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.

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Features

Revolt in the Temple: Poverty as Structural Control

Published

15 hours ago

2026/05/31

Thilina Walpola

The underlying issue in Anuradhapura is a struggle between a few families who, for years, have waged a quiet cold war over control of the Udamaluwa. Similar situations exist in Mihintale as well. These places, among others, are treated as treasures of Buddhism but, in practice, function as tightly controlled economic centres. The same pattern repeats in Kandy around the Temple of the Sacred Tooth Relic and in Kataragama at the shrine of God Kataragama. Variations of it exist across religious spaces of Islam, Catholicism, and Hinduism too, where institutional authority becomes indistinguishable from localised power networks. What is presented as sacred order often operates as inherited control.

It is indeed devastating to see situations where parents have no alternative but to expose their children to predators in robes for survival. This has nothing to do with religion itself, but with human pathology in the context of survival. These are the questions that demand answers, not superficial responses that treat symptoms while ignoring the conditions that produce them. What is more shocking and disturbing is not the tragedy itself, but the reactions to it. Social media has overwhelmed us, not towards understanding, but towards a fragmented cognitive state with no exit route.

A friend of mine in Nairobi used to keep all his electronic devices at home and go into the forest once a month, spending days there before returning. He called it “detoxification”, but in reality it was an escape from a system that no longer allows uninterrupted thought. Daily life is now saturated with unnecessary content, and attention itself has become a commodity extracted, processed, and sold back to us. This is where we have become unable to understand what really drives certain tragedies we endlessly react to, while remaining blind to the systems that quietly manufacture them.

Multi-dimensional poverty

Poverty is structural, poverty is political, and poverty is functional; it is a tool and a manoeuvring force of power. The question is no longer whether poverty exists, but who benefits from its persistence, and who is forced to survive within it. From education to medicine to basic food supply chains, countries like Sri Lanka are not simply mismanaged; they are structurally captured by a small number of actors who remain stable regardless of who is formally in power. Small-scale enterprises and NGO circuits that circulate foreign funding to “solve structural issues” often operate as hollow administrative performances, producing reports rather than transformation.

Poverty is not merely the absence of money. It is the absence of bandwidth, absence of protection, absence of time, and absence of cognitive stability. As Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir state, “Scarcity captures the mind. Just as the starving subjects had food on their mind, when we experience scarcity of any kind, we become absorbed by it.” This is a description of how human cognition is structurally reorganized under constraint. Scarcity does not sit outside the person; it occupies them.

They also state, “Scarcity leads us to borrow and pushes us deeper into scarcity.” That is the mechanism that must be confronted without euphemism. Poverty is not only deprivation; it is a self-reinforcing trap in which survival decisions generate the next layer of crisis. Once a society crosses a certain threshold of scarcity, it stops producing long-term reasoning as a default condition. It produces short-term survival logic, often mistaken by outsiders for irrationality.

It is precisely here that public discourse becomes intellectually dishonest. Everything is translated into moral language because moral language is easier than structural analysis. But morality without structure becomes theatre. It produces outrage, not understanding, and repetition, not reform.

It is indeed brutal when an individual wearing religious insignia—whether robe, symbol, or institutional identity—is accused of acts that fundamentally contradict the moral authority attached to that position. It is equally brutal when institutions that depend entirely on trust begin to function as shields rather than safeguards. But the deeper question is not shock. The deeper question is what kind of social condition produces families who see placement within such institutions not only as devotion, but as a survival strategy under constraint.

Ethical decision-making

That is where the argument collapses into its most uncomfortable form. Poverty does not produce ethical decision-making environments. It produces constrained optimization under pressure. When food insecurity, debt, and social instability converge, institutional spaces that appear stable become transactional destinations for survival rather than moral choices. To interpret this as purely cultural failure is to deliberately ignore the structural compression of options.

Mullainathan and Shafir describe this clearly: “Instead of saying that scarcity ‘focuses,’ we could just as easily say that scarcity causes us to tunnel: to focus single-mindedly on managing the scarcity at hand.” That tunnelling effect is not abstract. It is visible wherever long-term planning collapses under immediate pressure. Systems then misread this as irresponsibility, when it is in fact cognitive overload produced by structure.

What is rarely acknowledged is how deeply this extends into governance itself. Institutions increasingly operate as if they are managing rational, unconstrained individuals. In reality, they are interacting with populations whose cognitive bandwidth is already structurally taxed. The result is policy failure interpreted as public non-compliance, enforcement interpreted as moral correction, and reform interpreted as communication failure rather than design failure.

Social media has intensified this distortion. It does not merely spread information; it destroys sequencing. Structural problems require temporal depth. Social media removes that depth and replaces it with instantaneous judgment. Every event becomes a surface object, detached from causality. The outcome is a society permanently reacting and never diagnosing.

