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| Sunday, 02 March 2003 |
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The role of cinema in fostering ethnic harmony Text of a speech delivered on the occasion of the OCIC salutation '88 on March 20th 1988 at Tower Hall Theatre, Colombo. The term 'ethnic conflict' itself is of recent origin and came to be bandied about only after the traumatic and shameful events of July 1983 when the confrontation between the Sinhala and Tamil communities was aggravated. Before that people knew vaguely that there was some such problem, variously called 'communal problem', 'Tamil problem' etc, but it would be largely true to say that it had not impinged on the collective consciousness of the people as it did after 1983. Therefore somebody can well ask what relationship the ethnic conflict bears to the national cinema and why indeed such a theme as the present one should be raised in the first place. But since the cinema and now television have become powerful and influential means of communication in Sri Lanka today the attitudes they uphold towards the communities and how they reflect the relationship between the communities in their collective mirror will be of vital importance to social health in the country. Indigenous cinema Looked at in that sense and confining oneself primarily to the cinema - both Sinhala and Tamil works produced in Sri Lanka - one is made to discover almost with a sense of shock that very little of the relationships between the communities is reflected in the indigenous cinema. Sri Lanka since independence has been a multi-communal multi-religious polity and there has been an intermingling for decades of the Sinhala, Tamil, Muslim and Burgher communities. But very little of this intermingling can we see in the cinematic mirror. While the few Sri Lankan Tamil works have predictably dealt with a few limited themes centring on that community most Sinhala films with a few notable exceptions have dealt almost exclusively with themes which have been of concern to the Sinhala people. While this cannot be faulted since they are after all Sinhala films one is amazed at the absence of a multi-communal dimension in a country where the communities have historically co-existed. The spate of self-conscious tele-dramas which followed after the events of July 1983 can be seen as an attempt to expiate this sin. But for this trait I would not blame the cinema entirely. It is part of a larger failure,a failure to evolve a common tradition where the separate identities of the several communities would be preserved while being subsume in a larger ethos. This failure can be best illustrated by looking at Sinhala literature. Progressive deterioration Except for a few works which were themselves peripheral to the central stream of Sinhala writing there have been no works of fiction imaginatively dealing with the relationships of the communities and projecting a wholesome image of communal relationships. None of our major writers perhaps with the exception of Gunadasa Amarasekera in the latter half of 'Gandabbha Apadanaya' have dealt with the relationship between the Sinhalese and the Tamils - relationships whose progressive deterioration have now exploded with cataclysmic fury all around us. This insularity of our literary intelligentsia points to a larger failure of vision on the part of the entire intellectual elite in the country. This is why I have already said that I would not blame the cinema entirely for this situation. If we look at the Sri Lanka cinema we see that by and large the cinema has upheld attitudes which have been favoured by the society at large. The cinema has not been used in the main for challenging the existing orthodoxies and propagating and radical ideas. In such a situation it has not been surprising that the Sinhala cinema has been largely satisfied with perpetuating this blind spot in our society and behaving as if there was no problem between the communities in Sri Lanka. After all most of our politicians and intellectuals too were quite satisfied to do the same until disaster almost overtook us. However the cinema was placed in a better position vis-a-vis the other media to project a plurality of outlook because of its very nature. Cinema being a communal art most of the technical and other backroom personnel at least during the infancy of Sinhala cinema were Tamils. So were most of the leading film producers. Thus in the cinema we had a climate where people from various communities worked side by side in a spirit of camaraderie. The first Sinhala films were produced in Madras while the story line, characters and music were bodily lifted from the then popular Tamil films. But as I have already said the cinema largely upholds established standards and values. The theme of these early films was the dichotomy of the poor boy wooing a rich girl. But there was no feeling of class consciousness in these films. The poor boy was not oppressed by any sense of is own poverty or inadequacy. On the other hand by the last reel he would be himself incorporated into the magic circle and win the hand of the rich girl by vanquishing the upper class villain. No sense of realism penetrated this opaque facade erected by our early film-makers. In fact very soon these fantusies propagated by film-makers heavily in debt to the dream factories of Madras and Bombay were generating a reaction. Their dependence on the Indian cinema, the total garishness which characterised the end products and their complete alienation from the prevailing reality of a newly resurgent country provoked strong criticism on the part of the critics in the Sinhala language newspapers. This attitude was epitomised most powerfully by Jayaratne Wilegoda who wrote a regular film review to the 'Dinamina' under the pseudonym of 'Jayavital'. However as recent researchers such as Gunasiri Silva have pointed out Jayavilal's trenchant film reviews exposing the Sinhala cinema's dependence on the Indian cinema were also impelled by a strong patriotic impulse bordering on the chauvinistic. In reaction the film-makers began turning increasingly to the pastoral simplicities of the Sinhala village as celebrated by the Colombo Poets of the time. The films of Sirisena Wimalaweera merged into such films of the 1960's as 'Kurulu Bedda' and Sikuru Tharuwa' which offer us a picture of an idealised village life. Between the alien monstrosities of the South Indian-inspired film industry and the some what callow romanticism of the new Sinhala film there was very little room for any sense of realism in the Sinhala cinema. But even when such a realism came in the films beginning with those of Lester James Peries what we see is that the film-maker operates in a milieu and with a cast of characters which precludes the other communities in the country. This we can see even extending to the case of religion. It has become mandatory for the average tele-drama to pay pious homage to the village priest but there is very little in either cinema or television which portrays the way of life of any other religion. Communal problem It is only now that researchers like Sunil Ariyaratne have begun paying attention to the rich body of Catholic religious music. In the cinema perhaps 'Deviyeni Oba Kohida' can be singled out as a popular treatment of a Christian theme while in his 'Thunveni Yamaya' Dharmasiri Bandaranayake makes use of catholic symbolism in exploring the troubled psyche of his guilt-ridden protagonist. Admittedly it is not an easy task to deal sensitively and realistically with communal relations in a multi-communal country. In Sri Lanka this is made doubly difficult by the fact that the communal problem has been treated as the 'dirty little secret' of politics. We have on the whole tended to ignore it thinking that it would go away. The lack of such openness has ensured that the question should become a mine field which few creative artistes, let alone film-makers, have ventured into. The historian of culture and ideas in Sri Lanka will note the period when a Sinhala Department functioned at the Jaffna University as a time when attempts were made to change this situation somewhat. During this time young Sinhala intellectuals and creative artistes came into contact with their Tamil counterparts and each group was exposed to the culture and thinking of the other. Two significant cinematic creations flowed form this experience - Dharmasena Pathiraja's 'Ponmani' and Sunil Ariyaratne's Sarungale, 'this latter film based on an idea of Gamini Fonseka's. The first film dealt with the role of case in jaffna society and how it pulls asunder two star-crossed lovers. The other dealt with the whole question of Sinhala - Tamil relations during a time of communal disturbance (in this case the 1958 communal riots) with the emphasis on how communal differences disrupt one particular life, that of the protagonist Nadaraja. Both films drew heavily on the sights and sounds of Jaffna and if for no other reason have to be noted for introducing the northern Tamil milieu into the consciousness of the Sinhala film-goer. 'Ponmani' is one of the more notable Sri Lankan Tamil films in conception and execution but was perhaps too much in advance of the Tamil consciousness of the time in its discussion of caste. In 'Sarungale' we see a Tamil public servant coping with the fact of his Tamilness in a predominantly Sinhala office milieu and a somewhat sleazy lumpen proletarian background. (To be continued) |
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