Mahinda Rajapaksa's fringe factor

D. B. S. Jeyaraj, writing on the meeting between Mahinda Rajapaksa and Maithripala Sirisena held around three weeks ago, suggests that in the coming weeks, G. L. Peiris, the de jure leader of the Joint Opposition, will hand over power to Rajapaksa, the de facto leader. This will, he further opines, give the man enough clout to negotiate and, presumably, to settle those personality clashes that have widened the rifts within the Podu Jana Peramuna. All things considered, these three months hence will probably be determined by the moves the Joint Opposition makes and the retaliatory measures the United National Party takes. In that sense, the tête-à-tête between the president and his erstwhile rival is both an expedient move and an exercise in futility.

That the Joint Opposition is nothing without the Rajapaksas, everyone knows. G. L. Peiris is the most eloquent parliamentarian we have, but eloquence, no matter how much of an advantage it may be inside parliament, pales in comparison to popularity from outside that hallowed institution. It is of course convenient to say that the SLPP doesn't have much of a presence within the confines of the Diyawanna Oya and that what little parliamentary prestige it has managed to conjure up for itself has been due to the Rajapaksa Factor. And yet, that is the truth.

Given these reduced circumstances, what is out there for the SLPP?

In 2015, the dichotomies were clear: the SLFP and the UNP on one side, the Rajapaksa Proxies on another, the JVP and the TNA on yet another. When the TNA took over the Opposition and the leader of the JVP became Chief Opposition Whip, those were reduced to two: those for the Rajapaksas and those against them.

What 2015 did was create a gulf between parliamentary prestige and populist protest. The lack of disregard for parliamentary procedure, the emphasis on rhetoric over substance, and the demonstrations against the legislature (as an institution, not just a party-driven political body) echoed and spearheaded by the JO made it clear that the real fight was between the MPs, who had been elected, and the stalwarts of the old order, who were being supported on the sidelines. There was a fatal rift, for the latter, between numerical strength and popular appeal. That rift continues even today.

The Rajapaksas were smart. They still are. With each of the three main brothers, the organisers of their party sought to appeal to three different interests. Mahinda's appeal was with the rural peasantry. Gotabaya's appeal was with what I alluded to in certain articles last year as the "professional nationalists", the milieu which had supported the Hela Urumaya and was now disenchanted with the likes of Champika Ranawa. Basil's appeal, on the other hand, was with a business class touted as "nationalist" by some, but which in reality idealised a blend of ruthless authoritarianism and efficiency that the Rajapaksas as a whole (allegedly) stood for. In other words, Mahinda would get the village, Gotabaya would get the suburbs around Colombo, and Basil would plan out everything with business moguls and financiers.

Obviously, this formula did not and could not work in a context where people looked up to the policies of the current government and their implementation by them. From 2015 to the latter half of 2016, those who had idealised the government on the basis of how it privileged policy over rhetoric really believed it could deliver. That was why, when Ranil Wickremesinghe and his cohorts contended that Sri Lanka was in danger of falling into a middle income trap and the Rajapaksas had empowered the middle class without setting barricades against the inflationary pressures this would result in, we placed our faith in the Cabinet he and the President had formed.

But then, somewhere in 2017, that rift between mass popularity and parliamentary presence began to work the other way around, FOR the JO.

It began when the people realised that the current government wasn't implementing those policies it had harped on about, and was content in spreading their gospel. A population that had been taught about good governance, constitutional reforms, and sanhindiyawa began to grow tired. The middle class, the force behind the campaign to get Maithripala Sirisena elected, shifted gears. It had had taken a risk and rooted for a maverick, when traditionally it had privileged stability and continuity. That maverick had clipped his own powers and handed over the legislature to a party that had NOT won a mandate to govern from that institution. Worse, his program, overseen by that very same party, had begun to unravel itself badly.

Our middle class thus did what it was destined to do. Hedge its bets on the only movement that could take us back to the way things were. That movement was not the JVP. It was not the TNA, the JHU, or for that matter the Frontline Socialist Party. It was the Joint Opposition. Having rebranded itself as the Podu Jana Peramuna, it thus soon began to capture the middle class, hitherto the preserve of the UNP and, at least with respect to its more nationalist segment, the Hela Urumaya.

The apathy of the government, the even more pathetic apathy of the Opposition (to call it an Opposition would be to insult the legacy of poorly equipped Oppositions the UNP bequeathed to this country during the Rajapaksa years), and the silence of those ideologues hostile to the Rajapaksas and their brand of nationalism all conspired to empower the SLPP to get in more and more of this particular demographic.

The mainstream polity ridiculed the Joint Opposition and the SLPP for not having the numbers. That is a problem it is still afflicted with. But as the local elections showed, parliamentary presence can be a poor barricade against popular revolt.

It took an entire week for the storm that the SLPP's upset victory compelled to go away. A complacent government that had prepared itself for an insignificant margin of defeat (even those rooting for the Podu Jana Peramuna prepared themselves for a UNP victory) saw the front against the Rajapaksas that had held them together wear away, and eventually collapse. Never again would the President and the Prime Minister look at each other. After their clash, each would let it out that the other would be nothing without him politically: the Prime Minister, because he had to depend on the President for his return to the parliament; the President, because without the UNP, he could not have been the common candidate. Talk about the power of fringe parties!

There was another factor. The rise of the Alt-Right. Whether or not commentators are correct in terming Gotabaya Rajapaksa a neo-fascist who should be condemned on the same terms that (neo)liberals condemn Hitler and Caligula with, there's no denying that Donald Trump, Nigel Farage, and Boris Johnson made it possible for people to see things differently. The world, until then, had been largely determined by globalist financiers who supported centrists no different to the warmongers they were opposed to (a claim made not just by right wing conspiracy theorists and outfits like Breitbart, by the way). A world in which Obama was championed as a President for Peace thus grew disenchanted when, even with the hullaballoo against Donald Trump, it became evident this peace-loving leader of the free world had vastly expanded his country's drone program. The movement against the interests he stood for, predictably, emerged from outside the Congress, even outside the Republican Party. What happened later, to both ends of the mainstream political spectrum, we know by now.

What does all this amount to? One simple truism: the people have lost faith in the traditional institutions. In 2015, the momentum around the world was such that it was inconceivable that people could vote for a Donald Trump. The faith reposed on the three arms of the state, so strong then, was a legacy of the liberal tradition of the West, the same tradition the UNP sought to impose here in the name of democracy, freedom, and a better deal for everyone. In the end, tragically, all that failed.

The rift between fringe popularity and parliamentary presence befitted the political establishment in a world where liberalism trumped everything else. But we live in different times. Now the momentum is with those who exist outside the parliament. It is with those who can compensate for lack of parliamentary prestige with numbers drawn from outside the legislature. For now at least, that momentum belongs to the SLPP. And behind them, supporting them, there is, not the peasantry the Rajapaksas have always counted on, but a terribly disillusioned middle class.

Written for: Daily Mirror, October 19, 2018

TV Royal: Making the waves

I missed SPARK. Sure, I missed and continue to miss a whole lot of plays, films, and other events and this due to the fact that I hardly find the time and what little time I get tends to be spent (or wasted) doing nothing. And yet, SPARK was special. At a time when the government is emphasising on the importance of fostering innovation and creativity, the event, organised by Royal College and held from September 25 to 28, was a veritable exhibition (or an "Innovation Expo") showcasing what a typical student (more than 100,000 students from over 500 schools took part), given enough leeway, could do with what he picks up from his studies. It was one of a kind, though not unprecedented, and it was representative of the country.

On Day Three at the College Hall, an announcement was made and a website was launched. Both had to do with the inauguration of a TV Channel, unconnected to the Expo. Well, SPARK is gone and I am sad to say that I missed it. But that channel, TV Royal, is yet to make the waves. It will be aired on October 26, 27, and 28 (Friday, Saturday, and Sunday) on PEO TV. It will air pre-scripted episodes, live streamed events, even a short film competition. Sure, it has nothing to do with SPARK. But it has everything to do with the spirit of innovation that SPARK stood for.

People have preferences. This is known. And this applies to the media. Television used to be about storytelling, documentaries, and creative advertising. Now it is about crass mega series, propaganda pieces, and senseless 30 second spots that neither grab attention nor relay a coherent message. And yet, that's what people demand.

I'm guessing that most of us want to wade through what little free time we get after school or work with programs that are easy on the eyes. That is how mega serials have become a huge market. That is how Poya Day serials, so memorable back then, have become so bowdlerised now. Banality is the name of the game here, and programmers aren't just cautious about treading on new territory, they are terrified. It took years and years for the team behind Koombiyo to get it on the air after all, let's not forget.

TV Royal fulfils two aims. The first, Kaif Sally, one of the two organisers behind the project, told me, is "selfish". There are at present 48 clubs and societies extending to almost every field of activity, from astronomy to zoology, at Royal. As Kaif put it, "they are drawn to the competition that results from the pressure of proving that your club is better than your friend's." For this reason, TV Royal will attempt to bring out the sense of kinship between them.

The second aim, which I am interested in, is "selfless", and it entails "setting a trend" for other schools to follow. To put it more succinctly, this is the first time that a school here will telecast its own channel. "We do not want to set a precedent and then prevent others from matching that precedent. We want them to equal us, do better than us, and along the way, reinvigorate the concept of media units in the country."

