One-Dimensional Society? Thoughts on Modern Sinhala Culture

Dr. Wasantha Amarakeerthi Liyanage

Commenting on "the majority report" and "the minority report" on Sri Lanka's ethnic problem, Dayan Jayatilleka made a perceptive point:

"Sri Lanka's tragedy has been that those who endorse one text would not endorse the other, while in reality, the contents of each cannot stand alone, and can be brought to fruition only in tandem with the other."(Asian Tribune, 12/9, 2006)

Culture : This statement resonates far beyond the realm of politics, the intended discursive space of Jayatilleka's piece. The crucial verb here is 'endorse', which is charged with political implications. Behind any act of 'endorsing', there lies power.

A carefully chosen word indeed. In this essay, I want to take this statement out of its context and to use it as the point of departure in investigating an even larger cultural problem in modern Sinhala culture that I have been observing over the years.

To get at this problem, let's replace Jayatilleka's word, 'endorse' with a less political word: 'appreciate'. After all, the failure to endorse a text is predicated upon a failure to read and appreciate it even though many people endorse texts without ever reading them.

Looking at this problem from the vantage point of a cultural critic, I can see numerous examples of our 'cultural failures' to appreciate certain texts because we are only able to appreciate other texts.

Reading Mahaawansa

One can trace this 'cultural one-dimensionality' to the debate on reading Mahaawansa, perhaps the most political text in the world after the Bible and the Quran! It is political because with regard to Mahaawansa, 'appreciating' it, is perceived as 'endorsing'.

Those who like it do not like other texts that attempt to question and to supplement the homogenous Sinhala Buddhistness narrated in it by pointing out to different ways of being Sinhala and Sri Lankan.

For example, the pioneering scholarly effort by Prof. Gananath Obeyesekere to show us that Mahaawansa is not the only narrative of Sinhala history is seen as a conspiracy against The Text of the Sinhala nation.

The battle between the endorsers of Mahaawansa and its haters has a long history that goes all the way back to Mahaavihaara and Abhayagiri era.

Unlike some, I do not hate Mahaawansa. If Sinhala people believe that a part of their cultural identity is narrated in that text, their right to believe so is as legitimate as Zionists' use of Biblical truths to carve out an Israel in Palestine.

The belief in Mahaawansa, however, should not prevent us from reading, appreciating other texts that reveal another side of Sinhala identity that Mahaawansa does not narrate or even hides.

Moreover, the belief in Mahaawansa must not make us blind to other texts that relate the stories of other communities in the island. In addition, we need to learn the ways of reading a rich text like the Great Chronicle without reducing it to a dogmatic statement that even street-gangs can endorse.

At the same time, those who receive an unbelievable amount of NGO money to produce a play that basically attacks Mahaawansa, aren't going to teach us how to read better.

They only end up reaping the whirlwind- to allude to Prof. K. M. de Silva's superb phrase. Eighty thousand US dollars ($80,000), if the rumour got the figure right!

Genuinely independent playwrights like Rajitha Dissanayake, who is in debt making four plays, would make twenty plays with that kind of money! Unfortunately, Ratnavalli, an admirable piece of dramatic writing, was drowned in a sea of 'NGO quick-cash' and buried in the grave of intellectual integrity. The goddess Ratnavalli is betrayed once again!

Martin Wickramasinghe

Martin Wickramasinghe, who has taught us how to read more than anyone else, made an unfortunate mistake by defining Amavatura as the best work of prose while discarding Butsarana.

Many scholars after him simply followed Wickramasinghe's hierarchical paradigm of these texts, without attending to complex and multifaceted literariness in them.

Modern literary theory allows us to see that Amavatura and Butsarana are two masterpieces written by genius prose writers. I would even go so far as to claim that Butsarana is the best of them. Mr. Wickramasinghe made a similar mistake by ranking Guttilaya over Kavsilumina.

The ranking itself is not the problem here but the fact that he presents Guttilaya as a quintessential expression of Buddhist poetic sensibility. Why cannot we take both of these texts as two modes of Sinhala poetic expression?

Perhaps, he did not intend his halfwit followers to endorse one and reject the other. Even after brilliant scholarly work by Prof. Hemapala Wijayawardhane and Prof. Sucharitha Gamlath, the hierarchy Wickramasinghe set up still prevails.

It is sad that Prof. Wijayawardhane's doctoral thesis on the influence of Sanskrit poetics on classical Sinhala poetry remains unpublished for nearly 50 years. Written in English, the Wijayawardhane thesis closed its eyes on the children of 56!

Now, the work of Wickramasinghe himself is being subjected to one-dimensional readings in the contemporary Sinhala literary scene. Some argue that the 'father of Sinhala novel' knew all about modernism.

The implication is that it is okay to repeat what the great man did, without trying to transcend crucial limits in his work. There are some who argue that critiquing Wickramasinghe is a part of conspiracy! Conspiracy theorists, more often than not, are those who cannot read. They can read akuru but not texts. Our education system keeps manufacturing such readers.

Most important debates

Let's move into one of the most important scholarly debates in modern Sri Lanka: "the people of the lion debate." When Prof. Ranavira Leslie Gunawardhana argued that Sinhala ethnic identity as such was created in the 19th century, on borrowed ideological and discursive apparatuses from the colonial West and the Orientalist scholarship, Prof. K. N. O. Dharmadasa argued against it showing historical evidence that the idea of Sinhala nation, in its proto-form, had much longer history. In 'textual power,' each of these texts has its own strength.