Poverty, in this environment, becomes invisible in its real form. It is not seen as a continuous structural condition but as episodic failure. A scandal appears, is consumed, and disappears. Another replaces it. Nothing accumulates into understanding because attention itself is exhausted before synthesis can occur.

Modern Condition

The modern condition reflects a reversal of earlier social organization, where human relationships are embedded within abstract systems of finance, law, and administration that often fail to recognize the lived constraints of those they govern. In this disembedded state, institutions increasingly misinterpret human behaviour as their capacity for structural understanding weakens. At the same time, attempts to resolve systemic failures through expanding administrative complexity produce diminishing returns: more regulation, oversight, and reporting generate less coherence. Over time, institutions shift from functional effectiveness to symbolic performance, maintaining the appearance of control rather than achieving it.

This is why public outrage repeatedly fails to translate into structural change. Outrage is not a tool of reconstruction. It is a signal of system fatigue. It circulates, intensifies, and dissipates without altering the underlying architecture. Meanwhile, the conditions that produce repetition remain intact.

The most persistent illusion is that these are separate problems: poverty here, institutional misuse there, media distortion elsewhere. They are not separate. They are expressions of a single condition in which scarcity, complexity, symbolic authority, and fragmented enforcement interact without coordination. The system does not fail in one place; it fails in the gaps between these layers.

Symbolic systems

What makes this condition more severe is that symbolic systems continue to operate at full strength even when structural systems degrade. Religious identity remains powerful. Political rhetoric remains strong. Cultural symbolism remains intact. But enforcement capacity, institutional coherence, and social trust degrade beneath them. That gap is where instability grows. Until that gap is addressed at the level of structure rather than sentiment, repetition remains inevitable. New scandals will emerge, new interpretations will circulate, and new cycles of outrage will follow. Nothing resolves because nothing is being reconstructed beneath the surface of reaction.

This is no longer repairable through adjustment or rhetoric. It is a form of decay that persists until it exhausts itself, because the mechanisms meant to correct it are now part of the same failure. It continues until rupture, not reform. At that point, instability ceases to be episodic and becomes structural. Pressure will accumulate into breakdown, and what follows will not be managed transition but forced reversal. The responsibility lies with those who govern these institutions to prevent that trajectory, not through language, but through change. The drama is ending; farce is over; what we are witnessing is tragedy unfolding with unprecedented consequences.

by Nilantha Ilangamuwa

Features

Are threats to Buddha Sasana external or from within?

Published

15 hours ago

2026/05/31

Thilina Walpola

As Sri Lanka celebrates the birth, Enlightenment and the Parinibbana of the Buddha, almost a month after the rest of the Buddhist-world did so, there is widespread discussion about threats to Buddha Sasana provoked by some recent incidents. Regarding the views expressed about postponing Vesak celebrations in my article ‘May Day and postponement Vesak 2026’ (The Island, 25 May), my very good friend Dr Upali Abeysiri has sent me the following comments: “The Mahanayakas have a good reason to postpone Vesak. The dawning of the full moon has to be on the same constellation (nekatha) as when the Buddha was born and attained enlightenment. Although Adhi Poya is reckoned as the second full moon arising in the same calendar month, this is supposed to be an odd exception.” Though it would have been ideal if a consensus could have been reached prior to the split of celebrations, perhaps, it does not matter very much as celebrations occur on a symbolic rather than an actual date, there being no historical or archaeological evidence confirming exact dates.

Whilst there are no direct threats to Buddha Dhamma, as the expanding horizons of science continue to confirm the fundamentals of Buddha Dhamma, there is no doubt whatsoever that there are threats to Buddha Sasana. However, these threats become important as the Buddha Sasana performs the pivotal role in protecting and propagating the Dhamma and, hence, become an indirect threat to Dhamma itself. Therefore, it should be the concern of all Buddhists and it is in this spirit I am making some comments which some may interpret as disrespectful to the Maha Sangha. I can reassure that my intentions are entirely directed towards the preservation of the Buddha Dhamma and Sasana. Though the Buddha proclaimed that the Sasana consists of Bhikkhu, Bhikkhuni, Upasaka and Upasika, for all practical purposes Sasana had been led by Bhikkhus, often at the expense of others.

There is hardly any doubt that there are external forces at play in Sri Lanka and even some Buddhists seem to object to Sri Lanka being called a Buddhist country. Interestingly, no one seems to object to countries like the UK and the USA being called Christian counties. I

There is no registration or baptism in Buddhism and there are no rewards for Buddhists for conversions. As I pointed out in a previous article, ‘How does the Buddha differ’ (The Island, 1 May) unlike most other religions, Buddhism is not a ‘high-demand’ religion, nor ‘law-based’ religion and is not exclusivist. Perhaps, it is this liberalism, pacifism and gentleness, which are the real strengths, that are being exploited as weaknesses by others.

