by Uditha Devapriya

Continued from last week…

Almost immediately, the 16-year-old Martin Wickramasinghe was thrown into an unfamiliar environment. When he arrived, Colombo was being rocked by an outpouring of anger and hostility. A group of carters had begun a protest against municipal laws and regulations, and they had virtually brought the city to a standstill.

“[It was t]he first occasion during which a labour dispute in Ceylon reflected… the strong feeling of discontent against the government.”

Kumari Jayawardena, The Labour Movement in Ceylon

In 1907, a year after Wickramasinghe arrived in Colombo, Twentieth Century Impressions of Ceylon was published. Edited by Arnold Wright, the book describes in great detail the roads, the areas, and the institutions in Colombo, the world that Wickramasinghe was now part of. The Fort or Pettah area, where he worked, was the site of numerous commercial houses and administrative buildings. This was one of the most densely populated areas of the city, if not country, “inhabited almost entirely by ‘natives.’” Not far from Pettah lay the Cinnamon Gardens, which in the early 20th century had transformed into the most fashionable suburb in the city, housing the residences of its most affluent elites.

It was against this setting that Wickramasinghe began reading as many books as he could. Lacking formal education, he made the most of what he had by subscribing to foreign magazines, attending public discussions, and learning to write.

We have two sources for the books he read at this point in his life. The first are his memoirs, Upan Da Sita. The second is the bibliography of his collection at the National Library. While the latter has been well catalogued and offers a vivid glimpse into the titles, authors, and genres he was immersing himself in, Wickramasinghe’s recollections give us a clearer picture of the books that caught him and transfixed him in his first few years in the city.

Colombo came as a revelation to him. In Koggala, Wickramasinghe had been playing truant whiling away the time with his friends. In Colombo he became a different man. At home he had been curious about science and nature. In the city he sought to satisfy this curiosity through books and periodicals. It was against this backdrop that he came across rationalist writers and freethinkers and began reading them.

“My mind was possessed by a desire to learn about the beginning and end of the world. None of the bookshops in Colombo carried these books.”

Martin Wickramasinghe, Upan Da Sita

Translated by Malinda Seneviratne

One of the first authors he recollects in his memoirs is Robert Ingersoll. A rationalist, an orator, one of the leading figures of the age of free thought in the United States, Ingersoll had by now exercised a profound influence on the course of radical thought and politics in India and in Sri Lanka. His relentless criticism of organised religion, in particular Christianity, caught on in Ceylon, then at the heyday of the Buddhist Revival. The likes of Ingersoll and the British rationalist Charles Bradlaugh found common ground between their critique of Christianity and their affinity for Eastern religions.

Cinnamon Gardens, 20th century. Taprobane Collection

“In Ceylon, the literature of the free-thought movement was available and had been quoted during the Panadura debate.”

Kumari Jayawardena, The Labour Movement in Ceylon

Having come across Ingersoll, young Wickramasinghe seems to have been taken up by his writings. Interestingly, it seems to have been through Ingersoll that he made his discovery of Charles Darwin. In Upan Da Sita Wickramasinghe remembers sifting through the pages of the Rationalist Press Association. Founded by the English secularist Charles Watt in 1885, the Rationalist Press Association became the main outlet for the leading scientific thinkers and freethinkers of the time. Among the authors they published were the British science writer Samuel Laing and the German zoologist Ernst Haeckel. The biologist Thomas Huxley, one of Darwin’s most fervent defenders, also caught his attention.

From Ingersoll, Laing, Hackel, Huxley, Darwin, and the Rationalist Press Association, young Wickramasinghe moved on to other writers. A perusal of the first few chapters of Upan Da Sita, and the catalogue of the Wickramasinghe Collection at the National Library, reveals to us a fairly eclectic range of academics and freethinkers. The list of science and rationalist writers he read at this stage included Edward Clodd, Dennis Hird, A. C. Haddon, L. C. Miall, Paul Carus, and Hans Reichenbach.

What is important to note is that while these were all contrarian thinkers, not all of them thought alike, or subscribed to the same beliefs. Dennis Hird for instance was a clergyman, a member of the Church of England who converted to socialism and became an advocate of the working classes. A. C. Haddon was a leading anthropologist who had done fieldwork in South-East Asia, including Borneo. Paul Carus was one of the leading advocates of monism, a philosophy which sought not so much to disprove religion as to unearth a synthesis between science and faith. Carus’s The Gospel of the Buddha, first published in 1894, transfixed Martin Wickramasinghe. Reflecting on Carus’s work and philosophy, he noted how popular such writers and books had become in Colombo.

“Even Buddhists in the East, who did not know English, were familiar with the two books authored by Paul Carus, Gospel of the Buddha and Nirvana… He was the editor of the monthly magazine Open Court and the magazine Monist. I was a subscriber to both magazines by the time I was 20 years of age.”

Colombo, early 20th century. Public domain

Martin Wickramasinghe, Upan Da Sita

Translated by Malinda Seneviratne

The popularity of these works among non-English speakers seems to have intrigued Martin Wickramasinghe. Yet by the early 20th century such works had become affordable and accessible to a great many people, even in places like Colombo.

“’Progress’, emancipated from tradition… seemed to imply a militant break with ancient beliefs which found passionate expression in the behaviour of the militants of popular movements, as well as of middle-class intellectuals. A book named Moses or Darwin was to be more widely read than the writings of Marx himself.”

Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Capital, 1848-1875

The popularity of these magazines and journals helped transmit the most radical ideas and ideas to the most open minds. For someone like Wickramasinghe, this proved to be a crucible of learning. Yet what is relevant here is not that he read widely, or that he immersed himself in many writings. It is that he did not read blindly and did not respect these writers and thinkers merely because of their reputation abroad.

