Democracy development or development democracy?

Somewhere in the middle of the last century, Marxist scholars, disillusioned by the sanguine hopes they had placed on the public, began writing negatively of the working class. This grim assessment of the proletariat and the peasantry was the basis for some of the monumental works of post-Nazi Germany social theory: Richard Hofstadter’s thesis that the masses were anti-intellectual, C. Wright Mill’s thesis that they were bureaucratic, and, perhaps the most grim and important of them all, Hannah Arendt’s thesis that they were unwitting supporters of totalitarianism. To argue that these writers and their books formed the bedrock of how the West continues to look at the working class, not just in their part of the world but also our part of the world, would be an understatement. If there was no Hitler, no Mussolini, plainly put, there would have been no Hannah Arendt and no Origins of Totalitarianism. But to suggest that these theories work out well for the peasantry and the proletariat for this part of the world is, I think, rather self-deluding.

My friend Michael Patrick O’Leary once quipped that “the road to hell is paved with false analogies”, paraphrasing that saying about it being paved with good intentions. This is true of the way we view demagogues in the East on the basis of how they are viewed in the West. Sri Lanka is no exception to this: time after time, we have been told, explicitly of course, that demagoguery is the last refuge of the scoundrel, much like nationalism and patriotism, and that the demagogue frequently resorts to false promises so as to bring in more votes. This one way transfer, as I’d like to call it, belittles the people who have been promised various things and promotes the vested interests that tend to gather around the demagogue after s/he wins an election. Given this, what’s wrong with considering those voters as the covert supporters of totalitarianism they were touted as by Arendt et al?

Simply this: the East, particularly in countries like Sri Lanka, has years and decades of colonialism and exploitation at the hands of the West which the West does not have. In the West demagoguery is negative, so negative that even when it does occur (as in the case of Trump’s America) or almost occur (as in the case of Le Pen’s France), the checks and balances offsetting the externalities of that kind of demagoguery prove to be useful. But that’s because these countries have enough and more of what we had, and what we don’t: resources. If we’re desperate for totalitarians, if we seem to be covert sympathisers of dictators, and if we appear to be “sleeping with the fishes” (to borrow another phrase) by voting against our own interests in the form of neo-fascist leaders, it’s not because we don’t know the meaning of democracy, or totalitarianism, or leadership, but rather because we’re tired of leaders who privilege the ideological over the economic. We want democracy, we want ethic harmony, but we also want food on the table. And for an awful lot of people in this side of the planet, getting that food on that table is pretty hard.

So if we the people are not “We, the People” of the American Constitution, it’s simply because we have been cheated again and again by a specific class of politicians who dither on the issues they promise to resolve once they come to power. We saw this in 1978 and we saw this in 1994 and we are seeing this now. The reason why we did not see this in 2005 was because the leader elected then, democratically, remained the only leader who did well on the one issue he promised to resolve. But as time went by, the war proved to be too much of an asset, a national treasure in fact, to bandy about for the sake of self-perpetuation. There needed to be another set of issues, mainly economic, which the Rajapaksa administration could show as being resolved by them. A bubble economy of consumption came up after 2010 owing to their need to show the people that we were more of a nation of development democracy than one of democracy development. The mandate in 2010 was for that sort of polity. The sort doomed to burst some day.

That’s another story though.

What is often forgotten is that the fear of the masses the West has sustained was largely an offshoot, not of the complicity of ordinary Germans in the Third Reich, but of the culture of distrust the intellectual centre created when it came to the relationship between the State and its subjects. Western liberal democracy was hardly liberal or democratic in the early days. It was the joint outcome of years and decades and centuries of sustained exploitation of slaves and the working class. John Locke’s contentions about liberalism are at odds with his view of the sanctity of property because liberalism, which privileged the individual, needed at the same time a strong, authoritarian State. The State oversaw the exploitation of those subjects who continue to be erased out of the liberal narratives which are spawned by the successors of Locke and Mills and Bentham today. When liberalism was nonexistent in the early days of conflicts over land, the State needed a higher figure in the form of an unseen deity (Hobbes’s Leviathan). When Europe underwent the Reformation and turned towards rationalism, property became the new God.

But private property has been, throughout much of history, the source of the West’s exploitation of colonies and slaves. It has also, ironically, been the source of those liberal narratives I have alluded to. Land is simultaneously a harbinger of totalitarianism (for the masses) and of democracy (for the elite). Arendt’s suspicions of the general public, the people, were the suspicions of the Founding Fathers of the United States too. In that sense, the post-Nazi Germany universe merely compounded this culture of suspicion and distrust, creeping into the many organisations created (ostensibly) to preserve world peace or export democracy. The West has always preferred the individual to the collective, and it has historically believed in at least nominal democracy development over development democracy in our part of the world because it believes that what works for them will somehow work for us. That is not the case, and the West, even after Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq, has not yet corrected this vicious misconception.

