ABSTRACT
Introduction Kumaraswamy (Vela) Velupillai was born in Colombo, Sri Lanka, 25 September 1947, that is a little more than a month after (15 August 1947) Nehru had declared India to be an independent country and only a few months before Sri Lanka, then Ceylon, also became an independent country (4 February 1948). Events, anecdotes and almost unbelievable stories about his youth in Sri Lanka are many and I will here not attempt at all to report them as they were told to me by Professor Velupillai (from now on Vela) himself or reported to me by some of his friends and/or family members. This type of story telling is something that Vela should write about in his own autobiography. What I will try to do here is to attempt to follow some of Vela’s thought processes and creative path. I will certainly not try to systematize his intellectual production. I will be presenting the work of this deep and innovative scholar in an unusual way. What I will do is to link Vela’s actual life journey with his intellectual journey. What this will determine is a very ad hoc association between places and intellectual production. Some have described the intellectual work of Vela as kaleidoscopic – I too will give a ‘seemingly’ kaleidoscopic picture, but the theme of this chapter will be that the seemingly kaleidoscopic fragmented work is actually a coherent and aesthetically beautiful whole: a whole whose composition started the day Vela left Colombo for Kyoto . . . and has practically never ended, as he never returned back Sri Lanka. ‘Caminante no hay camino, se hace camino al andar. Al andar se hace camino, y al volver la vista atras se ve la senda que nunca se ha de volver a pisar’ (Machado’s Cantares from Velupillai 2005: 863).
