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. . . Ranil baptized as a Christian Dr. Gunatilake -Ranilbaptized as a Christian Dr. Gunatilake-Part I . . A 16th Century Clash of Civilizations, thePortuguese Presence in Sri Lanka by Dr. Susanthas Gunatilake

. .http://www.toplankanews.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=4193:2011-01-23-17-45-40&catid=2:political&Itemid=2
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Ranil baptized as a Christian Dr. Gunatilake -Part IPosted on January 22nd, 2011

H. L. D. Mahindapala

Part I

When the Portuguese began their spiritual and temporal conquest of Sri Lanka (1506

1658) it brought out the best and the worst in the Sinhalese. The best came out in the

heroic and successful resistance to Portuguese military expeditions to conquer the nation.The worst came out in the characters of Don Juan Dharmapala and Prince Vijayapala,

(1634 1654), the brother of Raja Sinha, who succumbed to the Western pressures and

influences. These are the first of the two elitist children who were brought up in theWestern culture and the consequences of their alienation were to introduce subversive

politico-cultural entities that owed allegiances to the dominant West a venal traitcommon among the elite even in contemporary times.

The fashionable trend to bring up children in the Western culture began with the

Portuguese who were only too eager to exploit the rival Sinhala power-players vying for

dominance by aligning themselves with foreign forces. In a cameo of Prince Vijayapala,

Paul E. Peiris, a pioneering historian of the colonial era, wrote: It was a source ofgratification to the Queen when the youthful Vijayapala was entrusted to a Franciscan,

the Frey Francisco Negro. (p.14, Prince Vijaya Pala of Ceylon, 1634 1654, from the

original documents at Lisbon, 1927) Vijayapala foreshadowed the mindset of theWesternized generations to come when he wrote to the Portuguese Viceroy in India

saying: I state, Senhor, that I was born with a strong predilection for the PortuguesenationIn my earliest years, greatly to the satisfaction of the Queen my mother, therewas assigned to as Mestre the padre Frey Francisco Negrao who taught me to read and

write. Under his instructions I learnt very good customs and etiquette and some special

habits which Royal person employ.Though I am a Chingala by blood I am a

Portuguese in my ways and affections. What is reflected here is just not the cultural

cringe but the swearing of loyalty to a foreign power for political gain.

In our times the Vijayapalas are ensconced mostly in the NGOs and in the UNP. The

alacrity with which these alienated cultural cripples are willing to act as political pimps toforeign exploiters waiting to rape and sodomize their mother-land is obscene. The

proliferation of the Vijayapalas and Dharmapalas has become a common cancer eatinginto the Sri Lankan body politic. The impact of this thuppahi culture (PhilipGunawardena) over-determined the thinking of the Westernized elite whose loyalties

were, by and large, to the Occidental centers of power, from Rome to London to

Washington. For instance, Cardinal Malcolm Ranjith (63), though born in Polgahawela,

is committed more to Rome than to his home town in Sri Lanka, mainly because of hisspiritual and temporal ties to the Catholic Church. After all, he is the equivalent of a

Cabinet Minister in the Roman Curia and to whom else can he owe allegiance except to


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the Pope, the President of the miniscule state of Rome. So the religio-political

descendants of the Dharmapalas and Vijayapalas continue to haunt the nation to this day.

They have been programmed to be obedient servants of Judaeo-Christian culture of the

West. It became politically expedient for the Sri Lankan elite to acquire the

characteristics of the Western culture. On the one hand, it gave them a sense ofsuperiority over the indigenous people to display their acquired Western characteristics.

On the other, handing over Sinhala and Tamil children into the hands of the Christianpriests/schools was a modus operandi adopted to guarantee upward social mobility in

colonial administrations. The tragedy is that the Westernized power elite did not die with

the colonial administration. They continue to wield a disproportionate power even today

by creeping in through the backdoor.

This Westernized priviligentsia reached its peak of power under the British. It is this

elite, drawn from Westernized constituents in all communities, that resisted the rising

grass root forces who were struggling to regain their lost heritage. This privileged elite

was entrenched in the commanding heights of the politico-economic structures and neverhesitated to either stage military coups or join hands with the Western agencies (example:

NGOs) to undermine the aspirations of the people who were denied their traditional

rights since the time of Portuguese occupation..

In our time Ranil Wickremesinghe is a typical example of the thuppahi culture. Whenhe invited the Portuguese Prime Minister to hold a joint celebration of the 500 th

anniversary of the arrival of Portuguese in Sri Lanka he was imitating Vijayapala in every

respect. Wickremesinghes foot-in-the-mouth gaffe provoked a public outcry. Thereaction against inviting the Portuguese predators to celebrate any anniversary of their

imperialist adventures is a black mark that will be there fixed permanently on the

forehead of Wickremesinghe. There was nothing to celebrate in the coming of thePortuguese who were the first to threaten the sovereignty and the territorial integrity ofnation from the West. Their political machinations which led the native rulers to sellthemselves wholesale to anti-national aliens corresponded with Wickremesinghes

betrayal of the nation to the West and to Velupillai Prabhakaran.

