{"id":75285,"date":"2018-03-04T20:06:39","date_gmt":"2018-03-05T02:06:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/?p=75285"},"modified":"2018-03-04T13:05:24","modified_gmt":"2018-03-04T20:05:24","slug":"big-match-a-colonial-project-of-producing-brown-sahibs-and-masculine-christians","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/2018\/03\/04\/big-match-a-colonial-project-of-producing-brown-sahibs-and-masculine-christians\/","title":{"rendered":"Big Match!\u00a0 : \u00a0A\u00a0 colonial project of producing brown Sahibs and masculine Christians \u00a0"},"content":{"rendered":"

Punsara\u00a0 Amarasinghe PhD Candidate in International Law Higher School of Economics Moscow<\/em><\/span><\/h2>\n

Every year month of March brings a tantalizing spirit to the lads in Sri Lankan schools located in major cities like Colombo, Galle and Kandy to raise their cheer for their alma maters waving their respective school flag while putting their maximum effort to be gallant before the fairer sex around every girl\u2019s school in the town. This is called the Madness of March or Big Match culture in Sri Lanka that has been prevailed for decades. Now most of the schools in Sri Lanka have their own annual big match or Cricket Encounter\u00a0 , but the history of school cricketing rivalries in the island shows us the initial Cricket encounters in colonial Ceylon was mainly confined to a set of elite schools scoured by either Colonial administration or Christian Missionaries.\u00a0 Royal-Thomian or commonly known Battle of the Blues is the oldest inter school cricket encounter of Sri Lanka with the history of 139 years as it was not even interrupted during both First and Second World Wars. The annual cricket encounter between Royal College, Colombo and S.Thomas\u2019 College, Mount Lavenia has firmly established its aura among the political and social elites in the island for many decades. Following Royal Thomian many other schools in Sri Lanka began their own big match smitten by the glamour of former and surprisingly those big matches became iconic features in school calendar and many old boys who departed from their schools take the opportunity of attending the event with sense of pride and nostalgia of the jolly good days they spent. Ambience of Royal Thomian big match is a better testimony that is showing the ardor of loyal old boys from every nook and corner of the social class.<\/p>\n

If we look at the roots of the big match evolution in Sri Lanka we can realize the inception of school cricket rivalries was finally attributed to a one objective of colonial project that had psychologically and culturally brainwashed the nation. In the first few decades of the British rule in Ceylon the presence of Missionaries was a vitally important factor as a constant agent of the social reform that British anticipated to carry out. The role of a missionary in education was significant in many ways as it was oriented towards changing the psychology of the colonized.\u00a0 The task of civilizing mission of the colony was bestowed upon the Missionaries and the grim colonial attitude towards the subject has been aptly depicted in Joseph Conrad\u2019s famous fiction Heart of Darkness\u201d.\u00a0 Conrad states The colonists are described as shiny, altruistic pioneers sallying forth into the dark uncivilized world to bring salvation and civilization to the ignorant races. Oh, but also terror, rape, enslavement, and forced conversion. Awesome!\u201d\u00a0 The Sport was one of innovative approaches used by Christian Missionaries in inculcating their Christian virtues among the natives and presumed savageness of natives was expected to be tamed by uplifting highest morals through Cricket. In fact the spread of Cricket in Victorian England among the public schools was mainly based on maintaining a certain English hierarchical values. Unlike football, Cricket was given a special place of reverence in the British school sports.\u00a0 Furthermore the propagating cricket was mainly focused on one particular goal from the outset albeit it was predominantly limited to elite public schools like Eton, Harrow and Winchester. In truth Anglican clergymen in England and school authorities identified the importance of cricket in creating the loyalty to the crown among the boys. In the lines of Vtiae Lapmada a Great War poetry written by Sir Henry Newbolt, cricket has been depicted as a tool to strengthen the allegiance to British Empire. In the poem Vitae Lampada an allegory of Cricket match was used to show how one should keep fighting for the country regardless the deprivation he faces.<\/p>\n

The introduction of Cricket in Ceylon and other colonies was accredited with British missionaries who took it up as a civilizing tool. \u00a0The sense of Christian evangelism was always imbued with spread of Cricket, especially the Missionaries who went to the colonies in preaching the gospel realized the importance of increasing physical fitness and moral obedience together. In tracing the historiography of School Cricket that we can understand how Cricketing rivalries among the schools began to appear under the patronage of Anglican clergymen. \u00a0S.Thomas\u2019 happened to be the first school to play Cricket in Ceylon and initially they had to play cricket with European dominating local Cricket clubs as none other school played the game at that time.\u00a0 S.Thomas College was a private Anglican institute moulded on the popular mantra of British Empire called Classics, Cricket and Christianity. \u00a0When the education was mainly oriented towards the Greek-Roman classical literature, Cricket played a decisive role by marinating the team loyalty and this so called loyalty was expected to be shown to the empire as well. Eventually Christianity was the bottom line of the education, Missionaries like Bishop Chapman of S.Thomas\u2019 or Rev. Frazer in Trinity believed the sports such as Cricket would be idealized the healthy Masculine Christians in the colony. As Arjun Appaduari pointed out the upholding a healthy standard in the empire was a British Imperial policy and the Christian missionaries made it possible by assimilating sports into the evangelical education they provided. \u00a0British sports historian J.A Mangan provides gracious statement about the moral mission of Christian Missionaries through Cricket. He states These men had the most profound of purposes: manliness achieved on the games field in order to create a universal Tom Brown: loyal, brave, truthful, a gentleman, and if possible a Christian. In all seriousness the, main means of their attempted moral manliness was cricket, the game of empire\u201d. In fact the establishment laid down by Missionaries had reaped its fruit by the early 20th<\/sup> Century as those big matches or cricketing rivalries became a limelight in the social life of Colonial Ceylon. In tracing the history of Royal Thomian encounter we can see most of the post independent leaders of Ceylon had played for either Royal or STC. But the reality behind propagating Cricket in the Sub Continent was based on British dubious tradition of forming a loyal and healthy class for the Empire and the equal status was not given for those native boys who played cricket despite the fact that they had fulfilled every potential to be typical Victorian gentlemen. As an example the Indian Cricketing legend RanjitSingh was a celebrity in England with his outstanding performance and played for England team, but when his performance began to get weaker in 1902 England\u2019s test serious against Australia, the response from English audience was rather racial and hostile towards him.<\/p>\n

Missionary attempt of inculcating the discipline and Christian moral conduct saw its success with the emergence of many other big matches in the island and following the tradition of Royal Thomian many other schools including the non-Christian schools opted for Cricket and Big Matches. Today the Big Match season in Sri Lanka stands as a fiesta and no one would bother about the genesis of Cricket rivalries as a part of evasive colonial project, because Lankans have grasped it for centuries and indeed mastered that Sport far better than the British. But the forgotten truth which cannot be disdained at any cost is the making a healthy class of boys was a mere pretext used by Missionary educationalists in the colonies and the real motive was necessarily to produce a set of Brown Sahibs for the Empire and devoted Christians for the service God. It is not an exaggeration to say that this ideal was accomplished in many British colonies during the heyday of Empire.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Punsara\u00a0 Amarasinghe PhD Candidate in International Law Higher School of Economics Moscow Every year month of March brings a tantalizing spirit to the lads in Sri Lankan schools located in major cities like Colombo, Galle and Kandy to raise their cheer for their alma maters waving their respective school flag while putting their maximum effort […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-75285","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75285","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=75285"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75285\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=75285"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=75285"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=75285"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}