The problem, as he points out, is that there is a serious dearth of such media units in Sri Lanka. The way I see it, this is buttressed by the lack of three things: equipment, interest among the students, and a set of media competitions.

It is not that schools, even those outside Colombo, lack willpower. Just three months ago, for instance, St Anne's College, Kurunegala organised "Sanvidha Sanjani" (which I missed, though for reasons of health), which delved into several facets of the media, from broadcasting to scriptwriting. But such events are more the exception than the norm ("Sanvidha" was held after a long time) and they depend, for the most, on the interest of a student or a group of students. That is the issue that TV Royal is trying to resolve, just as SPARK tried to resolve (in its own special way) the virtual absence of a culture of innovation in our students. To this end, a brief note on the organisers, the episodes, and the objective that the project is set to achieve, is called for.

TV Royal is the brainchild of one institution. MURC. That's the Media Unit of Royal College. It is unique, not only because of the resources it and the school it is affiliated to are endowed with, but also because it has managed to "step out" to. Established in 2001, it traces its beginnings to the late 1990s, when the Sinhala Literary Association went beyond its comfort zone and set up an "unofficial" media unit that facilitated news broadcasts. "We were limited in what we did when we started out. It was all about announcing. After 2007, we moved. We 'embraced' photography. Videography. Graphic designing. And live streaming." All these boil down to four outfits: the News Team, the Video Crew, MURC Creatives (covering everything from photography to event management), and Le Postre (something of a talent agency that enables students to take their creativity beyond the school).

Today, MURC is everything a media company can be. It organises workshops every year and practically every month, to select and groom students who wish to engage in the media. Be it graphic designing or photography or even announcing, the process is the same: the senior selects the students who then "become" his understudies. This system, despite its share of flaws, works. It works because, as Kaif tells me, seniors are shrewd enough to pick students who exhibit merit. It is this intricate relationship, between seniors and juniors, that found its way to TV Royal: mooted in 2014 by the MURC Board, it became the "idea of the year" four years later, THIS year, for Kaif and the other main organiser, Abdul Rizvie.

In essence, the project, budgeted at five million rupees, will involve 10 directors, 22 managers (that is, the chairmen of the clubs and societies), and around 40 or 50 crew members. As Abdul puts it, "it is easier to think of a television line-up than to actually plan one", which is probably why, even with the involvement of so many young professionals, there have been edits, cuts, and inordinate delays.

Each episode will be 30 minutes long. They will be broadcast later on YouTube. Apart from those dedicated to current events, there will be episodes on history, the buildings within the school, the spaces they have occupied over the years. Nostalgic, yes, and also in-house. For that reason, I am more interested in the episodes that will be about the world beyond those buildings and spaces. In other words, those which will be about the projects of the clubs and societies.

Some of the most interesting social processes play out in our schools. For obvious reasons. Students make up a significant demographic. They represent the ecology of their societies. They determine the trajectory of their country. Whoever contends that schools thrive on a way of life divorced from the reality outside them, then, is telling half the story. There is always some relevance in what school bodies engage with, no matter how insular the institution they are affiliated to may be, or may get.

TV Royal will highlight these bodies. There is the Scouts Association. The Western Orchestra. The Oriental Music Society. The Red Cross Society. And the Library Readers' Association. These are not the only clubs, but with what little time I had, I only managed to talk with their chairmen.

The Scouts will feature a "hike" across Mandaram Nuwara. The Orchestra will feature some Western classical pieces and English songs and a recounting of their history. The Oriental Music Society will feature some old Sinhala songs (from "Sanda Hiru Tharu " to "Mage Punchi Rosa Male") and a "reading" of their lyrics. The Red Cross Society, with the Sri Lanka Wildlife Conservation Project, will feature the elephant-human conflict and one innovative way through which it can be resolved (a hint: "pani dodam"). The Library Readers' Association will feature a certain writer and a montage of clips on the world of literature. These clubs and projects are "in-house", but at the same time, they are about things that exist outside their walls, their perimeters.

These are children. Students. Still in school. Most of them will be sitting for their A Levels next year. Most of them have found ways of "marketing" their passions. A few, very few, have planned out a life after A Levels holding on to those passions. MURC has helped them considerably, of this we can be sure.

Sahan Kithmina, Chairman of the Readers' Association, summed up for me what he wanted to do with his society: "Api ramuwen eliyata yanna oni." In other words, get out of the frame. The same can be said of the projects, going beyond the four walls of an institution, that the other clubs will indulge in. I'm guessing it will be "easy on the eyes". But I'm also guessing it will offer a veritable "alternative" to what television, so long in the hands of crass commercialists and profiteers, have offered or ever will offer. So no, I won't miss it. Not for the world.

Written for: Daily Mirror, October 16 2018

History is version, or 'The English and Their History'

A partial review of Robert Tombs's The English and Their History.

History is version. I remembered this as I read through three books: Orlando Figes's A People's Tragedy, Peter Conradi's Who Lost Russia, and Robert Tombs's The English and Their History. The first two made me realise that, when it comes to the Russian Revolution and Russia in general, Western scholars are not merely divided, they are confused. Figes's treatment of the event is probably the most widely read in the post-Soviet era, but even he gets certain facts muddled up. (Case in point: did the Soviet delegation to the Brest-Litovsk Treaty really compel a random peasant to come with them for the negotiations, as he points out?) As for Conradi's account, it is typical of the anti-Putin diatribes that scholars have been writing for years. The National Review puts it best: "The West misread Russia in the 1990s." Well, so did Conradi, the Review, and every other scholar.

Both Figes and Conradi tackle a particular period. Robert Tombs, on the other hand, tackles an entire civilisation. England being England, the "largest nation in Europe to lack a state of its own" (David Frum), there are enough and more historical realities and anecdotes that should make up a multifarious account of that civilisation. The role of the country in the slave trade, the colonialist enterprise, and the subjugation of its own people (particularly the Irish) would fill up any history book.

And yet, beautifully written though his treatment is, Tombs avoids these hard facts and conjures an alternative history in which the governments wanted to do away with slavery, ameliorate the evils of imperialism, and spread the spirit of charity among its less privileged citizens and brethren. History is version? You bet!

Is The English and Their History, as detractors may suggest, a "patriotic history of England"? Or is it, as David Frum suggests, a "systematic refutation of the most familiar lines of indictment"? Frum argues that it is no polemic, "not even an anti-polemic", which means that the objective is not to propagate a view, no matter how orthodox or unconventional. In three areas, however, Tombs becomes a revisionist: the slave trade, the state of the proletariat during the Industrial Revolution, and the response of the British government to the Irish Famine.

Tombs, when setting the record straight on these three events, refutes the orthodox accounts and their writers: the Abolitionists, the Marxists, the Irish Nationalists. From 1815 to 1850, the heyday of Dickensian England, for instance, the English experience was, for the likes of William Morris, William Blake, Arnold Toynbee, and Friedrich Engels, one of drudgery and unbearable poverty. In contrast to them, Tombs observes that drudgery and poverty in the slums of London, Liverpool, and Manchester was borne, not out of the Industrial Revolution, but of rapid, unplanned urbanisation. He takes on Engels's conventionally accepted work on The Working Class of England and writes against its pessimism, arguing that "an 1860s survey found 95 per cent of houses in Hull and 72 per cent in Manchester to be 'comfortable'."

These are assertions, and their sources hold water in roughly the same way that most of Figes's sources in A People's Tragedy do: that is to say, they reflect the particular, peculiar views of certain historians. That 1860s survey, for instance, was taken from Michael Mason's The Making of Victorian Sexuality, which refutes the view that Victorian England was a haven of prudery and hypocrisy; in Masons's eyes, at least, it was "in reality a code intelligently embraced by wealthy and poor alike as part of a humane and progressive vision of society's future."

I find that description hard to swallow, given that much of Sri Lanka's laws relating to marriage and divorce stem from Victorian morals. The Penal Code's hostility towards homosexuality, for instance, is at odds with the flowering of gay rights in 19th century Germany. To be sure, the German legal system also forbade relations between males (especially after the German Empire was unified in 1871), but German doctors, in stark contrast to their British counterparts, pioneered research which concluded that homosexuality "should not be viewed as a psychic depravity or sickness."

In Sri Lanka, of course, homosexuality remains a depravity and sickness. The Penal Code was enacted in 1883. Sections 365 and 365A criminalises relations between the same gender, with a term of imprisonment of two years. It is hard to conclude that these reflected the ethos of the civilisation on which it was imposed, given that a) the Code was a watered down version of its Indian equivalent, enacted almost a quarter century before, and b) it was a legal expression of a way of thinking that succeeded a period of capitalist accumulation in the country of its origin.

It was during Victorian England that vast strides were made in urban planning (a "stupendous effort in bricks and mortar", as Tombs puts it). It was an attempt at unifying different classes after the clashes between the bourgeoisie and proletariat that had characterised the period from 1815 to 1850. Whether or not the attempt worked, there's no denying that during this pivotal era, prosperity met with prudery, and the two joined hands. The result was a body of law which has never since been equalled in its universality and sexual hypocrisy. India, more populous than us, managed to move away from it. Sri Lanka, on the other hand, remains bonded to it.

