Pera’s wise and gentle Classics scholar is no more
Through many countries and over many seas, I have come, Brother, to these melancholy rites, to show this final honour to the dead- Gaius Valerius Catullus
What shall we say of him? How will he be remembered? As one by one, the lights go out on our beloved campus, we think of Merlin, the wise and gentle scholar, whose devotion to the Western classics went hand in hand with a spirit of inquiry that did not exclude him from a lively interest in the Mahavamsa and the historical aspects of oriental studies.
His was a truly rare spirit at that time – the 1950s – when academic activity, even at Peradeniya, which had built up an international reputation as a home of liberated minds – was becoming increasingly politicized and narrow-minded. The once revered classic works of Greece and Rome were becoming increasingly neglected because their study appeared to the minds of powerful but essentially indifferent politicians little more than a hobby of privileged young men. The English language itself – Sri Lanka’s highway from its medieval past to an understanding of the modern world – was treated as a weapon of social destruction, rather than recognised and valued as the precious treasure that it was.
The perennial beauty of the Peradeniya campus, the euphoria surrounding Independence, and our own youth and inexperience must have blinded us to the danger in which we lived there in our student years. How else could we have failed to observe what was happening around us? It was my own great good fortune that I was an undergraduate at Peradeniya from 1954 to 1958, years that I think of now as golden, because they were comparatively unstained (though they could not escape being occasionally touched) by the rot that must have been already setting in.
Merlin was one of the university teachers who kept the Western arts alive during those years. Working with, and ultimately directing, a rapidly shrinking student body, he had inherited the skills and dedication of the generation that had preceded him – J.L.C. Rodrigo, Cuthbert Amerasinghe, Roland Sri Pathmanathan. When he found that a classic work in Latin was beyond a student’s capabilities, he used a translation or translated it himself. He explored the possible links between ancient Greece and the literary monuments of India and Sri Lanka. His work on the Mahavamsa is illuminated by his knowledge of the epics of Greece and Rome. A strong personal interest prompted his book Elephants at War.
His early spell at S. Thomas’ College introduced him to the Western classics, and his sense of humour allowed him to appreciate the appearance of his own surname in a ‘version’ of Kennedy’s Latin Primer that schoolboy ingenuity produced:
Aulis, actis, caulis, collis, Jamis, Peiris, Francis, follis … Years later, he savoured the Sinhala ‘version’ of the STC motto: Esto Perpetua ( “Isthoppuwa Pichchuwa”).
As an English Honours student, I did not have the pleasure of being taught by Merlin, but as colleagues on the Peradeniya staff from 1962 to 1972, I met him often, a genial member of a circle of like-minded scholars in the University Staff Room. And it was there, over a cup of tea, that Merlin, speaking of some talented students in his class who had lamented the absence of a university journal in which they could publish and circulate their English poems, remarked that it would be a good idea to establish one (“Just a few cyclostyled sheets of paper, stapled together would do”). These were the words that inspired the literary journal New Ceylon Writing.
Vale, Merlin Peiris. We, who were your colleagues and friends, salute you.