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Sinhala Literature and Martin Wickramasinghe

1Sinhalese literature of the 20^th century has centered on the village as the locus vivendi of Ceylonese life and the role of Martin Wickramasinghe in this regard has been unparalleled. His life traverses a wide spectrum of Ceylonese history, and his writings record the vast changes from feudal to colonial to postcolonial that Ceylon underwent in the intervening decades. Wickramasinghe was a prolific writer whose interests lay in a diversity of fields: natural and social sciences, literature, linguistics, philosophy, education, Buddhism and other religions. Much of his fictional writing took as its centre the folk life and folk culture of Ceylon, and the struggle between the changing classes can be said to be a central theme in his entire corpus of writing. He is known in particular for the trilogy beginning with Gamperaliya (1944; English translation Uprooted2 2009), Yuganthaya (« The End of the Era » 1949; forthcoming in English translation as The Village and the City), and Kaliyuga (« The Epoch of Kali » 1957; forthcoming in English translation as The City). Gamperaliya is widely considered as the first Sinhalese novel « with a serious intent that compares, in content and technique, with the great novels of modern world literature » and is generally seen as « a seminal work and a point of reference in the evolution of contemporary Sinhala fiction. » (Abeysekara, « Today »)

2In the topoi of manorial life, Wickramasinghe locates the transformations of which the novel is a representation as well as a critique. Unlike the essentialized portraits of Ceylonese peasants in Leonard Woolf’s fatalistic novel The Village in the Jungle (1913), Gamperaliya has a wide range of characters whose diversity challenges Woolf’s essentialized representation of the « average » Ceylonese villager. It has been ubiquitously extolled for its realism that is, as Wimal Dissanayake writes in his Preface to Uprooted, « understood not as a transparent medium but a site for critical reflection and evaluation. In the best realistic novel, the trajectories of individual growth and destiny and social growth and destiny are inextricably intertwined, and Wickremasinghe establishes this point forcibly in the novel » (1). Indeed, Wickramasinghe’s stature in the canon of 20^th century Sinhala literature is determined by the role he played as Ceylon’s organic intellectual, as « the man who through his writings, led a heroic struggle to restore the culture of the common people of this land to its rightful place » (Abeysekera).

3Martin Wickramasinghe’s novelistic configurations of the Ceylonese village played a powerful ideological function in the creation of a village-based indigeneity; as Stanley Tambiah puts it, Wickremasinghe,

[t]he greatest Sinhalese novelist of this century… is credited with [the] formula of Sinhala cultural identity: vava (tank), dagaba (temple), yaya (paddy field). So important is this imprint that both in novels and television dramas, the impurities and immoralities of current urban life are uncritically castigated, while out there in the newly created peasant settlements and colonies, in the sites of ancient glory such as Anuradhapura and Polonnaruwa, might be found the ideal harmonious life. The new colonization schemes hold the prospect of regaining the lost utopia (Buddhism Betrayed, 109-110; my italics).

4When Wickramasinghe wrote Gamperaliya, just four years before Ceylon’s independence in 1948, the emphasis on the rural and the indigenous provided a powerful evocation of a precolonial identity, all the more precious given that, unlike India at the same time, Ceylon did not go through an intense anticolonial movement against British rule (Goonetilleke 11). Leonard Woolf’s rather unflattering picture of a Ceylonese village was the only (in)famous portrayal of Ceylon in the imperial literary market-place, and Gamperaliya is impelled, at least in its design, by Wickramasinghe’s desire to present to the global reader a different Ceylon, a more « authentic » Ceylon.

Wickramasinghe and the Paradoxes of Realism

5From this perspective, one sees the ways in which the most admired quality of Gamperaliya, its realism, seen most vividly in its construction of the Sinhalese village, Koggala, and in the representation of rural life, was in Wickramasinghe’s own time a strategically anticolonial construct, and which in the subsequent politically-charged climate of postcolonial Ceylon proved ripe for adoption into an expressly Sinhala nationalist discourse. Central to the novel’s vision of rural collectivity is the idea(l) of realism, and the valorization of realistic representation is a crucial factor in the novel’s status as « the best novel in Sinhalese, with a village background » (Sarachchandra, The Sinhalese Novel 140). E. R. Sarachchandra’s role in the history of Sinhalese literary criticism is a major one and he has often been credited with the elevation of Gamperaliya as the foremost fictional account of rural Ceylon. Sarachchandra praised the novel for « its authentic depiction of peasant society in Sri Lanka and the sureness with which the imported art form of the novel was allowed to develop along indigenous tracks of sensibility » (The Sinhalese Novel 23). Wickramasinghe himself diverged from Sarachchandra on important principles regarding the nature and origins of the modern Sinhala short story3, but they both more or less agreed on the principle of realism itself as a measure of « good » literature.