Tombs's book is both an alternative and a watered down account of history. Personally, I believe it is relevant even to Sri Lankan historians, because it paints a picture of colonialism and exploitation which is at once deceptively self-evident and distorted. On the slave trade, for instance, Tombs argues that there was a sustained campaign led against it by the British state, which culminated with the enactment of the Slavery Abolition Act of 1834. A closer examination of this piece of legislation, its historical antecedents, and its ramifications for a world in which the balance of power had shifted to the other side of the Atlantic are called for, I rather think.

The British state, which passed the Abolition Act in the 19th century, competed fiercely with the French and the Portuguese over the slave trade in the 17th and 18th centuries. Slavery was not born in England, nor was it a Western creation: as Tombs points out, between 1530 and 1640, more than one million European civilians were kidnapped and sold by Arab raiders in the Middle East. But the difference with the British slave trade, and indeed the European slave trade in general, was that it was systematic, brutal, and carefully planned out. It was an institution, not a practice.

Tombs's argument is that to view the Atlantic slave trade purely in terms of British involvement would be unfair, given that it was a joint effort between European buyers and African sellers. This is no different to the assertion that the British didn't conquer countries like ours, rather we let them conquer us, because the rulers we had were too cruel. Yes, collaboration does presuppose collusion, and the fact is that the slave trade was the result of an agreement between the exploiter and the exploited. Still.

To the writer's credit, he minces no words in depicting the horrors of slavery. But the end of it, oppressive as the institution of slavery was (the campaign against it became "the most important humanitarian campaign in English history") did not spell out the end of exploitation. On the contrary, its end was the result of two distinct yet related realities: the fear of the British ruling class of Africans becoming their competitors, and the shift to colonialism in Asia. It is significant to note here that the Abolition Act excluded from its ambit the "Territories in the Possession of the East India Company", which included India and Sri Lanka. The British may have been magnanimous, but they were hardly saints.

The truth was that the slave trade was indispensible to the accumulation of capital in Western civilisation. No matter how well intentioned the Abolitionists were, no matter how effective their campaigns may have been, there was a range of factors which had a say in the enactment of the Abolition Act, among them the emergence of America as the centre of Western power. It wouldn't be until 40 years later when the United States passed its own Abolition Act in the form of the 13th Amendment, but then, even with the advent of the Civil War, which according to certain romantic historians "freed" the slaves, slavery was never completely abolished: it was changed and it continued in the form of segregation, right until the Civil Rights Movement.

So what do we gain from these assertions, Tombs's and mine? The awful truth: that the history of the struggle against imperialism has almost always been underscored by considerations of realpolitik. The British may have been underrated in their love of humanity. But saints they were not.

Written for: Ceylon Today ECHO, October 21 2018

Debating beyond force and foes

Not every talker is a debater and not every debater is a talker, I've noticed. Talk is cheap. Debating, on the other hand, is a completely different kettle of fish. While the one and the other do meet in and enter everyday conversations and tournaments, they are not the same, because debating is a craft, an art in fact, which requires tremendous reserves of concentration, creativity, and energy. That, plus the fact that while anyone can butt in and give their two cents on a given topic, a debate entails something much more: a seasoned encounter between two camps opposed to one another based on a given subject. This is true for English debating and it is also true for Tamil and Sinhala debating because the latter two have more or less evolved via the history of the former. This article, incidentally, is about Sinhala debating.

Pasindu Madhusanka, Mino Gallawatta, Ridma Raveen, and Navod Nethma are four active debaters attached to the society of their school, Royal College. The Sinhala Debating and Oratory Society, as it's known there, evolved as an appendage of sorts to the Sinhala Literary Association and broke away to venture on its own path, as an independent entity, in 2001. Among its most active participants and chairmen in the past, I can name Nalin de Silva (yes, THAT Nalin de Silva), the late A. V. Suraweera, and Prathiba Mahanama Hewa, who all happen to come from different fields. Such details, interesting as they are to me, nevertheless pale away when considering the trajectory it and various other school clubs around the country are following and how it has unearthed the true nature of Sinhala debating as a craft. This is therefore not a detailed recounting of the society, rather a delineation of those active in the society.

Pasindu, this year's Captain, spoke first. "There are some erroneous views regarding this field which we've tried to get rid of. For instance, the view that Sinhala debating is all hot air and depends more on force than facts. That is not true. Speaking for our society, we privilege facts over force and have come to realise that shouting for the sake of winning over judges will get you nowhere." Ridma interjected here: "The biggest lesson you can draw from being a debater, in whatever language, is that there's a time to shout and a time to sober down." I got their point immediately: if we are to talk about this topic, controversial as it is, we have to talk about how debaters evolve and graduate and what they learn about wielding rhetoric.

A typical Sinhala debate includes four debaters. Marks are allocated on two criteria, the way you present and the way you break your contender's points. "The Captain is allocated 60 marks for only his presentation, while the split between the two criteria for the second speaker is 40-20, the 3rd speaker is 30-30, and the fourth speaker is 20-40. The rest of the marks come from the style of your delivery, or vaag vilashaya, and your body language, or anga chalanaya," Pasindu informed me, adding that having counted in more than 340 debates (a whopping portfolio) he has ascertained that there's no easy way for a debater to evolve. This brings him, and me, to how he and his colleagues managed to break away those myths regarding what they are doing.

Before that though, how they got to the Society is pertinent. In Pasindu, Ridma, and Navod, I infer three routes through which one enters the Club. With Pasindu, it was a teacher who recognised his voice for its persuasive, stentorian qualities (she happened to be his class teacher and was also attached to the society); with Ridma it was Pasindu's friendship; and with Navod it was a notice for a workshop conducted by the Society which he attended. "When we are young, we want to try everything out. We want to indulge in every extracurricular activity," Pasindu told me. Over the years, and not surprisingly, the procedure for attracting new recruits to the club has not diverged from what it used to be before, though by now, the drive towards getting new and potential debaters in has accelerated: "We organise projects every month, bring in experts for workshops, and conduct massive recruitment campaigns thrice a year."

The 'learning curve' they undergo is formal as well: "Starting from practice debates, we move the better students to inter house debates, and from them we pick out the best to represent the team at inter school debates. Even with this process, however, we have hiccups. Those hiccups materialise as limitations of individual debaters." Such limitations, Pasindu explained, can dog them for months if not years, but they go away eventually. "Navod, for instance, had a problem pronouncing the letter 'ka'. When he began, he used to be hassled off a tournament after the semi finals. But with practice over time, he has, while not eradicating this issue completely, resolved it. Ridma on the other hand was afraid of 'opening up' in front of an audience. He resolved it by concentrating on facts in his speech. These are personal problems inherited from childhood, and they have a big say in how a debate is conducted. Language matters as much as delivery, and if problems affect either of them, you need to address them."

Debaters have their preferred topics and these three are not, it must be said, exceptions to that rule. Preferences of that sort are conditioned by what one studies. Ridma, who did his A Levels in the arts stream, prefers topics delving into social theory, which incidentally makes up the majority of debating topics in the country. On the other end, Pasindu prefers topics revolving around science, which happens to be in the minority among national debate topics. "Economics, law, sociology, and diplomacy attract more confrontation, so they are in the majority. Nonetheless, I feel there should be more topics based on science." Whatever the theme, however, they are adamant that facts should come before force: the latter must be a corollary, or should grow out of, the former. I asked Pasindu, Ridma, and Navod that given that one must balance the one with the other, what of students who by nature tilt towards one OVER the other?

It's a challenge, but as all three inform me, it can be resolved. "There are students who have never uttered a filthy word in their lives. There are also students who by nature are assertive and tend to be forceful in what they say and how they act. In both cases, you have got to understand that a language, any language, is based on formal lexicons and on slang. They carry equal weight. To this end, we need to teach students how to be aggressive at a given moment and how to be sober and calm as well." Pasindu, by nature aggressive in how he speaks, is at the other end of Ridma, who is more collected. It's a veritable mishmash, and given that this is debating and not a literary association, it is to be expected. This, however, brings me to another persistent issue: that of language. More pertinently, how flexible language can get.

Obviously, judges, being the human beings they are, bring with them their notions of grammar and rhetoric, so it's to be expected that language and delivery depend on how these human beings take to them. Debates about religion, for instance, can get testy when judged by the clergy, but as Pasindu and Ridma tell me, they have faced tournaments where such awkward confrontations have occurred. This extends to the use of the language: "There are no hard and fast rules about what kind of Sinhala we should use. We teach our students to use as much Sinhala as possible, to be very resourceful when resorting to English, except in the case of technical terms with no vernacular equivalent. Our biggest challenge is with students steeped in neither Sinhala nor English. They are, for the lack of a better term, gandabba."

In fact it is interesting to know that while there are several dialects of Sinhala spread right throughout the country, from Kurunegala to Matara, in debating circles such dialects, at least among experienced societies, disappear and give way to a distinct dialect that only debaters conjure up. "This dialect is ridden with inconsistencies in grammar which would infuriate some. As an example, one term we always use, which actually traces its origins to the Royal team from 2011 and 2012, is 'athishaya avasthawa.' Those two words cannot, strictly speaking, be used together. But over time and through constant use, it has become a word on its own right. We do concur that grammar must figure in a language, but in this field, we are not rigid."

