The founding of Buddhist Ladies College

Excerpted from Chosen Ground: The Clara Motwani saga
by Goolbai Gunasekera

When Mother left Musaeus College, it was again because of her displeasure over the Board’s reaction to her dictates. Each side believed the other to be wrong. The story was this.A young girl of the Southern Province had repulsed a night-time intruder by slashing him and almost killing him, (or perhaps she actually did kill him) with a sword which happened to be owned by her father. She became quite a heroine. Those were the days of total non-violence, and the newspapers played up the incident for about a week. When the ‘heroine’ was asked what she would like in recognition of her bravery, she replied that it was her ambition to study at Musaeus College. The School Board decided to grant her request.

She was brought to Colombo by the Manager of the school (who was then Chief Justice of Ceylon, Mr. Hema Basnayake), and eventually sent to the Hostel. She proved to be an abysmal student and never fitted into the atmosphere of Musaeus. After two years of trying to do something with her, Mother felt it was time she left. Accordingly, she sent her back to Mr. Basnayake’s home. He promptly returned her to the hostel.

Feeling that her authority had been flouted in a tactless and arbitrary manner, Mother took issue with the Board. There was no question on whose banner victory would perch, and Mother was asked to leave. She was not given the option of resigning, and I have often wondered what could have caused seemingly educated men to behave so unceremoniously towards a person as gentle as Mother.

Of course it would be foolish to assume that this minor disagreement caused her dismissal. It was actually the straw that broke the camel’s back. Disagreement had been simmering for quite a while. Mother did not enjoy having the Board breathing down her neck at all times and countermanding orders which she felt were necessary to give.

The inability of the School Board to deal with strong Principals was noticed a few years after Mother left when yet another highly popular Principal, Mrs. Dulcie de Silva, was arbitrarily sacked . Dulcie did not accept her unfair dismissal gracefully. She fought back.

Su and I felt that Mother’s American attitudes did not work in her favour when dealing with Asian men who expected a docility from women which Mother just did not have. As far as personal relationships went Mother was totally non-combative, but in school she could be almost authoritarian. She could have got whatever she wanted had she approached the gentlemen of the Board in the customary oblique fashion of Sri Lankan ladies. Her American directness was not a quality those in authority over her appreciated.

Mother’s dismissal caused a reaction that the Musaeus College Board had not foreseen: the entire school went on strike. It made headline news in the papers. Reading of these exciting goings-on, Mr. Mohandas de Mel, an affluent lawyer from Avissawella, decided the time was ripe to fulfil a dream of his own. He got in touch with Mother – and a new school was born.

It was April when Mother ended her days as Principal of Musaeus. In May of the same year, Buddhist Ladies’ College opened. I was away in University at the time but I was told that BLC, the new, fledgling school, opened with nearly 400 girls on the Registers while Musaeus had an extremely depleted student body for a short while.

There was scarcely a hiccup between Mother’s leaving Musaeus one month, and beginning a brand-new school the very next month. It was a time of frenzied activity and excitement. Buildings had to be bought, furniture ordered, the entire hostel organized and playing fields got ready. The fact that everything was ready in a country like ours, where ‘tomorrow’ is an accepted norm of work, says much for the energy of Mr. de Mel and Mother.

But there was another factor – an unexpected factor – that played an important part in the founding of this new school. Upon Mother’s summary dismissal, outraged parents with children at Musaeus voiced their protests, but to no avail. Several hundred students camped in front of the home of the Manager, Mr. Basnayake, whereupon he locked the door on them, refusing to change his decree.

Parents then took the drastic step of removing their children from a well-established school to install them in a new and untried school of which Mother was the Head. The parental trust in Mother that was evidenced in this way was almost humbling to her. Certainly she was touched to the heart. Teachers followed suit: they gave up regular jobs without even seeing their new contracts, such was the affection and confidence Mother inspired.

