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William Howard Wriggins, the Bryce Professor of International Relations, Emeritus, and Director of the Southern Asian Institute of Columbia University in the City of New York, and former U.S. Ambassador to Sri Lanka, died in Hanover, New Hampshire, U.S.A., on 30 August, at the age of 90. He is survived by his wife Sally Hovey Wriggins and three children, Diana (Dinny) Cundy, Chris Wriggins(both, incidentally, past pupils of Ladies’ College, Colombo) and Jennifer Wriggins (born in Colombo in the mid-1950s) and six grandchildren.
Howard Wriggins grew up in Philadelphia where he attended the Germantown Friends School. It is recorded that the Quaker values he learnt there played an important role in his choosing to declare himself a conscientious objector at the beginning of World War II. A graduate of Dartmouth College, his early foray into post-graduate study in political science took him to the University of Chicago. His positive answer to a call from the American Friends Service Committee to join their relief operation in Europe at the height of World War II, made it necessary for him to shelve his studies for a while.
The young idealist Wriggins, all of 23 at this time, the record shows, moved around the Mediterranean area, from Portugal to North Africa to Italy to France as a relief administrator for the next four years. The memoir he has prepared, Picking Up The Pieces From Portugal To Palestine: Quaker Relief in the Mediterranean is based on the letters he wrote home at that time.
Returning to the United States after the war, he resumed his studies, this time at Yale, prior to being recalled by the Quakers, this time to Gaza where the Palestinian refugees were being sheltered after the creation of Israel.
We are told that these two sets of experiences, one during and the other immediately after the war, informed Wriggins’s life long concern with the interactions of governmental, military and charitable agencies. His work as a political scientist brought him to Washington D.C., — to the Library of Congress where he served in 1958 as chief of the Foreign Affairs Division in its Legislative Reference Section; and later to the National Security Council in 1967 when on leave from Columbia University he worked with Walt Rostow on the NSC staff. His bailiwick was South Asia, the Middle East and Northern Africa; still later to the U.S. Ambassadorship to Sri Lanka under President Jimmy Carter.
I first came into contact with this exceptional human being while I was Director of the American Centre in Kandy and he was U.S. Ambassador in Sri Lanka and our acquaintance made at that time ripened into a friendship that lasted all of a little over three decades and only came to an end a few weeks ago with his passing. I still have in my computer his last e-mail message of 20 July, 2008, in which he sent me his response to my wife’s article based on her recollections of the awful events in Sri Lanka connected with the infamous "July 1983".
Prof. Wriggins was exceedingly fond of Sri Lanka and her people. Like his two wonderful successors, the late Ambassadors Don Toussaint and Jim Spain, Howard Wriggins remained passionately involved with this tiny island home of ours until his death. His Ceylon: Dilemmas of a New Nation (Princeton University Press: 1960) will remain a classic and seminal work on Ceylonese politics in its social setting, of interest to all students of modernization in the non-Western world. Dated though that book now is, it will continue to remain a point of departure for any serious student of the politics of Sri Lanka. During his time as Ambassador in Sri Lanka, he found the time and energy to deliver two excellent public lectures; on Thursday, 25 October 1979, he gave that year’s G.C. Mendis Memorial Lecture entitled The Intellectual Enterprise in Sri Lanka at the Sri Lanka Foundation Institute and two weeks later, on 8 November he gave the Dr.G.P. Malalasekera Commemoration Lecture at the All Ceylon Buddhist Congress Hall, the theme of which was The Search for Roots. He thus exemplified the definition of a diplomat he had shared with his wife Sally which runs thus— "Diplomats are like swans, elegantly floating on the surface of things, but paddling like hell underneath". His swansong, a most perceptive and insightful essay titled After Forty Five Years, in Excursions and Explorations Cultural Encounters Between Sri Lanka and the United States that I put together in 2002, illustrates vividly his scholarly and personal devotion to Sri Lanka.
