Glimpses of modern Sinhalese Literature

By Prof. Ananda Guruge

A victim to the sword and cannon of the Portuguese, the ancient literary tradition, represented by the glorious lyrics on the mirror-wall of Sigiriya, the celebrated poems of Vijayabahu I, Rahula, Vetteve Veedagama and the elegant prose of Amavatura and Butsarana, died a sorrowful death despite the untiring efforts of Alagiyavanna.

A century or so passed on without even a single work of any merit. The eulogies of kings and chiefs, that the wage-earning versifiers composed, are all we have as representatives of this decadent period.

The constant strife between the Portuguese and the Sinhalese, between the former and the Dutch and the numerous rebellions were wholly detrimental to the progress of the nation. Education was neglected, the monks became immoral; the Buddhist church crumbled down and our fair Island, with its resplendent past, was shrouded in darkness.

In the year 1698 Mudliar Kulatunga of Velivita (in Tumpane) was blessed with a son, who was destined to redeem Lanka from that despicable state of things.

Velivita Saranankara - as he was named after entering the Buddhist order - spared no efforts in bringing about the revival of learning as well as the restoration of the Buddhist church. Among many interesting stories about this great personality is the one which deals with completion of Balavatara.

With his effective system of disseminating knowledge through pupils, he ushered in the revival of learning and students from all parts of the Island flocked to Kandy to make themselves proficient in Sinhalese, Pali, Sanskrit, Buddhism, Astronomy and Medicine. Some of them, from Matara, made Matara the centre of literary activity in a subsequent period which we call the “Matara Period.”

Meanwhile Ceylon came under the British rule. The Kandyan rebellion of 1817-1818 was responsible in severing the connection between the monks and the laymen. A temporary decline in literary activities set in and the clergy and the laity began to tread on parallel paths.

Among the latter - especially among the middle class - English was the more popular, though some of them were interested in the study of the national culture. The clergy established Pirivenas at Ratmalana Maligakanda and Peliyagoda.

The educated Sinhalese who were genuinely interested in the Sinhalese literature, formed special societies such as the Ceylon Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, the Oriental Studies Society and a critical study of history and culture was taken up. Daily and weekly newspapers were begun. Eminent men like James d’Alwis began to do research in our literature on western lines.

James d’Alwis will go down to the literary history of the Sinhalese with his monumental work, the English translation of Sidat Sangara, which - it is interesting to note - is preceded by an introduction that runs into well over 250 royal octavo pages. This introduction contains the first history of the Sinhalese Literature written in any language.

In spite of the fact that some of his views are refuted by later scholars, it yet remains an authoritative work on the subject. It must be also noted that James d’Alwis had earned a greater fame among his countrymen for his stray verses, which are now available in a number of little collections. He was a poet of no mean ability.

Although the first half of the nineteenth century saw a remarkable progress in the study of literature - not to say, in literature for creative work of the time was negligibly little - the Sinhalese community, as a whole was still dormant and quite immune to national and religious sentiments, until they were alarmed by the Jubilee celebrations of the various Christian missions in the ‘sixties.

The people became conscious of their national responsibilities and the out-burst of controversies, both religious and literary, was its earliest manifestation. The most notable of the religious controversies was the one conducted at Panadura, which was indirectly responsible for the great religious and literary revival heralded by Colonel Olcott and others.

The well-known ‘Sav sat dam vadaya’ which Sarathchandra calls the ‘battle of letters’ exerted a wholly unexpected influence on the minds of the people of Ceylon. It roused in them a spirit of investigation. The numerous debaters left no stone unturned in their search for passages from classical works in support of their theories.

As a result of this involuntary study of literature, necessitated by the controversy, the necessity of texts was strongly felt. Critical editions of classical works along with glossaries and commentaries were published by a teeming number of scholars of whom Mudliar W. F. Gunawardhane, Gate Mudliar Simon de Silva, W.P. Ranasinghe and Welipatanvila Deepankara Thera deserve mention.

For a few decades the publication of old texts was the only literary activity. No important work of creation, other than the popular metrical romances and translation of Tamil, Sanskrit and English romances, was undertaken.