Sri Lanka’s polity, come 2020, will thus be in shambles. Development democracy and democracy development are and have always been ill-fitted for each other here. Those who hedged their bets on the new administration after 2015, tragically, thought that the masses could be swayed on the basis of its allegiance to the tenets of good governance and sanhindiyawa. But the problem with this project was that you cannot focus on good governance without a strong bulwark. Mahinda Rajapaksa and his cohorts committed the opposite mistake: they delivered the goods, but failed to secure those goods for the longer term, and that by cracking down on dissent at every step of the way. Once these goods were taken over by the yahapalana administration, they were doomed to rot, because for them to flourish, they needed to be preserved by a strong, even authoritarian centre. This authoritarian centre is precisely what is lacking in the new government, and it is the demand for that centre which compelled the majority, even those who had supported Maithripala Sirisena previously, to oust him out of power at the grassroots level last February. The demand in 2015 had been for change: unyielding, unconditional. That demand continues, but now it is for a reversal: a 360-turnaround to the authoritarian, centrist, anti-peripheral development democracy of 2014 and before. Personally, I think the present administration is asking for it.

Image by Kavindu Hasaranga

Written for: Daily Mirror, May 18 2018

From art to kitsch, and between jana and janapriya

In his landmark essay “Avant-Garde and Kitsch”, Clement Greenberg discusses the evolution of art in terms of its separation into two broad cultures: the highbrow and the popular. The progression or regression (depending on how you see it) from the one to the other was facilitated by the transition from feudalism, with its repressive structures enabling a separation of art from the masses, to industrial capitalism, through which universal literacy was achieved to such an extent that those masses, until then deprived of participation in a society’s cultural sphere, became the shapers and makers of art forms (in particular, literature and music). Greenberg, who was a painter and an art critic himself, contends that this transition occurs owing to the tendency of a society to unravel itself once the religious, cultural, and various other morals and absolutes on which it is based begin to be questioned rather critically. By this, “one and the same civilisation produces simultaneously two such different things” – the high and the low.

While the essay has been discredited since, and scholars have pointed out certain inconsistencies therein, I am interested in some of Greenberg’s ideas because they pinpoint the bifurcation of aesthetics which we, in Sri Lanka, have been witnessing. The evolution of art, for Greenberg that is, follows two broad routes: from art (the academic, scholarly, upper class type, based on refined, sophisticated tastes) to avant-garde (the bohemian type, which separates art from the necessity of patrons and financiers) to its rear-guard, referred to as “kitsch” (a German word connoting the seamless fusion of commerce and art in modern, urban, industrial societies). Art and kitsch, highbrow and lowbrow, refined and vulgar: these are the terms we use to differentiate between these two aesthetic sensibilities, to an extent in Sri Lanka too. How can we apply Greenberg’s contentions, minus their flaws, to what transpired in this country, then? By considering the way the transition from the highbrow to the popular corresponded to the evolution of the kind of audience which, in here or elsewhere, pandered to these cultural forms.

Perhaps what needs to be borne in mind before examining the applicability of this cultural phenomenon to Sri Lanka is that in Sri Lanka, there was, historically, no real bohemian culture. Bohemians were wanderers, vagrants, uncommitted rebels, who simultaneously distanced themselves from and attached themselves to the bourgeois lifestyles they vowed to get away from. In here though, the separation was between the coloniser and his subjects, namely, the vast majority of the countrymen. For the latter, art was neither highbrow nor kitsch; it was purely a means of communicating within themselves. Even the Gal Viharaya at Polonnaruwa, as Regi Siriwardena pointed out, was built with a utilitarian objective, since worship was as vital to the people of those days as going to a job is to us today. While art did exist, very little of it was consumed as objects of refinement to be studied from afar; there was, in other words, no proper extrinsic value to the artefacts we hold up and admire in museums today, only an intrinsic plasticity. With the advent of archaeology and restoration, traditional art forms became something to preserve. The champions of this mode of thinking were the born-again natives from the Anglican elite, like Devar Surya Sena.

Greenberg traces the aesthetic route from art to avant-garde, and at the hands of the bohemians, avant-garde reaches its peak. It follows that if there was no real bohemian culture in Sri Lanka, there was no intermediate stage between art and kitsch, or between the highbrow and the popular. In the Bengali Renaissance, particularly the novels of Bankim Chatterjee, we see the fusion of the West and East, which unearths a culture that can be at least vaguely referred to as avant-garde. Greenberg’s thesis is that such a culture thrives on a self-referential sensibility. According to him, the avant-garde artists “derive their chief inspiration from the medium they work in”, which means that what is central to the work of, say, a Chatterjee novel or a Picasso painting is its preoccupation with its forms and techniques: it returns to its own workings and externalises those workings in every line and contour. If these indeed were the hallmarks of the bohemian sensibility, we cannot claim that we reached that intermediate stage.

