Bright-Eyed Brown Boys Ahoy

Ceylon: History in Stone by R. Raven-Hart 

‘I am convinced,’ declares Roland James Milleville Raven-Hart, OBE, on page 163 of Ceylon: History in Stone, ‘that Galle children are the most handsome in Ceylon.’ 

        In support of this opinion he quotes Werner Hoffmeister, a physician-botanist who visited Ceylon in 1844 in the company of Prince Waldemar of Prussia. Putting into harbour at Galle with the prince, Hoffmeister had noticed some of the local fishermen. Among them, he wrote, were ‘young boys of most lovely countenance, whose rich, flowing black hair fell over their backs.’ Raven-Hart was always keenly alert for observations of this kind; only two pages further on in his book we find him endorsing the judgement of a much more famous Teutonic visitor to Lanka, the eminent natural historian, artist and all-round polymath Ernst Haeckel – who, in his own writings, seldom troubled to conceal his taste for dusky young natives.

I enthusiastically agree when [Haeckel] says that in Ceylon ‘the stronger sex is also the more handsome; and the boys especially stand out by a certain affectionate expression’ (but ‘affectionate’ is a poor translation of the untranslatable schwärmerisch)… Sinhalese countrymen are almost always handsome and often really lovely…

Schwärmerisch does not quite defy translation. It means something like ‘eagerly affectionate’ or ‘fatuously complaisant’ . No department of life offers more scope for wish-fulfilling presumption than sex.

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Ceylon: History in Stone is a travel guide, now hopelessly out of date though it remains an excellent read as long as you aren’t put off by the plenitude of bright-eyed brown boys. Its author was adventurous, well-travelled, well-read and decidedly eccentric, a figure better suited to the late-Victorian world stage than to the twentieth century in which he lived. Even his origins were typical of those nineteenth-century British imperialists: according to an excellent biographical article by Richard Boyle in the Sunday Times, Raven-Hart’s father was the English vicar of a scantily-populated hamlet in Ireland, his mother the vicar’s more or less well-born Irish wife. His own double-barrelled surname was arrived at by combining theirs.
By the time young Roland had grown to man’s estate, the British Empire was already past its peak. He served it in the approved manner all the same, fighting with the Suffolk Regiment in the First World War, being gassed at the Battle of Cateau and later joining the Signals Corps, a branch of British military intelligence, in the Middle East. In the Corps he became an expert electrical engineer. Tellingly, his war service earned him no martial decorations from his own country but, instead, an OBE ‘for valuable services rendered in connection with military operations in Egypt,’ along with the French Croix de guerre and the Tsarist Order of St Stanislaus. With gongs like those, he may as well have headed his personal résumé with the word SPY in scare capitals.
After some post-war years spent ‘setting up a radio network’ in South America, Raven-Hart went to live in the French Mediterranean commune of Le Ciotat, whence he embarked upon a series of far-flung expeditions as a canoeist-explorer. These jaunts formed the basis of a series of travel books: Canoe Errant, Canoe Errant on the Nile, Canoe Errant on the Mississippi and so on, in which, as Boyle reports, he unblushingly ‘revealed his partiality for young boys as companions.’ In Canoe to Mandalay, for example, he descants upon the neotenic charms of a twenty-two-year-old Burmese who, to him, looked no more than sixteen: ‘the skin of his cheeks [was] as soft as that of his arms…[and he had] as little pubic hair as a just-adolescent European or American boy.’ This is slightly more graphic than anything you’ll find in the pages of History in Stone, yet even there, paederastic sentiment is rarely ever more than a page or two away.
Raven-Hart’s first visits to Ceylon were made in 1937 and 1938. He does not seem to have stayed long on either occasion; perhaps they were connected with the profession (rather than the love) that dare not speak its name. But he returned to the island in 1947, not long after the death of his much-neglected wife Hester, and this time he stayed for sixteen years. 