As a final point, Pasindu and Ridma dwell on the most important project that debating team at Royal are engaged in, Samprapthi. Each year, the project is formed with the intention of promoting unorthodox debating, and to this end it is planned to raise the camaraderie between debating societies in Sri Lanka. As these two inform me, in 2011 they brought together schools weak in Sinhala, in 2012 they brought together schools slightly less weak in Sinhala, in 2013 they conducted workshops in peripheral schools throughout the Western Province, in 2016 they trained societies from schools which had not made that many strides in the field, such as Carey College, while in 2017, they attempted (rather successfully) to tone down the confrontational thrust of Sinhala debating by inviting junior members and by deliberately 'mixing up' teams from different schools so that instructors from one school would be heading another school team. I was there at the last Samprapthi, and I saw how all those debates, all that confrontation, ended in an awards ceremony where there were no winners, only boxes of chocolates distributed among contending teams to (what else?) promote harmony.

So what's in it for the team? "Probably the most important thing we've learnt in debating is to not be ruffled by praise or blame, by victory or defeat. When we win, we don't flaunt. When we lose, we don't sour. Moreover, debating has taught us a lot about people, their preferences and their prejudices. I won't say that it has taught us everything that we need to know about those people we come into contact with in our tournaments, but it's gone a long way in helping us understand other perspectives. This in turn has helped us understand that this is a field which is not exclusively reliant on confrontations and fights. There's more, much more to debating, especially Sinhala debating, than shouting and hollering and bringing your competitor down. I suppose we are all united in saying that we've learnt to be immune to pressure, and by being immune to pressure that way, we've learnt to comprehend this field better."

And in the end, what debaters pick up and learn, what they discard and unlearn, what they perpetuate in the name of what they do, helps us understand what debating is and is not. Especially in Sinhala. In that sense, the stories Pasindu and the team can say speak a lot. Louder than their voices, certainly.

Written for: The Island YOUth, July 22 2018

Reflections on some wonderful friends

My friend Hiruna, who is studying for his A Levels, yet somehow finds the time to write the most beautiful Sinhala poetry I have ever read from someone his age, is something of a rarity. Not because he writes poetry (don't we all, at some point?) but because his preferred cultural icons are so far removed from the Sanukas and the Santhushes of this era that he has become virtually isolated. He has written essays and essays on everything from the era he panders to - the sixties, seventies, and eighties - ranging from Hansa Vilak to T. M. Jayaratne to Amaradeva to Sekara. Because of my inability to read between the lines when it comes to poetry, sivpada or nisadas, I have come to appreciate the critic in him rather acutely. He has read much more on the subjects he tends to than anyone his age.

And yet, he is not alone. There are others. Perhaps not as "into" what he likes as he is, but nevertheless with a sensibility which has been honed to past objets d'art that the young today are rubbishing day in and out. It's hard to tell whether this is a miniscule minority or whether it has the potential to grow up and mature. In that sense there's a lot to be expected from the families and friends of these youngsters, because with the correct guidance, they can and will become the wielders of the arts tomorrow.

The most common excuse dished out by those who are fascinated by the icons of the present is that "the past is dead, live with it!" It's a flimsy excuse, though one I've come across from youngster after youngster wherever I go and am. Perhaps it's to do with how the media has suppressed the old in the programs they broadcast. Either way, an entire generation is growing up not even having heard of the usual icons - Amaradeva, Victor Ratnayake, even Clarence - and this despite the fact that these names are hardly ones we can pass over. Someone once said somewhere (I can't remember the name or the time, though it was way, way back, a long time ago) that if Sri Lanka chose to send something that demarcated "ape kama" to the moon, it would send the songs of Amaradeva. Laudable, but consider that we have children, and students at that who are studying in GOVERNMENT schools, who have not even heard of his name, much less his songs. So yes, people like Hiruna are rather rare.

There are reasons. For one thing, schools have rarely produced artists the way they produce and are structured to produce engineers, lawyers, doctors, and accountants. Parents have set notions about what they want their children to become and this impedes on the ability of individual societies to do with the arts to nurture up and coming artists. If you are studying science for your A Levels, chances are that no matter how suitable for chairing and leading literary, drama, and debating societies you may be, you will be compelled to exit them abruptly to concentrate on passing that Z score and entering university. And this isn't resolved by handing these societies over to those who study arts. As Ayath, whom I interviewed last year over how Sinhala drama is taught and sustained at schools in and around Colombo, argued, there is a discrepancy between those who take to the arts and those who debate, do drama, or write poetry for competitions. More often than not, it's those other streams - Science and Commerce - which produce the bulk of the members who want to do something. More often than not, also, those who choose arts opt for it because they have nothing else to offer. "They just aren't interested" was what Ayath told me.

That's one reason. Not the only reason. It's easy to go on lambasting structures and institutions. Looking inward, at the fault in ourselves, however, is much, much more difficult. The truth is that many of us from this generation and generations after us are rabidly averse to the past, or anything that is too old to be venerated in hagiographic terms. When Amaradeva passed away, for instance, there were howls of protest over one particular young vocalist who contended that there were much better voices than the maestro's among his (the vocalist's) colleagues. Whether or not this was true (such judgments, subjective though they are, can be assessed), the timing of the statement was hardly apt. And yet, this is but just one part of a broader phenomenon. Young people I talk to take to the guitar and the microphone as though God has willed it. The richness of technology, in other words, is drowning the richness of imagination, and imagination, a key prerequisite to the production of art, is lacking among them. Sure, they know how to please the ear. It's just that they don't know how to please the mind.

Poetry, the most potent and literary of all cultural forms (the novel and the short story, by comparison, are newer, more recent), is a veritable yardstick when it comes to other cultural spheres, in particular music. "The young don't have the time to read, and even if they do, they just aren't interested" was what Ajantha Ranasinghe told me during our interview. He has a point. As a people, we aren't reading enough. Literacy rates, premised as they are on the ability to read and write on a rudimentary level, are hardly adequate by way of assessing whether we should be reading and writing more.

How can the culture of a country thrive if its poetry languishes? As Garett Field notes in his book "Modernising Composition: Sinhala Song, Poetry, and Politics in 20th Century Sri Lanka", the cultural revival we saw in the preceding century was supported by a plethora of lyricists who were able to preserve the literariness of their work while contributing to the country's musical sphere. It was for this reason, Field observes, that Chandrarathna Manawasinghe was able to come up with a new poetic meter for his masterpiece, "Wali Thala Athare", and that his "student" Mahagama Sekara contended in a 1966 lecture that "a test of a good song was to take away the music and see whether the lyric could stand on its own as a piece of literature." (This quirk, which we are used to in Sri Lanka, confounds Field so much that he admits the inadequacies of Western ethnomusicology when it comes to the Sinhala lyric.)

Ultimately, in a country and a region which has historically privileged the fusion of words and rhythms (regardless of how sophisticated or not our ancestors were, they were able to musicalise what they read in ways which baffle scholars today), the first step towards the flourishing of a cultural sphere is the dissemination of our poetry, and lyrics, among our students. This is not an easy task, but it is a task which we must engage in. After all, we're talking about generation after generation who grow up indifferent to history (which, during the social studies experiment of the Sirimavo Bandaranaike regime and even the dates-driven approach of the curriculum prior to it, was taught rather well). We're talking about an entire generation neglecting the need for the lyric, in favour of technology. The allure of the guitar and the boy band is too strong to be overcome. If ever they venerate the bands of the past - the Moonstones, the Super Golden Chimes, right down to the Gypsies and Marians and the Jayasri Brothers - we forget that these groups, superficially appealing to juvenile, adolescent tastes, nevertheless had members who did not neglect the lyric. Such a generation, growing up in indifference, can only be salvaged by our generation.

And it doesn't end with poetry, by the way. We all write poetry, especially Sinhala and Tamil poetry, when we are young. It's when we grow up that our tastes "part ways" and compel us to follow one path at the cost of all other paths. It's the same story when it comes to other cultural spheres, be it drama or literature or painting. Many of those teenagers I talk to who like drama, for instance, tend to be interested in the movies. Hardly remarkable, until you consider that the film industry in Sri Lanka has almost always depended on the theatre for its reserves of not only actors, but also scriptwriters. (If ever there was an actor here, a proper one, who did not hail from the theatre, I am yet to hear of him or her.) And of course, until you consider that acting today has been confined to models and dilettantes who lack the seriousness, the controlled grace, of the actors I admire: from the very recent past, Uddika Premaratne, Saranga Disasekara, and the newest face of them all, Thumindu Dodantanne.

Hiruna isn't alone, as I mentioned before. There are others. Many others. All of whom profess an interest in various other spheres, the movies included, with an interest in being active participants in those spheres. Hiruna, by nature introspective, prefers the path of the poet. Those others prefer the path of the director, the scriptwriter, and the discerning actor. To be all these things, it is necessary to be a discerning human being. Are our institutions, of learning and power, enough to channel their innate sensibilities and respond positively to what they want to become? I certainly hope so. Until that transpires, though, I can only hope and continue being friends and talking with them.

Written for: Daily Mirror, July 8 2018

Psychology or demonology: Where 'Garasarapa' lies

Garasarapa, Jayantha Chandrasiri's latest, was given a special screening at the Tharangani Hall at the National Film Corporation on Friday, the 22nd of June.

