Karl Gunawardena and Robert Knox - a memento

by Dr. Wilfrid JAYASURIYA

Karl Gunawardena, whose recent death we mourn, taught us history (“Ceylon history”) in the mid-nineteen-fifties when we were undergraduates in Peradeniya. I remember him as a dapper young man, dressed in shirt and tie, speaking from the bottom of Room A or the Arts Theatre in a very clear and audible voice on a literary historical subject-Robert Knox’ Historical Relation of the Island of Ceylon. Because I was not a “history special” student I did not know him personally but I remember his series of lectures vividly because of his verve and wit.

Robert Knox

Using a document to teach history and reading extracts from it, commenting critically on them, presenting the historical background in England and in Ceylon which gave depth and meaning to Knox’ work, quoting extracts from it for the sound of the prose was a literary exercise he revealed in and by which we were held captive. I wish I could have said this when he was alive but after his talks we would say to each other “what an interesting talk that was. “He rivalled Father Ignatius Pinto’s talks on European history with such memorable phrases as “he (Knox) preferred water and the hand to toilet paper” which I considered to be on par with Pinto’s “Elizabeth was only a political virgin.” These were introductions to pithy and witty writings on history which naturally led me to A.J.P Taylor’s essays on British and European history one of which began with a “Good gentleman, I am the Protestant whore,” said Nell Gwynn, when she was surrounded by a hostile crowd after the death of Charles the Second.” Karl showed the way to make history controversial, vivid and entertaining besides being learned.

As events turned out I did not meet Karl Gunawardena after that but I remembered him well enough to follow up on various writings on Robert Knox including a superb dissertation / book written by Suranganie Amarasuriya as her offering for the PhD from Hong Kong University. If I remember right her thesis was that Knox’ book was a verbal onslaught on the East, a kind of opening shot, to clear the way, soften the target as it were, for the physical onslaught on the countries like Sri Lanka that were eventually conquered and colonized. Knox wrote in the 1680s and the British conquered Kandy in 1815 and in between were the Portugese, the Dutch, Queroz etc “old unhappy far off things, and battles long ago.” Perhaps it is less fashionable now after globalization and hybridity to plug that line.

Recently I found that Knox’s chapters or essays were so well organized as models of composition that they could be used as rhetorical exercises in teaching undergraduates. For all of these I owe a debt to Karl Gunawardena.

These historical/literary interests which Karl Gunawardena stimulated as a undergraduate remained with me when I became a District Land Officer in Ratnapura and found that the diaries of the Government Agents were still available in the Kacheri record room and that the Government Agent Malcolm Abeyratne had already started reading them and copying extracts from them for a book of classified extracts on such subjects as land work, gemming, elephant kraals. These extracts were to me basically a continuation of a historical relation of the island of Ceylon as conceptualized by Robert Knox. I used them in a publication called The British Diaries and referred to them consistently in talking about my work as a District Land Officer in my recent novel: Time Traveller. A friend described this activity as “disturbing the dustbin.”

Surely there is much truth in that, as much as there is truth in man’s mortality: ashes to ashes, dust to dust. But yet some live in others’ memory and I remember Karl Gunawardena, from fifty years ago, as someone whom I admired and who unknown to himself showed me a way, and to whose memory I offer this little tribute.