The playwright and the novelist

Notes on culture:

By Uditha Devapriya

Sir Chittampalam Gardiner was a man to be reckoned with. With a sure eye for what would work and what wouldn’t, he had built a sprawling empire in the movie industry. By instinct he knew what people wanted, the kind of tastes they pandered to.

Movies meant big business those days. They invariably conformed to a certain pattern: men and women chasing after one another through song and dance, heroes and villains facing each other in a final skirmish, good triumphing over evil, innocence over cynicism. Primitive though they may have been, these nevertheless determined the fortunes of directors, actors, and technicians. As such they stuck to the same formula, and gave audiences more of the same. Gardiner knew this, and hence knew which horse to back.

Lester James Peries’s first encounter with Gardiner has to be situated in this context. Chitra Lanka, the “company” Lester and his acolytes had set up for his debut, Rekava, needed money. They had no one else to turn to. Thus with six reels of film in a bag, they went to meet Gardiner and his wife at the Regal, on “a dreary dismal morning.” In the darkness of the hall, no one said a word when they projected the film. They were nervous. If he said no, they had nothing else to do but wrap up production.

After much rising of tension, they sighed with inexorable relief as Gardiner asked them to come up to his office. There, beside Lady Gardiner, he wrote a cheque for Rs. 125,000 for the three mavericks: Lester, Willie Blake, and Titus Thotawatte. Not a particularly bulky man, he was nevertheless wont to making papal pronouncements. He chose this moment to make one of them: “I have just seen,” he declared, “the finest Sinhalese film ever made.” Lester’s heart fluttered: could it be that that the biggest movie mogul of Sri Lanka had liked Rekava that much? Apparently not: “Do you know that Seda Sulang will be an all time great?” he asked them quixotically. He had seen it in Madras a few days earlier.

The cultural renaissance which flowered in 1950s Sri Lanka took time to make itself felt in the cinema, and Gardiner’s comment in its own way proves it. Both Sarachchandra and Martin Wickramasinghe had made their mark years before Lester James Peries returned to Sri Lanka. Wickramasinghe had by then been acknowledged as the man of letters in, and of, the country, as much as Faulkner and Steinbeck, through their stories of rural society, had in the United States. Sarachchandra, who rated Wickramasinghe’s work highly in The Sinhalese Novel, had begun to experiment more boldly onstage, seeking inspiration in not just kabuki, but also Sinhala and South Indian folk drama.

In order to do justice to Lester Peries’s contribution to the cinema, we must juxtapose the playwright with the novelist. It is in the confluence of their worldviews, as different as they may have been, that we see the renaissance of the 1950s run its course and reach its peak, thereby shaping the trajectory of the cinema.

By the turn of the century, the theatre had found a receptive audience among sections of the urban working class and petty trading class. Its literary equivalent was to be found in the novels of Piyadasa Sirisena, under whom the written word became a tool of propaganda for Sinhala nationalism. The Sinhala stage – really a hybrid one, representing a melange of Parsi and rural folk drama – became Janus-faced: it valorised traditional values while subscribing to a colonial reconstruction of the past. Thus John de Silva’s Sri Wickrama Rajasinghe, while celebrating the heroism and martyrdom of Madduma Bandara and Ehelepola Kumarihamy, made no mention of the defection of their patriarch to British territory, and transformed the king into a non-Sinhala and anti-Buddhist pretender.

Sinhala nationalism, the ideology of small time traders, merchants, and vast swathes of the urban working class, became rooted for a while in these plays. As Frantz Fanon has observed, “[t]he history of national liberation struggles shows that generally these struggles are preceded by an increase in expressions of culture.”

This proved to be true of the small time trading class espousing anti-imperialism: the seeds of their opposition could be found more at the Tower Hall than at the Legislative Council. Their mode of protest remained at best a cultural affair, though as the case of Anagarika Dharmapala (a scion of a family of merchants) showed, such protests could go beyond a cultural framework and question the very basis of colonial rule.

What then of the novel? We need to examine its evolution in the West. Ian Watt, in The Rise of the Novel, argued that as a mode of narrative the novel was rooted in the emergence of the bourgeoisie; it’s more than just symbolic, after all, that it established itself definitively in 1847 and 1848, a period of unending revolution throughout the continent.

Edward Said would take up this argument in Culture and Imperialism decades later. Regi Siriwardena, however, disagreed. In a largely negative review of Said’s book, he argued that inasmuch as the bourgeoisie contributed to the growth of the novel, it gained popularity at the same time in societies where the aristocracy still held sway, the most obvious example being 18th century France. Siriwardena fails, in my opinion, to make a distinction between the evolution and the popularisation of the novel; either way, there’s no denying the role of the bourgeoisie in the West in the growth of narrative fiction.

