After “O Facs” and the “Kulturs” at Peradeniya

Read with much interest, the article in the Sunday Island of February 12, by Ernest Macintyre “Old Peradeniya – Ceylon’s first university in memory and imagination”. He mentions about the “O Facs” – the students of the oriental faculties largely from rural schools who opted for Pali, Sanskrit, Sinhala apart from Economics and History andthe and the Kulturs – urban school students, mainly Colombo, Kandy, Galle and the like who did English. Latin, Greek, Economics, Western Philosophy, History.

Later in his article Macintyre tells that students with names like Ludowyk, Pietresz, Ondaatje, Roosmale- Cocq, Taylor, Hingert, De Zoysa, Elhart, Van der Gert, De Lay, Moldrich, Wouterz, Solomons, Jansen, Roberts, De Saram, Nicolle, Schrader, Forbes and Hepponstal who arrived in Peradeniya (in 1950s) had been  unaware that Peradeniya was to be only a short stopover, on their way to Melbourne.

I quote from Macintyre’s “The government’s language policy change, displacing English was a year later. Hepponstall sensed the change. He migrated to Melbourne after only one term in Peradeniya, causing Vanderdergert to quip, “What happened to Hepponstall can happen to us all”. And it eventually did. A lost tribe of Lanka. Still identifiable mainly in Melbourne.”

Everybody with those names did not vanish to Melbourne – after several decades, some are still here and lead comfortable lives without any complaints. My question is what would have happened to later generations of those “O Facs” if country’s language policy had not been changed? Frequently we hear some people yell about this “Blunder of the Language Policy”, but they ignore the fact that the ‘Change’ was from a foreign language (English) to a native language (Sinhala) of seventy-five percent of the population. And later Tamil too was given its due place. Hundreds and thousands of our people who had their primary and secondary education in their indigenous languages are working all over the world holding good positions (and now this leaving is causing an adverse effect).

A Ratnayake