The missing moderate

The fifties was clearly a dark decade for the United States of America. Loyalties shifted, betrayal became the order of the day, and telling on your neighbour for the sake of purging what was then referred to as the Red Scare became so normalised that it didn’t matter who you were telling on. The Communists had come, the nuclear bomb was being developed by both sides, and in the rush to nip the Commie in the bud, the very idea of due process was rubbished to arrest and accuse. Not even the President of that great country could stop it.

In the end, it took a broadcast journalist (the inimitable Edward R. Murrow) to undress those who were trashing the very constitutional roots of America for the sake of (political) expedience. Murrow, a man of eloquence, spoke little but revealed a lot. His criticism of arguably the main antagonist in the drama that unfolded in that decade, Joseph McCarthy, led to the inevitable tussle between the two of them, against the man he snidely referred to as the "junior senator from Wisconsin" (a state which, curiously enough, never voted for a Republican after 1984, except for Donald Trump and that with a margin of no more than 25,000 votes).

Murrow was not a Communist. He was, however, shrewd. A stickler for facts, he called out McCarthy for what he was: a hysteric. On April 6, 1954, the latter attacked him in a televised address in which he made his point clear: “Neither Joe McCarthy nor Edward R. Murrow is of any great importance as individuals. We are only important in our relation to the great struggle to preserve our American liberties.” The last point was meant to be an affirmation of the first: Communism, in whatever form and espoused by whatever person, was so dangerous and so opposed to the liberties of the Founding Fathers that nothing less than a “great struggle” would suffice to subvert it.

The man he attacked, predictably enough, had a field day. A week later, he delivered his reply. He summed up McCarthy’s response the best way he could, with wit: “Anyone who criticises or opposes McCarthy's methods must be a Communist. And if that be true, there are an awful lot of Communists in this country.” Since Murrow had been attacked for being a Red, he made his point clear: the only way to subvert the Radical Left (or the Reds) was through constructive debate, not bombs. Demagoguery in whatever form, at the end of the day, congealed into what it actually was: cosmetic, sham, hollow.

I don’t know what Murrow would have thought of Castro, Tito, Nehru, Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty, and the Non Aligned Movement, individuals and movements (crassly) referred to as socialist or Communist by the American Right. I do know, however, that whatever he said or wrote would have privileged reason, not rhetoric. I know also that this world, and this country, drowning as both are in emotion, needs more men like Murrow.

Last week, we were witness to a debate over (of all things) a Christmas tree. The tree, touted as the world’s largest, was allegedly to be built through funds from the Ministry of Ports and Shipping, an allegation that has since been proven to be false. To sum up the ruckus: the tree was to be more than 300 feet in height, was being built with the help of volunteers (not government servants), and amounted to no more than 12 million rupees (a fraction of the 200 million its critics were railing against and of which half had been given by private donors). No, there’s nothing magnificent about artificial trees and probably nothing great about using cosmetics to celebrate what should be a time for reflection, but for now let’s forget all that.

Think instead of the drivel those ideologically opposed to the government was affirming. I shed no tears over the present regime, but as a citizen, I can't help but think: isn’t there room for reason anymore?

Let’s extrapolate. What is reasonable about trishaw drivers and private bus operators going on a strike against a government fine for speeding and overtaking another vehicle from the left? What is reasonable about blocking roads on a Friday evening as a protest against that fine, thereby piling up traffic at the end of a busy week? What is reasonable about pelting stones at CTB buses (6,500 more of which were deployed by the government to bring out some sense of order on the day of the strike) and forcing trishaw drivers not to accommodate a single passenger? And while we’re at it, what is reasonable about a government that keeps on making policy statements it has not stuck to?

Which brings me to another point. The problem with the current regime is that it’s too busy making sure the country makes a good impression on outsiders. “New Government Makes Significant Progress” was the headline of an article published in the Human Rights Watch website last January.

Progress? Significant? Where? Last time I checked, our representatives were busy spouting rhetoric on why teachers who beat up children must be cut some slack as frail individuals and why organisers of concerts must be caned with stingray tails. Last time I checked, a government that can only be referred to as politically schizoid (one of the perils of being a Coalition) was arbitrarily dishing out blame over a report that implicated an outgoing Governor of the Central Bank. That report hasn’t been scrutinised properly since. And last time I checked, that same government was approving bonanzas for its MPs even as millions of commuters (and voters) were struggling with inadequate CTB buses and a private sector bus mafia.

The problem with those opposed to the current regime, on the other hand, is that they are too busy lambasting everything the government does. The Christmas tree fiasco was one example. What of the glee with which they greeted news of the private bus strike, a strike that resulted in discomfort for millions of passengers on an inconvenient Friday? What of their schizoid support for and opposition to those clamouring against private education, even though we know they were hell-bent against the “Six Percenters” during the previous regime? And above everything else, what of their cosmetic opposition to the many instances of media scrutiny, censorship, and pilferage committed by this government? Would they hold on to their idealisations of press freedom if their leaders were in power? Probably not.

