One hundred and thirtieth birth anniversary today:

Continuing the saga of Richard Spittel

Chandana DISSANAYAKE

Born December 9,1881, Richard Lionel Spittel is the author of four works of fiction and two works of non-fiction that in varying extents deal with the lives of Sri Lanka’s indigenous community, the Veddas. The content of these works displays a unique effort at conveying the reader to the remotest parts of Sri Lanka in search of the Veddas, probably among the first inhabitants of the island, with their lifestyle, thoughts and innermost feelings interwoven into the narrative. Spittel’s firsthand accounts on Vedda life of three generations carry a wealth of information with regard to the origins and the subsequent disappearance of some tribes within the Vedda community, their social anthropological aspects recorded for posterity in an artistic enterprise with substantial creative output.

Indigenous people

Through authorial presence in the novel Vanished Trails (1950), Spittel- surgeon, social anthropologist and writer- highlights his actual first encounter with Ceylon’s indigenous people:

With nervous expectancy the Veddas awaited the meeting. Soon the stranger was before them, and for the first time I saw these aboriginal inhabitants of Ceylon. I was as excited by the sight of these Veddas as they were because of me. After many a disillusioning expedition through Ceylon’s wildest jungles, that punctuated half – dozen years of a busy surgeon’s life, I had my reward. Here for me was the realization of a dream beyond my imagination-Poromola, Gama, Kaira, as fine a group of savage hunters as survived from a bygone age…(p.145)

To quote from Surgeon of the Wilderness, Spittel’s biography authored by his daughter Christine Wilson, Spittel had once stated:

The jungles renew me. After the bustle and stress of Colombo, the anxieties of looking after my patients, being with these simple people who know no other man from civilization but myself is like a balm to my soul. Here, amid nature, and a people untouched by civilization, the reality of life comes into focus again. I find renewed faith and strength to go back to my work regenerated. (p.97)

Social anthropological concerns

What one cannot simply ignore here is Spittel’s dichotomous relationship with the indigenous community in Uva and the East and his own association with Colombo’s civilized norms and the resultant attitude that borders on condescension. Be that as it may, Spittel’s social anthropological concerns voiced by Christine Wilson point to an urgent task in hand, a task that needed to be accomplished expeditiously as an inevitable evolutionary process took its course.

To quote from Christine Wilson’s work once more:

He knew now that he was urgently driven in the race against time to record the habits of those living most nearly the life of their prehistoric forebears before it became too late. Every year, every month, counted.?'28p.57)

While this quest took him annually to the Vedda habitats and resulted in numerous notebooks and cine films, a secondary purpose of employing social anthropology in Lankan English fiction was envisaged. As stated in the Preface to Vanished Trails ‘the device of presenting social anthropology in the form of a novel that stresses the human interest, rather than after the severely detached manner of the purely scientific investigator’ was employed in ‘depicting the lives of three generations of Veddas in their transition from troglodyte, food-gathering stage to the crude beginnings of the hut-dweller and food-producer.’(p.v)

Research endeavours

Late 20th and early 21st century have witnessed several milestones in this process of transition. While the first Vedda to graduate from a Sri Lankan university, Dambane Gunawardena, received his BA from the University of Colombo in 1994, Unapana Varige Premaratne entered history in 2011 as the first elected Vedda member of a local council, having contested under the United People’s Freedom Alliance (UPFA) in the recent elections to the Dehiattakandiya Pradesheeya Sabha. Thus, Spittel’s ‘race against time’ to which Christine Wilson refers had been timely in capturing on paper and film the lifestyle of a community on the verge of extinction. Wilson echoes her father’s sentiments when she observes that ‘every day civilization was creeping closer to their hideouts to strangle them out of existence.’ (p.58)

On July 31, 2011, celebrations to mark World Indigenous People’s Day (that falls on August 9) were held in Wakare in the Eastern Province, with President Mahinda Rajapaksa as the chief guest and attended by the Vedda communities of Uva and the East. This post-conflict development perhaps invites a re-reading of Spittel in the sense that not only have the silenced guns opened up Wakare and other regions for normalcy of life for the natives but also enabled travel and research endeavours for others. Spittel’s 21st century readership would invariably have unrestricted physical access to the Eastern and Uva regions, brought under scrutiny in his fiction/non-fiction. Any reinterpretation of Spittel’s works could be accompanied by ethnographical studies in these parts, which would enable a better assessment of the author’s task seen in retrospect after sixty years.