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Mihintalava - The Birthplace of Sri Lankan Buddhist Civilization

Four great, transformative influences

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')

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