Psychology or demonology: Where 'Garasarapa' lies

Garasarapa, Jayantha Chandrasiri's latest, was given a special screening at the Tharangani Hall at the National Film Corporation on Friday, the 22nd of June.

Dewnaka Porage, in one sense the hero of Garasarapa, is the definitive younger face of Kamal Addaraarachchi, who plays his character as a psychology lecturer when he grows older. Everything is there - the frown, the firm mouth, the aquiline eyes, even the stubborn resolve - and so when he woos a girl (played by the charming Kavindya Adikari) who happens to be swayed by morbid and supernatural forces, we only hope that when SHE grows older, she will be played by the actress who more than any other actress has been paired with Kamal in the movies. But this excitement, this sense of nostalgia with respect to the film industry and its plethora of stars, is not at the heart of Jayantha Chandrasiri's latest work, which meanders along, sometimes with purpose, sometimes without it, and ends up in a climax that is as anticlimactic as it's going to get. The payoff, so essential to Chandrasiri's oeuvre, even in his television serials, is absent, and in a tragic way. When Hail Caesar was released I contended that it was precisely what the Coen brothers, with their descent into abstractions, intellectualisms, what-not, had us expect. Roughly the same argument can now be made of Garasarapa. Perhaps that answers the question I posed at the end of my last piece on Jayantha.

Garasarapa is about memory, the discarding of memory, the keeping of promises, and the potency of love. It is about all these things, and it is about everything else too. At its centre is an intriguing figure we see in only two or three scenes, rightly, someone who pops up from the deepest recesses of our collective consciousness and taunts our hero, the lecturer in psychology, for a wrong he committed decades ago. As with Jayantha's other works, Garasarapa hence interweaves two different eras: the present and 1980. Significant, because the love story at the heart of the plot takes place against the backdrop of racial tensions and these years signify two eras with respect to the history of those tensions (Sinhala versus Tamil). In that sense the film is probably Jayantha's most culturally multifaceted yet, because Sinhala and Tamil cohabit with Sinhala Buddhist and Catholic. What more can you say about a film which pits the famed kalu kumaraya against a cane wielded by a well meaning but strict padre?

The story's simple enough. A boy, Sandaras Edirisinghe, and a girl, Vidya, fall in love (it's love at first sight, of course) on their way to the church at Gadagama. The girl, possessed by the kalu kumaraya, can only be healed by the priest, played by Sriyantha Mendis, though the kumaraya finds his match in the boy, who owing to the potency of his love for her manages to dispel the villain, at least for the time being. (A few exorcisms later, all of which have the churchgoers dance in madness, overcome with the possession, the boy manages to get him out of her for good.) The girl, however, has to leave for Canada owing to rising tensions between her family and elements sympathetic to the LTTE. Decades later, having seemingly forgotten her and yet also having struck a deal with the kumaraya himself to find her, he marries a painter, Frankie, (Ameesha Kavindi), moves into a comfortable, upper middle class life, and finds his past catching up with him when she gets possessed by the serpentine prince.

The film has some of the fluidity and the crazy grandeur of Jayantha's previous work, only this time he's emboldened it all by resorting to some visual effects (Jayantha in the Divaina: "Whether we like it or not, and whether we can or cannot, we have to try to join the rest of the world when making movies here"). Two sequences stand out: the scenes of possession in the church when, while the Lord is being praised by the padre, the churchgoers dance out with our two lovers as the only sane ones among the mob; and the sequence in which these two finally realise their affections for each other and they run out, the only animated people in a crowd that's clearly been made absolutely still by CGI. It's Orpheus and Eurydice in Sri Lanka, a point driven home by the unfolding of the plot later on, with Sandaras striking a deal with the prince, who promises her that if ever she returns to the country, she and he will find each other.

But while visually exciting, I felt there was something missing. It had to do with Jayantha's theatricalism. He divorces speech from movement, words from action, and thus isolates the two from each other to such an extent that even the song sequence in the film lacks the mobility it clearly needs. (We see the two lovers from two separate frames crooning at each other. The movement, the action, takes place elsewhere.) Not that this issue stabs the eye; the sole redeeming point of the story is that it manages to transcend the hollowness of the theme of love. And yet, hollow it is, not only because we have seen this kind of romance before (from Ali Mankada to Oba Nathuwa Oba Ekka), but also because the payoff we await is the payoff we get, particularly when the two do meet years later, and that in a contrived way. Even the deal the boy strikes with the kumaraya, despite its Mephistophelian overtones, fails to deliver a bonus of any sort, because the catch to the deal is the catch we expected from the start: that he will meet her in circumstances which forbid them from seeing each other ever again.

