Travels with Ena: Home Stays – Part 1

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Aluwihare, Bogowantalawa, D. S. Senanayake, Derrick Nugawela, Ena de Silva, J R Jayewardene, Jaffna, Kurunegala, Old Place, Reeves Gardens, W J Fernando

For there were also days of immense joy and tranquility at Alu. I have never found Colombo congenial, and from childhood on I would spend weeks during vacations with friends and relations who lived outside the capital. My favourite refuge was the Old Place in Kurunegala, but I also spent many happy holidays with W J Fernando when he was Government Agent in Kandy. There had also been one or two stays with Hope Todd, also in Kandy, before he moved to Colombo, and afterwards, when he went back there on work and stayed in the little house in Reeves Gardens which he continued to maintain. Memorable too were a couple of long stays with Derrick Nugawela on his estate in Bogowantalawa.

By the time I came back from Oxford however all that had changed, with Derrick in Australia and Hope and WJ firmly settled in Colombo. My aunt Lakshmi still continued at Old Place for a few years more, and I stayed there frequently, but the place was clearly on its last legs. That in itself did not really matter much, for I was quite content to do nothing all day except write, just as I had done nothing all day as a schoolboy except read. But what did matter was that Lakshmi and I did not have very much to say to each other. In the old days we had discussed books, and she had provided me with lots of exciting modern stuff to read, but by the eighties she was not reading very much, and we had less to say to each other about books and writers.

Travels with Ena: Yala and other travels – Part 3

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Acts of Faith, British Council, Days of Despair, Ena de Silva, Harin Abeysekera, Ismeth Raheem, J R Jayewardene, Mahasilawa, Nihal Fernando, Patanangala, Philippine People’s Revolution, Priyani Tennekoon, Richard de Zoysa, Romesh Dias Bandaranaike, Shirley Perera, Steve de la Zylwa, Tangalle Resthouse, Tissamaharama Resthouse, Waruna Karunatilleke, Yala

Work at the British Council prevented me from going on all the Yala trips that Ena and her troops indulged in that year. Richard joined them quite often, more than once having to travel in the back of the pick-up so he could stretch out a leg swathed in bandages or otherwise requiring special attention, after yet another motor-cycle accident. Once he was accompanied by Steve de la Zylwa, which prompted an exciting story of being confronted by a leopard when they had gone swimming at Patanangala, though the rest of the party were not entirely convinced that there had been any real danger.

I was actually only once on a Yala trip with Richard, in 1986 when the Philippine People’s Revolution was happening. By then he was very close to Waruna Karunatilleke, who was helping in his work for Lalith, and had brought him along too, though Shanthi disapproved thoroughly, and even Ena found Waruna not exactly sympathetic. His determination, which Richard indulged, to listen to the news as the drama in Manila developed, seemed perfectly understandable to me, but Ena and Shanthi thought it quite alien to the Yala spirit. Richard, who of course sensed what was going on, gradually then moved away from the group, though this may have been as much because of the political involvements that were beginning to grip him, which also moved him away from Waruna too by the end of the decade.

Travels With Ena: 1983 and its Impact – Part 2

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Aluwihare, Aluwihare Heritage Centre, Anjalendran, Batik, D B Wijetunge, Ena de Silva, Geoffrey Bawa, J R Jayewardene, Premadasa, Ruhuna University, UNP

Ossie died shortly after Sir Richard. Ena was devastated, and needed to get away. Friends, notably Tilak Gooneratne she would later say, who had also married into a Civil Service family, arranged for a Commonwealth Consultancy and she worked for a year and a half in the British Virgin Islands. Geoffrey Bawa, the architect who had developed a remarkable collaboration with her after he had designed a house for her in Colombo, had rented that house as an office for the many projects he undertook for the new government of J R Jayewardene, most memorably the new Parliament but also Ruhuna University.

When Ena came back, she retired to Aluwihare. She had set up there a Batik workshop, one amongst many that fed the flourishing business of Ena de Silva fabrics. When she went away to the Virgin Islands, she had handed the firm over to a nephew of her husband, but he had run it into the ground. She was unable to resurrect it, caught as it was in the throes of a messy divorce between her nephew and his wife, but she decided to do what she could for the Aluwihare Centre, which had provided gainful employment over the years to the villagers, including several relations.

