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By Susil Sirivardana

Mervyn de Silva

When a compelling journalistic voice is stilled, his readership demands that the absence be filled by republishing selections of his oeuvre. This is both homage to a respected writer as well as a way of making him continue to live in his resurrected writing. So as a way of paying respect to Mervyn de Silva, whose 3rd death anniversary falls on June 22nd this year, we returned to the first collection of his articles, CRISIS COMMENTARIES: Selected Writings of Mervyn de Silva, edited by E.

Vijayalakshmi (ICES, Colombo, 2001), which is an initial take into a huge volume of engaged journalism, which any student of modern Sri Lankan society cannot afford to ignore.

Let us use as an entry point , two of his own , self-referential comments: "..my main purpose in this article is to indicate a basic approach to society and politics in Ceylon. It is my purpose also to mark the nature of the political processes at work and to delineate the general characteristics of a condition that every observer agrees is one of profound crisis" . (p.27) "...May I introduce myself as a student of literature who happened to become a journalist writing mostly about politics, local and international." (p.81)

Here we have the quintessential Mervyn de Silva, etching in succinct prose, his vision and mission, his art and craft. It's the familiar voice of an elder statesman who had a long-standing tryst with his familiars.

The first quotation beautifully evokes for us the vision and perspective that he brought to his writing career in its many varied guises as newspaperman, media analyst, regional commentator, seminarist, and editor par excellence. Here is a concern with fundamentals and first principles of two key categories. Particularising further, the concern is to unravel the nature of political processes and to deal with general characteristics of a crisis condition. This, I would argue, indicates both self-confidence and a certain intellectual authority in dealing with subjects with an unmistakably compelling appeal and relevance to the common reader.

Implicit in such a stance is an unstated process of self-challenging, and challenging familiar terrain. Underpinning it is a valuational and ethical commitment to a quality of existential and imaginative life. He is setting for himself and for us standards which help us to raise our consciousness by crafting a journalism that is the stuff of discourse. Thereby he is transcending and crossing the distance from information to knowledge, from impression to critical reflection. What we have before us is a mind holding the mirror upto our reality by a process of serious intellectual engagement in the best sense of the word. It is a manifestation of the social responsibility of the contemporary journalist at its most acute cutting edge.

In the second quote he reveals in understatement the bare-bones of his evolution as a journalist. He was a brilliant student of English Literature under Professor Lyn Ludowyke, and having internalised the fundamentals of Leavisite criticism and the critical training in the development of taste, he studied Law and came to Lake House, to the Daily News. Thereafter , his talents and potential had free reign until he became Editor of the Daily News, and Editor-in-Chief. After he was sacked, he went on to the Times of Ceylon, where he again became Editor-in-Chief of that paper also, being the only journalist to have held both key posts. He was dismissed from there too, and after that he started his own bi-weekly journal, the Lanka Guardian, which he edited from 1978. It was a long, gritty and fighting career. Its quality and resilience and also the humility of the man is evident. When many of his colleagues emigrated and went in search of newer pastures both in the West and Southeast Asia, in what were perceived to be cataclysmic times, he stuck to his self-carved niche and stuck through thick and thin, coming out gloriously.

Let us pick out some of the characteristics of the dimension of discourse in journalism. It is a concern with concepts, with political dynamics, the subtleties and undercurrents of socio-political process, all seized within a sensitivity, criticality and imagination, which was a great contribution to the building up of journalistic traditions in the country. In that sense it was a one-person school for learning.

In the course of his long and enduring journalistic career, Mervyn de Silva systematically brought under his critical scrutiny and attention a canvas that was impressive by any yardstick. These areas of journalistic investigation and discourse-making covered the primary theatre of Sri Lanka, but that was certainly not the limit of his vision. He circumscribed the South Asian regional scene and also the whole Third World, which was a cutting edge concern during the decades succeeding de-colonisation, immediately before and after the 1960s. From the Third World stage he ranged out into the global arena, making serious studies of the American, European, South African and Middle Eastern theatres.

Perhaps some illustrations of his writing should be made to do the speaking at this point, in order to concretise the form and content of his thinking in writing. He ends his long opening essay, 'Sri Lanka: The End of Welfare Politics' written in 1973, with this prophetic statement: " Adherence to the parliamentary form of government, still on the face of it, seems secure. It was indicative that at four by-elections held last October, the poll conformed to the national average of 80%, but there is no escaping the conclusion that this is a society in deep crisis. The nature of the crisis has put the political institutions, the ruling class, the elite, and a whole generation , on trial for Ceylon's life." ( p. 27)

He is writing with the memory of the April Insurrection of 1971 fresh in his mind. Hence the authoritative comment of the last sentence, full of prospective implications.

