Editorial

Security

Politics

World

Letters

Sports

Obituaries

Archives

Tradition in the age of Mammon

SUNDAY ESSAY BY AJITH SAMARANAYAKE

In an autobiographical piece in this collection of essays 'Through My Asian Eyes' S. Pathiravitana recalls how he had studied English at Ananda College under Mr. Cathigesan, one of the greatest secondary school English teachers of his time.

This was in the twilight of colonialism when nationalist feelings were very much in the Ananda air but English was still the key to open any door of importance. But the English language and poetry which was imparted was heavily lop-sided for it gave a flattering view of the imperial conqueror as against the cowed down native.

For example take the lines 'Oh East is East and West is West and never the twain shall meet' on the strength of which Kipling has been branded for centuries as the quintessential imperialist. But as Pathiravitana points out this is not the whole picture. Kipling also wrote: 'But there is neither East nor West, Border nor Bread nor Birth/When two strong men stand face to face, tho 'they come from the ends of the earth' which gives a completely different colouration to the poem. In the same essay he makes the point that Thomas Gray's 'Elegy written in a Country Church Yard' had always moved him with its wistfulness of atmosphere, rhyme and rhythm because the 18th century England which it evokes can be identified with by any sensitive reader familiar with a Third World countryside and the lot of its poverty-stricken peasant.

This then is the perennial dilemma faced by the English-educated intellectual. Much of the early cultural baggage which came to Ceylon in the luggage compartments of colonialism was romantic literature and poetry of the most mawkish kind or tales about the chivalrous doings of knights in armour. But the more sensitive young men and women of the time who were discovering the language were also to discover as the writer did the poetry of not merely Shakespeare but also that of Yeats and Eliot, Auden, MacNeice and Spender.

There is also the whole question of whether a person who is not born an Englishman can ever acquire the language in all its depth, nuances and complexity however versatile he may be as a scholar or however sensitive he may be as a writer or poet. This Pathiravitana addresses himself to in two essays about Lafcadio Hearn, an American who disillusioned with the western ways had struck out to Japan and had long been an English teacher there. He was, however, faced with a different kind of Kiplingsque dilemma, how one interprets the West to the East and vice and versa.

Apparently there is no way out for just as an American will not be able to communicate with a Japanese, a Japanese sympathetic to the western way of life will also not be able to communicate with the Japanese themselves. For as Hearn says: 'For in proportion he (the Japanese) should find himself in sympathy with western life, to that extent he would become less and less able to communicate that sympathy to the (Japanese) students.'

As an example of this incomprehension Hearn cites the question posed by one of his students who can not understand why there is so much about love and marrying in English novels. To this student it seemed very strange to the Japanese mind. In the same vein Pathiravitana observes that an English - educated lover would find it near impossible to say 'I love you' to his beloved if she were educated entirely in Sinhala. He certainly has a point when one considers the artificiality of words like 'alaya' and 'premaya' which were used in the early Sinhala film songs which were anyway copies of South Indian lyrics but there is certainly a richer diction in folk literature as the writer demonstrates in his essay 'The Unknown Poet.'

But as a writer expressing himself most substantially in English is it Pathiravitana's contention that one can not express oneself properly or entirely in English unless one is an Englishman (which none of us can hope to be except those absurd mimic men who might nurse such fond hopes) ? Again he quotes Hearn: 'But none of you can hope to be eloquent in any of a tongue than your own, or to move the hearts of people by writing in a language which is not your own. With an oriental language for a mother tongue, the only hope of being able to create literature in a foreign language is in totally forgetting your own. But the result would not be worth the sacrifice.'

Are we then to stop writing entirely in English and depend on imprecise translations into English of our Sinhala works to take their place alongside world literature? And how many of our intelligentsia (however loudly they might profess bilinguality) will be able to express themselves with clarity and chasteness in Sinhala. But what I feel Pathiravitana is saying, although not in so many words, is that what we can hope at best to achieve is to write a kind of accomplished English to communicate with the rest of the world. This I gather from the advice of Hearn's which he quotes: 'And here let me utter a word of warning as to the uselessness of trying to study style in modern English authors.'

