Features
Lester , Underrated : Akkara Paha
By Uditha Devapriya
Akkara Paha (1969) contains perhaps the saddest and most poignant finale in any of Lester James Peries’s films. Ajith Samaranayake distilled it brilliant in his tribute to Madawala S. Ratnayake, who wrote the novel.
Here were dreamy young antiheroes seemingly without a purpose in life, fascinated by their own sexual urges but gripped by a sense of futility and self-pity.
Sena, the protagonist of Akkara Paha, is one such antihero. Poor but intelligent, sharp but sensitive, he finds himself in a totally different environment after securing a scholarship to an elite school in Kandy. Unaccustomed to life in the city, he strikes up a friendship with a girl at his boarding. The friendship later grows into a romance.
Eventually, he realises his limitations: he is far more intelligent than anyone in his class, but a bounder in their scheme of things. He responds to this by rebelling against his own inheritance, first by abandoning the girl he fell in love with in his village, and then by neglecting his studies and pining after the girl at the boarding.
This recklessness costs him everything and brings him no consolation. He does all he can to impress the girl, Theresa, played by Janaki Kurukulasuriya, even raiding into the family till and getting what little money his sister, played in her second film role by Malini Fonseka, has saved to buy Theresa expensive perfumes. Theresa initially humours him. Yet after a while she loses interest in him and begins an affair with a rich cousin.
His sexual awakening leads Sena to much disappointment, and he soon abandons his studies and tries his hand at manual employment. He finds a job at a sawmill. Yet having been shielded from hard work by his father – who has staked everything on him getting a middle-class education and securing a white-collar job – he becomes sick and is sent to hospital. It is there that his family discover what he has done with his life and to his future.
The ending unfolds in the backdrop of these tragedies, but it is not a tragic ending. Spurred by his father’s indebtedness, Sena’s family have by now moved to a State colonisation scheme. Sena’s sister has fallen in love with a neighbour. The two of them decide to marry. Meanwhile, Sena rekindles his romance with his village sweetheart, Sandha, and in doing so returns, in a manner of speaking, to the world he abandoned.
The final scene, played against a slow, haunting poem sung by Amaradeva, underscores this process of departure and return, of abandoning the past and returning to it. Sena and Sandha wave goodbye to Sena’s sister and her husband. The two of them then walk back, heads bowed down, uncertain of their future, but somewhat hopeful.
Rathnayake’s novel wraps up differently, with the sister talking about Sena with their mother after her wedding, and her revealing that he intends to marry someone. The mother is distraught: he has already ruined his life for a girl, and is worried he may ruin what’s left of it for another. She changes after hearing who his intended bride is: Sandha.
By only hinting at Sena’s reconciliation with Sandha and the possibility of their marriage, Lester Peries ends the story on a more poignant, subtle note. It is not like the ending in Golu Hadawatha, where the spurned lover forgives the girl who rejected him, or in Nidhanaya, where the husband finally realises his love for his wife. What makes Akkara Paha one of Lester’s better films – and one of his more sensitive works – is the lack of certainty about Sena’s fate. Ratnayake is more definite, concrete. Lester is anything but.
Akkara Paha was the second of a trilogy of films that Lester Peries did for Ceylon Theatres. The trilogy, taken as a whole, remains a landmark in the Sinhala cinema, because on no other occasion did a prominent director, of his standing, get such a lucrative offer from a leading film company. Until then the theatres had pitted themselves against his work: according to his biographer A. J. Gunawardena, they refused to lend his team lighting equipment for Gamperaliya because of fears that his work would undermine theirs. By the latter part of the decade, however, things had begun to change.
Ceylon Theatres’ arrangement with Lester showed what could be achieved if the resources of commerce were put in the service of art. Yet of the three films he did – the other two being Golu Hadawatha (1968) and Nidhanaya (1970), the latter acknowledged as his best work – Akkara Paha remains curiously neglected and underrated. Though it travelled to the West – it was one of seven films by Lester screened at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, where among other things he met the formidable Pauline Kael – and won praise from foreign critics, it never got the reputation it deserved at home.
What makes this more curious is the film’s achievement. In no other work of his does Lester probe into the lives of the Sinhalese peasantry with as much poignancy as he does in Akkara Paha. While the film does exude what his critics saw as his bourgeois humanist tendencies – a charge levelled with equal vigour at his contemporary Satyajit Ray, who at the time was making his Calcutta trilogy, set against the backdrop of the Naxalite uprising in the city – it does not romanticise, still less glamourise, its subject.
