Some personal insights and a broad brush canvas of Ena de Silva

Ena de Silva’s 100th birth centenary fell on

Excerpted from
Exploring with Ena by Prof. Rajiva Wijesinha

Towards the end of 2019 I spent a couple of days at Aluwihare, where I had had many happy times with my aunt Ena de Silva. Since her death in 2015 1 tried to get there twice or thrice a year, not just for sentiment, but also to provide company for Piyadasa and Suja who have lived and worked there for many years.

The Matale Heritage Centre Ena established, for batik and embroidery, still continues on the premises, but the girls – some who started work there over 50 years ago – go home in the evenings and Piyadasa and Suja are left alone. Family members sometimes visit and occasionally stay overnight, but this does not happen often. And Piyadasa and Suja relish company and appreciate the fact that I now go up there to stay more than anyone else. So too Ena loved my frequent visits in the last years of her life. Ena’s daughter Kusum, who lives in California, thanks me but gratitude is unnecessary, for it is always a pleasure to be there, though one still sadly misses its chatelaine.

Piyadasa started at Alu in 1976, looking after Ena’s father, Sir Richard Aluwihare, and then took care of the house himself for around five years after he died in December that year. He then served Ena who went to live there in 1981, two years after her husband Osmund de Silva died. She had not wanted to continue in the home they had lived in for over 20 years and went off to the Virgin Islands as a Consultant, to adjust, shortly after she was widowed. When she came back, she moved to Alu and lived there for 34 years.

Suja came to cook for her in 1983, not able even to boil a pot of water in those days, according to Ena. But she turned into a marvelous cook, carrying out Ena’s wonderful ideas for the most delicious concoctions, ranging from polos sandwiches to Alu chicken, with a sauce combining sugar and spice and all things nice, as indeed the sandwiches did. And, though Ena claimed she had no expertise in puddings, Suja did well with Humbug, a pudding I was served when I first went there in 1993, and had often since though it always tasted different.

In 1983 went there with Nigel Hatch, whom Ena’s driver of those days, Sena, thought he recognized as the nephew when he was sent to pick us up at the bus stand. Nigel did look a bit like my Uncle Lakshman who had visited Ena two or three times after she moved there, coming up from Kurunagala where he was Bishop on his rounds of inspection of the clergy in his diocese. I think Sena saw him just the once, for he died in 1983 but, tall and handsome as he was, he had obviously made an impression.

On my visit in 2019 Nigel joined me on the second day, coming up on the early train from Colombo and then getting a bus from Kandy. That afternoon, after the statutory snooze after Suja’s wonderful lunch, we went up to the rock for tea which Piyadasa brought up on a tray, carefully negotiating the now slippery steps after the incessant rain of the last few weeks.

The rock was a natural feature which Ena had had cemented in 1989, so that the poruwa ceremony for her daughter’s wedding could take place high above the garden in front of the house, above too the upper terrace to which steps led from the garden . Bells had been strung up on the edge of the rock, to ring when the wind blew, and the sound would come to us for the next 25 years before the last bell fell away, shortly before Ena died.

And then, before it got dark, following Ena’s advice that we always be careful about what she described as creepy-crawlies, we went along that cliffside to the graves at the other edge, a little enclosure with inscribed stones for her parents over the vault where her ashes lie with theirs. Behind are inscriptions for her husband and her sister and brother-in-law and her son, though the ashes of the first are not there for they were scattered at the confluence of river and sea at Mutwal as he wished.

In the evening we sat out on the terrace over beer, and Suja’s vegetable patties, before going in for an Alu chicken feast. It was then that my driver Kithsiri, who had grown devoted to Ena in the 22 years he knew her, suggested we drive next day to Wireless Kanda. That was what she called Riverstone, the highest peak in the hills opposite, which we had often driven to in the eighties since Ena was always keen to go loafing.