The cast redeems the plot the best way they can, and given that this was directed by Jayantha, to think that they could not redeem it is impossible. It's the first time since Guerrilla Marketing, more than a decade ago, that Kamal Addaraarachchi, Sriyantha Mendis, and Jackson Anthony have been cast together, and while the three do not meet in the plot (Jackson, as I mentioned, is barely visible), their presence, together with that of Yashoda Wimaladharma (in a cameo) and Sangeetha Weeraratne (who is in a role we so eagerly expected her to be in the moment we saw her name in the credits), helped discernibly. Jackson roars and winces, passionately in love with a woman he cannot have, while Sriyantha, world-weary as always, does what he can to "purge" her. When we see the two meet at a church (of all places!) and when the hymns and sermons intersect with a "pagan myth", we are astounded. The performances help sustain our interest through this paradox (which is not a paradox once you think about how Catholicism in here has mingled with Buddhism, as with the poruwa), something I concede with respect to the new faces as well.

Given all this, what did Garasarapa entail or thematise? I refuse to believe or concede ground to the power-of-love claptrap that so easily induces one to fall in love with any work of art from the beginning. The theme, on the contrary, is to be found towards the end. Sangeetha, a doctor, explains to the audience that while Western science does not fit in easily with demonology, the two can and will cohabit, given the link between psychology and superstition. This explanation, rudimentary at one level, is to me important, because it reveals the Jayantha Chandrasiri who got swept away in the rest of the storyline thanks to that power-of-love rhetoric. This is the Jayantha who believes in a link between the West and the East, superseding those dichotomies between magic and reality sustained by intellectuals and rationalists. (Demonic possession, to give just one example, is not the preserve of Sinhala or even Indian societies.) That, and not the love triangle, is what came out at the end, though by the time it does come out, that triangle, and the overdrawn subplots around it which get nowhere (we see a friend of Kamal come and argue with him about finding the girl he loved; the conversation ends there itself, arbitrarily) ensure that such a theme gets washed away by the Butterfly Symphony-like idealism of the two lovers.

My friend Sahan, who sat next to me at the screening, comes from a generation that idolises Kamal, Sriyantha, and more than anyone else, Jackson, with the kind of devotion we exhibited when we were his age, and is more culturally sensitive and informed than the milieu I hail from. While enjoying the film (and predicting the "climax" and grinning at it as it unfolded), he seemed to feel that something wasn't quite right. "There's a lot to extract from someone like Jackson, and a lot to extract from a plot like this" was his comment to me when we walked out. True. There was a lot in what we saw, and a lot in what we should have seen but did not. In that sense Garasarapa left us groping for more. But in the lot it contained, particularly with its performances, it is a return to form for Jayantha, one which may well strike a chord with both the young and the old. As it has with pretty much all his previous work.

P.S.: Garasarapa is the second film by Jayantha after Samanala Sandhwaniya to not be scored by Premasiri Khemadasa. It is, as the opening titles make it clear, a tribute to the maestro, whom the young today are all the poorer for not hearing.

Written for: Daily Mirror, June 27 2018

Jayantha Chandrasiri and the intersection of magic and reality

Jayantha Chandrasiri likes to talk, I have always noticed. And how. He can explain and rationalise something that appears to be so portentous and heavy that once he stops talking you are left telling yourself, "Damn, why didn't I think of that before?" At times, though, he can get mysterious, offering explanations for something none of which make sense or hold the key to the truth. This latter personality comes up when his films are concerned. That's natural, and to be welcomed. Directors love revealing threads from the plots of their work and Chandrasiri, being an exception, likes to tackle the eager journalist, writer, or spectator by giving him clues as to what those plots hold. That, plus the sense of mysticism packed into his films, helps explain why they are so intriguing and why only a very narrow section of the critical fraternity has done justice to them. This is a review of his latest film, Garasarapa, which I feel deserves full treatment by a worthier critic elsewhere and which, over here, needs to be prefaced by a few thoughts on a director everyone loves to get confused over.

From his first tele-drama, Wedahamine, to his most recently screened film, Samanala Sandwaniya, Jayantha is one of the few visual artists from here whose body of work I've watched, re-watched, and pondered over seriously. What I think about them has a bearing on what I think about Garasarapa, because in more ways than one Garasarapa is to Chandrasiri what, say, Hail Caesar is to the Coen brothers: it's an inevitable consequence of everything which preceded and prepared us for it. This is true when it comes to his most discernible motif: the intersection of magic and reality, and in the context of our history. Supplanted by romances that never run counter to that motif, it is coloured by dichotomies which both pit the past against the present and bring them together: village versus city (Wedahamine), old versus young (Dandubasnamanaya), man versus woman (Akala Sandya). He was, and is, at his best when he is dwelling on a theme no one without even a smattering of Sri Lankan history can understand.

