The Island at 40

“We have turned into a cultural desert, the sort that Ananda Coomaraswamy warned against a hundred years or so ago ….

By Uditha Devapriya

The Island celebrates its 40th anniversary this year. By no means the oldest newspaper or publication in Sri Lanka, it is nevertheless by far the most intellectually stimulating of all the papers we have in this country. It was a favourite of Carlo Fonseka and Lester James Peries, both of whom swore by it in front of me. Dr Peries could never go without reading it, and Professor Carlo could never go without writing to it. A repository of facts, it has become a record of the country’s history. Its archival value is immense, which is why it is a pity one can’t delve into its past as much as one used to. As a writer, I have profited by it. So have millions of others. It is certainly an honour to be writing to it.

The history of The Island is at one level the history of the most transformative era Sri Lanka has witnessed and lived through. The paper began publication in 1981. Three years before, the most groundbreaking set of political, economic, and social changes had swept through the country, penetrating every corner and leaving no stone unturned.

The architect of this transformation, Sri Lanka’s first Executive President J. R. Jayewardene, summed up the zeitgeist of the era when he remarked that the only thing he could not do was to turn a man into a woman. One may not have agreed with what he was doing at the time, but then one could not be immune to it either. His reforms proved to be divisive, and in my opinion not a little flawed. But no one could help them, nor stop them.

I think it’s important to locate The Island in this specific historical context, for the simple reason that until it began publication there was no other large-scale independent paper in the country. The Left parties continued with their periodicals, and these were by and large influential – the circulation numbers of the Communist Party journal, Aththa, belied the fact that people passed the same copy of it around by the dozen – but in this new era, The Island proved to be a more influential source of opinion. Responding to the events of the day with much zest and enthusiasm, it became an alternative source of information. This was, after all, long, long before the advent of independent television and radio channels. Whatever its opinions regarding the political tumults of the day would have been, The Island proved itself more than equal to the task of covering ground everywhere.

How one approaches the times it began and the period in which it bloomed of course depends on how one views the politics of those times. For me, these were deeply divisive years. Censorship had become the order of the day and almost no one could, publicly, voice out their dissent to the way the country was being governed. If April 1971 proved that the State despite its veneer of confidence and security could be challenged by unarmed hordes, July 1980 showed that the State, with the “right people” at the top, could dispense with all norms of statesmanship and deploy unlimited powers against the Opposition. Against such a backdrop, it was only natural that the Opposition would fade away. Brutally beaten up and beaten back, anti-regime elements had no choice but to remain quiet.

The impact of such a state of affairs on the intellectual trajectory of the 1980s should not be underestimated. On the one hand, we saw what the Marxist scholar Aijaz Ahmad more or less was warning against: the migration of Third World intellectuals from the Marxist Left to an intellectual space that was ostensibly “Left” but in reality anti-Marxist (pundits would later call it post- or neo-Marxist; I think Samir Amin was right when he dismissed them all as anything but Marxist), and on the other, the migration of a nascent Sinhala middle-class to a chauvinist, communalist, and racialist ideology. I have already noted this in a two-part piece on Jathika Chintanaya I wrote for the Sunday Island not too long ago. Suffice it to say that while Marxist scholars shifted to the NGO-cracy, Sinhala nationalists, despaired of socialist politics yet opposed to the UNP regime, moved to nationalist spaces.

The Island provided an opportunity for both these groups to contribute to the discussion. It is here that its real contribution comes out. Despite the strictures placed on newspapers and journals, particularly those published by the Left parties, The Island continued to give much space to (ex?) Marxist and (Sinhala) nationalist ideologues, enabling a climate of debate and discussion that, I like to think, continues to this day. That it remains the only paper Nalin de Silva thought fit to contribute to in English certainly tells us a lot about how it was viewed by his peers and contemporaries back in the day. On the other hand, that de Silva’s ideological foe, the late and lamented Carlo Fonseka, also contributed to it, and regularly, tells us that it was hardly what one would call an ideological mouthpiece for a certain group.

Of course, the paper did not stop with the 1980s. It continued to wage campaign after campaign in the name of the country and the people of the country, though I rather doubt that it considered itself explicitly a crusader for the country’s and the people’s interests back then. The UNP regimes of the 1980s and the 1990s eventually gave way to the UPFA and the SLFP, coinciding with the shift of the new ruling parties from the Marxism of their early days to a Radical Centre. Of course, what it transformed into all depends on your perspective. Yet whatever that perspective may be, politics in the country never stopped evolving, as Laksiri Jayasuriya has informed us in his fine book on the subject. And through all those divisive and transformative times, The Island continued to stick to its role.

Easily the most intellectual of all mainstream papers we have now, The Island is a piece of living history. I can’t really count the number of historians, sociologists, anthropologists, and archaeologists, not to mention scientists, artists, and other scholars who have contributed to its pages. We are living in terrible times: not so much the economic crisis as the lack of an intellectual climate and a near absence of debates and discussions. We have turned into a cultural desert, the sort that Ananda Coomaraswamy warned against a hundred years or so ago. The Island is, perhaps, the only hope we have, and the only oasis along that desert. One only hopes that it doesn’t turn into a mirage.