I am wary of drawing dichotomies when such dichotomies tend to oversimplify. On the other hand, there's no point denying that in an age of unreason, there’s a divide between the nationalists and the cosmopolitans in a polity. This is true for the United States, Europe, and Sri Lanka. The fact that it is true, however, doesn’t make it less sad, because in this vicious divide, we are missing out on the moderate.

Which brings me to yet another point.

Reconciliation isn’t about calling everyone and anyone who disagrees with the government’s stance on it a racist. The government, unwittingly or not, has given the impression that it does exactly that. Doesn’t make the racists innocent cherubs of course, but in terms of handling and containing extremism, our politicos tend to irk both sides of a debate.

Take the recent incident over a monk caught abusing two state officials in Batticaloa. He was vilified as a racist on social media, a stooge and a panderer to Mahinda Rajapaksa. No one, literally no one, took the trouble of taking note of the real issues that the monk, Ampitiye Sumanarathana Thero, was raking up: among them, his allegation that the Sinhala community in that region were resented by quite a number of residents (from other ethnicities).

If it’s about representation, it’s about representation for all, even the numerical minority. Same goes for reconciliation. It's as simple as that.

So where does all this lead to?

Human beings are not impartial. They are swayed by the moment. There are, however, degrees of partiality: after all some are less partial than others. It is for that reason that we must unearth the moderate, that impossible idealisation of human beings which does, fortunately for us, exist. That moderate was swept aside again and again: in Cuba after 1960 (with the dismissal of José Miró Cardona), in Britain after 1997 (with the triumph of the Blairites), and in Sri Lanka after 2005 and 2015 (with the dismissal respectively of those against chauvinism and those against minoritarianism). Nevertheless, they persist. As they should.

In 2015, we wished for a less divided polity. The days of exuberance that followed, I am nostalgically inclined to say, seemed to confirm that wish. Nearly two years on, however, we are still wishing. And we are still hoping. That’s what we like to do, after all. Nothing wrong there.

But then, I am forced to conclude: there’s just so much hoping and wishing that we can indulge in.

Written for: Ceylon Today, December 13 2016

Mohideen Baig: The conscience of a collective

Some days are special. They celebrate life. They record milestones. They ensure that we do not forget. Not all are special and not all record history, but they tend to be special nevertheless. Sure, we sometimes forget why, but just for once, if we can concentrate on the particularities of a date, we will find that there are more reasons than one why a day, or a set of days for that matter, ought to be celebrated. Especially in Sri Lanka, one can add, given that we boast of a great many days dedicated to the various faiths that adorn our country and make up our identity.

Yesterday was Poya, the day before Mawlad. The former was and is celebrated by Buddhists, the latter by Muslims. Two days, utterly insignificant and mundane. Two days, demarcated by the calendar. Two days, for me a symbol of how diverse we are and which in turn point at better symbols, all of which affirm coexistence and hybridism in more open, expansive ways. Symbols that exist and persist, among a great many other fields, in the realm of the arts.

There is probably no one in this island who has not heard of W. D. Amaradeva. W. D. Amaradeva was born on December 5. There is also probably no one in this island who has not heard of Mohideen Baig. He too was born on December 5. Two men, one date. The former a Christian who became a Buddhist, the latter a Muslim who embraced, with his voice, the Buddhist ethos of this country.

People have written on Amaradeva, by the dozen. Therefore, I will write on Baig.

Mohideen Baig sang of many things. Like love. Or charity. Or the intricacies of a faith adhered to by the majority of this country. His voice opened up so well that we forget the man behind the song. That voice found its way to more than 400 films, most of which are probably known more than anything else for the fact that he was featured as a playback vocalist. He won some awards, though that didn’t ruffle him, and in the end, because he dedicated his life to his art, he neglected his own welfare. Back then artistes didn’t just engage in their work, after all. They wallowed in it.

He was born in 1918 in Salem, Madras to a fairly middle-class family that had aspirations for their children in other more mundane fields. From an early age though, young Baig rebelled against his parents, more specifically his father. At one point his headmaster told the father that he was not studying enough, which naturally earned the ire of his family and which compelled him to run away from home the following day. He eventually became a male vocalist at the Boys Dance Company in Trichy, which admitted him after he sang for them a song of S. D. Burman’s guru, K. C. Dey.

Not too long afterwards, he was found by the police and sent back home. But his fate, for him at least, had been sealed. When he encountered his family, he told them bluntly that he would be a vocalist. He wanted to be an Ustad, the highest honorific for a musician in his country. The parents, naturally enough, were stunned. He was not quite 13 at the time.

Baig had a brother who was stationed as a police officer in Colombo. That brother was killed in an accident and his funeral, in keeping with the practice of Muslims, was held at once in Sri Lanka. Young Baig and his parents came to the country to attend the cremation.

