In October 2019, the economist Razeen Sally (*1965) has published a personal, biographical, free-ranging, eclectic and entertaining book which includes historical, political, social, cultural and travel writing excursuses: Return to Sri Lanka. Travels in a Paradoxical Island (Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.com, Amazon.de).
Razeen Sally saw little of Sri Lanka between the ages of twelve and forty-two. He left the island with his family in January 1978 and — with the exception of four visits in the 1980s and 1990s — returned solo only in December 2006. From 2015 until 2018, he was a policy advisor to the prime minister and minister of finance of Sri Lanka.
The son of a Ceylonese-Muslim father and an Anglo-Welsh mother who converted to Islam to marry the man she loved, Razeem Sally felt restricted, uncomfortable and in his father’s shadow when they visited Sri Lanka although his father never forbade him anything. It was the death of his father in 2002 that lifted his mental block to start to explore his country of birth four years later. Sri Lanka, at the time, felt limited, distant, foreign to him.
In 2012, the economist moved from the London School of Economics (LSE) to Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore, which made it easier for him to explore his country of birth.
Razeen Sally’s book is both enlightening and entertaining, easy to read. He tells us that the young Lee Kuan Yew, on a stopover from Singapore to London, wished Singapore could be as advanced as Colombo. The founder of the modern Singapore as we know it today was not alone with his opinion. The British journalist Harry Hopkins came to Ceylon in 1952 and was charmed and impressed. Unfortunately, the subsequent development of Singapore and Ceylon (renamed Sri Lanka in 1972) could not have been more different.
Razeen Sally offers many insights in the political history of Ceylan and Sri Lanka, presenting short portraits of the country’s leaders, their biographies and policies. In addition, he does not neglect his family’s history.
Razeen’s paternal grandfather — ‘Appa’ to his grandchildren — was born rich, the son of a wealthy trader in pepper and other spices. Appa, a whimsical man, never did a serious day’s work in his life, and frittered his inheritance away.
The maternal grandfather of Razeen Sally’s father was a wealthy tea transporter. His lorries served tea estates in Uva. His daughter, Razeen’s grandmother, grew up like a princess, waited on by an army of servants and dressed in imported European finery. Her father, too, left a fortune when he died. His sons, part of Ceylon’s interwar playboy generation, spent it all extravagantly and speedily. One of them inherited one of the largest tea estates in Ceylon, complete with two factories; he gambled the lot away over a game of billiards in the late 1920s.
There is uncle Razeen, after whom our author is named, who became one of Ceylon’s richest expatriates. He had married a Thai Sinhala heiress to a jewellery business while doing an internship in Hong Kong. That enabled him to buy lots of property in Colombo and elsewhere. His jewel in the crown was the Mount Lavinia Hotel, just outside Colombo, one of three great colonial hotels in Sri Lanka.
Razeen Sally’s mother and father chose the Mount Lavinia Hotel for their wedding ceremony. Little did they know that Razeen’s father would return eight years later to run it after Uncle Razeen had bought it. That is where our author partly grew up and where his passion for colonial and other hotels comes from.
In Razeen Sally’s book you learn obviously also a lot about the history of Ceylon, Sri Lanka and the Civil War, about the country’s culture and religions, about regions and cities to visit, about leading politicians such as the Bandaranaike family, the Rajapaksa clan and others. In short, Return to Sri Lanka is a great read.
Razeen Sally: Return to Sri Lanka. Travels in a Paradoxical Island. Juggernaut, October 2019, 386 pages. Order the book from Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.com, Amazon.de.
Also from Razeen Sally: Trade Policy, New Century. Order the book from Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.fr, Amazon.de. My review in German from 2008.
For a better reading, quotations and partial quotations in this book review are not put between quotation marks.
Book review added on October 20, 2020 at 21:40 German time.
