Features

Nihal Fernando’s Odyssey in and with Sri Lanka: An Appreciation

Published

2 years ago

2024/07/14

by Neville Weeraratne

There is, on the title page of Nihal Fernando’s ‘Sri Lanka — A Personal Odyssey’ a photograph of a shadow of a man holding what must be a camera. It falls on a wide beach with a set of footprints leading to where the subject, Nihal Fernando himself stands. Beyond them and in the distance is a glimpse of the sea. This is an image that gently nudges me into recognizing Nihal himself, one of the finest men of our time, a great artist, a selfless devotee, his skills indisputable. I do not know who took the picture but it is surely an inspired gesture and helps to illustrate a confession Nihal made on another occasion, in the Prologue to his ‘The Wild, the Free, the Beautiful’: “I do not choose my subjects, they chose me …”

“My odyssey”, says Nihal among the acknowledgments to his collection of photographs, “enabled me to reinforce and renew my faith in the charm and simplicity of ordinary folk whose friendship, as always, I have valued.” I think he said everything with that simple statement. It involves everything: the people and the landscape as two indivisible factors that go into the making of Sri Lanka.

Throughout this incredibly enchanted life, Nihal has enjoyed the company of his wife, Dodo, “who looked over my shoulder” right through many ventures, the studio, the exhibitions of photography, the publications and his unabated enthusiasms for his beloved Island.

Nihal loved Sri Lanka passionately, every minute detail of it. He explored the island so thoroughly I do not think there is a single detail that could have been hidden from him. There was nothing he would not do to expound this overwhelming love, and one which he strove to share with his fellow-creatures on this island. If you would allow me to say it, Nihal’s was a hallowed task, he the poet and the saint revealing the beauty of his beloved island, not just once but a thousand times over; and for all.

Some years ago, Nihal suggested to me that I should write a piece in tribute of his lifelong endeavours as artist and photographer; and that, in turn, he would honour me with a similar essay. He argued that too often good things were said about people after their time so they could never be aware of how well or otherwise their endeavours have been received. I did not get around to this mainly because I indulged in the superstition that this was pre-empting nature. Anyway, I am also aware that Nihal has been honoured by several eminent people and much of this can be seen in the prefaces that appear in his many publications.

Nihal was a versatile man. Quite early in the piece, in the 1960s, he produced a book called ‘The Handbook for the Ceylon Farmer’ (with an edition in Sinhala) as a guide to the proper cultivation of a variety of crops.

Just as engaging was his other publication, the ‘Handbook for the Ceylon Traveller’ first produced in 1974 and dedicated, as he says, “to the Island we love”. This was a very interesting exercise, the work of many anonymous hands. They were experts on individual aspects of Sri Lanka who have “travelled the length and breath of this country, seen, heard, experienced and, above all, understood the land, its people and their life.”

You will appreciate the width of his imagination and commitment when you read in its brief introduction that “we have tried hard to be informative, we have been fastidious about accuracy and have been engaged in innumerable arguments on different interpretations of many things Ceylonese…” Its dedication is one that engages us all. “This book is not intended only for foreigners. We hope it will be a companion to our own people on their travels through the Island.”

Nihal had an irresistible personality which is revealed in the number of like-minded enthusiasts whose expertise he drew upon. Among them was Herbert Keuneman with whom he produced an exhibition and later a book, entitled ‘With the Dawn.’ This is an exploration of the wild life of Sri Lanka, an almost primeval engagement with a fundamental aspect of the country, as it was with ‘The Wild, The Free, The Beautiful’ (!986).

A highly regarded collaborator was his partner in their chosen profession, Pat Decker. “The sum total of our capital for a start,’ wrote Nihal in his Prologue to ‘The Wild, the Free, the Beautiful’ “was the sun, the moon, and the stars. Backed by that golden hoard, we wandered together along a thousand treks through a hundred woody wildernesses, each striking out to capture in his own right those shots of the wild, the free and the beautiful of our dreams.”

Nihal paid tribute to his beloved isle in another publication in 1991, with the collaboration of Luxshmanan Nadarajah. It was called ‘Serendib to Sri Lanka: Immemorial Isle’ which extends to much greater detail into the life and activities of its good folk.

My wife, Sybil, and I have had the privilege and pleasure of his company on similar ventures into the realities of life at its very roots. I want to say that these provided inspired insights without fuss and ostentation. I recall with delight an occasion when we were spending time at Wilpattu. While on a drive through the park, quite without warning, Nihal turned his Land Rover off the beaten track into a forest glade. He explained quickly what the diversion was about. “This is thirsty work,” he said, and produced a suitably refreshing drink from under his seat. His taste was insatiable!

