Merging literature and history

by Dr. Wilfrid JAYASURIYA

There is a revival of interest in English and world literature presented through the medium of English rather than through translations in Sinhala and Tamil. Though in the past six decades after independence ethnic and separatist nationalism seemed to have taken over the ideological battlefield English seems to have recovered its appeal to all sections of society.

Jean Arasanayagam : on lost heritage

Minister Sarath Amunugama is reported to have said that all children are now wanting to study in English. Buddhist temples are now the most noticeable locales for Spoken English and other varieties to be advertised, and classes held. In this context the usage of English as a medium for representing our emotions and world views attracts our attention.

'KALEIDOSCOPE - an Anthology of Sri Lankan English literature edited by D.C.R.A. Goonetilleke may represent phases in our post colonial history. It is interesting to try and see how English was used to express our emotions in the past couple of centuries and to chart our post colonial history, through the short stories, drama and poetry found in this collection. In doing so I could hope to throw light on the stories themselves in a "new historicist" way rather than in a "new critical" way only. The views I present here, however, are likely to be controversial because they will involve not only the interpretation of literature but also the interpretation of history.

Dominance

The earliest item in Kaleidoscope is W.S. Senior's "The Call of Lanka" (1937). I learnt this poem in the S.S.C. (Year 10) class in 1949, when English was the medium of education. It was written by the Principal of Trinity College, Kandy and presents a typical scene of the British colonial person, government official or planter or educationist looking at the world from a commanding height. Conquerors, both foreign and native, get to the highest point physically, if possible, to symbolize dominance. The descriptions of colonial explorers are replete with such images.

I climbed over the crags of Lanka And gazed on her golden sea And out from her ancient places Her soul came forth to me.

"Give me a Bard," said Lanka The Bard of things-to-be and the poem goes on to speak of the glories of the past and the present, echoing Lord Macaulay's poetry, especially the lines from "Horatius" in the Days of Ancient Rome. Horatius too was a poem which I elocuted in Year 3-5, and was thrilled by his single handed defence of Rome, by blocking the bridge over the Tiber.

But most shall he sing of Lanka

In the brave new days that come

When the races all have blended

And the voice of strife is dumb

The ringing tones also recall the Anglican hymns,

Which invoked God to support the British against their enemies as King David had done in the Old Testament. The middle class of Ceylon was brought up to admire the nationalistic rhetoric of Britain, and its most fervent admirers found it an easy step to whip up Buddhist "nationalism" when the context changed. They also spoke of country, race and religion, the Trinity of the new worship, imitating the British only too well, but misinterpreting the message. Rev Senior sang of a united Lanka. But he inspired emotions, which created division. This is an example of what literary theorists and philosophers call "appropriation" i.e. taking over some one's ideas and emotions and remodelling them in one's own image. In his The British Period in Ceylon History, the historian G.C. Mendis, claims that modern "nationalism" in Ceylon / Sri Lanka is the product of British rule. It didn't take very long to transform "nationalism" into tribalism, between the lions and the tigers.

I may appear to be uncharitable to W.S. Senior to place the origin of ethnic nationalism on the British. It is one of the ironies of history that the way to hell is paved with good intentions. Let us take the selection next in time: Fifty Fifty by H.C.N. de Lanerolle (1948). This famous play, the product of high Anglo-Ceylonese civilisation, is presented in a very abridged form in the collection. Only Act II is available. The play, as the editor points out is political satire and depends for its humour on the audience's attitude to "broken English." Ceylonese in British times prided themselves on their command of "correct, Oxford or BBC" English as an index of their social status. The closer you were to elite of the ruling race in language, behaviour and appearance the better. In Act II, Dionysius Sumanasekera, a middle class, middle aged Ceylonese gentleman is a colonial polyglot, wearing a cloth round his lower body, but the cloth is short enough (i.e. knee length) to reveal the trousers underneath-in Sinhala known as the "Mahattaya (English trousered gentleman) under the Sinhala cloth (redder yater)". In the context of the "Fifty Fifty" political debate, which was current, Diyonisius holds forth that he is willing even to give 100 percent representation in the State Council to the minorities, which of course would have rendered him ridiculous to the Sinhala audience.

