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| Sunday, 20 March 2005 |
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The 'pola' as urban emblem Sunday Essay by Ajith Samaranayake Two Sundays ago I spent almost a day at the Mount Lavinia 'pola'. Now this can be considered as a kind of middle-class slumming by the snooty but travelling as I often do by bus and three-wheeler I am quite accustomed to the social segment which forms the core of these weekly fairs. While the clientele come exclusively from the middle and upper middle classes of suburbia, the traders form a motley crew, which cannot quite be encompassed by the orthodox categories of class. The wares peddled at these fairs vary from vegetables to trinkets and the traders themselves do not form a fixed group. Most of them indeed are those who are in other occupations during the week (such as three-wheel drivers) and who swoop down of a Sunday to make money on the side. Then there are the hardy women from the interior who come with their fruits and vegetables and itinerant vendors and beggars of all kinds. To the jaded city and suburban dweller in fact these fairs constitute their only link with the mass of the average people outside the gates of their abodes. The mercantile executives in their shorts or their made-up wives in bell bottoms move among the shouting throng almost in a weekly rite of unconscious propitiation of the hordes which both serve their menial purposes and which they hold in terror as the barbarians at the gates. It is a consummate ritual dance of the classes. The point, however, is that the older class categories have faded although we need not persuade ourselves yet that we are living in a classless society under the begin aegis of the open market economy and the gods of the supermarket culture. The movers and the shakers and perhaps even some of the opinion-makers do not, of course go to market but the upper-middle and middle-classes who do come form a cross-section of a new amorphous middle-class which recent social changes have brought about. They can vary from the solely English-speaking remnants of the old order to the Sinhala-educated bureaucrats who form the backbone of the administration today. Or they may be the newly-married yuppies to whom most commercial advertising on television is directed. Gone irrevocably are the palmy days of the 1960's and 1970's when middle-class families went to a suburban or provincial grocery store and packed the family car with provisions for the month with an ice cream thrown in for good measure for the well-behaved children. Those old family stores owned by a kindly patriarchal owner who knew his better customers by name are gone now. The supermarkets, which have replaced them, are vast impersonal places where people push their trolleys trapped in their own inner worlds. At the other end of the pole at the 'pola' are, of course, the vendors who themselves form an amorphous group. They are no longer the small trader class of the past but are a happy band of adventurers who are ready to chance their arm at anything, which goes. Most of them are brash young men who form the urban lumpen classes and with whom the old class deference has completely vanished. It is not that they do not recognise class differences but that they are not in awe of the older English-educated classes. On the other hand they have a healthy regard for those younger elements of the same class who are ready to treat them as equals just as they have a healthy irreverence to overblown authority. Most of them have had little formal education having dropped out early to join the large urban hordes. They may be picking up their opinions from the newspapers or the television talk shows but they have a proper understanding of what is going on. Again there is a healthy irreverence towards political figures and other such heroes of public culture. The general feeling is that the whole of politics and public life are a pretence from which the people at large are excluded. They see it as a form of shadowboxing among the contending political parties. Perhaps it would be a good thing as in the days of Athenian democracy to summon the politicians to the 'pola' so that the people can give them a slice of their mind. Which brings us to the question of how best the energies of these sections can be channelled. For they form a kind of underbelly of society which given the wrong direction can be put to destructive use by adventurers and demagogues. This, of course, is the traditional lumpen class with additional trimmings but in a situation of class re-alignments and political uncertainty it will be salutary to address oneself to the question of what role they can usefully play. The emergence of this new under class is a consequence of the partial dissolution of the traditional working class. The working class, which emerged during the early years of the last century, was concentrated in the Colombo Port, the Railway workshop at Ratmalana, the big European firms dealing in tea and rubber and similar enterprises. They were radicalised by the militant politics of the LSSP and the CP. But now with the waning influence of these parties and the revanchist economic policies of neo-liberalism, which have been diligently pursued for the last several decades, this class seems to have exhausted its old role. There has been a steady contraction of the Government sector as a consequence of investment shifting to private enterprise and as a result the trade union movement, which flourished in the Government sector, has lost much of its old clout. The void has been filled at least partially by this new under class. But unlike the old working class organized round industry and commerce this new class is an amorphous floating segment of the population with no fixed locus. They are largely drawn from the ranks of the bus drivers and conductors servicing the private buses, three-wheeler drivers and lottery sellers and the like which the new parasitic urban economy has thrown up. Lacking in any political ideology or convictions they can easily become fodder to whatever dubious political movement might choose to raise its flag. This is why it is urgent to address oneself to their role in the emerging society. But to return to our beginning the weekly fair is as good a paradigm as any of the flux into which social relations have been thrown by recent changes in the economy, society and life-styles. It has become the happy hunting ground of a new under class and the arena for the play of class forces outside the charmed circle of the shopping malls. |
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