Cherished scholarship | Daily News

Cherished scholarship

Professor Wimal Dissanayake receives Asian Communication Award for 2021

It was the time when the republic experience was still in the infancy stages for this land. Communication was hardly beyond radio and cinema. Communication was a least-interested subject, but a growing field, in the early 1970s. Sri Lanka was a fresh republic, aching for new vistas in new fields. Communication was gradually becoming massive, though television is yet to be at least ‘new media’ to the country. The University Grants Commission thought it apt to initiate a new carrier-oriented undergraduate course for the discipline of mass communication. That birthed the Department of Mass Communication at the University of Kelaniya, the first-ever undergraduate course on the subject.

As the Department’s website now recalls the founding committee members appointed by the UGC comprised Professor MB Ariyapala, Professor Ediriweera Sarachchandra, Professor Wimal Dissanayake, Professor Sunanda Mahendra, DC Ranathunge and Dr Edwin Ariyadasa. The founding lecturers were Professor Wimal Dissanayake and Professor Sunanda Mahendra, while Dr Edwin Ariyadasa, Dr DB Nihalsinghe, K Jayathilaka, Dr WD Amaradeva, DC Ranathunga and Piyasiri Gunarathna were appointed as Visiting Lecturers. Courses were conducted in Sinhala, Tamil, and English.

Of the founding members, only a few (perhaps less than five) are alive today to recount the half-a-century story of the much-discussed subject. The Daily News meets one.

That is Professor Wimal Dissanayake who was awarded the prestigious Asian Communication Award for 2021 by the Asian Media Information and Communication Center in the Philippines. The award has been given in recognition of Dissanayake’s pioneering work on Asian theories of communication as well as his work on Asian cinema which is a branch of communication studies.

As Dr Sunil Govinnage has written to our sister newspaper, Sunday Observer, Wimal Dissanayake represents a rare breed of bi-lingual Sri Lankan intellectuals and belongs to a vanishing past. He adds that Dissanayake is a unique academic who is capable of working at several tiers of creative and academic spheres. He is a bi-lingual poet. He writes in both Sinhala and English. Dissanayake is a trained scholar in Elizabethan Drama.

At the East-West Center where he was the Assistant Director of the Communication Institute and later of the Institute of Culture and Communication Professor Dissanayake developed the study of Asian approaches to communication. He authored a large number of technical papers in English on this subject and published a book titled Communication Theory: The Asian Perspective.

And the book stands as a pioneering work today. It is used widely as a textbook in communication studies both in Asian and North American Universities. A newer edition of this book was released on December 4 on which Professor Dissanayake was given the award in Singapore. In addition, a collection of essays, which were originally given as lectures at the Kelaniya University, was also released on the same day to mark the occasion.

Dissanayake started his journey into communication initially as a newspaper journalist. After completing his undergraduate studies at Peradeniya he joined Dinamina, Lake House, as a member of the Features Desk. The editor at the time was MA de Silva. Others around him were BA Siriwardena, Edwin Ariyadasa, Sisil Illangakoon, GH Perera, Jayawilal Wilegoda and Hema Gunawardena. Later he went up to Cambridge for his PhD. There, the renowned cultural theorist Raymond Williams was one of his teachers.

At the same time, Dissanayake was associated with the World Service of the BBC. He was trained as a broadcaster at the BBC and in 1967. He was awarded the best broadcaster’s prize given by the World Service of the BBC. Following this stint, he was asked to be the first Head of the Mass Communication Department at Kelaniya University.

“During this period, I wrote some early books in Sinhala on communication and coined some of the technical terms that are currently in use. In 1975 I won a Fulbright scholarship and joined the prestigious Annenberg School of Communication, the University of Pennsylvania for my graduate studies in communication. There my adviser was the eminent mass communication scholar George Gerbner,” Dissanayake recalls the earliest days.

Gerbner later invited Dissanayake to serve on the editorial board of the celebrated publication, Journal of Communication that he edited. In1979 he joined the Communication Institute of the East-West Center as a research scholar.

While at the East-West Center he published a large number of books on communication. Over the year he has supervised over 75 M.A and PhD thesis on communication and related fields. He serves as the Editorial Advisor to a large number of important academic journals in the fields of communication, cinema and literary studies. He has been invited as the keynote speaker at international conferences held in countries such as America, Germany, Thailand, Japan, Malaysia, Singapore, the Philippines, India and Sri Lanka.

Dissanayake has also advised several universities both in the east and the west regarding the formulation of a communication studies syllabus. He has advised UNESCO regarding aspects of communication and culture. Professor Dissanayake has shouldered a corpus of scholarly writings on Asian communication theory – forms and concepts of communication in India, Japan, China etc.

Dissanayake is also regarded as a leading scholar of Asian cinema. His books deal with cinemas of India, China, Japan, Hong Kong, Korea, Philippines, Thailand, Sri Lanka, Taiwan etc. And his books on cinema have been published by leading publishing houses of the world such as Oxford, Cambridge, Duke, Minnesota, Indiana, State University of New York University Presses. Professor Ackbar Abbas, together with Dissanayake, started a series of books on Hong Kong cinema for the Hong Kong University Press. So far fifteen books have been published, and each dealt with a specific Hong Kong cinema.

“The first was written by me. It is called Ashes of Time and deals with a well-known film by the innovative Hong Kong filmmaker Wong Kar-Wai. I am the Founding Editor of the East-West Film Journal, an American film journal devoted to Asian cinema.”

Tradition is quite important, Professor Dissanayake emphasizes. The new things break a new path. But we must remember that tradition is not something dead. The tradition is the presentness of the past. You must be familiar with the tradition to usher in new paths.

That is one reason why we must love tradition and why we should bring it into the contemporary scene. That is one strong reason why Sri Lanka must cherish Dissanayake’s achievement as the recipient of the Asian Communication Award.


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