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Ceylon: History in Stone is a product of that sojourn. Rather like W.T. Keble’s Ceylon Beaten Track a decade earlier, it is an attempt to tell the story of the island through visits to ‘places of interest’ associated with it. Raven-Hart handles this device better than Keble does, eschewing the latter’s flights of time-travelling fantasy in favour of scholarly detail. He gives us the conventional narrative of Sinhalese history, commencing with a trip to Mahiyangana, which the Buddha is said to have visited (travelling, according to tradition, by air) in the ninth month of his enlightenment. Mihintale and Anuradhapura inevitably follow, and we hear again the story of Arahant Mahinda and King Tissa, the martial feats of Dutugemunu and all the other well-known, well-worn tales. There are, indeed, few surprises anywhere on the author’s itinerary: Dambulla, Aluvihare, Kalawewa and Sigiriya follow Anuradhapura in predictable succession. Each place receives an amiable, well-informed description, brightened with local colour, and an uncritical retelling of its role in history.
The chapter-arrangement is chronological: following our guide from place to place, we ricochet wildly back and forth across the island but keep moving steadily forward through history. Thus, after faring south to Tissamaharama, we turn back to visit ruined Polonnurawa, locus of a syncretic, cosmopolitan Lankan renaissance between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries; thence we proceed south again and westward through the darkening ages, tracing the decline of Sinhalese power via Yapahuwa, Kurunegala and Gampola into the shadow of the Kandyan hills. By this time the author has got ahead of his story, but a trip to Adam’s Peak (which he sensibly refuses to climb) returns him to the late-mediaeval period when Muslim traders and settlers dominated the littoral and commerce of the island. We hear more about them in the next chapter, which focuses on Ratnapura and features a canoe journey down the Kalu Ganga.
Over two-thirds of History in Stone, however, deals with the colonial era. No longer reliant on hesitant translations of ancient Pali and Sinhala texts for his information, Raven-Hart is on firmer ground here, and it shows. Kudos to him, he has read all the old authors – even Queiroz, who was hard to find in his day – and even translated a few into English himself. His guided tour, though, is now perforce confined largely to the southwest of the island, with brief side-trips to the colonial fortified ports of Jaffna, Batticaloa and Trincomalee. I found those excursions a disappointment, for though there is plenty to read in them about the bloody, confusing wars and power-politics which centred on those places, we learn little about their pre-colonial history or their traditional culture. Largely because of this omission, History in Stone affords Lanka’s Tamils an almost insignificant place in the island’s story. When the author does mention them (or the Chola invaders he wrongly assumes were their ancestors) he pays them scant honour; the contrast with his frequent and effusive praise of the Sinhalese is stark. As for Lanka’s other modern-day minorities, they are barely mentioned at all.
By the time we come to the British period, the tour has shrunk to a commute, up and down between Colombo and the hill country. The storytelling, though, has grown more colourful and incident-filled than ever. Juicy historical morsels abound; one I particularly savoured was the revelation that Charles-Daniel de Meuron, a Swiss mercenary commander in the pay of the Dutch who switched sides in the middle of the British assault on Colombo, marched his regiment out of the Fort and in among the redcoat ranks to the strains of ‘For He’s A Jolly Good Fellow’. To the Dutch, watching him go, he was anything but.
More remarkable is the author’s coldly unsparing account of how the Uva Rebellion – the only serious native threat to British rule that ever arose in Lanka – was put down. The revolt was more widespread than its name implies, and it was suppressed with great brutality. Historians (save for the near-contemporary John Davy) have tended to gloss over the details, but Raven-Hart is less reticent:

The rising of 1817-18…was serious: the sick in Kandy hospital were issued with arms and ammunition each evening; the city would have been evacuated had large reinforcements not arrived from India. Finally the British resorted to terrorism as the only means of ‘pacification’: Calladine tells how ‘we had parties out scouring the country…burning all they came across and shooting those they could not take prisoners.’ In one five-day raid three hundred houses were destroyed, and all the fruit-trees, palms, furniture, even pots and pans, ‘in fact everything that could tend to comfort or utility.’ Some of the military did well out of that ‘pacification’; Campbell, himself a British official, tells how people, their rice-terraces destroyed, were selling their cattle at any price to buy rice – a ‘Captain’ whom he mercifully leaves unnamed told him how he had ‘thus acquired’ more than five hundred cows and bullocks, besides buffaloes.

