Susil Sirivardena: an incomparable friend

It was in early 1966, as I worked in my office, a messenger came into announce a visitor. I did not expect anyone but unexpected visitors were not unusual in those times when telephones were not ubiquitous as now.

I got up to receive him. He was not only unexpected but also strikingly unusual. He wore an off-white cloth hanging from his waist about two inches short of his ankles and a collarless shirt with a split on the left shoulder tied together with two ribbons of the same colour. The shirt was of the same colour and material as the cloth he wore.

He wore a pair of simple sandals and carried a pan malla, or reed bag, from which one could see some papers peeping out. He was as dark as I was, open faced, ready with a smile and adorned with a sense of determination. We soon sat down to chat. He talked about a special issue of Samskrti they were planning and asked me whether I would consider contributing an article on universities. That isssue was very well received and ran out of print soon.

The 1960s was a time when economists were deeply immersed in studying education in relation to economic development. The Robbins Committee in Britain had issued its reports and there was a Commission sitting on university education in India. I was working on a paper on education for the Centenary Volume that was planned by the Ministry of Education and begged to be excused. However, I promised to take an interest in the work of Samskrti under his guidance. He suggested that we meet soon at leisure to talk and for the next 50 years and more we have been doing just that.

Susil was perhaps the last member of a line of young men from privileged homes who committed themselves early to the public good. They defined the public good in their own terms. The earliest was Solomon Dias Badaranaike, the son of a rich and powerful landowner and the young man went to St.Thomas’ College, Galkissa and to Oxford to read classics, entered the bar but committed himself to the public cause as it was understood then. About ten years later, a whole group of them emerged: Philip Gunawardena, Pieter Keuneman, N.M.Perera, Leslie Goonewardene (unrelated to Philip), Dudley Senanayake and T.B.Subasinghe. They were all from privileged homes and schools, went to universities in US and Britain and committed themselves to serve the public in the way they thought best.

Ranil Wickremesinghe was a late comer and he graduated from Colombo reading law. Susil was from a privileged home, went to St.Thomas’ and to Oxford, where he read English and defined his commitment to the public good. (A.T.Ariyaratne made in a different mould, defined the public good (outside politics) for himself and has served the public well.) Ranil and Susil were perhaps the last of that breed as privilege itself began to be newly defined and public service itself took on new shades.

Tragedy struck our society. A new set of political leaders emerged, who, uneducated, corrupted the public good to consist of their personal good and plundered the public purse without shame. An uncritical public sang hosannas to these criminals. The educated youth was not mature enough to define the public good for themselves and fitted into the machine or took to thoughtless violence.

Susil’s first job was as a teacher in a government school. When he asked for an appointment as a teacher in a government school and insisted that he be appointed to a school in a remote area, the officials were flummoxed. He had his say and went to teach English in Anuradhapura Central School. In this school he exhibited an unmistakable characteristic of his work: his passionate commitment to whatever he set out to do. He was no dilletante. It came forward in all his enterprises: as a civil servant, editor of journals and public speaking. There never was any halfhearted activity that he put his hand to. Besides the regular syllabus, he took the children to reading poetry and plays. He made lasting friendships in Anuradhapura: one that endured for long was with Sarath Wijesooriya, a mild mannered but steel willed colleague, who collaborated with him in editing Mavata, a journal committed to discussing cultural and social issues. Sarath later edited a bi-weekly sheet and wrote children’s books.

He joined the Ceylon Administrative Service having come first in the competitive examination to recruit young persons to eventual senior management jobs in the public service. His signature initiative was Janasaviya when he worked with President Premadasa. It has survived under various names and is now Samurdhi. It was designed and carried out as a poverty alleviation programme that called forth the fundamental urges in Susil to serve the public. He set about with passion, which is partly the reason that the programme was so successful. Yet one should note that it stagnated after him as a dole, bereft of its growth potential. The other area he worked in was housing, under the same president. He kept a long term interest in housing and helped government, whenever summoned. I missed almost the entirety of his career in CAS, as when he had been just promoted as the Director to ARTI, he was arrested and I left for New York a few days later.

Let us go back to Susil whom I saw that morning. I lived in an old house on Gregory’s Road. We had a broad varandah where I met visitors. I had some interest in education and P.K. Dissanayake (of the NCHE) and Susil both came there to talk about ideas pertaining to education, especially university education. Sometime then, he invited me to some discussions as a part of the attempt to encourage young scholars to think about change in society and culture and to contribute papers to Samskrti. We met on Saturday mornings in Dr.Ranjan Abeysenghe’s spatial house in Krillapone. Besides Susil, I recall Piyal Somaratne, who worked for Radio Ceylon and Mahinda Wijesekera who was a student at Vidyodaya and, in maturity, a politician. Susil went about on a light blue Vespa scooter and was a frequent visitor at our home. We mostly talked about books and articles and about writing for Samskrti. Sometime in May 1971 (it was perhaps a Saturday) he came to our place as usual and the next morning, we learnt that he had been arrested.

