Jana and janapriya: The contents of the culture

The young who take to Sanuka, and do not take to Amaradeva, and the old who take to the latter and not to the former, are at the end of the day the one and the same. The rift between these two demographics goes beyond just age differences. But how do you separate the one from the other? By the following yardstick: those who dote on Sanuka are purveyors of the popular culture, while those who dote on Amaradeva are purveyors of the formal culture. By formal, I am distinguishing it from the tastes of those who follow the music of Lionel Ranwala, Piyasiri Wijeratne, and from more recent times, Rohana Baddage and Bandula Wijeweera. As such we come across a differentiation: between janapriya for popular, and jana for what we consider to be the folk culture, though it is, in fact, a formalised variant thereof.

This distinction is vital when we delve into the cultural, social, economic, and political backdrops to those cultures. I have tried to the best of my ability to rationalise those backdrops and their relation to the art forms consumed by those who hailed from them  – especially regarding the petty bourgeoisie – but based on the responses I got I was not, I believe now, clear enough. The truth is that Sri Lanka’s predicament, economic or social, can be rooted in its inability to prop up an able bourgeoisie who could be to their culture what the liberal Bengalis had been to theirs in their Renaissance. The bourgeoisie, through syndicates, cartels, and other schemes which ended up creating what Kumari Jayawardena refers to as a “dynastic democracy” in Sri Lanka, took off from taverns and tolls and rents but never made it beyond a pre-industrial economy.

When the landowning aristocracy of a colonial society – particularly a society like ours or India’s – gains through capitalist enterprise, the conflict between their interests and those of the Colonial Office tend to deepen to such an extent that the former begin to protest; eventually, their protests find an equivalent in the cultural sphere through the literature of that period. Thus in Bengal we find the novels of Bankim Chatterjee, which like the novels of W. A. Silva were rooted in the romances of Walter Scott and Rider Haggard. In Sri Lanka, on the other hand, the interests of the propertied class and of the Colonial Office were one and the same. Macaulay, in his bid to turn the natives into brown sahibs (“English in tastes, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect”), had brought about in Sri Lanka what he could not bring about in India: the creation of a Westernised, “civilised” bourgeoisie whose loyalty to the Empire was beyond doubt. As such the militant nationalist liberal bourgeoisie in India were never to be found in Ceylon, and as Tissa Abeysekara notes, we had no Motilal Nehru who could burn his Saville Row suits as a symbol.

What we had, instead, was a powerful but stymied milieu, petty bourgeoisie in their tastes and opinions and what not, and aspiring to be a nationalist bourgeoisie. The traditional elite – the sangha, veda, guru, and govi of Bandaranaike’s pancha maha balavegaya (kamkaru was an addition necessitated by the rise of labour in the 20th century; they had no elite status in traditional society) – were superseded by a moneyed class, who in turn sought to overcome and overturn the old Mudliyars and Muhandirams whom the British had hitherto privileged. As scholars, including Professor Jayawardena, have noted, just as there was a division between the privileged gentry and these new capitalist upstarts, there was also a division within the latter class. Between the cautious conservatism of D. B. Jayatilake, D. S. Senanayake, and the founders (most of them, at least) of the Temperance Movement and the activism and at times chauvinistic rhetoric of Anagarika Dharmapala, for instance, there was a virtually unbridgeable chasm. (The fact that Dharmapala was never allowed in as a member of the Abstinence Union is a sign of this rift, which grew over the years.)

The art forms which this milieu, particularly the more nationalistic among them, affirmed and purveyed were hybridised, though not always so: they watched the plays of John de Silva and Charles Dias and read the novels of Piyadasa Sirisena. It would be a mistake to consider these as urban artists and writers, but their appeal was broadly of an urban, quasi-sophisticated (because hybrid) kind. It was not the praja shalawa in a village where these artists gathered, but the Tower Hall at Maradana, which over the years became a rallying point for patriotism to such an extent that the then Inspector-General of Police, H. L. Dowbiggin, wrote that he believed that de Silva’s plays were produced “with the object of creating a spirit of nationalism.” The Tower Hall was not restricted to the elite, but they opened up, not to the peasantry per se, but instead to the Sinhalese-speaking lower middle class and the urban workers: in short, the milieu which has historically been at the forefront of social and political upheavals elsewhere, particularly in continental Europe. It cannot be said that the peasantry, for whom art was not something to go out and watch after paying for a ticket, weren’t affected by this surge of patriotism in the cultural sphere, but the impact of these works of art would have been felt acutely by a more urbane milieu.

Regi Siriwardena called this a “belated and weak bourgeoisie”, approximating to a “trading and handicraft petty bourgeoisie”, whose stand was less against imperialism (though they were radical anti-imperialists) than against their Tamil and Muslim counterparts (whose business interests were never aligned with theirs: the 1915 riots, for instance, surged once some railway workers had an argument with a neighbouring tea kiosk owner, a Muslim, after he had decided to raise the price of a cup of tea). They were, simply put, neither here nor there. They needed a guiding star, in fact a searchlight, to help them come to terms with themselves and with what they wanted to become later on. That guiding star and searchlight, who deserves treatment elsewhere, was Anagarika Dharmapala. Shed away his racist invectives, his controversial slogans aimed at the Tamils and the Muslims, and you come across the only real militant nationalist from the bourgeoisie who envisioned a self-sufficient, industrialised economy. (This aspect to the Anagarika has never properly been examined.)

On the other hand, the nationalist revival which transpired after the intrusion of the Theosophists on the one hand and British rationalism on the other (where Henry Steel Olcott and Robert Ingersoll met was where the Buddhist rationalist movement began; to this day, we have leading intellectuals who equate the one with the other, a legacy of the historical coincidence of faith and scepticism during the revival) needed the help and support of the newly emerging bourgeoisie. George Bond’s account of the Buddhist revival and the ideological splits and amalgamations (“The Buddhist Revival in Sri Lanka”) is useful for those who wish to examine how the bourgeoisie were at once with, and against, the political consequences of the movement: how, for instance, the more conservative elements of the Ceylon National Congress, including Jayatilake and Senanayake, were in favour of a division between the clergy and the laity, as a means of preserving certain vested privileges, while the Anagarika clearly was not.

Added to this was another phenomenon: while the British sought to do away with remnants of the past in their colonies, and especially in India and Sri Lanka (being the Crown Colonies we unfortunately were), they could not do away with the exotic elements of that past. The Kandyan dress, the perahera, the caste-ism so rampant in the days of the kings, remained more or less as they were, with slight modifications. As the bourgeoisie evolved from the “betel bag” to the “coffee store” (Spence Hardy), they did not or could not let go of these familiar, archaic elements of the same culture they were now, thanks to their willingness to be Westernised, ostensibly repudiating. This rather strange dichotomy – repudiation versus affirmation – continues with the descendants of this bourgeoisie: you see it every time a member of that class, while welcoming a political sphere free of myths and lies, jaunts off to a temple or kovil, no matter how uncomfortably misaligned they are in those places, to perform a baaraya.

Perhaps because of their cultural conditioning, no matter how hard they tried, the bourgeoisie were unable to be the brown sahibs they tried to be. (The closest to a Macaulay the colonies produced was a Sinhalese: Dandris de Silva Gunaratna, who was praised by Macaulay himself as being his closest imitator.) They could not think on their own, and in not being able to think on their own, they couldn’t produce a culture of their own, barring the habits and customs of the British they aped. This necessitated a catalogue of cultural objects, and those objects, which required sponsorship, were sponsored lavishly by them. Initially, the help they provided extended to the building of temples, libraries, and hospitals, and were done out of a need to appear honourable in front of the British (to gain knighthoods). As time passed, and as their offspring began to rebel against their conservatism, this supportive streak eventually shifted and congealed to a colossal revival of cultural artefacts. From Dandris de Silva to Charles Jacob Peiris, and from Charles Jacob Peiris to Amaradeva, you come across a gradual, but radical, transformation: from the anglicised crust of the bourgeoisie to the indigenous, but sophisticated, roots of the petty bourgeoisie.

Written for: Daily Mirror, May 31 2017

Sketches from the South: Wewurukannala

Human beings love being reminded of what awaits them after they die. Heaven or hell, earth or purgatory, they want to know. And by knowing, they either work to make their afterlife a reality or do their best to change that afterlife. We all want to ascend to paradise, after all, and even if we don’t, we want to be born in this paradise of ours we call Earth. This is true of the Sinhalese and the Buddhists, especially those who plan out every deed they do in the name of what they will encounter once they leave home. And to a considerable extent, the hopes, fears, sorrows, and joys which this sense of karmic expectation compels from us is reflected in the way we depict our faith on temple walls: intense serenity on the one hand, for those who do good and merit, and intense suffering on the other, for those who do bad and evil. Visit a typical temple and chances are you’ll come across more of the former: in places of worship as with businesses, crowds come in to know how they will be benefited. They want to be reminded of the path to heaven. Not hell.

For atheists, agnostics, and rationalists, heaven and hell are metaphors denoting extremities on earth: starvation in Africa versus opulence in America. According to the Buddhists texts, this is false. Even the rationalists who say they’ve found in Buddhism the ultimate religion to square with their scientific outlook overlook the fact that no less a figure than the Buddha himself contended that such realms do exist and they are not a “state of mind”. (To call them that would be to invite censure the way Rahul Gandhi did when he called poverty a “state of mind”.) While I am certainly not equipped to write at length about Buddhist hells and heavens (which are different from their Christian counterparts on the basis that no matter how divine the reward or horrible the punishment, people always return to this realm, and are not sent to those realms for eternity), I would recommend a careful reading of the Devadutta Sutta from the Majjhima Nikaya for the lay reader who wishes to know more about this subject. That, and a visit to those temples which lay down the torments of the underworld.

