Tissa Jayatilaka and Jayantha Dhanapala, …. their OCR Text of the INTRODUCTION to in a FELICITATION OF Professor ASHLEY HALPE IN November 2008
Introduction
Ashley Halpé, Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Ceylon (now Peradeniya), celebrated his 75th birthday on the 19th of November, 2008. This birth anniversary also marked 50 years of his service as a teacher both at home and overseas. He has also enriched us by his research, poetry, paintings, translations and labours as a chorister, actor and director of plays and as an administrator. In addition, he has been a guide, philosopher and friend to generations of students and colleagues, many of whom have distinguished themselves in diverse fields of activity. He is, however, not a pedant or an abstruse intellectual. He is a down to earth human being and a congenial fellow-traveller known to let his hair down with glass in hand on an evening of civilised fooling over a round or two of contract bridge! Whilst giving of himself to the world around him in his characteristically understated style, Prof. Halpé has been, and remains, the exemplary family man, a devoted husband and caring parent. In fact, it is virtually impossible to speak of or write about Ashley Halpé without in the same breath mentioning Bridget, Mantha (Guy), Haasinee and Aparna, the rest of the Halpé gang!
The International Centre for Ethnic Studies (ICES) of Colombo decided early in the year to felicitate Prof. Halpé when he reached the milestone of his three score years and fifteen by bringing out a collection of essays in his honour. This Festschrift, edited by Prof. Chelva Kanganayakam, a former student of the man being honoured, who is now Professor of English at the University of Toronto, Canada, is scheduled to be released in December.
As only a limited number of contributors could be accommodated in the ICES publication, it was inevitable that a significant number of others from Sri Lanka and overseas had to be left out of it. They were, however, most anxious to pay their tributes to Ashley Halpé and in their quiet determination to do so turned to Bridget, Mantha, Haasinee and Aparna Halpé for help. The result was the decision to publish these less formal paeans of praise in a separate publication to complement the ICES volume. Hence A Garland for Ashley – Glimpses of a Life.
Ashley Halpé is the quintessential Peradeniya man. He belonged to the very first batch of Arts undergraduates who went up to the spanking new University of Ceylon on the banks of the Mahaweli Ganga in 1952 and remained there thereafter except for the brief period when, in their twenty first year, the Halpés were ‘thrown upon the world’ by ‘foul extrusion’. The sordid details of this ugly episod, are recorded by Tissa Jayatilaka in his essay in the felicitation volume edited by Chelva Kanaganayakam referred to above.
In a chapter he contributed to a book on the Peradeniya University, Ashley Halpé has written enthusiastically and evocatively of the glorious origins of his alma mater. ‘The whole concept’, Halpé tells us, was magnificent. This was no Oxford or Cambridge growing at its own sweet pace over the centuries and evolving a visual splendour of dreaming spires or of colleges by the Cam by imperceptible increments. Peradeniya was all planning, its variations of Kandyan architecture daringly blended with elements from Anuradhapura and Polonnaruwa, the whole flower “fragrant with shadow” intricately balancing formal landscaping and
.. chaste permitted wilderness
Complete with winding walks and warbling stream
Designed to breed debate and poetry…
The description occurs in his essay ‘Dear Perpetual Place’ in Peradeniya: Memories of a University, edited by K.M.de Silva and Tissa Jayatilaka, p.45 (International Centre for Ethnic Studies, Kandy).
Jean Arasanayagam’s poetic tribute to Halpé also captures effectively this magic of Peradeniya:
That was the month I remember
When the trees were wreathed with coronets of flowers
Bougainvillaeas bloomed in the ornamental park
Breathing in the excess of their own flamboyancy
We pushed aside their thorns
Crushed their tissue flowers like broken kites
Against our fingers.
