On committing (political) errors

For an entire decade after 1994, we were led by a government that caved into minoritarianism, all in the name of reconciliation and multiculturalism of course, and a bunch of self-serving politicos who have caused more harm to this country’s polity than anyone or anything else (barring the LTTE) could. I am talking here about those MPs and civil society representatives (isn’t it funny that the latter, without as much as one percent of the people’s vote, were allowed to script state policy?) who went fiddling around the streets, entrancing us with promises of a better future with devolution, federalism, and a distorted variant of that misread and overstated 13th Amendment.

There was a time when being a nationalist, or aligning yourself with that misconstrued abstraction called nationalism, meant attracting abuse. You couldn’t walk on the streets even if the majority of the country were with you: on TV, on radio, and in print, you were called out, abused, and in other ways ridiculed for opposing the myths and lies of Prabhakaran and his mouthpiece, Anton Balasingham. The government was being distorted by a civil society that remained cut off from the people while thinking that the people could be substituted for by the polity (when the two were actually one and the same).

Times have changed but leopards, as I mentioned in my last column, do not change their spots. After the fall of the UNP government (which was hanging on a slender thread anyway) in 2004, we saw the emergence of the biggest wave of nationalism and anti-federalism this country has ever seen, at least since 1977. It is not that the leaders had until then been unable to call a spade a spade and deal with pernicious myths being paraded as history, but that these same leaders, because they were more concerned with pleasing “policymakers” from within and outside the country, just didn’t seem to bother.

Despite the afterword that the period from 2005 to 2015 compelled, therefore, these leopards (the “policymakers”) continued to slink. They are still slinking.

These people were comfortable fighting for the right to self-determination of one collective while denying that same right to another (usually the majority). They thought they were superior to the rest of the country. They thought they could play with democracy and get away with it. They thought they could get the blind to see. They could not. The voice of the people prevailed. At least in the period from November 17, 2005 to May 18, 2009.

Fast-forward to 2014. What did we get? A government led by a populist who tended to rationalise his authoritarian streak in terms of his popularity. This populist knew how to talk and what to say and he knew when to open his mouth. He spoke his mind (something many of his predecessors couldn’t do, at least not with sincerity) and won over half the country. He thought, however, that he could hold on to his power forever, and to this end committed arguably the biggest error he could. He took in people he shouldn’t have, the most damaging of whom had held important posts in his predecessor’s government.

When 2014 was nearing its end therefore, we knew where we were heading: with a political family which was doing next to nothing against the closest this country came to a July 1983 in the recent past (I am talking about the Aluthgama riots), these political bigwigs began disagreeing with the government on principle without losing their footing in it. Being the astute strategists they were, they planned their exit and planned it so well that, no matter how strong Mahinda Rajapaksa would have seemed, his days in office got numbered at once.

And all in all, I think the history of his party had a say in his downfall. The SLFP was, from its inception, tainted with devolutionists and those who distorted history. The Marxists had a ball with it after S. W. R. D. Bandaranaike’s murder and they deftly created much of the political ideology that Bandaranaike’s daughter institutionalised after 1994. When an alternative politico was put out in 2004, these bigwigs initially backed down and then, after thinking it over, supported him. They thought they could contort him. When they realised that they could not, they backed down again, and did either of two things: remain with his government while championing communal myths, or join an Opposition more amenable to their worldview.

Given this, it’s no wonder that 2014 ended or rather had to end with a bang. The moment people we thought would never leave Rajapaksa left him, we knew he was doomed. The man’s family didn’t help one bit, of course, and Maithripala Sirisena, who contrary to popular opinion had the upper hand in the race (even factoring in the advantage the incumbent has in an election), took everything easily. He had a name and he had a reputation. He appeared simple and well, to a considerable extent he was. He knew words but didn’t need to speak. His opponent did all the talking for him. How could he not win?

Fact is, even those who’d supported Rajapaksa, including the various columnists and intellectuals who shaped his ideology (such as Gunadasa Amarasekera), expressed qualms over how his government was being run, which pushed the undecided nationalist (predominantly from the urban, young, and professional class) to Sirisena. January 8, 2015 was sealed long before the date was (unwisely) decided on, even as it marked the sixth anniversary of Lasantha Wickrematunge’s assassination and even as, only a few hours before election results began to flow in, we heard the news of S. L. Gunasekara’s death.

Mahinda Rajapaksa’s most distinct political error (putting aside all those allegations of theft and abuse which are yet to be verified beyond a shadow of a doubt against him) was to take in people who were determined to be hooked on to whoever was in power. I needn’t mention names here simply because there are too many.

