Shepherded by the urbane Old Thomian Herbert Hulugalle (and doubtless profiting, each in turn, from his discreet tactical advice), the reformist elite of Ceylon came to place their proposals before the Donoughmore Commission. The Ceylon National Congress delegation of E.W. Perera, S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike and R.S.S. Gunawardena presented its demands – for ‘responsible self-government’ within the Empire and territorial constituencies awarded by election under a strictly limited franchise – as if they formed the consensus of Ceylonese public opinion. In reality, the CNC itself was divided on these questions. James Pieris, for instance, was wary about calling for ‘self-government’ while E.W. Perera, who had succeeded him as president of the Congress, felt that the proposals did not go far enough and split from the association soon afterwards to form a new grouping, the Liberal League. The testimony of non-Congress delegates before the commission made it amply clear that no national consensus existed: as one of the minority representatives put it, ‘Each [of us] is here to protect his own race from misunderstanding.’

       Malays asked for recognition as a separate community based on their origins in the East Indies. Colombo Chetties begged to be considered apart from other speakers of Tamil. The leader of the Tamil Maha Jana Sabhai insisted that his people were not only the true original inhabitants of the island but that ‘the Tamil land was the cradle of the human race’ – on the strength of which he demanded special rights for Jaffna Tamils. A delegate from the oft-derided Karava community demanded that his caste be recognized as ‘a race from India and hence Kshatriya of the bluest blood,’ while delegations from other Sinhalese castes ‘asked quite openly for special representation, basing their claims on noble origins, history and discrimination [against them] by Goyigamas and the colonial administration.’

       Confronted with this emetic overflow of grievance and special pleading, the commission, perhaps understandably, chose to dismiss the elite reformers’ demands altogether. The common folk of Lanka –they somehow convinced themselves – would unite as a nation if only their betters did not impose division upon them from above. Thus, in a constitutional experiment bolder than any previously tried within the British Empire, they determined to ‘train the Ceylonese for eventual self-government’ from the grassroots up.

       Their report, when it was made public in mid-1928, embarrassed local reformers by recommending constitutional measures far more radical than any they had thought to call for. Chief among these was the proposal that all Ceylonese over the age of twenty-one be given the vote – a decision that would put Ceylon in the vanguard of democratic progress around the world, for even Britain, at this time, had not yet completed the process of extending the franchise to all adult women.

       Communal representation – which, the commissioners declared, had ‘eaten like a canker into the body politic’ – was to be abolished along with the old Legislative Council. Instead, the people of Ceylon would elect fifty representatives from geographically-defined electorates to a new legislative and executive body, the State Council. The council would exercise power through seven ‘executive committees’, each charged with responsibility for a different ‘portfolio’ such as home affairs, health, or education. Each committee would be made up of seven members, thus ensuring that every councillor apart from the Speaker was also a committee member and allowing for every shade of political opinion to be represented in the drafting of legislation and the supervision of relevant departments of government. This was very unlike a British cabinet committee, which is made up only of government ministers and for whose decisions the entire cabinet is responsible. Under the Donoughmore Constitution, committee heads would form a kind of quasi-cabinet known as the Board of Ministers, but there would be no collective responsibility other than that of keeping government expenditure within budgeted limits. Some devolution away from the centre was also envisaged through the establishment of regional councils, which would give ethnic minorities and disadvantaged castes additional opportunities for representation.

       This unusual and complicated distribution of power was designed to give inexperienced Ceylonese legislators as much training in the arts of policymaking and government as possible while preventing any one faction or communal group from dominating the assembly. By no means all government power was to be transferred to the committees: the central functions of state – defence, revenue and foreign affairs – would remain under the control of the governor, represented in council by his chief, legal and financial secretaries. In addition, the governor would have the right to appoint eight members of his own choice to the council, further increasing minority representation.

       Educated Ceylonese, for the most part, were appalled by the Donoughmore proposals. A firestorm of criticism and recrimination swept through the Colombo establishment. The newspapers crackled with controversy and spat polemics. In the Legislative Council, leaders of one group after another rose to denounce the abolition of special representation and warn against the dangers of giving ordinary people the vote. Sir Ponnambalam Ramanathan mocked the bien-pensant naivety of the commissioners:

 

Let the suffrage be given to everybody, be he fool, mischievous, or undetected rogue, and it will be all right

in the end, because if he is given the vote there is a chance of his becoming better! That contradicts all the conclusions of the educationalists...

 

At St Thomas’s College, the editors of the Magazine were obliged to be more temperate in their criticism. ‘Jottings on the British Cabinet System’, which appeared in December 1927 under the pseudonymous by-line of ‘Wanderer’, judiciously compared the proposed committee system to the untrammelled power and collective responsibility of a Whitehall cabinet and noted that, in Britain, even the monarch was excluded from cabinet deliberations and decisions – implying, not very subtly, that the Governor of Ceylon should similarly absent himself from the councils of his Board of Ministers.