Rajan Philips in Sunday Island 26 October 2025, where the title reads thus: “Susili Wilson (1928-2025): A Woman of Stature, Strength and Purpose”
Suseelavathy (Susili) Wilson, formerly of the University of Ceylon, Peradeniya, Sri Lanka, and later the University of New Brunswick, Fredericton, Canada, passed away on October 8, 2025, in Toronto, Canada. She was 97 years old. Born in Thellipalai, on June 2, 1928, she was the oldest child and only daughter of Samuel James Velupillai and Emily Grace Chelvanayakam. Her father, SJV Chelvanayakam Q.C., became the accredited Tamil political leader in 1956, and the following year entered into a historic agreement with the country’s Prime Minister SWRD Bandaranaike – the celebrated B-C Pact that enshrined the Sri Lankan government’s agreement on the minimum demands of the Tamils.
Her maternal grandfather was Maniagar RR Bar Kumarakulasinghe of Thellipalai, the village at the heart of Jaffna to which both Chelvanayakam and the Kumarakulasinghes traced their Tamil Christian roots. The latter were also well known in Sri Lanka for their accomplishments in the learned professions of law and medicine during the 1950s and 1960s.
Chelvanayakams had four sons after their daughter, each one of whom went onto achieve excellence in different fields: Manoharan in Physics, the late Vaseeharan in Mathematics, Raveendran in Finance and Accounting, and Chandrahasan in Law, Politics and Human Rights.
Susili herself was an accomplished student at Bishop’s College in Colombo, where she won the prize for the best SSC results in 1945, before moving on to university and a life of scholarship as a librarian. It was at the University of Ceylon, Colombo, that she met her future husband, Alfred Jeyaratnam Wilson. They both graduated in Economics which then included Political Science as a sub-discipline. Wilson went on to specialize in political science, after a brief stint as a leader writer for the Ceylon Daily News, while Susili took to library science.
After post-graduate studies in England, the Wilsons joined the University of Ceylon at its new Peradeniya campus, he as Lecturer in Government in the Department of Economics and she as a Librarian at the University Library. Still in their twenties, the Wilsons were academic celebrities even as they began their career at Peradeniya just as they would be while leaving Peradeniya for Canada as highly accomplished scholars 20 years later. AJ Wilson was a household name for Arts Faculty students because of his nationally popular textbook on Civics and Government, and he was married to SJV Chelvanayakam’s daughter. They were tumultuous times in Sri Lankan politics, and the political aura around the Wilsons was inevitable even in the rarefied university setting at Peradeniya.
A Witness to History
As a young woman and Chelvanyakam’s oldest child, Susili was acquainted with her father’s highly successful legal career and his reluctant entry into the vortex of Tamil politics. Chelvanayakam was one of the finest legal minds of his generation and a contemporary and close friend of forensic stalwarts like HV Perera Q.C., and retired Chief Justice Sir Edward Jayatilleke Q.C. They were frequent visitors to Chelvanayakam’s Colpetty residence at Alfred House Gardens. They were both there in the afternoon of 26 July 1957, the day the B-C Pact was signed, for a friendly postmortem.
It is well known that Chelvanayakam went into politics rather reluctantly, if not accidentally. He had been persuaded by then Tamil leader GG Ponnambalam Q.C., a dazzling orator and Criminal Lawyer, to join the Tamil Congress the Party that Ponnambalam led, and to contest the Kankesanthurai seat for the island’s first parliamentary election in 1947. That was Chelvanayakam’s first and successful election campaign, and as a 19-year old Susili joined her mother in helping with the campaign in Kankesanthurai that included their natal Thellipalai.
She was involved in all of her father’s campaigns that followed: the 1952 campaign that saw his only electoral defeat; the historic 1956 election in which Chelvanayakam’s Federal Part swept the northern and eastern provinces; two elections in 1960, one in 1965, and his last general election campaign in 1970. She was in Canada in 1975, when Chelvanayakam resigned from parliament in 1973, in protest against the 1972 Republican Constitution, forced a by-election in Kankesanthurai to demonstrate Tamils’ opposition to the new constitution, and resoundingly defeated the government’s Tamil candidate.
The stirrings that led to the emergence of Chelvanayakam as the pre-eminent Tamil leader were the disagreements between Ponnambalam and Chelvanayakam over Ponnambalam’s decision to join the United National Party government of DS Senanayake and his cabinet of ministers within an year after the 1947 election. Chelvanayakam opposed Ponnambalam’s decision as a betrayal of the undertaking he gave to the Tamil people as the leader of the Tamil Congress. [He then] broke away from the Tamil Congress and founded the Ilankai Thamil Arasu Kaddchchi, the Federal Party, even as Ponnambalam joined the government and became a Minister.
The Ponnambalam-Chelvanayakam schism has been political staple for more than a generation of Tamils stoned on politics. But Susili Wilson is the only person I have come to know, who had been at the best vantage point to observe, even if without formal participation, the inter-personal dynamic between two men whose decisions would be of utmost consequence for Tamil politics, if not for Sri Lankan politics itself. She would good humouredly contrast Ponnambalam’s flamboyance and flights of fancy with her father’s softspoken steadfastness. They were contrasting qualities of two contending leaders who resonated differently with the Tamil people as they chose to favour one over the other.
In her own right Susili Wilson was able to combine her knowledge of her father’s political life with her training and skills in the political and library sciences, to make a lasting archival contribution to her father’s legacy and to Tamil politics. What Prof. Wilson with her help began as an archival arrangement with Columbia University, New York, for preserving documents and papers of Chelvanayakam and Tamil politics, has since spawned similar arrangements at the University of Toronto, to include Professor Wilson’s papers as well, and to make them digitally accessible.
