Rajiva Wijesinha

Rajiva Wijesinha was born on 16 May 1954 to Sam Wijesinha and Mukta Wickremesinghe. He first schooled at S Thomas' College, Mt Lavinia (which he later served as Sub-Warden, for a brief period), and won an Open Exhibition in Classics to University College, Oxford when he was 16. After his first degree, which also led to an M.A. in 1977, he moved to Corpus Christi College, Oxford as an E. K. Chambers Student (Edmund Kerchever Chambers), and obtained a BPhil degree in English, followed by a DPhil degree on the subject of Women and Marriage in the early Victorian novel. The thesis was subsequently published by the University Press of America under the title The Androgynous Trollope. Wijesinha taught briefly at the University of Peradeniya before resigning in protest against the increasing authoritarianism of the government of President J. R. Jayewardene. He then worked for the British Council in Colombo as the Cultural Affairs Officer, before rejoining the University system to initiate English degree programmes for students from backgrounds that had limited English in school. He was responsible for the islandwide pre-University General English Language Training programme, as well as General English programmes at the Affiliated University Colleges established in 1992 to introduce employment oriented courses into the tertiary education system. In 2001, Wijesinha served as a Consultant to the Ministry of Education to initiate the reintroduction of English medium education in the state sector, which had banned it previously for several decades. He was also an Academic Consultant to the Sri Lanka Military Academy when it began degree programmes for Officer Cadets. He served as chair of the Academic Affairs Committee of the National Institute of Education, and was a member of the National Education Commission and the Board of the Bandaranaike Centre for International Studies. In 1982, Wijesinha supported Chanaka Amaratunga to set up the Council for Liberal Democracy and became Co-Editor of the Liberal Review, at a time when dissenting voices had no space to publish in Sri Lanka. He became President of the Liberal Party of Sri Lanka when it was established in 1987 and later took over as Leader of the Party after Dr Amaratunga's death in 1996. He was the Presidential candidate of the party in 1999 and came 6th out of the 15 candidates, defeating several former parliamentarians. During this period, he conducted workshops on liberalism in India, Pakistan, Nepal, Afghanistan and Indonesia, on behalf of the Friedrich Naumann Stiftung (FNS), the German Liberal Foundation, for whom he also edited Liberal Values for South Asia (revised recently as Liberal Perspectives on South Asia and published in 2009 by Cambridge University Press, Delhi). Wijesinha promoted English Language writing in Sri Lanka and initiated the English Writers Cooperative (EWC) of Sri Lanka while he was at the British Council, which aided and administered the EWC at its inception. He had earlier edited for the New Lankan Review, which provided space for Sri Lankan writers in English when the genre was regaining acceptance, and he served on the Editorial Board of the EWC for over a decade. He has edited several collections of poetry and short stories by Sri Lankan writers in English, most recently Bridging Connections, an Anthology of Stories which also contains translations from Sinhala and Tamil and was published by the National Book Trust of India in 2007. Wijesinha was the first Sri Lankan writer resident in the country whose works have been translated into a European language. Servi, the Italian translation of Servants which won the 1995 Gratiaen Award, was published by Giovanni Tranchida Editore in Milan in 2002, and this was followed in 2006 by Atti di fede. This last was a translation of Acts of Faith, based on the 1983 government-sponsored riots against Tamils known as Black July, and the first part of a trilogy that included Days of Despair (1989) and The Limits of Love (2005). He worked on The Limits of Love—which was based on the kidnapping and murder of the poet and journalist Richard de Zoysa—while he was a resident at the Rockefeller Foundation's Bellagio Center and at the Center for Writers at Hawthornden Castle. Wijesinha served for several years on the editorial board of the Journal of Commonwealth Literature. Works in other genres include The Foundations of Modern Society, Political Principles and their Practice in Sri Lanka and A Handbook of English Grammar, published by Cambridge University Press in Delhi, which also brought out most recently Declining Sri Lanka: J R Jayewardene and the erosion of Democracy. ==Work==