A TRIBUTE FROM A PUPIL
WORK IS WORSHIP
T. B. JAYAH
The teacher and educationist
When the news came through a few weeks ago that Al Hajj T.B. Jayah had been taken seriously ill at Medina, in the course of a goodwill mission to the Arab States and that, through the good offices of the King of Saudi Arabia, he was being ministered to by the best physicians available, it raised the very real fear as to what might happen – for a serious illness at the age of more than seventy in the trying climatic conditions of Arabian deserts could be fatal to a man born and bred in the soft and languorous environment of Lanka. This fear was more than justified when, almost within hours, came through the news that Jayah had died and had been buried at Medina. To his old pupils, such as myself it was inexpressibly saddening to reflect that, a man who had lived and laboured all his life in Lanka (except for the brief period of his sojourn in Karachi as High Commissioner for Ceylon in Pakistan) had to go thousands of miles away from Lanka - so poignantly far from all his friends and kinsfolk - and lay his bones in the burning sands of Arabia. It was saddening too to recall to mind that his wife who predeceased him, herself like him born and bred in Lanka, died in a foreign land, in Western Pakistan. But to Jayah himself both circumstances must have seemed peculiarly fitting - that the earthly remains of his beloved wife should go to form part of the earth of Pakistan, a Muslim State in which millions of Muslims everywhere see the reincarnation of Muslim culture its art and architecture, its science and mathematics and, overriding all, its religion, poetry, and philosophy; and that he himself should die and be gathered unto the earth of Medina, the very city where the Prophet Muhammad ended his days, one of the two cities hallowed for all time in the eyes and the minds of all good Muslims everywhere. Knowing as I do what a devout and loyal follower of Islam Jayah was, I feel certain that when he fell in the course of what proved to be his last earthly mission and pilgrimage, he must have prayed for death to come to him while he still was in the Holy City. The very circumstances, therefore, that sadden us when contemplating his death among strangers in a strange land must have filled his mind as he lay on his death bed with ineffable joy and that peace which passeth all understanding.
Others have paid tribute to the memory of Jayah the Muslim leader, Jayah the politician, and Jayah the diplomat. I would confine myself to Jayah the teacher and the educationist. It was around 1918 that Jayah joined the staff of Ananda College, as a teacher of Greek, Latin, and History in the Upper School. His scholastic reputation has preceded him, for we already knew that he was a distinguished Old Boy of St. Thomas’s College in its Mutwal days and that he had been one of the brilliant classics
pupils of Warden Stone, himself a first-rate classicist who in the pre-Ceylon period of school-mastering at Bristol Grammar School had produced a very scholarly edition of Sallust’s Catiline. It did not take long for us to discover the depth and the sweep of Jayah’s mind. Although the specific subjects he taught were the three mentioned above, he led us effortlessly into other fields of knowledge in which he was equally at home. One of his favourite poems was Keats’s Ode on Chapman’s translation of Homer’s Odyssey, which he often used to recite from memory :
“Much have I travelled in the realms of gold, and many a goodly kingdom have I seen”: Jayah had himself travel ed freely and afar in the realms of gold, the paths leading to which he frequently revealed to us. Even at this distance of more than two score years I remember how it was he who among my teachers was the first to introduce me and my class mates to such works as the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, the Thoughts of Epictetus, the dialogues of Plato, the lectures of Swami Vivekananda, the speeches of Annie Besant, Srinivasa Sastri, G.K. Gokhale, Lokamanya Tilak and (in our own Lanka) the silver-tongued oratory of Ponnambalam Ramanathan. None of these works (or their authors) had anything to do with the immediate subjects we were studying, and that was perhaps the very reason why we thoroughly rejoiced in our excursions, with Jayah as our guide, into fresh fields and pastures new.
And where our subjects themselves were concerned, how thorough and conscientious he was, whether it was Homer’s Odyssey or Plato’s Crito in the original Greek or Sallust’s Catiline or one of the many orations of Cicero that he was taking us through or the ever-deepening and broadening current of British History down which he was taking us on a voyage of exploration. He knew and loved his subjects through and through and he loved and respected his pupils as fellow human beings; these were the twin ingredients of his remarkable success as a teacher. At Dharmaraja College, Kandy, where he began his career as a teacher under the great Billimoria, at Prince of Wales College, Moratuwa, at Ananda College, and finally at Zahira College he won the warm friendship and regard of his colleagues and of his pupils alike by his sobriety and seriousness of purpose, his modesty and unostentatiousness (which I think were his salient traits) and his genuine love of learning and his unbending virtue and integrity. In the Latin class his favourite illustration of the substantival use of the infinitive was the well-worn “Orare est laborare” - “praying is working” or, perhaps more elegantly, “work is worship”. His entire life, whether as a schoolboy or as a teacher or as a school Principal or as a politician and legislator or as a diplomat was moulded by a passionate faith in the doctrine that work is worship, that the truest form of service to the ideals of one’s religion is the service of mankind. While as a representative Muslim he devoted the last forty years of his life to the educational and social rehabilitation of the Muslim community of Ceylon, he at no stage of his career was a narrow “communalist”. As a schoolboy he had closely followed the story of India’s struggle for freedom and knew all about such precursors of Indian independence as Chitta Ranjan Das, Bal Gangadhar Tilak, G.K. Gokhale, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, Mohamed Ali Jinnah, Annie Besant, et hoc genus omne. As a young teacher he had followed (and contributed to) the story of Lanka’s own struggle for Independence and had, albeit at some distance as befitted a raw junior, laboured with the giants who dominated the Ceylon National Congress - men such as Ramanathan and Arunachalam, James Peiris and D.B. Jayatilaka, E.W. Perera and E.T. de Silva, G.A. Wille and H.M. Macan Markar, and he believed, right up to the end of his life, in a united Ceylonese nation, not in a Ceylon torn by internecine strife. The universality of his mind enabled him, while remaining all his life a humble and devout Muslim, to recognise the fundamental unity of all great religions. If, in Kipling’s phrase, “the Colonel’s lady and Judy O’Grady are sisters under the skin” Jayah by his own experimentation had discovered that the Muslim sufi, the Hindu yogi, and the Buddhist dhyani are brothers in spirit.
S.A. Wijayatilake
28th June, 1960

MY DAD'S CLAN

Seated in the middle was my paternal grandmother Devinona Inga Meedin flanked on two sides were uncle Tuan Jamaldeen Meedin (Rtd James Finlay, father of late Allenson of Germany and late Marina, South Africa) and my dad Tuan Hameem Meedin ( WW2 veteran and Rtd Walker & Greig - father of Shafeena and Geoffrey Muhsin). Couple on left: seated was dad's sister Gnei Noor with husband Zainudeen Mohammed of Colombo Apothecaries(parents of Mrs Bintaree Samahon-passed away last month and late Tuan Naeem Zainudeen Mohamed, UK). and couple on right were dad's brother Tuan Deenon (Inspector of Police) with wife Nona Zamzam (parents of late Daleel-Ted of UK, late Endra-Raja Rtd Customs, late Mrs Binthayon Saldin, late Mrs. Farina Salim and late Mrs Jeeva Shaheed UK). The rest were domestic aides.
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