SWRD BANDARANAIKE

Our prime minister's (S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike's) direct male ancestor, of whose connection some members of his family used to take pride (see Twentieth Century Impressions of Ceylon edited by Arnold Wright, (1907) p. 525) was     Nilaperumal, a Tamil from south India who arrived in Ceylon in the late fifteenth or early sixteenth century. He was described as a `high priest' of a temple in Ceylon. He was the first Kapurala in his family of the Nawagomuwe dewale, with the fortunes of which the Bandaranayakes were long associated. Kalukapuge was a name which the family used to affect in the past. It is the Sinhalese version of Nilaperumalge, the ge name of the Bandaranayakes.

Don Francisco ( Franciscus?) Dias Wijetunga Bandaranayake, Mudaliyar of the Hewagam korale, who was born about 1720, was a direct descendant in the male line of Nilaperumal. He was one of those who supplanted the `original mudaliyars,'' when the latter `fled to Kandy' in 1760 to join the Sinhalese in the struggle between the Dutch and the Kandyan king. The reward for this defection was the office of mudaliyar of the four pattus.

Francisco first married Dona Maria Perera. They had six sons and four daughters. Their fourth son was  Coenrad Pieter Dias Bandaranayake Snr, Maha Mudaliyar, who was the grandfather of another Maha Mudaliyar of the same name (except for Pieter being spelled Peter), who served under the British. Francisco's fifth son was Daniel  Bandaranayake, Mohandiram of Siyane korale. He was baptised on February 16, 1748 and married on January 13, 1773. He was the father of Don Solomon Dias Bandaranayake, Mudaliyar of Siyane Korale.

Don Solomon married a grand-daughter of Susanna Scharff, who died on June 15, 1781 and was buried in the Dutch (formerly Portuguese) church in the Fort at the site of the present Gordon Gardens, but whose tombstone now lies in the Wolfendhal Dutch Reformed Church, Colombo. The coat of arms of the Scharff family is engraved on this tombstone, the distinguishing mark of which is a `right arm holding a sabre.' This is part of the heraldic arms of the Bandaranayakes. Susanna Scharff was a daughter of a lieutenant, Jan Christoffel Scharff, who served under the Dutch East India Company.

The names of the Scharff family are given in the journal of the Dutch Burgher Union, Volume 8, (p. 6.). J.C. Scharff hailed from Sangerhausen, Upper Saxony, Thuringia, in Germany. He married at Colombo on March 21, 1734, a lady by the name of Elizabeth de Saram. Susanna was baptised at Colombo on December 1743 8, and married, in Colombo on November 4, 1759, the Reverend Henricus Philipsz (1733-1790), a Sinhalese Christian minister of the Dutch Reformed church in Ceylon. An account of this minister appears in De Bruyn's History Of The Reformed Church In The Dutch East Indies, written in Dutch. He died on May 19, 1790. His tombstone now lies in the Wolfendhal Dutch Reformed church, but not beside his wife Susanna 's tombstone, by whom, evidently, it was originally erected at the church in Fort, Colombo.

Rev. H. Philipsz, who had his education in Holland, was a learned and outstanding Christian scholar. He was a son of a Maha Mudaliyar under the Dutch, and a grandson of a schoolmaster of Cotta by the name of D. Philippe. Rev.  Philipsz's brother Abraham Philipsz too was a Maha Mudaliyar under the Dutch. It was Abraham's son Johannes Gottfried Philipsz, one of Chief Justice Sir Alexander Johnston's proteges and interpreters, who was appointed the first Sinhalese member of the first legislative council of Ceylon in 1743. He died on July 1800. I have a long and somewhat obsequious letter written by Johannes  Gottfried Philipsz to Sir Alexander Johnston whom he addresses as `my lord and protector.' I discovered it among the collection of the Johnston papers which I obtained in England in 1954.

It is interesting to note that Philipsz's colleague, A. Coomarasamy, a Tamil interpreter under the British who became the first Tamil member of the same legislative council, was a son of Arumugapillai, an immigrant from south India who came to Gurudavil in the Jaffna peninsula. A. Coomarasamy was the father of Sir Muttu Coomarasamy and of Sellatchi, the mother of the Ponnambalam brothers, Coomarasamy, Ramanathan and Arunachalam.