Buddhism has no art to speak for itself; much of the art which cropped up, years and centuries after the passing away of its founder, was secular, conforming to standards created in the human mind. And more so than their Christian counterparts, who depicted fanged demons as guardians of hell, Buddhist temple painters seem to have found out eventually that either of two ways served to frighten or embolden the people into doing good. (Back in the early days, when worship was as integral to daily life as going to a job is to us today, most of those people took the precepts of Buddhism seriously, to their hearts, and made them a pivotal part of their lives.) The first way was by “externalising” the various torments of hell. Here, the paintings depicting those torments were etched out side-by-side with paintings of onlookers and visitors from heaven. The Beauvais Cathedral resorted to this method, with devils subjecting sinners to pain through boiling vats and prongs to the discomfort of those heaven-sent onlookers.

The second method was easier, though rarely resorted to: turn those hellish torments into veritable exhibits. Here the disturbed onlookers weren’t messengers from heaven, but the viewers themselves, us. The thin line between us and the punishments of hell was the imagination of the artist involved in drawing up the latter, which is why these paintings tended to be labelled, meticulously, with stanzas and allusions to religious texts, particularly (when it comes to the Sri Lankan temple) the Buddhist canon: so that we would know that these weren’t just figments of that imagination, that they were a reality. As I pointed out above, however, Sri Lankans, especially Sinhalese Buddhists, prefer to know the consequences of doing good on earth: they want to be emboldened into accumulating kusal (good karma), and that by discerning the various pleasures and comforts of life in the higher realms. Over the years, though, because of rising crime rates and vagrancy and other indicators of social evil, artists may have had to rethink on this issue, and consider depicting the consequences of bad deeds.

This latter phenomenon has neatly, I should think, tied up with rising tourist arrivals and the tendency of Westerners to “exoticise” the faith of the majority, Buddhism, in terms of paintings, drumbeats, and fragrances, once they’re here. Sri Lankans are howling at the fact that certain hotels are restricting them from entering their premises and instead favouring tourists, the outsiders, but the truth is that there is another side to this: because of the Westerner’s fascination with those paintings, drumbeats, and fragrances, the guardians and gatekeepers of certain other tourist spots, including temples and other holy sites, take in more money from them than from natives like you and me. On both counts it’s discrimination, and on both counts, the owners of the tourist sites want to cash in on the tourist, with respect to profits for accommodation (hotels and restaurants) and with respect to places of worship and the need to sustain them financially (temples). Depicting hell, as opposed to heaven, while obviously necessary with rising crime rates here, also spells out good business with the tourists who will be asked to contribute to the temple coffers once they’ve looked around. As far as Buddhism goes, “hell” is the nearest destination to their Westernised minds that they’d want to see, especially since while the concept of heaven in Buddhism is different from that in Christianity, the punishments meted out to sinners in hell are virtually the same in both faiths. They’ll pay to see how they’ll be flogged, stabbed, burnt, boiled, and brutally mutilated.

At Wewurukannala Viharaya, situated in Dickwella, near Matara, you’ll come across a tunnel to hell which compounds all these points, facts, and trends. It’s at once a reminder for the Buddhists, even non-Buddhists (and non-Sri Lankans: I came across Indians who visit for purposes of worship); a tourist hotspot for the Westerner; a cultural site for the historian; and a paradise for the ardent photographer. Since I was a little of all these things, I found Wewurukannala, and not just the tunnel, more than just fascinating. Composed of three parts – a budu medura in the front; the tunnel to hell in the middle; and a large seated Buddha statue, measuring at 160 feet, the largest in Sri Lanka, and resting against a building filled with paintings from the life of the Buddha along with a museum containing various cultural exhibits, further away – Wewurukannala dates back to the 18th century, to the reign of Rajadi Rajasinghe. While most people will remember the second and third of these sections, particularly the third (which, I rather thought, was more fascinating and colourful than the hellish exhibits), the budu medura at the front wasn’t all that bad either; in fact that’s where tourists are compelled or encouraged (depending on the time they’re in) to donate. Among those who had donated to the medura, and its paintings, I was surprised to come across a patron from Kolamunne, in my hometown, Madapatha.

Advertising is alien to Buddhists, since it’s probably the most lawkika (materialistic) of all forms of secular communication today, but just outside the tunnel there was an inscription which revealed to me just how well the Buddhist has been able to advertise and market his faith to the lay outsider.

The inscription, or quatrain, read as follows:

අපා දුක විදින්නට ඔබ කැමති නැත
එපා පව් කරන්නට තුන් දොරින් කැත
උපා යක් මෙන්න ඉන් වැලකෙන්න ඇත
විපා දක්වන්න බරපැනට දෙන් ඇත

Here’s a rough translation:

Desire, you do not, to suffer the torments of hell
Commit not, then, the sins that will lead you to hell
There exists a way out from the path to those torments
And that by extending your hand to help sustain us

It’s a neat roundelay, almost a rallying cry for Buddhists: keep away from hell and the sinful paths that lead to it; do your best to commit good in this life; and it’s a good deed to donate towards the temple and the tunnel in particular. In other words, it’s a good deed to help us market the consequences of bad deeds to the world! I don’t really want to consider this an advertisement, since that would be a rather crude way of rationalising what this particular quatrain (siv padaya) represents, but that’s the closest to a contemporary method of communication I can think of when describing these lines. (The quatrain might have been a recent addition; if it wasn’t, it proves that advertising or rather marketing was not alien to the Sinhalese Buddhist culture.)

Located 1.5 kilometres down the Dickwella-Beliatta Road, 22 kilometres away from Matara town, Wewurukannala presents to us a paradox: do we celebrate the tunnel as a masterpiece in design, cut it off from its cultural roots, and consider it as a veritable display, or do we take its message for what it is? I certainly couldn’t figure it out, partly because Sinhalese culture (secular, particularly when it comes to the arts and crafts) and Buddhism have intermingled in ways which are rather paradoxical. But considering it as a paradox is enlightening in a way: it gets us to think of the other paradoxes that exist in this world of ours, and how we can escape them, firstly by doing good, secondly by avoiding evil.

Written for: Daily Mirror, May 29 2017

Clement Greenberg and the aesthetics of kitsch

“One and the same civilization produces simultaneously two such different things as a poem by T. S. Eliot and a Tin Pan Alley song, or a painting by Braque and a Saturday Evening Post cover. All four are on the order of culture, and ostensibly, parts of the same culture and products of the same society. Here, however, their connection seems to end. A poem by Eliot and a poem by Eddie Guest – what perspective of culture is large enough to enable us to situate them in an enlightening relation to each other? Does the fact that a disparity such as this within the frame of a single cultural tradition, which is and has been taken for granted – does this fact indicate that the disparity is a part of the natural order of things? Or is it something entirely new, and particular to our age?” (Clement Greenberg, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch”)

Western critics, as I noted or rather implied in last week’s piece, seem preoccupied with the absoluteness of the way in which a specific work of art is communicated and disseminated among its audiences. But what is often forgotten is that such works depend on the mode of communication used at a particular time. In this sense, the three stages they tend to go through (use, excavation, examination) is an enduring testament to the multifariousness of a film, a play, a book, or even a poem. We impute fresh nuances to an art form because it survives the ravages of time. Art forms are never immune from their evolution; that is the source of their strength and their richness. It is archaeology that, at the end of the day, transforms objects of utility to objects of extrinsic study. This does not mean, nor should it mean, that we must forget where those objects came from and for which purposes they were originally used.

One critic who understood this, without resorting to differentiating between lowbrow and highbrow as Dwight Macdonald did, was Clement Greenberg. Greenberg is not widely read today because of the same reason why any critic isn’t read for long: changing aesthetic tastes. It was during his time that distinctions between art and non art began to be made on the other side of the Atlantic, the United States, during the interwar period. His seminal essay on the subject, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch”, was first published in 1939, at the time Hitler annexed Czechoslovakia; many of the ideas explored in that essay derive from what Greenberg felt to be the lure of kitsch in totalitarian states. But before delving into the specifics of these ideas, we need to understand what Greenberg felt to be the dividing line between art and kitsch. For now the premise for such a distinction is this: art is largely extrinsic, kitsch is intrinsic.

Art in contemporary society, particularly with the completion of the three seminal stages of Western aesthetics from the preceding century (realism and its offshoot naturalism, modernism, and postmodernism), becomes more externalised with each passing epoch. Since the one art form that can be talked about with respect to all those three epochs is literature, I will for the most limit my ideas to novels and poems. In the shift from realism and naturalism (with their emphasis on representation, their regard for unearthing what lies beneath through observations and depictions of what lies on the surface) to modernism (with its emphasis on individuality and subjective consciousness, particularly in the novel), we infer a transition from one worldview to another. It is a transition that externalises the workings and the techniques of an art form, even in painting, and out of this tendency we see disparate art movements at work, including the Cubists, the Prague Linguistic Circle, and the Formalists.

