Book Reviews

The Legacy - history, culture and Buddhism of Lanka

Foremost Books Publication
458 pages. Rs. 750.
Author: Ananda Liyanage

Review: Sachitra Mahendra

It is all about a Sceptre. The Sceptre that has mystical powers making its holder entitled to hold the royal rein in Lanka. The spread of the word obviously attracts the politicians including Prime Minister and Defence Minister second-in-line to the ruling party's top position.

However the custodians of the sceptre have divine commands not to share the privilege of seeing the Sceptre. Only he who could honestly unify the country is privileged to see the sceptre.

But... two modern apolitical individuals could witness the Sceptre because the custodians had a divine instruction to share the privilege of the sceptre with them.

Custodians might hardly have known the inherited right of the two individuals to witness the Sceptre; their inheritance can be traced as far back as two-thousand years when a noble Sinhala King was reigning. What is the inheritance of the two individuals?

Is it because they are not politicians? It's something more. It is in the final pages of 'The Legacy' for the reader to ponder the strange phenomenon slowly unearthing the inherited right of the two modern individuals.

A financier by profession, Ananda Liyanage takes a glimpse towards some dark era in history with his first English novel 'The Legacy', when one great warrior King Dutugemunu reigns.

Liyanage aptly selects the theme of King Dutugemunu who holds the honour to have unified the country. "History is my passion," Liyanage says on inquiring as to how he pursues a diametrically opposed subject to his financier profession.

"But nevertheless, I am also engaged in activities related to my professional subject area." Liyanage's Legacy involves two modern individuals: foreign archaeologist Caroline Summers and her companion Major Ravi Algama.

They seek out King Dutugemunu's Sceptre following a trail laid out over 2000 years ago from North to South on Sri Lanka's troubled eastern border.

Liyanage's plot reminds me Dan Brown's style on three reasons. Firstly the way Liyanage makes Caroline Summers decode the translation of the Sinhala monuments.

Secondly the book is full of author's extensive researches on the subject. Thirdly Liyanage also entertains two main protagonists like in Brown's all four books. And more or less the two protagonists develop an intimacy as the work progresses.

But the intimacy between Summers and Algama is of somewhat transcending nature compared with Brown's. It is not a mere love affair that might spring up between a young couple. Both are matured in age: Summers 37, and Algama being just over 40.

And both are professionals who have either no interest in or time for love affairs. Love between them, if there is any, is purely based on the professionally similar mindsets - this is both spiritual and historical.

We have the Buddhist legacy preaching that many intimate unions are Sansara-bound; the relationship between Prince Siddhartha and Princess Yasodhara is the best example. Apart from that we have examples of Nakula's parents.

In the same vein, Summers-Algama relationship is not something that abruptly starts as a result of their encounter in the trail seeking out the Sceptre. They not only have the Sansara-bound right to share intimacy, but also it makes them privileged to see the Sceptre, which was not for the ordinary souls.

It is but a strange phenomenon how their Sansara right to see the Sceptre comes to light - once again, I leave it for the reader to experience this on their own towards the last pages of Liyanage's Legacy.

As a result of Liyanage's extensive research, the novel is full of descriptions of Sri Lankan customs and traditions. He brings in the picturesque details of Mahagama, King Dutugemunu's hometown and the vicinity; this is something of a textbook for a foreign student on Sri Lanka with relation to King Dutugemunu's reigning period.

Liyanage's Legacy is also adapted into Sinhala as 'Raja Urumaya' by the veteran translator Anula de Silva. Unfortunately the Sinhala adaptation has left out many facts of the original work, on the assumption that Sinhala reader is familiar with Sri Lankan customs and traditions.

Concerning the literary flavour, I would have preferred the Sinhala work also to be a translation of the original rather than an adaptation.

'The Legacy' is interesting reading for the lover of history, culture and the Buddhism of Sri Lanka.

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On marital and extra marital relations

Focus On Books

Prof. Sunanda Mahendra

On reading the first Sinhala novel written by Edmund Jayasuriya, Totupaledi Hamuvu Yuvatiya (The girl met at the ferry, Sarasavi Prakashakayo 2007) the very first impression I had was that two things are intermixed: the marital and the extra marital relations, and these two can survive only in some of the creative works and some writers tend to abhor the two experiences as things that will not couple in the way most creators desire and portray as in many a commonplace sentimental novel written over the years.

'Why not?' one would argue that the marital and the extra marital situations do survive together in day-to-day life despite the social taboos and ethics encircled. There is much more than many reasons for this to happen.

The protagonist of this work, Nimal, is a young man who got married hurriedly than one can expect amid quite a number of upheavals in his childhood where the pivotal effect was his father who had been a strict disciplinarian from one point of view and a good-for-nothing wastrel from another point of view.