The transition from art to avant-garde is really the transition of one order to another. But the transition from avant-garde to kitsch is a reflection of changing landscapes and industrialisation. Colonial societies did not escape this wave of industrialisation, though they were asked to pay the price for European progress by handing over their resources at dirt cheap prices. Sarlis, the painter who depicted moments and excerpts from the lives of the Buddhas, was Sri Lanka’s equivalent of Ravi Varma: the painters of spirituality on carpets and temple walls and tapestries, through whom the faith of the majority became intertwined with the walls of their houses. This is the fusion at the heart of kitsch, and in such a fusion we come across (as Tissa Abeysekara noted in an essay) a pseudo-renaissance. But for the kitsch culture in Sri Lanka to unfold itself properly, it had to wait until three distinct epochs had passed: 1931, 1948, and 1956.

Art and avant-garde turn to kitsch the moment the masses, the majority, are empowered to be the shapers and makers of the culture of their society. Kitsch is a product of the industrial revolution, even in societies which experience that revolution second hand and (as with us) have never gone beyond the landowning aristocracy that the coloniser selected, tutored, and in effect bred. Emancipation, in a metaphoric sense, was what the masses demanded, from the shackles of colonialism or at least the culture of illiteracy colonialism necessitated in their societies. In the West, industrialisation was followed by the establishment of what was called universal literacy. In Sri Lanka and India, literacy, though hardly obtainable (as Will Durrant has written, the British India Government spent eight cents per head per year on education at a time when they were spending 83 on the army), congealed into demands for the franchise, which we got in 1931. If literacy was the prerequisite for kitsch in the West, it was the prerequisite for freedom in our societies. But the franchise in itself was not enough: what was needed was independence (in 1948) and a complete if not partial moving away from the policies of the British Government (in 1956).

The majority needed to be assimilated to the societies had been estranged from, but the minute they aspired to be the shapers of their collective destinies, a fatal rupture resulted between two forms of culture: the formal and the folk. This process was necessitated more or less by the rural-urban exodus which the franchise, independence, and the historical eventuality compelled by 1956, free education, resulted in. As Greenberg notes, “the peasants who settled in the cities as proletariat and petty bourgeois learned to read and write for the sake of efficiency.” But the formal culture they aspired to reach required tremendous reserves of leisure and privilege. The peasants simply could not afford that kind of leisure. Having been assimilated to the city, they could not return to the village either, because they had forsaken on their earlier way of life. As such, the “new urban masses” set up a pressure on the societies they were moved to, to provide them with a catalogue of art forms which they could enjoy. Subsequently it was this petty bourgeoisie which enabled the opening up of our art forms to outside (mainly Indian and Western) influences. On one hand, they enjoyed Sunil Shantha, Amaradeva, and Victor Ratnayake. On the other hand, they enjoyed baila, Rukmani Devi, and Clarence Wijewardena.

The fatal rupture – between folk and formal – caused by this social phenomenon was an inevitable consequence of the social mobility resulting from universal literacy (in the form of free education). Moreover, between Amaradeva and Clarence there was and is, to a certain extent, a separation, which while not unbridgeable remains, by default, distinct from one another. If we are to follow Greenberg and impute terms to these two streams of one sensibility, then we have to demarcate them as “jana” (highbrow) and “janapriya” (lowbrow). In both instances what was wiped out, or belittled, was the indigenous culture; the same culture which survives today, though barely, through the joint efforts of Sahan Ranwala and the Ranwala Balakaya as well as its followers and students (some of whom, like Chanuka Moragoda, have graduated to the janapriya sensibility through YouTube and other channels in social media). Obviously, one essay isn’t enough to dwell on the problems that this particular rupture has caused within our cultural firmament. Examining a problem presupposes a succinct explication of that problem. Before examining it, therefore, I will lay it down as follows. The fact is that while the janapriya culture has evolved, and continues to evolve today, from baila on your radio to Sanuka Wickramasinghe on YouTube, the jana culture, which includes among its vast canon Amaradeva and Premasiri Khemadasa, has stalled somewhere. Now that I’ve laid down the problem, I’ll examine it next week. For now however, I’m done.

