{"id":248262,"date":"2026-07-30T06:29:38","date_gmt":"2026-07-30T00:59:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.colombotelegraph.com\/?p=248262"},"modified":"2026-07-30T06:30:27","modified_gmt":"2026-07-30T01:00:27","slug":"upper-glencairn-where-the-winds-whisper-the-past","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.colombotelegraph.com\/index.php\/upper-glencairn-where-the-winds-whisper-the-past\/","title":{"rendered":"Upper Glencairn: Where The Winds Whisper The Past"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Jivaka Atapattu<\/a> –<\/strong><\/p>\n

A cool breeze comes down from the Castlereigh Reservoir and brushes against my skin. I am sitting in the summerhouse that occupies a corner of the beautifully laid-out Upper Glencairn garden. Roses, geraniums, yellow allamandas, pentas, phlox and carnations crowd the flower beds in a kaleidoscope of colour. Above me, the tops of the Grevillea robusta and Eucalyptus saligna sway gently, almost as if they are breathing.<\/p>\n

Something in me slows down. It is the kind of quiet that asks nothing of you.\"\"<\/p>\n

In the distance, the mountains roll out in undulating slopes of tea, greens layered upon greens, so many shades that at a distance they blur into one another. But to a trained planter’s eye, the difference is still there to be read: the old seedling tea, planted up and down the hills in straight lines, and the vegetatively propagated tea, grown along the contour. For a moment, everything feels held,\u00a0 <\/span>the breeze, the trees, the light on the fields\u00a0 <\/span>and the feeling engulfs me, tranquil and complete, as though the world were reminding me that I don’t have to chase anything right now. I can simply be here.<\/p>\n

And from here, the fifty-two years since I last lived and worked in this district come flooding back, settling into the garden beside me as though no time had passed at all.<\/p>\n

I can see it clearly. The same breeze, the same slopes of tea, not quite as vibrant now as they were then, but unmistakably the same land. It was 1974, and I was a young superintendent of Annfield Estate, Dickoya, rising fast in my profession, well regarded, with a whole life ahead of me. I had already marked myself out as a leader: Vice-Captain of the Dimbula rugger team in 1970, Captain of the Uva rugger team in 1971, and by 1974, Rugger Captain of the prestigious Dickoya Maskeliya Cricket Club. At home, a young family, a son barely two and a half, running about with more energy than the hills had tea bushes. Life then was a cabaret.<\/p>\n

In those days, the tea planter was a highly respected figure in the community, making a real contribution to the country’s coffers. Tea planting was serious business, and only a select few were chosen, in the old days, from the public schools, to gradually replace\u00a0 <\/span>the British Raj. We took a leaf from their book and\u00a0 <\/span>kept our estates in pristine condition and took pride in what we managed. Every planter wanted to outdo his neighbour, and that competitiveness was visible in the land itself \u2014 a friendly rivalry to be seen as the better custodian.<\/p>\n

That competitiveness is gone now. Large tracts of tea land lie in open neglect, something that would have been unthinkable in the old days, when no land was left fallow. And yet the atmosphere of the place has not changed; you still feel, sitting here, that this is God’s own land.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The Castlereigh breeze, I imagine, felt much the same then as it does now.<\/p>\n

What I feel is grief more than regret, at what politics has done to our land. I lived through what is usually called the evolution of the plantation sector, though I wonder now whether devolution is the truer word. An industry once admired the world over, and one that earned the country the greater part of its foreign exchange, was effectively dismantled by political expedience. Significantly, the learned Dr Colvin R. de Silva, an avowed communist earlier in his political career and by then Minister of Plantation Industries, advised the government of the day against the planned nationalisation. He warned publicly that it would be like killing the goose that lays the golden eggs, and that once done, no one would ever be able to unscramble the scrambled egg again. He said this having fallen out with the very government he served. The nationalisation went ahead regardless, carried out under the Land Reform Act of 1973 by Hector Kobbekaduwa, then Minister of Lands and Agriculture. How prophetic Dr de Silva’s words have proven to be.<\/p>\n

I lived through what followed, and like most of my contemporaries, tried to work through the constraints, some of us even accepted high office within the nationalised management corporations, in the hope that our experience and knowledge might steer them onto a better path. But the writing was on the wall. Resurrection proved difficult under government regulation, and harder still under political interference.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Newly elected governments were occupied simply with trying to stop the haemorrhage, let alone restoring the goose that laid the golden egg. One government eventually took the bold step of privatising the estates, but judging by the results, even that was got wrong. Dr de Silva’s scrambled egg remains scrambled. All the king’s horses and all the king’s men could not put Humpty together again.<\/p>\n