By separating art from its own workings, the artist achieves something of a distinction between art as it is conceived and art as it is felt. The latter is what promotes academicism, what transforms an objet d’art into an object of careful scrutiny. This is vastly different from the folk culture which, in the early days, dabbled in weaving, handicraft, embroidery, and design, and for completely different and utilitarian purposes. From that folk culture, to be seen in Sri Lanka most sharply for me in the mask culture of Ambalangoda, we come to the formal culture, of the 20th century, and here we see a shattering of art forms and categorisation of those forms into an absolute catalogue. Much of the reason for this was, of course, the Industrial Revolution; despite the mythical image of that revolution as a promoter of shoddy, commercialised art today, the truth is that it helped the folk culture evolve into the formal, and that through the historical eventuality compelled by industrialisation, universal literacy.

Of course, “literacy” back then wasn’t the “literacy” we toss around so carelessly today. M. J. Bowman and C. A. Anderson, the American economists, surmised that a rate of 30 to 40 percent was needed for a country to make significant progress in per capita incomes. Whether it was growth that enabled this sort of literacy or literacy that enabled growth during the Revolution is another debate altogether, and it is still being debated on by European and American scholars. Moreover, the literacy which was promoted in those centuries of sustained exploitation and ruthless mechanisation and specialisation wasn’t the literacy which entails, say, a flourishing, widespread critical culture; it was the sort that compelled workers and their families to be able to count and recite their letters for the sake of economic efficiency. The factory and conveyor belt required for their endurance the systematic limitation of the worker’s needs. Literacy was largely empowered by the Church and charities and money earned by the breadwinner. The results were striking: as E. G. West notes in his essay “Literacy and the Industrial Revolution”, the majority of the people were far more literate at the end of the revolution (1840) than they were at its beginning (1760).

Art was mostly limited before the Industrial Revolution and the emergence of capitalism to the refined tastes of an esoteric, sophisticated elite. It was cut off from the masses because the political systems which existed at that time, feudalism and absolutist monarchies, legitimised a separation of the elite from the people. Vases, urns, masks, and other artefacts, excavated if not looted from our part of the world, then transformed into objects of study and examination, belonged to an earlier, archaic epoch. When Keats wrote of the Grecian urn, that the unheard melodies therein were sweeter than heard ones, he was inadvertently referring to the esotericism of the study of arts in his day, privileging as it did a culture of reading between and into the lines that was cut off from the vast majority. The masses clamoured for plasticity, the apparentness of those heard melodies; they could simply not be bothered with the unheard melodies, which needed a sharp-edged, refined aesthetic sense to be inferred.

Dissatisfied, disgruntled, but nevertheless complacent, a section of this pre-capitalist bourgeoisie aspired to be vagrants and uncommitted rebels in the arts. Thus flourished a culture of bohemianism, which was BOTH a direct repudiation of and a subtle, indirect affirmation of the bourgeoisie its representatives yearned to cut themselves from. Like the romantic noblemen of pre-Revolutionary Russia, whose mythical idealisations of peasants were shattered once they confronted the living conditions of those peasants in flesh and blood, the new bohemians could not survive for long without patronage and funds, the same symbols of bourgeois apathy they wanted to be rid of. They went after utopias, and in the arts they found those utopias with a sort of avant-garde culture which was as opposed to revolutionary politics as it was to the propertied class. It is from this sensibility that we can trace contemporary avant-garde culture, the Andy Warhols and the Picassos and the John Cassaveteses. The most potent signature of this sensibility is its emphasis on flaunting its own refinement and its awareness of its own forms and techniques:

“Picasso, Braque, Mondrian, Miro, Kandinsky, Brancusi, even Klee, Matisse and Cézanne derive their chief inspiration from the medium they work in. The excitement of their art seems to lie most of all in its pure preoccupation with the invention and arrangement of spaces, surfaces, shapes, colours, etc., to the exclusion of whatever is not necessarily implicated in these factors. The attention of poets like Rimbaud, Mallarmé, Valéry, Éluard, Pound, Hart Crane, Stevens, even Rilke and Yeats, appears to be centred on the effort to create poetry and on the ‘moments’ themselves of poetic conversion, rather than on experience to be converted into poetry.”

Form as opposed to experience, and technique converted into poetry: this demarcates the bohemianism which existed during, and even before, the Industrial Revolution. It finds its way in the 20th century through the modernist novel and the Cubist painting. But inasmuch as this was borne out of a need, an explicit one, to reject the propertied class and their affirmation of art as an esoteric activity detached from the masses, it resulted in a culture which promoted art in another, as esoteric way, only this time the works of art in question were made esoteric and difficult to everyone. The thread that weaves Picasso and Matisse together, with André Gide and Virginia Woolf and James Joyce, is that the difficultness of their works and poems is not dependent on the yardsticks of a particular milieu; it is difficult for both the landed and the landless. But while this sensibility thrives on a bohemian culture, art as was understood before (i.e. an activity enhancing the tastes of a detached elite) continued to flourish too. There was no real dividing line between the one and the other, since the proponents of both schools came from the bourgeoisie. The conflict between the two thus necessitated the emergence of a third sensibility. Kitsch.

Written for: Ceylon Today ECHO, May 28 2018

Commemoration does not (necessarily) exclude celebration

“Why is today so special?” the driver of the van I was in asked me, and I was stumped. A second later I checked myself; Sri Lankans seem to forget so easily that forgetting the commemoration of the (military) end of the Civil War seems a trivial omission in comparison. (After all we have representatives of popular culture who don’t even know when we got independence.) Moreover, we were caught in a deluge, and the entirety of that day, last Friday, we were assailed with one rainstorm after another. It seemed to depress the significance of May the 18th, until I realised that nine years ago, the day that Velupillai Prabhakaran was killed and Sri Lankans went out to the streets in joy was also a day in which the rains fell down as ferociously.

I remember much less than my parents do about the war. My parents remember much less than their parents do about the prelude to that war. History is cruel, unforgiving. It transforms the unity and the dynamism of one epoch to the shedding of blood of another. It records grievances and never lets them go. The end of the war in military terms, hence, was never going to be the end of the war in total. History is unyielding, compelling us to return to what we forewent on and pleading with us to do something, anything, to address those aforementioned grievances and the ruptures they cause. The more we and our politicians dawdle, the closer we get to the repetition of that same history. I was born to a twilight generation, which saw the conflict in full sway and its cessation also in full sway. I know what it is like to return. I do not want to return.

I remember a rather privileged childhood spent in the outskirts of Colombo and I remember going to school and coming back not knowing the dread my parents felt, or the doubts they entertained about seeing us return at all. Bomb squads, ambulance sirens, road enclosures, and the occasional yell by a random bystander: if this was the culture we of Colombo and its suburbs felt, imagine the fear of those who courted that culture as an everyday reality, in the maayim gammana of the Wanniya beyond Medavachchiya (the same Medavachchiya which a politician from the then opposition party cruelly and unnecessarily conflated with Kilinochchiya in that supposedly most hallowed of all political grounds, the parliament). Imagine how afraid they would be if rumours of a return to the pre-2009 situation become a reality. Imagine how frustrated they would be if those fears remain unaddressed.

Those who dream of fragmenting this already fragmented nation, particularly those who call for independent homelands based on ethnic and religious backgrounds, and those who deny the right to commemorate, to reflect on, and to remember, with an admixture of joy and sadness, the significance of May the 18th, are those who flirted with the idea of fear in those blighted days. They are the people who sold peace and purchased war. They are the people who have lost their moral right to have a say in anything about the war after its cessation, if at all because they did everything in their power, and the power of whatever Dollars and Euros and Pounds they could get their hands on through their “efforts, to stall the path towards a definite military end to the conflict. For the truth of the matter is, our leaders (and there were a great many of them since that conflict “officially” erupted in 1983) had the greatest possible chance to bring together global efforts against terrorism and our need to end such terrorism on our own shores, once the West went through 9/11. Instead what did they do? They went around the capitals of the world, waltzed with leaders of the global community, and contended that we needed to talk to those terrorists. In the end the global community didn’t talk. We did. They bombed.

Moving on. Commemoration does not unconditionally entail celebration, but it doesn’t exclude it either. Commemoration means committing what one lost to memory, be it the 7,000 people the former government stated we lost at the final stages of the war or the 60,000+ people we all know we lost to the scourges of terrorism during the last 25 years. This begs the question, what is the figure we should account for? Does it include the 100,000 killed during the JVP insurrection, which in case you forgot was accelerated by the opposition to the dictated-from-above 1987 Peace Accord with India? Does it include the loss of human resources and the brain drain the conflict compelled? The international community will have their say and highlight a particular statistic. They will concentrate on what they want to concentrate on. But what of the other figures, ignored by those who have an axe to grind with the fact that we didn’t go through their process of approval? Don’t all wars end in bloodshed, and if they do, how was this war any different? These are questions we ask, from completely different political camps.

Rajitha Senaratne, a politician I disagree with vehemently on almost every issue conceivable, finally said something I could agree with the other day. “They were dear to them just as our people are dear to us” was the gist of his argument when justifying his conciliatory attitude to the politicians of the North choosing to commemorate May 18 as a Heroes Day. True. In that sense Mahinda Rajapaksa, Gotabaya Rajapaksa, Sarath Fonseka, Kamal Gunaratne, and the other chief architects of the end of the Civil War are as dear to the Sinhala people as the former deceased members of the LTTE are to the people of the North. We cannot just ignore that reality and say, “They are commemorating murderers and we are commemorating the murdered!” Such simplistic dichotomies conceal one pertinent truth: those members were forced to believe in a cause higher than themselves. It didn’t matter to Prabhakaran whether they believed it willingly or not. Every mother, father, and child they killed were killed out of an overwhelming fanaticism.

