Discover how South Asians shaped the nation, 1870-1950
The Ceylon Students' Association in London worked closely with the Majlis and the India League. It was very active in the 1920s. D. B. Jayatilleke and S. A. Wickremasinghe worked with Krishna Menon and Shapurji Saklatvala. They wrote the Study of the Report on Constitution together in 1928, on their responses to British constitutional reforms with particular reference to Ceylon’s Donoughmore Constitution. Many of its members were Sinhala-speaking socialist students from Buddhist Theosophist Schools who came to Britain for undergraduate or postgraduate study at the University of London. Its members went on to found the Marxist Lanka Sama Samaja Party in Sri Lanka in 1935. This London group opposed both A. E. Goonesinghe and the British Labour Party’s claims that the Ceylon National Congress were oligarchs, arguing that they preferred indigenous oligarchs to foreign rule. The Ceylon Students' Association along with the Pan-African Federation, WASU, the Federation of Indian Associations in Britain and the Burma Association, organized the Anti-Colonial Peoples' Conference in June 1945, which called for an end to imperialism.
D. B. Jayatilleke, N. M. Perera, C. R. de Silva (Secretary), S. A. Wickremasinghe.
Fenner Brockway, Rajani Palme Dutt, Philip Goonewardene, Pieter Keneuman, Harold Laski, Krishna Menon, Selina Perera, Shapurji Saklatvala, Drummond Shiels.
Wickremasinghe, S. A., Ceylon: A Study of the 'Report of the Special Commission on the Constitution'
Articles in Fourth International and British Militant
Visram, Rozina, South Asians in Britain: 400 Years of History (London: Pluto, 2002)