T. B. Ilangaratne: Celebrating Kandyan middle-class life

Centre piece by Ajith Samaranayake

Watching Lakshman Wijesekera's tele-drama Vilambitha inspired by T. B. Ilangaratne's semi-autobiographical novel of the same name one is struck once again by Ilangaratne's peculiar power as a writer. For if there was one single national politician who was devoted to creative writing it was Tikiri Banda Ilangaratne.

In a long political career spanning over four decades he was a powerful Cabinet Minister in three successive Bandaranaike Governments rising to be Acting Prime Minister on occasion but he never abandoned his passion for literature.

He wrote a crop of novels, wrote, directed and acted in stage plays while some of his novels were made into films, most notably Tilaka Saha Tilaka and Nedeyo and into the tele-drama Ambayahaluwo.

Ilangaratne was always good to spin a story simply but evocatively told and his novels appealed to a cross-section of the readership.

Vilambitha is the story of Tilaka Bandara a middle-class Kandyan young man who is sent to the big city of Kandy to receive an English education. English was, of course, the lingua france of those colonial times and a badge of superiority over the hoi-polloi.

Tilaka does not come from the upper bracket of the Kandyan aristocracy and Ilangaratne coming from the same social stratum was aware of the peculiar position this particular social layer occupied sandwiched as it was between the cream of the aristocracy and the poverty-stricken peasantry.

Tilaka's father is the village Lekam Mahattaya or the Registrar of Marriages and he is comfortably off by village standards. He naturally desires the best for his children and Tilaka is the apple of the Family's eye. But when the Lekam Mahattaya suddenly falls ill he has to mortgage the family home and property to spend both on the illness as well as to maintain Tilaka at his English College.

Hailing from the scenic village of Hataraliyadda and educated at St. Anthony's College, Kandy story teller Ilangaratne did not need any special mental effort to get into the skin of his protagonist.

Tilaka is the starry-eyed village boy who comes to the town to study English. He is somebody in the village but thrown among his city-bred classmates he is made keenly aware of distinctions which he had not felt in his rural milieu.

In the village where he wore sarong and shirt like all other boys and romped about the fields Tilaka felt no different from even the depressed caste Sundara's children. But when he visits his friend Sumana's bungalow (his father is a lawyer) he realises the class gulf which exists between the two families.

However Ilangaratne is such a gripping story teller that one only senses the social sub-text of the story.

He thrusts no message forcibly on the reader and the whole story is so subsumed in the friendship between the two adolescent boys that the feeling is one of warm camaraderie a small universe common only to the two young friends.

Ilangaratne also sketches in other subtle class distinctions. Talaka's elder brother Senevi is only a Sinhala school teacher and therefore wears a cloth and banian.

Tilaka being the upwardly mobile member of the family is the repository of everybody's social hopes and aspirations but as the story ends, is baulked by his inability to find a suitable job. As a result he loses Lasanda his first cousin with whom he has had an unspoken calf love affair and who is married off to a sub Inspector of Police. As the story ends unable to find a job Tilaka takes to farming so that the family will not have to give the 'ande' cultivator his portion of the paddy.

Another dimension of the novel is the close web of familial relationships in which the cast of characters is enmeshed. The story is heavy with the responsibilities and obligations rooted in the traditional family.

Tilaka's elder sister for example agrees to marry an older man and a widower with two children because no dowry would be asked for since her own brother would be marrying the widower's sister in exchange.

Although the writer does not make a fetish of it behind these familial relationships are impersonal economic and social forces eating into and eroding the standards of middle-class life. Thus caught as they are between the upper aristocracy and the peasantry Tilakas middle-class family has to struggle to maintain its customary standard of life thus getting mired in debt.

Ilangaratne followed up Vilambitha with two other semi-autobiographical novels Tilaka and Tilaka Saha Tilaka which traced Tialak's career as a Government servant, a trade union leader at the head of the 1947 GCSU-led General Strike and finally a left-inclined Member of Parliament closely mirroring Ilangaratne's own life.

Taken as a whole this trilogy is an intensely human story and on another level a microcosm of the upwardly mobile middle class emerging from the twilight of colonialism into the high noon of political Independence and coming into its own as a political class.

If one sets aside its Kandyan nuances the story is thus a microcosm of that bi-lingual nationalist-socialist middle class of politicians and intelligentsia who have had such a profound influence on Sri Lanka's politics and society since Independence.

Ilangaratne himself was a stalwart of this movement and thus the story is told with considerable authority. But its charm is that it is a very good read which does not come between the story and reader with any top-heavy ideological message.

In this sense Ilangaratne is unlike any other Sinhala novelist. He engages in no deep psychological probing of his characters or complex social theorising. The very simplicity of his story line and language give the impression of a light weight but this is deceptive because Ilangaratne is able to achieve an effect with his simple folksy tales which other novelists might fail to carry off with heavy tracts.