Vivienne Goonewardena

Violet Vivienne ("Vivi") Goonewardena (18 September 1916 – 3 October 1996) was a Sri Lankan pioneer socialist and feminist. Her life and politics were shaped by the most interesting times of the Sri Lankan Left and she was in turn one of its more colourful personalities.

Goonewardena was drawn into politics while still in school at Musaeus College through the Suriya-Mal Movement when in 1933 anti-imperialists and nationalists launched the sale of local Suriya (Portia tree) flowers as an alternative to poppies with the slogan "against slavery and poverty and for freedom and prosperity". As Head Girl she was to recruit her entire school to this cause. It was from this mass campaign that the Lanka Sama Samaja Party (LSSP) was forged in 1935.

Goonewardena was exposed to the ideas and activities of the socialist movement initially through her maternal uncles, Philip and Robert Gunawardana, themselves leaders of the Left. With their support, she defied her father and was among that then small group of women to enter university – completing her studies against his best efforts to frustrate her.

Her growing involvement with the LSSP brought her into regular contact with Leslie Goonewardena, with whom she fell in love. He was a graduate of the London School of Economics, a rising star of the Party, and later to be one of its central leaders and chief propagandists - which included being author of its official history.

The match was opposed by her father, a conservative family as Leslie belonged to a so-called 'lower' caste (minority caste nevertheless), belonging to a Christian family and was a revolutionary under surveillance by the British colonial regime. However Vivienne persisted, and following judicial intervention, was married to Leslie in 1939.

The LSSP opposed the Second World War and its activists were leading strike movements against the British Empire. The Party was banned and its leaders imprisoned or forced to go underground. To evade arrest Leslie Goonewardena and others including Vivienne and Selina Perera escaped to India in 1941. There the couple threw themselves into the Quit India Movement and participated in the formation of the Bolshevik-Leninist Party of India (BLPI), a socialist organisation aligned with the ideas of Leon Trotsky and the Fourth International, in April 1942. They returned to Sri Lanka only in 1945 once the warrant for their arrest had been revoked with the end of war.

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