Thomia is mainly about St Thomas’s College, but nearly half its chapters are not about the school at all. They cover selected events in Lankan history during the two-hundred-year timeframe of the story, which begins in 1801 with the establishment of modern, Western-style education in British Ceylon and ends with the celebration of the Thomian sesquicentennial in 2001. A few of the early non-STC chapters deal with aspects of the Victorian religious revival, the missionary movement in Britain and Ceylon, what a so-called ‘public school’ really is, the early life and ministry of James Chapman, and other subjects that have an important bearing on the story of St Thomas’s but do not directly involve the school.

      I have chosen this approach for three reasons. First and most broadly, I felt the need to erect a backdrop of Lankan history against which to present the events of Thomian history. It is no longer safe to assume, as it would have been fifty years ago, that an educated Lankan reader would have a reliable grasp of the modern history of their country. Therefore, I have made to provide readers who are not actual history students with some essential information. The history of British Ceylon, as taught in Sri Lanka today, is politicised, bowdlerised and distorted to the point of absurdity. Our post-independence history is barely taught at all. Consequently, few Lankans living today have more than a rough idea of what their country was like a quarter-century before they were born, let alone fifty or a hundred years prior to that. The parallel narrative of Lankan history in this book is intended to make up the deficit. It is not too much to hope that a few younger readers, some curious Thomians among them, will gain pleasure and insight, as well as knowledge, from my scene-painting, and perhaps one day discover the fascination of historical inquiry – and of writing history – for themselves.

      The second reason is that historical and political events affecting the country often had a profound effect on the College itself. As Lanka’s rulers, and her people’s habits, customs and hopes, changed down the years, so St Thomas’s also changed – often reluctantly, often in spite of itself – to accommodate these new realities. To understand the history of STC properly, therefore, one has to know something of the influences and forces that have acted upon the school from outside. In some cases – most notably the education reforms of the 1960s and ’70s – these forces were hugely powerful and potentially lethal to the school. How and why this came to be so, and how these challenges were met and dealt with, cannot well be explained without delving into the political and social history of modern Lanka itself.

      Conversely, St Thomas’s, through its sons, has influenced and affected the history of the country in countless ways. It began to do so almost as soon as its first alumni attained mature estate, but for a span of sixty years, from the imprisonment of temperance-movement leaders in 1915 until the fall of N.M. Perera in September 1975, its influence was everywhere. Of independent Ceylon’s first five Prime Ministers, four were Old Thomians, and this was only the most obvious of many conduits through which the influence of Thomia flowed out into the country as a whole. As with the narrative of what effect external forces, social, political and economic, had on the College, the breadth and depth of St Thomas’s reciprocal influence on the country cannot fully be appreciated without some retelling of Lankan history.

      This is why the story which you are, I hope, soon to read contains chapters on St Thomas’s that alternate, more or less, with chapters about Lanka herself. The latter are selective in their coverage; there is very little about tea cultivation, for example, but plenty about the Sinhalese Buddhist revival. There is quite a lot of politics. Readers interested only in the history of the school may skip the Lanka chapters if they feel inclined, but are hereby warned that if they do, they will miss parts of the STC story too – very often, the juiciest bits.

      As the reader will have gathered from the foregoing, this is neither a strict chronicle of St Thomas’s College (between Keble and Billimoria, that purpose has already been nobly served), nor a nostalgic treat for Old Thomians wishing to relive the ‘best years of their lives’. It is something a little more ambitious. It will be up to you, good reader, to decide whether I have realized my ambition or fallen sadly short.

 

A Word about Nomenclature

 

Percipient folk will already have raised their eyebrows at the way I spell ‘St Thomas’s’ and my use of the word ‘Lanka’ without the ‘Sri’. I suppose these eccentricities demand some explanation.

      For the first seventy-five years of its existence, the name of my old school was customarily rendered as ‘St. Thomas’ College’ in keeping with the spelling and stylistic conventions of the era. For reasons that are somewhat arcane (but which are explained in Chapter 39 of the book), a new convention was adopted in the mid-1920s and remains in use to this day. Since this history spans both periods, I felt it most appropriate to adopt a spelling that favours neither and has, furthermore, no sectarian implications but simply conforms to the orthographical and stylistic conventions of our own day. I apologize to Old Thomians and other readers who find the usage unfamiliar at first. It’s legitimate, I assure you, and you’ll get used to it. And don’t worry: I am certainly not suggesting that St Thomas’s College stop calling itself S. Thomas’ College! In fact, you will find the latter spelling used more than once on the Thomia web site.

      The name of my country, too, changed during the period dealt with in this book. Once Ceylon, it is now Sri Lanka. These names, like all names, have connotations: historical, political, communal, personal. It seems silly to me to use the present-day name (as historians often do) to refer to the colonial state, and odder still to apply the name ‘Ceylon’ to the modern nation-state. I have, therefore, used each name in its historically appropriate context. When speaking more generally of my motherland as an enduring demographical, geographical or spiritual entity, I have opted, irrespective of period, to embrace the lilting, timeless and literally beauteous name of ‘Lanka’.

 

Richard Simon

Nawala

20 December 2022