{"id":53426,"date":"2012-09-09T19:40:54","date_gmt":"2012-09-09T19:40:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.colombotelegraph.com\/?p=53426"},"modified":"2012-09-16T06:50:36","modified_gmt":"2012-09-16T06:50:36","slug":"hilary-an-illustrious-career-as-a-pre-eminent-educator-cut-short-in-sri-lanka","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.colombotelegraph.com\/index.php\/hilary-an-illustrious-career-as-a-pre-eminent-educator-cut-short-in-sri-lanka\/","title":{"rendered":"Hilary: An illustrious Career As A Pre-Eminent Educator Cut Short In Sri Lanka"},"content":{"rendered":"

By\u00a0Emil van der Poorten<\/a>\u00a0–<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Emil van der Poorten<\/p><\/div>\n

I don\u2019t know when Hilary Abeyaratne passed away in Australia, but it was, for someone like me who wanted to meet him again as I entered my own twilight years, too soon.<\/p>\n

There has been at least one appreciation of Hilary that has appeared in a weekly English language publication that speaks to his many qualities as a teacher.\u00a0 For my part, I believe that Hilary made a significantly greater impact on those with whom he came in contact, an impact that extended beyond the confines of the classroom and its immediate vicinity.<\/p>\n

My family\u2019s relationship with Hilary encompassed both my generation and the one that preceded it, in the shape of my father.<\/p>\n

My father never really forgave Hilary for what he saw as his \u201cmisleading\u201d my older siblings into a lifetime submersion in Trotskyist politics<\/a><\/span>.\u00a0 Those siblings, in turn, were most disillusioned with Hilary when they sought to have him more intimately involved with the political causes in which they had immersed themselves in Britain in the 1950s when Hilary, who had been their Housemaster and political guru at Trinity College,<\/a><\/span> was doing a post-graduate teaching practicum of some kind in England.\u00a0 In fact they never forgave what they interpreted as his \u201ctypically bourgeois dilettantism\u201d and an attachment to progressive politics which didn\u2019t extend beyond the theoretical.\u00a0 The Anglican Ladies Sunday Afternoon Tea Party at which good deeds were planned and little else was where they seemed to place Hilary\u2019s politics!<\/p>\n

httpv:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=gIwF8JeFBnU&feature=relmfu<\/p>\n

My contact with Hilary was not unlike that of my brothers, known in British political circles as Michael and Tony Banda, pseudonymous in typically Trotskyist fashion!\u00a0 At an impressionable age \u2013 my mid teens \u2013 I was enormously impressed by both Hilary\u2019s style as well as the content of what he spoke knowledgeably about.\u00a0 Coming from a background that was attached to English middle-class culture, I could relate to what Hilary said both in the classroom and outside it.\u00a0 I believe he was a little less explicit in what he told me about politics, perhaps because of his experience with my brothers and the fallout from those conversations.\u00a0 However, he did reinforce the stirrings of social conscience that, in retrospect I now know, was part of my family\u2019s belief system.<\/p>\n

In addition to his political progressivism Hilary was another breath of cultural fresh air in the halls of a Trinity where the environment had been created by the \u201cnew broom\u201d regime of Norman Walter for unprecedented physical and intellectual change.\u00a0 Among other things, Hilary was responsible for establishing a Film Society in the school and we had the opportunity of watching a very grainy \u201cBattleship Potemkin\u201d in 16 mm format and we learned that there was more to films about nature and wild life than the slick and cutesy Walt Disney films such as the \u201cLivingDesert.\u201d<\/p>\n

Trinity had been in the doldrums, in more ways than one, for many years and Norman Walter certainly shook things up.\u00a0 To me this was epitomized by some of the teachers he brought in from Britain.<\/p>\n

There was Hugh (H.J.K.) Smith, a Welshman if memory strikes me right, who made poetry come alive for so many of us to whom it had been unbelievable drudgery up to then; there was Derek Jukes who let his arts students indulge their creative fancies in a manner that Harry Hardy, very much the follower of academic tradition, would have shuddered at!\u00a0 There was J.J.Armstrong, a \u201cman of the cloth,\u201d from Ulster from whom I once received a \u201cthundering\u201d slap for having had the cheek to try to mimic his very heavy Irish brogue!\u00a0 Nevertheless, a good and conscientious teacher!<\/p>\n

