Indo-Lanka cultural ties set impressive record
by Prof D.C.R.A. Goonetilleke
When we refer to the interaction of India and Sri Lanka in whatever
field, we assume that they are two separate countries. But there was a
time in the distant past when India and Sri Lanka were a single land
mass. Even today after the land mass has split, the distance between
India and Sri Lanka is only 22 miles. That is the full distance of the
Palk Strait.

Sarojini Naidu |
In earlier ages when transport and communications between countries
and contacts were minimal, the only significant foreign impact on Sri
Lanka was that of India. Of course, everybody knows that the greatest
gift to Sri Lanka, made by India, is Buddhism. The religion, which
originated in India but was superseded there by Hinduism and Islam, was
brought across to Sri Lanka in the 3rd century B.C. by Ven. Mahinda, the
son of Emperor Asoka of India, who founded the order of Bhikkhus here.
He was followed by his sister Sanghamitta Theri, who founded the order
of Bhikkhunis here.
The arrival of Ven. Mahinda in the 3rd century B.C. is recorded in
the Mahavamsa, the great chronicle, and substantiated by a rock
inscription after his passing away, found in Ampara.
Buddhism is the fountainhead of Sinhala literature. Pali texts
brought by Ven. Mahinda were translated into Sinhala and designated the
Hela Atuva. The texts were translated back into Pali by Ven. Buddhagosha
(et al), who came from India in the 5th century. The Sinhala texts
disappeared or were destroyed and Pali became the official language of
Buddhism.
Prose works
The earliest extant prose works of importance in Sinhala date from
the 13th century and were pietistic – the Amavatura of Gurulugomi, the
Butsarana of Vidyachakravarti. Of special significance for the
development of the short story were Dharmasena Thera’s 13th-century
Saddharma Ratnavaliya and Saddharmalankaraya (1398-1410) by Dharmakirthi
Thera II, based on earlier Pali texts. It has been observed that the
Saddharma Ratnavaliya and the Saddharmalankaraya combine an ever present
moral and religious didacticism with a surprisingly rich, earthy yet
subtle vein of psychological exploration dealing with emotional impulses
and social pressures that govern daily life.
The Jataka tales (stories of the past lives of the Buddha) which were
recorded in the 14th century and were popularised by Bhikkhus who used
them to illustrate their sermons, form a part of a popular oral
tradition. These contained the rudiments of fiction which influenced the
rise of Sinhala fiction as from the late 19th century, as well as
stimulated later literary works.
Sinhala during the long years before the impact of Western literary
criticism were indebted exclusively to India, to Sanskrit in particular,
for literary touchstones – for ideas as to what constitutes literature,
for ideas as to how to appreciate and evaluate literature. The
touchstones include alankara (embellishment, decoration), shailya
(style), reethi (rules, standards), guna (inherent quality), vakrokti
(indirection, obliqueness), rasa, auchitya (suitability,
appropriateness) and dvani (denotation and connotation). In the 9th
century, King Sena’s Siyabaslakara was more or less a translation of
Dandin’s earlier Sanskrit work Kavyadarsha which discussed general
issues and poetic figures.
Literary forms
Sri Lanka also inherited literary forms from India. Sanskrit drama
was, probably, read but was never performed and did not provide a
stimulus to local playwrights. On the other hand, Kalidasa’s Mega Dutha
or Cloud Messenger inspired a whole host of Sinhalese Sandesa or message
poems such as the Mayura Sandesaya (the Peacock Messenger Poem) and the
Tisara Sandesaya (the Swan Messenger Poem). It is interesting to note
that among the Sigiri Graffiti is a Sanskrit sloka written by a visitor
from India called Vajira Varman, responding to the frescoes.
Sanskrit was not only a seminal influence on the arts in Sri Lanka
but that Sri Lanka made a contribution to Sanskrit literature itself by
means of a poem named the Janaki harana which has for its subject the
story of the Ramayana. Manuscripts of the poem found in the 1950s in
Malabar proved that the poet of the Janaki harana was indeed named
Kumaradasa. He was not a king but a scion of the Sinhalese royal family,
the son of a prince named Manita.
Tamil literature in Sri Lanka lay in the shadow of South India for a
very long time, and a distinctively Sri Lankan kind of Tamil literature
was unable to emerge until the 17th century. As purist scholars on both
sides of the Palk Strait endeavoured to follow a South Indian and
Sanskrit tradition, the first Sri Lankan Tamil literary works were
written in a religious spirit, the spirit of Hinduism which was another
great gift from India. These were confined to commentaries on the
ancient classics, tedious and conventional.
The first spark occurred in the late 19th century as a consequence of
religious zeal and conflict.

R.K. Narayan |
Christian missionaries sought to proselytise by preaching in the
native language, and they enlisted traditional poetic forms to express
Christian themes. On the other hand, to combat the inroads of
missionaries, Hindu poets created works which explicated and exalted
their own religion. This literature too was of a didactic sort.