There will always be external threats and the Buddha too faced many during his lifetime. Before addressing those, is it not more important to address the threats within? One of the most important problems seems to be the breakdown of discipline. Bhikkhus are bound by Vinaya rules, laid down by the Buddha and some recent incidents highlight total deviations. Though there were many previous incidents like unsubstantiated claims of Arahanthood, Bhikkhus attacking each other on YouTube and Bhikkhus conducting YouTube channels, not for the propagation of the Dhamma but for the accumulation of rupees, attention was focused after the detection of 22 young monks carrying narcotic drugs.

Though many commentators were quick to condemn the Sangha on this account, we need to go deeper. Narcotic menace has become a huge problem in Sri Lanka and it looks as if the drug lords would resort to anything to achieve their objectives. Though it looks as if some gullible young monks had been duped by drug lords, we need to question why it was possible. Is it due to the lack of supervision of these novices by their seniors that allowed them to accept a request in a WhatsApp group? Should there be checks and balances on foreign travel by Bhikkhus?

What shocked Buddhists was what followed next; the arrest of the Nayaka of Atamasthana for allegedly having sex with a minor. Anuradhapura was our first capital and Sri Maha Bodhi is the longest surviving authenticated tree in the world. Ruwanweliseya and Jetawanaramaya were among the ten tallest man-made structures in the ancient world, Jetawanaramaya still holding the Guiness record for the largest stupa in the world. Cyberspace is full of theories. Whilst some have condemned the Nayaka Thero even before the conclusion of inquiries whilst others claim that this was a coup by another Nayaka Thera in an attempt of succession.

I was intrigued, reading in a Sri Lankan newspaper about the 80th birthday celebrations of a Nayaka priest, who was convicted in London in 2012 of historical child sex abuse and sentenced to seven years in prison. I remember the case very well as he was the head of the Vihara, we had our first contact on relocating to the UK. I also remember his devotees, who believed that he was wrongly accused, collecting over £50,000 for an appeal. In spite of being represented by one of the top Barristers in the UK, the conviction was upheld but the jail-term was reduced by a year. His name is still on the sex-offenders register in the UK and he is permanently prevented from association with children. One can argue that as he has served the sentence and not reoffended, this should not be held against him but what baffled me is that he is still being referred to as the Chief Sangha Nayaka. Should a person on the sex-offenders register be the Chief Sangha Nayaka?

It is high time we put our own house in order before fighting the external enemies. It is reported that the former president CBK has written to the Mahanayakas requesting urgent reform and we should be obliged to her for taking the lead.

There are many aspects that need urgent reform, the first being removal of caste barriers practiced by some Nikayas, which is the greatest insult to the Buddha who promoted equality. The second is the active encouragement of Bhikkhuni Sasana which has not happened in spite of the landmark ruling by the supreme court. The third is the establishment of proper disciplinary processes under a single Adhikarana Sangha Nayaka with powers and support than allowing the government to take over the control of even non-criminal Vinaya matters.

There are many other issues that need settlement like the controversy of the land of Buddha’s birth which seems to linger on. An expert committee should hear all evidence and settle this issue once and for all.

As I have pointed out on many occasions in these columns, it is high time a Dhamma Sangayana was held, as the last one was 70 years ago. Ideally, it should be different with active participation of lay experts as well. It is the duty of us Buddhists to ensure that the words of wisdom of the Buddha continue to enlighten generations to come.

By Dr Upul Wijayawardhana

Features

Vijaya Kumar: Academic, Activist & Genial Fellow-Traveller

Published

15 hours ago

2026/05/31

Thilina Walpola

Professor Vijaya Kumar

The University of Ceylon, Peradeniya, was in our time, a less-crowded residential university, where everybody knew everybody else or at least knew of everybody else.

I knew of Emeritus Professor Vijaya Kumar of the Department of Chemistry at Peradeniya, or Kumar, as we referred to him fondly, before I got to know him. His dear wife Savitri, also a member of the academic staff of the Department of Chemistry, was nicknamed Kumee, by some of their students (of which vintage is unknown to me) and the duo were thereafter referred to affectionately as Kumar and Kumee.

The Faculty of Science became a regular haunt of mine as I would go there in the company of my batchmates to attend lectures on Basic Mathematics given by Professor Maheswaran, as it was a requirement for our General Arts Qualifying Examinations. I would also go there to listen to some excellent talks under a programme that was held in the auditorium of the Science Faculty referred to as “Popular Science Gossip”. The “gossip” at these talks were not confined solely to science but were broad enough to include Literature, History and other branches of knowledge as well. I would often spot Kumar in the audience at these talks or bump into him in the corridors of the Science Faculty. But I got to know him personally only after he became the Warden of Arunachalam, my hall of residence, during my undergraduate years initially, and later, as a member of the academic staff of the Department of English.

