The Cricketer
Chandra Schaffter
Chandra Schaffter opened the bowling for Ceylon against England in 1954. He recalls a period when club cricket in Sri Lanka was organised almost entirely along communal lines: Sinhalese, Tamil, Moor, Burgher, Malay, Parsi, Bohra. Membership was often restricted to those of a particular community.
Yet he remembers these divisions not as sites of hostility but as the basis for what he describes as “the friendliest rivalry that one could see.” The clubs were social spaces as well as sporting institutions. They nurtured talent, sustained competition and, in his account, gave shape to Sri Lankan cricket.
Over time, membership rules relaxed. Performance demanded openness. The clubs changed, as the country did.
I met Chandra Schaffter at the Tamil Union Sports Club. For nearly forty years, it had been the only ground in the country equipped to host international matches, with a covered pavilion and a manual scoreboard that, he told me, the Madras Cricket Association later copied. This was where he opened the bowling for Ceylon in 1954. He had been a member ever since.
His family history traced another journey. His grandfather, Peter Adolphus, had come from southern India in 1870 as a catechist assisting a missionary priest named Schaffter on the plantations. The family retained the priest’s name. Settlement, faith and migration were woven quietly into the story of cricket.
We walked through the pavilion corridors past photographs and names of former Tamil Union players. I asked him what he thought now of clubs once organised along ethnic lines. To me, such structures seemed exclusionary. He did not agree. The rules had relaxed over time, he said, and that was natural. But in his view the clubs had sustained the game and built its standards.
Later, I stepped onto the grounds and spoke with the staff who maintained the pitch and operated the old scoreboard. Like the players today, they came from different communities. The pavilion held layers of history at once.
Colombo
February 21, 2012
Transcript and translations
Language
Subjects discussed
It was the friendliest rivalry that one could see
When you have matches at such large intervals, you… after the match is over, then you have a big break and then you go to seed in some ways. So really it’s not easy to keep fit and to keep yourself in tune for big match like that because they are so few and far between.
They were all one day games and what they call whistle stop matches. The ship berthed in the port of Colombo at night. They came over and played a game during the day and then caught the ship back the next night.
Oh, you feel very, very nervous to start with. Also very excited because the ground is full of people, overflowing with crowds, and usually people all can’t get in with tickets. Some of them climb the trees and watch and some of them jump over the walls if they can. So it’s a great atmosphere to play cricket in.
I think I bowled quite well because I was mentioned by number of the British newspapers at the time and I think some of them were quite impressed with what I did because they went back and I was recommended to one of the counties. Sussex, offered me a contract to play for them. It was a great honour to be asked, particularly in those days, because counties didn’t take people, shall I say, with dark skins very easily at that time. So I was very fortunate.
This is going back to the early 1900s. Nearly all clubs of any worth were purely on ethnic grounds. You had the Sinhalese Sports Club. You had the Burger Recreation Club. You had the Moors Sports Club. You had the Tamil Union. You had the Malays…you had the Parsis…you you had the Bohras… were all communities, different communities which lived in Sri Lanka. But apart from the fact that they had these clubs which was really a place where people of a particular culture could meet, there was no other rivalry. There was no hatred. No bitterness at all. It was the friendliest rivalry that one could see.
But all the clubs were built on these lines and they grew up and… they are the clubs, those five or six clubs which I mentioned, which made Sri Lanka cricket come into being. Sri Lanka cricket is what it is today because of the clubs. And even today it is so because of the clubs. It’s the clubs which have built Sri Lanka cricket. It is the clubs which sustain Sri Lanka cricket. So and they keep going.
Nobody looked at it as being bad in any way. But in those days, those clubs were quite strict about membership because they were primarily social clubs. And they did not admit members who did not belong to their particular community. For instance, the Tamil Union had members only of Tamil origin. Later on, in later years, they relaxed the rule and allowed non Tamils to come in, but they had no vote. Then it was further relaxed and then they could play for the club. Now, of course, those rules don’t exist anymore, among any clubs, I think. As far as I know, they’ve all relaxed those rules.
But some of them were more rigid than the others. And I suppose the smaller they were, the more rigid they were because they wanted to preserve their identity a little more. Later on, of course, they found it worked the other way because if you wanted to win a cricket tournament, for instance, if you confined yourself to the members of your own community, you’d never have a chance of winning a tournament or getting very fast. So now it’s the other way. For instance, the Tamil Union, I think all but one or two are non-Tamils. Everybody accepts it, and that’s part of life. I think the world has also changed, or the country has changed, attitudes have changed. And so with that, the clubs have changed.
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