Equality

That issue is no longer before us in the twenty first century. Perhaps we could have a current version where a Tamil gentleman offers to cede 100 percent to the Sinhala majority before a Tamil audience. However, what both Lanerolle at that time and the editor of this anthology-he devotes an entire page in his introduction to giving percentages of population by ethnicity - appear to have missed about "Fifty Fifty" was that it was a demand for equality. Could equality be interpreted, as Napoleon the pig interpreted it, in George Orwell's Animal Farm-that he was "more equal?" Could equality be quantified in any way other than "Fifty Fifty?" So the Sinhalese only saw the surface meaning but did not grasp the deep structure. Had they done that the history of our country would have been different. Nehru in India, in the first decade after independence made 14 different regional languages "equal" in the Indian constitution (including English) by naming them "national languages,"when Bandaranaike proposed and passed the Sinhala Only law. The socialist Lanka Sama Samaja Party understood this and proposed "parity" for both Sinhala and Tamil but pigheadedly left English out. You cannot abolish equality and practice democracy. The contrasting histories of India and Sri Lanka bear witness to this.

In the play itself the resolution to the Sinhala Tamil issue takes the form of a Sinhala Tamil marriage. So the Fifty Fifty issue is resolved at the individual level. A happy but slightly comic ending. A fairy tale ending, nevertheless. In very recent history, in the 2000-2 period, the solution touted for the Sinhala Tamil war was federalism, to which G.L. Peries and Anton Balasingham, representing the different communities, agreed at the Oslo peace conference. However, what did federalism mean on the ground? The dispute between the claims of the indigenous farmers in Jaffna and the Sinhala soldiers encamped there, about territory, easily undid the result of negotiation at the macro level and the LTTE never agreed to federalism thereafter. To put it in literary terms the surface structure did not reflect the deep structure of agreement. These phrases are not "mantras" to resolve issues but just another way of putting it. The origin of the belief in equality is the Christian doctrine of the "fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of men" and though this idea was expressed in the American Declaration of Independence in a secular form in the phrase "all men are equal" it remains unaccepted by the heart. Men and women, both Sinhala and Tamil, believe in their hearts that the other is inferior to the self and so Fifty Fifty cannot be the deep structure. What the play does is to show that a happy ending is possible if the heart and not the head is dominant as in the case of the marriage of Chelvam and Nanda, by symbolically dissolving the identities of the lion and the tiger. What would such a union produce? The editor calls it "miscegenation" and still touts it as a solution! This is a topic in which all of us are confused, torn between the pulls of heart and head. It continues to be the dominant theme of art and politics.

In the Act II Diyonisius Ralahamay says that what matters is equality of opportunity in jobs and not equality of representation in the State Council:.

Diony: "Now look and see in Gormant service all the good jobs taken by the Tamils... in the law courts all good cases are taken by the Tamils...All the Tamil doctors have Sinhalese patients... but all coffins are full with Sinhalese people...

Charlotte Sumanasekera (wife of Diony): Now don't go off the rails. We are discussing the allocation of seats in the proposed State Council... Let us settle that.

Diony: "If they will give us fifty percent outside the State Council in the State Council we can give them fifty or even hundred percent." Charlotte: You must be mad (Kaleidoscope 226).

The Sinhala Only Act, in 1956 effectively deprived the Tamils of employment in government. The Indian Citizenship Act of 1950 effectively disfranchised the Tamil speaking community in the estate sector, who had enjoyed the vote as long as the Sinhalese. Put together the UNP and the SLFP knocked out the LSSP from political power and destroyed the prospect of developing the concept of Ceylon as one nation, which "parity of status" all languages, was meant to substantiate. And thereby ensured that Sinhala Tamil marriages as the basis of a united Ceylon will come to nought.

Proportion

In his autobiography Sir Ivor Jennings, who seemed to have been the actual draftsman of the first Constitution of Ceylon, based on the Soulbury Report, which itself was based on the proposals of the Board of Ministers, which again was drafted by Sir Ivor, states in his Autobiography that he specifically asked D.S. Senanayake, the Sinhala leader, for his views on "Fifty Fifty" and D.S. said that he didn't care what proportion was given to anyone as long as the State Council people agreed to it. Was Dionysius Sumanasekera a figure for D.S.?