Mahinda Rajapaksa, who gave leadership to the war, forgot one salient detail: that celebration, while permissible, does not entail colourful pageants the likes of which might have been conceived in the mind of Jean-Bédel Bokassa (go ahead, Google him) decades ago. Such crudeness was, of course, permissible, because a vast majority of the country happened to hail from the demographic who wanted to celebrate. It was only later, after he and his brothers fell from grace, that they decided to reflect, rather than decorate (the May 18 of 2015, if I remember correctly, was commemorated as a quiet, reserved ceremony at the Vihara Maha Devi Park). But it was too little, too late. Such a ceremony was needed earlier. Much, much earlier. And now, with all the racist invectives and outbursts erupting every month or so, we need it more than ever before. Without, however, erasing or banishing the possibility of celebration altogether.

Kamal Gunaratne, remembering his schoolboy days in the first chapter of his Road to Nandikadal (a book we should all read), reflects on a set of verses and lines from a song we don’t get to hear that often on radio today: Abeywardena Balasooriya’s “Awasan Husma”. The song, a deshabimana gee, begins with these plaintive lines:

අවසන් හුස්ම පොද නොබියව හෙළන්නට
සිවු රියනේ හිත සතුටින් නිදන්නට
මිනිසකු විලස ඉපදුණු පල දකින්නට
පුළුවනි මරණ මංචකයේ වුවද මට

Gunaratne remembers the sense of pride, of sadness, of joy, that it compelled in him. That sense of pride and sadness and joy, for me, comes out from the next set of lines:

දහදිය දිය උනේ නෑ මාලිගා වල
කඳුළැලි වැටුනෙ නෑ නිවටුන් දෙපා මුල
ගත හැඩි දැඩි උනේ ළඳුවල කැලෑ වල
කරගැට මතු උණේ නගුලට උදැල්ලට

In short, what does the king and the emperor, what does the fool, the unpatriotic, the idle, know about the sweat and the toil of winning a hard won peace? It is the question May the 18th compels from us every day. And I think it is also the question which we should all ponder on the moment a debate about whether to commemorate or celebrate that day crops up. Once we realise that we have no real moral right to fight over such debates, once we realise that those who laid down their lives for us did not lay them down so that we could fight over such petty issues, we will understand. And fully.

Written for: Daily Mirror, May 25 2018

Towards the 'jana' and away from the 'janaya'

When Jothipala died somewhere in 1987, people wept. His funeral, like the funeral of Rukmani Devi years earlier, was attended by thousands of fans, who braved the soon-to-erupt JVP-UNP bheeshanaya. If we are to assess the worth of a singer on the basis of how prabuddha (highbrow) he is, then there’s nothing to help us rationalise why so many could weep at this particular singer’s funeral. And yet, many did weep. So many, in fact, that after the funeral no less a person than Sarath Amunugama wrote an article on what he termed as the “janapriya sanskruthiya”, where he implied that Jothipala, despite his pandering to populist sentiments, had emerged as a singer of the nation. Having read this essay, Nalin de Silva, by his own admission an admirer of the “prabuddha sanksruthiya” back then, wrote a reply demeaning Amunugama’s stance and explicitly batting for the culture that was opposed to these populist sentiments. Decades later, having repented and turned around as the definitive face of the Jathika Chinthanaya, de Silva eschewed his fascination with the highbrow culture: “When Jothipala died, thousands of fans flocked to Kanatte and no ‘prabhuddha’ artiste had ever been respected by so many people at his/her funeral.” It took no less a figure than Amaradeva, the de facto symbol of that prabuddha sensibility here, to compel the same outflow of grief at his passing away.

Clement Greenberg’s analysis of art and non art doesn’t hold much water in Sri Lanka because, as with all colonial societies, we never made the transition from art to kitsch through an intermediate stage; we just transited from the one to the other. As such, instead of art and kitsch, we have what we can broadly term as “jana” on the one hand and “janapriya” on the other. Both these cultural sensibilities, as I wrote last week, neglected the folk culture, the culture regenerated by the efforts of Lionel and Sahan Ranwala as well as the likes of Piyasiri Wijeratne and Rohana Baddage. Rationalising this split requires an explication of how, and why, jana and janapriya remain wedded to each other, as strands of one holistic sensibility, and how and why the folk culture, when it evolved into the formal culture, had to waste away half its essence to the dust in a bid to appeal to mass or elite audiences. Was it because of the fact, which holds valid in virtually every society, that once you attempt to preserve folk art forms through a process of refinement, you inevitably contort those same art forms? And if so, does that explain why Jothipala and Amaradeva occupy the same pedestal, though from opposite ends?

The art forms which evolved after 1956 was smeared, necessarily, by the three art movements the Western world brought out in the 20th century: realism and naturalism, modernism, and postmodernism. The novels of Martin Wickramasinghe, the songs of Amaradeva, and the films of Lester James Peries belong squarely to the first and second of these movements. Out of these pioneers only Martin Wickramasinghe tried to go beyond their confines and parameters, and while Bawatharanaya (his last) is considered a lesser work, as a blatant act of depicting the Buddha the same way Nikos Kazantzakis depicted Christ (The Last Temptation was published around the time Wickramasinghe was writing Viragaya), it nevertheless attempted to go beyond the limits of modernism. Inasmuch as these artistes discovered a way through which the folk culture could be communicated to lay audiences, they ended up forming a substantial fan base among the milieu aspiring to become a petty bourgeoisie: as a result of free education and the social mobility it enabled among this milieu, the patrons of the Amaradevas and the Perieses and the Chitrasenas came from a bilingual, half-sophisticated crowd. Preservation of the folk culture, at the hands of this crowd, required Westernisation and Sanskritisation.

In postcolonial societies, particularly one with a dispossessed peasantry on the one hand and an uprooted, apathetic landowning bourgeoisie on the other, it was left largely to the petty bourgeoisie to act as intermediaries between the two. They were more or less cultural ambassadors, who intended to transform if not transubstantiate the art forms they had grown up with in the same villages they left later on, as with the Kaisaruvattes from the Koggala trilogy. This was true of societies in which industrialisation had not already enabled a sizeable population to leave those villages: in other words, the society we had, and the society Britain, France, and Germany (where the abstract concepts of autonomy and sovereignty, as well as the people’s will, came to be respected through the wave of literacy enabled by the Industrial Revolution) did not have. Sri Lanka in that sense lagged behind: we didn’t have a proper industrial revolution of our own, only a half-baked society of imperialists and their lackeys versus their countrymen.

In the early days, it was the offspring of these lackeys who idealised the folk culture, the peasantry, and tried their hand at preserving folk art forms no matter how imperfect their attempts were. Devar Surya Sena, formerly Herbert Charles Jacob Peiris, son of Sir James Peiris (the first non-European to be appointed President of the Cambridge Union), was the first of these offspring. They came from the Anglican elite, and in their efforts at spawning a national consciousness, they found a meaning for their own uprooted lives.

The generation of Amaradeva and Chitrasena came from a more intermediate social milieu, which belonged at once to both the formal and the folk and yet was at home with neither. They were affluent, but not affluent enough to rake up the sort of leisure and privilege essential for the formation of a refined cultural sensibility. The groundwork laid down by the likes of Sena proved to be crucial to them, and what they had discovered, the petty bourgeoisie added to. But what Sena and Rajapakse lacked, as their recordings of songs we mistakenly allude to as Sinhalese and Buddhist today (“Danno Budunge”) indicate, was the requisite Sinhala-ness to strike a chord with popular audiences. The petty bourgeoisie, at once linked to and disdainful of the peasantry, found their icons with a set of artists who could leap over this limitation. They could not go back to the village, nor could they completely turn away from it. This at times contradictory streak is what makes up much of our cultural revolution, from the forties and fifties onwards.

Free education liberated the masses from the necessity of a bilingual education. Until then, bilingualism remained a definitive mark of the petty bourgeoisie and the rural bourgeoisie, who sent their children to English speaking schools. Sinhala Only sought to do away with English altogether, and what resulted was a whole generation of audiences who were, proverbially speaking, never rooted in anything substantive. Once a cultural sphere evolves to this sort of audience, the artists tend to make a distinction between the folk and the formal while attempting to assimilate the former into the latter. Towards the end of the sixties, with the appointment of C. de S. Kulatilake as the head of the Folk Music Research Unit at Radio Ceylon, this process of assimilation began. It was through the attempts of Kulatilake that the likes of T. M. Jayaratne and Neela Wickramasinghe (who were tasked with singing and refining that quaint Sinhala ballad, “Badde Watata”, as part of their first assignment) emerged. These performers, who came after Amaradeva and Khemadasa had unleashed their musical revolutions (sourcing them to India and West, respectively), inadvertently brought about the fusion of one culture with the other.

