Race or class: A critique of the Jathika Chintanaya (Part I)

Somewhere between adolescence and adulthood, from 18 to 21, I read Nalin de Silva. It was hard for anyone to miss him, especially anyone who read the Divaina and The Island. While I cannot remember when I read his first piece, I do remember that piece well: a polemic on the relevance of philosophy, science, mathematics, and English. What caught my attention was its ending. Reflecting on Arundhati Roy and Noam Chomsky, de Silva contended that had the Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan remained in Chennai without meeting the British mathematician G. H. Hardy, his contributions would have been more perennial.

For de Silva, philosophy remains a monopoly of the West, since for centuries the West had determined its trajectory, leaving the rest of humanity with very little to contribute to. In that sense, and in his estimation, Ramanujan erred: he should have continued to formulate his own theories, appealing to Namagiri Thayar in much the same way de Silva had appealed to Natha not too long ago, without seeking validation from a Westerner.

What I find interesting about the essay, characteristically didactic and pugnacious to the point of acute hostility, is what it reveals about the thinking behind not only the author, but more pertinently the ideology he spearheaded with Gunadasa Amarasekara four decades ago: the Jathika Chintanaya. It is also interesting in what it says about its foes: not just Arundhati Roy and Noam Chomsky, but the very idea of English education and Western culture.

What did de Silva think of science and philosophy, and of politics – domains which centuries ago remained bound together, and not cordoned off from one another like they are now – and what did he want to do with them? If for de Silva Ramanujan remained a failed intellectual – and there are many other intellectuals his contemporaries have deemed failures, based on the same criteria – who were his preferred scientists, artists, politicians? The more I searched for answers, the more questions I found and the more those answers evaded me. That does much credit, I suppose, to the amorphous appeal of the ideology he avers.

Looking at it in retrospect now, the Jathika Chintanaya achieved a great deal as an ideological outfit, even if it didn’t count many allies on its side. Yet it was hardly unique: various other outfits had cropped up, or were cropping up, in other parts of the world, at around the time it was coming into being in the 1980s. The Jathika Chintanaya represented a cultural response to economic forces; it evolved a cultural critique of neoliberalism and globalisation: issues of political provenance, but which, with the slow demise of the Left during the 1980s, turned into subjects of nationalist, specifically ethno-nationalist, polemics. Again, hardly unique to Sri Lanka: across much of Asia and even in Reagan’s USA, these debates were undergoing an epochal transition, from political economy to ethno-nationalist ideology.

To give due credit to these outfits is only fair: in its critique of such topical issues, the Jathika Chintanaya took the place of, and gained more credence than, the Marxist and post-Marxist outfits it ended up opposing. An anecdote would help here. Somewhere in the 1990s a Left politician confessed openly that there was no alternative to privatisation. At that time no less than the daughter of the country’s most prominent socialist head of state, elected president on a popular mandate, was going about preaching the virtues of free market economics. Yet only a few years earlier, Nalin de Silva had launched a campaign against Coca-Cola and Fanta in local universities, and had got involved in protests against the Kandalama Hotel.

I find these contrasts intriguing: a Marxist confessing to the wonders of globalisation and the inevitability of Marxism’s fading away, versus an avowed anti-Marxist protesting against the symbols of those wonders from a non-Marxist perspective. This contradiction, intriguing as is, becomes disconcerting when you explore it further. Since lack of space prevents me from delving into it in detail, I’ll concern myself with two pertinent issues, issues which reveal for me both the enduring appeal, and the inherent flaws, of the movement: firstly its relationship with the Left, and secondly its contradictory array of class interests.

The tenuousness of the Jathika Chintanaya’s relationship with the Old Left had a great deal to do the latter’s relationship with Sinhala nationalism, for by the late 1980s the Old Left had ceased to be of any concern or relevance to a burgeoning Sinhala Buddhist middle-class. The reason isn’t too hard to find. With Old Leftists seen to be either Indophile (given their support for the Indo-Lanka Accord) or integrated into foreign funded and NGO-driven civil society, vast swathes of a newly bourgeoisied middle-class, disillusioned with Marxism, converted from a radical cosmopolitan perspective to an insular communalist one.

