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Sunday Essay by Ajith Samaranayake

(Continued from last week)

Says Gunatilake:

'The fact that this group or this activity did not emerge from the Western-educated Ceylonese was of course a symptom of something wrong with that class condition which led to the impoverishment of thought and of meaningful social activity. In his introduction Hector Abhayavardhana states that had the Western-educated Ceylonese elite been able to develop the country economically it might have rebuilt the Ceylonese nation round itself. This succinctly draws our attention to the tragic consequences of that decade.

The political implications

The economic stagnation of that decade resulted also in the mass distrust, the disparagement if not rejection of the Western-educated professional and bureaucratic groups. I would however not agree with Hector Abhayavardhana as to the political implications of his statement, as I do not think the Western-educated class or its "failure" is co-terminus with the ruling party of that decade or its failure.

He refers to the "cosmopolitanism" of the radical elements which led the left. Does not the "failure" then include these elements also, their incapacity during a crucial period of our history to make contact with the growing political consciousness of the rural masses?

The failure goes deeper, it derives from the insidious way in which an alien culture built barriers between the large rural community and small urban groupings privileged in "know - how" as well as power, the manner in which it dissolved the bonds of sympathy between these two. I would say therefore that the "failure" we talk about lay not so much in the incapacity to provide the political solutions. It lay rather in the incapacity to undertake that basic thinking, the intellectual study and inquiry necessary for the reconstruction of our society which seems to me to be deeper than, and anterior to political thinking.

Having said this Mr. Gunatilake went on to list a few 'tasks' which the Western-educated elite could undertake, he said:

(i) These small groups must devise concrete ways of meeting the Swabhasha masses in their eagerness to receive the new knowledge.

It would be necessary to ensure that the popular understanding of Western thought, of modern civilisation, is not debased by the entry of vulgar and commercialised literature. In order to maintain that popular understanding on a serious level, a series of popular Swabhasha introductions to modern thought, a selective translation of the 'classics' of the various branches of modern knowledge could be undertaken by these groups.

It is pointless and impracticable trying to reproduce the literature of the west in Swabhasha, with a view to building a self-sufficient and closed intellectual world for the Swabhasha intelligentsia. What is necessary is to provide a mature and serious "digest" of that knowledge, to create a mature intellectual climate which would stimulate the growth of a serious Swabhasha literature and also stimulate persons to establish communication with the international body of knowledge scientific and creative, through English.

(2) these groups must also undertake a serious intensive study of the problems of our society during this period of economic and cultural change. They should strive to provide that body of knowledge from which programs of economic action and social planning could draw. There is a danger when all the material for state planning and policy is collected entirely by state agencies on state directives. There should be a healthy intellectual agitation among independent groups of the intelligentsia on which any government could draw.

(3) These groups are also in a unique position in that they enjoy in certain ways a preview of Western industrialised society. As the community speeds towards the industrial civilisation of the West these groups are in a position where they could draw attention to the problems of that civilisation in the West, forestall them and evolve social values and formulate social objectives which would help to create a society in accord with the needs of the Asian community."

But what these comments reveal is that in spite of the breast-beatings and the feelings of guilt the western-educated elite which at this time was beginning to adjust themselves to the new bi-lingual milieu saw themselves as being still capable of playing a meaningful role. They saw themselves as an initially estranged intelligentsia which had to establish more meaningful ties with the people but after having accomplished that a segment which would be capable of bringing new currents of knowledge and thinking to the people, as intellectual leaders of society somewhat akin to Lenin's concept of the declasse intellectual who would have to bring a proletarian consciousness into the working class steeped in a trade union consciousness.

But how true is such a role today 26 years after? During these over two decades we have witnessed not only a challenge by insurgent Sinhala forces but also a challenge by Tamil insurgent forces to the Establishment of the day. If the western-educated elite saw itself ideally as a secular, rationalist and humanistic intelligentsia which could rally the nation round itself this is no longer the reality today. It has become fragmented and polarised,almost bifurcated into two antagonistic and hostile forces - the remnants of the liberal radical intelligentsia still upholding the old secular values and a new virulently aggressive populist intelligentsia proclaiming the superiority of native values conditioned by a Sinhala Buddhist ethos. But it looks almost as if both segments of this old intelligentsia are becoming irrelevant as far as the insurgent youth movements on both sides of the communal barricades are concerned.

Do the old liberal values or for that matter the old Marxist values of proletarian internationalism mean anything to this new generation of Sinhala and Tamil youth? What concept of the society, government and the world do they have when they proclaim the necessity for a one party state as the LTTE does or hark back to the golden age of the Sinhalese as the JVP does?

These are questions that those who today have made it a fashion to proclaim the necessity for returning to liberal democratic values and advocate holding General Elections as the cure for our multiple ills would do well to ponder. Is this enough by itself or do we not need more fundamental socio-political and economic changes which would mean making drastic inroads into the privileges enjoyed by the so-called upper middle class intellectuals or those who exhibit their punditry on rentier incomes?

