The birth pangs of Peradeniya University (Battle of sites)

Padma EDIRISINGHE

Rajasinghe I or Tikiri Kumaru Rajaisnghe may have turned the waters of Mulleriyawa fields to a russet hue with the blood of the invaders from Portugal infringing on Lanka’s sovereignty, but the memory of the Sinhalas is rather short and vendettas easily forgotten.

So just a few years after his death, a daughter of his gets baptised as Maria and lets her son too enter a University of Portugal for higher studies. Perhaps he is the first Sri Lankan to stamp the beginnings of a long continuity of Lanka with European Universities.

Writer has not had access to records of how many of our royalty and those who came next to them. ie. the very affluent and socially prestigious families entered these high citadels of learning in the European continent while great Buddhist Universities of Asia as Nalanda and Taxila succumbed to enemy attacks and merciless plunder and perished.

One has only to witness their ruins to visualise how sprawling and intellectually accommodating they have been.

To come back to the exodus of offspring of the affluent families of the island, to the West in search of University education, one would think that brains of the rest of the youth in the country were in their buttocks. No. These brains were right there in the correct place. What they did not have were the dough nor the contacts.

But humans are very resourceful and soon other ways and means of establishing contacts with these foreign Universities without actually going there began.

The initial connection began by way of sitting for exams conducted by British Universities. There were the exams conducted by the Cambridge University and from 1881 the University of London began holding exams.

Learning

Soon affiliation to Higher Institutions of learning in India (the more modern ones supplanting the burial sites of the ancient Universities) too began. The first medical students are said to have had their training in Bengal Medical school sited in Bengal.

Governor George Anderson had been the first to propound the idea of a separate Medical College in Colombo. Year, 1852. But it was not pursued till an outbreak of various kinds of diseases in the Wanni decimating the population there made a physician named Dr. Loos to re-stage the clamour again. In 1870 was established the Medical College with Dr. Loos himself as the head.

Now the cry for a separate University for the island embracing all branches of knowledge began to emerge. With national aspirations fuelling moods many leading men now joined in the cry for a separate University. Among the more earlier ones were Sir Ponnambalam Arunachalam and Ananda Coomaraswamy.

The Ceylon University association was formed in 1906 to make the dream a reality. The dream in itself was very vague. In fact no one knew where to site it though of course by general consensus it was Colombo and no other.

Ever since the first White trespasser had in the first decade of the 16th Century built his fortress in this sea side city its port shaded by the bowers of a Kolon tree, a non-articulated tradition slowly grew up that everything worthwhile had to be constructed in Colombo and in no other city.

The Medical College was already by Thurstan Road and the three and half acres left over could accommodate the rest of the faculties.

Dream

Soon began the Battle of Sites, just a little more dramatic than the Episode of the Flying Sausage orchestrated at Sanghamitta Hall, where this struggling writer had her room. (May be later some day, bomb blasts permitting, we could narrate that incident that led to the closure of the campus for a few days).

Dr. G. P. Malalasekera writing to the Centenary Volume on Education gives a hint that the dream of a University in spacious surroundings that would act as a catalyst for the island’s cultural renaissance was first conceived in the mind of Ananda Coomaraswamy. Kandy was likely to be the alternate venue.

But many just could not reconcile to such an important institution getting carried away about 75 miles away from beloved Colombo that Rajasinghe II had once proposed to the Dutch be razed to the ground, since it was the root of all the evil in the island.

Of course he was acting very selfishly since the animosity rose out of the fact that his own brother was parading on Colombo’s streets with a foreign army brandishing his sword against him.

Well. There was sword brandishing in the Legislative Council and later in the State Council too as to the location of the new University. Heated arguments went on. But the location seemed to definitely veer away from Colombo to the hills.

To exactly where in the highlands it was not clear. Foothills of the Dumbara mountain range was considered. And Aruppola? Sir D. B. Jayatileka and Ponnambalam Arunachalam had expressed the idea that the 3 and half acres in Colombo, along Thurstan Road was utterly inadequate for the envisaged University. Others who supported their idea and were all for a spacious location were Dr. A. C. Paul, Revd. Fraser and Marrs.

Then came a new cry and that from the House by the Beira led by press magnate D. R. Wijewardena and that was for siting it at Peradeniya with the Hantane mountain range looming above and Mahaweli flowing by. Dr. Malalasekera himself testifies to this.

Some 300 acres were said to be available. And a very picturesque site, that many adulate as the most scenic site of any university in the world. But wait. It was yet not constructed.

Delayed

This time the second world war intervened and delayed matters. Fresh ideas on the site emerged. So the University so long planned and subject to heated debates was actually shifted as late as 1952 to Peradeniya.

A few years later this writer herself happened to enter the portals of this in the midst of or despite some confusion in her personal life.

Cocooned most of her school life in a missionary school the names on the Halls just puzzled her. Marrs, Arunaachalam? Ramanathan, James Peiris, Jayatileka - connection was obscure to the new entrant reflecting the loopholes in our education system.

Though having written on a potpourri of various topics the writer never had written on her own University nor about its birth pangs nor on its arboreal beauty including the mauve and orange hued bougainvillaea arboreous overlooking the River of Great Sands taking its elbow bend just in the proximity...

So here is making amends for that at the expense of the House by the Beira that initially suggested Peradeniya as the most suitable location and eased the tension in the Battle of the Sites.