That "history" is Sinhalese and Buddhist, but it is never exclusionist. That his best work ran parallel with the rise of a middle class Sinhala Buddhist consciousness which in turn ran parallel with the rise of an urban nationalist political movement (think of the Sinhala Urumaya and its successor, the Hela Urumaya), is not, I believe, a coincidence. When Gamini Akmeemana, in his review, castigated what he felt to be the "middle class nationalist" outlook of Agnidahaya, Jayantha's first film, he was contending that it entailed nostalgia for "the mythical and the pastoral." In a reply penned just days after the review was published, Malinda Seneviratne, in his own inimitable way, suggested that the people of the 21st century aren't as rationalistic as Gamini implied them to be, and that the mythical and the magical in Agnidahaya wasn't as superfluous or unnecessary as "rational" critics described them as being.

Here's the problem with taking a rational stand on the movies in societies like ours: once you bring in the concept of cultural identity and heritage, you are bound to alienate a broad section of the population which has never really understood the workings of that culture. I don't think this is a problem with the director. It is a problem with the critic. Agnidahaya, being Jayantha's first, was slightly overdrawn. Technically and formally, it didn't stand out: the intersection of love and hatred (the tagline, let's not forget, was "vairaya aadarayata vada ganakamai") between Kamal Addaraarachchi and Jackson Anthony over Yashoda Wimaladharma wasn't properly sketched out, to mention just one defect. But most of the critics, particularly from the "cosmopolitan", "liberal" English press, seemed to ignore that. The Sunday Times's R. Wickramasinghe, to give just one example, in a review tellingly titled "Step out of history" suggested that it was wrong of Jayantha to concentrate his entire plot on the year 1664. Forgetting, of course, that much of Jayantha's forays into our history revolve around the 16th and 17th centuries, near-perfect centuries to delve into considering that they entailed a dichotomy between the reality of colonialism on the one hand and the reality of our cultural presence in the rural hinterlands on the other.

I think the mistake made by the English critic when he or she tries to assess films like Agnidahaya or television serials like Akala Sandya is the confusion that is sustained between magic and reality. As scholars much more experienced in the field than me will tell you, hundreds of years ago what is considered magic today was treated as a living, breathing reality. And not just in societies like ours. Even in the West, the concept of magic evolved out of a desire to explain what couldn't be explained, to rationalise what couldn't be rationalised. There was hence nothing erratic in Jayantha resorting to the supernatural. Everything, and practically every last detail, has been so well researched that he leaves no room for arbitrary effects. As Akala Sandya, which in this respect is his most "supernatural" work, illustrates, the "concept" of reading and communicating between minds and the power of yogic meditation (let's not forget time travel) had a definite historical foundation during the reign of Rajasinghe the Second, who ruled at a time when there was a interest in the martial arts (angampora) and swordsmanship.

Guerrilla Marketing in that sense was a departure of sorts, though not completely, from what he had been leading up to. This, the most theatrical of all his films (it owes as much to our folk cultural forms, particularly with Premasiri Khemadasa's music, as it does to the theatre of Beckett and Brecht), also brought to light a basic problem in Jayantha's universe. I still think Guerrilla Marketing is his best work, and not because I have a penchant towards seeing popular political figures from yesteryear being parodied and rather well at that. (I am, of course, talking about Jackson Anthony's performance, one of the best performances I've seen in a Sri Lankan film.) I also think that his primary fascination - the rift between what can be explained and what cannot be, or between the mythical and the real - found its way to the director's depiction of that most contemporary of "magical" devices, advertising. ("Guerrilla marketing" is a cheap, crude advertising tactic, and the last scene, of our protagonist returning home along a road that has huge cut-outs of the man he "marketed", is an indictment on the monsters he has released through his own cheap, crude deception.) It also has some of the best performances that a Jayantha Chandrasiri cast (Kamal, Yashoda, Sriyantha, and of course Jackson, not to mention Sangeetha Weeraratne) could ever have had.

But nevertheless, there was a basic problem. That problem had nothing to do with its plot or themes or cast or even technique. It had to do with the clash which came out between the cultural imperatives of the work and the melodramatic love triangle the work depicted. Deborah Young's review of Guerrilla Marketing in Variety is at times off the mark because it fails to account for the richness in Jayantha's madness (when she indicts those "innovative dance numbers that jump out of nowhere", she is both paying a compliment to Channa Wijewardena's choreography and devaluing a key component of the plot, because without those dance numbers, we would not get a sense of proportion, a foundation, through which we can make sense of the link between Gregory Muhandiram's rabid aversion to culture and his idealisation of mass deception), but where she is correct is where she takes to task what she sees (a little wrongly) as a "silly, star-crossed love triangle" between Thisara (Kamal), his wife Rangi (Sangeetha), and his former lover, who happens to be working at the same ad agency that Rangi and Thisara are, Suramya (Yashoda). Here, for the first time, we saw a dichotomy arise between two facets Jayantha had brought together before.

