Post-Colonial Perspectives 7 – Political involvements

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Amazon, British Council, Chanaka Amaratunga, Clive Taylor, Council for Liberal Democracy, Dudley Senanayake, Friedrich Naumann Stiftung, Hugh Fernando, John Keleher, Lalith Athulathmudali, Liberal International, Liberal Party, Maldives, Marcus Gilbert, Margaret de Silva, Neil Kemp, Ravi Karunanayake, Rex Baker, Sarath Fonseka, Sharmila Perera, Urs Schoettli

A mark of what I can only recall as the overwhelming generosity of the officials I worked with at the Council initially was the fact that they also sent me to the Maldives when we took one of the drama tours there. Zem told me later that, in the brief period in which she had looked after culture, she had done all the work, but the Assistant Representative had decided that he would make the trip to the Maldives himself. Rex and John were very different in that regard. So in fact was the Assistant Representative who joined them for the bulk of their period in Sri Lanka, Marcus Gilbert, a bright and energetic young man who later found his career stymied, doubtless because of his commitment to the countries in which he served. He was to take early retirement, as John Keleher did too, and also the idealistic Clive Taylor who had succeeded him, but who fled early from the horrors of Neil Kemp.

One reason the Council was able to send me abroad frequently, with no cost to the British taxpayer, was that we ran a large training initiative, called the Technical Training Cooperation Development (TTCD) programme, on which we sent about a hundred government employees to Britain for long or short periods of training. It was handled, under Marcus’ supervision, by a British lady called Margaret de Silva, a locally engaged member of staff as we were known, an expatriate married to a Sri Lankan. She drove a hard bargain with the airlines on our behalf, mainly KLM, and got a number of free tickets for the Council which were used for training programmes. This was how Rex ensured that we were able to send a lot of our locally engaged staff for training, without using up funds on airfares.

The Council was also generous about leave to travel for the Liberal Party, which Chanaka and the rest of the Council for Liberal Democracy officers decided in the course of 1986 that they wanted to establish. I was I think the only one against it, because I thought we were essentially a think-tank, but I agreed to get involved if the others went ahead, and also to be one of the Vice-Presidents, which was the position I held in the CLD. When I came back from my voyage round the world however, early in 1987, it was to find that I was the President. Hugh Fernando, who had been President of the CLD, had decided to join the SLFP.

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Colombo Changes 21 – Democracy under attack

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Asitha Perera, Chanaka Amaratunga, Council for Liberal Democracy, Gamini Dissanayake, Hugh Fernando, J R Jayewardene, Lalith Athulathmudali, Ranil Wickremesinghe, Rohan Edrisinha, S. Thomas’, Vijaya Kumaranatunga

Early in 1983 then I found myself without a job, and out of favour with much of Colombo. But by then it had become clear to me that Colombo had no standards at all, and one really had no moral option at all but to be an outsider.

This was not because of S. Thomas’ which, fascinating as it had been, was not at all significant in terms of the country as a whole. Rather, it was that while the whole esoteric drama of my dismissal was being played out, the country suffered the worst assault on its integrity it had had to face since independence.

This was the referendum of 1982, whereby J R Jayewardene extended for six years the life of the Parliament in which he had a massive majority. This was by virtue of the first past the post system, which he had recognized was unfair, so he had replaced it with a system of proportional representation. It was obviously also potentially destructive because, by having an utterly unrepresentative Parliament, there was a danger of dissent being driven underground. But then he decided to keep it going for a further six years through a Referendum, which he made it clear he would use all the powers at his disposal to win.

When I had resigned over the deprivation of Mrs Bandaranaike’s Civic Rights, which I saw as the first nail in the coffin of the country, most people thought I was exaggerating the danger. The following year, when we had the appalling thuggery of the District Development Council elections in Jaffna, with the burning of the Jaffna Public Library, more people saw the writing on the wall. And yet, most people in Colombo, including the Tamil elite, continued complacent. Most of them continued to believe in Jayewardene, and voted for him at the Referendum.

One of the few who understood the implications of the move was Chanaka Amaratunga. He had been a protégé at Oxford, where I had helped him get into my College, and then argued his case when he was in danger of being sent down for total academic indolence, which he justified on the grounds that politicking at the Oxford Union was more important. He did however get a degree, and then went on to do postgraduate work in London. He excelled at that, and what began as a Master’s degree was turned into a doctorate on the advice of his supervisor.

