Complex and contradictory: A literary survey of the Sinhala middle-class

By Uditha Devapriya

Amorphous and ambivalent, the Sinhala middle-class remains undefined and uncharted. It is difficult to pin them down to a particular conception of them. What are their tastes, interests, habits? What do they like? What do they believe? What do they want?

The fundamental problem in trying to understand them is the lack of a proper sociological study of them. The social scientist inevitably runs into a dead-end when trying to place them in their historical context. That they have evaded his radar so far, and so successfully, shows how more relevant peasants and workers have become for his peers.

Linked on the one hand to the undercurrents of religious nationalism and on the other to a comprador economic framework, the middle-class remains an intriguing object of study. Yet such a study has, barring a few interventions, so far not been authored. The only plausible reason for this is that the trajectory of the middle-class has never engaged scholarly interest in the way that of peasants and workers has.

Partly, this has been due to the country’s colonial heritage. With the changes of the late 19th century and resultant societal rifts, the peasantry and the working class became the focus of government appointed commissions. If the middle-class figured in the latter at all, as they did with commissions concerning salaries and pensions, they did so marginally. Elites, peasants, and workers epitomised the polarities of their society far better; they were, to quote Gramsci, in “perpetual ferment”, arguably more so than the relatively stable middle-class. Hence it was these groups that played a key role in many postcolonial studies of that society.

In fact it was not until the late 1960s that the Sinhala petty bourgeoisie became relevant to social scientists. The latter’s interest in them lay mainly, though not only, in relation to the Buddhist revival of the 19th and 20th century. Here we are indebted to Kumari Jayawardena, because her classification of colonial society is by far the most comprehensive, and cohesive, of such interventions. Jayawardena depicted the Sinhala petty bourgeoisie as a dominated and dominating group: hence while playing a leading role in the Buddhist revival, they prospered as merchants within a colonial economic framework. But Jayawardena’s work, and the work of such pioneering social scientists as Newton Gunasinghe, remains exceptional.

Interestingly, however, neglected as they may have been by the scholar, the Sinhala middle-class was rescued from obscurity by the Sinhala novelist. Here we should acknowledge the popular novelists of the early 20th century, most prominently Piyadasa Sirisena. It is true that their conception of culture and ethnicity was imaginary, and idealised. Yet their depiction of the petty bourgeoisie reflected the sociologist’s demarcation of them as a complex milieu; in one sense, they may even have aided the sociologist’s interest in that milieu.

For Sirisena, the Sinhala middle-class were either Sinhala nationalists or brown sahibs, the latter very often converts to Christianity and Western lifestyles. Such stereotypes, seen most clearly in Jayatissa saha Rosalin, were hardly unique to Sirisena – as Sarath Amunugama has noted, “the impact of the Sinhala novel on early twentieth century Sinhalese society has to be examined in the context of the prevailing religious literary tradition” – yet it was Sirisena’s work (as novelist and as editor of Sinhala Jatiya) which epitomised “the changes that were taking place in the Sinhalese social structure.” Hailing from the southern petty bourgeoisie, Sirisena romanticised his own milieu and demonised the Westernised and Christianised elite in ways no other novelists did. Those who have read Jayatissa saha Rosalin will concur with Amunugama’s view that, in Jayatissa, Sirisena depicted a specific type of Sinhala nationalist, tied to the cultural revival, yet not totally detached from colonial modernity.

Martin Wickramasinghe, whose views on culture and society were less ambivalent than Piyadasa Sirisena’s or W. A. Silva’s, did not make the Sinhala middle-class the focus of his best work like this. The Koggala Trilogy is not so much about the Sinhala middle-class as it is about a rural petty bourgeoisie which, through education and initiative, enter the ranks of a Westernised elite. The middle-class form the crux of the plot in Madol Doowa and Viragaya, as well as in his short stories, but even here Wickramasinghe does not offer a critique of this milieu in the way Sirisena does. Since his preoccupation was with social and cultural change, he dwelt less on the petty bourgeoisie than on their co-option by the bourgeoisie. As such, his vignettes of rural life offer us only fleeting glimpses of the middle-class.

Fleeting though they may be, however, his depictions of this middle-class stand out strongly. The most intriguing character in Yuganthaya, for instance, is neither Malin Kabilana nor his father Simon, but his friend Aravinda. Hailing from and raised in a village, Aravinda aspires to be the Kabilanas’ equal; there is a sequence in the novel where he puffs a cigar and dreams of buying a house in Cinnamon Gardens. Yet this does not make him deracinated, much less uprooted; Wickramasinghe depicts him as ambitious, but also kind-hearted, as seen by his act of prescribing medicines for free to his villagers. His father, on the other hand, has worked on time and overtime to educate the son; he expects nothing but the best for and from him. These pressures inexorably bear down on him, compelling him to side with, not Malin’s radicalism, but rather Malin’s father Simon’s conservatism.