Wickremesinghe political passion is to hobnob with the Western leaders and his greatest

fear is losing his status in the International Democratic Union (IDU) a gathering of

leading Christian right wing Western leaders, including Norway, which finances right-wing politics globally with its oil-rich money. His struggle to retain the leadership role in

the UNP now is not so much to serve the party or the nation (he never did) but to save his

seat in the IDU where he is ideally positioned as a deputy president of Asia to stooge for

the West.

Wickremesinghes penchant to be a willing agent for the West was somewhat of a puzzle

to me until I read Dr. Susanthas Gunatilakes latest book, A 16th Century Clash of

Civilizations, the Portuguese Presence in Sri Lanka. After all he comes from a familyconnected to the highest elite in Sri Lankan society. There isnt a family with better

Buddhist credentials than the Wijewardenes and his respected mother, Neela, has been a


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pillar of the Gangaramaya Temple. So is his uncle, the genial Ranjit Wijewardene whowas thrown unexpectedly into the political maelstrom hitting Lake House when he

returned from Cambridge and had to wrestle with all his might to restore the prestige of

the Wijewardene family after Ranils father, Esmond Wickremesinghe, dragged LakeHouse from the great nationalist heights of D. R. Wijewardene to the lowest depths of the

utterly Westernized Kotelawela regime a regime which was rejected in toto by themassive Sinhala-Buddhist wave that swept the polls in 1956.

Though Ranils maternal roots are in Buddhism his paternal roots are in the Anglican

Church the religio-political institution left behind by the British colonial masters. From

his fathers side he comes from the top ranks of the Anglican Church. His uncle Bishop

Lakshman Wickremesinghe was a shrewd political leader of the Anglican Church in SriLanka who led pro-federalist/separatist campaigns in the guise of political harmony. He

introduced the pol thel pahana and shades of yellow to the cassocks to make the

Anglican Church more appealing to the Buddhists. When he was Bishop of Kurunegalahe even introduced the Buddhist practice of entering the Church without shoes or

slippers. In an interview I had with him the Bishop told me that he was adopting Buddhistpractices and symbols to break down the cultural resistance and perceptions of Buddhiststo Christian garbs, candles and practices. It was his way of marketing Christianity and

making it more appealing for conversion. His nephew, Ranil, seems to be rather a curious

cross between these two cultures: he sports a pirith noola on his wrist to advertise his

Buddhist connections at home and he snips the threads off before he fronts up at the

Christian IDU in the West.

Dr. Gunatilake draws on this cultural background and drops his bombshell. He states that

the nephew of the Anglican Bishop according to newspaper reports had been baptizedas a Christian (Anglican).and from a sense of history the action of Wickremesinghe

(inviting the Portuguese to celebrate their 500

th

anniversary of their arrival) wasunderstandable.(p.290). He adds: And in fact, on more than one occasionWickramasinghe has been labeled by his political opponents as the contemporary Don

Juan Dharmapala. The people instinctively grasped the meaning of this reference to

Dharmapala without much explanatory exhortations.

Of course, Wickremesinghe never expected the backlash that exploded in his face. Butone positive result of his penchant for saying the wrong thing at the wrong time was that

the Portuguese period came into sharp focus overnight more than any other period of the

past. Not since Paul E. Peiris focused on this period in the 1920s has there been such a

passionate interest in the role played by the Portuguese in Sri Lankan history.

On their part, the Portuguese too were making preparations to celebrate the 500th

anniversary of their spiritual and temporal conquests of the east with the blessings of

the Pope. There were attempts made in India to celebrate similar anniversaries but the

strong resistance from the Indian nationalists soon put an end to it. Finally, the

Portuguese had their own celebrations of self-glorification in Europe.


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The reaction in Sri Lanka was predictably hostile. This prompted over a hundred scholarsfrom all communities to revisit the Portuguese period and go through it with a fine comb.

This movement was led by the Royal Asiatic Society. They launched the Portuguese

Encounter Research Project which was convened by Dr. Susantha Goonatilake. Somepored over documents, some visited the sites devastated by the Portuguese, some

documented with photographs the devastation caused by the Portuguese, some visitedLisbon and Goa to collect relevant data, some collected oral evidence with the solepurpose of reexamining the role of the Portuguese in Sri Lanka. Dr. Gunatilakes latest

book, A 16th Century Clash of Civilizations, the Portuguese Presence in Sri Lanka

came out of this project.

(To be continued)

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