Towards a fair critique of the Jathika Chinthanaya

It is fashionable now and then to associate a particular movement with a particular ideology. What is forgotten there, sadly, is that movements and ideologies are hardly monolithic and are almost always the products of collective imaginations, obsessions, and beliefs, which are as subject to change as the personalities of those who breed and perpetuate them. Human beings are rarely if at all flat; they are as idealistic as the people they combat against, which is to say that they are susceptible to change and expedience as and when the moment demands it. To lambast a movement on the terms it purported to stand for years ago, hence, is not only meaningless, but also futile: it helps no one, and far from bringing up a space for constructive dialogue, it precludes such a thing.

Over the years and decades, two important strands of thought have manifested themselves through the politics and representations of the Jathika Chinthanaya school of thought: identity (Sinhala and Buddhist) and knowledge (or the pursuit thereof beyond the paradigm of explicitly Western knowledge systems). It has earned both praise and censure (obviously) and as things stand, those who praised it have turned over to censure it and those who censured it have turned over to (begrudgingly) side with it. What’s important when critiquing, or praising, such a movement, however (and both must be done, it must be said, with a pinch of salt), is the fact that these two strands of thought, which like a motif in a symphony have been forever associated with it, have complemented the dualistic, contradictory political strands it has got itself entangled with.

The Jathika Chinthanaya traces its intellectual origins to the post-1956 cultural sphere of this country. What happened in 1956 was the displacement of the cultural by the political. When the politically cultural (since the movies of Lester James Peries, the novels of Wickramasinghe, and the plays of Sarachchandra were as political, inadvertently, as they were cultural) found its pivot in the political plane with the election of Bandaranaike, it was continuing or rather purporting to continue a tradition that had begun years if not decades before with Anagarika Dharmapala: the formation of a deshiya intellectual climate that no longer could be waived off by the ghosts and shackles of colonialism.

But the election of Bandaranaike heralded in a politics of expedience, and while it’s not fair or just to level the indictment on just the politicians involved, it seems to me that they were to blame one way or another. This piece, however, is not about those who were involved and to blame. Rather, it’s about the confusions that have been sustained with respect to the social milieu which made 1956 possible, and which also made the cultural and political revolution after 1956 possible. If I may lay down this confusion in clear-cut terms: the fact is that 1956 could not have been possible without the same intellectual elite who were bandied about and vilified by its own members, and the fact is that the biggest purveyors and supporters of that aforementioned revolution were not, as was once supposed, the rural peasantry, but the rural and urban bourgeoisie: the same milieu which empowered the Hela Urumaya from such suburbs as Borella, Nugegoda, Maharagama, and Kesbewa. Any discussion of the politics of the Jathika Chinthanaya must be traced to this milieu, and for a very good reason.

What binds the two strands – identity and knowledge – which in turn bind the JC and that milieu together is their commitment, on the political and economic front, to create an alternative system to the Western paradigms of modernity we are assailed with day after day. Those paradigms are seen, rightly, by the JC and those who bat for it and those who do not, as extensions of colonialism: from fast food to smartphones, from English Our Way to Facebook and Twitter. In this they are correct, and correct all the way, but this has often been undone by the lives of the people who have offered to lead the movement: more often than not, the personal has not succumbed to the social, and in the end, the rift between the two has been sufficient, in a (sad) way, for the detractors of JC to claim that they are really hypocrites, if not “intellectual protectionists” (Dayan Jayatilleka).

But it is this contradiction that has “coloured” the JC throughout its rather eventful history. Now if we are to critique this contradiction – which, by the way, is the same contradiction that has beset all other movements supportive of and opposed to the JC’s tenets – we will have to forego on the golden rule I’ve laid above: that no movement can be exculpated of a tendency to contradict its own stances. Instead, any fair criticism of the JC must start from the premise that it has been housed by individuals who have laid down principles which are at odds with those of other individuals who also come from that outfit. They have their preferences – and the JC, with its appeal to a broad, but segmented, Sinhala Buddhist urban and rural petty bourgeoisie, pick on these preferences as their desired outcomes – and they have their favourite political horses (like Gotabaya Rajapaska) over those they dislike and censure (like his brother, Basil).

In the eighties, when political swords were crossed and people actually believed in the tenets and truisms (they said) they stood for, ideological skirmishes of this sort were easier to take seriously. Today, with television and social media and the tendency of politicians and ideologues to jump from one stance to another without betraying the fact that they have, indeed, made such a jump, it’s difficult to ascertain just how sincere a movement is or its representatives are. This is why the Jathika Chinthanaya remains such a potent force, because the stance has appealed most, against manifestations of colonialism in modernity and post-modernity, has been enough for it to win over followers regardless of the fact that some of its other stances, particularly on the economic front, have been contradicted by the lifestyles and other positions indulged by its spokespersons.

For a fair critique of the Jathika Chinthanaya, therefore, we must concede that this remains their biggest and most enduring strength. That a rift exists between their stated aims and their chosen political backers, and sometimes between those aims and their very own “other lives”, and that their base is basically racist, chauvinist, what not, are criticisms which, if we are to take them seriously, can be applied in other ways to those making them. Political ideologues in Sri Lanka still confuse the personal for the social, and in sustaining such a confusion, they tend to miss the bigger picture: simply, that for any real constructive political skirmish to occur (like the skirmishes between Newton Gunasinghe and Dayan Jayatilleka on the one hand and Amarasekara and de Silva on the other, in the eighties), we must concede that an outfit houses individuals – frail, susceptible to change, and flawed – and that these individuals are not by any stretch of the imagination monoliths. There are no monoliths. Never were, never will be.

So what is that fair critique we can make? That, ladies and gentlemen, deserves careful scrutiny. I hence leave it for a later essay. For now, though, I am done.

Written for: Daily Mirror, May 3 2018