The Nice Burgher Girl
Jean Arasanayagam
Writer Jean Arasanayagam reflects on her Burgher identity, her experience of 1983 — “the watershed” moment in her life— and what it’s like being married to a Jaffna man.
Everyone in the household came out to meet us on the veranda of their home on Peradeniya Road in Kandy. Jean lived there with her husband Arasa, their daughter Parvathi and two excitable dogs.
For a moment introductions were drowned out by the barking. Jean advised us to sit down and remain seated; otherwise the dogs would start again. I wondered how we were going to record the interview.
I had never met Jean before, but during our conversation we discovered that we had both attended the same funeral in Jaffna in 1979. I had been six years old. It was my last month in Sri Lanka before returning to England with my father after my aunt’s death. Jean had known my aunt and uncle well from their days at Peradeniya University.
Eventually the dogs quietened down. Concerned they might start again, I wanted to begin the interview immediately. But Jean insisted on feeding us first. We were served cucumber sandwiches and afternoon tea — part of the Burgher hospitality that would feature in our conversation.
Like many artists’ homes, Jean’s work was scattered around the room. Drawings and manuscripts lay everywhere, alongside many of the books she had written. She had recently begun painting again and showed me several drawings, including a striking self-portrait.
Jean said that her early artistic inspiration came from the murals and frescoes in Kandyan devalas. But it was the violence of 1983 and Arasa’s memories of Jaffna that shaped much of her later writing.
As we spoke, Arasa occasionally helped fill in a forgotten date or name when Jean paused during stories of “facing the mob” or entering the “unknown world of the refugee camp”.
Jean said these experiences, however terrible, had shaped her life.
Despite growing up in a household that welcomed people from many different communities, she felt she had later been compartmentalised — largely because of her marriage to a man from Jaffna, however atypical a Tamil he might have been. At one point she had even been branded a “Tamil terrorist” by the principal of a school where she had taught.
At the end of our interview Jean wrote a message in one of her poetry books. One poem was about my aunt. I was travelling to London for a family wedding and she asked me to pass the book to my cousins, who had left Sri Lanka during the 1980s.
Many Burghers had already emigrated earlier, particularly after the Sinhala Only Act of 1956. Jean, however, had remained in Sri Lanka. Even after the threats and violence of 1983, she and Arasa refused to leave Kandy.
I wanted to know why.
Kandy
November 2, 2010
Transcript and translations
Language
Subjects discussed
We enjoyed life
I have no hierarchy. Burghers like to think that they have hierarchy. That they are pure Burgher, Dutch ancestry and all, but that’s a myth. It doesn’t really exist. And who knows about the Burghers anyway? Even in The Netherlands. Nobody.
I sometimes feel very lost and isolated, but they come to see me, my relatives as well as my old friends, come to see me as if it is a kind of shrine they come to visit. They come on a pilgrimage.
It’s only now, after writing A Nice Burgher Girl, that people are aware that there are so many different aspects to Burghers. Because I was talking about my childhood.
My father introduced us to different cultures. Every evening friends visited you. We sat down and had ginger beer and ginger ale, and the men had their whisky. The ladies chatted on the veranda or in the hall. We Burghers appreciate everything that belongs to everybody.
Kanabona minnissu? As Michael Roberts calls us, kanabona minissu? We enjoyed life!
Now I find that we are very closed-in. We make excuses that we don’t have time … enough time to talk to people or mix with people. And we have things do with our lives. But in the past it was just a life of friendship, and entertaining and going out to dinner and lunch and…spending the day. “Come and spend the day with us!”
So you go in the morning and then card games and having singsongs. The table is laid with everything under the sun. Yellow rice, ghee rice, chicken curry, beef curry. Ham. At home of course we didn’t eat thosai and iddli and all the rest of it; that was only much later on.
No politics coming at all. I didn’t know what it was to be part of an imperial colony or anything like that because they were all part of our house. We had all these colonials, you know, wanderers, as I said, Konradian characters who came, loved my father, then the planters… So I was able to experience different lifestyles. And I listened. I listened. I watched. I observed. I listened.
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