Neville Jayaweera’s personal and family history

Neville Jayaweera was born to Robert and Constance Jayaweera in Colombo, Sri Lanka, on 23 October 1930; the third of four siblings – Stanley, Sheila and Beryl.

He had his secondary education at St Thomas's College, Mount Lavinia, and at St Peter's College, Colombo. He took an Honours Degree in Philosophy from the University of Ceylon  in 1953 and passed into the  prestigious Ceylon Civil Service in 1955. 

In 1949, his brother Stanley had also taken an Honours Degree  in Philosophy  from the same university and in 1953 had passed into the elite Ceylon Foreign Service, within which he held several senior diplomatic positions and retired in 1988 as Sri Lanka's Ambassador to Germany. 

At University, Jayaweera met Trixie Jayasekera, who by an extraordinary coincidence was also born on the  23 October 1930, to Mudaliyar William and Mrs Stella Jayasekera of Ratnapura. She was the fourth of six siblings, Brightius, Daphne, Ethelinda, Ashley and Nihal.  Trixie had her secondary education at Bishop's College, Colombo, and took a General Arts Degree from the University of Ceylon and worked for several years as a Library Assistant under the Bromley Council in Kent.

Neville Jayaweera and Trixie Jayasekera  married in 1958 and have a daughter, Manohari (Mano), who received her education at Ladies College Colombo and in the UK at  two private schools,  St Christopher's School for Girls, Beckenham,  Kent,  and at Sydenham High School for Girls, in Kent. She went on to take a BSc from Kingston and an MSc from Sussex.Mano married Edmund Glynn, who holds a PPE from Christ Church Oxford, and an MA from the LSE London. 

Having  served with  the Government of Ceylon (named Sri Lanka  in 1972) from 1955 to 1972, and taking early retirement in 1972,  Jayaweera moved to the UK in  1974, and worked in the World Association of Christian Communication  ( WACC ) for 17 years. He resigned from the WACC in 1989 and resumed his career with the Government of Sri Lanka in 1991 to serve as Ambassador to the Scandinavian countries from 1991 to 1994.  On completion of his tour as Ambassador and taking final retirement  in 1994, Jayaweera and his wife Trixie,  now live in retirement in a quiet village in Kent.

A summary of Neville Jayaweera's Career

For a short period after graduating from the University of Ceylon Peradeniya in 1953,  Jayaweera was  an Assistant Lecturer in Philosophy in  the University, until he passed into the Civil Service in 1955.

Neville Jayaweera served In the Ceylon Civil Service (later renamed Ceylon Administrative Service) between the ages of 25 and 42, i.e. from1955 to 1972 , when he took early retirement. During those 17 years, Jayaweera held  several senior positions under government.

Among the posts he held while serving the Sri Lankan Government, between 1955 and 1972  were

1. Assistant Government Agent  ( A.G.A.) of the Administrative Districts of Ratnapura, Kandy, Badulla and Galle, in that order

2.  Government Agent  ( G.A.) of the Administrative Districts of Badulla Jaffna, Trincomalee  and Vavuniya.

3.  Senior Asst Secretary to the Minister of State ( Mr J.R.Jayawardena )

4. Chairman and Director General of the Ceylon Broadcasting Corporation. (CBC)

After taking early retirement from the government  in 1972,  until 1974, Jayaweera served as Additional Director of the Marga Research Institute Colombo

Thereafter, accepting an invitation from  the World Association of Christian Communication (WACC) in London, to work as their Director of Research and Planning , Jayaweera  relocated to London with his wife Trixie and daughter Mano, and served in that capacity till 1989.

He resigned from the WACC in 1989, and resumed his career with the Government of Sri Lanka  in 1990.

From 1990 to 1991 he served as Media Adviser to The President of Sri Lanka, His Excellency Ranasinghe Premadasa.

 From 1991 to 1994  Jayaweera served as Sri Lanka’s Ambassador to the Scandinavian countries, Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Finland.