In the same essay, he writes of the JVP and the dramatic implications of its rise for the polity: "To some extent the JVP ( People's Liberation Front), the party which led the insurrection, may be seen as the angry young children of the 'revolution' of 1956, when Mr. Bandaranaike's victory had swept away much of what at least the upper classes in Colombo had believed to be impregnable. It had represented a great leap forward in participatory democracy. The act of defeating an old established government is, I suspect, as critical a point in the growth of mass political consciousness as a country's first initiation into democracy". ( p.20)

Here the attempt is to successfully characterise the JVP as a potential new radical force for change in the local political scene. This has been amply vindicated in subsequent events.

In another essay called 'The External Aspect of the Ethnic Issue', see how he deals with the issue of historical timing: "While these remain the commonplace lessons of history, we must recognise here the presence of a fundamental problem. First the conflict between popular aspiration and the ruler's response. Second, how well, if at all, these are matched over a period of time, years or decades. In other words, the question of historical time. In the gaps (ever widening usually, in the Third World) between the two, between mass expectations and the adequacy of the response, and in the time gap which separates them, lies the incipient causes of violence." ( pp. 82-3)

What is uniformly evident throughout 'Crisis Commentaries', is the distinctive quality of mind of the analyst and commentator that is Mervyn de Silva. It is a mind that is saturated with the appearance and reality of politics and history. It is fully sensitive to the nature of contradictions. It is second nature for it to be aware that reality has many layers, which need to be clinically peeled, fold within fold.

"In Sri Lanka's case, what is of very special importance is the impact of the failure of economic policy on a new generation with high expectations nurtured by pre-independence and post-independence social welfare programmes, notably, free state education. The phenomenon of violent generational or youth revolt, first from the majority Sinhala community in 1971, is now manifesting itself among the minority Tamils of the North.

They too seem to perceive their situation in terms of a double discrimination and deprivation, both class and race. Both revolts, in my view, represent defiance and a total rejection of the respective political leaderships, Sinhala or Tamil, and of the political system itself." (pp.149-150)

Mervyn de Silva's use of language has a stylistic quality, felicity and evocativeness that is uniquely his own. It is the product of studied and sustained practice of the craft. A sensitivity to the texture and lyricism of language, enriched by a fund of reading and discussion, and thereafter, a craftsmanship honed over a five-decade discipline, produced a literary-journalistic sensibility which used language as critical metaphor.

Apropos the Marxists, a comment has "...The path to power ran through the paddy fields, and not factories or tea plantations"( p.16). Or, look at the insistent questioning in " Were these policies , in fact the humanitarian response of a ruling class...? Or were they..the shock absorbers of extremism...introduced into the political machine by sagacious rulers? Or were they the gift with which the political parties beckoned or rewarded the mass vote? As usual the truth is probably a combination of these..."(p.4). Look at the irony here : "...In the popular vocabulary, a Ceylonese revolutionary was a respectable middle-class, trousered person, a familiar feature of the political landscape for some decades. The Left seemed like a part of the establishment." (p.10).

'Crisis Commentaries' is only a first quick glimpse into a much larger volume of journalistic and scholarly writing. The first half of the book reads better than the second half, because it is more coherently structured. But as an index of Mervyn de Silva's journalistic career, it is inadequate. So now is the time for a set of carefully compiled and systematically edited volumes of his long career, where coherence and creativity of insight could possibly serve as norms for a selection of the more enduring writings arranged by theme and theatre of concern.

Long was the line of those distinguished practitioners, who provided leadership to their institutions, were gurus to the juniors and who contributed to the profession: Tarzie Vittachi, Denzil Peiris, J.L. Fernando, H.E.R. Abeysekera, Donovan Moldrich, Fred de Silva and Victor Gunawardena. Viewed within the setting of the intellectual milieu of the second half of the 20th century, Mervyn de Silva, both the craftsman and the personality, stands out as an exemplar of a meritocratic age, where the values of excellence, quality, disciplined labour, and commitment to professionalism, a multicultural sensitivity and an intuitive grasp of truth, were the norms of those who set out to reach for the stars. It as an age when youth were inspired by idealism, for which independence provided a supplementary value addition. The whole country, Asia, the Tricontinent, and the world itself, provided the intellectual canvas, and the world itself, provided the intellectual canvas.

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