[BITList] Nurse, Midwife and First Female Leader of a Country

[wantok at me.com]

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Bandaranaike,  Solomon West Ridgeway Dias  (1899-1959), prime minister of Ceylon, was born on 8 January 1899 at the family home in Horagolla, Veyangoda, the only son of Sir Solomon Dias Bandaranaike (1862-1946) and his wife, Daisy Ezline, daughter of Sir Solomon Christoffel Obeyesekere. He was born into a family of wealth and influence in a society where those with high social status were expected to lead. His father had been an adviser to several British colonial governors and enjoyed easy access to the policy makers of the colonial administration. Unusually, the British governor was his godfather. As a child he had extensive contact with the British colonial leaders and their culture, which smoothed his transition to the environment at the prestigious St Thomas College in Colombo. The school prepared him for Christ Church, Oxford, where he obtained a second class in the classical honours moderations in 1921, and a third in jurisprudence in 1923. At first he felt uncomfortable in his Oxford surroundings and described his first year of university as a 'nightmare struggle'. However, in 1921 he joined the university debating society, the Oxford Union, and won great praise for his debating ability. In 1924 he ran for the presidency of the union and finished a poor third. He attributed his loss to prejudice among his fellow students and suffered a great hurt that probably affected his attitude towards the British throughout his public life.

Entry into politics

Bandaranaike returned to Colombo to practise law in 1925, and ran for a seat on the Colombo municipal council in a by-election in 1927. By defeating A. E. Goonesinghe, the most influential trade union leader in the colony, Bandaranaike won recognition as an important leader of the anti-British forces, and later that year was elected secretary of the Ceylon National Congress (CNC). The CNC was at the forefront of Ceylonese agitation against the British for self-government and included all the influential political leaders of the period. In 1931 the Donoughmore constitution introduced a self-governing legislative council to the crown colony and adult suffrage. Bandaranaike was elected to it unopposed and remained a member of every legislature thereafter, until his death in 1959.

Throughout his life Bandaranaike, the privileged son of the Ceylonese elite, rebelled against authority: first against his father, and later, at Oxford, he challenged the authority of those who set the rules. After returning to Ceylon from England, his rebelliousness led him into new directions. He began to rebel against the British, initially by renouncing the Anglican religion of his parents, and later by challenging the colonial authority of the British. In 1937 he formed the Sinhala Maha Sangha (SMS) to represent Sinhalese Buddhist interests. His experiences at Oxford and while living under British rule had made him concerned about the impact of Europeans on the indigenous culture of Ceylon. The SMS was his attempt to protect his country's culture not only from the British, but also from the British-oriented Ceylonese elite. Although still a member of Don Stephen Senanayake's CNC, he was beginning the process of renouncing the Christian and British values espoused by the CNC leadership. The CNC was founded by members of the English-speaking Ceylonese elite. Many of its members were more comfortable in London than in Colombo, and had little in common with the vast majority of the population, who lived in rural areas and did not speak English. The SMS was the personal movement of its founder, Bandaranaike, and, unlike the CNC, it appealed to the Ceylonese peasants by championing their needs and culture.

Bandaranaike's rebelliousness did not extend to his marital relations. He accepted the traditional guidance of his family and allowed his father to arrange a marriage in 1940 to the much younger Sirimavo Ratwatte (1916-2000), the daughter of one of the most powerful families in the Kandyan hills of central Ceylon. The marriage, on 3 October 1940, united two of the most influential families in the country. Sirimavo was a dutiful wife, bearing him two daughters, Sunethra and Chandrika, and a son, Anura. Although she had been educated at St Bridget's Convent, neither she nor her husband could have envisaged that she would become the world's first female prime minister in 1960.

Independence and opposition

British rule in Ceylon ended in 1948. Their departure unleashed a series of forces on which Bandaranaike would capitalize in his rise to power. As long as the British ruled, ethnic differences were kept in check; as soon as they left, the struggle for power began. Despite Ceylon's small size, it was an ethnically diverse society: two major languages were spoken, the Indo-Aryan Sinhala (the majority group, to which Bandaranaike belonged) and the Dravidian Tamil. The two groups also followed different religions, the Sinhalese being Buddhist, the Tamils Hindu. The Sinhalese believed that during British rule their culture and religion had been repressed, and that speakers of English had been given preferential treatment for colonial jobs and benefits. Bandaranaike based his political movement on their claims; his policies to promote Sinhalese Buddhism adversely affected the Tamil minority, who from the 1970s were driven to rebel against the government.

