Ludowyk, English and the Sri Lankan University

Ashley HALPE

PERSONALITY: The temptation is immense, given the impressiveness of Professor Ludowyk's personality and teaching, to make this occasion purely celebratory. One might memorialise his brilliant readings and commentaries, or illustrate the subtle awareness of connotation in his published explications of texts, or even simply recall the telling phrase, the memorable gesture - every former student will have his favourite anecdote.

But I take my bearings, instead, from what was in fact Professor Ludowyk's valedictory essay, written in 1956 the year of his retirement and departure for London. In the last paragraph we find him saying.

As I type these words our ship moves through the

Suez Canal, and I remember Whitman's poem and

Forster's novel

He speaks in this essay of

...the belief in the ideal of man's understanding of the diversities of human experience. If this is not the concern of the departments of Humanities in the University, what should be?...If understanding could save, then there (is) indeed something practical our universities (can) do...

Our society seems to be committed to very different ideas of practicality and salvation. Fundamental Studies - note "Fundamental" - is seen as a hight powered scientifico - technical exercise and the devotees of technological culture ignore both the warnings and the sarcasm of Professor Sarachchandra.

Obviously, science and technology are of the highest importance in providing the material bases of the good life, but it is the humanities and the arts that help to define or at least adumbrate the ideals which give meaning and purpose to the individual life and to social relationships.

But while we celebrate the liberation of men from soul-killing labour, from being the little cogs in mechanico - industrial civilisation, we also seem to view the leisure so gained as a kind of threat, a vacuum to be filled.

And yet it should be obvious from the most cursory examination of our world that neither in traumatised Sri Lanka nor in, say the United States coping with Irangate can that leisure be devoted to pure pastime, to what Word worth called killtime.

We are a long way from the salvation through understating that Professor Ludowyk speaks of; we need a radical conviction that education is a lifetime process, with the shaping of society calling for the total involvement of all its members.

I'm sure you'll agree that this is where literature and indeed all the arts have their very special function. For literature is not just about Professor Ludowyk's "diversities of human experience" it is that experience made accessible.

"My writing", said George Eliot, "is simply a set of experiments in life - an endeavour to see what our thought and emotion may be capable of..." The writer's craft compels our participation in that experiment as we experience the words that are so flat and dull, so much inert clay in our inept hands, coming suddenly alive with a new power of revealing us to ourselves:

A novel or a work of history in the humanistic sense does not and cannot directly teach truth or wisdom. It offers us a process, a series of events in our minds, which will tend to bring the responsive individual nearer to his own truth and to his own wisdom by recognition or anticipation of his own experience.

To look at it more concretely, Gunadasa Amersekera's story (Going Back), for example, puts the plight of the Lankan intellectual, alienated from the manners, intuitions and natural relationships of traditional society more forcefully and inescapably than a whole shelf of studies in transition or accumulations of statistical data.

You read the tale and you enter into, even undergo the experience of its central character - you don't just observe, or learn, you are immersed. When Patrick Fernando in his poem A Fisherman Mourned by his Wife gives us the response of the bereaved woman in the lines.

You had grown so familiar as my hand

That I cannot with simple grief

Assuage dismemberment...

We are given both the sense of loss and something more: We are placed within the compassionate response of the poet by the subtle balance of the homely image and the consciously articulated statement.

In Lakdasa Wikramasinha's Don't Talk to Me About Matisse we experience the tense violence of a colonised mind deploying its inwardness with the culture of the violators to point up his repudiation of the incursion:

Don't talk to me about Matisse, don't talk to me

about Gauguin, or even

the earless painter van Gogh,

& the woman reclining on a blood-spread..

the aboriginal shot by the great white hunter Matisse

with a gun with two nostrils, the aboriginal

crucified by Gauguin - the syphilis - spreader, the yellowed obesity.

Don't talk to me about Matisse..

the European style of 1900, the tradition of the studio

where the nude woman reclines forever on a sheet of blood

Talk to me instead of the culture generally-

how the murderers were sustained

by the beauty robbed of savages: to our remote

villages the painters came, and our white-washed

mud-huts were splattered with gunfire.

Such writing transforms knowledge into experience - experience of varied shades of contemporary reality as well as putting us imaginatively and affectively in possession of the past, and creating the future - for after all, to imagine the still non-existent future is in a sense to shape it.

No doubt some of you are already beginning to think that, though all this is very true, in any given society these activities must proceed in terms of its indigenous literature and art. In our context English would appear to be simply a tool - a supremely useful tool but still only an adjunct or instrument of education and development.

What, then, is the true role of a Sri Lankan university's English department?

