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| Sunday, 15 June 2003 |
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Upholding the Great Tradition Sunday Essay by Ajith Samaranayake In perhaps the first tribute to be paid to Guy Amirthanayagam, Indran Amirthanayagam wrote that after the Sinhala Only Act was passed Guy Amirthanayagam felt alienated and unwanted in Ceylon as it still was. As a civil servant reared in the old order and what is more an intellectual and an aesthete brought up in the liberal classical tradition he might have felt this most acutely. So was it the Sinhala Only Act alone which drove so many like Amirthanayagam out of the country to enrich the world at large? The point may only be academic now but the fact was that it was Amirthanayagam's Tamilness (however cosmopolitan he may have been) which led to this final rupture from his homeland. This column has made this point and it need not be reiterated. The Sinhala Only Act enacted by S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike was motivated by good reasons but was finally misguided. It sought to break the monopoly of English over the country's administration and liberate both the Sinhala and the Tamil people from their serfdom to an alien language but only succeeded in enthroning Sinhala as the official language, alienating the Tamil people and perpetuating the sway of English which still remains the dominant cult. While Amirthanayagam acting as a Tamil went into the wider world H.A.I. Goonetilleke waited back. It can be argued that this was because he was a Sinhalese and may have felt more at home but then how many Sinhalese have forsaken their country for the flesh pots if not the intellectual bliss of the West? Rather it was Goonetilleke's devotion to his country whatever vicissitudes it might be facing which made him anchored to Sri Lanka. It was not as if Goonetilleke with his international reputation as a bibliographer and his own wide world outlook was not short of opportunities. Obversely this is not also a criticism of Amirthanayagam who would have genuinely felt himself to be alienated in a suddenly strange post-Sinhala only Sri Lanka and sought the wider world. So they went their different ways, these products of the Peradeniya renaissance, these bright young men, these great white hopes. And one can do no better than produce their own words, ours being lacking in power in this sad twilight. Writing on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of the 'Lanka Guardian' Goonetilleke offered what was virtually a testament of faith. This is what he wrote: "Conformity means death, only protest gives a hope of life." That was Bertrand Russell long ago and never has it been of truer application in Sri Lanka than today. Time was when protest came naturally to those who preferred to be protagonists rather than members of a compromising chorus. But Russell's durable dictum has been stood upon its head - the dissenter is hustled into limbo, while the conformist lives in splendid and secure isolation. Lanka Guardian began on the swelling tide of a supposedly brave new world. In its first ten years it has seen the collapse of old ideals, the disintegration of erstwhile norms of public morals and personal integrity, and the emergence of a social polity dedicated to the preservation of those in power at any cost, it would seem. Your review has stood steadfast in this swirling welter of change and decay, striving to bear aloft the torch of journalistic resilience, and to deliver, through its pages, a discerning commentary on our collective fate. Lanka Guardian may not provide an arena for seditious thought or subversive notions, but its virtuoso insights and sometimes irreverent analyses revive the palsied spirit and lubricate the inarticulate tongue. Long may you survive to offer a restorative tonic in the abiding interests of truth over repose and hope over despair!" Amirthanayagam for his own part wrote thus in his essay 'The Philosophical Meeting of East and West: The contribution of Ananda Coomaraswamy.' Very few of us particularly, in today's world, lumbered as it is with discreteness and irrelevance, are blessed with the synoptic genius, let alone that unremitting attention to the things of the mind and the spirit, which characterized the life of Ananda Coomaraswamy. Being clearly not one of this few, I have always felt when reading him like the beggar at the feast, greedy but unable to savour, let alone digest, the many delights at this rich table of traditional knowledge and wisdom. The feast is God's plenty, as Dryden said of Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales. Even though Coomaraswamy has not yet received as much recognition as his work so clearly merits, he has from time to time been praised in extravagant terms. In India, among the cognoscenti, he is a monumental figure, a star in the constellation of culture heroes. One does not have the right to expect from politicians, prime ministers or heads of state powers of sound judgment about intellectual matters. However, it is gratifying to find that Indira Gandhi - or at least her ghost writer - once ranked him with Tagore in the Indian Pantheon, and that the first prime minister of independent Sri Lanka - or at least his ghost writer - once said of him that to Coomaraswamy as to no other man Sri Lanka owed the stimulus for the revival in modern times of its cultural and spiritual heritage. Radhakrishnan, philosopher and president of India, said of him, "Among those who are responsible not only for the Indian Renaissance but for a new Renaissance in the world, Coomaraswamy holds a pre-eminent position." He counted among his admirers in the West T. S. Eliot, Eric Gill, and Aldous Huxley, who praised him for that extraordinary combination of vast learning and penetrating insight which gave him his unique importance as a mediator between East and West. Genetically and in cast of mind he was a blend of East and West: he considered it his role to discover and expound the tradition which was common, at its deepest layers, to both Eastern and Western art, metaphysics and religion. One of the reasons why he has not been as influential in the academic world as he should be is the fact that his learning and centrality of approach obliterate and straddle over currently established boundaries between academic disciplines, such as aesthetics, art criticism, history of art, metaphysics, philosophy, theology, and so on. Coomaraswamy was not concerned with being an academician or even making a contribution to one or more of several fields of knowledge. Increasingly over the years he was trying to relate all his interests to the central question of what is man that God should be mindful of him, and what is God that man should desire to know him. This blurring of boundaries is naturally resisted by those for whom the prevalence of distinct areas of study is a requirement for the display of specialized excellence, if not for mere survival among the coteries of Academe. I may here mention the case of a graduate student in an American university whose thesis proposal for a doctorate on Coomaraswamy as a philosopher was rejected on the ground that Coomaraswamy was neither in the mainstream of philosophy nor an original philosopher, as though it were more important to be different, unique and even eccentric rather than to build on foundations, so long as they were sound, and to extend the frontiers of knowledge as long as the knowledge remained valid. This incident would not have surprised Coomaraswamy, as he went out of his way to disclaim originality while displaying it in its real sense of "going back to the beginning" for the rediscovery and application to modern times of the traditional knowledge. The charge that Coomaraswamy is not in the mainstream would perhaps have amused Coomaraswamy as in all his endeavours he was concerned only with the "mainstream," in the way he understood it. Another reason for the scant attention paid to Coomaraswamy in academic circles is that he is so much better than the scholars at their own games - his deep knowledge of many languages, Eastern and Western, classical and modern, and his inveterate habit of burdening his lines and encrusting his footnotes with the most thorough and recondite references, in order to prove his argument beyond all possible doubt, is likely to dismay all but the dedicated seeker of knowledge". So Amirthanayagam and Goonethillake went their separate ways. The first went to Hawaii and America while the other stayed at home. While Amirthanayagam was concerned about the cultural processes encompassing the present post-modernist century, Goonethillake while staying in Sri Lanka, questioned the very basis on which the present society is founded. So perhaps in that sense there is no real dichotomy between Amirthanayagam and Goonethillake because whether they lived in Sri Lanka or America they upheld what they believed to be the Great Tradition. |
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