Visionary Educators: Trilicia Gunawardena at Govt. College of Art & Crafts

by Laleen Jayamanne

I knew Trilicia Gunawardena, as so many others did, only in her famously memorable role of the tragic princess in Maname and later as an actress in films. It is only now that I am learning about her philosophy of education and her extraordinary sense of duty of care for her students, and her imagination as a teacher of English as a second language (ESL), at the Government College of Art and Crafts, in Horton Place, in the 1970s. Professor A. J. Gunawardena and Trilicia, a familiar husband and wife duo in the art world, would drop in to observe Dhamma Jagoda’s theatre workshop which started in 1970, in Harold Peiris’ open garage, a makeshift space, generously given by Peiris until the Lionel Wendt Theatre (of which he was a trustee), was renovated and ready for us to move into much later as, ‘The Art Centre Theatre Workshop’. I have also just begun to read A. J. Gunawardena’s expansive and informative art reviews in The Island, written under the pen name, Jayadeva; they opened up an entire social and cultural milieu for someone like me, who was not in the country during most of the war years of the 90s. Though I was there to do some research, I left soon after President Ranasinghe Premadasa was assassinated by a suicide bomber and the political situation became very volatile. I think some of what A. J. Gunawardena wrote in the 90s is worth remembering now and I will touch on it shortly. It is sad to read that this generous and talented couple died in quick succession in the late 1990s, while still in their mid-sixties, with so much left to contribute to enriching the cultural and intellectual life of the country.

Just before leaving to study drama at New York University, in 1971, I went to meet Professor Gunawardena to get an introduction to Professor Richard Schechner, with whom he had studied and worked while he was a graduate student at NYU. I knew that he had guest-edited a Double Issue of the prestigious theatre journal TDR (which came out of the department), on traditional Asian theatre and kindly introduced me to the guru of environmental and ritual theatre and performance studies, Schechner. I remember the very first class with him. We were all seated on the floor cross-legged while he, the guru, sat on a chair cross-legged, without shoes. He had just returned from a research trip to India. We went around the class introducing ourselves. There were two male students from Nigeria and a woman from South Korea and the rest were all Americans. During that difficult year, It was while sitting through the mind-numbingly boring seminars in the NYU post-graduate theatre programme (costing an arm and a leg), that my mind began to drift and I began to slowly understand deeply the value of several of my professors in Ceylon with whom I had studied and who I loved dearly. It was then that I began to become critically aware of why a course or a syllabus, didn’t make much sense or why a subject that ought to have been interesting (like the history of European radical avant-garde theatre for example), was made so deadly dull by some of those famous specialists whose methods, or styles, of teaching, were not very engaging either. So, instead of learning much about performance, I began the long process of understanding, with difficulty, what a philosophy of education might mean and why it mattered. I feel I am still learning and still interested in methods of teaching film, and understanding how film teaches us to perceive, feel and think in most unusual ways.

I. M. Kuruvilla, who taught English at Aquinas University College, opened up a whole new world of literature (Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Malayalam) and Indian independent cinema and Lankan painting of Justine Deraniyagala for instance. Kuru, as we called him, was a Keralite, who was sent to Jaffna for his high school and university education and then came down to Colombo, married, had a family, and taught English literature to generations of students at Aquinas University College. Though he suffered from Parkinson’s disease he taught tirelessly with great energy till he was old enough to retire, never having missed a single class. Professor Cuthbert Amarasinghe’s lectures on Greek drama at the Peradeniya University, left an indelible impression on us as did his research published in a prestigious classics journal which he encouraged us to read. His study of the chorus in Greek drama was truly brilliant, I realised much later. These subjects and how they were taught and the duty of care these men showed us, their faith in us, gave us a solid intellectual foundation so that we could branch off into other unfamiliar areas with some degree of confidence later. We were truly fortunate to get a ‘world class’ education in old Ceylon.

