C.W.W. Kannangara is remembered in Sri Lanka as the father of free education, and this book sets out to tell his story as fiction rather than as biography. Ananda W.P. Guruge places it in the closing years of British rule, the period in which the question of who should pay for schooling, and who should be allowed into one, became a political argument rather than an administrative one.
The book is historical fiction, and it is built as a sequence of scenes that move towards a climax rather than as a continuous chronicle. Guruge shows nationalist leaders gathering around Kannangara as his proposals advanced, and he gives space to the opposition and the competing claims that followed — colonial officials on one side and the Marxist Left on the other, each contesting the credit for free education. The men and women in these scenes are drawn as people with private lives, not only as names attached to positions in a debate, and that is a good part of what the novel is doing: putting the arguments back into the mouths of individuals who held them.
Guruge was a diplomat and a Buddhist scholar, and he served as Sri Lanka's ambassador to UNESCO, to France and to the United States. He wrote widely in both Sinhala and English across a long working life. Education policy was close to the centre of his professional concerns, and the subject of this book sits squarely within that interest; readers who know Guruge from his scholarly writing will find here a different register, one that reaches for narrative and dialogue to carry an argument he could as easily have made in an essay.
This will suit readers interested in the making of modern Sri Lanka, in the politics of the late colonial period, and in how a single piece of social legislation came to be regarded as a national inheritance. It will also suit readers who simply want the Kannangara story told with some warmth and momentum. Because it is a novel, it asks to be read as one: the scenes are shaped for effect, and the private moments are the author's invention around a public record.
Published in English by Godage International Publishers of Colombo, a house that issues books in both Sinhala and English. The subject is one that Sri Lankan readers tend to know in outline from school and public memory; the book's interest lies in filling that outline with argument, personality and the texture of a particular political moment.
- Author: Ananda W.P. Guruge
- Publisher: Godage International Publishers
- Language: English
- Pages: 352
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