Bandaranaike's allegiance to the leadership of D. S. Senanayake and his United National Party (UNP), which had been formed by a merger between the CNC and his own SMS in 1947, began to weaken after the British withdrawal. Although he was the heir apparent to Senanayake as leader of the UNP, there were those within the party who wanted either Senanayake's cousin Sir John Kotelawala or his son Dudley to succeed him. Bandaranaike, who had served as minister of health and local government since 1947, finally led a revolt against Senanayake's leadership and crossed the floor of parliament to the opposition on 12 July 1951. He had hoped to lead a mass rebellion against Senanayake and his allies, but only five other members of parliament followed him to form the Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP). This was not even enough for him to become leader of the opposition. His defection was precipitated by the UNP's rejection of his proposals to make Sinhala the sole national language and to promote Buddhism and the traditional ayurvedic system of medicine. English, spoken by a tiny minority of the population, was thus still to be used as a 'link language', uniting the two linguistic communities on the island. In his speech on that occasion he declared that 'I go, in the words of Abraham Lincoln "with malice towards none and with charity to all", not only in regard to those who have honoured me with their friendship, but even in regard to those who honoured me with their enmity.' In the elections the next year the SLFP won only nine seats out the fifty that they contested, and Bandaranaike became the leader of the opposition.

Coalition-building and government

One of Bandaranaike's strongest qualities was his pragmatic ability as a compromiser and coalition builder. After his death he was quoted as once saying that 'the whole truth lies neither on one side, nor on the other. It is very often a rather puzzling compound of many things'. His defeat in the 1952 elections did not deter him. He immediately began to expand his political base by making alliances with others. By 1956 he had assembled an unlikely coalition of leftists, communists, and Sinhalese Buddhist nationalists into an electoral alliance that would transform Ceylonese politics. The SLFP would sweep the 1956 elections, propelling Bandaranaike into power. His own personality, coupled with the ideology of rural populism, held the coalition together for as long as Bandaranaike led it. Although the coalition constituents were united in their dislike of the conservative UNP, Bandaranaike offered them a complex populism that appealed to the leftist parties through its economic egalitarianism, and to the more conservative nationalist groups through its offer of empowerment for the rural Sinhalese peasant. Intense disagreements between conservatives, who sought to maintain the traditional hierarchical social and caste relations, and the leftists, who sought to replace hierarchy and deference with a meritocratic order, would destroy the coalition after Bandaranaike's death: they had little in common except his leadership. Because of Bandaranaike's efforts Ceylon would finally have a two-party system, but more importantly he opened the political system up to the poor and the lower classes, who were mobilized by his promises of change. He had found a wellspring of electoral support among the vast majority of the population, who did not speak English and lacked the educational and employment opportunities of those living in Colombo and the larger cities. The UNP had lost touch with the population, and Bandaranaike had forged a Sinhalese nationalist alliance which had appealed to the rural peasantry with his promise of 'Sinhala only'.

Bandaranaike saw himself as the leader of a new social order. He once described his role as

both a nurse and a midwife. I am a nurse at a deathbed ... I would like to see, as should be the case at every deathbed, that the death is reasonably peaceful and dignified ... I am also, I feel, a midwife at a birth. I would like that birth to be auspicious and painless as far as possible.
He stressed the concept of fair play in his actions and political statements; his government would enact a series of policies which would redirect the political system of Ceylon. He created a welfare state that provided a minimum standard of living for all Ceylonese. He also began to restore the Sinhalese Buddhist culture to what Sinhalese nationalists believed was its rightful place in the society. The Sinhala language was made the national language, replacing English, and Buddhism was given more rights. Both of these actions angered non-Buddhist and non-Sinhala-speaking people, and led to severe rioting by Tamils in 1958.

