• Revisiting Martin Wickramasinghe through art, culture, and observation
• How Wickramasinghe saw the world and why that way of seeing still matters

At the Sapumal Foundation on Tuesday (31 March), the final instalment of a lecture series on Martin Wickramasinghe brought the focus to a quieter, but more revealing question. Not what he read, or even what he wrote, but what he saw.

Titled ‘Ways of Looking: Martin Wickramasinghe and the Currents of Sri Lankan Art,’ the session was presented by Uditha Devapriya in collaboration with the Martin Wickramasinghe Trust. The opening remarks were delivered by Avishka Senewiratne, with closing reflections by Hasini Haputhanthri. 

Together, the evening moved between art, literature, and cultural history, but kept returning to a single idea: Wickramasinghe was not only a writer of his time – he shaped how that time could be seen.

A figure interpreted, not fixed

Senewiratne began by situating Wickramasinghe among a small group of figures who, in different fields, reshaped how Sri Lanka understands itself. 

“These are men whose bones are buried but whose work continues to shape generations,” he said, placing Wickramasinghe alongside figures like Geoffrey Bawa and Ananda Coomaraswamy.

Yet, rather than treating him as a fixed cultural icon, Senewiratne approached Wickramasinghe through the eyes of others. A series of portraits by artists including David Paynter, Richard Gabriel, Aubrey Collette, Harry Pieris, and L.T.P. Manjusri revealed not just a single image, but many.

In Paynter’s rendering, Wickramasinghe appeared composed, almost self-contained. Gabriel’s version grounded him, heavier, marked by the weight of knowledge. Collette’s sketches suggested detachment, even amusement. Manjusri, meanwhile, moved away from likeness altogether. “He was not interested in how Martin looked,” Senewiratne noted. “He was interested in what he did, and how that disturbed our comfort.”

The portraits, taken together, did not resolve Wickramasinghe into a single identity. They unsettled it.

A method of seeing

If Senewiratne framed Wickramasinghe as a subject of interpretation, Devapriya shifted the focus to method. This lecture, he explained, marked the end of a longer journey. “The lectures began in November. They had to do with the books Martin read. This one is about the things he saw.”

Wickramasinghe, he argued, functioned not only as a novelist or memoirist, but as something closer to an anthropologist. His writing on culture and society in the 1940s and 1950s was grounded in observation, in patterns, and in the logic of everyday life. 

“He wrote extensively on his culture and society,” Devapriya said. “What is not appreciated enough is that his writing followed a methodology rooted in a specific way of seeing the world around him.”

That way of seeing was shaped early. Born in 1890 in Koggala, the only son among eight daughters, Wickramasinghe grew up in a setting that gave him both stability and freedom. He moved through the village without restraint, observing, listening, absorbing. His interests ranged from science to marine life, and his time exploring places like Jungle Beach exposed him to a world where different influences met without clear boundaries.

“He saw how these different cultures and influences came together,” Devapriya said. “From an early age, he was aligned to these experiences.”

This mattered, because it placed Wickramasinghe outside the dominant intellectual frameworks of his time. Much of the early writing on Sri Lankan history, art, and culture came from British administrators or local elites shaped by colonial institutions. Wickramasinghe, by contrast, approached culture from within lived experience rather than inherited authority.

Culture as adaptation, not imitation

One of the clearest threads running through the lecture was Wickramasinghe’s rejection of cultural purity. For him, Sri Lankan culture was not something fixed or preserved intact. It was something formed through contact.

In works like ‘Ape Gama,’ he traced how colonial and local influences interacted in everyday life, often in ways that were visible but not always acknowledged. Devapriya pointed to examples such as temple architecture in the south, where Buddhist spaces adopted visual elements that, at a glance, resembled European churches. To an untrained eye, the resemblance might suggest imitation. For Wickramasinghe, it pointed to something else.

“All cultures are the sum of different influences,” Devapriya said. “But that does not make the final product derivative.”

This position extended to his critique of colonial art criticism. At a time when local forms such as ritual masks, temple paintings, or devil dancing were dismissed as crude or vulgar, Wickramasinghe argued for their legitimacy. What mattered was not where a form originated, but how it functioned within a society.

“Ultimately, in matters of art, the question of origin does not matter,” Devapriya said. “What matters is how society responds to it.”

Seeing beyond the aesthetic

Haputhanthri’s closing remarks brought the discussion back to the experience of reading Wickramasinghe, less as a scholar and more as a reader encountering him over time. She described him as a figure shaped by contradiction, moving between village and city, between classical and folk traditions, between interior and exterior worlds.

“He was a very complex character living through a very complex period,” she said. “When you read his work, you see these worlds merging.”

Her reflections also challenged the way art itself is often framed. A Buddhist statue, she pointed out, is not created for aesthetic appreciation in the way Western art might be. “We call the Buddha statue art,” she said. “But a Buddhist would not look at it for aesthetic enjoyment. It serves a different need.”

This distinction sits at the heart of Wickramasinghe’s thinking. He recognised that cultural forms cannot always be understood through imported categories. They must be read within the contexts that produce them.

A way of looking that endures

What emerged over the course of the evening was not simply a portrait of Wickramasinghe, but a framework. He did not see culture as something pure, nor as something diminished by influence. He saw it as something shaped, continuously, through interaction, tension, and adaptation.

In that sense, his relevance extends beyond literature. It sits in the way he observed, questioned, and connected. A way of looking that resists easy categories, and instead asks what lies beneath them.