Features

My Wedding, my father’s funeral and a portrait of Mr. Bandaranaike

Published

2 years ago

2024/10/20

Thilina Walpola

“An uncommon man in the age of the Common Man”

(Excerpted from Render unto Caesar – Memoirs of Bradman Weerakoon)

Two highly personal life-defining events occurred in 1956. One was my marriage in August to Damayanthi and the other the death of my father in late September.

Damayanthi Gunasekera was the third daughter of a friend of my father’s who joined the colonial police at about the same time as Station House Officers. They both served for 35 years before retiring as superintendent in charge of districts. But more than that, Damayanthi’s mother was a Weerakoon from the same village as my father – Payagala in the Kalutara district – and a second or third cousin as well.

Damayanthi’s mother who wed at the age of 14 was said to be a beauty and it was rumoured in family circles that my father. as a young police officer, was seriously interested in her. Be that as it may my parents were really pleased when the proposal from the Gunasekera side came along.

We were married on August 10, 1956 at the Galle Face Hotel and as decided by the two of us, Sir John, my former boss who we knew me quite well by then and Sir Oliver Goonetilleke, the governor-general who had been at school together with our two fathers at Wesley College, and the prime minister and his wife were to be the chief guests. Our marriage had been registered earlier and the witnesses had been my father and Damayanthi’s maternal uncle. The prime minister was busy that afternoon with the budget debate in Parliament but his wife, Sirimavo Bandaranaike, came and stayed for a long while.

The other event, the death of my father, a month after the wedding built a special bond of appreciation and obligation to the Bandaranaike family. My father died suddenly two days after surgery by Dr P R Anthonis, the famous surgeon, for a tumour in the urinary tract. The funeral was fixed for a Sunday morning. It was to be a police funeral as befitted his rank, attended by a bugler or two and the blue flag draping the coffin, but it remained by and large a personal affair.

It was therefore a surprise to learn from the police, as we arrived at Kanatte, that the prime minister, who had been out of Colombo at a swearing-in parade at Diyatalawa, for newly-commissioned officers in his capacity as minister of defence and external affairs was making his presence in a few minutes having cut short his weekend stay in the hills. He was accompanied by Gunasena de Soyza, the permanent secretary. They had booked two sleeping-berths and taken an overnight train to be in Colombo on time. I have never forgotten this extreme act of caring, by a person so highly placed, towards one of his officials and the personal inconvenience he must have accepted to be on time at the funeral.

Of course, the honour paid was to my father who had had a long and distinguished service record in the police force, as it was then called. A C Dep, a DIG of Police who wrote a classic History of the Ceylon Police’ provides an interesting account of the role and purpose of the Station House Officer in those days:

The Station House Officers did not disappoint those who were responsible for the creation of this rank. At first they had a very risky time. “Every one of the SHO in the Tangalle District was either shot or knifed at the beginning of the establishment of the Stations but they stuck to their work most pluckily. They often acted aggressively themselves. But they proved a valuable asset to the Force.” (IGP Dowbiggin)
A full appraisal of their value was given thus by another superior offcer, “They are rather vain, have not that strict sense of discipline that a man who has worked his way through the ranks has, are too fond of strutting about in plainclothes and won’t stand too vigorous a talking off on parade or any similar treatment. They are inclined to sulk and resign in a huff if ill treated. It is an incontrovertible fact that as a class the SHO have been respectable and respected. Their great asset and one which will never be fully appreciated until it is lost, is that as a class they are honest. They are not given to taking petty bribes in petty cases, to do so would be beneath their dignity.”

Among those who lived up to the expectations of Longden and proved that they could fill any high post with credit and dignity were: A Peries ( appointed 1905), P P Wickramasuriya (1905), I Deheragoda (1906), C V Gooneratne (1906), R J Weerasinghe (1906), M D M Gunasekara (1907), P R Krishnaratne (1908), VT Dickman (1908), A W Dambawinne (1908) and E R Weerakoon (1910).

M D M Gunasekera who joined in (1907) was Damayanthi’s father and E R Weerakoon (1910) was mine. I could not help thinking that the references to being “rather vain”, “strutting about”, being “inclined to sulk and resign” and it being “beneath their dignity to take bribes” were exceedingly accurate about my father, as I knew him.