“It was after four or five years… that I understood that Ingersoll was not a wise man but a clever lawyer and an orator who had a booming voice.”

Martin Wickramasinghe, Upan Da Sita

Translation by Malinda Seneviratne

In other words, the more he read, the more he reflected on what he read. And the more he reflected on what he read, the more he became critical of the writers he encountered in Colombo. This gave him the elasticity he needed to become a writer himself.

To that end, Martin Wickramasinghe’s time in Colombo made three distinct contributions to his career as the leading writer and public intellectual of 20th century Sri Lanka. First, it helped him disassociate himself from the popular writers of his time in the country. Perhaps the most popular of these contemporaries was Piyadasa Sirisena.

More a pamphleteer than novelist, more a propagandist than critic, Sirisena had staked his reputation on a series of novels which essentially portrayed Buddhists in a positive light and Christians in a negative light. As the dramatist and critic Ediriweera Sarachchandra later contended, Wickramasinghe disagreed with Piyadasa Sirisena’s world-view. Indeed, writing of Wickramasinghe’s first novel Leela, Sarachchandra noted that:

“… it appears (though the impression may well be wrong) that ‘Leela’ is a veiled attack on Piyadasa Sirisena and his novel ‘Jayatissa and Rosalind’.”

Ediriweera Sarachchandra, The Sinhalese Novel

Second, it fuelled in him a desire to write to public outlets. At the turn of the 20th century the main platform for the exchange of ideas, in a society like Sri Lanka, was the newspaper. Wickramasinghe wrote his first novel in 1914. Fuelled by the rationalist periodicals and journals, he wrote his first article to a newspaper, the Dinamina, two years later. His first article, simply titled “Plants and Animals”, landed him in the thick of controversy: in it he raised hard-hitting questions about rebirth and reincarnation.

“People were intrigued, and some outraged, by this unheard-of man questioning not only Buddhist but also Hindu belief in rebirth.”

Nalaka Gunewardene

Interview with Uditha Devapriya, 12 March 2025

Third, as he graduated from one writer to another, the books that he read encouraged him to study and become more proficient in English. Ironically, it also encouraged him to brush up his knowledge of Sinhala language and literature. The result is that he became well-versed in both English and Sinhala, giving him a foundation that was to equip him with the intellectual skills he needed for his later writing career.

“My cousin introduced me to U. P. Ekanayake. I went to see him twice a week at his bookshop… and read the Guttilaya, Kavyasekhara, and Hansa Sandesaya.”

Martin Wickramasinghe, Upan Da Sita

Translated by Malinda Seneviratne

These were arguably Martin Wickramasinghe’s most fruitful years. At the end of it all, he had progressed quite far in his thinking. Having read some of the leading scholarly publications of his time, he was now ready to embark on a career as a thinker and public intellectual. It was against this backdrop that he found employment at the Dinamina in 1920. The leading Sinhala daily of the time, the Dinamina gave him the financial and intellectual freedom to explore topics and subjects which had engrossed him in Colombo. Reflecting on this period later, he acknowledged how crucial it had been in shaping his thinking.

Times of Ceylon 1963

“In the village I engaged in games which were physically demanding. I rowed boats on the river, ventured into the jungle to pick guava, madan, mango, and cashew and enjoyed myself thoroughly. One year in Colombo had changed me… I spent the money I earned on books without thinking about Amma [mother]. When I realised that this was very selfish of me I was very hurt. Spending on books without thinking is also a vice.”

Martin Wickramasinghe, Upan Da Sita

Translated by Malinda Seneviratne

Ladies and gentlemen, I began my presentation with a quote. I would like to return to it.

“Reading books was his only way forward.”

Dr Rajiva Wijesinha

Interview with Uditha Devapriya, 13 June 2025

But what, ladies and gentlemen, does it mean? This is a question Dr Wijesinha has answered for me, and it is one I will try to answer here.

As I have mentioned more than once, Wickramasinghe lacked formal education. Yet the little education he received, in Koggala, Unawatuna, and Ahangama, gave him the foundation to read. More importantly it built in him a love for reading which was to last his entire lifetime. On at least one occasion he confessed this turned him into an omnivorous reader, someone who immersed himself in books purely for the intellectual pleasure it brought.

Yet at the turn of the 20th century, not a few freethinkers and public intellectuals, even novelists, followed this trajectory. Here one can draw parallels between Wickramasinghe and the British writer H. G. Wells. Today Wells is known for his visionary science-fiction novels, The Time Machine, The Invisible Man, and The War of the Worlds. Yet what is not that well known about him is that he, too, had to abandon formal education. As with Wickramasinghe, he had to find work, and only later find fulfilment as a writer. What one biographer noted about Wells, one could almost apply to Wickramasinghe.

“He had begun to understand what his own capacities were: to learn fast, to plan his work, to observe people about him, to know what he value most, to fight for what he wanted and to win. He knew he enjoyed good conversation, difficult books, intellectual puzzles and challenges, and the beauty of the natural world… He noticed the world around him with exceptional vividness and thought about it.”

Claire Tomalin, The Young H. G. Wells

“He noticed the world around him with exceptional vividness and thought about it.”

Could any sentence better sum up the impact that the books he read had on Martin Wickramasinghe and on his writing career? I think not, ladies and gentlemen. And on that note, I end my presentation. Thank you all for listening.

(Uditha Devapriya is a writer, researcher, and analyst whose work spans a range of topics, including art, culture, history, geopolitics, and anthropology. At present he is working on a study of Martin Wickramasinghe and an oral autobiography of Sumitra Peries. He can be reached at udakdev1@gmail.com)