Gunawardhana's text looks into the future and it is strong in political will. Dharmadasa's text looks back into the past and again into the future. His text is strong in 'historical facts'.

However, there are only a few people who appreciate both texts and learn from both. Ironically enough, one of those few is Prof. Stanley Thambiah, who was a villain of the Sinhala nation in the popular press during those 'Buddhism Betrayed' days.

It is true that so much is at stake when one appreciates or hates these texts for they are deeply rooted in the debate on Sri Lanka's ethnic and terrorist problems. But the issue of "one-dimensionality" of reading remains relevant here.

It seems to me, to move into literature, modern Sinhala poets and connoisseurs are also divided over the work of Mahagama Sekara. Some argue that he brought about the 'decay' of Sinhala poetry, while others treat him as the greatest of modern poets. Both camps fail to appreciate the texts of the opposite camp.

Those who endorse the work of Sekara and Rathnashri Wijesinghe, for example, ignore the work of Eric Ilayapparacchi, Gunadasa Amarasekara and Ariyawansha Ranavira.

The other camp in turn makes the same move. It is quite healthy for a literary culture to have disagreements among schools as long as the premise of the each camp is grounded on a genuine commitment to reading other's texts.

Moreover, it is seen time and time again that those who appreciate realist novels reject post-realist ones and vice versa. Thus, some love Tilakasena and hate Kammallaweera, for example. They still fail to convincingly demonstrate either good or bad in both writers.

While refined and self-critical postmodernists else where in the world argue for textual multiplicity and heterogeneity, Sinhala postmodernist halfwits make their favourite texts hegemonic. They are postmodern in theory, feudal in practice; Lacanian in jargon but lacking in wisdom! Here again, they are too subjected to the cultural malady of 'mono-textualism' or textual-one-dimensionality.

Tamil Literary Scene

This one-dimensionality may have been exacerbated by the polarisation of our society that happened since 1983. Jaffna University lecturer, Saaminadan Wimal's book (Demala Nawakathaawee Pilibimbuwa) on modern Tamil literature leads us to believe that Tamil literary community too faces this problem of one-dimensionality.

Perhaps the problem is even more severe, for Tiger ideology seems to pervade literature written there. No major Sinhala fiction writer uncritically or critically endorses populist Sinhala nationalism.

Even Amarasekara's fiction cannot be blamed for vulgar racist propaganda. His poetry is almost never about 'ethnic issue', 'peace' or any other immediate political topics.

Although one cannot make a judgment on the Tamil novels based on their Sinhala summaries that Saaminadan provides us, some of those novels look more like separatist propaganda.

There are understandable reasons for this: those writers are faced with a genuine collective danger: marginalisation, oppression by a centralist state, the perceived threat of loosing identity and the unfulfilled aspirations. Moreover, they have to live and write under the dominance of Prabhakaran, the Sun God.

Our universities, our generation

The cultural one-dimensionality of contemporary Sinhala society is expressed in the recent debates on cinema as well. Those who endorse "Samanala Thatu" do not endorse "Thani Tatuwa."

To endorse, to repeat myself, is to take a political position. On reading those debates in the press, however, I wonder if the debaters are even capable of reading and appreciating various texts in variety of ways.

If that inability transforms into endorsing one text while rejecting another, it is a cultural malady that needs remedy. Instead of creating citizens with critical and creative thinking, our education system produces machines that pass exams.

Sinhala literary studies at the University is mostly in the hands of "Parrots of'56" - to use the designation Ashoka Handagama (Mawbima, January 14th) has given to unimaginative and unskillful middle class people who call themselves "the children of '56."

If the Sun God is on the run, as the populist media has it, paradoxically, much of the darkness of Lanka will disappear with him (no pun intended!). But it should dawn on us that we must learn to attend to the complexities of various texts (of theirs and ours) in order for us to see the dawn of a new era (now the pun is intended!).

The one-dimensional culture can only produce the likes of Prabhakaran and its Southern equivalents. As Dayan Jayatilleka himself has shown us on numerous occasions, we need to learn the complex ways of reading texts by people like Anandasangari. And the other texts that are considered important to cultural Others.

With the term "one-dimensionality", I do indeed invoke Herbert Marcuse's One-Dimensional Man. Though rather dated by now, this text still has something to tell us on societies going one-dimensional.

Marcuse argued in the 60s that technological advances, the urbanisation and compartmentalisation of modern life would result in producing mechanical, one-dimensional men who are humanly poor among the riches of modernity.

One could argue that Marcuse is only echoing the sentiments so elegantly expressed in literary high-modernism and in Kafka.

Stalinist Soviet Union too created a kind of one-dimensionality even worse than the one in the capitalist West. It is understandable that some people became worried when Mr. Wimal Weerawansha called for a people's literature at the national literary festival last year.

Even though he was pointing to a fact that needs attention, he presented it in such a way that echoed Stalinist 'Purpose' and he was unable to base his argument on a careful reading of texts that he called "lacking in people's scent."

As frontrunners of southern populist politics, his party can play a major role in getting young men and women to move away from the cultural one-dimensionality that locks us into a vicious circle of violence and collective impotence.

But when it comes to populist politics, doing so is undoing oneself: Everybody tries to thrive on that cultural poverty, which is one-dimensionality. If there is a generation that must break this pattern it is ours, comrades, ours!

The writer is a Lecturer in Asian Studies at Cornell University, USA.