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| Sunday, 4 September 2005 |
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Wimal Dissanayake on four cultural intellectuals - Part IV : Sarachchandra and limits of the stylised theatre Sunday Essay by Ajith Samaranayake With Ediriweera Sarachchandra Wimal Dissanayake is on very familiar terrain for as Professor of Sinhala at Peradeniya University Sarachchandra was not only his teacher but also the formative intellectual influence of his own extremely fecund intellectual life. He notes how Sarachchandra to begin with had urged the introduction of western writers (such as Chekhov, de Maupassant, Gogol and Moliere) to the Sinhala reading public but in later years had been drawn to the complex ways in which tradition could be inflected by modernity as well as the reverse process. Here too he saw the Indian tradition as being central to any such discourse. Dissanayake demonstrates how in his attempt to evolve a new form of literary criticism suitable for assessing the new Sinhala fiction. Sarachchandra sought to fuse the best of classical Indian poetics with western literary analysis such as the New Criticism. Dissanayake writes: 'His essays were marked by a crisp wit that was quick to detect the synthetic and counterfeit and the gap between appearance and reality. It energised his writings while subtly invoking standards, both moral and aesthetic, as it played off facile self-indulgence against reflective self-knowledge. His human sympathy flows out of a clear recognition of the essential incompleteness of human beings.' The focus of Dissanayake's essay is, of course, on Sarachchandra's drama where he created a modern dramatic tradition by relating it to the classical Indian tradition. He shows how in his best known play 'Maname' Sarachchandra takes the age-old Chulla Danuggaha Jataka and re-interprets it 'within the matrix of a modern sensibility, to scrutinise vigorously the web of human relationships that lies at the heart of the tale so as to bring out a universally valid image of the human predicament.' Dissanayake demonstrates how Sarachchandra had to virtually single-handed labour at creating a tradition of Sinhala literary drama this being a notable vacuum in Sri Lanka's traditional literary and cultural life. While there was a vigorous literary and poetic tradition there was no similar dramatic and musical tradition. Sarachchandra in such a context saw the inherent possibilities in the nadagama, the dominant form of the folk drama, to facilitate a re-connection with the classical. Sanskrit theatre which he saw as the Great Tradition. However Dissanayake makes the point that Sarachchandra did not go directly to the Indian tradition, in the absence of Sri Lanka lacking a tradition of classical literary drama, but took the route of the nadagama whose vital strands he wove into a 'fabric that was at once recognisably traditional and refreshingly modern.' Dissanayake also shows how Sarachchandra buttressed this affinity to India by having recourse to another oriental tradition, namely the Kabuki theatre of Japan. As Sarachchandra has repeatedly pointed out there was a distinctly oriental concept of drama (in India, Japan and China) which was stylised and in which song, mime and music played a crucial role. This was in sharp contrast to the naturalistic western plays by dramatists such as Gogol, Chekhov and Moliere which he had tried to encourage in translation during an earlier phase but which had failed to strike a chord of resonance among the Sinhala audience. It is certainly true that Sarachchandra revolutionised the Sinhala theatre by fusing the classical Sanskrit drama with the folk play but Dissanayake fails to go beyond this and discuss why during Sarachchandra's own lifetime this should have come to represent a dead end for the stylised theatre as this genre was called singularly failed to evolve beyond Sarachchandra who remained its first and last figure. Nobody else had his genius to fuse the stylised movements, classical music and poetry into a wholesome theatrical offering which would be both traditional and modern. The stylised theatre was born and died with Sarachchandra. The other drawback of the stylised theatre was that it would lend itself only to certain themes. The themes appropriate to the classical theatre were the grand ones dealing with either history or the universal subjects of sublime or unrequited love, the passions and torments of the human heart, the despair attendant on the human condition as viewed from a philosophical perspective and other such sublime subtleties. Sarachchandra's own 'Sinhabahu' was about the mythological origins of the Sinhala race, his 'Pemato Jayathi Sokho' about the desperate love of an older Brahmin for a younger woman and upholding a Buddhist thesis that love begets sorrow, 'Vessantara' about a previous life of the Bodhisatva and so on. However, while Sarachchandra was re-enacting these grandiose themes the contemporaneous Sinhala theatre was moving in more practical if matter-of-fact directions. If Sarachchandra himself had favoured dramatists such as Gogol, Moliere and Chekhov in his early modern phase, later dramatists favoured the more modern exponents such as Ibsen, Pirandello and Tennessee Williams whom they either translated or adapted or from whom they drew inspiration for their original plays. Even in the case of such plays as Gunasena Galappaththy's 'Mudu Puttu' (based on Lorca's 'Blood Wedding') or Henry Jayasena's 'Hunuwataye Kathawa' inspired by Brecht's 'Caucasian Chalk Circle' these works were more free-flowing emanations from the folk theatre rather than the studied works of the classical Sanskrit drama favoured by Sarachchandra. If this was in the late 1950s and the 1960s in the subsequent decades the situation became even more radical. Surrealism and the theatre of the absurd became the dominant motifs of Sinhala drama. What is more to get away from the restrictions of censorship dramatists began locating their plays in a make-believe world of totalitarianism. So while Sarachchandra's role was certainly path-breaking it was not a path which led to the ultimate fruition of indigenous drama. In fact set against the harsher realities of the subsequent decades Sarachchandra's oeuvre of stylised plays appears as the self-indulgent theatrics of a placid bourgeois intelligentsia basking in and playing out the last long golden afternoon before the onset of the storm. However, Sarachchandra did play a modernising role as a literary critic where by seeking to blend, as Dissanayake notes, Sanskrit aesthetics with modern literary-critical standards he played a Leavisian role as the high priest of the Peradeniya school which counted among its star-struck adherents the young Wimal Dissanayake but this is an aspect which he does not care to develop. A pity since for all his pioneering labours on behalf of Sinhala drama Sarachchandra's real imprint might well be as a literary critic and a teacher who widened the horizons of criticism in the immediate post-independence era. |
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