Dewnaka Porage, in one sense the hero of Garasarapa, is the definitive younger face of Kamal Addaraarachchi, who plays his character as a psychology lecturer when he grows older. Everything is there - the frown, the firm mouth, the aquiline eyes, even the stubborn resolve - and so when he woos a girl (played by the charming Kavindya Adikari) who happens to be swayed by morbid and supernatural forces, we only hope that when SHE grows older, she will be played by the actress who more than any other actress has been paired with Kamal in the movies. But this excitement, this sense of nostalgia with respect to the film industry and its plethora of stars, is not at the heart of Jayantha Chandrasiri's latest work, which meanders along, sometimes with purpose, sometimes without it, and ends up in a climax that is as anticlimactic as it's going to get. The payoff, so essential to Chandrasiri's oeuvre, even in his television serials, is absent, and in a tragic way. When Hail Caesar was released I contended that it was precisely what the Coen brothers, with their descent into abstractions, intellectualisms, what-not, had us expect. Roughly the same argument can now be made of Garasarapa. Perhaps that answers the question I posed at the end of my last piece on Jayantha.

Garasarapa is about memory, the discarding of memory, the keeping of promises, and the potency of love. It is about all these things, and it is about everything else too. At its centre is an intriguing figure we see in only two or three scenes, rightly, someone who pops up from the deepest recesses of our collective consciousness and taunts our hero, the lecturer in psychology, for a wrong he committed decades ago. As with Jayantha's other works, Garasarapa hence interweaves two different eras: the present and 1980. Significant, because the love story at the heart of the plot takes place against the backdrop of racial tensions and these years signify two eras with respect to the history of those tensions (Sinhala versus Tamil). In that sense the film is probably Jayantha's most culturally multifaceted yet, because Sinhala and Tamil cohabit with Sinhala Buddhist and Catholic. What more can you say about a film which pits the famed kalu kumaraya against a cane wielded by a well meaning but strict padre?

The story's simple enough. A boy, Sandaras Edirisinghe, and a girl, Vidya, fall in love (it's love at first sight, of course) on their way to the church at Gadagama. The girl, possessed by the kalu kumaraya, can only be healed by the priest, played by Sriyantha Mendis, though the kumaraya finds his match in the boy, who owing to the potency of his love for her manages to dispel the villain, at least for the time being. (A few exorcisms later, all of which have the churchgoers dance in madness, overcome with the possession, the boy manages to get him out of her for good.) The girl, however, has to leave for Canada owing to rising tensions between her family and elements sympathetic to the LTTE. Decades later, having seemingly forgotten her and yet also having struck a deal with the kumaraya himself to find her, he marries a painter, Frankie, (Ameesha Kavindi), moves into a comfortable, upper middle class life, and finds his past catching up with him when she gets possessed by the serpentine prince.

The film has some of the fluidity and the crazy grandeur of Jayantha's previous work, only this time he's emboldened it all by resorting to some visual effects (Jayantha in the Divaina: "Whether we like it or not, and whether we can or cannot, we have to try to join the rest of the world when making movies here"). Two sequences stand out: the scenes of possession in the church when, while the Lord is being praised by the padre, the churchgoers dance out with our two lovers as the only sane ones among the mob; and the sequence in which these two finally realise their affections for each other and they run out, the only animated people in a crowd that's clearly been made absolutely still by CGI. It's Orpheus and Eurydice in Sri Lanka, a point driven home by the unfolding of the plot later on, with Sandaras striking a deal with the prince, who promises her that if ever she returns to the country, she and he will find each other.

But while visually exciting, I felt there was something missing. It had to do with Jayantha's theatricalism. He divorces speech from movement, words from action, and thus isolates the two from each other to such an extent that even the song sequence in the film lacks the mobility it clearly needs. (We see the two lovers from two separate frames crooning at each other. The movement, the action, takes place elsewhere.) Not that this issue stabs the eye; the sole redeeming point of the story is that it manages to transcend the hollowness of the theme of love. And yet, hollow it is, not only because we have seen this kind of romance before (from Ali Mankada to Oba Nathuwa Oba Ekka), but also because the payoff we await is the payoff we get, particularly when the two do meet years later, and that in a contrived way. Even the deal the boy strikes with the kumaraya, despite its Mephistophelian overtones, fails to deliver a bonus of any sort, because the catch to the deal is the catch we expected from the start: that he will meet her in circumstances which forbid them from seeing each other ever again.

The cast redeems the plot the best way they can, and given that this was directed by Jayantha, to think that they could not redeem it is impossible. It's the first time since Guerrilla Marketing, more than a decade ago, that Kamal Addaraarachchi, Sriyantha Mendis, and Jackson Anthony have been cast together, and while the three do not meet in the plot (Jackson, as I mentioned, is barely visible), their presence, together with that of Yashoda Wimaladharma (in a cameo) and Sangeetha Weeraratne (who is in a role we so eagerly expected her to be in the moment we saw her name in the credits), helped discernibly. Jackson roars and winces, passionately in love with a woman he cannot have, while Sriyantha, world-weary as always, does what he can to "purge" her. When we see the two meet at a church (of all places!) and when the hymns and sermons intersect with a "pagan myth", we are astounded. The performances help sustain our interest through this paradox (which is not a paradox once you think about how Catholicism in here has mingled with Buddhism, as with the poruwa), something I concede with respect to the new faces as well.

Given all this, what did Garasarapa entail or thematise? I refuse to believe or concede ground to the power-of-love claptrap that so easily induces one to fall in love with any work of art from the beginning. The theme, on the contrary, is to be found towards the end. Sangeetha, a doctor, explains to the audience that while Western science does not fit in easily with demonology, the two can and will cohabit, given the link between psychology and superstition. This explanation, rudimentary at one level, is to me important, because it reveals the Jayantha Chandrasiri who got swept away in the rest of the storyline thanks to that power-of-love rhetoric. This is the Jayantha who believes in a link between the West and the East, superseding those dichotomies between magic and reality sustained by intellectuals and rationalists. (Demonic possession, to give just one example, is not the preserve of Sinhala or even Indian societies.) That, and not the love triangle, is what came out at the end, though by the time it does come out, that triangle, and the overdrawn subplots around it which get nowhere (we see a friend of Kamal come and argue with him about finding the girl he loved; the conversation ends there itself, arbitrarily) ensure that such a theme gets washed away by the Butterfly Symphony-like idealism of the two lovers.

My friend Sahan, who sat next to me at the screening, comes from a generation that idolises Kamal, Sriyantha, and more than anyone else, Jackson, with the kind of devotion we exhibited when we were his age, and is more culturally sensitive and informed than the milieu I hail from. While enjoying the film (and predicting the "climax" and grinning at it as it unfolded), he seemed to feel that something wasn't quite right. "There's a lot to extract from someone like Jackson, and a lot to extract from a plot like this" was his comment to me when we walked out. True. There was a lot in what we saw, and a lot in what we should have seen but did not. In that sense Garasarapa left us groping for more. But in the lot it contained, particularly with its performances, it is a return to form for Jayantha, one which may well strike a chord with both the young and the old. As it has with pretty much all his previous work.

P.S.: Garasarapa is the second film by Jayantha after Samanala Sandhwaniya to not be scored by Premasiri Khemadasa. It is, as the opening titles make it clear, a tribute to the maestro, whom the young today are all the poorer for not hearing.

Written for: Daily Mirror, June 27 2018

Jayantha Chandrasiri and the intersection of magic and reality

Jayantha Chandrasiri likes to talk, I have always noticed. And how. He can explain and rationalise something that appears to be so portentous and heavy that once he stops talking you are left telling yourself, "Damn, why didn't I think of that before?" At times, though, he can get mysterious, offering explanations for something none of which make sense or hold the key to the truth. This latter personality comes up when his films are concerned. That's natural, and to be welcomed. Directors love revealing threads from the plots of their work and Chandrasiri, being an exception, likes to tackle the eager journalist, writer, or spectator by giving him clues as to what those plots hold. That, plus the sense of mysticism packed into his films, helps explain why they are so intriguing and why only a very narrow section of the critical fraternity has done justice to them. This is a review of his latest film, Garasarapa, which I feel deserves full treatment by a worthier critic elsewhere and which, over here, needs to be prefaced by a few thoughts on a director everyone loves to get confused over.

From his first tele-drama, Wedahamine, to his most recently screened film, Samanala Sandwaniya, Jayantha is one of the few visual artists from here whose body of work I've watched, re-watched, and pondered over seriously. What I think about them has a bearing on what I think about Garasarapa, because in more ways than one Garasarapa is to Chandrasiri what, say, Hail Caesar is to the Coen brothers: it's an inevitable consequence of everything which preceded and prepared us for it. This is true when it comes to his most discernible motif: the intersection of magic and reality, and in the context of our history. Supplanted by romances that never run counter to that motif, it is coloured by dichotomies which both pit the past against the present and bring them together: village versus city (Wedahamine), old versus young (Dandubasnamanaya), man versus woman (Akala Sandya). He was, and is, at his best when he is dwelling on a theme no one without even a smattering of Sri Lankan history can understand.

That "history" is Sinhalese and Buddhist, but it is never exclusionist. That his best work ran parallel with the rise of a middle class Sinhala Buddhist consciousness which in turn ran parallel with the rise of an urban nationalist political movement (think of the Sinhala Urumaya and its successor, the Hela Urumaya), is not, I believe, a coincidence. When Gamini Akmeemana, in his review, castigated what he felt to be the "middle class nationalist" outlook of Agnidahaya, Jayantha's first film, he was contending that it entailed nostalgia for "the mythical and the pastoral." In a reply penned just days after the review was published, Malinda Seneviratne, in his own inimitable way, suggested that the people of the 21st century aren't as rationalistic as Gamini implied them to be, and that the mythical and the magical in Agnidahaya wasn't as superfluous or unnecessary as "rational" critics described them as being.

