On the morning of 25 September 1959, S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike was shot at his home in Colombo. He survived long enough to undergo emergency surgery and dictate an appeal for compassion towards his attacker. By the following morning, he was dead. What can we establish about the hours between—and where does the historical record leave questions unanswered?
The final day of Bandaranaike’s life provides the setting for Till the New Times Come. The novel moves between the hospital, remembered encounters and imagined conversations. Beneath that fictional structure lies a documented sequence of events: a shooting at Rosmead Place, a desperate operation, a period of apparent improvement and a rapid deterioration.
The broad outline is clear. Some of the details require more care.
From Rosmead Place to the operating theatre
Bandaranaike was receiving visitors at his private residence, Tintagel, when Talduwe Somarama shot him on the morning of 25 September. Seriously wounded, the Prime Minister was taken to Colombo General Hospital.
Among those who treated him was the surgeon Dr P.R. Anthonis. In a 2005 interview, Anthonis recalled preparing for another operation when Sirimavo Bandaranaike’s brother, Mackie Ratwatte, arrived with news of the shooting. He went outside and found the Prime Minister in a car with his wife.
According to that recollection, Bandaranaike said he could walk into the theatre. Anthonis felt his rapid pulse, recognised the danger of internal bleeding and had him brought in by wheelchair.
It is a striking moment: the wounded man still attempting to act independently while the surgeon assesses an emergency. It is also a recollection given decades later, and should be identified as such.
An operation to stop the bleeding
Lucian Weeramantry’s Assassination of a Prime Minister, drawing on the murder trial, records an operation lasting approximately five hours and ending at about 4.15 p.m. Anthonis’s later recollection describes a somewhat longer procedure.
The essential purpose was to control internal haemorrhage and repair the injuries caused by the bullets. The account of the medical evidence reproduced from Weeramantry describes extensive internal damage. Surgery brought an improvement in Bandaranaike’s condition, but that did not mean he was out of danger.
That distinction matters. An operation can achieve its immediate objective without ensuring that the patient will survive the injuries that made it necessary.
A message from the wounded Prime Minister
One of the best-attested episodes is Bandaranaike’s determination to dictate a public message.
Weeramantry’s account of Anthonis’s testimony describes the surgeon advising against the exertion. Bandaranaike nevertheless insisted. He wanted the message written in longhand and read back to him, rather than simply taken down in shorthand.
The appeal included a request that his attacker be treated with compassion:
‘I appeal to all concerned to show compassion to this man and not to wreak vengeance on him.’
These words give us something unusually direct from the hospital: a deliberate public act by a man who had just survived an attempt on his life.
They do not explain every aspect of his thinking. But they establish that, amid his own suffering, he chose to urge restraint.
Improvement, humour and uncertainty
Accounts of the hours after surgery describe Bandaranaike speaking and joking with those attending him. Weeramantry’s presentation of the trial evidence records Anthonis confirming that the Prime Minister retained his mental faculties and made jokes after the operation.
Such details are memorable because they preserve the personality of the patient. They can also encourage an overly reassuring picture of his condition.
A man’s ability to speak, make a joke or express confidence is not proof that his injuries are survivable. The historical accounts need to be read with both realities in view: there were signs of recovery, and the danger remained grave.
The following morning
Bandaranaike died on 26 September 1959, roughly twenty-two hours after the shooting.
The sources differ slightly on the time. Weeramantry’s account gives 7.45 a.m.; the official medical bulletin, reproduced in later reporting, places his death at about 8 a.m. The bulletin describes a sudden deterioration beginning at approximately 7 a.m., followed by a rapid decline.
For an account intended for general readers, ‘about eight o’clock’ reflects that evidence more accurately than an insistence on a universally agreed minute.
The medical explanation also needs qualification. The coroner’s finding, as reproduced in later reporting, attributed death to shock and haemorrhage resulting from multiple injuries to the chest and abdominal organs. Anthonis’s much later interview attributed the sudden collapse to a pulmonary embolism. Both accounts state that no post-mortem examination was performed. These descriptions should not be silently combined into a single, certain diagnosis.
What the record cannot reveal
The evidence preserves actions, injuries, statements and observations. It cannot give us uninterrupted access to Bandaranaike’s thoughts.
We cannot establish everything he remembered during the night, how he privately understood his predicament or what he might have wished to say to his family. Nor can we turn his final appeal for compassion into a complete verdict on his political life.
These are the spaces that Till New Times Come explores through fiction. Its imagined encounters offer a way of considering responsibility, memory and unfinished hopes. They should be read as imaginative possibilities around the historical events.
The documented final hours are powerful in themselves. They show a wounded leader submitting to treatment, insisting on speaking to his country and asking that his attacker be spared vengeance. They also leave us with the uncertainty of a hospital vigil: an operation completed, an improvement observed, and a life that could not be saved.