Right of Reply - Manik Sandrasagra
10 July 2021 01:19 am
Views - 1985
This weekend I was sent an article published by the Daily Mirror which was about my father, written by an “award-winning journalist” called Ravi Prasad Herat. I admit that I didn’t choose to actually read the whole article. I mostly just skimmed it for inaccuracies (too many to enumerate) and counted the exclamation points (many).
Let me preface my response to this rather plagiarizing piece of writing masquerading as
investigative journalism, by explaining why I am writing a response now, after choosing to
ignore years of garbage those individuals have written about my father and my family for most of my life. Manik Sandrasagra (that is the correct spelling of our name, we are a Tamil family, and our name is spelled Sandrasagra, not Sandrasagara) was a public figure in Sri Lanka.
As such, we always accepted that various members of the press circle would write about him. Several well-known journalists including Lasantha Wickrematunge were friends and supporters of my father and collaborated with him, published his work and wrote about him, which had always been greatly appreciated. Thirteen years after Manik Sandrasagra’s death, though, it seems that his name can still make some “journalists” a few rupees. I am responding to this article, simply because it’s enough, now.
Let me start by pointing out that the writer who had never met my father, anyone in my family, or in Manik’s close circle of friends. He seemed to have watched a few YouTube videos and plagiarized sections of old articles, and done no research to discover anything new about his subject. Mr. Herat even threw in several “quotes” about my father, which were simply untrue.
One such example is a quote from Ananda Coomaraswamy (it stood out particularly, since he misspelt that revered gentleman’s name). Coomaraswamy could hardly have made a statement about Manik Sandrasagra’s philosophical viewpoint, since Coomaraswamy died in 1947, when my father was a toddler.
To be fair, I don’t take exception to everything the author says, there are actually a few widely published facts he focuses on that are not untrue. Yes, my father made several seminal movies that he was lauded and awarded for. I still have film buffs and cinema students reach out to me to ask me about his films and to talk about how impactful they were. To those people – I thank you; he would love to think that his work meant something to you.
Yes, he was a pretty extraordinary filmmaker - Seetha Devi was a movie that featured a Helicopter, motorboat chases and an underwater fight scene - and it was made in Sri Lanka in the 70s. I agree that is pretty cool. And Rampage was indeed inspired by Jaws.
Anecdotally, my mother Anne, personally made sure the elephants involved in the movie were pampered to the extent that years later, ‘Menike’, the star of the movie, remembered her at the Kandy Perahera.
My father also did indeed direct several plays (Sound of Music, My Fair Lady) which live on in popular memory.
True, there were a lot of plays and movies he didn’t make, as he was a creative soul and constantly ideating. I am incredibly curious as to why it’s so interesting for people to write about all the things he didn’t do (Bloody Mary, the strange sci-fi scripts he occasionally dug up), versus the many and more interesting things that he DID do.
Manik did a MILLION other things that are worth mentioning in a retrospective about his life-including designing and building two boutique hotels that are today still garnering rave reviews for their design, execution and their focus on ecotourism and conservation.
He also started the Pada Yatara back when it was downright dangerous to cross the terrain from Jaffna to Kataragama, getting permits and support for the foot pilgrimage way before it became trendy, and walking with the pilgrims himself, for as long as I can remember. He was a Shivite, a Christian, a Muslim and very Buddhist - he studied and celebrated all religions.
I would like to list a few of the other interesting things Manik did. This is not an exhaustive list, I was a self-absorbed teenager, growing up with a busy creative father who always seemed to be doing something extraordinary, so often I lost track of what he was up to. This is just what I recall, and what I most enjoyed of his multifaceted repertoire of work:
- He was Eartha Kitt’s manager in the 70s, and worked for Billboard. I mention this for no other reason than Eartha Kitt is crazy cool and I loved hearing stories about her from my Aunts (Dad was actually pretty quiet about past achievements and famous people anecdotes, he liked to focus on the present moment).
- He toured the Catskills with my godfather Nimal Mendis, and the tenor Nihal Fonseka. I did hear great stories about this journey, as they had many adventures including spending time with a Native American tribe, and preaching the gospel with some evangelical Christians they travelled with. Wild tales!
- Manik hosted a talk show called Platform on television, interviewing political figures including the former President, Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga.
- He held the Festival of Lanka bringing the village to the city, with dancers, the Veddhas, rural cooks, craftsmen, storytellers and shamans, in a huge event celebrating the first International Year of Indigenous People.
- He built a traditional clay hut with a fully functioning weva and paddy fields on the North Lawn of the Taj Samudra and hosted Edward Goldsmith, Pattie Boyd (Layla was written by Eric Clapton about the lovely Pattie), Oliver Tobias and David Bellamy who are just some of the visitors I actually remember.
- He held the annual Ananda Coomaraswamy Memorial lecture, graced by dignitaries that included Presidents, Prime Ministers, Ambassadors, writers, MPs, professors and other intellectuals. He pioneered the concept of tourism videos in Sri Lanka.
