Civilizing the Reluctant

Guns, Taverns & Tea Shops

by S.A. Meegama

This book, written by a left-leaning scholar and retired bureaucrat, puts before the general reader a wealth of information previously to be found only in official records and academic papers. Guns, Taverns & Tea Shops provides an insightful account of Lankan life and culture during a period of intense, dislocating social change, based mostly on the archived reports of contemporary provincial officials. 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 partially successful efforts of humane and diligent British colonial officials to bring a backward, impoverished and lawless people into the modern world. 

To praise the works 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. Nevertheless, 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, particularly those relating to the operations of provincial government and administration. As a historian of Lanka in my own small way, I found it deeply interesting, if 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.