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| Sunday, 25 September 2005 |
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Concluding Wimal Dissanayake on four cultural intellectuals Culture of bi-lingualism Sunday Essay by Ajith Samaranayake
Wimal Dissanayake combines the older branches of the humanities such as English and Sinhala (he has been a Professor of both) with the newer and more modish disciplines such as mass media and cultural studies which the more staid brahminical mandarins of academia still tend to view with suspicion. He is considered one of the foremost scholars of Asian cinema and Asian communications. Wimal Dissanayake was born in Pilessa a remote village off Kurunegala. Perhaps the idyllic surroundings of the Wayamba countryside enriched his emotional life and sharpened his critical sensibilities but what is true is that from his time as a schoolboy at Trinity College, Kandy Dissanayake pursued an active life of the mind. He was fortunate that the excellent English education at Trinity college he was able to supplement with the prevailing excitement over new trends in Sinhala literature and drama in the 1950s. Wimal Dissanayake from his youth then was very much a bi-lingual intellectual. He was one of the brightest of the second generation of intellectuals of the Peradeniya School that literary movement gravitating round the commanding figure of Ediriweera Sarachchandra which was equally idolised and reviled in its time. He made his debut as a poet and perhaps the best of the younger critics. Being bi-lingual to the core (unlike others who wore this either as a superficial sheen or whose bi-lingualism was only skin deep) Dissanayake was not only excited by 'Maname' and Gunadasa Amarasekera's poetry but also by Lawrence and F.R. Leavis. He obtained his doctorate from Cambridge University in the age of the Angry Young Men and kitchen sink drama a time he has captured in his anthology of poetry 'Nara Rakusa.' As a critic in the 1970s he was instrumental in introducing to a new largely mono-lingual generation figures ranging from Lorca to the Chinese poets in anthologies of essays such as 'Nirmanaya Saha Vicharaya' and 'Girikula Saha Sandamadala'. The address he delivered at the state literary festival at Kegalle in 1964 on the indigenous basis of the Sinhala novel although creating controversy at the time shows him at his best marshalling both Sanskrit' aesthetics as well as the western literary canon with equal ease and confidence. For the last two decades or so Dissanayake has been in exile in Hawaii and Hong Kong where he has taught at the East West Centre and the University of Hong Kong. He has broadened his interests to encompass the cinema, cultural studies and the post-modernist discourse and has written widely both in English and Sinhala. some of his works are standard texts in Western universities. In 'Enabling Traditions: four Sri Lankan Cultural Intellectuals'
Dissanayake therefore has undertaken a path-breaking exercise of introducing
four Sri Lankan writers and thinkers situating them within their social and
cultural contexts and pointing to both their strengths and infirmities. His
is a sweeping exercise although sometimes one gets the impression that some
of the post-modernist baggage he heaps on the shoulders of these figures
from a different time is somewhat burdensome. He would perhaps have done
better to have gone slower on the post-modernist pyrotechnics and paid
greater attention to the historical milieu which produced these
intellectuals. But it cannot be disputed that this is an impressive work
which sheds light equally on the four subjects as well as the author. |
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Wimal Dissanayake who has introduced four of Sri Lanka's leading writers
and thinkers to the international readership merits an essay in his own
right, for he is perhaps the leading Sri Lankan cultural intellectual of our
time with an international standing. By the quirk of circumstances and the
agenda of academia it has so come to pass that the best-known Sri Lankan
academics and intellectuals should be sociologists or political scientists.
Perhaps the best-known Sri Lankan names on the global intellectual map,
Gananatha Obeysekera and S.J. Thambiah, are both sociologists. So is H.L.
Seneviratne. The late A.J. Wilson whose quiet passing has gone almost
unnoticed was a political scientist. The late Lal Jayawardena who made an
equally unobtrusive exit was an economist. Wimal Dissanayake alone stands
out among the other branches of the humanities. 