I can't tell or ascertain whether Jayantha came to terms with this dilemma (several reviews, both local and foreign, pointed it out), but what I and what we do know is that it took a good eight years for him to return to the movies, and when he did return, he made the most atypical work he has ever given. Samanala Sandwaniya is Jayantha Chandrasiri through and through (not least because it has Yashoda as the main actress, and because it induces nostalgia for the past, particularly considering the reference to Gamperaliya through the names of its protagonists), but as Sumitra Peries, who loved it, once told me, "It is catholic in the sense that it is universal." And so it is. Unlike the patently indigene qualities of his previous work, Samanala Sandwaniya is a film for everyone and anyone. It was a retreat, and a great one at that (though here too, in the form of two buffoonish Laurel-and-Hardy-like jokers who cause a debacle at the park after mocking Yashoda, Jayantha steps out of line thanks to his theatrical past), and without any overt reference to "the mythical and the pastoral", it could be rationalised by both the liberal and the traditionalist. Maharaja Gemunu, which followed it, is a film I have unfortunately not seen. But what these two works necessitated was a return to Jayantha's previous oeuvre. Whether Garasarapa resolved the fatal contradiction Guerrilla Marketing unearthed, whether he managed to bring together the historical currents of his plots and the romantic triangle in them, however, are questions I will delve into in my review.

Written for: Daily Mirror, June 26 2018

Anagarika Dharmapala: Shedding the invective

Anagarika Dharmapala is the worst thing that happened to Sri Lankan history. He was a racist, a political pamphleteer, a propagandist who, at the end of the day, served the interests of the bourgeoisie by providing an antidote to the proletariat. He was a betrayer, a peddler of myths, and a demagogue. He was hence the definitive ancestor to S. W. R. D. Bandaranaike and Mahinda Rajapaksa. He might have been a German or Japanese collaborationist or spy, and his comments on the vileness of non-Sinhalese people are enough to rank him alongside Hitler and Mussolini. He did not present a nation-building project, rather a half-baked project that favoured the Sinhala Buddhist businessman, whose interests brought him more into conflict with his Muslim and Tamil competitors than with imperialism per se. Ostensibly anti-imperialist, he was less concerned with combating the exploitative structures of colonialism than with constructing a grand unifying myth for the Sinhalese, of course to the exclusion of every other race. He was, in short, an opportunist of the political sort.

That’s one way of looking at it.

Anagarika Dharmapala was the sole saviour of the nation. He rose up against the establishment and became the first member from the bourgeoisie to combat the British. He was the closest to a Mahatma Gandhi or, more relevantly, a Subash Chandrabose that we could have had. At a time when people were compelled to be cowards in the face of the British, he had the guts to get up and, despite the cost to his family business and fortunes, rant against imperialism. More than anything, however, he was a unifier, in that he recognised the Number One problem which was ailing our society: the absence of a proper industrial sector. He visited Japan, understood the importance of building up such a sector, and returned to call upon the members of the Sinhala Buddhist business class to build up an economy which would lead the way towards independence. He was greater than most of those hailed as national heroes today. He was a hero on his own right, and not just of the political sort.

That’s another way of looking at it.

Very few people have attracted revulsion, censure, and praise the way Dharmapala has. Not even Mahinda Rajapaksa comes close. I don’t think he was a saint. People tend to depict human beings as the angels and the saints they are not, and the popular culture, particularly in a country as small as Sri Lanka, has a tendency of turning individuals into icons and legends. When you take away the rhetoric of legend, you see those individuals for who they are. I believe the same can be said of the Anagarika and I believe that there are aspects to his life which have escaped the historian and the compiler. In this respect, I also believe that Sarath Amunugama’s attempt at sketching out this ambivalent figure deserves more than a cursory newspaper review. Such an attempt was called for. Clearly. Not because he was not a racist, not because he was not someone who tried to bring together the country in a bid to industrialise it, but because he was both and because human beings are hardly the monuments we worship. This is not a review, therefore.

There were certainly two sides to the Anagarika's campaign: the ethno-religious, and the economic. But as with William Blake, the mystic and the social revolutionary, and Ananda Coomaraswamy, the cultural renovator and the believer in the caste system, it is impossible to isolate the two and consider them separately (which is what scholars do). Rather, as historians have pointed out, it is the intermingling of these seemingly opposed sides and aspects to his character which reveal the true face of his national project, shorn of the invectives it has attracted, sometimes rightly, over the years. To understand the Anagarika's economic stances, one must therefore understand the brand (if you may) of his faith which he propagated in the 19th and 20th centuries. George D. Bond's insightful, exhaustive account The Buddhist Revival in Sri Lanka (1988) distinguishes between two Buddhisms: this-worldly and other-wordly. It was the Anagarika's overwhelming belief that Arahantship, which had been considered the preserve of an elected few, was possible in one's present life, that it need not be deferred to a future life. It was a strongly rational interpretation of the faith, which meant that he frankly deplored the worship of gods: "No enlightened Buddhist... would ever care to invoke a god." (notice the use of a simple G).

