Exhaustive study of Lanka-Soviet relations

Sri Lanka Soviet Relations

Author: Prof. W. A. Wiswa Warnapala

Publishers: Godage International Publishers

Price: Rs. 1,500, 278 pp

REVIEW: E. M. G. Edirisinghe

DIPLOMACY: Prof. W. A. Wiswa Warnapala who has several excellent titles to his credit on politics and elections in Sri Lanka, has now launched a book on relations between Sri Lanka and the Soviet Union from its very inception.

It is a comprehensive study, both analytically and narratively, on relations between the two countries which gradually developed into a firm trade and cultural pact mutually beneficial to both countries.

Prof. Warnapala tracing the history of building relations with the Soviet Union back to its origin shows the distinct dislike each successive government displayed towards it before 1956.

The defence pacts the UNP had signed with Great Britain did permit neither recognition nor direct relations with the Soviet Union which was vehemently anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist since the October Revolution in 1917.

Impact of the October Revolution on Sri Lankan politics and social thinking was so deep that it paved the way for future cultural and trade relations.

It also greatly influenced political thinking within the country leading to pro-Soviet and socialist parties to share political power at the centre as well as the periphery.

It was Dr. S. A. Wickramasinghe in the 1920s the first intellectual to introduce the socialist philosophy behind the October Revolution to the Sri Lankans.

New era

However, it was with S. W. R. D. Bandaranaike capturing state power in 1956, heralded a new era of foreign relations, and Sri Lanka established diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union.

Bandaranaike whose vision that triumphed in the 1950s had its roots in his political thinking as far back as 1932 in which year he said that it was the business of the Government in the case of the important national service to step in and control it.

With the formation of the United Socialist Party in 1940, the people in general began to show an interest in the Soviet Union and its political pursuits and economic affairs.

Prof. G. P. Malalasekera was our first Ambassador to the Soviet Union. At a function held to welcome him he spoke in Sinhala, and later taught Sinhala to the Russians while lecturing to them on Buddhism.

Diplomatic relations were followed by trade and economic relations with several agreements being signed with a view to promote and strengthen friendly relations between the two countries.

One major early outcome of these relations was the establishment of the Iron and Steel Factory at Oruwala. Inauguration of such bilateral relations was later extended to cover all the socialist countries in Asia and Eastern Europe.

During Sirima Bandaranaike’s time the relations between the entire socialist bloc and Sri Lanka was extended to encompass cultural relations as well. The Soviet Cultural Centre is a landmark gift to Sri Lanka from the Soviet Union.

Mrs. Bandaranaike’s subsequent visits to the Soviet Union further strengthened the ties between the two countries. Teachings of Lenin together with those of Marx had a profound influence on the political evolution of Sri Lanka particularly since gaining independence in 1948.

Process of evaluation

The writer in his detailed perusal of the process of evaluation of relations between the two countries reveals in interesting point in recent political history when he says that Rohana Wijeweera, a student of the Lumumba University in Moscow when he staged an armed uprising to capture state power in Sri Lanka, the Western powers un-hesitantly blamed the university calling it a recruiting ground for radicals who could later become armed revolutionaries.

Russian literati

With relations reaching peak with areas such as science, education, arts, literature were included in growing bilateral agreements.

Consequently, the first Russian work on Sinhala literature was published in 1970. Madol Doova and Vahallu of Martin Wickramasinghe were translated into Russian and Wickramasinghe became a well known figure among the Russian literati.

Some of his books translated into Russian went into several prints. Also, it is interesting to note that it was T. B. Subasinghe, a Cabinet Minister in the seventies, who initiated the petroleum exploration within Sri Lankan territorial waters although it did not move beyond the discussion stage.

Apart from the lengthy essay on the progress of Lanka-Soviet relations, the writer has included random notes from his Moscow diary which he meticulously maintained during his stay in the Soviet Union as the Sri Lankan counsellor/Political and Economic Affairs at the Sri Lankan embassy in Moscow.

