Childhood in Gintota

Sybil Wettasinghe was born in 1928 and spent the first six years of her childhood in the village of Gintota, situated in the suburbs of Galle. She lived in her ancestral home from which she absorbed the sights, sounds and rhythms of village life. The experiences she gathered in these formative years made an indelible impression on her and later became the primary source of inspiration for her stories and illustrations. Wettasinghe was born at a time when there was a sharp contrast between the island’s urban centers, which were steeped in British colonial culture and the villages of the hinterlands, which still sustained traditional modes of living. As Gintota had retained much of its rural character despite its proximity to Galle, Wettasinghe gained access to aspects of indigenous culture that were fast diminishing from the urban areas.  Daily life in Gintota was tempered with the comings and goings of a colourful cast of characters, ranging from stilt walkers who traversed the village reciting nadagam melodies and tom-tom beaters conveyed the announcements of the temple to kavilokalkarayas who disseminated news to the residents through their long drawn poetic recitations.ⁱ  In times of hardship and uncertainty, when illnesses and calamities befell the village, families often sought recourse through devil worship. The elaborate drumming, dancing and chanting of the exorcisms and devil dancing ceremonies of the village left a deep impression on the young child’s mind.

The ancestral home in Gintota provided an ideal environment for Wettasinghe to freely develop her creative faculties at an early age. She came from a family of established builders and spent a great deal of time with her father and maternal grandfather who were both building contractors. Her grandfather was also an artisan and sculptor and she often watched him at work as he crafted figures and statues for temples around the island. While the males in her family used their expertise to build large-scale structures, the women channeled their creative skills towards small and intimate crafts.   For instance, her mother devoted a lot of her free time to needlework and lacemaking and her aunts secured an income through weaving rush mats for the local market. Being part of a community whose leisure activities involved such creative pursuits played a significant role in nurturing young Wettasinghe’s interest in expressing herself through art.

Wettasinghe spent these early years in a tight-knit community of women who had an independence of spirit that she admired and eventually developed within herself as she reached adulthood. These strong-willed and opinionated women had become resourceful and self-sufficient through managing their households without the aid of the men who took long absences from the village to seek employment in Colombo. Gintota was also home to a thriving tradition of handicrafts and local women were involved in lace-making, reed mat weaving and coir production, all of which Wettasighe observed in the long hours she spent with the village matriarchs. As an adult artist she would claim that the child in her never left Gintota, and many of her stories and drawings mirrored this sentiment, depicting a nostalgic portrayal of the scenes, imagery, community and value systems of southern villages.

Transition to Urban life and Missionary Education

When Wettasinghe reached the age of six, her mother relocated the family to Colombo to educate her in English. They rented a house in Dehiwela and Wettasinghe enrolled in the missionary school of Holy Family Convent. The move to Colombo brought Wettasighe into the throes of urban life, where she encountered cultures and lifestyles that felt alien to her. Estranged from the familiar landscapes and rhythms of Gintota, she took her time in adjusting to this new and strikingly different urban cultural world.  Until now, her conception of community came from the intimacy of her Sinhala-speaking southern village. But as she began schooling at Holy Family convent, she came into contact with the English speaking elite of the metropolis. Unlike her village school, the convent was a cosmopolitan space that educated both local and foreign students.  Wettasinghe found herself studying alongside the daughters of British, Australian, Danish and Malaysian civil servants, administrators, judges and businessmen working within the colonial system and the progeny of local Sinhala, Muslim and Jaffna Tamil elites. The school provided this eclectic group of students with an education modeled according to the curriculum of British Boarding Schools and Private Girls’ High Schools.

Missionary education in Colonial Ceylon was characterized by efforts to inculcate British cultural and social values in the student body. Young women who attended private schools were trained to assimilate gender-related social norms and acquire domestic virtues and values with aspirations to become attractive helpmates for educated menⁱⁱ.  The 19th Century trend in missionary schools to imbibe students with Victorian values and Christian morality continued into these early decades of the 20th Century and formed part of Wettasighe’s education. At the convent, Wettasighe took classes in homescience, were she acquired domestic skills such as cooking and needlework and studied the ‘fine art’ of social etiquette. She learned to conduct herself in a ‘decorous’ and ‘lady-like’ manner in her moral science class where the nuns groomed the girls to sit, walk and present themselves with poise. The convent’s mission to produce refined and accomplished young women extended beyond grooming them into suitable wives for educated upper-class women. Ceylon of the 1930’s was seeing the nascent stages of a women’s movement, with debates about women’s rights and women’s empowerment entering the public sphere and women gaining the right to vote through universal franchise. These feminist discourses had a significant influence on education within private girls’ schools and young women were encouraged to pursue university education and seek employment as teachers, doctors and nurses.