So next morning, after breakfast, we set out, climbing through Rattota to the steep slopes beyond. With Ena it had initially been an afternoon drive, leaving early though so that we could get back before the descent of the mists that swirled round the hill at tea-time. And now, though it was morning, we had a sense of what we had experienced before, as rain started dripping down when we approached the peak.

But there was a big difference, in that 30 years before we had been the only people heading that way. Now, even on this rainy morning, there were crowds. It was obviously a popular place for a Poya day excursion, and at the turn-off to the peak there were heaps of cars and loud music.

Still, the drive brought back many happy memories. And it was on the way back that I thought that perhaps I would go through my diaries and set out the various journeys Ena and I had been on, starting with the excursion Ena had suddenly proposed to Nigel and me when, as she later put it, she had assessed us over lunch, way back in 1983, and decided that we were game to go loafing.

In doing this I am making use of what I wrote for The Moonemalle Inheritance, the book I produced for her 90th birthday in 2012. The second part of that book recorded travels with her over the preceding 30 years. Some of this is reproduced here but I have added so as to make clear what great friends we were, and the enormous fun we had together, not only travelling but sitting together and talking, at Aluwihare and elsewhere.

Some of this will read like a catalogue, but I wanted to record all our times together at Aluwihare, and much more that we did together. And I will try too to make clear the impact of her work, and how much she contributed to arts and crafts in this country.

It was only in 1983 that I got to know her properly. Having heard about my adventures at S.Thomas’, she decided that there was another unorthodox person in the family and invited me to stay with her at Aluwihare. It was 18 months after she had gone there at the end of 1981 that I made, in May 1983, the first of what were to be frequent visits to her.

Ena was not an especially close relation. Her mother Lucille was a Moonemalle, whose father’s sister was the mother of my maternal grandmother, Esme Goonewardene. But the two cousins, Esme and Lucille, both born in the last year of the 19th century, remained close, perhaps because they both married Civil Servants who were senior administrators in the last years of British rule.

My grandfather Cyril Wickremesinghe however died young and could make no contribution to independent Ceylon. Sir Richard Aluwihare, who had been five years younger, survived into the late seventies. He had retired in 1955 and moved to the new house which he had built on top of a hill in Aluwihare village, looking eastward towards the Gammmaduwa Hills. But a year later he was drawn into politics, contesting the Anuradhapura seat where he had served as Government Agent after my grandfather.

One of their predecessors had been a Britisher called Freeman who had won election to the Legislative Council on the strength of his service to the area. But there was no such gratitude in 1956 and Sir Richard was roundly defeated in the sweeping victory of S W R D Bandaranaike’s MEP colaition. Also defeated, in the Matale constituency in which Aluwihare lay, was Sir Richard’s brother Bernard who had crossed back to the UNP. In 1951, when Bandaranaike left the UNP government to form the SLFP, he had been one of his few aristocratic supporters.

His departure in 1956 was unfortunate, for had he stayed he would undoubtedly have been Bandaranaike’s deputy, and succeeded him as Prime Minister when he was assassinated in 1959. As it was, the Deputy belonged to a caste which others in the party considered unsuitable. That led to vast intrigues, an interim Prime Minister who was a disaster, a hung Parliament in March 1960 so that the UNP Prime Minister (Bernard was his deputy in that Cabinet) dissolved Parliament when he was defeated on the throne speech, and the emergence of Mrs Bandaranaike as leader of the Socialist United Party and Prime Minister after the July 1960 election.

Meanwhile Bandaranaike had offered Sir Richard the position of High Commissioner to India, and he served in New Delhi from 1957 onward. Lucille however died there early in 1961 and, though he soldiered on, he was not really in control and his daughters persuaded him to give up and return home. So in 1963 he went back to live at Aluwihare. When he died, in December 1976, his daughters found he had left it to them to divide up his property as they wished. Phyllis, whose husband Pat was a Ratwatte, at the top of the Kandyan aristocratic tree, took the properties in Kandy while Ena got Aluwihare. To everyone’s surprise she decided to retire there herself after her husband Osmund de Silva died, a couple of years after her father.

