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| Sunday, 1 June 2003 |
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Concluding 'The gods that failed': The testament of an outsider Sunday Essay by AJITH SAMARANAYAKE
The partial unreality of the kind of cloistered intellectual world inhabited by Indira and her father is demonstrated by the father's inquiry whether maintaining diaries was a strictly Sinhala practice. It is Dr. Weerasinghe's opinion that this was a practice of the Victorian upper classes which had seeped into Sinhala society as a result of colonial influences. Adopting a sociological approach Upali suggests that this was a device widely used by Sinhala novelists and this might have influenced a literary young man such as Nimal to maintain a diary. It is Upali's view that the cultural practices of the emerging rural Sinhala middle class were heavily influenced by literature and he cites as examples the writings of Anagarika Dharmapala and Piyadasa Sirisena. It is Upali's argument that the generation represented by Nimal and his own generation are really two sides of the same coin with the one difference that the younger generation does not have the same analytical power as the one preceding it. The point, however, is that the previous generation was fortunate enough to escape the hopelessness which stared the next generation in the face in a situation of economic contraction and the explosion of the expectations which the Welfare State had fostered in them and their parents. As a would-be engineer Nimal might have been luckier than the rest who as Arts students would be condemned to unemployment and a bleak future. Bourgeois intellectual
Upali's generation was also fortunate in the sense that they escaped the mono-lingual fate of the generation which followed. In the case of Nimal's generation their intellectual horizons are necessarily circumscribed by the fact that they only understand Sinhala and this is what compels Indira to start reading the Sinhala novels which form the substance of the emotive life of a sensitive young man such as Nimal. But as Indira finds out to truly discover the essence of a work of art such as a novel one must be sensitive to the very pith and essence of the tongue, the subtleties and nuances of the language. This Indira is unable to attain because of her bourgeois background and immersion in western culture. It is significant for example that for all her Marxist ways she continues to refer to her mother and father as mummy and daddy throughout this book. Her father, Dr. Weerasinghe, is portrayed as a typical bourgeois intellectual of the type who gave leadership to the LSSP in its early years. Thoroughly immersed in Marxist literature and western culture he speaks in English to Indira and all his friends and uses Sinhala only on the political platform. It is not that Dr. Weerasinghe's generation is dishonest or bogus. To them English is the language of their deepest emotions, products as they are of colonial education, and in hindsight he even feels in his old age that embracing Marxism as students in England they were perhaps trying to assert their superiority over their colonial masters just as a different segment of Ceylonese leaders became fierce nationalists such as P. de S. Kularatne and Dr. Gunapala Malalasekera.
In fact this hints at the relationship between Indira's own parents for it is offered as a microcosm of the kind of marriage contracted in the 1930's between Ceylonese young men who had gone to England for higher education and young English women driven by a sense of identification with the oppressed people of the colonies. Thus the marriage between Dr. Weerasinghe and the young Jewish student who had been a live-wire of the Asian Socialist Circle centred on the London School of Economics is part of a line of such real-life marriages such as those between Dr. and Mrs. Malalasekera, Mr. and Mrs. P. De S. Kularatne, Dr. and Mrs. A. P. de Soysa and Dr. and Mrs. S. A. Wickramasinghe. As the product of such an union Indira is doubly removed from the mainstream of Sinhala society for she is not only westernised but also comes of mixed blood and this is what gives its particular poignancy to the photograph she treasures of the three of them taken opposite Wordsworth's home in the Lake District during their last visit to England. The ambience of the Wordsworth residence imparts the requisite romantic glow to what proves to be a somewhat melancholy family group for Mrs. Weerasinghe succumbs soon after to a terminal illness. This romantic aura of earlier generations contrasts oddly with the more plaebian university politics in which Indira and Nimal are engaged as a result of her Marxist education classes. The atmosphere at the university had changed even from the time of that previous generation as represented by Upali until getting a good degree and escaping from the poverty trap becomes the dominant imperative of the average student. As Sira, one of Nimal's political associates, puts it while Indira seeks to implant some worthwhile political philosophy into the minds of the rural university entrants all they want is to escape from their village upbringing and become upwardly mobile. Among this rabble Nimal is defined as an outsider. It is not merely that he feels alienated from the village because of his imitative education but also that within the university itself he chooses to retreat into his own mental world. What is interesting and ironic here is that this mental world is constructed round the fictional works of Amarasekera himself and Sarachchandra, the centrepieces of the Peradeniya canon of the 1950-60's. Sometimes Nimal imagines himself to be Ranatunga, the hero of Amarasekera's much-discussed novel 'Yali Upannemi' later rejected by the author himself. Ranatunga is a young man from a Buddhist milieu who finds it difficult to reconcile his emotional and carnal desires and elects to retreat into a world of the emotions divorced from the gross demands of the body. Is Amarasekera then parodying himself consciously? What does such a young man living in a world of the emotions have in common with a politically-motivated rebel? 'Outsider figure' This is what makes me feel that Nimal is not really a portrait of the radical JVP-type rural youth of the 1970's but rather a projection of the kind of rural middle-class 'outsider figure' who was the stock-in-trade of the Peradeniya fiction. He has more in common with the fictional characters in Amarasekera's own 'Jeevana Suvanda' who feel enervated by the false, imitative, rootless life of the hot-house Jenningsian Peradeniya University of the 1950-1960's rather than the later more politically conscious rebels. It is therefore no accident that the creed Nimal finally advocates is not so much Marxist as a kind of populist-nativistic radicalism, indeed a caricature of Amarasekera's own 'Sanskruthi' thesis of an enlightened rural leadership. What this denotes, concludes Indira, is the possession on Nimal's part of a 'false consciousness' as described by Marx in his 'German Ideology' and his Paris Manuscripts. But what was the origin of this false consciousness? Was it the anomalous position occupied by Nimal's generation in the sense that they were alienated from their village environment but had yet to find a productive or socially useful role? Whatever the reason the novel ends on a fairly hopeful note. Nimal is dead although it is not really established whether it was suicide or homicide spurred by Police violence. However Wicks, a political associate of his, who visits Indira sees a more positive side to events. Describing their university politics as self-deluding and adventurist he nevertheless says that for any useful social change there has to be a synthesis of idealism and intellect or as he puts it 'your mind Indira and our hearts'. Would it be then that the Gods have not quite failed, that there is still room for hope? |
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