Fate works in strange ways and so the ardent artiste, enamoured of a country that wouldn’t remind him of the pain, the toil, and the disagreements he’d run into in his homeland, decided to migrate here. He did just that in 1932, despite the many protests made by his family. He wasted no time and wasn't undecided: in 1935, he performed his first song, “Karuna Muhude Namu Gileela,” while a little more than a decade later, he sang in the country’s second feature film, Asokamala. In all this, moreover, he had a veritable guru and mentor: Mohamed Ghouse, or Ghouse Master.

6,500 songs are a hefty amount, especially considering that vocalists today try to clinch fame with a fraction of that number, and for Baig, music became his way of life, his way of articulating a message, an emotion, or even a story, no matter how many songs it took. The films he was involved with helped, of course, because after all at a time when the cinema here was in its infancy, the likes of Kele Handa, Sujatha, Daiwayogaya, and Deiyange Rate (the latter of which paired him with G. S. P. Rani in my favourite song of his, “Welle Kiri Welle”) entranced spectators.

The cinema of a country, no matter what commentators will say, is linked to the faith and the worldview of a collective. Even in as puerile an adaptation as that of W. A. Silva’s Deiyange Rate, there are sequences where the aspirations and even founding myths of the Sinhala Buddhist community are affirmed. Because they were based on stories authored by writers who propagated (cultural and political) nationalism, they needed a cohesive affirmation of that same nationalism in nearly every field when transposed to the screen. Among these fields, no doubt, was music.

That is how Mohideen Baig came to us. After Asokamala and a few other films that tried to forge an identity out of an art-form derided as too Western, a series of adaptations of the novels of W. A. Silva and Piyadasa Sirisena, which embraced a way of life that was fast eroding and a collective that was encountering modernity, came and went. They made the rounds at the box-office and more importantly, featured Baig to such an extent that whenever there was a song "about” Buddhism, he was called in.

From the fifties therefore, he gave us his best: "Buddhang Saranang Gachchami" and "Thaniwai Upanne" are just two of his most heartfelt songs, heartfelt not because they affirmed the faith of the majority cosmetically but because they seemed to have been sung by a man who adhered to that faith. And it wasn't just about Buddhism, of course. He could sing as acutely of love: "Anna Sudo" and "Parama Ramani", being the evergreen classics they always were, paired him with that foremost exponent of the love song here, Rukmani Devi. A detailed recounting of all his songs, however, would be beside the point in this article.

He was not forgotten in his time. In 1956, S. W. R. D. Bandaranaike conferred a Distinguished Citizenship on him. In 1967, he won the Sarasaviya Award for the Best Playback Singer for the film Allapu Gedara. He won the Kalasuri titles twice, in 1983 and in 1987. He got the opportunity to appear at our first Independence Day ceremony and at the 1974 Non-Aligned Summit in Colombo.

He was not, however, so enamoured of these titles to be complacent. And so, until his last day (November 4, 1991), when he died at the age of 71 owing to an infection acquired during a cataract surgery, he went on singing despite the many financial and economic problems he and his family faced (on a TV show, I clearly remember, he vented out his sadness and frustration in front of Premakeerthi de Alwis and Victor Ratnayake on a TV, both of whom listened intently).

Did he become an Ustad? Perhaps. But in keeping with his stance on awards and accolades, it never really mattered.

For the man meant more to this country than he himself realised. Being a Muslim, he would have also understood those little details which go into the celebration of a collective. He wasn’t cut off from his own heritage, moreover: while he sang for Buddhists, he followed his own faith diligently.

That is why we can say that he taught us some lessons. Chief among them, that one didn’t have to come from a particular community to celebrate it. There are things that go into celebration, after all, none of which can be really monopolised by a collective. And in these harsh times, when we are still reaching out to other identities, I suppose that helped and will continue to help.

Mohideen Baig was born the same day as W. D. Amaradeva. None of them were at-birth Buddhists, while the former remained a non-Buddhist his entire life. I believe that tells something. What it is, we should note.

And so, we can ask: Are we better as a nation for these people? Should we continue rekindling their memory? Have we gone back since their passing away? And if we have, is there hope?

To all these, I can only answer: perhaps.

Written for: Daily News TOWN AND COUNTRY, December 14 2016

Premakeerthi de Alwis and the parameters of words

Premakeerthi de Alwis was murdered on July 31, 1989. His assailants were more or less ordinary people, like you or me, fixated on their ideology so much that they disregarded everything which made their victim the man he was. His crime? Announcing at a Gam Udawa concert, the flagship project of a government those who sponsored the murder were hell-bent against. A strange cause for killing someone, but then again politics tends to do strange things to people, turning the innocent into assailant, the celebrated into victim, overnight. No, this is not a political tribute to Premakeerthi. I doubt he had a political life. Most people of his calibre don’t.

We are so entranced by the written word that we rarely affirm simplicity. My grasp of Sinhala, I admit, at best leaves much to be desired: perhaps for that reason, I prefer the spoken to the written word. On the other hand, however, it takes a firm grasp of that written word to make one comfortable and seeped in the spoken dialect. After all, no one can seriously contend that those who wrote, whether as novelists, poets, or playwrights, shrugged off the need to learn the classical aspects to a language just so they could hone in on the colloquial.

