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Sunday Essay by Ajith Samaranayake

The anniversaries which fell in a sequence during the last two weeks of Martin Wickramasinghe, Ediriweera Sarachchandra and D.R. Wijewardene should prompt us to take a swift look at Sri Lanka during the last century in the shaping of whose contours these three figures had a substantial hand.

Ediriweera Sarachchandra

D.R. Wijewardene ee

Martin Wickramasinghe rr

Too often do we try to see a country in terms of its political leaders attaching to them thereby an exaggerated importance. It has perhaps been Sri Lanka's tragedy that intellectuals and men of letters such as Ananda Coomaraswamy, Munidasa Kumaratunga, Martin Wickramasinghe and Ediriweera Sarachchandra have been peripheral to the social process permitting the politicians to play a disproportionate role in determining the country's destiny.

Martin Wickramasinghe and Ediriweera Sarachchandra were both intellectuals and writers who shared both similarities and discrepancies between them. Sarachchandra was an academic who with a doctorate in philosophy turned his mind to the teaching of Sinhala at the Peradeniya University and the aesthetic education of the Sri Lankan nation.

Martin Wickramasinghe on the contrary did not belong to the academy and indeed has no proper formal education. However by sheer reading and diligent applioation alone he became the leading Sinhala writer and a man of letters in the classical mould. In a tangential way they were both connected to D.R. Wijewardene. Ceylon's first and most powerful press baron, Wickramasinghe as the editor of the 'Silumina' and Sarachchandra as the comparatively short-lived manager of a book club which Lake House launched.

Martin Wickramasinghe is recognised as Sri Lanka's first proper Sinhala novelist having broken with the didacticism of Piyadasa Sirisena and the romanticism of W.A. de Silva but having consolidated himself thus he embarked on a spiritual odyssey through which he sought to discover the unique identity of Sinhala society or the 'Sinhala Lakuna' as he termed it.

This he sought in the folk idiom, the Jataka stories and the classical poetry which had broken decisively from the ornate tradition of Sanakritised court poetry. Sarachchandra on the other hand (at least in his early period) was influenced by the individual aestheticism then prevalent in the West and casting himself in a Leavisite mould set up a literary salon on the banks of the Mahaweli. But Sarachchandra was also influenced by the patriotic sentiments emanating from the Indian struggle for independence which sentiments were to find their ascendancy in his later polemical writings such as the 'Dharmishta Samajaya' which led to his assault at the hand of political thugs.

Both Sarachchandra and Wickramasinghe then in their own ways sought the 'Sinhala Lakuna', Wickramasinghe discovering it in a robust nativistic tradition and Sarachchandra in a code of aesthetics. While Wickramasinghe's famous trilogy of short stories is informed by the sense of realism born of the Buddhist perception of flux and change Sarachchandra's best plays are informed by a sense of tradition rooted not merely in the indigenous Sinhala theatre but also the traditional theatre traditions of this part of the world.

This sense of tradition or identity is central to the experience of any country, nation or people. Whether it was Ananda Coomaraswamy, Munidasa Kumaranatunga, Armuga Navalar or Martin Wickramasinghe all these figures of the past century have in their own ways sought to contribute to the forging of identity, different though their approaches may have been on the matter. While in the case of Kumaranatunga and Navalar it was a kind of harking back to a golden age (of Hela and Saiva Siddhantha respectively) with Coomaraswamy and Wickramasinghe it was an attempt to recover and reclaim a sense of tradition.

In the case of Sarachchandra too there was a return to the roots in his later years. The man who championed aestheticism and a Lawrentian world view in his early years, the guru of the bohemian Peradeniya cult, became the mellowed prophet of asceticism having on his western sojourns discovered the futility of materialism. While finding inspiration in the character of Veesantara he was still able to turn a sardonic eye on himself when after his tour of duty as Ambassador to France he wrote a novel chronicling the mental collapse of a Sri Lankan Ambassador who seeks an appointment with the French President to teach him the fundamentals of Buddhism.

There were piquant paradoxes as well. It was Wickramasinghe who wrote the seminal essay titled 'The Collapse of the Brahmin Class' on the UNP's rout at the General Election of 1956 but Wickramasinghe never took upon himself a public political role. In contrast Sarachchandra, the retiring aesthetic, addressed election meetings on behalf of the United Front in 1970 and got assaulted for his troubles as we have already remarked when he tried to comment on the collapse of moral values in the 1980s.

Wijewardene who knew both of them in a role of patronage can be viewed with anyone of a pair of spectacles depending, of course, on your ideological inclinations. He can be either viewed as a patriotic newspaper publisher who stood for Sri Lanka's independence from the colonial tentacles or as a die-hard defender of conservatism who wanted his own class to inherit the country at the dawn of independence.

As in most instances the truth is somewhere inbetween. Certainly the Lake House newspapers were the principal forum for the Ceylonese leadership waging a constitutional campaign for independence (timid and half-hearted though this might have appeared to the radicals) but Wijewardene being a man of his class and his times and perhaps going along with the innate cautiousness of his race did not desire radical change. But the confluence of these two differing strands in his character (analysed by Wickramasinghe in his autobiographical 'Upan da Sita') made him who he was, Ceylon's first newspaper publisher challenging British vested interests and giving a voice to his people.

Then where does this rather rambling essay leave us? Here we have two writers and a newspaper publisher but what contribution were those basically serious men able to make to their country? All of them were in the realm of propagating ideas but have those ideas worked? Have they seeped down to society? Have they been able to fire the imagination of a people?

I rather think not. At the risk of being branded simple-minded. I would venture the view for what it is worth that our latter day political leaders have never listened to the intelligentsia while the intelligentsia has never asserted itself as against the Leviathan state. If the bulk of politicians have been venal the bulk of the intelligentsia have been self-indulgent and opportunistic. No amount of worship at the newly-discovered godhead of the technocrat can obviate the folly of the political leaders and the intellectuals not coming into a communion with each other.

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