D. B. Jayatilaka

Don Baron Jayatilaka was born on 13 February 1868 in Waragoda, a village near Kelaniya just outside Colombo, in what was then British Ceylon ^[1]. His family belonged to the Sinhalese Buddhist gentry of the low country, and the boy grew up within sight of the Kelaniya temple, one of the most venerated Buddhist sites on the island. Any account of the D. B. Jayatilaka biography has to begin with this setting, because the defence of Buddhist institutions under colonial rule became the organising thread of his life.

He received his early education at Vidyalankara Pirivena, the monastic college at Peliyagoda, where he studied Sinhala, Pali, and Sanskrit under learned monks, before moving to Wesley College in Colombo, a Methodist school that gave him a thorough English education ^[1]. The combination was unusual for the period. Most ambitious Ceylonese youths chose either the vernacular monastic track or the anglicised mission schools; Jayatilaka mastered both, and the dual training later allowed him to move with equal ease between Oriental scholarship and imperial committee rooms.

He took his first degree through the University of Calcutta, to which Ceylonese colleges were then affiliated, graduating in the early 1890s ^[2]. Years later, already a public figure in middle age, he went up to Jesus College, Oxford, where he read for a degree and was called to the Bar at Lincoln's Inn ^[2]. Few contemporaries could claim a formation that ran from a Pali pirivena to an Oxford college.

Jayatilaka's working life began in the classroom. In 1890 he joined the Buddhist Theosophical Society's school network, the movement launched after Colonel Henry Steel Olcott's arrival in Ceylon, which aimed to give Buddhist children a modern education outside the missionary system ^[3]. He became the first principal of Dharmaraja College in Kandy in 1890, and in 1898 he moved to Colombo to head Ananda College, the flagship Buddhist school of the island ^[3]. Under his direction Ananda grew from a struggling institution into a serious rival of the older Christian colleges.

His energies ran well beyond school administration. In 1898 he helped found the Colombo Young Men's Buddhist Association and served as one of its guiding figures for the rest of his life; the YMBA became the principal lay organisation of the Buddhist revival ^[3]. He also worked closely with Anagarika Dharmapala's generation of activists, though his own temperament was conciliatory where Dharmapala's was fiery. Colleagues remembered a patient committee man who preferred negotiation to confrontation.

The question of who was D. B. Jayatilaka in this period has a simple answer: he was the steadiest institution builder of the Buddhist educational movement. Where others supplied rhetoric, he supplied schools, syllabuses, and trained teachers, and the network he administered educated much of the Sinhalese leadership of the next half century ^[4].

In the first decade of the twentieth century Jayatilaka emerged as a leader of the temperance movement, the campaign against the colonial government's licensed liquor trade. The movement, which peaked in the waves of agitation around 1904 and 1912, was formally about drink, but it doubled as the first mass political mobilisation of the Sinhalese Buddhist countryside, and historians treat it as a nursery of Ceylonese nationalism ^[4]. Jayatilaka sat on its central committees, toured the provinces, and edited temperance publications.

The movement's prominence made its leaders suspect in official eyes. When communal rioting between Sinhalese and Muslim traders broke out in 1915, the colonial administration declared martial law and, misreading the disturbances as sedition, arrested a swathe of temperance and Buddhist activists. Jayatilaka was imprisoned without trial alongside D. S. Senanayake, F. R. Senanayake, and other future national leaders ^[5]. He was released after several months when the panic subsided, and no charge against him was ever sustained.

Rather than radicalising him, the episode sent him to London, where he spent the war years and after as the secretary of the reform movement's British operations, lobbying Parliament and the Colonial Office for constitutional change and for redress over the martial law excesses ^[5]. It was during this long English residence that he completed his Oxford degree and his legal training, turning enforced exile into preparation for the political career ahead.

Jayatilaka returned to a changed political landscape. He was a founding vice president of the Ceylon National Congress in 1919 and later served as its president, guiding the organisation through the constitutional debates of the 1920s ^[6]. Elected to the reformed Legislative Council in 1924 for the Colombo district, he quickly became one of the leading unofficial members, respected across communities for his moderation and command of procedure ^[6].

