Hector Abhayavardhana
| Hector Abhayavardhana | |
|---|---|
| Born | 5 January 1919 Kandy, Sri Lanka |
| Died | 22 September 2012 (aged 93) |
| Nationality | Sri Lankan |
| Occupation | Theoretician |
Hector Abhayavardhana (5 January 1919 – 22 September 2012) was a Sri Lankan Trotskyist theoretician, a long-standing member of the Lanka Sama Samaja Party (LSSP) and a founder-member of the Bolshevik-Leninist Party of India, Ceylon and Burma.
Abhayavardhana was born in Kandy where his maternal grandfather was an Anglican vicar - at a time when the Church of England was the established church. His father was a government servant and a pillar of the establishment.
Abhayavardhana was educated at St Thomas' College, Mt. Lavinia. His upbringing, being anglicised in culture and religion, was typical of the colonial middle-class and hence remote from the mass of Sinhala-speaking Buddhist people. He and his fellow matriculation student were once posed the question 'Would you have been better off under your own king?' by their teacher, in response to which he began to ponder upon nationalism and British colonial rule.
At fifteen he renounced Christianity and became an atheist. In 1936 he joined University College, Colombo where he read liberal arts and came under the influence of E.F.C. Ludowyk and Doric de Souza, who had Marxist sympathies. He went on to complete his colonial education at the Colombo Law College.
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