Perhaps the underlying force had been this phenomenon that he had decided to get married to the girl who was serving him with meals while he was working for a particular office.

This girl Kamala, is portrayed as one of the most innocent down to earth ones, he had met in his life as a young man. She is domesticated to the point that she does not have any of the aesthetic interests; Nimal has cultivated over the years such as music painting and theatre.

She is just another wife who looks after him in his needs and requirements, and thus makes his life easy and relaxed. But the times change some nuances as he is promoted over the years to a university library as a chief executive. He meets another young girl Nadi, who is much closer to him than the former.

This is the turning point and perhaps sensitively captured from a series of episodes woven with an innerness and subject closer to the heart of the reader transcending the barriers of sentimentality for they go on discussing matters complex and serious in the form of a dialogue lively and resourceful but never too pedantic in structure.

When the whole world looks at them in their openness, they go on engaged in the world of their own and prove that 'love is blind' from a serious point of view. They extent their relations to a plane beyond one could grasp in simple terms, where they cannot afford to loose or to miss each other and the relationships are too tight that they cannot face the realities of the world as well.

This is yet another turning point when the world of the dream centred love collapses with the legitimate wife, Kamala coming to know of the affinities the world of Nimal and Nadi shatters down gradually.

But it does not totally collapse as the wife is made to understand that she is not a clear-cut entity in the world of her husband Nimal, in the way she foresaw things in the past.

The onlookers who are not at all sympathizers of a clandestine relationship bring news to the wife of Nimal and Nadi about their wanderings in hotels and guesthouses, and their roaming from place to place in his car.

All these situations in the first instance is a buffer for Kamala. But as time goes on, she finds it difficult to resist further thrust brought on her and she shows signs of repulsions towards him resulting his internal change visible to the reader once again in a series of episodes with a complexity of conflicts in the mind of Nimal.

In many ways the work becomes a psychological study of three characters giving way to an understanding of the innerness in each character.

The climax of which is the change brought inside the character of Nimal with a sense of utter frustration culminating in the passage to a better plane of solace he finds in religiosity, where he is portrayed as a pilgrim not from a strict narrow image of the common parlance but with an understanding of the need to change oneself giving way to a better spiritual bliss Here, much more than is observed in any other Sinhala novel, the writer takes the reader to a plane of living of the manners of wayfarers in forest abodes struggling hard to fulfill and achieve their spiritual goals in the hardest possible means of penances.

This way of life is compared with that of the mundane sensual life as engaged by the protagonist of the work Nimal, where he feels like any other great person the two levels on which the life rests, the mundane and the spiritual poles apart from each other.

And this gives way for him to realise many more factors than he had already found in his brief span of life and makes him return once again to the place where he commenced his life abandoned by himself due to his own ignorance and carelessness or callousness.

But these terms (which I use) have no value or place in this creative work as the writer intends to portray in the most sensitive manner possible the existential pattern in which the people lead their lives.

Though with a simple narrative line, the work of Edmund Jayasuriya, as a debut marks certain significant factors. The basic issue is the brevity in which the humane episodes are handled and the readability of the work as a whole, leaving no extraneous inclusions in the form of summaries and harangues which is most commonly observed in today's Sinhala fiction.

The other significant factor is the intensity of the division of the subtext as against the upper layer of narrative split into three groups the prologue or the intention for the narrative, and secondly, the past story [icutvata] where the entire complex experience of the three characters rest and the third being the present story or the epilogue where the actual present situation is laid bare without any detached bearings from the point of view of the writer.

Though a number of novels all over the world are written about extra marital relations it is difficult to discern which one carries more weight from the point of view of the thematic complexity as regards the expression of the realities underlying transcending the barriers of mere fictional structures.

On the contrary, it is also difficult to know which one pinpoints the best psychological innerness of the clandestine relationship with an understanding of the stark realities of the culture.

The term Totupola [the ferry] is symbolically used as it signifies a religious sense of a temporary stopover nearby a river bank waiting to be crossed over to the other side. Jayasuriya's novel is one good example which balances both sides in the best possible manner.

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To hang or not to hang?

The Trial of Pauline de Croos
The Trial of Pauline de Croos
Author: Tyronne Fernando P.C.
Publisher: Vijitha Yapa Associates
Release: By Christmas 2007

Reviewer: Methsiri Cooray, Attorney-at-law.

"The trial of Pauline de Croos was authored by Tyronne Fernando way back in 1973 when he was a young criminal lawyer at Hulftsdorp just returned from England.

Published by M.D. Gunasena, it was a best seller. 34 years later Vijitha Yapa has chosen to reprint it in the same form but with an Epilogue from the author on his views of the death penalty-having gathered experience as a Crown Counsel, President's Counsel, Parliamentarian and State Minister of Justice, titled "To Hang Or Not To Hang?" It is good reading for the general public.