One who would have enjoyed these journeys into wild more frequently would have been his daughter, Anu Weerasuriya, herself now a highly accomplished photographer and a devotee of everything Sri Lanka is. She has collaborated in many ventures and many publications but one that stands out in my mind is ‘Eloquence in Stone, the Lithic Saga of Sri Lanka’ published in 2008 when I had the privilege of writing about it. If I may quote from what I wrote on that occasion, I said: “It is no ordinary publication. It is a treasury, a devout offering, a declaration of unconditional love; and also, alas, a confession of fear. The object of this yearning is in danger of ruin even as we gaze upon it and as we wonder at its beauty. This book is indeed a repository of a deeply felt response to a dying civilization. It is made up of a fabulous collection of photographic images around which is uttered a hymn of praise, a psalm spoken in awe…”

Sinharaja Tammita-Delgoda collaborated with Nihal in the preparation of the text that accompanies the photographs which are, in turn, the work of Nihal himself and that of Anu and four other photographers, Luxshmanan Nadaraja, Christopher Silva, Devaka Seneviratne and Roshan Perrit. Quite clearly, Nihal had succeeded in influencing and encouraging a newer, younger generation in the pursuit of his own indefatigable enthusiasm for everything that Sri Lanka stands for and has to offer.

My tribute to our friend calls for me to be more explicit in the detail I need to communicate at this time. I find I cannot improve on what I wrote when the book first appeared: “It is the extraordinary power of photography that it can freeze time and hold within each frame any chosen moment, any chosen image, individual and landscape. This is what this magnificent book does, eloquently, simply and with the ultimate dedication. It is a prayer uttered by a group of people whose religion is their country. The altar at which they worship is Sri Lanka, ancient as it is but still alive and full of hope for those who would have faith in her. Nihal Fernando is the high-priest of this cult.”

Nihal had the satisfaction of seeing in his son, Yohan, share his own enthusiasms for Sri Lanka. He also has had the joys of three grand-daughters, Anu’s daughter and Yohan’s twins.

Before all this, Nihal was on the editorial staff of The Times of Ceylon, which gave rise to the studio he set up. Studio Times was the product of this experience and for many decades it served as the centre for the commercial demands of their profession. He had the participation of his daughter in this enterprise since it moved from the Fort to premises on Skelton Road.

Thank you, Nihal, for revealing to us the Sri Lanka you loved and shared with us. Now, rest in peace.

Over half a century ago, Nihal Fernando, founder/photographer of Studio Times Ltd., started traveling the many roads of Lanka with camera in hand photographing his island home. On Monday, Apr. 20, 2015, Fernando, born Aug. 8, 1927, breathed his last at age 87. His family called on all those who cherished him in life to plant a tree in his memory. “He will like that,” they said.

All News Advertisement

Features

The Division Bell Mystery

Published

20 hours ago

2026/05/29

Thilina Walpola

Tales of Mystery and Suspense 3

The murder, in a private dining room in the house, is of a financier with whom the government was negotiating a loan. When this seemed difficult the Minister of Home Affairs agreed to lead discussions, since he had known Mr Oissel the financier when they were young. Hence the private dinner, but when the Minister stepped out for a vote, Oissel was shot just as the Division Bell rang.

The Brahms and Simon detective novels, the first of which I wrote about last week, were amongst several books by the pair that Robert Scoble gave me when I was in Australia towards the end of last year. Amongst them was another thriller of a very different sort, though that too was written and set between the wars.

Called The Division Bell Mystery, it was set in the House of Commons, the first such book I believe, and was by Ellen Wilkinson, a Labour MP who became Minister of Education in Attlee’s government after the war, having served previously as Parliamentary Private Secretary to several ministers. Her hero Robert West is also a PPS, but a conservative, and his Minister, of Home Affairs, is an old style aristocrat, not much loved by the less orthodox Prime Minister, who nevertheless needs his support on many occasions.

The murder, in a private dining room in the house, is of a financier with whom the government was negotiating a loan. When this seemed difficult the Minister of Home Affairs agreed to lead discussions, since he had known Mr Oissel the financier when they were young. Hence the private dinner, but when the Minister stepped out for a vote, Oissel was shot just as the Division Bell rang.

West was just outside the door when the shot was heard, and when he opened it saw only the dead body with a revolver beside it. The assumption that this was suicide was however challenged by Oissel’s grand-daughter Annette, who was his heir, on the grounds that he would never have killed himself. But her view was given greater credence by the Inspector put in charge of the case who said there were no burn marks on the body which would have been the case had Oissel fired the pistol himself.

Matters are complicated by the fact that Oissel’s flat had been burgled while he was at dinner, and Jenks the policeman allocated to him, who had served the Home Secretary and seemed more acceptable to Oissel than someone from the Security Service, had been killed. Matters get even more complicated when Annette says her grand-father’s notebook in which he wrote his secrets in cipher was missing.