Between 1976 and 1983 Jayaweera was also a Member of the BBC’s Central Religious Advisory Committee (CRAC) London

Between 1975 and  1983  Jayaweera was a trustee of the International Broadcasting Institute (IBI)  later renamed International Institute of Communication.( IIC ) London

Between 1980 and 1991 Jayaweera was a Member of the Board of Governors of the Worldview  International foundation (WIF)  Colombo

Between 1980 and 1989 Jayaweera was the WACC’s permanent representation to the UNESCO as well as to the ITU in Geneva.  

During 1975 and 1989 Jayaweera travelled the globe lecturing on the New Communication Technologies and the Communication Revolution, subjects on which he has written extensively.

Jayaweera has also written extensively on Sri Lanka’s  ethnic conflict, and on spiritual matters.

Since his final retirement in 1994, Jayaweera  settled down with his wife Trixie in a village in Kent, UK,  where he  has been leading a contemplative life, meditating, praying and writing on spiritual subjects. 

For a fuller account of  Jayaweera’s career and for a summary of his spiritual transformation,  please read his autobiography   titled “ The Fork in the Road” available in this blog.

Into the turbulence of Jaffna

(chapters from the author’s unpublished memoirs)

by

Neville Jayaweera

Chapter 1

How it all started

The story of my immersion in the turbulence of Jaffna actually begins in Badulla, in July 1963. In April of that year I had completed three gruelling years as the General Manager of the Gal Oya Development Board and had asked the Secretary to the Treasury for a posting where I could catch my breath, so to say, and recuperate. The Sec. to the Treasury obliged by posting me as Government Agent (G.A.) of Badulla, where I had served as Assistant (AGA) few years earlier and where Trixie my wife, and I, quickly settled down to a more leisurely life, working amidst the friendly and verdant villages of the Uva province.

Into the turbulence of Jaffna

(chapters extracted from the author’s unpublished memoirs)

by

Neville Jayaweera

Chapter 2

A Sinhala conquistador

I must confess,  that being chosen as the pivot of N. Q. Dias’s  master plan to enforce the Official Language Act throughout Jaffna, to encircle the North with military camps and bring the Tamils to heel,   released in me a surge of gung-ho energy, and it was in a spirit of a Sinhala Conquistador, resolved  to plant the Lion Flag and Sinhala supremacy among a troublesome Tamil people, that I sallied forth. Except that, for a coat of shining armour I had only a thick coat of  juvenile hubris and for my steed a clapped out motor car.  Forty years on, I cringe in shame and disbelief when I recall that a Sinhala Sunday paper of that time, referring to my posting to Jaffna, called me the new Sapumal Kumaraya. I have no plea to offer in mitigation except the vacuous ego’s eternal vulnerability to delusions of grandeur.

Into the cauldron of Jaffna

( an experience in managing ethnic conflict )

by

Neville Jayaweera

Chapter 3

A confrontation at Temple Trees

As the curtain went up on the evening’s drama, I felt like little David facing up, not to one Goliath, but to two. However, it was not the formidable Mrs Bandaranaike who filled me with trepidation but N.Q. Dias. I have never seen N.Q. abrasive in speech or manner, being always soft and gentle in tone, but that silken exterior concealed a core of burnished steel, and it was that hard core that I seemed about to tangle with that evening.

Into the cauldron of Jaffna

( an experience in managing ethnic conflict ) 

by

Neville Jayaweera

Part 4

Administrator or Manager

Before I begin narrating how I faced up to the impending mass protest, I want to take some time discussing a seemingly theoretical but critical question. Should a Government Agent be an administrator or a manager? The distinction is not merely semantic or only one of form, but profoundly one of substance and content. 

Naturally the answer will vary from district to district, some districts requiring strong administrators and others requiring competent managers. However, that still begs the question about what precisely distinguishes an administrator from a manager.

