By Tissa Jayatilaka –

Tissa Jayatilaka

The University of Ceylon, Peradeniya, was in our time, a less-crowded residential university, where everybody knew everybody else or at least knew of everybody else.

I knew of Emeritus Professor Vijaya Kumar of the Department of Chemistry at Peradeniya, or Kumar, as we referred to him fondly, before I got to know him. His dear wife Savitri, also a member of the academic staff of the Department of Chemistry, was nicknamed Kumee, by some of their students (of which vintage is unknown to me) and the duo were thereafter referred to affectionately as Kumar and Kumee.

The Faculty of Science became a regular haunt of mine as I would go there in the company of my batchmates to attend lectures on Basic Mathematics given by Professor Maheswaran, as it was a requirement for our General Arts Qualifying Examinations. I would also go there to listen to some excellent talks under a programme that was held in the auditorium of the Science Faculty referred to as “Popular Science Gossip”. The “gossip” at these talks were not confined solely to science but were broad enough to include Literature, History and other branches of knowledge as well. I would often spot Kumar in the audience at these talks or bump into him in the corridors of the Science Faculty. But I got to know him personally only after he became the Warden of Arunachalam, my hall of residence, during my undergraduate years initially, and later, as a member of the academic staff of the Department of English.

Prof. Vijaya Kumar

Our Science Faculty undergraduate contemporaries, especially those at Arunachalam Hall and its immediate neighbour, Jayatilaka Hall, both within a stone’s throw away from the Science Faculty, shared many an anecdote about Kumar and their other lecturers. One of these anecdotes, had to do with a spectacular (motor car) driving feat of Kumar’s. Legend has it that he drove from his university bungalow-home to the Faculty of Science deploying only the reverse gear of his car! Kumar, on hearing of this, had told certain of his student friends, including some who became his colleagues later on, that this story is one of the biggest yarns he had heard in his life!

Some of his one-time younger colleagues, now in retirement like Kumar, tell me that Kumar exuded warmth and friendliness in all of his professional and administrative interactions with others in the wider university community. But there was no warmth or mercy for those who indulged in the unsavoury pastime of student ‘ragging’. He was a very strong proponent of the need to ensure to all freshers an environment free of the menace of ‘ragging’. He remained ever-vigilant during the ‘ragging’ season. There are stories of his chasing ‘raggers’ and catching them. Professor Maheswaran, who later became an intimate friend and remains so after more than half a century, was another who was fiercely opposed to ‘ragging’. I was a personal witness to Mahes chasing a ‘ragger’ up and down the stairs of the main library to nab him. Yet another of his students has noted that Kumar’s office room in the Faculty was a total mess at all times. It had tables, piled so high with books and documents that one could not easily spot Kumar at his desk. He, however, had the knack of pulling out from amidst the clutter, any document that he needed at any given time. If anybody were to volunteer to help tidy his desk, Kumar would respond firmly with “Don’t you touch my desk!”.

Kumar, like several of his colleagues in the other faculties as well, had his own eccentricities. According to information received from reliable sources, Kumar who taught Organic Chemistry used to carry his lecture notes in his shirt or trouser pocket with ‘the entire lecture condensed in point form on a half-sheet or half of a half-sheet of paper’. The way he rummaged through his sling bag filled to the brim with stuff to find an item that he needed was another ritual that amused onlookers.

Kumar, interestingly enough is a Royal-cum-Thomian product, in that he had his primary education at S.Thomas’ Prep School, Kollupitiya and the entirety of his secondary education at Royal College, which he entered in 1953. In a note written by Kumar himself, he notes that despite having had excellent teachers at Royal, his was not a notable school career. He goes on to say that “the only achievement I could boast of was my being the joint-winner of the school General Knowledge Prize”. However, he had been active in a Scout Group outside of school (1^st Port of Colombo, Sea Scouts) where he “was Queen’s Scout, Patrol leader, and later, Assistant Scout Master”.

Kumar entered the Faculty of Science of the University of Ceylon in 1961 and secured from it an honours degree in Chemistry in 1965. He joined the academic staff of the Department of Chemistry in the Faculty of Science, University of Ceylon, Peradeniya in 1965 and left the following year for Magdalen College at Oxford University, from which institution he obtained his doctorate in Chemistry. His entire teaching career was at Peradeniya, where in the period 2003-2006 he served as the Dean of the Faculty of Science, a position that his late father-in-law had held a few decades earlier.

Among the other highlights of his career are: Chairman of the Industrial Technology Institute (formerly the Ceylon Institute of Scientific and Industrial Research, CISIR); Member (representing Sri Lanka) of the Geneva-based UN Commission on Science and Technology from 1999 to 2007 and its President from 2001-2003; President of the Sri Lanka Estate Workers Union from 1989 onwards; Member of the Politburo of the Lanka Sama Samaja Party from 1988 to 2014 and currently, a member of the Executive Committee of the National People’s Power (NPP).

Vijaya and Savitri Kumar are parents of daughters Shamala and Ramya, who are following in the footsteps of their parents: with the former teaching in the Department of Agricultural Economics in the Faculty of Agriculture, University of Peradeniya and the latter, in the Department of Community Medicine at the University of Jaffna.

(I wish to thank the following who assisted me in the writing of this brief essay: Mr. Bandula Warnakulasuriya, Emeritus Professor Ratnayake Bandara, Professor Mahinda Wickramaratne, Professor Swarna Wimalasiri and Mr. Manik de Silva).

*Editor’s note: Prof. Vijaya Kumar, a member of the NPP’s National Executive Committee and is still active in politics turns 84 today. This article by Tissa Jayatilaka, former Executive Director of the United States – Sri Lanka Fulbright Commission for Mutual Academic Exchange, was written for an upcoming collection of essays on Kumar’s life by his friends.