MERVYN DE SILVA:56YEARS AFTER ’56

“The eagle landed softly on the moon. Now Mr. Nixon will land even more gently in Peking” wrote Mervyn de Silva on July 22, 1971 in the Ceylon Observer. Neil Armstrong passed away this month. The 83rd birth anniversary of Mervyn de Silva falls on September 5. In the same article on the Sino American Rapprochement he told his compatriots in Sri Lanka “It is nothing less than the shift of the gravitational centre of world politics from the west to our own continent. It is here that that the ultimate question of war and peace will be decided in our time” These prophetic words were written forty one years ago.

I think it was the midseventies and Nimal Karunatilake, who introduced me to journalism, had done his stint as the Press Secretary to Dudley Senanayake. I was then an obscure reporter for the Daily News with Mervyn de Silva as editor. Said Nimal Karunatlake or rather pronounced with his singular punditry “To my mind the two quickest and brightest minds today are those of Felix and Mervyn.” Then he added the caveat “But Mervyn is human.”

Though my career in Lake House lasted a little more than five years, I developed a close friendship with Mervyn. I learnt during those years and in the three decades that followed that he was indeed very human. Mervyn’s was a razor-sharp mind shrouded by irreverence to orthodoxy and a pen- chant for child-like foibles. Mervyn’s capacity for witty riposte was unmatched. Once, his brother Neville was offered a newspaper assignment in the Cook Islands by a delegate attending the ESCAP conference, the first major international conference held in the brand new BMICH. When Mervyn was told of the offer received by Neville, he pronounced “I knew he would go far as a journalist.”

In order to refresh my mind and to read some of his dispatches, essays and commentaries I visited the Lake House library. To my amazement I discovered old volumes of newspapers stacked on the ground. The three files under Mervyn de Silva contained clippings of articles written on him after his death. There was one solitary photocopy of his 1967 article “1956: The Cultural Revolution that shook the Left”. It was a bizarre coincidence that despite the apparent neglect of these archival treasures, Mervyn’s file contained his views on this one epochal event.

Mervyn’s son Dayan in his moving portrayal of his father “The Old Man and the Typewriter” says that he was “a deviant product of the three most powerful ideological apparatuses of modern Sri Lanka: Royal College, Peradeniya University and Lake House.” Just as much as Lake House tried to produce a Mervyn de Silva in its own im- age he tried to reshape Lake House in the image that he felt was consonant with the times of creative destruction as symbolized by the single record of his original writing that remains in the file marked Mervyn de Silva in the Lake House Library in 2012. That is 56 years after 1956.When Mervyn joined it, Lake House was a reluctant or rather a faulty mirror of the socio political forces of the time. The English language papers provided a platform for the cosmopolitan intelligentsia and the native mercantilism. As a bright school boy at Royal College and a restless and impulsive undergraduate of the Colombo and Peradeniya Universities, Mervyn dreamt of being the editor of the Ceylon Daily News, the flagship publication of Lake House - the Brookings Institute of what one may term ‘UNP Ceylon’.

Neville Jayaweera his classmate, university contemporary and the epitome of the then Ceylonese intelligentsia has excelled in describing the sociopolitical milieu in which Mervyn dreamt of being the Editor of the Ceylon Daily News. In his ‘Re-constructing an Editor’s Undergrad Days’ Jayaweera begins “Nineteen forty nine, the year that Mervyn de Silva and I entered university at Thurston Road, was still the best of times – that is for those who were from the ‘right set’.”

His junior in the profession Ernest Corea was appointed the editor of the Daily News. I have worked for both Ernest Corea and Mervyn de Silva. Ernest was stable. Mervyn was bright. Ernest was the status quo: ‘Are you better off than you were four years ago?’ Mervyn was change: ‘Don’t stop thinking about tomorrow’. The professional vicissitudes of the two men in the sixties of the last century reveals how accurately Lake House represented the microcosm of the firmament that existed outside. I have cited the two slogans of Reagan and Clinton.

Looking back at ’56 Mervyn observed in 1967: “In little manageable Ceylon, colonization meant both the spoliation of traditional culture and the total surrender of upper classes to the aliens ‘superior’ way of life. In the way of resistance, there were few lonely voices – the stirring indictments of a Dharmapala, the patriotic polemics of a Piyadasa Sirisena, the purist’s ardour of a Munidasa Cumaranatunge, the sublime if little known promptings of an Ananda Coomaraswamy.”

Fourteen years later, in 1981, Mervyn revisits the issue in the Lanka Guardian: "Perhaps in the absence of a truly national and unifying pre-independence movement, Ceylonese nationalism, denied a natural birth, acquired mongrel features with the departure of the foreign ruler. Inasmuch as it was against foreign domination and foreign symbols, this nationalism historically speaking, was normal. But when it focused on the Tamil minority, a community identified as the favoured child of colonial policies, it was racist."

Mervyn de Silva was close to the sources of power. It never seduced him. He was oblivious to power. That made him an incorrigible satirist. It also made him one of the most perceptive chroniclers of contemporary events of our country and the world.

[The writer was a reporter for the Daily News and the Observer from 1968 to 1974, going on to write a column “Men and Matters” by Narada

for the Sunday Times when it was edited by Mervyn de Silva. Sarath de Alwis could be reached at Sarath.si

thija41@gamail.com