That was found in Jenks’ pocket, and then a photographer came to West to say he had been asked by Jenks to photograph this. More worryingly for West, he finds in the Home Secretary’s drawer a few pages from the notebook with what appears to be an interpretation of the cipher.

Ellen

Overwhelmed by all this he confides in a recently created peer who knows all about the business world, who insists that they leave the house party at which they had met over dinner and discuss the matter with the Prime Minister who promptly summons the Home Secretary.

But the Home Secretary had gone to Scotland to launch a ship over the weekend, so the meeting could take place only on the morning of the Monday, when difficult questions were expected on the adjournment motion. He admits at the meeting that he had got Jenks to take the notebook, and also that he knew the code since it had been created by him and Oissel when they were young.

He thought he should resign, and even contemplated suicide, but the Prime Minister told him that that would be even worse for the government, and that he should go home to bed. The Prime Minister said that he himself would handle the question, which he did with aplomb, insisting that confidentiality was needed until the inquest. What had happened would be made clear then, he declared, leaving West and Inspector Blackit and Lord Dalbeattie what seemed the impossible task of solving the murder.

Dalbeattie had suggested that West ask a female Labour MP who was very fond of him to get what information she could from the staff. That there was some involvement there had become clear when West, going back late one night to collect a briefcase he had left in a dining room, found someone lurking in the dark in the corridor outside the private rooms. Room J, where the murder had happened, was meant to be guarded throughout by a policeman, but he had left the room having felt dizzy, and it seemed that his coffee had been drugged. West’s sudden appearance however had prevented anyone else getting into the room.

Dalbeattie decides to recreate the scene of the murder and has a dinner party in Room J on the Tuesday night, inviting West and Annette and the society hostess at whose house he had met, and also Patrick Kinnaird, an MP who was engaged to Annette, as well as the Permanent Secretary to the Home Ministry.

After coffee Inspector Blackit comes in with Grace, the Labour MP who had got the confidence of the staff, and a journalist who had also been helpful, and just as they say they think they are on the track the division bell rings. Grace jumps up and tells the Inspector that that provides the solution and they get a ladder, and sure enough find the revolver in the space where the bell is. Directed at the place where Oissel had sat, it had been primed to go off with the ringing of the bell. The waiter who had helped to set things up made clear who the murderer had been.

The reason for the murder and the confused motives of all those involved made for a fascinatingly intricate mix. But also impressive in the book were the descriptions of the isolation possible in the crowded premises of the house, the forceful characterization of the members – Grace based on the writer, the society hostess based on Nancy Astor, the first female MP – and the laid back nature of senior politicians which West realized had to change in the brave new world of high finance.

Features

The challenge of keeping value-based politics alive

Published

2 days ago

2026/05/28

Sahan Weerasooriya

Anti-migrant protests in Durban, South Africa. BBC

The current outbreak of anti-immigrant protests in Durban, South Africa is bound to have taken many a subscriber to value-based politics or political idealism quite by surprise. After all, this is evidence that despite the historic accomplishments of nation-builders of the stature of the late President Nelson Mandela it cannot be taken for granted that identity politics, including racism in its worst forms, is no more in South Africa.

At the time of this writing details are scarce on the substantive root causes of the protests but it could very well be that economic grievances, particularly on the part of the majority community in South Africa, are contributing considerably to the disaffection. Shrinking employment and material prospects are likely to figure majorly among the factors igniting the unrest.

Fortunately, the local authorities in Durban are losing no time in calling for peaceful co-existence among the relevant communities and are pointing to the vital importance of stepping-up national integration processes. Apparently, immigrants in sizable numbers from neighbouring countries are present in Durban. However, international TV footage of the protests quoted some local authorities as saying that the majority of the immigrants in some centres that housed them were not illegal migrants and had the documents that entitle them to be in Durban.

In the Durban protests the world has fresh proof of the socially divisive consequences of the gathering globe-wide economic disaffection, touched off particularly by the continuing crisis in West Asia. Going ahead, the world would need to brace for increasing identity-based unrest of the kind it is just witnessing in South Africa.

Considering that the material lot of ordinary people everywhere could only aggravate progressively, with the US and Iran showing no signs of negotiating an end to their confrontation any time soon, it will be left to the more democratic and progressive sections of the world community to initiate positive measures collectively to bring a measure of relief to the discontented.

The swiftness with which such relief will be provided would depend crucially on the importance those sections taking up these undertakings attach to value-based politics as opposed to Realpolitik of power politics.

Going by these yardsticks, Italy could be considered to be moving in the right direction. Recently Italy came to the fore in initiating the collective named, ‘Rome Coalition for Food Security and Access to Fertilizer’, which has as one of its aims the swift provision of fertilizer to economically weak African countries.

