Edwin Ariyadasa at 93

A tribute by Ajith Samaranayake on Edwin Ariyadasa's 80th birth anniversary in 2003.

Edwin Ariyadasa chuckles that he has outlived the Biblical span by ten years. This perhaps comes naturally to somebody who has been abstemious in his ways although in a newspaper interview he did admit that he had as a young journalist at Lake House both smoked and drunk. But that obviously was in the quite dim distant early days of inauguration into the tumultuous newspaper life. It is not merely the abstemiousness of his ways but the rigorousness of his intellect which has been able to carry Edwin Ariyadasa over the Biblical divide.

That admission of an early flirtation with cigarettes and drink does cast an unusually human light on a man who has almost become an icon of what is now called the Mass Media in deference to the prevailing verbal fashion. In fact Ariyadasa's progression from journalist to communicator, from wordsmith to media guru, is indicative of the man. It demonstrates his mental agility, his ability to adapt to the times and his consuming intellectual curiosity which has made him a bridge-head between generations and cultural eras straddling what is almost a century.

Higher education

Ariyadasa who was born on December 3, 1922 in Unawatuna in the Galle District had his early education at the Buddhist Mixed School in the village and his secondary education at Mahinda College, Galle. In his autobiography Bhava Thanha Sarvodaya leader A. T. Ariyaratne recalls that his elder sister, Mr. Ariyadasa and his sister had all studied in the same class at the Unawatuna school. Coming to Colombo for his higher education Mr. Ariyadasa obtained his B.A. from the University of Ceylon studying Sinhala with English as his subsidiary subject.

Picture then the native son newly-arrived in the big city in that twilight of colonialism. Education was the high road to social mobility and that education remained strictly liberal classical. Mr. Ariyadasa's generation was fortunate that it escaped both the mono-lingual fate as well as the mental adulteration to which later educated generations were so cruelly subjected.

In the pontifical view of Sir Ivor Jennings, the archetypal colonial intellectual, Ceylon may have been a cultural desert but at the University College and later the University of Ceylon the last generation of the colonial intelligentsia could yet hope to receive a rounded classical education. If one studied Sinhala and English one could read both Sanskrit aesthetics as well as the critical theories of F. R. Leavis, both the poetry of Thotagamuwe Rahula Thera as well as the fiction of D. H. Lawrence.

Destiny seemed to have already determined that this bi-lingual young man should become a journalist and rise to the pinnacle of that calling. He was also fortunate in his friends and patrons. Martin Wickramasinghe who was then a Lake House editor was a neighbour at Samudrasanna Road, Mount Lavinia (where I too spent two years much later) and though the years separated them the doyen of Sinhala writers and the serious-minded young graduate (both of them sharing a common southern ancestry) soon became friends and Mr. Ariyadasa was a regular visitor to the Wickramasinghe household even helping one of the writer's sons with his studies.

A fellow university mate was Esmond Wickremesinghe, the father of the Prime Minister, who had by now become the Managing Director of Lake House. Esmond who was then staffing his newspapers with young writers of a liberal or radical bent such as Regi Siriwardena, B. A. Siriwardena, Dharmapala Wettasinghe and Tissa Gunatilleke, invited Ariyadasa too to join the team. Mr. Ariyadasa recalls early morning duty at the Observer where Denzil Pieris and he took turns to write the daily editorial with a peon rushing the copy down to the compositors page by page as they wrote.

Native groves of academe

At Lake House Mr. Ariyadasa has roamed through all the press rooms having served at various times, the Observer, the Daily News and the Dinamina. He was a staff writer of all these papers, Features Editor of the Dinamina and capped it all by becoming the Editor of the Navayugaya. He introduced Sinhala writers of the 1960s and the 1970s to the English readership through reviews as well as by translating their stories into English in a very popular series which was titled "Take Five Minutes" in the Sunday Observer in the late 1960s.

Destiny was also preparing Mr. Ariyadasa for another important role. This was the 1970s and a new discipline named Mass Communications had taken the academy by storm. It was the latest fad in western universities and had soon spread to the native groves of academe as well.

The more prissy academics might have looked down their lordly noses at this upstart discipline but a department had been established at the Vidyalankara University (as it was then) at Kelaniya as an adjunct to the Sinhala Department with Prof. Wimal Dissanayake as its first head. Mr. Ariyadasa with his academic background, grasp of Sinhala and English and even intellectual temper coupled with his vast experience as a practising media man was the perfect choice as a visiting lecturer. Thus he became one of the original set of Mass Media teachers and has to his credit a vast army of students including those who today teach and head the departments of Mass Communications in universities.

Vast reaches of learning

He is the perfect embodiment of theory and practice which has made him one of the few serious media practitioners in the country over the last several decades.

What is remarkable about Mr. Ariyadasa is the range of his interests and the scope of his mind. Where most academics and serious writers are content to be limited by their chosen original discipline, Mr. Ariyadasa's mind has roamed far and wide. He is as knowledgeable about the humanities as the hard sciences, as proficient in literature as outer space, as cogent an advocate of the spiritual as a prophet of the micro-chip age.

It is common to call him a walking encyclopedia and he is an invaluable asset to a generation starved of a knowledge of English and thus debarred from the vast reaches of learning. One of Sri Lanka's first television pundits he is noted as a foreign affairs commentator whose exact diction and somewhat didactic air makes him a pleasure to listen to.

Mr. Ariyadasa's admiration for the United States of America and his fondness for Time are a loveable joke among his friends but this, one feels stems from his identification of America as the embodiment of the New World rather than any sense of imperialism which is normally associated with that country.

Cultivation of the mind

Similarly Mr. Ariyadasa does not propound any philosophy or subscribe to any particular theory or school of thought but his humanism and his willingness to share his knowledge with a new generation are beyond doubt.

A bachelor of whom it could be said that he had no time for marriage he has devoted his life to the cultivation of the mind and now in the evening of his life is attended by a loving extended family at the Manning Town super flats in Narahenpita where men and women come and go, talking not of Michael Angelo (as in T. S. Eliot) but of yesterday's seminar and this evening's theatre performance.

To pay tribute to Mr. Ariyadasa at 80 is therefore also to salute a vanishing cultural era in our country. It was a spacious era when men and women could still come from the villages and become imbued with a modern consciousness and sensibility without forsaking their roots.

It was an era of English education, modern knowledge and the peak of the humanities.

It was an era where men and women were large enough to transcend some of the petty man-made barriers which separated them from nature, oneself and their fellow human beings.

Dare we say that it was a time when men and women led more fulfilled lives? Journalist, editor, broadcaster, television personality, communicator and communications teacher, Mr. Ariyadasa is above all else, an old-fashioned man of letters whose mind at 80 still roams beyond the galaxies and the stratosphere and reaches out to the stars.