Speech
at book launch
10 July 2010, Penang

It has been almost forty years since our father passed away. For years many friends and relatives in Malaysia and Sri Lanka had been urging us to re-issue The Sara Saga, which had long gone out of print.

My bother and I wish to thank Salma Khoo Nasution and Abdur-Razzaq Lubis of Areca Books for offering to republish The Sara Saga. We also wish to thank Ismail Gareth Richards and Cecilia Mak for their sterling work in seeing through the final production process, for the excellent book cover design, proofreading, etc. An earlier effort to re-issue The Sara Saga was made by the late M.G.G. Pillay through a kind intervention by Lim Kean Chye. Unfortunately, the untimely death of Pillay ended the venture. To many others, unnamed, thank you for your steadfastness to the idea of republishing the Sara Saga.

Let me mention one person in particular. I wish to thank Harold Speldewinde for his unstinting support in this effort. "Uncle Harold" (as he known to many) much like my father before him has become a veritable Penang "institution"; an "NGI" or Non-Governmental Individual. He's an icon of volunteerism and public spiritedness and has been for many years President of the Penang Veterans Association. Harold never tires of extolling the legendary valour of my father - how Sara 'single-handedly saved' Penang, 'the bravest man he ever knew', etc. The truth is my father headed the multi-ethnic Penang Liaison Committee which saw to the orderly surrender of Penang to the Japanese and the committee comprised many committed citizens of Penang. Many people contributed to the effort to look after Penang during the Japanese invasion. The onerous job of leading the Committee fell on the shoulders of my father. As Sara had written in the Straits Echo, at the point of the Japanese invasion, "the British had fled like thieves in the night". Someone had to take up the cudgels to manage Penang and its people.

Anyway, the story goes that Harold (who was my father's body guard) was at my father side when Sara brought down the Union Jack at Fort Cornwallis to stop the Japanese from bombing Penang. If truth be told, it was my father's wily but lightweight sub-editor, Gopal, of the Straits Echo who did the job of climbing the flagpole to remove the flag which was tied to the pole and couldn't be lowered in the usual way. Both my father and Harold were too heavyweight for the job!

Our father wrote his autobiography entirely from memory. It was first published in a serialized version in the Ceylon Observer. He was able to draw on this version, along with whatever his readers came up with by way of corrections on the facts, for the book. Although he was justifiably proud of his excellent memory, we ask the reader to forgive the bona fide errors. In this new edition, we have spotted and corrected some. In the course of researching the history of the Straits Echo, we were able to correct his error of making it eight years younger than it was! Lim Seng Hooi founded it in 1903. Before this, he had established a Chinese language paper the Penang Sin Poe in 1889 and was proprietor of the Criterion Press which published the papers. The Echo's motto was "Fiat Justitia Ruat Caelum" (Let Justice be Done Though the Heavens Fall) and its first editorial extolled the virtues of a free press, seeing the paper's role as a "fearless exponent of public opinion." Sara took the Echo's motto to heart as its first non-European editor.

Now, on to a bit of family history, not found in the book. My father met our mother, Teng Ah Soo ("Bobbie" to friends) after he was released from solitary confinement by the Japanese Occupation government into hospital to recover from severe berri-berri. She nursed him back to health and they fell in love. The story of the Japanese imprisonment is in the book of course but not his love affair with my mother - a convenient elision! He gave us names to reflect the circumstances of the time – Manicam, his own name, and Jayaratnam, my name, to mark the victory of the Allies over the hated occupiers.

Our father had two children with his first wife, whom we knew as Aunty Mona. Sadly, our half-brother Lakshman had no progeny. Our half-sister Manorani's only son Richard Manic de Zoysa, our father's first grandchild and his pride and joy, was tragically killed in Sri Lanka along with 60,000 young persons in the dark days of the Premadesa government. My sister Bubbia (Monorani) started the Mother's Front to champion the cause of mothers who had lost their sons and was later decorated by Mrs Chandrika Bandaranaike , a subsequent Prime Minister of Sri Lanka.

On the Malaysian side of the family, besides us, three grandchildren (Petra, Adil and Rosa) carry the genes but the surname will not be passed on under the prevailing conventions of nomenclature. To be sure, though, his magnanimity, his public spiritedness and his joie de vivre will live on through us all.

Our father, known as 'Sara' or 'Uncle Sara' to his friends, could perhaps be seen as an early exemplar of the "global soul," to borrow Pico Iyer's term. Iyer, of Indian descent, was born and bred in England, transplanted to California and then chose to make Japan his second home. Our father was born in Ceylon, educated in England and chose to make Penang his final home. More than just geographical ubiquity, the metaphor of global soul conveys a searching spirit and mind, a yearning for ultimate truths. This was very much Sara, the man.

You will find as you read these pages that Sara was a person straddling many worlds. His very deep Ceylon-Tamil roots and pedigree, his affectation with the lifestyle of the English and its iconic sport, cricket, his persona as an Asian nationalist, pulled him in different directions – literally and figuratively. He personified the quintessential character of men of his generation, social class and upbringing. These English-educated elite comprised the personae who strode the corridors of influence and power of his time.

But the social elite of his time were also manifest public intellectuals. As these pages will show you, Sara was naturally drawn into social activism, and whether one identifies or not with his brand of politics, men like him were naturally and intimately part of a nascent civil society in the emerging national formations of a decolonising Asia. For Sara, these national entities were his native Ceylon (later, Sri Lanka) and his adopted Malaya (later, Malaysia) to which he had made significant contributions in his own way.

It was also rather logical for persons of Sara's upbringing and education to occupy the professions of journalism and diplomacy. Sara took to them like a fish to water. Much of the book deals with the events, issues, and personalities he encountered in his two chosen professions.

As social activist, journalist and diplomat, Sara gives us invaluable insights into the many path-breaking conjunctures of his times: the Japanese invasion and occupation of Malaya (and, particularly, Penang), the struggles and contestations preceding the independence of Ceylon and Malaya and the politics thereafter, the Bandung Conference, and so on. In addition, the book gives the reader many precious peeks into some of the most influential political, social and business figures in both these countries as well as in Indonesia.

The sharp mind of a journalist, coupled with a photographic memory, and the élan of a consummate social animal, has penned what could be considered not just a swashbuckling autobiography but an important work of social history.

As the reader follows his life story, we hope he or she will have glimpses into how Sara resolved the dilemmas, paradoxes and seeming conflicts of his colourful upbringing and personality.

Finally, my brother and I wish to dedicate this re-publication of the The Sara Saga to the memory of our mother, Teng Ah Soo, who passed away on 25 February 2006 and to memory of our sister, Bubbia (Manorani Saravanamuttu) who passed away on 14 February 2001.