Disruption of western-educated elite

Even if we take the program sketched out by Godfrey Gunatillake earlier can we say that the western-educated and later bi-lingual intelligentsia which has played such a dominant role in the mental life of the nation were able to play a more meaningful role in later years? Did they play a sufficient role in educating the almost exclusively Sinhala-educated generation?

Were enough works translated from English into Sinhala, 'a series of popular Swabhasha introductions to modern thought, a selective translation of the classics', as Mr. Gunatillake put it? Or was this intelligentsia only concerned with preserving their privileges and perpetuating them through its own children only, while keeping the larger mono-lingual generation in a sub-culture of darkness? Aren't the spectres which have not risen from that sub-culture and are haunting the sleep of these pundits and mandarins the creations of this intellectual monopoly?

Perhaps this is the best place for a comment on the tragic disruption of the western-educated elite or the nucleus in however unsatisfactory a manner of a Sri Lankan intelligentsia as it was conceived in the 1960s. There is no point in pretending that there was ever a homogenous Sri Lankan nation.

That myth was blasted long before independence. The principle of 'divide and rule' was certainly a pernicious patrimony which we received from the British but how easily our own elite fell victim to colonialist machination. From the original sin of the Pan-Sinhala Cabinet to the call for 50-50 from the short-lived co-existence of Sinhala and Tamil Cabinet Ministers in the first Government to the strident cry for federalism, from the passive Satyragraha campaign of the Tamil people in the 1950s subsequently transformed into a campaign of violence in the face of majority terror - this is the sad and tragic tale of intolerance, alienation between communities and finally the collapse of the old secular intelligentsia.

In that sense the tragedy of the Sinhalese and the Tamils is the same. Just as the Marxist political elite of the Sinhala community continued to repose faith in the system of parliamentary democracy the Tamil leadership too used to cling to the forms and institutions of an open society even in the face of the assaults which their campaign for the Tamil people's rights had received from ostensibly democratic Governments. It was the explosion of these fond hopes quite manifestly at the hands of both the SLFP Government of 1970-77 and the present UNP Government which paved the way for the rise of a militant youth movement rejecting the established leadership and even the best elements of an open society.

Just as southern insurgency with its substitution of the gun for civilised discourse is a product of the breakdown of society the LTTE with its adherence to the same is a parallel development in an area of the country where the cadjan curtain, the product of journalistic stereotype, has become an intractable reality due to a failure of vision of the contemporary leadership.

I shall not attempt the great exercise in analysis which seeks to find out which came first the hen or the egg. Sinhala and Tamil nationalism fed on each other although there were qualitative differences between the two nationalisms. I shall only say that the commonality of outlook which existed between at least the liberal-minded intelligentsias of the two communities was disrupted only recently. In fact there were Sinhala intellectuals who in private admitted to an admiration of the LTTE at a time when its attacks were directed at the state which was perceived as being more and more authoritarian. The tide began turning only after the LTTE's openly chauvinistic stance and its attacks on Sinhala civilian communities.

Now, of course, strident, Tamil chauvinism is met by strident Sinhala chauvinism. There is the attempt to project a Sinhala-Buddhist ethos, restore the Sangha to a leadership role and give respectability to Sinhala neo-nationalism.

In the face of this rise of nationalism, both liberal as well as Marxist values which have hitherto held society together, are becoming irrelevant. As far as Sinhala nationalism is concerned there is a convergence between the old and the new. Traditionally Sinhala nationalism has been conditioned by patriots like Anagarika Dharmapala and Piyadasa Sirisena who sought to restore both the progressive as well as the regressive values of Buddhism and nationalism.

Today too there is a new breed of intellectuals who seek to give respectability to that whole intellectual package. The institution of the Maha Sangha is being projected as the ultimate saviours of the nation quite oblivious to the process of social differentiation within its ranks. The jargon of science and Marxism is being used to justify and invest with respectability the new obscurantism.

Post-Independence intellectual baggage

What did liberalism secular values, western-education and even Marxism - that whole cherished heritage of the post-independence intelligentsia - mean to a young man growing up in Jaffna in the mid-1970s the time when the militant, movement was born. I remember once on a visit to Kandy stepping into the Boys Scouts Headquarters there where the Sansoni Commission was then sitting.

The witness that day was former Superintendent of Police Chandrasekera who was SP Jaffna during a turbulent time which included the tragedy with which the Tamil Research Conference culminated. He described vividly his encounters with Sivakumaran, the fore-runner of the Tamil youth who have today taken to arms and to whom a statue was put up after his suicide in the custody of Mr. Chandrasekera's Police, again the fore-runner to the cyanide suicide of the contemporary Tamil youth movement.

