Archives

by Ajith Samaranayake

A.T. Ariyaratne is 71 today although if I know the man he is bound to dismiss this birth anniversary as yet another milestone which prolongs the cycle of Sansara but which will certainly give him more time to serve his fellowmen which after all has been his life's work.

Since he won the Ramon Magsaysay award for community leadership at the age of 38 he has been an international legend although like most prophets sometimes unhonoured by his own countrymen. As early as 1971 the 'Reader's Digest' featured him as 'Ceylon's Pick-and-Shovel Samaritan' with the subtitle 'Moving mountains is all in a day's work for Ari and his youthful volunteers. 'However today at 71 Ahangamage Tudor Ariyaratne has gone beyond his original concept of Sarvodaya inspired by Vinoba Bhave and moved to a concept of community and nationhood which would ensure the full flowering of the human personality transcending the petty man-made chasms of race, religion and caste.

Ariyaratne's life story is now part of the modern folklore. Born in Unawatuna to a middle-class family his boyhood and young adulthood were spent like that of many young men of the time in the shadow of the village temple and the temple at Meddekanda near Balangoda in the Ratnapura district where his father was a small-time businessman. Educated at Buonavista College and Mahinda College, Galle he organised a co-operative society of coir weavers as a schoolboy having been moved by the abject plight of these artisans who were exploited by middlemen and mudalallis alike. As a teacher at Nalanda College (having completed his training at the Maharagama Training College) he initiated what was to turn out to be the most profound social revolution of our times from a humble rented home in Second Division, Maradana.

What Ariyaratne did was revolutionary for the 1960s. Having visited several villages inhabited by the so-called low caste folk both in the Sinhala areas as well as the Eastern Province he sought to do something constructive to improve the lot of these wretched of the Sri Lankan earth. Towards this end he mobilised his students at Nalanda and during the school holidays set up camp among these humble folk and worked side by side with them cutting roads, digging wells, building houses and often laying the infrastructure for wholly neglected villages. Neither did Ari's volunteers ignore the educational, cultural and spiritual side of life. The mornings began with bhavana, cleaning their own toilets., family meetings and after strenuous days on the field there would be cultural items and decent entertainment.

To quote the 'Reader's Digest' about his first camp at Kanatoluwa: 'A startling transformation took place. With dozens of hands at work, 19 woven-bamboo huts were repaired and three latrines built. A well was dug and lined with brick, coconut seedlings were planted, vegetable gardens cultivated and a small rattan-weaving industry established. In the evenings Ari's volunteers held literacy classes, taught games to the young, basket-weaving to the women, and basics of farming and the uses of fertilizer to the men. They demonstrated the essentials of health, hygiene and nutrition'.

The Conservative Establishment was aghast. Here was a secondary school assistant teacher taking boys from well-to-do Colombo families and getting them to rub shoulders with 'low caste people', eat their food and drink their water. However Ariyaratne received the whole-hearted support of his then Principal M.W. Karunananda and the assistance of the Girl Guide Commissioners Sita Rajasuriya and Muktha Wijesinghe and the devotion of that great but entirely under-estimated patriot the late Upali Senanayake (son of F.R. Senanayake). So the movement thrived until today there is no district with several Sarvodaya village with a whole supporting network including its own bank which offers credit to small farmers and industrialists and monitors the progress of their enterprises.

At the sprawling Sarvodaya campus at Moratuwa, of course, there is every community amenity from pre-schools to creches, orphanages to schools and dormitories for the disabled. Ariyaratne's latest project is one to house and rehabilitate unwed mothers (most of them teenagers) who had been victims of abuse mostly within their own family circles while their mothers had been chasing that pot of gold in the desert sands of the Middle East, that illusory solution offered to its lower middle-classes by a crisis-ridden society. Some of these girls who have had to undergo the trauma of virtual rape and child-bearing in their teens have had only the most rudimentary education (and some none at all) and a retired Director of Education D.A. Perera has evolved a new method of teaching them which he imparts personally at the centre at Rawatawatte where these unwed young women mother their infants while learning the alphabet and arithmetic.

