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| Sunday, 26 October 2003 |
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Saman Herath Chandrasiri A tribute to a beloved teacher SUNDAY ESSAY by Ajith Samaranayake When I wrote an autobiographical essay in these columns on August 10 on the occasion of my 49th birth anniversary I referred to a teacher who had an especial influence on our intellectual development, Saman Herath Chandrasiri. But I did not know then that Mr. Chandrasiri might well have been dead even as those lines were written a fact which I discovered only last week. I did not inquire about when or how he had died. The fact of death can not be expunged or reversed however one might seek to adorn it with details. Mr. Chandrasiri who taught Sinhala to several generations of students at Trinity College, Kandy was something of an enigma. In retrospect one feels that Mr. Chandrasiri himself was by no means reluctant that the situation be such if he did not actively collaborate in the cultivation of this enigma. Part of the mystery was that he had been for a time a bhikkhu which is probably true although nobody to my knowledge has got this fact ascertained from Mr. Chandrasiri himself. He certainly had a deep knowledge of Sinhala, Pali, Sanskrit and Buddhism but it was not merely as a teacher of these subjects that he touched our lives. He taught us about life itself. A matter of interest for the educationists if not the sociologist is how the elitist English-medium private schools such as Trinity and S. Thomas' Mount Lavinia came to recruit purist Sinhala teachers to teach their anglicised students their mother tongue. One explanation is that the Principals or Wardens of these schools themselves being classicists steeped in Latin and Greek came to recognise their counterparts in the 'Hela' school of Sinhala teaching. Whatever the reason it is a fact that 'Hela' teachers such as Sri Charles de Silva at Trinity (who produced students such as Wimal Dissanayake and Sarath Amunugama) and Arisen Ahubudu at S. Thomas' had a dominant influence on the teaching of Sinhala in their times. By the time we arrived Sri Charles de Silva was long gone but the Sinhala Faculty was presided over by another Charles, Charles Amunugama or E.M.C. Amunugama who too died a few months ago. A former Principal of Vijaya College, Matale who had unsuccessfully contested a parliamentary seat in the 1960s Mr. Amunugama had distinctly pro-UNP views. In this sense Mr. Chandrasiri was a perfect foil to him for although not belonging to any political party he was a flaming radical by any standards and was not reluctant to speak out on the subjects of the day however tangenitally they may have had a bearing on whatever he was teaching at the moment. This can be easily dismissed as 'talking politics in the class room,' a cardinal sin in the eyes of the conservatives but looking back this kind of informal discourse by a teacher can serve to widen one's mental horizons and enrich the mind as no book or lecture can do. As I have already observed Mr. Chandrasiri did not champion any particular political party's cause so that he could not be accused of partisan propaganda. He spoke from the broad point of view of a humanistic socialism and in the cloistered atmosphere of the Trinity of that time what he spoke did much to drive into the minds of even the privileged offspring of the upper middle class (the generic species of the Trinitian of the time) some sense of the social injustice then prevailing and the need for a more egalitarian social order. This was the time of the April 1971 Insurrection and a year after the then prime Minister Sirimavo Bandaranaike attending the school's Centenary prize day as its chief guest (the first time in Trinity's history that a politician had been invited to be the chief guest) congratulating the school that no Trinitian had been involved in the Insurrection. This compliment was taken in a self-congratulatory spirit but it also served to underline even in a negative sense the insularity of most of my school mates of the time. School is after all not entirely about teaching or studies. It is also about the kind of values which one can imbibe both from the school as an entity as well as the teachers who make up that collective entity. In that sense Mr. Chandrasiri and Mr. Esperance Ratwatte (to whom too I have referred earlier) were pre-eminent. While Mr. Chandrasiri spoke from the point of view of socialism Mr. Ratwatte perhaps because he was a Kandyan who had been bred in an anti-colonial milieu spoke from the standpoint of a fierce nationalism. It was Mr. Ratwatte who inspired Ruvan Ekanayake (Sri Lanka's best younger cardiologist today) and me to bring out a hand-written magazine titled 'Jathika Jeevaya' several issues of which were brought out by us in the year 1968 when we were only Grade 8 students the year of the students' revolt in France and the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. Mr. Chandrasiri also was a partner in a minor coup which two of us pulled off in the early 1970s. After the results of the GCE (O/L) examination was released L.S. Abeygunaratne (now the Additional District Judge of Colombo) and I discovered to our dismay that we were not qualified for the Advanced Level classes. It was then that Abeygunaratne showing early signs of his legal acumen found that we could get into the A/L class if we studied Buddhist Civilisation a subject which was not taught at college at the time. Finally we were able to persuade the then Principal Mr. E. Lionel Fernando (Himself a man of wide sympathies) to place the subject on the curriculum with Mr. Chandrasiri as the teacher. We were a class of two and sometimes not being able to find a class room we used to roam all over the school finally ending up in the tuck shop or the balcony of the school hall to discover what the Buddha taught at the feet of Mr. Chandrasiri allegedly the former Buddhist monk. Mr. Chandrasiri was not very tall but he was stocky and powerfully-built with a moustache and wavy hair. He also had a deep voice and was one of the most powerful speakers whom I knew at the time. When driven to anger or protest a torrent of words would emanate from him and we would gaze at him amazed that the Sinhala language could be put to such powerful use. He was one of the very few people who at that formative stage in our development instilled in us a sense of social injustice and the need for a more egalitarian social order. Our class consisted sons of UNP Cabinet Ministers barons of commerce and other such rightwing luminaries but even they listened to Mr. Chandrasiri's heretical views with respect. Mr. Chandrasiri no doubt had the satisfaction that he was boring in to the citadel from within and sowing the seeds of radical ideas in the closed minds of the offspring of the Kandy bourgeoisie. POSTCRIPT: Percipient readers would have of course, noted a mistake in the previous column. Leonard Woolf never wrote a novel called 'Baddegama'. This was A.P. Gunaratne's brilliant translation of Woolf's novel 'Village in the Jungle'. The novel was made into a film by Lester James Peries on a screenplay written by the late Prof. A.J. Gunawardena. |
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