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| Sunday, 31 August 2003 |
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U. Karunatilake's 'Colombo Diary': Political history as poetry Sunday Essay by Ajith Samaranayake U. Karunatilake we have known all these days as a poet who combines perceptive social comment with wit and lyricism, in fact a rare blend which adorned the pages of the 'Lanka Guardian' until its demise and lately those of the 'Daily News'. In 'Colombo Diary' however (Sarasavi Publishers 276 - pages Rs. 350) he reveals himself in a totally different and indeed an intriguing light. These diaries which span the period of 1971 to 1975 with a short personal interlude are not only a chronicle of the times but also throw revealing light on the writer and his own development although by this time he himself has become a middle-aged, bald-headed family man. In this book Karunatilake reveals himself as a professional in the pharmaceutical industry a politically-conscious citizen with distinctly Marxist inclinations and a son, father and family man in our interlocked extended family system and it is this combination of elements which impart its particular distinctiveness and sometimes pathos to his narration. His selection of the 1971-75 period is no arbitrary aberrance. For this was the period of the brave experimentation on the part of the SLFP-LSSP-CP United Front Government of Prime Minister Sirimavo Bandaranaike to take Sri Lanka in the direction of socialism, a project which was rudely interrupted by the April Insurrection mounted by the JVP in 1971 with which this diary begins and indeed provides its major strand. Insurrection The diary opens with the writer attending the funeral of Maud Keuneman, wife and comrade-in-arms of the Communist leader Pieter Keuneman which provides a sombre prelude to the Insurrection which broke out the same night. The juxtaposition is revealing for the writer himself had been a Communist in his student days at the Colombo University (although one would have hoped for some reminiscences of his encounters with such personalities as the later CP (Peking) leader N. Sanmugathasan and G.V.S.de Silva (who with Philip Gunawardena collaborated in the historic Paddy Lands Bill) and is patently sympathetic to the Government and indeed committed in his own professional field of pharmaceuticals, this being the exciting days of the brave Senaka Bibile reforms of the industry. This part of the diary provides a day-to-day account of the Insurgency and posits the idea put forward by the UF leaders that this was a conspiracy to thwart their radical project of socialising large and influential areas of the economy and suggesting that there was a hidden Right-wing hand behind the whole movement, both local and foreign. In the persona of family man Karunatilake immerses himself in the small joys and larger tragedies familiar to any Sri Lankan living in the embrace of an extended family gravitating between his Skeleton Road home in Havelock Town to his father's remote fastness at Wangiyakumbura in the Badulla district (closest big town Welimada). In fact one is struck by the ease with which the writer moves between what would appear to be the self-enclosed worlds of the multi-national pharmaceutical industry (the company he works for having foreigners in key executive positions), the upper middle-class professional world of Colombo and the Uva village where he is very much at home. For a Communist Karunatilake is also quite a traditional Sri Lankan, visiting Wangiyakumbura for the Sinhala Avurudda and observing 'sil' at Vesak while one is also struck by the number of temples he visits both in village and town and the number of high priests he is personally acquainted with. Again for a Communist one is struck by the lack of condemnation in this book of the state which organised Buddhism has assumed in our day and age although admittedly the narration stops at 1975. In fact he is taken aback when he observes the priest at the famous rock temple at Degaldoruwa boiling milk at the dawn of the Aluth Avurudda observing that it was not very edifying to see what was essentially a Brahmin domestic ritual being performed within the precincts of a Buddhist temple apparently oblivious to the fact that many aspects of Hinduism have been willingly incorporated into Buddhism by the clerical Establishment. middle-class life Karunatilake is at his best in evoking the atmosphere and milieu of Sinhala middle-class family life with its plethora of cousins, aunts and uncles, nieces and nephews. It is essentially a picture of leisurely middle-class life in the 1970's today made topsy-turvy by the fast pace of urban living under the pressure of a consumerist order and the rise of a yuppy class quite in contrast to the well-mannered daughters, nephews and nieces inhabiting Karunatilake's world with its settled framework of values although this world is also not without its own occasional rebelliousness and aberrant behaviour demonstrated for example by the adventures of Ramay particularly with the suitor who suddenly descends on her from abroad while she is apparently pledged to somebody else. Certainly the young men and women who flit through the narrative here are by no means the 'goody goody' sort. They don't do too well at their OLs and have to sit again. They have their share of fun but one gets the impression of clean, decent family living belonging to a different age which one feels has been irrevocably lost to us. urban civilisation The turning point in Karunatilake's emotional life comes when from a sheltered middle-class life in Ratmalana he is pitched into life in the wilds of Badulla when his school St. Thomas' College, Mount Lavinia is evacuated to Gurutalawa during the Second World War. His acquaintance with these remote Uva villages is renewed when his father