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| Sunday, 10 August 2003 |
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A fragment of autobiography SUNDAY ESSAY by Ajith Samaranayake Today I shall be 49 years old. When this mewling puking infant came upon this world in the August of 1954 it was the first anniversary of the Hartal, the first popular uprising since Independence. In fact my mother still recalls that when they were on their way to their home-coming the previous year the Colombo-Kandy road had been festooned regularly with pandals, not to welcome the happily-married couple but in honour of the newly-installed Prime Minister Sir John Kotalawela (Mr. Dudley Senanayake having stepped down from that office in the aftermath of the events) who had visited Kandy the previous day to take part in the ritual observances at the Dalada Maligawa and to pay his mandatory obeisance to the Mahanayake Theras of the Malwatte and Asgiriya chapters of the Siam Nikaya. This is not an essay in self-indulgence or even nostalgia. It is a modest attempt at writing part of our history, a partial peep at a time when the country was still at relative peace before the storm broke and Sri Lanka was violently wrenched away from the roots of our childhood days. Social biography I suppose I am a child of 1956, that memorable but also in retrospect fateful year. But not perhaps a child of 1956 falling into the popular typology of that term. In his autobiography recently released Gunasiri Silva (who sub-titles his book as the social biography of the 1956 generation) says that he felt alienated at Isipathana Vidyalaya feeling that he came from the lower middle class in what he thought was basically a middle-class milieu. In my case I suppose it would have been the reverse. Because studying at Trinity College, Kandy I was in an upper middle-class milieu surrounded by all the badges and emblems of a British public school. My classmates were all sons of planters, land owners, Kandyan aristocrats, or professionals such as doctors, engineers, lawyers, academics or upper-grade public servants, the cream of the upper middle class in those leisurely 1960's when the storm had yet to break. As a fee-levying private school under the wing of the Anglican Church the school was rightly or wrongly viewed as a bastion of class privilege and I recall our Sinhala teacher Esperance Ratwatte saying how he as a student not that long ago had heard fiery speeches at a public meeting at the Kandy Town Hall demanding that the school next door should be nationalised and its portals presumably thrown open to the sons of the workers and the peasants. Certainly they were leisurely times of work and play, of the Trinity-Anthonian Big Match at Cricket and the gladiatorial combat for the Bradby Shield at Rugger, a time when many of us were wholly cut away from the mainstream of life and the currents of the day with only Mr. Saman Herath Chandrasiri the rugged Sinhala teacher and a fiery speaker to stir some kind of social awareness in the breasts of the complacent and the idle. A few of us would go to the D.S. Senanayake Memorial Public Library and read George Orwell or Arthur Koestler but most of the others only read comics or James Hadley Chase if they read anything at all. Meanwhile, we were being groomed to dutifully follow in the footsteps of our fathers (pater was the more favoured word) and become planters, doctors, engineers. But yet the storm was gathering. Dominant language In another sense the more sensitive of us may have felt somewhat alienated because we were caught between two cultural worlds. Apart from the English language we were taught all our other subjects in Sinhala but English was the dominant language, the lingua franca of the school, the language of the assembly and the Prize Day until the late E.L. Fernando came and ruptured that holy tradition somewhat. But all about us society was changing, Sinhala was coming into its own, a new generation of the middle-class was on the rise (signalled most strikingly by a humiliating defeat at Rugger at the hands of the arriviste Isipathana Vidyalaya) and even the social composition of the school population was changing with the arrival of the sons of the new rich. Governments had come and gone, Sinhala had been enthroned as the official language of education and English thrown on the scrap heap except at schools like Trinity. The universities were becoming overcrowded and the Colombo University was even extended up to the old Race Course (promptly giving rise to the jibe 'Asva Vidyalaya!) and the springs of white-collar employment for which the middle-class and lower middle-class Sinhala-speaking youth had been educated were drying up at an alarming rate. An international expert Dudley Seers came and compiled a report. Mr. Dudley Senanayake, by then Prime Minister again, proclaimed a Green Revolution, a slogan was coined weaving the tank and the temple (wewai dagobai) and life went on much the same. The Bradby Shield was won and lost, won again and lost again. Came 1971 and the JVP insurrection when disillusioned rural and urban lower middle-class youth whose Great Expectations had been exploded by a tottering Welfare State took up the 'gal katas' and the Molotov cocktail. A curfew was declared but the privileged of Colombo who could afford to get curfew passes (the SP is my cousin no child) actually had curfew parties till the wee hours of the morning when a desperate populace would come on to the empty streets to buy their scanty provisions before the curfew was clamped again. Young men were killed, many were imprisoned and an impressive scheme of rehabilitation was proudly announced. The Ceylonese Revolution which the LSSP and the CP (by now partners of the Government with the SLFP) had preached for years had fizzled out in a pathetic putsch. Mixed