So, sitting in this summerhouse at the Upper Glencairn bungalow, I reflect on the fifty-two years that have gone by, and ask myself whether the plantations will ever recover their past glory. When we visited the Dickoya Maskeliya Cricket Club, also known as the Darrawella Club, we found our answer. This once-pristine planters’ club, which used to buzz with activity, now resembles a closed-down, dilapidated barn, roped off so that no one may enter. It was, in its day, an impressive building: two bars, the Cads’ Bar and the Ladies’ Bar, where the brass shone and the glass gleamed; a billiard room with its classic tables; a well-stocked library; a badminton hall that converted into a ballroom on special nights, with a stage where amateur plays were staged; two tennis courts occupied almost daily; a squash court in regular use.<\/p>\n

It was there that the realisation came to me fully. The tea industry, as I knew it, belonged to a bygone colonial era \u2014 highly efficient organisations run with the precision of clockwork, requiring a well-trained and disciplined labour force to meet exacting standards. Those of us who succeeded the British Raj carried on in the same vein, holding the standard and quality of work as paramount. A tea estate ran to the minute. Muster was at 6.00 a.m., not 6.05. At five to six, the muster horn sounded, and everyone had to be in attendance; this was where the day’s work was detailed on the muster chit, recording the field numbers and the workers assigned to each task, one copy sent to the Periya Dorai and one kept by the SD, the Assistant Superintendent. Workers reported to their allocated places by 7.30 a.m., and the tea pluckers took their rows at 7.00 a.m. Everything moved to time. From a distance, one could see three or four batches of\u00a0 <\/span>some thirty women, baskets on their backs, moving up the field plucking tea in unison \u2014 and on a VP field, moving sideways in unison too. It was a fine sight. That well-oiled system, the one I knew so intimately, was nowhere in evidence when I visited Dickoya. The activity, the visible rhythm of the place, was simply absent.<\/p>\n

Nationalisation put an end to that colonial order, but it failed to replace it with anything workable in its place. The same system carried on, but the intensity and the standards that once defined it were allowed to slip. The Regional Plantation Companies that succeeded the state ventures play much the same tune today \u2014 perhaps the bugle is simply blowing a little flat.<\/p>\n

What happens now? The inevitable, I suspect, and nothing more. Like every government before this one, little is being done to arrest the momentum of decline. Things will evolve on their own, I imagine, though I could not say how. And yet, when you travel through the up-country, you realise how beautiful this land remains. God gave Abraham and his descendants a strip of land called Israel, and it was mostly desert. We have been given a small, beautiful island \u2014 and one wonders what we are doing with it. The estates belong to the government; having nationalised them, the government owns the consequences of the state they are in today.<\/p>\n

I know human beings to be resilient, and that some form of evolution will take place regardless. But without political foresight and management, that evolution will remain what it has been for the past fifty years: ad hoc and, I fear, unsustainable. The evidence is close at hand. With the population expanding, the towns of Hatton, Dickoya and Maskeliya have spread the way lava erupts from an active volcano, flowing wherever there is least resistance, with no town planning and no land allocated for their growth. The government needs to take this seriously. The plantations remain state land, sovereign land, what we once called the Crown, and it falls to government to chart the way forward. This land must remain in agriculture.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Tea, as it stands, cannot survive under present conditions. Unless serious planning begins now, we are lining ourselves up for a disaster of our own making.<\/p>\n

Having set out the sad decline in agricultural standards, and in how these estates are managed today, I must return to where I began \u2014 to the breathtaking beauty of this land. We drove past two beautiful reservoirs, the Castlereigh and the Moussakelle, the landscape as fine as anything from heaven, with the afternoon mist rolling down the hills. Along the way I found myself identifying the many species of tree planted here over the past century or more: Grevillea robusta, a native of Australia; Eucalyptus grandis and Eucalyptus saligna; Albizia sumatrana; Pinus caribaea; Acacia decurrens; and the popular dadap, botanically Erythrina variegata. Most of these species were brought to this island from elsewhere at one time or another, and it is worth pausing to note, after everything else, how remarkably well they have made this place their home.<\/p>\n

*Jivaka Atapattu – <\/i>Could be reached at jivaka101@gmail.com<\/i><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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