
ABOUT THE BOOK
A detailed history of St Thomas’s College, Sri Lanka (Ceylon), which serves as a lens through which the social, historical and cultural development – and, ultimately, the tragedy – of the country itself is observed and examined. Thomia concentrates on mutual influences and interactions between this ‘elite’ boys’ school – a tropical facsimile of an English public school that has produced four Prime Ministers of the country and hundreds of other figures of national importance – and the society of which it is a constituent. The focus alternates between Thomian and national history, smooth transitions from one to the other being facilitated by the wealth of common subject matter. The narrative is chronological, commencing in 1801, fifty years before the founding of STC itself, and ending with the sesquicentennial of the College in 2001.
Thomia is very much a story of colonialism and decolonialization, told from a unique and potentially controversial social perspective. This, however, is only one aspect of a wide-ranging book, and readers are left to draw their own political conclusions. The author’s aim is literary, not academic or polemical.


ABOUT THE AUTHOR