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| Sunday, 25 April 2004 |
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| News Business Features Editorial
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Politics as comedy and fiction Sunday Essay by Ajith Samaranayake Now that the election posters are already becoming dog-eared on the city walls here is a book for our times. Somaratne Balasuriya has always been a writer who has taken a lively interest in politics and this book of short stories titled 'Sihina Dekak' comes pulsating with all the passions and tensions of a political theatre which has often become stained with blood and strewn with corpses. This is life in the raw behind all the pieties and platitudes of the political pulpit where men parade in chaste white to conceal all the more cunningly the skulduggery and the machinations of a game whose only aim is the brute capturing and retaining of power at any cost. This might be the raw material of politics but the writing is hardly raw. Balasuriya has observed politics closely both in its actual workings and in the manner in which it has found reflection in the mirror of the mass media and his forte is the closely observed incident and the fine nuances of the detail. How a hired gunman is dressed, the affection he showers on his chosen firearms, the pitch and tone of a politician's voice, the pomposities of the academy are all grist to Balasuriya's mill and all these he conveys with an ironic humour which impart an acerbic edge to his writings. The title story swings pendulum-like between the ambitious Cabinet Minister who wants his rival out of the way and the hired gunman on whom the contract falls. Here we are in the brutish political jungle where even the big beasts belonging to the same party eye each other with weary suspicion not knowing exactly what the other's underhand designs might be. Although coming from two stations in life both the Minister and the gunman are caught in a symbiotic relationship and what gives the story its particular ironic thrust is the parallel nature of their conditions. The Minister has need of the hired killer and the killer having got into the business cannot get out of it (although he no longer needs the money) because he has to supply what is demanded of him. This is a world of filthy money, a surfeit of drink and deadened consciences where both characters are propelled by an almost karmic force. Two stories here deal with the groves of academe, familiar territory to Balasuriya who is Professor of Sinhala at Kelaniya University. They are however an extension of politics because the writer is keenly aware how politics of a destructive partisan kind has eaten into and eroded the university system in recent times like much else of the social and cultural institutions of contemporary Sri Lanka. The enthroning of a mercenary careerism among the academics, the intellectual impoverishment of the student community and the resultant erosion of academic values is at the heart of Balasuriya's critique of the university system. Of particular interest in the light of last week's installation of the new Cabinet Ministers is the story titled 'Suba Mohothin Veda Baragath Vagai.' It is about the comedy which attends a new Minister assuming office and Balasuriya delineates the ceremony from the time the news of the new appointment is heard to the point when the new Minister and his wife and daughter take off after the ceremony in their new high-powered official chariot with a delightful mastery of detail. The dramatic transmogrification of a mere MP into a Cabinet Minister, the security that suddenly springs up around his august presence, the hopes which the elevation kindle among his personal staff, the machinations and the manouverings among the bureaucrats in their bid to get close to the new Minister, the empty rituals of the ceremony which marks the assumption of office are all skilfully sketched in until we reach the climax where the people from the Minister's electorate who are brought in buses by his hangers-on are turned away at the gates for security reasons and have to be content with a fleeting glimpse of the ministerial motorcade as it whizzes past them. Captured in this image is the alienation from the people implicit in the Minister's elevation just as the bare land off Battaramulla to which the bus-load of villagers are banished stands for the hopelessness of the lot of the average voter in the electoral system. But perhaps the best realised and most poignant story in this collection is 'Gammananthaya' which combines the writer's two pre-occupations of politics and the university. The unlikely hero of this story is a university lecturer of the old school. Being a classical Sinhala scholar he becomes increasingly isolated in a university system which emphasises disciplines with market values at the expense of the dispassionate intellectual inquiry which should be the true hallmark of the academy., Socially too our hero belongs to a threatened species. A middle-aged man set in his ways he belongs to that old school of staid scholars with ties to the pirivena system which was the fount of classical Sinhala language and literary teaching. He is also assailed by his own extended family which expects bigger things from him as an academic. Estranged from his wife and daughter and living in lodgings in Colombo and supplementing his income with private tuition he becomes more and more eccentric in his way and is given to soliloquies. In time the central focus and fantasy of his barren emotional life becomes a sleek new car which he wants to buy to prove his own worth and importance in the eyes of his disenchanted family. The dashing of his hopes which is recounted against the backdrop of the closure of the university and the heightened security situation in the country which prevailed in the late 1980s strikes a poignant note which encompasses both an individual's desperation as well as the curdling of an entire social system. Somaratne Balasuriya has always strongly believed that the surrounding political, social and cultural climate of a given time presents the writer with valuable raw material for his fiction. Unlike some other writers who believe that a writer should detach and distance himself from this material (which means that he or she needs time to translate this material into fiction) Balasuriya feels that the writer is equipped to grapple with his material here and now. All these stories which he says were written in the late 1980s bear the hallmark of this particular brand of literary thinking. The 1980s after all was the period when Sri Lanka society was assailed by twin insurrections on both sides of the geographical and communal divide creating a sense of discord and disorder in the popular mind. It was also a time of violence and arbitrary killings and also a time of drift and moral confusion. The stories collected here mirror these feelings whether in politics, the upper bureaucracy or the university and although Balasuriya's manner is ironically comic underlying this manner is the consciousness of the collapse of an entire social order. In 'Sihina Dekak' then Balasuriya continues the tradition he began in 'Wap Magula' and 'Karattaya' of mining the political and social terrain for literary raw material and his stories which are extremely readable are also a valuable record of the last three decades in Sri Lanka's history which have proved to be so destructive of all that the country had ostensibly achieved during the three previous decades. |
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