As expected, the SLFP broke into two. The UNP, led by a man who (never mind what people will say of him) knows how to calculate and take risks, let his opponents be led by Rajapaksa at that year’s parliamentary elections so as to solidify his victory upon the former’s defeat. That election, which was less a race to get the SLFP back to power than it was a race to strengthen the grip of the Mahinda Faction, had it both ways: it kept the Mahinda Loyalists happy and it kept those who like to “bleed green” happy. The devolutionists, federalists, and minoritarians, who couldn’t shout because the Rajapaksa Factor had done what earlier leaders couldn’t (institutionalise nationalism in the state), had a field day. They too were happy.

That’s all history, though. What’s pertinent is what we can learn from it, starting with this: whatever the government here, and however nationalistic it seems, key representatives from it tend to be led by those who weren’t elected to govern the people. I am talking about the ladies and gentlemen in the Civil Society Club, who think they know better than the 20 million people of this country. They won’t talk about federalism and self-determination now (because if they do, the nationalists will be ready), but they will fudge the truth anyway. They are as enamoured of the present government as they were of its predecessor: as long as it caves into their demands, they will be content. If not, they will clamour for regime change. That’s the truth. We must deal with it.

Consequently, there is a need for balance. Readjustment. While I cannot condone a Rajapaksa Restoration (since to do so would be to invite the threat of another decade of indifference and, I daresay, intolerance), I do believe that what he purported to stand for, at least until 2012 when he enacted the 18th Amendment, should be continued: a nationalist project that stands for the rights of the majority without trampling on the rights of others. In a context where there’s a mismatch between nationalism and individual rights, the best alternative would be an all-encompassing national identity that does not, cannot, and will not confuse multiculturalism with rootless cosmopolitanism.

I am thinking of some names here, though I do not endorse them unconditionally. Names like Gevindu Cumaratunga.

Gevindu has a way with words. He knows how to undress. He continues to be there, on TV and elsewhere, shredding away the intellectual fallacies of Eelamists and separatists and (less discernibly but as significantly) of those who continue to support the present regime solely by virtue of their opposition to Mahinda Rajapaksa (among them, Upul Shantha Sannasgala and Asoka Abeygunawardana, both of whose claims he debunked live and/or in front of them). He is no chauvinist. Few, if at all, can or will begrudge him politically. He should therefore move ahead.

The point I am trying to get at here is that the likes of him should be promoted. In the political field, after all, you can commit an error only twice. The error that Rajapaksa committed, which I pointed out above, cannot be repeated. If it is, what we’ll see isn’t the unfolding of a nationalist project. Only an aberration. An aberration so huge that another 10 years, even with as strict, ramrod, and nationalist a figure as Gotabhaya Rajapaksa, will be wasted building up a political ideology that gets contorted and then destroyed from within. Happened once, will happen again. For that reason, as we near the second anniversary of Maithripala Sirisena’s election, we should be mindful. If we are not, we’ve already lost the race.

Written for: Ceylon Today, December 27 2016

Anne Ranasinghe and the torment of forgetting

Somewhere in my youth, I started reading Keats. I took to him and his poetry, his way of looking at life and his way of treating its vicissitudes with equanimity. There was something about his odes, his sonnets, and his paeans of love, anguish, and torment that enthralled the morbid adolescent in me, and so (for better or worse) I appreciated his poetry.

My praise, however, was not unqualified: just as much as I liked his use of imagery, I spurned what I felt to be at times his refusal to engage with the political, the social. Not that I could blame Keats himself, of course: he was 25 when he died, and like all young poets, he thought he knew everything when he did not.

I wonder, though, whether we prefer keeping out of the social as a means of avoiding the realm of reality. I wonder also whether poets, or at least the vast majority of them, are tormented by memory so much that in what they write, and what they say, they consciously (or otherwise) shy away from the pain of memory. They are not alone in this, because after all that’s what a great many of us, frail as we are, like to do. Still.

Anne Ranasinghe, who died last Saturday, wrote poetry. She wrote it with a sense of anguish which convinced us that she knew, intimately and painfully, what she was writing about. Some write about remembering and the pain of remembering. Anne wrote about forgetting. In her best poetry, as she herself informed us, she tries to forget, to get away. She could only tell us to live, even as those around us died. We didn’t always agree, but we didn’t have to. She was a poet. She had lived. We were the readers. We had not.

