Martin Wickramasinghe and Sinhalese literature

"My body grew like that of any Sinhala villager. My mind, however, developed differently. The benefit of private education from a centre of learning or from learned pundits were not available to me. I resorted to leaning by directly exploring my world and by eagerly reading books" - Martin Wickramasinghe.

In this week's column, I want to examine the life and times of Martin Wickramasinghe and his overarching influence on Sinhalese literature. As we celebrate his 120 birth anniversary, it is pertinent to look back, at least briefly, on the literary legacy of Martin Wickramasinghe.

Martin Wickramasinghe is Sri Lanka's greatest authors and intellectuals. He began to write in his mother tongue at the age of 13 years and continued to write both in Sinhala and English until the age of 86. Some of his major novels and short stories have been translated into English, Russian, German, Dutch, Chinese, Romanian, and Tamil Languages.

Martin Wickramasinghe published his first novel "Leela" in 1914. "Gahaniyak" (A Woman).Of his work, the most prominent Gamperaliya (Village in Transition) was published in 1944. He has published 14 novels. Martin Wickramasinghe has written and published a total of 107 short stories. The first collection was published in 1924 under the title

Martin Wickramasinghe was born in 1890 in the pastoral village of Koggala in the Sothern province of Sri Lanka. Like many authors of universal fame, Wickramasinghe was greatly influenced by the surroundings of his native habitat, its panoramic beauty and the down-to-earth life led by its inhabitants. Although he subsequently migrated to Colombo and spent a large part of his life there, Wickramasinghe could not forget the village of Koggala and its unassuming villagers and socio-cultural life, particularly, at the tail end of colonialism in Sri Lanka.

The village of Koggala and its folks were vividly captured in his literary productions in general and in Gamperaliya in particular.

Martin Wickramasinghe was, by and large, a self-educated (auto-didactic) intellectual who dominated the milieu. His multi-faceted personality spread over diverse areas such as journalism, literary criticism, public sphere as a cultural intellectual, philosophy and anthropology. As a cultural critic, Martin Wickramasinghe played a pivotal role in introducing psychoanalysis and some of the scientific concepts such as Charles Darwin's theory of evolution, for the first time, to a Sinhalese readership. He was in the forefront of inventing Sinhalese wardsfor English scientific terms such as evolution, at a time when the medium of instruction was switched over to vernacular from English.

Milieu in transition

Martin Wickramasinghe' enduring legacy should be examined against the milieu he was born into as he grew up to become a formidable cultural and social intellectual. When Wickramasinghe was born, it was the hay day of British colonialism in Sri Lanka. The collapse of feudalism and emergence of capitalism with the political and economic independence in the horizon was indeed an eventful era, marked by unprecedented socio-economic upheavals. One of the salient characteristics of the time was the dismantling of the monarchy and the British who conquered the island, developing the rudimentary infrastructure as a part of the British Empire.

The education which was primarily aimed at producing a local English educated bureaucracy to support the British administration, led to the formation of a class of professionals such as clerical workers and teachers and the emergence of a business class. This, then turned the socio-economic order dominated by landed gentry topsy-turvy . It was this transition of the milieu which Martin Wickramasinghe vividly captured as a sub-text in his trilogy Gamperaliya (Village in transition), Kali Yugaya (era of Kali) and Yuganthaya (End of an era).

Gamperaliya as a seminal literary work

Apart from its rich Sinhalese colloquial idiom, the novel Gamperaliya marked an important millestone in the evolution of Sinhalese fiction in general and in the genre of novel in particular. The pre-independent era in Sinhalese fiction was marked by literary productions, which were primarily used as vehicles for political propaganda.

For instance novels by Piyadasa Sirisena, who wanted to instil morale values in the readers and to stir patriotic sentiments, were inundated with long harangues and rather incredible plots. The language and the idiom in those novels were also monotone and artificial. Some of the characteristics of the early Sinhalese novels were the absence of evolution of characters, artificial dialogues, deliberately inserted diatribues, and the deliver of sermons to the readers.

Gamperaliya which is now widely accepted as the first ever Sinhalese novel was a marked departure from the hitherto established tradition of Sinhalese novel. For the first time, Martin Wickramasinghe set the precedence of realistic novel in Sinhalese literature.

It was through Gamperaliya that Sinhalese novels reached maturity in diverse aspects, albeit not an unblemished masterpiece in Sinhalese literature. Gamperaliya is marked for, among other things, use of colloquial Sinhalese idiom, application of psychological concepts in the evolving three dimensional characters and literary concepts such as inter-texuality (story within a story) and generation of novel tropes. Although the plot is, somewhat, similar in character to Anton Chekov's Cherry Orchard, Martin Wickramasinghe vividly depicted the socio-economic transformation that took place in the milieu as a sub-text of the novel.

The story revolves around the family of Kaisaruwattes who represents decaying feudalism and Piyal, a young bright teacher of English symbolises the emerging business class. In a way, in Gamperaliya, Martin Wickramasinghe has codified the post-colonial economic history of Sri Lanka in the most creative and artistic manner.

The author has exploited to the maximum, every avenues of creativity to arrive at the central theme. For instance, vividly realised descriptions of nature are often synchronised with the changing moods of the characters.

It should be stated here that the author has not used colloquial Sinhalese idiom in its raw form as some of the so called contemporary Sinhalese literary award winners would interpret to achieve their ends. In fact, Wickramasinghe adapted colloquial Sinhalese idiom into fiction in an ingenious manner.

Wickramasinghe further expanded his thesis in the two novels of the trilogy Kali Yugaya and Yuganthaya. One of the factors that made Martin Wickramasinghe a literary genius of Sri Lanka is that he was a bilingual who read voraciously to understand world literature. His wide ranging reading on diverse array of subjects such as literature, philosophy, science and psychology earned him the title of 'Sage of Koggala'. The enduring literary legacy of Martin Wickramasinghe continues to influence contemporary Sinhalese literary scene.

However, born in mind that the use of raw filth (bordering on pornographic literature) by so called post-modern Sinhalese literati, is not the refined colloquial Sinhalese idiom that Martin Wickramasinghe used in his corpus of writings. On the other hand, labyrinthine structure of a poor novel with equally poor syntax cannot be interpreted as a 'Post-modern novel'. Lessons are many to be learnt from the life and work of Martin Wickramasinghe.