Travel: Finding traces of a globalised past in a Colombo cemetery

On a Saturday late last month, I visited the cemetery not to take in its beauty, but on a mission. Just weeks earlier, I had learnt that my great-grandfather was buried in the Sri Lankan cemetery. I knew he had died in 1933 or 1934, but that was all the information I had and thus went with little hope of finding his grave. Yet within minutes of walking into the office for the Christian cemetery, there was his name, with the plot’s location: Dr K. K. Jacob, 5A 024A. The lined notebook where the records of 1934 were kept had been elegantly rewritten, the roll-call of burials looked as if it were an entry in a handwriting competition. The person in charge then consulted an old record of the plots from that time. Scarcely 150m away from the office, we were standing in front of the grave. Ninety years almost to the month after he had died, the lettering on the gravestone was still easy to read: “In Loving Memory of Kaithail Koshi Jacob… Died 8th April 1934.”

Weeks earlier, when I had learnt from a cousin in Chennai that my paternal great-grandfather was buried in Colombo, I had joked in an email to a Sri Lankan friend that I should have visa-free access to the country since my great-grandfather’s work as a doctor there had likely helped his ancestors recover from dysentery. In fact, as often happens, the real story was much richer. K.K. Jacob had headed the Infectious Disease Hospital in Colombo approximately between 1916-34. His obituary published in a local newspaper applauded “his early diagnosis of smallpox and the plague as (having been) of the utmost value not only to the island but also to the health authorities of other ports. His work in connection with the recent small-pox epidemic was beyond praise.”

In a world of Google, Netflix and large global capability centres for Goldman Sachs operating out of India, most of us likely assess our times as the high watermark of globalisation. But, the arc of K.K. Jacob’s life was a reminder that the late 19th and early 20th centuries were also a period of unfettered globalisation and cosmopolitanism, in large part because it was a heyday of British imperialism.

Before his medical career of almost a quarter of a century in what was then Ceylon, K.K. Jacob had grown up in Travancore and studied medicine in Madras and Edinburgh. He was not by any means unique in making a career in another country. Many others were pulled along by the engine that was British imperialism and much more open borders, including the Chettiars to South-East Asia and Gujaratis and Sindhis to Africa.

Although colonialism is rightly critiqued for its dense web of social and economic exploitation, it also made possible relatively free movement of businesspeople, professionals and civil servants across continents. Famously, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was requested to start a legal practice in South Africa in the 1890s and soon flourished as a lawyer and civil rights leader in a foreign country in a way that would now be near impossible. Less implausibly, English writer and editor Leonard Woolf (husband of the writer Virginia Woolf) made a name for himself as a colonial civil servant in Ceylon between 1904-11, first in Jaffna, then in Kandy and finally in Hambantota, the site of a controversial port built and owned by China in a flourish of 21st century imperialism.

Writing The Economic Consequences of Peace (1919), Woolf’s close friend, the economist John Maynard Keynes, had issued a kind of nostalgic benediction on the globalisation the world—or rather his world—had enjoyed until the outbreak of World War I in 1914: “The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, in such quantity as he might see fit, and reasonably expect their early delivery upon his doorstep; he could at the same moment and by the same means adventure his wealth in the natural resources and new enterprises of any quarter of the world.” By the standards of Amazon today, this seems an overstatement, but Keynes was making a fair point when he says that the Industrial Revolution and this opening up of the world also made advancement possible into the middle and upper classes “for any man of capacity or character at all exceeding the average, for whom life (then) offered conveniences, comforts, and amenities beyond the compass of the richest and most powerful monarchs of other ages.”

It is hard to guess how K.K. Jacob’s career would have played out if he had stayed in his native Travancore, but his career as an expatriate Indian in government administration and hospitals in Sri Lanka could not occur today. After World War II, and especially in the last few decades, visas and work permits have tightened up. My great-grandfather’s obituary mentions that the authorities wanted him to delay his retirement till he was 60. He died a month or so short of turning 54. “It was always felt that it would be difficult to replace him as the head of the IDH,” the writer of the obituary observed. “In Ceylon, he was the final authority on the subject (of smallpox and the plague).”

K.K. Jacob also enjoyed the colonial lifestyle of a senior doctor. He had a tennis court at home. One of the frequent visitors was fellow tennis aficionado and close friend, the distinguished future first foreign secretary of independent India, K.P.S. Menon, seconded to Kandy in the early 1930s as the British government’s agent there. The two played tennis together often on a court that was on the grounds of my great-grandfather’s bungalow, an uncle told me.

My great-grandfather quite literally worked himself to death. A grandson of his recently told me that if a call from the hospital came in the middle of the night, K.K. Jacob thought nothing of returning to work. Just a fortnight before his death, he had a stroke. He was suffering from myocarditis, an inflammation of heart tissue. In an era before antibiotics, the condition was incurable. Before he had fully recovered from his stroke, he was back at work. As the obituary noted, “Dr. Jacob may be said to have died at his post for if he drove himself less hard, he would have lived to enjoy his retirement.”

Last year, while in Colombo, I needed to take the third dose of a rabies vaccine after having been bitten by a dog in Bengaluru. On a weekend morning, I went first to a private hospital, which directed me to the National Hospital of Sri Lanka, the government hospital next door. I trudged up the road expecting the long waiting periods and organised chaos of an Indian government facility. Instead, I was administered the injection in the well-laid out rabies treatment unit within minutes of arriving. My offer to make a payment was gently refused. As Swati Narayan observes in her book Unequal: Why India Lags Behind its Neighbours, Sri Lanka’s public health system is well ahead of its South Asian neighbours. A girl born in Sri Lanka in 2021 can expect to live to 81, Narayan observes; the equivalent life expectancy for an Indian girl is 69.

Looking back, I cannot help marvelling that a century ago, my great-grandfather played a part in building the foundation for what has become Sri Lanka’s superior public health record. (This record is under siege now because of the economic crisis, but if my experience was anything to go by, despite the high cost of drugs, health workers’ strikes and doctors seeking to go overseas, that solid start of good primary public health should endure.)

Harder to explain is how Colombo has been a second home for me after repeated visits since 2002, years before I knew I had an ancestor who had died there. Like an archaeological excavation, the coincidences lie layer upon layer. Writing my will a few months before I discovered his grave, I had requested that a small portion of my ashes be dropped at the foot of my parents’ grave in Bengaluru and deleted an impractical plea that a handful be dropped in the Borella cemetery because I had become enamoured with its tranquillity, opting instead for the sea at Bentota on the southern coast of Sri Lanka. The Colombo gym I regularly exercise at begins its warm-up jogs along the perimeter of the cemetery. On more than a few occasions earlier this year, I had thus been a couple of hundred metres from my great-grandfather’s grave without knowing it. I have often quoted the late writer Gita Mehta’s witty remark that “karma is not everything it is cracked up to be.” Now, I am not so sure. Standing before my great-grandfather’s grave a few Saturdays ago, I was at a loss for words, an agnostic trying to make sense of the long tail of fate and history.

Rahul Jacob is a former travel food and drink editor of Financial Times, London and a columnist for Mint.