When news of Jayantha Dhanapala’s death came through in May 2023, I remembered a question Carlo Fonseka raised in an article on Amaradeva years ago: “After him, who?” I also remembered a message someone sent me from Toronto when I informed him of Sumitra Peries’s passing last January: “The end of an era.” I thought both responses fitting on this occasion: an era has indeed ended, but we do not know what it will lead to.
Many of the tributes that have been penned on him have charted his career, and none more comprehensively than Ravinatha Aryasinha, who delivered his eulogy at the Trinity College Chapel in Kandy. As a diplomat Dhanapala began his life in 1965, when he entered the country’s Overseas Service. From there he was despatched to various capitals, from London to Beijing, before wounding up in New Delhi. From Delhi he moved to Geneva, ending up later as Sri Lanka’s man in Washington. He also distinguished himself at the UN Institute for Disarmament Research. Among his achievements at this point was the extension of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, as President of the Non-Proliferation Review Conference.
It would be easy to laud these achievements, to hold them up as the benchmark for those who aspire to enter the country’s Foreign Service. But Dhanapala was also a product of his time, and we would be doing an injustice to him and his legacy if we do not locate him in the social, cultural, and intellectual landscape of his country.
For obvious reasons, his funeral service was held at his school. In The Kandy Man, Sarath Amunugama reflects on the intellectual climate that Trinity College fostered in his time, the contemporaries he counted, and the many societies and clubs they joined and took part in. Dhanapala emerged from all these crosscurrents. As Aryasinha stated in his eulogy, it was at Trinity that “his global vision was nurtured and celebrated.”
Unlike the sterility of Colombo, Kandy and Trinity brooked a more progressive intellectual climate, and Dhanapala counted among his peers, juniors, and seniors those who would later put Sri Lanka on the world map. They included not just Lakshman Kadirgamar or Sarath Amunugama, but also Nihal Rodrigo, Stanley Kirinde, Wimal Dissanayake, and Jayantha Kelegama. It was under the then principal, Norman Walter, that the school implemented several reforms: “to address,” as Dhanapala later recounted, “one of the unhappy legacies of the British public school tradition – its de-emphasis of intellectual prowess.” These included “inviting distinguished persons to address the school assembly” and organising a seminar at the height of the 1956 Suez Crisis “which censured British policy.”
These had an indelible impact on Dhanapala. The next year, 1957, he penned an essay on “The World We Want.” The essay won him an award and a trip to the US, where he met the then Senator for Massachusetts, John F. Kennedy. This was hardly an isolated achievement. Unlike school magazine essays today, which mostly serve to reinforce the greatness and elite status of these institutions, school magazine essays back then were profoundly perceptive and concerned with the country and the world at large.
Dhanapala was thus part and parcel of an education system that provoked young people to not just reflect on the world around them, but also question and reimagine it. For all intents and purposes, this system no longer exists; it has instead given way to a culture of complacency, in which we uncritically celebrate the institutions we inhabit without asking how we can reform or improve them.
Dhanapala, moreover, won his prize at a time of deep social and cultural transformation in the country. In his autobiography The Kandy Man, Sarath Amunugama reflects on how, during his time – in the mid-1950s – students began to take an interest in Sinhala and Tamil, in the culture, history, and heritage of their country. It was at this particular juncture that elite schools, not just in Kandy and Colombo but also elsewhere, from the North to the South, inaugurated Sinhala and Tamil Literary Societies, whose activities centred not only on language and literature, but also local politics and global affairs.
All this was tied to a quest that Sri Lanka had launched, a quest for an identity of its own in the backdrop of Cold War tensions and the establishment of the Non-Aligned Movement. There was much talk of Global Southernism, of the contribution Sri Lanka could make to the Global South, at this juncture. It was here that an entire generation of civil servants and diplomats, not to mention intellectuals and academics, began charting a distinct path for Sri Lanka, among them Gamani Corea and Godfrey Gunatilleke. And it was that tradition of Global Southernism which encouraged and pushed them and their intellectual descendants, including Dhanapala, to represent their country at the highest levels abroad.
None of this is to say that Dhanapala’s career was free of, or from, critique. Yet there is no doubt that Dhanapala represented a different generation and milieu, a different cultural and intellectual climate. Today that generation, milieu, and climate no longer exists, and it no longer flourishes. We have gone a long way back. What is regrettable about this is that we have come to accept it. We have become complacent.
Uditha Devapriya is a regular commentator on history, art and culture, politics, and foreign policy who can be reached at [email protected]. Together with Uthpala Wijesuriya, he heads U & U, an informal art and culture research collective.