An Uncommon Man in the Age of the Common Man

My interest in S W R D Bandaranaike, this uncommon and complex man, who was now poised to be the harbinger of the age of the common man, led me to read as much as I could on him. Who was this uncommon man whom nobody really quite understood?

If one looked at the family background he was even more alienated from the common man and of the West, more so than Sir John with his formal dress codes and his KCMG.

It was well known that S W R D Bandaranaike was the son of Sir Solomon Dias Bandaranaike, Maha Mudaliyar of the Governors Gate and one of the leading lights of the colonial bourgeoisie and Lady Daisy Dias Bandaranaike of the Obeysekera family. In 1902, when Mr Bandaranaike was two years old his father had been accorded the CMG (Companion of the Order of St Michael and St George) while on a visit to London. The family was one of the richest in the Siyane Korale, (now most of the Gampaha district) owning large extents’ of coconut land and valuable urban property.

Even the very name ‘Solomon West Ridgeway’ which Sir Solomon gave his son was redolent of the family’s association with the British Raj and the then Governor Sir Joseph West Ridgeway had been SWRD’s godfather. As was common at the time in this class of society, the family was Christian and of the Anglican fraternity.

Sir Solomon had tried strenuously to mould his only son in his own image. The boy was kept at home on the country estate at Horagolla and tutored by English teachers until he was 15. The private tuition was not a success as Henry Young, the first master had a ‘fondness for the bottle’ and was soon got rid of while the second, A C Radford, a graduate of Cambridge, was resisted by the young Soloman who disliked the tutor’s attempt to turn him into an English schoolboy of the times.

As Mr Bandaranaike himself had written when he was 18, “Mr Radford never realized my peculiar position and the necessity to use suitable methods in dealing with me. He spent his time in an attempt to destroy my ideals and foist his own upon me.”
The release came when the First World War broke out and the tutor went back to England and Solomon was sent to school for the first time. The secondary school that Sir Solomon chose for his son was St Thomas’s College at Mutwal. But even here, where the sons of the elite studied, young Bandaranaike was treated differently.

He did not live in the boarding like the other boarders but in the house of the Warden and according to his contemporaries had special privileges. Prestige at STC went to those who excelled at team sports like cricket and Bandaranaike who favoured more individval activities such as tennis and debating was not among the most highly respected. However he was remembered for his first class at the Senior Cambridge, his articulate writings and his debating skills.

Warden Stone, a firm and reserved man who was a Classics scholar and a teacher of Greek, won young Solomon’s respect. “Warden Stone is able to appreciate a boy’s point of view’, he was to write. ‘He never tries to force his ideas on a boy against his wishes. He has often told me ‘Stick to your own opinion’.”

Oxford and reading classics, with Stone’s advice and tutelage, was the way forward but this had been delayed until the end of the War by the difficulty of finding a berth on a ship. In his “Memories of Oxford ” Bandaranaike had spoken of the ordeal that awaited the ‘darkie’ who had the temerity to read for the Honour School of Classics. He wrote, “My first year at Oxford I recollect as a period of disappointment and frustration. In all directions I found myself opposed by barriers, which, though invisible and impalpable, were nonetheless very real.”

But this feeling of rejection had not lasted too long. The solution to his problem was as he puts it in ‘memories’ the realization that “before I am their equal I must be their superior”.
Reading Memories was an enlightening experience for me because it opened many doors into Mr Bandaranaike’s personality and his likes and aversions. One of his three ambitions at Oxford had been to be the president of the Union, a position that usually went with oratorical skills of the highest order. As a lad of 18, standing in the outer ring of the vast crowd around the Independence Hall on February 4, 1948, I had, like many others, been mesmerized by his eloquence.

As leader of the House he had outlined his vision of a new order, freedom from ignorance, disease, want and fear. And he exhorted all of us to join him “in fanning the flickering flame of democracy”. It was heady stuff in the mould of Nehru’s ‘tryst with destiny’ at the ‘dawn of the midnight hour’. In “Memories” he had explained the exultation he felt when orating and the power of holding an audience in thrall by his words.

This is how he put it after making “the best speech I ever delivered at Oxford”: Soon the House hung breathless on my words; there was dead silence among the audience which was too absorbed even to applaud. I was conscious of such power over my fellow men as I had never known before. For a few moments I was master of the bodies and souls of the majority of my listeners.”