And, as if to prove that the only ones who don\u2019t make mistakes are those who don\u2019t do anything, there was a recruit to the staff called Dixon, if memory strikes me right, who left quite mysteriously and, seemingly, under a cloud.<\/p>\n

If you think that Walter\u2019s was a regime devoted to \u201cre-colonizing\u201d Trinity, there were several eminent Sinhala and Tamil scholars brought on board, one of whom I distinctly remember was a Charles de Silva who had flowing locks of a kind associated with intellectuals and artists of the time.<\/p>\n

There were also, of course, the non-conformist survivors from the days of Empire. Among these was the Gandhian, A. M. Sunderamani, who possessed one of the most under-rated intellects on Trinity\u2019s staff, a man of wisdom whose principles were epitomized by the fact that he disobeyed the edict of a previous principal, Campbell, and continued until he left TCK, to wear his Indian national garb of khaddar<\/em> (raw cotton) on every occasion, formal and otherwise.<\/p>\n

This then was the TCK that Hilary throve in.\u00a0 I cannot speak for the years after Norman Walter left \u2013 post Bandaranaike \u201cSinhala only<\/a><\/span>\u201d – but I certainly have vivid memories of Hilary in the Walter years and, warts and all, he epitomized the (western) liberal tradition that, sadly, seems to have deserted the Kandy school.<\/p>\n

Hilary encouraged his students to think for themselves.\u00a0 You certainly didn\u2019t learn by rote in his classes.\u00a0 In fact, to me the impact of his teaching is most evident in several contemporaries whom I have met up with, sometimes after half a century, who, while they came from very conservative Kandyan backgrounds and might have been expected to more than retain that conservatism, provide living examples of the breadth of vision that Hilary\u2019s teaching projected.\u00a0 I am truly filled with wonder when I consider where these men came from, culturally speaking, and the space they now inhabit and presumably did during their working lives.\u00a0 That was a large part of Hilary Abeyaratne\u2019s legacy.<\/p>\n

To some of us at least, \u201cH.B.A\u201d was a glamour boy of significant stature!\u00a0 He, admittedly, drove a poor excuse for a sports car, one of the \u201clemons\u201d of the British motor industry, an Austin A40 Sports.\u00a0 It was a nice enough looking vehicle with a soft top, the only real concession to \u201csportiness,\u201d but otherwise very much a part of the citrus branch of the imperial automobile industry of the time!<\/p>\n

Hilary liked a tipple and was famous for his \u201ccivil service butts,\u201d cigarettes lit, drawn on and then stubbed out while moving from one classroom to the other without benefit of an \u201cinterval\u201d in which to indulge his addiction to \u201ccancer sticks.\u201d\u00a0 In fact, there were the more adventurous among my contemporaries who\u2019d make a practice of picking up these \u201cfags\u201d off which only a couple of \u201cpulls\u201d had been taken, storing them away for future use!<\/p>\n

Hilary was part of a generation of the Abeyaratna family that personified excellence in the fields of endeavour they entered.\u00a0 Ernest devoted his life to dry zone agriculture and headed up the research station at Maha Illupallama for years, performing a veritable labour of love with great distinction; Michael, the youngest, shone as a surgeon and, if I remember right, \u201cBrightie\u201d de Mel more than excelled in her chosen medical field.\u00a0 Their parents, Dr. Lloyd and his spouse were paediatricians of repute not to mention human beings of exceptional integrity and excellence.\u00a0 The Abeyaratne\u2019s of those two generations not only excelled in their chosen professional fields but were the personification of the liberal democratic tradition of that time.<\/p>\n

The fact that Hilary left Sri Lanka when he did is indicative, notwithstanding any protestations to the contrary, of the historical progression of the narrow, chauvinistic, intolerant and violent culture that had begun to overtakeSri Lanka.\u00a0 To me, the life of Hilary Abeyaratne parallels the history of late twentieth century Sri Lanka and the opportunities lost to those who might have continued to be the beneficiaries of educators of excellence like him.\u00a0 Ironically, Hilary and, through him, all those who might have benefited from the ministrations of an educator par excellence were victims of the politics that Hilary and his fellow believers had broadly supported!<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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