Ajith – pen of an era

Ajith Samaranayake was a liberal intellectual in Sri Lankan journalism and his life spanned an era of radical change. He lived and died as the nation itself slipped from political liberalism to an era of the coffin of untold proportions.

I got to know Ajith in the early 1980s as a parliamentary reporter in the old House at Galle Face. Those days conversation was free at the cafes and taverns of Hospital Street and Bristol Street in Fort, but beer was expensive. It was the backdrop of Sri Lankan journalism of Lake House and Times of Ceylon. Ajith was the brilliant young player of that theatre.

The importance of being Samaranayake in English journalism was his unique grasp of language, and his knowledge of the literary, political and intellectual discourse of the Sinhalese. The son of a Kandy lawyer, Ajith had grown up in an atmosphere of intellectual dialogue among lawyers and Peradeniya academics.

For over a quarter century he educated the English newspaper readership of the greater world outside the cricket and rugby clubs of the middle class. He explained the dynamics of emergent trade unionism and politics, and radical trends in literature and social attitudes, mostly among the Sinhalese and sometimes among the Tamils.

His strength was in explaining individuals as diverse products of our social canvas, emerging within our order. He provided the rationale for their behaviour, with detachment. All this made his reporting and commentary unusual and elevated it to somewhere between our society’s influential Sunday journalism and academic commentary.

He had no time for intellectual jargon and correctness. With his secondary education from Trinity College, Kandy he surpassed the graduates and post-graduates of local journalism. He had cut his teeth in the editorial and learnt of his mistakes from his seniors upon a bar stool -- still the only genuine Sri Lankan school of journalism. He was not bestowed with what he would have been most embarrassed about – fellowships, scholarships and awards. He was a home-grown English journalist grounded in reality, and what he wrote was perhaps some of the most discussed in Colombo, in the last 25 years.

A gentle human being, he walked with those who thought they owned the world as if he did not care who owned it. The ease with which he walked, lived and wrote is very much of the time he entered the newspaper world, but did not leave behind.

He ran the race, but he did not let the race run him. Raised as a Christian, he was a man who was at peace with himself and very Buddhist in attitude – believing that it is still possible to achieve liberation, walking silently through this world. In the evening of our generation of reporters, who still discuss in earnest the possibility of tomorrow’s scenario, I look around me to raise my glass to Ajith Samaranayake.