Sanura Kulanaka had an idea. He wanted the students to read. He also wanted them to write. So he organised class libraries, appointed library readers, got junior members to sketch out, in drawings, what they felt about what they read, and got more senior members to write down capsule reviews regarding the same. Time usually spent playing cricket, having brawls, or whiling away doing nothing and/or gossiping was hence spent on reading between the lines. As a result, the level of discipline improved. Considerably. And the students began reading, and writing, more than ever before.
But Sanura wasn’t really satisfied. He wanted to go beyond those class libraries. So he got a bunch of students and visited the National Library. He then got down two renowned writers, a translator and a novelist, and got those students to read what they had written, carefully, and jot down any questions regarding the craft and the themes in their work. Sanura himself came across an inconsistency in one of their books. At the reading session, he pointed out that error to the novelist, who conceded and smiled. The students were naturally happy. Sanura still wanted more, though. More than what a class library, a visit to a big library, and two reading sessions could yield.
Eventually, he hit on what he had wanted. An exhibition. One that would bring bookshops from across the country. He came up with a name. Poth Lanthaya. His friend, Rajitha Abeysinghe, translated it: Bookland. Held over two days, July 31 and August 1, it was supplemented by a schoolboy band, a quiz competition, and the “official handover” of World Book, the motto of which contained this line: “Today’s explorers are tomorrow’s leaders.” Sanura was an explorer. So was Rajitha. So were their friends. And so were the members under them. All that was needed was an initiative, a series of projects, which could turn them into those leaders. That initiative, which brought these boys together, bore three initials. LRA.
Sanura was the Chairman and Rajitha the Secretary last year of the Library Readers’ Association of their school. I wrote about the LRA right before they unveiled what was promised to be the ultimate showcase item of theirs, Bookland, which for lamentable reasons didn’t get the audience, and the enthusiasm, which it deserved. This, however, is less an indictment on them than it is on those who should have known better and patronised what Sanura, Rajitha, and the boys have been doing ever since they were inducted as members of the LRA Board. But I’m digressing here. I need to get back.The Library Readers’ Association is the oldest club/society at Royal College, Colombo. Until 1946, a hundred years after it was originally formed, it functioned as a committee with positions filled in by teachers and members of the academic staff, and after 1946, it turned into a student organisation.
Ostensibly, its motive was and is to uplift the College library, but times have changed and with changing times other, as important if not more important motives have been prioritised, among them the need to improve, possibly finance, and coordinate the school library network in Sri Lanka, from the North to the South and from the East to the West. What’s interesting at the end of the day about the LRA, for me that is (as a student of the social sciences and social theory), is how its members have come to reflect and symbolise those changing times and how certain pressures have bestowed a higher responsibility on them. Not just a higher responsibility, but a higher calling.
10 years after the LRA turned into a student organisation, the history of this country, as we know it, changed. The social forces which had held sway and had been pervasive everywhere until then transformed, almost overnight and in the blink of an eye, into another set of social forces, centring on and revolving around one important historical eventuality: free education. The change this entailed, and compelled, was felt everywhere – in the cultural and the political – and it necessitated a shift in the way we thought about and articulated our art forms: our cinema, our theatre, and yes, our literature.
Before 1956, our authors, writing in Sinhala, teetered between two polar opposites – the propagandist literary tracts of Piyadasa Sirisena on the one hand and the earthy, naturalistic novels of Martin Wickramasinghe. Between these two (both of whom I have read and come to admire on almost equal terms) lay an entire country waiting to be emancipated – students and adults – and they were emancipated by the processes which 1956 unleashed.Probably the best index we have of the extent to which such processes proved to be fruitful here is our literature, and probably the best demographic we have here to measure that index with is our schoolchildren, specifically the Sinhala-speaking schoolchildren. Those who had doted on Wickramasinghe and, if they felt his work to be too sophisticated, the more populist but rather high-flown anti-colonial rhetoric of Sirisena, graduated to other writers after 1956: Karunasena Jayalath (who wrote of young lovers when young love was a tabooed subject), Deemon Ananda (who still enchants us), and Chandana Mendis (whom every schoolchild swears by). The LRA members, most of whom I’ve talked with, represent this demographic, this shift, and with them the demographic and shift that will matter when they take their projects, and their ideas for a country of readers and writers, forward.
Having being brought up and educated in an “estranged” milieu, I frequently lament my lack of familiarity with the texts and authors that most of those my age and in their teenage years go for. In my case, it has been a case of graduating from Enid Blyton, Richmal Crompton, Roald Dahl, and the Hardy Boys, right up to Agatha Christie and (as of now) pretty much everyone else. If you converse with these boys from the LRA, on the other hand, you’ll peruse a different set of literary preferences. Sanura himself, in the longest conversation I’ve had with a student that age (I don’t talk enough, I realise), contended that the fun, the pulsating rhythms of speech and dialect, which he enjoys in a Sinhala novel, especially his favourite genres (crime and mystery) don’t come out when he sits down to read an English novel, a notion which almost everyone else in the team echoes. (It’s pertinent to note that most of team members, like Sanura himself, come from “the village”, and that they have brought their preferences from “the village” to “the city.”)
The titles and authors they prefer, and do not prefer, tell a lot about where they come from and the background they bring with them with the books they read. Here’s a random list: translations of Russian (social realism) stories, Upul Shantha Sannasgala, Chandana Mendis (of course!), and from more recent times, Susitha Ruwan and his Ravana Meheyuma cycle of novels.
Individual preferences tend to diverge and converge: Vimuth, this year’s Secretary, tells me that while he is enamoured of Russian literature in general, he prefers Sannasgala’s Amma to Gorky’s Amma, while Roshan, the Treasurer, tells me that inasmuch as Gorky’s Amma has become a “standard text” for those as young as 10 or 11, his personal favourite is Poleyov’s The Story of a Real Man, translated as Saba Minisekuge Kathawak. Not that they aren’t picky over books this way all the way, though: another member, Sithira (the Assistant Secretary), tells me that he reads everything and anything (“I can’t pick and choose!”), as does the present Chairman, Sahan Kithmina. As for Rajitha, who contacted me over Bookland, he more or less prefers non-fiction: economics (Keynes, Milton Friedman), political science (Machiavelli, John Locke), and, the closest to a creative writer in his list, Dale Carnegie.
It’s a veritable mishmash, and I for one like it. A nation of artists and critics, after all, can only come from a nation of writers, and a nation of writers can only come from a nation of readers. Based on the projects they have committed themselves to – including, but not limited, to what I’ve outlined at the beginning of this sketchy piece – and the way they have set about articulating their preferences through the preferences they’ve promoted for everyone, I can only write down only one thing: if we don’t read enough, or write enough, we’ll continue with a culture that divides the high from the popular. How else do you think that rift has continued, between the young and the old, between you and me, today?
Photos by the Photographic Society and the Media Unit of Royal College
Written for: The Island YOUth, March 11 2018
