Enid Blyton and Martin Wickramasingha through Madol Duwa

I was invited by Uditha Devapriya to make the closing remarks after his lecture on Martin Wickramasingha at the International Centre for Ethnic Studies on Friday the 6^th February 2026.  The discussion following the presentation consisted of some very interesting and erudite interventions by Professor Sandagomi Coperahewa and Dr Sarath Amunugama and others on Martin Wickramasingha’s contribution to the Sinhala language, and on his anthropological perspectives.  I was quite concerned that my closing remarks would go down as completely irrelevant.  After all, I was never very sure how I qualified to be there. My closest connections with Martin Wickramasingha has been through knowing his children and grandchildren; Uncle SK and Aunty Dham were mentors, VK was a good friend of my father’s, Ishani is  my sister’s classmate,  and Anusha has been a very dear and close friend ever since  I worked with her at the Lanka Mahila Samiti several decades ago.

Of course, as a novelist Martin Wickramasinghe has influenced most Sinhalese Sri Lankans of my generation from a very young age. I am exposing my own very colonial, anglicized, Ladies College, Christian background when I admit that as a very young reader (before reading Wickramsingha’s other novels) my point of reference was, of course Madol Duwa.  I read Madol Duwa alongside T B Illangaratne’s Amba Yahaluwo in Sinhala, and every single Five Findouters and Dog, and Secret Seven books that were written by Enid Blyton in English. On the surface her stories and  Wickramasingha's and Illangaratne's seem very similar.  Kids having adventures. And, especially exciting  for a city girl like me, kids having adventures out in the wild.   But looking at them more deeply, through a post-colonial, decolonizing lens, I can see that they are very different.  So I complemented Uditha’s lecture and the discussion that followed with some thoughts  I had on re-reading Madol Duwa as an adult. I saw that even in the framing of this children's story, Wickramasingha was more than just a narrative storyteller or fiction writer.

Enid Blyton’s children were like the Madol Duwa protagonists having adventures of their own, BUT, they were living in England at the centre of empire,  whereas Upali and Jinna (Madol Duwa) were living in colonial or post-colonial Ceylon, and there too in the periphery, in a village.  All of the children had interesting adventures outside of adult supervision.  There was less tension between the English kids in Enid Blyton’s novels and the adult world,  their childhood escapades were depicted as driven by innocent curiosity and a sense of adventure, education was suspended and in some sense so was the adult world, nature was picturesque, the adventures were temporary, magical and heroic even, but the status quo was not disrupted. The children returned to an established social order.  

In Madol Duwa, the relationship between the children and the adult world was definitely conflictual, and the children challenged or felt uncomfortable with adult authoritarianism and the social structures they were subject to (in the home, in school, in the village, in local government). The boys’ adventure was driven not just by curiosity but also by the need for freedom from those restrictive structures.  Classroom learning was disliked and shunned.  The preference was for learning from experience.   The natural environment was not a romantic space, it could have been considered hostile and difficult to manage, but eventually it yielded a livelihood.  And in Madol Duwa, I found that childhood ended with a sense of responsibility. 

Blyton’s stories universalised the white British children’s experience, and even though the world of empire was not alluded to or visible in the stories, it presented a world that was normal and safe.  In Madol Duwa, Wickramasingha incorporates a subtle anti-colonial critique. The colonial institutions, school particularly, are alienating and by centring the village and the community, and by presenting nature as grounding rather than just scenic, he challenges imported forms of knowing and emphasises lived experience.  I suspect we could go on to analyse Madol Duwa using the analytical concepts of Edward Said, or Frantz Fanon, or Gramsci, - but that is a job for real scholarly work.  All I would like to do is stress that Wickremesinghe applies an anti-colonial analysis and thinking that pervades much of his writing to even the simplest of his stories.   

Examining Madol Duwa also puts into relief how seemingly innocuous stories like those of Enid Blyton can, and maybe have,  shaped what Anibal Quijano, or Walter Mignolo describe as coloniality in the global south.  This is what Fanon would have referred to as colonisation’s psychological subjugation and it depicts how colonial systems of education alienate our true form of self.  In a new political era in our country, and in the context of looming changes to our education system, highlighting this aspect of  Martin Wickramasingha’s work is really important.