Professor Walter Perera, revewing The Ceylon Journal Volume 2 Number 2 in The Island, 4 January 2025, where the title reads ““New Year Dawns with more stories of Sri Lanka” …. with highlights being impositions by The Editor, Thuppahi
In 2024, I helped launch the maiden issue of The Ceylon Journal [TCJ] to a full house at the elegant, near-patrician environs of the Sri Lanka Medical Association Auditorium. My encomium to the editor Avishka Mario Senewiratne for a well-wrought first issue was accompanied by a cautionary tale about the perils of editing. During my 16-year stint as editor of The Sri Lanka Journal of the Humanities [SLJH], I had observed how editorships sometimes become vanity projects which last only as long as the individual who does the job for a substantial period of time, retains interest; consequently, there was a need to plan for the TCJ’s long term future even as its first issue was drawing praise.
Less than a year later, I must necessarily rebuke myself with the biblical reprimand, “O ye of little faith”! Senewiratne has forged ahead and published two further issues of sustained quality with a fourth, the subject of this review, which will appear in early 2026. His energy does not show any sign of flagging.
The fourth issue begins with an interesting editorial-cum article by the editor “English Periodicals of Old Ceylon and the other The Ceylon Journal.” The pursuit through research to find a previous TCJ has inspired an expansive article that included journals and newspapers of the 19th century. In rummaging through a scrapbook belonging to Edmund Blazé, Senewiratne had found “a fragile pamphlet announcing the forthcoming publication of a periodical titled The Ceylon Journal, dated 1894,” a journal that never got off the ground.
Compiling an article about journals of a particular historical period can become a monotonous exercise with titles being listed as a disk jockey would, say, announce songs on a radio show. But Senewiratne’s article is dynamic. I was fascinated to learn that the governor Sir Robert Wilmot Horton who founded the Colombo Journal had expressed views that were so anti-establishment that the Home Office had it suppressed. The role played by missionary societies in sustaining journals and newspapers until “the focus began to move from proselytization to cultural and intellectual engagement” is set down with evidence. Equally well rendered is the way Ceylonese gradually took over editorships once (presumably) the effects of the Colebrooke-Cameron reforms that led to English being taught extensively in Sri Lanka resulted in locals with the required competency to undertake these tasks.
When I approached Ian Goonetileke to submit an article for the last issue of SLJH to be published in the twentieth century, he produced “Robert Knox in the Kandyan Kingdom 1660-1679: A Bio-Bibliographical Commentary 1975 (Addendum 1998),” his last published work. In acceding to my request, he asked if his friend Merlin Peris in turn would write another piece on his passion for “pachyderms,” a teasing reference to Peris’s “Knox on Elephants” which had appeared in a previous issue. Ironically, it was in Peris’s home that I last met CR de Silva, the author of “Elephants in Sri Lanka.” De Silva’s is more generalized than Peris’s research since it covers three centuries—the 16th to the 18th.
According to popular wisdom, elephants are categorized as Indian and African. De Silva adds a twist to this by identifying a subdivision because the Sri Lankan elephant was considered superior to the Indian from antiquity. He quotes Megasthenes in the third Century BC who declares that “Sri Lankan elephants were more powerful, larger and more intelligent than the mainland (Indian) elephants,” This is a view that is shared by other elephants, apparently! He cites Ribiero’s 17th century narrative: “Ten or twelve (elephants) from various parts were employed in dragging logs at the docks in Goa, but when one of the Ceilao animals was sent to work at the dock where all the others were, as soon as ever he entered, the others made him an obeisance with great humility.”
In this work of outstanding scholarship, de Silva explores how elephants were used over three centuries for multifarious tasks. He dwells at length on the way elephants were hunted, tamed and sold overseas and the conflicts between humans and elephants which exist to date. In conclusion, he points out areas that future researchers should take up.
Nimal D. Rathnayake concentrates on “the Rock Painting and Engraving Sites (RPES) that have come to our attention in the period since the late 19th century” with reference to “Gehenu dennage galge,” found at Buddama in the Uva Province. In an absorbing piece, he introduces readers to the various theories surrounding the images of humans, animals and birds found therein and what they say about the social interactions of the time. Although these engravings are largely undamaged by nature or human intervention right now, he insists that they be dated and safeguarded from potential threats.
TCJ has averaged about an article per issue on a female notable or on women’s concerns. Kanchanakesi Warnapala’s “Vanitha Viththi: A Pioneering Newspaper for Women” fulfils that role in the current number. After apprising readers of newspapers like Kulangana Handa which foreshadowed it, she proceeds to chart meticulously the evolution of this journal which initially championed women’s causes while not trying to offend men, through the time it became almost feminist in orientation until “film-related content and celebrity interviews began to dominate, producing a more stereotyped and fashionable model of womanhood.”
Vanitha Viththi existed from 1957 to 1985. Through this beautifully illustrated article, we recognise that this newspaper existed during momentous changes in the island–the social upheaval of the 1950s, Sri Lanka producing the first the world’s first woman prime minister in the 1960s, the insurgency of 1971, the left-wing policies that shaped the island from 1970 to 1977 and the Open Economy that was created thereafter. It does not need any prompting from the author for the informed reader to conclude that the demise of the journal coincided with the Open Economy.