Osmund had succeeded Sir Richard as Inspector General of Police though, as Ena told the Queen, who expressed some surprise when introduced to the father and son-in-law as the head and deputy head of the police, that that was his profession. Sir Richard was a Civil Servant who had been brought in when the first Prime Minister of independent Ceylon decided that the British head of police had to be replaced. Ceylonese officers were not however senior enough to take over so Ossie, as the most senior of them, had to wait until his father-in-law retired before heading the force.

Ena had run away from Ladies College to marry Ossie. He was from a different caste and her parents, who had found him excellent company as a police officer when they served in distant districts, were not comfortable at the idea of him marrying into the family. There was a court case at which, Ena said my grandparents were been summoned as witnesses. The judge hit on the healthy compromise of asking a British priest to keep Ena until she was old enough to decide on her own if she wanted to get married. At the age she was when she ran away, she required parental consent.

To her surprise she found that the priest expressed himself entirely on her side, when she was sent to his house, but told her she needed to be patient. She managed to achieve this, and duly married when she could, and a couple of years later was reconciled with her parents after her first child was born. Still, she continued to have a reputation for being unorthodox, and she lived up to this when, after her husband retired she abandoned social life altogether and instead concentrated on what became Ena de Silva fabrics.

Ossle’s retirement had been premature. When he was appointed, the then Prime Minister Sir John Kotelawala had offered him a contract, and when this expired Bandaranaike did not renew it. Ena claimed that Ossie had made it clear to him that his allegiance was to the law and not the government. He was not helped by his colleagues, all angling for the post, though Bandaranaike characteristically trumped them all by appointing his bridge partner Abeykoon, another senior public servant, as IGP. Sadly several of the senior police officials then entered into political intriguing, culminating in the 1962 coup attempt.

There had been attempts to inveigle Ossie too into joining, and Ena would frequently cite his brusque response to Aelian Kannangara, a UNP stalwart who had been part of the conspiracy. Ossie had told him, ‘We are not the Praetorian Guard’, a line Ena relished. She also noted that he had firmly rejected Bandaranaike’s apologetic offers of other positions, embassies as well as the Chairmanship of Air Ceylon. Interestingly she claimed that the only relation on her side who appreciated Ossie’s position was her mother Lucille, who had been most opposed to the marriage, but who was a Moonemalle with rigid standards of public conduct.

Osmund de Silva died a little over two years after Sir Richard. Ena was devastated, and needed to get away. Friends, notably Tilak Gooneratne she would later say, who had also married into an old Civil Service family and been a respected Civil Servant himself before going to the Commonwealth Secretariat in London and then becoming our High Commissioner there, arranged for a Commonwealth Consultancy. Ena thus worked for a year and a half in the British Virgin Islands. She handed over the business to Ossie’s nephew Keerthi Wickramasuriya, who was married to Thea Schokman whom I had known as the Librarian of the British Council in Kandy during my schooldays. But they soon afterwards went through an acrimonious divorce which also devastated the business.

Fortunately Geoffrey Bawa, the architect who had developed a remarkable collaboration with her after he designed a house for her in Colombo, had rented that house as an office for the many projects he undertook for the new government of J R Jayewardene, most memorably the new Parliament but also Ruhuna University. So that iconic house at least remained safe.

When Ena came back, she retired to Aluwihare. She had set up there a Batik workshop, one amongst many that fed the flourishing business of Ena de Silva Fabrics which she had started after her husband’s retirement from the police. Though she was unable to resurrect the whole business, she decided to do what she could for the Aluwihare Centre which had provided gainful employment over the years to the villagers, including several relations.

Over the next thirty years the Matale Heritage Centre, as I first suggested it be called, developed not only fabrics, with traditional embroidery added onto its trademark batiks, but also a carpentry workshop and a brass foundry. These were started when Ena decided that the young men of the village also needed work, else they would get into mischief. The claim was prophetic, for the young men of Aluwihare escaped the fate of many others in the country when the JVP insurrection of the late eighties took its toll.

