A Brief Colonial History Of Ceylon(SriLanka)
Sri Lanka: One Island Two Nations
A Brief Colonial History Of Ceylon(SriLanka)
Sri Lanka: One Island Two Nations
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Thiranjala Weerasinghe sj.- One Island Two Nations
?????????????????????????????????????????????????Monday, May 15, 2017
The Story Of Trespass & Punishment
Thirukkurral is an amazing piece of work in Tamil literature, written by poet and philosopher Thiruvalluvar, (one also uses Kurral and Valluvar, with the prefix Thiru adding
a touch of holiness to them). He is thought to have lived some two
thousand years ago. The work consists of 1330 couplets, arranged in 130
chapters spanning three major themes of virtue, wealth and love. The
literary beauty of Thirukkurral is in the packing density of
information. An often quoted analogy, by those who do not have
competence in calculating the necessary pressure and volume, is to make
you imagine drilling a hole in a mustard seed and pumping all the water
in the oceans into it. But in terms of information content, I bet if a
DNA molecule were to study Thirukkurral , it would hang its head in shame. A second important thing about Thirukkurral is that it is not a holy book that acts as an interface between man and stone. Its verses observe far
more than they prescribe. Promises of reward for good behaviour and
threats of punishment for trespass are generally kept to a minimum. Yet
the demarcation of boundaries between good and bad along each of the
three axes of the poet’s interest are communicated with exceptional
skill.
That being the case, when the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) organised a day of celebration for Thiruvalluvar,
my drinking partner in Bridgetown — the Sri Lankan Tamil fellow by the
name Sivapuranam Thevaram — insisted that we travel down to the capital
and attend the event. Browsing to register for the event, we discovered
that SOAS has had a statue of Thiruvalluar at its entrance for
some 20 years. The humble man with amazing thought and command of
language would also now think of himself as photogenic, for by now he
would have featured in the graduation photographs of hundreds of SOAS
students. My own first reaction, I confess, was to take a selfie with
him within a few minutes of arriving at the School.
“Would they actually know his work, or of him, machan (buddy),” Thevaram asked me in the train to London, “or would the students just pose for photographs and walk past?”
This
question was followed by a few minutes of deadly silence between us
contemplating how many of the 1300 couplets we ourselves knew! I pulled
out my copy of Thirukkurral from my rucksack and started
counting. There were 58 I had come across before and could tell the
meaning of in some detail. Of these, I could only recall 26 by heart if
prompted with the first word.
“I know 27!” claimed my friend, beating me by one.
We
joined the SOAS event with a sense of embarrassment. Of what is hailed
as the finest literary work in our language, a language we hold dear in
our hearts as one of the oldest among those now living, one in whose
name we as a community sent thousands of kids to kill themselves, the
two of us knew just about 2%. Shameful. Even if we had learnt one
couplet a year, we should have covered over twice that.
The
SOAS celebrations consisted of garlanding the poet’s statue, some
talks, dance and music, and a panel discussion. Despite the weather
forecast, the afternoon was pleasant. In the talks, we were told funding
cuts to universities and the recent imposition of fees (£ 9,000 for
students in the UK) meant SOAS no longer teaches Tamil. Gone are the
days of direct government funding so some disciplines could sustain the
luxury of professors outnumbering students, the Faculty Dean said. Some
languages like Arabic and Chinese are better resourced due to the
economic muscle they wield and the fear they inject. It would appear
that Rajendra Chozan’s memory, so eloquently captured in Kalki’s Ponniyin Selvan,
isn’t enough to help Tamils punch at the same level. SOAS was looking
to generate endowments and other sources of funding to kick start
activity in several minority languages including Tamil, and had
ambitions of establishing a chair in Tamil studies. Another speaker said
there were efforts to raise the statue and seat him on a pedestal a few
feet higher.
The
dance performance was sweet. Seeing dance mentioned in the programme,
my friend and I were preparing for the usual – the young boy-god Krishna
stealing butter from the fridge! But this was creative and adventurous,
a special choreography of five couplets in Thirukkurral. Though it took us both some effort to relate the kurrals being depicted to the abinayam (dance gestures) in places, we enjoyed the dance very much. A short recital of some kurrals
by children showed the challenges of accurately articulating the
phonetic and syllable-stress patterns of Tamil by those whose first
language is from the Indo-European family. But the kids did a far better
job than Tamil announcements herd in flights of Sri Lankan Airline.