It covers his official activities as well as personal matters which find to be very informative. His personal notes in particular, disclose the busy life of a diplomat and how one maintains a balance between home, office and in an alien society.

Personal diary

His account in the personal diary could be the envy of any young man who wish to lead a complete and complex life in all aspects of one’s personal and official capacity each mingling with the other is a delight the reader; on reading these notes they turn out to be one’s own personal experience.

Readable and extremely useful to any research worker on the subject and a supplementary reader for any one who is interested in acquainting oneself with our relations with the socialist bloc, this volume is an exhaustive study on the subject.

Spaces of possibility for equality, intellect and love

The Sweet and Simple Kind

Author: Yasmine Gooneratne Perera Hussein

Publishing House

Available at leading bookshops

Price: Rs. 1,000

REVIEW: Sharanya Jayawickrama

FICTION: Set in Ceylon in the transformative moments immediately before and after Independence in 1948, Yasmine Gooneratne’s novel The Sweet and Simple Kind, recently short-listed for the 2007 Commonwealth Writers Prize, presents a narrative trajectory of love, loss and remembrance.

A novel divided into four parts, it presents us with the intertwined stories for Latha and Tsunami Wijesinha, distant cousins and close childhood friends, as they more through formative periods in their lives.

To her various aunts and to the mothers of prospective husbands, Latha appears winningly “sweet and simple”, yet she possesses a clear intellect, a maturity of sense and a keen love of English literature (revelling in particular, like the author, in a partiality to Jane Austen novels).

In some ways, the novel reads as homage to Austen, with its female-centred and socially embedded narrative; like Austen’s books, it ends with marriage, yet not before considering what marriage means for intellectually and emotionally independent women, and for inter-community relations in the newly independent island.

It is Latha who provides the organising consciousness of the novel, for it is she who presciently grasps the meaning of her cousin’s unusual name, although she is as yet unsure whether Tsunami is “an earthquake waiting to happen” or “the one the earthquake hits” (p.53). With this play on names, Gooneratne ties the gentler world of 1950s and 1960s Ceylon to the ruptures of the present day.

Unhurried style

Gooneratne writes this novel in an unhurried style, which effectively contributes to the gradual construction of the world of the novel through an accumulation of details and characters, so that a listing of dishes feasted upon at tsunami’s home at Lucas Falls, or a description of everyday life at Peradeniya University adds to the accrued atmosphere of lived moments in time.

Pace of memory

The pace of the narrative also reflects the pace of memory as it documents the world of “a patrician elite in which old money and privilege had frequently joined forces with political power” (p. 195). The first part of the novel is set in the main at Lucas Falls, the home of the wealthier branch of the Wijesinha family.

Tsunami’s father Rowland Wijesinha had been the A.D.C. in the time of the adulterous British Governor Millbanke, until the mysterious death of Lady Millbanke brings an end to this particular episode of colonial habitation.

The estate is bought by a young British planter whose fortunes thrive on tea cultivation until he eventually sells the property to a wealthy Sinhalese mudaliyar, from whom the present Wijesinha can descend.

The ghost of Lady Millbanke is said to haunt particular corridors of the historic house, her spectral presence neatly tying together colonial deceit with the intrigues of Independence and the treachery of the post-colonial era.

Lucas Falls, a fallen paradise within which the stories of a family register the traces of colonial history and prefigure the neo-colonial future, is for Latha a life lived in displacement: she spends there formative moments of her childhood, away from her own genial father and conservative mother, keeping secret the English porcelain baths, rose-patterned quilts, and coloured squares of a Monopoly board that make her dream of far-away London.

Here, Latha attends Sunday services at church with her Christian relatives and participates in the imperialistic renaming of the ayah, chauffeur and other domestic staff as characters from the verse of Longfellow and Pope.

Symbols

However, Lucas Falls also offers symbols of the plural life of the times, centring around the figure of Helen Ratnam, the Indian-born mother of tsunami and her siblings. Helen is an inspired and talented artist who favours vibrant colours and free-flowing lines; as mistress of Lucas Falls she must take on certain domestic duties which require her to channel her energies differently.