The same can be said of lyricists. Most, if not many among them, are so fixated on those classical aspects that they tend to forego on a vast majority of the audience they are attempting to target. In this they are not to be blamed, after all it is a language they are operating in and a language, particularly with regard to those who speak it as their mother tongue, must be known and understood to know and understand a work of art that operates on words.

History is endowed with a horde of artistes who began with the ornate and became simpler: think of the hard to grasp rhetoric of John de Silva’s plays and think of the plays of Sugathapala de Silva, the latter known for their “kitchen sink” dialogues. Think also of the classical poets from Kotte and elsewhere, the splitting of our poetry after the Second World War into two schools (Colombo and Peradeniya), the ideological persuasions that each entertained, and the later transformation of both into simpler, easier to grasp lines, verses, and songs (particularly with the advent of Amaradeva, Sekara, and the likes of Khemadasa and Somadasa Elvitigala).

That is what made Tissa Abeysekara to write, “In the beginning was the melody.” He was correct. In later years that melody would be added to and frilled, only to be returned to its simple, basic essentials again much, much later. Happens everywhere, not just here.

I remember talking once with Premaranjith Tilakaratne, playwright, scriptwriter, lyricist, raconteur, and de-mystifier of myths pertaining to the performing arts, about poets and songwriters. Predictably, we got around talking about Sekara. I argued that his songs represented the peak of the transformation from the classical to the colloquial in our music. He agreed.

I then brought up Premakeerthi de Alwis. He confirmed what I’d been saying all along about poets with his take on the man: “While the likes of Sekara indulged in what can be considered as yuga gee (epochal songs), Premakeerthi opted for less mundane themes in his work.” For me, that represented the essence of the man. He didn’t write yuga gee. He needn’t have. He wrote on simpler, easier to grasp topics. Topics you and I took to at once.

He was born Samaraweerage Don Premakeerthi de Alwis on June 3, 1947. His father Simon worked at the railway, and they lived at Maligakanda, back then (as it is today) a cosmopolitan and crude section of the metropolis. His encounters with his surroundings would have compelled him to write on what can only be called urbanised themes, something his education would have compelled also: first sent to Maligakanda Madya Maha Vidyalaya, he was later educated at Ananda, where he ended up compiling the school magazines (Anandaya and Dhamma Jayanthi). While there he also tried (unsuccessfully) to audition as a singer at Radio Ceylon. He was 14 at the time.

His ambition had been to become a vocalist. After he left school, he took to journalism. In 1966 he joined Visithuru, the film magazine published by Dawasa, under the watchful gaze of its Managing Director D. B. Dhanapala. The following year he joined Radio Ceylon as a freelance announcer. He went up the ranks over time, becoming a full-time announcer in 1971 and, at the time of his murder, an administrator at the News Desk. From 1947, he also became a freelance speaker. Small wonder: his voice, at once gentle, eloquent, and loud, got attention the moment it opened up.

He began his career as a lyricist when he got together with that inimitable vocalist and actor, Freddie Silva. Together with Victor Ratnayake, they gave out some of the bitterest, most acerbic, and yet funniest songs they could have. We remember them even now: “Handa Mama” (a meditation on those who work and those who idle), “Aron Mama” (a parable about those who prattle), “Boru Kakul Karayek” (a reflection on those who walk on stilts, literally and figuratively), and “Gamana Bimana Hari Kadisara” (a warm tribute to the innocence of the kalu kumbiya). These were not epochal songs, yet they enthralled us, simple and witty to a fault as they were.

Here, for instance, are the opening lines to "Handa Mama"

හඳ මාමා උඩින් යතේ
අපෙ මාමා බිමින් යතේ...

In the course of that song, Freddie and Premakeerthi talk of accomplishment and failure, of those who strive and those who choose to idle:

දියුණු වන්න වේලාවක් නැති විය
අපෙ මාමා තව පහළ ගියා
රාජකාරි හරි අකුරට ඉටුකළ
හඳ මාමා තව ඉහළ ගියා...

The words, the melody, the voice: together these deal with a serious if not disturbing subject, infused however with a message that is both timeless and funny. Not many, it must be acknowledged, could have extracted humour from such a theme. Premakeerthi could.

And it wasn’t just with Freddie. Listen to some of his other songs. “Desa Pa Sina” is about the idiocy or naïveté (depending on how you look at it) of youthful romance. “Eda Rae” is about the pain of waiting for love. My two personal favourites, “Oba Dedunna Akasaye” and “Me Nagaraye”, the one joyful and the other poignant, are also on love. “Oba Dedunna Akasaye” in particular has, over the years, gained a currency for itself, in large part owing to what one can consider as the lyricist’s signature: his ability to conjure up an image with his words:

සුළඟේ නළවා
පෙර සේ එනවා
ඔබ මා කළඹා
කිමදෝ යන්නෙ නොරැඳී ගලා...