What did the whole post-Independence intellectual baggage mean to Sivakumaran whom SP Chandrasekera described as an intelligent young man? In fact he said that he had tried to draw the young man out and get to the bottom of his feelings. Listening to his evidence one got the feeling that it was like something out of a Kostler novel, perhaps 'Darkness at Noon,' perhaps 'Arrival and Departure'. What did liberalism, democracy and secular values mean to an intelligent young man in Jaffna in the mid-1970's, shut out of the university due to some new fangled scheme of standardisation?

When the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna first emerged it was almost compulsory for this older intelligentsia to portray them as shallow and witless youth, either bucolic or pleabian, who knew nothing of the great Marxist traditions and were led by their nose by Rohana Wijeweera. But who was responsible for this impoverishment of the intellect and the sensibility? During the spacious and leisurely 1950s it was not difficult for either the Marxist intelligentsia or the Peradeniya-centred aesthetic intelligentsia to imbibe the new thinking from western sources. But in the contracting world of the 1960s the world of the 'asva vidyalaya', as the older privileged class called the new temple of learning at the Race Course with an appropriate horse laugh, intellectual impoverishment and the enthronement of cliches and slogans became the new ideology.

Who was responsible for this? Was it the students or the politicians who desperately sought to expand and thereby dilute university education and their academic collaborators?

It seems to me that their is a definite gulf between this older intelligentsia - whether it is liberal Marxist or nationalist - and the emerging young and those who have sought to express their opposition to the prevailing system through the gun. It appears to me that there is little likelihood of this generation accepting the leadership of the older elite.

I do not know enough about contemporary Tamil literature but I do not think that there is anything in Sinhala literature except perhaps for a few scattered poems in newspapers which is capable of telling us why so many young people today are rejecting the established values and joining radical movements which aim to overthrow the prevailing order by means of violence.

What we have as protest poetry are the poems written in the 1970s by those who have now comfortably settled into their own grooves in a kind of sub-establishment, those who in the 1970s themselves were not that young and who were romantically inspired by the abortive revolt of 1971. In fact it will be an interesting sociological study to see how many of these angry young men are now successful academics, administrators and higher-level schoolteachers.

What relationship has the emerging young to this older elite? I shall illustrate with an example. Some months ago the teenage son of a friend of mine joined the JVP. He had left behind a letter and left home. MY friend is a schoolteacher and a journalist of left inclinations. He says that his son hardly spoke at home. Is there here merely an estrangement between generations or is there something more? What does either the liberal intellectual tradition or the great Marxist tradition mean to that teenager, the muddled product of the new electronic culture?

That generation is a product of the television and the cartoon book, the synthetic world of the all-powerful hero who can never be conquered. What does literature or the old literary culture mean to this generation? Has the electronic age already inculcated its own morality in them?

As the discussion at the Community Institute in 1962 demonstrated the western-educated elite although wrecked by guilt and their position somewhat undermined by the rising Swabhasha tide yet conceived for themselves a meaningful role in the affairs of this country. It was an elite drawn from both the Sinhala and Tamil communities and animated by values situated within a common Intellectual tradition. But that common and unifying tradition does not exist any more.

The Tamil segment of the Intelligentsia has become radicalised in the direction of nationalism by their own experience of oppression. It is difficult to believe that the scars caused by the last few years beginning with the infamous July 1983 when even some of the Cabinet Ministers who have been hailed as great liberals,intellectuals and custodians of various traditions now, had no word of sympathy for the battered and violated Tamil community, can be healed soon.

On top of this cleavage within the Intelligentsia we find the young turning away from dialogue and discourse and finding refuge in instruments with which no dialogue is possible. Can we afford to dismiss them as a witless rabble and go back to our esoteric preoccupations? So far I have attempted to sketch in very briefly several of the more important phases, movements and tendencies which have gone into the formation of the Sri Lankan intelligentsia from the dawn of independence.

I said at the outset that I will try to examine to what extent the intelligentsia have been able to generate ideas conducive to the social good and to what extent these ideas have been able to influence events. In the ultimate analysis any such influence has to be measured by the political and social developments which have been produced and how wholesome they have been from the point of view of the nation. In this respect, of course, the picture is depressing.

Obviously the most forceful idea which has influenced post-independence politics has been nationalism in both its Sinhala and Tamil manifestations (we are now seeing the emergence of a militant Islamic nationalism as well) and it is the tragic products of these rival nationalisms which we see today. Not only has the intelligentsia being incapable of checking these developments but it has been by and large thrown into moral confusion by the emergence of these forces.

During these last four decades of Independence the intelligentsia has on the whole taken up two attitudes towards politics and the political leaderships to whom the country's destinies have been entrusted. With perhaps the exception of the Marxists they have either recoiled from politics, seeing it as a dirty game not for lily-white intellectual souls, or taken up the position that it was the job of the politicians to govern while they (the intellectuals) would keep the administration and the professions going.

