Trail-blazer in development thinking

This week’s Reminiscences features Godfrey Gunatilleke, a distinguished former civil servant and the founder of the country’s oldest independent think-tank, the MARGA Institute. In our interview he wished to talk little about himself but more about the times he lived through.

Yet that was not possible. The times he lived through cannot be separated from him and it is only through personal recollections that we can reconstruct the past that my generation is totally unfamiliar with. He possessed a mind congenial to the ideas that were rapidly transforming the world around him. At the age of 86, his charisma is still evident. It would not be possible to capture the full flavour of his multi-faceted life in a brief article about him. What is presented here are few reminiscences selected from different periods of his life.

“I was born in 1926, in Matale, and my early childhood covers the period after the Great Depression. There was much hardship and economic upheaval during that period and our family and household too faced those difficulties. My father, Daniel Perera Senaratne, was a Notary and he was practising in Kandy and Matale. My early school days were in Kandy at Good Shepherd Convent and St. Anthony’s College. The last six years of my schooling was at St. Joseph’s, Colombo.

Children’s literature

“I grew up in a bilingual household. English being the medium of instruction in schools, we switched easily from English to Sinhala and vice versa when we conversed at home. This exposed me and my siblings to a rich mix of cultures. As a child I lived in the midst of two imaginary worlds - one part created out of the children’s literature of the West - Hansel and Gretel, Red Riding hood, fairies and elves; the other from Sinhala folktales, the Jataka stories Andare and devas and demons. As a child I was fascinated by two books which my father had brought for his children - a version of Arthur Mee’s Children’s Encyclopaedia and 10 volumes entitled ‘Lands and Peoples’. These books gave me a glimpse of the vast mosaic of other human cultures, the enormous diversity of the human world. Then when I went to school I had the benefit of a system which had not yet divided students by language. The class in the nineth grade was quite extraordinary for its ethnic and religious diversity. We had Sinhalese, Tamils, Muslims, Burghers, Malays and a boy from the Parsi community and our friendships cut across all the racial and religious boundaries. I think this experience of diversity in the household and school stayed with me throughout my life and helped to form my adult value system.”

“When I look back on my school life one thing I recollect is my stubborn reluctance to go to school and long periods of absence from school. It is from the ninth year onwards I started to enjoy school immensely. The enjoyment came from much more active participation in school life, the inspiring teachers we had, the inter -school debates. Looking back I find that within the Catholic environment the non-Catholics like me did not feel cramped in our explorations in learning. I read a lot of leftist literature and discussed them with my fellow students. In the debates I remember I spoke glowingly of the Russian Revolution. I recall Father Peter Pillai who was the Rector making a critical comment, somewhat gently, on my views on Russia and presenting me with a book by Nicholas Berdyaev on Russian Communism to temper my enthusiasm for the Bolshevik Revolution. But that was all. The contacts I had and the friendships I made and the teachers all contributed to a very rich student life.”

Education system

“My generation were not products of the free education system. Education became free only in my first year in the university. I went through most of my schooling on scholarships which gave me free tuition and was awarded a scholarship for English Literature on my admission to the university. As might be expected my four years in the university was a time of far-reaching transformation for me. They were very crowded years. The subjects I took engaged me in a way which at first I had not expected. It became more than a subject that equipped me for an occupation. The way in which Dr E.F.C. Ludowyk brought to us the method of teaching he had learnt in Cambridge gave us a body of knowledge that taught us to analyse and understand human relations in all their complexity.

“This knowledge is at the centre of all I learnt thereafter about administration, development and human rights. A small group including myself published a journal called Harvest, which was the first of its kind. This involved us in work which was very rewarding intellectually. The university years also defined for me my engagement with society. I was part of a group which was Marxist/Trotskyist in orientation, but the factional struggles and sterile controversies within the main Marxist parties became frustrating. In the early 40s, Arthur Koestler had published his famous novel ‘Darkness at Noon’. It had a powerful impact on many of us; it seemed to be questioning the fundamentals of Marxist materialism. Several of my friends and I moved out of the Marxist group.”