“Eda Rae” and “Me Nagaraye”, both of which haunt the listener from the perspective of a pained lover, seem to have come straight out of a poem by Thomas Hardy. To make this comparison is to remember that Hardy, and the English Romantics (Wordsworth, Shelley, Byron), exerted a considerable influence over the Colombo poets, with whom Premakeerthi associated for some time. “Eda Rae”, for instance, has Milton Mallawarachchi speak these lines:

නැසිය මිතුරන් පැමිණිලා
ආසිරි සුබ පැතුම් පැතුවා
ඔබ නාවේ ඇයි මිහිරියේ?

The verse begins with hope and ends with the pain of thwarted expectation, hinging on hopes for relief and requited love: the same themes we encounter in Hardy’s best poems (like the first stanza of “A Broken Appointment”). This is not to say that all Premakeerthi did was transliterate an experience felt by such poets, but the fact that such a comparison can be made in the first place brings up another point of congruence between him and Hardy: the ability to turn the most mundane words into imagery, to infuse them with powerful feelings, a trait that Hardy derived from some of the greatest English poets, including Wordsworth and the Romantics.

Malinda Seneviratne once wrote, “I found that most of my favourite Sinhala songs were penned by this man.” Why the feeling of surprise? Victor Ratnayake quoted a number not too long ago: 5,000. That’s how many songs Premakeerthi wrote. Not an easy number, particularly owing to the unfortunate conflict between quantity and quality artistes usually succumb to. To have sustained interest in what he wrote was a challenge in itself. To have compounded all that with an output that remains virtually unparalleled for an individual lyricist would have been tougher. No wonder Malinda was surprised.

But if all this was true, why was this man forgotten? Why was he haunted by anonymity? And why do we still "discover" his work?

Because he wrote for the vocalist, some will reply. Because he wrote for the image and that image dissolved into a melody, others will conjecture.

For he had a way with words. He wrote cogently. He wrote prodigiously. So prodigiously that no one can contend he didn't write enough. He wasn't selective in the themes he chose to write on, moreover: some of his best songs were in fact rooted in personal experience (think of “Surangeeta Duka Hithuna”). His triumph was that this didn't make them (too) personalised. Not surprisingly, they touched us, almost as though they'd been written for (and about) us. For we were those who walk on stilts, who idle and celebrate idleness even as they admonish other idlers, and who feel the pain of love as intimately as he might have.

And to a large extent, that is why we can say that anonymity is a curse. Certainly for Premakeerthi and certainly for those countless poets and lyricists whose work transcends those who authored them. Then again though, works of art are like that: they exist without the signature of their authors and, for the most, survive despite the best attempts of some to claim bragging rights over them.

I listened to Premakeerthi de Alwis in his songs, even though I never heard his voice. He was there in them all, despite the fact that he never claimed ownership over them. He made his presence felt. We felt it. So much so that we didn’t need a name under what he penned.

Written for: Daily News TOWN AND COUNTRY, December 7 2016

The end of the affair

Review of Jith Pieris’ “Affair at Ward Place Hotel”, staged at the Lionel Wendt Theatre on October 28 and 29

We live in a world where works of art tend to relate to one another, so much so that it’s difficult to distinguish between, say, a film and a play which broach on the same subject. There’s a term that’s tossed out by postmodernists in this regard: intertextuality, or to what degree an objet d’art resembles another. In the hands of the unwary critic, however, it becomes an obsession almost, a reason to try and spot out those discernible marks (which make one think, “This reminds me of such and such a story from elsewhere”) in nearly every film or play that critic encounters.

All this came to me on October 28 as I watched Jith Pieris’ latest, Affair at Ward Place Hotel, at the Lionel Wendt. Scandals, particularly political scandals, have become so common that one doesn’t really bother to keep up with the news anymore. I suspect Pieris has realised the hackneyed nature of such a theme, for he’s tried to present it while giving the impression of having put in half a dozen other plot devices to keep us entertained. Did he succeed? Maybe, but let’s get to that later.

Affair at Ward Place Hotel began with probably the most unexpected thing ever: Harry Belafonte’s rendition of "Island in the Sun". For two minutes we were kept in the dark, literally, as Belafonte sang of the sweat, the blood, and the toil of living and working in the island, before we saw two people who embodied the opposite of all that: Wasaam Ismail as an errant Establishment politician (Ranjith Wijesundera) and Eraj Gunawardane as his cousin Dev. Ranjith is facing that acutely common problem people of his calibre face: keeping the Big Boss happy.

Dev is an idealist. Ranjith isn’t. This comes out in the conversation between the two: Dev has come up with a speech with some statistics pertaining to his cousin’s Ministry (Transport), which the latter at once rejects. He doesn’t want facts, he wants frill. Statistics for him aren’t what count for popularity in this age of rhetoric, so he asks Dev to rewrite the speech. That however is peripheral to an even more common problem: Ranjith needs to get cosy with the Other Woman in his life.