The main motif of this collection, however, lies in Pathiravitana's exposition of the traditionalist view of which he has been something of a lone champion in Sri Lanka from the time we remember. Here he is fighting on two fronts. On one hand he has to disabuse and demystify the use of words like 'orientalism' which seek to give a false aura to the whole idea. In 'Seeking Truth', an essay on Rene Geunon for example, Pathiravitana says that Geunon had to 'clear the storehouse of Eastern wisdom of a lot of spiritual lumber that had accumulated in recent years.'

Having thus cleared the lumber house of ideas, the writer, following on not merely Coomaraswamy and Geunon but also Marco Pallis gets to the crux of the matter. In the piece last week I referred to caste which has set the traditionalists apart from the rest of the present liberal, democratic and social-democratic herd. Reviewing 'The Unanimous Tradition,' that Festchrift produced by Ranjit Fernando of the Sri Lanka Institute of Traditional Studies (who has single-handedly held aloft the banner of Traditionalism from his reclusive enclave at Dharmapala Mawatha in a society going in the direction of the very antithesis of Tradition) Pathiravitana writes: 'Though there were distinctions like caste and class there was also a unanimity among the people in accepting that way of life.

Only degrees of refinement separated folk from aristocratic culture, but in outlook and attitude they were one.' Again in his essay on Coomaraswamy (on the occasion of the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts bringing out his selected letters, something which our own cultural panjandrums should have done for this most outstanding of Sri Lankan scholars) Pathiravitana observes: "The second was the time he lived in, which paid greater attention 'to the needs of economic man' while neglecting the 'religious man.' It could be said that his mission in life was to reconcile the two, which were drifting apart, and increasing the confusion of our age. In this he has been misinterpreted as wanting to put the clock back, but as he himself in answering these charges has said, he was only attempting to put the clock forward to a 'a brighter noonday.'"

Those last three words also suggest the style of the man for Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy, born to an aristocratic Jaffna Tamil father and an English mother, was one of the best stylists of his time although his philosophy may have been too demanding for the likings of many. But in today's materialist world ruled by the gadget and the television commercial and where man's requirements are artificially created and induced by advertising until he becomes alienated from himself Coomaraswamy's words ring with clairvoyant resonance.

But in a world which is under the hegemony of Mammom, that all-consuming ugly beast, that godhead to which our rulers, policy-makers and even the intelligentsia bend their pathetic knees is it possible to bring about the unity of 'economic' and 'religious' man for which Coomaraswamy stood, return to that immanent deity, the Common Man is every man, the same as Daemon of Socrates, that Natho in the Dhammapada line, 'aththahi aththano natho' (The Self is the lord of the self) which Coomaraswamy envisaged in that past now inexorably erased by the juggernaut of non-traditional ways?

For all Pathiravitana's despair of a non-English man ever being able to write good English his style is clear-headed and felicitous and shot through with his own quiet sense of irony and wit. He eschews the kind of cerebral brilliance which the late Mervyn de Silva (whom elsewhere I have called the last great stylist) one suspects assumed sometimes for effect but is among a very few who writes elegant English today.

Finally a personal note yet again for the third time in this column, I suppose, in as many weeks. It was S. Pathiravitana who as Features Editor carried my first serious piece of writing in the 'Daily News' in 1974 when the paper was edited by Mervyn de Silva.

In a sense then this is the debt of gratitude to a 'guru' if Mr. Pathiravitana would allow me the use of that term. This collection of essays spanning half a century is proof of his steadfastness in adhering to the ideals of a more decent society underpinned by Tradition (shared by all our communities until they were violently torn asunder) although Pathi has known that for most of the time he has had to tenaciously swim against the tide, an exercise which oddly enough he may even have enjoyed at times.

www.crescat.com

News | Business | Features | Editorial | Security
Politics | World | Letters | Sports | Obituaries

Produced by Lake House
Copyright 2001 The Associated Newspapers of Ceylon Ltd.
Comments and suggestions to :Web Manager