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| Sunday, 19 September 2004 |
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The mystic world of Tissa Abeysekera Sunday Essay by Ajith Samaranayake
Tissa Abeysekera's new book titled 'In My Kingdom of the Sun and the Holy Peak' consists of three stories which can be described either as long short stories or short novels. Their action is set in three quite disparate periods in the history of Sri Lanka during the last 200 years and while the writer claims that there is a broad pattern linking the three at some sub textual level, he also concedes that they can be read as three independent stories. But what is important is the quality of the mind and the nature of the prose coming out of it and here Abeysekera's work not only illuminates the national condition, but also impresses us with the supple strength of his writing. The first story 'A White Horse and the Solar Eclipse' is set against the dissolution of the Kandyan kingdom and its conquest by the British in 1815. here myths and legends are interwoven with history to create a majestic tapestry which holds the seeds of dissolution and decay. It tells the story of the advent of Prince Cunnersamy to the throne as Sri Wickrama Rajasinghe after assassinating his father at the command of his Chief Minister Pilimatalawe, the deposing and execution of Pilimatalawe, the killing of the Ehelepola family by a King who becomes steadily demented and the final over-running by the British of the once unassailable kingdom. Master brain The bare bones of the details are given flesh and blood by the characters, some of them historic and some of them invented, such as the King, Pilimatalawe, Subbamma (the Queen Mother), the Chief Priest, Pilimatalawe's son and Sir John D'Oyley, the master brain behind the British penetration of the Kandyan kingdom. The story here is broken into what the writer calls three movements and each movement in turn has three narrative strands and the whole is filtered through the consciousness of an oracular sage, Ponna Naekethar, sitting on top of the Tispane rock. This first story, steeped as it is in history and legend, has the quality of a fable and is narrated in an appropriately rich phantasmagoric-like prose. It is a period of history rich in intrigue and all kinds of convolutions of the human heart such as suspicion, the drive towards parricide, promiscuous sexuality and treachery and betrayal. Central to the narrative is the archetypal struggle in which the so-called Aryans of the Lambakanna or Long-eared Clan are locked in mortal combat with the Tamils or Cholas respectively represented by the high-caste Kandyan chieftains Pilimatalawe and Ehelepola and the Kings of the Nayakkar dynasty from South India occupying the Kandyan throne. King Kittisirirajasinha is slain by his own son Cunnersamy at the behest of Pilimatalawe, his Chief Minister, both the King and his Premier enjoying the embrace of a common mistress, Subbamma the Malabar princess. But Cunnersamy as King deposes and executes Pilimatalawe and Pilimatalawe's son goes into exile in the company of the Chief Priest. There is a sense of star-crossed tragedy, a quality of doom as the grotesque and macabre last days of the Kandyan kingdom are played out against the sombre backdrop of the decimation of the Ehelepola family and the King's rising paranoia. This quality of doom finds an appropriate image in Subbamma's worship of Goddess Kali, the destroyer, just as the conquest of the kingdom by the British finds a fitting metaphor in the white horse which is thought to stalk the city by night carrying the headless body of the slain King Kittisiri. Is Subbamma who haunts the corridors of the palace real or a phantom? Are the horse and the rider phantom or a clever strategy on the part of the British to feed and exploit native superstition and fear? The novelist weaves through the interstices of these possibilities and the result is a heightening of the mood of foreboding. Political and social changes If this story assumes the quality of a fable, the second 'The Crossing at Dark Point' is more rooted in the realism one expects from the novel. Set in the years immediately preceding Ceylon's attainment of nominal political Independence, it hints at but does not quite fully explore the unfolding political and social changes of the time. The drama is played out between the Kandyan villager Bandara who is however ostracised because of his links with the two low-caste sisters Dingiri and Bachahamma and the Police sergeant from the Low Country, Silva, who stumbles upon their menagerie with tragic consequences. The tension here then is between the Kandyan villagers with their hoary secrets, myths and superstitions locked in their breasts and the outsiders from the South who are trying to penetrate into their hearts. It is to the carters who are plying from the South to the Eastern villages that Dingiri offers her sexual favours when Bandara is sent to prison for killing Abraham Baas, the timber merchant, who is the symbol of the city's predatory mercantile penetration of the traditional village. The village is helpless in the face of those invading alien forces and its only defence is to frighten them away with the apparition of the woman with child and the mangy dog at the Dark Point, the Kaluwara Thota. But the village itself has two faces, the fearsome, forbidding face turned to its dark ancestral past heavy with superstition and the serene, happy face symbolised by the villagers who trek to the holy peak of Sripada, the two tracks diverging from a common point. and once Sergeant Abeyratne has defied the Kaluwara Thota and reached safety on the other side he is offered that serenity and joy in the shadow of the peak to which the butterflies come to die in their numbers dashing themselves against the mountain. It is the last story set in our own times and named 'The Bull, the Cobra and the Golden Swan' which is the least convincing. This is the story of the new-rich parvenu class produced by the Government contracts abundantly available under the open market economy and their political ambitions fed and fired by their newly-gained affluence. The more affluent they become, the more they fear for their future barricading themselves behind elaborate ritual practices and sorcery even as their wealth rouses and aggravates their sexual desires. This story too is heavy with superstition and family guilt, but somehow this device which comes off well in the first two stories appears as a mere adornment here and even serves to blunt the social edge of the decay and the disintegration it seeks to portray. The point perhaps is that the technique of hyper-realism or magic realism, which the writer adopts, sits well only on periods and situations in history which are divorced and distanced from our more immediate and convulsive times. The challenge would be to evolve a technique which can capture and articulate our own times and the dominant technical question would appear to be whether the realistic tradition which is the central motif of the classical novel has exhausted itself or whether it still carries the potential of conveying the circum-ambient reality. In Sinhala fiction for example, Simon Navagaththegama adopts a technique somewhat approximating to Abeysekera's with its recourse to fable and folk tale while Gunadasa Amarasekera maintains that the realistic technique is still capable of reflecting social reality. Pervasive mood The pervasive mood of these stories is one of quiet melancholia, a celebration of and a salute to a time and a body of values being gradually eclipsed. The first and the last record the decay of two quite different orders of society, the first the feudal social order of pre-colonial times and the last the decencies associated with the post-Independence Welfare State and the liberal democratic order tied up with it. Thus the last 200 years which span the writer's chronicle have seen the feudal order giving way to merchant capitalism and this being succeeded by an unbridled and full-blooded neo-capitalism gone mad. But there is no overt moralising here only the dispassionate and clear-eyed recording of events. There is also the struggle between modernity and tradition, the modernity represented by capitalism, the nation state, political independence and the drive towards modern technological development as symbolised by Baby Mahattaya who builds his reservoirs in the Dry Zone, but at a terrible human cost. Abeysekera is too subtle a writer to make propagandist statement or offer readymade formulas so that all this is only delicately suggested. But finally the volume is a blow struck on behalf of Tradition, that one unanimous thread which brings all three stories to their close with the symbol of the Holy Peak of Sripada. But most importantly, perhaps this volume is a testament to a kind of sensibility which is fast declining in our coarse and vulgar times. Abeysekera's prose which is flavoured with his readings in classical Sinhala as well as folk literature and English fiction and poetry and which has a hauntingly pellucid quality to it is a reminder that he is one of the last few pillars of the bilingual intelligentsia. He is rooted in the soil but is not called upon to wear his nationalism on his sleeve like so many of this breed. He is exposed to the west without becoming slavishly addicted to all the new fetishes emanating from it. This is why this volume comes perhaps as something of a last lingering salute to a receding time. |
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