A clash of cultures

"Profane academic learning - whether in the arts or sciences - is quantitative and analytical by tendency, concerned with appearance, forces and material properties; its nature is to criticise and decompose; it works by fragmentation. The possession of all the sciences, if unaccompanied by knowledge of the best, will more often than not injure the possessor." - Plato
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by S. Pathiravitana

(March 02, Colombo, Sri Lanka Guardian) In 1838, the then Governor of Ceylon, Sir J.A. Stewart Mackenzie, wrote to the Sultan of Maldives, Muhammad Imad-ud-Din, acknowledging receipt of a letter received from him through the Maldivian Ambassador in Colombo. It said:

I have received, by Your Highness’s Ambassador, Your Highness’s friendly Letter, and I much rejoice to hear of Your health and Your continued friendship for the British Government and for myself.

I shall do everything in my power to promote the good understanding which exists between us, and I am confident that, should any British vessels touch at the Maldive Islands, Your Highness will afford them protection and furnish them with such articles they may require.

The last time a British ship called at the Islands to survey the seas, the Sultan, who preceded him,

Not knowing what the ship was really up to, refused permission. Nonetheless, this being the Gunboat era, the ship brushed aside the refusal and went ahead with its project. Subsequently matters may have been patched up and friendly relations may have been cautiously resumed. The Maldivian Ambassador in Colombo may have succeeded in the patching up, in the course of which he may have made some suggestions.

Sir Mackenzie’s Honourable letter went on to say:

Your Ambassador, Ibrahim Nakuda, has conducted himself in a very proper manner, and much to my satisfaction. I have sent by him some Presents, which I beg your Highness to receive as tokens of friendship of the British Government.

And then we come to the somewhat controversial part of this correspondence.

Having understood as the wish of Your Royal Highness as well as that of many of Your subjects to be taught the English language, I am prepared to give them the opportunity of acquiring that language without any cost to themselves; and I invite two of your Royal Highness’s subjects, not exceeding 16 years of age, whom You may be pleased to select and sent to Colombo.

The reply was stunning, but polite, simply because a request seems to have been made by His Majesty and subsequently turned down for the reason that, "Our Religious Tenets prohibit Our children being instructed in their youth". Let us not get involved in these palace intrigues, but reflect on this controversy by reminding ourselves that the Governor could have extricated himself before putting his foot into this academic venture, had he consulted the Dictionary of Islam by Hughes available to him at that time.

According to that Dictionary - "Education without religion is to the Muhammadan mind an anomaly. In all books of Traditions there are sections specially devoted to the consideration of Knowledge; but only as far as it relates to a knowledge of God, and of God’s book" - the Quran. Had Mackenzie also known his Plato, it would have helped him to understand Islamic thought better and saved him from hurting his foot.

For here is an illuminating thought and a clear warning from Plato. "Profane academic learning - whether in the arts or sciences - is quantitative and analytical by tendency, concerned with appearance, forces and material properties; its nature is to criticise and decompose; it works by fragmentation. The possession of all the sciences, if unaccompanied by knowledge of the best, will more often than not injure the possessor."

That’s what the West was saying. The East, too, helps to understand Islamic thought. Once when an Indian student of Western Philosophy came to Sri Ramakrishna in search of knowledge, the saintly man asked him whether he was married and how the wife looked at things. "M’, the inquirer after knowledge, who later became his biographer, answered, "She is all right. But I am afraid she is ignorant." Displeased by this reply the Bengali Saint observed, ‘And you are a man of knowledge."

Going on to explain what the saint was trying to say, he realised that all this time he thought that one got knowledge from books and schools. Later on he gave up this false notion He was taught that to know God was knowledge. Not to know him was ignorance, just as the Buddhists say that all maya is ignorance and to know the Self is knowledge. The Chinese sages are even more terse:

He who is learned is not wise
He who is wise is not learned (Lao Tse)

And one final word of wisdom from the West - For in much wisdom is much grief; and he that increaseth knowledge increases sorrow. Ecclesiastes i1. 18

Had the Sultan accepted Mackenzie’s offer what would have been the fate of the Maldives? Now, this was about the time the Colebrook-Cameron reforms were unleashed on this country. And these reforms only continued what Lord North intended to do with his educational reforms for Ceylon much earlier, when his main intention was to convert the natives to Protestant Christianity. Perhaps the evangelization of the country may not have taken the central place in the Maldives, had the Sultan accepted the proposal, but the English education that was introduced into this country would have caused even worse damage there than the spread of Christianity here.

Lord Macaulay had not yet formulated his notorious plan to educate the Indians when the Cameron-Colebrook couple was here. That was the same kind of plan that North too had with his limited resources, but he hadn’t formulated it so clearly and so straightforwardly as Macaulay did. This is what Macaulay had in mind: "I feel - it is impossible for us with our limited means, to educate the body of the people. We must do our best at present to form a class of person Indian in blood and colour but English in tastes, in opinion in morals and in intellect."

Macaulay’s plan had only a limited success in India, though he did succeed in creating a microscopic minority, which would have agreed with what the Western educated Nehru who admitted as the final result of his Western education, "I find myself at home nowhere, out of place everywhere." But what happened in Ceylon was more successful than what the British expected. In a percipient essay Dr Lakshman Marasinghe wrote to the Sri Lankan Journal of International Law under the title The British Colonial Contribution to Disunity in SrI Lanka, he traces what the education policy the British introduced finally produced in Sri Lanka:

"..it might be said that by the time of independence, in 1948, Ceylon had witnessed the growth of a class of persons, small in number, whose cultural and attitudinal underpinnings were those borrowed from alien cultures. By 1948, this small group had formed a class of powerful powerbrokers in Ceylon through whom the departing colonial power hoped to influence the governments and its institutions of Independent Ceylon. This comprodore class was expected to chart a course for the island’s future in which the English language and Western cultural values and attitudes shall have a place of prominence. The political cultural revolution of 1956, occasioned by the first Bandaranaike government, was a natural consequence of this colonial education policy."

Another disaster of this cultural collision was the impact of English on the Sinhala language. In this same issue of the Royal Asiatic Journal of Ceylon issued in 1935 from which I secured the information about the little Maldivian drama, there was an article by the Ven R. Siddartha on the Sinhalese language. In that he was referring to ‘another menace to our language... more appalling than the one already mentioned. This is the influence of the English language with which the Sinhalese language has no similarity whatsoever.

‘As English and Sinhalese differ in every way, the introductions of the idioms of the English language into the Sinhalese language makes the latter ridiculous....If precautions are not taken in time, and if preference is not given to Sinhalese over English in the education of our children, in a few generations the Sinhalese language will be irreparably corrupted.’ That warning was sounded almost seventy years ago. In the last two years the devastation caused to the culture and language has had the able support of the different TV channels and numerous FM stations, where we find now Sinhala is being pushed to the wall once more.

I can see the new regime preparing to focus its attention more on teaching English than the Sinhala language. To introduce English at the stage when a child’s mind is forming, will only turn the child away from its own cultural roots, as it happened in the past to produce, what Dr Lakshman Marasingha calls, the comprodore class with its leaning towards alien cultures and attitudes that have been the ruin of the political leaders of our country as the case of the last Prime Minister clearly shows.