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| Sunday, 4 July 2004 |
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Colvin : The heroic phase Sunday Essay by Ajith Samaranayake
The publication of a Sinhala biography of Dr. Colvin R. de Silva by veteran author Malalgoda Bandutilleke (Colvin Shega Enterprises - Rs. 400) provides an appropriate point of departure to reflect on the life and times of this gargantuan figure who would have been 97 if he had been alive today. Colvin would have been a brilliant academic historian if he had not turned his considerable talents to politics and the law. Although a full time politician of the Left, he became one of the most successful criminal lawyers of his time, capable of deploying awesome forensic skills. He was a major figure of Sri Lanka's Left movement, a formidable theoretician who was nevertheless also a very successful politician and a monumental parliamentarian of the classical school, a rare blend for it is not always that thinkers make very good public figures. A solid rock of a man who was courageous to a fault in the defence of his cause, never perhaps has a contemporary public figure combined within himself such diverse qualities as Colvin Reginald de Silva the hero of our narrative. Colvin whose doctoral thesis was the famous 'Ceylon under the British Occupation' was himself a shining example of the upward mobility of the colonial middle-class which the Colebrooke-Cameron reforms produced in Ceylon. This was a class distinct from both the old doddering aristocracy of the Kandyan highlands as well as the new comprador land-owning classes of the Western Province who were later to lead the reformist constitutional campaign for Independence. The middle-class was a professional class which had reached its positions in life through its own efforts and the English education which the British had introduced to produce a class of native loyalists. Colvin's father was an allopathic doctor and the fact that his father was able to support Colvin (as he did his elder son Walwin, the civil servant) through CMS mission school, Balapitiya, St. John's College, Panadura to Royal College, Colombo culminating with the University of London was testimony to the steady upward mobility of this middle class throughout the colonial period, ending with their absorption into a new urban upper middle-class produced by the expanding opportunities opened up by the colonial order. Imperial metropolis In fact this colonial middle-class ambience was to give its curiously quaint flavour to the young lawyer who returned from the imperial metropolis as a committed revolutionary. He took rooms at the YMCA hostel in the Fort and set up practice as a lawyer since he wanted to belong to a profession which would free him from ties to the government or any other official institution. He travelled by a rickshaw to the Wellawatte mills where he organised and led Ceylon's first strike. Life as an agitator did not postpone Colvin's entry into the bourgeois institution of marriage for at the age of 27, he married his cousin Suvineetha, the first woman to pass the Cambridge Senior examination from his native Balapitiya. The wedding was held at the Colombo Town Hall and among the invitees was another young lawyer J.R. Jayewardene who had been Colvin's classmate at Royal College. If this suggests a cosy Colombo ambience, Colvin obviously saw no contradiction between it and the radical life of a trade unionist and an agitator where he had chosen to turn the very weapons of bourgeois society such as the law that he had studied against the oppressive colonial order. Colvin was not only the first trade unionist to defy by then petrified Labour Party Leadership of A.E. Goonesinha, but he was also the first President of the LSSP and the fact that he was chosen for this position from a galaxy of talent such as Philip Gunawardena. Dr. N.M. Perera, Leslie Goonewardene and Dr. S.A. Wickramasinghe was a tribute to Colvin's undoubted leadership abilities and oratorical and propagandist skills even as a young man. By inviting such leaders of the Indian Independence struggle as Pandit Nehru and Kamaladevi Chattopadyaya to Ceylon, the young LSSP firebrands, two of whom were by now State Councillors, were able to raise the banner of rebellion against British rule. When a wave of strikes broke out on the upcountry estates, Colvin was at hand to lend his legal skills on behalf of the widow of a worker Govindan who was killed by Police firing at Muloya estate. (Later he affected the nom-de-plume of Govindan in his polemical writings.) Both here and in the case against the deportation of the young Australian planter Bracegirdle, the LSSP was able to put the colonial government to rout by proving in the first case the illegality of the order to fire and in the second, the illegality of the Governor's deportation order. What emerges is a complex portrait of a politically conscious, highly intelligent and articulate young man sprung from a colonial milieu. He does not disdain the education and related skills and benefits which the colonial order has brought him, but seeks rather to turn them against that order. He does not reject the duties and conventions of middle-class life such as marriage and begetting children, but this does not prevent him from going underground when the party is prescribed and its leaders incarcerated culminating in the famous jail break and flight to India. This is the life of a radical, led in the womb of middle-class gentility in a country lacking a revolutionary tradition. By holding public meetings in the teeth of opposition both from the British Raj and the propertied interests such as the leaders of the effete Ceylon National Congress and organising the exploited workers on the tea plantations, the LSSP leaders had to invent in Ceylon a whole revolutionary tradition within the framework of their middle-class colonial milieu. Heroic years Bandutilleke, the biographer is at his best, portraying these early heroic years of Colvin and the LSSP during which they faced courageously their opponents and made great sacrifices for their struggle. Colvin for example was a father of four when he was jailed and saw the children only after five years when he was released from prison the Second World War. The years which follow although industriously documented here are more pedestrian and anyway raise some painful questions which the biographer cannot quite answer. Some of these anyway lie outside the scope of a biography and demand nothing less than a history of the party both before and immediately after the war. What lay behind the bifurcation of the LSSP and the Bolshevik Leninist Party of India (BLPI) after the war and would the LSSP have taken a different direction if the split had not taken place? If the LSSP had not abandoned the revolutionary path for the parliamentary road, would its future have been different? Did the tactic of the coalition with the SLFP, of which Colvin did not quite approve, bear the necessary fruit of helping the LSSP make inroads into the rural masses or did it pave the way for the party to be dissolved within the SLFP? These questions tend to cloud somewhat the early heroic phase of the LSSP, but histories and biographies such as this are necessary and useful in shedding light on a period in Sri Lanka's history from which we can immensely profit. For they draw our attention to a time when men were truly great, when they did not fear to make sacrifices for the larger cause, when public life was capable of producing genuine good. Those men (and women) are to our day like giants to pigmies. More immediately, Bandutilleke's 'Colvin' (which is profusely illustrated) brings to life the character of a man who personified the revolutionary tradition like no other and as propagandist, political leader, parliamentarian and lawyer made an immeasurable contribution to the social progress of post-independence times and improving the quality of life of the mass of the people of town and countryside. For if Colvin and his like could not make the Sri Lankan revolution, they were nevertheless able to see in their lifetimes the egalitarian ideas which they introduced into society in the 1930s bear fruit in the vast body of progressive social and labour legislation and a better life for their people. |
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