And to a large extent, that had to do with her life. Born Anneliese Katz in the town of Essen in Germany, she witnessed the horrors of war at an early age. She saw the rise of Nazism, saw her town’s synagogue being burnt, and more than anything else, saw the night of broken glass in November 1938. Her parents, naturally frightened, sent her to an aunt in England, where English became her adopted tongue and where, until much later, she wouldn’t hear of their deaths and the deaths of every other relative back in Germany. She was not quite 15 at the time.

After passing out as a nursing sister and meeting a medical student (whom she married), D. A. Ranasinghe, she moved to Sri Lanka where, in 1956, she became a citizen. Her husband began teaching at the Colombo Medical College and this encouraged her to obtain a Diploma in Journalism from the Colombo Technical College. Of what she learnt, she recounted much later: “News reporting. The law of defamation. Novel writing. Practical journalism. Short story writing. The Polytechnic journalism section had a nice logo on their stationery: a hand holding a pen inside a heart! With the slogan ‘with heart and hand’.”

That’s all biography, of course. They reveal, however, the artiste in the woman. Anne, who made Colombo her permanent home in the sixties, saw from afar the trials and tribulations of a world (in particular, Europe) trying to shed its past. Sri Lanka, as she (rather) correctly inferred, was not burdened with those tribulations, so in whatever form of chauvinism or extremism she encountered in Sri Lanka, she encountered in gushes and torrents and then turned into poetry. We were not, after all, aware of the horrors of the War, at least not to a great extent, to make us forget.

For that reason, she will be reflected on more than anything else for the theme she resorted to the most: the thin, fragile line between the past and present, between forgetting and remembering. In her most potent poetry – derided by some, read by all – she drew parallels between the Sri Lanka she was in and the Germany she had been in.

Take, for example, this passage from “July 1983”

Forty years later
once more there is burning
the night sky bloodied, violent and abused

and I - though related
only by marriage -
feel myself both victim and accused

The last line in particular makes us aware of her painful, self-contradictory character: by marriage, she was bonded to a culture of privilege, yet she was already bonded to a past where she had been a victim. Did she ever resolve this tension within herself? Perhaps.

My two favourite poems of hers, “At What Dark Point” and “Plead Mercy”, however, tell a different story. In the latter, her daughter encounters a "bullock yoked to a cart" and asks whether life, for him at least, is preferable to death. Those who refuse to hope, who know the world for what it is, would say “No!” Anne, however, can’t give up on hope even though she herself is no optimist:

I tell her what I know
Is not true, that life
Is always better than death

In "At What Dark Point", on account of which critics took her to task over what was perceived to be her indifference, she witnesses a peasant on the road in front of her house, twists and turns fibre into rope. The peasant evokes in her memories of Kristallnacht. He compels her to ask us, “Who knows if the past can come back to us?” We look at the peasant, perhaps make a snide remark or two, and refuse to answer. We were the readers, after all. We hadn’t seen what she had.

And to a considerable extent, that explains why some critics disliked her. They contended, and not without reason, that she was refusing to answer questions that she herself had raised. To that the only sensible response would be that artistes aren’t born to equip us with answers. We read what is written, filmed, or sung. We read what is performed. We make the questions. Not up to them to answer. That is why (with much reservation though) I can forgive the later Wordsworth, who sought refuge in inertia to atone for the revolutionary streak he had indulged in his youth, and that is why I still enjoy Keats.

Personally, I prefer Lakdhas Wikkrama Sinha to anyone else. A pity he isn’t read or taught (for reasons that warrant another article), but then Anne wasn’t too bad either. As someone who grew up reading (into) her, as someone who believed that the role of the poet was to help us see, not want for more, I can only quote what this late, maligned, and much lamented lady had to say of her uprooted identity, translating Rose Ausländer’s harrowing account of the Holocaust:

My fatherland is dead.
They have buried it
in fire

I live
in my motherland
of words.

Anne Ranasinghe, who was 91 last Saturday, left behind her poetry and taught us, even at death, that forgetting was more tormenting than remembering. For that alone, we should be grateful.

Written for: Ceylon Today LITE, December 25 2016

The Left: the god that (we) failed

In his essay “The Ex-Communist’s Conscience”, Isaac Deutscher lambasted those he felt to have abandoned their youthful inclinations for extreme Marxism in favour of a rightwing economic and social philosophy that was as bad, if not worse. He argued, cogently I believe, that with the betrayal of the stateless society (for which the Russians had fought in 1917) by Joseph Stalin, the ex-Communist, or the Communist who became a renegade, sought solace in a variant of rightwing politics that was, at the end of the day, no better than the totalitarian excesses of Stalin.

