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| Sunday, 6 June 2004 |
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Moral conscience of our times Sunday Essay by Ajith Samaranayake This assessment of Gunadasa Amarasekera's work is meant to mark the conferment by the Sri Jayawardhanapura University of the degree Doctor of Literature (honoris causa) on him for his contribution to Sinhala letters over the last half century, at the university's convocation on June 9 at the BMICH. The degree will be conferred by Ven. Medagoda Sumanatissa Thera, Chancellor of the University. To locate Gunadasa Amarasekera on the contemporary social map is a difficult enterprise since he touches it at several points. The young novelist and poet who emerged in the 1950s defying convention and raising the banner of the avant garde in Sinhala letters mellowed into the social thinker of the 1970-80s who sought to connect society with its Great Tradition. Now as the chief ideologue and propagandist of Jathika Chinthanaya (which he sees as the contemporary incarnation of that Tradition), he has waded into the public battles of the day, forsaking the seclusion of the scholar's study and the self communion of the writer. Yet on closer examination, it is not difficult to detect an unifying thread binding his entire intellectual enterprise. Although this has manifested itself in recent times in a more coarse public-political way, Amarasekera's intellectual project has been to discover and give utterance to the native soul, the collective consciousness of the people which has been submerged by centuries of colonial subjection and Western intellectual encrustations and to re-connect this native psyche with the ongoing political, social and cultural struggles for national emancipation. Amarasekera's entire life as a creative writer has been a wrestling with this theme. He has firmly believed that no writer can live in isolation from the mainstream of life around him and that a writer has to come to grips with the political, social and economic forces of his time. But if there is to be a robust literature, there has to be a refined intellectual dialogue in the society surrounding the writer. This has not always been so, particularly in the 1960s, which he has seen as an age of intellectual quietism and he has had at times almost single-handedly to initiate such a dialogue. Hence his break with the Peradeniya School from which he emerged and which he was later to see as an ivory tower and his attempt to make literature more reflective of contemporary social concerns without sinking to the crudities of socialist realistic orthodoxy. Gunadasa Amarasekera belongs to the first generation of native intellectuals to profit from Western liberal education without uprooting themselves from the soil as a result. Earlier generations which were exposed to such an education had become mere mimic men, but exposed as they were to both the nationalist renaissance at home and the liberating winds of progressive thought blowing in from the West, Amarasekera's generation was able to bring about some kind of synthesis between the best currents of both traditions. Even in the 1950s, when he was worshipping at the Lawrentian temple and causing apoplexy among the prudes with his novel "Yali Upannemi" Amarasekera was seeking the roots of his inheritance in his own soil. Lively debate A major catalyst in this quest was Martin Wickramasinghe's novel 'Viragaya', which led to a lively debate about the nature of its central character Aravinda. While there were those who, using the yardsticks of the Protestant work ethic, saw Aravinda as a failure in life, Amarasekera, in some of his later essays appearing in the anthology "Aliya saha Andayo", was inclined to see Aravinda as a character sprung from a Sinhala Buddhist ethos which saw detachment and a non-acquisitive way of life as the ultimate standard. Preoccupation with the political dialogue and the ideological superstructure of society inevitably led Amarasekera to probe the social formation which constituted their base. If Wickramasinghe, in his famous trilogy of novels, had depicted the collapse of the feudal order and the rise of urban mercantile capitalism, Amarasekera took the reverse route to the village and became the supreme chronicler and celebrator of the rural middle-class. By this time, the rural middle-class had become a major political force with the victory of the Bandaranaike-led MEP in 1956. Himself sprung from this class, Amarasekera saw both its strengths and its frailties, poked fun at its pomposities and idiocies and has given us the most complete portrait in our literature of this class caught between town and village. At its upper layers, this class after going through the university mill (where they parade as Left revolutionaries) enters the middle levels of the bureaucracy and marry daughters of the new mudalali class with substantial dowries. At its lower layers, this class is trapped in the contracting rural economy and faced with the drying up of the wells of white-collar employment, falls into the limbo of futile rebellion and anarchist politics. At the upper layers, it is the bilingual LSSP generation which has forsaken the revolution which supplies the grist to Amarasekera's fictional mills while at its lower end, it is the JVP-led monolingual rural youth. It is this reflection on post-Independence social and political developments with particular emphasis on the emergence of the middle-class which forms the basis for Amarasekera's own ideology or the Jathika Chinthanaya. His point of departure is Marxian socialism which formed the mainstream intellectual discourse of this period. But by the 1960-70s, Amarasekera begins to question the validity of a Marxism which is not rooted in the Sri Lankan