Of literary bondage
 

by Professor D.C.R.A. Goonetilleke

When we refer to the interaction of India and Sri Lanka in whatever field, we assume that India and Sri Lanka are two separate countries, but there was a time in the distant past when India and Sri Lanka were a single land mass. Even today after the land mass has split, the distance between India and Sri Lanka is only 22 miles. That is the full distance of the Palk Strait.

In earlier ages when transport and communication between countries and contact were minimal, the only significant foreign impact on Sri Lanka was that of India. Of course, everybody knows that the greatest gift to Sri Lanka made by India, is Buddhism.

The religion, which originated in India but was superseded there by Hinduism and Islam, was brought across to Sri Lanka by Rev. Mahinda, the son of Emperor Asoka of India, who founded the order of monks here. He was followed by his sister Sanghamitta Theri, who founded the order of Buddhist nuns here.

The arrival of Rev. Mahinda in the 3rd century B.C. is recorded in the Mahavamsa, the Great Chronicle, and substantiated by a rock inscription after his passing away, found in Amparai. The inscription is in the early Brahmi script. It has been copied and translated into English by Sri Lanka's eminent archaeologist, Senarath Paranavithana, as follows: "This is the stupa of the Elder Ettiya and the Elder Mahinda who came to this island by its foremost good fortune."

Buddhism is the fountainhead of Sinhalese literature. Pali texts brought by Rev. Mahinda in the 3rd century B.C. were translated to Sinhalese and designated the Hela Atuva. These texts were translated back into Pali by Rev. Buddhagosha, who came from India in the 5th century.

The Sinhala texts were destroyed and Pali became the official language of Buddhism. The earliest extant prose works of importance in Sinhalese date from the 13th century and were pietistic - the Amavatura of Gurulugomi, the Butsarana of Vidyachakravarti.

Of special significance for the development of the short story were Dharmasena Thera's 13th-century Saddharma Ratnavaliya and Saddharmalankaraya (1398-1410) by Dharmakirthi Thera II, based on the Pali text Rasavahini (written in the period 1220-1295) which, in turn, was based on two earlier Pali texts Sahasshavatuppakarana (10th century) and Sihalavatuppakarana (4th century), both probably based on an original in Sinhalese.

The Saddharma Ratnavaliya and the Saddharmalankaraya combine an ever present moral and religious didacticism with a surprisingly rich, earthy yet subtle vein of psychological exploration dealing with emotional impulses and social pressures that govern daily life.

The Jataka tales (stories of the past lives of the Buddha) which were recorded in the 14th century and were popularized by monks who used these to illustrate their sermons, form a part of a popular oral tradition. These contained the rudiments of fiction which influenced the rise of Sinhalese fiction as from the late 19th century, as well as stimulated later literary works.

The Sinhalese during the long years before the impact of Western literary criticism were indebted exclusively to India, to Sanskrit in particular, for literary touchstones - for ideas as to what constitutes literature, for ideas as to how to appreciate and evaluate literature.

The touchstones include alankara (embellishment, decoration), shailya (style), reethi (style in a provincial sense), guna (inherent quality), vakropti (indirection, obliqueness), rasa, auchitya (suitability, appropriateness) and dvani (denotation and connotation).

Sri Lanka also inherited literary forms from India. Sanskrit drama was, probably, read but was never performed and did not provide a stimulus to local playwrights.

On the other hand, Kalidasa's Mega Dutha or Cloud Messenger inspired a whole host of Sinhalese sandesa or message poems - the Mayura Sandesaya (the Peacock Messenger Poem), the Tisara Sandesaya (the Swan Messenger Poem), the Paravi Sandesaya (the Pigeon Messenger Poem), the Salalihini Sandesaya, the Hansa Sandesaya (the Swan Messenger Poem), the Kokila Sandesaya (the Cuckoo Messenger Poem) and the Savul Sandesaya (the Cock Messenger Poem). It is interesting to note that among the Sigiri Graffiti is a Sanskrit sloka written by a visitor from India called Vajira Varman, responding to the frescoes.

Tamil literature in Sri Lanka lay in the shadow of South India for a very long time, and a distinctively Sri Lankan kind of Tamil literature was unable to emerge until the 17th century. As purist scholars on both sides of the Palk Strait endeavoured to follow a South Indian and Sanskrit tradition, the first Sri Lankan Tamil literary works were written in a religious spirit, the spirit of Hinduism which was another great gift from India.

These were confined to commentaries on the ancient classics, tedious and conventional. The first spark occurred in the late 19th century as a consequence of religious zeal and conflict. Christian missionaries sought to proselytize by preaching in the native language, and they enlisted traditional poetic forms to express Christian themes. On the other hand, to combat the inroads of missionaries, Hindu poets created works which explicated and exalted their own religion.

This literature too was of a didactic sort. With the spread of English education, there were faltering attempts by the Tamils to imitate Western models.

The South Indian film and dance forms like Bharata Natyam, Kathak and Kathakali continue to exert a stranglehold on Tamil mass entertainment and art in Sri Lanka, but the winds of change in Sri Lanka in the 1950s made a deep impact on Tamil writing - fiction, poetry and drama - and brought about a Tamil literature that broke free from South Indian literature and assumed a distinctively Sri Lankan identity. Tamil writing became irrevocably secular and popular in character.

The Tamils in the North of Sri Lanka are different in many ways from Tamils along the East coast, and both are very different from the Tamils of the hill country who were originally brought across from India by the British in colonial times to work on their plantations as indentured labourers. Each region has its own dialect, myths and legends.

Continued next week