Deutscher’s essay, incidentally, was a review of The God That Failed, a book brought out by a group of ex-Communists (Louis Fischer, André Gide, Arthur Koestler, Ignazio Silone, Stephen Spender, and Richard Wright), all of whom (in particular, Koestler) had been idealists who’d looked up to the Russian Revolution and what it stood for even as Stalin forced out Trotsky in the power struggle that ensued after Lenin’s death. I hardly need to add that, never mind the withering of the state that socialism was supposed to bring about, not even Stalin could prevent the institutionalisation of bureaucracy that Marx had cautioned against in his writings.

As for those six ex-Communists, they weren’t the only renegades who’d later made a mark in what I termed in my column last week as a “dark decade” in American history (the fifties), but they were the most vocal back then. Among the others who would joined them were John dos Passos (whose poetry, despite his being a renegade, stands out remarkably fresh even today), Whittaker Chambers, James Burnham, and Max Eastman (a close associate of John Reed, one of three Americans buried at the Kremlin). Because of what they felt to have been a betrayal of their ideals, they all made a circuit from the Left to the extreme Right.

Deutscher did not condemn their anger against Communism. What he condemned was the refuge they sought in their attempt to ward off their inclinations for the Left. He succinctly tracked down their route: having broken away from the Communist Party, they’d declare loyalty to their own sect and creed of the doctrines which they felt the Party should stand for, before breaking away from Communism altogether. I think Deutscher put it best: “He (the ex-Communist) no longer throws out the dirty water of the Russian revolution to protect the baby; he discovers that the baby is a monster which must be strangled. The heretic becomes a renegade.”

The world is littered with renegades who pass themselves off as heretics. Party politics, personalities, ideologies: these congeal in the end to mere rhetoric. It’s all about power and clinging to power. If at all, the history of the Left, marred as it is by ideological shifts and divisions, is a good indicator of how far we have ventured out and come back. We are all heretics who become renegades, and for that reason, no Left movement in today’s world has been immune to breakages and slip-ups.

Last Sunday (December 18) marked the 81st anniversary of the oldest political force in the country, the Lanka Sama Samaja Party (LSSP). “Force” is a strong word, so strong that it can’t be used to refer to a party that, in the opinion of some, has outlasted its glories, but for the moment let’s forget that. Whether or not one agrees with its principles, one can’t disagree with its past. There were, as is typical of such parties, shifts and breakages, but these were resolved (until relatively recently) in favour of an all-encompassing ideology that made up the most powerful Trotskyite party in the world. This week’s column is not about the LSSP but about the Left in Sri Lanka: not the (lowercase) god that failed us, but the god that we failed.

Historians, in their attempt to compare Sri Lanka with other colonial countries, frequently and falsely contend that the period from 1815 to 1948 was one in which capitalism bloomed. This is not a tirade against every historian: there have been some who’ve identified this period for what it was: one in which schools, Universities, and every other institution considered today as a public service catered to a stunted, hybrid bourgeoisie. No less a person than Professor Kumari Jayawardena, with her landmark research on the colonial bourgeoisie, argues that even in a supposedly capitalist society as the one we were supposed to have had, caste considerations did not erode away. In Nobodies to Somebodies, she refers the caste rifts rather wittily as symbolising a transition from the “Old Mudliyars to the New Misters.”

The colonial bourgeoisie tried their hand at tolls and rents, monopolising the paalam paruwa in an attempt to curry favour with the coloniser. Needless to say, they were paid for their loyalty. As the British solidified their stranglehold, the aspiring bourgeoisie rose, graduating from the plantation sector to mining, arrack rents, and eventually the post of the Mudliyar. Practically every school financed and built during this time, at least those considered as “elite” today, were there for one purpose: to help the “native” landowner and rentier obtain a Westernised education for his children. The irony of this, if you can spot it out, is that 12 years were spent in these schools and another four or five in University (preferably Oxford or Cambridge) for the purpose of getting employed as translators, clerks, and civil servants in a menial government office.

The truth then is that this burgeoning capitalist class was not capitalist at all. All they did was mine, extract, and sell. They were not businessmen. They were extractors. They were not interested in making profits. They were more interested in making a quick buck. In other words, the colonial bourgeoisie were never the productive commercialists they’re touted as today. What they earned they got easily, if not because of a monopoly over natural resources then because of cheap labour and colonial patronage.

