A commemorative stamp on the veteran Sinhala journalist, D B Dhanapala, was issued by the Philatelic Bureau of the Department of Posts as sponsored by the Sri Lanka Press Council. What is actually the significance of the commemorative stamp was clarified by the keynote address. The stamp was a result of the Diploma Course research assignment at the Press Council Diploma in Journalism and Media Studies.
The well-wishers of the occasion included the family members of the late journalist about whom a lot was known. How learning at home as well as in India paved the way for him to be a writer not in his mother tongue Sinhala, but English, where a Master’s Degree he earned from Alahabad University, reading in English literature and classics under the guidance of learned scholars he wrote in English several books out of which the collection of pen portraits which he contributed to Daily News around late 1912 came to be printed as Among Those Present. As the book became popular, his late son Dr D B Nihalsinghe brought out the second print in 2011.
The pen portraits or profiles include those who were living at the time of writing these sketches. They mostly include the eminent social reformers, writers, painters and university dons who Dhanapala associated so closely.
Penetrative and investigative features
There are 22 such pieces. Though they are not short biographies in the strict sense of the term they could be considered as penetrative and investigative features of human interest. The pieces include personalities such as Anagarika Dharmapala, Ananda Coomaraswamy, D S Senanayake, Ediriweera Sarachchandra, G P Malalasekara, Senarat Parantavitana and Venerable Yakkaduwe Pagngnarama Thera. The value of these portraits swings up today. The modern researcher has in his possession the present contribution to an intimate sourcebook of some of the missing links. As the saying goes seeing is believing.
Dhanapala had some close links with each of them when he wrote them under the pseudonym Janus. His style of writing is sensitive and eye-opening as an observer cum narrator of events. Writing on Anagarika Dharmapala he commences as follows:
When I was about seven, I happened to be a sales boy in a boutique in a suburb of Galle. The chief salesman of the shop had some pretensions to culture. When the day’s work was done, and the last plank of the doorway fitted into the groove, he read to us by the suit of a bottle lamp, interesting bits out of the Sinhalese papers over and over again. In these passages from the press would occur the name Anagarika Dharmapala.
This then is jotted down as the starting point in Dhanapala’s sense of awareness. He blends the experiences he felt into words sensibly creating several layers of social meanings.
He creates a sense of credibility where the fact and experience felt by him becomes an over-pervading entity. Dhanapala reveals his inner self to the point that words he utilises in the communication explore a wide sphere of experiences. This goes to the extent of making a prose writer who excels in a poetic vision.
Most forgotten factors
Running to eight printed pages, the anecdote-filled profile of Dr Ananda Coomaraswamy raised some of the most forgotten factors linked to his research into the realms of archaeology and geology both in India and Ceylon. The short but insightful vision embedded in the profiles shows the extent to which Coomaraswamy was instrumental in dispelling some of the western views on oriental theories of culture, history and mythology.
Dhanapala states the following words as a passing judgment.
He (Coomaraswamy) illustrated by a single quotation the marvellous directness and simplicity of the social ethic of which the psychology of Buddhism affords sanction and which had the great significance of the warring nations: victory breeds hatred for the conquered is unhappy. The supreme tenderness and compassion associated with the Buddha was brought out by a passage in Kuru deer Jataka where the Buddha asks: ‘Who would willingly use harsh speech to those who have done a sinful deed.
Summing up the learned journal, Dhanpaala says: He (Ananda Coomaraswamy) thus had in his studies, be they on ethics or art, philosophy or religion, a meaningful message an implied injunction suitable for the modern western world, in which he lived most of his life.
I felt as an admirer of Professor Ediriweera Sarachchandra, the essay on him by Dhanapala covers some of the unforgettable factors pertaining to the life of a university don who was multi-faceted.
Dhanapala, the journalist who had known Sarachchandra as a graduate teacher at St Peters tries to trace the steps taken in the development of his profession up to the making of a researcher cum playwright producer of historic worth.
Most profiles of Dhanapala in this volume evoke at times a vein of sensitive humane humour.
All in all, he who paid tribute to those who were present at his time are no more. As such, the rediscovery of his writing. I feel is the greatest tribute we could pay him.
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