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Focus on books by Professor Sunanda Mahendra:
Clay pots for Walauva despots
Meti - a Sinhala novel
Taraka Wasalamudaliaracchi
Sarasavi Publishers, 2008
210 pages. Rs. 375.
The reader naturally has a question whether the caste system is still
in vogue reading the novel, the second by Taraka Wasalamudaliaracchi
(the first being Dehi featured in this column some months back).
The answer is in the complex human experience, lying embedded as the
central subject matter of this work set in the not-so-distant past,
presumably the post independence era.
There is no such indication, but the reader becomes aware about the
background through characterisation. This however does not hold back the
communicative flavour emitted via the central experience enveloped in
happiness and sorrows of people torn between their day-to-day and
unplanned life structure for a better future.
The reader is taken around a certain village down South that
undergoes a series of social changes and pinpointed two selected family
patterns.
The experiences revolve around the life of a potter family, Ruvina,
with professional inheritance down the centuries, living with meagre
necessities. Ransina's family makes clay pots and pans, and sells them
at Deyyandara pola, the nearby market to make a living.
In Muttetuve walauva, the ancestral family of the village headman,
the reader finds a comparatively fewer human beings living in comfort
with their inherited wealth.
This is what one would call the village nobility, which is seen or
picturised in many Sinhala works - including Gamperaliya - as a
gradually declining entity depending on certain factors both individual
and social.
This is also the high caste of the Walauva dignity - Muttettuve is
denoted as 'food' - who had served and inherited both wealth and class
nobility from the feudal social order of the historical pre independent
past.
The pattern of the Walauva is portrayed as in its waning glory but
trying its best to sustain via various methods such as keeping of the
household duties in order entrusted to the servants at their beck and
call, and giving away of various gifts instead of money, and keeping a
certain degree of aloofness about human relations are concerned.
This makes the reader feel that the caste, though not one of the
important issues, is a human experience and is still seen in its latent
stages either losing the traditional effect or made to feel that it is
in a way made to raise its head at certain significant moments like
love, marital relations, and other sociological links that bind the
people together.
Wasalamudaliaracchi selects a particular noble family, attempting to
give a microcosmic effect, of a village headman, where the family ties
are tightened by the strong impact of motherhood, especially after the
death of the headman, depicted as one of the sensitive human relations
in the rural family patterns.
But how long can this strong relationship survive? This is the
question raised in a series of events that follow when each member of
the family, two brothers and two sisters, who had the mother's thumb
strongly felt, becomes a loosening end at the needs of human relations
of the sensory material world.
One by one the children who had the rule of the mother looses their
grip tightened both by the traditional manners, though despotic and high
caste links and maternal love. The problems pertaining to the land
ownership too becomes a paramount and crucial issue.
At this juncture it is seen by the reader that the parental
duty-minded process is overshadowed by other social forces on one hand
from the parental point of view. It is seen as the part fulfilment of
duty and on the other hand, the parents have to leave the world at one
stage of their existence, leaving the offspring in harmony, by
transferring the ownership legitimately to the inheritors.
This too may lead to graver agonies in the minds of inheritors. They
may have new issues and the merits of the parental performances may not
be too sound. At this juncture, the family lineage has to face several
issues like the dependable intimacies in sharing the fellow feelings.
The writer, with a kindling sense of imagination and observation,
selects and portrays some of these aspects of the changes and agonies
inherent in the lives of the parents and children in two family types in
the same village set up.
Jinadari comes from the high caste family and Weerasiri from the low
caste family of the clay pot makers.
They are pinpointed as the protagonists of the work and they take the
reader around the whole village as the pivotal narrators. She is the
elder sister in a family made to look as both religious and adhering to
the Buddhist doctrines with the emphasis on the Vasala sutta; the sutta
mentions that a man is not born either as a Brahmin or as a Chandala.
He is a Brahmin or a Chandala depending on the actions performed.
Weerasiri is also a religious minded young man bent on developing his
own character as well as the characters of others, and the eradication
of evils of the village as commonly observed.
The clay pots are brought to the kitchen and serve the Walauva owners
long before they are sold in the village fair as a custom.
This, though is a simple narrative technique in the work, takes the
reader a long way via the subtext. The family members of the clay are
known to be downtrodden and said to be low caste while the people who
buy the clay pots are named as high caste.
But what happens is that a series of events that follow in the
village set up make them known to each other as like-minded intimates,
when it comes to attachments like the inseparable partners in love with
each other.
In this context the elder daughter of the family, Jinadari, is
enamoured by the elder son of the low caste family, Weerasiri; they are
both in the same staff of Daham Pasala or Sunday school. They not only
teach the Buddhist text but also take time off for their intimacies.
They come to know each other and are seen as two aloof persons in the
beginning but the stages change as they come closer to each other when
the need arises. But in the same manner they are kept away from the
ancestral family lineage due to many reasons beyond their cognition.
Wasalamudaliarachchi, however, makes them runaway from the
traditional pattern of thinking and strive hard as people of the earth,
running a boutique and making them live and understand the differences.
Jinadari and Weerasiri get married rather late in their life, due to
circumstances beyond their control.
There is a page moving narrative line, intermixed with a complex web
of human intricacies. A good Sinhala novel with a contemporary vision
full of happenings.
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