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| Sunday, 25 May 2003 |
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Continuing 'The gods that failed' : Portrait of an anti-hero SUNDAY ESSAY by Ajith Samaranayake
For her part Indira refuses to characterise the semi-political relations she had had with Nimal as a love affair. She is also driven by contempt for the conduct of Upali who while at the Peradeniya University had been a Marxist and a follower of her father, the LSSP's Kandy Leader, and now in her eyes was angling for a promotion as a high-flying bureaucrat.
Indira, however, is made somewhat anxious by a version of Nimal's death propagated by the University's lawyer that it was her speaking to Nimal which had made him jump out of the window during the student fracas. Nimal is quoted as saying that now he didn't mind whether he was alive or dead a statement which obviously suggests a still suppressed love on Nimal's part for Indira. This is what makes Indira swallow her pride and ask for the diaries fearing that they might pack some unknown dynamite. The diaries which come in three exercise books are not so much diary entries (though so numbered) but more of a narrative though not in a sequential order. Indira is amazed that Nimal had conceived a love towards her as early as two years ago. Some sections of the writing make her feel that he had merely been roaming in a world of fantasy. As the diaries begin Nimal has just met Indira whom he already knew as the daughter of the well-known Dr. Weerasinghe of Kandy, a popular LSSP leader. She is a third year medical student and this real-life meeting with a pretty young woman whom he had already known of makes Nimal idealise her beyond measure. He is proud of the fact that he is a third year engineering student and not a mere Arts student like his comrades and senses that there was a feeling of wonderment in her eyes when she learnt this. Indira has begun a series of classes in Marxism for rural students entering the university convinced that this will be more useful than organising the urban workers which the older generation of Marxists such as her own father had engaged in. She finds it difficult to find the necessary reading material in Sinhala and realises that the older generation had not made any attempt to produce even some basic texts in Sinhala. On Nimal's part his sense of idealised romance is compounded by the realisation that Indira comes from an infinitely higher social stratum than himself. She is closely related to the owner of Wicklow estate which is the biggest estate in his neighbourhood. He recalls how as village children they had watched the children of the estate and their relations come to the village on holiday and is suddenly wonder-struck that on some distant day he might himself have seen Indira as a child. In his romantic state of mind this sounds to him like a fairy tale. Committed to the success of her Marxist classes Indira remains totally impervious to and indeed blissfully ignorant of these romantic hopes she had unwittingly kindled in Nimal's heart. In fact she has to fight her own comrades who argue that the village youth were burdened by petit bourgeois attitudes and that it was a waste to conduct political education among them. Knowing the acute paucity of Marxist political texts in Sinhala she concludes that the world of the Sinhala-educated is bound to be a dominantly literary one and seeks to find out the kind of fiction and other emotive material which is read by this generation. In retrospect she feels that this is another reason which might have brought her close to Nimal. Sunimal who is now introduced into this world of essentially parlour Bolsheviks is in Nimal's eyes an intellectual poseur. In him we can see more than a shadow of a well-known figure of the 1970's who was projected as having transcended the limits of his bourgeois upbringing because after a Cambridge education he had returned to Sri Lanka, donned the national dress and taught in a rural school. He propounds the theory that the revolution needed by Sri Lanka should centre on the village and any Marxism if it is to be accepted in Sri Lanka should be implanted on the native culture. According to Nimal's comrades who had associated with him Indira and her group had been condemned as decadent Trotskyists. If Sunimal challenges Nimal on a political level, however, the advent of Leslie into their small world has other implications. Nimal sees Indira going about with Leslie in his car and is seized with a sense of jealousy. He is described as a lecturer in the department of sociology who had returned after a Sorbonne education, a long-haired Trotskyist. However, Nimal feels he has taken his revenge when a fellow student reveals to him the fact that Leslie for all his sophisticated ways is a man from the village himself who had studied in the same Maha Vidyalaya as his fellow student. These diaries then are a mix of romantic idealism and sexual jealousy which compounded by Nimal's lower middle-class upbringing point in its deterioration to a darker side of his psyche. He is capable both of impassioned poetry as well as fierce jealousy. Indira on the other hand with her sophisticated urban mind and upper middle-class upbringing is quite unable to respond or relate to Nimal in this mood. This is why she repeatedly muses whether in fact the two of them ever had had a romance. Although Leslie is married Nimal is driven by an almost pathological obsession that Indira and he are carrying on a sexual liaison. The prose in these parts of the diary is almost frenzied and overtly sexual. Obsessed by this jealousy Nimal turns dramatically against everything that Indira represents and which he had earlier idealised in her. He even resorts to a poison pen letter campaign against her on the campus. It is in this frame of mind that Nimal breaks with Indira's politics and propounds a kind of populist Narodnism which is also ironically enough an echo of Amarasekera's own 'Sanskruthi' thesis that it is the educated rural youth who will inherit the earth. Reading these diaries which appear to be a mix of idealism, political insights and fantasy Indira is driven to re-examine her own mentality and psyche, her class and her upbringing. She compares the dilemmas of her generation with that of her father's the first generation of Marxists. It was the realisation that the working class politics which this generation had engaged in was futile that led Indira to concentrate on the rural youth as a possible motor of social change. But here too her upper middle-class upbringing and her unfamiliarity with Sinhala cuts her away from this class of youth however fiercely she might try to identify with them intellectually. Although she reads Sinhala novels Indira feels that she is cut away from the vitality of the language and can not relate to the subtleties and the nuances of the language as somebody of rural origin is able to. There is an emotional lack here. Again by a cruel trick the village youth are suspicious of Indira's sophisticated Left politics in the same measure that she seeks to identify herself with them. There is a breakdown in sympathy not only between generations (that is between Indira and her father) but also within Indira's own generation as testified to by the growing alienation between Indira and Nimal. It is Amarasekera's strength that he sees this not merely as a class problem but also a cultural problem. It is not only that Indira and Nimal come from two opposing social classes, the upper middle class and the lower middle-class but also that they belong to two antagonistic cultural camps, the dominantly English-educated bi-lingual stratum and the Sinhala-educated mass. Between Indira's cultural alienation and the kind of betrayal of idealism represented by Upali, the renegade bureaucrat, what hope is there for the bourgeois intelligentsia? Obversely can the social revolution be led by an exclusively Sinhala-educated generation from the village impoverished by their lack of English and weighed down by feelings of social inferiority. This is the contradiction which Amarasekera posits as the novel reaches its denouement. To be continued |
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As 'Premaye Sathya Kathava' opens Upali, the high official of the
Defence Ministry who has come to assist in the Police investigation into
the alleged suicide of the student Nimal, informs Indira that he is in
possession of several diaries belonging to the dead student supposedly
chronicling a love affair between the two. He adds that he had decided not
to submit this material to the inquiry suggesting that he has been
impelled in taking this decision by good taste.
