Brahmi on Potsherds in Anuradhapura

#uதுකම් (#Duty):

Continued from Yesterday

By Laleen Jayamanne

Brahmi Script on a Pot

The Brahmi script holds potential for thinking about Lanka and its culture’s links to a wider world, prior to the arrival of Buddhism and the formalisation of its current languages. Artists could perhaps draw on specialist knowledge from friendly secondary sources that bring together the fields of epigraphy, archaeology and linguistics in an accessible way to non-specialist. One such fairly accessible scholar is Purushottam G Patel who is a linguistic theorist who has taught at the University of Ottowa, Canada and is active in his retirement. “Constructing a Framework for Theories of the Brahmi Writing System”.

Photography of Charith Pelpola

It is while reading this article several times that something unexpected happened. I had been looking at the photographs of Sarath Chandrajeewa’s collection of pottery exhibited in his 1997 exhibition, ‘Art in Pottery’ at the Lionel Wendt Art Gallery. It was an unusual exhibition in that paintings were included with pottery as an effort to bring the undervalued, if not at times denigrated practice of pottery, (mati wada, ‘pottery-head’), into an alignment with the valorised art form of painting. The 16 paintings included were all on the theme of the life of a potter. The photographs of this work are included in the book Paths of Visual Art edited by Namal Avanthi Jayasingha. The quality of photographs in the book works as an excellent historical record of Chandrajeewa’s work in the absence of a readily available museum collection to view the originals. Some of Lanka’s best professional photographers, including the Studio Times’ professional photographer Nihal Fernando, have documented Chandrajeewa’s work from his first solo exhibition in 1990 on. This enables me to have some feel for the work, albeit in a diminished way, never having seen the originals. ‘Art in Pottery’ was sponsored by Nihal Fernando and the Lional Wendt Trust while the photographs were taken by the gifted wild-life photographer and documentary film-maker, the late Charith Pelpola who died while still quite young. Here is his engaging self-description:

“By profession I make TV documentaries. By choice, I am an artist, writer and one-time environmental photographer. By instinct and necessity I remain Lost in the Jungle…”

I am struck by the only black and white photograph in the entire book, Paths of Visual Art. What was striking was not only this choice of a particular pot, which was inscribed with a few signs. Having looked at some Brahmi letters on the potsherds unearthed by Deraniyagala, I realised that some of the signs on Chandrajeewa’s pot were indeed similar if not identical to it. The surface of that particular pot is rougher in finish, (more textured, with a patchy finish) than the rest. The shape of the pot appears strangely original in form, not quite functional, rather more sculptural, abstract. Pelpola appears to have registered these differences when he chose to take a black and white photograph of this single pot with Brahmi akshara or letters inscribed on it. Therefore it stands out among the other pots photographed in colour bringing out their warmer terracotta tonality. What is Chandrajeewa and Pelpola doing in gesturing to this long buried past, this time lost? No one has said anything about the letters on the pot in the many reviews of the show and the potter himself is silent on it too. Alas, the young nature photographer is also gone now much too soon. His review of the exhibition is striking in the way he responds to the colours on the pottery, created not with paint, but with the choice of a variety of unearthed coloured clay and experimentation in firing the pots. He then sees correspondences between these colours and the barks of certain trees when they peel off during a specific season…This is subtle, delicate critical writing about the art of pottery, creation of colour and their profound links with nature in contemporary art of Lanka.

I must confess I am shaken by ‘my discovery’ of the Brahmi script! I saw this pot so many times as I flicked through the pages of this colourful and informative book but made no connection with the Brahmi until I read about Siran’s discovery which then led me to the article by Patel with images of the potsherds inscribed with Brahmi letters. Patel says that the linguistic unit of Brahmi is the concept of the akshara. There is also a Sinhala film called Akshara (Sanskrit root), which means a letter in the vernacular (akura). Now I know that linguistically Akshara is not just a letter but that it refers to a particular kind of sound in Brahmi. Patel says that linguists call it an open vowel and is linked to the sound of recitation, chanting. According to structural linguistics the smallest unit of sound is called a phoneme and the smallest unit of meaning is morpheme. In Brahami the smallest unit suggests the voice and attunes the ear as in song. Chandrajeewa is saluting Siran Deraniyagala and evoking our archaic past, which dispels Lanka’s myths of mono-cultural orign. Famed as ‘the pearl’ of the Indian ocean, such a deep memory of Lanka would be a welcome ‘irritant’ to mythical thinking, I feel.

Bi and Tri-Lingual Lanka?

Recently, during the height of the Galle Face Aragalaya phase, I heard a brilliant stand-up routine on YouTube where performance artist Sathees Nadesan a Lankan comedian dramatized his encounter with an army officer at a check-point in Colombo during the civil-war, in the 90’s. The dialogue was completely real, every-day, colloquial but totally absurd, as in ‘absurdist theatre’ absurd through repetition and dead-pan delivery. The incident was recreated by the artist in such a clever way, with pauses, playing with our (Sinhala) expectations. When he was a school-boy on his way to school, he met this same army officer, who would stop him about two or three times a week, and they would go through the same linguistic routine. The comedian’s Sinhala accent was perfect and his command of the variety of Sinhala feudal pronouns for the simple, democratic English ‘you’, was highly calibrated for insulting social inferiors and used as a running gag. So that with each repetition, the laughter opened up yet another circuit of the “micro-fascism of every-day-life” he had experienced as a Tamil school-boy during the civil-war years in Colombo. Here’s a fragment from the routine heard during the aragalay but recalled poorly. It was far funnier than what I reproduce here for which I apologise to the artist. But I do remember the crescendo of laughter heard on the video and also recall my sense of astonished delight at encountering this performance.

Soldier: Are you Tamil?

Student: Yes

Soldier: Why are you here?

Student: I live here.

Soldier: Why?

Student: I was born here.

Soldier: What’s in your bag?

Student: Books

Soldier: Why?

Student: I am going to school

Soldier:…

I was left wondering about the soldier’s level of education as well.

These imaginative examples of using language performatively, creating self-reflexive cross-cultural exchanges, are a small but vital part of the moment of social awakening in Lanka, evident in the early days of the aragalaya. And the Brahmi script on potsherds found buried deep down in the earth, in Anuradhapura and also in Tamil Nadu are also a pointer to a shared rich sense of both cultural and ecological diversity of Lanka. Perhaps a multi-scripted word for ‘JUSTICE’ (Yukthia), might also be a stronger and more pointed idea for this moment of grave danger for democracy in Lanka. යුක්තිය!

Remembering Charith Pelpola

Charith Pelpola, Former Young Asia Television (YA TV) presenter, journalist and wildlife enthusiast, passed away in Singapore. He produced and presented documentaries on the natural world broadcast worldwide by Animal Planet and Discovery channels.