The Moonemalle Inheritance:
Social history analysis through ancestry
By Prof. Yasmine Gooneratne
Writing a family history is a formidable undertaking. When Rajiva
asked me to say a few words on the occasion of the launching of his
book, I am amazed now at the light-hearted way in which I accepted his
invitation. I was recalling, I think, the playful spirit in which I
started writing a book about my own family in 1980, and I had quite
forgotten the hard labour that occupied the five and a half years which
passed before Relative Merits appeared in print in 1986.
Rajiva, who is, as you know, an erudite, sensitive and extremely
hardworking teacher of literature, tells me that Relative Merits
established a ‘genre’. Such a statement, coming from a person trained to
make careful literary judgments, seems to indicate that in many places
in this land, there must be people beavering away at putting on record
the stories of their own families.
Well, good luck to them, I say. I had no intention of establishing
any kind of genre. But, given the deep interest most Sri Lankans take in
hunting out and talking about their own ancestries – not to mention
hunting out and talking about the ancestries of others, especially of
people they don’t like very much –it is more than likely that there are
numerous people here this evening who are engaged in biographical
writing of one kind and another.
Family history
I would therefore like to give you some idea of what is involved in
writing a family history. And also, perhaps, some insight into what
writing this book must have involved for Rajiva.
Hunting of any kind is detective work, and readers of crime fiction
know that the first thing a detective must do is to list the names of
the principal suspects. Sir Peter Wimsey does it in the novels of
Dorothy Sayers, Hercule Poirot does it in Agatha Christie’s books.
Accordingly, Part 1 of The Moonemalle Inheritance gives us the names
and backgrounds of several families connected with the ‘Old Place’, a
walauwa built in Kurunegala during Queen Victoria’s reign by Edward
Gregory Gunawardena, an enterprising young lawyer from Galle.
Gunawardenes, Moonemalles, Hulugalles, Wickremesinghes, Wijesinhas –
there was room in that spacious mansion for them all.
And that is saying a lot, for families were large in those days,
possibly in imitation of the Queen herself, and the comforts of those
families were attended to by an army of live-in retainers.
In dealing with numbers on such a scale, some organising principle is
essential, and the traditional system, common to nations everywhere
which own large and ancient families, is the Family Tree, on the trunk
of which can be grafted slips from varied sources. When Rajiva prepares
this book for the hard-cover publication such an important book
deserves, I hope he will include a Tree that identifies the slips, and
shows where and how they attached themselves to the main trunk.
That would certainly be a great help to the researcher who is not, as
one might say, to the manor born. Such a researcher may find the
connections between individuals and families obscure. A Family Tree also
exercises a cautionary warning regarding the dangers to future
generations of the continuous inter-marriage that has for so long been
practised among landed families.
What are the clues to the mysteries of who was who, and what was
what? A biographer will find them in a Family Tree. Our society is not
only multi-ethnic and multi-religious, it is multi-layered. Imagine a
cake such as the famous Bolo Folhado, which our first Western
conquerors, the Portuguese, introduced to this country in the 16th
century.
Family Tree
Now consider how closely our multi-layered society resembles that
cake, in which pastry is alternated with fruit and sugar. Look at the
Family Tree of any old Sinhalese family, and you are looking at over
three centuries of social change, as the names of Portuguese fathers and
godfathers give way in the 17th century to surnames such as Jansz and
Jansen, Van Langenberg and Van Cuylenberg, prefaced by the Christian
names of Dutchmen and Dutchwomen. These yield place in turn to the
Jameses, Alberts, Stanleys, Alfreds, Georges and Percivals that were
adopted in the 18th century as our families built up fortunes, entered
the professions, and prospered under the Pax Britannica.
Finally, with independence in the 1940s, came the recollection of a
Sinhalese/Buddhist past. ‘Louis’ transformed into ‘Lalita’, ‘Peter’ into
‘Piyasena’, ‘John’ into ‘Jayasena’, ‘Albert’ into ‘Ananda’.