The South Indian film and dance forms like Bharata Natyam, Kathak and
Kathakali continue to exert a potent influence on Tamil mass
entertainment and art in Sri Lanka, but the winds of change in Sri Lanka
in the 1950s made a deep impact on Tamil writing – fiction, poetry and
drama – and brought about a Tamil literature that broke free from South
Indian literature and assumed a distinctively Sri Lankan identity.
Tamil writing became irrevocably secular and popular in character.
Nevertheless the South Indian influence was a catalyst. It should also
be observed that dance forms such as Bharata Natyam, Kathak and
Kathakali have interested Sinhalese performers and audiences.
Influence
In the 20th century, among the Indians who exerted an influence on
Sri Lankan culture, the greatest was Rabindranath Tagore. He is the only
Indian to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, a hallmark of world
recognition, and the creator of the song in Bengali which was adopted as
the national anthem. In his Bengali essays, Tagore stresses that the
Bengali word for literature, “Sahitya”, derives from “sahit” and
etymologically means together or intimacy.
Tagore was not chauvinistic. He emphasised that an India, bereft of
Western contact, would have been wanting in an essential element in her
quest for fulfilment. Like Jawaharlal Nehru in The Discovery of India,
Tagore believed that the greatest blessing of British rule was that it
enabled the heterogeneous country that was India to rise in a single
voice, the Indian voice. Tagore expresses his view of freedom: Where the
mind is free, and the head is held high, where knowledge is free; where
the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic
walls. Tagore seems to me the quintessential Indian.
As commonly in ex-colonies, the presence of the colonial ‘masters’
had a suffocating effect on the creative energies of the local
inhabitants in Sri Lanka and the emergence of Sri Lankan English
literature flows from the growth of nationalist currents. This growth
was stimulated by the freedom struggle in India and by certain
remarkable Indians who were active in that period.
In the 1930s and early 1940s, the Kandy Lake poets were inspired by
Indian poets such as Tagore and Sarojini Naidu. R.K. Narayan’s success
in the West is likely to have stimulated Jinadasa Vijayatunga. D.F.
Karaka was a household word in Sri Lanka at that time; his fiction and
non-fiction would have acted as a stimulus to local writing.
S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike attended a performance of Tagore’s Saapmochan
which Tagore himself staged in Colombo during a visit to Sri Lanka in
1934, and Bandaranaike wrote in his review (which included a quotation
from Sarojini Naidu’s poetry):
India has as good a reason to be proud of Tagore as of Gandhi; for he
has made an original contribution to art which can stand the test of
comparison with anything of the kind the West has evolved.
Ediriwira Sarachchandra (1914-1996), a remarkable bilingual, became
the pre-eminent man of letters in Sinhala as well as the leading
novelist in English.
Formative influences
Some of his formative influences were Indian. When he was a schoolboy
at S. Thomas’s College in the 1920s and early 1930s, he came into
contact with Tagore, a collection of whose short stories was a
prescribed text at the college.
The mysticism of Gitanjali made a deep impact on Sarachchandra. He
read of Tagore, and of Santiniketan, the institution Tagore had founded
in Bengal, where the life led by the teachers and students accorded with
Tagore’s credo of ‘high thinking and plain living’ and seemed to
Sarachchandra ideal.
When Sarachchandra was a student at the University College, Colombo,
he saw at the Regal Theatre a performance of the same Tagore dance drama
which Bandaranaike did, and recorded his experience.
Rhythm
During the ballet we saw the great poet Rabinranath Tagore seated on
stage, keeping time with his foot to the rhythm of the music, and
savouring the pleasure given by his creation.
In his long robe and black headgear, with white hair flowing on
either side of his face and a beard that covered his chest, he was an
impressive individual with an aura of majesty about him. To see him in
the flesh was happiness of a sort I had never hoped for.
Shortly afterwards, Sarachchandra witnessed Uday Shankar dance, with
his troupe, at the same theatre. Sarachchandra became enchanted by
Bengali music and dance, which he identified as a part of his cultural
heritage, and desired to go to Santiniketan to study it. He succeeded in
doing so. When he returned to Ceylon from India in 1940, he was a
transformed man. He gave up Western dress for the Indian kurta. He was
employed for a while as a Sinhala teacher at S. Thomas’ College. The
young Westernised students there found him amusing and nicknamed him
‘Tagore’, which Sarachchandra considered a compliment.
Wilmot Perera was inspired by Tagore’s Santiniketan and his
association with Tagore himself to found Sri Palee in Horana as a school
for music, dance, the fine arts and allied subjects.
Perera felt the British system of education in Sri Lanka at that time
did not suit Sri Lankans and he favoured traditional learning. He
modelled Sri Palee on Santiniketan and followed Tagore’s system as
practised there. In fact, Sri Palee was launched by Tagore himself in
1934.
