Reflections On The Language Of My Birth

Cumaratunga Munidasa

By Uditha Devapriya –AUGUST 7, 2018

Uditha Devapriya

There are times when I lament my abysmal knowledge of Sinhala. It is a language of course, but even as a language it takes much more than memorising grammar rules and vocabulary to master it. Being a dilettante when it comes to these matters, I never really picked it up. Poetry eludes me, so does prose. I tried my hand at writing a few essays there and a few love poems here, but the experience was so overwhelming that I gave up. This was years ago. I haven’t tried again since. In hindsight this can indicate fear, ignorance, complacency, or a lack of willpower, depending on how you look at it. My excuse is that without getting acquainted with the foundation of a language or for that matter the historical processes behind a language, it is difficult to be creative.

Professor K. A. I. Kalyanaratne, former co-honorary secretary of the Hela Havula, in a review of Cumaratunga Munidasa‘s Purana Sinhala Akuru Karanaya, contended that it is language which separates us from the animal world. I strongly agree. Language is what makes civilisation possible, and civilisation is what facilitates identity on the basis of shared rituals and practices. Perhaps no other intellectual and artiste from the 20th century understood this in relation to the Sinhala language more than Munidasa himself, whose death anniversary fell on July 25. No, this is not a sketch of the man, much less an exploration into what he did, rather some brief reflections on his work.

Garrett Field, in his seminal but overlooked work Modernising Composition, contends that the modern history of linguistic politics in Sri Lanka begins with Cumaratunga. Put briefly, the man tried to do for the language what the revivalists of the previous century had done for Buddhism. It was his belief that purity in language, the ‘maw basa’, shorn of foreign accretions, was integral to the ideal of nationhood. There would not, in other words, be a ‘desa’ and ‘rasa’ without a ‘basa’. With this objective, he thus sought to redefine Sinhala, not just in relation to academic syllabuses (at one point he was appointed as an inspector of Anglo-Vernacular schools for the Department of Education), but also in opposition to the accepted texts which had been used to teach the subject. Based on these beliefs, he confidently rejected both the Sasadāvata and the Muvadevdāvata, which contained Sanskrit loanwords he felt to be inimical to his project. He was not, in other words, afraid of rebuking what needed to be rebuked.

There were three faces to the man: linguist, poet, and activist. Contemporary society and scholarship tend to analyse each facet in isolation, forgetting that it is the fusion of them, and not the study of one over the other, which can help us understand what the man did and whether the project he spearheaded worked to its envisioned end. That is why his criticism of poets who imbibed Tagore cannot be seen as only an aesthetic judgment, but rather as an integral part of his belief in achieving purity in the markers of our identity. Not even the Mahavamsa was immune from his pen, since it promoted the idea that the Sinhalese were descended from North India, when historical records showed that there was a thriving “hela” civilisation prior to the arrival of Vijaya.

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