 
With the crushing of the Uva Rebellion the history of modern Lanka – then known as the Crown Colony of Ceylon – begins. In this the author has relatively little interest: he gives us a much-condensed account, concerned mainly with the plantation enterprise and the Sinhalese Buddhist Revival. Correctly, he presents the latter as a reaction against official ‘neglect’ of Buddhism and attacks on the faith by Christian missionaries.
So much for modern history; as for sightseeing, we are given little more than a glimpse of post-colonial Colombo as a European visitor on a day-tour might see it before being bundled off, yet again, to Kandy. Here we are treated to a close-up view of the Perahera, accompanied by a disquisition on the place of Buddhism in Lankan life. This is slightly incongruous: as Raven-Hart surely knew, the Perahera was originally an animist (nominally, Hindu) festival on to which the Buddhist elements that dominate it today were later grafted. Besides, Lankan history in his time ended at Independence Square in Colombo, not in Kandy. Yet though he lived in Ceylon for fifteen years after independence, Raven-Hart has almost no comment to make about this period. 
Rather, the book ends with a deliberate reversion to the past. The author takes us back to a place he has shown us once already: Balane Pass, the ‘one-way door’, as he calls it, to the Kandyan kingdom and a potent symbol of the Sinhalese ability to resist or assimilate foreign invaders. No doubt he has a point to make, but since he does not make it explicitly, we are left to work out his meaning by our own lights.

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We might have understood this mysterious subtext of his better if those lissom brown boys didn’t keep interposing their confounded bodies. We meet the first of them on page fifteen, at the foot of Mihintale Rock.

A schoolboy attached himself to me, one of those sudden children who have an attractive way of turning up in Ceylon with local information, often quite accurate.

This seems innocuous enough; Keble, a revered schoolmaster, often stopped to chat with local children in the course of his own travels round the island. But only four pages later, we find Raven-Hart visiting the nearby Kaludiya Pokuna (‘Blackwater Pool’) with his new friend and a troop of other juveniles.

My urchin guided me there: at least, I chartered him to do so, but he somehow turned into half a dozen. We all swam there, the older boys tucking up their sarongs through the crutch, the brats discarding them altogether with one wriggle. The working costume of the Sinhalese male of all ages is… a string round the waist holding the ends of a wisp of cotton, aft often so narrow as to disappear between the buttocks, forward not a centimetre wider than it needs to be. I imitated it with a handkerchief tied to a waistband of creeper… It made me an excellent string-substitute.

A photograph illustrates the text, but only a portion of the pokuna is to be seen in it; the real subject is a prepubescent Sinhalese boy, naked except for a loincloth – worn exactly as described – and leaning seductively against a rock. 
On to Anuradhapura, where another ‘schoolboy’ ‘attached himself to me’; Raven-Hart spends the afternoon wandering round the remains of the ancient city with this child. Likewise, at Polonnaruwa, he chooses ‘a friendly lad of 14 with shining teeth and hair and eyes,’ gifted with a few words of English, to accompany him for an afternoon among the ruins. The sites of these vast ancient capitals were thinly peopled in those days; there was barely any of the tourist and pilgrim traffic you see at them now, so we must picture the author, a slovenly, prophetically bearded middle-aged white man, wandering with his shining-eyed companion through a bosky, deserted parkland dotted with beckoning copses and vine-draped ruins. It must have felt like Paradise – to Raven-Hart, at least. 
Wherever he goes, he finds with ease the company he seeks. After a while, you become wise to his technique. It is simple enough: he merely walks down to the nearest tank or bathing-beach and takes a dip. Boys, after all, love to bathe and fish, so there are usually a few about. Mass tourism being still in the future at this time, a nearly naked white person is a curiosity to them; in no time at all, Raven-Hart is surrounded by a small crowd of ‘urchins’, and from among them he makes his selection. At the end of the day, the chosen lad will be rewarded for his service with a ten-cent coin pressed into his ear or, if his employer is feeling unusually generous, fifty cents to spend on sweets. Sometimes the term of employment is slightly longer, with the boy sharing the author’s rest-house bedroom for the night. All this is frankly told, though without any hint of prurience, and since both the barriers interposed by race and class and the intimate relationship between master and servant allowed for greater propinquity in his day than in ours, the appearance of decorum is not hard to maintain. Yet some readers at least must surely have perceived – a few, no doubt, with a secret thrill – what Raven-Hart really was up to.

