Archives

Martin Wickramasinghe is widely considered the greatest Sri Lankan writer of the last century. Here, renowned film director and writer Tissa Abeysekara introduces Wickramasinghe's work, the influence his childhood village had on his writing, and the Museum that stands there today.

In 1944, less than a year before the Second World War ended, a novel was published that was to change the course of Sinhala fiction forever. It opens with a passage evoking an unmistakable sense of time and place.

"The village of Koggala occupies a long stretch of land bounded on one side by the sea, and on the other by a wide river of enchanting beauty, the Koggala Oya. A smooth black ribbon of road linking the Southern towns of Galle and Matara separates the village from the sea. The verandas of the houses bordering the road face the seafront, which is itself like a long veranda running the length of the village.

"The railroad extends as far as the eye can reach, like an endless stepladder with no beginning and no end. The rail track is on an embankment, a few feet above ground level.

The scooping of earth to raise the embankment many years ago has left long ditches on either side. Some of the ditches, fed with water from nearby culverts, have become little ponds, abounding in Water Lilies, Lotuses, and Little Fish."

This is perhaps the first time the Sri Lankan landscape entered in all its authenticity into Sinhala writing - either in prose or verse. In the entire range of classical Sinhala poetry and prose, there is not a single memorable passage which captures, with the same sincerity and immediacy, the splendour of the Sri Lankan landscape nor the rich texture of its life.

The passage is from Martin Wickramasinghe's novel Gamperaliya. The English translation of the title, The Changing Village, may sound mundane. But, Gamperaliya is a title that has acquired a new meaning in the context of creative Sinhala Literature. The Changing Village has become a seminal work and a point of reference in contemporary Sinhala fiction.

It's also a book which sits firmly at the centre of the entire body of Martin Wickramasinghe's writings, both creative and critical.

Wickramasinghe's portrayal of the maritime village of the mid-South invites an easy comparison with the Malgudi of his Indian counterpart RK Narayan. But Malgudi is fictitious, woven into a compelling tapestry by the rich and varied elements culled from typical South Indian habitats. Wickramasinghe's Koggala, on the other hand, is a real place which - though vastly transformed - still exists. In the realm of fiction it shares the map with Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha, Steinbeck's Salinas Valley and Hemingway's Big Two-Hearted River.

What makes it remarkable is its level of observation and quality of imagery. Stripped almost bare of all the trappings of romanticism, and the stilted idiom of Sanskrit poetics so beloved of Sinhala writers of the time, the passage quoted above has a lucidity and an economy of expression, filtered through a fine poetic sensibility.

It is authentic, yet it is reality recreated in the mind's eye of a poet and transmitted to the reader with a certain intensity.

Wickramasinghe's sensibility and life-view were fashioned and refined almost exclusively by these rural maritime landscapes, both geographical and socio-cultural, in which he lived in the formative years of his life.

In a beautifully written autobiography completed in the evening of his life - an evening that fortunately endured for 15 fruitful years - Wickramasinghe lovingly recaptures the life and landscape of his beloved Koggala.

The Koggala Oya, geologically trapped into becoming a vast, sprawling lake teeming with fish and dotted with islets; the Indian Ocean breaking endlessly on a coral reef where, in the placid waters between the clean white girdle of a beach and the reef, an amazing variety of marine species abounds; the homesteads between the sea and the river; people interconnected by family ties and friendships nurtured over long years of being together in a common habitat - all this is woven into a gentle harmony playing beneath the surface, forming an ever-present backdrop to the book.

In his autobiography, Wickramasinghe confesses that his boyhood curiosity and fascination with the marine species he saw and observed in the coral reef in Koggala drew him to Darwinism in later years and, between 1931 and 1936, he wrote extensively on animal life.

The little boy was fascinated by the strange shapes and forms of underwater life - coral flowers, pebbles and jelly-like humps that sprang to life when you prodded them with a stick. They tutored his mind and sharpened his level of observation to reflect upon the complexities of human life around him, with a detachment unique in Sinhala writing.

Koggala was Wickramasinghe's universe, the 'slice of life presented for the serene joy and emotion of the common man', the postscript with which he concludes The Changing Village and its two sequels - the Age of Kali and On the Edge of an Era.

Beginning with one of the most unspoilt shorelines on which the Indian Ocean pounds, Koggala sits on the edge of a vast plain which stretches almost like a billiard table upto the foothills of the central massif of Sri Lanka. Here the eye travels long distances undisturbed. There are no deep shadows as in the hills to shroud the mind. The sky is clear and open and the sun falls free all day except when the monsoon rains blow from the sea towards the distant hills.

Here the mind is free to wander across the vast open sea, through the home gardens where tall palms and fruit trees stand clear of each other with plenty of space between, and over the glistening water of the river to the blue line of hills far away. Life itself was functional and unembroidered. But there was grace in that simplicity, a dignity and seamless elegance.