Here's the problem with taking a rational stand on the movies in societies like ours: once you bring in the concept of cultural identity and heritage, you are bound to alienate a broad section of the population which has never really understood the workings of that culture. I don't think this is a problem with the director. It is a problem with the critic. Agnidahaya, being Jayantha's first, was slightly overdrawn. Technically and formally, it didn't stand out: the intersection of love and hatred (the tagline, let's not forget, was "vairaya aadarayata vada ganakamai") between Kamal Addaraarachchi and Jackson Anthony over Yashoda Wimaladharma wasn't properly sketched out, to mention just one defect. But most of the critics, particularly from the "cosmopolitan", "liberal" English press, seemed to ignore that. The Sunday Times's R. Wickramasinghe, to give just one example, in a review tellingly titled "Step out of history" suggested that it was wrong of Jayantha to concentrate his entire plot on the year 1664. Forgetting, of course, that much of Jayantha's forays into our history revolve around the 16th and 17th centuries, near-perfect centuries to delve into considering that they entailed a dichotomy between the reality of colonialism on the one hand and the reality of our cultural presence in the rural hinterlands on the other.

I think the mistake made by the English critic when he or she tries to assess films like Agnidahaya or television serials like Akala Sandya is the confusion that is sustained between magic and reality. As scholars much more experienced in the field than me will tell you, hundreds of years ago what is considered magic today was treated as a living, breathing reality. And not just in societies like ours. Even in the West, the concept of magic evolved out of a desire to explain what couldn't be explained, to rationalise what couldn't be rationalised. There was hence nothing erratic in Jayantha resorting to the supernatural. Everything, and practically every last detail, has been so well researched that he leaves no room for arbitrary effects. As Akala Sandya, which in this respect is his most "supernatural" work, illustrates, the "concept" of reading and communicating between minds and the power of yogic meditation (let's not forget time travel) had a definite historical foundation during the reign of Rajasinghe the Second, who ruled at a time when there was a interest in the martial arts (angampora) and swordsmanship.

Guerrilla Marketing in that sense was a departure of sorts, though not completely, from what he had been leading up to. This, the most theatrical of all his films (it owes as much to our folk cultural forms, particularly with Premasiri Khemadasa's music, as it does to the theatre of Beckett and Brecht), also brought to light a basic problem in Jayantha's universe. I still think Guerrilla Marketing is his best work, and not because I have a penchant towards seeing popular political figures from yesteryear being parodied and rather well at that. (I am, of course, talking about Jackson Anthony's performance, one of the best performances I've seen in a Sri Lankan film.) I also think that his primary fascination - the rift between what can be explained and what cannot be, or between the mythical and the real - found its way to the director's depiction of that most contemporary of "magical" devices, advertising. ("Guerrilla marketing" is a cheap, crude advertising tactic, and the last scene, of our protagonist returning home along a road that has huge cut-outs of the man he "marketed", is an indictment on the monsters he has released through his own cheap, crude deception.) It also has some of the best performances that a Jayantha Chandrasiri cast (Kamal, Yashoda, Sriyantha, and of course Jackson, not to mention Sangeetha Weeraratne) could ever have had.

But nevertheless, there was a basic problem. That problem had nothing to do with its plot or themes or cast or even technique. It had to do with the clash which came out between the cultural imperatives of the work and the melodramatic love triangle the work depicted. Deborah Young's review of Guerrilla Marketing in Variety is at times off the mark because it fails to account for the richness in Jayantha's madness (when she indicts those "innovative dance numbers that jump out of nowhere", she is both paying a compliment to Channa Wijewardena's choreography and devaluing a key component of the plot, because without those dance numbers, we would not get a sense of proportion, a foundation, through which we can make sense of the link between Gregory Muhandiram's rabid aversion to culture and his idealisation of mass deception), but where she is correct is where she takes to task what she sees (a little wrongly) as a "silly, star-crossed love triangle" between Thisara (Kamal), his wife Rangi (Sangeetha), and his former lover, who happens to be working at the same ad agency that Rangi and Thisara are, Suramya (Yashoda). Here, for the first time, we saw a dichotomy arise between two facets Jayantha had brought together before.

I can't tell or ascertain whether Jayantha came to terms with this dilemma (several reviews, both local and foreign, pointed it out), but what I and what we do know is that it took a good eight years for him to return to the movies, and when he did return, he made the most atypical work he has ever given. Samanala Sandwaniya is Jayantha Chandrasiri through and through (not least because it has Yashoda as the main actress, and because it induces nostalgia for the past, particularly considering the reference to Gamperaliya through the names of its protagonists), but as Sumitra Peries, who loved it, once told me, "It is catholic in the sense that it is universal." And so it is. Unlike the patently indigene qualities of his previous work, Samanala Sandwaniya is a film for everyone and anyone. It was a retreat, and a great one at that (though here too, in the form of two buffoonish Laurel-and-Hardy-like jokers who cause a debacle at the park after mocking Yashoda, Jayantha steps out of line thanks to his theatrical past), and without any overt reference to "the mythical and the pastoral", it could be rationalised by both the liberal and the traditionalist. Maharaja Gemunu, which followed it, is a film I have unfortunately not seen. But what these two works necessitated was a return to Jayantha's previous oeuvre. Whether Garasarapa resolved the fatal contradiction Guerrilla Marketing unearthed, whether he managed to bring together the historical currents of his plots and the romantic triangle in them, however, are questions I will delve into in my review.

Written for: Daily Mirror, June 26 2018

Anagarika Dharmapala: Shedding the invective

Anagarika Dharmapala is the worst thing that happened to Sri Lankan history. He was a racist, a political pamphleteer, a propagandist who, at the end of the day, served the interests of the bourgeoisie by providing an antidote to the proletariat. He was a betrayer, a peddler of myths, and a demagogue. He was hence the definitive ancestor to S. W. R. D. Bandaranaike and Mahinda Rajapaksa. He might have been a German or Japanese collaborationist or spy, and his comments on the vileness of non-Sinhalese people are enough to rank him alongside Hitler and Mussolini. He did not present a nation-building project, rather a half-baked project that favoured the Sinhala Buddhist businessman, whose interests brought him more into conflict with his Muslim and Tamil competitors than with imperialism per se. Ostensibly anti-imperialist, he was less concerned with combating the exploitative structures of colonialism than with constructing a grand unifying myth for the Sinhalese, of course to the exclusion of every other race. He was, in short, an opportunist of the political sort.

That’s one way of looking at it.

Anagarika Dharmapala was the sole saviour of the nation. He rose up against the establishment and became the first member from the bourgeoisie to combat the British. He was the closest to a Mahatma Gandhi or, more relevantly, a Subash Chandrabose that we could have had. At a time when people were compelled to be cowards in the face of the British, he had the guts to get up and, despite the cost to his family business and fortunes, rant against imperialism. More than anything, however, he was a unifier, in that he recognised the Number One problem which was ailing our society: the absence of a proper industrial sector. He visited Japan, understood the importance of building up such a sector, and returned to call upon the members of the Sinhala Buddhist business class to build up an economy which would lead the way towards independence. He was greater than most of those hailed as national heroes today. He was a hero on his own right, and not just of the political sort.

That’s another way of looking at it.

Very few people have attracted revulsion, censure, and praise the way Dharmapala has. Not even Mahinda Rajapaksa comes close. I don’t think he was a saint. People tend to depict human beings as the angels and the saints they are not, and the popular culture, particularly in a country as small as Sri Lanka, has a tendency of turning individuals into icons and legends. When you take away the rhetoric of legend, you see those individuals for who they are. I believe the same can be said of the Anagarika and I believe that there are aspects to his life which have escaped the historian and the compiler. In this respect, I also believe that Sarath Amunugama’s attempt at sketching out this ambivalent figure deserves more than a cursory newspaper review. Such an attempt was called for. Clearly. Not because he was not a racist, not because he was not someone who tried to bring together the country in a bid to industrialise it, but because he was both and because human beings are hardly the monuments we worship. This is not a review, therefore.

There were certainly two sides to the Anagarika's campaign: the ethno-religious, and the economic. But as with William Blake, the mystic and the social revolutionary, and Ananda Coomaraswamy, the cultural renovator and the believer in the caste system, it is impossible to isolate the two and consider them separately (which is what scholars do). Rather, as historians have pointed out, it is the intermingling of these seemingly opposed sides and aspects to his character which reveal the true face of his national project, shorn of the invectives it has attracted, sometimes rightly, over the years. To understand the Anagarika's economic stances, one must therefore understand the brand (if you may) of his faith which he propagated in the 19th and 20th centuries. George D. Bond's insightful, exhaustive account The Buddhist Revival in Sri Lanka (1988) distinguishes between two Buddhisms: this-worldly and other-wordly. It was the Anagarika's overwhelming belief that Arahantship, which had been considered the preserve of an elected few, was possible in one's present life, that it need not be deferred to a future life. It was a strongly rational interpretation of the faith, which meant that he frankly deplored the worship of gods: "No enlightened Buddhist... would ever care to invoke a god." (notice the use of a simple G).