We can imagine this trinity – jana, janapriya, folk – as variants of the same cultural sensibility. What differentiates the first two from the third is the milieu which pandered to them. Jana and janapriya were cultural forms which cropped up once the petty bourgeoisie were able to separate art from its historic roots. I am not contending that this act of separation was a sacrilege; in fact far from being a sacrilege, it was an inevitability. And by separation, I do not imply that art forms were stripped of their cultural roots. What happened was this: fusing the folk with the formal meant, over the years, refining and redefining the former. That required the opening up of the art we had to the art they had, elsewhere, in the outside world. Largely urbane, secular, and sophisticated, if only half so, the new petty bourgeoisie, equipped with neither their roots nor the language of access, English, secularised the culture they patronised. The mystical, the extraordinary, the other-worldly, they had already separated from the real, the mundane, the this-worldly, in how they followed the faith of the majority, Buddhism. This distinction was reflected in the way they, and the artists they pandered to, sang, wrote, filmed, and performed. Here we can agree with Nalin de Silva’s contention that the artists of 1956 contorted our effort to search for a modernity located in the Sinhala Buddhist locale. And here we can properly examine a contemporary dilemma: while a janapriya sensibility continues to evolve, the jana sanskruthiya has, somehow, and tragically so, stalled. We have many Jothipalas, but we have no Amaradeva to at least cry at when he passes away.

Written for: Daily Mirror, May 24 2018

Sketches from the South: Towards Matara

At first glance, the sights, the sounds, the flavours, and even the people appear like a poor reflection of their counterparts from Galle. First you come across the Star Fort, which resembles a pared down version of the more famous Fort from that other part of the South. Then you come across the beaches, which resemble and remind you of Unawatuna and Koggala. Then you walk around and realise that, yes, while these are sites you have seen elsewhere along the coastal belt, they are not all there is to see here and probably not the main sites to come across, record, and write about. The real Matara, in that sense, lies beyond the beaches, the rest houses, the sights, sounds, and flavours. Less packed in than Galle, and less urbanised than most places leading up to it, it is a veritable tourist hub and destination – if you know which spots to patronise and which people to talk with.

Matara is, I have come to feel, a paradox. While less urbanised than Galle, and by default less packed in, it concentrates its streak of opulence alongside the coast and within the town. Symbols of conspicuous consumption adorn both sides of the road, as you travel along the beaches to the Rest House. A huge cavalcade of Cargills, Perera & Sons, and several big name fashion houses and dress points is what you come across here. It seems as though Matara is a repository of big spending, given these. But then the statistics tell a different story. According to the census data from 2016, the inhabitants of Matara spend less relative to their income (75 percent) compared with the people of Galle (84 percent). However, this apparent spendthrift habit conceals another reality: in terms of bank loans the people of Matara tend to borrow more (around Rs 320,000 per household), and they spend proportionately more on food (36 percent) when compared with Galle (Rs 290,000 and 34 percent respectively). That opulent streak is limited to the town, yes, but the habit of spending, and spending on food at that, runs riot in other parts of this region. This has not come about at the cost of equality, by the way; as the statistics make it quite clear, Matara ranks as one of the least unequal places in the South, with a Gini coefficient of 0.39.

What makes Galle “stand out” in terms of tourist destinations is not really the city, but rather the surrounding hamlets: Unawatuna, Koggala, and even further beyond. That tourist line ends, I rather think, in Weligama and Mirissa, at least in terms of beaches, seafood restaurants, and various other exotic sites. In Matara you are limited for the most when it comes to beaches to Polhena, and if you travel further on, to Hiriketiya and Medawatta. But these are packed in, smaller than Unawatuna, and they predictably attract so many crowds that solace and contemplation, as a traveller that is, is simply not possible. So if you’re in Matara, you might in all good faith have to tear yourself away from those beaches, and though they exude a clear, lucid sheen against the sun, they are secondary to the other sites you can traverse through here. But even those sites – to name a few, the Weherahena temple, Dondra point, the lighthouse at Dondra, and the famous, world renowned Hummanaya – are not enough. They are more than adequate to fill your diary and travel notebooks. That, however, is not all there is to travelling in Matara.

First and foremost, there are the people. As with Ambalangoda, the most distinctive characteristic of the inhabitants of Matara is the way they speak. And it’s not just the dialect or their mode of speech; it’s also their lexicon. In this part of the country you come across one of the most localised variants of Sinhala, and you encounter an entire dictionary of terms denoting things, emotions, and gestures, both tangible and intangible, which you might at times find bizarre. Perhaps because of this bizarreness, people from here, once they choose to leave their hometown and reside at least temporarily in Colombo, drop that mode of talking. At one level, I think this is a sign of how inferior they feel, and at another level, I think it’s also an inevitability, given the development spate and the drive towards eradicating local cultures that we’ve necessitated in the name of progress and efficiency. Sinhala, unlike English (the variants of which evolved out of class hierarchies), retains its diglossia and distinction between the written and the spoken variety owing to the fact that the people of those days, who talked in a particular way, were restricted from visiting other regions. In other words, immobility, not progress, was what preserved these dialects. If this is so, then the only real solution I can see is to stop visiting other neighbourhoods and be where you are.

Piyasena Kahandagamage, in his seminal but somewhat overlooked book Pradeshiya Vivaharaya, has recorded many of those terms which form various regional dialects and variants of the mawbasa. It’s fascinating to see how many of them have entered everyday usage, and from the South and Matara in particular: thunapaha, hapana, hamine, iyum piyum, and that most endearing of all terms tossed between loved ones and spouses, eyi. But then there are those lesser encountered terms, which in one sense sound almost exotic to us: goiya for a person, makkayi for what, bin allanawa for planting a seed, and perhaps the most bizarre of them all, dodanna for talk. As Kahandagamage astutely notes, the speech patterns of the South are more or less spread along Giruwa Pattuwa, Magam Pattuwa, and last but not least, Matara Wellabada and Kandabada Pattuwa. (Beyond these, one must visit Galle: Rathgama, Balapitiya, and Ambalangoda. But with the spate of urbanisation and Westernisation in these areas, those patterns are being wiped out.) The true, authentic Matara, moreover, exists away from the coastline, and is to be found most acutely in Walasmulla, Akuressa, and Dickwella, among various other hamlets.

The unwary tourist, bombarded with brochures and guides telling him or her what to do and what to visit, tends to miss these places because what sells in the tourism industry is what everyone knows about. Near Walasmulla and bordering Hambantota, for instance, there is Mulkirigala, named Adam’s Berg by the Dutch once they conquered this part of the island (they got it confused with Adam’s Peak). Constructed in the third century, Mulkirigala is culturally significant, not least owing to the historical record that one of the 32 Bo saplings brought to Sri Lanka by Sangamitta Thera was planted there. Away from Walasmulla, and closer to the coastline, there is then Dickwella, which houses the sprawling and at times controversial Wewurukannala Raja Maha Viharaya: home to the largest seated Buddha statue in Sri Lanka (at 160 feet). Is it any wonder, I thought to myself as I gazed at this statue, that it is almost as forgotten by outsiders as that other temple in Ambalangoda, the Galagoda Viharaya, which happens to house the largest reclining statue in not just Sri Lanka, but also South Asia? These records have escaped the eye of the unwary traveller, a pity because they needn’t have escaped him at all.

Visiting Matara, or for that matter Galle or Ambalangoda, with the intention of talking with the natives is probably the most Orientalist project you, as a traveller, can commit on this island. No one wants to be seen as a member of his town or village if he or she is seen purely in terms of the parameters of that town and village. At another level, this can almost be seen as condescending, and Sri Lankans, particularly from the South, are too proud (and rightly so) to let the outsider judge them on the yardsticks of hometowns and origins such outsiders create by, and for, themselves. Getting into the roots of a place requires getting into the skins of its inhabitants, but not with the intention of seeing the “natives” for who you or someone else thinks they are. (E. M. Forster, in A Passage to India, depicts this side of Anglo-India, through the imperialists who wish to see the real India. Coming to Sri Lanka to see the real Matara, the real Galle, etc, is no different.)

The inhabitants (I desist from using the more condescending “natives”) of Matara don’t “come out” the way they seem to do in Galle and Ambalangoda, where people like to talk straight, to the point if they so wish, and very often with a sense of outrage. Outrage is something one rarely discerns in this area. Not because such sentiments don’t overflow (they do, they do), but because people from here are not as packed in and are thus more unevenly distributed between the city and the village. No matter how culturally archaic Ambalangoda and Galle may be, they have come to resemble their more commercialised suburbs in Colombo. (Land prices in Galle, particularly near the Fort, are on record as some of the most expensive in the country.) Compare that with the unevenness of the economic development in Matara (the main bus halt near the Fort houses a 3D film hall, of all things, while as you get away from the city you come across dilapidated locales and half-broken houses), and you can understand how the people of this region, and beyond, tend to be uneven in their dealings with the outside world. They do talk straight, but they also talk at cross purposes, leaping from one topic to another, rarely curt or short. In that sense, the inhabitants are far more deserving representatives of this region than the beaches, or even the religious sites.

Written for: Daily Mirror, May 22 2018

Essays on art and non art: Revisiting 'Masscult and Midcult'

Is the conflict between art and non-art, so much a staple of contemporary society, really beyond resolving today? To answer this question is to ask another: who decides on, and thereby sustains, the separation between art and non-art, and what are the yardsticks to be used when deciding on what is the one and what is the other? If one cannot answer the latter question, then it’s reasonable to suppose that one cannot hope to answer the former, simply because they are inextricably related with regard to the theory of aesthetics. One has to take sides; one cannot be a moderate, because taking a moderate stance, however well-intentioned that may be, means being uncommitted to the evolution of art. And the evolution of art really amounts to the evolution of conflicts between critics, between the purveyors of art as refinement and art as entertainment. To this we can add other conflicts, other ideological rifts, extending to specific art forms: formalism in painting, linguistics in literature, montage in the cinema, alienation in the theatre.

