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Pride in a place torn by prejudice

Readers of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice will recall that Elizabeth Bennet, the future "mistress of Pemberley", on first seeing Mr. Darcy's home "standing well on rising ground, and backed by a ridge of high woody hills", felt an intense admiration for its site and natural grandeur.

Austen's famous fictional Pemberley was based on Chatsworth in Derbyshire. Now a real Pemberley exists - in picturesque, though war-torn, Sri Lanka a few kilometres from where a mob killed more than two dozen inmates at a rehabillation camp for suspected rebels.

The conflict between the island's Sinhalese majority, who are mostly Buddhists, and the Tamil minority, who are mostly Hindu, dates from the 19th century. In 1948 the British colony of Ceylon became independent; it was renamed Sri Lanka in 1972. The government - dominated by Sinhalese - instituted policies designed to reverse the favouritism most Sinhalese believe the Tamils received from the British. Since then, the conflict has become increasingly violent, with 60,000 combatants and civilians killed so far.

The Tamil Tigers, terrorists notorious for suicide attacks, are demanding a separate Tamil nation.

The Pemberley International Study Centre is a beautifully realised island of culture, everything Austen and Janeites would wish for. Modelled on the Rockefeller Foundation's Bellagio Study and Conference Centre, Pemberley's buildings and gardens are magnificent. The centre is just outside Haputale at an elevation of 1200mm in Sri Lanka's central mountain range and has some of the finest views in the country.

The centre's trustees select applicants from around the world to spend up to four weeks as resident scholars. The trustees particularly welcome applications from people who are studying or writing about certain specified fields, including Austen, the environment and archaeology, or whose work involves the fine arts or creative writing, as well as Sri Lankan subjects.

The wide variety of topics is designed to attract scholars in many fields, so that Pemberley will become a landmark international institution.

Pemberley House is used during another part of the year to provide educational programs for Sri Lankan youth. Members of the Gooneratne family, which owns Pemberley, speak of their gratitude towards their native land and emphasise their goal of using Pemberley to give something back to Sri Lanka.

Inland from the cemetery at the port of Trincomalee, where her brother Charles is buried, Austen might be surprised to see the name Pemberley attached to a 19th century tea estate bungalow gloriously restored, furnished in traditional style and equipped with up-to-date amenities.

But on an outside wall of the house is a prominent brass plaque with a quote from Pride and Prejudice about Elizabeth's reaction to her Pemberley. "She had never seen a place for which nature had done more, or where natural beauty had been so little counteracted by an awkward taste", with the words "For Yasmine".

The house and the centre are a tribute to Austen scholar Yasmine Bandaranaike Goneratne from her Darcy, Bremdon Gooneratne. A physician and, in his day, an acclaimed cricketer, he is a conservationist devoted to the history of Sri Lanka and the protection of its wild elephants. The Gooneratnes divide the year between Pemberley and Australia, where Yasmine Gooneratne is an emeritus professor of English at Macquarie University in Sydney.

Yasmine's aunt, Sirimavo R. D. Bandaranaike, was the world's first female prime minister (Bandaranaike's daughter, Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga, is head of Sri Lanka's Government). Gooneratne's publications include Relative Marits: A Personal Memoir of the Bandaranaike Family of Sri Lanka and two insightful novels on postcolonial themes.

A Change of Skies and The Pleasures of Conquest. Her finest portrayal of the coloniser's mentality is the 1999. This Inscrutable Englishman, a biography of John D'Oyly that she wrote in collaboration with her husband.

D'Oyly worked in the Ceylon civil service in the early 19th century, when Britain controlled only the periphery of Ceylon, not the ancient centres or Kandy, the mountain capital. Although he fell in love with Ceylonese culture, by extending British rule over the entire island he is directly responsible for the British cultural influence in Ceylon - an influence ironically illustrated in the tastes of the Gooneratnes.

Today, as when D'Oyly arrived Sri Lanka is divided. The central government has been unable to subdue the insurgents, centred in the northern Jaffna area and eastern provinces. Sri Lanka also still proves more complex and intriguing up close than at a distance. Those of us who were resident scholars at Pemberley House in the summer of 2000 experienced contracts and surprises. Initially, the centre seemed far from ethnic conflict, but we could not forget the ties of the Gooneratnes to the Sri Lankan political aristocracy and prominent Sinhalese families.

The staff members at Pemberley are non-extremist Tamils. Hard-working and English-speaking, they maintain an elegant, old-fashioned standard of life at Pemberley. Although many of them come from poorer backgrounds, the manager of tea cultivation is the former owner of the entire estate. A well-educated man, he occasionally joined me and fellow scholars before dinner, telling stories of the life of the local tea planters.

Across the road from Pemberley House is an orphanage founded by Father Bosco, a Tamil Christian who takes in children without regard to the barriers that divide Sri Lankans elsewhere. The orphanage uses innovative agricultural practices in its production of eggs and vegetables, which it sells to raise money. It is thus a prototype for solving Sri Lanka's two biggest problems poverty and tensions among religious and ethnic groups.

Back at Pemberley House, conversation at meals, with one of the Gooneratnes presiding, centres on anecdotes of their early lives in Ceylon along with a formidable blend of literary topics.

The Gooneratnes clearly hope their scholars will equal those at Bellagio, where they once studied. We were to use this unique opportunity to concentrate on our projects, with generous help from their numerous academic and professional friends.

Nothing detracted from the intense intellectual atmosphere - not the splendid tropical landscape, the beautiful house or the news that a cobra had been shot near the new ornamental pool (constructed in the shape of Sri Lanka). Even when everyone watched a complete lunar eclipse from the porch in the light of dozens of tiny oil lamps. Yasmine Gooneratne pointed to the sky and quoted Tennyson's Locksley Hall:

Many a night from yonder ivied

casement, ere I went to rest,

Did I look on great Orion sloping

slowly to the West.

Many a night I saw the Pleiads,

rising thro' the mellow shade,

Glitter like a swarm of fire-flies

tangled in a silver braid.

On another evening, the guests were army officers, including two young men recently returned from the Jaffna front. Even then, any conversation about politics was discouraged. At the Bellagio of the east, in the mountain heart of a nation at war, the nostalgic Gooneratnes and the resident scholars discuss. Austen, elephants and their protection, the attraction of 19th-century British poetry for upper-class families in Sri Lanka, and the failure of the world to see through the publicity of Tamil Tigers.

There is a strange isolation to Pemberley House, as if one were on a luxury liner. For the moment, all else in the world is utterly remote, beyond the island for the dinner table, beyond the smoky haze from brush fires. Even the capital seems far away and no one mentions the latest in Sri Lanka's civil war. We read the Colombo newspapers, bought each morning in Haputale, only in our elegant bedrooms.

Anne Tagge is a US writer. She was a member of the first group of resident scholars at the Pemberley International Study Centre, where she studied the history and literature of exploration.

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Copyright 2001 The Associated Newspapers of Ceylon Ltd.
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