Civilizing the Reluctant: Guns, Taverns & Tea Shops

Guns, Taverns & Tea Shops

by S.A. Meegama

This book, written by a left-leaning scholar and retired bureaucrat, presents general readers with an insightful account of Lankan life and culture during a period of intense, dislocating social change. Based on the archived reports of colonial provincial officials, it makes public a wealth of information previously confined to academic papers and official records.

      Amusingly, the author seems to have thought he was writing an indictment of British colonialism in Ceylon (the publicity for the book presents it as just that); but since he is a fair-minded scholar and not a nativist ideologue, what he has in fact produced is an impressive account of the conscientious and only partly successful efforts of humane and diligent British civil servants to bring a backward, impoverished and lawless people into the modern world. 

      To praise the work of these men, and the social and economic successes of what the British called ‘our premier Crown Colony,’ is not to deny the fundamentally exploitative nature of colonialism. But given that colonialism was, historically speaking, an unavoidable reality (and given the fact that Lankans had already experienced 199 years of far worse treatment under Portuguese and Dutch rule), the contents of this book speak highly for the quality and humanity of British administration in Ceylon.

      The author of Guns, Taverns & Tea Shops, S.A. Meegama, was Director-General of the Sri Lankan Ministry of Planning & Economic Affairs at the peak of Lanka’s Socialist phase during the 1970s. In this capacity he reported directly to the Prime Minister, Mrs Bandaranaike. A CIA note on him that I was able to find mentions his multiple degrees from Oxford and Cambridge and the ten years he spent teaching at British universities before returning to Ceylon, adding that he was ‘considered professionally brilliant,’ but had ‘no small talk’. These comments give something of the flavour of his book as well: it is larded with long quotations from the reports of various British civil servants and, though more than competently written, is stylistically and emotively featureless. 

      For all that, I recommend it highly to readers with a fairly serious interest in the history of Lanka during the British period. It fills in many of the blanks left by other historians, who have tended to concentrate on political and cultural issues to the neglect of functional, day-to-day realities of Lankan life. As a historian in my own small way, I found it deeply interesting, though at times slightly over-detailed. It isn’t by any stretch of the imagination a ‘good read’, but it is – for those interested in the subject – almost an essential one.