Sat Mag
Martin Wickramasinghe: The novelist, critic, and problem
By Uditha Devapriya
The novelist
Last Saturday marked the 131st birth anniversary of Martin Wickramasinghe. In a career spanning 59 years – from his first work, Leela, published in 1914, to his last, Bhavatharanaya, published in 1973 – Wickramasinghe authored more than 80 novels and 2,500 essays. Most of those works were translated into other languages, including English, and also Russian. Though many associate him today with the Koggala trilogy – rightly touted as the greatest novelistic saga ever written in this country, in Sinhala – his writings extended to every theme, from language to culture to history to Buddhism. He never obtained a formal education; owing to a death in the family, of his father, he had to withdraw from Buena Vista in Galle. But his eclecticism survived and thrived through this deficiency; it sharpened his sensitivity to the world around him, opening his eyes to the dynamics of social change unravelling in the country.
This sensitivity is very much evident in Gamperaliya, and arguably more so in Kaliyugaya. The Koggala trilogy takes place against a backdrop of not just a changing village (Gamperaliya’s title in translation) but a changing economy. Piyal, the outsider with hopes for a better life, leaves this changing village for a changing Colombo. The departure is well timed: in the city, a rubber boom and some astute investments grant him access to the kind of wealth and social mobility difficult to obtain back home. Wickramasinghe, like Balzac, has a knack for delineating a milieu through descriptions of objects, and in this part of the story he identifies the descent of the Kaisaruwattes with the crumbling down of their ancestral walawwa.
Yet, despite their reduced circumstances, they refuse Piyal’s offers; it’s only when the husband of the youngest daughter, Nanda, who Piyal tried to court before he left the village but could not owing to caste barriers, dies that they marry her off to him. Gamperaliya ends on a conundrum: will the idealism of their romance survive their new class status?
Kaliyugaya
Rejecting his family and his inheritance, Alan leaves for England with his lover; years later, in a lengthy, blistering letter to the two of them, he exposes their pretentiousness, the hollowness of their lives, the emptiness of their values. He contrasts these with the warmth he saw in the village and faults the mother for keeping him away from there as a child.
Wickramasighe’s depiction of Alan in Kaliyugaya, though sketchy at one level, is intriguing: his rebelliousness borders on revolution, but he keeps himself to a personal critique of the values to which his parents adhered. It’s in Yuganthaya, the most political of the three stories, that a whole new generation – epitomised by Alan’s sister’s son, Malin Kabilana – revolt against the values of the old – epitomised by the man the sister marries, Malin’s father Simon Kabilana.
What Wickramasinghe attempted with these novels, which in Yuganthaya end on a conundrum not too different from that which ends Gamperaliya and Kaliyugaya – how will the young really achieve their dreams for a new society? – was more or less a sociological treatise on the clashes of class, caste, and generations that linked the rise of a new Sinhala bourgeoisie to the rise of the revolutionary Left. Wickramasinghe depicts these conflicts as independent of the personal lives of his characters, yet shows how they impact the latter in ways they can’t imagine or predict: in Yuganthaya, for instance, Malin’s flirtations with Marxism are at first tolerated by his father, but as time goes by, the two of them realise that they can’t reconcile.
It’s probably reductive to say that Wickramasinghe was subscribing to a Marxist conception of history, one dictated by class antagonisms – from aristocracy versus bourgeoisie in Gamperaliya to bourgeoisie versus working class in Yuganthaya – here. But it certainly is in tune with such a reading: class antagonisms are rooted in specific historical conditions, and instead of insulating them from the processes unleashed by these conditions, Wickramasinghe shows how people in his stories undergo vast transformations under the pressures of those processes.
The critic
This view of history and social change is what permeates Wickramasinghe’s non-fiction writing as well. A voracious reader of Marx and Darwin, Wickramasinghe intuitively understood, if not grasped, the currents of reform making themselves felt in post-independence Sri Lanka. How he understood these winds of change had to do with his reading of the country’s history from two vantage points: the place of Sinhala culture in contemporary society, and the question, not of the place of the Sinhala language in that society, but of which Sinhala to fit into it.
The polemics that ensued from this centred on a debate between what he referred to as the great tradition and the lesser tradition: he identified the former with purists who viewed language as a vehicle of slick, ornate aestheticism for the few, and the latter with reformists who viewed it as a means of access for the many. Indeed, his critiques of the former make up much of his writings on language: many of his essays dismissed them as “an imitative tradition.”
These essays dovetail with his prolific writings on culture and society. For Wickramasinghe, the history of the country was linked to the evolution the language of its majority. In that sense, the five centuries between 1100 and 1600 AD marked the rise and fall, the peak and decline, of the culture: with the Sanskritisation of the language, a crude syncretism invaded the temple, turning the people away from Buddhism’s intellectual roots to a superficial cult of deities.
The confrontation between Thotagamuwe Sri Rahula and Vidagama Maithri, in that sense, boiled down to a debate between the great traditionalists and the lesser traditionalists. It is within these encounters that the cycles of peak and decline of culture and language, indeed of religion, were eventually resolved. In that battle, the lesser traditionalists won; what made them the superior of their adversaries was the latter’s inability to influence the culture of the people. The Buddhism that Wickramasinghe idealised was, naturally, in tune with the latter culture: a Buddhism free of Brahmanical excretions, a Buddhism rooted in the folk.
