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| Sunday, 6 February 2005 |
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Independence introspections Sunday Essay by Ajith Samaranayake The following article was written by this columnist for the 'Sunday Island', in 1986. The idea was given by Editor Vijitha Yapa who was ideally looking for somebody born in 1948 to look back on his own and his country's life in tandems on Independence day. Although falling short by seven years, as he explains, the present columnist did his best and feels that some of the points made 19 years ago are still valid. The article was originally titled 'Nearly as old as free Sri Lanka. Salman Rushdie an Indian novelist much in vogue in the west these days, wrote an entire novel 'Midnight's Children' on a hero who grew up with India. Rushdie's central figure had been born at the stroke of midnight when India made its advent on the international stage to the accompaniment of Pandit Nehru's stirring rhetoric. The idea of tracing a country's history through a personal autobiography is a fascinating one and my Editor was last Thursday looking for a Sri Lankan Salman Rushdie for the writer like his hero had been born on Indian National Day. I don't quite fit the bill (falling short by six years) but the proposition is fascinating. Who will not like to link his country's story to his own personal chronology? Nostalgia Sri Lanka was six years and seven months old when I was born but yet the date in its own way was significant. It was August 1954, the first anniversary of the hartal of 1953. This is the one central event to which the old left keeps on returning nostalgically as their most stirring moment of mass activity. It was the pinnacle of the left's achievement in the arena of mass politics and never again were things the same after that. When I was born, 1956 - that other turning point in Sri Lanka's chronicle - was still well in the future. Sir John Kotalawela was on the Prime Minister's throne and egg-hoppers were the culinary craze and political fashion. The sense of a 'little bit of England' was still strong among not merely the elite but the middle-classes as well. The young were subjected to an indulgent rearing replete with apples and golden syrup for breakfast. A boy born into a middle-class family could then expect to be cocooned from the outside world in a way quite difficult to envisage now. The extended family was the proper milieu of the middle-class and the young prodigies could hope to measure out their years with prize-givings and lavish birthday parties. The private school in which I was educated was an enclave of elitism in a way which I dare say has changed little since. The problems we faced were not by any means economic or social. They were basically cultural. We were brought up on a diet of received wisdom and a code of values which then seemed inviolate. The day's intellectual opinions were received from the morning newspaper of the Lake House and Times Group which were of course staunch allies of the Establishment. It was only later that we began rebelling against this received wisdom. SWRD slain The great social and economic movements of the day passed us by in our sheltered world. I remember my father pausing by the Colombo General Hospital as he brought me back from school one afternoon to inquire from the policeman at the gate about the condition of Prime Minister S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike who was then lying seriously ill after the assassination attempt which was soon after to prove fatal. But the outside world was for us just a faint stirring in the columns of the newspapers. It did not by any means menace our world. The 1956 overturn more than the hartal was to later affect our little world. I remember a teacher at Trinity College recalling how as a young man still in school he had listened to impassioned speeches at left meetings at the Town Hall in Kandy calling for the nationalisation of the school which was almost next door. By the time I was a schoolboy of the same age however such idealism was safely in the past in national life. There were no stirring calls to expropriate privilege in education. But yet we went through our own intellectual adolescence and own love affair with ideas. Culture again was the main motif. We went through a deep infatuation with nationalism almost bordering on the chauvinistic. We brought out a small hand-written journal which was the banner of our resurgent hopes. We paid homage to the poetry of S. Mahinda whose stirringly chauvinistic poetry became our credo. Thinking ourselves rootless and passing through an orgy of self-torture we wished to identify ourselves profoundly with the soil. This phase was soon replaced by a commitment to larger ideas but still narrow though our previous identification was I think it made us better people because of that initial immersion. It alleviated the sense of alienation we felt as products of a privileged education whose ruling religion was "Playing the Game" and whose twin deities were Cricket and Rugger. Like most of the young we were very idealistic and no doubt we were painfully self-conscious in our rebellion such as refusing to attend a formal school dinner because we disliked wearing a coat and tie. Looking back at those days however through the prism of the present I cannot help feeling that things are much better today. Today's life-style is more demotic and more relaxed and society is open to more influences though not all of them might be healthy. School children today are more advanced and more self-possessed and I feel they do not suffer from so many guilt feelings either. This social revolution however has not been entirely healthy. The open, even permissive society, has brought about a frightening degree of intellectual shallowness and tepidity of ideas. It has created a standardised culture on sale in the super-market civilisation of our day. Does the younger generation today with the exception of a coterie of the serious-minded think deeply about the issues of the day I am left wondering. Ethnic problem The problem is again cultural though it is rooted in accompanying social changes. The problem of communal relations which is known by the safe sanitised title of the "ethnic problem' has thrust itself as the main item of the contemporary agenda. It had become fashionable to claim that during the days when children were educated in English there were no communal feelings but how valid is this myth? In our school we had boys of all communities in the same class but English was a link language only for a minuscule minority like us who were private school products. Certainly there was greater understanding between us whether we were Sinhalese, Tamils, Muslims or Burghers but I feel that these values of our past too have been toppled by our more cruel times. Thirty-two years after 1954 today, things are vastly different. The country has become more baffling to comprehend. The elegiac 1950's will never again return while the cherished certainties of the past lie bruised if not entirely shattered. But yet 38 years are but a drop in a nation's history. The country's whole future awaits it and there can be no flight from hope even if all around us there is darkness and sounds of sterile fighting. The cultural and social revolution has still not entirely run aground. Today's challenge is to forge a communal identity (as distinct from a communalistic identity, I hasten to add) in which the culture and genius of the various communities will have an integral part. In large measure the problem is one to do with my generation on both sides of the communal divide. I remember the Secretary General of the TULF A. Amirthalingam telling a team from "The Island" which visited him in September 1981 in Jaffna that the present communal problem was largely the product of the younger generation of both communal groups. He said that his son who is now a political refugee was born on the day the Sinhala Only Bill was passed and he sounded sad rather than angry. The problem before the country is to evolve a common language in which this generation can speak to each other. Lost souls If the re-discovery of their lost souls was the priority for both the Sinhala and Tamil cultures after independence then the challenge today is to evolve a common idiom. Last Friday I left the Press Gallery of Parliament after watching a process which was ecstatically described as one which sought to reverse a distortion spawned by history. The theme that day was the need to accept into the mainstream of life a category of people who had been aliens in our midst hitherto. As I left I couldn't help wondering whether this episode which took place just four days before the 38th anniversary of Independence didn't hold a hopeful portent for the coming years. |
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