To be sure, not everyone made this transition so deterministically or dramatically: there were some who took a longer ideological route, from the Old Left to the JVP and later to Sinhala nationalism. A few even stuck through the Old Left in spite of the Indo-Lanka Accord before turning to the nationalist Right. All in all, though, that transition remained the same for most: disillusionment with Marxists turning into disillusionment with Marxism itself.

It should be mentioned here that no less than Nalin de Silva began his political journey with that same Old Left, in a party that had as its founder a man who was later to praise the leader of the LTTE in public; a man ensconced today in the same party whose leader stripped him of an academic post, and blacklisted him, in the 1980s. Like Wordsworth pondering his youthful ardour over the French Revolution, de Silva eventually absolved himself of these associations by formulating and evolving a cultural critique of Marxism in toto.

It should also be acknowledged that the crisis of the Old Left predated the 1987 Accord. The crisis had its roots in the then government’s crackdown on trade unions, and its deployment of a brutal military-security apparatus to crush every real and imagined vestige of dissent. Yet despite this indisputable fact, nationalists see it differently; for them the Left’s crisis sprang from its siding with India, an act which “betrayed” its anti-nationalist character.

Race…

Such critiques of the (Old) Left did not materialise after the Indo-Lanka Accord. Gunadasa Amarasekara had made them years before with his Anagarika Dharmapala Marxvadiyekda?, in which he reflected on the links between Marxism and nationalism and lamented the failure of contemporary Marxists to maintain those historical links. What the Indo-Lanka Accord did was to provide a litmus test, a testing ground, for these critiques; having set up the Left as a straw man, the Jathika Chintanaya naturally saw in the support given by prominent Leftists to the Accord a confirmation of its fears, and suspicions, about Marxists.

Its response to India and the Old Left – and the Indophile section of the UNP, not to mention the fiercely nationalist SLFP-MEP – do not, however, explain its response to the JVP, i.e. the New Left. This is problematic when you consider the interests which brought these outfits together. Apart from the SLFP, the party most opposed to Indian intervention happened to be the JVP. The Jathika Chintanaya opposed it too, resorting to the same rhetoric vis-à-vis India: if not so chauvinistically, then certainly in the same communalist breath.

In fact the founders of Jathika Chintanaya went as far as to sympathise with the JVP (“a complex grouping of people representing thousands of rural youth who want socialism” was how Amarasekara saw them in 1988, before the peak of the second insurrection). Insofar as the JVP’s socialism cohered with the Jathika Chintanaya’s nationalism, a value congruency thus prevailed between the two (“We must give them every possible opportunity,” implored Amarasekara). Yet despite this congruency, the two never came together. Why not?

I suggest that this failure of consensus despite congruence has a great deal to do with the difference in tactic, strategy, indeed ideological grounding, between the JVP and the Jathika Chintanaya. When I pose the question as to why these groups could not reconcile and unify, the two most frequent responses I get from followers of the Jathika Chintanaya are, that the JVP resorted to violence antithetical to Sinhala Buddhist tenets during the insurrection, and that it has shed its Sinhala Buddhist character today. These represent two distinct failures of tactic and strategy from two distinct periods: back then and right now.

On the face of it, the Chintanawadi perspective is right: the JVP did engage in excesses which marginalise any sentiments condoning violence and group supremacy that the founders of the Jathika Chintanaya espoused back then, and it has through its entry into the democratic mainstream been co-opted today by a left-liberal intelligentsia, who for Sinhala nationalists remain as “anti-nationalist” as their Old Left counterparts from the 1980s. But this difference of ideological grounding between these groups does not in itself explain the failure to reach a consensus, and must not be assessed on its own. Instead it must be compared with the second of those points I highlighted earlier: the class composition of the Chintanawadeen.

To be continued…