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| Sunday, 24 November 2002 |
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Features |  |
| News Business Features Editorial
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The sad lumpenisation of the Bourgeoisie Sunday Essay by Ajith Samaranayake Last week's Sunday Essay left behind several loose strands. While
beginning with the mob attack on Trans Asia Hotel and the savagery at the
Sri Jayawardhanapura University it concentrated thereafter Sri Lanka's upper classes or the bourgeoisie has never been an independent social class. It grew up because of and was tied to the apron strings of British imperialism. It was also not a bourgeoisie in the classical sense, because it was not basically a class engaged in production. The British owned the principal means of production which were the plantations so that the Ceylonese upper classes of the time were mainly land owners or owners of graphite mines. These were the 'Nobodies' who finally became 'somebodies' to cite the graphic title of Kumari Jayawardena's recent gripping sociological account of the rise of the Ceylonese bourgeoisie. As both Jayawardena and Michael Roberts, who have done extensive work in this area have pointed out, while the land-owners were mostly Goigama Buddhists the Karawa caste (both Buddhist and Catholic) prospered through trade and arrack renting. The Salagama and Durawa castes also had their own representatives in the upper classes. The land-owners who were mostly absentee landlords had a firm grip on the village and turned this to advantage in the form of vote-banks for their party, the UNP, since they commanded the allegiance of the tenant cultivators over whom they held sway. In his novel 'Gamperaliya' Martin Wickramasinghe shows the growth of the trading branch of the Ceylonese bourgeoisie through the character of Piyal. Rejected by the aristocratic Kaisaruwattes as not fit enough to be a suitor for their daughter, Piyal comes to Colombo and works in probably the Galle Face Hotel. In due course he obtains the contract to provide eggs and fruits to the hotel. Through Englishmen whose acquaintance he makes through his work he obtains the contract to provide goods to another leading hotel and the services barracks. Within two years he becomes a contractor with a monthly income of Rs. 5,000 (a grand sum by the standards of his day). By the time of 'Yuganthaya', the last of the trilogy of Wickramasinghe's novels, this arriviste upper class has consolidated itself as a solid comprador class sending their sons abroad for education. However sections of this class have only a veneer of western sophistication. In his 'Miringu Diya' the same writer offers such a caricature in the form of the appropriately named Westic Dhanasuriya. This devotee of everything western however has a limited knowledge. He thinks that 'Pickwick Papers' was the name of an old English journal and that Chesterton was the landlord of an English pub! The intelligentsia of the bourgeoisie was, of course, those who were educated at Oxford and Cambridge and returned to Ceylon to either become barristers or to man the higher echelons of the Civil Service once this sacred temple was thrown open to a handful of selected Ceylonese. These people had obtained a classical liberal education of the western type but except for a few patriots such as Sir James Peiris, E. W. Perera and the Ponnambalam brothers and a few intellectuals such as Ananda Coomaraswamy and James de Alwis this English-educated intelligentsia remained slavish imitators of their colonial masters. In the late 1960s following the victory of Prime Minister Bandaranaike in April 1956 the national bourgeoisie, derided as the 'mudalali class', appeared on the scene. Of rural origin this class was primarily composed of men from the South who had little formal education but made up for this by business acumen and hard work. Most of them had migrated to Colombo with only the bus fare in their hands but were able to set themselves up in business and other enterprises through the import substitution economic policies pursued by the Sirimavo Bandaranaike Government in the early 1960s. This was a class of businessmen who wore the cloth and coat or the cloth and banian but they sought to obtain the social respectability and the sophistication which they lacked by giving their daughters in marriage to civil servants, lawyers, university professors and other such members of the new elite. This new elite itself (as opposed to the comprador elite) was composed of men who were themselves of rural origin and were the sons of village schoolteachers, ayurvedic practitioners and small traders. Gunadasa Amarasekera has proved himself expert at probing into and dissecting the mind-set and values of this new class. However, the opening up of the economy after the UNP election victory of 1977 and the consequent incorporation of the Sri Lankan economy into the capitalist world order which followed the liberalisation of trade and the injection of foreign capital into the economy produced a different kind of capitalist in Sri Lanka. Neither the old comprador class nor the indigenous mudalali class this can best be described as a lumpen bourgeoisie. In Marxist terminology the term 'lumpen' is used in relation to the proletariat or the working class which is the very antithesis of the bourgeoisie. By the term lumpen proletariat is denoted that stratum of the working class which forms the underbelly of society. They are not real wage-earners but lead a parasitic existence by living off the capitalist class as its thugs, pimps or touts. Likewise the new lumpen bourgeoisie is a capitalist class in the sense that they possess capital but they have neither the social graces of the old comprador class nor the native decencies of the Mudalali class. A rootless class bred entirely in the city they lack both an advanced education as well as the wide-ranging liberal culture of their forebears. Some of them might describe themselves as technocrats and worship at the hi-tech temple. For them the Internet might be their godhead and the computer their totem pole but even if this immersion in technology goes very deep (which it does not) this itself points to their mental barrenness. At the western end this lumpen capitalist class lives off a diet of western popular culture while at its native end (although they wear a lounge or safari suit unlike the cloth and banian of the old mudalali class) they feed from Sinhala popular culture and the hybrid cinema and theatre which has become hugely popular during the past two decades. These were the new rich who patronised the plays of the late Nihal Silva and laughed at the vulgarities of his Sergeant Nallathambi. For this lumpen bourgeoisie it is an emblem of class to patronise the night clubs of the posh hotels and the casinos of the city by night. Although not an independent class by itself to this should be added the sons of the powerful politicians of both major parliamentary parties who do not flinch from flaunting both the money power as well as their fathers political power derived from the support and security they receive from both the official and unofficial bodyguards assigned to their powerful fathers. There have been more than one occasion in recent times of such cocky sons brawling at five-star hotels and disrupting private parties. Although reported by sections of the press these seem to be all dismissed as the high-spirited frolics of the young not least because the very newspapers which indignantly report such incidents do not bother to follow them up (a bad habit with the media). So the new lumpen bourgeoisie with its many faces is an amorphous class. It perhaps lacks the self-confidence of the old comprador class or even the old mudalali class because it is without roots. On one hand it is thrown up by the old native capital but it is also tied to foreign capital and derives a sense of bravura from such links. Hence the need to celebrate the clinching of a deal in five-star luxury. Some part of this class might even derive from the more seedy elements which played the role of lackeys to the old comprador class but for this very reason lack the social graces of that class. This makes for comic social situations but can turn positively ugly if every man on the make is allowed to summon his private bodyguards to go berserk in public every time he has a quarrel with somebody else. Rootless and thus lacking in identity, caught between an insular island mentality and the so-called great Global Village, tied to foreign capital but in a subordinate role, intoxicated with money and the indirect political power which comes with it this new lumpen bourgeoisie might be a confused class but there is no reason why that confusion should intrude on the public peace. |
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entirely on the
student community which, of course, we rightfully examined as a factor of
the present condition of violence but what of the upper classes who
directly or otherwise were responsible for the five-star mob attack?