In June I left for New York City. After he came back from prison and whenever I came back to Colombo, we met infrequently as circumstances permitted. Susil never talked to me about the trial and imprisonment and I felt I would violate his wishes if I asked him about it. It was characteristic of him not to talk about himself. I knew his brother who lived in Manhattan and apart from that I knew nothing of his parents. It was from a note that Kusum Kumara passed to me a few days back that I learned that Susil’s family and Felix Dias Bandaranaike’s had had a feud (kontharyak). Felix Dias Bandaranaike was besides the prime minster the most powerful person in that government.

One of Susil’s major accomplishments, arguably the most vauable for posterity, was the publication of Mavata, a magazine devoted to discussing culture, especially fiction and poetry. It was ‘the small magazine’ that he often spoke about. What he attempted and that was new was an assessment of the cultural history of this society, from the point of view of the then dominant ideas about colonialism and neo-colonialism. In the first editorial in Mavata he periodized these developments and defined the development, in our society, of two streams of literature and literary criticism. The ‘majority school’ was better connected to the common people than the ‘minority school’ that developed in the university of Ceylon, especially at Peradeniya. The ‘colomba kavi’ was the main literary form of the majority school while the ‘Peradeniya school’ used fiction, poetry and literary criticism to dominate, via schools, the minds of young people in the years after 1950. Susil published a complete anthology of Vimalaratne Kumaragama’s poetry. Samskrti, (in which Susil played a major role both before and after Mavata) gave expression to the views of the Peradeniya school. Its first board of editors of five were all graduates of the University of Ceylon. It would be most instructive to study the first editorial of Amaradasa Virasinhge in Samskrti in 1953 and Susil’s in Mavata in 1976. They contrasted in many ways. The first issue came out in 1976 and the last in 1992, having issued 56 numbers in between. The editors were Susil, Piyal Somaratne, Kumudu Kusum Kumara, Sarath Vijesooriya, V.Arthur, Kirthi Ekanyake and several others, not all at the same time. Many young people who shone later contributed to it. Contributors included Kumudu Kusum Kumara, Sena Thoradeniya, Kumari Jayawardena, Parakrama Kodituvakku, S.G.Punchiheva, K.S.Sivakumaran, Mahagama Sekera, Premakirti de Alvis, and Abraham Kovoor. Mavata inspired may young men and women to examine their own culture.

Sometime in 2009, Amaradasa Virasighe asked me to join Samskrti. I did not know him and consulted two persons who had worked in Samskrti earlier. Both advised me against joining Samskrti. I talked to Susil and he thought I should go. In gratitude, I asked him to join me. Most of what we did in Samskrti were considered together, although we were each entirely responsible for our actions. In 2009 itself, Susil wrote out a manifesto for Samskrti ‘smaskrti sangarave jivodaya’ which was followed 2013, by a more elaborate programme. The Special Issue on universities had gone out of print and Susil and I put out a reprint with a new introduction. He was very keen to make special issues on both M.D.Ratnasuriya and Dharmasiri Ekanyake and that appeared in 2011. In 2013 appeared a special issue on Gitanjali and G.B.Senanayahe , edited by Susil. Dharmasiri Ekanayake was a regular contributor on literary criticism to Samskrti and I proposed that we collect them in a book with an introduction we would write jointly. When we went to ask Dharmasiri for permission to do that, he guffawed as usual and produced four ‘log ‘books’ of neat hand writing which contained book that we had planned. It was published 2012 as ‘sahityaya ha vicara kalava’.

Susil wrote outstanding film reviews for Samskrti beginning 1966 on Bimal Roy’s Bandini in 1966, ‘Satyajit Ray’s art of film making’ in 1968 and Siri Gunasinghe’s ‘ranavan karal’ in 1968 and ending with ‘valapatala’ in 2009 and ‘sri siddharta gautama’ in 2013. These last few years were spent understanding ‘nation building’ in our country in the 20th century. He sought guidance in Indian writings and spent several weeks in successive years at the Indian Cultural Centre in New Delhi. We discussed several drafts of an outline but got no further.

Susil and I set out, roughly about the same time, from different ports fitted out in very different vessels with sails of different material. Those vessels were carried forward by fair tail winds, generated by utterly different forces. En route, we put into different ports for victuals and other supplies and so enriched, we finally put into harbour where we went ashore and put up different camps, unbeknown to each other. Susil destroyed his boat and equipment; I preserved mine tethered in a cove for future use. Our forays inland, always new to each new generation, were in different directions. Some of them were into wastelands created by evil men whose designed destinations differed from those of Susil. We met up and carried on common campaigns, with the objective of public education. Susil left tall landmarks, which will guide many an intrepid adventurer in future. For all his labour and that plenitude, we are grateful to Susil.