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| Sunday, 28 August 2005 |
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Wimal Dissanayake on four cultural intellectuals - Part III Martin Wickramasinghe and the Buddhist humanist dilemma Sunday Essay by Ajith Samaranayake The second Sri Lankan cultural intellectual in Wimal Dissanayake's catalogue is Martin Wickramasinghe who even 30 years after his death is hailed as Sri Lanka's outstanding intellectual and creative writer if not literary critic. The reasons for this, of course, are rather obvious. Born in 1891 Wickramasinghe without the aid of pirivena or academy, foreign tutors or overseas education catapulted himself into the box-seat of Sri Lankan letters and was something of a Dickens, Hardy, Chekhov and Bertrand Russel all rolled into one on the scale of a far-flung British colony which was an intellectual back-water in comparison with the Empire in India. What interests Dissanayake about Wickramasinghe (he calls him an autodidact) is how he was shaped by Buddhist humanism and how he in turn sought to demonstrate how this could act as a discourse guiding us in our approach to literature and life. Buddhist humanism was the path he took to connect with tradition and harness its many-sided resources to re-vitalise the culture. Dissanayake contends that in his major work 'Sinhala Saheetyaye Negeema' Wickramasinghe chooses the 'Amavatura', 'Saddharmarathanavaliya' and the Jataka stories over 'Butsarana' and 'Pujavaliya' because the earlier set of works reflects and enacts the power of Buddhist humanism. Again as a literary critic he was drawn to these works because of the evocative idiom resonant of the folk which they used in contrast to the ornate Sanskritised diction of the latter works. Dissanayake also demonstrates how Wickramasinghe studied the Jataka stories chronicling the 550 previous births of the Buddha and found them to be rich in psychological insights and skilful anatomising of human emotions and behaviour. In this sense he found a parallel between the Jataka stories and the works of Dostoevsky and even Proust. In the words of Joseph Needham, the eminent British scientist and Sinologist and a great admirer, Wickramasinghe's 'perspicacity' enabled him to present 'Gogol as a Sanyasi and father Zosinia as a Boddhisatva. Similarly Wickramasinghe made a study of the 'Theri Gathas' which were the work of bhikkhunis and had been earlier approached in a purely pietistic manner. But Wickramasinghe demonstrated their enormous power and beauty and simple unadorned style. It is also Dissanayake's contention that he adopted the same yardstick in his assessments of the work of modern writers. He says that Wickramasinghe as a critic was searching for a form of cultural criticism that drew upon traditional Buddhist culture and its concomitant humanistic vision in contrast to critics such as Sarachchandra who were using a modernist aesthetic and the criterion of realism. To buttress his thesis that the essence of Wickramasinghe's world view was Buddhist humanism Dissanayake then proceeds to analyse his major literary works, the trilogy 'Gamperaliya', 'Kaliyugaya' and 'Yuganthaya' and his 'Viragaya' and 'Bhava Taranaya', his last work and indeed based wholly on the Buddha's life. Dissanayake certainly succeeds in demonstrating convincingly Wickramasinghe's mission of 'creating a mode of literary criticism which has as its central strand the vigour of Buddhist humanism' but it is a pity that he does not concentrate enough or merely glosses over Wickramasinghe's contention that this was to be found in the traditional peasant culture or 'pure Buddhist culture' to be found in the villages. For this was the central dilemma which dogged Wickramasinghe's thinking. It is certainly true that indigenous culture, in Raymond Williams' conception of 'a whole way of life' was animated by the best currents of Buddhist humanism but this was in retreat even as Wickramasinghe was writing his major works. The alien mores and manners sponsored by colonialism were making inroads into the old simple ways as demonstrated by Wickramasinghe himself in a brilliant sketch of a village wedding in which the bride had been dressed in a mock-Edwardian way. What is more although Wickramasinghe himself admired the traditional peasant culture, established Buddhism itself was under the firm grip of a Sangha hierarchy wedded to the ossified feudal ways and turning its face firmly from the 'Gamperaliya' taking place in its midst. This is why in spite of his touchingly sympathetic portrait in 'Viragaya' Aravinda Jayasena in the final analysis comes out as an ineffectual though well-meaning and extremely sensitive man trapped between his ideals and the demands and requirements of the hum-drum quotidian world of drab reality. For all his admiration of the peasant culture Wickramasinghe could not create a single authentic peasant character except perhaps in the under-estimated 'Karuwala Gedera'. All his heroes are anti-heroes, characters such as Aravinda and Tissa in the trilogy, middle-class men conditioned by the colonial milieu and caught between conflicting cultural worlds. Which, of course, does not negate in any way the main thrust of
Wickramasinghe's contention that any wholesome or worthwhile way of life has
to be animated by tradition and that this could be located in the Buddhist
culture which provides the central motif of the Sri Lankan way of life. In
fact, this contention gains added point in the context of the hybridised
mass culture of our days. But it is also necessary that this kind of
cultural criticism should extend beyond Buddhist humanism in our day when
Buddhism itself is being steadily corrupted by politicians and mudalalis
with the active abetment of the Sangha itself. |
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