In the rush to rake up profits that naturally resulted from this, not everyone made it big: as Nobodies to Somebodies makes it clear, families such as the Telge Peiris ancestry from Panadura were afflicted by the vagaries of demand and supply which were part of the primary sector they were operating in. The few that did make it big, however, literally gave birth to an anomaly: their offspring became social, political, and economic agitators. Their sons became prodigal, their daughters took to the feminist movement, and all in all, a largely Western education supplied them the very tools of social change the parents had held back.

Leopards, however, don’t change spots and these offspring, even after the religions riots of 1883 and the racial riots of 1915, congealed into the elite their parents had been: aristocratic to a fault, yet mindful about superstition and tradition and wary of modernity.

This latter contradiction, a reflection of their hybrid (confused) identity, spilt over to 1948 and our post-independence history, when key political figures from the colonial bourgeoisie became both elitists and demagogues: ignorant of the aspirations of the majority, yet pandering to their chauvinist, self-destructive demands as and when it was expedient to do so. As I observed in my article on poverty and the (political) periphery in September, no class has done more harm to this country than the meritocrats, i.e. those who conflate economic power with intelligence.

It was in this context that the LSSP was formed, in 1935. Long before the UNP was formed and S. W. R. D. Bandaranaike brought about swabasha, the stalwarts of the Left – Philip, N. M., and Colvin – were agitating for complete independence. It was Philip Gunawardena, not those touted as national heroes today, who asked for an independence that went beyond Dominion status. While I personally feel that the transition from colony to Dominion helped ward off much of the ethnic unrest that heralded India’s independence in 1947, I also feel that by artificially concealing a political structure that catered to the British under a veneer of populism, our leaders managed to bottle up the hopes, fears, and ideals of the majority, all of which broke out so violently later on that we are still paying the price for the short-sightedness of our leaders.

Regi Siriwardena, in a series of essays, tried to answer a perplexing question: why, even after taking the front in our independence struggle, couldn’t the LSSP muster broad support? Siriwardena’s answer was that the LSSP was a Trotskyite party and Trotskyism, at its base, repudiated nationalism.

To that my answer, presumptuous as it may seem, is that the people simply couldn’t have cared whether Leon Trotsky rubbished nationalism or not. Secular though their outlook may have been, the stalwarts of the Left were no “mul sidagath aragal karayo” (uprooted revolutionaries): they were connected with the people and this at a time when even independent candidates (including Kumari Jayawardena’s father, A. P. de Zoysa) could hope to enter the Legislature. They were popular, they did muster support (the Bracegirdle affair is evidence for this), and they could and did get elected to represent the people.

The answer, I feel therefore, is more complex than what Siriwardena came up with. My belief is that the political elite of the day could and did contest with no opposition, while the candidates from the Left had to contend with the many instances of malpractice, abuse, and the advantage of the upper hand the elite were endowed with. The latter point was clearly discernible in the State Council election of 1936. While quite a number of leftists, Philip Gunawardena included, entered with comfortable victories, in constituencies home to the political establishment (such as Veyangoda and Kelaniya) the candidate was elected unopposed. This is of course not the only reason why the Left couldn’t fare well, and why, in later years, it had to be happy kowtowing to a breakaway faction of the UNP. But it is a reason nevertheless.

Given this, what did 1956, 1964, and 1970 breed? The Old Left, even by then a pale replica of what it had once been (after all, no movement can be expected to sustain its base after years of detention and internal rifts), facilitated the “maturing of the long submerged Sinhalese intelligentsia.” This intelligentsia, which Siriwardena saw as a "belated and embryonic bourgeoisie", consisted of the kade mudalali and the game iskole mahaththaya. Ideologically they reflected the rightwing outlook of the very same forces the nationalists championed: the pancha maha balavegaya.

The irony here, incidentally, is that no more than three decades later, the same Old Left that championed swabasha and “Sinhala Only” would be distorted by the NGO mafia to pander to minoritarianism and federal-speak. It was left to the New Left, the radical movement from the South (as opposed to the pipe-smoking, armchair socialism that had adorned the independence struggle against the Establishment), to rake up problems and force the government to see them.

This of course led to two uprisings resulting in atrocities that account for the massive deficit of professionals, artistes, and thinkers we are facing today, subject to the caveat that sections of the Old Left, by omission or commission, aided and abetted the ideology of the same government they were supposed to be against. Given this context, it’s no cause for wonderment that the radicals from the South could do what even the army couldn’t: bring the entire country to a standstill for three years.