While being rational, it was also reformist, just like his reformism when it came to the economic and social sphere. Traditional Buddhism argued that the supramundane path, or the path of the sotapannas, the once-returners, and the non-returners, was not possible for layman. Dharmapala effectively wiped away this distinction by claiming that everyone and anyone could participate in the religious life. While this is tentatively comparable to the efforts made by Calvin and Luther in Europe during the Protestant Reformation, as Regi Siriwardena has argued, there was no real radicalism underpinning this new and revolutionary variant of Buddhism: it still thrived on a fundamentally conservative base. Be as it may, one can't really discount Dharmapala's attempts at opening the path to the lay devotee. He emancipated that devotee by arguing, controversially at times, that there was no real need to defer the achievement of Nirvana to a future birth. Naturally, this was on the other extreme of the traditional monastic elite, who preferred a more otherworldly interpretation of their faith in which higher states of consciousness were reserved for those who had donned the robes and passed through several stages in Arahantship.

The traditional monastic elite had as their patrons the traditional elite, the Nobodies who had become Somebodies through capitalist accumulation. They too subscribed to the a more mundane interpretation, arguing (perhaps to protect their own vested interests in this birth) that the chief aim of a Buddhist was to procure enough merit to enjoy a happier, more meritorious next birth. While this interpretation had not been birthed by the Theosophists, it grew out of those who followed Theosophy (which even Dharmapala subscribed to, until differences between him and Henry Steel Olcott made them part ways). D. B. Jayatilake, for instance, in an essay titled "Practical Buddhism", contended that the efforts of one life were not enough to attain complete renunciation. It required a preliminary course, the preparation for a future life. The chief aim of one's present life, on the other hand, was to observe precepts, support one's family through right livelihood, and do good in this world. Herein lies the subtle but fatal rupture between Dharmapala (the reformist) and his opposing group (the neo-traditionalist): the former was fiercely advocating the shattering of distinctions between the present and the future, while the latter conversely advocated the maintenance of those distinctions, and of various other distinctions which approximated to the views of those in the group who believed, inter alia, in the liberal ideal of a secular state, with a separation between the government and the temple, between faith and personal life: in short, between precept and practice.

It doesn't take one much time to ascertain that the overwhelming support for this school of thought came from the new bourgeoisie, because in part at least, they were seeking ways to rationalise their business interests through a new interpretation of Buddhism. Dharmapala too was an entrepreneur, but was hardly of the sort that the new bourgeoisie were. One can contend that it was his line of family businesses, which involved manual labour and the transformation of material into industrial products, which spurred him into his nationalist crusade. One can also contend that it was the nature of those businesses which compelled him to strike out on his own when it came to a radical re-evaluation of Buddhism. Years later, when Kumari Jayawardena's father, A. P. de Zoysa, would join that battle against the new bourgeoisie, who by then would become leaders of the independence movement, the political landscape had bifurcated between a left movement which sought to industrialise this nation and a rightwing movement which remained complacent with the petty, primitive nature of their form of capitalist accumulation.

It is difficult to draw up imaginary lines dividing Dharmapala the national figure from Dharmapala the lay preacher. In an essay on Buddhism, published at the turn of the 20th century, for instance, he implores the British to "let industrial and technical schools be started in populous schools and villages." Perhaps more than anything else, if we are to chart Dharmapala's ascendancy as a crusader and a radical wielder of his faith, we need to consider that it is the intermingling of these two strands, rather than the separate analysis of each of them, which can best help us understand the man beneath the robe, and the robe and the enigma which made up the man. Free from all that invective.

Written for: Daily Mirror, June 15 2018

On Professor Carlo Fonseka, for no reason at all

“With apologies for generalising, I would say that despite decades of free education Sri Lankans are still lazy thinkers; a most gullible lot. Astrologers abound and it is easy to spread a false story. Divine intervention is still widely believed and sought after and clever Kattadiyas make good money. Political leaders shamelessly dash coconuts asking for divine curses on enemies. Faith healing missionaries keep audiences spellbound. Schools do teach science but students are not encouraged to think scientifically. Subject content is studied for exams and the scientific thinking habit ends after uploading the textual content at exams. Science is divorced from lives.” (Shyamon Jayasinghe)

I still remember the first time I met him. It was somewhere in 2013. To keep a long story short, I had written a book and owing to my immaturity (I was 18 at the time, after all) I felt he was the best person to write the foreword to it. And why? Because the book, a novella (which I have since disowned, so horrendous it is!), delved into the perennial conflict between reason and mysticism and Professor Fonseka, a leading light in the Rationalist Movement in Sri Lanka, would have enjoyed reading on that. Or so I thought. What I knew, back then, during that first visit, was that he wanted to meet me. (I had provided him with a first draft beforehand.) So I went, rather pompously (I was 18 and I was immature, let us remember once more), to his residence, a large, sprawling, and yet somewhat unostentatious home tucked away in the corner of Pita Kotte, and rang the bell. He was not there, he was in the washroom, and he would meet me in five minutes, I was told. So I sat down and waited, eager and (again, I was immature) rather pompous.

