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India to be the largest English speaking country

Address at the Gratiaen Prize award ceremony, by Prof. Senake Bandaranayake

This is perhaps the first time since my student years that I have had a formal contact, even if only briefly, with the world of English literature. I must say at the outset that I have no special knowledge or insight in this field.

I have no intention, therefore, of saying anything about creative writing in Sri Lanka, or elsewhere - especially in the presence of so many skilled practitioners and critics. I will instead use the opportunity to present a few casual thoughts on two somewhat related matters: the place of English in Sri Lanka today, and a periodisation of Sri Lanka's intellectual and cultural history in the 20th century.

We have seen the Gratiaen Prize gathering momentum through the years, and I am sure that this year's short list and award will push that enterprise more than one step forward. The Gratiaen has become, within its constituency, one of the special literary and intellectual events of the year. That constituency itself is the English-speaking, English-reading, English-interested public, a bi-lingual or multi-lingual social group.

This now numbers, we are told, between one and one-and-a-half million. That is a sizeable catchment, and I think we may assume that at least a tenth or twentieth of that number, are readers of contemporary literature.

The use of English

Our business world, of course, uses English as the medium of communication, not only at boardroom and managerial levels, but even at the metropolitan shop counter. The world of Sri Lankan politics has always been multi-lingual, but English remains the language of high-level, operational, policy and decision-making.

The universities, which originally championed the cause of the national languages, as the key instrument in cultural decolonisation and the overthrow of hegemony, have now turned their attention to the strategic importance of English-medium education. It is now clearly recognised that English has a key role in access to information; to international discourse; in all fields of the natural, applied, rational and social sciences, and even in the arts and humanities.

It has a particular function in the democratisation of cultural capability and the encouragement of conceptual, analytical and critical thinking. Similarly, English language teaching at primary and secondary school level is being revived. The English tuition class, in a variety of forms, is becoming a widespread phenomenon in rural and provincial centres.

Looking beyond our shores, the South Asian subcontinent, is one of the world's key English-speaking zones. In the not-too-distant future, India will surely become the largest English-speaking country in the world. English-language publishing in India, Indian critical and analytical discourse in various fields, and South Asian creative writing, especially the contemporary novelists, are phenomena of global scope and significance.

At the other end of the scale, we have the situation in Bhutan, the kingdom of the Thunder Dragon. On a recent journey across this Himalayan state - one of the last societies in Asia which still offers us what we might call 'living history' - I was pleasantly surprised to find that it had been official policy since the 1960s that both primary and secondary education was universal, compulsory and entirely in English.

Even the youngest school child in some remote village, impeccably dressed in Bhutanese national costume, quite readily and competently spoke with us in English, as did almost everybody of the younger generation.

Back in our own Sri Lankan context, there are, as many of you would know, major plans to revitalise English teaching and the use of the English medium in schools and universities, after nearly four decades of relative neglect.

There is quite a lot of discussion about how to make English available and effective in universities. This is not the occasion - and, in fact, somewhat beyond my competence - to discuss those issues here, but rather to use all these as indicators that we are now entering a period in which there are great expectations of a national resurgence in the use of English. It is in that broad context that I would locate the Gratiaen prize and its very direct encouragement of creative writing in English in Sri Lanka, which will become increasingly important over the years.

The world of literature, of the literary imagination, of creative writing and critical discourse lies at the heart of the revival of English usage, in ways that one may not immediately associate with literary activity.

Many of those who belong to what I call the first and second generation of Sri Lanka's post-Independence scholars and intellectuals, had their early intellectual training in the traditions of English literary criticism of the Colombo-Peradeniya school, either directly as students of the 'Ludowyk' - New Criticism circle, or indirectly, as in my own case, with sixth form teachers who were brilliant products of that 'school'.

There is no more obvious an example of the width and intellectual calibre of this Ludowyk-Leavis-Scrutiny-New Criticism intellectual training than the Chairman of the Gratiaen Trust, himself, who is a distinguished planner, administrator, institution builder and writer, produced by that tradition.