Into the cauldron of Jaffna

( an experience in managing ethnic conflict ) 

by

Neville Jayaweera

Chapter  5

Models of governance in contention

On the day of the mass demonstration in Jaffna, much more was at stake than merely the question of law and order.  Two contrary models of governance were vying for credibility – the confrontational model and the conciliation model. Would the model of dialogue and conciliation advocated by me work, or would we have to fall back on the confrontational model advocated by N.Q. Dias and the military. Over the five preceding years in Jaffna, the confrontational model had failed repeatedly, and the Prime Minister, in an unprecedented turnaround, had mandated me to try out the conciliation model. Now, the testing time was upon me.  

Into the cauldron of Jaffna

( an experience in managing ethnic conflict ) 

by

Neville Jayaweera

Chapter  6

A protest through arson

Even in the relative stability of the mid 1960s in Jaffna, the GA was in constant peril of a sudden ambush or of being drenched by a squall of unsolicited publicity,  as the two events I am about to narrate will testify.

One day in the first week of February 1964, a few months  after the mass demonstration and march on the Kachcheri, I had been called away to Colombo on official work.  Early one morning around 2 am, the telephone in my Mt. Lavinia residence  rang. At the other end my wife Trixie was very agitated. She told me that the Kachcheri was on fire and was spreading to the Residency, which was immediately adjacent. However, with the help of my parents who were staying with her at that time, she had quickly summoned the police on the scene and they had fought the fire with water and sand and had extinguished it before it reached the Residency.

Into the cauldron of Jaffna

( an experience in managing ethnic conflict ) 

by

Neville Jayaweera

Chapter  7

The Wretched of the Earth

In the early 1960s, a black psychiatrist from Martinique named Franz Fanon wrote an explosive little book titled the “The Wretched of the Earth”. The book, along with the works of Amilcar Cabral,  provided a centre of integration for much of the New Left thinking of that era, and equally, fuelled many of the insurrectionary movements in Africa and Latin America of that time. The “Wretched of the Earth” were the faceless, anonymous, underclass of various societies, who for centuries had been crushed, degraded and marginalised by a dominant class. Generation after generation, the dominant class had programmed their minds to believe that their degradation had been ordained by the natural order of things, and in the case of the Tamil underclass by God himself, so that all self-belief and a sense of self-identity on which they could build their lives had been squeezed out of them.

Into the cauldron of Jaffna

( an experience in managing ethnic conflict ) 

by

Neville Jayaweera

Chapter  8


The twilight of the Vellalas


The reference to two Tamil nationalisms is not intended to deny the overarching consciousness of Tamilness that unites all Tamil speaking people. The Sri Lankan Tamils share a common history, a common language, a common religion, and the occupancy of a common territory for over a thousand years, all of which together constitute the minimum requirements of a claim to nationhood (not to be confused for statehood).

However, within that overarching unity there are also great divergences.  Though they all speak the same language, and trace their origins to Tamil Nadu, Jaffna Tamils differ from Eastern Province Tamils and from the  Up-Country Tamils, notably in their historical and cultural experiences, and not least in the way they speak Tamil and respond to political challenges. 

Into the cauldron of Jaffna

( an experience in managing ethnic conflict ) 

By

Neville Jayaweera

Chapter 9

A cyclone, the Prime Minister  and nation building 

In the last week of December 1964 a cyclone of unprecedented ferocity devastated the Northern Province. The fishing villages of Myliddy,  Kankesanthurai, Point Pedro, Nargakovil and several areas within the Jaffna district were reduced to a wilderness of sand dunes, stagnant salt water and windswept debris. In the Myliddy fishing village alone, several hundreds  lost their lives at sea.  The Collector of Ramnad District in SE Tamil Nadu (India) contacted me to say that over 200 bodies had been washed ashore there and he had no alternative but to order mass cremations on the sea shore  in order to halt the spread of disease.  Throughout the Jaffna District the Kalavoham crop ( the main paddy crop ) was wiped out and hundreds of  fishing boats were reduced  to matchwood. The distress was appalling.