It was, he informs us in After Forty Five Years, in the 1950s when teaching comparative politics at Vassar College that Wriggins began to look seriously at Ceylon. Its peaceful transition to independence from British colonial rule appeared to the young political scientist ‘a remarkable achievement’. The late 1940s and 1950s were the decades of independence movements in Asia and Africa, a tumultuous change from the Euro-centric colonial systems to independent statehood. The youthful professor of comparative politics was drawn to the idea of living in Ceylon and studying closely the efforts its leaders were making to shape a peaceful and prosperous future. He hoped thereby to learn something of the challenges and creative efforts necessary for coping with this transition. Thus began Prof. Wriggins’s close and intimate encounter with Ceylon/ Sri Lanka.
He and his wife Sally first came here before the watershed year of 1956. They arrived in Colombo in 1955 and stayed on until 1957. There were two dramatic events—one pleasant and the other nastily unpleasant—that the Wriggins family experienced during their first visit to Ceylon. The pleasant experience was the birth of Jennifer, the third child of the family. The unpleasant one was Howard Wriggins’s frightful illness. He came down with an unknown fever on the day after Christmas in 1956 which was eventually diagnosed as paratyphoid.
His wife Sally Wriggins’s Asia on My Mind: From Ceylon to the Silk Road 1955- 2005 A Memoir contains six chapters on Ceylon/ Sri Lanka. She talks warmly therein of the two years(1955 to 1957) that the Wriggins family spent in Colombo at a bungalow at the corner of Maitland Crescent and Horton Place in Cinnamon Gardens. This is how she describes their home and Howard Wriggins’s academic labours:
What a crowded bungalow it was! Wonderful, cheerful Julius, our houseboy, who always seemed to be running even when he wasn’t, took care of everything. He slept by choice on a mat on top of a table on the side porch, which always shocked me. Our cook, Sandy, with the toothy smile, made heavy birthday cakes but also sharp, eye-watering curries. A part-time gardener, who wore a charm on his chest to ward off the devil, came a few times a week. A nanny slept in one of the children’s rooms. Add to this a busy typist and Howard’s research assistant with his papers spread all over the dining room table, and children, bicycles, visiting American scholars. Irene De Silva, a Sri Lankan friend, often stopped by with mangos and pots of delicious buffalo curd. Even the garden overflowed with pet rabbits, the servants’ children, and their children who came to purchase rabbits. What a bunched-up existence! What delightful chaos!
Howard meanwhile worked long hours in his study surrounded by tables piled high with books, pamphlets and documents. Stacks of newspapers lay on the floor. Seven yellow jackfruit-wood bookcases, a file cabinet and a rush wastebasket spilling over with balls of crumpled paper filled that cramped space. This was the work-engine of the house, where my husband, on a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, labored and perspired, the sweat dripping, his arms sticking to the foolscap pad in front of him. When Howard, sensibly, finally bought an air conditioner, he was able to work longer and the children could pull their mattresses out of hot, sultry bedrooms, shove them under his worktable, and sleep there at night.
The dining room was in a narrow wing of the living room. At breakfast the table began to fill up with long rows of bottles—syrups, pills, vitamins – to ward off swollen glands, boils, and tummy troubles. I can still hear Dr. Sproule saying: "What your children really need, Mrs. Wriggins, is a little bit of ‘upcountry’’’ – or what we Americans might call ‘mountain air’. However, on nights when we had parties, this same dining room table was filled with dishes of chicken curry, cashew nut curry, dhal, rice piled high, eggplant and okra.
Subsequent occasional visits followed during the 1960s and early 1970s and then came Howard Wriggins’s Ambassadorial stint from the summer of 1977 to the end of 1979. He continued to visit on and off thereafter and keep resolutely in touch with Sri Lanka and his many friends here in the academic and political arenas.
I wish to record here a few significant extracts from his essay After Forty Five Years which, in my view, are far more than mere quotable quotes. The first of these has to do with his first meeting with S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike in 1955 and it reads thus :
Early words about the Language Issue:
At a large garden party in Colombo 7 in the fall of 1955 I was first introduced to S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike, then the leader of the Opposition. My friend explained to him that I was a visiting professor of politics from the States who hoped to write a book about Ceylon’s first years of Independence. Already the issues of Sinhala language and the condition of Buddhism on the island were much talked of, and everyone I had earlier met urged me to be sure to meet him.
