the trouble to note them as such; not to have done so suggests that he is as ignorant about these matters as Haafner himself. The translation, too, leaves a good deal to be desired; the style is arid, the syntax at times positively Teutonic, and the native English speaker is hard put to decipher such turns of phrase as ‘a funk of 22 years’ and ‘at the pen in Nagapatnam’. The accents of the Straits of Malacca also seem to enter the picture when the Sinhala word for ‘python’ is not rendered as pimbura but as a Malay-sounding pimbera. But these are quibbles, and will not detract greatly from your enjoyment of this biography of an unusually – often shamelessly – candid European imperialist.

Stinking Poor

Orwell writes brilliant prose even when he is trying to nauseate you.

This he succeeds in doing very effectively here through his description of life as a plongeur or dishwasher at a couple of Paris restaurants. Even though times have changed (and I don’t live in Paris anyway), I shall certainly remember this book next time I eat out. You will too, if you read it, and we shall both consume nothing but bottled mineral water that day as a result.

If the dishwashing chapters don’t make you spew, the chapters on bedding down in the ‘casual wards’ (dosshouses) of London and Kent surely will.

So, dear reader, consider yourself warned. If, in spite of my words, you still go ahead and read this book, good for you. You should; I should have read it ages ago myself. Besides, you will love it, even if at times you find it hard to go on.

Stay the course! Don’t let yourself be put off by the utopian-socialist analyses of the lives and sufferings of tramps and plongeurs. Despite the lucidity and honesty of his writing, Orwell was a man who thought with his heart not his brain. The politics he espoused – his sturdy opposition to totalitarianism excepted – was nonsense. His one great insight was that Communist Russia was an evil, oppressive tyranny, not the workers’ Paradise his fellow Socialists in Britain thought it was. That isn’t relevant here, of course. But the batty socioeconomics interleaved among the pages of perceptive and courageous prose fiction or journalism is the price one pays for loving Orwell.

Nature Ramble

Discomedusae, by Ernst Haeckel

A Visit to Ceylon

by Ernst Haeckel
translated by Clara Bell

This is a delightful account of a visit to my native country by one of the greatest naturalists of the latter half of the nineteenth century, who was a fine writer and a brilliant artist to boot. His book concentrates mostly on the geography and natural history of the country, though he makes some observations about the people, too. Although his outlook and his ideas inevitably reflect his time, he brings a devotedly empirical attitude, as well as a refreshingly modern scepticism, to his observations. Haeckel was, of course, a great supporter of evolutionary theory and the man chiefly responsible for introducing Darwin’s work to the German-speaking world. Less admirably, he was also a proponent of racist and eugenicist views – which are, fortunately, present only in germinal form here.

I’d known about this book for many years and even repeated one oft-quoted passage from it in my own writings, but somehow never got round to reading the whole thing until a few weeks ago. What a treat it turned out to be. Haeckel’s breezy, confident, yet somehow unassuming style is a delight, and his descriptions of sights and scenes in Ceylon are lapidary. He gives us an island full of laughter, light and air, a far cry from the stygian forests, brooding ruins and shiftless devil-worshipping natives portrayed by Christian missionaries, who were embittered by their largely fruitless struggles to convert the Ceylonese from their native superstitions to those of Europe. Even these disappointed souls, however, never failed to testify to the natural beauty of the country – at which Haeckel never ceases, in his book, to marvel.

Ceylon: Jungle River by Ernst Haeckel. Lithograph by W. Koehler

His principal object in coming to Ceylon was to study and describe the marine life of the seas surrounding the island, as he had earlier done with that of the northern Mediterranean and the Red Sea. Having been disappointed in his hopes of visiting the natural treasure-house of Trincomalee on the east coast, he had to content himself with studies in Galle Harbour and Weligama Bay. In Weligama he lived for three weeks entirely surrounded by the local people, exploring the bay and the nearby lagoons and wetlands and making no contact with any white person. Most of his descriptions of the Sinhalese people and of village life in Ceylon are drawn from this experience. He also visited Kandy, where he was overwhelmed by the riches of the Peradeniya Botanical Gardens, and made a tour of the up-country plantation districts (he was impressed by the British planters’ work ethic, but laughed at their insistence on dressing for dinner every night though living in the back of beyond). In the company of an ancestor of mine, Henry Trimen, he then made an expedition to World’s End, where the southern extremity of the central hill massif terminates in an abyss. From here, he and Trimen descended by the precipitous Nagrak trail to Nonpareil Estate, 4,000 feet below, and thence to Ratnapura, where they boarded a local riverboat that carried them down the Kalu Ganga to the coast. From here Haeckel returned to Colombo by rail and caught a steamer home to Europe, breaking journey in Egypt along the way.

