Rediscovering Martin Wickramasinghe

The Martin Wickramasinghe Collection at the National Library in Colombo contains over 5,000 books. Most of them are worn out and dusty, though well preserved. Some are recent additions. The oldest among the collection date to the early 1910s.

- BY UDITHA DEVAPRIYA

Straddling different periods, genres, and subjects, they remain a useful guide to the man who owned them, read them, and wrote on the topics they covered.

Arguably the most interesting point about them are the annotations.

Wickramasinghe was a voracious reader, "omnivorous" as he called himself, and he spent much of his income on books. He was indiscriminate yet critical in what he read. This comes out quite well in the annotations. Some of the older books have notes every few pages. The more recent ones hardly have them at all. This shows that Wickramasinghe was learning about these subjects for the first time through these texts, and that he was reading as much as he could about them. As he read, he remembered. As he remembered, he annotated.

Most of these annotations are marginal comments. Some point to other sources. Many are critical, hardly any laudatory. On the side of one page in the 1934 edition of Caroline Rhys Davids's Outline of Buddhism, to give one example, he argues the author seems "ignorant of modern anthropology." In his copy of Maurice Baring's An Outline of Russian Literature, published in 1914, he critiques the author's characterisation of Leo Tolstoy: responding to Baring's comment that "Tolstoy wrote about himself from the beginning of his career to the end", Wickramasinghe writes, "This observation is wrong", adding that "it is... altruism which impels Tolstoy to confess all the wrongs he has committed."