Arts

"Pera" – Celebrating the beginnings, responding to the present

Continued from last week is Professor Ashley Halpé’s address to the Colombo Branch of the Alumni Association of the University of Peradeniya, reminiscing the good old days of the magnificent university.

The physical environment was no less challenging an invitation to exploration. Many Sundays saw us begging a picnic lunch of bread and tinned mackerel from the kitchen so we could go hiking. We went up Hantana or across the Gardens (no charge for admission those days!) to the far side of the river where sandy swathes lay beside the expanse of rocks and rapids above Halloluwa, or up the road and across the fields a couple of miles beyond Hindagala.

During revision time the Gardens were favourite resorts, as were the park between Hilda and the Senate (part of which became the Open-Air Theatre, and the grassy bank between the senate and the river.

Union election time revealed deep rifts between the Colombo-based right-oriented "junta" led by the incumbent president "Connie" Constantine and the Trots, the Trotskyites, led at Pieris by Munidasa and Chandra Gunasekera. Passions ran high, deals were struck, traps sprung; barrels of throaty eloquence poured out from the high table platform at hall meetings. No one dreamt of not voting; the cynical repudiation of the ballot at the end of the ’80s was in effect a vote against the chaos of those terrible months.

There was the day a strike was thought to be necessary. I cannot now remember why. A sit down on the grounds of the Lodge was organised, lunches were carried to the satyagrahis (no one used the word then, though) by staff sympathisers. Sir Ivor was away. He drove back, unfolded his gaunt frame from his ancient Morris (or was it a Standard?) and said "Gentlemen, do you know your proceedings are illegal? Come in and have some tea."

He walked the Campus roads in the evenings, a benign and energetic headmaster; our Warden Cuthbert Amerasinghe invited groups of students to his house on Sanghamitta Hill. Doric de Souza mesmerised his opponents at table tennis in the gym, Dr. Passe and his wife, Prof. Hettiarachchi and M.H.F. Jayasuriya were fanatic in their attendance of the tennis courts.

Fr. Pinto ate hoppers and sambol with us in the little tea boutiques in Peradeniya and accepted coffee proffered him in our mugs when he visited us at Pieris.’ Men who had the temerity to visit girls at Hilda Obeyesekere were swept by the suspicious eyes of Miss Mathiaparanam, the logician-warden whose dragonish exterior and exacting discipline overlay a deep motherliness.

As that enchanting year drew to its close in the early rains of April 1953, I found myself far from eager to face the mugginess and crowds of Colombo. I had found what I was looking for, an independent and residential university life, and with three years ahead in Peradeniya it really seemed to me that, that world couldn’t ever end.

Those years fulfilled the promise of the first, not infrequently surprising me with unexpected enrichments and bringing surprisingly little tension and pain. I went down from Peradeniya in 1956 to return six months later as a fledgling don flushed with the award of a ‘First’ I had barely hoped for and never expected.

It was during this phase that Bridget, "bred in a sunlit garden of the south/ nimble with youth," saw past the overconfident addresses of the incredibly gawky and bony! — young man, an image remorselessly recorded in our photographs of the period, to some potentiality of our 53 years of thriving. Her generous nurturing of our growing together was interwoven with my discovery of myself as a university creature to make rich polyphony of my years of apprenticeship.

Should I be apologetic that I was not one of the marchers to Kandy during the hartal, nor an avid student of and participant in campus politics (except when my friend Aloy was a candidate), nor one of those who stayed up all night cheering as the election results of 1956 came in?

The fact is that I am not, for I gave myself wholeheartedly to the shaping of the campus community after Vice-Chancellor Walpita persuaded me to agree to being the University Proctor in 1966 — which led very early to my perceiving that what the university needed more was a Director of Welfare, a function I added voluntarily to the official disciplinarianship.

The complete picture is that Peradeniya was for me neither a microcosm nor a theatre for self-expression but a kind of gama, the only gama or ‘hometown,’ to use a pleasant Lankanism, that I have ever known. Those undergraduate and early university-teacher years were the years of my discovery, when I put down roots in this community which "one never leaves" as Sir Ivor put it, when friendships, arguments, poetry and, finally, love were inextricably parts of a personal realisation of the university idea in a matrix that had both unique beauty and seeming permanence.

But Peradeniya has, of course, changed — changed dramatically — and many times. The 1960s saw the rising tide of admissions and the cultural revolution of 1956 engulfing the university. The arrival of the other faculties made the Peradeniya campus a complete university living up to its name — we were still the University of Ceylon! But the strains on accommodation and social and political relationships, accentuated by the growing restlessness in the country at large, made the ‘60s a time of stress and turbulence.

Student politics often threatened ugly confrontations between parties, while student demagogues attempted trials of strength with the authorities with more zeal than wisdom. But it has to be said that the authorities were more often than not surprisingly lacking in foresight and failed at trouble-shooting.