While being rational, it was also reformist, just like his reformism when it came to the economic and social sphere. Traditional Buddhism argued that the supramundane path, or the path of the sotapannas, the once-returners, and the non-returners, was not possible for layman. Dharmapala effectively wiped away this distinction by claiming that everyone and anyone could participate in the religious life. While this is tentatively comparable to the efforts made by Calvin and Luther in Europe during the Protestant Reformation, as Regi Siriwardena has argued, there was no real radicalism underpinning this new and revolutionary variant of Buddhism: it still thrived on a fundamentally conservative base. Be as it may, one can't really discount Dharmapala's attempts at opening the path to the lay devotee. He emancipated that devotee by arguing, controversially at times, that there was no real need to defer the achievement of Nirvana to a future birth. Naturally, this was on the other extreme of the traditional monastic elite, who preferred a more otherworldly interpretation of their faith in which higher states of consciousness were reserved for those who had donned the robes and passed through several stages in Arahantship.

The traditional monastic elite had as their patrons the traditional elite, the Nobodies who had become Somebodies through capitalist accumulation. They too subscribed to the a more mundane interpretation, arguing (perhaps to protect their own vested interests in this birth) that the chief aim of a Buddhist was to procure enough merit to enjoy a happier, more meritorious next birth. While this interpretation had not been birthed by the Theosophists, it grew out of those who followed Theosophy (which even Dharmapala subscribed to, until differences between him and Henry Steel Olcott made them part ways). D. B. Jayatilake, for instance, in an essay titled "Practical Buddhism", contended that the efforts of one life were not enough to attain complete renunciation. It required a preliminary course, the preparation for a future life. The chief aim of one's present life, on the other hand, was to observe precepts, support one's family through right livelihood, and do good in this world. Herein lies the subtle but fatal rupture between Dharmapala (the reformist) and his opposing group (the neo-traditionalist): the former was fiercely advocating the shattering of distinctions between the present and the future, while the latter conversely advocated the maintenance of those distinctions, and of various other distinctions which approximated to the views of those in the group who believed, inter alia, in the liberal ideal of a secular state, with a separation between the government and the temple, between faith and personal life: in short, between precept and practice.

It doesn't take one much time to ascertain that the overwhelming support for this school of thought came from the new bourgeoisie, because in part at least, they were seeking ways to rationalise their business interests through a new interpretation of Buddhism. Dharmapala too was an entrepreneur, but was hardly of the sort that the new bourgeoisie were. One can contend that it was his line of family businesses, which involved manual labour and the transformation of material into industrial products, which spurred him into his nationalist crusade. One can also contend that it was the nature of those businesses which compelled him to strike out on his own when it came to a radical re-evaluation of Buddhism. Years later, when Kumari Jayawardena's father, A. P. de Zoysa, would join that battle against the new bourgeoisie, who by then would become leaders of the independence movement, the political landscape had bifurcated between a left movement which sought to industrialise this nation and a rightwing movement which remained complacent with the petty, primitive nature of their form of capitalist accumulation.

It is difficult to draw up imaginary lines dividing Dharmapala the national figure from Dharmapala the lay preacher. In an essay on Buddhism, published at the turn of the 20th century, for instance, he implores the British to "let industrial and technical schools be started in populous schools and villages." Perhaps more than anything else, if we are to chart Dharmapala's ascendancy as a crusader and a radical wielder of his faith, we need to consider that it is the intermingling of these two strands, rather than the separate analysis of each of them, which can best help us understand the man beneath the robe, and the robe and the enigma which made up the man. Free from all that invective.

Written for: Daily Mirror, June 15 2018

On Professor Carlo Fonseka, for no reason at all

“With apologies for generalising, I would say that despite decades of free education Sri Lankans are still lazy thinkers; a most gullible lot. Astrologers abound and it is easy to spread a false story. Divine intervention is still widely believed and sought after and clever Kattadiyas make good money. Political leaders shamelessly dash coconuts asking for divine curses on enemies. Faith healing missionaries keep audiences spellbound. Schools do teach science but students are not encouraged to think scientifically. Subject content is studied for exams and the scientific thinking habit ends after uploading the textual content at exams. Science is divorced from lives.” (Shyamon Jayasinghe)

I still remember the first time I met him. It was somewhere in 2013. To keep a long story short, I had written a book and owing to my immaturity (I was 18 at the time, after all) I felt he was the best person to write the foreword to it. And why? Because the book, a novella (which I have since disowned, so horrendous it is!), delved into the perennial conflict between reason and mysticism and Professor Fonseka, a leading light in the Rationalist Movement in Sri Lanka, would have enjoyed reading on that. Or so I thought. What I knew, back then, during that first visit, was that he wanted to meet me. (I had provided him with a first draft beforehand.) So I went, rather pompously (I was 18 and I was immature, let us remember once more), to his residence, a large, sprawling, and yet somewhat unostentatious home tucked away in the corner of Pita Kotte, and rang the bell. He was not there, he was in the washroom, and he would meet me in five minutes, I was told. So I sat down and waited, eager and (again, I was immature) rather pompous.

I came to talk about the book, its contents, and what the professor could write by way of penning the foreword. Instead, after he came, the first thing (or one of the first things) he asked me was what I thought about Shakespeare. I was no Shakespeare fan by any stretch of the imagination – besides, I have a poor memory, so remembering those immortal lines of his has always been a tedious, impossible task – but I had seen some film adaptations of the Bard’s work, and I told him that the play which caught my attention the most was Julius Caesar, hastening to add that I was an ardent fan of the 1953 adaptation starring (of all people!) Marlon Brando. Professor Fonseka, whom I thought preferred the book to the film (which he did, as he implied later), was astounded, and went on relating his first experience seeing it at the Regal when he was a schoolboy at St Joseph’s, and how he would sacrifice the opportunity of seeing the Big Match to frequent the Regal and watch other movie adaptations of the Bard’s plays. “Shakespeare forged the first demagogue in the history of English literature, in Mark Antony,” he told me. The conversation trailed from one play to another, until it struck noon. We didn’t talk about the book.

Before I left, he brought a copy of The Island (it was a Sunday) and showed me an article he had written on the indomitable Richard Dawkins, and on rationalism. Back then I was not fully aware of the professor’s contribution to the field, barring a quick perusal of the translation of Abraham Kovoor’s Gods, Demons, and Spirits (the translation, Deviyo saha Bhoothayo, was by Dharmapala Senaratne, another firebrand from the Rationalist Movement). I didn’t think much about it but after I went home, and in the following days when I checked the archives of the Island and came across his encounters with the inimitable Nalin de Silva, I was fascinated. I could not decide on which side to take, or whether I was meant to take sides. Had I consulted Fonseka, I am sure he would have given the same answer. Like Nalin, he had been an eloquent speaker and moreover a member of the Sinhala Debating Society at his school (Nalin had been the Captain at Royal College). Despite this, they resorted to manifestly different styles and manifestly different tricks. I remember in particular an exchange towards the end of Doramadalawa where the professor, who never loses his cool, replied to his opponent with this aside:

“ඔබතුමා කියන දේවල් වල ඇත්තක් තියෙනවා අලුත් එව්වත් තියෙනවා. මට පේන්නේ ඇත්ත ඒවා අලුත් නැහැ, අලුත් ඒවා ඇත්ත නැහැ.”

Naturally enough, this enraged the opponent: “දැන් මොකක්ද ඒ කිව්වේ, මම බොරු කියන එක නේ!” He went on and on as the credits rolled. I couldn’t resist smiling. So I smiled. Not with all those intellectual salvos, not with all his credentials (and I have found much in those credentials to side with, to agree with) could he withstand that fatal, awe-inducing final remark. That was Carlo Fonseka. Cool. Witty. And resolute.

Over the months and years there have been so many other things about the man that I come across and have agreed and disagreed with, spanning the scientific, the cultural, the political, and the personal. His prose, at once self-explanatory and gradual, never seems to creep away and leave you in the dark. Perhaps it’s a legacy of his work as a medicine man, but when he writes, he writes so much at length that it seems he’s trying to get his point across as comprehensively as he can. It’s almost as though he’s afraid of leaving something behind, as though the careful reader (as opposed to the common reader) will chide him in his mind should he commit that unforgivable error. And heaven forbid any essay of his which does not include his thoughts on the link between evolutionary science and cultural, social, and political processes! Just take a gander at his pieces on Malini Fonseka, Rukmani Devi, Victor Ratnayake, and the late Amaradeva and Lester James Peries. He’s always bringing up biology, and while critics have taken him to task (some have even penned irate replies to what he has written) over this, I believe he is spot on.

Two years ago, he published a compendium of his writings, fittingly titling it Essays of a Lifetime. I have not read it. I could not. By the time I got around to buying it, it had been sold out. But I have read reviews of the collection by, among others, Laksiri Fernando (“I was delighted to know Professor Carlo Fonseka’s popular writings are now published in one volume”), Kumar David (“Carlo is an N. M. man; I am a Samasamajist”), and Shyamon Jayasinghe, whose article I have alluded to at the beginning of this tribute. Shyamon takes to task the contention that erudite as he was, a Fonseka would never have been born after the advent of Free Education and Sinhala Only, and though I only partly agree with this thesis (which has been demolished by many leading intellectuals and critics, top among them Regi Siriwardena, over the decades), I nevertheless am in accord with his stance that there is much in our education system which leaves no room for free thinkers, let alone rationalists and scientists and radicals.