I came to talk about the book, its contents, and what the professor could write by way of penning the foreword. Instead, after he came, the first thing (or one of the first things) he asked me was what I thought about Shakespeare. I was no Shakespeare fan by any stretch of the imagination – besides, I have a poor memory, so remembering those immortal lines of his has always been a tedious, impossible task – but I had seen some film adaptations of the Bard’s work, and I told him that the play which caught my attention the most was Julius Caesar, hastening to add that I was an ardent fan of the 1953 adaptation starring (of all people!) Marlon Brando. Professor Fonseka, whom I thought preferred the book to the film (which he did, as he implied later), was astounded, and went on relating his first experience seeing it at the Regal when he was a schoolboy at St Joseph’s, and how he would sacrifice the opportunity of seeing the Big Match to frequent the Regal and watch other movie adaptations of the Bard’s plays. “Shakespeare forged the first demagogue in the history of English literature, in Mark Antony,” he told me. The conversation trailed from one play to another, until it struck noon. We didn’t talk about the book.

Before I left, he brought a copy of The Island (it was a Sunday) and showed me an article he had written on the indomitable Richard Dawkins, and on rationalism. Back then I was not fully aware of the professor’s contribution to the field, barring a quick perusal of the translation of Abraham Kovoor’s Gods, Demons, and Spirits (the translation, Deviyo saha Bhoothayo, was by Dharmapala Senaratne, another firebrand from the Rationalist Movement). I didn’t think much about it but after I went home, and in the following days when I checked the archives of the Island and came across his encounters with the inimitable Nalin de Silva, I was fascinated. I could not decide on which side to take, or whether I was meant to take sides. Had I consulted Fonseka, I am sure he would have given the same answer. Like Nalin, he had been an eloquent speaker and moreover a member of the Sinhala Debating Society at his school (Nalin had been the Captain at Royal College). Despite this, they resorted to manifestly different styles and manifestly different tricks. I remember in particular an exchange towards the end of Doramadalawa where the professor, who never loses his cool, replied to his opponent with this aside:

“ඔබතුමා කියන දේවල් වල ඇත්තක් තියෙනවා අලුත් එව්වත් තියෙනවා. මට පේන්නේ ඇත්ත ඒවා අලුත් නැහැ, අලුත් ඒවා ඇත්ත නැහැ.”

Naturally enough, this enraged the opponent: “දැන් මොකක්ද ඒ කිව්වේ, මම බොරු කියන එක නේ!” He went on and on as the credits rolled. I couldn’t resist smiling. So I smiled. Not with all those intellectual salvos, not with all his credentials (and I have found much in those credentials to side with, to agree with) could he withstand that fatal, awe-inducing final remark. That was Carlo Fonseka. Cool. Witty. And resolute.

Over the months and years there have been so many other things about the man that I come across and have agreed and disagreed with, spanning the scientific, the cultural, the political, and the personal. His prose, at once self-explanatory and gradual, never seems to creep away and leave you in the dark. Perhaps it’s a legacy of his work as a medicine man, but when he writes, he writes so much at length that it seems he’s trying to get his point across as comprehensively as he can. It’s almost as though he’s afraid of leaving something behind, as though the careful reader (as opposed to the common reader) will chide him in his mind should he commit that unforgivable error. And heaven forbid any essay of his which does not include his thoughts on the link between evolutionary science and cultural, social, and political processes! Just take a gander at his pieces on Malini Fonseka, Rukmani Devi, Victor Ratnayake, and the late Amaradeva and Lester James Peries. He’s always bringing up biology, and while critics have taken him to task (some have even penned irate replies to what he has written) over this, I believe he is spot on.

Two years ago, he published a compendium of his writings, fittingly titling it Essays of a Lifetime. I have not read it. I could not. By the time I got around to buying it, it had been sold out. But I have read reviews of the collection by, among others, Laksiri Fernando (“I was delighted to know Professor Carlo Fonseka’s popular writings are now published in one volume”), Kumar David (“Carlo is an N. M. man; I am a Samasamajist”), and Shyamon Jayasinghe, whose article I have alluded to at the beginning of this tribute. Shyamon takes to task the contention that erudite as he was, a Fonseka would never have been born after the advent of Free Education and Sinhala Only, and though I only partly agree with this thesis (which has been demolished by many leading intellectuals and critics, top among them Regi Siriwardena, over the decades), I nevertheless am in accord with his stance that there is much in our education system which leaves no room for free thinkers, let alone rationalists and scientists and radicals.

