The Gleanings of An Extraordinary Life

A Man Called Ceylon

Somasiri Devendra

The postage-stamp-sized photo I found on the internet won’t take much enlargement, but it should still be possible to make out the salient details of the cover of A Man Called Ceylon in the image at right. Two uniformed schoolgirls, satchels in hand, balance expertly on a raft made of nailed-together planks while a boy, also in school uniform, punts them towards a landing-place on a riverbank somewhere in the hinterland of Sri Lanka. The crystal-clear water and sandy stream bottom tell us that we are looking at a forest scene; the clothing and relaxed postures of the children on the raft make it obvious that it is an everyday one. It is, we realise, how these children travel to school every day.

It would be hard to think of a more perfect cover illustration for Somasiri Devendra’s book, which – not to beat about the bush – I confess I found utterly delightful. A Man Called Ceylon is a set of essays and articles produced by the author over many years and is quite probably the result of an computer spring-cleaning effort like the one he describes in ‘The Forests of the Night’ (herein). Yet judging by its structure, Devendra clearly intends us to take A Man Called Ceylon as a record – though by no means, I hope, the definitive record – of his life. 

What a remarkable life it has been, and how beautifully the sagely-chosen photo reflects it. The plank raft, with its ancient, functional design, evokes the author’s enduring (indeed, hereditary) involvement with boats, ships and navigation. It also refers, in a glancing way, to his learned accomplishments in marine archaeology and the study of vernacular marine architecture. The clear, fast-moving stream shaded by overhanging trees, meanwhile, gives us the forested interior of Lanka, Devendra’s preferred environment when on dry land. The children represent education, which the author values so highly that he has turned its acquisition and dissemination into a lifelong project. The children’s disposition and activity are also full of meaning for those who know our country well: traditional folkways adapted to modern needs, the peaceable acceptance of well-established social roles, even the extraordinary lengths to which Lankans are known to go in order to obtain a decent education – all these are in the picture, just as they are in Somasiri Devendra’s life.

A Man Called Ceylon is divided into halves. The first of these, subtitled Waterways & Watercraft, deals with what we might call the author’s maternal heritage. The title story is that of Lloyd Oswald Felsianes, a Ceylonese teenager of mixed race who ran away from home to enlist as a cabin boy on a British merchant ship. Nicknamed ‘Ceylon’ by his white shipmates, Felsianes sailed the world for seven years before returning home to marry, settle down and become, in the fullness of time, a tugboat captain or ‘driver’ at the Port of the Colombo and the grandfather of Somasiri Devendra. 

This section largely features articles about boats and the sea, and about the author’s experiences as an officer in what was then the Royal Ceylon Navy – but to describe it so gives no idea of the scope of the material. There are lapidary disquisitions on ancient Indian Ocean trade, Arab navigation techniques and the construction of sambuqs and boums – traditional wooden ships – by Indian craftsmen in Sharjah. There is an account of the voyages of the Annapooryanamal, a Jaffna-built sailing ship that circumnavigated the globe under a variety of different names (and a number of different captains, one of whom was the film star Sterling Hayden). There is a scholarly account on the evolution of inland watercraft in Sri Lanka, as revealed by archaeology, and an item about the surrender of an Italian naval vessel, the Eritria, to a ship of the Ceylon Naval Reserve during the Second World War. Also in this section are a scholarly meditation on the Malwatu Oya, a river that served the ancient Sinhalese capital of Anuradhapura as its main link to the sea and thus to the world beyond the shores of Lanka, but whose course is now almost dry; a tentative identification of sailing-ships in a drawing scratched into the surface of a temple mural in Kandy by a seventeenth-century Dutch vandal; and much more besides. Though the material is sometimes recondite, the style is easy and clear, often elegant and never affected or over-literary. In spite of the editorial and proofreading howlers that all writers who publish in English in this country must suffer, it is a pleasure to read.

The second half of A Man Called Ceylon, subtitled History & Heritage, deals with Lanka – its history and prehistory as well as its timeless quiddity. It is presented to us as the author’s legacy from his father, the educator, archaeologist and man of letters Don Titus Devendra. The elder Devendra, a co-editor of the Buddhist Encyclopaedia, was a Sinhalese nationalist during that hopeful period (roughly 1920 to 1950) when the term had not yet been besmirched and travestied by vandals. Appropriately, the heritage dealt with here is in large part a Sinhalese one, though the author also deals with the prehistory of the island and its peoples before the coming of the legendary Sinhalese ancestor Vijaya, and includes a number of pieces relating to more recent times as well.