Post-Colonial Perspectives 6 – Travels for the Council

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Alistair Niven, Anna Rutherford, British Council, Burma, Eddie Baugh, Edwin Thumboo, Meenakshi Mukherjee, Michael Ondaatje, Punyakante Wijenaike, Salman Rushdie, V S Naipaul, Yasmine Gooneratne

In addition to sending me to Britain for the Literature Seminar in 1985, the Council sponsored a lot of travel for me over the years. Much of this was to Britain, for two training programmes in 1988 and in 1991, and for the Triennial Conference of the Association of Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies at Canterbury in 1989. I believe ACLALS had originally been set up to look also at literature in other languages, but obviously that was a massive task and meanwhile the corpus of writing in English from all over had grown so significantly that keeping up with that alone was already proving difficult.

Many papers at the Conference indeed involved close study of obscure Commonwealth writers by European academics carving out niches for themselves. Many were the bubbles that were blown large in those years, that soon burst without trace, the glamorous young lady for instance who read the same extract at an interval of three years from the only work she had produced that had been deemed significant, the almost white Australian who claimed to be of aborigine ancestry and declaimed about persecution, the supposed masterpieces that had won the Booker Prize and proved unreadable.

Colombo Changes 20 – Dismissal

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Lyn Illangakoon, S. Thomas’

The Inquiry was a hoot. It was held in the Cathedral, and I was allowed to take a friend. Radhika Coomaraswamy kindly accompanied me on the first day, but she was a busy person, and subsequently I took Glencora, who sat there throughout the proceedings for the next few weeks, and reacted splendidly whenever occasion offered.

The Board had ignored the advice of the lawyers that they should ask me to nominate someone. There was also a recommendation that the third person should be someone absolutely neutral, but this was ignored, and instead they chose three people, two of whom where former Members of the Board which had selected Illangakoon to be Warden. Clearly they could not accept that he was a scoundrel, so I realized the dice were stacked against me from the start.

The third member was Vincent Thamotheram. He had been with my father in the Attorney General’s Department and Mahinda Ellepola, whom I had consulted, told me that he would in essence get his revenge for the various digs my father had had at his expense. He was also connected to Duleep Kumar. I therefore thought I might as well enjoy myself, and in the course of the Inquiry I accused him of being prejudiced: the next day I apologized profusely and said I had not realized before that he was related to the Treasurer. This caused him apoplexy, and he claimed it was an even greater insult, which was of course true.

Post-Colonial Perspectives 5 – Unlimited travel

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Amazon, Bombay, British Council, Goa, Hong Kong, Istanbul, Penang, Rex Baker, Simla, Vietnam

One of the pleasures of working for the Council under Rex Baker was the leisure he allowed me.  We worked on flexi-time, which meant that I could have lots of lieu leave, since much of what I did required work in the evenings and at weekends. But in addition he was quite generous about giving me unpaid leave if I wanted to travel abroad for any length of time.

I had four long stints away, three on board the American University ship on which I had begun doing inter-port lectures in 1982. Sadly they stopped coming to Sri Lanka after I had done two more such short trips, from Hong Kong  in 1984 and from Bombay in 1985, but then they invited me to do the whole voyage, teaching English in 1986 and then in 1990 running the Core Course, the compulsory introduction to the world that was mandatory for all students. They also asked me to do a long inter-port stint in 1989 to cover all of Asia, so I had to fly to Istanbul and sail all the way to Penang.

Colombo Changes 19 – Exposing Corruption

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Duleep Kumar, Glencora Perera, International Schools, Lyn Illangakoon, Ranil Wickremesinghe, S. Thomas’

While awaiting the charges and the inquiry, I did a little investigation, aided by a wonderful lady called Glencora Perera, who had decided to support me enthusiastically. I had met her through the English Association, of which Ashley Halpe, its long-standing Chair, had asked me to become Secretary while I was at Peradeniya. Glen had known my uncle Lakshman in her youth and thought I took after him: though a solid supporter of the UNP, she was very positive about my resignation, unlike most of the elite in Colombo.

Interesting, I was told by one of them, when I started having problems at S. Thomas’, that one rumour being spread was that I was not really interested in S. Thomas’, but had wanted to make a mark there so that I could then go into politics and rival my cousin – Ranil Wickremesinghe then being Minister of Education. This was a preposterous idea, though I did think that Ranil, though a relatively good Minister, was weak on some matters. I had called him about restarting English medium, and he told me flatly that it was illegal. When I pointed out that he was permitting English Medium to be started in the guise of International Schools, he said that those did not come under him, but belonged to another Ministry. He himself had sent the papers to the Attorney General, to have them prosecuted.

