They sought the Vote

Young Nimal de Fonseka now 77, witnessed the making of history. 
From the Sunday Times – Magazine, 2nd January 2000.



The ladies gathered at ‘Sravasti’, the stately home of her grand aunt Mrs. W. A. de Silva and though she was just a little girl of four or five, she was taken along. ‘They piled into the great cars and headed for Queen’s House where they were to be granted an audience with members of the Donoughmore Commission who had come to Ceylon to determine what its constitution should be.’

The delegation was on a mission to Queen’s House to state their case for universal suffrage.

The little girl who insists that she was just ‘an appendage’ though witness to this historic event, was Kalutarawedage Nimal Indrani de Fonseka. “I remember the Governor’s wife seated there as Miss Nell (later Mrs. George R. de Silva), sister of the famous Dr. Andreas Nell, spoke of how it was time the women of Sri Lanka had the vote. I listened leaning against my grand aunt’s chair. I later realized what a battle they fought, to get those rights.” Among the ladies she remembers that day were some prominent names of yesteryear, Lady Panabokke, Lady Arunachalam, Miss Cissie Cooray and Mrs. H. M. Peries. A year after British women were granted voting rights, this privilege was accorded to the women of Ceylon, in 1931, decades ahead of many ‘developed’ countries.

Her memories are understandable hazy, but that early brush with history led the young girl born to a ‘privileged life’ to grow up into a women who had the country’s interests close to her heart.

Much traveled from her youth, she married L. S. B. Perera, who went on to become ambassador for Ceylon in Canada in the late sixties during the Dudley Senanayake government and promoted the country with pride, wearing ‘only handloom sarees, never Indian’. Her grand uncle W. A. de Silva, a great scholar, philanthropist and freedom fighter had predicted that she would shake more royal hands then her aunt who had met seven members of royalty and two American presidents. And true enough, at Expo’67, his prediction came true when she met many heads of state.

The golden days at Sravasti are gone. “It is a new Sri Lanka” she says, but for one who has seen the passage of time and many elections, the memories will remain.