It has too often and too easily been assumed that role has in fact been the perpetuation of a gigantic irrelevance, or at best the anxious defence of an elite enclave: that the disciplines practised were inappropriate to Sri Lankan reality and contributed to the alienation of the English-speaking privileged class.

Such opinions and assumptions are saddening insults to the memory of the man we honour today. The essay he wrote on his way out to England in 1956 was on The East-West Problem in Sinhala Literature and in it he speaks of the need for

"...the enormous labour of presenting the thought of the East afresh to the world in translations different from those which, through their pre-occupations with exclusively Western and Christian valuations and terminology, have up to the present insufficiently and wrongly rendered them. The West has to unlearn a great deal it has come to believe about the East...

He was sensitive to "the search of the dramatist in Ceylon for a mode which would bring in the traditional" and he observed acutely that "the most fruitful results" of English and English education in Sri Lankan literature were not in the writing in English but in "the effect it has had on writing in Sinhalese... It has done something to create a group of professional writers in Sinhalese, a group which hardly existed before".

He was one of the earliest to note what is now generally accepted, that "the Sinhalese novel and the Sinhalese short story, as they exist today, have been a noticeable result of the contact of Sinhalese with English".

He was too modest to mention his own work with the Sinhala Ranga Sabha but Professor Sarachchandra has handsomely acknowledged its value, he has said that

To watch Loduwyk produce the play was to me an unforgettable and most enjoyable experience. I did not realise at the time that it was providing me with the basic education I needed in an area of artistic activity that was to become, later, practically my life work.

Of his published work, three of his books, the first three published after his retirement, are thoughtful evocations and discussions of Sri Lanka and its culture.

When one focuses more specifically on his work in English teaching we find his saying in the book he published for the use of teachers during the war, Marginal Comments, that

It is unfortunate that students in secondary schools in Ceylon have no knowledge of an Oriental literature besides which the literature of a foreign culture like the English might be placed. The obvious practical result of literary studies in English would then be their use as an instrument of comparison.

And again

"... English is studied as if it were the natural expression of the people of this country when we should, if it is to be of any value to us, remember at all times that it is the expression of a culture very different from ours....

The point here is that Professor Ludowyk was deeply and sensitively aware of the immediate context of his work as a professor of English and head of a department of English, conscious of Sri Lankan reality and responsive to indigenous literature and culture. Note, for example, his beautifully perceptive reworking of Paranavitana's translation of Sigiri Graffito no, 381;

Hail! I speak, a worker in iron:

'Little honey-heart,

Golden girl

All you asked of me

passionately, senselessly,

I myself have done'.

Pray tell the gold hued one

What I have spoken.

By no means a Sigiriya specialist he had seen the precious nugget buried in Paranavitana's notes to the graffito - the comment on the word miyelandhi. Paranavitana himself had missed the vibrancy of the word he had deciphered, rendering it sweetheart in his translation, though in the note he says "the word, therefore, literally means 'honey-heart'".

Sweetheart, after all, is abstract, hackneyed and loose: honeyheart a truly meta -phoric melding of experiences. Professor Ludowyk's gift for close reading enabled him to bring Par -anavitana's discovery to readers.

Obviously, in a university department of English the major task is the exploration of literature in English and the education and enthusing of students in that area of knowledge and experience.

Godfrey Gunatilleke has borne witness to the profound education of the sensibility that he and other students gained from learning to "gauge the reality of experience in literature" through "Lydowyke's discipline of literary criticism".

Every lecture had its creative design that yet seem instinctive and not deliberate; the deft deployment of scholarship was beautifully balanced by superb readings from his authors and the sensitive explication of the words on the page. The readings that studded his lectures were an integral part of our education; to quote Godfrey Gunatilleke again

His voice, profoundly sensitive to changes of tone and feeling in every line, swept us at once into the complex... inner world of the poem. For the duration of the reading we seemed to 'live' the poem... The reading illuminated for us what perhaps the best critical analysis of the poem could have only accomplished in a much more mediate fashion.

But if this was the major concern, it is also possible to see a kind of Little Tradition of work on and for Sri Lankan culture beginning with Professor Ludowyk and continued by his pupils and his pupils' pupils and indeed even in the changes in the English Department.

Sarathchandra Wickramsuriya of the department was invited to deliver one of the addresses to a Sahitya Day celebration and he has to his credit a comprehensive research study of the evolution of Sinhalese narrative prose, a book of Sinhala short stories and critical writing in and on Sinhala.

We can consider here the translations of Reggie Siriwardena, Ranjini Obeysekere, Chitra Fernando, Lakshmi de Silva, Derek de Silva and many others - it is a field I enjoy working in myself - and the Sinhala film scripts of Reggie Siriwardene and A. J. Gunawardena.

