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| Sunday, 10 July 2005 |
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Stilling of a resonant voice Sunday Essay by Ajith Samaranayake
That was a fitting tribute to a man who had adorned public life for almost half a century as a writer poet. Provincial Council Minister but above all else as an unparalleled political orator but who lived at the Serpentine Flats at Borella in typical plaebian surroundings which was surely close to his great heart. Vajira Pelpita was born in 1940 to a respected family in the Ruvanwella electorate. His family came from the feudal class of the time which he later treated with characteristic disdain. There would have been something of the rebel in him even in his adolescence for he took to the robes at an early age. He was ordained as Yatideriye Vajirabuddhi and this is how we know him in his first person. Vajira was infinitely fortunate in his associates. His political mentor was Dr. N. M. Perera, the Member of Parliament of his area who took the young monk under his wing. They used to travel together for political meetings and in a recent reminiscence Vajira recalled that NM had a westerner's fastidiousness about not spitting on the road. His argument had been that so many edible plants could come up on that roadside which could be harmed by such senseless action. The encounter between the Sauve Marxist leader, the first Leader of the Opposition, a pupil of Harold Laski and one who had been described as the ideal Labour Prime Minister if only he had been born in Britain (perhaps a precursor of Harold Wilson) and the young idealistic monk was the stuff of history. Vajira became an active member of the LSSP and its youth leagues and rose to its highest councils the Politburo and the Central Committee. Later he joined the Communist Party of Sri Lanka and occupied similar positions. Another early influence was Ven. Mapalagama Vipulasara, the sculptor monk who created the stage for the visit of the late Pope John Paul the Sixth Ven. Vipulasara was a broad-minded bhikkhu who straddled both the progressive political movement as well as the artistic avant garde with finesse and the young Vajirabuddhi no doubt profited by that encounter as well. The Ven. Yatideriye Vajirabuddhi burst on the national imagination at the General Election of 1970. On the UNP platform of Prime Minister Dudley Senanayake there was a formidable triumvirate of bhikkhus Devamottawe Amarawansa, Meetiyagoda Gunarathana and Hettimulle Vajirabuddhi. The only monk to address the public meetings of SLFP leader Sirimavo Bandaranaike was the young Yatideriye Vajirabuddhi but he was the star of the rolling cavalcade of that historic election which brought a Government into power by a two thirds majority. Soon after that election Vajira left the robes appropriately enough in India, the land of the Thathagatha and always the intrepid newspaper editor, the late Gunadasa Liyanage, juxtaposed the photographs of the monk and the layman in the now extinct 'Riviresa' newspaper. A graduate of the University of Benares, Vajira was well versed in Sanskrit, Pali and English. He had a great love for India which he considered the womb of our common civilisation. For a person who came from an essentially rural Sinhala background and who to boot was a bhikkhu he had no sense of communalism or majoritarian chauvinism quite in contrast to some fashionable intellectuals and writers who in their dotage have exchanged the boheminiasim of their youth for the most retrograde kind of extremist communalism. Vajira was among many other things a Minister of the Western Provincial Council during President Kumaratunga's stewardship of the council as Chief Minister and President of the Sinhala Kavi Sammelanaya. He was both a gifted poet as well as one of Sri Lanka's best Sinhala political speakers. As a speaker Vajira with his deep and resonant voice brought into pay formidable resources. Apart from his deep knowledge of the language he also brought to bear a folksy wisdom about men and matters leavened with his own philosophy of life and an incredible wit which had his audience in stitches. In the last analysis then how would Vajira like to be remembered? This might be a rash surmise but I for one believe that his memory in history would be as one of the best products of the humanism personified by both Buddhism as well as the classical Marxist tradition. He was too young to associate with the great radical political bhikkhus of the Vidyalankara Pirivena of the pre-Independence period such as Bambarande Siriseevali, Yakkaduwe Pragnarama and Kotahene Pannakitti but he surely drew from their roots. But as a former monk he was a formidable challenger of the present Buddhist movement which is seeking to uproot that tradition and take it to a vicious chauvinistic political culture. Most other obituarists have said that Vajira had died when his services
were most needed but perhaps his premature death was due to the
senselessness of our own society of which he did not want to partake any
longer. |
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It rained briefly last Monday afternoon as they carried Vajira Pelpita
away from the Art Gallery, that unlikely mausoleum for the great and the
good in the arts, in a country lacking such a public space. The rain did not
hamper Vajira's funeral obsequies but was rather in the nature of a blessing
by nature itself. 
