Rajiva Wijesinha, in The ISLAND, August 2024 …. a review of THE CEYLON JOURNAL ….
Earlier this month I attended the launch of a new journal, the brainchild of a youngster called Avishka Mario Seneviratne. I had been urged to attend by Goolbai Gunasekara, a great patron of imaginative learning, whom I much admire, but in fact I had met Avishka previously, when he turned up at home to look through books from a library that I was disposing of.
All learning seems to be grist to Avishka’s mill, and what he conceived of is a journal that covers a multiplicity of subjects, looking at a range of aspects of Sri Lankan history. For this purpose he got together a brilliant team of writers, ranging from my old Peradeniya colleague Prof C R de Silva to the evergreen Elmo Jayawardena. There is a vivid account by Chandran Ratnam, who has done much to put this country on the map, of the making here of an Indiana Jones film, while Avishka himself has contributed an account of the life and work of Roland Raven-Hart who wrote a great deal about this country. His most famous book in this regard was Ceylon History in Stone, which covers, as Avishka puts it, ‘travel, history, heritage and people’.
With regard to people, Avishka does not miss out Raven-Hart’s ‘weakness for young boys’, but he deals with this elegantly, without the prurience which affects some critics of Raven-Hart’s work. Interestingly, the article suggests that he influenced Arthur C. Clarke, who shared some of his perspectives, to settle in Sri Lanka. Clarke in turn described Raven-Hart as ‘a fusion of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Professor Summerlee and the traveller Sir Richard Burton’. I should note that I find the comparison with Summerlee strange, and wonder whether Clarke meant Challenger, the adventurous protagonist of The Lost World rather than his sceptical colleague Summerlee.
There is a beautifully evocative account of the ’43 Group, while a much earlier artist is brought before us in an article by the Chairman of the George Keyt foundation about Andrew Nicholl who produced some lovely watercolours in Ceylon in the middle of the 19th century. It mentioned what I had not known, knowing about the two in two different compartments as it were, that he had been a protégé of Emerson Tennant, Colonial Secretary, who wrote one of the best known tomes about Sri Lanka.
The journal is a fund of information about many subjects, but it is all information that anyone, whatever their concerns, would find interesting. And the articles are all immensely readable, written in simple language that conveys much very readily. This applies to pieces by senior academics as well as the youngsters to whom Avishka has given space, notably the Secretary of the Journal Committee, Ashan de Alwis, who has produced a very readable account of the persecution of Muralitharan in the nineties and the forceful response of Captain Arjuna Ranatunga.
Though all credit goes to Avishka for his brainchild, he did not produce it on his own, but with what seems to have been an efficient support team, including not only his school friends, but also senior public figures.
Amongst these is our most senior and distinguished Civil Servant, Dharmasiri Pieris, who had agreed to be the patron of the journal. Its legal advisor is Manohara de Silva who has contributed a fascinating piece about how the Supreme Court overturned a sensible judgment by Paul E Pieris, and thus contributed to the triumphalism that led to the Sinhala-Muslim riots of 2015. I had not realized before that the lead role in this was taken by Justice de Sampayo, a Sinhalese, and the British judge in the case seems to have followed his lead.
A less well known topic, also quite fascinating, is looked at by two Peradeniya medics, whose wider concerns are exemplified in an account of the tree under which Major Davie, whose ill fate it had been to be left in charge of the 1803 British expeditionary force in Kandy, found himself surrounded despite the safe conduct that had been negotiated. Horrible though subsequent British treatment of the Kandyans was, both of the king and the nobles and people who revolted, the bitterness caused by the king reneging on his word may have seemed to perfidious Albion to justify continuing perfidy.
Less dramatic elements in recent history are presented in accounts of female Marxist activists in the early 20th century, including the dynamic Gunawardenas (and Vivienne Goonewardene too) and the British wives of Ceylonese idealists such as Doreen Wickremasinghe, and the now forgotten first female MP from the LSSP, Florence Senanayake, mother of Laki. As a counterpart to this we have a sympathetic study of George Wall, a merchant prince of the 19th century who was however sympathetic to the people of the country and fought in the Legislative Council, along with Charles Ambrose Lorenz and James de Alwis, against the Paddy Land Tax. Incidentally it was Lorenz who started in 1850 a journal called Young Ceylon which was the inspiration for Avishka’s undertaking.
The erudite academic Sandagomi Coperahewa has written about linguistic culture in early colonial Sri Lanka, highlighting the impact of Portuguese as well as the efforts of the Dutch to gain familiarity with the local languages. Coperahewa’s pluralism is apparent too from his highlighting the role of Tamil in the Kandyan kingdom.
An academic of earlier times, Prof Paranavitana, writes of the early cartography of the island, while there is also a less erudite but equally fascinating account of early banknotes. All these articles, if brief, clearly make their points, the one exception being a piece of Colombo architecture which introduces many interesting ideas and characters but with no clear conclusions – but perhaps that simply reflects the confusion that has overcome the city.
All in all the Journal is a joy in both conception and execution, and I hope the energy of its founder leads to many more numbers. Certainly the enthusiasm of the young, in a context is which so much around us seems moribund, is immensely welcome, and I hope heralds a renaissance in this country.
******************