It has been said that Governor Maitland `feared' the Mudaliyars. But the word `fear' in this context, has apparently been used in a special sense. For the evidence of contemporary records shows that there was no class of people in Ceylon so addicted to fawning, flattering and sycophantising (sic) in its relationship with its masters as that of the  Mudaliyars. It must of course be borne in mind that the times in which they lived were different from ours. There was no middle class. There were the exploiters and the exploited, the foreign masters and their native subjects, the rulers and the oppressed. Into this pattern of political and economic society entered the mudaliyar, using all the craft and cunning, the art and artifice of the adventurer and social climber, with his stock-in-trade of jealousy-ridden hypocritical flattery and sneaky ways. Little wonder then that we find most of the  Mudaliyars `professing Christians,' because no one was qualified to hold office unless he was a Christian. And little wonder too if the authorities saw through this hypocrisy, and `feared' the machinations of the enemy within their gates.

In this connection, in Hugh Cleghron's `minute' or memorandum on the administration of justice and of revenue in Ceylon under the Dutch government (1799) written at a critical period of our history, at the very time when Dutch rule had ended and British rule begun, is worthy of note. Cleghron observed: "If the poverty and indolence of the natives of this country were to be traced to their true cause, these would be found to originate in the insecurity of their little property, which is at the mercy of the moodeliar, (sic). That few or no appeals have been made against his decisions is to me a stronger proof of the dread of his oppression, than of respect for his justice."

Governor North too has left for posterity his observations on the Mudaliyars in his letter to Marquis Wellesley dated October 27, 1798, the original of which is among the Wellesley manuscript in the additional manuscripts section of the British museum in London. Governor North stated, "the  maha moodliar is always resident near the person of the governor. He never sits down in my presence, nor appears before me in shoes, but is in fact the grand vizier of Ceylon. Every order I give him is immediately executed, and whatever takes place on the island is communicated by him to me. The only pecuniary reward which he and the inferior moodliars look to from the government are small `accomodessans.' Their great object is to gain marks of distinction, such as sabres, gold chains, medals, etc., of which they are highly vain and by which the Dutch governors well knew how to secure their attachment." (Journal of the Ceylon branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, New Series, Volume 3 (1953), p. 143 n. 20).

The above is a faithful contemporary description of things as they were. Although these medal-collecting  Mudaliyars went without shoes and bowed times without number before their governors, the Mudaliyars too in turn exacted, without any compunction or human consideration whatsoever, a cringing servility from the inarticulate masses of the people, between whom and the rulers they placed themselves as permanent barriers. Indeed they would seem to have donned jackboots when they went out and trampled on the rights of the dumb masses.

The people were forced to approach these recently exalted brown slave-drivers, using the most self-degrading and abject terms of address. A relic of this barbarism can still be detected in certain households, happily fast disappearing, the members of which delude themselves into believing that they had sprung from a highborn, low-country Sinhalese aristocracy which we now know was neither high-born nor Sinhalese.

Some of these misguided souls still insist on being addressed as "hamu" by their servants. Handsomely are these servants paid for this performance. Unfortunately the nouveaux riche and members of other rival social groups and castes (which the earlier hamus despised) too appear to have entered into this competitive trade of self-laudatory hamu--making, with disastrous results to all contestants. Hence the slow disappearance of the hamu in the present social set-up.

As in other feudal societies, the Ceylonese masses of the time had no rights. Generally they were led, like dumb-driven cattle. When the Madrasi Dubashes made themselves obnoxious during the brief period when the East India Company administered Ceylon from Madras, the displaced local Mudaliyars seized the opportunity to whip up a feeling among the people that, after all, the known devil was better than the unknown.

There were, however, mudaliyars and mudaliyars.. The Philipsze's had a tradition of learning inherited from their humble, nonetheless much esteemed, pedagogic origins, and a consequential understanding of true human values. They were also fortified by genuinely religious Christian convictions, unlike most of their fellows who were bogus Christians who sold their conscience for messes of pottage. With these qualities ingrained in their character, the Philipsze's contributed not a little to raise the tone of the small coterie of courtiers that danced attendance, albeit barefoot, round the gubernatorial throne.

It is this tradition of public service, which was born apparently of the best in east and west and which distinguished the Philipszes, that has enriched the blood and lent lustre to the lineage of our prime minister, Solomon West Ridgeway Dias Bandaranaike.

The Reverend Henricus Philipsz and Susanna Scharff were the parents of some eight children, the eldest of whom was also a Christian minister by the name of Reverend Gerardus Philipsz. There is a reference to him in Cordiner's Ceylon, Volume 1 page 88. He married Johanna Adriana, the eleventh child of Petrus van Dort, son of Cornelius van Dort and his wife Johanna Paulus. Some of the sketches done by J.L.K. van Dort were recently published by Lady Hilda Peiris, wife of Sir Paul E. Peiris.

The sixth child of Susanna Scharff and Rev. Henricus Philipsz, Johanna Elizabeth Philipsz, was born in 1772 and married on September 15 1799, Diederich Wilhelm Spittel, the father of Gerardus Adrian Spittel, whose son Frederick George Spittel was the father of our well-known surgeon and author, Richard Lionel Spittel. Diederich Wilhelm Spittel's father, John Lourens Spittel also came, like the Scharffs, from Germany, from Weimar in Saxony.