- He made Pooja ‘86, a documentary narrated by Richard de Zoysa (who is still missed and loved by many) about the roots of the ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka.
- He made Routes of Wisdom in the ‘90s - an environmental and ecologically focused six-part documentary series with Dr. David Bellamy (also my first time on a film shoot that I remember).
- Rather randomly, he designed an entire collection of hand-block printed homewares featuring Sri Lankan flora, which I am still using in my house today, more than 20 years later.
- Manik was a prolific and skilled writer, for anyone interested, just Google his writing, there’s plenty of it online. He co-authored a book published in 2007, with Jessica Agulló, called Sri Pada that took him to Santiago de Compostela for the book launch.
- I’m not going to attempt to enumerate the work he did that was conservation-focused - there was a lot of it, but he pioneered the concept of ecotourism in Sri Lanka. We submitted a proposal to the Sri Lankan Tourism board, when Tyronne Fernando was MP that was the model for a Sustainable Development Zone, which would have been an important way of promoting sustainable agricultural practices, traditional farming and craft in rural areas.
- We had a plethora of rescued animals that we raised, including a monkey, several birds, squirrels and a pet peacock. He and my mother rescued a lot of animals. I think that’s definitely worth a mention!
Manik, my father, was also arrested in the UK in the early 80s, a case that was then thrown out of court in the UK for lack of evidence. He was never convicted of any offence, in any court, in any country. The claim that Richard Boyle was the only person who visited my father in prison is also false, he was visited by several people including my mother, and my brother, along with his legal advisors and other family members. Manik was part of an extradition trial in Sri Lanka that he won. He also won a libel suit against a reputed newspaper, for exactly this kind of inaccurate journalism. His arrest seems to be the favourite anecdote from his storied past, that certain members of the Sri Lankan press enjoy focusing on, especially since his death. If this ancient history is the key focal point in a so-called “commemoration” written by someone who calls himself a journalist, and can’t manage to just conduct a Google search to figure out who Manik Sandrasagra’s daughters are - well, this is a sad day for the journalistic profession in Sri Lanka.
My father believed marijuana should be made legal. Today it is, in most parts of the world, and most right thinking society has accepted the myriad benefits the plant provides, including pain relief, relief from seizures and epilepsy. The global legal marijuana market size was valued at US$ 9.1 billion in 2020 and is expected to expand at a compound annual growth rate of 26.7% from 2021 to 2028. Manik spoke about the benefits of marijuana; he published on it and was an open advocate for legalization - a fact that is constantly dredged up as some kind of sensationalist way to revive conjecture about his court case from the 80s. It’s 2021 - weed is legal almost everywhere, and court convictions are being overturned worldwide for people with actual Marijuana-related convictions. Mr. Herat and his ilk need to let the past go - rehashing history is not “investigative journalism”. I suppose for some, that one snippet about a marijuana-related arrest almost three decades ago, might be the most exciting thing they can think of. Certainly for some of his associates at the time, it must have been very exciting to know someone in the middle of one of the most sensationalized court cases in Colombo. My father went through a lot - and whatever happened back then, he paid his dues to society many times over, simply by living through the invective and vitriol directed at him, by that so-called society and the press.
Manik has a family, and it still hurts us to see the kind of garbage that people wrote about him then, and are still choosing to focus on and dredge up now, peppered with a few outright lies for good measure. My father transcended this one event in his life, and he lived well beyond it, and I assure you, the rest of his life was much more exciting than that one moment in the early 80s.
I’m not going to address every inaccuracy in this article - it would take me all day, and as I said, I haven’t read it in detail. Manik was outspoken, a brilliant orator and widely misquoted - which I suppose is the peril of being a public figure. Here are a few items I would like to address, as they are simply silly claims that are wildly untrue and evidence of a lack of research that is frankly alarming:
- Manik didn’t live in a thorn-clay hut in Anuradhapura. He lived (with me, my mother, and later with his second wife and my sisters, his beloved daughters) in Horton Place, in Colombo 7. Far from leaving us to “live our own lives”, he was an active and somewhat overprotective parent. He was a massive and sorely missed part of my life. Daddy didn’t eschew society to live alone in the wild. I am not even sure how one would live in a thorn hut, I imagine that it would be very painful.
- Manik’s daughters are not named Kawshika, Tiliya, Narishta and Enoka. This is arrant nonsense and again, simply a depressing demonstration of the lack of any kind of journalistic accuracy. Information about who Manik’s actual daughters are is widely available. Might I again suggest Google, which might greatly help the author with his so-called “investigative journalism”.
- I would also urge the author to verify that the writers he is suggesting that my parents were avid readers of, actually exist. I have never heard of Carroll Blake, but I can confirm whoever he was, he definitely was not a Greek philosopher, nor was he a part of our library. I do agree my whole family were avid readers, and we do love Greek philosophy, so at least that part is true!
On the 13th anniversary of Manik’s death, if you want to know some things about him that do commemorate his well-lived life, please try reading something that he wrote, or something that someone who knew him and loved him, wrote about him and let’s just leave it there.