The material here is even more wide-ranging than in the first part. Since much of it is based on personal experience, it also gives a better indication of what a varied and adventurous life Somasiri Devendra has led. Its centrepiece, however, is a three-part prehistorical essay of astonishing scope, ‘Ratna-dweepa, Janma-bhoomi’, which begins with a description of the geological evolution of the island of Lanka from the supercontinent Pangea by way of the Indian Plate and its wanderings, and concludes with a speculative account of native society at the time of Vijaya’s putative arrival. Speculative, yes, but informed by science and scholarship: Devendra eschews both nativist mythmaking and the flights of imaginative fancy indulged in by the likes of the late C. Rasanayagam, the author of Ancient Jaffna. ‘No man or god built this bridge’, he states flatly of the barely-submerged isthmus connecting Lanka to South India, putting confabulators on both sides of the Palk Strait firmly in their place. His attitude – even when wandering through the dreamtime of ancient myth and fable – is determinedly empirical. ‘History...depends only on written records,’ he writes in the same essay, ‘but science has provided us with tools to use and draws credible conclusions that can be tested.’ A generalist and a polymath, he often glimpses connexions that a specialist might not see, and is not shy about discussing them: the one he draws between Buddhist veneration for the peepul or bo tree and prehistoric fertility rites, by way of a Sinhala kavi he heard chanted by pilgrims before the Maha Bodhi in Anuradhapura, is a particularly intriguing example.

It is hard to give a fair description of the riches Devendra has crammed into this part of the book. His writing owes something to the prose-poetry of John Still’s Jungle Tide – a debt he frankly acknowledges – but the experiences he describes are all his own. He gained them first as a schoolboy accompanying his father on reconnoitres and ‘digs’, then as a naval officer helping to set up and man military outposts in the middle of nowhere, and finally – after intervening decades in the Colombo tea trade, a period of which he tells us nothing – as commanding officer of a group of irregular volunteers (he does not say so, but we gather that they were special ops of some sort) during the Sri Lankan civil war. There is a wealth of knowledge about Sinhalese history and folkways interwoven with this, gained largely in the form of personal encounters and experiences. And there is more – a review of Robert Crusz’s book on the Cocos Island Mutiny, and another of Lewcock, Sansoni and Senanayake’s The Architecture of an Island, personalized with reminscences of Barbara Sansoni and her family. There are colonial curiosities: forgotten surveyors’ benchmarks discovered in unlikely places, a stone slab at the end of Wellawatte Bridge. The inscription on the latter is effaced and illegible, yet Devendra manages to trace the provenance of the slab, only to find that it was an English lady resident’s poetic tribute to, of all things, a banyan-tree. 

My favourite anecdote from this section, however, is the author’s description of the excavation of a ruined dagoba or stupa in the middle of the forest: he evokes vividly the jungle sounds and scents, the painstaking archaeologists at work, the long-concealed relic-chamber slowly coming into view.

The chamber was now visible, but more delicate work remained to be done. The remaining [granite] beams were cracked: each cracked piece had to be secured by rope and every one lifted out at the same time... It was a solemn moment to see the chamber after eight centuries. In the middle was the Meru gala, the square stone pillar representing Mount Meru, the Cosmic Mountain. Resting on it was the main reliquary. Around the central pillar and at the corners of the chamber were multi-headed cobras in terracotta. Set into niches on the four walls were images of the Buddha made of gold foil filled with sandalwood paste. The walls were covered with a paper-thin plaster, painted – but in a manner never before seen in this country – black background with beautiful red line-work figures, classical in simplicity and rendering.

No matter what he is writing about, Devendra’s mind and personality are vividly present on every page. It is an inquiring and capacious mind and a friendly easygoing personality, as free of prejudice as it would be possible to find, I think, anywhere on Earth. He has a gift for describing personal experiences, so that it is easy to empathise with his feelings and share his sense of wonder. But there is something else here as well, something that can only rightly be described as love – the unconditional, all-encompassing love of all being that Buddhists call metta, and which Christians refer to as agapé. 

It shines undimmed throughout the book, adding its grace to these haphazard, unsystematic yet thoroughly enchanting gleanings of an extraordinary life.