Another daughter of Susanna Scharff, her third child, being the name of Cornelia Honrica (Henrietta?) married firstly at Colombo on the July 27 1789, Adolf Martin Heyman, an ensign in the Dutch service, a native of Leuwenstein. A silver tobacco box belonging to this lady, with the name `Heyman' inscribed on it, was in the possession of Sir Paul E. Peiris. This lady lost her husband sometime afterward and married secondly Christoffel de Saram, forth Maha Mudaliyar, the holder of a new office then created by the British to exalt their interpreter who worked in the office of the commissioner of revenue. A son of this union was Johannes Henricus de Saram who at the age of fourteen was taken by Governor Maitland to England in 1811 to study for the Christian ministry.

He was described in a letter written by his companion Balthazar de Saram, a member of a different family of Sarams, one attuned by family upbringing to western ways and habits, "having been from his infancy reared up in his own family whose only deviation from the manners, language and costume of the Dutch was his father's native dress." I have seen this correspondence in the original at the public record office in London. Cornelia Henrica (Henrietta) de Saram, nee Philipsz, who died on April 9 1824, is also commemorated by a tombstone at the Dutch Reformed church at Wolfendhal.

Before he left England, the young Christian minister Rev. Johannes Henricus de Saram, married an European lady, Frances Treherne. The marriage was solemnised in London in the church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields on June 9, 1820.

It was this young man's sister Cornelia, a grand-daughter of Susanna Scharff, who married Don Solomon Dias Bandaranayake, mudaliyar of Siyane korale.

Change of spelling

Don Solomon's branch of the family of Bandaranayakes from now onwards appear to spell its name as Bandaranaike. Don Solomon lived to a ripe old age. It should be recorded here that he was a great servant of the British crown. It was this Solomon Dias Bandaranaike who received a government grant of one hundred and eighty acres of land. He was also the recipient of a medal from Governor Brownrigg with the citation "as a reward for eminent service during the Kandyan rebellion, AD 1818. Don Solomon's photograph appeared in volume two of Tennent's Ceylon. He died on September 15, 1859.

Don Solomon's son, Don Christoffel Henricus Dias Bandaranaike, who was born in 1826, succeeded his father. He married a kingswoman, Anna Florentina Philipsz, daughter of Philipsz Gysbertus Panditaratne and granddaughter of Johannes Gottfried Philipsz, whose family had by then adopted for general use the cognomen Panditaratne. To this couple was born an only son, who later became famous in the service of successive British governors. He has recorded an account of his intimate associations with kings, princes, dukes and governors and men and women distinguished in various orders of chivalry, in his autobiography Remembered Yesterdays. But unfortunately his book does not make us any the wiser about his own family story.

With remarkable extravagance of language he styled himself Sir Don Solomon Dias Abeywickrema Jayatilleke Senewiratna Rajakumaruna Kadukeralu Bandaranaike, knight commander of the most distinguished order of St. Michael and St. George.

To this Christian knight of St. George, a scion of the house of Nilaperumal and a cadet of the families of Phillipsz and Scharff, was born Solomon West Ridgeway Dias Bandaranaike, our present prime minister, who has determined for himself a new course in Ceylon history, having divested himself on the habits and habiliments and religion of his own immediate forebears. arrived from South India in the late fifteenth or early sixteenth century. High priest of a Temple in Ceylon. Was the first Kapurala in his family of the Nawagomuwe Dewale. The family is also known by the Singhalese name of Kalukapuge.

Johanna Louisa Dias Bandaranayake, a direct descendant of Nilaperumal and Scharff, was married to John Martinus Peiris. Of this union was born the well-known historian and author of several books on `Sinhalese Families,' Sir Paul E. Peiris. Sir Paul's grandfather Johan Louis Peiris was the mace-bearer at the supreme court, when it was presided over by the great chief justice, Sir Alexander Johnston. Johan Louis Peiris was the son of Wilhelmus Peiris, who died on August 24, 1816. Wilhelmus Peiris' father was Louis Peiris, a proponent in the Dutch Reformed Church. Louis Peiris had a brother, Dernigellege Pauloe Pieris Samarasinghe. Louis Peiris's father (Manuel?) hailed from  Attidiya near Colombo. He as a member of the  lascarins ( Sinhalese foot-soldiers) under the Dutch, and was the recipient of several  paraveni lands as a reward for his services. He (Manuel) has a brother by the name of Deringellege Joan (John?) Fernando, whose grandson Abraham  Peiris was also a proponent in the Dutch Reformed Church.