S.R. Kanakasabai

When the ’43 Group formed in Colombo in 1943, the committee of twelve it named included a painter who had come the length of the island from Jaffna. S.R. Kanakasabai was Inspector of Art for the Northern Province, and it was through that work, and through Geoffrey Beling, the colony’s Chief Inspector of Art, whose ideas he had taken up, that he was drawn into the circle of modernists around Lionel Wendt. He is among the least celebrated names attached to the Group, and yet his working life left a deeper mark on the north of the island than his short exhibiting record can show.

He was born on 10 July 1901 at Irupalai, a village in the Jaffna peninsula, and was schooled in Tamil and then in English at Kopay. His gift for drawing was noticed early. At sixteen he was taken on as a drawing teacher, and the Jaffna photographer S.K. Lawton, struck by his portraits, urged him toward proper training. In 1919 he became the first student from Ceylon to enter the Madras art school. His money ran out after three months and he came home, until Rao Bahadur Masillamanipillai, a benefactor connected to the Madras High Court who had seen his paintings, put up the funds for him to finish. He returned to Jaffna in 1920.

Back on the peninsula he chose teaching over the other posts offered him, and taught for six years at Parameswara College, the school Sir Ponnambalam Ramanathan had founded, before being appointed Inspector of Art for the Northern Province at the age of twenty-six. In that office he changed the way art was taught to children in the province. He had taken up the method Beling called free expression, which released a child from the drudgery of mechanical drills like perspective and drew out instead its own sense of beauty and colour, and to it he brought fresh insights of his own into the teaching of the young. He was president of the Winzer Art Club as well, and a figure of standing in the art life of Jaffna.

His work as a painter is now thinly recorded. He showed at the Group’s second exhibition, and after an absence of some years returned in 1948 with a single painting titled ‘Black Out’. He died on 14 March 1964. A movement is made first by the people who begin it, and Kanakasabai was among the few the founders drew in at the start; but his surer legacy is the schoolrooms of the north, where a generation of children was taught to see for itself.

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Sources

1. Weereratne, Neville. 43 Group: A Chronicle of Fifty Years in the Art of Sri Lanka. Melbourne: Lantana, 1993.
2. Bandaranayake, Senake, and Albert Dharmasiri. Sri Lankan Painting in the 20th Century. Colombo: National Trust of Sri Lanka, 2009.
3. Dissanayake, Ellen. ‘Ceylon’s 43 Group of Painters’.
4. The ’43 Group. ‘Missionary Zeal.’ https://www.43group.org/chapters/chapter-7-missionary-zeal
5. The ’43 Group. ‘Once and Future Artists.’ https://www.43group.org/chapters/chapter-14-once-and-future-artists
6. Sapumal Foundation. ‘Brief Life History: S.R. Kanagasabai.’ 23 March 2023. https://www.facebook.com/SapumalFoundation/posts/688455729752758/
7. de Soysa, Rohan. ’The ‘43 Group: Origins, Aims, Activities and Legacy.’ National Trust of Sri Lanka, 29 September 2016. https://thenationaltrust.lk/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/The-43-Group.pdf