R.A.L.H Gunawardana’s Separation From His Pali Dictionary At A Crucial Time

By Darshanie Ratnawalli -February 23, 2014 

Darshanie Ratnawalli

“It is ever so with the things that Men begin: there is a frost in Spring, or a blight in Summer, and they fail of their promise.” “Yet seldom do they fail of their seed,” said Legolas. “And that will lie in the dust and rot to spring up again in times and places unlooked-for”. - Return of the King, Lord of the Ring, Book V, Chapter 9

In 1967, as a young man of 30, R.A.L.H (Leslie) Gunawardana successfully challenged S. Paranavitana’s Ceylon-Malaysia fixation and won renown. This feat of reason and research was published as “Ceylon and Malaysia: A Study of Professor S. Paranavitana’s Research on the Relations Between the Two Regions” (full text here). Gunawardana’s achievement became almost a milestone along the memory lane of Paranavitana. Professor J. G. de Casparis memorializing Paranavitana wrote (1996); “As we all know Paranavitana devoted some his most penetrating studies to ‘Ceylon and Malaysia in ancient times’. The arguments used by Paranavitana in favour of his identifications are not as strong as they may have appeared at first. Thus, the main identifications on which the close relations between Sri Lanka and ‘Malaysia’ are based have been convincingly invalidated by RALH Gunawardana in…”

In 1995 (“Historiography In a Time of Ethnic Conflict[i]”,p1), a mature Leslie Gunawardana noticed that the ethnic conflict was blighting Sri Lanka’s intellectual activity and scholarly production, causing “a notable relaxation of intellectual rigour in research” and a “dismal intellectual climate”. Naturally he wasn’t referring to himself. However, between 1967 and 1995 interesting things had happened to Gunawardana too. In the derivation of the old Sinhala word “aya” in his “Prelude to The State, 1982[ii]”, we glimpse a Leslie Gunawardana with an intellectual rigour so relaxed that it seems to be on vacation in a dismal intellectual climate.        Read More