Lester
All that, in turn, underscores an even more remarkable achievement. In the history of the Sinhala cinema, Akkara Paha may have been the first film to depict the contradiction between the material ambitions and the lived experiences of the Sinhala Buddhist rural youth. Lester does not really explore these tensions, or predict their unravelling in later years, particularly in April 1971. But compared with his other two Ceylon Theatres films – in particular Golu Hadawatha, which again delves into the Sinhala middle-class – Akkara Paha engages with the discontent and frustrations of the rural youth.
We do not really know what Lester’s response to the April 1971 insurrection was. What we do know is that by that point, a new and more radical group of filmmakers had begun to criticise him for what they saw as his bourgeois humanism.
Around this time the leftwing Bengali filmmaker Mrinal Sen was berating Satyajit Ray on similar grounds as well. Yet whereas Ray – who was as representative of the Bengali bourgeoisie as Lester was of the Sinhala bourgeoisie – made the Calcutta Trilogy – which underscored his sympathy for the radical youth in light of the Naxalite insurgency – Lester went his own way. At the time of the 1971 insurrection, while the likes of Dharmasena Pathiraja were making Ahas Gawwa, he was directing Desa Nisa.
In that regard, I see Akkara Paha as his most radical work yet, more radical than Yuganthaya, which as Pathiraja pointed out for me in an interview years ago was marred by a somewhat jaundiced view of politics. The film predicts the radicalisation of the Sinhala youth though it steps away from engaging with that completely. Like Para Dige, Pathiraja’s best work and in my view his most underrated, the protagonist does not face a clear future at the end: like the protagonist in Pathiraja’s film, he and his fiancée stare into the distance, although unlike in Para Dige they turn back and return home.
It is this act of turning back which, at one level, may have won for Lester censure from his more radical critics. I disagree with those who portray Lester as a conservative artiste. But that does not undermine their fundamental point: that at a time of great political ferment and artistic rebellion, his films seemed to be out of step with the times. Perhaps it is this led critics to perceive a drop in quality in his later work, starting from Desa Nisa. That this drop transpired immediately after his Ceylon Theatres trilogy is telling.
Whatever the reason may have been for the film’s lack of success, Akkara Paha marks an important point in Lester’s career. It is poignant, haunting, tragic, and redeeming. Between the romanticism of Golu Hadawatha and the nihilism of Nidhanaya, it occupies a twilight world. Admittedly, the story is optimistic, and in its ending, somewhat naïve: the novel is more concrete and direct. But it is suffused with a humanism that transcends its limitations. Above all, it is vintage Lester James Peries: life-affirming, ever hopeful.
Uditha Devapriya is a writer, researcher, and analyst who writes on topics such as history, art and culture, politics, and foreign policy. He is one of the two leads in U & U, an informal art and culture research collective. He can be reached at udakdev1@gmail.com.
It may be some time before the full impact of food inflation is felt in the West. Until such time the world would continue to keep itself in suspense over whether the Trump administration is in earnest when it seeks to convey the impression that it is backing a negotiated solution in West Asia.
As is usually the case, consumer stress would be one of the final determinants of political change. To the degree to which the average US consumer somehow ‘muddles through’ and puts the food on the table, to the same extent would the Republican sections of the US public in particular be tolerant of the Trump administration’s inconsistent handling of the West Asian war and the main issues stemming from it. That is, there would be no grave popular disaffection and a demand for political change in the short term.
However, the indications are that the Trump administration’s support base is suffering some erosion in the wake of the current economic crisis. While reports indicate that Democratic sections are firming-up their opposition to the political centre, Republican support for Trump is also showing signs of waning, we are given to understand.
The above developments are probably why Trump is on record as having given Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a ‘dressing down’ recently on his seeming intransigence on the question of giving negotiations a chance in West Asia. The show of displeasure could be really aimed by Trump at containing the impatience of the American public.
However, the current ground situation in the Middle East, particularly the uncontained bloodshed, is likely to impress on the thinking sections of the world that more than temporary political change is needed in West Asia and the US.
A well thought out political solution that addresses all the contentious issues at the heart of the Middle East conflict is what enlightened opinion would demand, and very rightly. Right now, the ‘peace efforts’ initiated by the Trump administration give the impression of being piecemeal solutions at best.
There have been, of course, numerous initiatives in the past aimed at bringing permanent peace to the Middle East. These failed mainly because they did not address in full the root causes of the conflict.
