Sirimavo Bandaranaike

Sirimavo Ratwatte was born on April 17, 1916, in Balangoda, a highland town in the Ratnapura district of British Ceylon. She was the eldest of six children in the Ratwatte family, part of the Radala aristocracy of the Kandyan highlands, a class that had long supplied headmen and administrators to the colonial government ^[1]. Her father, Barnes Ratwatte, served as a rate mahatmaya, a local chieftain and official, and later sat in Ceylon's Senate.

Though her family was Buddhist, she was educated at St Bridget's Convent in Colombo, a Catholic girls' school where instruction ran in English. The pairing of a Kandyan Buddhist upbringing with an elite convent education shaped a woman comfortable in both the village and the drawing room ^[1]. She did not attend university, which was unremarkable for aristocratic daughters of her generation, but she absorbed an ethic of public duty through social work.

Before politics ever touched her, she spent years with the Lanka Mahila Samiti, a rural women's welfare movement. She traveled through villages organizing programs on nutrition, family welfare, and cottage industry, work that later gave her a practical familiarity with rural Sinhalese life that few Colombo politicians could match ^[2].

In 1940 she married Solomon West Ridgeway Dias Bandaranaike, an Oxford-educated politician seventeen years her senior who was then a rising minister in the colonial State Council. The match joined two powerful families, the low-country Bandaranaikes and the Kandyan Ratwattes. The couple had three children: Sunethra, Chandrika, and Anura ^[1].

For most of the marriage Sirimavo remained a political wife rather than a political actor. Her husband broke from the United National Party, founded the Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP) in 1951, and swept to power in 1956 on a wave of Sinhalese nationalist and Buddhist revivalist feeling. His government made Sinhala the sole official language, a decision with consequences that would define, and eventually consume, his widow's own career ^[3].

On September 25, 1959, a Buddhist monk shot S. W. R. D. Bandaranaike at his Colombo residence; he died the next day. The assassination left the SLFP leaderless and the country shaken. Party elders, searching for a unifying figure, turned to the grieving widow, who had never held or sought office ^[2].

Anyone asking who was Sirimavo Bandaranaike before 1960 would have found a private aristocrat; within a year she was a global first. In May 1960 she accepted the presidency of the SLFP, and in the July 1960 general election the party won a clear majority. On July 21, 1960, she was sworn in as Prime Minister of Ceylon, the first woman anywhere to lead a modern government ^[4]. Because she was not yet an elected legislator, she entered parliament through the appointed Senate.

Critics dismissed her as a caretaker trading on sympathy, and her tendency to weep when recalling her husband earned her the nickname "the weeping widow." The label underestimated her. She proved a determined administrator who consolidated control of the party and pressed her husband's program with more resolve than he had shown ^[2].

Her first government nationalized foreign oil companies, took over Catholic and other denominational schools, and enforced the Sinhala-only language policy in administration. These moves cheered her Sinhalese Buddhist base but alienated the Tamil minority, Western investors, and the Catholic press. In 1962 she faced down an attempted coup by senior military and police officers, many of them Christian, and afterward reshaped the officer corps ^[3]. Economic strain and a split with her leftist allies brought defeat in the March 1965 election.

Any honest account of Sirimavo Bandaranaike achievements has to begin with the precedent itself: she normalized the idea of a woman commanding a state, years before Indira Gandhi or Golda Meir took office ^[4]. Her second term, won in a landslide with a United Front coalition in May 1970, produced her most durable constitutional legacy. In May 1972 her government adopted a new constitution that severed the last ties to the British Crown, renamed Ceylon the Republic of Sri Lanka, and gave Buddhism the foremost place in the state ^[1].

Abroad, she became one of the most visible figures of the Non-Aligned Movement. She maintained working relations with both Washington and Moscow, cultivated close ties with China and India, and in 1976 hosted the fifth Non-Aligned summit in Colombo, chairing the movement at its height ^[5]. Earlier, in 1974, she negotiated an agreement with India settling the status of the disputed islet of Kachchatheevu, and a 1964 pact with Indian premier Lal Bahadur Shastri had addressed the citizenship of Indian-origin plantation Tamils ^[3].

At home her socialism ran deep. The government nationalized plantations, banks, and trade, imposed land ceilings that broke up large estates, and expanded state control of the press, including the takeover of the influential Lake House newspaper group ^[2]. In April 1971 she survived a violent insurrection by the Marxist JVP youth movement, crushing it with foreign military assistance at a cost of several thousand lives. Rationing, import controls, and queues for basic goods marked the later years of the term, and in July 1977 the electorate delivered a crushing defeat, reducing the SLFP to a handful of seats ^[3].

Defeat turned to humiliation in 1980, when the new government of J. R. Jayewardene had a presidential commission find her guilty of abuse of power during her second term. Parliament stripped her of her civic rights for seven years, expelling her from the legislature and barring her from elections ^[1]. Many observers, including some of her opponents, viewed the punishment as political retribution.

Her rights were restored in 1986, and she contested the 1988 presidential election, losing to Ranasinghe Premadasa but keeping the SLFP alive as a national force. Through the violent 1980s, as civil war with Tamil separatists spread in the north and a second JVP uprising bled the south, she remained leader of the opposition and the party's matriarch ^[2].

The family reclaimed power in 1994, though in reversed order. Her daughter Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga led the People's Alliance to victory, became prime minister, and then won the presidency in November 1994. Chandrika appointed her mother prime minister, by then a largely ceremonial post under the executive presidency. The appointment made the Bandaranaikes the first family in which mother, father, and daughter had all headed a government ^[4].

Her third premiership, from 1994 to 2000, was quieter than the first two. In her late seventies and using a wheelchair for much of the period, she served as an elder counselor while her daughter directed policy, including the long war against the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam ^[5]. She resigned the premiership in August 2000, closing four decades at or near the summit of Sri Lankan politics.

She did not withdraw from public life even then. On October 10, 2000, after casting her vote in the parliamentary general election at a polling station near her home, she suffered a heart attack and died at Kadawatha, outside Colombo. She was 84 ^[4]. Her death on election day struck many Sri Lankans as fitting for a woman whose adult life had been organized around the ballot box. She received a state funeral, and her ashes were interred beside the memorial to her husband at Horagolla ^[2].

The basic Sirimavo Bandaranaike facts guarantee her a place in political history: first woman prime minister in the world, three terms in office, chief architect of the 1972 republic. Any Sirimavo Bandaranaike biography must also weigh the costs. Her language and university admissions policies deepened Tamil alienation, and historians trace part of the path to the civil war that erupted in 1983 through decisions taken in her governments ^[3]. Her economic controls, defended as anti-colonial self-reliance, left the island poorer than its East Asian peers and were largely dismantled after 1977.

Yet her achievements in widening the political imagination are hard to overstate. In 1960 no country had ever been governed by a woman chosen through its own political process; by the time she died, dozens had, many of them in South Asia, where her example resonated most directly ^[4]. Within Sri Lanka she built the SLFP into one of the two poles of national politics, a position it held for half a century.

Her dynasty outlived her. Chandrika Kumaratunga served as president until 2005, and her son Anura held cabinet office and the speakership of parliament. Statues, stamps, and the renaming of public institutions keep her image current in Sri Lanka, while scholars continue to debate whether her rule empowered ordinary citizens or an aristocratic family. Both readings contain truth, which is perhaps the most accurate summary of her complicated career ^[5].