The predictable happens: Ranjith has a wife, the wife is unaware of the mistress (a film star, Sammy Perera), Dev is asked by his cousin to conceal some toys (I desist from explaining what they are) in a bag, that bag gets mixed up with another belonging to a demagogue politico from the Opposition (by name, Jayanath Weerakoon), and in the rush to get the correct bag back from the room at the Ward Place Hotel, each party comes across nasty secrets belonging to the other. What these secrets are, I will not explain: they are part of the narrative and the narrative, it must be said, shouldn’t be explicated in full. After all, the role of the critic is not to explicate, but to comment.

So I will comment. The narrative of Affair at Ward Place Hotel, for me at least, spoke for itself, which has more to do with the genre it’s placed in. Much of what goes for political farces, after all, provokes humour because they strike a chord in us rather uncomfortably. Who wouldn’t laugh at the exchanges between Ranjith and Jayanath, as they talk convivially with (while plotting against) each other? Who wouldn’t grin when Ranjith talks about “buying off” the other side?

Point is, humour at the Wendt has won a certain following because that humour tends to reflect the political. How successful that humour is depends on the playwright’s ability to placate his audience with a veneer of fiction. Sometimes this becomes hackneyed, sometimes it tends to go over the top. Jith, however (fortunately for us and being the veteran he is), didn't trip here: he filled his Affair with enough contraptions to give at least the illusion of novelty.

And to an extent, this had to do with his cast. Wasaam Ismail was scintillating as Ranjith: confused, frustrated, overconfident, egotistic, and when faced with scandal, dim. Eraj Gunawardane is at his best when depicting blue eyed and naive characters, and here he triumphed as Dev. I couldn’t help but smile at his arguments with Ranjith (the one an Honest Abe, the other a sardonic realist) and I couldn’t help but grin as he remembered their younger days, when Ranjith would constantly bully and torment him: such childhood feuds aren’t really the preserve of political families, but they go a long way in shaping the divide between the realists and the idealists.

There were others. Kithmina Hewage as Jayanath Weerakoon, I felt, acted with enough wit to make us remember the tragicomic dichotomy at the heart of the populist: between his public face (pure, charismatic, and appealing to rhetoric) and his private life. Nilushi Dewapura as his aide Sharika showed promise, but the relationship between her and Dev didn’t get to where the audience would have wanted it to be, with Dev as the absent-minded University graduate and her as the frank, assertive political understudy (always a favourite combination when it comes to the dramatic potential of that dictum about opposites attracting).

Pemanthi Fernando was delightful as Ranjith’s wife Dimi, whose stout and overbearing figure made up the humour at the centre of her husband’s affections for his Other Woman, Sammy Perera (Thanuki Goonesinghe dishing out a solid, though not as complex, performance). As for the rest, Lithmal Jayawardhana was an Indian waiter (along with Madura Wijeratne, Nandika Thevarapperuma, and Ravin Hettiarachchi) who compensated for the script’s less than flattering depiction of his character with enough mannerisms to keep us laughing (at one point the four of them seemed ready to do a “Singing Waiters” item, and I confess I was looking forward to such a thing myself). All in all, entertaining.

I wrote of dichotomies before. Affair at Ward Place Hotel was filled with them from the word go: between Ranjith and Dev, between Ranjith and Jayanath, between Dev and Sharika, and between Dimi and Sammy. But that didn’t make them personal only: they were made to relate to the wider political and social context of the narrative, aptly summed up by the best one-liner in the play (dished out by Ranjith): “People want politics in theatre and theatre in politics.” Which is what, I thought to myself, and then I realised: it doesn’t matter anymore.

Compounding all this was the decision to have Nandun Dissanayake, that epitome of self-amusement and self-mockery in our English theatre, read the introductory announcement. The seriousness with which he spoke was at odds with our image of him as anything but serious, a hilarious distortion of the reality by the myth which could have been said of the many rifts that adorned, shaped, and coloured Jith’s play. Such rifts might have jarred and confused, but here they did not. Thankfully and mercifully, one can add.

In the final analysis therefore, Affair at Ward Place Hotel delivered. As is typical of such plays, they were catered to those who had time to kill, who wished to laugh at our political landscape with the luxury of detachment that only artistes can bring about. I confess that my verdict is woefully inadequate to convey to the reader a summing up of the worth of the play, but then again I suppose one doesn’t have to be a connoisseur to glean the base and essence of a work of art.

So to wrap up: Jith’s latest was a veritable assortment, a melting pot that brought together stories we have encountered and tropes that have been assembled, in more ways than one, before, which compelled my comment on intertextuality at the beginning of this review. Did that help? Maybe. Did I enjoy it? Of course. Did it achieve what it set out to achieve? I hope so.

