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| Sunday, 23 January 2005 |
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The dark face of the new left Sunday Essay by Ajith Samaranayake
Adaraye Simenthi is Eric Ilayaparachchi's third novel and forms with its predecessors a trilogy which takes for its subject matter nothing less than the political, social and cultural developments of the last half a century in Sri Lanka's history. The first novel named Bagandara dealt with the decay of the Old Left and the emergence of the JVP while the second named Vithanda Samaya' took for its theme the evolution of the Sinhala entrepreneurial class and its gravitation to a fiercely majoritarian frame of mind. In the present novel the writer discusses the development of a generation of socially-conscious youth against the backdrop of Marxist ideas and the paradoxical convolutions, sometimes tragic at others comic, which they undergo in our muddled times. The novel takes its title from a term coined in the 1950's by the poet Siri Gunasinghe, a pioneer of the Sinhala free verse movement. Gunasinghe who was heavily influenced by the French Imagists sought through such new idiom to break old patterns and infuse a new consciousness into Sinhala poetry. In Ilayaparachchi's novel the cement of love is used to describe the various relationships between a set of characters who beginning their friendship at school go through the vicissitudes of life together in politics, love and even intimations of death. Central to the novel are three characters, namely the narrator, Sirikumara and Gauthamadasa and rotating round them their parents, sisters and political associates whose interlocked lives the novelist uses to illuminate a slice of contemporary history. Of these three Sirikumara and Gauthamadasa can be considered as men of action while the narrator who is a writer and poet is the intellectual afflicted by self-doubt. Gautamadasa who takes part in the 1971 Insurrection later sinks into the conformity of the life of a Government servant with aspirations of upward mobility and settles into a dull married life. Sirikumara on the other hand is a non-conformist from his days at school represented by his rebellious hair which can never be kept in place and for which he earns the wrath of a tyrannical teacher of the old school. He is not past engaging even in anti-social acts such as crippling the school's water supply to get his back on the tyrannical pedagogue. But he is not without a streak of invention and displays a model of the volcanic explosion of Mount Vesuvius for the Siyawasa educational exhibition but loses three of his fingers when the model blows up on the final night. This same trait Sirikumara carries on to later life when in spite of the fact that he lacks any real formal education he becomes the local leader of the factional Trotskyite party of which the narrator too is a respected intellectual member. It is a sense of ruthlessness which takes him to the top but in spite of his own misgivings the narrator recognises the ruthless realism of the leader as when Sirikumara justifies himself at the disciplinary inquiry into the conduct of Sunanda who had been his lover. In fact as a garage mechanic Siriumara has at least some tenuous connotion to the working class whereas the narrator is only a poet with his head in the clouds, a petty bourgeois intellectual playing at a remote revolution. Indeed the Sudesh Garage which is Sirikumara's haunt becomes the recurrent image of this novel occurring at significant psychological moments. It becomes a symbol of the kind of prodigal, picaresque life which Sirikumara leads as well as the confusion of purpose and nullity of much of the narrator's generation. It is both a symbol of adventure peopled with robust individual characters as well as a place of seediness and squalor. This image of squalor provides the parallel to the central theme of illegitimacy which runs through the novel. Sirikumara is an illegitimate child while the child who is born to the narrator's sister is his illegitimate son although the sister Latha is legally married to Gauthamadasa, the upwardly mobile Government servant. The other parallel is that on a political level the narrator's generation has been engaged largely in illegal political work as an adjunct to their left-wing politics. The focus of the novel is on a small Trotyskyist political party (connoisseurs of Left sectional politics will not find it difficult to make the connection) of a type which sprung up following the discrediting of the Old Left among the youth after the Insurrection of April 1971. Ilayaparachchi captures well the isolation of such groupuscules from the mainstream of politics, their sense of self-importance, conspiratorial political style and other such defining characteristics. He offers a cross-section of the marginalised Left such as the earnest idealism of the tragic brother-sister combine (is there a touch of incest in their relationship?) who immolate themselves on the altar of the party and the middle-aged apparatchik Suriyagoda, cunning and obnoxious, but the best and most detailed is the portrait of the theoretician Pradeepa. Pradeepa is the kind of upper middle-class intellectual to be found in most Left parties steeped in the theory of Marxism but unable to establish any organic relationship with the masses from whom they are distanced by language, class and other considerations. She is described as coming from a conventional Anglican background which imparts her crusade to take Marxism to the working class an evangelical quality. well versed in French she is animated by the student politics of the Paris barricades of 1968 which infuse both a feminist as well as a sexual political element to her Leftism. But the more orthodox bureaucratic elements in the party do not take kindly to her crusade describing it as a species of upper class patronage or charity towards the workers. Baulked in her efforts she retreats into a kind of intellectual solipsism and there is a neurotic quality to the later descriptions of Pradeepa which suggest the pathos of some of these well-meaning upper class Marxists within the hierarchies of the smaller Left parties of our times. The novel is written in Ilayaparachchi's now characteristic surreal, absurdist style where seemingly irrelevant pieces of fact, history and knowledge are collected to conjure up vast eras and historical epochs. There are memorable cameos such as the Burger veterinary surgeon to whom the narrator has to turn to treat Gauthamadasa's gun-shot wound since as an insurgent he can not be taken to a hospital. However, perhaps due to the fact that the story is narrated in the first person (unlike its predecessors) some of the events and characters do not quite come alive, as say in Vithanda Samaya which gives the present novel at times a flat narrative quality and a sense of hyperbole. In its essence Adaraye Simenthi is an unabashedly political novel about the isolation and impotence of the New Left following the collapse of the Old Left and the dissolution of the Soviet Union and its satellite East European states. At the beginning there is a brief efflorescence when the New Left's mordant criticism of the betrayal by their political elders attracts new cadres and full-time workers. But in time these New Left parties become mummified in their own orthodoxies and are transformed into incestuous claustrophobic little sects feeding off their own petty vanities and jealousies. Unable to establish a proper relationship either with the urban working class or the peasantry they are driven to engage in a kind of youth politics seeing in the youth a new sub-class. But here too it is the youth from the lower middle class which has to bear the brunt of the leg-work while the educated middle-class function on the theoretical plane. The writer also illustrates the illusion of working with the peasantry. The narrator realises this sharply on a visit with Pradeepa to a border village off Polonnaruwa where the people are caught up in the double vice of war and poverty and lacking any proper conscious leadership are driven to a kind of unconscious populist communalism. By this time Pradeepa herself having been abandoned by her urban Left comrades is compelled to seek gratification in such pathetic gestures as distributing Red Cross relief to these villagers under the paradoxical aegis of a high-ranking Army officer who it is hinted had been a childhood friend. A heady mix of politics, sex, the picaresque and the absurd Ilayapparachchi's latest novel is a lament to the New Left and the intellectual, political and moral confusion of our rudderless times. |
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