Where every prospect pleases

BY RAJIVA Wijesinghe

I AM still convinced that this country is the most beautiful in the world in terms of landscape. Other places may have greater individual attractions, but nowhere else, I think, does one find such a fantastic range of scenery within such a small compass.

This used to be one of the principal attractions of Sri Lanka, and now sadly I feel increasingly that it is the only one. We seem to be rushing more and more avidly to prove correct the Victorian Bishop who wrote of an island 'Where every prospect pleases, and only man is vile.'

L W de Silva, the Supreme Court Judge who retired to England in the 70s in high dudgeon at what he saw as the collapse of civilization, nevertheless wrote a learned article in which he tried to prove, through metrical analysis, that Heber must initially have written of Java. 'In Ceylon's pleasant isle' was not iambic, whereas substituting Java gave a better rhythm.

Appealing though the argument is, I suspect the Victorians could well have pronounced Ceylon with as strong a stress on the first syllable as they gave to Java.

Besides, beautiful as much of Java is, with long stretches of dull flat lowland and comparatively boring beaches, it is not really a patch on our own wonderful island.

The only place, I used to think, that could have offered us competition in terms of physical beauty was Bali. However that could not have been Bishop Heber's subject, for the people there are far from vile.

They struck me, when I first visited, way back in 1982, as eminently civilized, gentle and helpful, but also very dignified.

It was the leaders of Bali after all who, when imperial conquest seemed inevitable, dressed ceremonially and flung themselves against the guns of the conqueror in search of an honourable death, in preference to surrender and servility.

They were a far cry from our own nobility, a few sterling exceptions apart, who handed the country over and then did their best to pander to and profit from their colonial masters.

In 1982 tourism was still limited. So was my budget. After a harrowing journey (two overnight buses, with a very full day in between, exploring Jogjakarata and Borobudur), I stayed in a small hotel in Sanur, away from the Australian surfing paradise of Kuta.

Morning and evening the boys who served would engage in ceremonies before the gods in the courtyard, in theory Hindu, but involving also elements of animism as well as Buddhism.

It was then that I began to realize how absurd it was that we did not know more of this area with its shared cultural roots. Travelling later on the mainland, seeing what Lanka in Phnom Penh, the Sinhalese inscriptions in the Temple of Learning in Hanoi, the images of Parakramabahu in Pagan, I felt this more strongly, but Bali was I believe the beginning of a sense of commitment.

And finally now this has borne fruit, in that even if nothing else I did with regard to curriculum reform lasts, at least I managed to ensure that the ancient history of South East Asia, the civilizations associated with Borobudur and Angkor Wat, now figure in our school syllabuses.

It was nearly twenty years later that I went back, this time to the ASEAN People's Forum, when we were put up in a very grand hotel that seemed however oddly familiar. I discovered then that Geoffrey Bawa had been one of the inspirations for many of the upmarket hotels in Bali.

The connection had developed through Donald Friend, who had moved on to Bali after a long sojourn in Sri Lanka, seeking a very different sort of paradise from that of the Victorian bishop.

By then tourism was a massive industry, though again one was struck by the charm and dignity of the people, not only the hotel staff but also the vendors on the shore, so different from our own beach entrepreneurs.

A year later everything exploded. The bombs in the nightclubs frequented by Australians brought home to the Balinese the ruthlessness of terror, just as we had experienced it so often in the preceding decades.

Those born on Bali itself may not have been responsible, but for a country that had managed to build up, at its core at least, a strong sense of national identity, the attack by fellow Indonesians came as a shock.

When I visited again, in August last year, things seemed to have settled down. Tourists were back, the beaches were crowded.

On the last day we had lunch it what passed for the town center, in a mall that was very full. Two months later it was in a similar mall that the terrorists struck again. This shows, I suppose, that in the globalized village, we can all be victims of terror.

At the same time unlike us, who have in our different ways precipitated our own awful situation, the Balinese are victims of external forces, a clash of cultures in which they have no part.

Where we destroyed our paradise, Bali seems to me a clear example of a sanctuary violated by external forces. I am not sure which is sadder.