One of the confrontations led to a tear-gas attack by police on students demonstrating near the Science Faculty which led in turn to an onslaught on the Lodge by an angry mob of students who held the Vice-Chancellor, Sir Nicholas Attygalle, responsible for their woes. The university was closed for several months. In the end the chief casualty was university autonomy, for the government used the situation to take the appointment of vice-chancellors into its own hands, with the minister of education intervening directly in university affairs.

Ever since, we know, that stress and uncertainty have become characteristics of our way of life. Open turbulence and the return to an uneasy continuance of academic and residential life have been expected ebb and flow. It has often seemed that Peradeniya was just staggering on, reeling from blow after blow; at other times one has been amazed by the institution’s powers of recuperation from seemingly mortal wounds.

One can recall the explosion of violence between students and soldiers (fortunately unarmed that day) in 1968, the disruption of academic activity and the high-handedness of partisan groups before and after the election of 1970, the emergence into the open of the JVP and the campus involvement in the ghastly trauma of April 1971 and its aftermath, the dismemberment of the Faculty of Arts and the downgrading of Peradeniya to a campus of a University of Ceylon with its headquarters in Colombo in the "University Reorganisation" of 1972/73, the renewal of political turmoil as the election of 1977 approached, culminating in a police shooting that killed a student.

The brutal attacks on Tamil students in 1983 fortunately met by a united effort by staff and students to establish the unity that has survived to this day, a second shooting, the horrors of the bheeshana kalaya in 1987-90, the emergency measures taken to cope with the sudden increase of admissions by 25% in 1991 and other such changes…

It often seemed that Peradeniya was going into irreversible decline. Looking down from the house in Lower Hantana (A6) with its unparalleled view of the central campus I wrote in my 1967 poem Letter To A Student of "the slow white sear" of his "distant hopelessness;" in 1970, when news of disruption and confusion reached us, on sabbatical halfway across the world I expressed in another poem a premonition of "the imminence of a minor apocalypse," its "horsemen quiet and potent/waiting on the hill of Hantana."

The cataclysm was soon on us. The frontiersmen of 1971 seemed to burst up through the ground everywhere, intransigent in "the rigour of their hot hate, their terrifying faith," seeming to "presage our superannuation" but soon only "young bodies tangled in monsoon scrub/ or rotting in river shallows."

Two decades later Peradeniya, itself spared the worst in earlier upheavals, was the backdrop to two gruesome spectacles: the still living bodies of three men tortured on suspicion of being vigilantes, tied to trees near Wijewardene, and soon after, the vigilante slaughter of 13 men whose heads were arranged around the Shirley d’Alwis Memorial — the central roundabout — one clear, sweet morning.

Both examples speak of a disastrous coarsening of values, of the cheapening of human life. We cannot take refuge in the observation that this was, and remains, a reflection of the common Lankan attitude and experience today. When we put beside them the many examples of murderous student violence, even during ragging and political "argument," we have to ask ourselves whether we do not have to feel some responsibility for the moral tone of our undergraduates: whether we should not try to do something about it.

Professor Sarachchandra particularly emphasised the responsibility of those of us who are teachers when he gave Uddala, the professor in Pēmatō Jāyati Sōkō, the powerful lines in which he blamed himself for the death of Swarnatilaka at the hands of his beloved students:

My pupils are one life with me,

If from them she had her death

Then these my hands gave her that death –

(Translation of Pēmatō by D.M. de Silva as Love Is The Bringer of Sorrow, Salzburg Studies in English Literature, Poetic Drama and Poetic Theory, ed. Dr. James Hogg, Salzburg,1976, p36.)

But there is a further and professional side to this moral responsibility of the teacher.

I’m thinking here about the common conviction of the poor intellectual culture of our graduates. Even university teachers often complain that students do not read, even in their own fields, and that kuppi classes — cram sessions conducted by seniors — copying of worked assignments and rote learning take the place of intellectual exploration and discovery.

But when we look at that situation we have to suspect that the inability of the university system to deliver quality, speaks of lacks in our own intellectual culture and our teaching. It is up to us teachers to teach in such a way that input from reading becomes intrinsic to the learning style of students and to make evaluation depend on the evidence students give of their reading and their intellectual depth.

The vicious system would not long survive if students were compelled to learn by processes such as problem-solving, logical deduction and comparative analysis — e.g. of secondary sources. If students do not consult the books and material available it is surely the task of teachers to set up situations that would necessitate that they do — and to check whether they have. It is the responsibility of professional educators to be professional.

Nor are we alumni exempt from responsibility. As alumni are we an effective and relentless lobby in the university, in education, in youth affairs? Shouldn’t we be such a force?

I recall the great fight we put up against the disruption of the University of Peradeniya under the guise of University Reorganisation in 1972-73. I remember the adventure we experienced in 1952-56 that I spoke of earlier.

Shouldn’t we try for a renewal of those energies?

Hot scene at Magarita Blue