The passionate socialist

A Special Correspondent

Following article was published in the Daily News on March 28, 1972

‘Socialism is a positive constructive movement and socialists who wish to contribute to the movement should abandon hatred and be positive and constructive

Everything about Philip Gunawardena when he first burst into politics had the quality of legend. He was the new prophet who brought the gospel of socialism to Ceylon. Hewagam Korale where he was born was the land of the Sinhala soldier.

His father, Boralugoda Ralahamy, shared with his Kandyan contemporary Maduwanwala the reputation of having halted the inroads roads of British vested interests who were then acquiring all the possible land beginning from the hills of Uva right down to the lowlands bordering the Kelani. No other master was acknowledged in their territories.

This spirit of independence burned fiercely in the young socialist's soul, later to be fanned by a wealth of experience in the international socialist movement that most of his contemporaries could only dream of. It has been said of Philip that he fired the blood of men and clashed with the police in more cities of the world than the average politician can name that he had more colleagues scattered around in foreign political prisons than the total number of an average man's acquaintances.

In later years, he came to count both among the rulers of resurgent Asia and Africa and the forgotten exiles of the socialist movement in the West many who remembered the daring of his exploits and affectionately acknowledged his teaching.

He was a complete stranger to fear. He had the passion and fire of the convinced socialist.

Political thinking

He had lost none of it when he first entered the State Council. Witness the scene in that august and hopeful assembly: the year 1936. A fiery young speaker is on his feet attacking the headman system. The fossilised remains of a decadent feudalism, he calls it. The barbs are deadly and well directed, but they hit a target the orator could hardly have intended.

A dignified old world figure in a dark coat and cloth abruptly rises from his seat in the gallery at the end of that tirade against the very system he represented. He goes straight to the Kachcheri. Where he borrows a sheet of paper from a clerk and writes out his resignation. This is none other than the legendary Boralugoda Ralahamy and the speaker is his second son Philip. Few sons are gifted to evoke such respect from a father of the Ralahamy's calibre.

Philip's political thinking began at the age of 14, when his father was condemned to death by a Court Martial in the dark riot-torn days of 1915 for the offence of being on the side of the people whether as it is believed to this day in Boralugoda, he was the determined child who accompanied his mother on a desperate mission to present a last minute petition at Queen's House, the fact remains that the Ralahamy was ultimately reprieved and lived long enough to take great pride in his son.

Not even the doubts of elderly cronies who approached the old man in later years with rumours that his sons were spreading a dangerous doctrine of hate could shake the Ralahamy's confidence in his second son. He confessed that he knew nothing at all about 'this Samasamajism' but he did know his son, Philip, and he was quite sure he would do nothing wrong. Philip was to inspire this kind of faith among his close associates. For an essentially political figure, this was extraordinary.

As a schoolboy at Ananda, Philip began attending the first political meetings of the incipient national movement in 1918, but in 1920 he preferred to join the extremist ‘Young Lanka League’ of Victor Corea. A. E. Goonesinha and C. H. Z. Fernando instead of the National Congress founded by F. R. Senanayake.

But it was really to the pioneer American socialist Dr Scott-Nearing that he owed the inspiration for what was to become the sustaining philosophy of his life. At the end of three years reading in political science, law, labour problems and philosophy, both Philip and his campus friend at the university of Wisconsin, the celebrated Jayaprakash Narain attended a political lecture by Dr Scott-Nearing which was to mark the beginning of their socialist outlook.

Left movement

Scott-Nearing, who visited his pupil in Ceylon on his last journey to the east once wrote: “Socialism is a positive constructive movement and socialists who wish to contribute to the movement should abandon hatred and be positive and constructive.”

Philip's guru was not one of your wild eyed revolutionaries. Neither did Philip come to socialism as one would imagine slaves are driven to revolt.

He came to it out of an abundance of moral scruples, a sense of outrage against injustice, out of a belief in the brotherhood of man.

His love of humanity was an integral part of a truly sensitive nature. When he spoke to massed audiences at Galle Face or at election meetings, he seemed to magnetise them with his sincerity and it was a tremendous striking force that his words generated. In personal life unassuming and retiring to the point of shyness, yet entirely without inhibition in his public utterances there was no contradiction between theory and practice, the ideal and reality, the thought and the deed in his life.

He never took a rickshaw ride because the degradation of another human being revolted him. The man who suffered the most for his politics carried the least bitterness in his breast. To him revolution was not a matter of personal hatreds but the creating and guiding of social forces.

Philip’s role as a political thinker would have to be the subject of a special study. He was a political catalyst of our time as even the briefest recapitulation of his career will substantiate. Never a believer in party politics or parliamentary rules he sought to change the course of events by foresight and strategy. He had an uncanny knack of sizing up situations.

A single move of his would often leave his rivals gasping for breath. If not actually running for life. This was never truer than of his troubled relations with the Left movement. It is a moot point whether the daring of his mind exceeded even his physical intrepidity, but it is in the nature of things that courage of the kind that makes history and challenges destiny must combine the two. In later years, he was called unpredictable and changeable by rule-of-thumb thinkers of the Left. “I am not hag-ridden by books” was his answer. “Nor do I see Ceylon in the mirror of foreign writing.”

Unlike the scissors-and-paste philosophers that the Left movement produced in abundance, he did not make the mistake of elevating every quirk of foreign revolutionary history into arid dogma. He followed the spirit rather than the letter of Marxism. Thus, he was the first among the new leaders to thrill the resurgent spirit of the people with slogans they could all understand.

Those who expected the promised social revolution to follow the path laid down in the textbooks called him a chauvinist. Ten years or so later, they would be busy eating their words - and using his. Parity, for instance, has been submerged in a Sinhala policy for which he was reviled in 1956.

Political science

Though books had not cluttered his mind, Philip remained a student all his life, a student of human affairs. There was scarcely a more widely read parliamentarian in the House. Always in his seat even through the dreariest debates; Philip would often be seen relieving the tedium with a new book of remarkable topicality. He never really stopped learning and it was this habit which taught him to think out ever fresh paths of action.

The background is worth recalling. After completing his secondary education at Prince of Wales, Moratuwa and at Ananda College under P. de S. Kularatne, he followed a year's course in economics at the University College, Colombo, before he went to America. There he read further in political science and philosophy, with two years at Illinois University and three at Wisconsin.

Moving to New York Philip threw himself from 1925 to 1928 into the thick of the socialist movement and the anti-imperialist organization of American colonials. He thrilled crowds by his oratory not only in Union Square but in many cities of Central and South America. Dr Jose Vas Gonsalos, the Mexican revolutionary, later to be a minister in the first Revolutionary Government of Mexico, was in this period his close friend Doctors Seyed Hoosein and J. C. Coomarappa, the left wing Indian nationalist, were among those who collaborated with Philip.

To be continued