2 June 2017 12:00 am
The death of Siri Gunasinghe last week left the nation’s cultural establishment numbed. And not for nothing: Professor Gunasinghe, who among other things was one of only two novelists here who directed a movie (and a landmark one at that), was the last of the bilingual literati that made the waves here and overseas. Everyone else who followed him were politically and philosophically of a different breed, the sole exception (at least to an extent) being Gunadasa Amarasekera.
The truth is that modernity is not incongruent with nationalism. The truth is that modernity can and does subsist on tradition
Gunasinghe’s death, a personal tragedy as it is, interests me more for what it means to our cultural establishment, the same establishment which has tried so hard to chart a kind of modernity that was not uprooted. That is has failed, and that its failure has to do largely with the culture of inferiority which has gripped our people since 1956, leaves no room for doubt.
At the cost of simplifying an already simplified situation, I will hence say this: politically, socially, and
Political movements never really end. They can only be stopped, and that at the cost of stalling an otherwise gradual social process. 1956, on that count, was less a movement than an experiment, which signalled (ironically) the upheaval of the anglicised elite through the leadership of a scion of that same elite. I remember reading in one of those travel books (by Discovery) on Sri Lanka that the 1956 election passed power from the legatees of colonialism to an indigenous leader. That is patently false. Power was passed, yes, but only from one shade of Westernisation to another. As subsequent elections showed, it was basically a social transformation effected by the grassroots but denied by the self-contradictions of its own leadership.
1956, on that count, was less a movement than an experiment, which signalled (ironically) the upheaval of the anglicised elite through the leadership of a scion of that same elite
S. W. R. D. Bandaranaike’s programme, as I mentioned in this column last week, derived for the most from two sources: Western liberalism and the Bengali Renaissance. The former, critics and commentators have explored. The latter, to a considerable extent at least, they have not. A tragedy
Amartya Sen, in an article written to the New Republic six years ago, contended that Tagore, far from being the romantic traditionalist he is touted as today, was actually a modernist railing against the social order of his day. He was at odds with Gandhi, whose idealisation of the spinning wheel or chakra as a symbol of a return to the past he critiqued as lacking judgment and energy (“The chakra does not require anyone to think”). Despite his enthusiasm for Gandhi’s political campaign, consequently, he was doubtful about Gandhi’s social persona, filled as it was with repulsion towards Western civilization. In this, however, Tagore was no imitator, no rootless cosmopolitan who idealised that same Western civilization he championed with regard to the progress it attained in the realms of science, literature, and political philosophy.
Added to that was another, more potent problem: unlike in Bengal and even India (also nurtured by a Renaissance), the cultural revolution which 1956 wrought was first affirmed and then denied by its political leadership. 1956 in that respect could not have happened were it not for three figures: Professor Sarachchandra, Lester James Peries, and Martin Wickramasinghe. All three were well versed in Western modernity, while Sarachchandra and Wickramasinghe were equally versed in the national ethos (Peries’ upbringing denied him that ethos until later on).
He was at odds with Gandhi, whose idealisation of the spinning wheel or chakra as a symbol of a return to the past he critiqued as lacking judgment and energy (“The chakra does not require anyone to think”).
The political pamphleteers behind Sinhala Only, on the other hand, were less interested in that kind of fusion than in an irrationally radical chauvinism which, ironically, gave birth to the same political
Plainly put, what happened that year was a bifurcation of our intelligentsia into the indigenous and the uprooted. It gave a set of false channels for the underprivileged to vent out their collective rage, which in the end left class structures intact and empowered the uprooted elite while giving the impression that they were placed on the same pedestal as that of the indigenous. The lack of any congruence between the cultural and the political in the “revolution” wrought that year facilitated that: the same revolution which helped the likes of Siri Gunasinghe would deny bilingualism its due place and hypocritically demean English (in the political sphere) while fermenting a culture of envy among those who could not wield it. The most immediate result of this, obviously, was the absenting of an educated bilingual intelligentsia.
That is why (and I am going back to my earlier point) I say that we are seeing a horrendous form of anti-intellectualism. Here. Today. Those who are unable to wield the language of access, English,
And you know what? We don’t seem to be worried. Not by a long shot.