But it was in Australia that I was able to consolidate my understanding of why a well-formulated philosophy of education mattered and how that determines the kind of curriculum one might develop, and the way one actually taught and behaved in the classroom. These changes to education happened in an intellectual environment where Film and Media Studies disturbed the traditional Humanities methodologies in English lit, Art History and Philosophy, for example, in the post-1968 era of the Anglophone humanities education revolution. The rise of the Feminist Movement in the late 1960s gave rise to new disciplinary areas in the 70s such as Women’s Studies, which much later became Gender. An International journal culture in English disseminated radical ideas developed in Europe through the translation of major theoretical texts from the German, French and Italian, some influenced by Marxism and ‘New Left’ thinking and others by the developments in structural linguistics, semiotics and soon after, the post-structuralist explosion of critical theory.

May 1968 in Paris is considered a key event in new left politics, where there was a spontaneous uprising of workers and students against authoritarianism in the Universities and factories, the Vietnam war and the government of President de Gaulle (1959-1969). The powerful communist party of France was also sidelined by new alliances and President de Gaulle’s government was ousted, soon after an initial victory at the polls. In the wake of an unusual sense of social freedom and openness and questioning of old hierarchical ways of doing things, there were educational experiments in Universities and in institutions of the media, especially in the anti-psychiatry movement, which developed new, more humane ways of understanding and treating mental illness. The traditional boundaries that divided disciplinary areas were questioned and interdisciplinary methodologies were developed to understand the social field in a state of unusual flux and transformation. University courses in the new campuses were opened to migrant workers from North Africa, without the requisite qualifications. Grading was abandoned in favour of attendance and participation in the class. The University of Technology, Sydney, where I taught briefly, also adopted this policy in their new Media Studies degree.

At this distance from Sri Lanka, just by following what’s happening there now across the country and at Galle Face, on YouTube, Facebook and through the newspapers, in English and Sinhala, one gets some sense of what May ’68 in Paris might have also felt like, just at the level of certain hard social barriers falling and the opening up of the social field to experimentation led by youth in alliance with the workers. But with the ever-present fear of the armed forces and police controlled by the state on guard. And when the police did attack the students, 10 million workers joined in with a general strike. The workers did win pay rises and also the right to early retirement. But of course, the level of urgent material deprivation and the major economic crisis and that of governance is specific to this moment in Sri Lanka. I hear now academics and students discuss the importance of a renewal of educational goals and methods and the need to fundamentally challenge the neoliberal university policies that have strangled creative thought and made education into a commodity with all the violence that does to the mind and creative processes of thinking. Within this context, it would be worth remembering a visionary teacher like Trilicia who invented her own methods of teaching, suited to the specific conditions on the ground, under difficult conditions produced by the 1970’s socialist economic policies of the Sirimavo Bandaranaike government.

Trilicia Gunawardena’s Teaching Methods and Duty of Care

I learnt of Trilicia’s method of teaching the English language and details of how she cared for her students from several publications of Sarath Chandrajeewa. He was a student of her’s in the 1970s at the Government College of Art & Crafts and pays tribute to her in his scholarly writing by documenting her practice. His detailed descriptions bring her to life as a generous, friendly and kind teacher with a sense of humour. She was also very creative in her lesson plan.

“She used to select a biography of one of the western masters for her English lesson each day. In this way, we were to learn stories of the masters and their works. We learnt the history of art and the English language at the same time”.

Paulo Freire and other Latin American radical educational theorists of the 1960s who wrote on the ‘Pedagogy of the Oppressed’, spoke of such integration as being essential to motivate students to learn. Because the English classes were soon after the lunch break and students tended to nod off, Trilicia would sing songs from Maname to keep them awake! From Chandrajeewa’s documentation, one gets a sense of how much Trilicia herself enjoyed her teaching, which is a rare perspective indeed on a teacher. At the end of the term, she would bring a large delicious cream caramel as a treat and students would climb the jack fruit trees, break leaves and make cones to eat it in. The political-economic background of this era is described by Chandrajeewa to show how it affected art students in their studies very directly.