Photos courtesy of: Drama Sri Lanka and Nishantha de Silva

Written for: Ceylon Today LITE, December 11 2016

Fidel Castro and the tragedy of revolution

Last week, for the first time, my column attracted censure. Someone identifying himself under a pseudonym took me to task over two points: my indifference towards the American Election and what was unfortunately perceived as my championing of Fidel Castro. I answered him twice but could not, for some unfathomable reason, get him to see my perspective. This person was adamant that I was refusing to see Donald Trump’s demagoguery, his blatant racism, and his stance on immigration even as I clearly noted that a United States under Hillary Clinton would be no better, at least in terms of that great country’s foreign policy.

As for Castro, I hold no candles for him. The Cuba he governed languished without democracy for almost half a century. Dissent was out of the question, criticism not at all tolerated. Even the slightest hint of sarcasm, wit, and unconventionality was met with imprisonment: sometimes for days, sometimes for weeks, more often than not for decades. It is indeed unfortunate that those who worship the likes of Castro, Che Guevara, and the Sandinistas are entranced by their garb and their supposedly ascetic existence. Fact is, there was nothing ascetic about these people when it came to governing their citizens.

The Miami Herald is published and read in Florida, which is 90 miles from Cuba. It is mainly catered to the same community that celebrated the death of Castro: naturally, what gets published in it is quite critical of him. In an op-ed (titled “Red ink: The high human cost of the Cuban revolution”) published therein, Glenn Garvin goes through some compelling statistics, all of which centre on the human cost of Castro’s regime.

Garvin essentially infers that, given the obscurity which shrouds much of that regime even today, it is difficult to get at a proper number for those who were killed, imprisoned, or made to disappear. Castro’s cronies probably took a leaf out of Nazi Germany’s book here, after all the Nuremberg Trials were made possible because of one mistake: the Nazis archived each and every atrocity they committed, a virtual treasure trove for those who wanted to prosecute the likes of Goering and Eichmann after the War.

There are two main sources that enumerate the murdered in Cuba. R. J. Rummel, the late historian from the University of Hawaii, estimated the death toll at anywhere between 35,000 and 141,000, with a median of 73,000. However, the Cuba Archive, a project which documents human rights abuses in that country, placed the toll at somewhere around 7,200, a much lower figure. This is not conclusive, though: Castro is reported to have killed as many as 5,000 immediately after the 1959 Revolution that brought him to power. Clearly, it would be a bit remiss to assume that from 1959 to the 2000s only 2,000 more people were killed.

Statistics can get controversial. In the mid-nineties a collage (drawn up by Cuban Americans) bearing the names of 10,000 countrymen killed by Castro’s regime was challenged when many of those 10,000 proved to be alive or to have died of natural causes. Cuba’s interventions in other countries – most notably in Africa – which helped push to power (at least temporarily) Marxist governments are officially said to have caused 4,000 deaths. But a Cuban Air Force General who defected put the number of those killed in one country alone (Angola) at 10,000. Meanwhile, there still is debate over the death toll of those who tried to escape the regime: the Harvard-trained economist Armando Lago put it (until 2003) at 77,000, but this was soon questioned as a shaky figure. Clearly, there is no consensus here, though not for a lack of trying.

I am wary of dogmatists from both sides of a debate and I am wary of those who pretend to sleep when carefully documented statistics tell a different story. The truth is that Castro, and his (intellectual) forefathers before him, provided an absolution for much of the garb that adorns revolutionaries. There is nothing romantic about dictatorships, nothing idealistic about turncoats. What happened in 1959 in Havana, to put it simply, should not have turned into a bloodbath that survived on propaganda, state terror, and cosmetic nationalism. However, this does not and will not belittle the propaganda of those ideologically opposed to such bloodbaths for less than innocent reasons.

I never get tired of reading Granta, the quarterly literary magazine published in the United Kingdom. Last year I was gifted with two whole boxes of these priceless gems, by a writer I am yet to meet. Just the other day I was reading an issue which centred on Russia, that is, the collapse of Communism in the Soviet Bloc. There were some rather interesting pieces on what revolutions to do the truth and how the truth gets contorted by those who wish to attack revolutions.

One of them caught my attention at once. Orlando Figes, in a feature story titled “Burying the Bones”, encounters members of the clergy and ordinary citizens on the day they buried the remains of Nicholas II (the last Tsar of Russia) in 1998. By that time, soon to close in on a century and a millennium, Boris Yeltsin’s regime was facing acute food shortages, rising poverty and crime, political turbulence, and of course widening economic inequalities. That, however, didn’t ruffle the people of St Petersburg, as they watched the funeral of the man who ruled Russia with an iron fist, who sanctioned anti-Jewish pogroms and authored mass executions of peasants who protested against his regime, with an almost mystical sense of awe.

In his article, Figes talks with those who idolise Nicholas and his family, including a priest from the Orthodox Church that would beatify the Tsar as a saint. When asked about the atrocities perpetrated by the man, the good Father replies that the demonstrations, uprisings, and protests over inequalities were not peaceful and more startlingly, were in fact sinful (try telling that to those starving on the streets today). When asked about the anti-Jewish pogroms authored by him (which continued even after the Revolution), well, the good Father has only one excuse to trot out: that the Tsar did not directly sanction it.