While she is unable to tutor the young girls in Sinhala, an increasingly urgent knowledge for the youth of Independence, she instead teaches them to quilt, an unorthodox skill in Ceylon but one learnt by Helen from an English teacher at her Delhi school.

This is her means to “extend the beauty of her husband’s ancestral home” (p.56) and she allows the young girls to tack and hem the bright diamonds and hexagons in place while she reads to them from her own childhood favourites including As You Like It, David Copperfield and Pride and Prejudice.

Homespun artist

This homespun artist also plants wild flowers in a corner of the Lucas Falls grounds, which comes to be lovingly known to Latha as the ‘Indian garden’.

Its previous mistress, the tea planter’s wife, had directed the laying out of the roses, lilies, hollyhocks, mazes, bowers and avenues which point to the imposition on the tropical land of an obsessive memory of England.

Helen transforms this selected corner into a space for the nurturing of wild flowers, reflecting the way that Lucas Falls during her time is a space that allows the blossoming of open minds.

However, the ties that bind this large and unconventional family, whose free opinion first unsettles and then nourishes Latha, soon begin to fray, a process that prefigures the fragility of an open society and the alienation of “outsiders” and non-conformists within the increasing politicisation of an exclusivist Sinhala Buddhist national identity.

1948 is the year marking Independence, the year of the Citizenship Act that disenfranchise Indian Tamils working on the tea estates, and the year which marks the fracturing of the family, as Gooneratne begins to portray the privately devastating oscillation caused by seismic shifts in public life.

Transformations

Lucas Falls continues to reflect the transformations taking place in the nation at large, becoming a space that records the rewriting of history through polarised “race-memory”.

The colonial plantation house takes on another life, renamed as the Wijesinha maha walauwa, the requisite ancestral house tying the claims of an opportunistic family to heritage and land.

Helen’s artworks are swiftly replaced with images of Sigiriya frescoes, elephants carved from ebony and ivory, and a gilded papier-mache frieze of Prince Dutu Gemunu adorned in full battle regalia.

These overt national markers promote the new identity of Rowland Wijesinha as nationalist politician, who exchanges European dress for national costume, self-indulgently woven from fines silk.

The hypocrisy of such self-serving Sinhala Buddhist nationalism is nicely observed when, following a trip to the US, the new mistress of the house deems it proper that Bibles should be visibly positioned because “every well-appointed guest room should have one”. (p. 438)

Latha and Tsunami’s sojourn at the new University of Peradeniya occupies the central part of he novel as a significant transformative space for consciousness and identity, experienced by the young women students in a potentially transitional moment for the young nation.

Strong aroma

Arriving in Peradeniya in the first class carriage of the train, Latha takes her seat on the campus coach next to a girl from whose hair rises the strong aroma of coconut oil.

Gingerly glancing at her new companion in the close atmosphere of the coach, Latha notes that she is wearing a brightly flowered skirt and rubber slippers, and that she holds “a paper parcel with oil stains on it that smelt of stale masalavadai” (p. 210).

However, when the coach enters an avenue of ancient overhanging mara trees, from which garlands of golden ehela bestow their blossoms on the lush grass beneath, Latha’s misgivings dissolve, for it is this girl who lyrically voices the shared experience of beauty and idealism that will envelop the students in their new world.

Latha looks at her companion with new respect and reflects: “(I)t’s true... We are moving together, this stranger and I, and all of us in this coach, through a shower of gold (p.211).

This moment captures the affectionate and idealistic tone that infuses Gooneratne’s narrative as it seeks to recreate spaces of possibility for equality, intellect and love.

Like the plump cardamom pod that Latha’s father rolls around his tongue near the end of the novel, whose flavour has been distilled and almost dissipated as it cooks slowly in a pot of saffron rice, the novel memorialises what is now “no more than an exquisite rumour, a mere hint of its own presence”, a memory of sweetness and the loss of simplicity.

This review first appeared in the May/June 2007 issue of Confluence (UK)