There is the work in the Sinhala theatre of G. K. Haththotawegama, Ranjini Obeyesekere, etc., the most recent being 'Nidahasa' by R. B. Dissanayke which figured prominently in the short play festival.

There are such studies as Ranjini Obeysekere's 'Sinhala Writing and the New Critics' and Derek de Silva's introduction to the plays of Ediriweera Sarachchandra; Gananath Obeyesekere's notable contributions to anthropology and sociology followed by those of Joe Weeramunde, and a respectable list of publications in Sinhala - the Sarachchandra felicitation volume that appeared a month or so ago includes two.

One should include here the names of those who have made their mark in journalism like Mervyn de Silva and Philip Cooray. I would say that the pioneering work on the English language in Sri Lanka and in English teaching begun by Professor Passe and Doric de Souza and continued by Chitra Wickramasuriya, Kamal de Abrew and Thiru Kandiah and their many pupils will ultimately be seen to have an important place in the social history of our country.

Finally - and this is a place of honour - I do not doubt that the writers as different as Gamini Seneviratne, Chitra Fernando, Yasmine Gooneratne and Jean Arasanayagam, and the newest voices heard among the older ones in the current issue of 'Navasilu', 'Phoenix', 'Channels', etc. participate with their poetry and prose in the great tasks of extending the consciousness and stirring the conscience of our people.

It is with mindfulness of this tradition and responsibility, indeed with glad acceptance that we view the everyday work of an English department.

Speaking for ourselves in Peradeniya - and, no doubt, departments elsewhere see things in much the same way - we try to find new ways of helping students learn, exploring literature for themselves rather than being taught about it.

We take risks with the repertoire, foraying into unfamiliar places and seeking the new growing points, in the new literatures in English, in comparative studies, in literature in translation.

But we also consciously confront students with the facts and experiences of our plural culture, for example through foundation courses in Sinhala and Tamil literature and culture and the study of the living context of Sri Lankan literature in English.

I do not pretend that all is sweetness and light. We do sometimes get students who are unable to breakthrough the limitations of a Westernised urban upbringing.

But one can, I think, claim that English and English departments have already performed and are performing every much more than purely service functions in this country, accepting the responsibility and the vocation to reinterpret the tradition and vision of Professor Ludowyk in our present circumstances.

The recent separation of English Language Teaching Units from the Departments of English defines that responsibility and potentiality more sharply by removing the utilitarian duty from our departments.

However, even in this area a practical task still remains, but on a much higher level than is envisaged by Spoken English and intensive courses.

Some years ago Gunadasa Amerasekera spoke to us on the subject of 'English and the Sinhala Writer'. He showed that there were many reasons "why English has had no valuable influence on our own literature." But he went on to say

I consider the knowledge of world literature provided by English an indispensable requirement for the modern Sinhala writer.

He emphasised the need for the writer of a novel or short story to know the tradition of those forms, and he was doubtful whether enough translations would ever be available.

He concluded by saying

Let me come now to the last point why I ask for more and more English for the Sinhala writer. I think a writer is primarily an intellectual, a thinker who is expected to comment intelligently on the life and the times in which he lives. I cannot think of any great writer who has not performed this role. If the Sinhala writer of the future is to perform this role he should be primarily an enlightened person. And as you know too well no enlightenment is possible without knowledge.

Where knowledge is concerned I do not think there is any other medium than English through which we could acquire it today.

Therefore if the writer in Sinhala is to be a person worth listening to and not a mere medium to be used by demagogues it is imperative that he should be a man of learning and knowledge and that he should have a viable medium for such learning and knowledge.

It is imperative that he should know a world langauge such as English. It is time we said this openly even at the risk of becoming unpopular.

What Gunadasa Amerasekera says there has an immediate relevance to the place of English in the Sri Lankan university. Not all university students can be or should aspire to be novelists or poets but they do all constitute an intellectual elite and are or should be the potential leaders of our society.

It is as true for such a student as for the would be writer that if he is to be "a person worth listening to and not a mere medium to be used by demagogues it is imperative that he should be a man of learning and knowledge and that he should have a viable medium for such knowledge. It is imperative that he should know a world language such as English...." Without the "enlightenment" Gunadasa Amerasekera speaks of and the knowledge on which it is based a doctor, an engineer or an executive is merely a technician or even a tool, not a whole man, open to manipulation by unscrupulous minds, the more dangerous as his economic importance and social prestige conceal a lack of political culture and an absence of general understanding.

Knowing English at this level is obviously very much more than a command of basics - as Gunadasa says, it has to be a viable medium, a genuine second langauge and not a Kaduwa to be handled with circumspection.