That brought home to me the bizarre nature of the Jayewardene Cabinet. It was Ranasinghe Premadasa, the Prime Minister, who had taken the Colombo International School under his wing, when its Principal, the redoubtable Elizabeth Moir, had a row with the Investors who had set it up. Ironically, the Vice-President of the S. Thomas’ Old Boys Association, when I first started having difficulties, told me that the existing education system was beyond repair, and asked me to join him and some other Old Boys in starting an International School. I turned the offer down, which may, in addition to my response to Alex Wijesinha, that I did not see being Head of a School as a permanent career, have contributed to the rumour of my other ambitions.

But the point was, I thought it better to try to reform the system from within. I did in fact prepare a long paper, in which I pointed out how we could legitimately conduct English Medium classes in terms of the existing regulations but, in the animosity that had developed against me, the paper was never put to the Board.

Post-Colonial Perspectives 4 – A range of performances

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Alfreda de Silva, Amaradeva, Anne Ranasinghe, Colombo Symphony Orchestra, Earle de Fonseka, James Goonewardene, Jean Arasanayagam, Lakdasa Wikkramasinha, Patrick Fernando, Peace Samarasekera, Piyasara Shilpadhipathi, Prashanthi Navaratnam, Punyakante Wijenaike, Regi Siriwardena, Rex Baker, Trinity College, Yasmine Gooneratne

Colombo Symphony Orchestra

Before I got involved in education too, my work consisted of ensuring positive publicity for the work of the Council in general, while also promoting literature and art and film and music. I set myself a target of about half a dozen programmes a month in the Hall, together with something larger about once a quarter. Fortunately Rex was quite happy to let me work on Sri Lankan efforts too, so I generally managed to ensure a regular flow of activity.

This was made easier by the fact that London had a library of films, from which we could borrow one each month, for several screenings, in addition to a set for a festival each year. I had a judicious mix of culture and entertainment, old favourites

Trinity College Choir

and contemporary productions. Then there were lectures and readings, the occasional art exhibition, and a few concerts. We got down British musicians about twice a year, for performances in the Hall as well as in larger concerts outside, usually in collaboration with the Symphony Orchestra. I was also able to showcase local talent such as the Trinity College Choir, and Prashanthi Navaratnam, after her initial training in London.

Preshanthi Navaratnam

We developed an excellent collaboration with the Symphony Orchestra, chaired in those days by the redoubtable Peace Samarasekera and conducted almost always by Earle de Fonseka. He was utterly charming, and a highlight of all performances was the dinner he hosted at his house for the entire orchestra, plus anyone he thought had helped. We also did some work with local musicians, initially because a delightful man called Sivasambu ran what he called the Bloomsbury Group in London, which had an annual festival for which he asked the Council to sponsor an artist from Sri Lanka. We sent both Amaradeva and Piyasara Shilpadhipathi, on one occasion together. I knew the work of the former of course, but I was privileged to discover the latter’s excellence as a drummer.

Colombo Changes 18 – A sacrifice

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Duleep Chickera, Duleep Kumar, Lyn Illangakoon, Lyn Weerasekera, S. Thomas’

To go into details of  my roller-coaster ride at S Thomas’ would take up too much space and time, but an overview would be interesting, given what it taught me about elite society. After I had withdrawn my resignation, Illangakoon wrote what can only be described as a literary masterpiece. He claimed that he had long wanted to give up being Warden, and now asked again to be relieved, but added that he had nowhere to go and was unable to live on his pension alone. He then went on to say that he found it impossible to work with me.

The Board accordingly decided to accept my resignation. Lyn Weerasekera and my old Chaplain Baldwyn Daniel pointed out that it was wrong to do this after I had been persuaded to withdraw, but the Treasurer produced a lawyer who said I had made conditions, and the Board could therefore reject these. When I got the letter claiming that the Board accepted my resignation since it was unable to accept my conditions, I pointed out that I had made no conditions, I had simply requested the Board to inquire into Mr Illangakoon’s conduct, and their refusal of my request did not affect the withdrawal. The Treasurer, a man named Duleep Kumar, tried to insist, but they then consulted proper lawyers, including Sam Kadirgamar, who said that there was now no resignation before the Board.

So it was decided to accept Illangakoon’s resignation, but he was allowed to stay on in the Warden’s bungalow, and was to be paid till the end of the year. The Archdeacon of Colombo, Rev Gnanapragasam was asked to officiate as Warden. He reluctantly accepted the responsibility, but in effect left me to do the work, dropping in at College when he could, but otherwise working on files that I would take to him as required.