“Whither the Left now?” is a question on everyone’s lips, though not everyone can or will answer it. It is the basis for a tragedy and a farce, a reflection on opportunities missed and never reclaimed. The Old Left today, all in all, have consistently shown that they are behind the political bourgeoisie, that they are unable to stand up on their own, that they lack the courage of their own convictions.

How bad is this? On the one hand, we have a section of the LSSP supporting the former president on account of what is felt to be his opposition to the West. On the other hand, we have another section (ironically baptised as the “Majority Group”) proclaiming that their aim is to solidify the gains made on January 8 last year. The latter, by the way, is careful to weed out the fact that they are part of a government led by their historical foe, the UNP: in every press release and feel-good statement they make, they hence proclaim support for the president, not the government. Which side is better, which side is more despicable? Again, not a question everyone can answer.

Where do we go from here? Do we look back at vanished glories, or do we glorify the turncoats who’ve absconded ideals for expedience? It’s a pity Sri Lanka couldn’t throw up a Deutscher to answer this.

In A Passage to India, Ronny Heaslop asks the more liberal and tolerant colonial Englishman, Cyril Fielding, as to where one can find the real India. "Try seeing Indians," Fielding replies. “Where can one find the real Left?” we can ask, at which Fielding, I believe, would have vanished away without an answer. Not because there aren’t any real Leftists, but because thanks to this accursed reality called power politics, no leftist worth his salt would stay for long, hen-cooped in his vision of the country and the world, without capitulating.

Written for: Ceylon Today, December 20 2016

'Mi Casa Es Tu Casa': Tonic for insomniacs

Because art depends so much on the written word, it was an oversight on my part to not have read the text that went with “Mi Casa Es Tu Casa” (“My Home is Your Home”), Anoma Wijewardene’s exhibit at this year’s Colombo Biennale. I was chided and rightly so by her, to the extent whereby she had to refer me to her preface (of sorts) to her exhibit, a preface I certainly recommend everyone to see and read before making judgments. Anoma’s piece, by the way, is in display at the J. D. A. Perera Gallery and will be until the 20th of this month.

She is of course is no stranger to these things. With more than 35 exhibitions and more than 20 solo exhibitions (in Sri Lanka and around the world), she’s come to symbolise the very themes she opts for in them: namely, the dichotomies between reason and passion and between time and beauty, the complexity of human feelings and the need for perforations in an era of borders, the kind of themes that have, over the years, made her art more discernible to the public. “Mi Casa Es Tu Casa” was and will be, going by that, no different. This therefore is not a review of what she’s come up with. This is a comment.

Starting off, how was it? First and foremost, I loved the setup. It was basically a painting on fabric (symbolising fragility) with four distinct backgrounds, featuring four maps of the country. Each background was supposed to depict something earthy, close to nature. Simple, yet effective. Moreover, Anoma’s preface tells us that the perforations on the canvas represent how fictional borders are in an age where information can be and is shared between platforms in a matter of seconds. Again, simple.

At the centre of the whole piece was a golden bowl, filled with water and positioned directly below a spiralling crystal ball (or orb). The bowl was supposed to represent the energy that flows from this world: call it loving kindness, maithreeya, charity, whatever. The orb, on the other hand, tried to visualise how out-of-control the world is (which, coupled with the fact that orbs are used to predict the future, in turn indicated the faulty, shaky destiny we’ve subjected ourselves to).

The viewer is invited to walk behind the piece, observing life through the many perforations that adorn it and in the process, take in the painter’s worldview of such perennial themes as borders, identities, hybridism, purity, and of course the interplay between chaos and order that seemed to make up much of the world this year.

Added to all this was a voice-over: Arundhati Roy, with excerpts from her landmark “Come September” speech, delivered a year after 9/11 and touching on the (mis)uses of cultural nationalism and rhetoric in the face of uncertainty. All in all, an in-your-face adjunct to an already edgy exhibit.

Did all this need a caption? For me, yes. It was hard not to misread. It tended, after a point, to overwhelm. So I went back to Anoma’s preface, which reflected on her concern and “growing disbelief” over the events of this year that left one in a state of despair. What these events are, we know, so I was more interested in how Anoma figured out a way to deal with them, through her art. Naturally therefore, I was surprised when she told me point-blank that she wasn’t interested in making statements. In other words, she steers clear of value judgments.

But is it possible, I asked myself. Can artistes choose not to engage with the social? After all, there is something called the political in every sphere, not just the arts, something which can elude only the most happy-go-lucky of people. Because her exhibit was adorned not just by that aforementioned preface but two separate boards, one featuring an essay by Radhika Coomaraswamy and another featuring quotes by religious and secular leaders (from then and now), I was not a little sceptical of her claim, so I attempted to grill her. What I got from her, as answers, were a little wide off what I was aiming at. Not that I was disappointed, of course.

