Proud and prejudiced - Ferdinandus

INTRODUCTION 3
which the family has passed in this Island if the male ancestors were Dutch,
Portuguese, or other Europeans, whoever may have been the female parents
but only if the parents were married.
In later years the term 'Burgher' was extended to include 'Eurasians' or children of unions
between the British and the indigenous people of Ceylon whose parents were most often not
married. Burghers and Eurasians were not enumerated separately in the periodic census reports
and the term 'Burgher' eventually began to include the Eurasians.
The original Burghers were town dwellers and traders. Deprived of their livelihoods by
the British, they began to emphasise education, and employment in the public service, as the
preferred route for economic survival. They became the people who delivered the professional
and bureaucratic services in early British times when no other ethnic group was either
competent or prepared to do so. They became the instruments of modernisation and western
development. They were the people 'in-between'.
The British brought modernisation, the advantages of western civilisation, commercial
plantations, and improved communications. It was the Burghers who converted the plans into
concrete achievements. Burghers were pioneers in land surveying, construction and maintaining
of road and railway networks and delivery of health and medical services. They were pioneers
in education, upholders of the law, maintained order and impartially delivered the numerous
government services that enabled all communities to improve their living standards. They were
instruments of western progress as Ceylon inched, without violence, towards economic and
political independence. Burghers avoided politics and political power. Their role was to
impartially serve the administration and this they did well.
Burghers maintained law, order and discipline irrespective of class, caste, ethnicity and
religion. After the Burghers left Sri Lanka, these divisions became magnified. Over 50,000 Sri
Lankans have been killed in ethnic, religious and class violence since 1958.
The Burgher community, at the time Ceylon became independent from British rule,
was a diverse one. It comprised both rich and poor; those more European in skin colour and life
style, and those indistinguishable from the indigenous Asians. The term 'Burgher' had been
widened to include all those who were Christians, spoke English as their home language, wore
European clothes, and had British, Dutch and Portuguese names.
The persons who described themselves as 'Burghers' in the periodic census reports
were never more than 0.6% of the population and never more than 46,000. They lived in a
compact tropical country with a variety of religions, languages, races, scenery, exotic foods and
the cultures of both East and West. They were a visible and influential community and their
casual, relaxed, open, urban life style blended the West with the East.
Why did they leave their island paradise? What made them migrate? The Burghers did
not change. Ceylon changed for the Burghers. The Government decreed that the language of the
Sinhalese, the Sinhala language, was to be the language for all official purposes. The Burghers
became marginalised. They left their homeland for countries where their language, English, is
spoken. The Burghers have adapted to life in their new countries and those who remained in
independent Sri Lanka have also adapted. The ethnic word 'Burgher and the community it
described will soon be extinct. The