A schoolboy of 11 years Gotabaya Kirimbakande found dead at the bottom of a church well in Ratmalana. Following a huge public outcry his father and father's lover Pauline was charged for the murder. But since there was no apparent motive the father was acquitted for want of evidence. Pauline was convicted by a 6 to 1 Jury verdict, 2 to 1 decision of the Court of Criminal Appeal, but her appeal was unheeded by the Privy Council in London.

Tyronne Fernando looked after Pauline's interests throughout - her death penalty being commuted to life imprisonment, her release from prison for good behaviour and her migration to Australia where she is now a mother.

The book is also a legal treatise instructive for the law student, legal practitioner, member of the bar and of the bench. Tyronne Fernando brings out succinctly some of the finer points in criminal law and procedure.

He cites K v Loku Nona 11 NLR p 4, 'If the boy was assaulted and then put into the well, it would not be murder per se unless the original assault itself was with the intention of killing.' Another useful note: Placing the accused in a special enclosure is a British practice.

In the US the accused sits with his lawyers, demonstrating his innocence until proven guilty. There is also an abundant information on forensic medicine. Rigor mortis is complete in a body 10-12 hours after death. Shrivelling of the body indicates it has been in water for at least 6 hours.

The book is above all, a telling indictment on the death penalty. There is a note on the manner of execution prescribed by a British Governor in 1799. The book outlines the real danger of the wrong person being executed. "Eye witnesses make mistakes.

Confessions are coerced or fabricated, racism trumps the truth. Lab tests are rigged. Defence lawyers sleep. Cops lie." Murder of a child is bad. Hanging of an innocent person for it is worse concludes the author. The answer is more scientific detection, (eg DNA tests) fool proof conviction, but not the death penalty.

The death penalty is not even a deterrent. President Carter has said that the homicide rate is at least 4 times greater in the US than any European country none of which authorizes the death penalty.

The current method of execution in the US, the lethal injection, has sometimes caused prolonged and painful death, and has been suspended in many States. The author quotes Dr. Colvin R. de Silva in Parliament in 1956. "For once you are dead, you may never be brought to life again." Timothy Evans of England on innocent man executed in 1950 is a case in point.

This is a thought provoking book. It must be read by everyone living in these turbulent times.

'A collection of poetry

A Basket of Sweet Fruits
Publisher: The English Union of Jaffna Hindu College
Pages: 198
Year of Publication: 2007

Ruwini Jayawardana

"A Basket of Sweet Fruits" is a collection of poetry written and compiled by Subramaniam Maheswaran, an English teacher of Jaffna Hindu College. Around 126 poems, each presented in memory of a famous personality of the past( Jane Austen, Henry James, Octvio Paz, Horace, Sandra Cisneros, Moliere etc) makes up the book.

The poems are based on a number of subjects such as nature, loved ones, school, peace and various issues related to society.

He focuses on contemporary topics with the aim of luring the readers to enjoy the beauty of poetry. Through simple language the poet brings forth his personal experiences and emotions.

"My chief aim is to make a change in the present trend of life that seems pitiful.My poems consist of revolutionary, philosophical and social ideas, thoughts and suggestions which, I hope, could awaken all the readers to the importance of doing good things to the society to which they belong to.

I have cited everything the readers want to know using simple and effective terms along with phrases and idiomatic expressions," Maheshwaran stated. "I have seized an opportunity of meeting a challenge by writing poems in English, a task which is the most difficult out of creative writing. I shall continue to write English poems for the benefit of the society."

This collection of poems is a source of encouragement to all those interested in reading and trying their hand at English. "A Basket of Sweet Fruits" was launched recently.

The Speaker's latest book

A "Sangwadi Lipi Saraniya", a book compiling articles published in Silumina, Dinamina, Divaina and Riviresa contributed by Speaker of the House W.J.M. Lokubandara will be released tomorrow at the Speaker's House at Kotte.

These were articles published in the newspapers mentioned above expressing his views and response to debated issues such as Sama Kaleena Sinhala Viyakarana Vadaya (debate on contemporary Sinhala grammar); Yapa Patun Vadaya (debate on Jaffna); Asammatha Vivaranaya Vadaya (debate on unaccepted grammar), Miliyana Vadaya (debate on the Sinhala word on million); Haputale Kande Vadaya (debate on Haputale Mountain), Ingirisi Kodi Paagaluu Vadaya (debate on the trampling of the English Flag).

The compilation of these articles in book form serves the reader and the researcher looking for studied views on these matters and also manifest the ability of the writer to ably argue convincingly the issues he had taken to debate. His use of language and clarity of thought will push the reader to read at ease while enjoying what these articles contain.

It will help one to enhance one's knowledge on the issue he had dealt with and will be a good treat to the mind of the scholars and students who research.

