Review By Manik de Silva
In a labour of love, Sarath Amunugama’s two daughters, Ramanika Unamboowe and Varuni Fernando, have produced a lavishly illustrated coffee table book titled A full life offering a delightful cameo of a man, who neither became Prime Minister nor Mahanayake as impishly predicted by his Peradeniya chums of long ago - but came close enough to the former position.Amunugama’s has indeed been a full life. As he has told his children, his great good fortune had been the fine education he received, first at Trinity College where he counted people like Gamini Dissanayake, Jayantha Dhanapala, Nihal Kappagoda, Nihal Rodrigo and Denzil Kobbekaduwa among his contemporaries and thereafter at the University of Ceylon in the golden years of its then Peradeniya campus.
I first met Amunugama in the Kandy home of Gananath and Ranjini Obeysekera in the sixties. I had been sent to Peradeniya by my first boss and mentor, Denzil Pieris, then editor of the Ceylon Observer, to do some stories on prevailing unrest on the campus. Ranjini had kindly offered to put me up for a couple of nights and late one evening Sarath Amunugama, probably GA Matale or Additional GA, Kandy, at the time, dropped in. He was bursting with enthusiasm for the ``loot’’ (no doubt material of sociological value) he had collected on some excursions to temples in the area.
Amunugama’s accomplishments are too well known to require re-telling. He was one of the brightest students, both at Trinity and at Peradeniya, in his day and it was a foregone conclusion that he would enter the coveted Ceylon Civil Service. He came second in an intake of eight and his decision to enter the elite administrative service was undoubtedly a loss to academia with his accomplishments in the university’s sociology departments well recognized by eminent scholars like Ralph Pieris, Stanley Tambiah, Gananath Obeysekera and Laksiri Jayasuriya who taught at Peradeniya in those days.
Though no longer a cabinet minister (in name), Sarath Amunugama is without doubt perhaps the most capable and accomplished of the serving political leadership. Given that the president holds the finance ministry, Amunugama as deputy minister, would in fact be the de facto minister for all intents and purposes. He also wears a second hat as senior advisor to the president, a position previously held by Basil Rajapaksa. It is a measure of the man that he did not reject a lesser title, but graciously helped the president to try to keep a cap on the number of ministers in a typical gentlemanly fashion. He could have easily said he would either serve in the cabinet or the backbench but that is not his way.
Unencumbered by ideological baggage, though once a Peradeniya `Trot’ who was elected General Secretary of the Economic Society by the University Trotskyites, Amunugama always talks sense in his public speeches. Never abrasive, he is carefully listened to wherever he speaks. He is candid and unafraid to express what he believes is right even though what he says may not exactly be politic.
Having known him well for over 40 years, enjoying many courtesies and kindnesses from him during my journalistic career, I can say without hesitation that he was a most unbureaucratic bureaucrat, friendly, efficient and decisive. As Director of Information, he was the Competent Authority responsible for running the press censorship during the JVP’s first adventure in 1971. It was a pleasure to work with him because even where he had to use his blue pencil, he would take the time to explain the reason why. He was never unreasonable.
As the Associated Press stringer then, a position bequeathed to me by Denzil Pieris when he left the country, I remember taking a cable to him for authorization for transmission by the Overseas Telecommunication Service. It was a scoop – naming a U.S. citizen shot dead while he rode a motorcycle through an insurgent-held area. ``Sorry, Manik, I can’t let you name the man. His family has not yet been notified and it wouldn’t be right for them to get the bad news off the AP wire. How did you get his name?’’
It was a friendly inquiry though I didn’t let out the secret. Although disappointed, I accepted his reasoning as fair. I, like every other correspondent who had business with the Competent Authority, knew that he would never stop a story if he possibly could. He was a friend of journalists and adored by the press officers posted by the Information Department to the various Ministries.
The 28 pages of text his daughters have written gives much more than the bare bones of potted biography offered in the sketches that Lake House publishes of all MPs after each election – undoubtedly a most useful reference volume. If Amunugama served longer as Chairman of the Associated Newspapers of Ceylon Ltd., than the few months he did during the tail-end of the D.B. Wijetunga presidency, even that publication and more so the ANCL newspapers would have taken a new look. His Lake House avatar was merely a holding operation to assist his friend Gamini Dissanayake to attain the presidency. But that was not to be.
