Gananath Obeyesekere

We knew him as Ganaya all those years ago in the 1950s. With a First Class in English, he naturally joined the Department as an Assistant Lecturer. In our first year we heard his rendering of prose and verse in the English tongue. Apart from an hour or so of reflection by Doric de Souza and Ashley Halpe on what would be referred to today as Creative Writing by William Blake and John Keats, Gananath offered us the clearest exposition of whatever he spoke about. It was easy to listen to him. We had no opportunity to feel we were or could be, there being no limits to “potential”, his equals till that evening when he escorted his colleague, Ranjini Ellepola, to her Hall of Residence and kept walking on to Mahakande, where he sort of woke up to find his car missing. Forgivable: he had left it behind in the parking lot by the lower ‘pillars’.

Around that time, he moved to the new Department of Sociology, which had a teaching staff of Professor Ralph Pieris, who was about to ‘go abroad’ and Stanley Tambiah. And, so it happened that by the following year, bored by ‘practical criticism’ and the Canterbury Tales as recited by Professor Hector Passe, I asked to move to sociology. Tamby was in charge there and he said, ‘English is the best Department. We are here in our infancy. It’s not a good time to move. You stay there.’ Well.  We had all left Peradeniya before Professor Passe mentioned to me that Tamby had consulted him in the matter.

Gananath’s first work was on ‘Land Tenure in Village Ceylon’. (I write from memory). His field work was done in and around the village of Medagama in Hinidum Pattu in Galle District.

I do not know whether that work falls within the boundaries of ‘sociology’ or has the character of ‘anthropology’. By then Gananath would have by-passed Cambridge (the route that another great scholar, also with a First in English, Gehan Wijewardena, took towards his explorations in the area of anthropology that came to base itself on language – Tai – and what he termed its ‘hinterland’) and lodged himself in Washington on the Pacific end of the USA. I doubt that location had anything to do with his celebrated study of European Myth-making in the Pacific. What I recall of that is that Marshall Sahlins, Professor of anthropology at Chicago challenged Gananath’s account of what Cook was said to have done. A debate was called for, both agreed to it, Sahlins failed to turn up. And then, of course, a whole cacophony of support for Sahlins broke out from/among the Eurocentric readers of the world.

Gananath’s work on matters such as Buddhism, karma and rebirth occupied his energies through his tenure of two decades as Professor of Anthropology up to and for some years after retirement. All that has been followed by his work on Lanka’s history including especially a gathering up his early field notes on the Veddahs. Through that period as well as earlier, Ranjini produced works on Lankan poetry in English and in translation into English for journals based in US universities. In this marking of an age-related celebration of Gananath’s work, it would be remiss of me if I were to fail to mention her work in translations of Pali works in particular, work that probably more than match the efforts of the Rhys-Davids and of amateur-scholars from over a half century and more ago. The work on the Jataka stories alone would carry its life through till the Eurocentric world destroys all. When they left Princeton, they moved to an apartment in Manhattan that overlooked a large Barnes and Noble bookstore, which evidently was where on her visits to New York their daughter spent all its working hours. When I visited them with my daughter and her family, the children, all under12, made obeisance said polite words and, before they sat down on the floor with their puzzles and picture books, decided that Gananath was an Aththa and Ranjini, ‘Amma’s friend’.

At this point, I should perhaps go back to where this note began: Gananath and the Department of English. Its first Professor, Lyn Ludowyk had passed and an annual lecture in his memory instituted. In his lecture – I think he ended it thus – Ganaya chose to recite the following poem/letter sent by Thomas Hardy to his friend George Meredith:

Forty years back, when much had place

That since has perished out of mind,
I heard that voice and saw that face.
He spoke as one afoot will wind
A morning horn ere men awake;
His note was trenchant, turning kind.
He was one of those whose wit can shake
And riddle to the very core
The counterfeits that Time will break….
Of late, when we two met once more,
The luminous countenance and rare
Shone just as forty years before.

Gananath hits 92 on 2nd February.

G S