Written for: Daily Mirror, May 17 2018

Bathiya and Santhush: The awakening of a new sensibility

If there’s really nothing “new” to be “discerned” in the recent popular culture here, it’s not because the artists don’t want to try out something new, but because audiences are so easily captivated by the familiar details and the technical veneers of their work. In Sri Lanka, for the most that is, once you come up with something that directly or otherwise swerves away from the old, you have a horde of other artistes who will imitate you, thinking that’s the only way by which what you came up with can be sustained, and perpetuating a culture in which trends are despairingly recycled in a hundred different ways. It’s easier to copy than to create a cultural sensibility, after all, particularly when that sensibility is rooted in the popular: the pop culture sensibility.

Popular culture has been the type of culture most difficult to define, praise, or criticise, because unlike what’s conveniently termed as the high culture, its tastes are those of a great many audiences and demographics, and therefore belong, not to an esoteric few, but to an entire society. You can’t take this or that element and consider it to be the hallmark of this specific society and demographic; you can’t say this or that artist is the representative of their culture. For better or worse, the artists operating in the industry have to account for everyone, and along the way, they have to find an equilibrium, or if I am to pick a better word, a compromise. It’s difficult to achieve a perfect equilibrium, in any science or art, so when those artists do win popular audiences, they tend to alienate a few. That’s why they garner so much opposition when they begin their careers. And that’s why they tend to deteriorate in later years: because they are complacent owing to the successes they encounter in their first few years and decades.

Bathiya Jayakody and Santhush Weeraman came to us at a time when we desperately needed to break away from this complacency in our music industry. By the time they released their first album, Vasanthaye, 20 years ago, the cassette industry was giving way to the CD industry, and the World Wide Web had just been born in Sri Lanka. In other words, it was a tentatively twilight era for our entertainment industry, and these two, as with all popular artists, targeted a sensibility that would in later years embrace the internet. Meanwhile, however, they went on targeting the youth, and reaping dividends as they went along, with their production houses. But beyond these technical specificities, they were doing something more, much more. They weren’t reinventing or recycling what their predecessors had done: they were discovering, creating, and prescribing new tastes. The popularity they got, therefore, was not really unexpected.

The purveyors of the popular three minute song here, until the nineties, worked for audiences and listeners who were as committed to the melody as they were to the lyric. This did not really extend to the Amaradevas and the Khemadasas and the Victor Ratnayakes, whose conception of music was vastly different to the Moonstones and the Clarence Wijewardenas and the Stanley Peirises, who were the exponents of popular music for their time. Even in the works of Wijewardena and Peiris, there’s a subtle intermingling of the articulate lyric and the plaintive melody; the fact that these “populists” (as they were derided in their day) went for lyricists who also wrote for the Amaradevas and Khemadasas (Ajantha Ranasinghe, Kularatne Ariyawansa, even K. D. K. Dharmawardhana, who wrote Peries’s “Hawasata Paya”) lends credence to the point that even at their most populist, these composers valued both tune and word.

I strongly believe that Bathiya and Santhush are the last link to this tradition which our music industry had by then embraced and affirmed. Their most frequently opted for lyricists – Nilar M. Cassim and Wasantha Dukgannarala – were aware of the need for something deeper to exist beneath the melodies and the tunes which the composer came up with. My favourite songs of theirs – “Mal Pan Podak” and “Kiri Kodu Hithata” occupying the top two slots – beautifully echo this fusion of poetry and plaintiveness. They are what I consider, though rather sadly, to be the last few instances of a musical sensibility that simply does not exist anymore, not because of an absence of sincerity among contemporary composers but because audiences, particular young audiences, are somewhat content with what they hear on the radio every (other) day.

To a considerable extent, this has to do with the theme that those artists went and continue to go for: love, or more specifically, unrequited love. As Malinda Seneviratne observed more than 15 years ago, if you tune into a radio channel chances are the songs you’ll hear will be about those perennial themes “I love you, you love me, how nice!” or “I love you, why don’t you love me?” or the inevitable complaint “You don’t love me anymore!” Malinda’s rationale was that love, no matter how endearingly strong it is, constitutes just one element of the human experience (a fact that contemporary artists seem to miss out frequently), but I’d like to go a step further: love, no matter how unbearable it may be, always operates on a rift between personal experience and aesthetic experience; in other words, to convey, simply and at the same time powerfully, the gushes and torrents of contradictory feelings one faces when confronting and courting romance, one must be equipped with both the personal and the aesthetic.

