Jennifer Paldano Goonewardane

(A version of this article first appeared in Explore Sri Lanka, Nov 2023. ©2023, BT Options.)
Thomia is a book on the island’s modern history told through the annals of a colonial-era boys’ private school. However, it’s more than a mere telling of history, and more than a book about a school. It tells parallel stories through the eyes of those who lived in each succeeding era of Lankan history and were connected to its events. It gives human faces to them, giving character to names and context to events, and creates, for the first time, a great theatre about lives and social situations.
Evolution
The overused Shakespearean observation about the world being a stage on which individuals make their exits and entrances, each playing many parts in his or her lifetime, seems apt for St Thomas’s College as the school is portrayed in Thomia, a new ‘unauthorised biography’ by Richard Simon. This very big book (two volumes, 81 chapters, more than 1,300 pages) tells the interwoven stories of modern Sri Lanka and the College, a leading Sri Lankan boys’ school that was originally established in 1851 by the first Anglican Bishop of Colombo, James Chapman, with support from British missionary institutions.
Thomia is about people and the parts they play in history. It explores STC’s influence on Sri Lanka and its role in the country’ development, a part played out for it by the many prominent Old Boys whose lives and deeds altered Lanka’s social, economic, political and cultural fabric. Telling this story required a massive amount of research: unnumbered days – years, in fact – spent at the College library at Mount Lavinia, reading every available issue of the STC Magazine from 1884 to the present day; sessions in the British Library in London, the Bodleian Library at Oxford and the School of Pythagoras at Saint John’s College, Cambridge, tracing the lives of famous wardens and other notables, Lankan as well as British; months spent poring over the memoirs of Old Boys and scouring the endless, often unreliable resources of cyberspace. Among Richard’s adventures as a researcher were the tracing of an obscure descendant of a mysterious English warden (STC’s term for headmaster) who abandoned the school and fled to Borneo, some tricky interviews with elderly, eminent (and highly opinionated) Old Boys, and the discovery of the true origins of Royal-Thomian rivalry, which had nothing at all to do with cricket.
Richard, an Old Thomian himself, has written several books on Sri Lankan history and culture. He calls Thomia his personal project. ‘It began around 2011,’ he says, ’as a coffee-table book.’ Commissioned by then warden John Puddefoot on behalf of the STC Old Boys’ Association, the status of the project shifted over the years in response to administrative changes at the College and was finally abandoned. Out of its ashes rose Thomia, an exhaustive survey covering 200 years of the modern history of the country and 150 years of STC itself. It is the fruit of over a decade of research and writing.
Though STC opened its doors in 1851, the story told in Thomia begins in 1801 with the British government’s first attempts to establish a modern Western-style education system in colonial Ceylon. Richard guides readers from that early experiment to the opening of STC in mid-Victorian times, carefully tracing the development of education in the colony, beginning with the original missionary-run, state-funded education system created by early British governors. The continuing history of Lankan education is another important theme in the book, with sections and chapters devoted to the work of C.W.W. Kannangara, the 1961 takeover of denominational schools, the educational experiments of the United Front government of the 1970s, the so-called ‘international schools’ of today and much more.
Why ‘Thomia’?
The name reflects the distinctive character of the project. Today, it is unfamiliar – or unknown – to most people associated with STC. This was not the case during the early 1940s, when the word first enjoyed popularity at Mount Lavinia (where its use continued until well into the 1960s). During this period it appeared often in the STC Magazine and other Thomian publications. Its special champion was L.A.H. Arndt, a master at STC with a strong and prolific literary bent. Discovering the word in the course of his reading, Richard seized upon it as an apt title for his book.
So what does Thomia mean to the author? ‘It seems a bit fuzzy at first, but there’s a specific set of things it means. You can see it as denoting the physical or notional College in its historical continuity as a corporate body, and also, more poetically, as a non-physical entity – the spirit of StThomas’s College.’