Others who graduated from the English Department in the University of Ceylon - or who came under its influence - whose names come easily to mind are, in alpha order, Upali Amarasinghe, Guy Amirthanayagam, Richard Attygalle, Yasmine Gooneratne, Ian Goonetilleke, Ashley Halpe, Dick Hensman, Gananath Obeyesekera, Mervyn de Silva, Regi Sirivardana, and Jeyaraj Thambiah, all of whom are writers, analysts, commentators, or scholars, of high quality, whose work is on record. (I am sure there are others we should include in such a list).

Intellectual tradition

One of the fundamentals of this academic tradition, apart from its emphasis on the general development of sensibility, was the critical and analytical technique associated with the New Criticism school known to us as 'practical criticism'. Although we may now see the limitations, the closed-circuit nature of Practical Criticism, for many of us it was our first encounter, while we were already in the fifth and sixth forms at school - with what we would now associate with 'deconstruction'.

We learnt to pull apart an imaginative construct, see how it was structured, how it worked, to probe its associative and evocative connections and hidden meanings, evaluate its strengths and inadequacies.

A major strand in the contemporary history of intellectual and creative activity in Sri Lanka, was the formation of the intellectual tradition represented by the alumni of the University of Ceylon in the 1940s and 1950s, and their contemporaries who went to university abroad, or were intellectually or creatively active in extra-university contexts.

Standing as we do on the threshold of the 21st century, we have an excellent vantage point from which to look back at the cultural and intellectual history of the 20th century in Sri Lanka. Although I have written about this elsewhere, it has been in relatively obscure contexts, so please bear with me if I repeat myself.

I would like to place before you the notion that the generation of the 1940s and 1950s was the first generation of modern intellectuals in Sri Lanka. This proposition and periodisation needs some explanation.

The idea of a first generation of modern intellectuals emerging in this country only as late as the 1940s is perhaps a startling proposition! What I mean by this is that this was the first time Sri Lanka produced an entire body, an entire generational group of modern intellectuals, in substantial quantities, who were both entirely and distinctively Sri Lankan and, at the same time, in full possession of varied aspects of modern knowledge and contemporary culture, at its highest levels.

Of course, long before this generation of the 1940s, there were outstanding individuals who were modern intellectuals, in the sense that I am using here. Perhaps the earliest was Simon Casie Chitty, who was active from about the 1820s. (Another, even earlier, although he mostly lived in Europe, was quint Ondaatje, pamphleteer, essayist and one of the principal agents of the French revolution in the Netherlands.) James d'Alwis wrote his introduction to the Sidat Sangarava in 1852, the same year in which the zoologist E. F. Kelaart published his 'Fauna Zeylanica' (Prodomus Faunae Zeylanicae). D. M. de Z. Wickremasinghe began his career in London and Oxford as an epigraphist in 1891 and Ananda Coomaraswamy's pioneering work in geology and cultural history started around 1898. W. A. Silva, who launched the realist Sinhala novel, wrote Siriyalatha in 1907 and his outstanding work Lakshmi in 1922.

Almost of the same generation were the historian Sir Paul E. Pieris and the essayist and visionary, Sir Ponnambalam Arunachalam. A period of considerable intellectual creativity was the inter-war years of the 1920s and 30s, when scholars like Paranavitana and Malalasekara began their careers. This era also saw the emergence of the early modernists like Martin Wickremasinghe, Lionel Wendt, Justin Daraniyagala and George Keyt, choosing a few representative figures in literature and art.

They were 'giants in their time' and made lasting contributions to the intellectual and cultural history of the country. But they were only outstanding individuals, mountains in a relatively flat landscape. From this distance of time, they do not strike us as part of an entire generational group of intellectuals.

The post-war, post-Independence generations were very different. Not only was there an exponential increase in intellectual and imaginative activity, there was also a level and quantum of original thinking, of creative originality, rare in earlier decades. Moreover, this extends over a whole range of fields - such as the academic world, the sciences, literature, theatre, painting, film, architecture. Most important of all, we have an entire Sri Lankan constituency for such activity.

Thus, the songs of Ananda Samarakoon and Sunil Shanta, Sarachchandra's Maname, Lester James Peries' Rekawa, or Martin Wickremasinghe's Viragaya reverberate through the entire country.

