Novel topics, my domain

By Nilma DOLE

Richard Boyle was born in November 1950 in Kent, England, whose father, A. C. Boyle, was a well-known doctor. Having attended Haileybury and Imperial Services College at Hertford, he won second prize in the Brooke Bond National Travel Scholarships and Educational Awards in England in 1964 for an ‘anaconda story’. In 1970, he worked at the Thames Aeroport Group, which was promoting an offshore airport/port as the third London airport. His duties were mainly writing relevant material for the Chairman, Sir Willian Gorell Barnes, one of Edward Heath’s ‘flying knights” who negotiated Britain’s entry into the Common Market.

In 1973, he became the second assistant director of ‘God King’, directed by Sir Lester James Peries, which gave him his first taste of Serendib. Richard wanted to produce and write his own movies, which resulted in several years of toil before setting up ‘East of Elephant Rock’, a Maugham-esque project with the now well-respected director/producer Don Boyd, starring John Hurt, Judi Bowker, and Jeremy Kemp. The film was shot entirely in Sri Lanka in 1976, and was screened at the London Film Festival, although poorly received by the critics. The next year, 1977, he wrote and co-produced the elephant horror movie, ‘Rampage’, a UK/Sri Lankan production directed by the late Manik Sandrasagra and starring the late great actor Gamini Fonseka.

Over the next few years, with help from Swami Siva Kalki he developed an off-beat science fiction project, Point of No Return, which was never filmed, despite help from Clarke.

In 1984, after a series of failed projects, and with a new interest in documentaries, Richard decided to quit movies.

He married Sharmini Chanmugam, one of the first TV producers in Sri Lankan television, settled in Colombo, and set up a specialist documentary production company that made material for UN agencies and NGOs.

Richard scripted, while his wife directed. Productions included Old Trails, New Paths, Barefoot Radio, The Plumber and Pericles, How to Avoid the Suriya Tree, Natural Allies, Hazard Profile, Gender Agenda, and The Suffering of a Nation.

Today, Richard Boyle is a cultural researcher/ writer, gifting us with astounding books like B.P. de Silva: Royal Jeweller of South Asia, Knox’s Words and ‘indbad in Serendib - as well as having participated in the Galle Literary Festival this year.

A new book Zeylanica Britannica is in the works and he invited us to his nature-friendly abode for a bit of pow wow.

Q: How did you get into writing?

A: I first got into writing through feature film scriptwriting, and then wrote documentaries, but having done that for about 15 years, I decided that I’d had enough of the problems of being a producer and financing independent films and decided to work on my own at my desk.

Q: What else impelled you to move on from scriptwriting?

A: I always had an interest in researching 19th century literature on Ceylon by English authors and I had become weary of the creative strictures associated with scriptwriting. I felt inspired by that period, which I later researched in detail when I volunteered around the turn of the century to assist the Oxford English Dictionary with its revision. I set myself the task of reading 100 books from Robert Knox’s first description of Ceylon in English published in 1681, to Anil’s Ghost by Michael Ondaatje published in 2000. I read these books primarily to extract all the references to the nearly 100 words in the OED that are either of Sinhala origin or associated with the island, such as chena, kangany, kabaragoya, etc.

Q: How do you research?

A: The research process is unplanned and can take me in all sorts of surprising directions that you couldn’t have imagine at the start. During my time in Sri Lanka I had become friends with two of the best researchers of this period. One was the late, great bibliographer Ian Goonetileke who had compiled his multi-volume ‘A Bibliography of Ceylon’.

Then there’s Ismeth Raheem, professionally known as an architect, but his immaculate and far-reaching research rivals his trade. His extraordinary mind holds a great wealth of information on many aspects of Ceylon. They have both been a great help to me. There are others: Rajpal de Silva and his marvellous collections like Newspaper Engravings and Illustrations & Views of Dutch Ceylon and Manik Sandrasagra who gave me an eclectic introduction to Sri Lanka in the 1970s.

Q: Tell us about your publications.

A: The first book I published was B. P. de Silva’s biography, ‘B. P. de Silva: The Royal Jeweller of South East Asia’. His story is of interest because he was one of the many jewellers and other craftsmen from Galle and surrounding villages, especially Magalle, who, living near a major port, emigrated in the mid 19th century to seek their fortune elsewhere. They were the first to do so in Ceylon.My second book was a direct result of my research for the revision of the OED. This revision is likely to take many years. So far murunga is the first new Sri Lankan word to be added. The book called Knox’s Words looks at the 26 words that Knox first used in English in his book A Historical Relation of Ceylon. The most important of all of these words is Buddha : it was Knox who brought this hallowed name to the world, together with more mundane words like kittul and tic-polonga and words that are of English construction, like land-leech , which is used nowhere else.

My next literary venture was more of a reader’s book. I wrote Sindbad in Serendib to highlight some strange and curious facets of Sri Lanka.

One is the curious association of the name anaconda with the island, an association that has been referred to briefly recently with the birth of 20 anacondas at the Dehiwela Zoo. In brief, it seems that the Dutch, while labelling the snake specimens they had acquired from their colonies, mistakenly attached the label for the brown vine snake, the henakandaya in Sinhala, to anaconda. In addition, the word anaconda was used for the first time in English in a tall story about an anaconda that attacked a tiger on the outskirts of Colombo.

The next book I’m working on, Zeylanica Britannica, concerns interactions by British people with Ceylon, mostly described in their books or autobiographies. There’s a reasonable selection of female writers - Maria Graham, the first English woman to describe Ceylon in 1810, and then there was the notable botanical artist, Marianne North, and Leonard Woolf’s sister Bella, who wrote the first pocket guidebook on the island. Then there’s the famous Victorian actress and occultist, Florence Farr, lover of George Bernard Shaw among others, who came to the island to become principal of Sir Ponnabalam Ramanathan’s Girls College in Jaffna. Unfortunately she had breast cancer and died in a Colombo hospital. There’s chapter concerning the novel Captain Singleton by Daniel Defoe, the first appearance of Ceylon in fiction. Other chapters include Charles Dickens Edward Drood and the Twins from Ceylon, which was unfinished at the time of his death, and the visit of D. H. Lawrence.

Q: How do you cater to the needs of your audience?

A: I try to tune my work to topics that have not been well covered in the past or not covered at all. For example, as in Sindbad in Serendib, the full account of the etymology of anaconda has not been written about before, as with the The Three Princes of Serendib the fairytale that inspired Horace Walpole to coin serendipity . Also in this volume I recount the little-known story of the ship the ‘Pearl’, which was attacked by a giant squid outside Galle. I’m not sure whether it was mentioned in local newspapers a century ago but it hasn’t been written about in modern times. So I try to document rare information to assist future generations of researchers.

Q: Describe an unforgettable experience.

A: My first taste of Ceylon. Just a few months before I came here, I had the privilege of watching the documentary Song of Ceylon (1934), one of the best ever made, with Basil Wright as its director. It had a tremendous impact on me and gave me a wonderful foretaste of this country.