“The ‘70s was a very difficult time period for our society. Commodities like rice and chillies were rationed and they were given based on coupons. Police checked people at security posts and took into custody those who carried such items more than they were allowed to. There were queues everywhere to buy bread at bakeries and to get rations at cooperative stores. Due to the closed economy policy of the ‘United Front Government’,which came into power in 1970, imported goods like watercolours, special papers, oil paints, canvases, brushes and paints for printmaking were hard to find and their prices were also increased exorbitantly. The student loan was only Rs 150 per month.

There was a food shortage in the 1970s. A poem written in very large letters on the canteen wall in Kelaniya Campus was also written on our university canteen. This poem symbolises the food shortage at that time”.

bread and dhal one day be Buddha

cabbage and potatoes be Sariyuth and Mugalan

“Teachers and students who did not join in our tour of the North (Jaffna), contributed by donating dry ingredients and pre-cooked foods.

Trilicia Gunawardena gave us three large pans full of pickles, brinjal moju and fish ambulthiyal, to take on our trip to last many days. This was the biggest donation of all.”

(Jaffna Doors & Windows, Reminiscences, Sarath Chandrajeewa. P. 32, footnote 14.)

The ‘70s was the era when teaching at the Government College of Art & Crafts was still bilingual which enabled Tamil students from Jaffna to study in Colombo, in English, and there were structured exchange programs between the North and the South. All of this came to an end through the student-led ‘Sinhala only’ activism which rejected the study of western art history and centred the curriculum on Sinhala-Buddhist art history. In the previous decade, the student union-led protests against anything perceived as ‘western’ included breaking the glass which framed the large prints of Western Modernist masters decorating the walls of the school in 1963. These prints (given as a gift by David Paynter who headed the school and taught there), I gather, were auctioned off sometime prior to 2005, and I wonder what replaced them. David Paynter, a fine painter himself according to his peers, was pushed out of the institution to which he was dedicated, with a slogan of great shame pasted on placards:

“Burgher suddha david pintharuwa gedara palayan.”

The current slogan, ‘Gotagogama’, is far more linguistically polite than the verb ‘palayan’, used here against a dedicated teacher who the Sinhala chauvinist students considered a racial inferior! And all this was done in the name of Sinhala-Buddhist values. The pithy alliteration of the hashtag however shows a new linguistic sensibility among the young Sinhala intelligentsia, which Professor Michael Roberts would definitely hail as an innovative ‘thuppahification’ (hybridisation) of the suddhe Sinhala, with which I heartily agree.

As all teachers who care for their students, Trilicia also paid special attention to the capabilities and talents students exhibited and would guide them in their choices. So it was that she advised Chandrajeewa to focus on sculpture and advised him to study bronze casting with Tissa Ranasinghe who was by then teaching the craft at the Royal College of Art in London. Ranasinghe, who was the preeminent modern bronze sculptor of Lanka and also the head of the art school where he taught, was forced to leave because of the misguided student protests against his teaching and ideas as being ‘western’. I have referred to the painful details in a previous piece for The Island (13/4/22). Many years later while he was working for the National Youth Services Council, Trilicia suggested to Sarath to apply for a university teaching post. She had in fact brought him the forms to apply for a lecturing position at the Institute of Aesthetic Studies, of the University of Kelaniya. This kind of guidance and actions are the signs of a teacher who cares about students as much as the institution she works in and helps to create a nurturing, generous, intellectually rigorous academic milieu for all to thrive in. It demonstrates a strong belief in a merit-based institution rather than one based on political nepotism. It’s worth remembering ethical teachers such as Trilicia because we know that institutions of higher education, and especially the Institute of Aesthetic Studies or previously, the Government College of Art & Crafts, have been undermined by political appointments and sackings.

(To be continued)