“[T]he leading critic, novelist, and litterateur of 20th century Sri Lanka” is the subject of Uditha Devapriya’s contribution. What he finds unique in Martin Wickramasinghe is that he was of rural stock, unlike the modernist and other intellectuals whom he counted as his contemporaries, but not hidebound by tradition and custom. It is his independence of thought that enabled him to support the indigenous cultural revival while repudiating the binary stances of Christians vs Buddhists as espoused by Piyadasa Sirisena.
Devapriya can but skim through Wickramasinghe’s many achievements given the constraints of space. For instance, beyond stating that his “trilogy charts the descent of the southern Sinhalese feudal aristocracy and the rise of the colonial bourgeoisie,” he does not examine Wickramasinghe’s fiction at any great length. But the author should be credited for introducing the readership to Wickramasinghe’s multifaceted career as a novelist, journalist, essayist, and philosopher, a man who truly shaped 20th century Sri Lanka in several ways.
Chryshane Mendis’s “The Archaeology of Lanka’s Early Urban Centres Part 2” is a follow up to his article which appeared in TCJ 2.1. Here, he focusses on how Tissamaharama and Kantarodai developed as urban centres.
Senewiratne’s second essay “An Analysis of Population Statistics in Sri Lanka from Ancient Times to the Portuguese Period” highlights the “creative” and patently inaccurate manner of gauging population size in the island’s ancient chronicles and by some colonial writers in discussing the same period. He then enunciates how “the drafting of “tombus” (registers of lands and revenue)” and other measures, such as baptismal registrations, led to more scientific methods being adopted in Portuguese times. Major inaccuracies (both willed and fortuitous) remained. The tendency of the Portuguese to exaggerate the number of “enemy” soldiers lost in battle being one such example.
A telling response to Michiel Baas’s “What’s ‘Dutch’ About the Dutch Burghers of Sri Lanka?” comes towards the end: “That the Netherlands was not even remotely considered a destination [on leaving the island in the 1940s and 50s] underlines that what it meant to be “Dutch” Burgher was all about being ‘like’ the British.” The essay traces the rise and fall of the status of those who came to the island from Holland—their involvements with the Kandyan kingdom, the Portuguese, and the British. While the community endeavoured to keep itself distinct from others by founding the Dutch Burgher Union and other protocols, ultimately these actions were carried out to assure the British rulers that they were on a par with them, actions that were rarely successful.
Until email began to make its presence in the 1980s, many Sri Lankans would correspond with friends, relatives and businesses abroad via airmail. The exquisitely illustrated “Birth of Air Mail in Ceylon: The Indian Influence” by Srilal Fernando charts the history of the service from its hazardous beginnings to later times when it became the norm for international communication.
“The Lost Temple: Tenavaram and the Hindu Heritage of Southern Sri Lanka” explores the way several faiths intertwined in ancient times and how vestiges of Hindu worship are still found in Buddhist temples. The essay is also a “reimagining” of the fabulous temple Tenavaram situated where Devinuwara exists now. The Portuguese looted the temple for its gold and other wealth and built a church atop it. A Buddhist temple is now located therein. Hasini Haputhanthri, the author, concludes: “Tenavaram, along with many Hindu temples of the south, never regained its former stature. Its fading from the mainstream historical imagination reflects not only colonial destruction but also post-colonial marginalisation.”
It is saddening to read an article on the building of railway tracks during colonial times after the cyclone in December destroyed many of the iconic railway lines built by the British. But Indrani Munasinghe’s “The Construction History of the Uda-Pussellawa Railway in Sri Lanka” takes us through the challenges the authorities faced in the process—the need to persuade the British government that the narrow gauge line was essential for the tea industry and the tough negotiations with various groups such as the military who demanded high compensation for the land they would lose being just two such issues.
Much space in “Buddhism in Candlelight” by Asoka Mendis de Zoysa is devoted to Herman Hesse’s visit to the Sri Dalada Maligawa under candlelight. The Nobel prize winner’s reaction to Kandy is not too different from that of another famous literary visitor, DH Lawrence, ten years later: “The relic’s casket failed to impress Hesse,” the necessity to give numerous tips irritated him, and his interactions with priests, as rendered in his own words, were “an inadequate dream and delirious state.” The positive contributions of other Germans to Buddhism in Sri Lanka are noted with respect. While apparently sharing Hesse’s view that Buddhism has become commodified in the celebrated temples, de Zoysa identifies other spaces that encourage the more contemplative side of Buddhism.
Anslem de Silva’s “Laki, Me, and the Floral Unicorn,” which is the last essay, is a somewhat whimsical piece in which de Silva details how he became friends with Laki Senanayake, a man who supported many in the fields of art, sculpture and architecture, and interacted with him vis their common interests.
I suggest that the editorial team casts it net wide and find new authors to submit articles. The presence of familiar names in consecutive issues guarantees top drawer research but could give the impression that TCJ is too dependent on a charmed circle. That said, kudos to Senewiratne and others for bringing out yet another exceptional volume.
(The reviewer is Professor Emeritus, Department of English, University of Peradeniya)
*Copies of this valuable periodical can be purchased by contacting 072 583 0728
Review by Senath Walter Perera
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