If there’s a quality of freshness to be found in the lyrics of, say, the late Ajantha Ranasinghe and Kularatne Ariyawansa, it’s because these men understood only too well the pitfalls and flaws that a separation between the personal and the aesthetic could compel in their work. In Ranasinghe’s verses there always are strong undercurrents of pain and sorrow beneath an otherwise calm veneer; it’s this poetic agility that found its way to the later generation of Nilar Cassim and Wasantha Dukgannarala and this agility that one encounters, even if in brief glimpses, with Bathiya’s and Santhush’s early work, particularly in “Mal Pan Podak” (Dukgannarala) and “Unmadani” (Cassim). Put simply, the artist and his collaborators have not confused personal experience for aesthetic profundity, and poetry has not been turned into a (needless) vassal of that experience.

ඔබගෙන් තවත්
ලැබූ පෙම් වදන්
ඉතිං ආදරෙයි නම්
බෝමයි හැගුම්

What helped my generation (which was the generation that grew up with these two budding players) identify with them was the fact that they identified with the demographic we came from: urbane, middle class, rather consumerist. It’s that sort of suave urbanity that crops up in every song of theirs, even today.

මල් මී සුගන්ධේ
නැළැවී වෙළී
මල්වැල් ගොතන්නී
වෘන්දා වනේ

Bathiya’s and Santhush’s biggest strength in this respect wasn’t just the lyricists they teamed up with but the production houses they worked with, and later built up, and the fact that the internet hadn’t made inroads into the country, at least not fully. We had never heard of YouTube when we first heard “Unmadani” and “Kiri Kodu Hithata” (the latter of which I came across the first day I went in a school van, in a lazy, desultory afternoon somewhere in mid 2006). That, plus their agelessness, and the image they projected on us through the television and the concerts they organised. Even their clothing preferences helped them stand out: Bathiya with his tight black shirt and, later, long cream coat, exuding a retro 70’s look and a hesitant veneer of sophistication, and Santhush with his fedora hat, exuding a more brash, assertive youthfulness (his brother Dushyanth exuded it even more). The two of them met through their stints at Scouting, and in fact in their best songs, you can infer an almost Boy Scout-ish innocence and naiveté: they look at, but are almost shy to look into, the feelings they confront.

As with Clarence, Rookantha Gunatilake, and their most immediate predecessor, Athula Adikari, Bathiya and Santhush targeted and won an audience that hailed from a middle class, consumerist, but not exactly affluent background. With their deliberately slow rhythms, their carefully projected inflections, and their urbane, sophisticated accents, they were able to enrapture us and sustain our interest throughout: quite a rare ability, you must admit. Their lyrics, which weren’t hard to follow but which weren’t the watered down doggerel they’ve become with composers and vocalists today, made sense, even when we didn’t listen to them, and because they made sense, they moved us, truly, madly, and deeply. The truth of the matter is that you just don’t get that kind of music anymore.

When Sanuka Wickramasinghe came up with “Saragaye”, schoolboys and schoolgirls I know were dazzled; here was an artist singing about a one-night stand when most popular vocalists were content in yarning on and on about love stories that seemed to last for eternity. This is the kind of novelty the young have been conditioned to accept, without any scepticism. I don’t blame them, because the last few years have seen a kind of deterioration in our music industry that no amount of censure can correct. Love, that most fatally easy theme to sing about, has hence turned into an object of facile novelty. Listening to Bathiya and Santhush takes me back to that day when love was neither facile nor novel: when it really, truly, sincerely mattered. It’s a day that might never, ever come. Again.

Written for: Daily Mirror, April 10 2018

Sketches from the South: Karandeniya

From Piliyandala (where I live) to Matara, there are about 130 kilometres, the fastest route to take being the Southern Expressway (which will take you about two hours, or even less). But the Expressway has its limits: it hasn’t been built beyond Matara, not properly anyway, and in those two hours, the only sights you’re exposed to on either side are newly refurbished homes, impersonal hills, and banal buildings. There’s nothing to look forward to: no people to look at and talk with, no photographs to take and savour. Nothing beats the exhilaration of a ride through Galle Road. When you pass the Kalutara Bodhiya, and then cross the much celebrated Benthara Paalama, remembering that famous saying about not trusting anyone who resides beyond it, you feel as though you’re entering a different world. That’s because the South is exactly that: a different world.

In Beruwala and Aluthgama there’s hardly anything by way of cultural sites to spot out and write on, but you are overwhelmed by the architectural diversity, including that most Muslim of all architectural motifs, the trellis. (Tilak Samarawickrema, when I talked with him about the presence of the trellis in many of Lester James Peries’s movies, including Gamperaliya and Golu Hadawatha, contended that it was alien to Sinhala culture.) It is when you go beyond Benthota that the tourist sites crop up: one by one, hotels and restaurants fill up both sides of the road, until you reach a point where you can’t escape them. Because of Benthota, perhaps, Induruwa, Ahungalle, and Balapitiya too are covered with resorts, eateries, and whatnot, until you reach Ambalangoda, which is where the people, the sights, the sounds, and the flavours take on a distinctly Southern character. It is in Ambalangoda, I feel, that the South becomes the South.