He cheerfully welcomed me to Ceylon, and urged me to drop by at his Rosmead Place office whenever his secretary could arrange a time. He struck me as a man of considerable energy, perhaps a bit high strung but at the same time casual, taking pleasure in conversation like so many of his compatriots. After some small talk, including his appreciation for Tom Sawyer and Hucklebery Finn, I asked him how his campaign was going? He thought it was going well; he was working closely with others to forge a broad opposition coalition. The bhikkus were actively behind his effort as were those who believed the Sinhalese language should have its proper place. It was high time for a political change.
Whether it was in that first conversation or some time later at his spacious home, as we explored the rising swabasha movement I heard him say: you know, Professor Wriggins, I have never found an issue as good as the language issue for exciting the people. I thought this a remarkable statement, and have always thought so since. My mind immediately ran back to the kind of passionate religious and ethnic violence all too familiar in India. He said it in a way that suggested he was confident the excitement could be managed. I worried that out of such optimistic political judgments, troubles might lie ahead. Of course, he knew his country much better than I, a relatively new visitor; perhaps his and others’ enthusiasm for such a change would not cause major difficulties.
He continued saying that there were thousands of people in this wonderful country who felt no identity with their government because its official business was conducted in English Like many others, he urged me to go to the countryside, where the bulk of the people lived. Go see yourself (Excursions and Explorations, pp. 3-4).
Outside of Colombo 1955/1956:
In one sense, Bandaranaike’s efforts materially broadened political participation among the hitherto politically more passive Sinhalese. He drew them into closer identity with the elected government, a move many thought a good thing.
I well recall the excitement of the days immediately after the election as the people swarmed into the Parliament building, dramatizing their presence in a new way. It seemed to this American a bit like a Ceylonese Jacksonian revolution. But in the excitement and impatience of electoral politics, the drive to replace English virtually overnight and to ensure the proper place for Buddhism ignored the concerns of the Tamil speaking peoples. Nearly 25 % of the population seemed to have been suddenly forgotten. Moreover, the original negotiated bargain on which independence had been peacefully achieved had been unilaterally abrogated. As we now see, the gains to the polity from increased participation of the majority were more than balanced by the terrible future costs that followed.
I must own that in the late 1950s it never occurred to me that the language zealots and the Buddhist enthusiasts , who had been so successful in demanding Sinhala Only, would go so far as to reject the very idea of a plural polity, which seemed to me such a fundamental part of Ceylon’s life. Nor did I at the time imagine that the Mahavamsa would eventually come to provide the dramatic text for so many, casting the contemporary Tamils living in Jaffna , Colombo and elsewhere in the east and the south as the virtual equivalents of the invading Tamils of nearly a thousand years ago!
These exclusivists ideas combined with a near stagnant economy became a highly dangerous mix (ibid. , pp. 5- 6).
Our Next Stay: August 1977 to December 1979:
In August 1977, when I returned as United States Ambassador, my wife and I arrived at Katunayake airport in the midst of the curfew following the post-election anti-Tamil riots.
I was struck by how much more separate the two communities had become. Some of my friends showed a kind of wariness if not actual distrust toward members of the other community, when before I had understood them to have been friends. Ancient history now had a remarkable presence in public rhetoric(ibid. ,p.7).
Since 1994:
To this observer it appears that unless the two principal Sinhalese parties shape together a serious proposal to offer to the minority communities, or at the least, one of the two mainstream parties fully supports their opponents’ initiative, no proposal can carry the weight of plausibility in the eyes of the minorities. This is why the quality of relations between the Government and its mainstream Opposition is of critical importance in finding a resolution.
The fate of this land is not foreordained by events as described in ancient manuscripts, but lies in the hands of Sri Lanka’s leaders and its peoples today. The difficulties now facing the country are indeed intractable. But history in Sri Lanka has taken many unexpected turns in the past 50 years. We may hope that similarly unforeseeable developments may yet bring an end to these miserable events(ibid. , pp. 9-10).
That hope was expressed scveral years ago. The end to Sri Lanka’s misery, however, does not seem within our grasp yet. Those of us who are devoted to fighting for social justice for all Sri Lankans within a plural and sccular state have to carry on the struggle to which Howard Wriggins, a sincere and valued friend of Sri Lanka, lent his considerable academic and diplomatic weight for well over half a century.