Figes ends his piece with a telling comment: “Most people know very little about Nicholas or any of the Tsars, since the subject was always poorly taught and grossly distorted in Soviet schools. There are just as many gaps in post-Tsarist, Soviet history. The result has been that myths and conspiracy theories are substituted for historical knowledge.”

The point I am trying to get at here is that no matter how repressive a dictatorship may be, that does not and will not absolve the excesses of a dictatorship which existed before it. Those who have an axe to grind with Castro, one can surmise, may be genuinely horrified at his malignant attitude towards dissidents, but I wonder: what of the many among them who belittle if not trivialise the excesses committed by Fulgencio Batista?

Do they not realise that inasmuch as both Batista and Castro were dictators, what divided the one from the other was this: under Castro, strides were made in healthcare, education, and poverty alleviation, strides which as one commentator pointed out to me the other day would take decades for the West to accomplish? What did Batista have to show during his regime? Only the Ugly American.

The mainstream media was always quick to ridicule Castro, sometimes for the gaudiest reasons. Once when Castro visited New York to attend a United Nations summit, an American news agency reported that after his entourage left the hotel they had stayed in, the management had to clean up the chicken bones the Cubans had left behind: a half-truth that certainly contributed to the image of the man as a devilish glutton. “Cuba is where Lucifer lives,” Michael Moore sarcastically says in his documentary on the US healthcare system, Sicko, just as he and a bunch of American patients arrive in Havana for a treatment denied to them in their own country.

In one sense, the attitude of the US government to Cuba, right until the Obama presidency, showed a lot of hypocrisy. Forget their involvement with the Batista regime. Just think of the doublespeak they were enforcing on the rest of the world when they dealt with Castro. "Mr Castro is a tyrant who uses brutal methods to enforce a bankrupt vision and I will use my veto powers to ensure that the four-decade old embargo on Cuba remains in place," George W. Bush once declared, even as his envoys in Sri Lanka were forcing our representatives to negotiate with the LTTE, who by no stretch of the imagination could be called freedom fighters.

The US government cut off international aid to Cuba in 1992, when the dubiously titled and drafted “Cuban Democracy Act” starved a country which, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, was without a proper international sponsor. The tragedy with today’s system of international sanctions, I have always felt, is its failure to distinguish a tyrant from his or her citizens, a tragedy that has cost the US and us (pun intended) a great many lives and a great many dollars. This came out most discernibly in much of the history of the relations between Washington and Havana.

The world had moved away from Communism when, in 2003, Castro declared that his country was transitioning to it. He said this as a response to the then newly established "Commission for Assistance to a Free Cuba", co-chaired by Condoleeza Rice. The wording of that Commission itself was dubious: Bush would argue that his government was not waiting for the day of Cuban freedom (which would have come from within the country, organically), but rather the day of freedom in Cuba (which was doublespeak for intervention from outside).

Barack Obama, always the man of many words, opted for negotiation over conflict. Castro, by then an invalid who had retired as a would-be Elder Statesman, distrusted the Americans and openly criticised what could be considered as a U-turn by his government (led by his brother, Raul). That distrust has, one must admit, less to do with his affirmation of Communism than the history of US intervention in the region. With the election of Donald Trump, who is more Bush than Bush himself, one can’t tell where relations between Cuba and the US will go to. One can only conjecture.

And at the end of the day, conjecture does not help. I will therefore conclude.

People talk of Batista and Castro. The former died in 1973, having taken away more than 30 million dollars from his own country’s Treasury when his government was toppled in 1959. The latter died last week, having survived almost 640 assassination attempts. The former was the West’s playboy, the latter the playboy of those opposed to the West. In the much hyped debate between these two however, there is one name we forget: José Miró Cardona.

Who was José Miró Cardona? He was a member of the anti-Batista Unity Group that tried a peaceful negotiation with the man. In August 1958 he wrote a letter to Dwight D. Eisenhower protesting against American involvement in the Cuban civil war. He joined forces with Castro and was with him right until they seized power. He was Prime Minister for six weeks that year and was appointed as his country’s Ambassador to Spain in May the following year. In July however, he resigned his post and sought refuge in the Argentine Embassy. By 1961, he was in the United States. The Kennedy administration would soon hail him as a liberator.

Cardona was a moderate. Like all moderates, he was sidelined. Revolutions do not end with those who author them: they end only with the institutionalisation of the values those authors are supposed to stand for. Such values can only be enforced by reformists and moderates. Cardona did not live to see them inscribed in the land of his birth.

What else can we say? Fidel Castro (and we must be honest to acknowledge this) needed force. He monopolised it. Along the way, he alienated those who called for reforms. The rest is history. And history, as Regi Siriwardena once wrote, is open. So open that we are yet to determine whether those people on the streets of Havana mourning Castro were forced to lament the death of their former leader.

Written for: Ceylon Today, December 6 2016