"Sangwadi Lipi Saraniya" is a publication of the Dayawansa Jayakody and Company, at Ven. S. Mahinda Thera Mawatha, Maradana, Colombo.

Wiruma

A.M.A. Azeez - Graphically reminisced

A.M.A. Azeez - A profile
Publisher: Dr. A.M.A. Azeez Foundation

Review: Prof. Bertram Bastiampillai

A.M.A. Azeez is remembered on 24th November, every year on the sadly significant occasion of his Death Anniversary. An eminent and lovable personality Azeez was a significantly knowledgeable personality, born in North Sri Lanka and remembered as an illustrious and versatile product of the so called arid North, and also well over whole of the Island and knowledgably even abroad.

Azeez was the only rare exceptional leading Muslim achiever to be noted famously in a volume devoted to record the achievements of 100 Muslims in an unforgettable galaxy of scholars and public figures assembled in neighbouring India.

It is a well merited fitting tribute, the Dr. A.M.A. Azeez Foundation in Sri Lanka has handsomely and presentably produced a "Profile" during the Commemoration this year.

The outstanding contributors recounting the praiseworthy achievements of Azeez, in this pleasantly produced publication by Dr. A.M.A. Azeez Foundation to coincide with the 34th death anniversary of unforgettably leading brilliant figure who has rendered a worthy tribute ever to be remembered, a versatile scholar, an ornament to the coveted civil service as a superb performer of public functions, and above all one who adorned the public legislature of then Ceylon, later Sri Lanka, by his intelligent, indefatigable and industrious services and priceless contribution.

A map of many splendid achievements within a short mortal career, Azeez towers as an enviable Educationists and Zahira College, Colombo, a testimonial to Muslim education leaves with an eternal testimony to learning and teaching brainchild of Azeez.

It is indeed appropriate to pay an elegant tribute and proffer thanks to the sponsor of this volume, Mr. A.G.A. Barrie, a successful product of Zahira during A.M.A. Azeez's guidance.

Many will be grateful to him for the output of this volume in commemoration which goes a long way to educate readers of Zahira and its past eminent Principal, noteworthy illustrious Azeez.

Similarly readers do get profoundly obliged to the Secretary of the Azeez Foundation for a well informed preface, presented to readers and amply and intelligently informative of A.M.A. Azeez and his incomparable contribution as well as that of Zahira towards education and public activity, religious education and responsible citizenry.

It is quite apt and delectable to have commenced this commemorative volume with an enjoyably learnedly instructive recall of the daughter of A.M.A. Azeez's childhood under a loveable, learned father.

The younger days of Azeez family is graphically reminisced as well as the "school days". An important mature trait the child reflects upon is her father's role as an advocate of Women's Right to Education.

This was bold foresight and distinguished A.M.A. Azeez's uniqueness in rational and scholarly thinking. This introductory chapter is most welcome and enriches the "Profile" undoubtedly. It is an embellishment and adds to the abiding interest engendered in the "Profile" on Azeez. It includes interesting family photographs.

A full and detailed account by S.H.M. Jameel follows. This account focuses on Azeez's role during the Kalmunai Era when he is his powerful prestigious administrative capacity, Azeez contributed to build up the relatively neglected East of the island where dwelt a number of Muslim compatriots.

A colour map of the large area administered by Azeez in Kalmunai and rare photographs are included.

In tribute is a comprehensive poem bestowing honour and gratitude to Azeez by a Muslim who benefited from the goodness and fairness of Azeez the administrator.

Next follows a Governor's expression of appreciation of Azeez's administrative efforts to better his area and of governance wishing more strength to his efforts at helping the village citizenry in an almost forgotten area, now.

Prof. K. Sivathamby who too had benefited from Zahira and Azeez makes a nostalgic contribution. It is amply and copiously filled with memories and provides entertaining yet thoroughly interesting.

If Prof. Sivathamby furnishes a fitting and absorbing finale to a delightful to read Profile on Azeez, who inspires anyone with his accomplishments, Sivathamby speaks of personal awareness. Finally, the profile closes with a reproduction of the Chapter on Azeez in "100 Great Muslim Leaders of the 20th Century", published in New Delhi in 2005. This is indeed a deserved conclusion.

This book on the Profile of Azeez edited by S.H.M. Jameel, a student of Azeez era of Zahira College, Colombo, is attractively assembled and contents entertaining while educating on the event filed brilliantly successful career of A.M.A. Azeez. It is a well-earned commemorative record.

A.M.A. Azeez was a rare perfect gentleman who left so much success and achievement educationally, culturally and the country was left poorer when he passed away.

(The book "A.M.A. Azeez - A Profile" is available for sale at the price of Rs. 200/- at the office of the Dr. A.M.A. Azeez Foundation, 47/2A, Fredrica Road, Colombo 6. Telephone 2598949).