Asia and women's rights

My Sunday visitor was almost frenzied with a compliment he had received recently ie. he was a brilliant writer. National consensus? No. Just a pal's comment but it set him a worthy goal. He would narrate the history of our race for the sake of our children before he takes the final bow.

"Once upon a time there lived a princess named Suppa Devi".

That is how the writer would begin. In fact he was attempting to unfold the story of the origin of the Sinhala race "as told in the great chronicle. How did I come into the picture? Having told the tale in his and mine own language, he wanted me to translate it into English so that it can reach world readership.

How ambitious can humans be!

He was aged, as aged as me. That is why he was concentrating on this sordid tale (pardon me), seething with the most unexpected and at times nauseating stuff. Only one who stood in glorious light was the author of the great chronicle who was extremely frank and opted to tell it all including the incest and the patricide.

A scene from the French Revolution.

Poor man! Here I mean not the famous chronicler, but the poor writer of our times. Let us call him Irugal Appuhamy. He would tell the tale before "he himself kicked the bucket"...What a crude way of putting it! The great race would never coin such an ungallant term for the final departure. They had with their own innovative minds coined for this act, Sanskritised and glorified terms such as Paralokapraptha, Swarga parayana and Kalayatra. The higher the status of the one deceased, the longer the term used for the final exit.

Terrible mess

Let us get back to our main character i.e. Irugal Appuhamy. Poor man! Soon he realised that he had put himself in a terrible mess. In his introduction he states that he is writing for children.

Hanging on to a moral perspective has been very healthy for oriental writers. Instilling Pahan sanvegaya in the reader has always been the norm. But here is a pretty kettle of fish, poor Irugal is coming across.

The main female character who can be easily dubbed the mother of the race is an utterly confused person. There is no doubt about it. Irugal himself is utterly non-confused - replete with immaculate white national costume and a bowed head and school teacher mannerisms. He was very well read too.

He had read almost all the tales of the origins of the races of the world but he had never come across a woman such as Suppa Devi, daughter of the king of Vangha, a principality in North India.

I stopped in my translation and began pondering on this peculiar woman. I am sure Irugal did the same. He was in hot water.

He could never play the role of moral teacher by presenting such a character. Suppa Devi, no sooner she reached the youth phase, hated the orderly life in the palace.

She wished to get out and savour the free external world, just pell-mell. Two pence she cared for the agony of her parents or for her own reputation when as a young damsel, she developed a relationship with a trader plying his caravans from Vangha Desha to the Tamraliipti port, on the Eastern coast of India.

She envied the life of these Tavalamkarayos or caravan traders bulldozing their way in the thick nettled foliage of the Vangha forest and soon envisioning a life of joyous and utter freedom she had joined them!

Womanly virtues

What a tale! What a refutation of womanly virtues and fragile moral platitudes as obedience, respectability, chasteness and what not. Irugal, like me, would have let his mind churn on the matter. But what can be done? Now that he had begun it he had to not only finish it but camouflage it by tenets that smacked of respectability. Irugal now turns crafty and turns Suppadevi into an epitome of yearning for freedom.

He writes, "The princess hated the comforts of the palace. Sometimes from the balcony she would watch rugged looking and muscled men hack trees for firewood in the compound below and wished she was in their company. She also watched the birds flit from tree to tree and watch four footed ones frisk outdoors and earnestly wished that she was one of them."

Soon her wish was granted by the gods for she had surreptitiously joined the team of caravan traders.

The inevitable Femme Fatal was staged when a lion-man attacked the trader team and carried away the princess. The rest is known history and again, not very civilised and readable history.

I remember my son asking me why all that happened is all so unpleasant I remember coining my excuse for the frankness of the chroniclers.

"All island histories are like that. Not only our island history.

What happens is that a few get domiciled in a god-forsaken island and they being humans just breed and breed like a warren or rabbits. Then they imitating the bigger countries already developed develop themselves into what are called nation states.

As if all that is not enough, they or the more enlightened of them begin to fantasise and weave strange stories. From "unacceptable "these stories grow into "acceptable" to cover up the embarrassment that could be caused."

"So is that how the story of Suppadevi got white washed?"

Liberty

"Yes. Centuries before the French revolutionaries began to scream out the catchwords of "Liberty! Equality and Fraternity" copied from essays of writers as Voltaire and Rousseau, Suppa Devi did not stop at hollering the words but had put them into practice "...But now Irugal like me sits in a tight corner wondering how to complete the white washing process. No. My job is only to translate the stuff the author has written but one feels sorry for him for it is certainly a gargantuan task, the whitewashing of Suppa Devi, a capsule of hot headed and fiery urge to be just free and libertine.

And this, if one goes to consider Suppa Devi as the earliest female (or even male) Asian advocate of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity, it is rather strange that the only positive role played by females in Europe as regards the materialisation of this concept is staged as late as the 18th century when Olympe De Gouges, a French freedom fighter puts out the Declaration of the Rights of Women.

So, Asia comes first again.