The Moonemalle Inheritance: Part One – Old Place – Old Place in Colombo

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Bandaranaike, Church of Ceylon, Cyril Abeynaike, Elephant House, Hewadiwela Christians, J R Jayewardene, Kurunagala, Leo Moonemalle Goonewardene, Lucille Moonemalle, Old Place, Phyllis Ratwatte, Sir Richard Aluwihare, St. Anthony’s Kochchikade

Apart from the joys of staying at the Old Place during the holidays, we also had the pleasure of Leo and Lakshmi coming down practically every fortnight to Colombo to stay with us for a long weekend. They came in his old Humber Hawk, which seemed to us a very grand car, stopping on the way into Colombo at St. Anthony’s Kochchikade, a ritual doubtless instituted by Dottie, who had been a Catholic. That is why Leo and Dottie, and now Lakshmi, are not buried near the rest of the family, but lie in the Catholic section of the cemetery in Kurunagala.

Leo was not especially religious, but Lakshmi was, and was delighted when I decided once to go with her to the Catholic Church at Christmas. My uncle the Bishop was deeply upset that I had not been to his cathedral that day, and was only slightly mollified when I said I had gone to a Catholic Mass at midnight. I suspect he understood that I was getting tired of church-going, and was more interested in spectacle rather than dogma. This has lasted, contrary to his hope that it would be a temporary phase, which he said comfortingly that most young people went through, though I had started it earlier than most.

 

Post-Colonial Perspectives 13 – New political alliances

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Bandaranaike, Champika Ranawaka, Chanaka Amaratunga, Cyril Mathew, Dhammika, Dinesh Gunawardena, IPKF, J R Jayewardene, Jaffna Library, JVP, LTTE, Mr Ashraff, Mr Yoheswaran, Ossie Abeygunasekera, Ranasinghe Premadasa, Ratnasiri Wickramanayake, Referendum, Vijaya Kumaranatunga

By the late eighties, Sri Lanka was in a state of turmoil. In the North and East, the Tigers were battling with the Indian Peace Keeping Force. In the South the JVP was gaining in strength, aided I believe by several SLFP members who saw this as the only chance of getting rid of the authoritarian government J R had developed, with not even a pretence of fair elections. The techniques initiated at the election to the Jaffna District Development Council in 1981, which had included murderous intimidation of opposition politicians (I was in Parliament when the MP for Jaffna, Mr Yoheswaran, subsequently assassinated by the LTTE, described how he had barely escaped with his life) and gratuitous violence such as the burning of the Jaffna Public Library, had been applied successfully in the country at large.

Given the absurdity of the Referendum which put off elections to Parliament for six years, the wholesale prevention of opposition meetings, the total control of the media, and then to make doubly sure the ruthless stuffing of ballot boxes (not just impersonation but the phenomenon of armed gangs taking over whole ballot books from Returning Officers), I am astonished at how the chattering classes, who accepted all this because it was done by their favoured patron, now claim two decades later with a very different sort of duly elected government in power that democracy is in danger.

The stand taken by Chanaka then was the more admirable, and I continue proud of the dissent we expressed in the days before this became fashionable. But the greatest credit I think has to be taken by the old Left, which not only opposed J R’s authoritarianism and racism, but then had also to face violence from the JVP when they came out in support of the Indo-Lankan Accord. In the Provincial Council elections that took place in 1988, they came under attack on both sides, and some brave characters lost their lives, as for instance the Communist Party stalwart who had helped print the Liberal Party newsletters.

Colombo Changes 24 – Black Friday and its aftermath

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Black Friday, Communist Party, Dayan Jayatilleke, ICES, J R Jayewardene, JVP, Lakmahal, Lakshman Wickremesinghe, NLSSP, Radhika Coomaraswamy, Tamil

I was out of Colombo when the storm broke, in Bentota with Nick for the last few days of his holiday. We were cushioned therefore from the worst of it, and only knew what was happening when we heard people talking at the table next to us during dinner on the Sunday.

Those were days in which getting telephone calls was not easy, but I managed to call home and found that the house was full of Tamil friends who had sought refuge there. I was told I might as well stay away, for convenience, and I did, for three days more, in increasing alarm.

There was no curfew in Bentota, and we were able to walk around, which allowed me to see truckloads of thugs moving to the Western Province in the next day or two. They seemed to have no difficulty in crossing the bridge into an area supposedly under curfew.

Nick was worried too, and anxious to see whether he should go back to England immediately, so we finally caught a bus on the Thursday morning. There was chaos at home, with people sleeping everywhere, but my parents as usual remained calm, and managed to feed everyone.

Colombo seemed to have settled by then, and that evening JR finally appeared on television to address the nation. The Tamil friends who were staying at home gathered round the television anxiously, but they were rudely disappointed. JR in essence blamed the Tamils for what had occurred, claimed he had been weak in not dealing more firmly with terrorism, and announced the introduction of yet another constitutional amendment, one which seemed designed principally to drive democratic Tamil politicians out of Parliament.

