''Sovereignty is a dirty word"': Pathiraja on national anthem, independence and democracy struggles

Dharmasena Pathiraja’s second death anniversary falls today

By Sivamohan Sumathy-January 28, 2020,

2020; the year that looms ahead has already told much to us in this brief month, drawing to a close. As we battle them all, from bush fires to transpersons claiming street spaces, I also battle a very private grief that time is not healing.

28 January, 2018. Pathi left us two years ago bringing a certain cold anguish to my heart –anguish is private, personal and public. His was a life lived out in the public under the public gaze. In the last year of his life, in 2017, he made two phenomenal speeches, one at Tharangani, at an event celebrating 50 years of his film making career on June 27. On that day, he stressed the need for democracy, and for a political leadership that will not be bullied into acquiescence by the clergy. Later, at the International film festival in Jaffna in September 2017, where he was felicitated, he spoke of how he discovered a home in Jaffna, and was always among friends. He spoke of the great spirit of academic freedom and vibrant academic and artistic culture he found at the then new Jaffna University under the leadership of Dr. Kailasapathy. This is all public knowledge.

But there is more to tell; a more private and personal story. It was somewhere in the early 2000s. I had not stood up for the national anthem at the opening of a film screening (at a film festival) at Elphinstone and was told off by one of the managers. I recounted this to Pathi later that evening, carelessly, and he did not say anything, he did not pay any heed to my disgruntlement. Next day, he came back from Sri Palee ( yes, it was on one of those days when he was at Sri Palee) with a friend. He asked me about whether I was attending the festival screening, to which I mumbled something like "I did not feel like it." Then he said, "we are going," and I joined them. Today, as we battle and endlessly discuss whether the anthem can be sung in Tamil or not, I cannot help recalling how Pathi and I and the friend, Somachandra Wijesuriya ( of First Rising fame) sat through the national anthem, sat still and silent, paying mute respect to it while others struggled to their feet.
We need forthrightness, bold action and a courageous vision, a courage to be alone and stand alone. In his filmmaking practice he stood out, creating a distinctive idiom that very few could touch. It was sure and inimitable. There is talk of his launching the second paradigm, a popular theory. And it is true that he inspired a host of filmmakers younger at a time of change and social upheaval. But the deep complexity of his search was his own and only his own. One finds that distinctive mark in his recent films, Sakkarang and Swaroopa, in the masterful compositions and the uncommon vision.

Soldadu Unnehe and our Independence

"Ensnared in his starvation: This man achieves a consciousness of the working class when the poor and the proletariat meet under the gaze of police brutality. "

These are Barthes’s words on Charlie Chaplin. Soldadu Unnehe is the independence day film par excellence. It is the vision of the poor and the proletariat as Barthes said. These lines are doubly astonishing to me, when I remember Pathi say:

In Soldadu Unehe I broaden the scope of the city, go right up to the edges, where the underworld, the prostitute, a pickpocket, a clerical servant fired from his job and a discarded soldier eke out a living under the tree. The tree is their home. And the tree becomes part of the lives of these people. The film is about what these four protagonists encounter within three days, a day before and after the Independence Day and Independence Day itself. Here, more than in any other film, I use a fragmented style within the story telling mode. Again, it is perhaps the most Brechtian of my films. But I also think I used a mixed idiom of Brecht and Chaplin. The old soldier in the film evokes both the critique that Brecht is famous for and at the same time the Chaplinesque quality of pathos one feels for the tramp or the outcaste. It is also quite trenchantly critical of the nation, the idea of sovereignty, and how one must wage war to protect its borders. Yes, strangely it is as much a film of the '90's as that of the ‘70s and '80s.

It is easy to see Brecht in Sri Lanka, for we are familiar with the idiom, and it is more uncommon to create a Chaplinesque form, for comedies in Sri Lanka are of another order. One of the most arresting developments in the film is the way the politics of gaze is set out; From the very beginning, the old soldier looks out at the independence day parade, culminating in the gaze under which it all comes together; police brutality. Barthes could have been writing about Soldadu Unnehe.