 While access to higher education and job opportunities opened up new possibilities for women, it also brought new pressures and expectations.  While many of her schoolmates found their career prospects expanding with these changes, Wettasinghe felt circumscribed by them.  As her SSC examinations approached, she had begun to lose interest in her studies and was becoming increasingly absorbed in her art. At home and in school she encountered stiff resistance to her creative pursuits. Her mother was livid as she provided Wettasinghe with an English education hoping to eventually enroll her in an architecture program after she completed school, a plan that received much support of her school principal, Mother Annunciation. Both women refused to entertain the idea that Wettasighe could embark on a career as an artist, possibly because the bohemian image associated with artists did not fit the mold of the ‘educated lady’ endorsed at the convent.  Disenchanted with her studies and reluctant to take her SSC examinations, Wettasinghe appealed to her mother to allow her to leave school without completing her secondary education.

While Wettasinghe was preoccupied with defending her artistic ambitions at home and in school, an opportunity to actualize her aspirations arrived unexpectedly. Unbeknownst to Wettasinghe, her father who was sympathetic of her creative pursuits had submitted her work for an exhibition at the Colombo Art Gallery. These drawings soon attracted the attention of Mr. H.D Sugathapala, headmaster of the Royal Primary School, who approached her with a request to illustrate his Nava Maga Standard 5 Reader. With her father’s encouragement and her mother’s reluctant consent, the 15-year-old Wettasinghe began illustrating the stories for the publication. The Nava Maga Reader, which was a collection of Children’s stories from diverse cultures, was a landmark book as it was the first publication in Sri Lanka to be printed in colour. It was also the launching point of Wettasinghe’s artistic career and the first of many books she would produce in her 60-year long sojourn as an artist, storyteller and illustrator.

Work in the Newspaper Industry and Publishing World

In 1948, Mr. Sugathapala who edited the Nava Maga Reader took the 17-year old Wettasinghe to the Lankadeepa press to introduce her to the newspaper world. Attracted by the idea of working with print media, Wettasinghe met the editor of Lankadeepa, Mr. D.B. Danapala, who immediately offered her a job upon seeing her drawings. He was keen to include her in his staff because of her rural background and wanted her to illustrate aspects of village life unfamiliar to urban readers. She obliged and began illustrating her grandmother’s folktales, which were mostly disseminated through oral traditions and therefore inaccessible to the reading public. After a year of working at Lankadeepa, Wettasinghe became restless and dissatisfied with illustrating one strip a week for the newspaper. Plucking up her courage one morning, she strode into the office of the Times’ columnist Sita Jayawardena and introduced herself as an illustrator seeking new and challenging assignments. That year she took on additional work at the Times, illustrating Suti Banda’s caricatures of Colombo’s urban socialites. In 1952, Wettasighe moved to the much-coveted Lakehouse publications where she became the main illustrator of the Janatha newspaper. Much to her delight, her entry into Lakehouse gave her access to an entire network of newspapers and she wrote and illustrated for the Observer, Silumina, Daily News and Sarasaviya. At the Sarasaviya she created her renowned character ‘Kusumalatha’ and subsequently invented the popular figure ‘Rasawathi’ for the Nawaliya of Upali Newspapers. In 1952, while working at the Janatha newspaper, she made her first attempt to write stories. With the persuasion of the chief editor Denzil Peiris and chief sub-editor Dharmapala Wettasinghe, she produced a narrative called ‘Kuda Hora’ for the children's page of the newspaper. This story eventually developed into a book that won critical acclaim both locally and internationally. Inspired by the success of ‘Kuda Hora’, Wettasighe applied herself to writing as well as illustrating and proceeded to produce over 200 children's books over the course of her career.