But there is even more to it than that. Gunadasa Amerasekera is talking about enlightenment; and the kind of English education I'm talking about is intimatley related, in its education of the sensibility to the process of natural development. But for this to be possible we must have universities that take themselves seriously, in the spirit of Whitehead's marvellous description.

A University imparts information, but it imparts it imaginatively. At least, that is the function it should perform for society. A university which fails in this respect has no reason for existence. This atmosphere of excitement, arising from imaginative consideration, transforms knowledge.

A fact is no longer a bare fact; it is invested with all its possibilities. It is no longer a burden on the memory: It is energising as the poet of our dreams, and as the architect of our purposes.

But this requires that our universities and indeed the nation be committed to the culture of the imagination - and this is hardly the case. Our supposedly highly literate population takes four to five years to absorb a print run of 2000 copies of a serious Sinhala novel - you can imagine the position with regard to poetry - although 4000 candidates took Sinhala for the GAQ examination and several times that number sat for the Advanced Level. Sinhala and Tamil survive in the university largely as the second and third choices of students rejected in the competition for places in more popular honours courses while Arabic, Islamic Civilisation and French have the dubious attraction of soft options. A Professor of Sinhala mourns that Honours students don't even read their texts while a first-year syllabus does not require that they read any at all.

The Faculty of Arts has withdrawn a once flourishing course in general studies that included introductions to literature, art and the history of thought, while music and drama lead the most precarious of largely extracurricular existences. and in a master-plan, as it were, for the university - a Corporate Plan for University Education produced by the University Grants Commission we have a revealing, almost schizophrenic, duality.

Under the Aims of University Education it is declared that a "University should concentrate on equipping a student with a critical awareness of self and society....;" speaking of "one all-important end, to interest a student in the pursuit of truth" and of the "training of students' minds" it speaks, too, of

"..... nurturing an understanding and appreciation of the values of their own and other societies. Given the complexities of the modern world, and the multiple changes that confront young people as they set forth to meet the challenges of life outside the University, the importance of the cultivated and critical mind becomes self-evident."

But the next chapter of the plan roundly declares that

"The pattern of growth of University education in the past has been influenced more by the social demand for Higher Education than by manpower considerations. In the proposals in this Plan greater emphasis has been laid upon the latter"

The duality I refer to suggests an uncertainty of attitude a notional foregrounding of liberal, humane values and an actual commitment to utilitarian standards.

But it will not do for the Universities merely to bewail their subjection to the UGC or for faculties of Arts and Humanities to be left to cope as best they can.

It is for the universities to face the issue with imagination and resolution, to concern themselves with the total culture of all their students, breaking through the limiting concepts of faculties and specialisms.

Since the specialists and the technocrats appear to be calling the shots, a quote from one of the great men of science might be in place. Speaking of Higher Education Albert Einstein said

I want to oppose the idea that the school has to teach directly that special knowledge and those accomplishments which one has to use later directly in life.

The demands of life are much too manifold to let such a specialised training in school appear possible. Apart from that it seems to me objectionable to treat the individual as a dead tool. The school should always have as its aim that the young man leaves it as a harmonious personality, not as a specialist.

Our present university structures do not suggest anything like a concern with such views, although they were certainly part of the original concept.

Sir Ivor Jennings wrote that a "University's task is much wider than mere training up to degree standard.... it is a community, with a life and spirit of its own...." A university is a world of its own in which the undergraduate should acquire wisdom as well as learning."

I trust it is not late for those who have been nourished and enriched by the life and work of Professor Ludowyk to launch some effort to foster the values that occupied his mind at the time of his farewell to Sri Lanka and its University.

Celebration of the birth centenary of Professor E.F.C. Ludowyk

BIRTH CENTENARY: Prof. Ludowyk was born on the October 16, 1906. He became the first Sri Lankan Professor of English at the early age of thirty-two and gave a distinctive quality to the Department of English and to English studies.

In theatre, he gave our audiences a diet of serious and excellently performed modern English and World Drama, while Professor Sarachchandra has written on Ludowyk's contribution to his understanding and practice of the arts of drama and to the shaping of modern Sinhala theatre and drama.

A great love of his country and perceptive understanding of it are to be seen in his books The Footprint of the Buddha and Those Long Afternoons. His academic works include two guides to literature and scholarly editions of several Shakespeare plays.

Shakespeare's Twelfth Night will be performed in honour of Professor Ludowyk by the Kandy Players, directed by Professor Ashley Halpe, on October 29 and 30 in Kandy at the Children's Library Hall (next to the Kandy British Council) at 7.00 p.m. each night and at the Weeramuni Punchi Theatre, Cotta Road, Borella on November 4 and 5 at 7.30 p.m. each night.

The production is sponsored by the British Council. It is set in Sri Lanka and uses Sri Lankan costume.