H.C.N. de Lanerolle was a prolific writer of comedies or satires of Ceylonese life, using as the basis of his satire, an implicit comparison with the norms of British culture and civilisation. This was hardly surprising since up to independence, and may be a few decades afterwards, Ceylonese, as colonial people, admired the British way of life and continue to do so. Lanerolle's other play "He Comes From Jaffna" has also been republished in a collection edited by Ernest Macintyre, which contains a "modernised" version of it, titled "He Also Comes From Jaffna", written by Ernest Macintyre, who has been a most prolific playwright, director and producer, focusing on the ethnic theme to audiences in Ceylon and Australia. In Sri Lanka his best known play is "Rasanayagam's Last Riot", where Rasanayagam, a Colombo Tamil, who is seen in a Sinhalese household and who is safe there, while an anti Tamil riot is going on, prefers to venture out into the streets abandoning the safe refuge offered him. It crystallises the tragic situation in which Tamils as well as Sinhalese, not affected by anti Tamil feelings, find themselves. A similar situation confronted Ranjini Tiranagama, a Tamil medical doctor, married to a Sinhalese, who preferred to return to Jaffna, leaving her safe residence in Colombo, only to be murdered by the LTTE. Her fate crystallised the tragic situation of the Tamil moderates who were victims of both Sinhala and Tamil extremists. Her story was the subject of a novel by Gamini Akmeemana, which won the Graetian Award for fiction.

The other writer who has created a large body of work, using identity as her major theme, is Jean Arasanayagam nee Solomons, poet and novelist. On the one hand she struggles with the fact that being married to a Tamil, while being a descendant of the Dutch colonial rulers, she has become enmeshed in a conflict, not of her choosing or in which she should be in, even by the logic of the situation. On the other hand, she wishes to celebrate the special ancestry and feelings she has, as a representative of the coloniser than the colonised. The result of these quite mixed feelings is a large body of writing replete with images full of turmoil and vivid colour, of great vitality. She uses sea imagery to resuscitate the memory of her Dutch ancestors, who ruled a part of Ceylon in the 17th and 18th centuries.

Out of the blindness of the sea,

Where those unknown Voyages began

I was drawn through the sea nets

And flung among the coffee berries and cinnamon

My skin is green from the verdigris of age

My insignia rubbed off the coin useful for

Neither barter nor trade

These images may well be the source from which a clearer and focused hybridity, priding itself on its special character, may emerge. She reminds me of Walt Whitman, who is described by a modern poet, Allen Ginsberg, as seen in a supermarket "shopping for images." Jean Arasanayagam's special talent may be discerned in a story such as "The Cry of the Kite", (in "Peacocks and Dreams," Navrang, New Delhi) which is about the return of a high caste (Vellala) Jaffna man and his Colombo based family to his ancestral home in Navaly, Jaffna and his departure from it, perhaps for ever. The story captures the significance of the visit with brilliant narrative.

We entered the village of Navaly. The car stopped before great wrought iron gates. They were closed. Before them, the grove of palmyrah stretched before us, the earth dark in the shade yet lit from within by traceries of sunlight filtering through black fronds. A carpet of yellow margosa flowers and palmyrah fruit covered the ground. Dark avenues of straight limbed palmyrah palms led in endless rows into the unrevealed interior where the house lay, unrevealed and hidden.

I looked at Arjuna. He stood like a stranger at his own gates, reluctant to enter... Looking through the glass windows of the house... he spoke as if he beheld several visions of the house simultaneously... It had been many years since he left Navaly, perhaps over fifteen years. "We used to make those huge kites too-they were so big, really enormous." Sometimes during the Chohalam season the great kites, lifted high up by the wind, would be tied by strong ropes to the trees. All night long the pattam would hum, the wild tearing sound of the vinkoovel rising like the great brass throated Nadheswarm of the temple festivals. The pattam were immense man sized kites, sometimes shaped like fish or birds. In the dark they sang through their reed throats, cried and soared over the groves, their huge shapes floating over the face of the moon and sailing through seas of cloud.

Ambition

The wind tugged at them so fiercely that two or three men had to hold the thick ropes, which controlled the release. In their movement upwards they seemed to bear the whole grove with them, tearing up the roots and all, in their upthrust. (124 Peacocks and Dreams) The image of the kites flying in the garden of the house and the tremendous and frightening noise they make, as they flap in the wind, were they a symbol of the anger and the ambition to be released from the bonds and traps of the present that people in that village longed for? The intensity of the description transforms it to a symbolic level.

Jean Arasanayagam also writes about a lost heritage from her European ancestors, a loss caused by history, by her forebears remaining in the new colonised lands and losing their significance in current history. The visit to Navaly where her husband Arjuna's forebears had been illustrious in their time in history, is allegorical of her position too.

Her forebears too, the European conquerors and traders, who came to Ceylon in the 17th and 18th centuries, when the Dutch ruled a part of Ceylon, were illustrious in their time and the nostalgia, that Ponnambalam and the remaining inhabitants of Navaly feel, for their past inheritance may be a reflection of the author's own pent up feelings.

If so it would be a good example of what T.S. Eliot in his essay on Hamlet called an "objective correlative" through which an author presents her own personal feelings.