Both Wettasighe's newspaper illustrations and children's books are characterized by their portrayal of rural Sri Lanka. Mired in folk culture, her stories frequently invoke the imagery, festivities and ritual ceremonies that constitute village life and draws attention to the idiosyncrasies of archetypal village characters with sensitivity and humor. Kuda Hora, her most popular work, makes subtle references to the social change that filters in from the city to the village. The main character, "Kiri Mama," returns from his sojourns to the city and brings back an assortment of colourful umbrellas to show the village folk who have never encountered such contraptions before. As the story unfolds, each new umbrella disappears from sight leading him on an adventure to discover the identity of the thief. In Duvana Revula a village elder sports a beard, which grows uncontrollably and sweeps through the village engulfing houses, streets and people in its wake. Another popular story, Vesak Kuduwa, describes the thrill and excitement among the village children as they prepare lanterns for the Buddhist holiday. The story centers on a young boy who accidentally traps his grandmother inside one of his monumental lanterns in his hurry to finish it. Other popular books, Magul Gedera Bath Natho (1971), Sinakku Mama (1991), Kiri Itirennai (1993) and Hoity the Fox all capture moments of folk life in their simple and humorous story lines. While Wettasinghe often romanticizes the rural, she tends to caricature the urban. This trait is clearly seen in her illustration series and adult novel, Kusumalatha, a satirical depiction of the conducts, habits and social graces of ‘high-society’ women of Colombo.

Development as a Self-taught Artist

Wettasighe forms an unusual figure amongst her contemporaries as she evolved her own artistic style without formally training at an art school or apprenticing with an established artist. At that time, most emerging artists of her social standing enrolled in institutions such as the Ceylon Technical College or affiliated themselves with the Ceylon Society of Arts. Colombo in the 1940’s was home to a vibrant artistic community, spearheaded by the ‘43 Group. The nine-member collective of artists were leading the local modernist movement, drawing influences from French Impressionist painters. In counterpoint to the ‘43 Group, another faction of artists emerged, propelled by a desire to paint within a strictly non-western framework. Trained in the Indian Santiniketan School and spurred by the island’s rising nationalism, these artists were overtly anti-colonial and attempted to purify local art from western influences.ⁱⁱⁱ  While this profusion of activity was unfolding within the local artistic circles, Wettasighe remained unaware of the developments as she rarely ventured into Colombo’s galleries and exhibition spaces. Disinterested in associating herself with a particular group of artists, she crafted her own visual language based on her memories of her childhood in Gintota and impressions of the world around her.

 From her early years as an artist, Wettasighe was attracted to non-western painting traditions and chose not to follow the British-influenced artistic trends. Instead, she turned to the work of early Indian modernists such as Jamini Roy and Nandalal Bose and assimilated the influences of Moghul paintings, which she encountered through Colombo museum’s collection of Indian Art. In later years, as she matured as an artist and became aware of the local artistic practices and movements, she found that the work of the ‘43 Group, which was lionized among the local elite, did not capture her interest and attention as much as the work of painters working on traditional themes such as G.S Fernando and Somabandu. She felt that the work of these artists was eclipsed by the ‘43 Group and did not reach the limelight as they were working outside the elite spheres. She appreciated their paintings as they were ‘nationally minded’ and strived to retain elements of indigenous life without assimilating colonial art practices. While she did not wish to work in collaboration with them or adapt their styles of drawing, she felt a closer affiliation to these artists working within the Sinhala-speaking spheres.