Following ‘the period of translation’ (if I am permitted to call it so) signs of a growing interest in fiction were noticed in the ‘nineties. The way for later novelists was paved by Albert de Silva and M.C.F. Fernando and their quasi-novels such as Vimala, The Love Letter, Good Wife, were directed precursors of the artistic novels of A. Simon de Silva in the early 20th century.

Coming to contemporary literature, we are struck by the great progress it has made within this short period of 48 years. Our impressions may be put down in the same words of Bhujanga Rao Bahadur, who speaks of the modern Telugu literature.

“The intelligentsia acquired a knowledge of English literature. Under its influenced, literary tastes are changing and literary ideals undergoing radical transformations. New ideals challenge attention and evoke enthusiasm, new watchwords are springing up.

On one side, love for the vernaculars is being intensified, on the other side there is a growing, almost a petulant impatience with the old forms and ideals. The mutual interpretation of the cultures has hardly begun....A new power has entered our literary life and it is too early to forecast the possibilities of the conjunction....The twentieth century is vibrant with literary activities.”

Although it is well-nigh impossible to trace the development of modern literature in detail due to the multiplicity of its themes, we may attempt a sketch of its main features. A number of new literary forms was introduced, the most important of which are the novel, the short story and the drama. All these evince external influence, western as well as Indian.

The novel, which was experimented upon by a number of nineteenth century writers, was perfected by A. Simon de Silva, who is accredited with the first Sinhalese novel, Meena, published in 1905. Meena was welcomed ‘as a significant literary venture’ by almost all the newspapers and periodicals of the time.

A study of its reviews is found very useful for them, throw light on the literary tastes of the people and also show us why the later novels of Simon de Silva and Piyadasa Sirisena were didactic in purpose.

In the field of Sinhalese fiction three personalities outshine the others, they are Piyadasa Sirisena, the moralist, W.A. Silva the romanticist and Martin Wickremasinghe, the realist. Their works represent three definite phases of the growth of the novel. Piyadasa Sirisena’s works introduced the novel to and popularised it among the masses who were so long strangers to any other literary form than the Jatakas and whose sole interest centred round ‘morality’.

W.A. Silva, in turn, popularised it among the more sophisticated classes and the task of writing novels for the sake of novels or as works of art, with due stress on characterisation, was undertaken by Martin Wickremasinghe. But the services rendered by any of these cannot be under-rated if his novels do not conform to the standards of the English educated critic.

It is strange that we do not find among the galaxy of our young writers many promising novelists. Instead, we see that most of the fiction writers have adopted the short story as their medium. It seems to have ousted the novel already.

The short story, in a crude form, had been a popular medium in our literature since circa 1200AD. With the influence of its English prototype, it underwent immense modification and encouraged by the editors of dailies and weeklies, who did not wish to publish long novels, probably because their papers were rather impermanent, it emerged during the ‘twenties as a full-fledged literary form.

Martin Wickremasinghe and W.A. Silva who were mentioned above, have also established themselves as short story writers. G.B. Senanayake and Hemapala Munidasa of the so-called ‘Wickremasinghe School’ and I.M.R.A. Iriyagolla have a number of good short stories to their credit. The satirist, T.G.W. de Silva with his mock University of Padpadagama and its great professors and Bhagalavati is the best known. The numerous satirical sketches he had written since 1939 have won the admiration of all their readers, but it has to be said that the reader of his recent stories is disappointed by their low quality.

The drama was a feature unknown to Sinhalese till about the middle of the nineteenth century. The well-known magical cults Panmaduva ......and Kolam ......and the fertility cult Sokari ..... are supposed to be the earliest representatives of the Sinhalese drama. But only Nadagama, which is Dravidian in origin, afforded room for the author’s originality, hence the beginnings of the drama are to be found there. We are lacking in gratitude if we do not mention in this connection our first Nadagama writer, Philippu Singho, the blacksmith, who scribbled the earliest Sinhalese Nadagama on his walls with charcoal. The Natya.....that came to us from North India ousted the Nadagam and has ever since become the popular form of drama in Ceylon. Many are the persons, who strove to improve our ill-developed Natya and only a few outstanding figures such as C. Don Bastian, John de Silva, T.B. Ilangaratna, J.N. Jinendradasa, B.A.W., Jayamanne and M.G. Perera may be mentioned due to lack of space. With all their efforts the drama yet remains incomplete and unappreciated. The fault is that all Natya writers attempted to cater to the low aesthetics of the masses and none ventured to modify their tastes. The abundance of unwanted songs, the artificial inclusion of comic sketches (even when they are not in keeping with the theme), the stress on colour in preference to simplicity of costume and scene, the stress on colour in preference to simplicity of costume and scene, the neglect of acting are all against our Natyas.