Mr Bandaranaike’s achievements at the Union were such that he had a right to believe that his ambition to be the president might be fulfilled. But fate intervened in the way of a serious illness that he developed during the autumn term of 1923 which kept him away from the Union and from serious canvassing. It would have been an uphill task since there was also at that time at Oxford a palpable feeling that it was undesirable that the Union should have a president who was not white.

He had earlier tried for the post of junior treasurer in March of 1924 and won, but his quest for the presidency in June was of no avail. He ended third to HJS Wedderburn, the heir to the Earldom of Dundee. Bandaranaike was reportedly deeply hurt at the bloc vote against him – possibly on racial grounds – and this is said to have left him skeptical of the sincerity of the British, especially politicians of the Conservative kind. This stayed with him during the rest of his political life.

I was also moved by the manner in which Bandaranaike had grappled with the problem of authority throughout his early days in relations with his father, his tutors, at STC, at Oxford and so on. Many years later, in perhaps the definitive biography of SWRD Bandaranaike, the political scientist James Manor described this dilemma which Bandaranaike faced throughout his life in the following way
Each time he moved into a wider arena this problem arose in a new form. His childhood was dominated by his difficulties with the authority first of his father whom he mocked, resented and feared, and then of a tutor who acted as his father’s surrogate. At school and at Oxford he was intensely preoccupied with what he saw as his struggle to establish his superiority and his authority among his fellow students.

Throughout his adult life he was unable to accept the authority of any superior. He denied the legitimacy of British rule in Ceylon – a posture which helped him reject his father’s public role as a pillar of the British regime – although for long periods he maintained an uneasy truce with colonial officialdom. As a young politician he could not accept the authority of the leading Ceylonese nationalists who were suspicious of a young man whose father and grandfather had scorned them.

The result was two decades of alternating cooperation and strife, even when (after 1936) he served in a team of ministers led by a senior nationalist – D S Senanayake the architect of the island’s independence in 1948. That phase ended in 1951 when Senanayake with his allies and kinsmen drove Bandaranaike out of Ceylon’s first post-independence Cabinet.

In his early days after assuming office, Mr Bandaranaike was to refer somewhat grandly to the world, to the country and indeed to all of us, as living in a period of transition, caught between two worlds – one dying and the other struggling to be born. He liked to portray himself as the midwife assisting in the birth of the new world which his period of intense labour and change would help produce.

Like Jawaharlal Nehru, with whom he had established a firm friendship, Mr Bandaranaike, too, was a man caught between two cultures. His upbringing and education had been wholly in English and he had a command of the language to become one of the finest speakers in the Oxford Union. On his return to Ceylon after five years abroad he could hardly speak a sentence in Sinhala. Yet, in adulthood he acquired a clear understanding of the hopes and fears of the mass of the Sinhalese for their language and culture and for Buddhism.

All News Advertisement

Features

Trump’s tariffs, AKD’s gazette and Sri Lanka’s diplomatic slumber

Published

2 days ago

2026/07/17

Thilina Walpola

“We are rather respectable in Colombo. We go to bed fairly early, and we remain there till morning. “

According to Sri Lanka’s diplomatic folklore, the late S.W. R. D. Bandaranaike uttered these words while explaining the reasons for Sri Lanka’s abstention on the UN resolution condemning the Soviet invasion of Hungary. Apparently, SWRD’s foreign ministry officials were asleep at home when the diplomatic cable seeking instructions was received from New York. In those days, there were no cell phones, Internet, or even fax or telex machines. The diplomatic cables were sent through post offices. Decoding them was a slow and time-consuming process. Thus, the government could not provide appropriate instructions to our mission in New York in time, and the Sri Lankan delegation abstained on that sensitive UN vote.

Sri Lanka’s Absence from Section 301 Consultations

But then, how does one explain Sri Lanka’s absence from the crucial bilateral consultation held in Washington by the Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR) during March-April on “Forced Labour” under the Section 301 of the US Trade Act of 1974? Didn’t our foreign and trade ministries send appropriate instructions to Washington in time? Even if the instructions from the foreign ministry were transmitted to our embassy in Washington by pigeon carriers, there was enough time for Sri Lanka to participate in those meetings.

