Reflecting on Jathika Chintanaya

By Uditha Devapriya

Shanti Jayewardene’s fascinating study of Geoffrey Bawa discusses how art, culture, and knowledge have long been dominated by Western narratives and discourses. She charts Bawa’s evolution from colonial scion to national icon and questions his conceptions of art and architecture. She notes these as having been both hegemonic and anti-hegemonic.

Assessing Kandalama, for instance, she reflects on how it incorporated the aesthetics of Sigiriya and Buddhist giri monasteries while at the same time opening itself to allegations of disrupting and intruding on rural communities.

Jayewardene’s account is lucid, critical, and for the most, accurate. Most importantly, she undergirds her critique of Western paradigms of art and development with an equally fair critique of nativist responses to such paradigms.

In her introduction, for instance, she mentions several “modern intellectuals” in the early 20th century, who contributed in diverse ways to the formation of independent Sri Lanka. She distinguishes between those who led a revival through predominantly urban art forms such as theatre, and those who went inward to a Sinhala and Buddhist rural culture. Though the rural-urban binary can be crude and simplistic, she suggests that in Sri Lanka, both these strands were represented, if not dominated, by an urban intelligentsia.

In that sense, there is little in terms of social class and background that separates John de Silva from Anagarika Dharmapala, or from Gunadasa Amarasekara. But their visions for the country were hardly complementary. Amarasekara’s critique of S. W. R. D. Bandaranaike – that he imbibed Western liberal ideas too much to give impetus to a national movement– for instance, constitutes the Sinhala nationalist critique of modernity in Sri Lanka. I would even say it constitutes an alternative reading of cultural modernity, in contrast to the visions of nationhood and nationality offered by Bawa or Lionel Wendt.

These contrasting visions of nationhood and national development surfaced in the protests against Kandalama, the campaigns against multinational companies like Coca-Cola, and, in the early 2000s, the backlash against Valentine’s Day.

Many of these were spearheaded by Jathika Chintanaya, arguably the most influential nationalist intellectual group in Sri Lanka. It is important, at the outset, not to generalise on such movements, to distinguish between different phases, to trace their lineage and chart their evolution. Doing so would help us understand not just why they came to be, but also, controversial as it may seem, why they are still relevant.

In Sri Lanka, as pretty much everywhere else, nationalist groups were born of and from the conditions of their time. Almost all of them were formed in the 1980s, when the Left had decayed and lost its credibility across much of the Global South. Many of the earliest members of these groups themselves hailed from the Left. Their renunciation of the old faith constituted an intellectual rupture.

Lionel Wendt

From their class-centrism they turned to a culture-centric vision. As Dayan Jayatilleka has noted, this owed to the failure of the Old Left to adopt the rhetoric of anticolonial struggles like the Matale Uprising. Once the Left lost mass appeal, it was only inevitable that the nationalist right would step in.

Paradoxical as it may seem, these groups were founded and initially led by intellectuals who had benefitted from the same cultural modernism and cosmopolitanism they critiqued in their work. Gunadasa Amarasekara, who was felicitated at a grand ceremony last November at the BMICH – a venue Jayewardene describes as “a Sino-Lanka version of 1950s American modernism” – epitomised this tradition better than anyone else.

A product of Peradeniya, a student of dentistry who read and was influenced by Lawrence and Proust, he nevertheless renounced that tradition, in effect disowning it.

Ironically, it was this lineage which helped Amarasekara to mould Jathika Chintanaya into something more than just the crude nationalist outfit it is viewed as, and in many ways actually is, today. It is Amarasekara, more so than Nalin de Silva, who is the author of the modern Sinhala nationalist manifesto. At various times this manifesto has been borrowed and rewritten by different actors and groups: the Sihala Urumaya in the 1990s, the Jathika Hela Urumaya in the 2000s, the Bodu Bala Sena in the 2010s.

I notice a regression from the one to the other. While I remain critical of Jathika Chintanaya in general, I admit that, at its inception, it contained a clear intellectual undercurrent. Perhaps inevitably, that has now given way to a rabid irrationality, marked by a tendency to confront rather than engage with rivals. How so?

Gunadasa Amarasekara

Whatever one may say of it, in its first few years Jathika Chintanaya was determined by Amarasekara’s vision. His vision was different to not just Geoffrey Bawa’s or Lionel Wendt’s, but also Martin Wickramasinghe’s. In his preface to Gamanaka Mula, for instance, he critiqued Wickramasinghe for having focused on the colonial elite rather than the Sinhalese rural middle-classes: the petty bourgeoisie, in Marx’s formulation.

While Marx would have disparaged this class as symbols of “rural idiocy”, Amarasekara saw them as crucial to the nation’s development. There is much to disagree with this thesis. Today, the Sinhala middle-class he valorises have become culturally nationalist and socially compradorist. They are no longer bearers of the future, or sons of the soil.

But such ideas stood out in a way that most contemporary nationalist discourses do not. The reason is not that hard to find. In Sinhala nationalism as in national politics, there has been and continues to be an intellectual decline. The nationalist movement no longer produces authentic, creative thinkers. It has instead become trapped in its echo chambers, incapable of summoning any firepower. Put simply, it no longer has an Amarasekara capable of taking it forward; it is now going downhill all the way.

What is most ironic about this is that it is the very developments that nationalists champion as having emancipated Sri Lanka – the discontinuation of English and the enthronement of Sinhala – that have prevented the nationalists themselves from fully realising their potential. Amarasekara’s interventions in the 1980s were so relevant and profound not because he shied away from contemporary intellectual discourses, but rather because he was willing and able to engage with them. From Eric Fromm to Martin Jacques, from Huntington to Fukuyama, Amarasekara chose to reflect on the writings on Western intellectuals, trying to understand the frontiers, and limits, of their work.

It is the lack of willingness to engage, the lack of capacity to absorb what is called “modern knowledge”, that has stunted the growth of the nationalist movement. The independence struggles of other countries and societies flowered so well because they had intellectuals who engaged with their rivals. Sri Lanka did not reach this potential, still less achieve it: it produced no Frantz Fanons, because its elites were too subservient or, as bad, because they searched too much inward. We refused to stick to a golden mean, the so-called middle path, and in doing so ruptured from within, becoming intellectually sterile.

This, in a nutshell, is our national tragedy.

Jayewardene ends her study of Bawa by imploring artists and intellectuals to not just think, but act: to do, and not merely be. She argues that we must subvert Eurocentric knowledge, not by critiquing it and leaving it at that, but by recognising that “local forms of modernity” were never overwhelmed or “submerged” by the West: in effect, that we possessed a form of modernity of our own, moulded by our past.

Despite my disagreement with and critique of Jathika Chintanaya, I believe that during their early years, they tried to do just that. This is no longer the case.

In that sense, I think Shanti Jayewardene should follow up her work on Bawa with one on Amarasekara. Amarasekara’s vision, to be sure, could not have been more different to Bawa’s. Yet it compels us to think radically about the country, its heritage, and its future, just as Bawa did – and just as nationalists today do not.

The writer is an international relations analyst, independent researcher, and freelance columnist who can be reached at udakdev1@gmail.com.