It is this institution that nurtured Ashley Halpé (‘And Peradeniya claimed him for her own’ – ‘The Boyhood of Chittha’ in his Silent Arbiters, 1976) and to which he has given back in ample measure. He did not hold back as did that miserly son who figures in that well known Sinhala folk poem and Peradeniya has not had to pose to this distinguished son of hers the same sad poetic question the distraught mother posed to her ungrateful son-manalada puthey kiri dunney ma numbata? Ashley Halpé’s giving has been abundant and fulsome and, as Gerry Peiris tells us he has given with ‘undimmed passion and grace’:
Those of us who had the opportunity for ringside observation of how the university system works are aware that courage of convictions cost Ashley certain career rewards at the highest levels. He figured at the vanguard of resistance against the efforts of the early 1970s to dismember the University at Peradeniya under the guise of ‘rationalisation’ of higher education. A decade or so later he fell into disfavour even with some of his long-standing personal friends who had acquired control over university governance because of the unconcealed support he gave to victims of inequality and injustice. He also bore with equanimity the victimization he himself suffered. These setbacks and disappointments were inconsequential. There is no doubt in my mind that Ashley has, in fact, earned in abundance the rewards of real worth due to him for his unique and indelible contribution to the university community in its first fifty years at Peradeniya, and that he has quite ample reason for contentment about what he has given and achieved. I have seldom seen the esteem and affection with which he is held by former students being offered with comparable intensity to other Peradeniya teachers of our time.
Ashley Halpé was twice a Fulbright scholar and has, over the years, contributed handsomely to the promotion of mutual understanding between Sri Lanka and the United States. His contribution to putting Sri Lanka on the map in the other parts of the world has been equally substantial as testified to by Eric Williams (Canada), Richard Murphy (Ireland), Anthony Newman (United Kingdom), Werner Habicht (Germany), easily overcoming the “European distance” in the process which in his modesty he initially thinks he is incapable of doing), Peter Elkin (Australia) and Meenakshi Mukherjee, Keki Darruwalla and Haresh Trivedi from closer home (India). The latter is of the opinion that, “Ashley is probably the best known Sri Lankan academic on the English teachers’ conference circuit in India and also, with his affability, modesty and sheer goodness, the most warmly regarded…. In recent times, in the circles in which I move it is Ashley more than anyone else I know who has proved to be a bridge between Sri Lanka and India, and of a kind equally well regarded and celebrated on both sides. May he live long and go on refining many more peoples’ notion of Sri Lanka.”
Dennis Bartholomeusz in a warm personal tribute recollects that Ashley Halpé’s was “one of the best lectures on Hard Times by Charles Dickens that I have ever had the pleasure of listening to, greatly appreciated by students and staff at Monash University while John Holt of Bowdoin College in Maine, U.S.A, referring to him as “Teacher Extraordinaire” salutes Ashley Halpé “as the wonderful epitome of a teacher, a hybrid personality reflecting the best of Lankan possibilities and sensibilities”. Ashley Halpé is indeed the “national treasure’ that Shelagh Goonewardene, W.J.M Lokubandara, among others, say he is. Jayantha Dhanapala echoes the sentiments of many a Peradeniya product when he says with “a sigh of relief and joy” -that “Ashley Halpé took the path less travelled by and that has made all the difference for all of us as his friends and his students.”
It is salutary, we feel, to end this introduction with the concluding thoughts of yet another wonderful product of Peradeniya’s famed Department of English, Prof. Dennis Bartholomeusz-
“Professor Emeritus, Ashley Halpé, remains a many-sided Renaissance thinker, against all the odds, when the nation heading for a new birth in the 1950s, appears to be heading today in the opposite direction. Professor Halpé with his undivided passion for music, poetry and painting has kept a small creative lamp burning bright as the night grows darker. His [publications] speak for the nation as a whole, a pluralist culture, now being busily torn up by the politicians as if war was a game of snakes and ladders played by children. The most vividly authentic of Halpé’s recent paintings exploring the wastelands of death in the run-down gardens of Eden, tell us that war is no game. His astonishing colours glowing into life approximate to a condition of music.”
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