The Humanitarian Social Commitment of Lakshman Wickremesinghe-by Michael Roberts

Professor Rajiva Wijesinha, item taken from Daily News, 24 October 2023, ….. with highlighting imposed by The Editor, Thuppahi

Bishop Lakshman Wickremesinghe died on October 23 forty years ago. He was my uncle, and I had a special affinity with him with regard to both intellect and emotions. When I came back from Oxford, where he had studied a couple of decades before me, he was the family member who was most supportive of my resignation on the issue of the deprivation of Mrs. Bandaranaike’s Civic Rights, for unlike most members of the elite he understood early on what that meant for the future of democracy, a blight that has never left us since it was followed by a premature Presidential election, the ghastly referendum, and then the attacks first on Supreme Court Judges and then on Tamils.

one moment during Black July 1983

His anguish about the pogrom of July contributed to his death, ‘heartbroken at the treatment of his Tamil brethren, the direct outcome of the tragic impact of race riots in Sri Lanka on his already weak heart’. This assessment comes towards the end of the piece my sister, Anila Dias Bandaranaike, wrote for a recently published Recollections of Senior Friends of the Student Christian Movement of Sri Lanka which is replete with references to his impact.

Having recently read that book, I was overwhelmed again by the range of his activity, governed by his overwhelming commitment to the oppressed. He once noted that his role was to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted, and this was an urgent compulsion that possessed him throughout his life.

Impact on Social Justice and Pluralism

I can do no better than show the impact of his humanity, combined with intellectual analysis, through quotations from that book. I will start with the contribution of Michael Roberts, who was teaching at Peradeniya in the seventies, a period in which I was away, who having known him when he was an undergraduate, ensured his participation in the discussions arising from the upheavals of that period.

Roberts had been at the University when Lakshman arrived as Chaplain – ‘It was not until some point in 1958 that the Protestant Church, away in the hillside valley was ready for use with the charismatic figure of Fr. Lakshman Wickremesinghe as inspiring leader’. He expands then on Lakshman’s seminal role, stressing his understanding of the changes in the social outlook of the country that occurred in that decade, and also noting his pervasive pluralism – ‘Central to the convivial strands of Christian interaction from 1958 were two “monuments” – the premises of the Church and Father Lakshman Wickremesinghe. As convivial as inspiring, “Father Lak” developed several modalities of worship and fellowship. In step with the socio-political transformations of that decade and our time in Sri Lanka, he initiated the practice of mixed carol services with Tamil and Sinhala hymns among the usual English ones. It was rendered particularly meaningful by the sheer beauty of the hymnal of expression, the arrangement of space and the religiosity of so many of the student regulars.

Roberts goes on, after reminiscences of his time as a student, to talk about the different world he worked in as an academic. He refers then to how he involved Bishop Lakshman in his efforts in the seventies to draw attention to the rising tensions in the country, with the introduction of a new constitution that seemed to all except the government parties to have been imposed without proper consultation. The Ceylon Studies Seminar in 1972/73 ‘organised a half-day seminar in the Senate Room of Peradeniya Campus to review the constitution, with Bishop Lakshman Wickremesinghe and Professor A. Jeyaratnam Wilson among the main speakers. Then in October 1973, there was a full-day conference arranged together with the Marga Institute, which was just coming into prominence, with the afternoon sessions ‘devoted to what we called “Bridge-Building” and involved four speakers, vis Neville Jayaweera, Vaithianathan Karalasingham, Bishop Lakshman Wickremesinghe and myself’.

Though obviously, it is his efforts with regard to ensuring justice for minorities that now dominate perceptions of Bishop Lakshman’s humanity, there were other elements too that are worth recording, not least because his approach was so very unusual, back in the fifties, for someone of his elite background. He thought it important that the range of experience of those he mentored should be wide and inclusive. Aware of the urban ethos of most of them, he was insistent that they experienced rural life too.

Surajith Peiris records that ‘he organized a work camp for the male SCMers during the long vacation in April 1959. We travelled to Kilinochchi by train and had to sit in a tractor-trailer which took us several miles along an unpaved bumpy road to the work camp site…We did eight hours of digging in the blazing hot sun and cooled down in the stream nearby in the evening’. But typically, Lakshman seems to have shared in this for the article goes on to say ‘Each evening Fr. Lak brought us back to our senses and closer to God with Bible Study and Prayer.

I cherish those evenings we had with the loving and caring Fr. Lak and the guidance he gave us.’

Enduring Influence on the Student Christian Movement

Narmesena Wickremesinghe, who had given me the SCM book, records another example of Lakshman’s care and concern when his flock was away from their usual milieu. In 1960 he went with a delegation to the Triennial SCM Conference in Lahore, where he prepared the bible studies for the whole group. But Narme also records that when on the way back some of the group were quarantined in a hospital close to Dhanushkodi where they were to take the ferry, Lakshman stayed back with the SCM Secretary ‘to attend to the needs of the delegates’.

His determination to expand the outlook of those he looked after went hand in understanding and sympathy for all those in need. Prof Lakshman Guruswamy notes another example of loving personal care in writing that ‘I neglected my studies and was in a panic about failing the exams. Then providentially, Fr, Lakshman visited my house in Kandy and invited me to stay and study in the chaplaincy. I gratefully accepted and I passed my exams. SCM through Fr. Lakshman, thus saved me from a disaster in my career.

Guruswamy’s article is almost ecstatic in its adulation of Lakshman, and I will conclude by quoting from it at length, to make clear Lakshman’s impact on such a bright youngster – ‘It was difficult to separate this wonderfully gifted, handsome, brilliant, charismatic, and pious young priest from SCM. If you followed Fr. Lakshman, you became part of SCM. It was impossible for me to disengage SCM from Fr. Lakshman who was the greatest, most devout, and charismatic person I have known.’

******************

PERTINENT LITERATURE

Michael Roberts: “Nationalist Studies and the Ceylon Studies Seminar at Peradeniya, 1968-1970s,” 2 October 2018, https://thuppahi.wordpress.com/2018/10/02/nationalist-studies-and-the-ceylon-studies-seminar-at-peradeniya-1968-1970s/

DBS Jeyaraj .... https://www.dailymirror.lk/article/Black-July-Thirty-fifth-Anniversary-of-Anti-Tamil-Violence-153018.html

Michael Roberts: …..https://thuppahis.com/2023/07/24/the-agony-and-ecstasy-of-a-pogrom-southern-lanka-july-1983/

Michael Roberts: ….. https://thuppahis.com/2023/07/26/reflections-my-engagement-with-the-pogrom-of-july-1983-in-sri-lank/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_July