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Leading light of leftist movement in Sri Lanka dead

Caroline Anthony Pillai

COLOMBO: A leading light of the early leftist movement in Ceylon and wife of S.C.C. Anthony Pillai, Dona Caroline Rupasinghe Gunawardena, passed away in Kosogama, on the outskirts of Colombo on Monday. She would have turned 101 on October 8.

Media Director of Presidential Secretariat Lucien Rajakarunanayake says, “The void created by her death cannot be filled. She was and would continue to be a legend.”

In the words of S. Muthiah, she was “the last living link with the early leftist movement in the Ceylon that is now Sri Lanka… spent much of her life in India, but gradually became less of a revolutionary and more of a helpmate to her husband in the labour movement in Madras.”

The marriage of Dona and Anthony in itself was unique in many ways. S.C.C. Anthony Pillai joined the Lanka Sama Samaja Party (LSSP) in 1936 and party and the leadership soon felt he had the makings of a good trade union leader. But he needed to know Sinhalese and Philip Gunawardena suggested he take lessons from Caroline. “The language lessons led to marriage for life,” Mr. Rajakarunanayake says.

In his tribute to ‘labour leaders from Ceylon’ in The Hindu dated February 23, Mr. Muthiah says, “Charles W Ervin, who has written about the Trotskyite movement in Ceylon” says, “In many ways Caroline and Tony were worlds apart. He was cool and calculating, she was impetuous. He was a Tamil, she was a Sinhalese. His parents were Christian, her’s Buddhist. He was 24 years old, she was 30. Yet the two became close and fell in love. In 1939 they were married…”

Immediately the Party asked them to move to Ceylon’s central highlands and, together, despite harassment by both the planters and the authorities, they helped to organise the labour.

“World War II only made the authorities get tougher with the LSSP, and in July 1942 several of its leaders secretly fled to India…Anthony Pillai went underground in Madurai.” Anthony Pillai was arrested in March 1947 and Caroline took over the task of addressing public meeting after meeting.

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