Where I also agree with it is the fact that since he took the Rationalist Movement to what it became in the seventies and eighties, people are as gullible as ever. Is this an indictment on the professor’s own work, which has been criticised by the likes of Nalin de Silva as being blatantly Judeo-Christian as the Christianity and theism it seeks to encounter and flay? I am not in a position to say.

Ever since that day in 2013, I must have met him about five times, including once in 2016 and again in 2018, the latter about three weeks ago at the Memorial Service for Lester James Peries (where he delivered the eulogy). He has mellowed gracefully. His wit, his way of talking slowly, to the point, and never off the cuff, is still there. They say Lester Peries reminded one of a Bourbon Prince: short, unassuming, and never beset by the arrogance which visits lesser personalities. Well, if that were the case, you can say the same thing of the good professor: short, full of humility, and never even once arrogant. “I keep my pride locked up. It escapes only through my work,” Lester told me. Again, you can make the same case for Fonseka: his word is his work, and his work is his pride. But that was a different time. A time so different that we can’t escape into it. The past, as someone once wisely said, is another world altogether. One would have to be extremely fortunate to have born to it. Lester was. Carlo was. Many others were. We were not.

Written for: Daily Mirror, June 14 2018

Sketches from the South: A history of schisms

The history of the Buddhist clergy, in this country, has largely been a history of schisms, splits, and amalgamations. Over the decades and centuries, several important points have been inferred with respect to this (at one level) inevitable historical process. First and foremost among them, that the breakdown of Buddhist sects in response to growing caste militancy was a consequence, and not cause, of the political games played by the British after their conquests. Insignificant though this may be, it is nevertheless important in that people tend to paint a rosy picture of caste-ism while forgetting that the rifts between the different castes were exacerbated once the Colonial Office realised it could harness them to its advantage. As scholars have noted, regardless of their political persuasions, caste-ism, while not rampant in Sri Lanka as it was in India, eventually found its way to the political process. Caste politics was not unheard of before the advent of the British, but it was institutionalised after it. To a considerable extent, this was reflected in the history of the Buddhist sects, and to an even more considerable extent, the battle over caste in the order was played out between Kandy (the hill country) and the South (the low country).

In contrast to the conservative, tightly knit Siyam Nikaya, which spread out to the Asgiriya and Malwatte Chapters, the Amarapura Nikaya, which was an offshoot of the caste militancy that grew after the Kandyan Kingdom was annexed, was a fairly loose confederation. As with all such tightly knit sects, however, the Siyam Nikaya was bound to give way to the policies of intruders, in this case the British, whose (deliberately) ambivalent responses to the practices of the Nikaya have been recorded by historians elsewhere. While a copious recounting of those responses and their historical route is hardly the point of this essay, perhaps a brief, cursory look might enable readers to appreciate how the dominance of one sect had to give way to the dissemination of other sects over the centuries. The timeline relevant to this cursory look, incidentally, spans from 1815, the year of annexation, to 1848, the year of the Matale Rebellion.

When the annexation was complete, assurances were made by the Colonial Office that steps would be taken to preserve the privileges of the traditional elite, which obviously included the monastic orders. Until then, the politics of the Kandyan Kingdom had followed a largely cyclical process, encompassing shifting loyalties and shifts in the regime (particularly, it can be said, after the Nayakkars began their reign). But with the advent of the outsider, this was destined to be succeeded by a largely linear process, in which that outsider, the conqueror, managed to concentrate hitherto traditional privileges within his vast bureaucracy. The traditional elite, naturally anxious to preserve those privileges, sought to preserve them through religion. It was in this context that the Siyam Nikaya was guaranteed the continuation of its practices, in part through the much vilified, controversial Kandyan Convention. No less a person than the then Governor of Ceylon, Robert Brownrigg, visited and placated the nervous monks at the Malwatte and Asgiriya with assurances that “the protection and security promised to their religion would never be wanting.” John D’Oyly, Chief Translator and later Baronet of Kandy, made similar assurances and entreaties to the kapuralas of the four devales in Kandy (Kataragama, Pattini, Vishnu, and Natha). The two promised to undertake three practices which had been the duty of the King: providing food to the temples from the Maha Gabadawa, holding the pageant of the Tooth Relic in Kandy, and maintaining the Dalada Maligawa.