This was both the womb and the cradle of Martin Wickramasinghe's genius. Its essence flows through his creativity and lies like a memory in the texture of all his work. In the years since his birth in 1890, Koggala has gone through a metamorphosis. In the last 50 years, change has not come through evolution, or through gentle organic growth.

It has come suddenly, like a flash blood, disruptive and traumatic.

In 1941 the Second World War entered a global arena with the bombing of Pearl Harbour. As the battle lines were being re-drawn, Koggala was selected as a site for an airfield, with all ancillary facilities, under the far Eastern Command. The order for the villages to evacuate came suddenly and the time given was just 24 hours.

The overnight uprooting of an entire community from its ancestral habitat may not have been as cathartic or as epic as the brutal resettlement of the 'Oakies' and their trek through the 'dust bowl' in Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath.

Here, there was at least some hope: fragile goods such as ceramic ware were tied in sheets and lowered into wells to be recovered at a future date. Nevertheless it still meant a cluster of eight villages collectively referred to as Koggala was wiped off the mainstream socio-economic map of Sri Lanka.

For more than five years Koggala was forbidden territory. The village and its contours of daily life had all but vanished.

A couple of years after Sri Lanka regained Independence in 1948, the Royal Air Force camp was evacuated and a ghost town revealed. A barbed-wire fence enclosed the area.

Wickramasinghe's description of how, at more than 50 years old, he returned to the village where as a little boy he had roamed so freely, is a moving piece of writing, where nostalgia is always tempered with reason, and sentiment never allowed to become sentimentality. All is observed with no trace of bitterness; instead, there is an undertone of wry humour reminiscent of the best of Narayan, at once subtle and immensely entertaining.

"I removed my coat and crawled on all fours through an opening just big enough for a canine."

Instead of a bustling and lively Southern village, what he found was an empty airstrip with deserted buildings and weed-choked pathways. His description is charged with a sense of history, and his personal observations are constantly related to a larger reality - a quality that alone can make a memoir great literature.

The house in which Wickramasinghe was born has inspired the Martin Wickramasinghe Trust to establish a centre of folk culture and life. The house is surrounded by eight acres of a restored ecosystem planted with hundreds of varieties of indigenous trees and shrubs in which bird life abounds.

Within the grounds is the Martin Wickramasinghe Museum of Folk Culture. The museum has a wonderful collection of artefacts and memorabilia which recreate - for those familiar with his works as well as the uninitiated - the world of peace and harmony which forms the key theme of his literature.

The artefacts speak to us of a world totally integrated and at peace with its environment. The handcrafted kitchen utensils, the clay and earthenware pots and vessels on which wholesome food was slowly cooked over wood-fires, the loft canopying the hearth to filter the wood smoke, the tools used for cultivating paddy fields, the mats, bullock carts and other conveyances... all the utensils of an unhurried way of life rooted in a simple agrarian economy.

Wickramasinghe's world lay between the paddy fields and the sea, between the river and the vegetable groves; a rich, hybrid diversity, more dynamic and lively than what prevailed in the closed highlands of Sri Lanka. Here agriculture was tinged with commerce, the ploughman lived side by side with the fisherman, and life did not begin and end within boundaries but opened out towards distant horizons across the sea.

It's world now confined to memories and to the written page accessible to those who can read the language in which Sri Lanka's greatest writer of modern times wrote. The Koggala Museum makes it a visual text, accessible across the boundaries of language. It's fitting tribute to a man who, through his writing, led a heroic struggle to restore the culture of the common people of this land to its rightful place.

The opening of The Changing Village quoted at the beginning of this profile continues as follows.

"To discover the antiquity of the village of Koggala going back a thousand years, one would have to dig for evidence buried deep beneath the surface of the land. But the evidence that the land itself has been here for tens of millions of years is there for all to see in the mountain of granite that towers above the village near the edge of the railroad.

It would have been there, a mute and unmoved witness to the violent explosive upheavals of nature that took place long before even the plants and trees that now abound around it and in its crevices had evolved. The villagers who call this Hirigal Devale or the Devalegala believe that not even dynamite could blast it."

The upheavals of the last 50 years have been different. But the spirit of old Koggala survives in the Folk Museum. Like Devalegala which translates as the 'Shrine Rock', the Museum is both an epitaph and a manifesto of a way of life that offers us values which are still relevant. For euphony, I call it the Rock and the Shrine, and I mean not only Devalegala and the Koggala Museum of Folk Culture, but also what they stand for Martin Wickramasinghe himself.

(Passages quoted from The Changing Village are from a translation by Lakshmi de Silva)

(Courtesy: Serendib)

www.Pathmaconstruction.com

www.ceylincoproperties.com

www.ppilk.com

www.crescat.com

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

Produced by Lake House
Copyright © 2003 The Associated Newspapers of Ceylon Ltd.
Comments and suggestions to :Web Manager