To start things off I pointed at Radhika’s essay and Arundhati’s speech and argued, to the best of my ability, that the fact of their inclusion indicated that the artiste in her was engaging with the political. Anoma flatly denied it and retorted that her role was to present things as they were and empower the viewer to draw inferences.

True, but doesn’t that presuppose some political inclination on her part? To that her response was: not really. If that is indeed the case, I tried to contend, what is the use of art? She didn’t really give a reply, but I gleaned it nevertheless: there is no “use” as such in art.

In hindsight, I think I was looking the wrong way up at the issue and I think she was correct. That she featured an exhibit which in turn featured a speech cautioning the world against cultural nationalism doesn’t presuppose that she shares that view to the dot. In fact, if I were to go a step further, I’d say that the artiste’s take on borders and nationalism isn’t value-imbibed at all. It ascertains value, yes, but what that value is depends on our interpretation, which as Nietzsche once implied correctly is more discernible than truth. The responsibility of the artiste, going by that, is to provide the audience with some cushion, ideological or otherwise, on which they can make assertions, arguments, and if necessary, counterarguments.

Does that leave me satisfied, though? I’m not too sure.

To this end I sought and found some solace in a comment by Gananath Obeyesekere on one of Anoma’s previous exhibitions, "Quest". Here’s the comment: “It is necessary for poets, painters, dreamers, scholars, religious re-thinkers and visionaries to raise their collective voices and jolt the public conscience, showing us the futility of the terrifying discriminations we have invented and hopefully persuading us to resurrect the gentleness – our feminine nature, one might even say – that many of us have suppressed. Then perhaps we can go to sleep.”

“Perhaps we can go to sleep” – that line stayed with me as I reflected on Anoma. It compelled me to ask her some off the cuff questions, all of which centred on her conception of art.

I tried to fire some salvos, starting with this: if she’s so preoccupied with removing commentary from her exhibit, doesn’t she think the artiste has a role to play? Not really, she replied, adding as an afterthought that no artiste, here or elsewhere, is born to this world to play out some role. In other words, not only is the artiste not required to convey a message to the audience, s/he isn’t required to do anything with an exhibit or objet d’art apart from, of course, presenting it.

Now someone can reflect on this and think that Anoma is championing a conception of art that is cut off from the social, an idealisation of a field of human activity at once futile and impossible.

But I beg to differ. After all, no less a figure than Engels wrote (of writers), “the author does not have to serve the reader on a platter the future historical resolution of the social conflicts... he describes.” On that basis, one can applaud Brecht and Ai Weiwei and still hold some ground for Ruskin, Wilde, and all those other artistes and critics who championed that credo, “Art for Art’s Sake.” It’s all to do with choices, as Anoma tells me. The way she sees it, the choices that Brecht made, out of necessity perhaps, required him to undergo torment and anguish. Not an easy route for an artiste, but there you have it: it’s all to do with the artiste’s individuality.

So what of Obeyesekere’s line? I don’t think Anoma could desist from passing some message in her exhibit on that count. As the day ended, she asked me as to what I thought of it. “We are insomniacs,” I replied. She smiled. I asked her what she thought. “I’m not sure,” she replied.

Nor are we, I reflected as I packed my belongings and departed. Was “Mi Casa Es Tu Casa” supposed to leave us with that, though? I don’t think so. Free of frill as it was, I think there was a message, though I can’t say whether it’s the only one. Should we be unhappy? Certainly not. There is always room for interpretation, after all. One should then interpret.

Written for: The Island LIFESTYLE, December 18 2016

Nandani Gallage’s shelter of pity

In this rational, globalised world of ours, pity has become a commodity, to be marketed and in other ways exhibited for everyone to see. Sure, we have our share of social campaigners and activists, but more often than not that accursed reality known as “hype” sets in to inflate such people beyond reasonable proportions. The media is to blame, both for what it does promote and for what it does not. This, I must add, includes not just activists but also those who lend a helping hand to our less privileged friends, among them dogs.

There is a woman I know who looks after some dogs. I am no fan of orphanages, and for me personally this woman doesn’t exactly run something that could be classed under that tag. The last time I checked (a long, long time ago), she was handling about 10 dogs. The last time I called her (not too long ago), that number had risen to 17. Hardly something someone her age could handle, given her story and the various pitfalls life has greeted her with, but as I think back and reflect, I can’t help but smile. She hasn’t exactly had reason to be chummy with optimism, but despite all that, and despite a manifest lack of finance, she’s still scraping through.