Of the three, the first is the most interesting, since the adherence to and the abrogation of its practice is for me a good indicator of how the Colonial Office affirmed, and later derogated from, the practices of the traditional Kandyan elite. It took several decades for the British to abscond from taking part in the ceremonies of traditional society in India, and that was a consequence of the Mutiny, which took place in 1857. In other words, it took an entire Mutiny to turn the British away from Indian life and culture. In Sri Lanka, by contrast, only 17 years were needed for them to renege on their promises regarding that life and culture; by 1832, contrary to the provisions in the Convention, the Colonial Office had elected to do away with the provision of food to the monks, and instead replaced it with a scheme whereby an annual stipend of 310 pounds (or about 30,000 pounds, when adjusted for inflation) would be paid to the temples. This was an uneasy proposition from the start, and was doomed to stall. It did stall 15 years later, in 1847, when after a campaign against it led by the Legislative Council (which argued that to fund Buddhist monks would be to force a Christian legislature to support heathenism), it was shelved off in favour of a meagre land ownership scheme to benefit the monks. As no proper arrangements were made for the management of these lands, however, some of them would pass into alien hands. This same process, of representations to the effect of preserving traditional privileges giving way to their retraction, can be seen even in the way the British “took to” the pageant and the maintenance of the Maligawa.

By no means did the rebel sects emerge purely because of the activities of the British. Long before Pilimathalawa’s and Eheliyapola’s defections, long before the Chieftains decided to side with the British in a bid to oust the King, those rebel sects were quickly coming up. Their emergence was conditioned by the regions they originated from. In the hill country, the dominant caste was Govigama; in the outer fringes and the low country, the dominant castes were Salagama, Karava, and Durawa, and in that particular order. The Siyam Nikaya yielded to the pressures this conundrum necessitated, and years after its founding by Welivita Saranankara, it yielded to the dominant caste. Upasampada was restricted to this caste (which was not dominant in the low country, or along the coastal belt). This was true especially when considering how power was distributed in the bureaucracy, prior to the British annexation, between the different castes: while in Kandy the non-Govigama castes had their own headmen, the departments to which they were attached for the performance of their duties were overseen by Govigama chieftains.

These discrepancies, unaddressed for years and decades, had to spill over. They did spill over in 1799 with the founding of the Amarapura Nikaya, which had its biggest following in the South among various groups, ranging from those who felt marginalised by the policies of the Siyam Nikaya to those who were tied to British interests and thus wanted to “affirm” breakaway factions (in the secular or non-secular realm) which were free from the control of the former Kandyan Kingdom. This was tied to the fact that, while certainly not free from the shackles of colonialism, the South was freer than the hill country and Colombo, and was thus more open to a revolt in the Buddhist order. (In fact open support was given to the revolt by local headmen, many of whom had repudiated Buddhism and professed Christianity to become part of the bureaucracy.) But while two upasampada ceremonies had been conducted, in 1772 (at the Thotagamuwa Viharaya in Thelwatte) and in 1798 (at Tangalle), these were not endorsed by the conservative monastic elite (which in 1764 conspired to restrict ordination to Govigama; Sitinamaluwe Dhammajoti was the last non-Govigama monk to receive his upasampada at the hands of the Siyam Nikaya). In 1799, therefore, Ambagahapitiya Nanavimala, a Salagama monk who resided in Welithara (a Salagama stronghold), went to Burma with a contingent of five samaneras and three lay devotees. They stopped at Amarapura, where they were duly ordained in 1800, and from where they returned in 1803 to inaugurate the new sect at Balapitiya. This was the Amarapura Nikaya, and their trek to Burma was financed by a leading entrepreneur from the region, Dines de Zoysa Jayatilaka Sirivardana, most likely an ancestor of Cyril de Zoysa, who would lead the Buddhist revival in the 20th century.

But for this sect to get formal recognition, it needed a stamp of approval from the British in the Maritime Provinces. This could only come about through the efforts of an ally monk, and that monk, also from the Salagama caste, was Kapugama Dhammakhanda. He enjoyed the patronage of the chief headman of his village, Adrian de Abrew, who like de Zoysa was an ancestor of a prominent Buddhist lay revivalist (Peter de Abrew, the founder of Museaus College). Kapugama organised an expedition to Burma on his own account, and in 1807, with the patronage of de Abrew, he set off, to return two years later. Curiously enough, however, while the objective of the expedition was to gain recognition for the new Nikaya, the certificate of confirmation given to him by the monks at Burma did not make reference to the sect; that would come about in 1825 (a decade after the annexation of Kandy) with an official Act of Appointment given to Nanavimala Thera. (The British had commenced the practice of issuing written Acts of Appointment a few years before.) The reason why Kapugama himself was not handed the Act was simple: in 1816, he rejected Buddhism and became a Christian. But this act of departure, symbolic though it was, did not, as events later showed, prevent the rise of ideological clashes within the Amarapura Nikaya itself.

Written for: Daily Mirror, June 7 2018