Hugh Nevill (1847-1897) was an outstanding British civil servant who worked in Sri Lanka (formerly Ceylon) from 1865 to 1897. He first served as Private Secretary to the Chief Justice. In 1869, he joined the Civil Service and held many positions until 1897, when he resigned as the District Judge of Batticaloa. He then sailed for France with his collection of manuscripts but died there soon after.
Nevill is, however, better known for his scholarship. His interest in studying the origin and development of Sinhala (the language of interethnic communication and the mother tongue of 74% of the population today) led him to make himself one of the pioneer scholars in the dialects of the Veddhås, Rodiyås, and Vanniyås. He founded and edited The Taprobånian, a journal, in which he published many of his articles. Nevill wrote on many disciplines: anthropology, archaeology, botany, ethnology, folklore, geography, geology, history, zoology, mythology, palaeography, and philology. He was also instrumental in the formation of the Kandyan Society of Arts (Mahanuvara Kala Sangamaya), an institution which still flourishes in contemporary Sri Lanka.
The Hugh Nevill Collection contains 2,227 manuscripts. Nevill prepared two descriptive sets of his volumes, one on the prose works and the other on the poetical works. He took his hand-written works to France with the intention of publishing them but his untimely death prevented him seeing this through. His works on the poetical manuscripts were subsequently edited by P.E.P. Deraniyagala and published as Sinhala Kavi (Sinhalese Verse). After his death, Nevill's manuscripts were brought to the British Library from France by a Sri Lankan scholar, Don Martino de Zilva Wickremasinghe. The Hugh Nevill Collection (1904), now in the British Library, contains manuscripts written in Sinhala, Malayålam Tamil, and Påli.
Mr K.D. Somadasa of the British Library, London (formerly librarian at the University of Sri Lanka) has gone through the Nevill manuscripts afresh and has described them in detail. His works run into seven volumes and have been published by the British Library and the Påli Text Society.
The Sri Lanka Portuguese Creole Manuscript
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