It would be a mistake to equate this with the romantic nationalism which accompanied the folk revivalist movements of 19th century Europe. Wickramasinghe’s valorisation of a Buddhism of the people was informed less by a nostalgia for the past than by a need to reflect on the past as a way of charting the future. Indeed, his revivalist rhetoric, far from channelling inflammatory and exclusivist chauvinism, attempted to strike a balance between past and future, between tradition and modernity; this put his search for roots far away from, say, Johann Herder’s call for a return to the values of the past through immersion in folk culture.
This was why, though he heeded and approved of their call for a less ornate language, he did not share the Hela Havula’s belief in a pre-Vijayan civilisation. In Sinhala Sahithyaye Nageema he rejected the existence of such a past: his conclusion was that “pre-Aryan inhabitants remained for a long period of time at a very primitive level of culture.”
The Hela Havula obviously did not subscribe to such a reading: the pioneers of the movement, Munidasa Cumaratunga and Raphael Tennekoon included, argued that Kuveni’s engaging with a spinning wheel at the time of Vijaya’s arrival showed that pre-Indo-Aryan civilisation had been quite advanced. Wickramasinghe, on the other hand, wrote that they lacked even the implements of an agrarian society: when asked for food, for instance, the same Kuveni points Vijaya and his followers to sacks of grain stolen from merchant ships.
One need not engage extensively with these niceties to understand Wickramasinghe’s views on society, history, language, religion, even politics. He was not averse to welcoming change where change was needed; this explains, for instance, his opposition to monks who held a fast at S. W. R. D. Bandaranaike’s residence against the latter’s pact with S. J. V. Chelvanayakam.
It may come as a surprise to those who read Wickramasinghe as a crude nationalist that instead of rejecting the pact, which granted devolution to areas preponderated by Tamils, he denounced the monks and the intelligentsia backing them for stalling attempts at granting “the rightful place to the Tamil language.” For him, nothing much distinguished these agitators from purist scholars engaged in translating scientific words to “chaste Sanskrit”; the same scholars who, he surmised, “treat[ed] the common man’s spoken Sinhalese as a vulgar language.”
A problem
Tissa Abeysekara once recalled the intellectual leap he made as an adolescent from Sirisena and Silva to Wickramasinghe; for him, it constituted no less than a transition from one sensibility to another. That the sensibility of the many, attuned to Sirisena’s nationalist-propagandist tracts and Silva’s romantic historiographies, did not make a similar transition to Wickramasinghe’s works tells us about the class composition, the class limitations, of those who read him and those who did not. It also tells us why Wickramasinghe’s output, prodigious as it was, enjoyed or suffered the same fate as Lester Peries’s films and Sarachchandra’s plays: while these objets courted the patronage of a nationalist intelligentsia, they did not shape a nationalist-modernist consciousness in Sri Lanka as much as Tagore and Yeats did in their respective societies.
Why not? I suggest that this has to do with the failure of the post-1956 generation to make the transition from a cultural ethos rooted on the one hand in exclusivist chauvinism and on the other in a servile, comprador modernity to an ethos that combined the best of both worlds. Chauvinists and pro-Western “modernisers” alike must, certainly, share the blame for this failure. Yet dishing the blame, whoever the guilty, is neither here nor there; the point isn’t so much that they failed as how this failure was reflected in their response to the cultural artefacts of 1956: Sarachchandra’s plays, Peries’s films, and Wickramasinghe’s novels.
The generation of 1956 which came to influence the course of politics – a largely Sinhala petty bourgeoisie, educated but unemployable – gave way to the generation of 1971 and 1989: two of the bloodiest years of our post-independence history. Their worldview remained far more insular than Wickramasinghe’s. Revolutionary in a facile way, yet upward aspiring and concerned with reforming society to suit their class interests, their cultural tastes naturally reflected their warped politics and perceptions of social change; the latter diverged significantly from the politics and perceptions of social change the pioneers of 1956 had envisioned in their works.
More than a difference of sensibility thus separated these pioneers of 1956 from the generation of 1956. Those who raised the revolutionary banner in 1971 and 1989 found more inspiration in the songs of Sunil Ariyaratne and Nanda Malini, the protests of Pavana, than the humanism of Wickramasinghe’s, Peries’s, and even Gunadasa Amarasekara’s works. In saying this I am by no means offering a critique; I am merely stating a fact, making a point.
Perhaps it was despair at these changes that moved Wickramasinghe to censure the rebels of 1971. I understand Wickramasinghe’s criticism of those rebels, just as I understand his feelings of repugnance at their insurrection. That leaves me with much to ponder; exactly half a century after the insurrection, reading through his novels, stories, and essays, poring over his comments on people and politics, on culture and society, I often wonder what 1956 would have become had it drunk from the waters of the cultural renaissance it ushered in, one which Wickramasinghe laid the groundwork for, instead of the rhetoric of revolution that overwhelmed it and turned it blood-red. 1956’s failure to become what it should have, what it represented, was in that sense a failure, not merely of cultural sensibilities, but more fundamentally, of national values.
(The writer can be reached at udakdev1@gmail.com)