In a recent statement Italian Minister of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation, Antonio Tajani, said that a principal aim of the project was to ensure that the farmers of Africa gained easy access to fertilizer, considering that food security is a growing concern among some of Africa’s economically vulnerable countries.

The statement went on to mention that some 30 countries hailing from the Mediterranean region, the Middle East, the Balkans as well as the FAO had been invited to join the coalition. The venture is far-seeing in that food security is main among the reasons for social discontent which in turn could degenerate into endemic political turmoil and bloodshed. Separatist violence and geographical fragmentation of countries wouldn’t be too far behind these developments, as Africa itself has often proved.

It is hoped that more G7 countries would take the cue from Italy and do what they could to ease the hardships of economically distressed countries, particularly of the global South. In these efforts they would need to break rank with the US, which is today brutally indifferent to the consequences of its policy of making ‘America First’, come what may.

Going by current developments, the Trump administration seems to be blithely oblivious to the wider, deleterious effects of its policy course in West Asia. Besides rendering Iran militarily and otherwise impotent nothing else seems to matter to Washington, as regards West Asia. This is policy short-sightedness of an extreme kind. After all, right now West Asia could be said to be sitting on the proverbial powder keg.

On the other hand, Iran is not giving the world the impression that it is doing anything constructive to get out of the policy straitjacket that it wove for itself decades ago. Rather than enter into a policy of ‘live and let live’ in relation to Israel in particular and initiate a process of reconciliation with the latter, it has chosen to operate within policy parameters that continue to damn Israel. This has put Israel always on the ‘defensive’ so to speak and prevented the opening up of space for meaningful dialogue.

That said, Israel is obliged to explore the possibilities of entering into a negotiatory process with the Arab-Islamic world that could lead to a de-escalation of tensions and bloodshed. It cannot continue to look at its neighbours through lenses that distort them as archetypal enemies who should be ‘wiped off completely from the face of the earth.’

In other words, the need is urgent for Realpolitik to give way to value-based politicks. Italy is beginning to prove that the latter approach could be pursued with some success. May be the EU and the UK could throw their weight behind these initiatives as well and establish that international politics could be refashioned on the basis of humane, civilized norms. The UN would need to be fully supportive of these moves and prove an organizational nucleus of the operations that follow.

In fact the time is ripe for people of conscience to collectively stand up on the side of peace and say ‘No’ to war and violence. Organizations such as the ICRC, the WHO and Medicines Sans Frontiers have already taken up this call. Referring to the widespread destruction of health facilities and their dehumanizing results these organizations have said, among other things, that ‘This is not a failure of the law. It is a failure of political will.’

True, ‘failure of political will’ among those powers that matter accounts for the runaway, uncontrollable nature of war and destruction in contemporary times, but more fundamentally it is a failure of the human conscience. It could very well be that the phenomenal levels to which violence and war have been unleashed today have had the effect of deadening consciences. This is a matter for urgent study and wide discussion.

Features

Vesak celebrations … with Cuteefly

Published

2 days ago

2026/05/28

Sahan Weerasooriya

Perfect for celebrations, gifts, and meaningful occasions // Gift pack

I would describe Indunil Kaushalya Dissanayaka as innovative and creative, and she operates under the name of Cuteefly.

Indunil always comes up with something novel to celebrate special occasions, and she does it with candles … and that’s her profession.

She was in the spotlight when she created a happening scene, with candles, for Christmas, Sinhala and Tamil New Year, and Valentine’s Day.

As lanterns light up Sri Lanka for Vesak, the Colombo-based candle maker is quietly turning wax and wick into little pieces of the festival.

Candles reflecting Vesak themes

Her candles reflect Vesak themes – light, peace, remembrance, giving, etc., to enable you to fill your Vesak celebration with devotion and beauty.

Among her Vesak creations is a lotus-shaped soy candle, scented with sandalwood, lavender, etc., meant to burn during this Vesak Poya Day.

Indunil Kaushalya Dissanayaka: Customers
praise her for her creativity

These handcrafted Vesak candles are perfect for offering at the temple, she says.

What makes her creations so novel is that they come in different shapes, scents, themes, and all are handmade.

What’s more, her customers have heaped praise on her for her creativity.

According to Indunil, her creations are perfect as a thoughtful gift … to bring beauty, unity, and light into every moment.

Says Indunil: “Our beautifully handcrafted Unity candles are designed with premium detail and love, making them perfect for celebrations, gifts, and meaningful occasions.”

Cuteefly, says Indunil, is available online.

Readers could contact Indunil on 0778506066 for more details.

He Facebook Page is: Cuteefly.