soil and not conveyed in the people's language and therefore fails to find a resonance in the native soul. He sees the Marxist discourse conducted by the Left intellectuals of the LSSP in particular as a pale reflection of the theoretical gymnastics of the Western salons which have no relevance to the realities of Sri Lanka. He finds the cultural dialogue initiated by the Bandaranaike victory somewhat more meaningful, but sees that this too has gone to ground among the rocks and shallows of opportunistic politics. In his search for a more authentic intellectual movement in our time, he is prompted to go back to the anti-colonial nationalist crusade launched by the late Anagarika Dharmapala, which had been aborted with his self-exile in India. Realistic novel This same rootedness in tradition can be found in his creative writing. As a novellist, he has always worked within the framework of the realistic novel. As a poet, he has always adhered to a metrical form even at the height of the Peradeniya School's obsession with free verse. His contention has been that modern experiences which are certainly necessary to give a new direction to Sinhala poetry have yet to be conveyed in a diction which can strike a chord of response in the Sinhala soul. This is the basis of his critical work 'Sinhala Kavya Sampradaya' perhaps the most important work of literary criticism in the second half of the previous century, where Amarasekera argued that Sinhala poetry will have to go back to the tradition and diction of the Kotte period and that the modern poet will have to take up the torch of Alagiyavanna Mukaveti. It is this search for tradition, something solid and rooted in the past, which can be placed in juxtaposition to both Western liberalism as well as Marxism, both of which he sees as dissatisfying, which has led Amarasekera to propound his concept of Jathika Chinthanaya. He finds its roots among the 'dasa raja dharma' or the tenfold tenets of Buddhist statecraft later embodied in the Asokan model of kingship (described by Max Weber as 'a patriarchal, ethical and charitable ideal of a welfare society'), the primitive agrarian communism of the early villages and their communal and cooperative way of life. He is also inspired by the humanistic aspects of socialism characterised by Eric Fromm as 'like Buddhism, a religious movement that even though speaking in secular and atheistic terms, aimed at the liberation of human beings from selfishness and greed. 'In this amalgam of a self-supporting communitarian way of life rooted in Buddhist ethics and a humanistic socialism, Amarasekera believes is to be found a basis for a new way of thinking which can strike a chord among the people at large. It is, however, his insistence on the overarching nature of this Sinhala Buddhist culture and identity and that the Tamil and Muslim cultures and ways of life are only branches or tributaries of this central stream which has led to disagreement compounded by Amarasekera's recent public postures and polemics on the political platform. But at bottom, his attempts at returning to and re-discovering a collective Sri Lankan Great Tradition can be seen as an attempt to address himself to and rectify the poverty of philosophy which inflicts our intellectual, moral and spiritual lives. But as always, it is in his creative writings that Amarasekera best expresses his world view and here two texts are central, his short novel Premaye Sathya Kathava and his last short novel, Pilimaya Lovai Piyavi Lovai which is an extension of his short story Gal Pilima saha Bol Pilimaya which is one of the seminal fictional works of our time. In this first work, Amarasekera envisages a synthesis of head and heart, the head belonging to the socially conscious urban intelligentsia and the heart belonging to the large mass of rural youth. The head here is represented by Indira, the daughter of a first generation LSSP leader with whom the undergraduate Nimal becomes almost pathologically obsessed and whose death during a student protest at Peradeniya forms the plot of this short novel. In the second short story and the short novel, we find in the protagonist the type of intelligent young man from the village concerned with politics and literature, whom Amarasekera has consistently seen as the only white hope for the country. These works constitute a kind of summation of Amarasekera's thinking. It is the urban intellectual as envisaged by Lenin who can take the doctrine of socialism to the larger masses, but that doctrine cannot be a bloodless or lifeless creed, but one that can take root among the people and strike a chord in their hearts. The mission to liberate the people has to be carried out by an enlightened body of motivated young people who form the vanguard of the struggle, but they have to be armed with a philosophy and a world view which has sprung from the soil which nourishes and sustains the people. Whatever one might think of his world view, however, Amarasekera's contribution during the last half century to Sinhala letters is unchallenged and it is on this account that the Sri Jayawardhanapura University is conferring the honorary degree of Doctor of Literature on him. As a novelist, short story writer, poet, literary critic and thinker, he has excelled in extending the mental and emotional horizons of Sinhala literature and his contribution is only next to that of Martin Wickramasinghe, the great savant and patriarch of our times. He has brought a wholesome and decent sensibility to Sinhala writing which he has conveyed in melliflous, often poetic, prose. A blend of literary and critical awareness has lent intellectual vigour of a rare kind to his work. He is on every score the moral conscience of our times. |
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