His account of his excursions in Ceylon made me want to travel back in time and see my native land as it used to be before modernity, money and a growing population took their inevitable toll. The land he describes is Edenic, with only the faintest marks of human habitation and industry to mar it – except in the hill country, where he laments the loss of hundreds of thousands of acres of primaeval forest to the colonial plantation enterprise. Ceylon was then in truth the paradise of nature clumsily and mendaciously evoked in present-day tourist advertising. Accessible fragments of paradise still remained when I was a young man, but they are nearly all gone now. Books like these, old sketches, paintings and photographs are all that remain. Ceylon no longer exists; we are all Sri Lankans now, to our great loss.

Ernst Heinrich Philipp August Haeckel

Jumping the God Shark

Fields of Blood

Religion & the History of Violence

by Karen Armstrong

A REVIEW OF THE INTRODUCTION TO THIS BOOK

Theology is, of course, mostly concerned with the distortion and obfuscation of truth. The simple ‘truths’ of religion cannot bear dispassionate scrutiny, so they have to be cloaked in layers of sophisticated misdirection to protect them from the light. Such is the purpose of theology.

But I read and write history, and it is hard to do this without encountering some theology along the way. When I was younger, I found these excursions enjoyable. Over time, though, my critical faculties grew keener and I became less willing to waste good reading and thinking time on nonsense.

Such is the perspective from which I read the introduction to Karen Armstrong’s book about religion and violence, Fields of Blood. I had meant to read the whole book, but found this impossible.

Armstrong, commendably, wastes no time introducing her thesis: it is presented in the very first paragraph of the introduction, in the shape of another writer’s observation that religion has been made a scapegoat for the human predisposition to violence.

Ah, so. A history book with a theological proposition – which is to say, an attempt to hide the hairy, smelly truths of human motive and action under petticoats of elaborate fabrication. Having stated her thesis, Armstrong next constructs a straw-man definition of religion ‘as seen in the West’ that no person of faith could possibly accept for an instant. This definition deserves to be quoted in full.

A coherent system of obligatory beliefs, institutions and rituals, centring on a supernatural God, whose practice is essentially private and sealed off from all ‘secular’ activities.

What rubbish. That's a description of the trees, not the wood, and a pretty bad one at that. But Armstrong tells us this is what ‘we in the West’ (I’m not from the West) think religion is, and then proceeds to tell us why we’re wrong.

Other cultures, she tells us, have different, more expansive definitions. As an example she gives us Debuisson’s description of the Sanskrit term dharma,: ‘a “total” concept, untranslatable, that covers law, justice, morals and social life.’

Oh what precious twaddle. Dharma is very easily translated as ‘applied moral philosophy’. But yes, of course, religion is Protean. It’s like money – one of those consensual illusions on which human society and culture are founded, but which elude definition. So? All this palaver with definitions is clearly a setup for sleights of hand to come, allowing the author to include and exclude facts and points of view as suits her case without alerting the reader. It was at this point that I realized there was no value in continuing with this book.

I thought I would at least finish the introduction, but three pages on I came to a digression on the chemistry of the brain in which Ms Armstrong makes a complete fool of herself, getting serotonin all wrong. I could see no reason to read further.

For what it’s worth, I agree with the thesis that religion is not to blame for the violence perpetrated in its name. No more is money the root of all evil. These things are conduits for the potential to do evil that exists, pent up, in all of us, but if we didn’t have them, we would simply find other ways to express it. It is ourselves, not our institutions, that are to blame.

But Armstrong’s approach to the proposition is simply untenable. It is not the study of history but the study of evolutionary psychology that will, perhaps, one day exonerate religion – as the common man understands it – from blame for all the atrocities perpetrated in its name.

I have enjoyed and been enlightened by Karen Armstrong’s work in the past, when she was in a more sceptical mode and had interesting things to say about, for instance, fundamentalism. That era is now long gone. She has become a book factory, reliably churning out another god-bothering tome every year, to the undoubted delight of her fans, her publishers and her bank manager, but with nothing of substance left to say. A sad if somewhat unusual case of the commercialization of religion.