Online edition of Sunday Observer

Sita Kulatunga worked at the Open University as its Editor. In the Open University the main stay is the print materialbecause books are printed in both languages and for different levels. All the books that are printed here have to be edited.

However, the Editing Department is not so strong and the Subject Department itself does the editing. But a good number of the editing, where the language is not up to the mark done is done by the Editor. "From 1987 to 1997 I worked as the Editor at the Open University.

(This article is written in response to a number of inquiries, especially from G.C.E. Advanced Level students and students who follow the National Diploma in English about the life and work of Ms. Sita Kulatunga)

Then I retired from service but continued to do some translations for the Open University. One thing I felt was that there were very intelligent people on the staff because they were compelled to work in a language with which they were not at all competent, the material that came was weak.

And in the Open system, we have to write simply. I could remember one student, I think an Engineering student, who came to me.

There was a description of a machine and at the end of it, a sentence started with ' Apart from it ...' and this boy did not know what " Apart from it ..." meant. He thought that it was a part of a machine. In workshops I conducted for lecturers, I taught these are elementary things to students. Then there were typing mistakes in the translations. after this I did some work for Advance Technical Colleges.

My second collection of Short stories, which came much later than Dari, was " High Chair and Cancer Days ". Then came " Sakhada" - a collection of short stories in Sinhala. These stories have Nigeria as a background. The translations of Prof.Asoka Bandarage's " Women, Population and the Global crisis " as " Kaanthawa, Janagahanaya saha gooliya Arbudaya " and " Colonialism in Sri Lanka " by Prof.Asoka Bandarage. There are poems like " Godperson and other poems " and there was a poem on the" Mango tree " that was at my ancestral home.

Speaking on education as being a liberating factor, Prof. D.C.R.A Goonetileke in " Sri Lankan English Literature and the Sri Lankan People 1917-2003 " comments on " The spread of education as being a liberating factor, as revealed in Sita Kulatunga's ' The High Chair ' (1979). It focuses on the daughter of the village dhobi woman who is aided by an educational system that enables her to enter the university as an equal of a member of the village elite.

This makes her all the more conscious of the humiliation and oppression of the cast system which is so acutely felt when, her mind and body no longer is accustomed to the family occupation, she is compelled to deputize her mother who is ill. Her self-consciousness is tempered by a sneaking sense, as in a Jane Austen heroine, that she is a heroine only to herself." " ...... Sita Kulathunga published" A Gode person and other poems (2003)"

Prof. Yasmine Goonaratne in her collection of Sri Lankan women writers in English, has dedicated a chapter to Sita Kulatunga's literary contribution to Sri Lankan writings in English. She comments, " Sita Kulatunga's novel, Dari, The Third Wife, was awarded the Sri Lanka Arts Council Prize for English writing in 1988, and short listed for the Gratiaen Award.

The fruit of the author's teaching experience in Nigeria, this novel is an ornament to Sri Lankan English letters: a quite remarkable tour de force, it reveals through a series of intimate letters to a school-friend the innermost thoughts of a young Nigerian woman who, just when she is beginning to think of higher education and a career, is given in marriage to a prosperous businessman as his third wife.

'Dari' a thoughtful, high-minded and passionate young woman who must learn to keep her deepest feelings and aspirations under control in the enforced idleness of her husband's house. Her relationship with her 'mates' (the two senior wives of Alhaji Bello) and their children, her relationship with her husband, and her strategies for survival in the claustrophobic atmosphere of her new existence are areas explored in convincing detail and with utmost naturalness by Sita Kulatunga: The heat saps your strength and even moving from one place to another seems an exhausting and heavy task.

The throat is parched all the time and when you drink something sweat pours out of every pore of your body. Mere trifles can irritate you, and throw you out of equilibrium.

The pitifully small square of a window placed high on the back wall of my bed room (it is so high that I have to climb on to a stool to reach it) is the only opening to the outside world ... I can't understand why they placed this apology of a window so high up on the wall. To me, it is symbol of my woman's plight, the semi-imprisonment. Whatever I see of the world is through that aperture by getting on to a stool, which might totter at any moment.

"Sita Kulatunga's fine story ' The High Chair ', which won first prize in the Short Story competition conducted in 1977 by the English Association of Sri Lanka, and was awarded SAARC Women's prize in 1999, has been translated into German by O.Froehling and into Japanese by Tadashi Noguchi.

It focuses on a Sinhalese village girl who has been able, despite her origins, to enter university. Prema is the daughter of a dhobi woman. A highly intelligent young woman, she is humiliatingly aware that she belongs to a cast that is considered inferior to most others according to the rules laid down by the hierarchical social system, which still flourishes, in 'democratic' Sri Lanka.

At home on her first university vacation, she has offered to deputize for her sick mother, wash a bundle of soiled clothes and household linen at the stream, and, the task completed, delivered a bundle of freshly washed and ironed laundry to the home of the Chairman of the Village Council. " says Prof.Yasmine Goonaratne. ...Dreading an encounter with the Chairman's son Thilak Jayasuriya, her classmate at Peradeniya (though not in the village, where he had attended a superior school), Prema enters his home through the back door.

Luncihami, a servant of the household ' who knew who is who, provides Prema with a small schoolroom chair to sit on when she calls with her bundle of laundry: for a dhobi's daughter, a high backed chair of the dinning room at the Chairman's residence -chairs on which she and her kind are not permitted to sit -are out of bounds , representing a way of life that her birth has placed beyond her reach.