Four great, transformative influences
BY PROF. WIMAL Dasanayake
AN Indian friend of mine, a renowned scholar, once suggested that I
write a book on modern intellectuals of Sri Lanka, pointing out that
very little is known about them outside of Sri Lanka. He drew my
attention to some excellent work that had been done in recent times on
Bengali intellectuals.
I agreed with him about the need for a work of that nature; at the
same time, I realized the complexity of, and challenges posed by, such
an undertaking. This short book should be seen as a preliminary step
towards such an undertaking.
The observations and analytical statements contained in the ensuing
essays are tentative explorations across a large terrain. And here, I
use the term essay in its original sense of being a provisional trying
out of ideas.
The objective of this book is to examine the thoughts of four of the
most influential Sinhala cultural intellectuals in terms of their
sustained engagement with tradition. Munidasa Cumaratunga (1887-1944),
Martin Wickramasinghe (1891-1976), Ediriweera Sarachchandra (1914-1996)
and Gunadasa Amarasekera (1929- ) have exercised a deep and profoundly
significant influence on the thought and imagination of
twentieth-century Sinhala culture.
Each in his own distinct way, grappled with the issue of tradition,
and how tradition could be harnessed for serious creative and
interpretive processes. To engage with the thoughts of these four
writers is to come to grips with an important dimension of modern
Sinhala culture.
Edward Said once remarked that, "At bottom, the intellectual, in my
sense of the word, is neither a pacifier nor a consensus-builder, but
someone whose whole being is staked on a critical sense, a sense of
being unwilling to accept easy formulas, or ready-made clich,s, or the
smooth, ever-so-accommodating confirmations of what the powerful or
conventional have to say, and what they do; Not just passively
unwillingly, but actively willing to say so in public." These
characteristics are much in evidence in the four intellectuals that I
examine in the following pages.
All of them, in addition to being influential intellectuals were
creative writers of distinction. They possessed the gift of critical
intelligence in abundance, and lamented the loss of cultural anchorage
and inner reference points discernible in modern society.
They were all involved in an indefatigably resourceful quest for the
meaning and contemporaneity of tradition. They were transformative
intellectuals in the best sense of the term.
All of them, as creative writers and critical thinkers, located
themselves in the liminal space between tradition and modernity, and
sought to understand the predicaments of contemporary life and culture
from that vantage point.
The inter-articulation of these writers serves to foreground their
common interests and epistemes. Their desire to train their critical
gaze on the past, paradoxically, had the effect of deepening their
comprehension of the present.
It is this gain in knowledge that persuaded them to see the urgencies
of the present through the optic of tradition. While they demonstrated
the importance of tradition, they also wanted to rescue it from
hardening into dogma.
Walter Benjamin once observed, "in every era the attempt must be made
anew to wrest tradition away from a conformism that is about to
overpower it." Cumaratunga, Wickramasinghe, Sarachchandra and
Amarasekera would have totally approved of this desideratum.
Munidasa Cumaratunga and Martin Wickramasinghe were close friends,
although they differed sharply on several issues. Martin Wickramasinghe
had a profound impact on Sarachchandra's thinking, and Sarachchandra
played a central role in winning national recognition for Wickramasinghe
as a writer.
Gunadasa Amarasekera, initially, was a great admirer of both
Wickramasinghe and Sarachchandra, and a complex network of images,
clusters of ideas and common pathways drew them together.
They were erroneously lumped together as members of the Peradeniya
School; in later years, both Wickramasinghe and Amarasekera were
critical of some aspects of Sarachchandra's writings and the Peradeniya
School that he was credited with instituting .The works of the other
three were intimately known to each of them.
The concept of tradition was of utmost importance to all four of
them. They sought to problematise it and re-theorise it. Sri Lanka is a
small country with a long cultural history, located next door to India
which can boast of one of the greatest civilizations that has evolved
over the centuries.
This fact makes it imperative that local intellectuals grapple with
the geo-cultural implications of this proximity. This proximity to
India, both geographically and culturally, gives rise to a sense of hope
as well as anxiety of influence.
While Sarachchandra, like Coomaraswamy advocated the need to identify
with the greater Indian cultural tradition, Cumaratunga, Wickramasinghe
and Amarasekera were much more cautious and circumspect.
Wickramasinghe's reservations about Brahmanic influences have a
significant bearing on this issue.
All of these intellectuals, as Auden said of Freud, are not mere
individuals but climates of opinion; they have transformed the life and
thought of our age in new and profound ways. They fought against arid
professionalism and arbitrary departmentalization of knowledge and
insisted on the untrammeled flow of ideas across disciplines.
This is most evident in the work of Martin Wickramasinghe. They also
struggled against habit-blindness and underlined the need to
re-understand texts and events within newer cultural frames.
This book constitutes an exercise in cultural criticism. I have
sought to cast the net as wide as possible, and locate the work of the
intellectuals under study in the wider discourses and theoretical
interests of the humanities and social sciences.
This book consists of five chapters. In the first chapter, I have
tried to examine diverse approaches to tradition in the intellectual
world at large, and to focus on the pioneering work of the well-known
Sri Lankan born scholar Ananda Coomaraswamy as a way of bringing out the
distinctiveness of the four writers I have chosen to focus on.
The second chapter is devoted to a study of Munidasa Cumaratunga, his
explorations into tradition, especially in the arena of philosophy of
language and the way tradition and modernity interact within his long
poem, Piya Samara. Martin Wickramasinghe was the greatest novelist and
critic of his time.
In my analysis of his encounters with tradition, I aim to investigate
into the ways in which he sought to create a characteristically Buddhist
approach to culture in general and literature in particular.
The next chapter will deal with the work of Ediriweera Sarachchandra
who was the greatest modern dramatist of the twentieth-century and a
trail-blazer in modern Sinhalese criticism.
My focus in this chapter will be on the way he created a modern
Sinhala theatre on the basis of tradition and his attempt to fashion a
form of practical criticism based on a combination of traditional Indian
aesthetics and modern English practical criticism.
The last chapter is given over to a discussion of Gunadasa
Amarasekera's concept of tradition and how it is reflected in his
poetry. His ideas of tradition were later expanded and given a political
edge so as to anatomize current social trends, and in the process,
running into fierce criticism. No one has a sharper sense of social
dislocation than Amarasekera.
I did not have the good fortune of meeting Munidasa Cumaratunga; I
was too young to get to know him personally. I knew the other three
intellectuals quite well. I was an acquaintance of Martin Wickramasinghe,
a student of Ediriweera Sarachchandra and I believe, that I am a friend
of Gunadasa Amarasekera.
Over the years, I was fortunate enough to discuss matters related to
tradition and modernity in Sinhala literature and culture and kindred
issues with the three of them.
These discussions shaped my thinking in interesting and productive
ways, but let me hasten to add that, they are in no way responsible for
the ideas enunciated in this book.
I have read and re-read Ananda Coomaraswamy's writings with great
profit. I am always astounded by his wide-ranging erudition; his
erudition compelled me to study his works closely, although that study,
occasionally, issued in dissent.
At a time, when there is so much cultural criticism written on Sri
Lanka based purely on the present, it is instructive to examine how five
intellectuals explored their traditions paying close attention to the
past and the original languages with which it was connected.
It is interesting to observe that all five of them regarded the
legitimacy of cultural criticism as resting on the reflexive recognition
of cultural identity.
(The above is the preface from the writer's most recent work titled:
'Enabling Traditions: Four Sinhala Cultural Intellectuals') |