Novelistic technique
Thomia is far from the first attempt to tell the story, or rather the stories, of STC. Others, former masters and wardens among them, have written books and articles about the College; the first ‘official’ history was published in 1896. These books became essential sources for Richard – but unlike them, his own follows a very different course, one that sets the College firmly into its Lankan context. ‘After I published the Cast of Characters on the Thomia website, I had an angry email from a famous cricketing hero of bygone years, asking why he wasn’t in the book. I explained that is wasn’t that kind of book, but I don’t think he was very convinced. I hope he’ll understand when he reads it.’
The narrative in Thomia switches between the history of the school and that of the country, placing the ‘biography’ of STC against the backdrop of key events in Lankan history. One sees a scrupulous researcher in Richard, evident in his portrayal of the wardens, masters and famous Old Boys of the College. D.S. Senanayake, S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike and Richard de Zoysa get chapters to themselves; other national figures, such as Anagarika Dharmapala, D.R. Wijewardene, N.M. Perera, Ranjan Wijeratne and even the leader of the Cocos Island Mutiny, Bombardier Gratien Fernando, are extensively covered. The author conjures up their personalities, humanizes their stories and turns them into characters in the national drama, playing out their parts against the greater Lankan story: the coffee boom and the Crash of 1881, the temperance movement and the Sinhalese Buddhist revival, two world wars and the Great Depression, the road to self-government and independence, ethnocentric ‘nationalism’, Socialist experiments, communal violence, the JVP rising of the Seventies, the multiply tragic and traumatic Eighties, Lanka’s long civil war and more. It reveals the role of the sons of ‘Thomia’ in all these events.
Truth be told
Historical truth is hard to pin down. Memory grows hazy, published sources may or or may not be factual, present-day assumptions and biases often make it difficult for us today to assemble an accurate understanding of the past. Some of the most provocative chapters of Thomia retell the events in post-independence Lanka in which many famous (and a few infamous) Old Boys played their part, often working against the interests of their own social class and their fellow Thomians. It may seem strange that a school reputedly committed to Western culture and ‘Britishness’, highly esteemed and generously supported by the country’s affluent, deeply conservative upper class, produced so many Socialists, ethnic nationalists and religious controversialists – men who struck some of the heaviest blows against the secular, Anglophone national establishment of early post-independence Lanka. In what might be called a forthright take on facts, the author dives deep into the crises created or promoted by these famous Old Boys, trying to understand and explain how they came to think, speak and act as they did.
Thomia, one soon realises, does not shy away from difficult subjects – however close to home they may be. Matters such as disciplinary abuses and excesses at STC are not evaded. Richard acknowledges the violent side of school life – bullying, ragging, extreme corporal punishment, and so on – and deals sympathetically with the struggles of the College to rise above and finally overcome these abuses. ‘In the story of STC, the good far outweighs the bad,’ he says. ‘But the honest historian has to talk about both.’
A unique selling proposition
Thomia is Richard’s most extended private project, which he completed in manuscript form in January 2023. The nature of the book made it a tough proposition for a conventional publisher; it was a British editor to whom he sent the manuscript who suggested that private publication might be the answer. Though somewhat embarrassed to indulge in what is known among professionals as ‘vanity publishing’, he took her advice. Thomia will be published, he says, in a deluxe two-volume hardcover first edition in early 2025, ‘in time for Old Boys’ Day and, of course, the Royal-Thomian’. So far, he is meeting all costs himself, as he has done from the beginning – but the publication will eventually, he hopes, be paid for ‘by subscription’ – that is, by selling a sufficient number of copies in advance. ‘I'll never recover the money I spent over ten years of writing and research, nor will I ever get those years back,’ he says, ‘but if I can cover the cost of publication alone, I’ll be satisfied.’
To pre-sell the book, he has created a website, www.thomia.com, where those interested in owning a copy can add their names to a mailing-list so as to be able to purchase one as soon as it comes out. Why not immediately? ‘I haven’t yet worked out the unit cost,’ he says. ‘I’ll be able to fix on that in a few weeks, and immediately after that I will start accepting orders.’ He than adds, hopefully, ‘Wish me luck.’
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