The recent article about Nuwara Eliya celebrating its 180th birthday (The Sunday Times, August 17, 2008) by Shelton Hettiaratchi brought back fond memories of old family connections with Nuwara Eliya, going as far back as 1870.
The article made two references that have relevance to our family. The first was that “a town development board was established in 1921”. I have a copy of an article that appeared in The Sunday Times of December 7, 1980, written by M. E. Marikar, one of Kandy’s well-known correspondents, which mentions Mr. Naganather Mudaliyar Canaganayagam, my late father.
The article also referred to an outbreak of cholera in Nuwara Eliya between 1865 and 1870 which killed four people, including the chief justice of the time. That bad experience “prompted the authorities to set up a health and development centre in the town in 1874”. My grandfather, the late Adigar A. Naganather, C.B.E., J.P.U.M., was active in that centre, and helped the authorities to persuade the Indian labour of that time to co-operate with the authorities to make the centre a success.
Incidentally, my grandfather was the Chief Ceylonese Executive of the Oriental Banking Corporation of Nuwara Eliya in 1870, and he later became the Founder Guarantee Shroff of the British Bank, National Bank of India Ltd, Nuwara Eliya, in 1892. This bank was “Ceylonised” in 1970 and became the Hatton National Bank Ltd., Nuwara Eliya.
My father, Gate Mudliyar N. Canaganayagam, succeeded my grandfather at the National Bank of India, Nuwara Eliya, in 1912, and I succeeded my father at the National Bank of India, Kandy (and the Hatton National Bank) in 1947.
This unique sequence of three generations of bankers from the same family was recalled by the late Chief Justice M. C. Sansoni in a newspaper article in which he referred to our family as the “oldest family of bankers in Ceylon/Sri Lanka from 1870 to date”. |
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