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The essayist as patriot

Sunday Essay by Ajith Samaranayake

S. Pathiravitana occupies a peculiar position in English language journalism. For one thing as the note on the back cover of this book of 400 pages says he has worked on three leading English language newspapers in Sri Lanka, the 'Daily News' 'Observer' and 'The Island' editing the first twice and the last and being the features editor of the second.

The English-educated classes should have given the leadership to a more meaningful social transformation but was this possible under the conditions of plantation capitalism and anyway were they of all ready as a class for such a struggle? Pathiravitana makes the valid point that Arunachalam and Coomaraswamy were able to write thus because they were rooted in a more stable tradition, the former as a Hindu and the latter as a proponent of philosophia perennis.

In his book ‘Sinhalese and the Patriots’ Sir Paul countered the notions propagated by the colonial missionaries, bureaucrats and merchants that it was they who civilised the natives. -----------------

He has also had an abiding interest in Sinhala journalism working for the Lake House weekly 'Silumina', 'The LSSP-sponsored 'Janasathiya' and editing his own Sinhala magazine 'Danuma' which in the 1960s was meant to slake the Sinhala reader's thirst for international news and comment. He has mainly been identified with left or left-of-centre positions in the political spectrum but can airily make an observation such as the following:

For that matter, a generation of Ceylonese brought up to look upon their political elders, particularly after the Marxist inspired Suriya Mal movement, as being contaminated by the accident of belonging to what has been called the Comprador Bourgeoisie, has continued to look upon them as being nothing more than the top-hatted tail-coated black Englishman most of them would have wished to be. (A Philosopher-Statesman from 'Through My Asian Eyes - Page 13 - Godage International Publishers (Pvt) Limited, Rs. 650).

Pathiravitana therefore, is best described as a patriot although that is by no means a fashionable term these days but he is not the type (knowing him) to be overtly troubled by such passing intellectual fads and fashions. It is also no accident either that the above sentence should occur in an essay on Sir Ponnambalam Arunachalam for he is the kind of patriot who belonged to a generation before the professional political classes (whether comprador bourgeois or cosmopolitan Marxist) whom the writer admires. It is also no accident that he dedicates this book 'to the memory of Ananda Coomaraswamy and Rene Guenon whose writings have helped me to get my bearings in transiting through the bewildering world of our times.'

This bewildering world of our times is, of course, the last half a century (the period in fact during which these essays were written to newspapers) although also naturally it harks back to the period immediately preceding this time.

Here as I see it Pathirvatana has to grapple with two central issues or rather one dominant dilemma. As a writer practising in English (in fact there are no less than four pieces here on the English language itself) he has to recognise at least tacitly the progressive role played by English in extending our collective intellectual horizons.

But he does not appear to be always happy about the intellectual and cultural baggage which has come down to us with that language and forms much of our contemporary consciousness. For example he quotes thus from Arunachalam who interestingly enough wrote in a message to the first issue of the 'Ceylon Daily News' of January 3,1918. 'Look at the houses in the Cinnamon Gardens. The utterly bourgeois ideal they enshrine, the vulgar show and frippery, aping the suburban villadom of a fourth rate English town. They spread their parasitic influence far and wide and are the greatest obstacle to the Simplification of Life which is our country's most urgent need.'

Here then is the dilemma of the western-educated intellectual. The English came to Ceylon as part of a modernising mission and although Pathiravitana might not agree if not for the colonial penetration of Asia by the British we would be still wallowing in the 'idiocy of rural life' as Marx put it. Marx was clear-headed enough to see that the bourgeois revolution was a necessary instrument to change irrevocably the old and obsolete patterns of Asiatic production and the ossified feudal social relations in which they were contained.

If not for the bourgeoisie we would not have had either the modern factory or the Collected Works of Shakespeare. But rather Pathiravitana's complaint is that the British changed our ways of indigenous life too utterly. Again he quotes Arunachalam; 'There is no doubt that we have all, and especially the English-educated classes, become infected with it. (i.e. materialism). How strenuous we are in our race for wealth and luxury, how little we care as to the means! We hanker for the dividends in rubber and tea out of the sweat of the brow of coolies kept to their tasks by cruel and oppressive laws.

But that precisely was the paradox of the colonial situation. The English-educated classes should have given the leadership to a more meaningful social transformation but was this possible under the conditions of plantation capitalism and anyway were they of all ready as a class for such a struggle? Pathiravitana makes the valid point that Arunachalam and Coomaraswamy were able to write thus because they were rooted in a more stable tradition, the former as a Hindu and the latter as a proponent of philosophia perennis. But that itself entails a return to a stratified society based on caste however much Pathiravitana might try to find virtues in (A.M. Hocart's work 'Caste' can it be applied to a context like today where capitalism is no longer plantation capitalism but neo-capitalism on the global scale of the multi-national corporation?

However, Pathiravitana's essays are a valuable antidote to the kind of mindless worship of everything emanating from the Global Village in the name of modernisation. In his very first essay for example titled '...their country....may retain its celebrated name of Sinhala' he draws attention to the valuable role played by a historian such as the late Sir Paul E. Pieris at the very dawn of Independence to restore a balanced and rounded view of the country as it existed before colonial deprediation. In his book 'Sinhalese and the Patriots' Sir Paul countered the notions propagated by the colonial missionaries, bureaucrats and merchants that it was they who civilised the natives. Tracing the brief period of three and a half years between 1815 and 1818 when the Kandyan chiefs, recognising that they had been duped by the British, rose in rebellion Sir Paul has written 'Abundant details of the incidents of these crowded three and a half years including the last hopeless struggle of bows and arrows against firearms, have been found in unpublished contemporary records and there is no need to suppress them as avowedly John Davy did when he wrote an Account of the Interior of Ceylon in 1821 the people of Ceylon are entitled to know the facts.'

So the Uva Rebellion was crushed and under the Colebrooke-Cameron Reforms a new native class of Brown Sahibs was created. But out of this class also emerged intellectuals such as Arunachalam, Coomaraswamy and Pieris who were not prepared to subscribe to the version of Ceylon history peddled by the White Raj or the materialism which they propagated. But the question is why after the demise of this nascent class of Ceylonese patriotic intellectuals the so-called struggle for freedom passed into the hands of a plaint class of native clients produced by that very imperial economy and battening themselves on the coconut plantations, lumbago mines and the like, that class of Nobodies who became Somebodies in Kumari Jayawardena's memorable phrase? Why was the admittedly strident and flawed Sinhala nationalist campaign of Anagarika Dharmapala and Piyadasa Sirisena allowed to dry up on the sands of time to be supplanted by a new class of mimic men?

(To be continued)

Communist Manifesto: It is always nice to receive letters even if one stands corrected by them. With reference to my comment on August 3 casting doubt on whether the 'Communist Manifesto' had been translated into Sinhala a reader who signs himself merely as ECS informs me that the latest edition of it (published in 2002) is available at Kurulu Poth at 594/1, Nawala Road, Rajagiriya. In fact I stand five times corrected for apart from the present issue it has been translated into Sinhala four times before by E.S. Ratnaweera in 1940, Leslie Goonewardene and K. Ramaswamy also in 1940, Premalal Kumarasiri and Harry Abeygunawardena in 1952 and Dedigama V. Rodrigo in 1976. My infinite regrets for the mistake.

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