The role of the critic is curious, yet contradictory: he is not required to be on par with the art or the artist he is reviewing and appraising, but the standards he creates for that art or artist are entirely his own. In other words, the true critic delves into the objet d’art to find out how much of the artist is embedded therein. He is not supposed to be the artist, only to discover the auteur beneath the individual. But then this mode of criticism belongs to the journalist, who reviews individual objets d’art (movies, plays, books, etc) in return for a stipend. There is a higher mode of criticism that exists on its own right, on which the journalist reviewer depends for a veritable horde of resources. In this mode, the critic, or writer, no longer bothers with specific works of art. He is preoccupied with the function of art, as a whole, regardless of the disparateness and uniqueness of individual artist. On a canvas he attempts to chart, and assess, not a body of work belonging to a particular filmmaker or playwright, but several bodies of work belonging to an entire art form.

Once in a while the distinction between these two modes of criticism gets blurred, often deliberately, since a critic can in the same review discuss a work of art and the history, and theory, of the art form to which that work belongs. Out of necessity perhaps, the first film critics, who were really either novelists or journalists, preferred to examine and at times lambast the art form, ignoring the individuality of the films which were being churned out by those who sought to combine the theatre and the cinema. It was only much later that this mode of criticism was overcome by the individual film reviewer: in order, Manny Farber, James Agee, and the most powerful of them all, Pauline Kael. Agee was probably the only real film critic; both Farber and Kael deigned to examine movies as an art form in essay after essay. Agee’s standards were not academic, nor were they “cinematic”: his reviews were written from the standpoint that the movies being reviewed deserved being examined as autonomous works of art, however new they were.

More often than not, nevertheless, film criticism, the youngest of all modes of criticism, opens its doors to the cultural critic, who seeks to apply standards created elsewhere, in other cultural spheres, to the movies. Among these critics we can mention Susan Sontag and Dwight Macdonald. But the fact that they apply standards created elsewhere does not mean that they automatically disparage movies as being too facile and too novel. Nor does it mean that they do not disparage them based on that crude premise. Sontag, for instance, was a champion of new avenues created by Godard, Resnais, and Cassavates, while Macdonald, described as “America’s browbeater” by Franklin Foer, was suspicious of what he thought was the cinema’s ability to compromise on sophistication through cheap, moneymaking processes. This goes back to the question I outlined at the beginning: in the movies, or for that matter in any art form, who is to decide on what is art and what is non-art? The answer to that, of course, is that we can’t find an answer. The critic vents out his or her personal opinions; he or she is entitled to them. That is all.

In his “Masscult and Midcult”, Dwight Macdonald warns against what he sees as the tendency of American culture to do away with highbrow tastes in favour of a middlebrow and lowbrow culture. He describes masscult as the culture of the masses; like Hannah Arendt, Richard Hofstadter, and C. Wright Mills, he views the masses as a negative force, obliterating specificity in favour of mass consumption and the conveyor belt. Midcult, on the other hand, is a more insidious culture, or even cult: superficially catering to higher tastes, it eventually betrays its own lack of sophistication by pandering to lowbrow tastes, in the guise of commercial art. This distinction was specifically rooted in the United States of the post-Nazi Germany world. The American proletariat, willing to submit to authority for stability, thrived on an ethic of groupthink and uniformity, and this uniformity was to be seen visibly in the American cultural sphere

Macdonald’s exercise in cultural distinctions was not a casual academic game, but a necessity compelled by what he saw as infiltrators who were attempting to evict the pre-Nazi Germany cultural sensibility. Virulently attacking the masses, along with the ability of commerce to market art to those masses through the factory and the conveyor belt, was for him an act of standing up for what he thought the artist stood for. In other words, it is in Macdonald’s controversial thesis that we find a confirmation of the myth of the artist as a loner, who shuts his doors and paints, or makes a film, or composes a song, while drowning out the sound of a nearby factory; in other words of the artist who rebels against commerce. What this necessitated was a distinction, and a sharp, unyielding one, between masscult (potboilers) and midcult (the plays of Thornton Wilder and Tennessee Williams, which depicted urban ennui as the new realism).

For Macdonald, midcult was a falsity, a vicious myth which was perpetuated by the purveyors of lowbrow art, while masscult was the real deal: lowbrow tastes disseminated as lowbrow art. While the essay he wrote on these two modes of culture has been rather discredited (in no small measure) since, and is out of favour in today’s globalised, heavily commercialised world, it nevertheless struck writers and artists at the time. It was felt to be a last gasp for a bygone generation: the generation of the dandies and the bohemians, the latter of whom would give way to the generation of bourgeois bohemians and pop art revolutionaries. A last gasp, because the solution Macdonald thought he found for the conflict between masscult and midcult on the one hand and highbrow culture on the other was simplistic if not naive: simply, that the highbrows must flee to their own place under the sun. No one, not in an era where advertising and Godard were courting each other, would have abided by this solution.

While no one reads Macdonald’s didactic overtures and takes them seriously today (not least because his writings are all but completely out of print now), it would be futile to exclude him from the canon of 20th century criticism altogether. Like F. R. Leavis’s distinction between mass civilisation and minority culture, masscult and midcult and highbrow culture were terms which were used to project the nostalgia of the writer towards a bygone era, and in making aesthetic judgments using those terms, Macdonald admittedly tripped over more than once. (For instance, he exempted the likes of Dickens from his list of indicted artists, forgetting that Dickens, not unlike the writers of potboiler detective fiction which Macdonald would have found almost nauseating, was a popular writer as well, at least in his day.) This was true of Leavis also. (Again we have the example of Dickens: in his early work, Leavis despised him, and wrote against him, but towards the end of his life he did a 360-turnaround on his earlier judgments, praising Dickens to the extent of inflating lesser works like Hard Times and Little Dorrit.)

Far from putting aside Leavis or Macdonald, I would suggest here that the crux of the argument they (in particular, Macdonald) put forward is the question whether art can really be separated from non-art, at least intermittently. The truth is that a work of art “survives” its own evolution by being constantly reconfigured, so what is considered art today would have hardly been art at the time of its conception (as an example, we can point at the Gal Viharaya at Polonnaruwa, which was sculpted back when worship was as essential to the daily routines of citizens and villagers as going to work is today). What binds the likes of Macdonald and Leavis together is their fixation over the distinctions between different aesthetic tastes, or levels thereof. What I can say against this line of thinking is that a work of art passes through three distinct phases: use (at the time of its initial conception), retrieval (at the time of its excavation), and study (at the time it ceases being a practical object and becomes, yes, an aesthetic object). In other words, it’s not the nature of a work of art that makes us differentiate between lowbrow and highbrow, rather the mode of communication used to convey the worth of the object to lay audiences.

Written for: Ceylon Today ECHO, May 20 2018

Vimuth Dewmina: Beyond scores, shields, and meets

In 2012, a boy who would dabble in basketball, volleyball, and badminton, and also get involved with several clubs and societies he hadn’t even dreamt of joining before, at his second school, was asked to come over by a bunch of friends to watch a boxing match. He would have been in Grade Seven at the time. Or Grade Six. In any case, it doesn’t matter. What matters is that he accepted the invitation. What matters is that he went. And what matters is that while boxing had remained an alien activity to him until then, this particular match enthralled him: it seemed to promote both aggressiveness and respect, respect on the part of both players for one another.

That match got him to think. So he thought. Two years later, when he finished thinking, he decided on joining his school’s boxing squad. This was in 2014. Two further years later, by which time he had resolved to concentrate on boxing and boxing only, he had undergone training, taken part in various meets, and prepared himself for the ultimate encounter, the Stubbs Shield. But before we get to Stubbs, the medals and tokens he won there, and the sense of fulfilment it compelled in him, we need to look at those two years, and assess the foreword and afterword they bring out. The protagonist of that story, incidentally, has a name. Vimuth Dewmina.

Vimuth’s story begins many, many years ago. He was born at the Wathupitiwala Hospital at Attanagalla. His father (a pastor) hailed from Bowatte, his mother (a housewife) hailed from Negombo, while in his early years he and his family lived in Kirindiwela until they moved to Kuliyapitiya owing to a shift in the parish. “Kuliyapitiya is pretty urbanised now, hardly recognisable in fact. I remember running as a child, very clearly, and running over an edanda and even falling into it once.” While he didn’t do much at his first school, St Joseph’s Boys College, he did take to athletics there. “St Joseph’s wasn’t endowed with proper infrastructure. Nevertheless, I did what I could with what I had.” In the end, having sat for his Grade Five Scholarship in 2010, he passed with a cool 179 marks and left for Royal College.

It was at Royal that he became enthralled by the prospect of going beyond just studies and taking to sports and societies. He began with basketball, shifted to badminton, got into the B team, and trained well enough to be considered a member of the A team, and by the sidelines played volleyball as well. But then he went for that boxing match. Naturally, he got confused. “What was I to do?” he asks me. “For months, I reflected on this issue. And then, in Grade Nine, two years after I watched that match, played with Trinity College, Kandy, I decided to box. By the time I joined the squad, however, selections for tournaments had been finalised. Half the year had gone by, and I had to spend the other half training.”