At bottom the Middle East conflict is mainly about race and religious hate bred by socio-economic and material inequalities. For instance, if the Palestinian people were not displaced and deprived of land occupied by them at the time of the founding of the Israeli state, ethnic enmities would not have grown to the current unmanageable proportions.
When addressing the above questions, though, it must be remembered that the Israelis too were a displaced people who were entitled to land and a state of their own in the Middle East. Basically, out of these seemingly irreconcilable and conflicting demands have grown the Middle East imbroglio.
Middle East peace is considerably about reconciling these demands and arriving at a solution that would ensure the creation of two states that would opt for peaceful co-existence thereafter.
As long as the US does not see the need for a non-partisan solution that addresses the needs of both ethnicities and religions and goes all-out, as it were, to have it implemented, the Middle East would continue to bleed.
However, staunching the blood flow through the creation of two states would be only half the job done, though a very important part of it. More pernicious, pervasive and difficult to remedy are the inter-ethnic and inter-religious hatreds that have been unleashed over the decades.
However, if substantial, long-lasting peace is to be fostered in the region the latter ‘demons’ would need to be exorcised from the hearts and minds of the communities concerned. No doubt an uphill task but one that must be undertaken by those who wish the region well.
The UN would need to put its ‘best foot forward’ in such undertakings but it is time that it dawned on the international community and other caring quarters that Middle East peace, and all other such uphill challenges, require proactive peacemaking on the part of all civilized sections for their effective management. That is, public involvement in peacemaking too is a must.
Since hatreds are harboured in the human consciousness the enmities embedded in the latter need to be managed and defused judiciously alongside other undertakings in a peace process. In the case of West Asia, such enmities could be even spread globe-wide besides being multi-dimensional. For instance, it ought to be thought-provoking that Iran is insistent on a peace initiative that would also include Lebanon.
Besides security considerations it is also ethnic and religious affiliations that account for Iran making this demand. For instance, the Shias are a numerically important religious community in Lebanon and they provide a significant number of Hizbollah fighters, who are in a vital sense carrying out a ‘proxy war’ for Iran. It also needs to be factored in that Iran is a Shia-majority country.
Thus trans-border religious affiliations could add to the complexities and enormity of ethno-religious conflicts. However, the task of managing centuries-long enmities needs to be launched and prodded on with by peacemakers since a downing of arms alone would not guarantee substantive peace.
It is not realized sufficiently that the process of ending hatreds begins with mutual apologies by antagonists to a conflict for the harm inflicted on each other. This would be anathema in some ears but there is no getting away from the requirement. It is the vital first step to permanent peace anywhere.
In fact there could be no reconciliation worth speaking of without such mutual apologies. It is a point worth re-iterating in these times when even the government of Sri Lanka is voicing the need for national reconciliation. Well, without the words, ‘I am sorry’, there could be no permanent end to enmities – they would do well to remember.
The above requirements may not go down very well with governments, but they resonate in the hearts and minds of most people, since they are inheritors of religious traditions of some kind.
This is a principal reason why peacemaking works well when publics too are involved in them. The effectiveness of such campaigns increases several fold when they have a Mahatma Gandhi or a Jawaharlal Nehru at their helm. A strong proactive involvement by the public in peace could lead to the emergence of such leaders at some point in these campaigns.
Official Digital Partner of the 2026 ‘Dakshina Prabha’ National Vesak Zone
Dialog Axiata PLC, Sri Lanka’s #1 connectivity provider, collaborated with the Ministry of Buddha Sasana, Religious and Cultural Affairs to bring one of Sri Lanka’s largest and most technologically advanced Vesak experiences to the ‘Dakshina Prabha’ National Vesak Zone. The three-day celebration, in Matara attracted more than hundred thousand visitors, who engaged with a series of innovative digital activities powered by Dialog 5G Ultra, including Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Virtual Reality (VR) experiences, digital pandols and a Data Dansala. The opening ceremony was attended by Hon. Sunil Handunnetti, Minister of Industry and Entrepreneurship Development and Hon. Saroja Savithri Paulraj, Minister of Women and Child Affairs, along with distinguished guests and Dialog’s senior management.
One of the key attractions at the venue was the Dialog 5G Ultra-powered Virtual Reality (VR) experience, which attracted more than 35,000 participants. The activation enabled devotees to virtually visit and pay homage to sacred Buddhist sites, including the Jaya Sri Maha Bodhi in India and the Atamasthana in Anuradhapura, directly from the Vesak zone in Matara.