Thanks to the Wilsons, the Chelvanayakam era in Tamil politics almost from its very beginning had the rare benefit of receiving contemporaneous coverage in academic journals in the English speaking world. Even though it may largely have been a coincidence, it was also compensatory considering the paucity of official attention and priority given to Tamil questions in the national political discourse especially when they were articulated with constitutional propriety and with no hint of violence. The B-C Pact was a well intended exception but only to have its abrogation prove the general rule.
More importantly, AJ Wilson wrote extensively on Sri Lankan politics, perhaps more voluminously than anyone else yet, and his forays into Tamil politics were foursquare within an overall framework that was consistent in its objectivity, commitment to truth, and exceptional scholarship. It is not an exaggeration to say that whatever Professor Wilson wrote first passed muster with Mrs. Wilson who was his first reader, critic and lifelong sounding board.
From Peradeniya to Fredericton
Their time at Peradeniya, that was the latter part of 1950s and the 1960s, was also conducive to reaching excellence and maintaining high academic standards. Although they were still formative years for Peradeniya, they would also turn out to be Peradeniya’s golden years, especially for the Arts Faculty and its many disciplines. The Wilson’s were part of a growing universe of young scholars and their young families among whom serious scholarship easily overlapped with convivial socializing. Among their many friends at Peradeniya were Ian Goonetilleke and his wife Rosalyn. Ian was already a legend on campus as the Librarian of the University Library. His cultural curiosity and reach extended beyond the campus perimeter to include artists and intellectuals in the country. One of them was George Keyt, Sri Lanka’s storied painter. Like other friends of Ian, the Wilsons befriended Keyt and became collectors of his paintings.
Susili worked with Ian at the Library and may have had the chance to succeed him had the university at Peradeniya been able to keep its early promises. That was not to be and like many other academic families at Peradeniya before and after them, the Wilsons left Sri Lanka in 1973 with their young children, Malliha, Maithili and Kumanan to start a new chapter in the pastoral sweep of Fredericton in Canada.
They were already known among Commonwealth scholars in Canada, and had spent a year in Montreal when Professor Wilson was on sabbatical leave at McGill University. Wilson was Professor and Chairman of the Department of Political Science at the University of New Brunswick, Canada’s oldest university, for nearly 20 years. Mrs. Wilson joined the University Library and she was also active in the cultural activities of the small South Asian community in Fredericton.
Through the years they saw their children excel in studies and make their mark in their chosen fields: Malliha took to Law and became Assistant Deputy Attorney General in the Province of Ontario; Maithili was an Aeronautical Engineer and changed course to a career in Medicine as a Dermatologist; and Kumanan is a Medical Doctor and a distinguished specialist in internal medicine, digital health and public health policy.
After the Wilsons joined the University of New Brunswick, quite a few Sri Lankan students have done post-graduate studies at UNB, including three of Prof. Wilson’s former students at Peradeniya. “He observed ethnic parity,” Mrs. Wilson would say referring to his choice of students: a Sinhalese, Laksiri Fernando; a Tamil, the late Ambalavanar Sivarajah; and a Muslim, Rizwi Faizer (daughter of Dr. MCM Kaleel, well known Muslim political leader). Dr. Walter Perera of the Peradeniya University did his Masters and Doctorate in English at UNB.
I came to know Professor Wilson during my final year at the Peradeniya Engineering Faculty, in 1972, when I invited him to lead off the faculty’s annual Dean’s Day seminar on the new Republican Constitution, with Dr. Colvin R. de Silva, then Minister of Constitutional Affairs, as the featured speaker. I had also met him in the company of my uncle Rev. Thani Nayagam who was a good friend of the Wilsons. I met Mrs. Wilson and the children years later in Fredericton when my wife Amali was enrolled at UNB to do her MA in Anthropology. All of us who were in Fredericton at one time or another, are all grateful beneficiaries of the kindness, generosity and the hospitality of Mrs. Susili Wilson and Prof. AJ Wilson.
Prof. Wilson passed away early in 2000. Several years earlier, at the 1966 Kuala Lumpur Conference of the International Association of Tamil Research (IATR), with both SJV Chelvanayakam and GG Ponnambalam in attendance, Wilson presented a research paper on “The Contribution of some Leading Ceylon Tamils to the Constitutional and Political Development of Ceylon during the 19th and 20th centuries.” The death of Susili Wilson brings a distinguished closure to what was a distinguished chapter in the history of Tamil politics and constitutional development in Sri Lanka. To paraphrase St. Paul, she ran the good race, lived the good life, kept her promises, and has earned her rest. To her family and friends, and to her grandchildren, Melanie and Matthew, she leaves behind fond memories and rich legacies to cherish and to celebrate.
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A NOTE From Michael Roberts, 27 October 2025
AJ Wilson was one of my teachers at Peradeniya University in the late 1950s; and then a senior colleague within the Peradeniya Arts Faculty from 1966 onwards. When a small circle of activists initiated the Ceylon Studies Seminar on the 20h November 1968, Professor Wilson had the honour of presenting the first paper – entitled “Sinhalese-Tamil Relationships and the Problem of National Integration.”
In what was a groundbreaking practice, the CSS circulated cyclostyled versions of the written seminar paper beforehand and had each author present a 5-minute summary before discussions were activated. This procedure assisted a deeper investigation of issues.
SEE Nationalist Studies and the Ceylon Studies Seminar at Peradeniya, 1968-1970s | Thuppahi’s Blog
Thanks a lot for reposting this eulogy to Mrs Susili Wilson (daughter of S.J.V. Chelvanayakam), authored by Rajan Philips. The information provided by Phillips is a revelation for me, because I had been only a letter correspondent with Prof. A.J. Wilson, during his final decade in 1990s, after I met him once in Colombo in 1981. RIP Mrs Wilson.