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| Sunday, 26 March 2006 |
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Regi Siriwardena:
The writer as thinker Sunday Essay by Ajith Samaranayake 'Politics and Society' is the concluding volume of the selected writings of Regi Siriwardena published by the International Centre for Ethnic Studies and edited by A. J. Canagaratna. It is in all senses a summation of the mature writings of Regi who was indubitably Sri Lanka's leading literary intellectual and spanning politics, society and culture offers an abundance of riches illustrating his abiding intellectual curiosity and incisive mind. There are four major strands here signifying Regi's wide interests during the latter period of his life. They are the convulsions which the Soviet Union and its East European satellites were subjected to following Mikhail Gorbachev's reforms, Sri Lankan politics with a special emphasis on the role of Prime Minister S. W. R. D. Bandaranaike and the LSSP, Sri Lanka's first political party, questions of national identity in multicultural Sri Lanka and the role of English, the ambivalent 'Kaduwa,' in our post-colonial society. To all these issues Regi brings to bear his characteristic attitude of mind reared by his initial immersion in Marxist thought and honed by the radical humanism of his later years. As we know Regi began life as an activist of the LSSP during the underground years while a university student and continued his readings in Marxist literature while serving Lake House as leader writer, parliamentary sketch writer and Assistant Editor of the 'Daily News'. It was during this time that on a visit to London he met Isaac Deutscher, the author of the monumental three-volume biography of Leon Trotsky and one of the most penetrating political writers of our time. As Regi himself acknowledges, 'My intellectual debt to him is considerable' and it will not be unfair to say that Deutscher's has been the major intellectual influence in Regi's own development as a writer and analyst. In his writings on the Soviet Union after the October Revolution and the convolutions which Marxist thought has undergone since Marx, Regi begins from the categories of Marxism and works his way towards new approaches in keeping with the spirit of Lenin's famous quote. 'Theory is grey, my friend, the tree of life is always green' although he can not resist adding that Lenin didn't always take his own advice but that is no reason not to profit from it. Regi's major contention is his writings on the Soviet Union has been t hat since the revolution did not take place as envisaged by Marx and Engles in an advanced capitalist country but in industrially backward Russia socialism as practised in the Soviet Union after Lenin was really a transitional stage between pre-capitalism and capitalism proper. Not only has no socialist revolution taken place in any advanced capitalist country but all countries which have gone socialist are either Third World countries or countries with a preponderant peasantry. Surveying then the gulf between prophesy and result, expectation and reality Regi notes the resilience of capitalism as an economic system but is dismayed by the enormous powers which President Bush's United States has amassed as a result of the failure of the socialist project and the collapse of the Soviet Union. He concludes that although socialism might have been discarded in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe the ethical appeal of socialism will persist. In the last analysis it is this humanism of Marxist thought which imparts its own peculiar flavour of Regi's attitudes even as he watches old dreams turning to dust and the clay feet of old deities being exposed. Similarly in the case of Sri Lankan politics and in particular the LSSP, in which he had invested his youthful hopes. Regi is clear-minded. His obituary note on Dr. N. M. Perera which first appeared in the 'Lanka Guardian', I have for long admired as a confluence of his clarity of thought and felicity of expression. He is justifiably mordant on Dr. Colvin R. de Silva for his later reassessment of the JVP Insurrection of 1971 as an ultra-leftist adventure after having dubbed it as a fascist venture when was a Cabinet Minister. In this context we also have to keep in mind that Regi was Secretary of the Civil Rights Movement formed by concerned citizens who had been agonised by the then United Front Government's brutal suppression of the first JVP Insurrection. However, if we take a long-term view and put the passing political parade aside the more important issue which Regi has raised the realm of politics would be the question why Sri Lanka has not possessed a tradition of radical bhikkhus which prompted a four-part research essay by Dr. Kumari Jayawardena. This exemplifies Regi's endeavour of taking Sri Lankan society back to its spiritual roots which meant that he was equally opposed to both the apocalyptic chauvinism of Anagarika Dharmapala as well as his latter day reincarnation Gunadasa Amarasekera. Regi's concern with the question of national identity in a multi-communal society is also bound up with his concern with the role of English. His essays on how Sinhala Buddhist identity is projected in school text books was a path-breaking venture while in his writings on English as a language and medium of communication his concern was both to demystify the social role of English while making it a more effective means of communicating the true feelings pulsating within an emerging populace to whom English was not their first language. In my own obituary of Regi I compared him to Edmund Wilson, the great American intellectual and essayist and it will be fitting to conclude this brief speech on Regi by quoting what Isaiah Berlin, a great philosopher of our age, had to say of Wilson which sits equally well on Regi. He said: "He was the last major critic in the tradition of Johnson, Sainte-Beuve, Belinsky and Matthew Arnold; his aim and practice were to consider works of literature within a larger social and cultural frame - one which included an absorbed, acutely penetrating, direct, wonderfully illuminating view of the author's personality, goals and social and personal origins, the surrounding moral, intellectual and political worlds and the nature of the author's personal vision. He told me during his visit the modern tendency towards purely literary scholarship, towards an often deliberate ignoring of the texture of the writer's life and society, for him lacked all genuine content. I agreed with him fervently. Art shone for him, but not by its own light alone. He is gone, and has not left his peer. (This is the text of a speech delivered at the International Centre for Ethnic, Studies on March 24, on the occasion of the release of this book) |
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