Our Science Faculty undergraduate contemporaries, especially those at Arunachalam Hall and its immediate neighbour, Jayatilaka Hall, both within a stone’s throw away from the Science Faculty, shared many an anecdote about Kumar and their other lecturers. One of these anecdotes, had to do with a spectacular (motor car) driving feat of Kumar’s. Legend has it that he drove from his university bungalow-home to the Faculty of Science deploying only the reverse gear of his car! Kumar, on hearing of this, had told certain of his student friends, including some who became his colleagues later on, that this story is one of the biggest yarns he had heard in his life!

Some of his one-time younger colleagues, now in retirement like Kumar, tell me that Kumar exuded warmth and friendliness in all of his professional and administrative interactions with others in the wider university community. But there was no warmth or mercy for those who indulged in the unsavoury pastime of student ‘ragging’. He was a very strong proponent of the need to ensure to all freshers an environment free of the menace of ‘ragging’. He remained ever-vigilant during the ‘ragging’ season. There are stories of his chasing ‘raggers’ and catching them. Professor Maheswaran, who later became an intimate friend and remains so after more than half a century, was another who was fiercely opposed to ‘ragging’. I was a personal witness to Mahes chasing a ‘ragger’ up and down the stairs of the main library to nab him. Yet another of his students has noted that Kumar’s office room in the Faculty was a total mess at all times. It had tables, piled so high with books and documents that one could not easily spot Kumar at his desk. He, however, had the knack of pulling out from amidst the clutter, any document that he needed at any given time. If anybody were to volunteer to help tidy his desk, Kumar would respond firmly with “Don’t you touch my desk!”.

Kumar, like several of his colleagues in the other faculties as well, had his own eccentricities. According to information received from reliable sources, Kumar who taught Organic Chemistry used to carry his lecture notes in his shirt or trouser pocket with ‘the entire lecture condensed in point form on a half-sheet or half of a half-sheet of paper’. The way he rummaged through his sling bag filled to the brim with stuff to find an item that he needed was another ritual that amused onlookers.

Kumar, interestingly enough is a Royal-cum-Thomian product, in that he had his primary education at S.Thomas’ Prep School, Kollupitiya and the entirety of his secondary education at Royal College, which he entered in 1953. In a note written by Kumar himself, he notes that despite having had excellent teachers at Royal, his was not a notable school career. He goes on to say that “the only achievement I could boast of was my being the joint-winner of the school General Knowledge Prize”. However, he had been active in a Scout Group outside of school (1st Port of Colombo, Sea Scouts) where he “was Queen’s Scout, Patrol leader, and later, Assistant Scout Master”.

Kumar entered the Faculty of Science of the University of Ceylon in 1961 and secured from it an honours degree in Chemistry in 1965. He joined the academic staff of the Department of Chemistry in the Faculty of Science, University of Ceylon, Peradeniya in 1965 and left the following year for Magdalen College at Oxford University, from which institution he obtained his doctorate in Chemistry. His entire teaching career was at Peradeniya, where in the period 2003-2006 he served as the Dean of the Faculty of Science, a position that his late father-in-law had held a few decades earlier.

Among the other highlights of his career are: Chairman of the Industrial Technology Institute (formerly the Ceylon Institute of Scientific and Industrial Research, CISIR); Member (representing Sri Lanka) of the Geneva-based UN Commission on Science and Technology from 1999 to 2007 and its President from 2001-2003; President of the Sri Lanka Estate Workers Union from 1989 onwards; Member of the Politburo of the Lanka Sama Samaja Party from 1988 to 2014 and currently, a member of the Executive Committee of the National People’s Power (NPP).

Vijaya and Savitri Kumar are parents of daughters Shamala and Ramya, who are following in the footsteps of their parents: with the former teaching in the Department of Agricultural Economics in the Faculty of Agriculture, University of Peradeniya and the latter, in the Department of Community Medicine at the University of Jaffna.

(I wish to thank the following who assisted me in the writing of this brief essay: Mr. Bandula Warnakulasuriya, Emeritus Professor Ratnayake Bandara, Professor Mahinda Wickramaratne, Professor Swarna Wimalasiri and Mr. Manik de Silva).

*Editor’s note: Prof. Vijaya Kumar, a member of the NPP’s National Executive Committee and is still active in politics turns 84 today. This article by Tissa Jayatilaka, former Executive Director of the United States – Sri Lanka Fulbright Commission for Mutual Academic Exchange, was written for an upcoming collection of essays on Kumar’s life by his friends.

(Colombo Telegraph)

By Tissa Jayatilaka