In March, the USTR initiated these 301 investigations on 60 trading partners, and invited all of them for confidential consultations. Out of the 60, 46 participated in these consultations. Sri Lanka was not one of them. Other countries that didn’t participate in these consultations included China, Russia, and Venezuela! In addition to that, the Section 301 Committee conducted a public hearing with interested parties on April 28 and 29. Washington-based diplomats, representatives from few trade ministries as well as representatives from many foreign trade associations and chambers participated in these hearings. Sri Lanka was once again conspicuously absent.

As a result, when the USTR published the proposed forced labour tariffs on June 2nd, Sri Lanka ended up with a 12.5% duty. Pakistani and Indonesian diplomats participated in these consultations and took appropriate follow-up measures, and managed to enter the 10% duty category. As even a threat of a modest tariff hike could disrupt supply chains and reduce competitiveness, particularly in an industry such as garments, I discussed this issue on 15 June and underscored the importance of Sri Lanka’s participation at the next hearing, which was scheduled to be held from July 7th .

Awakening from Diplomatic Slumber and AKD’s Gazette

Fortunately, Sri Lanka finally awoke from weeks of diplomatic slumber, and Ambassador Mahinda Samarasinghe participated in the public hearing on 9 July, and promised, “…. · We have agreed to the text in our negotiations with the USTR on forced labour, …. The gazette as we speak is being printed and I’m getting the gazette tomorrow morning, and the gazette will be shared with USTR as I get it“.

As promised, President Anura Kumara Dissanayake issued a gazette on 10 July banning the imports of goods produced by forced labour. These new regulations are very similar to what Pakistan and Indonesia enacted in April, after their consultations with USTR in March. Why couldn’t we do it in April? Why did we wait till the very last minute?

Challenges ahead

“War is too important to be left to generals alone,” is a famous saying attributed to former French Premier Georges Clemenceau. Similarly, monitoring our main markets is too important to be left to diplomats alone. The United States is the largest single-country market for Sri Lanka. Therefore, Sri Lankan trade chambers and associations should become more proactive in these markets and participate in these events. For example, the chairman of the Pakistani apparel exporters association participated in the April hearings. Similarly, representatives from the Indian Agricultural and Processed Food Products Export Development Authority, the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry, the Confederation of Indian Industry, and Reliance Industries also participated in July hearings. At an event where each speaker is given only five minutes (strictly enforced), having a number of speakers from a country is an advantage. The presence of industry representatives in these kinds of events also help them understand the market dynamics and the future challenges. This is important, particularly because there will be many more challenges with Trump’s tariffs.

With the gazette issued on 10 July, Sri Lanka has imposed a prohibition on the importation of goods produced with forced labour. Now, the challenge will be to effectively enforce the prohibition. And what are the goods produced with forced labour? The USTR list only focuses on aluminum, cotton, electronics, lithium-ion batteries, rice, and tobacco. However, according to the U.S. Department of Labour, the list is much longer. Hence, this list may change continuously during the next two years and tariffs may fluctuate once again.

So, this is definitely not the time to slumber.

(The writer, a retired public servant, can be reached at senadhiragomi@gmail.com)

by Gomi Senadhira ✍️

Features

Tales of Mystery and Suspense 10 Casino for Sale

Published

2 days ago

2026/07/17

Thilina Walpola

After the overwhelming grotesquerie of J K Rowling’s latest Cormoran Strike novel (written, I should have noted, as the others were, under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith), I thought I should return to the world of fun, and also a much shorter description since this thriller moves quickly without the layers of detail that Rowling engages in.

I then move to the second comic thriller by Caryl Brahms and S J Simon. This, their second story to feature Vladimir Stroganoff and Adam Quill, was Casino for Sale, as lunatic a romp as the first, though without the emphasis on the ballet that characterized A Bullet in the Ballet.

This one begins with the impresario Stroganoff buying a casino cheap from Baron Sam de Rabinovich, only to find that it was a rundown place, not the grand casino of La Bazouche, a resort on the Frenc+h Riviera, as he had initially thought. The grand one belonged to Lord Buttonhooke, and Stroganoff could not compete, until he thought of bringing the Ballet Stroganoff to the casino – which of course leads to Buttonhooke deciding to have ballet performances in his Casino too.