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Ceylon: History in Stone is a popular book. My own copy (seemingly a facsimile of the original Lake House publication) is at least a fourth edition. Classic guidebooks on Lanka can have long shelf-lives: the justly famous Handbook for the Ceylon Traveller, for instance, has remained in print for decades. But the Handbook has an organisation behind it, and people with a financial and sentimental interest in keeping it going. Raven-Hart’s book, as far as I know, has neither.
Maybe it’s just my dirty mind, but it strikes me that its popularity has a darker source. I refer, of course, to the boys. History in Stone appears to have been written in part to popularize, just discreetly enough for a naive reader to miss but all too plainly to the initiate, a Lankan tourist attraction that has long been popular among foreigners with recondite tastes. Not to mince words, Raven-Hart was advertising the charms of Lankan lads for the benefit of international paedophiles. No wonder his book has so rarely been out of print.
He stands in a long tradition. In Sex & Serendipity: Cultural Encounters & Homoeroticism in Sri Lanka, the Australian scholar Robert Aldrich mentions, among others, the names of Sir Hector MacDonald, an erstwhile British military commander of Ceylon; the American composer and author Paul Bowles (who – shades of Haeckel – once rented a palatial house on ‘Serendib Island’ in Weligama Bay); the Australian painter Donald Friend; Arthur C. Clarke (whom Raven-Hart, according to Richard Boyle, persuaded to take up residence in Lanka) and other visitors and sojourners whose love for the Paradise Isle was far from Platonic. Aldrich’s book is about gay men, not paedophiles, but some of the characters he mentions were undoubtedly both. And there were others; despite never having done any particular research into the subject, I have come across a good many in the course of my own historical reading. Admittedly, one has to read between the lines to spot them but, as with History in Stone, this is rarely very difficult.
The sexual accessibility of Lankan boys to foreign visitors is no secret today; it has been common knowledge ever since the early years of the tourism boom, when the corruption of children and youths in fishing-villages adjacent to the hotels then springing up like cubist mushrooms along our west coast first began to inspire concern among the sort of folk who make it their business to worry about such things. The Spartacus International Gay Guide, a sort of Lonely Planet for queer sex-tourists, added an annual squirt of adrenalin to the panic by praising Lankans as a people warmly hospitable towards its reader-demographic. A study in the epidemiological journal WorldAIDS, published in 1993, stated frankly that Lanka was ‘known as a gay paradise’ and estimated that, at the time of publication, some 15,000 ‘beach boys’ were engaged in homosexual prostitution. When AIDS hit in the mid-Eighties, a number of earnest efforts were made to sign the boys up for HIV testing and counselling, but all these campaigns failed because, as local authorities glumly reported, the intended targets were ‘financially independent’ and could not be bribed to participate in them.

The bloated white men in Speedos who flocked to Lanka ‘for the boys’ were following, perhaps unknowingly, a trail blazed by wealthy foreign decadents of an earlier age. In those bygone days, when travelling for pleasure was a pastime only the rich could afford, Ceylon was a destination attractive to sophisticated globetrotters not only for its scenic beauty and picturesque ancient culture but also for the Westernization of its society and the cosmopolitanism of its upper classes, native as well as foreign. In most European colonies, the social tone was set by military officers, carpetbaggers and morally degenerate bureaucrats, who kept strictly to their own society and didn’t mix with the natives. Ceylon was very different: only first-class imperialists were good enough for Britain’s ‘Premier Crown Colony’, where it was also easy to meet and break bread with urbane, hospitable locals who had learnt their English at elite missionary schools – schools which also formed their manners, tastes and views along comfortably Western lines. Many of these were boarding establishments, where illicit sex and child abuse were as rife as at the English public schools upon which they were closely modelled. 

        This multicultural elite boasted a bohemian subculture of its own, in which well-to-do homosexuals (as well as, no doubt, others whose sexual propensities were not so benign) found a partial refuge from the censure of conventional society. Members of this subculture were only too happy to introduce like-minded foreigners to the local demi-monde. Meanwhile, on a less rarefied level, countless soldiers, civil servants, surveyors, teachers, clergymen, merchants and other expatriates whose foreign service had been sweetened by the taste of forbidden fruit also sent or carried word of Paradise home to their friends and lovers.

But what word was being spread? Questing homosexuals certainly found Lankan lads attractive, but did they also find them eager to be embraced – schwärmerisch, as Haeckel put it? Some, at least, have affirmed it, and speculated as to the cause. ‘Why,’ asked one recent, tactless American traveller, ‘did [gay men] seek me out in Ceylon [more than in India]? Was Ceylon more tolerant of homosexuals because it was Buddhist?’ 
This is not a question that can safely be asked in Lanka today. In any case, the thesis is absurd on the face of it. Buddhism levies no especial prohibition against homosexuality, but it frowns on sexual indulgence in general and specifically forbids monks to engage in any form of penetrative sex. Lay Buddhists, as I know them, are no more tolerant of sexual ‘deviancy’ than the followers of any other faith. Nor does contemporary Lankan society in its secular aspects show any great sympathy toward homosexuals; quite the opposite, if anything. 

