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by Ajith Samaranayake

What would Pieter Keuneman have thought of the idea of being cast in bronze and being erected on a side-walk? One of the most urbane, witty and sophisticated political leaders of the last century he might have treated this belated beautification with a characteristically whimsical smile.

After all everybody who was somebody in public life from colonial times has been commemorated in the form of a public statue so why not Pieter although a new generation reared on the electronic media, the Internet and video games might often not know who these strange figures are who tower over the urban landscape.

This article is written for the occasion when a statue of Pieter Keuneman will be unveiled this evening near the Elphinstone theatre, Maradana by the Mayor of Colombo Prasanna Gunawardena on the initiative of former Colombo Mayor and Minister and MP for Colombo district A.H.M. Fowzie.

Pieter Kenueman was the ultimate example of the bourgeois intellectual who transcends his class and embraces Communism and working class politics, the only other exception perhaps being his younger colleague, the late Sarath Muttetuwegama, himself a lifelong communist and at the time of his untimely and tragic death the only Communist in Parliament. There have been other distinguished leaders of the Left (both in the CP and the LSSP) but most of them came from middle-class backgrounds or were of working class origin. Pieter however was exceptional in more ways than one.

He was, to begin with a Dutch Burgher and although there were Burghers of an earlier time who were imbued with a social consciousness the community as a whole was given to conservatism and the support and defence of the Establishment. Pieter was also the son of a Supreme Court Judge, one of the first set of Ceylonese judges to adorn the Supreme Court benches.

He had his education at Royal College, Colombo and the University of Cambridge where he became the President of the Union. When he returned to Ceylon (as it was then) he was immediately spotted by Sri Lanka's original press baron D.R. Wijewardene and employed as a writer on the Daily News where he wrote most of the editorials and is said to have been perhaps the country's first agony aunt with the late Anandatissa de Alwis.

Why then did he become a Communist, testifying to the classical Leninist thesis that it is only the bourgeois intellectual who transcends his class who can take socialism to the working class who up to that time is only possessed of a trade union consciousness or mentality? The reason perhaps is twofold but inevitably intertwined. He certainly came to Communism out of intellectual conviction but it also had very much to do with the time he spent as a student in Britain, the seat of Empire over which the sun was then believed never to set inviting the classic riposte of the late Dr. Colvin R. de Silva that this was because the Lord Almighty did not trust the British people in the dark!

Those were stirring times. With the victory of Communism in the Soviet Union, socialist, if not Marxist, ideas had a great appeal for an European intelligentsia becoming steadily disillusioned with the post-First World War social order.

Sidney and Beatrice Webb, the prophets of British Fabianism, had gone to Russia and had proclaimed that they had seen the new world and it was working. Cambridge itself was a hive of Communist activity. Andrew Boye in his book 'The Fourth Man' says that nearly two thirds of prominent British Communist or party sympathisers during the 1920's had studied at Oxford or Cambridge. Prominent among them was Rajani Palme Dutt, son of an Indian father and a Swedish mother and a graduate of Balliol who by the time Pieter was in Britain was the General Secretary of the British Communist Party.

Another was John Strachey, one of the most powerful writers and propagandists of Marxism in Britain who wrote the book 'The Coming Struggle for Power' which was read by aspiring socialist intellectuals almost on their knees. There were also scientists such as J.D. Bernal and Joseph Needham (who later became an authority on China) who were Marxists. This political and intellectual climate in Britain (and particularly the influence of Palme Dutt) would no doubt have shaped the mind of the young Keuneman.

So Pieter Keuneman returned to Ceylon, worked briefly at Lake House and gave notice to the legendary Wijewardene, his first and only employer, and became a fulltime worker for the then United Socialist Party (the percussor of the Ceylon Communist Party). He never looked back thereafter.

By this time the LSSP was in existence but the split between the Trotskyists and the Communists (Stalin was now in power in the Soviet Union and Trotsky was in exile) which has since bedevilled the Sri Lankan Left was showing its first signs of becoming a serious issue. On his return Pieter had been instructed, as Lionel Sarath recounts in his biography of the late M.G. Mendis to contact Mendis who was by that time conducting what was called the Colombo Workers' Club. From then on late Pieter himself takes up the tale:

'The Workers' Club in Hulftsdorf became the main centre of these activities, in which a leading part was played by M.G. Mendis. The 'returned students' - Kandiah, Vaidialingam and myself, conducted the study circles. Working class comrades such as the late W. Ariyaratne, Lionel Kulatunga and David Hettiarachchi as well as many others joined both aspects of this work.' (Selected Speeches and Articles (1947-1987) - Pieter Keuneman - People's Publishing House, Colombo.)

The 'both aspects of the work' Pieter refers to here was rebuilding the trade union movement (debilitated by the split), organising workers' study circles and leading limited working class struggles around specific demands. Earlier on, Pieter had explained that the United Socialist Party had been formed at the small house in Peliyagoda and that its leaders were Dr. S.A. Wickremasinghe, the father of Ceylonese Communism, M.G. Mendis and K. Ramanathan, who had been secretaries of the LSSP, the late Venerable Udakandewala Saranankara (one of the early Communist bhikkhus), W. Ariyaratne and T. Duraisingham, the only one of these pioneers still alive, migrating recently. In time the USP was dissolved and the Ceylon Communist Party (now the Communist Party of Sri Lanka) was formed on July 3, 1943. Earlier Pieter had recalled how Dr. Wickremasinghe and D.P. Yasodis (a working class stalwart of the Party) had been jailed for writing anti-colonial articles in the USP newspapers.

The rest, of course, is history. Pieter became the MP for Colombo Central, a three-member constituency and the heartland of the Colombo working class, which produced among others the late President Premadasa, and Minister of Housing and Construction in the 1970 United Front Government of Prime Minister Sirimavo Bandaranaike and succeeded Dr. Wickremasinghe as the Chairman of the Communist Party on his death.

He was one of the most elegant and polished speakers in Parliament and held his seat from the first Parliament of 1948 and was only defeated in 1977 when the country's entire parliamentary Left was decimated.

For as long as anybody could remember he edited (along with his second wife Maude) the party's English organ the 'Forward' writing the last page political column titled 'Chitra's Column. 'After the death of Maude during the time of the 1971 April insurrection he continued the paper single-handed almost to the last though going steadily blind in his last years and was only riled when the late Mervyn de Silva puckishly suggested in his 'Men and Matters' column in the 'Sunday Island' that even the letters to the editor from readers as far-flung as Bandarawela were written in such elegant prose that Pieter himself must be writing the letters!

Very few knew that Pieter died in near straitened circumstances. The bourgeois intellectual and Supreme Court Judge's son who had come to Communism through conviction had come full circle but did not give up the faith.

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