Soldadu Unnehe is perhaps the only film in Sri Lanka taking on the idea of independence as the subject of treatment. Regi Siriwardene calls it the most political of films until then. Watching the film, not at that time, in ‘81, but today, is a chilling experience; for we have learnt so much in those intervening years. Setting the film within independence day celebrations and war is a bold move cinematically, as form and idiom. It brings memory into sharp focus with our present preoccupations. Pathi’s films do just that; take us into the past and into the future. A constant shuttling. From Ahas Gawwa to Sakkarang, there is a shuttle from the past to the present and the future.

Both Laleen Jayamanne and Regi Siriwardene have remarked that the film Paradige is before his time (cited in An incomplete sentence). Today, watching Paradige one sees that it is very much a part of its time. Both Ponmani and Soldadu Unnehe have this eerie feeling of being not just ahead of their time, but about being prophetic. The film has a war before we had a war; our own partition war. Independence from British Rule came to Sri Lanka relatively easy, it seems. We did not have the trauma of partition. In Ghatak and I: Where there is no partition, he asks this question insistently about Sri Lanka. What means Ghatak to us, where we had no partition?

The trauma of the nation: Soldadu Unnehe is about the partition. It anticipates the partition or the deep political scrutiny that the nation invokes both in the civil war in the north and east and the 88/89 violence. But though these two events are nationalist and counter nationalist happenings, Soldadu Unnehe is clearly situated within the Marxist idiom of class and gender.

Through the trauma of the old soldier, through the marginalities of its four protagonists, the film evokes the pathos that Barthes writes of. Soldadu Unnehe is Chaplinesque, but it is also Pathi’s own idiom and vision. The Old Man is also the conscience of a fragmented nation.

The shadowy presence of the clerk’s wife, who leaves him, and the central role of the sex worker, Prema Akka, push the margins to the centre unequivocally. While the old soldier is of pathos, Prema Akka’s marginality is even further removed. It is from her that one finds the most prophetic indictment of the nation. Shouting back at her comrades, in a friendly but forceful rebuttal, the seemingly unknowing prostitute flings the word sovereign back at the men: "Sovereignty! Sounds like a dirty word."

Sovereignty: Taking off from what Regi and Laleen Jayamanne said about Paradige, I want to think about what it means to be ahead of its time. What is that deferred time? What is time deferred? Soldadu Unnehe means so much more today than it did then; it means something horrifyingly relevant in the post war period. Sovereignty is both contested and underlined by dollars, independence-day parades, tourism, goods, and middle-class morality. It is easy to see the critique here. But I want to raise something more important and critical about the form itself: about form and sovereignty, form and independence and form and nation.

"Maybe one should move away from seeing oneself as a Sri Lankan filmmaker. This is going to be difficult given the heightened ethno-political identifications we work with in Sri Lanka. Our frames of reference. We write about, pontificate on 50 years of Sri Lankan cinema, its strengths, weaknesses, limitations and where we should move on from there. All this is very laudable. Particularly as we in Sri Lanka need to reflect on the current political moment of the country. But such a frame of mind is also very constraining. In an important ideological sense, film has a language and languages of its own; to call it Sinhala, Tamil or Hindi is to fall into a trap." Extract from An Incomplete Sentence.

At the seminar in Jaffna, he tells me that the Sri Lankan cinema is like a regional cinema of India. In today’s highly integrated world of technology, one needs to pay intense attention to this. My film, Puththun Saha Piyavarun, (Sons and Fathers) is a tribute to this feeling of Pathi’s. Pathi was the sharpest critic and the most ardent supporter of my films. In turn, every film of mine is made for him. He was excited by the form of the film in Ingirunthu and called it profoundly Brechtian. But Sons and Fathers is about the film industry itself, it was about him and others like him; people he knew intimately and he was excited by it. My conversations with him are the genesis of it. Puththun saha Piyavarun, my one and only Sinhala film is a born out of those conversations. It is a tribute to Soldadu Unnehe and all his other films, talking about sovereignty, national anthems, films, global and local and all things else of our days together.