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Bright insights into the life of an educationist

by Prof. Sunanda Mahendra

A person who had served society and the country where he or she lived for over a period of 60 or more years may tend to look back in a pensive mood, in retirement. He or she may obtain the services of another person to jot down whatever experience undergone or write in the way required by that particular individual.

Dr. (Mrs.) Tilokasundari Kariyawasam, who had a brilliant career as an academician and an educationist, has served in various units of education of Sri Lanka, spanning more than five decades.

Commencing her career as a teacher, she ascends the ladder in the category of a principal, directress, director general and commissioner in such educational units as Department of Education, National Institute of Education and the Ministry of Education.

While all these aspects are well documented in her autobiography titled 'Sonduru Dasuna', the reader is taken on a trail where quite a number of bright moments are creatively laid down.

Significant areas

As autobiographies come to be quite discursive, this publication is clearly designed confined to the most significant areas in the life of a teacher, administrator, educationist, psychiatrist, wife and a mother.

Dr. Tilokasundari neatly lays down her home background, which for most of the present generation of readers may look like the beginning of a fairy tale, where rich parents try their best to provide their daughter with all the comforts that go into the making of a pleasant life without worries.

According to her own expression, she possesses more of rural lifestyle than the sophisticated suburban inheritance.

The write scholar goes onto describe in the most readable manner possible the salient ingredients that had moulded her life as a scholar, the leisure which had resulted in the reading habits and the agrarian culture that has enhanced environmental studies.

While recording the types of occupations led by the village folk she concurrently shows where her parents as breadwinners live, the possibility of helping her lead a better life, restraining within a particular cultural milieu.

From her earliest childhood memoirs the reader is gradually shown the manner in which she gains a steady firm footed educational foundation, where one comes across the names of great teachers both local and foreign.

One important factor that she emphasizes is the value of intelligent parentage, where a certain degree of broad-mindedness is essential on bringing up a child. As a daughter of parents who were teaches, she visualizes the care shown on the value of education.

From the primary levels of education which ends up brilliantly. She recollects the university days, where she enters into a realm of not only serious erudition that keeps her time occupied in books and tutorials, but also the outlets such as acting in plays and romantic encounters in one of which she meets her future husband as well.

One of the finest moments recorded in the university period is the event in which she becomes an actress, of a play titled 'Sunetra' based on a novel by W. A. De Silva. This has not been recorded elsewhere, if I am not mistaken.

Challenges

The post university period in her life is depicted as a period of various challenges in the capacity of a teacher principal and an administrator.

The mainstay in her challenged becomes the reawakening of the girls' school Sanghamitta in Galle, where one is shown the expression of the best strength of an educationist. What is more interesting is the way she shows bouquets and brickbats levelled in the career of a sincere altruistic personality.

She shows the reader how politicians gradually seep into the body as an extraneous factor in that particular field, demolishing, if not degenerating the high ideals moulded by a traditional teaching culture.

For the most part as a reader, I felt that the scholar writer insists partly and adumbrates on the essence of orientalism as a holistic theory for the betterment of a learning and teaching culture. For the most part she emphasizes on the human values and moral upbringing that could go into the structure of education.

As one subject area is linked with the other, the reader feels that the autobiography contains quite a number of facets on religion, folklore, psychology, sociology, language and communication. The fact that the writer cannot dissociate from one from the other, is inherent.

She reaches the climax in her career as a recipient of a doctorate from the University of London. Her experiences in the exposure to a vast sphere of scholarship is also recorded vividly, inclusive in the formation of several international organisations for the benefit of the women around the world.

One of the most sensitive events recorded in 'Sonduru Dasuna' is the incident where she encounters the death of her husband who has been a source of inspiration to her all throughout her career.

Overcoming the grief and restraining the strains of hardship is depicted as the hallmark in the life of this scholar, who winds up her document in humble veneration to those who helped to see the world more clearly and achieve the state of living she possesses today.

There is not a moment of dullness in this autobiography, which I deem as a tribute to the present generation of teachers and students, if an autobiography could be classified as an essential genre in literature, probably the most powerful effect of this work is the moral effect, it thrusts on the reader.

Tapestry woven of a medley of strands

A Testament to Autumn

Author: U. Karunatilake, Sarasavi Publishers, Nugegoda.

Poet Upananda Karunatilake has brought out his third collection of poetry too, titled, 'A Testament to Autumn'.

This book demands serious notice from his readers who have been treated, on the two earlier occasions, to some excellent poetry and it needs no explanation for, that excellence has bene recognised in the appropriate quarters: both his earlier books, "Kundasale Love Poems" and "Kandy Revisited" have won the State Literary Award (English Poetry) for their respective years, 1999 and 2001.

The present writer who has had the good fortune to read his two earlier books can therefore, make a comparative assessment of the merits and the demerits, if any, of this collection.

This is advisedly said here because, this time, the author has made a sharp departure from his earlier work, both in theme and approach, in spite of the fact that thematically, something of the earlier collections can be found here, too, yet such poems are few and far between their voice is drowned in the loud and clear calls, more strident and urgent, of politics and religion.

One would think this is a strange medley of themes for, here is a tapestry woven of three variegated and distinctly different strands of themes: love, religion and politics: But that is how it is!

Love poems

The few love poems appearing here may be disposed of first; they are few it is true, but is evident that something of the earlier fire is till alive, with its embers burning deep under the ashes. To this category belong poems such as, "Interlude", "Welikanda", "Wangiyakumbura", "Menikdiwela", "Letter from Boralanda", "Dukkha Vippayogo", "Reunion", "Way weary", "Two Temptations", etc., etc.

