The following is the draft of a speech the writer delivered at Lakmahal Community Library on Thursday (27) on Martin Wickramasinghe. The event was facilitated by the Martin Wickramasinghe Trust and was moderated by Hirun Matheesha. This is Part I of the lecture. Part II will follow next week.
Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, and thank you for coming.
I want to begin with a quote: “Reading books was his only way forward.”
It has a wider relevance to today’s presentation. I will return to it towards the end, and I will reveal who said it as well, but do bear it in mind until then.
I think Hirun Matheesha introduced me better than I ever could, though I suspect he was too kind and generous with the introduction. So I will skip the ice-breaker.
Martin Wickramasinghe was easily Sri Lanka’s most well-known and prominent novelist and critic of the 20th century. In a career spanning 60 years – his first major work was published in 1914, his last in 1973 – he authored some 13 novels, a number of short story collections, and countless collections of essays on art, culture, history, literature, and politics.
In terms of the themes he tackled in these works, he was a polymath. Though not an artist in the conventional sense of that word, he was a leading modernist in Sri Lanka and perhaps in South Asia, even if we often do not give him credit for this.
For obvious reasons, it is his fiction that has endeared him to the reading public in Sri Lanka. And why shouldn’t it? After all, there is hardly a student or a university undergraduate who has not heard of ‘Madol Doova,’ the Koggala trilogy, or even ‘Viragaya.’ These are seminal works in the context of Sri Lankan and Sinhala literature, and they have been translated into several languages, including Hindi, Russian, and Chinese.
By all accounts, Wickramasinghe was a voracious writer. He was also quite generous with his books. He had a tendency, which I suppose is intrinsic to all of us writers, to gift them to everyone and anyone he met and became friends with.
If you read through his letters and correspondences – all carefully preserved at the Martin Wickramasinghe Trust – you will find that in every other letter someone writes to him, there is an acknowledgement of a gift of several books. It did not matter who it was: the US Ambassador in Colombo, the Warden of one of the leading schools in Sri Lanka, or the guard at a museum in Kent.
“It was very kind of you recently to send me the inscribed copies of two of your books, ‘Aspects of Sinhalese Culture’ and ‘Sinhala Language and Culture’” – letter from Christopher Van Hollen to Wickramasinghe, 21 July 1975.
“I am writing to thank you very much for the copy of your book which you have so kindly sent me… I have not yet had time to read it, but I am sure it will be interesting” – letter from R.S. de Saram to Wickramasinghe, 14 March 1950.
“On returning to Ceylon, I sent the keeper of the Darwin Museum a copy of the fifth revised edition of my Sinhala book on Darwinism and evolution” – Martin Wickramasinghe, ‘The Darwin Museum in Kent,’ ‘Revolution and Evolution.’
The fact that he could reach out to different kinds of people, from different backgrounds and stations in life, and use his books to connect with them at an intellectual level, shows how much of a networker he was in addition to being a thinker. This was true at almost all points in his life: long after he had become established, he was writing letter after correspondence to almost everyone he met. And he was gifting his books to all of them.
Born a decade before the turn of the 20th century, Wickramasinghe quickly became the preeminent public intellectual and contrarian thinker of his time in Sri Lanka. He fused these two personalities within himself, and in doing so made a significant contribution as a thinker.
I see this contribution as fundamentally being two-way. First, he wrote on a range of topics, in his home language Sinhala, which had not been accessible for local audiences. Second, he used his first-hand knowledge of his culture, applied the frameworks of foreign thinkers and scholars, and wrote extensively in English on his society.
In doing so, he redefined what it meant to be a public intellectual.
”A powerful shaper of public discourse, who made it clear that one cannot become a public intellectual without reaching the public” – Nalaka Gunawardene, interview with Uditha Devapriya, 12 March 2025.
To have written so much and made such a contribution, Wickramasinghe no doubt read a great deal before he began to put his thoughts down in pen and paper. To understand this and appreciate it, however, we need to be aware not so much of what he wrote as what he read, and more importantly, how he reflected on what he read.
The Martin Wickramasinghe Collection at the National Library in Colombo contains over 5,000 books. Most of them are worn out and dusty, although well preserved. Some are recent additions. The oldest among the collection date to the early 1910s. Straddling different periods, genres, and subjects, they remain a useful guide to the man who owned them, read them, and wrote on the topics they covered.
Arguably the most interesting point about them are the annotations. Wickramasinghe was a voracious reader. Indeed, he called himself an “omnivorous reader”. He spent much of his income on books. He was indiscriminate yet critical in what he read. This comes out quite well in the annotations.
Some of the older books have notes every few pages. The more recent ones hardly have them at all. This shows that Wickramasinghe was learning about these subjects for the first time and that he was reading as much as he could about them. As he read, he remembered. As he remembered, he annotated.
Most of these annotations are marginal comments. Some point to other sources. Many are critical, hardly any laudatory. On the side of one page in the 1934 edition of Caroline Rhys Davids’s ‘Outlines of Buddhism,’ to give one example, he argues the author seems “ignorant of modern anthropology”.
In his copy of Maurice Baring’s ‘An Outline of Russian Literature,’ published in 1914, he critiques the author’s characterisation of Leo Tolstoy.