Audience and Popular Support

As Wettasinghe’s art began to reach the local public through newspapers and books, it arrested the attention of notable editors, writers and artists. While Wettasinghe did not tailor her narratives and illustrations to suit a specific audience or work according to a particular ideological purpose, her art drew the interest of a distinct segment of the public, the Sinhala cultural intelligentsia. It was the mid 1950’s and the island was experiencing a surge of nationalist sentiments as its citizens grappled with envisioning and constructing a post-colonial Ceylon. At this time the political sphere was riven with debates about language rights as well as the various attempts by the majority community to assert a Sinhala Buddhist identity purified of colonial influences. Such political forces engendered a profusion of activity in the literary, musical, visual and performing art spheres, where this cultural identity was being imagined and expressed. This resurgence of interest in the traditional and vernacular drew the attention of the cultural intelligentsia to Wettasinghe's work, which gave prominence to folk culture.
From the literary circles, poets such as Chandraratne Manawasinghe and luminary writers such as Martin Wickremashinge and W.A Silva lauded Wettasinghe for the rootedness of her stories in peasant life. From the musical communities she drew the support of Sinhala singer W.D Amaradeva as well as the singer/song-writer Sunil Shanta. Wettasinghe was also commissioned to illustrate thr collections of "Handahami" co-authored by Kumaratunga Munidasa, Ananda Rajakaruna and Reverend S. Mahinda. From the visual arts, she captured the attention of the two members of the prestigious 43' Group who expressed a keen interest in vernacular culture, Aubrey Collet and L.T.P Manjusri. Collet was a painter and cartoonist whose daily caricatures provided the readers of the Times of Ceylon and Lakehouse presses with sharp and biting political critique and L.T.P Manjusri reproduced murals and frescos of temples and brought about a hybrid art form that integrated European surrealist and cubist influences with local Buddhist art.

As a writer and illustrator of children's books, Wettasighe made significant interventions in the sphere of children's Sinhala literature. In a review of her art, journalist Benedict Dodampegama stressed that Wettasighe made a crucial contribution to shifting children’s attention from western influenced narratives to stories rooted in local Sinhala culture. This was particularly important given that a substantial amount of Sinhala children's literature of the time constituted direct translations of European stories such as those of Hans Christian Anderson. Dodampegama claimed that by infusing her stories with imagery of village life and extolling the temple, paddy field and village tea-shop, Wettasighe gave local children a sense of identity and patriotism at a time when western narratives were alienating them from their cultural roots. Such commentary reveals that Wettasighe's art practice through which she negotiated a deeply personal sense of displacement and nostalgia for village life, intersected in significant ways with a larger political movement, which was searching for a purified Sinhala identity.

Experiences as a Woman Artist

Wettasinghe emerged as a unique figure among artists and illustrators not only due to her distinctive drawing style, but also because she was the only woman illustrator in the newspaper industry at the time. She soon discovered that her gender placed her at an advantage within the print and publishing community, which was willing to support and nurture a woman artist and writer. When it came to her readership however, she believes that she was taken seriously by her audience partly because she was mistaken for a man. She amusedly recalls many humourous moments when reviewers of her early books and readers of her newspaper stories expressed incredulity and astonishment upon learning that the illustrator they were admiring turned out to be a woman.

  She received enthusiastic support from prominent women in Colombo including artists Ena de Silva and Sita de Saram, who introduced her to the work of women artists such as Grace Van Dort and Maisy de Silva. Other women supported her by giving her important introductions that opened up avenues for new work. Columnist, Sita Jayawardena, who wrote the women's page of the Times introduced Wettasinghe to its editor and helped her to diversify the subject matter of her illustrations. Subsequently, Mrs. Edmund Rodrigo, a patron of the arts, found her work with Lakehouse publications where she finally secured an entire page for her illustrations. While working at the Times Wettasinghe developed a close friendship with Sita Jayawardena and in the time she spent with the columnist, she gained sharp insights about gender dynamics in Ceylonese colonial society. Ladies of "High Society Colombo" often flocked to Sita with requests to write about them in her women's column and many of them arrived at her residence and office before weddings, horse races and parties, dressed up in their regalia of elaborate hats, parasols and dresses styled according to European fashions. This performative element in their conduct struck Wettasinghe's amusement and she wrote and sketched her observations in her adult novel "Kusumalatha," a biting satire of upper-class women and urban life.

     Another distinctive feature of Wettasinghe is that while many women artists of her time abandoned their creative work after marriage, she continued drawing and writing as she balanced multiple roles as wife, mother and artist. In 1955, while working at the Janatha newspaper, she married Don Dharmapala Wettasinghe, the Chief Editor of all the Lakehouse Newspapers. Their courtship began while they worked as colleagues and Dharmapala Wettasinghe expressed a strong commitment to her artistic and professional pursuits. It was he who suggested that Wettasinghe begin writing and well as illustrating and it was upon his insistence that she penned her first story, Kuda Hora, which became a classic work of Sinhala Children's Literature. As their family lives and professional lives became intertwined, they evolved a unique partnership; both as her editor and husband, Dharmapala Wettasinghe provided a supportive structure for her to freely engage in her work. Unlike most women of the time who often made the choice between domestic life and their artistic pursuits, Sybil Wettasinghe was able to advance her career alongside starting a family, vivifying the fact that these were not mutually exclusive roles.