Mr. Gunasena de Zoysa, civil servant and later Sri Lanka’s High Commissioner in Britain, was a parent whose daughter, Ranji, was thus transferred. Srikanthi Salgado, daughter of the Director of the Coconut Research Institute, was similarly transferred. Musaeus opened the following term with one eighth of its former student strength. Children were removed from Musaeus overnight. Sunila, wife of Tilak de Zoysa, Deputy Chairman and Managing Director of Associated Motor Ways (AMW), says she remembers her father scooping her out of bed in the Musaeus hostel, saying: “You are going to Mrs. Motwani’s new school!”

For this mass withdrawal of students from Musaeus, the Head Girl of that school, Lalitha Thilakasena (now Gunawardena, and also a professor at one of one of the Sri Lankan universities) was responsible. She spoke so persuasively at meetings of the parents and students that she pretty much led the cross-over. Mother was unaware of all these meetings and organized protests until the shifting student population began registering at Buddhist Ladies’ College. Naturally, Lalitha continued her Head Girlship in the new school without a break, and entered the University of Ceylon at Peradeniya in a blaze of glory.

To the fury of the Musaeus Board of that era, Buddhist Ladies’ was a full blown school from day one. Thankfully, attitudes have since changed. Today’s Chairman, Mr. Ajitha de Zoysa, has no recollection of that time at all – hardly surprising, since he must have been barely out of diapers himself!

So life at BLC began…

One incident springs to mind. Just round the corner from BLC was ‘Bake House’ a popular bakery that had the creamiest eclairs and the softest bread to be found in Colombo. Hostellers of schools were not allowed to go outside the school unaccompanied, so no one would dream of asking if they could run up the road for an ice cream at Bake House. As far as Mother was aware, no one in the school boarding would dare to ask permission for such an unlikely jaunt.

One evening, the Prefects of the school decided that they would really live life on the edge. They planned to visit ‘Bake House’, timing their expedition for an evening when Mrs. Blake, the Hostel Matron, had her weekly day off, and Mother had left the school for home. Feeling terribly adventurous, the group had a great time. They ate all they possibly could, and got back to the hostel over a conveniently low section of the surrounding wall. Alack and alas, they were spotted by a neighbour who decided to alert Mother.

The next day Mother summoned her Head Girl, one of BLC’s most popular senior Prefects, Janeswari Wijesekera.

“Janeswari,” she said while Janeswari trembled, “is what I hear true?”

“No, Mrs. Motwani,” Janeswari replied, but she looked so guilty that Mother needed no further evidence.Mother looked Janeswari straight in the eye.

“If you tell me you did not break out of the hostel last night,” she said, “I will believe you, and I will drop the matter.”

Quaking, Janeswari gave her word that she and the other Prefects had been safely within the enveloping wall of BLC all evening. Mother let her go.

For the rest of the day and the whole of the next, Janeswari was the sorriest being ever to walk the corridors of BLC. Finally she could bear it no longer. On the third day, she was waiting in Mother’s office to confess. Pleased that her faith in Janeswari had been vindicated, Mother said no more about the matter to anyone outside the Prefect body, but to this day Janeswari and the Prefects remember what Mother said to them that day.

“I tried never to lie about things like that again,” she told me recently.

The morale of the new school was high, and a spirit of closeness and camaraderie pervaded it that touched the entire student and teacher body. There was a kind of pioneering air about the whole experience, which I personally found quite heady when I returned from University two years later to be a teacher myself in Mother’s new school.

The founding of BLC is something that those who were actually the pioneering teachers and students of the school never forgot. Years later, in far away America, I would meet middle-aged ladies who would say to me with a distant look in their eyes and pride in their voices;

“I was one of those who crossed over with Mrs. Motwani.”

Mother now set about turning this new school into as fine an institution as she could. Mr. de Mel had leased “Calverly”, a large property belonging to the Virasinghe family. Classrooms were soon built, and Mother began the Lady Irwin Home Science course, which was a usual feature of any school she happened to be heading.

The Buddhist Ladies’ hostel was governed with a stern but extremely kind hand. Mrs. Blake, a smart and highly efficient Matron, came to Mother at a time when she was most needed.