in retirement decides to retreat to Wangiyakumbura where he had earlier bought an allotment of crown land under a 'middle class colonisation scheme'. There is also a happy fate intervening in this transition in the form of a Dutch Buddhist priest who had been convalescing at their home in Ratmalana and moves to an aramaya in Wangiyakumbura built on land donated by the Rate Mahattaya of Divithotawela. So the transition from the metropolis to the outer reaches of urban civilisation until the elder Karunatilake who stubbornly insists on living his own life in retirement dies on his estate and is borne away by his son in a Raymond's hearse for the final rites in Colombo. This cyclical tale of joy and sorrow, triumph and tragedy is told against the backdrop of 1971-75, the years of hope pinned in the United Front's socialist project and its consequent decline. As we have already observed Karunatilake sees the JVP's 1971 adventure as a calculated attempt to sabotage the UF's socialist project and detects the hands of local and foreign capitalist interests behind the youthful rebellion. He even suggests that the JVP had had a hand in trying to stop the General Election of 1970 in which the UF came to power with a decisive mandate and the violence against UNP supporters which broke out soon after the UF's election victory seeing all this as attempts to perpetuate the status quo. This is very much in line with the UF thinking of the time but the writer is not unmindful of the Government's complacent attitude either. In fact this family chronicle is studded with regular political tracts which supply interesting and perceptive comments on the developments of the time. colonial condition Karunatilake advances the interesting and thought-provoking theory that much of our post-Independence woes can be traced to a particular aspect of our colonial condition, namely the fact that the British war effort and the establishment of the SEAC military establishment had siphoned off thousands of gainfully-employed rural folk into the main towns where they subsisted on the wartime currency inflation. After the ending of the war this created a servicing class at the expense of a productive class. As he puts it cogently: 'All that has happened post-1948, and sad to say post-1956, is that these frustrated unproductive layers in our society, have proliferated. 1956 gave an impetus to a fresh malignancy because it interpreted the liberation of the common people as the increase of opportunity for the common people to join the unproductive strata of our society. It was a liberation into stagnancy, a sentimental journey that ended in the job, in the brick and asbestos houses, and the villager's wedding reception at a Tourist hotel, complete with poruwa ceremony and pop music. He is certainly right but unfortunately this massive expansion of the servicing class or the middle class by adding fresh layers to it was what the Welfare State fostered and the common man expected to achieve as his right. By the time the 1970 UF Government was installed this process had been too advanced to be arrested and indeed the 1971 Insurrection which the writer condemns can be seen as the misguided expression of revolt of the second generation of this middle class at being denied what they were fondly made to believe were the fruits of their achievement as educated youth. This is the real pathos of Karunatilake's allegiance to the UF. For example passing the Galle Face green bedecked for the UF's May Day rally in 1973 he utters the following silent prayer. 'A government gets its stature from the people, stop becoming bourgeois, a government with bourgeois ambitions and bourgeois greed. Fall into a more dynamic and confident stride take the people with you, take them out of their petty middle class boundaries to face the frontline in the struggle. Come out of the Mercedes Benz's, come out of the furtive class dreams bred of corruption and fear of the common people. .....If you want people to fight, lead the fight. But remember that you are fighting for them, and not to maintain your hold on them. radical feelings The pathos, of course, is that here the writer is evoking the language of a class struggle which is utterly at odds with the situation which brought the UF government into being. Although admittedly interrupted by the ultra-Left adventurism of the JVP, the UF was not the product of a popular revolution or even an upsurge of radical feelings but merely the outgrowth of a popular it unprecedented parliamentary victory of three heterogenous political parties (admittedly of Left inclinations but which maintained their separate political identities). In such a context it would have been unrealistic to expect the kind of popular identification of the masses with the Government even of the type which obtained in Chile where a decidedly more radical upheaval was crushed and to which Karunatilake devotes considerable attention. 'Colombo diary' then is an amazing work interspersing and cutting between the personal and the political but also investing the personal with a peculiarly social nature. In the Preface the writer says that although appearing nearly 30 years after it was written first nothing has been changed in the text and observes that until the novelists take over the task of depicting the realities of the day the 'poor chroniclers' as he calls his tribe will have to tread the borderland between History and Art, a remark which finds a curious resonance in C. Wright Mills observation quoted in this column only at the beginning of this month that the true vocation of the social analyst is to be found in the combination of biography and history. Here then is such a testament arresting in its social analysis and beautifully written with Karunatilake's characteristic lyricism. |
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