Stroganoff invites Quill to visit him, which Quill decides to do since he has left Scotland Yard, having come into a legacy. No one believes this, and he has to face questions as to what he did to have been sacked, with sympathy for having been found out.

Caryl and Simon

The day he arrives in La Bazouche there is a murder, of a vitriolic critic called Citrolo, in Stroganoff’s office. He had been going to write a damning review of the opening night of the ballet and Stroganoff, when he realizes Citrolo cannot be swayed, drugs him and dictates the review himself to the papers. He leaves Citrolo sleeping and finds him shot the next morning, whereupon he decides to muddy the waters and leave a suicide note and lots of other murder weapons. So much overkill, as it were, of course ensures that he is arrested.

But the excitable French detective who makes the arrest follows up his suggestion that Buttonhooke was also involved, and so the two casino owners find themselves in cells next door to each other, with the detective Gustave quite happy to provide creature comforts for a fee.

Quill decides he must investigate, and finds Gustave most cooperative, since he has a laid back attitude to work. So it is Quill that finds a notebook which makes it clear Citrolo is an accomplished blackmailer, and that there are lots of possible murderers, including Stroganoff’s croupier, who was crooked, Rabinovich, who was now working for Buttonhooke, a confidence trickster called Kurt Kukumber, whose prospectus for a dud gold mine was found in the office and Prince Alexis Artishok who was engaged in a deal to buy diamonds from the ballerina Dyra Dyrakova.

Stroganoff had been trying to get Dyrakova to dance for him, but having done so previously she had refused. But then to Stroganoff’s chagrin she agreed to dance for Buttonhooke. The clearly crooked Artishok had told Buttonhooke’s mistress Sadie Souse, who was not very bright, that Dyrakova possessed diamonds she was willing to sell cheap, and Sadie was determined to have them.

Quill meanwhile finds out that there was a secret passage to Stroganoff’s office, the obvious solution to what had begun as a locked room mystery, and that this was known by almost everyone apart from Stroganoff himself. And then Rabinovich is murdered, just after Gustave had released his two original suspects, leading him to blame Quill for having insisted on that and thus allowing them to kill again.

Soon afterwards Dyrakova arrives, and the town is full of posters announcing that she will appear in the casinos, elaborate posters for either one, since Stroganoff is determined that she will dance for him, and if she does not come willingly, he has devised a scheme to make her do so unwillingly. So, though Buttonhooke has her taken off to his yacht immediately she arrives at the station, Quill along with Arenskaya gets her into a launch and to Stroganoff’s casino, where she performs to tumultuous applause, not knowing for whom she is dancing.

When Quill asked her about the diamonds, she said she had sold them long ago, and that gave Quill the solution to the mystery. Rabinovich had known about this, and Artishok had killed him to prevent Sadie learning it from him, he had killed Citrolo who had recognized him for an accomplished card sharper, not a Russian prince at all. But before he is arrested, he gets away in a boat, and the police launch that pursues him is on the point of catching him up when it runs out of petrol.

Again, lots of excitement, and entertaining references – Gustave grows marrows – and if not quite as brilliant as its predecessor, Casino was certainly a delightful read.

Features

The challenge of being positive about SAARC

Published

3 days ago

2026/07/16

Sahan Weerasooriya

The RCSS forum addressed by SAARC Secretary General Ambassador Md. Golam Sarwar in progress. (Pic courtesy RCSS)

It was a few years back that a former President of Sri Lanka took it on himself to pronounce SAARC ‘dead’. Since then there have been other sections of Sri Lankan opinion that have joined the critics of SAARC and taken the solemn stance that SAARC has indeed died what may be called a natural death.

Their fatalism is understandable. SAARC has failed to meet at heads of government or state level for the past several years to take the SAARC process notably forward. Regional cooperation has more or less been only an appealing idea. No substantive concrete projects have taken off to make the idea a hard reality. ‘Inner paralysis’ seems to be SAARC’s lot. Hence the fatalism in these circles.

However, being one of the worst cash-strapped regions of the world and a teemingly populated one with people virtually left to their devices, what choices do the ‘SAARC Eight’ have other than to try their best to band together and continue with their cooperation efforts, however small they may be?

