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| Sunday, 23 March 2003 |
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| News Business Features Editorial
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Musings of a ghost from the past by Prof. Suwanda H. J. Sugunasiri : Part 6 Rural leadership, the missing link Missing, did I say? But it was right there, under the very nose of the academy. It was the very rural intelligentsia that is said to have lowered university standards! This intake, like no other batch earlier, had their nose to the ground more, knew the territory, and what was good for themselves and their families and communities. And so, they could have been the change agents that could have facilitated development, of the periphery. But the eyes of the nation's educators were across the ocean, not on the land! So, instead of harnessing their energies, and their eager brains, to provide the badly needed rural leadership, the university's attempt was to educate them to leave the village for a city straightjacket, moulded in ... was it mother-colonial, or, the (un)think-tanks of the city? When a Sinhalese youth revolution emerged in the seventies, the country went Oh, Gosh! Misguided to use terror, 65,000 sharp (or dumb, depending on which perspective one takes) minds are estimated to have given their lives. But, that was then. Let's now see what areas of Sri Lankan national activity may require English today. Oh, the list is coming to me.. International Trade, National Sex Trade and Tourism, International relations, study overseas, academic upgrading for profs, scientists, doctors, lawyers and accountants, watching English movies, of course, learning about Christianity. But... help me here. I'm stuck. I can't see to come up with any more. Have I left out anything important? But while you're trying to help me, let me see what areas of national activity that don't require English: electioneering, conducting parliamentary business, selling and buying at the irida pola or on the main street, investing money, banking, farming, fishing, taking the bus, going bike riding, talking to friends, gossiping, dating, having sex, getting born, falling sick, seeing the doctor, dying, celebrating Alut Auvrudu or Pudu varadam, Wesak, Christmas, Thai Pongal or Eid al-Fitr...., meditating, chanting or praying, getting to school and work, doing athletics, doing sports... Stop me, or else I'll go on for ever! Ah. Sports.... Now there's something that must have English. Yes, I am getting a beep here. I think it is trying to spell it out for me. Here it comes ... C.. R...I...C...K...E..T.. Oh, it's cricket! How I loved that game, playing for 'Nalanda and Ananda.' Sending those zingers in that opening over, shining, on my pants, the leather ball, handed over by captain Dhanasiri Weerasinghe, ! So yes, how could you possibly play cricket on the world circuit without English? Or win the World Cup? But, then, a contrary thought. Do athletes from the Eastern European, Hispanic, Francophone and Nordic countries win gold medals because they speak English? The story of cricket, in fact, may speak to the very issue of development. Cricket, as you well known, is an expensive game, compared to, say, soccer, volley-ball, gudu, ellay. So does the country get less bang for the buck pouring all the money into cricket? Or putting all the eggs into one basket? Sri Lanka is a land surrounded by water. So swimming has gotta be cheap. Costs nothing! But is swimming a popular sport? How many international class swimmers has the country produced? How about beach-ball, sans its semi-nudity? Soccer (world's most popular game), volley-ball (needs no vast or well-manicured space), badminton (needs only two to play), and frisbee throw (needs only yourself)? So what cricket does is underdevelop the other sports, the ones to which masses have easier, and cheaper, access to. 'Underdevelop' here, of course, means, in developmental literature, one benefiting at the cost of another. Such as the rich getting richer in the same process as the poor getting poorer. Are Sri Lankans, then, shortchanged from the benefits of sports by their addiction to cricket, which for the majority, would be a spectator sport than a participatory one? Just asking Cricket probably, then, may be symptomatic of the increasing divide between social classes, English-educated and trying-to-be-English-educated. So what has the chase after English done for the latter? What opportunities do they get to cultivate their skills, expertise, interests? What opportunities do they get to contribute to national growth - without having to leave the homestead, some only to end up on city streets? But what about the English-educated themselves? I don't want for a moment to suggest that Sir Ivor's intentions were bad. To say that he wanted to make Oreo cookies of university products - brown outside, white inside, or Brown Sahibs, in Tarzie Vittacchie's words, would be to be unkind, and ungrateful. But that, of course, is only what could be expected to happen. And did happen. Ask the good professor from the U of Pennsylvania who says that the Sinhalese are the example par excellence of the colonized mind! English undeniably is the richest, most flexible, changing and growing language in the world. It opens up all kinds of doors, unavailable through just about any other language. But we need to pay heed to the classic line of the Americn linguist Edward Sapir - that "We're prisoners of our language." If that is so (without denying its opposite - that language is also determined by culture), what does a slavish reliance on English do? It simply imprisons the country within a western framework, a western worldview. Now just what kind of worldview is this? A conflictual one? Take e.g., the Parliamentary system. Does it, with its party politics, generate conflict? You tell me. How about Marxism, another product of the west, under which power comes from the barrel of a gun? Or the legal system which prides in its 'adversarial' approach, ideas like 'conflict resolution' and 'community healing' barely coming into the picture? Does the capitalist system engender cutthroat competition, unbridled greed and exclusive individualism? Not that, mind you, there is anything wrong with getting rich. One needs to build the wealth before it can be distributed. Buddha was supported by millionaires Anathapindika and Visakha, and never did he suggest that they should stop being rich. Indeed he encourages young people to make wealth so they don't have to repent later. Individualism is a real energy-generator. It can push one to heights of creativity. But unbridled individualism, caring for none? Can we then ask, just as cricket undermines other sports, does an over-emphasis of, an infatuation with, English undermine national languages? And cultures? How about Pali and Sanskrit, the languages of traditional wisdom? If indeed the languages of the country are forced to take a back seat, what it does is to deny the worldview offered by them. And push the potential creative energies of the masses, Sinhalese, Tamil, Muslim, off the development table. Just like displaced farmers became onlookers of imported tractors, displaced language users can only watch the virility of the language sucked right out, under the weight of the imported worldview. The outcome is that the country fails to look for home-grown models of development, or think creatively. Or indeed take a good look at the past. Those who ignore history, doesn't the wise reminder go, are doomed to repeat history? Buddha, too, for example, encourages individualism alright. But he also calls for bahujana hitaya, bahujana sukhaya - the welfare of the many, the good of the many. Buddhist well-wishing is for the welfare of all (sabbe satta sukhi hotu), not only for the dot.com millionaires. To be in an exclusively English, and Western, mould is to venerate at an exclusive altar of secularism, too. Most harmfully, It renders everyone into a practice of what the ancients called moodata data niyaweema. Looking outward for any and everything, underdeveloping any sense of looking inwards, taken both in the material and the spiritual senses. The dream of every able-bodied young and old, then comes to be to jump ship for some western country, at the earliest opportunity - making an eternal emigres-in-waiting of every Sri Lankan. Busy marking time, until the day dawns when ... Lady Luck comes calling, they come to constitute a mere tentative work force, little committed to their all-important developmental contribution. And indeed it is the country, then, that comes to be shortchanged! All this also means neglect of the countryside where the majority of the people live. But worst of all, a continuing disdain for the greatest national wealth - the masses. I can bear witness to this attitude of disdain from my own personal experience, way back when I was still in the country. On days I would travel by public transportation in pants and shirt, I would get the respectful, "Sir, move to the back please." But when in the national, what I get from an irate conductor is, "Ayya, hanh hanh, passata, passata." Interestingly, it came from the masses themselves. Internalized from the city core? But that was then. |
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