The first five lives of N. U. Jayawardena
N. U. Jayawardena: The First Five Decades.
Authors: Kumari Jayawardena and Jennifer Moragoda.
Colombo, N. U. Jayawardena Charitable Trust
Deshamanya N. U. Jayawardena (NUJ for short) was a renowned and
respected business leader in Sri Lanka who also had a strong scholarly
streak. During his long life of ninety four years, he held a number of
leadership positions in the public sector, before joining the ranks of
Sri Lanka’s fraternity of financial sector entrepreneurs.
In the minds of persons of my generation, who have had some
familiarity with the development of the system of banking and finance in
Sri Lanka, NUJ occupied a position of great esteem as the first Sri
Lankan Governor of the Central Bank of Sri Lanka, among his many other
firsts over a period of twenty odd years of public sector career.
During much of this time, Sri Lanka was under colonial rule. NUJ, as
a self-made man, deserves admiration for being able to rise up so
quickly to so many important positions of economic management. His
innovative activities within the Sri Lankan financial sector during the
later years of his life as architect and creator, as well as manager of
a number of financial and banking institutions, are well known.
It was with keen anticipation that I started reading NUJ’s biography.
The interesting episodes in the first half of his eventful life are
presented in this volume in the backdrop of contemporary socio-political
and economic changes. It is sometimes said that biography is the only
true history.
The clever combination of personal biography with contemporaneous
social history, presented in the excellent prose of Kumari Jayawardena
and Jennifer Moragoda, makes this biography exceedingly readable.
It has been particularly interesting to me as I too belong to what
the biographers call the ‘Ruhuna diaspora’ both in broad regional and
narrow community senses in which this term has been used in this
biography.
NUJ formed part of the ‘Southern Province exodus’ (p. 50) of the
1920s. This exodus became larger in size, generation after generation.
What would have been a trickle at NUJ’s time had already become a
significant outflow of human capital by the 1960s when I became part of
that process.
I knew about NUJ many years before I came to know him personally. I
had heard of him during my secondary school days in Galle. Mihiripenna,
the small village of my birth and upbringing, was part of NUJ’s life as
well after he moved from St Servatius’ in Matara to Galle for his
secondary education at St. Aloysius. NU lived with his elder sister in
Talpe and like many of us from Mihiripenna (the adjoining village), NUJ
communted by train to school having walked to the small rail station in
Talpe.
By the time I commenced my secondary education at Vidyaloka Vidyalaya
in Galle, NUJ was already almost at the pinnacle of achievement in his
public sector incarnation. The 5-6 years of my secondary education
coincided with his rather turbulent association with the nascent Central
Bank of Sri Lanka covering all major aspects of that association - work
with John Exter in the relevant commission of inquiry which led to the
establishment of the Bank, holding the position of Deputy Governor in
its first few years under Exter’s governorship, service as the first Sri
Lankan Governor of Central Bank, dismissal from this position on charges
of wrong-doing (1955) and eventual exoneration from those charges
(1957).
In spite of the years between the times of NUJ’s secondary education
and mine, there were elderly people who knew him well and therefore
occasionally talked about him with us during our childhood in
Mihiripenna. Most such discussion would have referred to NUJ as a person
whom children should emulate.
I should mention Rev. Tangalle Dheeralankara of the Mihiripenna
village temple (elder brother of Professor Jothiya Dheerasekera, later
Bhikku Dhammavihari, referred to in the NUJ biography: p. 35) among
these elders.
I can also vaguely remember Rev. Dheeralankara talking of NUJ
visiting the village temple to meet the chief incumbent, perhaps during
the period when he was looking for ‘solace in religion and community’
during the turbulent days of his transition from dismissal from Central
Bank service to setting himself up in private sector (p. 165).
It was in the early 1980s that I met NUJ for the first time. My
meeting with him was to discuss matters of mutual interest surrounding
two institutions I was closely associated with at the time - the
Department of Economics at University of Colombo and the Sri Lanka
Association of Economists (SLAE) which was established only a few years
ago.
This first meeting, in the Mercantile Credit head office in the Fort,
had left behind in me vivid memories of his life and style of work as a
private sector leader of finance. I had the opportunity to meet him on a
number of occasions since then, privately as well as in formal
gatherings.
The NU biography, portraying NUJ’s personal traits so interestingly,
takes my mind back to these encounters with NUJ. We discussed a variety
of things in these meetings - about the promotion of the teaching of
economics in Sri Lanka, development of the newly established SLAE and
contemporary economic and financial issues.
What remains from these early encounters with NUJ however, is the
text of an interesting address he made in 1984, edited and published in
the SLEA journal Upanathi Vol. 3:2 (July 1988) under the title “Current
Approaches to Banking in Sri Lanka: A Critique and Some Suggestions for
Reform”.
NUJ’s statement that he “came from a humble family and did not have
any privileges of class or caste” has been cited at several points in
the biography. This statement strikes a familiar chord with many of us
who have come up through education - together with determination,
commitment and hard work - to rise to leadership levels in the society
in their respective chosen fields of specialisation without the support
of family, class or caste privilege.
Those in later generations would perhaps cite the push they had
received from the educational reforms of the mid-1940s, the so-called
Kannangara reforms, as a major factor in their upward social mobility,
particularly the free education component of these reforms.
NUJ however, grew up in a system without these State-sponsored
subsidy schemes. In the absence also of adequate family support, NUJ was
compelled to depend heavily on his individual qualities of, using his
own words - determination, tenacity, purposefulness and cultural values
- for upward social mobility. NUJ was indeed famous for his strongly
held ideology, being averse to State intervention in private lives,
including State-funded subsidies.