Bandaranaike's three-year term of office (1956-9) was marked by many new legislative initiatives, but also by a delicate manoeuvring to keep the political forces he had unleashed under control. On one side were the leftists, who wanted more land reform and welfare policies. On the other were the Sinhalese Buddhist nationalists, who sought increased rights for their culture and religion while maintaining the economic and social status quo. The great compromiser had to keep his coalition together and also to make concessions to the angry Tamil minority, which was most severely affected by the pro-Sinhalese policies. In the end he would fail, not on broad political grounds, but on the petty personal issues that had crept into the political debate.

Assassination

On 25 September 1959 the forces that Bandaranaike had worked so hard to keep under control destroyed him and his coalition. After an early-morning meeting with the new American ambassador at his home in Cinnamon Gardens, Colombo, Bandaranaike paused to greet some well-wishers and clients who had gathered on his verandah to greet him or to seek his help. He first turned to a Buddhist bhikkhu (monk) and gave the traditional greeting with a short bow and his hands clasped in front of him. The monk blessed him and left. A second monk stepped forward and Bandaranaike began to greet him in a similar manner. As Bandaranaike bowed, the monk pulled a gun from his robes and began shooting. Bandaranaike fell back into a chair, at first unaware of the severity of his wounds. He died twenty-four hours later. His assassin was wounded and arrested while trying to escape.

A Buddhist monk, the Venerable Mapitigama Buddharakkitha, had conspired with the assassin and several other former Bandaranaike supporters to kill the prime minister. The precipitating factor appears to have been an anonymous pamphlet which alleged that Buddharakkitha had been sexually involved with a female member of Bandaranaike's cabinet. When Bandaranaike refused to take action against the possible authors of the pamphlet, Buddharakkitha conspired to kill him. Although it was alleged that some members of Bandaranaike's cabinet, including Wijayananda Dahanayake, who became prime minister after Bandaranaike's death, may also have been involved in the plot, they were never charged with the conspiracy.

Bandaranaike, the man of wealthy origins who had turned his compassion to the poor of the country, displayed the same compassion in a statement made from his deathbed to a journalist. 'A foolish man dressed in the robes of a bhikkhu fired some shots at me in my bungalow this morning. I appeal to all concerned to show compassion to this man and not try to wreak vengeance on him ... I appeal to all to be calm, patient and to do nothing that might cause trouble to the people.' A few hours later he died. His death shocked the nation. The mourning population stood in two 6 mile-long queues, with an average wait of seven hours, to file past his body as it lay in state. When the mourning was over, more than half a million people had paid him their respects.

Assessment and legacy

Few leaders of any country have had such a profound effect on their country as Bandaranaike did on Ceylon (which only in 1972 officially adopted the name Sri Lanka by which the Sinhalese had always known it). His welfare policies raised the quality of life for the average Ceylonese so much that by the end of the twentieth century his country had health provisions and life expectancy comparable with Western countries, despite its poverty. Although later governments changed his policies, they left the basic elements of the welfare state in place.

The nationalist forces Bandaranaike unleashed spread into a civil war in the 1980s and forced a continuing debate about the role of Sinhalese Buddhist nationalism. However, his admirers point to his unfinished efforts to achieve a compromise with the leadership of the main Tamil party, the Federal Party. The legacy he left had a profound effect on Ceylonese politics. So too did his family's influence. His widow, Sirimavo, became the first elected female head of government in the world, serving from 1960 to 1965. She was re-elected as prime minister from 1970 to 1977 and again from 1994 until two months before her death, on 10 October 2000. Also in 1994 Bandaranaike's younger daughter, Chandrika Kumaratunga, was elected president of Sri Lanka. Kumaratunga charmed the nation with charisma similar to her father's. She rebelled against her mother's leadership of the SLFP and left the party for most of the 1980s before returning to lead it to electoral victory in the parliamentary and presidential elections of 1994.

R. C. Oberst 

Sources  J. Manor, The expedient utopian: Bandaranaike and Ceylon (1989) + W. H. Wriggins, Ceylon: dilemmas of a new nation (1960) + DNB
Archives University of Peradeniya FILM BFINA, current affairs footage + BFINA, documentary footage + BFINA, news footage
Likenesses  group photograph, 27 June 1956 (Commonwealth group), Hult. Arch. · K. J. Somanade, photograph, 1959, Hult. Arch. [see illus.] · photograph, 17 Dec 1959 (of portrait on his tomb), Hult. Arch. · portrait, Oxford Union




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