Jayantha Dhanapala (1938 – 2023)

By Tissa Jayatilaka

The splendid career as well as the many glittering prizes won by Jayantha Dhanapala is common knowledge and does not require reiteration here. Rather I wish to focus on the man himself in this tribute to an exceptional person whom I had the privilege of getting to know personally at the tail end of the 1980s. I had of course heard of Jayantha and his many accomplishments long before our first meeting. Having read a newspaper review of North-South Perspectives, an international affairs journal that I edited, which focused on the promotion of greater understanding between the ‘developed’ and the ‘developing’ world, Jayantha telephoned me to ask if we could meet. I readily agreed and thus began a friendship that lasted until his death a few days ago.

Although I had not known at the time of that first meeting of ours, I soon learnt that encouraging those of the younger generation to contribute their mite to the betterment of Sri Lanka and the world outside of her shores was a priority for Jayantha. In the process, he enabled those of us who came into contact with him to better ourselves in order to continue to give of our best. In his appreciation of Jayantha ‘s life and career, former diplomat A.L.A. Azeez (who joined the Sri Lanka foreign service in 1992) talks at length of the marvellous role of guide and mentor of younger colleagues, including himself, that Jayantha played throughout his days in the foreign service. In the same spirit, after his retirement from the UN and upon his return to Sri Lanka, he served as a Trustee and member of the Board of Advisers of Sri Lanka Unites, mentoring a local youth movement dedicated to the transformation of Sri Lanka to a land free of religious and ethnic strife. He was involved from the inception in the establishment of the Friday Forum, an informal and self- financed group of older citizens dedicated to democracy, good governance, human rights and the rule of law.

Our friendship grew over the years, I happen to think, because we shared much in common. We both schooled and spent our formative years in Kandy– he at Trinity in the 1950s and I at Kingswood in the 1960s. Later he and I both entered the University of Ceylon, Peradeniya at different times, given that he was a decade older, where we both read for the Special Degree in English. His extra-curricular activities at Peradeniya, like mine, included sports– rugger in his case and cricket in mine– and theatre. We both took part in plays, held office and were participants in the diverse activities of the University Drama Society (DramSoc).

Jayantha and I also shared a fondness for the spoken and written word and, not infrequently, combined our resources in this area. We jointly edited A Garland for Ashley: Glimpses of a life celebrating the life of Ashley Halpe and His 50 Years of University Teaching (2008). He was instrumental in making me the editor of SIRIMAVO – Honouring the world’s first woman prime minister (2010) for which publication he wrote an excellent essay on The Foreign Policy of Sirimavo Bandaranaike. He contributed a chapter titled, A City Upon a Hill for Excursions and Explorations Cultural Encounters Between Sri Lanka and the United States that I put together in 2002. He reviewed Peradeniya: Memories of a University (1997) that I jointly edited with K.M. de Silva. Jayantha served as keynote speaker while I introduced the publication at the launch of the late Tissa Abeysekera’s collection of essays on culture and the arts titled, Roots, Reflections and Reminiscences (2007). A couple of years ago, Jayantha and I teamed up one more time to write an essay titled, A Study in ‘Creative Compassion’ for The Fourth Lion – Essays for Gopalkrishna GANDHI (2021) edited by Venu Madhav Govindu and Srinath Raghavan.

In the 1990s, when our friendship had matured to an extent that I could ask the Dhanapalas for a personal favour, I would on certain of my regular visits to the United States, stay with Maureen and Jayantha whenever they were free of pressing official commitments. I stayed with them in Washington while he was our ambassador (1995-1997) and later in New York when he was serving as Under-Secretary General for Disarmament Affairs (1998-2003). In New York, they would book tickets in advance for plays on Broadway to make my visits even more enjoyable. Their friendship and warm hospitality knew no bounds. I also recall a visit to the UN with my wife Lilani and our daughter Lara when Jayantha hosted us to lunch at a restaurant in the premises of the UN headquarters.

No account of Jayantha would be complete without a reference to the solid and sensitive supporting role played by Maureen in his life and career. She was a superb fellow-traveller who had known Jayantha from a very young age and were fellow undergraduates at Peradeniya as well. If marriages, as we are told, are indeed made in heaven, then theirs undoubtedly would be one of them. They were an extremely compatible and congenial pair to the very end. After their return to Sri Lanka, we had the opportunity to meet Jayantha and Maureen in more relaxed settings over food and drink, either at our home or theirs or in the homes of common friends.

Lilani and I went up to Kandy to spend a long- promised weekend with our senior colleagues and intimate friends Gananath and Ranjini Obeyesekere at April’s end. Knowing of our strong desire to meet Jayantha and Maureen during our visit and, as all of us were close mutual friends, our kind and thoughtful hosts invited the Dhanapalas to lunch at their lovely home. It was when we sat to lunch that it struck me that all six of us around the table, belonging to different eras, had been through the Department of English and read for the Special Degree in English at the University of Ceylon, Peradeniya which later became the University of Peradeniya. Little did we know that one of us would be gone in less than a month and not be around for another meeting over lunch! Impermanence is all.

My one-time teacher (he taught Lilani too, in later years), senior colleague in Peradeniya’s Department of English and close friend, Professor Thiru Kandiah, and his wife Indranee, have shared a friendship of much longer standing with the Dhanapalas. Thiru was a year senior to Jayantha at Peradeniya while Indranee and Maureen, who had been schoolmates and close friends at Girl’s High School, Kandy, resumed their friendship at a later date at Peradeniya. Their fathers had been members of the Trinity College staff, very close friends and neighbours. Trinity’s Lemuel House was founded when Jayantha was a student at the school with Indranee’s father, the illustrious teacher and Head Master Mr. R.L Kannangara in charge. Jayantha was one of the most outstanding students of Lemuel and Indranee’s father soon came to respect and, also like him very much.

The Kandiahs now live in Perth, Australia and realising that they may be unaware of Jayantha’s passing, I wrote to inform them of the sad event. Soon there was a flurry of emails exchanged amongst the three of us and I found myself in total agreement with their assessment of the Dhanapalas.

Here is Thiru on Jayantha:

Jayantha was held in especially high esteem and regard by absolutely everybody. This was not least for the obvious brilliance of his mind. But closely allied with that, there was in addition this very distinctive way in which he tended to come across to people in his interactions with them- as of his very nature a signally intellectual sort of person: always impeccably reasoned, and very definitely and firmly so, if in an unostentatious and quietly unassertive, also exemplarily courteous, manner that lent him great dignity; with the unmistakable integrity of the positions he adopted on matters and what he stood for adding considerable power to the strikingly impressive impact he had on people.

Indranee’s pertinent observation is that Maureen is as good natured as she is beautiful and gentle and that the school, “could not have found a better head prefect than her”. She goes on to say that Maureen’s father was a very caring and helpful person and her mother, a gentle and gracious lady. These are sentiments that deserve to be widely shared and hence my doing so.

All in all, Jayantha Dhanapala was a formidable personality, though, never aggressive or unapproachable. He was friendly and unfailingly courteous at all times. I wish to end this tribute with another most appropriate quote from Thiru Kandiah:

Much will, I am sure, be said and written of Jayantha at this time of his leaving us. But the man we were fortunate to know and whom we had such affection and respect for will remain in our hearts and minds as long as we are around.