For whatever reason, Baring was highly critical of Tolstoy: “Tolstoy wrote about himself from the beginning of his career to the end.” To this Wickramasinghe responds: “This observation is wrong. It is… altruism which impels Tolstoy to confess all the wrongs he has committed.”
Between Baring’s book and Rhys Davids’s there is a space of 20 years. During this period Wickramasinghe had matured and evolved. Beginning his life in Colombo as a bookkeeper to a shop owner, he went on to write articles to the Dinamina. In 1914 Wickramasinghe wrote his first novel, ‘Leela.’ His preface to the first edition makes it clear how much of an influence the books he was reading had upon him.
In no ambivalent terms, he notes the futility of drawing lines between Western and Eastern philosophy, science, between ways of looking at the world. The story itself unremittingly critiques tradition and order.
“There cannot be one shastra (system of knowledge and thought) for Asiatic people and another shastra for Western people” – Martin Wickramasinghe, ‘Leela.’
Such attitudes could only have been fostered through the books he was devouring. As he himself recounts in his memoirs ‘Upan Da Sita,’ he started reading rationalist and Western texts almost as soon as he shifted to Colombo in 1906.
Wickramasinghe’s granddaughter Ishani remembers his library very well.
“As a teenager I read D.H. Lawrence, Tolstoy, the Russians, from his collection. For him, reading was a window to the world” – Ishani Sinnaduray, interview with Uditha Devapriya, 20 March 2025.
She also recalls he was insistent that his children and grandchildren read English and that they did not limit themselves to Sinhala or Sri Lankan literature.
“He regarded Sinhala literature highly. And he had a complicated relationship with Western culture. He critiqued it, yes, but he also recognised its value” – Ishani Sinnaduray, interview with Uditha Devapriya, 20 March 2025.
It is not within the scope of this lecture to delve into these aspects of Wickramasinghe’s life, work, and thought. However, it is clear he could not have written what he wrote without reading what he read. That is a convoluted way of putting it, but it is true.
To appreciate this, we need to realise and understand that his collection at the National Library is but a sizeable fraction of the total number of books and publications he acquired or read in his lifetime. Indeed, at one point in ‘Upan Da Sita,’ he confesses that he no longer has a copy of a certain book or text with him. Yet the memory of what he read remained clear and sharp in his mind.
What that indicates, more than anything else, is that he had no alternative to the books he read. Deprived of formal education at a fairly early stage in his life, books became a crucial part of his growing up. To appreciate this fact further, though, it is necessary to go back and revisit his childhood and teenage years.
Martin Wickramasinghe was born 135 years ago, on 29 May 1890, in the southern village of Koggala, some 22 km from Galle and 140 km from Colombo. Koggala stood at a midpoint between Galle and Matara, two of the leading coastal villages in British Ceylon. In his two memoirs, ‘Ape Gama’ and ‘Upan Da Sita,’ Wickramasinghe remembers vividly the world he was born to.
A highly impressionable mind, he often wandered around his village, playing with children his age and exploring the natural surroundings. When he moved to a new school, Buonavista College, run by the Anglican Church in Unawatuna, later, he spent his free time exploring the jungle beaches in Rumassala.
“Twice or thrice a week, after school was over, I went to the Rumassala forest… I was vaguely certain there were lions in Rumassala. I also felt there was something heroic in wandering around the jungle in Rumassala” – Wickramasinghe, ‘Upan Da Sita,’ translated by Malinda Seneviratne.
In Koggala, Unawatuna, and Galle, he encountered many worlds and grew familiar with all of them. Though he was born to a rural and traditional setting, he found himself in the midst of Buddhist monks, Christian missionaries, and a culture that had fallen under the sway of European colonialism for over 300 years.
It was during these formative years that he gained first-hand knowledge of the culture and environment of southern Sri Lanka. This was a highly transitionary period. The Galle Harbour, which had once commanded prestige, was slowly fading away, giving way to Colombo. It was against the backdrop of these transitions that he was forced to halt his studies and move to Colombo in 1906.
“I find it difficult to recapture and convey the rapturous reactions of a village boy on seeing Colombo for the first time. The Fort shops, the jetty, breakwater, and harbour alike captivated me. The great glass display window of a Fort shop, Tate’s Diamond Palace, bright with electric light, was one such sight that held me” – Wickramasinghe, ‘Lay Bare the Roots,’ translation of ‘Ape Gama’ by Lakshmi de Silva.
Martin Wickramasinghe had first visited Colombo when he was still studying at Buonavista. Almost immediately, he grew fascinated by the rhythms of life that animated the city. With his family he visited some of the more popular sites in the area, including the museum.
By the turn of the 20th century, these institutions had become symbols of a changing age, capturing a time when Sri Lanka was caught in the throes of colonialism yet was clamouring to discover its past. It was to this world that he shifted in 1906.
(The writer is a researcher, writer, and analyst whose work spans a range of topics, including art, culture, history, geopolitics, and anthropology. At present, he is working on a study of Martin Wickramasinghe. He can be reached at udakdev1@gmail.com)
(The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect the official position of this publication)