For the prospective school boxer there are, in Sri Lanka, various meets organised at the regional and national levels, but of them three stand out: in order, the L. V. Jayaweera Meet, the T. B. Jayah Meet, and the Stubbs Shield. In 2015, about eight months after he was selected for the squad at Royal, Vimuth got the chance to fight at the L. V. Jayaweera Meet. “I remember wading through the quarter and the semi finals, until I reached the finals, where I lost 2-1 to a boxer from Peradeniya Central. My weight category there was 46-48 kg. Then I was despatched to the T. B. Jayah Meet, again in the same weight category. There too I lost at the finals, and again with the same score as before. From there we left for the Stubbs Shield. My weight category was 48-50 kg. I managed to procure a Bronze Shield, but couldn’t go beyond the semi finals. I lost to a contender from Horana Vidyarathna. Ironically, the score happened to be 2-1 again.”

In 2015 they had practised at Pannala, which had a climate that was more or less similar to Colombo’s, and in 2016 they would practise, right before that year’s Stubbs Shield Tournament, at the colder and hence less easy to adapt to Diyathalawa. “I obviously couldn’t play at the L. V. Jayaweera again, given that I played before. But the T. B. Jayah and the Stubbs Shield were open to me. With respect to the former, I waded through until the semi finals, where I was taken aback by probably the most competitive contender I’ve encountered until now. He was from Dheerananda College in Kandy and he had a bodyline that was in many respects better than mine, though he was shorter than me. He could play well. I lost to him that day: 2-1. I have encountered him three times since then. That was the only time I lost to him.” According to Vimuth, this defeat proved to be a turning point: it helped him reflect on what he actually wanted to do.

“By this time I had stayed with the squad for over two years. I asked myself, ‘What have I done throughout all these years?’ When we went to Diyathalawa, I therefore resolved on improving myself. When we were sent home to rest afterwards, I watched as many boxing videos as I could, particularly with respect to taller players, to up my game-play. This was right before the Stubbs Shield. I obviously wasn’t going to go for a Bronze Shield. I needed to achieve more, much more. Diyathalawa, with its cold climate and the long walks we used to take every day to the playground and then to the gym, helped considerably there. So did the fact that we were coached that year by a new person, one Mr Anthony, who had a kind word for us no matter how badly we played. I think those factors contributed to my performance at the Shield, where I encountered that player from Dheerananda again, went through three rounds at the semis against him, and emerged as the winner with a score of 3-0, and as the champion in my weight class, 50-52 kg.”

That year, the Stubbs Shield turned 99. The following year, it turned 100. The problem was that Royal had lost for the last 30 years. Vimuth’s evolution as a contender on his own right, clearly, had a say in the squad’s determination to make the 100th Shield their moment. “We won the quarter finals. Of the eight players from our squad, six made it to the semi finals. We won there as well. At the finals, I encountered a player from Horana Vidyarathna. Earlier another team member, Ansaff Ahmed, had won a match we thought was tilted against him. The next fight was mine. That I won 5-0 helped, because it tilted the scales in our favour. If I had lost, not only would it have discouraged the squad, it would have meant that for us to win, we would have to go through three more encounters. We didn’t need to. Our captain became the Best Boxer, the Most Scientific, and just as importantly, we clinched the Shield after 30 long years.”

To my surprise, Vimuth tells me that after all these encounters, he considered himself done. “All I wanted to do was court victory for my school,” he tells me, “After that was over, I was asked to return to my studies, which I willingly obliged.” But the afterword which the Stubbs Shield compelled form him wasn’t done, at least not yet, so over the next six months, Vimuth was selected to represent the country at two foreign meets: one at Germany, last December, the other in Indonesia, in April this year. While he was unanimously selected along with a contingent from his Royal for the former, he had to undergo trials for the latter. “I loved Germany, but couldn’t get used to its cold climate. That’s why I was happy I got a Bronze Shield,” he remembers. As for Indonesia, the Asian Boxing Championship, he had toured with three other contenders.

Vimuth has other stories to relate, which we ought to delve into when they’ve completed their rounds the way his stints at boxing have. Not that those stints have ended. Far from it, I hope. “Over the last six years, I managed to discover myself. And not just in sports. Being part of various societies contributed too. In that sense I need to remember a few names, particularly my coaches, Mr Abdulla Ibunu, Mr Nisthar, and Mr Senarathna, along with our in more ways than one patron, Mr Lakshman Amarasekara. Then there is our Senior Games Master, Mr Riyaz Aluher, who took the trouble of accompanying us in Germany, and of course our Principal, Mr Abeyrathna. I am grateful to them all.”

Vimuth’s life so far has been adorned by scores, shields, trophies, and ranks. Will they blind him or empower him? I sincerely hope that they will empower him. As we all do.

Written for: The Island YOUth, May 20 2018

The story of a song, an uncle, and a niece

There are songs that remain etched in our minds long after we listen to them and long, long after we forget the first time we came across them. They bring to mind certain experiences that we like to forget but for some inscrutable reason don’t want to forget. Like schooldays. First crushes. Unfulfilled romances. Friendships that sour into enmities. And so on. Either way, for better or worse, the words we hum and the tunes we strum stay with us for the simple reason that such songs, the best of them at least, were meant to be retained in the repository of our collective imagination. In other words, they were initially conceived to be as unprofessional and simple as possible. They lend flavour to experience and help us associate a particular memory, bitter or jovial, with a certain time and place.

Just as there are stories behind the first times we hear such tunes, however, there are also stories behind the how, when, and wherefore of those tunes, those who ideated and came up with the melody, those who wrote down the lyrics, and those who lent their voices. Out of 100-odd songs, I’m willing to wager that not even 30 can boast of such worthy prefaces. But those 30 sadly tend to be overlooked, because we aren’t really bothered about their foreword. Who’d have thought, for instance, that Ajantha Ranasinghe wrote “Tharu Arundathi” after coming across a girl across the street that he never dared to introduce himself to?

This is the story of one such song. Before I get to it, though, I need to get to the names of those involved in it. Two names. Victor Silva and Nirasha Perera.

Few would know of Victor and Nirasha and fewer would know that they were the two vocalists behind the song they ended up singing, right before it was appropriated, unjustly I should think, by other more established vocalists. Indeed, outside their immediate circle not many would believe that they were destined to become professionals in the field, right before the professions they’d carved for themselves through their education got them out of that field.

Let’s start with Victor. Victor had a passion for singing. From an early age. But there was a problem. His father didn’t want him to sing. He wanted him to become a Chartered Accountant, back then (as of now) a lucrative career. So during his early schoolboy days at Holy Cross College, Kalutara (his hometown), he didn’t pursue music despite the fact that he could perform quite well. Things changed, however, when he shifted to St Aloysius’ College in Galle and became a boarder. The priest in charge of the boarders was Father Debura, straight from Italy. He was also in charge of the Choir. Naturally, the Father tried the boarders out with their voices. Having heard Victor, he selected him then and there.

Victor obviously had a problem with his father and this he confided to the Reverend Father. The Reverend Father, thankfully, understood him well. “Don’t worry, tell him to see me,” he confidently told the young man, and the next time the parents of the boarders came to meet the priests and the rectors who ran the school, Victor readily took his mother and father to meet Father Debura. The Father had only one question to ask: “Mr Silva, would you like your son to use his voice to sing the praises of God?” The question, craftily crafted, won Victor’s father over: “No Father. Let him sing!” Remembering this conversation decades later, for me, Victor had one thing to say: “By the grace of God, and also Father Debura, I didn’t let my voice waste away!” Subsequently, he was taken in.

In 1965, St Aloysius’ took in Anton Weerasinghe, a layman practising and learning to become a priest (what one called a Scholast). Weerasinghe was versatile, with an ability to play the tabla and guitar and also to compose. Victor, who took part in various dramas and sang for them as well, soon came under his tutelage, when Weerasinghe got him and a friend of his, Eric Gunaratne, to come up with an original song. Having hankered after a tune and a set of lyrics to fit that tune, the boys finally hit upon an original they could be happy with: “Suran Menika”. Weerasinghe heard it, smiled, and polished it in his own special way.

Time passed by rather quickly. Victor left school and moved to Colombo in 1967, having passed his exams well enough to contemplate on his higher education: as usual, in accountancy. Just as it was as looked up to as it is today, however, it was as tough as it is today, so he had to stay at a hostel to get his mind on his education. The hostel he stayed at, situated near Ananda Rajakaruna Mawatha in Borella (back then called Campbell Place), housed several students engaged in various subjects, from medicine to law to engineering to accountancy. Given that they were all boys, they indulged in the usual bajaw session with the guitar (which Victor had by then mastered, to a certain extent). Among those friends he encountered, there was Duleep de Silva, member of the then phenomenally popular Los Flamencos (remember “Bolanda Katha” and “Kalu Kelle”?) and like Victor an article clerk at a company. “What happened was this: one fine day, Duleep asked me to come up with a song. He wanted to get it recorded.”

Neither Duleep nor Victor could versify. But they had another friend, a medical student called Nihal de Silva. Whenever Victor strummed a tune, he would rush to Nihal and the two of them would brainstorm a set of lyrics to suit that tune. So having brainstormed over and over again with respect to the tune that came up at Duleep’s request, the two of them hit on an original. They titled it “Bale Bale”, a mock, tongue-in-cheek reference to the bales of used cloth material that were imported during the Sirimavo Bandaranaike regime (owing to the fact that imports were restricted on all fronts). To crown what they’d done, they then came up with two more songs: “Pasal Kaale”, a ditty on the evolution of schoolboys from students to lovers, and “Suneetha”, composed by Anton Weerasinghe, by now domiciled in Manila. Having heard all three with “Suran Menika”, Duleepa took Victor and Nihal to meet Gerald Wickremesooriya.

