The Man from Koggala

119th Birth Anniversary of Martin Wickramasinghe falls today (29):

Dr. Sarath Amunugama

Seventy-five years ago an intelligent child could not grow up in Koggala without acquiring a certain curiosity about life and nature. On one side the village was bounded by the sea; a vast expanse of water stretching as far as the Bay of Bengal.

A child would watch the huge waves hit the coral reef which formed a natural breakwater a few hundred yards from the shore.

From the coral reef the sea ran in little foamy wavelets towards the sandy beach. Seasonally, or with low tide, the water would recede and little children would run along the beach and deep into the sea collecting cowrie and sea-anemone.

Inland, the village skirted a sluggish river. There were many little islands in the river. Children would creep along the marshy river bank among the Kirala trees to watch fishermen perched patiently on their dug-outs waiting for that tell-tale tug on the line.

On Poya days they would run ahead of their parents to the village temple and be thrilled at the prospect of a cart-ride to Paragoda Vihara for Vesak or Poson.

Martin Wickramasinghe was born in Koggala. In his childhood experiences in this village we can recognize some of the influences which fashioned his vision of Sinhala culture, religion and literature.

As Martin Wickramasinghe himself tells it, as a child he was amazed by the natural life that surrounded his village. From the sea-anemone and the water slug, the tadpole and the infinite variety of fish, he learnt of the wonders of natural evolution.

If he was an early rationalist and if his literary and social criticism is full of a sense of continuous change and growth, we may seek the beginnings of that vision in his experiences at Koggala.

At a time when Sinhala writers liked to believe that they were descendents of angels, Martin Wickramasinghe in his Satya Sntatiya argued convincingly that they were, after all, descendents of the apes. He was then a rationalist and Darwinian evolutionist.

It was this involvement with the ideas of Charles Darwin that brought Wickramasinghe to social anthropology. Social Anthropologist of this time believed that just as Homo Sapiens evolved from a lower to a higher order human society itself evolved from primitive to modern society.

Facets of culture and social organization were studied as aspects of a culture which were not only inter-liked but also subject to continuous change.

It is this vision of inexorable and perhaps inevitable change that comes through most clearly in Wickramasinghe’s literary works. Time is the hero of his trilogy, Gamperaliya, Kali Yugaya and Yuganthaya; the titles themselves suggest the author’s pre-occupation with time, change, upheaval.

But these changes are observed with a degree of detachment, perhaps even amusement, for Martin Wickramasinghe is wise enough to know that ‘the more we change, the more we remain the same’. Piyal, the village-born entrepreneur, who, with his thrusting, cunning energy builds an industrial empire, is helpless in the face of his children’s repudiation of the very values that helped their father to give them an affluent life.

It is only Tissa, pampered younger brother of Nanda and Anula, who can observe these changes with a certain degree of detachment and amusement. He understands Alan’s need to assert his own loyalties but also feels a welling of sympathy for his sister and brother-in-law who see their world crashing before them.

They cannot even understand what has gone wrong. In many ways Tissa represents Wickramasinghe himself. Certainly the portrait of the young boy in Gamperaliya is drawn from his personal experience.

Martin Wickramasinghe the rationalist, the early subscriber to the Rationalists’ book Club and life-long admirer of Bertrand Russell, found Buddhism and Marxism to be congenial philosophies. He was attracted by the Buddhist perception of change. “One does not step into the same river twice.”

He saw in Buddhism the basic cultural imperative of our society. In his view it was adherence to the humane, rational value-structure of Buddhism that conditioned and created Sinhalese society.

He, following Ruth Benedict, identified it as an Apollonian culture as distinct from a fierce, combative blood-thirsty Dionysian culture. Whether such an identification is anthropologically valid, is of course, open to debate.

Marxism envisages the transformation of society from pre-capitalist to a capitalist and eventual communist state on the basis of a transformation of property relations.

The predicted withering away of the State, given the demands of modern technological society, is only a fanciful projection to which everyone pays lip-service but hardly believes any more. Martin Wickramasinghe found no difficulty with the philosophy of change.

But as far as I can see he did not accept the dialectical form of this transformational process. Nor did he believe that the whole superstructure of ideas, values, religion and beliefs were conditioned primarily by the nature of economic relations and therefore subject to change on the basis of a change of economic patterns.

On one hand he has consistently argued for the recognition of a distinctive Sinhala ethos which was distinguishable from the other cultures of the Indian sub-continent.

He was in the line of cultural ‘rebels’ who questioned the Indo-centric view of Sinhala culture, religion and history.

In this he was the target of the criticism of priests and pedants. (the very group that took up the cry against Bavatharanaya). But for over forty years Martin Wickramasinghe went on plugging his theories of Sinhala culture and Art.

In his Kalu Nika Sevima and his critical evaluations of traditional poetry he argued for the existence of an indigenous, humane Buddhist, folk tradition which challenged the pedantic, Sanskritic culture of the elite who slavishly imitated Indian “high culture”.

It is this operation of this dialectic which makes Martin Wickramasinghe’s early writings on literature—- particularly Sinhala Sahitiyaye Negima and Guthila Geetaya, easily the very best pieces of literary criticism in the Sinhala language. The vigour of his analysis and his insights into traditional poetry remain unparalleled.

On the other hand, we also see an element of social analysis.

The elite tradition of the chief priests and courtiers is contrasted with the folk tradition. Wickramasinghe looks on those works which drew on the folk tradition like Saddharmaratnavaliya and Guthila kavya as the liveliest and most expressive examples of traditional literature.

From his formative days to Bavatharanaya we see in the works of Martin Wickramasinghe the evolution of a humanist, rationalist, philosopher and writer. Like all good artists and philosophers, he begins with a sympathetic but distinctive, perception of the human condition.

Everything changes and men, like flies in a bottle, struggle to overcome and reach beyond their fate. Some win and others lose. But that does not matter so much as how we confront such a fate.

That our comparatively young modern literature could seriously consider these problems is in no small measure due to the writings of Martin Wickramasinghe. He is the glory of our literature and, indeed, our time.

(From: Sarath Amunugama, ‘Notes on Sinhala Culture’ chap.14.) Photographs courtesy: From The Cradle - Glimpses of Sri Lankan Folk Culture portrayed at the Martin Wickramasinghe Museum of Folk Culture published by The Martin Wickramasinghe Trust.