If you want to trace your forbears, look at their names, and see them
with fresh eyes, not just as beloved grandparents and honoured
great-grandparents, but as flag-carriers of history.
Biographies, like novels, require memorable characters, and Part 2 of
this book brings into view a remarkable personality who makes magic and
weaves spells. I saw Ena Aluvihare first when, as a child of about six,
I was taken by my parents to see a film, The Blue Bird of Happiness, at
the Regal Cinema in Colombo. The foyer was crowded with people, and
while we were queueing up for our tickets, there was a great buzz of
talk – apparently someone special had just arrived, and was, at that
moment, walking into the theatre.
My father lifted me on to a chair so that I could see what was going
on. That was when I had my first glimpse of Rajiva’s aunt Ena. Her
extraordinary beauty was already a legend; in her kingfisher-blue silk
osariya, tall and slim, with her black hair in a knot, and a single
black kiss-curl on her cheek, she was unforgettable. And I never did
forget her.
For years Ena in her blue silk sari was remembered by me as an
authentic symbol of beauty, truly a blue bird of happiness, and it is a
special joy to me to be associated with a book that gives substance to
that memory.
Ena de Silva appears in Part 2 of this book as a real-life wit and
charmer. She is also a great traveller, constantly on the move to see
new locations and meet new people. Channa Daswatte will speak of her
artistic skills, her feeling for the handicrafts of the island’s village
people, and her unique contribution to Sri Lanka’s developing ideas
about furnishing and interior design.
And Ena appears again in Part 3, as a fictional character, the
creation, partly, of her nephew’s imagination, and partly, of his
political vision – though not, I was amused to find, of hers! For Rajiva
has told me that his aunt Ena became extremely cross when she discovered
that that ‘her’ fictional character (Phyllis) becomes in his book the
wife of ‘Tom’, the novel’s fictional version of the late Mr J.R.
Jayewardene.
That said, let us consider – as all detectives must do – the motive
that inspires the writing of a biography. First and foremost is, I
think, the wish to put things on record, and a useful exercise,
preparatory to the writing of one’s own book, is to borrow or buy, but
certainly to read the biographies written by others.
That is the quickest way to get to know what had been done, what is
expected, what is acceptable to one’s contemporaries and prospective
readers.
This, alas, can be a disappointing exercise in the Sri Lanka of
today, in which most new biographies are ‘Lives’ of politicians.
Although some of these people may be personally known to you, and some
of them may be relatives or lifelong friends, you may find them
unrecognisable in print.
The inconvenient wives of first marriages, for instance, have been
known to be air-brushed out of existence, glaring political gaffes that
are well-known to everyone have been omitted or glossed over, and haloes
have been painted around the heads of every stumbling sinner.
There is, alas, no shortage of sycophantic literature around these
days, and praise is lavished on public men by the writers of their
lives, with an extravagance that beggars belief. What is the desire, the
hope, that motivates the writing of such nonsense? Let’s not ask. The
mindset of such writers has not changed in many years: it’s just got
more firmly set and cemented.
A motive of an entirely different kind, and one with which I have
every sympathy, is the one created by an author’s awareness that a
valued way of life is passing, and by his wish to capture and explore it
on the page before it vanishes for ever. Old houses fall into disrepair,
old families scatter and dwindle, but the written word can hold them
steady, and endow them with permanence for posterity.
Among the outstanding virtues of this book is the fact that, despite
the political connections – and in some cases, eminence – of some of the
people who inhabited the Moonemalle walauwa, Rajiva’s account of them
stays scrupulously this side of idolatry. Not even when writing of
Bishop Lakshman Wickremesinghe, a person so much admired and honoured by
others beside Rajiva himself, or of the enormously gifted Ena Aluwihare,
clearly the heroine of this book, whose talents have become part of our
own lives, does our author fall into the traps of sentimentality or
sycophancy.
And although resentments and regret do occasionally pulse beneath the
book’s civilised surface, the reader is left at the end with memorable
impressions only, of affection and of love.
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