Academic career

Gunatilleke also said that during his years in the English Department the learning process was not only in the classroom but also in what was taking place outside. A rich learning process took place in the tuck shop where there was constant discussion, intense intellectual inquiry, long debates and controversies about different ideologies and schools of thought. There were heated debates between the Trotskysts and Stalinists. These discussions formed a major part of the intellectual development for the student body at that time, particularly in the English Department.

Gunatilleke graduated in English Literature with first Class Honours in 1948 and was awarded the Arts scholarship to pursue higher studies in UK. His first preference was for an academic career but he had to make a hard choice for personal reasons and decided to remain in Sri Lanka. He entered the Ceylon Civil Service in 1950, passing out first in order of merit. As a cadet his first station was Jaffna. Thereafter he was attached to the Prime Minister’s office during the period when D.S. Senanayake was the Prime Minister. This was the time when far-reaching changes were taking place in the political arena. Chelvanayagam left the Tamil Congress to form the Federal party, Bandaranaike left the UNP to form the SLFP. The trend towards ethnic polarization was rising sharply.

Public service

“My brief spell in the Prime Minister’s office gave me a rare insight into the subtleties of political management and the inter play of personal relations which were going on behind the scenes. The first act of D.S. Senanayake after taking over Bandaranaike’s portfolio was to summon an all island conference of the chairmen of Local Government bodies who were among the strongest supporters of Bandaranaike.

He assigned me with the task of preparing the documentation for the conference which included a detailed analysis of the distribution of grants according to electorates. This was a shrewd move. It exposed some of the biases in the allocation process which favoured the local bodies which were perceived as supporters of Bandaranaike. Senanayake gave the impression of a leader who wanted to correct the political biases and act fairly. He was moving aggressively into Bandaranaike’s territory.

Recollecting his experience during the early period of his public service, he said:

“The Civil Service at that time was functioning in a manner which gave us a sense of responsibility very early in our career. It had its good and bad consequences. I became Deputy Director when I was only 27 years, in 1953.”

“What we learnt in the civil service was that we did not stop learning after we got into the profession. We were not a specialized service; we moved from one department to another. At that time however there was no structured training programme.” Gunetilleke served as chairman of several state corporations during the period from 1960-67. Thereafter he served in the Ministry of Planning and became the Director of Plan Implementation. He also became the Additional Secretary and remained as advisor to the Prime Minister for a short time. He took early retirement from administrative service in 1972.

“The best period of my career as a public servant was my service in the Planning Ministry from 1965-1972. Gamani Corea was the Secretary from 1965-70. My colleagues and I greatly enjoyed working with him and learnt a great deal working with him. Foremost was the capacity and knowledge one acquired to place one’s administrative tasks and policies in the development context. But what gave me the highest job satisfaction was setting up the Plan Implementation Department and introducing systems for project evaluation, progress control and monitoring of the government capital budget.

Subsequent to his early retirement, Godfrey Gunatilleke established the MARGA Institute, a development studies Institute, the first of its kind in Sri Lanka.

International agencies

“The idea was in gestation for a long time with my colleagues in the Planning Ministry and me. The new dimension I think that we were able to add was the focus on development as a multi-dimensional process. The institute worked closely with a wide range of international agencies and was closely associated with the global effort at re-examining the concept of development and incorporating all the important human dimensions.”

He was closely associated with the Civil Society movement in Sri Lanka from its very beginning. There was another aspect to his life, that was his interest in literature. Even after joining the administrative service his interest in literature did not diminish. He was involved in the literary field and he has written short stories such as ‘The Garden’, ‘Thief in the Night’ and articles such as ‘Language Without Metaphor.’ His reminiscences about all these activities are truly illuminating and food for thought.