A Hundred Years of Pauline and C.R. (Dick) Hensman

The birth anniversaries of Pauline Hensman (née Swan) and Dick Hensman occurred over the course of the past year. This attempt to provide an overview of their life and times will inevitably suffer from gaps, since neither they nor most of their contemporaries are alive. It will therefore have to draw on the imperfect memories of their children and younger friends, who would have to rely on hearsay for the parts of their lives from which they were absent. Nevertheless, the main events and themes of their lives emerge quite clearly.

Tribute To My Father

 

The twenty-fifth anniversary of Back July 1983 is an appropriate time to remember my father, C.R. (‘Dick’) Hensman, who died peacefully on 9 July 2008. At that time, under the pseudonym L. Piyadasa, he wrote a book – Sri Lanka: The Holocaust and After (published by Marram Books in 1984) – which documented and analysed the events not only of that fateful day but also of the periods preceding and following it. This was one of the first publications to expose the shocking evidence of government sponsorship of the violence, and involvement of people at the highest levels of power in what would today be classified as crimes against humanity.

The analysis was continued in a sequel, Sri Lanka: The Unfinished Quest for Peace, (Marram Books, 1987), published following the Indo-Lanka Accord of 1987. What was striking was that it attributed the violence not to widespread inter-ethnic hatred but to the drifting of the Sri Lankan state towards fascism. It was made very clear in both books that the solution was not a separate Tamil Eelam, which would inevitably suffer from the same authoritarian and exclusivist politics as the proposed Sinhala Buddhist state, but a Sri Lanka where people from all ethnic and religious communities could live in any part of the island in security, dignity and peace. His message remains as relevant today as it was then.