The new has cohabited with the old in Ambalangoda. Especially away from Galle Road, towards Karandeniya, where the roads become more constricted the further you drive inward, you feel that the people you talk with to ask for directions have accepted the inevitability of the new without foregoing on the old. Even in the way they speak, with their regard for emphasis and their drawn out dialect, they are SPECIFIC. But those who associate Ambalangoda with the mask (and Ambalangoda still houses a veritable design culture) often forget that masks are hardly endemic to Sri Lanka and that the cultural roots of these places go deeper and are to be found more in the temples and the people who reside near them. It has been said of the people of Karandeniya, especially, that they are not afraid of talking straight, if they feel they have to. But even with this, they are not afraid of encountering the new. The fact is that the people of Karandeniya, who are more characteristic, I think, of Ambalangoda than city dwellers, make up one of the largest percentages of migrant workers from any region in the country. It is a statistic that has been forgotten, but that statistic has been all but completely acknowledged through the years. That’s why Karandeniya is closer at heart to Ambalangoda than most other places in Ambalangoda. This fusion of newness and oldness can be spotted out even in the road leading to the Karandeniya Raja Maha Viharaya. Recently refurbished, this temple is graced by a long road that goes uphill and is flanked on both sides by a long stretch of one of the most Sri Lankan of all universally consumed exports, cinnamon trees.

The Galagoda Shailatharama Viharaya, as it’s referred to in brochures and travel books, houses the largest reclining Buddhist statue in South Asia. While my mother tells me that she counted 109 one foot tiles from one corner to the other, in reality it runs up to 115 feet or 35 meters, not much until you consider the fact that the reclining statue at the Gal Viharaya in Polonnaruwa is about 45 feet or 15 meters. The temple, reflecting the Ambalangoda which exists outside Karandeniya, is both old and new. Now more than 800 years old, it is a little older than, say, the Thotagamuwa Raja Maha Viharaya in Telwatte, Galle, and it traces its origins to the Dambadeniya Period, though the statue looks like it’s made of cement. The person responsible for much of the temple could have been the then Chief Minister of the King, Devapathiraja, who was responsible for many of the temples that exist and flourish along the coastal belt of the South and after whom a school was named in Rathgama (the school my grandfather attended). Incidentally, the road leading to the temple hadn’t been there before; what had existed were 208 arduous steps, which had proved to be too much of a hardship for the people in the area over the years. The road was a brainchild of a former Chief Incumbent, the Venerable Somananda Thera, while the hall housing the statue came recently as well, under his stewardship. (Though the record of its being the largest such in South Asia has been confirmed by scholars, there is another reclining statue which boasts of being the largest such in the low country, which obviously includes Ambalangoda, and that is to be found in the Indrasararamaya, near the Sabaragamuwa region, around 30 kilometers from Colombo in Aruggoda.)

Around the statue are various other excerpts and snapshots from the life, not only of the Gautama Buddha, but also the other Buddhas, who have all been carefully marked and labelled in a long tableau on the other side of the shrine room. In one corner of the outer chamber of the room you come across Elara and his soldiers, and on the other, you come across Dutugemunu; it’s like they are about to meet each other, for their final encounter, and the Buddhas in-between are onlookers, overtly confirming a fusion of Sinhalese culture and Buddhist legends and iconography which is so often to be found in a Sri Lankan temple, though not quite so graphically. And if these statues appear to be new, and not in need of being refurbished, that has a lot to do with the fact that about a century ago, a well off villager in Karandeniya named Iyonis oversaw the renovation of them all.

There are obviously more stories which the ardent traveller can associate with the temple at Karandeniya, but for reasons I’ve touched on before, they tend to be missed. In that sense we have to be grateful to Somananda Thera, who was despatched to the Viharaya in 2000. Someone told me that it was a recently built temple, but that’s because Somananda Thera transformed it over the years into a modern place of worship, renovating those parts most susceptible to decay, while also compromising on the archaic-ness of the budu medura. (At one point, the builders, misunderstanding the Thera’s instructions, covered the floor in cement.) The “newness” of the structure is in one sense the “newness” of Karandeniya and its residents. Moreover, before Somananda Thera’s arrival, the entire place had reeked of bat droppings and, worse, wanton neglect. The Archaeological Department, owing to certain understandable reasons, had not checked into preserving it properly. Thanks to the Thera’s efforts, however, it flourished, and its historical importance, particularly its association with the Dambadeniya Period (the reign of the second Parakramabahu) and Devapathiraja, began to merit more than a cursory mention. It is from 2004 and 2005, after the tsunami, that interest in it seems to have soared. Today, travel writers and bloggers do write on the Shailatharama Viharaya when they visit Ambalangoda, once they are done with masks and puppets.