There is no escaping the mounting debt trap for many of these countries and bankrupt Sri Lanka is a glaring example, but ‘throwing in the towel’ and abandoning themselves entirely to the diktats of the strongest economies and their agencies will prove a ‘living death’ for many countries in the SAARC fold.

The gains may be meagre but giving-up on SAARC cooperation in full would prove self-defeating for the organization and South Asia. Right now, the collective intention ought to be to salvage what the region could from the tenuous cooperative efforts. Moreover, such initiatives could go some distance to generate a degree of goodwill among the Eight and help in sustaining a dialogue process.

Given this backdrop it proved ‘a stich in time’ for the Regional Centre for Strategic Studies (RCSS), Colombo, to recently host the SAARC Secretary General Ambassador Md. Golam Sarwar to a round table discussion on the unifying potential of SAARC and its future possibilities, besides other related issue areas.

Held on June 24th and moderated by RCSS Executive Director and former ambassador Ravinatha Aryasinha, the forum brought together a vibrant, wide ranging audience comprising academicians, diplomats, senior public servants, civil society activists and many others. Following the presentation by Ambassador Golam Sarwar titled, ‘Reigniting SAARC: Achievements, Challenges and the Way Ahead’, a lively Q&A followed.

The above forum could be described as an act of lighting the proverbial ‘candle’ rather than ‘cursing the darkness.’ It surely is a ‘darkness’ that could be seen as daunting considering that the region’s pivotal powers, India and Pakistan, are failing to act in a spirit of accord but are engaged in bitter finger-pointing on a number of questions of vital importance to SAARC.

On the other hand, what is the rest of the region doing to bring the above sides together? It is disappointing that to date the rest of SAARC has failed to launch a major diplomatic drive to bring peace between the feuding regional heavyweights. It needs to act without delay and establish its earnestness and this effort would need to prove SAARC’s staying power in the unfolding months and even years.

In assessing SAARC’s seeming failure local opinion in particular has failed to factor in what could be described as weak leadership. Since Sheikh Mujibur Rahman of Bangladesh, the founding father of SAARC, the region has failed to produce a visionary leader who could advance the SAARC cause with charisma and drive.

Among other reasons, weak leadership accounts considerably for the faltering and stuttering status, as it were, of SAARC. Badly needed are leaders who could go the extra mile, think less of narrow national interests and work diligently towards the collective well being of the region but SAARC’s millions of ordinary people have been made to wait in vain for leaders of such stature. Instead, they have been burdened with politicians who seem to be relishing the apparently moribund state of SAARC.

Looking back, it could be said that it was the dynamic leadership factor that led to the launching of the Non-Aligned Movement and for its sustenance for a few decades. True, it could be seen in some quarters that NAM is no more, but as in the case of SAARC, the former too has been unfortunate to be burdened over the years with politicians who lack the vision and drive to unflaggingly advance the fortunes of the South. NAM and SAARC lack the dynamism and vision of leaders of the stature of Jawaharlal Nehru, for example, to give them the required guidance and intellectual depth.

The reasons are complex for there not being among us currently political leaders with the vision and the steadfast commitment to advance the legitimate interests of the South. However, it could be stated with conviction that the majority of Southern leaders have too easily caved in to the demands of the global North and its financial agencies.

These leaders have failed to see, for instance, that the largely market economy oriented Northern governments would not view with favour a centrist economic model that attaches priority to the interests of the dis-empowered publics of the South. This realization ought to have dawned on the current government in Sri Lanka, for instance, some while ago but it has no choice but to abide by IMF dictates since economic survival at present is unthinkable without the latter’s succour.

Accordingly for SAARC this should be the time for some soul-searching. Priority needs to be attached to ending the feuding between India and Pakistan since at present the material fortunes of the region hinge largely on these regional giants giving peaceful relations among them a try. This is no easy challenge to meet but some daring, visionary diplomacy needs to take hold among the rest of SAARC.

There is some sense in SAARC bringing the peoples of the region together through programs that address their best collective interests. A meeting of minds among SAARC nations could enable SAARC and its agencies to build a region-wide people’s movement for progressive political and economic change that could in turn lead to the region’s political leaders sensitizing themselves more to the neglected needs of their publics.

However, the time is ‘now’ for the initiation of these progressive changes and the voice of SAARC well wishers would need to drown out those of their critics.