The Donoughmore Constitution of 1931 transformed his position. Under the new arrangements Ceylon received universal adult franchise, the first Asian colony to do so, and an elected State Council whose members ran government departments through executive committees. Jayatilaka won the Kelaniya seat, and his colleagues chose him as Minister of Home Affairs and Leader of the House, making him in effect the senior Ceylonese figure in the government ^[6]. He held both posts from 1931 until 1942, through a second election in 1936, and was knighted in 1932 ^[2].

Among the notable D. B. Jayatilaka achievements of this decade were the steady transfer of administrative responsibility into Ceylonese hands, the expansion of vernacular education, and the management of an often fractious Council that included Marxists, communal representatives, and ambitious younger men. Critics, including some within his own board of ministers, thought him too cautious and too deferential to the Governor. His defenders replied that his patient, lawyerly approach kept the constitutional experiment alive and made the later transition to Dominion status possible ^[7]. In 1942, under pressure from younger colleagues led by D. S. Senanayake, he resigned his seat and his leadership, accepting appointment as the Government of Ceylon's representative in New Delhi, where he handled wartime relations with India, including the sensitive question of Indian labour in Ceylon ^[7].

Politics never displaced scholarship. Jayatilaka edited a series of classical Sinhala texts, wrote on Buddhist literature, and in 1927 became the founding editor in chief of the Sinhala Etymological Dictionary (the Sinhala Sabdakoshaya), a monumental project modelled on the great historical dictionaries of Europe ^[8]. He presided over the collection of citation slips from centuries of Sinhala writing and saw the earliest fascicles toward publication; the dictionary, continued by later editors, remained in progress for decades after his death. The University of London recognised his textual work with an honorary doctorate of letters, and he served as president of learned bodies including the Ceylon branch of the Royal Asiatic Society ^[8].

His private life was quiet by the standards of his political generation. He married Mallika Batuwantudawe, daughter of the Oriental scholar Pandit Batuwantudawe, a match that joined two of the leading learned families of the Buddhist revival ^[1]. The couple had no children. Contemporaries described a man of simple habits, a teetotaller in keeping with his temperance convictions, who kept up his Pali reading throughout the busiest years in office.

Among the lesser known D. B. Jayatilaka facts is the sheer range of his institutional service: school principal, dictionary editor, YMBA president, Congress president, minister, and diplomat, often several of these at once. Colleagues joked that committees convened around him by natural law.

The New Delhi posting, taken up in 1942 when he was already in his mid seventies, proved demanding. As Ceylon's representative in India during the Second World War, Jayatilaka negotiated on food supplies, shipping, and the status of Indian immigrant workers, questions that strained relations between the two territories ^[7]. He performed the work conscientiously but his health, never robust in old age, declined under the burden.

In May 1944 he fell gravely ill in India and set out by air for Colombo, hoping to reach home. He died on 29 May 1944 in the course of the journey, before he could be brought back to the capital, at the age of 76 ^[1]. His body lay in state in Colombo and the funeral drew enormous crowds, with the State Council adjourning in tribute. Obituaries across the island press mourned the passing of the man many called the elder statesman of the national movement ^[9].

Jayatilaka died four years before Ceylon gained independence in 1948, and the men who negotiated that settlement, above all D. S. Senanayake, had served their political apprenticeships under him. Historians of the period credit him with proving, during eleven years as Leader of the House, that Ceylonese ministers could govern responsibly under universal suffrage, an argument that weighed heavily in London's decision to concede self-government ^[7].

His educational and scholarly monuments have proved equally durable. Ananda College and Dharmaraja College remain among Sri Lanka's foremost schools, the Colombo YMBA still occupies the central place he built for it in Buddhist lay life, and the Sinhala dictionary he founded was carried on by the University of Ceylon and the state for generations ^[3][8]. Statues and portraits of him stand in Colombo and Kelaniya, a main road in the capital carries his name, and Sri Lanka has issued commemorative stamps in his honour.

Assessments of his politics vary. Nationalist critics in his lifetime and after found him too gradualist; later scholarship has generally been kinder, treating his moderation as strategy rather than timidity ^[6]. What is not disputed is the breadth of the foundation he laid: in schooling, in scholarship, and in the constitutional habits of the state that became Sri Lanka.