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Even so, the stubborn student of human nature will be moved to ask how far Lankan lads collaborated in their own despoliation. I have known and moved among the beach boys of Mount Lavinia and Moragalla, two of the oldest and most popular resorts in Lanka, and I have seen for myself that the traffic in desire – in the late twentieth century, at least – was not quite as lopsided as it might appear from a distance. Most of the boys attached themselves to white women who had came out from Europe singly or in pairs with the precise intention of having sex with the locals; some also trafficked themselves to foreign men when the opportunity arose, while others catered exclusively to this market. None of these lads saw themselves as victims; on the contrary, they considered themselves the predators. They often extracted valuable gifts – love-tokens – on top of payment for their services, and more than one was able to set up in some legitimate business with the help of donations from his foreign clients. Some had even been taken to Europe – indeed, the holy grail of all their aspirations was permanent residency in the West. On Moragalla and Bentota beaches, the boys’ slang for ‘tourist’ was ‘visa’.
Of course, as any anti-imperialist worth her vegan salt will remind you, the boys’ feelings of agency, even control, over the international affairs they conducted were illusory; beyond the immediate ambit of the encounter itself, it is obvious who had the greater power and freedom, the beach boy or his ‘visa’. And it must be admitted that evidence of the filthy trade in children – in which there is no possible ambiguity regarding power relations – was always to be found along these beaches if you cared to look. Yet for all that, it is not at all difficult to see the older beach boys, like their clients, as belonging to a collaborative tradition, a mutually beneficial (and mutually degrading) commerce that is centuries old.

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Ironically, the successful establishment of mass tourism in this country was due in large measure to the work of certain members of Colombo’s bohemian smart set who were well known to be gay. One of the earliest of these was Lionel Wendt, whose contribution to Song of Ceylon, the first internationally-distributed tourist-promotion film about the country, was definitive. Another was Herbert Keuneman, the author of an unpublished manuscript which evolved, under other hands, into the Handbook for the Ceylon Traveller. Older readers still mentally agile enough to cast their minds back to the Sixties will find it easy to add a dozen or so locally well-known names to this list, including that of a successful director-general of the Ceylon Tourist Board. Some famous foreigners were involved, too: Clarke ran an upmarket scuba-diving business and did much through his writing to help popularize the country as a destination; Donald Friend, ‘Australia’s favourite paedophile’, who had been involved with the early development of tourism in Bali, also played his part in the evolution of Lankan ‘resort style’.

It would be absurd, of course, to conclude that our tourism industry was specifically raised up with pederasty in mind. That sort of conspiracy-theory is too simple-minded to be true, leaving out a host of other factors that weighed far more heavily in the development of the industry than the influence of a mere coterie. Yet it would be equally unwise to deny a connexion; Lanka has attracted visitors who are unconscionably fond of pretty brown boys for far too long to permit anyone to disavow the possibility of such an influence. But how and why it came to be so had better remain a mystery; it is not at all wise, in a country like Sri Lanka, to pry into such matters. Safer simply to blame the suddas and leave it at that.
But that surely cannot be all there is to the story. As I type this, I hear in my head the words of a Sinhala song, one that will be familiar to many readers – certainly to those educated at the posh boys’ schools I mentioned earlier. They sing it in their cups sometimes, to the tune of ‘John Brown’s Body’. It is called Mahaveli Ganga Aïné and it recounts, step by step, the sexual molestation of an innocent, compliant child. It isn’t just foreigners who are keen on our beautiful brown boys.

Bibliography 

1. Raven-Hart, R, Ceylon: History in Stone. Colombo, 2018, Stamford Lake 
2. Hoffmeister, W., Travels in Ceylon & Continental India. Eng. trans. Edinburgh, 1848, W.P. Kennedy.
3.  Haeckel, E., Indische Reisebriefe (Ch. 10). Berlin, 1909, Gebrüder Paetel. 
4. Boyle, R., ‘The Mysterious Major Raven-Hart’, Sunday Times (Sri Lanka), 19 Feb 2017.
5. Aldrich, R., Sex & Serendipity: Cultural Encounters & Homoeroticism in Sri Lanka. London, 2014, Routledge.
6. West J., ‘Selling Cheap Sex & Seashells’, WorldAIDS, Mar 1993.
7. Itiel, J., Escapades of a Gay Traveller. Ann Arbor, 2003, University of Mich. Press.
8. Antony Funnel, ‘Our Favourite Paedophile’, ABC Radio News (Australia). Online at www.abc.net.au/news/2016-11-28/donald-friend-our-favourite-paedophile/8053222