“I really do not know how I could have managed without her,” Mother used to say.The boarders had a great time, with Matron turning a blind eye to midnight feasts and all the other things hostelers dream up during the day.

Sriya Radalgoda, a former pupil of Musaeus, was Mother’s secretary at BLC, and had the responsibility of dealing with correspondence in the new school. She spent many agonized moments trying to comprehend Mother’s tendency to elide certain vowels. ‘Turret Road’, for instance, became ‘Trrt Road’, and poor Sriya had not the vaguest idea what Mother meant. She came to me for clarification.

“Just add vowels of your own and you’ll be just fine,” I told her, and presumably she managed.

Since Su had opted to go to Lady Irwin for her Home Science degree, Mother was able to keep an eye on her doings in New Delhi. Examiners were coming out annually to Sri Lanka from Lady Irwin College, to check the course work of the BLC entrants and also to hold the Home Science exams. Su was not happy with this personal relationship her mother had with her university.

Su collected boyfriends as some people collect books. She always managed to come up smelling of roses even when two hot-headed Arab students tried to scale the walls at Lady Irwin one memorable night, in the hope of seeing her. Su just disclaimed all knowledge of them and their questionable passion, although she privately told me, her envious sister, that the young men in question were ‘absolutely cute’. They were deported by the way.

At Lady Irwin with Su were several other Sri Lankans. One was Vinita Warasuvitharna (now Gunaratne) a shining light of the College, and Chitra Kanadavanam, with whom I have lost touch.

On one never-to-be-forgotten occasion, Su’s luck deserted her. As usual she got into trouble over some young man. My parents heard about it and made agitated calls to Sir Richard Aluvihare, our High Commissioner in Delhi. Poor Sir Richard had no idea that Father expected him to keep a beady eye on Su. The earlier High Commissioner, Sir Edwin Wijeyaratne, was a friend of the family, and his wife often had Su over for tea. Su spoke beautiful Sinhala and Lady Wijeyaratne enjoyed talking to her. She would send glowing reports to Father on Su’s progress though, how she knew what was happening at Lady Irwin was obviously what Su felt was on a need-to-know basis only.

Su was finally returned to the bosom of her enraged family as insouciant as always and quite impenitent.

“What can I do if I’m pretty, and boys like me?” she asked airily.

Father was speechless. Mother was more understanding with her independent and unconventional daughter.

At BLC, I began my own teaching career. Armed with a brand-new degree, I thought I knew all there was to know about teaching. Mother disabused me of that idea soon enough. Truth to tell, I could not have had a better start to what eventually became a full-time career for me. It is one of my lasting sorrows that Mother never saw the building of the Asian International School by its Founder/ Chairman, Mr. W P. Perera. She would have been so proud, and her praise would have been sweet indeed: all the more so because she had not greeted my choice of a teaching career with enthusiasm.

She expected her teachers to be like Chandra Godakumbure or Dr. Dharma Ponnusamy — dedicated, thoroughly versed in the subjects they taught, and willing to work far beyond the call of duty. She did not quite see me bathed in this rosy aura. She told me (very unenthusiastically) that she would give me a try.

“I really don’t see why you seem so doubtful, Mother. I’m a chip off the old block…..both of them,” i would boast.

“You’ll need to be more than just a chip darling. If you don’t want to incur criticism and even critical comparisons, you will need to be a fully hewn model from the old blocks.” Guardedly, she gave me a job, starting with English teaching in Grade Six.

As the daughter of the BLC Principal, I was given a far heavier timetable than my contemporaries. I was rarely allowed any medical leave. “Take an aspirin and get to school,” was all the comfort I got, even when I really did have a temperature. On the day I got engaged to my husband ‘Bunchy’, Mother graciously granted me the last two periods of the day off. I might say that in those less stressful times the average teacher got at least two days off on her engagement, and a further ten days in which to get married and go on her honeymoon.

Predictably, Mother saw to it that I married in December … a holiday month. Not only was no leave needed, but I did not need to honeymoon on school time. Finding an auspicious time for the wedding was not on Mother’s agenda.