Category Archives: literary achievements

September 24, 2016 · 11:01 am

Lakshmi de Silva: An Inspiration as an Academic

KS Sivakumran in Daily News, where the title is  “Lakshmi de Silva – an academic to reflect upon”

aa-lakshmiA remarkable translator, teacher and a poet in English and perhaps in Sinhala too is the unassuming and scholarly Lakshmi de Silva. She is one who had encouraged me to write and was persistently asking me to bring some of my articles in the press to be collected in book form. Last year, Vijitha Yapa Publications published a collection of 26 poems of her under the title Reflections running to only 35 pages qualifying its stature as a booklet. Invariably a printed book should have at least 50 pages according to the National Library Services Board. And yet the quality of her poems is uniquely of a high standard in the classical sense. Continue reading →

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September 4, 2016 · 9:43 am

Victor Melder’s “Randolph” Problems. A Split Personality

Victor Melder of Rhythm of the Wheels 

I have had several messages from my cyber world contacts asking why the name change from Victor to Randolph Melder. Whilst some believed it was a SCAM, others thought I was having a mid-life identification crisis, yet others wanted to know the new email address!! At birth I was named Randolph Johnny Victor Melder, and from day one used Victor as my first name, so as to distinguish me from my father – Randolph Joseph Churchill Melder, as he used his first name Randolph (Rando) for identification.

aa victorImagine the confusion, as all official documents carry my official name – Bank, Medicare, GP Services Driver’s Licence etc, to have them call out Randolph (in the words of a friend with the same problem), I am tempted to scream, Randolph Melder died in 1989.       Continue reading →

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August 31, 2016 · 3:30 am

Reading Amunugama’s Study of Anagārika Dharmapala in LION’S ROAR

Tissa Devendra in The Island, 31 August 2016, where the title reads “

I quailed when asked to review Sarath Amunugama’s 700-odd page work on Anagarika Dharmapala’s life and times. I wondered what else was there to write about this colossus who strode across the Buddhist scene in the ‘Ceylon’ of little more than a century ago. So many of his statues adorn our towns and so numerous are the books, pamphlets, learned articles, both in English and Sinhala, published in Sri Lanka, India, Britain and America that there seemed little new to say. But Sarath Amunugama — administrator, politician, art lover and, above all, a meticulous scholar — has overcome my reluctance with his comprehensive, yet eminently readable, study of the Anagarika’s life and times, aptly titled The Lion’s Roar- a singularly apt description of the reverberations that the Anagarika caused in Colonial Ceylon and India.

Anagarika Continue reading →

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August 11, 2016 · 12:41 pm

Sustaining Research at Peradeniya Arts Faculty: Pathways

GERADL PEIRISGerald Peiris, in a Talk entitled ‘For a Sustainable Tradition of Research in the Peradeniya Faculty of Arts’

 The Chief Guest, Dr. R. H. S. Samaratunga; Vice-Chancellor, Professor Upul Dissanayake; Chairman, Professor Shantha Hennayake; distinguished participants of the conference,  I thank the Vice-Chancellor and the organising committee for inviting me to make this presentation. Apart from the honour, any visit to the university is, to me, a sentimental journey down the memory lane stretching back almost exactly 60 years to July 1956 when I came here as a first-year student..

I should begin with a comment on the conference theme –‘Unleashing Minds to Create a Sustainable Future’– by stating that it would be prudent to make it more explicit with an addition of a few words for it to read: ‘Unleashing minds to create a sustainable future of peace and prosperity for the people of Sri Lanka’ to clarify that what we expect is not, say, a future of dependence and subservience to the global powers, not a future as a component of the Indian federation, not a future that discards our treasured cultural heritage, and  not even a fancifully imagined future as “The Knowledge Hub” of Asia, or of South Asia or of the Indian Ocean periphery.

PERA 22

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July 14, 2016 · 4:04 pm

A Sensitive Prisoner Memoir: Commodore Boyagoda’s Captivity in LTTE Heartland

Sunila Galappatti in conversation with Commodore Boyagoda, courtesy of The Wire, 14 July 2016, where the title is “The Risks of Testimony: ‘Memories of Captivity with the Tamil Tigers”

It takes a long time to tell this story to friends: to say that I have a book just out; that I worked on it for five years without speaking openly about it; that it is a memoir written in the voice of a naval officer who was held captive for eight years during the Sri Lankan civil war and that he speaks of that experience in an understated and accepting way.­

SUNILAThis acceptance is the most surprising thing about the story and, almost immediately, people ask, “Did he go Stockholm?” I tell them it is a joke the commodore makes. “Maybe I have Stockholm syndrome,” he will say, and laugh. How is he to know, or I? We are not able to make a diagnosis, any more than the people who ask the question.