Post-Colonial Perspectives 9 – Political developments

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Bradman Weerakoon, British Council, Chanaka Amaratunga, Cold War, David Gladstone, Denzil Kobbekaduwa, Derek Samarasinha, Ed Marks, elections, India, Indo-Lanka Accord 1987, IPKF, J R Jayewardene, John Keleher, Liberal Party, Provincial Council, Rex Baker, Schools Furniture Project, Soviet sympathies, Vadamaarachchi offensive

By the late eighties I was quite heavily involved in politics, and had even stood in the Provincial Council elections that took place in 1988. Rex Baker was quite startled by this, and it seems the British High Commission had asked him, devoted as they were in those years to Jayewardene and his solid adherence to the West, whether this was proper. Rex had dutifully checked the relevant manuals and told me, having called me in to discuss the matter, that in Britain employees of the Council had political rights in common with other Civil Servants, and could contest local elections. He had deemed the Provincial Councils elections to be of this sort, so he saw no reason to stop me from standing.

The question of contesting a general election, he said, was otherwise. I told him then that, if such a situation arose, I would not embarrass him, which pleased him until I said I would of course promptly resign. He had I think assumed that I would refrain from standing, but he took my unexpected reassurance in a positive spirit, and I think it helped him to understand the depth of my feeling about what Jayewardene had done to the country.

It was in that same year that I first stood in an election in Sri Lanka that the work I did changed entirely in character. This arose from the same cause that had prompted my candidature, namely the Indo-Lankan Accord of 1987. In addition to establishing Provincial Councils, the Accord had seemed to restore peace to the country, and the British decided that they should support this. As far as the Council was concerned, the salient part of this decision was a large grant for reconstruction, which was to be devoted to restoring educational facilities.

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.

Colombo Changes 13 – On my own

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Alfie Moragoda, Clarrie Gunawardena, Esmond Wickremesinghe, J R Jayewardene, Jaffna Library, Lakshman Wickremesinghe, Ravi John, Richard de Zoysa, Romesh Soysa, Sarath Muttetuwegama, Tissa Jayatilleke

Thirty years ago then was a fallow period , as I came to terms with the realities of a rigid regime. The position I had hoped for at the Bandaranaike Centre for International Studies vanished into thin air, and the editor of the ‘Sunday Times’ was compelled to stop my weekly literature column. All this was the more upsetting in that Colombo still assumed that all was well with the government and the country, and it must be one’s own fault if one was treated by the government as an enemy of the people, characterized by someone on the UNP Working Committee, as my uncle Esmond entertainingly described it, as a bearded Communist.

I was reminded then of the delightful Art Buchwald satire I had read many years ago of a country that received a lot of American aid, because it had a small Communist party. The aid had a beneficial effect and the country advanced into prosperity, with the Communists too benefiting. But when they gave up their old ideology, the Americans decided that aid was no longer necessary – so that the government had to beg them to keep the party going, to ensure further inflows of aid.

That story had a more preposterous incarnation in Sri Lanka two years later, when Jayewardene permitted appalling attacks on Tamils, and then claimed that this was the understandable response of the Sinhalese to efforts to divide the country. He therefore introduced legislation which in effect led to the elimination of the TULF from Parliament. That however proved too much for his Western allies, so before long the government reversed its stand and claimed that the attacks had been launched by  Communists. The old Stalinist Communist Party was proscribed, along with Vasudeva Nanayakkara’s Revolutionary Trostskyists and the JVP which Jayewardene had revived after he came into power.

Lakmahal 15 – Different Perspectives: Family Traditions

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Colombo, D. S. Senanayake, Dudley Senanayake, J R Jayewardene, Lakmahal, Sir Baron Jayatilleke

Dudley Senanayake with his father Prime Minister D. S. Senanayake and Finance Minister J. R. Jayewardena. He was then Minister of Agriculture & Lands.

Esmond’s almost lifelong commitment to the UNP can be seen as part of a family tradition, for his father Cyril had been D S Senanayake’s right hand man when the latter was Minister of Agriculture, first as Government Agent at Anuradhapura to supervise the seminal Minneriya scheme, and later as Land Commissioner when he moved to Colombo and into Lakmahal. The two families were close, and they had also been friendly with the Wijewardenes, the owners of Lake House. For years the page at which the old Visitors’ Book at Yala had stood open was the one that recorded a visit of D S and his wife, Cyril and Esme, and D R Wijewardene and his wife.

It was probably therefore to the entire satisfaction of both sets of parents that in 1944 Esmond, having sown his wild oats, married Nalini, the eldest daughter of D R Wijewardene. He had qualified as a lawyer by then, having entered university at the tender age of 17, the year the family moved into Lakmahal. Having obtained a first class in history, he then turned to the law, in which he would doubtless have excelled had D R not summoned him in to look after Lake House.