economy Much of what followed is recent history which does not need much recalling. The mixed economy which had broadly prevailed up to 1970 under both the UNP and the SLFP was substantially replaced by an autarchic economic system, fearful and inward-looking, which its critics said was really a form of state capitalism. The LSSP whose Finance Minister Dr. N.M. Perera had called for the capture of the commanding heights of the economy was ejected from the Government for recalling the Hartal the very year I joined Lake House as a cub reporter, 22 years after that event which had prefigured my parents' marriage. Came 1977 and Mr. J.R. Jayewardene who had been waiting in the wings all that time since Independence, biding his time and wearing his Sphinx-like look in and out of Parliament, became Prime Minister and then promptly President. The autarchic system was suddenly thrown open to all comers and the President himself gleefully declared 'Let the Robber Barons come.' Ministers Ronnie de Mel and Lalith Athulathmudali presided over the free market economy and open trade respectively and Mr. de Mel suddenly remembered from his varsity days an old English saga Hayek who had written a tome titled 'Road to Serfdom.' The Executive Presidency was enthroned, the Opposition decimated by a disappointed electorate and for the first time a Tamil leader, Appapillai Amirthalingam, was Leader of the Opposition. A second Presidential Election was held which Mr. Jayewardene won (former Prime Minister Sirimavo Bandaranaike's civic rights having been taken away) and a Referendum was also held and won by the ruling party. Then came that fateful July 20 years ago to this year which hardly any pundit cared to comment on last month. The Tiger movement became a full-blown guerilla force and then even took the form of a conventional Army. India intervened and was beaten back but not before the JVP again took to arms under a patriotic flag but was trampled in dust and blood and its whole hierarchy decimated. The rest is even more recent history until today an uneasy peace prevails over the island under a dyarchy with the President and the Prime Minister coming from two different political parties and the Tigers now in the open but yet to show any positive signs of accommodation. So what does all this rigmarole have to do with my being 49 years today. In self defence I can only quote the eminent American sociologist the late C. Wright Mills who in his book 'The Sociological Imagination' written in 1959 a mere three years before his death made the following observation. 'The sociological imagination enables us to grasp history and biography and the relations between the two in society. That is its task and its promise. To recognise this task and this promise is the mark of the classic social analyst.' Certainly I am no social analyst but here is a biography of a sort and history of a sort. The autobiography is that of a young man born into the leisurely milieu of the 1950s who now on the threshold of middle age watches the society he knew being torn at its seams. Equal opportunity The history is that of a country which with early universal adult franchise, free education, a high rate of literacy, an impressive Welfare State and a seemingly solid two-party system (in which even the Left acquiesced) has lost its way and gropes in a maze of its own sorry making. So where does biography and history meet and leave its bitter fruit. If we had given the young of all communities an equal opportunity without soiling ourselves with racist or religious slogans could not this eruption have been contained? If we had continued with a balanced mixed economy and what is more revived agriculture which had been laid low during colonial rule wouldn't there have been an indigenous economic efflorescence? If a genuine sense of nationhood cutting across barriers of race, religion, caste and tribe had been fostered at the very dawn of Independence could not the fratricidal blood-letting of the recent past have been avoided. If the study of English had not been myopically abandoned by a chauvinistic political class, who nevertheless taught their own children the Queen's tongue, would a whole generation today be in a state of intellectual impoverishment and spiritual poverty? If we had been able to shed our outworn neo-colonial skin and evolve an indigenous way of life of our own would we be in this moral morass? But most importantly if we had had genuine leaders who could offer a true vision for a newly-resurgent country rather than mouth empty slogans to gather votes would not Sri Lanka have been a better place? So 49 years gone but only questions and no answers. Next year I shall be 50 and perhaps I shall say with T.S. Eliot, that poet of the bleak urban landscape, 'I grow old, I grow old, I shall wear the ends of my trousers rolled.' SOURCE: The quotation from C. Wright Mills is from page 12 of his book 'The Sociological Imagination' first published by the Oxford University Press, New York in 1959 and re-issued by Pelican Books in 1970. At the time of his death in 1962 he was Professor of Sociology at Columbia University. POSTSCRIPT: I have perhaps done an unconscious injustice to Trinity's language policy in saying that English was dominant. For the fact was that all the classes were mixed consisting of Sinhalese, Tamils, Muslims and Burgers and in my third standard class even the Vice Principal's English son, Peter Burrows, and we parted only to do our subjects in our separate mother tongues. This certainly fostered brotherhood so that English had necessarily to be the lingua franca. But where are those classmates of mine now in this grey twilight and anyway how easily that camaraderie of the classroom became ruptured under the pressure of terrible forces? |
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