Naming Anil Moonesinghe

Vinod

My father, Anil Moonesinghe, who passed away on December 8, 2002, was born into a different world than today’s, a very different Sri Lanka. In 1927, the year he was born, Sri Lanka – then called Ceylon – was ensconced in the bosom of the British domain.

The portraits of King George V and Queen Mary adorned middle-class parlours. The British flag – the Union Jack – was used to decorate the roads for weddings (it only came to be replaced by the Lion Flag after1972).

The middle classes were fairly well-off, but the lot of workers and farmers was abysmal. Malnutrition was rife and the people were uneducated and unhealthy – the infant mortality rate was then equal to or worse than India’s.

Church of England

To crown it all, the English ruled the roost, ably assisted by their ‘Brown Sahib’ lackeys. Only whites were allowed first class in trains, apart from members of the top aristocracy and ministers of the Church of England.

Britain still presided over an ‘Empire on which the Sun never set’ - an empire built on a base of racism; the natives of its vast realm remained the ‘White Man’s Burden’.

As late as 1940 British churchmen, including the Archbishop of Canterbury, published an open letter in ‘The Times’ of London, acknowledging ‘the barriers of race and colour which exist to-day in British colonies’ and calling for an end to inequality.

House of Commons

My grandfather’s maternal uncle Anagarika Dharmapala’s legs were broken in Jaffna prison. His brother Edmund died there. Although there was a call in the House of Commons for an inquiry into the circumstances of his death, the British government refused, considering this to be perfectly acceptable.

The entire family seethed with such anti-British sentiment that my grandfather, who had once been suspended from Royal College for wearing national dress, even refused to buy a British car.

When the Japanese attacked Colombo in April 1942, my 15-year old father was at Rajagaha, near Galle. He tried to organize the local boys into a brigade to help the Japanese when they landed. From Rajagaha he could see the Catalina seaplanes taking off from Koggala, so he fired at them with a shotgun, with no result.

Back in Royal College, he was known by the nickname ‘Rommel’ because of his oft-repeated assertion that the British, then scampering back from Libya to the Nile – would be chased by the eponymous German beyond the Suez canal.

It was Dharmapala who gave my father his real moniker. The story of how this happened might be of interest.

Aryan speakers

Two and a half millenia ago, the Aryan speakers who inhabited this island called themselves ‘Abhaya’, ‘Anula’, ‘Chitra’, ‘Chandra’, ‘Siva’, ‘Tisa’, and so on. As the years went by, their descendants began to give themselves grandiose surnames, generally ending with ‘Singhe’, ‘Nayake’, or ‘Wardena’.

The situation became more confused, as honorifics sometimes included titles such as ‘Aarachchi’, ‘Korale’ or ‘Witharana’.

Then came the Portuguese, who gave people Christian names, which persisted for centuries after they were chased out by the Dutch. It was when the Hollanders were replaced by the British that Dutch names became fashionable. Latin names too had their day.

Thus it was that my grandmother’s grandfather was Adrian de Silva Senanayake Wijegunawardena. His children were Andiris, Cornelia, Cornelius,Theodore and Tiberius. My grandfather’s grandfather bore the name Lansage Andiris Perera Dharmagunawardena. My great-great-grandfather was Hewavitarne Don Carolis.

European names

Then English names became ‘in’, six decades after the conquest. My great-great-grandparents named their children with impeccable Church of England names: Charles, David, Edmund, Simon and the somewhat twee Engeltina. David was of course to become better known as Anagarika Dharmapala. On the passenger manifest of the ‘City of Paris’ arriving in New York in 1893 his name is given as H Dharmapala.

At the time, apart from the European names in vogue, most indigenous Sinhalese names were ‘Banda’ or ‘Hami’ or ‘Menika’, suitably modified with an adjective such as ‘Loku’ (big), ‘Podi’ (small), ‘Sudu’ (white), ‘Kalu’ (black) or ‘Ran’ (gold). Or else they were brutally vulgar, like ‘Ukkung’ or ‘Hawadiya’.

Buddhist heritage

Some people had differing names, depending on the occasion. For instance, the Rate Mahattaya of Wellawaya, PB Rambukpotha’s initials stood both for Peter Benjamin and for Punchi Bandara.

Great-uncle Dharmapala wanted better. He wanted names that were not the result of foreign invasions, but which would reflect the glory of Sri Lanka’s history and its Buddhist heritage. He disapproved of ‘thuppahi’ (deracinated) names. It was he who, when my grandmother married into the clan, changed her name from ‘Beatrice’ to ‘Sita’.

He turned to North India – his chosen land - for inspiration. He had already given his nephews such Indian names as ‘Kumaradas’, ‘Nalin’, ‘Neel Kamal’, ‘Piyadas’, ‘Raja’, ‘Sanath’ and ‘Wimala Dhamma’.

He had also given the writer Uparis Silva the handle by which he is remembered – Piyadasa Sirisena. It was because of him that Malalasekera changed his name from George Peiris to Gunapala Piyasena. Names such as Dharmadasa, Kamalawathi, Manel and Saranadasa owed their origin to my great-uncle.

Faith in astrology

My grandmother went to him and asked him to give her first-born child a name. He agreed. She then gave him my father’s horoscope, drawn up almost at his birth.

Dharmapala was annoyed. He scolded her, telling her not to have faith in astrology, that one’s future was shaped by one’s actions, not by the position of the stars.

Nevertheless, he was happy to give a name to my father, which was the Bengali name Anil Kumar – pronounced like ‘anneal coomah’. However, the elocution didn’t last the transition across the Palk Strait; my uncle Susil’s name was similarly perverted from the correct ‘susheel’. So my father and uncle were the first Anil and Susil in Sri Lanka.

Incidentally, it was Dharmapala who began the tradition of male names lacking the final vowel, in the style of North India – which is now very much in vogue.