Today, February 9, 2025 is the launch in Sri Lanka of the biography, ‘The Lamp of the Company Above – the life story of Anwer Cadir of Dehiowita’.
The author, Ian Bayly, has come from Australia for this special occasion after releasing his book in India, Myanmar, Thailand and Nigeria, which were also countries in which the late Anwer Cadir lived in and served their communities. The book launch is being held at Hill House, Pirivena Road, Dehiowita, which is Mr. Anwer Cadir’s family home, where he was born and passed away.
Since this is also the 44th anniversary of his passing and this year being the 75th anniversary of the Baha’i Faith in Sri Lanka, when he became a Baha’i, Dr. A. K. Merchant, a long time former member of the National Spiritual Assembly of the Baha’is of India and now a Director of the Moksha Trust, a major inter-Faith organisation in South Asia that is organizing a World Peace Summit in October this year, is coming as a special guest at the event on Sunday. Family, friends, neighbours and Baha’is are coming together to celebrate his extraordinary life.
Anwer Cadir was one of Sri Lanka’s earliest civil engineers, who served under Lord Mountbatten in the Royal Engineering Corps at Peradeniya Gardens during World War II. After the war, he later worked for the Ceylon Public Works Department before traveling to Burma (Myanmar) to work as an engineer and there he married a Burmese lady. In Sri Lanka, he worked on the Gal Oya project and on the Norton Bridge Dam project. In Nigeria, he worked on the Niger River dam project,
Anwer Cadir was also noted as the first member of the Baha’i Faith community in Sri Lanka. In May 1949, in Colombo he met a homeopathic doctor from India, Dr. Lukmani, who was a Baha’i. He accepted this new Faith because he loved its fundamental principle: the oneness of mankind and because the Baha’i Faith accepted that the spiritual teachings of all the great religions of the past are basically saying the same message. Then, it was Anwer Cadir who established the Baha’i Faith in Thailand in 1952. He also often served as a member of the National Spiritual Assembly, the national governing body of the Baha’is of Sri Lanka, throughout much of the 1960s, 1970s until his sudden passing on February 5,1981.
Ian Bayly came to Sri Lanka in 1977 and was living here for seventeen years. He is a graduate of Peradeniya University and he married Anwer Cadir’s second daughter, Dr. Munireh (Mona) Bayly. Bayly later joined the Overseas School in Battaramulla as an economics teacher and eventually became the high school principal before his family left in 1993.
He is now retired, but he has served as an international school administrator and headmaster in Jordan, Venezuela, Peru, India, China and Australia. Mr. Bayly, his wife and children still continue to return to Sri Lanka whenever they can.