With hardly any habitation around the temple, Karandeniya nevertheless seems to have graduated from being in the outskirts of Ambalangoda to a veritable all-but-in-name tourist spot. And though there’s nothing much by way of accommodations outside the city, as travel bloggers have made it clear, there are enough and more residents around these outskirts who are more than willing to take in tourists and visitors for a reasonable fee. The people of Ambalangoda, rather like the people of the South and also of much of Sri Lanka in general, are friendly, but they are also straight talkers, and I witnessed this kind of straight talking while chatting with common everyday folk in the area. On route to Matara, the quintessential cultural hub of the South after Galle, I was taken aback by the vocal distinctness to be found in this region; although we have been assailed and continue to be assailed by modernity, we still speak in the dialect of the region we hail from, even if we hide that dialect when we’re in another region and especially when we’re in Colombo. In that sense the most “characteristic” characteristic of the resident of Ambalangoda is his dialect; he tends to drag what he’s saying, preferring to speak slowly, almost lazily, even when he’s loud or when the situation calls for quickness of speech.

As for the masks and puppets and the artefacts of cultural commercialisation, well, they deserve to be written on too, even though they have been written on by others. But I leave that for a later essay. For now, my travelogue in Ambalangoda ends in Karandeniya.

Photos by Uditha Devapriya

Written for: Daily Mirror, May 15 2018

For the love of today, or why the young take to Sanuka

When you listen to “Saragaye”, and watch the video online, you get enveloped in complete happiness. In some vague, indefinable, almost magical way, Sanuka Wickramasinghe has given a form to our collective experience of one night stands and crushes and unrequited romances. And yet the elders don’t like him: they lambast him over every little detail. Even the choice of title, for these puritans, is a gross misdemeanour (“Saragaye”, in case you were wondering, is the apotheosis of ragaya, or passion and lust) which may lead the young astray (as if the elders weren’t doing a despicably good job of that already!). I can’t understand how one music video, and a 24 year old vocalist with around three or four minor hits to his name, could bring about this heightening of an already terse conflict between the elders and their offspring, but there you have it: the former criticise him because he appeals so ineffably and directly to the latter.

Many of those I’ve met with, and interviewed or chatted with at length at some point, who are not elderly, see in “Saragaye” a facile novelty that barely transcends its limitations (more on those later) because of the vocalist himself, and the electronic percussive rhythms that we’ve not heard for quite some time. While the elders see in it the kind of music that can corrupt our youth, these people see in it a perpetuation of a form of music that does not thrive on words or a literary sensibility. Even the young, armed with their Sinhala Honours Degrees, offer an excuse for their mixed feelings towards the man: that despite the percussive rhythms and the daring monochrome visuals, “Saragaye” offers nothing by way of summing up the human condition through poetry.

This attitude of rabid scepticism, while not excusable, isn’t entirely without reason. As I pointed out in my article on Bathiya and Santhush some months back, and last year in my article on Ajantha Ranasinghe, in the Sinhala sarala gee a balance was always kept between the personal and the aesthetic. The narrator became, in the early days of the Amaradevas and Victor Ratnayakes, the embodiment of a collective experience, because that poetic tradition provided a multitude of metaphors and rhetorical devices through which that experience could be refined, formalised, aesthetised, and turned into a popular tune. This was true of Ranasinghe’s work, and even truer of, on the one hand, K. D. K. Dharmawardhana (whose best lyrics are laden with so much poetry that they are difficult to take in, in one go) and, on the other, Premakeerthi de Alwis (whose rich vocabulary he discarded in favour of a simple, almost verbal form of poetry). As the years went by, however, we missed out on the word, and substituted for it the glosses of technology.

Because technology, no matter how alluring it is, usually isn’t very interesting or enriching, the older generation fell out. There had been production houses in the seventies and eighties, but they had all been primitive in the way they were operated: if you got your recording wrong, you had to repeat, again and again. That sense of meticulousness gets lost in the blur of money-making processes, and the new production houses, owned by second generation artists and the offspring of the first generation artists – Ranga Dassanayake, Raj Seneviratne, Bathiya and Santhush – unleashed a New Wave. But that New Wave operated on a fatal rift, between technology on the one hand and the profit motive on the other. (Can they ever coexist?) They entranced the millennials, from my generation, and predictably alienated the old.

