Early Life and Education
Born Chandrika Bandaranaike, she hales from an aristocratic family that has a long history in the socio-political arena of the country, her father, S.W.R.D Bandaranaike was a government minister at the time of her birth and later became Prime Minister. He was assassinated in 1959, when Chandrika was fourteen. Chandrika's mother, Sirimavo Bandaranaike, then became the world's first female prime minister (1960). Her brother, Anura Bandaranaike, was a former Speaker of the Parliament of Sri Lanka and a former minister. Her grandfather, Sir Solomon Dias Bandaranike, was the Maha Mudaliyar, (the chief Ceylonese representative and advisor to the Governor of Ceylon) during British colonial rule.
She was educated at the St Bridget's Convent, Colombo. In 1965 she entered the Aquinas University College and gained a scholarship to the University of Paris in 1967, where she spent five years, graduating from the Institut d'Etudes Politiques de Paris (Science Po) in political science. While in Paris she obtained a Diploma in Group Leadership from the same University.Her Ph.D studies in Development Economics at the University of Paris were interrupted when she returned to Sri Lanka to enter politics, where her mother’s government had launched a wide ranging programme of socialist reform and development. During her days in France, she was active in the Student Revolution of 1968. She is fluent in Sinhala, English and French.
She married film star and Sri Lankan politician, Vijaya Kumaratunga (also Kumaranatunga), in 1978.
Read more about this topic: Chandrika Kumaratunga
Famous quotes containing the words early, life and/or education:
“We early arrive at the great discovery that there is one mind common to all individual men: that what is individual is less than what is universal ... that error, vice and disease have their seat in the superficial or individual nature.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Every life and every childhood is filled with frustrations; we cannot imagine it otherwise, for even the best mother cannot satisfy all her child’s wishes and needs. It is not the suffering caused by frustration, however, that leads to emotional illness, but rather the fact that the child is forbidden by the parents to experience and articulate this suffering, the pain felt at being wounded.”
—Alice Miller (20th century)
“What education is to the individual man, revelation is to the human race. Education is revelation coming to the individual man, and revelation is education that has come, and is still coming to the human race.”
—Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729–1781)