Inspired by Mahatma Gandhi, Vinoba Bhave and Jayaprakash Narayan Ariyaratne has today progressed to his own vision and world view. Perhaps he has taken a lesson from the life of Jayaprakash Narayan who as a charismatic Indian leader was perhaps only next to Nehru. A committed socialist (in fact a fellow student of the famous American Marxist Prof. Scott Nearing with our own Philip Gunawardena at the University of Wisconsin in the USA) Narayan led the socialist faction within the Indian Congress Party and later formed the Praja Socialist Party. However realising that India's future lay neither with western-style materialism nor with the orthodoxies of doctrinaire socialism Narayan retired into a spiritual life although briefly coming forward to give leadership to the forces which dislodged Indira Gandhi from power in the mid-1970s. Ariyaratne, however, has had no truck with any political party nor with any organised orthodoxy including religion. He is a Buddhist both by birth as well as conviction and firmly believes that any viable Sri Lankan society should be based on the Buddhist way of life.

However, the emphasis on Buddhist rights which has been converted into a convenient slogan by some self-seeking politicians he sees as debilitating because it detracts from the essential values of the Buddhist way of life. Thus did the Buddha teach:

'Dittincha Anupagamma Seelawa Dassanena Sampanno'

This means eschewing the ego which separates man from man and being filled with a sense of discipline and being endowed with a vision. It is this basic teaching of the Buddha which Ariyaratne seeks to turn into a social, economic and cultural philosophy.

It is now taken as articles of faith that foreign colonialisms had shattered Sri Lanka's traditional way of life and its self-supporting economy and bred the ground for the infiltration of alien values and ideologies into the country. As a result it bred poverty particularly among the 80 per cent who still constitute the bulk of the people. Ariyaratne's path out of this morass is six-fold. That is:

a) 'Poorna Paurushodaya or the full development of the human personality.

b) 'Kutumbodaya' or the development of the basic family unit.

c) 'Gramodaya' or 'Grama Swarajya' which means the villagers taking their own decisions leading to a process of village self-government.

d) 'Nagarodaya' or the development of the cities based on values.

e) 'Deshodaya' or the development of the nation as a whole into a self-sufficient entity also based on values.

f) 'Vishvodaya' or the brotherhood of man based on unity and peace.

If all this sounds like a prescription for Utopia Ariyaratne also has a practical side to his scheme. Let us here confine ourselves only to the economic aspect since economics predominates in any society. Ariyaratne proposes an economy which gives priority to fulfilling man's needs, the establishment of small-scale projects, the infusion of small-scale investment, appropriate technology and commercial enterprises which will be administered by the community, giving priority to production based on needs and measuring this by both quantitative and qualitative yardsticks, treating the environment, the social wealth, science and technology as the basic developmental factors, reviving the rural economy, making men satisfied creatures rather than alienated or robotic machines thus leading then community towards simple cultural and spiritual ways of life.

This is neither a harking back to a past golden age nor a fanatical rejection of all modernism for Ariyaratne recognises that we need while adhering to indigenous values to be completely aware of all the new developments in the world. However the central motif is the recognition of indigenous values, ways of life and a kind of economy and society which will fulfil basic human needs rather than pamper to the artificially-induced needs and tastes of a consumerist society.

It is a kind of Third Way which has been recognised not merely by progressive parties and the Green Movement in the West but also the more enlightened international agencies such as the World Health Organisation. In fact Ariyaratne says that it was a conversation which he had had with a 'veda mahattaya' in Ihala Kuruketiyawa which prompted him to write an article as early as 1971 to the official journal of the WHO on basic human needs which has today become the creed of those groups who are fighting the corporate capitalism and consumerism of the West and the monetarism which underpins this whole monstrous structure. So prophets do not go entirely unhonoured for by going back to the roots of this 'basic needs' philosophy we are recognising not merely A.T. Ariyaratne but also that nameless 'veda mahattaya' of the Sri Lankan heartland now long gone to his union with his ancestral gods.

Source: 'Bhava Thanha', first volume of an autobiography - by A.T. Ariyaratne - Vishva Lehka Publishers - 2001.

News | Business | Features | Editorial | Security
Politics | World | Letters | Sports | Obituaries |

Produced by Lake House
Copyright 2001 The Associated Newspapers of Ceylon Ltd.
Comments and suggestions to :Web Manager