As the ‘Suddha’ takes the stage:

Hybridisms, denials and the undeniable unfold

By Dilshan Boange

March 2 marked two significant events in my calendar. One is personal and limited to those who share a bond with my alma mater Wesley College Colombo as we celebrate the Founder’s Day. The other is when history was made in the form of the Kandyan convention of 1815 was conceived to realise a conditional ceding of the country’s administration to the representatives of the British Crown.

And thus on this year’s March 2 where two very special events unfailingly come to mind, I made a silent.

 engagement with a manifestation of a playwright’s ideology on what the legacy of the British have left us with, to contemplate and debate on.

A stage play turning into a pulpit

I went to the Tower Hall to watch Udayasiri Wickremaratne’s ‘Suddek Oba Amathai’ a theatre production not entwined in intricate plots and storylines but entertaining portrayals reflective of the reality of our mindset(s) bound in an undeniable hybridism after having been once part of the British Crown.

This reality was brought out through three monologues that turned the stage into a pulpit for advocacy, adulation confession, revelation, praise and worship as well as inquiry and interpretation both critical and frivolous.

And by this method Udayasiri has given an unhindered voice to issues battering Sri Lankan society on the matter of establishing identities both individual and collective in the undeniably inescapable postcolonial scenario that has thrust a hybridism upon us which we may seek to deny.

The first segment of the play was delivered by Nalin Pradeep Udawela a character representative of the neo-colonial mentality of ‘west worship’.

Although the depth of the discourse by this character can span pages and pages in discussion and debate I wish to address a very salient point which I feel characterises the present day dilemma of those who seek to ape the westerner for all the sophistry and flamboyance the suddha is seen to have and flaunt.

The disservice done to the suddha

One of the disservices Udayasiri has done very callously to the British is to declassify them from the exalted position of suddha and reclassify the whole of the white skinned world in the western hemisphere as suddho.

Mothers’ front The other day I attended the funeral of Manorani Saravanmuttue with my mother I still recall that how I was shuddered out of my sleep as a six year old By hellish cries of tortured souls Particularly that of women, Thousands of mothers   Whose children’s lives were snatched off at their prime! The nameless three mothers The top, middle and lowest Strata of society Were looking at the burning circles of fire Through the red-blood flames I saw their tearful eyes, woeful countenances Searching for their snatched off sons, daughters And the justice denied forever I was the wretch Who had to travel Through the roads Full of burning tyre-pyres, Passages of misery and desolation Answering the mid-term question-papers For the third term at school Endless blackout days, Literarily burning midnight oil Under the flickering light of the lantern No reconciliation for them No truth commissions They are the forgotten souls Forgotten forever Under the façade of normalcy Let those three mothers Be mothers for the generation Buried under maiden soil Denying them of the morning sun-light of life Ranga Chandrarathne (Montage dedicates this poem for Richard de Zoysa on his birth anniversary on March 13)

The over generalisation of Europeans as Suddho has in my opinion diluted the exclusivity accorded by Sinhala vernacular to the builders of the Empire upon which to a certain extent in history the sun didn’t set. The actor goes onto enumerate the countries of the suddha

who in his staunch belief should be respectfully referred to as Sudu mahaththaru and includes the continental counties as well as Scandinavian countries.He refers to Paris and speaks of its greatness and incomparable beauty.

The confusion of identifying the ‘suddha’ from a nation(al) grounding but mere skin colour alone is a crass negation of everything the original suddha stood for and projected to the world.

The rather intensely pronounced British–Franco cultural animosity from the countries separated by the channel tunnel seems not to have found any treading whatsoever in the thinking of the character played by Nalin Pradeep Udawela. Would the British feel flattered by profuse praise and worship proffered by this character in its entirety?

Udayasiri has shown tongue in cheek very classily through this performance to critique the very perceptions and conceptions that have enslaved some Sri Lankans who would very likely display such servility in their thinking to exalt the westerner as greater than the Lankan.

Effacing the western nations of nationalities

In the very generalisation the suddha ash lost his identity and the whole of the western world is effaced of their respective individualities as nations who proudly boast of rivalries and struggles for regional superiority before venturing out to see what else is out there in this flat tea saucer like world (before it was ‘discovered’ to be a globe) carefully keeping away from the edge lest they fall into oblivion. Therefore a larger question looms very hilariously tinged with patches of darkness at the end of it.

Since the suddha worshiper’ of today may even not know of the original suddha classification and its significances, (note since people of the other two colonial powers the Portuguese and the Dutch were referred to as parangi and lansi respectively) what exactly are they worshipping?