The future of the drama lies not so much in the hands of professional actors as the amateurs, who alone can teach the people what is to be sought in a play. Before we discuss the verse literature, let us note some changes that had taken place in our language within the last 48 years. During this period the Sinhalese language has been used to express ideas which has never been expressed in it before and it was used in writing by a greater number hailing from different strata of society. While the novelists, the playwrights and short story writers connived at the exigencies of grammar and convention, the ‘pandits’, with their ‘most comprehensive and most complete’ grammar the Sidat Sangara, were taking them to task. So much so, there was a time when literary criticism was defined as an ‘inquiry into the author’s language’ and reviews were confined to pointing out errors in accidence and syntax. At a time when the struggle between the exponents of grammar and the users of the language was at its height, Cumaranatunga, the reputed scholar, who, versatile as he was attained Islandwide fame as a grammarian, poet and critic, launched his pursit movement. “More Sinhalese and better Sinhalese’ appears to have been his earlier slogan, but later it was seen that his wish was to replace the modern Sinhalese language with an archiac form of the same, which he called ‘Subasa’. Subasa found admirers throughout the country and one could not be but amused at the horde of school-masters and students who were trying to make themselves as incomprehensible as they could. Yet it should be said that Subasa in the hands of Cumaranatunga and his immediate disciples, Raphael Tennakoon and Jayanta Weerasekera, was a remarkable vehicle of thought. Subasa has an extensive and representative literature of its own.

Returning to our survey of literature, we see that verse forms a very important literary gentre. As it is the case in every literature, verse in Sinhalese, too, occupies the first place in both popularity and importance. Our modern verse literature consists of various types of poems (e.g. short descriptive poems, lyrics, narrative poems) and of them the narrative poem is the favourite. In form it is not new to our literature though in subject matter it has been immensely influenced by the novel.

I consider the verse sections of the early novels of Piyadasa Sirisena as the connecting link between the religious jataka poems and the secular narrative poems. During the last decade, it is noticeable that the poets could not cope with the rising demand for these poems. And every person who could write verses attempted to write narrative poems. In no other field, I am sure, had so many people tried to write when they had nothing to write about. In the midst of the short-lived mass of narrative poems, there are a few real literary gems. The works of ‘Keyas’ especially Sudo Sudu (adaptation of Tennyson’s) Enoch Arden), the serious compositions of Meemana Prematilaka such as Miniha, Nelum Kekulu, and Etera, the lyric Piya Samara of Cumaratunga, the satirical narratives Vavuluva, De Vinaya and Hevilla of Raphael Tennekoon and Hapumali of Wimalaratne Kumaragama de-serve the epithet “poem” in any literature.

At this juncture, one is undoubtedly tempted to glance at the future of Sinhalese literature. Its future depends to a greater extent on the attitude taken by the reading public and the critics towards the products of the present-day writers. Of the three powers in the realm of literature, which Lascells Abercrombie speaks of, we notice among the Sinhalese the power to create and the power to enjoy and not yet the power to criticise. Literary criticism, in its correct perspective, is new to both our readers and writers. Sarathchandra, in his introduction to “Modern Sinhalese Fiction” says, “It is a difficult thing to criticise living authors, especially in a country where there is little or no criticism and whatever criticism there is, has not advanced beyond the stage of praise or invective. I have been also warned that I would be making many enemies.”

The series of articles criticising his work in Nuvana (a monthly) and the sarcastic references to it in Subasa, prove to what extent Sarathchandra was right in judging the temperament of the writers.

For the progress of our literature, constructive criticism is essential but in our eagerness to criticise let us not forget the valuable advice Krishan Chandar, the well-known Urdu author, gives us “at this moment you will have to give concessions in order to attract more and more writers; otherwise a slightly unbalanced criticism, now, cost you a writer, whose loss your literature can hardly stand.”

From “Rajan”- School Magazine, Dharmaraja College, Kandy (1946)