The first attitude is personified by the rather dim and colourless protagonist of Ediriweera Sarachchandra's novel 'Heta Echchara Karuwala Ne (later translated by the author himself as Curfew and the Full Moon) who is suddenly thrust into the 1971 insurrection while taking a butch of Peradeniya University archaeological students on a blameless expedition to, if I remember correct, Polonnaruwa. The second attitude was represented by a participant at the 'Community' discussion Chandran Chinnappa who argued that it was not the western-elite which had failed but the political leadership. Dr. Chinnappa (who is a scientists) argued: "A lot of us, particularly those who are technically qualified, have no power. This kind of work has to be initially started and provision made for development by the people who govern, the ruling elite. The people who govern have been, I think bad governors.

I don't think this was a failure of the western-educated elite, rather it is bad government which is responsible for what did not happen after the British withdrew.

The intelligentsia therefore was largely satisfied with allowing the politicians to run the country and the politicians as we know have been sadly lacking in ideas. They have been greatly enamoured of the cliche and the slogan, the shop-soiled ideology and the thread-bare philosophy.

Again with the exception of the left there has been little thinking among the political parties about a program of economic development, social re-construction and cultural regeneration. One can think of a few examples like that of the late G.V. S. de Silva who worked in collaboration with Philip Gunawardena to draw up the Paddy Lands Act as instances of fruitful collaboration between intellectual and politician but these are exceptions which are moreover explained by their peculiar circumstances.

Politics in Sri Lanka has been largely devoid of ideology. While the intellectual vacuity of the Right has been notorious the Left has never enjoyed the power to implement their ideas except in collaboration with centrist and populist parties. The dominant political leaderships have been marked by a parochiality of approach, a pettiness of intellect and a poverty of vision, soil on which a politics of back-door deals, skulduggery and manouvering have flourished.

Therefore, when the most profound moral and intellectual crisis of contemporary times burst upon the country the intelligentsia no less than the people were taken by complete surprise and thrown into confusion. Except for a few civil rights groups, left political parties and concerned individuals there was little resistance to the centralisation of power in an Executive President which is at the root of the present crisis.

The intelligentsia watched without a murmur the emasculation of Parliament, the stifing of dissident opinion, the rise of private hit squads and later private armies, the use of political thuggery and intimidation, the witch hunts unleashed against opponents and finally, as the supreme salute to the consolidation of intolerance, highbrow-bashing. Intellectuals were vilified and insulted. It became common to brand critics as subversives, Marxists and trouble-makers. Petty political commissars grown arrogant by the patronage and protection of their masters were unleashed on anybody who dared to be critical of the status quo.

The intelligentsia was helpless to check these developments either because they had been silent and docile for too long or because they had been subtly locked into the status quo. Political leaders and intellectuals who were capable of resistance were silent because of Old School loyalties to those in power or other strange ties.

Otherpoliticians were silenced by the granting of favours and reduced to court jesters by conferring them with high-sounding but meaningless office. A school of intellectuals and writers, drawn from minor men of letters and other such pseudo-intellectual hangers on, emerged to felicitate the new ruling class. With the acceleration of the racial conflict and the shattering of the remnants of the old secular intelligentsia the situation was even more aggravated. The polarisation of the intelligentsia was complete and it only remained for the ambitious and the opportunistic to climb the bandwagon after having repudiated their old loyalties.

The crisis of the intelligentsia therefore is a crisis of conviction and an abysmal failure to influence the political leadership by mobilising themselves as an independent intelligentsia and the bearers of healthy social and moral values. While one section of the intelligentsia was quite satisfied to occupy its ivory tower others were happily grovelling in the political market place. Now both sections have been thrust into the vortex of national crisis and societal collapse.

The intelligentsia has been reduced to pathetic helplessness before the power of the mighty state. It is quite another matter that the state itself, weighed down under the load of its self-defeating authoritarianism, is now convulsed by internal contradictions. The intelligentsia had no hand in bringing these contradictions to a head.

It is a tragic commentary on the present intellectual condition that there should be a sudden nostalgia for the lost values such as liberalism, parliamentary democracy etc, even while the darkness is closing in around us. The true test of the intelligentsia in the coming period will be its ability to resist any further inroads on the people's rights and attempts to seduce them (that is the intelligentsia) into subservience by further blandishments and the use of intellectual middle-men who are today busily trying to salvage the tattered and tarnished images of some politicians.

The politicians cannot be faulted for attempting to perpetuate themselves in power because that is their ultimate end. The people are disorganised, confused and helpless. It is only the intelligentsia who can face up to and resist the authoritarian forces, the barbarian's at the gates. If they fail in that the present crisis will be compounded by betrayal, the ultimate act of treason against the people.

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