Nandani Gallage doesn’t remember a time when she wasn’t carrying, bathing, or fondling a dog. She lives in Wewala, a quiet if not inconsequential suburb near Piliyandala, where the nearest vet lives 20 minutes away and where street dogs are the norm and not the exception. Her story begins many, many years ago, when she came across four such dogs near her house. “It all started with them, to be honest,” she tells me, “Soon enough word got around that an old woman was looking after abandoned pups. I guess people thought I could take care of their pets more than they could, so not long after that I began getting more of them.” The numbers, she remembers, kept on rising.

Like all such women who don’t look out for funds, Nandani wasn’t a practical person. Initially, she had thought of borrowing funds from her neighbours, who weren’t unwilling to part with their savings for her. “I remember getting as much as 4,000 rupees from them at one point. But eventually you feel bad asking for more. I am sure they would have kept on funding me without asking me to pay back, but I was rather disheartened at having to live on charity. So I decided not to ask anymore.” Today she has a daughter who’s rather well off and sends her money often, but even that is inadequate for what she’s doing now.

For she doesn’t just look after dogs in her decrepit house. She goes around the suburbs and feeds others like them. Think of the cost involved: not just the working capital she needs to maintain those she has sheltered in her own home, but the extra money spent on food for those she hasn’t! Fortunately for her, a local trishaw driver, who realised the gravity of her plight, drives her everywhere at no cost. “People aren’t the demons we think they are,” she tells me, “Others have been as kind. But their kindness isn’t enough. I am in a position where I need more.”

She arrived at that position after months and years of hardship. Nandani comes from a fairly well off background: she was educated at Piliyandala Central College and later went to Buddhist Ladies College in Colombo. She married a comfortably wealthy if not generous man, who died about three years ago. “He was quite kind. He understood and would have understood my plight, no matter where I would have been. Unfortunately, people made use of him. They tricked him.” And by way of explaining this, she tells me that while he was alive, a young and seemingly decent chap from his office had managed to borrow two million rupees (not a trivial amount) to go to Naples, Italy.

After her husband’s death, Nandani had naturally badgered the chap to return the money owed to her, but he had refused. Eventually, he had agreed to pay about 7,000 rupees a month. “He hasn’t paid a cent even now,” she sighs. Not having being in such a precarious situation I wouldn’t know the pain she’s going through, but I can guess and I will comment: we tend to forget the kindness of others. Nandani, thankfully, has not let it peel away her faith in humanity. “I have not been forgotten, but at a time when I need to maintain so many dogs, I honestly need more help.”

Charity, however, is not what she is looking for. Not being a fan of that term and its non-applicability to situations such as this, I agree with her wholeheartedly. That doesn’t marginalise her dilemma, though: either she needs a self-sustaining model through which she can finance her work or she needs to part with her pooches so that they can be given to a more wholesome, kindlier shelter. She vehemently (as I predict) rejects the second option: “I have grown so close to these fellows that I simply can’t let them go.” The tears in her eyes, I must admit, jolts the sentimentalist in me, and not for no reason: any rational minded person would realise the futility of her situation, but for Nandani, it is emotion, not reason, that should be privileged.

For that reason, I think we should reach out. It’s not a question of charity. It never was. I am not a big fan of domesticating animals and even if I were, I wouldn’t consider Nandani’s shelter as anything but that: a shelter. In any case, I believe she has opened our eyes to a persistent problem. One of the commonest reasons for the stray dog problem in this country is that people are thoughtless in their habit of throwing away unneeded puppies.

People like Nandani are not hard to come by, and what they do is more than enough to make up for the inhumanity of others, but all too often they attract the attention of dog-dumpers so much that they end up perpetuating an already bad problem. That is why, even though she deplores it and I detest it, she will have to live on charity, and at least now refrain from sheltering more of those dumped on the streets.

I saw Nandani Gallage a few months back. She has aged. She has grown more tired. She should be. She is shouldering a burden others half her age wouldn’t dare shoulder, and despite the best efforts of her daughter, her family, and those who know her intimately (including, it must be said, my mother), she is desperate for more. At a time when we lavish attention on pedigree pets and cast aside others to the streets, she rekindles our faith in humanity. And for that, we must be grateful. We must give back.

Nandani Gallage can be contacted at 0725235416

Photo by Dushani Pushpika

Written for: The Island LIFESTYLE, December 11 2016