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| Sunday, 18 May 2003 |
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The gods that failed Sunday Essay by Ajith Samaranayake Re-reading the last Sunday Essay I felt that I had left an unresolved conundrum which could be framed in the following terms. If the 1940's-1950's generation was not as Prof. Senake Bandaranayake claims a distinctively Sri Lankan intelligentsia but somehow as I claim a cosmopolitan, and even a hybrid, section and the 1980's-1990's generation was intellectually impoverished because they did not know English what kind of intellectuals or leaders of thought can Sri Lanka hope to throw up as we struggle onwards in this new century? Between the cosmopolitan and the impoverished what hope is there for the country? Readers will recall that it was my argument that the 1980's-1990's generation lacking a proper knowledge of English could not be expected to absorb the intellectual spirit and temper of its predecessors, however creative or rooted in the Sri Lankan soil they might be. At the same time I argued that the generation of the 1940's-1950's and the 1960's-1970's although they were products of Free Education were somehow more cosmopolitan than distinctively Sri Lankan and not entirely inconsonance with the Sri Lankan ethos. This seeming contradiction can perhaps be understood and even partly resolved if we inject into this generational continum a kind of intermediate generation deriving from both the 1940's-1950's and the 1960's-1970's. It was hoped at that time that this generation would derive from the 1940's-1950's generation the broad intellectual sweep and liberal classical culture and from the 1960's-1970's generation the rootedness in the soil and the identification with the generality of the people which their alienated predecessors appeared to lack. But these were the gods that failed, the Godots who did not come, the native sons who betrayed their roots. The most succinct statement of this thinking was spelled out by Gunadasa Amarasekera in his essay (titled in Sinhala), 'It is the educated rural youth who will take charge of the country's future appearing in the tenth anniversary issue of 'Sanskruthi' in April 1963. In this essay he identifies three layers of the intelligentsia who had hitherto emerged in Sri Lanka and looks forward to the advent of a fourth. The first is what he calls the Brahmin class in deference to Martin Wickremasinghe or that class of deracinated intellectuals bred either by colonial education or the slavish system of imitation in the immediate post-Independence period. The second is a class of rebels produced by this same upper class who saw their own anomalous condition in society as alienated intellectuals but who lacked the spirit to break with the traditions of their class. It is Ananda Coomaraswamy who is identified by Amarasekera as the exemplar of this class. The third is a class of native intellectuals labouring under an inferiority complex vis-a-vis their upper class counterparts and who lead a timid hybrid existence lacking both the self-confidence of the bourgeois intellectual as well as the sense of rebellion and non-conformity of the native sons. The fourth class of saviours which Amarasekera looked forward to in the mid-1960's was a class produced by Free Education as well as the condition of collapse of the Brahmin class in 1956. Since this class was being produced under the conditions of the constriction of the Welfare State (in the late 1960s) they would be driven to identify with the larger masses rather than join the rat race. They would be inspired by the essence of their traditions and be exposed to the best influences from outside. They will labour under no false sense of nationalism and be severely critical of even their religion and ethos and reject false western values Amarasekera argued. The saviours, however, never came. The dialectical materialists would argue that this was only a romantic notion on the part of the poet Amarasekera since the intelligentsia not being an independent social class could not lead a social revolution. Those who favour Gramscian concepts of Hegemony will contend that society is so overwhelmingly caught up in the system of bourgeois hegemony that nobody can escape it. But whatever the reason Amarasekera's saviours were caught up by the Welfare State, given an education which alienated them from the soil and incorporated into the upper middle class as represented by the Administrative Service and the university system. Amarasekera himself offers a series of portraits of these would be saviours transformed into pet poodles of the system in such short stories as 'Upa Comasaris' and 'Mithura Balaporoththuwen' in 'Ekama Kathawa.' This then has been the class which from the 1940's to the 1970's has kept the wheels of the administration moving for the ruling classes and producing through the schools and the universities the ideologies which have given intellectual momentum to society and propagating them through their control of the mass media. They have been basically an upper middle class which has been bi-lingual, at its upper end cosmopolitan and western-oriented and at its lower end populist and nativistic. The two generations of Prof. Bandaranayake's typology and the three categories of Gunadasa Amarasekera's definition all more or less are embraced by these five types. This is where one might take a useful look at Amarasekera's short novel 'Premaye Sathya Kathava' which along with its companion 'Asathya Kathavak' won in Vijitha Fernando's English translation this year's Gratiaen Prize. For in this novel the writer demarcates four contemporary social types which throw valuable light on any discussion of the intelligentsia of our times. Upali, a high official of the Ministry of Defence, who comes to assist the Police in their investigation into the alleged suicide of the undergraduate Nimal belongs to that segment of the Administrative Service which the writer has long held in contempt for having sold the idealism of their youth for a mess of Administrative Service pottage and a rich dowry which accompanies marriage to a mudalali's daughter. He is shown as something of an evil genius trying to manipulate the inquiry into achieving the kind of result which will not discomfort the beleaguered Government. Indira on the other hand belongs to the bourgeois intelligentsia as does her father who had been the LSSP's Kandy leader. Now in the twilight of his radical politics he shows an excessive fondness for Buddhist metaphysics rather than Marxist dialectics and extends an amused tolerance towards his one time pupil, Upali, much to Indira's chagrin. Indira, however, is still fired by a sense of idealism and this is what impels her towards Nimal who believes that she is in love with him. Indira then is offered as a remnant of the bourgeois intelligentsia who makes a desperate gesture towards aligning with the vast body of rural youth represented by the likes of Nimal. This novel merits some examination at length because of the contours of the intelligentsia of the 1960-1970's which it reveals. Bound up with this is not only Amarasekera's thesis as propounded by the essay in 'Sanskruthi' which we have already referred to but also the whole evolution of the educated youth of the time. If Upali represents the educated youth of the 1960's who had been radicals in the universities but later embrace the upper middle-class 'good life' what Nimal represents is that vast mass of village youth produced by the universities but because of their lack of a knowledge of English condemned to a mono-lingual limbo. For this is roughly the JVP generation and constituency which have engaged already in two attacks on the established political and social system. The JVP is a party which is distinctly separate from both the Old Left parties as well as the established components of the two-party system, the UNP and the SLFP. It is largely a party of the rural and urban youth whom some have even seen as a sub-class in Sri Lanka. Doctrinaire Marxist in its ideological outlook and populist-nationalist in its domestic politics it is the closest Sri Lanka has come to a Third Force. The JVP, of course, ranges beyond the ambit of a mere political party but also embraces a social formation, the educated youth of town and countryside. This is the formation which Prof. Bandaranayake says it is too early to come to grips with but has already begun to exert an inexorable influence on our politics. For any understanding of this phenomenon a study of Amarasekera's novel would be invaluable. (To be continued next week) |
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