The development of the novel, as with the theatre, played out differently in countries like Sri Lanka. Under conditions of plantation colonialism, newspapers and periodicals came to be owned by a Sinhala petty bourgeoisie on the one hand and European businessmen on the other, though a rentier elite later took over: D. R. Wijewardene, for instance, bought the Dinamina in 1914 from a Sinhala scholar five years after it had been started.

Nine years before WIjewardene’s takeover, A. Simon de Silva had written Meena, reputedly the first Sinhalese novel; a tale of love and intrigue, it had little in common with the later endeavours of W. A. Silva and Piyadasa Sirisena. The latter, for their part, popularised fiction among the same crowd patronising urbanised Nurti productions, and went beyond the likes of John de Silva by appealing to a rural middle class as well.

How the pioneers of the theatre and the novel in 20th century Sri Lanka – Sarachchandra and Wickramasinghe – diverged from these trends is the subject of much conjecture. In their contrasting attitudes to the culture that underpinned their art, we see the paradox at the heart of the renaissance of the 1950s: like all cultural revivals, it took off from the past, yet had to be anchored in the future. Both playwright and novelist understood this duality, but at the same time their approach to it contradicted one another’s.

On the one hand there was Sarachchandra, who saw the Sinhala village as split between two worlds: that of ritual and that of religion. The two, he noted, could never come together. Far from enriching the performing arts, he felt that Theravada Buddhism contributed to their stagnation, and valorised a Sanskritised culture: one sees this even in his characterisation of temple art as narrative rather than emotive.

Like Ananda Coomaraswamy quoting the Culavagga, Dasadhamma Sutta, and Visuddhi Magga in support of his contention that Buddhism ignored the arts, Sarachchandra would view the resuscitation of folk drama and the revival of Buddhism as two different goals. It is ironic that a playwright who went, in much of his plays, for Buddhist parables should reprove religious ideology this way, but it is clear that his vision of the cultural revival pitted him against those who sought in that ideology the wellsprings of the revival.

On the other hand, there was Wickramasinghe, who championed a lesser literary tradition which had laid emphasis on popular, emotional, anti-Brahmanical Buddhism. He debunked Coomaraswamy’s thesis, and like Walpola Rahula claimed that Buddhism encouraged even men of the cloth to engage in cultural pursuits. Making a distinction between amusement and genuine art, he acknowledged the role played by the Buddhist temple in the flowering of the latter. For him, the Sanskritised Sinhala that scholars like Sarachchandra defended in the wake of “Sinhala Only” meant nothing to the ordinary man; on that basis, he defended those who agitated for parity of status for Tamil, accusing the monks who held protests against S. W. R. D. Bandaranaike’s proposal for the reasonable use of it of having “[t]reated the common man’s spoken Sinhalese as a vulgar language.”

Thus Sarachchandra’s ideal was oriented fundamentally to a ritualistic past rooted in a Brahmanical, Sanskritised tradition. While dismissive of Nurti, he sought to improve on it by incorporating the Buddhist parable with folk drama. Wickramasinghe’s ideal, by contrast, was oriented to a religious past devoid of Brahmanical trappings. In the realm of theatre, until a decade or so later, Sarachchandra’s ideal held sway; in the realm of literature, again until a decade or so later, it was Wickramasinghe’s that did.

When Chittampalam Gardiner raved about Seda Sulang to Lester James Peries, who was much, much younger than either of these cultural giants, the cinema had resisted these ideals. If in their conception of culture Sarachchandra differed from Wickramasinghe, in their critique of bioscope they were more or less alike. They relegated it as an amusement art, a point Sarachchandra underscored when he described Gamperaliya, a film he very much liked, as an opa pathika or a sui generis objet d’art.

Offering a critique of this thesis, Tissa Abeysekara argued that the cinema in Sri Lanka, no doubt epitomised by Lester, underwent the same cultural transformation that the theatre and the novel did. More Christianised than Sarachchandra, and certainly less rooted in the past than him or Wickramasinghe, Peries, not unlike much of the “43 Group” of which his brother, Ivan, had been a founding member, resorted to the visual arts to compensate for his linguistic handicap: just as Ivan had painted, he would film. There could thus be nothing opa pathika about the work he was engaged in; it was rooted, as much as Sarachchandra’s plays and Wickramasinghe’s novels had been, in the cultural revival.

The cinema has been faulted, rightly, as the most Western of all arts; it still hasn’t been “Easternised”, not even by the looming figures of Akira Kurosawa and Satyajit Ray. In Sri Lanka as in Japan and India, it had to seek inspiration from two art forms rooted in the past. The purveyors of these art forms here both looked to the past, but their conception of it, though ostensibly similar, radically differed from one another. Gardiner may have preferred Seda Sulang to anything Peries could come up with, yet by the end of the decade and the beginning of the next, the revival that Sarachchandra and Wickramasinghe had unleashed would find its way to the cinema hall. To these two cultural giants, and to their contrasting attitudes to tradition, Peries thus owes more a considerable debt.

The writer can be reached at udakdev1@gmail.com