The workshops were followed by a Restaurant, or rather two, when Ena decided she should do something the middle aged women of the village too. They were known as Alu Kitchens. She had begun by supplying meals on order in a custom built kitchen on her own premises, designed with fantastic views by Anjalendran, Bawa’s best apprentice. This was K1 (kitchen one) and then, deciding she had to expand into the village too, she set up K2 as a small guest house in a property by the road that belonged to the family of her cousin Alick. He it was who had succeeded Bernard as the UNP candidate for the area, lucky in that, when Bernard died suddenly, his son had been too young to take over. The UNP, anxious for any Aluwihare, had found Alick, the youngest son of Bernard’s step-brother Willie, the most suitable of those willing, though he had nothing like the educational or intellectual qualifications of Bernard or Sir Richard. But he proved an active constituency MP and in turn established his own dynasty.

Ena herself steered clear of politics. Though the family was strongly committed to the UNP and indeed Chari, the oldest son of her sister Phyllis, had been active in the 1977 election campaign and occupied increasingly important administrative roles in successive UNP governments, she was strongly critical of J R Jayewardene and his behavior. I suspect one reason we got on so well was my forthright opposition to Jayewardene when this was not at all popular in Colombo circles. In fact she proved even more deeply critical of his legacy, suggesting when I finally decided to vote for the UNP, in the General election of 2001, in the belief that its leadership had reformed and would do better, that she was not quite so optimistic.

Though she claimed to know nothing of politics, she was an extraordinarily sharp observer of political developments, both in Sri Lanka and abroad. She had a few strong prejudices, but these often tallied with my own. The few things we differed on included both President Premadasa and, ironically given Premadasa’s own dislike of India, the role of India in Sri Lankan politics. I was myself a late convert to Premadasa, having come to appreciate his obvious devotion to rural development, as well as his very healthy approach to the rights and the welfare of the minorities. But Ena thought he had ridden roughshod over too many and, though she granted he was a better leader than either his predecessor or his successor, that did not make him acceptable.

Ena’s attitude to D B Wijetunge I think summed up her very practical if idiosyncratic view of politics. She claimed that she was never so frightened for the country as when he was President, because he was so clearly an idiot. That very healthy and no-nonsense approach was in marked contrast to the absurd panegyrics about the man by the old elite, which had resented Premadasa’s ascendancy, and it confirmed my view that an ounce of Ena’s prejudices was worth a ton of anyone else’s analysis.

About India she was less rational. Though she was quite critical about what she saw as the extreme Sinhala Buddhist prejudices of her husband, she had certainly absorbed something of his views in her hostility to the Indian Tamil presence in the hills which she claimed had been at the cost of the Sinhala peasantry. This was certainly correct, and we agreed in noting the responsibility of the British in having so altered the demography of the country, but she thought I was too indulgent in claiming that much more had to be done for them once they had been granted citizenship, and also that depriving them of citizenship in the forties had been unjust.

She was also convinced that the efforts of Tamil politicians to obtain greater autonomy were excessive, and we had to agree to disagree about devolution. But her essential fairness never left her, and she quite understood the enormity of what the Jayewardene government had done in 1981 and 1983 in unleashing violence on Tamils, and how this made Tamil demands for greater control of the areas in which they lived more understandable. But she continued to believe that India had stirred the pot out of pure self interest, and that Indian efforts to broker peace were not to be trusted.

Such criticism trumped even her awareness that the Jayewardene government had engaged in unnecessary confrontation with India in its effort to align itself with the West in the Cold War. For, interestingly given her elite upbringing during the colonial period, Ena had an even stronger distrust of the West and its efforts to control other countries. She had no illusions whatsoever about its self-serving agenda, and this made her a strong ally in recent years when, once again, the urban elite supported Western efforts to derail our struggle against terrorism. I was glad then that I was able to convince her that India had played a positive role in this regard, though I believe she continued to wonder what benefits India expected to derive from its support.