34a - Black Tigers Marching 36b-T-tigresses

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July 5, 2016 · 4:32 pm

My Peradeniya Days: Labrooy, Pinto and Jennings as Touchstones –KM de Silva

Kingsley de Silva, being a section from Chapter V entitled “Academic Life” which is part of his Memoirs [in process]

The academic and intellectual life of the campus I have left as the last part of the collage, in reverse order of importance. At the end of my first year I had a choice of reading for a special degree in Economics or History. Given that choice most of my peer group would have chosen Economics because of the career prospects a degree in that discipline would offer. In my first two tutorials in Economics, F R jayasuriya, , a senior and controversial teacher, gave me an alpha; any pleasure 1 derived’ from that was completely lost when I discovered that every one in my group had also got an alpha. I decided that there was no intellectual challenge in getting an alpha on such easy terms and so the option of Economics was voluntarily closed, I had no doubt that it would be History, and 1 have had no regrets in making that choice.

L 6ah -Justin & Ford Popular 1952. WJF LabrooyPERA 33 www.ft.lk

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July 2, 2016 · 4:36 am

A Tribute to GC Mendis: Pioneering Tertiary Education in History for Lanka

Michael Roberts

 The teaching of history at a tertiary level began with University College in Colombo in the 1920s, where students were prepared for an external degree at the University of London. Professor SA Pakeham taught medieval and modern European history to those who enrolled for such courses. Pakeham’s place in the history of history-teaching yet awaits its researcher.[1] One contribution stands out: Pakeman seems to have discerned the talents of Garrett Champness Mendis, then a Lecturer at the Government Teacher Training College. An opening was secured for his postgraduate training under Professor Rhys-Davids at London University and GC Mendis proceeded to UK to work under that renowned Pali scholar.

GC MENDISThis period of study encompassed extended sojourns in Munchen (?) in Germany[2] under the tutelage of Wilhelm Geiger (1856-1943). This spell in England and Germany resulted in his command of Pali and his dissertation A Historical Criticism of the Mahavamsa (1930, unpubd). Amazing as it may seem, he could not be slotted into history teaching at University College when he returned and he was appointed initially as a Visiting Lecturer in Pali.[3] Continue reading →

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July 1, 2016 · 4:17 pm

Dr. GC Mendis and the Colebrooke Cameron Papers, 1956

IMG_3785-4r copy Dr. G. C. Mendis 05

In the third quarter of the 20th century when I was studying history at Peradeniya Campus University of Ceylon, it was fashionable for budding historians to select political topics, such as the periods of British Governors, for their dissertation work. I opted otherwise and chose agrarian history for my D. Phil. Work at Oxford. This leaning had been generated by my 4th year Honours course under W.J. F. Labrooy where we had to cut our teeth in documentary explorations through the two volume ‘monument’ edited by Dr. G. C. Mendis, namely The Colebrooke Cameron Papers, two vols. Oxford University Press, 1956.

Dr. Mendis had retired from university service by the time I entered Peradeniya, but, building on the work of S. A. Pakeman at University College in Colombo, he had been the founding architect of the Department of History at the University of Ceylon, with the able assistance of his younger colleague, W. J. F. Labrooy, over many a year.

So the opportunity is taken here to introduce The Colebrooke Cameron Papers to all those readers interested in Ceyloniana and Sri Lankan history as one facet in the elaboration of Dr. G. C. Mendis’ vital role in the development of the discipline in Sri Lanka  with the aid of a bibliography of his works. Michael Roberts Continue reading →

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June 28, 2016 · 3:53 am

Trouser under Cloth: Architecture and Nationalism in Sri Lanka

aa- anomaThe role of the home, the domestic sphere and the intimate, ethno-cultural identities that are cultivated within it, are critical to understanding the polemical constructions of country and city; tradition and modernity; and regionalism and cosmopolitanism. The home is fundamental to ideas of the homeland that give nationalism its imaginative form and its political trajectory.

56-a body of leadng graphite entrepreneurs

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June 28, 2016 · 2:51 am

Deloraine Brohier on Lineage and Memories

Carol Aloysius, courtesy of the Sunday Observer 26 June 2016, where the title is “My Parents’ Genes shaped My Life”

DELORAINE
One of Deloraine Brohier’s most vivid and fearful memories was living in snake infested circuit bungalows- the transit homes for the wandering Brohier family headed by Ceylon’s first Ceylonese Surveyor. “My father, Dr R.L Brohier joined the exclusively British run Survey Department in 1910 and retired in 1949. The youngest in a family of three, I spent my early childhood travelling with my parents to wherever my father was sent. My first memory is Ratnapura when I was about five. Like all the circuit bungalows we lived in, it was beautifully landscaped and overlooking the Kalu Ganga. Unfortunately, it was snake infested”, she recalls, still shuddering at the memory.  One encounter in particular stands out, if only because it was so terrifying.  ” I was just four, and liked rolling on the carpet. One day, I sat on what looked like a big bump under the carpet. Thinking it was a cushion, I began riding on top of it like an imaginary car. Then, my father noticed the bump moving. After instructing that I be carried away without frightening me, he hit it hard with a club. And a huge snake slithered away!” Continue reading →

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