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| Sunday, 19 March 2006 |
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Chintaka Vidanage: The boy on the border Sunday Essay by Ajith Samaranayake Overnight a young man from Polonnaruwa has become an iconic hero if not a legend. Yesterday Chintaka Vidanage was only a face in the crowd. Today his defiant visage is emblazoned in the public mind. His morale-boosting gold medal triumph at the Commonwealth Games in Melbourne has come at a critical moment in the national conjuncture and dare we say holds out important signposts for the future Sri Lankan road map. If Duncan White was our first athletic hero Susanthika Jayasinghe was the heroine of the unfolding track and field drama. The two personified distinct eras. White was a Burgher and belonged to a community which had made a distinct contribution to Sri Lankan life but because of reasons peculiar to its own existence was cut away from the generality of society. But he was very much a representative of the palmy post-independence Ceylon (as she still was) enjoying the lazy golden afternoon of the Korean boom. Susanthika in contrast ran in from a different time and a different milieu. She came from Etnawela in the backwoods of the Kegalle district and now we have Chintaka Vidanage from the even more remote recesses of Polonnaruwa, an ancient kingdom. Chintaka has been described as coming from a colonist family which will bring to mind Madawala S. Ratnayake's evocative novel 'Akkara Paha' made into a film by Lester James Peries. These were the people who struck out into the Malaria - infested North Central Province to be settled on the new lands opened up by the colonisation schemes initiated by the first Prime Minister D. S. Senenayake. The colonisation schemes have been attacked on two fronts. Economically and sociologically they have been condemned as costly blunders while the Tamil political parties have described them as Sinhala encroachments into their territory a savage point of contention in the relationship between the two communities. But yet from our collective discontent can we not bring forth some rich fruit? Just as Cricket has returned to Jaffna the victory of a young man from Polonnaruwa at the Commonwealth Games should be a happy portent for all. Sri Lanka although a Republic remains within the Commonwealth and Cricket which is perhaps Britain's enduring legacy to the sub continent is one of the last tenuous links between embattled countries and communities in this region. The point then perhaps is that while we might strike strident anti-imperialist postures as ex-colonial peoples we can not entirely get out of the friendly colonial embrace. Let us then weave together this rather disjointed narrative of sports and society. A young man from a province caught up in Sri Lanka's fratricidal war has won a Gold medal at the Commonwealth Games, a legacy of our departed imperial masters. If 'Divide et impera' was the motto of British imperialism is it too fanciful to think then that Chintaka Vidanage, the boy on the border of our suicidal common conflict, can be a harbinger of a sunnier time? |
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