All these poems genetically belong to the earlier collections: in this book they appear interlopers and out of place, as will be seen in this paper. In all these, the author goes back in time and reminisces his youthful days of bubbling love.

In the little poem, "Pallekelle", he goes back into the fading past and recalls an instance where the two of them walk along a secluded path choked with an impenetrable ramble, he retraces his steps, as inexorable time takes every memory away:

"I retrace my steps

Unable to penetrate the past

We walked entangled, swinging arms,

Close and carefree.....

But nothing echoes now

In this wild erasure." ....from "Pallekelle"

These poems are loaded with the pain, tenderness and yearning in retrospect:

"You are material form

That temps contact...

Where my ear awaits

Your voice in soft call.....your scent,

Pervasive as the fresh earth;

Yes, you are the world

Where soft sensation runs...." etc., etc.,

Before proceeding to the poems of the other two groups, it is worth examining the poems of the first section for their felicities of language: the chief virtue is their lyric quality and, of course, the dominant theme in them, love and its reminiscence, readily lend themselves to it:

"The goblin silhouette

Against the bright, blue sky." .....from: "Wangiyakumbura".

"Recalled in cruel tranquillity

Of many mountains before and after

"Now afar in time, that avenue

Puts on its lilac lamps anew." ..... from: "Tabebuias"

Imagery

The little poem, "Boralanda", is replete with striking imagery:

".... that ridge of saplings

which tittered as I passed

Tall already, and graceful in the wind."

And again, in the same poem:

"We were in a heaving sea of low hills

Westward, high mountains held the sky

With the sun behind."

The entire short poem, "Impermanence", carries a haunting quality of a pervasive lyricism: it has to be read in its entirety to experience it.

Again, before taking up the poems of the other two sections, religious and political, which really take up the major part of the book, it seems necessary to say a word about a few poems that correctly, do not fall within any of these three groups, like the "Scholar's Tale".

Here the author's caustic humour and even ribald sarcasm rides dominant when he proceeds to tell the truth about certain beliefs and myths, held sacrosanct by men, thus making nonsense of such beliefs.

In the poem, "The Scholar's Tale", he laughs behind his sleeve at people who so late in the day, try to prove with their pseudo-scholarship and bogus researches, things like purity of blood-lines of certain ethnic groups, whenever since history began, there has been a continuous co-mingling of blood during times of war and invasion.

Incidentally, this kind of irreverent sarcasm is seen in several poems appearing in the group written on political themes, ie., in "The Guv'nor Takes a Holiday sub-titled, "Without Foreign Exchange" (in itself-sarcastic!):

"He reports five per cent growth!

But poverty? That, he says, is sloth

High management overheads?

Change the pillow for the ache in the head,

Saith the World Bank."!

Taken as a whole, the poems in this section are cold, realistic and argumentative: they seem to mock at the earlier poetry he wrote, warm, lively and laden with emotion; it may be said, a bubbling humanism was their chief strength.

We are aware, most of the political poems have been taken from 'The Lanka Guardian'; those who know that venerable journal, also remember it for its obstinate radical socialist stand on political and economic matters: that Karunatilake's poems were welcome there for a good two decades, speaks for his own stand on these matters.

Testament

His poetry here, is virtually a testament to it. The cynicism, the barbed criticism, and the withering sarcasm in this poetry are, it appears, directed at the capitalist establishment and its representative institutions in the modern world like the Word Bank, the I.M.F. and their splinter lending and financing outlets which have by now, well and truly established a new economic colonialism instead of the former territorial colonialism in the poorer countries which they call, 'The Third World Countries!, 'The Developing Nations' etc., which terms themselves, by now, have acquired a derogatory connotation."

"The world Bank guy studies him awhile

With his best Academic Boston smile

Advise in the interim....

Intervention is advisable

This financier needs low interest shot in the arm

Give him a subsidy."

......... from: "Epilogue"

These poems are replete with the jargon these 'Experts' have evolved over the years to deal with economic and political problems, so common in this part of the world today: terms such as, "Market Economy", "Growth Rate", "Free Market Theory", "I.M.F. Orders", "Mechanism of Free Supply and Demand", "Unpaid Loans", "Exchange and Currency Restrictions" etc., all relate to the economic evils that are afflicting the so-called 'Developing Nations': all this is grist to Karunatilake's mill.

Readers however, know this is not the stuff out of which traditional poetry is made, as they are used to look for, conventionally. But in this Collection, this is the fare the poet grimly dishes out to his readers:

"Telecom, Gas .....

Metered water and rich sewerage:

The Surgeon General pays

In Dollars, Marks or Sterling

For each pleasurable

Manipulation of under-developed Banks"

..... from: "Entrepreneurs All".

Preface

To come back to the beginning, Karunatilake tells all this in his un-inhibited preface:

"The key factors in the equation were, economy, devaluation, re-orientation of value-inflated projects, transplanting the Mafia to aid and about a new ruthless comprador class beside whom the old colonial compradors appear like benevolent philanthropists."

This is very strong language: but the poet seems to ask, how else can one speak of situations like this; he unerringly puts his finger on the right spot of the malaise that has struck this part of the world!

As for the poetry written on religious themes, this writer pleads incompetence to comment on them.

Finally, this is a book of poetry, true but it is as well a socio-economic document examining a era of our history. It needs to be taken seriously. The book is handsomely brought out in good paper, with a cover illustrated, relevant to the material within: it deserves a place in any collection.

- M. B. Mathmaluwe

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