Gerald, who had started the Sooriya label, was thrilled. He got them to come to his residence, in Colpetty. Having gotten hold of another popular performer, Chandima de Alwis (band member of The Spitfires, a beat group), apparently now domiciled in Australia, they all went and met Gerald and ultimately persuaded him to record all four songs. The recording, Victor remembers, was done by Patrick Denipitiya, an Old Boy of St Aloysius’, and was completed by the end of 1970. The following year, at the height of the insurrection, the four of them would record four more songs at the Dalugama Studios, polishing up the recording from 6 pm to 6 am. “Back then, if you got one tune or word wrong, you had to start from scratch all over again!”

Several stints at the SLBC English Commercial Service aboard the Sooriya Show (hosted by Vijaya Corea, who introduced him as a “rising star”) later, Victor found himself returning to the career he’d left behind, in Accountancy, when (“by the grace of God”) he managed to pass his exams quite well. “My father was extremely happy. I had proved to him that I could sing and balance the books.” By 1972, he was working comfortably (“to my heart’s content”) at the Ceylon Tobacco Company. But before he abandoned singing, at least for a short while, he’d meet one person who’d figure in his life a few years later: Nimal Mendis.

This is where Nirasha comes in. Victor married Nirasha’s mother’s younger sister in 1973. When the two of them would meet at family parties, they’d almost always be selected to perform middle class baila and pop tunes like “Koheda Yanne Rukmani?”, which was first performed and popularised at Nirasha’s school (Holy Family Convent, Bambalapitiya) and was a rehashed version of the nursery rhyme “Where Are You Going My Pretty Maid?” Uncle and niece would meet each other for a more serious song, however, when in 1978 Nimal Mendis, composing the music for Sumitra Peries’s film Ganga Addara, requested him to perform a theme song. There was a catch though: he had to perform it with a small girl. “Obviously, Nirasha fitted the bill!” Victor heartily chortles.

Ganga Addara, as those who’ve seen the film and the later, rather crassly made television remake would know, popularised Vijaya Kumaratunga through the titular song (performed, though never with the same intensity and sense of conviction, by other young vocalists). But there’s another tune, slotted in at the beginning of the film while the opening credits are rolling on. Sumitra Peries and the film’s producers, the Sumathipala family (Milina Sumathipala), had taken in Maurice Dahanayake’s son, Channa, and one of the Sumathipala daughters, Shalini, to act as the juvenile versions of the two protagonists and lovers in the story, played as adults by Vasanthi Chathurani and Sanath Gunathilake. The opening credits sequence really has no bearing on the larger narrative, but was used as a means of portraying the young innocence of the love that turns our heroine, Nirmala (Vasanthi) insane and in the end forces her to commit suicide.

This opening tune was, as with Nimal Mendis’s other works, written in English, and while it didn’t make sense, it was not intended to be an overtly serious song either. The chorus, Victor and Nirasha remembers for me, ran on like this:

Tralalalala you...
Tralalalala me....
Tralalalala sing together...
Tralalalala we...

As for the second verse:

Swim like a fish...
Fly like a bird...
Be happy, little boy, little girl...
No time to feel sad...
My lass, my lad...
Love is a wonderful thing....

(Victor and Nirasha argue over the last line: the latter informs me that it was actually “Love is a magical word...” In any case, it doesn’t really matter.)

Nimal Mendis, as I mentioned before, wrote in English. To translate it into Sinhala, he got a Tamil gentleman from Panadura: Augustus Vinayagaratnam, who had already worked with Nimal for “Ganga Addara” (the titular song) and, earlier, “Upul Nuwan” (featured in Lester James Peries’s Ahasin Polawata, which also featured Vijaya and Vasanthi and which also was produced by the Sumathipalas). In the end, Augustus, rising up to the occasion, met the primary challenge this entailed: keep to the spirit of the original while communicating it to the vernacular audience. If “Tralalalala You” was meant to be so innocent, so jovial, that it was born (in one sense) to be sung as a carefree interlude, then Augustus delivered on the brief he was given. Nimal, obviously, was happy.

On the 31st of March, 1978, Nirasha and Victor went off to a studio near the Archbishop’s House (the Joe-Neth Studio) in Borella. They had met about twice or thrice, before, at Mendis’s residence, an annexe off Jawatta Road. At the time Nirasha would have been 12, Victor about 30. “Mind you, we hadn’t recorded a song like this before. Not even Uncle Victor!” Nirasha remembers, with a gleam in her eye.

And to top it all, the song they were recording had to be recorded with some schoolchildren from Sangamitta Balika Vidyalaya in Borella. “They would have all been primary schoolgirls, from Grade Four or Six. I was taken to one studio with Uncle Victor, and I put on an earphone. The other girls didn’t. What they sang, they had to sing with all the gusto they could bring out. It was really and truly a raw, unfiltered, unprofessional, and yes, innocent song. ‘Cherubic’ in the best sense of that word. In fact I don’t think it was meant to be recorded as a serious tune. None of us had voices which had been polished or refined. Nimal wanted that kind of tune, that kind of recording. But there was a problem. No matter how hard we tried, the girls couldn’t muster up the gusto he needed.”

At the studio there had been Mendis as the composer, Augustus as the lyricist, and Sarath Fernando as the orchestrator. All three of them tried to uplift the girls’ spirits, to no avail. “I remember Uncle Sarath making faces at them, trying to keep them amused. We obviously needed to make them feel the song they sang. So Nimal hit on a solution. He asked me to sing the first line of the first verse, and when it was sung again by the girls, to take a step back from the microphone and sing it with the rest of the girls. That way my voice would blend in with theirs and at the same time I wouldn’t stand out from them. I remember him telling Uncle Victor also to step away from the mike. It was a risk we all had to take. And at the end of the day, it was a risk that paid off. Handsomely.”

If took all of five or six takes for Nimal Mendis to get what he wanted, and the end result was to his liking. It was, as Nirasha so aptly puts it to me, a very unprofessional song, one that ran along and flowed along succinctly to the tenor of a group of children who probably weren’t aware of what they were doing. Incidentally Augustus’s lyrics reflected this, so well that they retain the rawness of Nimal’s composition. As for the song, well, here are some of the lyrics:

දෑතේ බැදිලා ඈතට දුවලා
නොපෙනී යනවද සුදු නංගී
ඉනිමං බැදලා ලස්සන හොයලා
ගමනක් යනවද සුදු මල්ලී

The name of the tune? “Ran Tikiri Sina.”

The story of “Ran Tikiri Sina” doesn’t end here though. The afterword it compels can be, in Nirasha’s and Victor’s own words, be summed up as follows: despite the producers and the composer, it was sadly and ultimately hijacked and, if I may use that term, appropriated by more established players who, ironically, missed out on one quality of the tune that the two original vocalists had not: the sense of innocence that no polished voice could convey or do justice to. “In hindsight I think it was erroneous on the part of these vocalists to choose ‘Ran Tikiri Sina.’ Not because we sang it originally, but because it wasn’t meant to be sung in a professional, suave way. It needed to retain a welter of joviality. That’s what Nimal Mendis got with the original recording, that’s what was never replicated elsewhere. Moreover, we had a saving grace in the form of the children who performed it with us. We had one reply to give audiences: ‘If the recording you hear doesn’t have a children’s ensemble, then it isn’t ours!’”

There was another saving grace. Hudson Samarasinghe, then at the Sri Lanka Broadcasting Corporation (SLBC), got hold of the story behind “Ran Tikiri Sina”. He thought for some days, paid a visit to the Sumathipalas, procured an original spool of the tune, returned to the SLBC, and got it recorded there. “As long as I’m in this division, I won’t let another version of this song be broadcast,” he is reported to have told Victor, who recounts this to me this rather happily. “Hudson saved us. We would have wasted away, particularly since we gave up our musical careers afterwards, if not for him.” More was to come, happily.

20 years after Ganga Addara was released, that is in 1999, the Sumathipalas held a felicitation ceremony involving everyone who had been a part of the film, from Sumitra Peries to Tissa Abeysekara (the scriptwriter) to Donald Karunaratne (the cameraman) to of course Nirasha and Victor. When the awards were duly handed over, to the two of them, and the acknowledgement read out in public, the journalists and media men and women present at the occasion were rather astonished. “For over a decade they had associated ‘Ran Tikiri Sina’ with another set of vocalists. They were astounded to realise that we were the original performers. Not long afterwards, we got requests for interviews, and we were thenceforth featured in several newspapers which carried such telling headlines as ‘Ran Tikiri Sina smiles again.” To top it all, Chandimal Fernando, who too had performed the tune, though not for commercial purposes, called the two of them to sing it with him onstage: “The first time we sang it onstage, to be honest.”

I met Victor Silva and Nirasha Perera at their residence in Rosmead Place the other day and I was happy, relieved almost, that 40 years have passed. 40 years, that is, since the recording of the song this article is about, specifically 40 years to March 31. A lot has happened. Some of it needn’t be recounted, others have been recounted. By me and by everyone else. In the meantime, all we can say, looking at these two gentle people and perusing the lyrics of the tune they hummed, is what someone once said of music in general: “It gives a soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination, and life to everything.”

I first heard “Ran Tikiri Sina” on air from the lips of other established singers. Watching Ganga Addara made me realise that such songs are appropriated by those who piggybank on the successes they encounter, whether at the hands of critics or of popular audiences. Victor and Nirasha have much to be happy about in that respect, I think. For now and forever. So thank you. For now and forever.

Written for: Daily Mirror, March 27 and 29 2018