Arguably Sri Lanka’s only living novelist of repute from the pre-1956 period, Gunadasa Amarasekara depicted a different middle-class in his later novels. Amarasekara did make the middle-class the subject of his early work; the difference lies in how he views this milieu. His shift from a romantic to a nationalist outlook, signalled early on by his rejection of free verse and contemporary literary criticism in Aliya saha Andayo, predicted a shift in his perceptions of the middle-class and its place in Sri Lanka’s political history.

As Amarasekara unequivocally notes in his preface to Gamanaka Mula, the first in a cycle of novels, Wickramasinghe’s focus in the Koggala Trilogy had been on a “deracinated upper middle-class.” This did not include the local middle-class. In his novels, Amarasekara’s aim was to chart the evolution of this national middle-class, from a marginalised group in the late 19th century to a more assertive class in the mid 20th century.

Amarasekara’s intellectual retreat from the city to the village must be viewed in the context of his articulation of Jathika Chintanaya, though this is not all that colours his views on the “national” middle-class. The Gamanaka cycle of novels, on a much more ambitious scale than Wickramasinghe’s Koggala Trilogy, portrays its milieu in much the same way that the likes of Kumari Jayawardena had: complex and contradictory, ensnared by colonialism and globalisation, yet tethered to cultural and religious nationalism. For Amarasekara, however, the contradictions this milieu vacillates between are not just ideological, but generational; in the character of Piyadasa, who emerges at the end of the long cycle Westernised, yet critical of Westernisation, we come across a counterpoint to Piyal from Wickramasinghe’s Koggala Trilogy, who enters into and embraces the colonial order. Piyadasa represents a cleaner break from the ideas of his parents, and a return to his ancestral roots, than Piyal.

The Gamanaka novels frame 1956 as progressive and inevitable. Yet as Amarasekara’s political interventions, such as Anagarika Dharmapala Marxvadida?, show, the author does not accept 1956 at its face-value. For Amarasekara, 1956 represented a break from and a link to the politics that had dominated the country until then; the Sinhala middle-class would end up as key players in what unfolded thereafter. While this might present the middle-class as a monolithic social group, which admittedly it does, Amarasekara contends that the post-1956 moment turned them all from a position of subservience to one of dominance, pushing them to the forefront of the country’s political, cultural, and intellectual life.

Deceptively simple as such a reading of post-1956 history seems, it nevertheless assigns an important role to the petty bourgeoisie, a group which, after all, continues to play a pivotal role in the country’s politics. Yet for a more cohesive critique of that class, we have to turn to other writers, particularly Amarasekara’s most trenchant critic, Siri Gunasinghe.

In Hewanella, Siri Gunasinghe offers not one, but two readings of 1956, embodied in the characters of Jinadasa and Wijepala. Gunasinghe’s achievement in his work is in presenting, not a criticism of 1956, but an assessment of the possibilities to which it opened the country and the local middle-class. Thus, while Jinadasa symbolises the reactionary facets of narrow nationalism, Wijepala is less insular; the latter eventually turns into a man of reason, while the former wallows in his backwardness. While I do not necessarily accept this division as the only possible one – since to do so would be to dichotomise 1956 between heroes and villains, something a novelist can engage in, but certainly not a sociologist or an anthropologist – it is more complex, despite its compressed narrative, than the Gamanaka novels. Indeed, its very brevity offers a critique of the latter’s ambitious longue durée.

Late colonial and postcolonial Sri Lanka represented a crucible for the Sinhala middle-class, especially for the first four of the much heralded pancha maha balavegaya: monks, ayurvedic physicians, village schoolteachers, and farmers. It remains one of the many ironies of history here that while Sinhala nationalism came to be embodied by these four milieus, other classes, including peasants and workers, were left behind, and eventually forgotten; this is something few social scientists, among them Newton Gunasinghe, have explored.

However, no study of these social processes would be complete without a survey of Sinhala literature from late colonial to postcolonial periods. From the fiercely trenchant nationalism of Piyadasa Sirisena’s Jayatissa saha Rosalin, to Martin Wickramasinghe’s assessment of the colonial bourgeoisie, to Gunadasa Amarasekara’s charting of the Sinhala petty bourgeoisie’s trajectory following the end of colonial rule, to Siri Gunasinghe’s critique of what that milieu would later become, this literature offer us a glimpse into the most complex and contradictory class in postcolonial Sri Lanka: a class not yet comprehensively delved into, barring the work of a handful of scholars. Romantic and fanciful as some of these literary endeavours may be, they nevertheless give us rare insights. These should not be neglected.

The writer can be reached at udakdev1@gmail.com