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Gunadasa Amarasekera: Reconciling tradition and modernity

Sunday Essay by Ajith Samaranayake

The last of the four intellectuals to engage Wimal Dissanayake's attention in 'Enabling Traditions' is Gunadasa Amarasekera, the eminence grise of Sinhala letters, now enjoying the much-deserved halo of the prophet of Jatika Chintanaya although such encomia are not without its attendant controversy.

Indeed Dissanayake describes him as "arguably the leading, Sinhala cultural intellectual and also more politically active than the others hitherto discussed. This, however, is a rather recent incarnation and can be dated from 2003-2004 when Amarasekera involved himself with the Desha Hithaishi Jathika Vyaparaya of which he is Joint Secretary.

In fact, this tends to distract somewhat from his undoubtedly considerable literary merits for one quite does not know where the poet ends and the thinker takes over. Amarasekera, however is bound to dismiss this as an occupational hazard attendant on thinkers who fall among politicians.

Amarasekera as poet

Dissanayake's basic attention is on Amarasekera as a poet and his attitude to tradition. Beginning with his first collection "Bhava Geetha" (1955) Dissanayake positions him between the then dominant Colombo school and the emergent free verse movement the first of a romantic or sentimental nature with an occasional dose of populism but trapped in obsolete metrical grooves and the second characterised by a self-conscious bohemianism genuflecting at the altar of the french Imgists rather than the triumivarate of Lawrence, Pound and Eliot whom Dissanayake has singled out because Amarasekera's own early poetry shows both Eliot's and Lawrence's influence. Dissanayake is perhaps here on a fast forward track because Amarasekera at this time was not really reacting to the free verse movement with which he himself was loosely identified.

It must not be forgotten after all that it was G. B. Senanayake, that much underestimated writer, who introduced free verse to Sri Lanka although if has been coupled in the popular memory with Siri Gunasinghe whose early verse, in 'Mas Le Nethi Eta', 'Rathu Kekulu' etc. even earned the idolatrous admiration of the young Sarath Amunugama who brought out a collection of poetry named 'Hadu Thula Asa' even as Dissanayake and himself as fellow Trinitians and Peradeniya soulmates were talking of poetry and literature until the hills darkened over Hantana. However, Dissanayake is correct when he says that Amarasekera in contrast to the other free Verse poets adhered to a metre although eschewing the traditional 'samudragosha' metre beloved of the old school. Amarasekera's poetry rather drew on the 'pel kavi' and 'malyahan kavi' of the folk poets.

In a sense Dissanayake's engagement with Amarasekera is an encounter with his own early self since he admits that he himself had taken up an opposing position when Amarasekera through works such as 'Amal Biso' was advocating the strength of folk poetry. If in 'Amal Biso' Amarasekera drew on the folk tradition in 'Gurula Vata' he had recourse to the classical idiom to which he has returned in his last work as well, namely 'Asak Da Kava'. It is also interesting that in the process of this exercise Dissanayake discounts Amarasekera's second work 'Uyanaka Hinda Liyu Kavi' which contains his modernist work greatly admired by critics such as A. M. G. Sirimanne, the father figure of Sri Lankan Practical Criticism. It is also no accident that Dissanayake's own poetry has tended to adhere to a metre as opposed to those of Siri Gunasinghe for example.

In 'Asak Da Kava' Amarasekera seeks to resurrect a classical Sinhala poem popularly accepted as being based on a Jataka story the 'Asankavathi Jataka'. Unfortunately except for four excerpts the rest of the poem is missing. Inspired by the poem cast by some malign force into literary oblivion Amarasekera brought out his own work. Deploying a poetic idiom close to the Kotte period Amarasekera makes of this poem a criticism of society trapped in the coils of consumerism. The dramatis persona are King Brahmadatta of ancient vintage, a princess and a hermit but the voice is that of Amarasekera and his view that if we are not to commit collective suicide as a nation our lurch on the present Gadarene slope has to be tempered by a call to our better nature.

Dissanayake concedes that this poem involving as it does mythological characters and a remote era can be attacked from a modernist position but postulates the theory that the poet displays a connection to tradition in terms of 'thematics' and that to relate to tradition is also to raise issues about modernity.

Again examining Amarasekera's diction in this work Dissanayake is at pains to dismiss the criticism that he had used the classical idiom mechanically and had been walled in by tradition. Thus both in theme and diction it is Dissanayake's contention that Amarasekera is engaged in a worthwhile dialogue with tradition in the enterprise of modernity.

But the point is of what inter section tradition meets with modernity or obversely how tradition with all its encrustations can fertilise modernity.

This does not mean that we have to blindly surrender to either the forces of the neo-colonial or coca cola culture or the massed phalanx of the obscure post-modernist sages. But it also means a re-examination of tradition and how it can be accommodated in the present context. For example, Amarasekera himself has written in both modes but who is to uphold his modernist works such a 'Uyanaka Hinda Liyu Kavi,' or even 'Avarjana' (a much underestimated work) over the more traditional works such as 'Amal Biso' 'Gurulu Vata' or 'Asak Da Kava?' while metrical symmetry imparts a certain stylistic consonance to Amarasekera's work who are we to estimate history, myth, symbolism or allegory over contemporary experience?

Classicism, tradition

This argument gains all the more relevance because it is not merely Amarasekera who has had recourse to tradition although in his seminal work 'Sinhala Kavya Sampradaya' he has emerged as its undisputed theoretician. Poets of a younger generation such as Parakrama Kodituwakku and the late Monica Ruvanpathirana too have grappled with the issues of classicism, tradition, the poetry of the folk and modernity.

But each has approached his or her terrain from different perspectives which does not make for grand obiter dicta of a single Sinhala poetic tradition.

It has been Amarasekera's sustained thesis that while the Sinhala poetic tradition was a free-flowing current it had become snared during the Kotte period and led to a dead-end during the Matara and Colombo periods emerging in the arid wastes of free verse.

No doubt colonial rule which both Amarasekera and Dissanayake condemn had much to do with the erosion of the poetic tradition but what is not fully realised is that this itself was part of social change. Poetesses of the Matara period such as Gajaman Nona and Ranchagoda Lamaya were not only early icons of liberated women but brought an exhilaration to poetry while the Colombo poets with all their limitations both imaginative and stylistic, were products of profound social change during the inter-war years heralding Sri Lanka's nominal independence. Here too while the ritual nods are made to Wimalaratne Kumaragama it is a pity that Ananda Rajakaruna and Sri Chandraratne Manawasinghe have not earned their critical reward.

Next week: Amarasekera and Jathika Chinthanaya

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