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| Sunday, 5 September 2004 |
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| News Business Features Editorial
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Drought and stagnation of the village Sunday Essay by Ajith Samaranayake
Is there any point or purpose in writing in a strange script about the miseries of the drought-stricken peasantry? What consolation can we bring to these country folk of ours by giving vent to our feelings and emotions in the language of our one time imperial masters? For, the gulf between those who rule the country, administer its laws, draw up its development plans and make its public opinion from the capital city, all in the Queen's Language, and the vast mass of the rural peasantry who are governed by these laws and plans and passively consume these urban opinions is at the heart of the misery in the countryside. And that misery, although always present, only impinges itself on our consciousness (if not our collective conscience) only when it is dramatised by some unusual occurrence such as a drought, flood or a cyclone which renders thousands homeless or uproots or prostrates them by the sheer violent force of an act of God. But beyond the fringes of the urban consciousness and the perimeters of life in the urban centres, the people at large, the men, women and children in the countryside, lead lives of quiet desperation. Theirs is a daily battle with a parched dry earth which yields them less and less each year. Subsistence agriculture is the only way of life they and their fathers and forefathers before them have known. They eat less and less. They can afford new clothes only during the Aluth Avurudda. Their schools are derelict, their tanks neglected and silted over, their hospitals short of drugs. They have to trek for miles through jungles to the nearest towns. Their children drop out from school early to take to the occupation of their fathers, but every year the harvest becomes poorer and poorer. It is a cruel joke to expect them to buy all the goodies or gadgets which are advertised on television or in the colour supplements. Metropolitan arrogance For all the attention the Colombo-based politicians and the media pay these people, they might as well not exist. They are the victims of the peculiar urban notion that only those who are within the range of vision of the politicians, administrators, policy-makers and media people living in Colombo are real. For these people suffer from a sense of metropolitan arrogance since it is in the air-conditioned sanctums of the capital city that laws are devised, policies and programmes formulated and platitudes handed out in print and over the electronic media for consumption by the great unwashed populace living in their rural hovels and mud-huts outside the magic circle. The late President Premadasa was often fond of saying that nobody who had not walked unshod on a village road, or slept on a mat or bathed in a village stream should formulate policies for the village, but in time, this itself came to assume the status of a mantra gaining sanctity by presidential utterance rather than a motto for the formulation of national policy. In the case of the Northern and Eastern Provinces, the situation was further compounded. The Tamil and Muslim people living in these provinces were not only physically distant from Colombo, but also estranged from the majority of the urban elite because of their ethnicity and religion. The conflict which has raged for decades in these areas has had the effect of almost mentally erasing these people from the consciousness of the metropolitan opinion-makers. This, in spite of the fact that they have been both victims of a cruel war, uprooted and displaced, orphaned and dispossessed, but are also economically some of the most disadvantaged of Sri Lanka's people, particularly in the Wanni and the Eastern Province. In spite of almost six decades of political Independence, the proclamation of the Republic and brave statements from politicians that Sri Lanka lives in the village and that the farmers are the backbone of the nation, little has changed from the days of Leonard Woolf's novel 'Village in the Jungle' and its grim picture of life in a southern Sri Lankan village in colonial times. The average peasant is caught in the grip of the same inertia and the same sense of helplessness and hopelessness as Woolf's protagonists. It is true that since Woolf's time, the jungles have been cleared and colonisation schemes set in place, infectious diseases have been eliminated, the headman system replaced and other such reformist measures have been undertaken. But at bottom, the lot of the peasantry has hardly changed. The same system which condemns the villager Babun to prison after hearing his case in the Queen's Language and the same system which is loaded and weighted against the peasantry faced with all the forces of social injustice and exploitation continues. The peasant is still unable to get a decent price for his produce at the farmgate and continues to be exploited by the middleman. He is at the mercy of usurious money lenders. Justice is meted out to him in a strange tongue. New mercantile class The most significant social convulsion chronicled in our literature is in Martin Wickramasinghe's 'Gamperaliya' which shows the collapse of the old feudal order in the village and the rise on its rubble of a new mercantile class. But after that, the action moves away from the village to Colombo where this new-rich mercantile class gradually establishes itself in the city and attains the status of a comprader bourgeoisie. The village remains stagnant, a refuge for women, old men and children while the new educated generation is attracted by the bright lights of the city in the pursuit of their white-collar ambitions. It is this newly-imparted education which uproots the young from the village and sets them on the road to the university and middle-class employment in the government sector, then the plum of the job market. At the intermediate level, the educated young became clerks or schoolteachers while at the upper levels, they entered the Civil Service and contracted good marriages with fat dowries. The system of Madhya Maha Vidyalayas, initiated as a result of the Free Education system spearheaded by the late C.W.W. Kannangara, was actually meant to impart modern knowledge to a new generation within the rural milieu itself and produce a newly-educated generation who would be able to adapt themselves to new forms of employment in a rejuvenated rural economy which was expected to take place after Independence. But no such rejuvenation occurred except for settling landless peasants from the South of Sri Lanka in the newly-opened up colonisation schemes in the North Central Province. There was no large-scale revival of rural agriculture, no land reform programme, no redistribution of land, all of which could have led to a genuine renaissance in the countryside and a radical re-orienting of agrarian and property relationships in the village. Literary portraits Literary portraits of these social changes too are on offer. Leel Gunasekera who was for long a Government Agent in the dry zone has written a trilogy of novels, 'Pethsama,' 'Athsana' and 'Man Nethi Da' which offer an accurate picture of peasant life in the Wanni. Madawala S. Ratnayake's 'Akkara Paha' deals with the life of a Kandyan farmer family who are settled in a newly-established colony. A novelist belonging to a later generation, Sarath Ariyaratne has written extensively about life in dry zone villages, following the advent of youthful rebellion in the 1970s. But inspite of Independence and the benefits accruing from the all-embracing and benevolent Welfare State, the contours of village life have remained basically unchanged. The farmer is trapped in uneconomic subsistence agriculture in a family plot or is an 'ande' cultivator working for somebody else. The life of the farmer is not attractive to the new generation. The cost of paddy farming increases with little to show by way of returns. Vegetable producers continue to be at the mercy of the middleman. There is no satisfactory mechanism on the part of the Government to buy their produce direct from them. The village continues to stagnate and is thrust dramatically into the headlines only when a drought strikes. Next Week: The failed strategies of development |
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