A memoir Full Of Spirit
I have been recently researching some interesting women of 20th century Ceylon/Sri Lanka, and have come across a Memoir by the late Rohini De Mel. It is one of the most vibrant and joyous insights into the Sri Lanka of yesteryear that I have ever read.
She titled it ‘Full Of Spirit’, and indeed I could see from first reading her remembrances and recollections that this was a lady who engaged fully and actively with her society: intellectually, socially and culturally.
The young Rohini De Mel
She loved horses and riding, and dogs and motor cars. She played golf and tennis, and joined all the existing clubs, she loved travelling: often by ocean liner and the early aeroplanes. She made lifelong friendships across barriers of race and religion. She loved nature and the great outdoors. And the impression that radiates from the pages is of an exuberant and expansive personality. A public figure who also had an enriching private family life, and who committed herself to understanding and participating in the broader life of the country, dedicated to social service in her everyday life in a way many people today call activism.
She succinctly notes in her introductory Author’s Note that, over eight decades of her life, the world had become more unpredictable, and more violent. “It has been a challenge not to become ‘desensitized’, in order to survive”, she states.
In an anecdotal and impressionistic way, like images in a slideshow, Rohini gives us fascinating glimpses of some of the big events of the latter half of the 20th century and the early 21st. These include the ongoing civil war, near encounters with some of the terrorist troops, the devastating 2004 Tsunami, and some perilous moments and journeys which were clearly conducted on tenterhooks, but recalled with humour and resilience. She also shows us what it was like growing up in a big extended family, in what seems today to have been the golden age of Sri Lanka. The sensory detail of the picnics they had, the games they played as children, and all the jamborees they enjoyed create a vivid picture of a life well lived.
She describes Rabindranath Tagore, who she remembers with his white beard coming to speak at her childhood home, and various members of the British Royal Family, racehorse-owning Sheikhs, and the social reform group she clearly spearheaded, the MRA (Moral Re-Armament Association).
People with historical standing, like the philanthropist Charles Henry De Soysa, and SWRD Bandaranaike, who we in Colombo in 2025 know as statues in public spaces in the city, were known to Rohini and elder members of her family, personally.
In the post WW2 period, Sri Lanka (then Ceylon) was outward looking and its citizens full of enterprise and energy. It is no surprise that Rohini, the product of such a kaleidoscopic and multi-faceted culture, was so intrepid, so intensely enthused by life, and so interesting.
She was an enthusiastic photographer, and had a studio where she took portrait photographs, having interned with the great Madame Yevonde in London, and she also took extensive photographs of her travels. She seems to have enjoyed great freedom in her life: freedom of mobility, the freedom of choice bestowed by privilege, and freedom from the constraints of unhappy or stifling marriages, from which many contemporary women of spirit of her era could not emerge.
But her vibrant attitude to life was a gift of her own perspective and life choices: of non judgmental connectivity, and openness to others. She was able to see value in both sides of an argument, and respect the viewpoints of both parties on each side of the argument.
Her own capacity for candid self evaluation is refreshing: “Another phrase: ‘As I am, so is my Nation; I am the disease or I can be the cure’. The choice was mine. I knew I was not the cure, so I thought I better look inside myself. I saw I was self-willed, stubborn and thoughtless. I wrote to my father apologizing for being ungrateful – wild & untamed – but he never replied. But when he died I found my letter on top of many others!! I guess he valued it.”
She goes on to say: “As for me after I had written, the windows of my mind flew open, and I found myself taking more interest in people & the world. Margot (her mother) who realized that marriage was not the top priority in my life, encouraged me to find purpose & philosophy through MRA and to belong to a larger world family which initiated change.”
What a glimpse she offers us of a fascinating human being, and a great country.
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