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| Sunday, 4 January 2004 |
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Madawala S. Ratnayake: The romantic outsider Sunday Essay by Ajith Samaranayake This article which appeared in this newspaper on January 12, 1997 on the occasion of Madawala S. Ratnayake's death is reproduced on the occasion of his seventh death anniversary which will be marked by a public meeting and a recital of his songs of the Mahaveli Centre on January 8.
Madawala S. Ratnayake who died on Wednesday night at the age of 68 and was cremated on Friday in keeping with his wishes, was the last great romantic of his generation, that generation of young writers who stood in the vanguard and manned the frontiers of the efflorescence of Sinhala letters in the 1950's. Steeped in the folklore and mythology of the village Ratnayake saw life through a romantic haze which he gave memorable utterance to in the best of his songs written for maestro Amaradeva. Sirisena Ratnayake who prefixed his name with that of his village off Alawwa in the Kurunegala district was the archetypal villager. He had his education at the village school in Humbuluwa, the Kegalle Vidyalaya and St. Sylvester's College, Kandy the bitter-sweet sense of adolescence and young adulthood he has captured in his prize-winning novel 'Akkara Paha' later make into a film by Lester James Peries. Here is the archetypal young man from the Sinhala village confronting the different values of the town but in a typically Madawala-like gesture opting to return to his roots, albeit in a different rural environment - the new colonisation schemes being opened up at the time. Ratnayake who started life as a journalist at Lake House and later the 'Lankadeepa' came into prominence when his short story 'Peter Mama' came second in the Sri Lanka section of a worldwide short story competition. The first prize was won by Gunadasa Amarasekera for his story 'Ratu Rosa Mala' while the first prize in the English section was won by the late Felician Fernando, later an Editor of the 'Daily Mirror'. Ratnayake's early novels such as 'Sitha Nethi Bambalova' (set against the practice of polyandry in a Kandyan village) were very much a part of the bold permissive wave of the 1950's. Here were dreamy young anti-heroes seemingly without a purpose in life, fascinated by their own sexual urges but gripped by a sense of futility and self-pity. Perhaps Ratnayake's most productive period was when he joined Radio Ceylon, as it was then, as a programme producer. Here with Mahagama Sekera and Amaradeva he stood at the frontiers of the musical revolution of the day. His children's programme 'Tikiri Sina Reli' was the nursery for so many literary and musical talents of later time. In his best songs written for Amaradeva such as 'Bambareku Avai', 'Nil Mahanel', 'Swarna Vimaneta Eha Lokayen' and 'Min Dada Heesara's he exploited to the full the evocative simplicity of the folk idiom. As a lyricist he stood in the line of Ananda Samarakoon and Chandraratne Manawasinghe and in terms of time was perhaps even slightly senior to Mahagama Sekera. His songs spoke to one's senses and evoked the lost Arcadia that all of us carry in the recesses of our heart. As a poet and writer Ratnayake would no doubt have been touched by the wave of sentimental poetry which emanated during the time of the Second World War. This was a frivolous kind of verse which was well-suited for those uncertain times and was lapped up by servicemen and a new generation of the young to whom the war opened up new and exciting vistas. Later came the more refined romantic poetry of Meemana Prematilleke, Wimalaratne Kumaragama and Sagara Palansuriya influenced in part by the English romantic poets and the protest poetry of P. B. Alwis Perera. These and the free verse of G. B. Senanayake and Gunadasa Amarasekera was the environment which formed Madawala, the poet and lyricist. Ratnayake was also a prolific novelist and short story writer practising to the end though dogged by illness. As a writer he experimented briefly with the stream of consciousness technique in 'Sita Neti Bamba Lova' but his later novels were uniformly formalistic. He did not go in for refined techniques as such and was more a simple story-teller. He soon put his early rebellion behind him and settled down to the role of the wise villager drawing on a rich mine of folklore. One of his last novels 'Akkai Mai' recounted the harrowing days of the Malaria epidemic when whole villages were devastated and laid low by the scourge and death was a constant visitor to every household. His last novel 'Sittarakuge Kathawak' had a curious fifties feel to it. It was Madawala's last nostalgic salute to his young adulthood, a time lost for all times. As a writer Ratnayake was also somewhat of an outsider because he stood outside the literary movements and political allegiances of his day. Not being a graduate, he did not belong to the Peradeniya School though he was writing at the same time and some of his novels can be read on the same terms as the Peradeniya Literature. He was also outside the fashionable political movements in literature. He was essentially an old-fashioned story-teller in a long and distinguished folk tradition. His vision was that of a self-sufficient village steeped in the sturdy old values of the past, a vision he articulated just a few years ago in a novel 'Nil Manel Vila', which in its belief of a self-sufficient village supported by bank credit strikes a curiously quaint note. It could not have been that Ratnayake did not know that the village of his youth had changed irrevocably but unlike most writers of our post-consumerist times she did not see the village decaying. To the last, this tiny, sweet, wizened man with his winsome smile clung stubbornly to his roseate vision of lost Arcadia. |
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