OUR ASSOCIATION WITH CHUNDIKULI GIRLS’ COLLEGE - A FAMILY REFLECTS

 Our family lived in various parts of the Island due to the nature of our father’s work. Life seemed idyllic to our young hearts and minds, irrespective of our immediate circumstances, the state of the country or even the world! Settling in different parts of the island had its benefits, as we experienced at first hand, their varied cultural practices and landscapes, from the hill country, to the coastal southern and eastern towns and of the capital Colombo. However, when we moved to Jaffna it was for the longest period of our schooling life.

I am the second of four girls. My sister Suhendrini and I had already begun our schooling in Colombo and in Batticaloa.  Chundikuli Girls’ College, (Chundikuli, for short), was of special significance to our family as it was closely linked with the school’s history from its inception. As the story goes, our maternal great grandfather Alfred Hensman, was keen to give his daughters an exemplary education locally, like the one he had planned for his sons in India. He therefore approached Rev Carter, the principal of St. John’s College and Mrs. Carter, to request their help in setting up a girls’ school. So began Chundikuli under the aegis of the Church Missionary Society, with Mrs. Carter at the helm. The verandah of the vicarage of St. John’s church became the first classrooms.  Four of Alfred Hensman’s daughters were among the first nine pupils, and prominent among them was great aunt Grace Hensman who later became the school’s first Ceylonese vice- principal.  Our grandmother, and in due course, our mother Rubina, also completed their secondary education at the school.  Conscious of this educational legacy, and might I say, rather overawed by it too, we looked forward eagerly to life at Chundikuli.

I was welcomed into Standard two by a lovely class teacher. A few of my classmates lived down the same road as we did, and so friendships were forged in and outside school, and lessons learned in an atmosphere of discipline, tempered with kindness. Drink and lunch intervals were times to revel in all sorts of games, whether it be the 5 stones and marble huddle, hopscotch, cards or simply enjoying the play equipment which would probably break all the safety regulations of today! My sister Arulini recalls an incident relating to a playground swing, a circular contraption with rings suspended on chains, and to which one held on while being swirled around. As Arulini was too small to reach the rings on her own, she was hoisted up to the rings by a bigger girl, but alas, was left to fend for herself when the bell rang, which ended in a fall onto the concrete base and bruised knees!

Chundikuli had a reputation for producing excellent plays and dramas, some of which were well received nationally. I was once selected for the part of a prince in a children’s play named The Whistling Brownies – a fairy tale that appealed greatly to my love of make-believe. The costumes too added to the atmosphere of magic! Mine were a pair of breeches with a jacket in purple, replete with gold braid while Arulini was resplendent as a fairy in a frilly white dress, holding a gold wand! Training under the formidable Miss Myrtle Rajaratnam, a consummate actor herself, was pure drama for us! On another occasion, we did a “ballet” sequence in white tulle dresses, for an inter-school event at Jaffna College.

 Many other dramas and plays were produced during our time at Chundikuli especially by the senior students. Among the notable ones were The importance of being Ernest by Oscar Wilde and Elizabeth Bennet, an adaptation based on Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and which was later staged at Ladies’ College Colombo, to critical acclaim.  There are also other cherished memories that my sisters and I share. Our youngest sister Lilani recalls going to her kindergarten classroom on her first day of school and being enthralled by the beautiful chalk drawings of every well-known nursery rhyme, and which perhaps contributed towards a happy settling in! She also remembers performing onstage with two other little singers, each in their separate chalk- drawn circle, with dolls in their arms, singing “I have a dolly dressed in blue”. She was apparently more concerned about staying within the boundary of the chalk circle than with her performance! 

Apart from our academic endeavours, we had singing classes, in both eastern and western traditions, drill and exercise classes, speech competitions and sports training for our annual sports meet, including practices for the ‘march past’,  to the tune of the Colonel Bogey March, under the exacting eye of Mrs Jeevu Champion!

Of the four of us, it was Suhendrini who enjoyed the benefits of a Chundikuli education far longer than the rest of us, as she stayed on for an extra year or two in order to sit her Ordinary Level Examinations. The rest of us however moved on when my father was transferred out of Jaffna. She recalls how she too was conscious of our family connection to the school from the very beginning. She writes, One of my first memories at CGC was being assigned my school house (Good Child) which I was told was my mother’s and my grandmother’s house too. It left me with a sense of continuity and belonging. There was also a constant reminder of this connection whenever she entered the school hall which was dedicated to the memory of our great aunt, Grace Hensman, whose portrait was prominently displayed there.  Moreover, as Suhendrini writes, I well remember my mother mentioning that she was asked to design the ‘grill’ on either side of the back doorway of this hall, a design that turned out to be simple, original and elegant.

This sense of history deepened when she discovered that her first teacher in Standard four, Miss Agnes Champion had herself been taught by our mother. Her earliest impression of this classroom was that it ‘was beautiful, with a thatched cadjan roof, airy and cool, with old- fashioned desks with an inkwell, very Dickensian in style. The walls were made up of white washed boards on which hung charts and pictures secured with drawing pins…’ It later became apparent that quite a few other teachers had also been at some stage, our mother’s students! To her surprise, she found out that many of her classmates’ mothers too had been taught by our mother, as she [i]had begun her teaching career in her late teens in fact, before leaving for teacher training college. Suhendrini also recalls a particularly memorable day when as a new student, she was introduced by Miss Mathai to the vice-principal Miss Kelk as Rubina’s daughter as they walked past their drill class. This was just before Miss Kelk’s retirement and her departure to the UK.

Although eventually, all four of us sisters completed our education elsewhere in Sri Lanka and in other parts of the world, we nevertheless feel that much of the spiritual, social and academic grounding that we received from Chundikuli Girls’ College contributed greatly towards who we have become.  By maintaining our link with Chundikuli and being made aware of its goals and achievements, I believe that Chundikuli continues its legacy of encouraging and training young minds to face a changing and challenging world, in the manner it has always done and will probably continue to do for the foreseeable future.