6Wickramasinghe’s choice of the rural as the setting for Gamperaliya was predicated on his tacit agenda for constructing in an anticolonial vein (as Rao did in Kanthapura) a uniquely Ceylonese indigeneity and on his configuring a specific kind of realism whose basis he (in contradistinction to Sarachchandra) could find in pre-modern Sinhala-Buddhist narratives that he championed all his life. The precise nature of realism (or its lack) in pre-modern Buddhist narratives is outside the scope of this study4, but an exploration of Wickramasinghe’s conception of realism sheds light on the motivations behind the construction and re-presentation in Gamperaliya of the purportedly utopian (Sinhala) village.

7A quick glance at Wickramasinghe’s essay on the Jātakas compiled in his historical work Landmarks of Sinhalese Literature (1948) provides a clue to the kind of realism he thought valuable and worth recognition. The Jātaka Tales refer to a large body of folk literature (numbering to about 547 tales) native to India concerning the previous births (jāti) of the Buddha5. As Richard Cohen defines, « Jātaka is a generic term for the stories of Shakyamuni’s [the Buddha’s] births while he was a bodhisattva [on the path to enlightenment]… Probably from the time of the Shakyamuni himself, jātaka stories have provided monks and lay folk alike with an imaginative basis for conceiving what it means to train for buddhahood » (211).

8For Wickramasinghe, the Sinhalese Jātakas present a « landmark » in the literature, for they eschewed the « punditisms of literary Sinhalese » and adopted « a spontaneity and ease which the classical language did not possess » (125). The result was, he notes, a « simplicity of language… [and] a narrative style that was hardly ever excelled in [Sinhala] literature till modern times » (125-6). He further extols

the subject-matter of the Jātakas [that] was drawn from the raw material of life, though in a different country [India], in conditions not essentially different from ours (126).

9This « rawness » is, in fact, vital to his conception of the ideal realist idiom: « The Jātakas give us a picture of life in the raw, as the authors found it in the villages of North India, painted artlessly and faithfully by people whose wisdom was ripened by a knowledge of the world. Hence they are our earliest specimens of realistic literature, and have no rival, in this respect, in the entire field of ancient writing » (128).

10The essay’s discussion of a few particular Jātakas, however, creates a completely different picture than the one Wickramasinghe presents: each of the tales he retells is emplotted on themes of violence, torture, sexual promiscuity, and excesses of temperament and action. Among the particular tales Wickramasinghe recounts are the Dharmapāla Jātaka where a king incensed by the love he sees his queen shower upon their newly-born son has the child tortured to death, whereupon, the queen dies in grief; the Ksāntivada Jātaka where a sexually dissolute king tortures an ascetic to death for luring his harem-maidens away by his preaching; and the Asāntamanta Jātaka where an old woman enamoured of a young pupil of her son’s attempts to kill her son so she may live happily with her young man. There is, in the tales themselves, little sight of the « realistic subject-matter » that Wickramasinghe finds a laudable literary accomplishment, and it appears to be a spurious critical logic that argues that « [t]he early Buddhist fashioners of these Jātakas deserve credit for taking up an independently critical attitude towards the rash and selfish deeds of even kings. It is seldom that we see such independence in the later writers of Brahmin literature » (130). Or that « that the writer should have had the courage to record such a flagrant breach of morality shows his first-hand knowledge of life, and his desire to be faithful to it » (130).

11In sum, it is by a sleight in critical logic that, despite adumbrating only the most outrageous of the Jātakas with every conceivable excess as the central thematic concern of the story, Wickramasinghe can yet affirm the « realism » of the work:

The Jātakas laughed at all institutions, at women and men, good as well as bad, at Brahmins and monks and ascetics. They smiled at the hypocrisy of the conventional virtues, much in the manner of a modern author… They are not primitive myth, as popularly supposed, embodying the repressed wishes of a nation, nor are they fairy tales distorting the facts of life and dealt out as dope to the masses to compensate for their miserable lot on earth. The Jātakas portray life fearlessly, as it is, and seek to make people good by holding up to their view a close-up of reality… They educate, not by providing model worlds and model men and women, but by holding up to view the stark realities of life, by showing the ill-effects of uncontrolled passion on society and the moral order (136-8; my emphasis).

12Additionally, diverging from Sarachchandra in his insistence on the indigenous origins of modern Sinhala prose (that were to be found, he argued, in the Jātakas, primarily), Wickramasinghe sought to further bolster his assessment of pre-modern Sinhala literature by a comparison with European writing:

When Dr. Sarachchandra wrote his book [Modern Sinhalese Fiction] he did not take into account that some Jātaka stories had some elements of realist novel of 18^th century England. He considered Buddhism and ancient Sinhala literature to be lower, and discarded Jātakas as mere folktales. So it is not surprising that he concludes that the Sinhala novel was borrowed from Sanskrit narratives and from the Western novel (qtd. in Liyanage 5n).

