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| Sunday, 27 April 2003 |
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Beyond the seasonal playground Sunday Essay by Ajith Samaranayake The last of the hoof beats had faded at the race course when we reached Nuwara Eliya in that muted and somehow pathetic gesture of the metropolitan elite which annually invades the town in April at attempting to resurrect the past glories of the old Turf Club. The blood and thunder of real horse racing will never return to the track just like those White Sahibs who made a Little England of Nuwara Eliya in their heyday and the Governor's Cup remains the last forlorn trophy of that past imperial glory. It is entirely fitting that in this post-colonial era descendants of the Indian estate workers whom the British brought to nurture the plantation economy with their blood and bones should today ride horses and win trophies for the delectation of the brown sahibs who flock to Nuwara Eliya in April in faithful imitation of a ritual annually enacted by their departed masters. In fact there could have been no better demonstration than this of the vast gulf which separates the classes from the masses, a gulf which is both social and cultural. While the electronic media in unison was exhorting the hoi polloi to observe the traditional New Year or Aluth Avurudu customs and penetrating the countryside from Horana to Hanguranketha to stage ersatz Avurudu festivals here was the Colombo elite betting on the horses on that same sacred Avurudu day in blissful ignorance or defiance of custom. Defiance of custom In Nuwara Eliya we felt like interlopers because we were there only for the day from Bandarawela which in contrast looks very much like a poor relation. If Nuwara Eliya is sleek and grand-looking, Bandarawela looks a hum drum town with nothing much to distinguish it. Even in the heart of the town the roads are full of pot holes and there are no pavements to speak of. The town is dusty and unclean and the slightest rain is enough to strike the electricity system dead. On Good Friday, for instance, the whole town was plunged into darkness from shortly after 3 pm to around 7.30 pm as a result of heavy showers accompanied by lightning and thunder. That day the town was awash with revellers from Colombo come up for the next day's Fox Hill motor races and the racing cars stood expectantly outside the Bandarawela Hotel and the Rest House. This is the high point of the town's social calendar, however, and after that flurry of excitement in adjacent Diyatalawa, Bandarawela goes back to its long and sluggish slumber. Nuwara Eliya on the other hand is where the elite come in April kicking up the dust of this otherwise somnolent town with their Pajeros, Landcruisers, Prados, Monteros and other such sleek chariots of power and crowding the lobbies and restaurants of the Grand Hotel, the town's principal temple of pleasure where they had even laid out a casino. The white man came to Nuwara Eliya in April to escape the heat of the lowlands and their brown successors follow suit presumably to be seen and be recognised as part of a charmed circle and who can blame them when both the President and the Prime Minister were there as well in a final crowning of the season? typical parvenu style The Nuwara Eliya season, however, is no longer the exclusive playground of the elite. The upper middle classes are now being swamped increasingly by the middle classes in this hill resort. At the upper end of the spectrum the middle classes come in their own vehicles, the men wearing shorts or other sporting gear and the women dolled up in typical parvenu style. At the lower end of the spectrum they come in hired vans bringing their cooked meals from home and eating them by the roadside. Added to this army are the young people of both sexes but predominantly male for whom a trip to the hills is an occasion to let their hair down. Sporting the typical costumes of the middle-class young these young men and adolescents descend on Nuwara Eliya with their mobile telephones and transistor radios roaming the streets of the town aimlessly and raiding the wine shops for beer. By night there is the carnival to entertain them and by day the roadside kiosks selling everything from fast foods to trinkets. Beyond the pleasure gardens of the elite, however, life goes on as usual for the vast masses of people in the Nuwara Eliya and Badulla districts just as it does for the rest of the country. The frolicking of the upper classes or the visitations of sundry luminaries do not even touch the periphery of the life of these people. Whether they are the estate workers of the tea plantations or the peasantry engaged in paddy or vegetable cultivation there is no escape for them from the daily grind. They wait for hours at roadside bus halts for buses which come only spasmodically and are crowded into the buses which do come carrying their bundles and their infants while the affluent and the powerful thunder past them in their expensive chariots. At the Ella junction for example I watched a young Buddhist priest get down from the pillion of a motor cycle and enter a roadside tea kiosk. It was long past his noon meal time but he was going for his 'dana' to that humble boutique. Who can blame him for how do we know how far he may have travelled on that precarious pillion and from where? By the high roads leading to the great hill country towns the wattle and daub huts remain the same and so do the worn-out and weather-beaten men and women in their compounds. For the peasant life is nasty and brutish but not necessarily short. 'Devoted Economic Centre' So what of their future? While a vast question mark is raised over paddy farming in the light of the fondness of the IMF and World Bank mandarins for large-scale export-oriented agricultural crops over paddy the lot of the vegetable farmers of Nuwara Eliya, Welimada and Bandarawela remains the same as ever. They are still at the mercy of the middleman who fleeces both the rural producer and the urban consumer as he has continued to do relentlessly over the decades. In spite of all the pious promises of collection centres and cold rooms by the Marketing Department the producer is compelled to sell to the middleman who is better equipped than the state. Outside Welimada town there is what is titled a 'Devoted Economic Centre' (what on earth that means only the bureaucrats perhaps know) but its very bareness and lack of activity is symptomatic of the pathetic role the state plays in the affairs of the village cultivator. Has the state then abandoned the country's peasantry which politicians inform us ritualistically is the backbone of the nation to the mercies of predatory mavericks? Is the age of laissez fare already upon us? What happens to that army of ragged children who in the absence of regular buses trek to school from a remote village beyond the hills above the scenic Belihul Oya resthouse? In a context where for the first time the numbers sitting this year's Advanced Level examination were lower than last year's how much will they advance on that hard and difficult road? What happens to those who drop out? Are they condemned to what Marx called the 'idiocy of rural life?' Or if they cut and run towards the neon lights of the Big City will they be sucked into the urban quagmire of crime and vice? political independence These are the questions and the quandaries which will remain once the dust has settled on the race tracks and the elite has departed from its annual Nuwara Eliya jamboree. Those who do the pilgrimage to Nuwara Elya after all are the decision-makers of the country, the movers and the shakers, the political panjandrums, the bureaucratic mandarins and the brahmins of the private sector. They are the political and administrative executive, the captains of industry and the princes of commerce, the big bankers and the upstart merchants. They are the elite which has ruled this country since political Independence 56 years ago under various flags or combination of flags. They annually foregather in Nuwara Eliya whatever their political colourations may be or their political sympathies but the question is whether they have ever seen beyond their charmed circle, their enchanted playground, the racing and motor racing tracks and the gold course. This is the over-arching tragedy of a country which despite all the brave utterances of its leaders appears destined still to genuflect to the Governor's Cup, relic of a lost age which refuses to be banished. |
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