Is it the entire white skinned anglophile world? Then would the British like to consider the Australians as on par with them? (Australia being very noticeably a much ‘less acknowledged cousin’ of the British compared to the super power found across the Atlantic!).

There lies the dilemma that the neo-colonial may not be fully aware of. Let us then raise the question large and loud to them who disdain localism in favour of the Suddha–Who, or ‘What’ pray is your ‘suddha’?

Lessons in history

While Jayalath Manoratne’s performance came as more tactfully executed in its cheekiness and audience appeal in terms of undetectable sarcasm and naturally flowing wittiness the focus point would be the relevance of history today to us in the wake of being at odds with out hybridism.

The topic the second act dealt with was ‘History’. The depth and scope of dealing with history in all its vastness and variations to make it a discussion that covers the whole gamut of the subject would by itself create history was a point that the character of Manorathne stressed on at very much the outset of the monologue.

The approach taken to this subject was to look at the concept of history as being two fold –written history that establishes the mainstream discourse on history as a record or document and the other being the history that people or individuals carry within them as their ‘personal history’.

To elaborate his argument the character cites the example of the last king of Kandy King Sri Wickrema Rajasinghe about whom history has been written and interpretive narratives are found in various forms from books to lore that includes orally preserved traditional Sinhala poetry or kavi.

He says while there is history written ‘about the king there’ is also (a) history within him. And between these two forms of history there may be discrepancies to ascertain the truth of what really was or could have been is what is strongly inferred.

A Kunderian argument

However, in the classification of both of these narratives as being history in the very same essence of the word, I wish to bring out a point of contention based on a Kunderian perspective of how history differs from ‘the past’.

The Book of Laughter and Forgetting by Czech author Milan Kundera speaks very explicatively of how history becomes an account of events that are archived and manipulated varying from written record to photographs to topography that is meant to serve a strict political agenda.

The past as in Kunderian conceptions is the narrative, the memory that remains within the individual and does not find a place in history.

Perhaps the conception Udayasiri bears of history is that all events past and preceding our present, by default, qualifies as ‘history’.

Yet the history is the narrative that accounts the rationale for the ‘present’ based on its position of being the authoritative narrative of and from a ‘place of authority’.

In this context what can we speak of history and the hybridism that was set out by the first monologue? One can contest that since the advents of the suddha in Sri Lanka and his domination of writing history from his perspective of the world at large and becoming a foremost authority of a modern scientifically sound method of ‘recording the past’ in to history, history itself now has a mould that serves the outlooks of the suddha, the coloniser.

Although the discourse by the character of Manorathna portrayed a person concerned of the erosion of our national history’s importance in the national consciousness, and contention over the embracement of a foreigner’s greatness, the monologue ends with a joviality of cynicism admitting that the performance after all is just meant to be for the stage and the moment of the performance and may not have an impact nor a validity beyond the very stage it came to life on, as it was scripted for the player by Udaysiri Wickremaratne.

Real purpose

What was the real purpose of doing so, one may question from the playwright. What did such a gimmick seek to achieve from the audience? Was it to suggest that the idea of resurgence in national minded thinking to appreciate our nation’s pre-colonial history ends in a jest?

Moving on to the third and final performance of the drama the monologue of a woman played by Madanee Malwattage delivered what seemed at first a rather disjointed discourse when considering how the two previous segments complemented each other from an ideological threading on the basis of a postcolonial critique.

Theorem

Propounding a line of argument or theorem, as sadaranathwawadaya which one may interpretively translate as ‘fairnessism’, the woman went on to build a critique of social perceptions and interpretations of gender roles and stereotypical behavioural moulds to define men and women.

Through this theorem of ‘fairnessism’ the reversal of the emotional beings within men and women when faced with ‘love’ took central focus in giving an equation to make men and women as on par. Approaching the subject of love and hate and how they are rooted in the same core of our founts of emotions gave an almost epiphanous explanation to how the discourse of the woman fitted into the previous two monologues.

A dual approach

There is in us in our search for our identity and a sense of indigenousness in renouncing any subservience to the former coloniser, a subconscious dilemma. A dilemma of dualities and divided loyalties. There is both love and hate entwined within us threaded almost inseparably in forming the outlooks we bear towards the suddha.

It is this opposing emotions coexisting within us and spiralling as two different effects that causes us to both eagerly subscribe to fine dining with a fully laid out table of cutlery and still resent the suddha for all the plunder they are guilty of, the debasing they did to our grand heritage by infusing ideologies of white supremacy to suppress us through our own whitened hands no less. The love and hate theorem was in my understanding a parody of the dilemma within us that makes our disposition towards the suddha neither one of complete love nor utter hate.