Remembering Ian Goonetileke: A Doyen of The Arts & Sri Lankan Publications-by Michael Roberts

Michael Roberts

Gamini Seneviratne, in a set of profound reflections entitled “Ian Goonatileke, A Memory” and presented previously …. but now subject to a change of title and highlights imposed by The Editor, Thuppahi

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Browsing through various writings that had to do with Ian, I came upon the following paragraphs that seem to merit a fresh airing in the light of the literary awards recently made under the Gratiaen Trust. Regardless of his spell of scepticism (as mentioned below) that made him turn away from his commitment to advancing his friend Michael Ondaatje’s hopes and intent in funding that Trust it came to establish another award in Ian’s name, one for translation.

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“I came to associate with him only in the last quarter century of his life, that is, after he had resigned from the service of the University of Ceylon, Peradeniya, as its Librarian, after a quarter century there. His service was to ‘the university’ in a sense that was wider than ‘the idea’ of one held by people from ‘Oxbridge’ – including Ivor Jennings. It encompassed, of course, the faculty and students past, present and yet to come and provided for their use convenient, even nudging, physical access to worlds of learning as recorded in books and journals, with a particular eye for those that had to do with the broad culture that fed learning and reflection at Peradeniya. The journals included, besides the academic journals in which, in the western tradition, fresh contributions, however trivial, to the sum of human knowledge, (as in most PhD theses nowadays), first appeared, the commentorial texts of ‘little magazines’ and periodicals published here. For many years Ian had the good fortune of a knowledgeable and supportive faculty in carrying out this task. When even they failed the University, Ian left.

“In the opening episode of Slow Waltz in Cedar Bend, a snap-shot of a party/ social gathering in academia, Robert James Waller has this: a middle aged professor, variously put down as ‘incorrigible’, ‘eccentric’, ‘a great teacher’, and just back from India is asked about cobras. “Yes, the snake charmer in the marketplace had one in a basket. The snake’s mouth was sewn shut to keep it from doing any damage.” / “How did it eat?” / “It didn’t. It eventually dies. Then the snake man goes and finds another one and sews its mouth shut, too. That’s the way it works” / “My God, that’s cruel, even though I abhor snakes.” / “Yeah, working conditions have gone downhill all over. On the other hand, it’s pretty much like the university. We just use heavier thread, that’s all.”

Ian Goonetileke declined membership in an academic free masonry, hell bent on playing footsie with the mafia that has enthroned itself. He backed up his views with concrete actions. The circumstances of his leaving Peradeniya are well known; the following may not be.

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When Ian was “inveigled and beguiled” by Michael Ondaatje to chair his Trust (which funds the Gratiaen Prize), he had expected that local writers would pursue “the interests of truth, justice, equality, and the overpowering need to bear witness”. The last he translated, in Goethe’s words, as being “a primary responsibility of the creative writer”: “One must repeat from time to time what one believes in, proclaim what one agrees with and what one condemns”.

Noel Gratiaen would have been horrified by the manner in which the literary award made in his name has been captured by a coterie whose interests are quite different. They are a group that for the most part has, with the aid of the pseudo-academic establishment, projected its pretensions to “academic insight” and thereby into “creative writing”. Patrick Fernando and Lakdasa Wikkramasinha are long dead, Gunadasa Amarasekera, Simon Nawagattegama, Sita Kulatunge, Henry Jayasena, Lakshmi de Silva, Ashley Halpe and a few others are around, and Yasmine Gooneratne has been away for three decades. The coterie that has bent its energies towards exploiting the handouts and energies of the neocolonial are not distinguishable from the kind of ‘government’ we have suffered. When Anil’s Ghost appeared, their published responses to the collapse of their hopes in Ondaatje was a display of their “felt need” to kowtow to an icon from which they had nourished expectations of quite another benediction.

Since he had a high regard for Michael Ondaatje and his work, Ian quit that scene as gently as he could.

“All my letters are Unfinished Journeys”, he wrote, the particular reference being to the title given to Shiva Naipaul’s last piece of writing before his death in 1985. Naipaul had begun what was to be a book on Australia with an account of a visit to Colombo, and recounts his efforts, through the British Council, to meet people from whom he could learn about Sri Lanka. They suggested he meets a Mr. Goonetileke who could tell him “everything he wants to know about Sri Lanka”. At the address given he is directed to a Goonetilake whom he treats with “the deference due to a man who has recently brought to fruition a multi-volumed enterprise of scholarly research,” but finds that the Mr. G. he meets is “altogether lacking in the austerity” he had associated with the man he had come to meet. Eventually, the man confesses, “I am the Goonetilake involved in development studies”. That is the kind of ‘self-development’ that Ian exposed for what it was, – an enterprise that led, as he put it, to “a marga of no return”.

Yes, memory matters – a sentiment that came to mind in the context of the iconic song,

sasara vasana thuru / nivan dakina thuru

pinketha hela ran derane / yali upadinnata

hethu vasana veva, hethu vasana

tisa vevai, sigiriyai / ape urumayai

In a long heritage that in more recent times includes the likes of Ananda Coomaraswamy, D B Jayatilaka, P E Pieris, John Silva, Charles Dias, Munidasa Kumaratunga, T B Illangaratne, E R Sarathchandra, Dayananda Gunawardena, Marcelline Jayakody, E F C Ludowyk, Wilmot Perera, Chitrasena, Gananath Obeyesekera, S J Tambiah and Lester James Peiris,…. Ian belonged among Sri Lankans who endeavoured to preserve it.