[2] In 1969 he submitted a thesis titled A Philosophical Investigation into the Nature and Role of Emotion in Art comparing Indian and Western aesthetic theories and was awarded the PhD degree in philosophy by the University of London.

He was the dean of the Faculty of Humanities, head of the departments of Philosophy, English and Sinhala and the chief student counselor in University of Jaffna.

Soon, he became one of the leading theoreticians of RCL and along with Keerthi Balasooriya, initiated a strong movement to widely popularise Marxist aesthetics theory.

Despite being one of the most accomplished academics on Sinhala language as well as on English, Pali and Sanskrit, he was sacked from his university in 1980 by the J. R. Jayewardene regime due to his strong political stand and his participation in the general strike in 1980.

Later in 1994, he was reinstated under the government of Chandrika Kumaratunga, but soon left his position voluntarily, frustrated by the level of academic and political degeneration in the university system.

He was a pioneer in introducing the writings of Georgi Plekhanov, Leon Trotsky, André Breton, Walter Benjamin and Terry Eagleton on Marxist literary criticism to Sinhala readership.

He became the most popular opponent of the then dominant bourgeois idealist literary tradition of the Peradeniya School led by the late Professor Ediriweera Sarachchandra.

In the 1980s Gamlath flashed himself in the sky of literary criticism in Sri Lanka as an adjudicator to whom all with no hypocrisy went and listened in the hope of expanding their intellectual horizons.

During the ceasefire, in October 2003, he became one of the leading intellectual supporters of the initiative in organising the biggest Sinhala-Tamil cultural festival in the recent history.

He was the most outspoken academic who demythologised 'Mahavamsa' and continued to challenge the Sinhala readership to leave behind the 'Mahavamsa' mindset to form an alliance with the Tamil oppressed.

[6] Gamlath was born in Nakkawita, a scenic village bordering the Sri Pada forest reserve and the Seetawaka river, in the Sabaragamuwa province.

Thus, with the objective of furthering his education, he left with his uncle, who was a Buddhist monk at a temple in Awissawella and took up the saffron robe by the name Nakkawita Ananda.

The Vidyalankara Pirivena was an elite seat of learning in the country at that time, and the young monks who studied there gained a broad sense of political, social and cultural understanding.