Indian literature
In the past 20 years, translators into Sinhala have shown a
remarkable interest in Indian literature, both the literature in English
and the literature in the local languages. Bobby Boteju believes that
one should know the literatures of neighbouring countries before one
ventures further afield. He has devoted himself to translating Indian
short stories and translated over one thousand of these. He was the
first to introduce R.K. Narayan to the Sinhala reading public by
translating Malgudi Days in 1991.
He has translated stories by C. Rajagopalachari, the first Governor
General of India after Independence, and stories by Asokamitran,
originally written in Tamil; stories by Premchand, originally written in
Hindi; stories by Takazi Sivasankar Pillai, originally written in
Malayalam; stories by Tagore, originally written in Bengali; and stories
by numerous other writers.
Translations into Sinhala from the Indian languages have been usually
done via English renderings, but Chinta Lakshmi Sinharachchi has
translated Indian literatures directly from the original languages,
Bengali, Hindi and Urdu.
She has translated Tagore’s Gora from the Bengali, Premchand’s Godani
from the Hindi, Chattopadyaya’s Aranayak from the Bengali, the original
texts of Satyajith Ray’s trilogy, Apparajitho, Pather Panchali and Apu
Sansar.
Among the Indian writers in English, R.K. Narayan has been a
favourite among translators into Sinhala: W.A. Abeysinghe has translated
Swami and Friends; Kulasena Fonseka The Painter of Signs; Milroy
Dharmaratne The Dark Room.
All the translations from Indian literature have been well received
by the Sinhala reading public, probably, because of their relevance,
given the similarities and links between the Indian environment/culture
and the Sri Lankan. It is perhaps too early to think in terms of their
impact on creative writing in Sinhala. But there are already signs of
influence.
During the Kandy period, the phase before British rule in Sri Lanka,
the Sinhalese kings brought wives from South India. As a consequence,
Carnatic music entered Sri Lanka. In more recent times, earlier Sinhala
drama such as the nadagam and nurti use Carnatic music.
Marris College of Music, later named after its founder as the
Bhathkande College of Music, at Lucknow has been, and still is, the
Mecca for oriental musicians from Sri Lanka.
Sunil Shantha, Lionel Edirisinghe and V.S. Wijeratne, all studied
there. On his return, Sunil Shantha became the first popular artiste in
Sinhala music.
Amaradeva, who was Sunil Shantha’s violinist, took off from where
Sunil Shantha left. He adopted a North Indian style and infused an
increased musical content into his songs. Before Sunil Shantha, Sinhala
music as practised by Sedris Master and Rupasinghe Master was based on
Raghadhari music.
The music of popular Sinhala films was often provided by Indians such
as Naushad or copied from India by Sri Lankan singers such as H.R.
Jothipala. Sri Lankan popular Sinhala films were, and still are,
influenced by South Indian cinema/Bollywood. Indian teledramas dubbed in
Sinhala and Hindi songs are popular fare on local television channels.
George Keyt
George Keyt is undoubtedly Sri Lanka’s most famous painter. The
dominant influences on his art were Hindu mythology and literature.
Keyt’s sensuous, stylised art, in turn, had a great impact on younger
painters.
The profound influence of India on Sri Lanka in the field of culture
has been underpinned by political and economic links.
The Sri Lankan Independence movement drew inspiration to a certain
extent from the Indian Independence movement.
There was cooperation between the Indian National Congress and the
Ceylon National Congress. Delegates from Ceylon such as S.W.R.D.
Bandaranaike addressed sessions there, while those from India such as
Gandhi and Nehru addressed sessions here. It was mainly as a consequence
of the militant freedom struggle in India that the less militant Sri
Lanka won its independence.
In the sphere of economics, India is currently Sri Lanka’s biggest
trading partner. In addition to normal trade, there is a Free Trade
Agreement between the two countries. India is one of the major investors
in Sri Lanka.
The interaction of India and Sri Lanka in every sphere – cultural,
economic, political – is now more intense than ever before, while at the
same time both countries are more open to influences from other
countries as well.
Perhaps Mahatma Gandhi has suggested the final wisdom in this
context: “I do not want my house to be walled and my windows to be
stuffed.
I want the culture of all lands to be blown about my house as freely
as possible, but I refuse to be blown off my feet by any one of them.”
I have dwelt on ties that serve to unite Sri Lanka and India, not on
the current forces that are dividing the two countries, in the hope that
that the unifying forces will prove stronger than the divisive factors.
D.C.R.A. Goonetilleke’s recent books include “Salman Rushdie: Second
Edition” (London; New York: Palgrave Macmillan), “Joseph Conrad’s Heart
of Darkness” (London ; New York: Routledge) and “Sri Lankan English
Literature and the Sri lankan People 1917-2003 (Vijitha Yapa). |