13Furthermore, he argued that « the depiction of psychic complexities of the human mind in the Jātaka stories is compatible with the psychological realism of great novelists like Fyodor Dostoyevsky » (Liyanage 6). What he chose to disregard or overlook were the many differences in the two kinds of realism he was trying to yoke together, not without a degree of critical violence. For the realism of the Jātakas is a far cry from the historical discourses of secular and rational thought that undergirded 19^th century European realism, and ironically Wickramasinghe, who chose to highlight comparisons and consonances in themes and some stylistic aspects between the two, rarely deployed in his own long career any stylistic/literary devices unique to the Jātakas or other Buddhist prose narratives. It is an irony Liyanage records with a degree of wryness: « Despite being a prolific literary critic, [Wickramasinghe] never discussed how Buddhist narrative structures could be used in modern fiction. Even when he wrote his last book, a fictional biography of the Buddha, Bhavataranya (1976), he firmly stayed with realism producing a social realist narrative of the Buddha’s life » (262). Sarachchandra too, with the exception of one novelized retelling of a Jātaka tale, chose in his creative fiction to endorse the kind of realism that he championed in Wickramasinghe. Together, their writings and critical commentaries paved the way for the dominance of social realism as the keynote of post-Independence writing in Sinhala6.

14The attempt to assert « realism » in the Jātakas comes at the cost of negating and overlooking many anti-realistic features. The focus in the Jātakas on quotidian lives, on a wide diversity of themes, and the absence of the supernatural or of deus ex machinas in the telling does mark an important difference from « The Arabian Nights [that] are tales of fancy and imagination, and Sanskrit tales [that] are romances couched in language equally romantic » (Landmarks 127); however, it is also important to note that the metanarrative of Hindu/Buddhist philosophy and the generally didactic and edifying function of the Jātakas firmly ties these stories to a religious framework in ways quite distanced from Wickramasinghe’s other model of the realist method – the social realism of 19^th century European writers that was rooted in post-Enlightenment secular thought and philosophy. It is this latter kind of realist narration that in his own writing Wickramasinghe was attracted to, and it is noteworthy that in his first novel, Gamperaliya, there is no hint of the kind of realism he praised in the Jātakas. Indeed, a rather Victorian conservatism rules the major love plot, which is centered on the failure of communication between a conformist aristocratic young girl (Nanda) and her effete and diffident English tutor (Piyal). There is in Gamperaliya nothing of the ribald or the violent that one sees in the Jātaka stories Wickramasinghe outlines; nor is there any reflection of the carnivalesque or subversive function that he notes of the Jātakas in general (they « laughed at all institutions… smiled at the hypocrisy of the conventional… [138]). In fact, the « modern author » of Gamperaliya re-creates in the novel the conventional and the old guard, and through a curious mix of nostalgia and memory affirms, in the face of obsolescence and replacement by the new, those older ways of life and being that seem to hold no more. Enfolded in the novel’s recreation of a timeless Koggala, under the duress of colonial modernity, is a rural utopia of the Sinhalese imaginary, a symbolic space of resistance and history that provides sustenance and a way to reclaim the honour and glory of legend. As Charles Hoole puts it,

Sinhalese history under four-and-one-half centuries of Western colonial rule would be unintelligible without reference to the concept of utopia. In such times of political subjugation, the utopian ideas enabled the Sinhalese Buddhists to visualize periods of intense spiritual awakening in the future, giving them much needed hope to endure their present state of dishonor… .To the Sinhalese community as a whole, utopia became a powerful source of unity and invincibility, in the face of foreign encroachments (103-104).

15The valorization of the Jātakas for their « realism », when it is quite clear that the ascription of such a paradigm is far from perfect, goes hand in hand with Wickramasinghe’s larger agenda for adumbrating an anticolonial, Sinhala-Buddhist cultural tradition that could be proud of its past and its history. Indeed, it is to the forging of such a tradition that he devoted his own lifetime and literary output.

16This discussion of Wickramasinghe’s conception of realism sheds some light on the central paradox that defines the kind of realism he crafts in Gamperaliya, a realism that was a far cry from the outrageous, excessive, and ribald Jātakas that he exalted in his critical commentary. The only sense in which the matter and idiom of the Jātakas can be said to be found in Gamperaliya is in the ways in which the novel’s characters are drawn as types (some more ideal than others) rather than as fleshed-out characters. In fact, Gamperaliya is an affirmation of the utopian qualities of a feudal order comprised of a village community headed by an idealized, benevolent feudal male head, and the novel functions as a record of a mode of being that Wickramasinghe sensed was coming to pass as British rule drew to a close in Ceylon and a replacement government of urban elites looked set to take over. The novel’s historical importance, however, is undoubted, as it popularized in the Sinhalese literary imaginary a paradigm for realism in rural representation, the utopian, which in its own turn became crucial to the discourse of mainstream Sinhala cultural nationalism. This is an argument I make more fully in my monograph, Utopia and the Village in South Asian Literatures, and here today, I hope I have been able to suggest the paradoxical legacies of Sri Lanka’s foremost Sinhala writer, Martin Wickramasinghe, in whose critical essays on the Jātakas, the nativist and autochthonous value of the tales provides evidence of Wickramasinghe’s firm commitment to anticolonialism, a commitment that in his own novelistic writings he trenchantly reformulated. In so doing, Wickramasinghe leaves us with a very different living tradition of the Jātakas, one whose adaptation in the Sri Lankan novel makes it distinct from those in India but tremendously important for those of us who seek to understand the multiple tracks by which realism proliferates in the South Asian novel.