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| Sunday, 22 June 2003 |
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A culture under siege Sunday Essay by AJITH SAMARANAYAKE During the last few weeks this column has been engaged in an assessment (albeit sweeping and impressionistic) of Sri Lanka's post-Independence intelligentsia inspired by Prof. Senaka Bandaranayake's Graetian Prize keynote address and Gunadasa Amarasekera's own two short novels which won that prize this year in translation. Now the successive deaths of H. A. I. Goonetilleke and Guy Amirthanayagam, two stars of that firmament, offer a kind of elegiac climacteric to our essays giving us the opportunity to put the various strands together and tie up the loose ends. The post-Independence intelligentsia was built around the University of Ceylon at Peradeniya (then the only university), a seat of learning which was modelled on England's Oxford and Cambridge where it was expected that the new generation would be given the opportunity to engage in the pursuit of learning in an atmosphere of idyllic beauty. These were hopes entirely in consonance with those leisurely, post-colonial times of the Korean Boom where the horizons had yet to be darkened with the grey clouds of a later more turbulent time. It was to this time and this generation that Dr. Bandaranayake paid homage when he described it as the first truly modern intelligentsia to be produced by Sri Lanka. However Peradeniya was also a hothouse as those outside the charmed circle were to discover. Those who had been produced by the elite Colombo or provincial schools or those who were born into the upper and upper middle-classes found nothing strange in this transplantation of Oxbridge by the banks of the Mahaveli but those who came from outside the charmed circle of these schools or this class found the setting unreal. This feeling is best epitomised by Amarasekera's short stories in 'Jeevana Suvanda' where the protagonist feels alienated from his false and unreal milieu. Another intelligentsia But outside the gates of Peradeniya there was another intelligentsia and it was this class which came to play a pivotal role in later politics. Peradeniya produced the civil servants, academics, planners, journalists and other professionals which post-Independence times needed but somehow the feeling grew in the country that this class was alienated from the true feelings and aspirations of the bulk of the people who constituted the peasantry. The Marxist politicians who had chosen the urban working class as their constituency and were anyway as cosmopolitan as the professional class were also branded with the same hot iron. It was this feeling surging into a torrent which led to the movement of the 'Pancha Maha Balavegaya' of the Maha Sangha, ayurvedic practitioners, Sinhala school teachers and peasants with the workers trailing at the rear which brought S. W. R. D. Bandaranaike to power in 1956. All these were people who had been brought up outside the charmed circle of Peradeniya. They had been educated either in the pirivenas (which had kept the torch of Oriental learning aflame during the dark colonial times) or in Sinhala schools or later the Maha Vidyalayas begun by C. W. W. Kannangara. But they formed an influential segment of rural peasant society being bhikkhus, school teachers and ayurveda doctors who ministered to either the body or the soul of the native populace. So when we speak of a post-Independence intelligentsia entirely in terms of the Peradeniya University our thesis is not complete since we have ignored a large segment of the native intelligentsia outside this circle. It is true that the offspring of this section came in time to be absorbed by the urban intelligentsia the best example being Amarasekera himself but this cultural clash can by no means be glossed over or underestimated in the context of the 1950s. As we have already observed in a previous essay Amarasekera's fond hope that this second generation of the native intelligentsia would lead Sri Lanka's social revolution did not come to pass. In fact when a social revolution led by the native sons erupted in the form of the JVP insurrection it was directed as much against this class as against the old comprader class for by this time this class had itself been absorbed by the administrative service, the universities and the professions and was seen as a new privileged class. Those assaults on the citadels of the old privileged classes however proved to be futile and the question is where do we go from here? Old privileged classes On one hand the old privileged classes have if at all fastened their hold on society tighter by the open market economy, the consumerist lifestyle and the new fast-spreading popular culture, oozing out of every electronic pore, which has become the opiate of today's youth. The universities are facing a steady intellectual and cultural erosion and are no longer the centres of opinion. The humanities have already been displaced by all kinds of technical disciplines in a culture where the computer has become the godhead and the Internet the altar of a new secular and amoral religion. While this technological culture is on the ascendant the old High Culture is being steadily undermined by the fast spreading popular culture. This is best exemplified by the constant laments in the Sinhala press that Sinhala literature and history are no longer being taught in schools and the strident campaign particularly by Prof. J. B. Dissanayake against the bastardisation of Sinhala by the Sinhala electronic media. These should not be viewed entirely as the laments to a lost age by a few precious souls living in a roseate past. Rather they are the percusers of a wider cultural erosion and an attack on the values on which the social order is based and which alone have the capacity to keep all the contending social classes together. For example the vulgarisation of Sinhala is not merely a question for chauvinistic concern for it is the language which confers identity on that segment of the people and unites them in a common endeavour. This attack is also therefore an attempt to subjugate the culture to what we are piously told is a new global culture emanating from the metropolitan centre of a Global Village but is in reality a campaign to foist a form of cultural imperialism by the West on native or indigenous cultures. What is ironic about this scenario is that little doses of English are being infused into Sinhala by the new generation of sleek young electronic parrots in their T-shirts and denims while an entire generation of their brethren has been deprived of a knowledge of English due to misguided education policies. The result is that even university graduates today lack a knowledge of English thus making it easy for the old English-educated or bilingual elite to perpetuate its dominance over society. In fact in a recent issue of 'Pravada', the journal of the Social Scientists' Association Sasanka Perera a senior sociology teacher at Colombo University drew attention to the pathetic situation in academia today where graduates of sociology (and this is true of all disciplines) know little beyond their lecture notes which themselves are out of date since they were the notes given to their lecturers when they were undergraduates. So to sum up, little seems to remain of that old intelligentsia valorised by Prof. Bandaranayake in his oration. They are either dead or have left for richer pastures abroad fleeing the constrictions and the contraction of a collapsing university at home. As the same issue of 'Pravada' noted all the best sociological minds such as Gananath Obeysekere, S. J. Thambiah and H. L. Seneviratne are today in America. This is true in some measure or another of all disciplines. Between a fading older intelligentsia either dying or exiled and a whole horde of mono-lingual graduates and postgraduates what hope is there for the universities? Beyond Prof. Bandaranayake's horizons the immediate prospects do indeed look bleak. |
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