Where I also agree with it is the fact that since he took the Rationalist Movement to what it became in the seventies and eighties, people are as gullible as ever. Is this an indictment on the professor’s own work, which has been criticised by the likes of Nalin de Silva as being blatantly Judeo-Christian as the Christianity and theism it seeks to encounter and flay? I am not in a position to say.

Ever since that day in 2013, I must have met him about five times, including once in 2016 and again in 2018, the latter about three weeks ago at the Memorial Service for Lester James Peries (where he delivered the eulogy). He has mellowed gracefully. His wit, his way of talking slowly, to the point, and never off the cuff, is still there. They say Lester Peries reminded one of a Bourbon Prince: short, unassuming, and never beset by the arrogance which visits lesser personalities. Well, if that were the case, you can say the same thing of the good professor: short, full of humility, and never even once arrogant. “I keep my pride locked up. It escapes only through my work,” Lester told me. Again, you can make the same case for Fonseka: his word is his work, and his work is his pride. But that was a different time. A time so different that we can’t escape into it. The past, as someone once wisely said, is another world altogether. One would have to be extremely fortunate to have born to it. Lester was. Carlo was. Many others were. We were not.

Written for: Daily Mirror, June 14 2018

Sketches from the South: A history of schisms

The history of the Buddhist clergy, in this country, has largely been a history of schisms, splits, and amalgamations. Over the decades and centuries, several important points have been inferred with respect to this (at one level) inevitable historical process. First and foremost among them, that the breakdown of Buddhist sects in response to growing caste militancy was a consequence, and not cause, of the political games played by the British after their conquests. Insignificant though this may be, it is nevertheless important in that people tend to paint a rosy picture of caste-ism while forgetting that the rifts between the different castes were exacerbated once the Colonial Office realised it could harness them to its advantage. As scholars have noted, regardless of their political persuasions, caste-ism, while not rampant in Sri Lanka as it was in India, eventually found its way to the political process. Caste politics was not unheard of before the advent of the British, but it was institutionalised after it. To a considerable extent, this was reflected in the history of the Buddhist sects, and to an even more considerable extent, the battle over caste in the order was played out between Kandy (the hill country) and the South (the low country).

In contrast to the conservative, tightly knit Siyam Nikaya, which spread out to the Asgiriya and Malwatte Chapters, the Amarapura Nikaya, which was an offshoot of the caste militancy that grew after the Kandyan Kingdom was annexed, was a fairly loose confederation. As with all such tightly knit sects, however, the Siyam Nikaya was bound to give way to the policies of intruders, in this case the British, whose (deliberately) ambivalent responses to the practices of the Nikaya have been recorded by historians elsewhere. While a copious recounting of those responses and their historical route is hardly the point of this essay, perhaps a brief, cursory look might enable readers to appreciate how the dominance of one sect had to give way to the dissemination of other sects over the centuries. The timeline relevant to this cursory look, incidentally, spans from 1815, the year of annexation, to 1848, the year of the Matale Rebellion.

When the annexation was complete, assurances were made by the Colonial Office that steps would be taken to preserve the privileges of the traditional elite, which obviously included the monastic orders. Until then, the politics of the Kandyan Kingdom had followed a largely cyclical process, encompassing shifting loyalties and shifts in the regime (particularly, it can be said, after the Nayakkars began their reign). But with the advent of the outsider, this was destined to be succeeded by a largely linear process, in which that outsider, the conqueror, managed to concentrate hitherto traditional privileges within his vast bureaucracy. The traditional elite, naturally anxious to preserve those privileges, sought to preserve them through religion. It was in this context that the Siyam Nikaya was guaranteed the continuation of its practices, in part through the much vilified, controversial Kandyan Convention. No less a person than the then Governor of Ceylon, Robert Brownrigg, visited and placated the nervous monks at the Malwatte and Asgiriya with assurances that “the protection and security promised to their religion would never be wanting.” John D’Oyly, Chief Translator and later Baronet of Kandy, made similar assurances and entreaties to the kapuralas of the four devales in Kandy (Kataragama, Pattini, Vishnu, and Natha). The two promised to undertake three practices which had been the duty of the King: providing food to the temples from the Maha Gabadawa, holding the pageant of the Tooth Relic in Kandy, and maintaining the Dalada Maligawa.

Of the three, the first is the most interesting, since the adherence to and the abrogation of its practice is for me a good indicator of how the Colonial Office affirmed, and later derogated from, the practices of the traditional Kandyan elite. It took several decades for the British to abscond from taking part in the ceremonies of traditional society in India, and that was a consequence of the Mutiny, which took place in 1857. In other words, it took an entire Mutiny to turn the British away from Indian life and culture. In Sri Lanka, by contrast, only 17 years were needed for them to renege on their promises regarding that life and culture; by 1832, contrary to the provisions in the Convention, the Colonial Office had elected to do away with the provision of food to the monks, and instead replaced it with a scheme whereby an annual stipend of 310 pounds (or about 30,000 pounds, when adjusted for inflation) would be paid to the temples. This was an uneasy proposition from the start, and was doomed to stall. It did stall 15 years later, in 1847, when after a campaign against it led by the Legislative Council (which argued that to fund Buddhist monks would be to force a Christian legislature to support heathenism), it was shelved off in favour of a meagre land ownership scheme to benefit the monks. As no proper arrangements were made for the management of these lands, however, some of them would pass into alien hands. This same process, of representations to the effect of preserving traditional privileges giving way to their retraction, can be seen even in the way the British “took to” the pageant and the maintenance of the Maligawa.

By no means did the rebel sects emerge purely because of the activities of the British. Long before Pilimathalawa’s and Eheliyapola’s defections, long before the Chieftains decided to side with the British in a bid to oust the King, those rebel sects were quickly coming up. Their emergence was conditioned by the regions they originated from. In the hill country, the dominant caste was Govigama; in the outer fringes and the low country, the dominant castes were Salagama, Karava, and Durawa, and in that particular order. The Siyam Nikaya yielded to the pressures this conundrum necessitated, and years after its founding by Welivita Saranankara, it yielded to the dominant caste. Upasampada was restricted to this caste (which was not dominant in the low country, or along the coastal belt). This was true especially when considering how power was distributed in the bureaucracy, prior to the British annexation, between the different castes: while in Kandy the non-Govigama castes had their own headmen, the departments to which they were attached for the performance of their duties were overseen by Govigama chieftains.

These discrepancies, unaddressed for years and decades, had to spill over. They did spill over in 1799 with the founding of the Amarapura Nikaya, which had its biggest following in the South among various groups, ranging from those who felt marginalised by the policies of the Siyam Nikaya to those who were tied to British interests and thus wanted to “affirm” breakaway factions (in the secular or non-secular realm) which were free from the control of the former Kandyan Kingdom. This was tied to the fact that, while certainly not free from the shackles of colonialism, the South was freer than the hill country and Colombo, and was thus more open to a revolt in the Buddhist order. (In fact open support was given to the revolt by local headmen, many of whom had repudiated Buddhism and professed Christianity to become part of the bureaucracy.) But while two upasampada ceremonies had been conducted, in 1772 (at the Thotagamuwa Viharaya in Thelwatte) and in 1798 (at Tangalle), these were not endorsed by the conservative monastic elite (which in 1764 conspired to restrict ordination to Govigama; Sitinamaluwe Dhammajoti was the last non-Govigama monk to receive his upasampada at the hands of the Siyam Nikaya). In 1799, therefore, Ambagahapitiya Nanavimala, a Salagama monk who resided in Welithara (a Salagama stronghold), went to Burma with a contingent of five samaneras and three lay devotees. They stopped at Amarapura, where they were duly ordained in 1800, and from where they returned in 1803 to inaugurate the new sect at Balapitiya. This was the Amarapura Nikaya, and their trek to Burma was financed by a leading entrepreneur from the region, Dines de Zoysa Jayatilaka Sirivardana, most likely an ancestor of Cyril de Zoysa, who would lead the Buddhist revival in the 20th century.

But for this sect to get formal recognition, it needed a stamp of approval from the British in the Maritime Provinces. This could only come about through the efforts of an ally monk, and that monk, also from the Salagama caste, was Kapugama Dhammakhanda. He enjoyed the patronage of the chief headman of his village, Adrian de Abrew, who like de Zoysa was an ancestor of a prominent Buddhist lay revivalist (Peter de Abrew, the founder of Museaus College). Kapugama organised an expedition to Burma on his own account, and in 1807, with the patronage of de Abrew, he set off, to return two years later. Curiously enough, however, while the objective of the expedition was to gain recognition for the new Nikaya, the certificate of confirmation given to him by the monks at Burma did not make reference to the sect; that would come about in 1825 (a decade after the annexation of Kandy) with an official Act of Appointment given to Nanavimala Thera. (The British had commenced the practice of issuing written Acts of Appointment a few years before.) The reason why Kapugama himself was not handed the Act was simple: in 1816, he rejected Buddhism and became a Christian. But this act of departure, symbolic though it was, did not, as events later showed, prevent the rise of ideological clashes within the Amarapura Nikaya itself.

Written for: Daily Mirror, June 7 2018