The only kind of novelty that attracted this generation, as the years went by, was the kind that thrived on technology, and technology, once it became intertwined with the melody in ways that had not been seen before, became a byword for peotry. Youngsters who respond to a song like “Saragaye”, the elders I know keep on telling me, aren’t responding to the words or even the meaning that those words evoke, but instead reflect on and allow themselves to be carried away by what lies on the surface. These elders point at Iraj, and even Bathiya and Santhush, and claim that they began this trend, forgetting that while technology clearly cannot, should not, and will not be a substitute for lyricism, we can’t avoid resorting to it either. The millennials went for this technology-induced music; they were what Pauline Kael referred to decades ago as “brutalists”, who were tired of the “sanctity” of the songs they were being forced to listen to.

After Bathiya and Santhush and Iraj, all three of whom spawned a generation of imitators who never transcended their imitativeness despite the superficiality and the facileness of their work, we come to Sanuka Wickramasinghe. Sanuka represents a different kind of facile novelty, not just in terms of the electronic percussiveness and the rhythms of his music, but the themes he goes for in song after song. When you read (into) the answers he has given to those questions asked by interviewers in those countless gossip websites, you are enthralled by the simplicity and naiveté of the way he sees the world. (He’s still a schoolboy, even in the way he croons.) If his songs – and there haven’t been many of them since he started out in 2011 – reflect a vibrant youthfulness, it’s because he’s young and very much so. (One year my senior, to be specific.) Sanuka has gone beyond those earlier imitators before him in taking the young beyond technology, but if he has failed at least a little in this venture, it’s because the old, having responded to this endeavour of his warmly, are instantly repelled by what he thematises in his works: in the case of “Saragaye”, a one night stand and the temporariness of uncommitted love.

About a year after he released “Saragaye”, Sanuka released “Perawadanak”, which was manifestly different, especially in terms of the themes it tackled. If “Saragaye” belonged to a young demographic that hailed from an urbane, chic, and school-going milieu, “Perawadanak”, with its vignette of an unfulfilled love, appealed to a considerably elderly population. A schoolboy I know once asked Sanuka why, and his reply was that this shift in the targeted audience was an effort to get his songs beyond the youth; it was an attempt at pleasing the elders who shirked him. (“Saragaye” was about giving into passion; “Perawadanak was about the catharsis of a broken romance.) Did it work? I should think so: many of the elders I know, and talk with, while disdainful of “Saragaye”, reacted less coldly to “Perawadanak.” That Sanuka has not done a song since then speaks volumes, I believe, about the fact that he released it just a year after his first big hit just so to get out his themes to a wider public, since in Sri Lanka, the young, while comprising 25% of the total population, are just not enough for someone of his calibre to reach stardom.

These two songs, I think, reflect the kind of songs we’ve been missing out for almost a decade. They are not perfect in any conceivable sense – which begs the question, why should we demand perfection in any art form? – and they do leave the purists, the elders, and those who look for “profound poetry” in the dark. But the indictment that there is no meaning in “Saragaye”, that the lyrics lack the requisite complexity for us to elevate it to the status of ART, are, I firmly believe, lopsided at best and wildly inaccurate at worst. “Saragaye”, for instance, opens with these mystical, almost otherworldly, and deliberately fragmented lines:

නිය රටා
මවනවා
අපතරේ වූ කතා
රැය පුරා
උණුහුමේ
මල් පෙති තලා

It’s fragmentary for the simple reason that the love story being described here has no proper structure, or for that matter order: unlike those conventional music videos you see everywhere here, there are no walls to be surmounted or for that matter no lovers bemoaning failed romances. The narrator of “Saragaye” has no standalone voice either, because Sanuka is not the protagonist of his video; he’s observing from the sidelines, reflecting on what he perceives. The fragmented lyrics add depth to this already lopsided romance, and in the end, we don’t really understand what the hero or protagonist sees in the woman.

Those who argue that contemporary music has become a mishmash are, while not wrong, aren’t entirely correct either. The most common excuse dished out is that the young don’t look out for complexity in the lyrics, that they are entranced by the allure of the surface – in other words, technology – so much that they don’t bother reading into the work. Nothing could be further from the truth. In deceiving themselves about the young this way, the elders, or at least those who aren’t willing to compromise or give their offspring the benefit of the doubt, are forgetting that we are seeing a revival of sorts in our musical sphere. It’s the kind of pop revival Europe underwent in the seventies, with the rise of ABBA and Brotherhood of Man and Lulu, all three of whom won at the Eurovision Song Contest for tunes we remember and treasure and hum for their innocence and simplicity, despite the fact that, yes, the elders of that time derided them.

The elders have spoken. So have the young. We can choose a side, or we can enjoy what’s on the radio. Perhaps we’d better switch on the radio. That’s what I’d do, since that’s the only real option we have.

Written for: Daily Mirror, April 12 2018