    Striking the balance, however, involved navigating difficult circumstances and changes in her husband’s professional life impacted the course of Wettasinghe’s career. With the change of government in 1971, Dharmapala Wettasinghe left his job to protect himself from political victimization. Once he left Lakehouse, Wettasinghe discontinued her work as an illustrator for its newspapers. The following years brought tremendous hardship for the couple, both financially and emotionally. During this tumult, Wettasinghe employed her artistic skills to support the family and ventured into designing, producing and exporting Batiks. After learning the art of Batik making from Soma Udabage who introduced the craft to the island, she set up a workshop in a shed in her garden and employed and trained 125 girls in manufacturing Batik prints. She then marketed her products through stores in Bambalapitiya and Galle Face Court. She had shifted to becoming the main breadwinner of the family and was determined to find work that gave an outlet to her creativity. She paused her writing and illustrating for three years while building up her Batik enterprise and resumed it upon being invited to submit her illustrations for the Japanese Norma Conqua picture book competition.

 Wettasinghe attributes her ability to continue her work as an artist alongside bringing up a family to her commitment to her work as well as the support she received from her husband. Upon reflecting on why her contemporaries discontinued their art practice, Wettasinghe finds that many of them experienced and submitted to societal and family pressure to give priority to their roles as mothers and wives over their roles as artists. She surmises that the reason behind this was that many women who took up art, did so as hobbies and therefore, lacked the tenacity to pursue their work when they adopted more socially acceptable roles.
International Recognition

      During her career, Wettasinghe has won much international acclaim and her children’s stories secured awards both in Europe and Asia. In 1965, her story ‘Vesak Lantern’ won an Isabel Hutton Prize for Asian Women writers for Children. Her first book ‘Kuda Hora’ was chosen for the Best Foreign Book Award in Japan in 1986 and in 1987 it won the Japanese Library Association Award as the most popular children’s book. ‘Kuda Hora’ book was translated into seven languages (English, Norwegian, Danish, Japanese, Chinese, Korean and Swedish). Wettasinghe has held exhibitions of her work in Japan and Czechoslovakia and in 2003, she was invited to Norway for a book festival for well-known authors. Internationally her work has received high acclaim and attention, in particular for its distinctly vernacular themes and styles.

The Sojourn Continues…

At the age of 82, Wettasinghe continues to write and illustrate. Each morning she sits at the drawing board on her desk and lets her imagination run, inventing characters, landscapes and stories with a mind that is still as vibrant and impish as it was when she first illustrated the Nava Maga Reader. Writing and drawing has fulfilled many of her needs and she continues it not only for the creative pleasure it brings but also as a way of remaining connected to a part of her past that no longer exists. By recreating the world of her childhood village of Gintota and illuminating its day-to-day rhythms, rituals and events Wettasinghe has kept its folk culture alive for herself. This very personal and intimate practice has, over the years, attracted a diverse audience, ranging from intellectuals attempting to revive vernacular culture and international publishers interested in promoting local narratives to children seeking colourful stories to curl up in bed with.  Finally, the story of her life intersects with significant narratives of social and cultural change in the island and her personal journey vivifies one way of navigating among others, urban/rural, indigenous/colonial,societal polarities. 

Notes:

 i. Sybil Wettasinghe,1995, Child in Me, Colombo: Published by Author

 ii.  Anoli Perera, 2008,“Women Artists in Sri Lanka: Are they the Carriers of the Women’s Burden?", South Asia Journal for Culture, Vol. 2. Pitakotte: Colombo Institute/ Theertha. 

 iii. Jagath Weerasinghe, 2005, ‘Contemporary Art in Sri Lanka’. In, Ed. Caroline Turner Ed., Art and Social Change: Contemporary  Art in Asia and the Pacific. Canberra: Pandanus Book.