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| Sunday, 16 March 2003 |
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Features |  |
| News Business Features Editorial
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Independence and Inauthenticity by Susil Sirivardana
Four particular questions rise within us. How sensitively did we negotiate that conjuncture? Did we get the fundamentals right? Did we pay sufficient attention to the intellectual choices before us? Or, is the historicity of that transition more flawed than we are ready to admit? Today we can canvas these vexed questions with the benefit of lived experience. Experiential knowledge privileges us. Choices of Independence As we journey our way through 55 years of our Independence, we recognise the weight and importance of issues we did not see before. The enlarged frame of reference becomes more than decisive. That decisiveness has to do with what we called fundamentals. It has to do with civilisational-cultural paradigms. In other words, the intellectual choices of Independence relate to the choices of civilisational--cultural paradigms. Political independence, as we cursorily use that concept, seems a highly insufficient term to capture the full meaning and implications of building a free and united nation. There is another very important reason why the intellectual paradigms were so fundamental. Because it was with those intellectual paradigms and their consequential dynamics, that we were going to interpret and understand our reality in order to rebuild the Independent Sri Lanka we all yearned for. Let's go back to 1948. We were re-emerging from 450 unbroken years of Western colonialism. That was no period in history to be taken lightly. It was as long and as decisive as anything we have known before. It was a period of struggle that stretched and exhausted us to our limits. But if we are to crystallise this long historical transition into some simple terms, how can we see this? Surely, the fact of colonialism, as has been well stated by many scholars, is the loss of subjecthood or subject status of the victims in making their own history. For 450 years therefore, we were denied our civilisational birthright of constructing our own history. Independence and freedom means, therefore, that we repossessed that right and responsibility for constructing our own history. Now let us restate in civilisational-cultural paradigmatic terms the choices that were available to us at Independence. It is only the over half-a-century long hindsight and the excruciating suffering we have inflicted on ourselves as an independent people, that enable us to formulate these choices in terms of such meaningful inclusive categories. The first choice we had was - situate ourselves solidly and concretely within a South Asian and Asian civilisational-cultural matrix, bearing in mind that very special nexus we have had with the Indian sub-continent. The other choice we had was to continue along the Western and European continuum, giving it what we would like to imagine as a suitable post-colonial interpretation of it. The rest of the story is very much a part of our contemporary memory. That story is the direct outcome of the choice we made. Opportunities missed In spite of the fact that we piggy-backed to Independence on the back of the Indian Independence struggle, and in spite of close ties the two Left movements (Indian and Sri Lankan) had, we repudiated this connection no sooner we got Independence. The fact that we could not resolve our difference of opinion with regard to our plantation community for so long is also symptomatic. As a result, we lost so much. We had the opportunity to forge strong and abiding links of an intellectual and civilisational nature by using as sources of inspiration the great modern achievers of India like Gandhi, Rajagopalachari, Nehru, Rukmani Devi Arundale, Kamaladevi Chattopadhyaya, Jayaprakash Narayan, Vinoba Bhave and Sarojini Naidu. This is inspite of Gandhi, Nehru, Kamaladevi and Sarojini Naidu having visited us more than once. How casually we seemed to have received them! How ad hoc all of it was when viewed against past history! Our practice of inauthenticity and self-denial goes deeper. There was the telling story of how a small group of Sri Lankan aficionados like Sarachchandra, Wilmot Perera, Ananda Samarakoon, Premakumara Epitawela and others experienced the civilisational-cultural magic of Shantiniketan, only to come back and do enduring and path-breaking work on their return. Others who travelled there mentally, like Hemapala Munidasa, Munidasa Kumaratunga, Martin Wickramasinghe and Senarath Paranavitane also drew deeply from these South Asian wellsprings. What more acid test of the potential direction the whole society could have looked to? Ironically, what we missed out in this act of inauthenticity was far more than a link with a larger civilisational-cultural paradigmatic whole. In the process, we shut out accessing our very own multifaceted internal sources of inspiration and contact. The biggest shame is what we did with '56. Quite apart from the tragedy of dividing the nation, we also failed to make a deep and lasting engagement with these sources and fountains of our own internal culture. So much so that, after four decades of '56, we are publicly admitting to ourselves that the quality of expression in Sinhala, for instance, has deteriorated to unacceptable levels. We are not talking here about the concept of Jathika Chinthanaya. We are talking about an inclusive civilisational-cultural paradigm, one of whose defining characteristics is its cultural pluralism - its multi-culturalism. Jathika Chinthanaya, on the other hand, is a deeply flawed ultra-nationalistic fragment, with no overlap with the paradigm we have in mind. Relation to our pathologies We believe that there is a close connection between the inauthenticity we have diagnosed and our subsequent historical, societal and structural faultlines like the ethnic question, the value and moral bankruptcy in our society, the decadence of our contemporary political culture, the pusillanimity and underdevelopment of our middle class and civil society for all its subjectivism to the contrary, for the collapse of our agrarian base and our inability to design a new sustainable people-based agrarian system, our refusal to acknowledge the superiority of Participatory Development in practice and our incapacity to produce true leaders with the necessary vision, values and large-mindedness to stand above the fray and mediate tensions and contradictions as wise people trusted by all communities and classes. The connection between the inauthenticity and the pathologies mentioned above is that they may be traced ultimately to the source and the nature of the intellectual paradigms. As we see it, the paradigm constitutes the source from which the other processes flow. In that sense, it constitutes something like a primal cause. We would also like to distinguish here the difficult issue of causes and symptoms. As we see this, the paradigm is the cause and the pathologies are the consequences and symptoms. For example, we see a connection between the pervasive mediocrity among our intelligentsia and the fact of inauthenticity. The point we are alluding to is not that the choice of paradigms we did not exercise would have ensured a different and less conflictual history. We are not glibly trying to assert a counter-history to the reality we have had. What we are saying is that a more authentic exercise of the choice of paradigms in the course of our decolonisation since Independence, would very likely have produced a very different intellectual-cultural fusion of the South Asian/Asian and the Western European, where the elements of hybridity would have been much more authentic in terms of the practice of historical subjecthood. |
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| Editorial | Security Produced by Lake House |
Independence 2003 is a landmark in many respects. We stand at a razor's
edge. Just today, we stand before one of the greatest challenges of our
tryst with destiny - rebuilding trust, retaining it relentlessly and
renegotiating our history to a just and lasting peace. A peace for all of
us. Surely, our thoughts go back to the past, to 1948 when this chapter of
Independence began, and even to the years before that.
