Outside the maritime provinces, alcohol use had been rare among the peoples of early British Ceylon. Buddhism, which prizes clarity of thought, frowns upon the use of intoxicants; Hindus regard drunkenness as degrading and for Muslims, of course, the consumption of alcohol is strictly forbidden. But when a taboo is broken often enough it loses its force, and short of complete abstention, neither Sinhalese villagers nor the demoralised communities of Tamil-speaking estate workers possessed any regulating mechanisms of usage and custom to protect them against the tsunami of booze that washed over the island in the 1820s after the excise authorities began inviting public bids for licences to sell arrack.

       Auctions of these ‘arrack farms’, conducted by district government agents at their kaccheries as well as centrally in Colombo, generated huge sums for the government. Local entrepreneurs soon discovered how profitable the sale of firewater could be: arrack-renting made the biggest fortunes and fuelled the initial rise of the low-country capitalist class, who came to be known as ‘rent lords’ (rainda ralayo) in homage to the source of their wealth. Arrack raised and furnished the great mansions of Colombo and the southwest, paid for the horses and carriages parked in their driveways and underwrote the grand balls and garden-parties at which brandy and champagne flowed like water (though the beneficent spirit itself was rarely on display). Arrack, it should be noted, also paid the tuition and boarding fees of rent-lords’ sons at exclusive missionary schools and at the colleges of Oxford and Cambridge. The sums expended upon these good things were extracted, cent by cent, day after day, from the poorest people in all Ceylon.

       First to warn against ‘the vice of intemperance’ were European missionaries who worked among the villagers and estate labourers and saw at first hand the ruin caused by the coming of the arrack farms. Another early critic of the system was Maj. Thomas Skinner, Governor Barnes’s great road-builder and later Surveyor-General of the island. Skinner, who was familiar with the tragic effects of alcoholism among up-country villagers, lamented the corruption of ‘a previously sober, orderly, honest race’ and warned that ‘there would not, ere long…be a respectable Kandyan family left in the country.’ Giving evidence before the British House of Commons in the wake of the Matale uprising of 1848, Skinner described how tavern-keepers recruited their customers by offering samples of alcohol gratis – a marketing technique perennially favoured by the vendors of addictive substances.

 

To give people a taste for the use of spirits it is often… necessary to distribute it gratuitously, the tavern-

keepers well knowing that, with the use, the abuse of the indulgence follows as a certainty. I have known

districts [where], some years ago, not one in a hundred could be induced to taste spirits, where drunkenness

now prevails to such an extent that villagers have been known to pawn their crops upon the ground to tavern-keepers for arrack.

 

For the proliferation of such tragedies, Skinner blamed the government, which had ‘tacitly allowed, if it has not…positively encouraged’ the use of spirits by the people of the island.

       By the end of the nineteenth century a small protest movement had begun, with missionaries in the vanguard. Methodist ministers were particularly active in what they saw as a spiritual struggle against a Satanic vice, forming ‘social service leagues’ that were in effect temperance societies and condemning the government’s excise policies in every available forum. The Wesleyans were soon joined by an unlikely ally, Anagarika Dharmapala, who formed the first Buddhist temperance society, the Sura Virodhi Vyaparaya, in 1895. Dharmapala’s influence attracted thousands of Buddhists to the movement, which at once took on a nationalist flavour, becoming sharply critical of state policy and more confrontational in its methods.

       Cooperation between Methodist missionaries and Buddhist revivalists was not as unlikely as it seems to us today. Members of the Sinhalese small bourgeoisie seeking a modern education for their sons often found it at Methodist schools, which existed in most towns and tended to be less expensive and intimidating than Royal or the haughty Anglican colleges. As it expanded during the early twentieth century, the temperance movement came to be dominated by men who had received their education at Methodist schools: D.B. Jayatilaka and the author-historian W. Harischandra were old boys of Wesley, W.A. de Silva hailed from Richmond (whose headmaster, W.J.T. Small, was a leading light of the Galle Temperance Association), while the activist, future principal of Ananda College and education-reform advocate P. de S. Kularatne attended both Richmond and Wesley.

       Yet if Methodist-educated leaders were prominent in the early years of the movement, Thomians were not far behind – especially during the second phase, which began in 1912. Besides Dharmapala himself, other active Mutwal alumni included the Senanayake brothers, Don Stephen and Francis Richard, soon to find fame in national politics, the Panadura capitalist Richard Salgado and Arthur V. Dias, ‘a philanthropist who spent on the temperance movement what his father made from dealing in alcohol.’

       Nor was it only among old boys that the promoters of teetotalism hoped for Thomian support. On 21 May 1912, at a meeting organized ‘under the auspices of the Ceylon Temperance Union to protest against the introduction of the Excise Bill and the consequent facilities for drink,’ Anagarika Dharmapala, the convenor, read out telegrams and letters from well-wishers who had been unable to attend the meeting but pledged their support. Among these missives (sadly, there is no record of its actual contents) was one from the warden of St Thomas’s College, then in his tenth year of office and an established figure among the great and good of the Crown Colony of Ceylon: Rev. William Arthur Stone, M.A.