Visitors receive complimentary mobile data through Dialog’s QR-powered Data Dansala.
Dialog also conducted an AI Digital Vesak Greeting Card Competition from 21 May to 01 June 2026, attracting numerous entries from across the country. The shortlisted designs were showcased across 20 large LED screens throughout the venue and across Matara City, and were also made available for download via mobile devices. Further, through the use of AI, traditional Jathaka Katha were reimagined in a digital format, demonstrating how technology can be used to preserve and enhance cultural and religious heritage. Together, these initiatives blended traditional Vesak celebrations with emerging technologies, offering visitors a unique and immersive way to engage with Vesak traditions.
Extending the spirit of Vesak through connectivity, Dialog conducted a special Data Dansala powered by its QR Reload platform, enabling visitors to receive complimentary mobile data by scanning QR codes placed across the venue. In addition to the Matara National Vesak Zone, similar Data Dansala activations were also conducted at the Gangaramaya and Bauddhaloka Vesak zones in Colombo.Visitors also had the opportunity to create personalised Vesak-themed digital photos through an AI Photo Booth, generating AI-enhanced portraits using their own photographs and adding a contemporary digital element to the Vesak celebrations.
Visitors watch AI-generated Jathaka Katha
Commenting on the initiative, Hon. Sunil Handunnetti, Minister of Industry and Entrepreneurship Development, said, “The 2026 Dakshina Prabha Vesak Festival marked the first time AI-powered digital innovations were incorporated into a National Vesak Festival in Sri Lanka. Presenting Buddhist stories and teachings through technology created a new and engaging way for visitors to connect with these traditions. We thank Dialog for supporting this initiative and for working closely with us to bring our vision to life. Their contribution played an important role in making this first-of-its-kind event a reality.”
Lasantha Theverapperuma, Group Chief Marketing Officer of Dialog Axiata PLC said, “We thank the Government of Sri Lanka for the opportunity to support the 2026 Dakshina Prabha National Vesak Festival and for embracing technology as part of this year’s celebrations. As the Official Digital Partner, we were privileged to contribute through our Dialog 5G Ultra and AI capabilities, creating new ways for visitors to engage with Vesak traditions while preserving their cultural significance for future generations.”
Beyond supporting the National Vesak Zone in Matara, Dialog also enhanced the Gangaramaya and Bauddhaloka Vesak zones through a range of digital activations during the Vesak season. The company additionally continued its sustainability initiatives, including the Thirasara Aloka Poojawa, which illuminated rural places of worship through solar-powered lighting solutions.
Universal Woman is an international pageant focused on “beauty, elegance, and talent” for women, positioning itself as a platform to shape global ambassadors. The 2026 edition will be held in Cambodia, and Sri Lanka will be there, as well.
According to reports coming my way, contestants, at the international event, will work with industry trailblazers, under international standards.
Sri Lankan supermodel, runway and pageant trainer Chulpadmendra Kumarapathirana, is the National Director for Universal Woman Sri Lanka 2026.
With over two decades in the industry, Chula was crowned Miss Sri Lanka 2006, and has since shaped the next generation of titleholders through her Colombo-based Chulpadmendra Catwalk Studio, widely regarded as one of the country’s leading modelling academies.
The team behind Universal Woman Sri Lanka 2026
A former host of Derana Miss Sri Lanka for Miss World 2008 and a judge for Miss Universe Sri Lanka 2025, Chula now serves as National Director for Universal Woman Sri Lanka 2026, leading the franchise’s search for Sri Lanka’s delegate to the international final in Cambodia.
Applications for Universal Woman Sri Lanka 2026 are being taken, via WhatsApp: 077 659 4994, says Chula.
The judging panel for Universal Woman Sri Lanka 2026 includes Senaka De Silva, Pageant Aesthetic Advisor & Chairperson of the Judging Panel, Angela Seneviratne, Caroline Jurie, Rozelle Plunkett, and Suraj Mapa.
Universal Woman Sri Lanka 2026 officially began its journey with a first round of auditions, held in Colombo, marking the start of an exciting new chapter in Sri Lanka’s pageant industry.
Launching the first round of auditions
The platform aims to empower women while selecting an intelligent, confident, and inspiring representative to compete at the Universal Woman International Pageant 2026 in Cambodia, this September.
Universal Woman Sri Lanka now moves forward with the vision of creating one of the country’s most prestigious and empowering pageants while preparing to crown a queen who will proudly represent Sri Lanka on the international stage.
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