The biography under review would undoubtedly have been exceedingly
difficult and time consuming to compile. This would have been
particularly so in the case of the early chapters covering NUJ’s
childhood, adolescence and early youth, given the paucity of written
records.
Although some of these early chapters have, as a result, little
directly about NUJ’s life story, the biographers have made good use of
publications on contemporary social conditions letting the reader make
his or her own judgements about NUJ’s early life. In writing this
biography, well-known publications describing and analysing Sri Lankan
society and polity during the latter half of the nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries (scholarly work of local and foreign authors, as
well as of colonial administrators, together with numerous official
documents) have been extensively and cleverly used without losing sight
of the objective of biography writing. In drafting the second half of
the volume the authors appear to have benefited from greater
availability of material from NUJ’s personal files as well as from more
abundant publications.
As already noted, an interesting aspect of this biography is its
skilful combination of the life history of NUJ with the relevant social
history of the times. On the basis of my personal interest, let me
select a few chapters and the social history component that is covered
in those chapters. Chapters 3 to 5 examine some aspects of social
conditions during the first half of the twentieth century under the
British raj - conditions that exercised a sizeable influence on
individual lives of many contemporaries.
The commentaries about the educational facilities of the time,
largely developed by the Christian missionaries, though brief, are
interesting, particularly as conditions have undergone revolutionary
change following the significant educational reforms of the mid-1940s
and after. The biographers record NUJ’s own judgement that it was his
alma mater St. Aloysius College, Galle which inculcated in him some of
the excellent qualities which helped him become what he eventually
turned out to be - namely determination, tenacity, purposefulness and
cultural values.
I have had no exposure to education in Christian missionary schools.
I had the opportunity, however, of knowing, through relatives and
friends, that some of the good comments about missionary school
education and the teachers involved (highlighted in this biography) were
applicable to such schools even in the 1950s, three decades after NUJ’s
education at St. Aloysius’.
The difference perhaps was that by the late 1950s and early 1960s,
the missionary schools lost the monopoly of ‘good’ education in the
country. Competitive schools came up in the private sector under
organisations like the Buddhist Theosophical Society and also in the
State sector.
The analytical material presented by the biographers on contemporary
social conditions is particularly interesting when it comes to the
period of NUJ’s life after his school education. For many years, comment
has been made by scholars, policy makers as well as managers of private
businesses about the predilection of educated youth for Government
sector jobs. Conditions have changed to some extent, but still this
characteristic prevails among the bulk of the educated youth in our
society.
Widely heard was the comment about the educational system developed
in Sri Lanka under British rule to train the locals for Government
service in administrative, accounting, clerical and other tasks. The
lure of Government service rested on security of employment it offered,
social dignity attached to it and the opportunity it provided for upward
social mobility.
The numbers who rose from humble backgrounds to high social positions
over the last hundred years did so through education, Government sector
employment and of course, conscientious hard work plus some luck, may be
counted in tens of thousands if not in millions. Truly rare though are
such meteoric rises from Government sector clerical service to Central
Bank governorship. Such talents and commitment to work as were found in
NUJ also are extremely unusual, and rare in any society.
NUJ’s expertise, both as scholar and practitioner, was in the area of
banking and finance. His work as Assistant Secretary to the well-known
Ceylon Banking Commission (also called Pochkhanawala Commission) of 1934
was instrumental in strengthening his knowledge in banking and finance.
The NUJ biography provides a succinct, clear account of economic
history of colonial Ceylon to provide the backdrop for the appointment
of this Commission of Inquiry. The biographers have used some of the
classic works on this subject to write the relevant sections of the
volume. Examples are H. A. de S. Gunasekera’s From Dependent Currency to
Central Banking, Wickrama Weerasooria’s Nattukottai Chettiars and of
course, the Report of the Commission itself - one of the most highly
valued sessional papers produced by a Commission of Inquiry.
The pinnacle of achievement for NUJ in his public sector service was
his appointment as the Governor of the newly established Central Bank
after the resignation of the first Governor, John Exter. He thus became
the first Sri Lankan to hold this key position in economic management.
The last three chapters of the biography cover details of NUJ’s
turbulent association with the Central Bank and the political backdrop
of this association.
The detailed account of political developments in the first decade or
so after independence is likely to be exceedingly educative to younger
generations.
In order to explain the political backdrop to the events of how NUJ
was ‘made a scapegoat to shield the activities of bigger fish’ (cited
from the Tribune of August 30, 1957, p. 172 of biography), the authors
explain the role played by family and caste links in Sri Lankan politics
then (as they do even now), in addition of course, to ownership of
wealth.
The three final chapters of the volume are instructive of the process
of evolution of electoral politics in Sri Lanka after independence.
Details provided in this volume about the lives of some of the key
persons in Sri Lankan political life of this period, are useful to
understand the political processes.
The story concerning NUJ is about political discrimination against an
official who refused to bend rules to favour the political masters.
Certain autonomy on the part of senior public servants was perhaps
routine nature at that time. Conditions have changed so much, however,
that today, similar instances of refusal to carry out wrongful
instructions from political masters are believed to be exceedingly out
of the ordinary. Today, therefore, cases of victimisation for
non-compliance are perhaps also rare, clearly rarer than cases of
political favouritism in appointments and promotions.
This biography of NUJ covers the range of his life in the first five
decades - 1908 to 1958, and is a work of great interest to students of
economics and politics as well as the general reader.
- W. D. Lakshman
(The writer is the former Vice-Chancellor and Professor of Economics
of the University of Colombo)
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