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
?????????????????????????????????????????????????Friday, December 15, 2017
The Children Of The Children: The Culture Of Envy
It’s
convenient now and then to root our collective, national incapacity for
something, anything, in our (real or imagined) feelings of cultural
inferiority. Not just convenient, but also justifiable, given our
harrowing trysts with colonialism. But what is convenient and
justifiable emotionally and in terms of rhetoric isn’t always what is
true and what should be true. That is why we have to move on, though not
at the cost of forgetting what decades and centuries of black-and-white
exploitation left us with: a ramshackle economy which never took off
thanks in large part to the inability of the colonial (and
post-colonial) bourgeoisie to transform it into an industrialised
society. Our bourgeoisie are modernists only when it comes to their
ability to emulate superficially the Occident. They’ll probably be
surprised to learn that Anagarika Dharmapala, whom they vilify using all
sorts of expletives and what-not today, was more of a modernist than
them.
I believe that a firm engagement with history, its
pluses and minuses, its flattering and less than flattering facets, is
what makes for the blooming and nurturing of a cultural sensibility. In
Sri Lanka that sensibility never really endured for long, considerably
owing to the fact that we are, after all, still a post-colonial society.
Our filmmakers and artists are wont to describing our society as
post-war, but in this they are only partly correct: neither the war, nor
the efforts made at building bridges after the war, can conceal the
inexorable culture of apathy on the one hand and elitism on the other
hand which our bourgeoisie continues to stand for. And affirm. The
emergence of an alternative education system in the late 70s and 80s is,
I rather suspect, a good indication of that culture. For the fact of
the matter is, and I am being quite blunt here, that the rise and
proliferation of private, international schools was a vague result of
the emergence of a swabasha education sector after 1956. The one
necessitated the other through English.
It has been said of the Israel that its founding
fathers (and mothers) were idealists, while those who were chosen to
lead it after their demise were the realists. I suppose the same can be
said of other incidents in history, including the founding of the United
States, with the truism that ideals are always tempered by
disenchantment. The aborted project that was 1956, which we can trace to
the writings of Dharmapala and also, faintly, in the Buddhist
Renaissance brought about by the Theosophists, empowered one generation,
a generation who were already vassals to an education system which
privileged entrance to the Civil Service as the only mark of distinction
in society that mattered. The irony is that our elite sent their
children to Oxford and Cambridge for the sole purpose of entering that
Civil Service, and not for anything that was nationally, economically,
productive. (Part of the reason why P. de S. Kularatne returned to Sri
Lanka to act as Principal at Ananda College was his realisation that the
British were less interested in the Civil Service he himself hoped to
enter than his own countrymen.)
The rift which existed before 1956 was largely economic
but also determined by language, specifically English. In his book on
the LSSP, Working Underground, Regi Siriwardena observes that in
colonial society the latter sometimes overrode the former to such an
extent that even the middle class, bereft of privilege and occupying an
intermediate position between the haves and have-nots, were able to rise
socially. A revolution, cultural or political, is decided at the outset
by this intermediate class, who enjoyed the benefits of a median
position without the inhibitions and deficiencies that visited the elite
and the multitude equally. Siriwardena became our foremost critic,
translating our cultural sphere to the patrons of the Lionel Wendt and
our English Departments despite his inability to wield Sinhala, the
language of the 1956 revolution, properly. But this intermediate
position wasn’t filled only by those who spoke and wrote in English. It
was also filled by the rural and the urban Sinhala Only bourgeoisie.
They would elect Bandaranaike as the idealists, while their children
would become the realists.
The dichotomy between the ideal and the real in our
cultural and political spheres this point reveals is important because,
carried away by the world of social empowerment that the Bandaranaike
government promised would open to the Sinhala Only bourgeoisie, the
idealistic elders educated their later-to-be pragmatic children in the
vernacular, forgetting, or choosing to ignore, the fact that what
transpired in 1956 was the substitution for the hitherto existing class
discrepancies of a more insidious form of elitism. The social rifts
which prevailed until then were bottled up, repressed in fact, until
what resulted was a culture of envy (as I pointed out last week). A key
element of this new culture of envy was the inability of those who had
been promised rice from the moon to comprehend the alternate space that
the English intelligentsia carved for themselves here. The latter lacked
the numbers, but what they lacked in numbers was compensated for by
their sway over policy. They became, in short, the policy elite: Michael
Young’s technocrats.
And in seeing the hegemony that these new elites and
their offspring wallowed in, the empowered ones found themselves quickly
to be disempowered and disarmed. They were the insurrectionists who had
felt betrayed by a largely obsolete left movement. They attempted to
abort elected governments in 1971 and 1988, the former largely drawn
from our universities and the latter from the rural, political South.
(It’s interesting to note here that many of those who led the 1971
insurrection, and were later rehabilitated, remained JVP’ers while
partaking of the NGO sphere that invaded the country in the eighties.
Some of these former insurrectionists have today become apologists for
whatever government spouts their rhetoric of federalism and devolution.)
Being largely rural and pragmatic they would have realised the follies
of their elders who had elected for swabasha in 1956. Being
insurrectionists they would have confused the follies of their elders
for an excuse, on their part, to discern each and every organ of the
State – including the judiciary and the education sector – as an arm of a
rightwing status quo.