Two outstanding developments of this generation, of both national and international significance, were the paintings of the '43 Group and the Sri Lankan school of modern architecture associated with Geoffrey Bawa and Minette de Silva. An early beacon of those times, almost forgotten today but with a deep and hidden influence, was the critical review Community, edited by Dick Hensman. All this had an originality and an artistic, literary and intellectual reach unprecedented in previous decades.

New intelligentsia

In the universities, at home and abroad, the work of the new intelligentsia, in the field of the national languages, in cultural, religious and social studies, and in the natural sciences, reach entirely new heights, and have a wide impact. K. N. Jayatilleke's work on Buddhist Philosophy, Sugathapala de Silva's research on Sinhala linguistics, Kailasapathy's on Tamil literature, Adikaram, Rahula, and Jayawickrama in Pali and Buddhist Studies, S. J. Thambiah and Gananath Obeyesekera in Anthropology, George Thambyahpillai in climatology, Chandrasena in natural products chemistry, Eliezer in theoretical physics, Gnanalingam's work on the ionosphere, Ponnamperuma in the biochemistry of the origins of life, Kovoor in cell and molecular biology. (The absence of women in this generational list stands out.)

My selection is representative, not exhaustive. I am sure each one of us will have our own nominations. But those I have listed are not just outstanding achievements; they are achievements marked by a very high level of scholarly or scientific originality, in both national and international contexts.

What is most important, however, is that they are no longer isolated peaks in a flat landscape, but part of an extensive mountain terrain.

They are the apex of an intellectual pyramid which includes a whole host of other scholars and professionals: university professors, teachers, lawyers, doctors, engineers, administrators, journalists, businessmen, managers, institution builders, politicians, social activists, too many even to name a few examples. They form the principal players in Sri Lanka's internal intellectual history in contemporary times, a subject which deserves far more attention than it has had hitherto.

Mountain terrain

Moreover, this generation of the '40s and '50s, replicated itself and expanded with the second post Independence generation, that of the 60s and 70s, my own generation. I won't name names - and there are so many - but I believe that those of us who were in school in the 40s and 50s, and who graduated in the 60s and 70s, and our contemporaries outside the university environment, certainly built on, broadened and, I hope, significantly deepened the work of our predecessors.

In a convenient, generational calibration of twenty-year slots, the next period is that of the 80s and 90s. It is much too early, too close up, to assess or discuss, except imperfectly, the intellectual and imaginative topography of the creative work and intellectual product of the emerging generations of the last twenty years or so - and much depends on one's own standpoint and fields of activity - especially at a time when relativism reigns supreme. But whether the dynamic has slackened, or changed in ways we do not quite understand, is an issue that we need to address.

So much for this thumbnail sketch of aspects of the intellectual history of Sri Lanka in the 20th century. I would like to end with a few random observations on the contemporary moment. Unlike in the immediate Independence and post-Independence era, the universities are no longer the epicentre of intellectual activity in the way that they were.

Nevertheless, I have several brilliant young university colleagues, and in my own field of archaeology and archaeological heritage management, we have not only seen an exponential increase in professional practice and new institutional developments, but we have also produced a successor generation, the scope and depth of whose work in several areas is new or more advanced than our own.

Similarly, in contemporary painting we have seen an exciting post-modernist bouleversement from the profound, modernist art of the '43 Group, especially in the work of Jagath Weerasinghe and the Vibhavi and IAS artists.

The architectural style of the Sri Lankan modern school may not have produced a real succession, but we still have - as in Anjalendran's colourful buildings or Lalin Collure's new Boulder Garden hotel - work that is as good or better than that of the first and second generation. But are there parallel developments on an exponentially increasing scale and an incremental quality in other fields, as there should be? I leave you with that question!

A beacon, a banner

We could end where we began. Although I said I will say nothing about literature, I would like to add to my reckoning the extraordinary work of the contemporary writers of the diaspora: Michael Ondaatje, Yasmine Gooneratne, Romesh Gunasekara, Shyam Selvadurai, all of whom draw constant sustenance from their Sri Lankan roots. This is sometimes matched by that of those who remained at home, such as Lakdasa Wikkramasinha and, no doubt, others. It is in the pursuit of this latter project that the Gratiaen Prize appears as a kind of beacon, a banner, a lighthouse, a calibration.

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