Amunugama was no pretender. Many previous chairmen of Lake House, Ranjit Wijewardene and Sunil Rodrigo among them, did not wish their pictures published in ANCL papers when they were in the saddle. That was an iron-clad rule. As editor of the Daily News during Amunugama’s short tenure at Lake House, I told him this and asked whether we were to keep him out of our pages. ``Don’t do that,’’ he said, ``I’m going into politics and publicity is useful.’’
As stated at the beginning of this review, A full life is lavishly illustrated. Sarath Amunugama, obviously, saved pictures and other memorabilia that has proved handy for the publication which includes a section of his George Keyt collection acquired during his Kandy days. He obviously had as good an eye for works of art as he did for the books he read voraciously throughout his life.
Although a public service salary would not support expensive tastes, he had like Ronnie de Mel, a predecessor in the finance ministry, invested wisely buying Keyt’s paintings. De Mel acquired his as a university student, astonishing his friends at what he paid for the paintings - a pittance of a few rupees compared to what they are worth today. Sarath would have probably paid more, having acquired his collection some years later.
The Amunugama girls take the reader seamlessly through their father’s many achievements from his school days at Trinity, the Peradeniya University, public service career, his assignment in the UN system as Director of the International Program for the Development of Communications at UNESCO in Paris (he got his Ph.D there) after serving a few months as Secretary-General of AMIC, the Asian Mass Communication and Information Center in Singapore. Some delectable anecdotes, as good as some of the stories that Amunugama, a raconteur par excellence sometimes narrates, is part of the text.
The authors have not said it all but they have placed their fingers where it matters – like Sarath’s move from provincial administration to the information field during the Dudley Senanayake government. The politics of the time and the dramatis personae come alive, people like G.V.P. Samarasinghe, the Permanent Secretary to the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting (in addition to Defence and External Affairs), Neville Jayaweera, Chairman of SLBC, Anandatissa de Alwis, Permanent Secretary to J.R. Jayewardene’s Ministry of State from which the subjects information and broadcasting was taken away as Dudley-JR tension mounted.
Although the book is mostly pictures, the few pages of text has a lot of little known information – when JRJ, fighting two insurgencies in the north and south found himself confronted by a wave of anti-Indian feelings sweeping the country, he had to fall back on the political and administrative support of a small group led by Gamini Dissanayake. Then Indian High Commissioner in Colombo, J.N. Dixit, reviled as the ``Viceroy’’ says in his book Assignment Colombo: ``Jayewardene asked me to be in touch with Gamini Dissanayake and an intellectual associate of Dissanayake, Sarath Amunugama, for working out the details.’’
These nuggets include Amunugama’s friendship with G. Parthasarathy whom he met during his UNESCO days in Paris. Parthasarathy used to come there as a special envoy of Indira Gandhi. At a crucial time for Indo-Lanka relations, JRJ, having learned of Amunugama’s friendship with Parthasarathy from Gamini Dissanayake, used him to convey confidential messages.
Few would also know that Amunugama served some months as a visiting fellow at Harvard’s Department of Social Anthropology, courtesy Stanley Tambiah and some of the papers he produced at the time have been published in reputed journals.
Amunugama, though without any animosity to Premadasa, was drawn into the Democratic United National Front (DUNF) of Lalith Athulathmudali and Gamini Dissanayake perhaps because of his friendship with the latter. He also had an excellent relationship with Athulathmudali. Made a vice-president of the DUNF he was to later successfully negotiate and equitable solution to the rivalry between Dissanayake and Athulathmudali who both had presidential ambitions.
Later he was able to help broker the deal that took Dissanayake back to the UNP with President Wijetunga. Some UNP seniors, including the president, were initially hostile but Amunugama, a kinsman of Wijetunga who had served as Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting during Wijetunga’s tenure as Minister, was able to persuade the president to change his mind.
Amunugama was first elected to Parliament in 1994 from the Kandy district, having been invited to nurse Galagedera by President Wijetunga. He later defected to the CBK government along with five UNP seniors. Those who crossed with him were Wijepala Mendis, Nanda Mathew, Susil Moonesinghe and Chula Bandara. Of them, Amunugama and Mathew joined the Kumaratunga cabinet.
It would be useful if the authors consider publishing an abridged version of A full life as the text deserves a wider readership than the limited number who would have access to the luxury volume. It’s a fine read embellished by many good pictures.
Sarath Amunugama : a full life by Ramanika Unamboowe and Varuni Fernando.(Siripa Publishers, 149 pages, 2009)
Price: USD 142.95
