Andi Schubert

Social Scientists’ Association of Sri Lanka

“The Demands of Dutiful Subjects: Democracy, Education, and Negotiation in Ceylon at the Turn of the 20th Century”

In 1912 British colonial administrators saw it fit to introduce a scheme of limited franchise for elections to the Legislative Council in Sri Lanka (then known as Ceylon). The introduction of these reforms was a result of advocacy by an intermediary class produced out of Britain’s encounter with Ceylon. Their demands foregrounded their education which had primarily been through schools founded by the British in Ceylon and in British universities. Their demands for the introduction of franchise emphasized the spread of liberal principles through European education as well as their readiness to participate in democratic processes.

If the education of this class of local elites was the grounds on which they pressed their claims, education was also the grounds on which Ceylon’s colonial administrators rebutted their arguments. For Ceylon’s colonial administrators the ‘Europeanness’ of their education and values automatically alienated this class from the average Ceylonese person. As a result, it was their European education that made this class of Ceylonese unsuited for democratic rights. Negotiating between these contrasting perspectives on the effects of European education fell to colonial administrators in London.

To explore these dynamics, this paper draws on official correspondence as well as sessional papers on political reforms from this period. This paper focuses on these demands, resistance, and negotiation to explore the relationship between democracy and colonial education in Ceylon. It argues for the need to re-visit the role that education plays as a factor in Ceylon/ Sri Lanka’s experience of democracy.

Andi Schubert is based in Sri Lanka. He is currently a Senior Researcher attached to the Social Scientists’ Association, one of Sri Lanka’s oldest research organizations. In 2011 he co-founded the Young Researchers’ Collective, an initiative and platform to support and promote the work of young researchers in the country. Andi holds a Masters Degree in English from the Kansas State University and a Bachelors (Hons). Degree in English from the University of Kelaniya, Sri Lanka. His MA thesis was titled A Genealogy of an Ethnocratic Present: Rethinking Ethnicity after Sri Lanka’s Civil War and focused on the recursive nature of early 20th century debates about ethnicity in post-war Sri Lanka. His research interests broadly span the fields of cultural studies and intellectual history and his most recent publication has examined how insecurities about the status of local knowledge emerged in three colonial translations of the Mahawamsa, a religo-historical text of critical importance to Sri Lankan historiography. He is currently the co-editor of Polity (previously Pravada), the journal of the Social Scientists’ Association.