By Rajan Philips –

Rajan Philips

Quiet flows another don. The aging fraternity of Peradeniya Engineering alumni has lost another one of its beloved teachers. V. Shanmuganayagam, an exceptionally affable and popular lecturer for nearly two decades at the Peradeniya Engineering Faculty, passed away on 15 January 2026, in Markham, Toronto, Canada. Shan, as he was universally known, graduated with First Class Honours in Civil Engineering, in 1962, when the Faculty was located in Colombo. He taught at Peradeniya from 1967 to 1984, and later at the Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, before retiring to live in Canada.

In October last year, one of our colleagues, Engineer P. Balasunderam, organized a lunch in Toronto to felicitate Shan. It was very well attended and Shan was in good spirits. At 85 he was looking as young as any of us, except for using a wheelchair to facilitate his movement. The gathering was remarkable for the outpouring of warmth and gratitude by nearly 40 or 50 Engineers, who had graduated in the early 1970s and now in their own seventies. One by one every one who was there spoke and thanked Shan for making a difference in their lives as a teacher and a mentor, not only in their professional lives but by extension in their personal lives as well.

V. Shanmuganayagam

As we were leaving the luncheon gathering there were suggestions to have more such events and to have Shan with us for more reminiscing. That was not to be. Within three months, a sudden turn for the worse in his condition proved to be irreversible. He passed away peacefully, far away across the world, from the little corner of little Sri Lanka, where he was born and raised; and raised in a manner to make a mark in his life and to make a difference in the lives of others who were his family, friends and several hundreds of engineering professionals whom he taught.

V. Shanmuganayagam was born on May 30, 1940, in Point Pedro, to Culanthavel and Sellam Venayagampillai. His family touchingly noted in the obituary that he was raised in humble beginnings, but more consequentially his values were cast in the finest of moulds. He studied at Hartley College, Point Pedro, and was one of the four outstanding Hartleyites to study engineering, get their first class and join the academia. Shan was preceded by Prof. A. Thurairajah, easily Sri Lanka’s most gifted academic engineering mind, and was followed by David Guanaratnam and A.S. Rajendra. All of them did Civil Engineering, and years later Hartley would send a new pair of outstanding students, M. Sritharan and K. Ramathas who would go on to become highly accomplished Electrical Engineers.

Shan graduated in 1962 with First Class Honours and may have been one of a very few if not the only first class that year. Shan worked for a short while at the Ceylon Electricity Board before proceeding to Cambridge for postgraduate studies specialising in Structures. His dissertation on the Ultimate Strength of Encased Beams is listed in the publications of the Cambridge Structures Group. He returned to his job at CEB and then joined the Faculty in 1967. At that time, Shan may have been one of the more senior lecturers in Structures after Milton Amaratunga who too passed away late last year in Southampton, England.

When we were students in the early 1970s, there was an academic debate at the Faculty as to whether a university or specific faculties should give greater priority to teaching or research. Shan was on the side of teaching and he was quite open about it in his classes. He would supplement his lectures with cyclostyled sheets of notes and the students naturally loved it. It was also a time when Shan and many of his colleagues were young bachelors at Peradeniya, and their lives as academic bachelors have been delightfully recounted in a number of online circulations.   

The cross-sectional camaraderie at the Faculty in those days is well captured in one of the photographs taken at Shan’s wedding at Point Pedro, in 1974, which too has been doing the rounds and which I have inserted below. Flanking Shan and his bride Kalamathy, from Left to Right are, M. Dhanendran, Nandana Rambukwella, K. Jeyapalan, Wickrama Bahu Karunaratne, A.S. Rajendra, Lal Tennekoon, Tusit Weerasooria, and  R. Srikantha. Sadly, Rambukwella, Karunaratne (Bahu), Tennekoon and now Shan himself, are no longer with us.  

Screenshot

Like other faculty members, Shan kept contact with his former students turned practising engineers and they would reach out to him to solicit his expertise in their projects. In the early 1980s, when I was working as Resident Project Manager with my Peradeniya contemporaries, JM Samoon and K. Balasunderam, at the Hanthana Housing Scheme in Kandy, undertaken by the National Development Housing Authority (NHDA), Shan was one of the project consultants helping us with concrete technology involving mix design and in-situ strength testing using the testing facilities at the Faculty.

The Hanthana Team

Looking back, the Hanthana housing scheme construction was the engineering externalization of the architectural imaginings of Tanya Iousova and Suren Wickremesinghe, for building houses on hill slopes without flattening the hills. The project involved the construction of hundreds of housing units with supporting infrastructure comprising roads and drainage, water supply and sanitary, and electricity distribution using underground cables. Tanya & Suren Wickremasinghe were the Architects with an Italian construction company as contractors.

To their credit, Tanya and Suren assembled quite a team of Consulting Engineers that was a cross-section of E’Fac alumni, viz., Siripala Kodikkara and Siripala Jayasinghe (Contract Administration); Prof. Thurairajah (Foundations & Soil Mechanics); S.A. Karunaratne (Structures); V. Shanmuganyagam  (Concrete Technology); Neville Kotagama and DLO Mendis (Roads & Drainage); K. Suntharalingam (Water Supply & Sanitary); and Chris Ratnayake (Electrical).

As esoteric gossip goes, DLO Mendis had an informal periodization of engineering graduates, identifying them as either Before-Thurai or After-Thurai, centered on 1957 – the year Prof. Thurairajah graduated with supreme distinction and went on to do groundbreaking theoretical research in Soil Mechanics at Cambridge. Of the Hanthana consultant team, Neville Kotagama and DLO Mendis were before Thurai by six years, Shan was five years after, and all the others came later. Sadly though, only Tanya and Chris are with us today from the 1980s group named above.   

After Hanthana came 1983 when all hell broke loose and hundreds of professionals and their families were forced to leave Sri Lanka. Shan left Peradeniya and joined Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, encouraged by his Cambridge contemporaries from Singapore. He taught at Nanyang for twelve years (1984-1996) before moving to Canada with his wife and three sons who were by then ready for university education.

All three children have done exceptionally well in their studies and professional careers. The oldest, Dhanansayan, is a Medical Doctor and a Professor at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, in Madison, United States. That was where India’s Jayaprakash Narayan and Sri Lanka’s Philip Gunawardena had their university education a hundred years ago.    

The younger two sons took to Engineering. The second son, Kalaichelvan, is Program Manager at Creation Technologies, an award-winning global electronics manufacturing service provider. And the youngest, Dhaksayan, is the Chief Information Officer (CIO) at the Toronto Transit Commission (TTC), which is North America’s third-largest urban transit system.

All three have done their parents proud and Shan would have been gratified to see them achieve exemplary success in their chosen fields. A first class Engineer and a first class teacher, Shan was also a great father and a loving grandfather. As we remember Professor Shanmuganyagam, we extend our thoughts and sympathies to his beloved wife Kalamathy, his sons and their young families.