Ceylon's first prime minister started out running a graphite mine
D. S. Senanayake was a mediocre student and keen cricketer who managed his family's graphite mine and rubber estates. Jailed without charge for 46 days by British authorities in 1915, he went on to negotiate Ceylon's independence and became its first prime minister, remembered today as Father of the Nation.
Don Stephen Senanayake was born on 20 October 1884 in the village of Botale, son of a man who had grown rich from graphite and was expanding into plantations. Raised in a devout Buddhist household, he attended S. Thomas' College, an Anglican school, where he shone at cricket rather than books. After a short spell as a clerk in the Surveyor General's Department he joined the family business, bringing rubber to its estates, and in 1914 was sent on a government commission to study graphite mining in Madagascar.
He and his brothers joined the temperance movement founded in 1912. During the 1915 riots the British arrested them, and Governor Sir Robert Chalmers regarded the movement as seditious, so they faced possible execution before release on bail from Welikada Prison. The harsh crackdown helped spark a modern independence movement among the educated middle class. Senanayake entered the Legislative Council unopposed for Negombo in 1924, took over leadership after his brother F. R. died on pilgrimage in 1925, and joined the new State Council in 1931.
As Minister of Agriculture and Lands for fifteen years he tackled rice shortages, passed the Land Development Ordinance, expanded cooperatives, helped found the Bank of Ceylon, and in 1938 created Yala National Park through a flora and fauna law. During the Second World War he oversaw food supply and had an airfield built at the Colombo Racecourse in time for the Easter Sunday Raid. The constitutional scholar Ivor Jennings became his adviser, and the Soulbury Constitution passed the State Council with just three votes against.
Invited to form the first cabinet on 24 September 1947, he led Ceylon to independence, marked on 4 February 1948. He declined a knighthood but in 1950 became the first Ceylonese member of the Privy Council. His Gal Oya scheme resettled over 250,000 people, and ancient sites at Anuradhapura and Polonnaruwa were restored. His government's 1948 citizenship law left more than 700,000 Indian Tamils, about 11 percent of the population, stateless. He died in office on 22 March 1952.
Source: D. S. Senanayake
