Our cultural landscape: From Kandy Kolamba
In the third century BC Pandukabhaya turned the capital, Anuradhapura, into a city. It was referred to as Anuradhagama at the time. Until then, the distinction between town and village, taken so much for granted today, was hazy and even trivialised. No less a text than the Mahavamsa blurs this distinction early on when, in the seventh chapter, it states that the ministers of Vijaya built villages (gam) in various regions and then lists among those villages Vijithanagara, or “the TOWN of Vijitha”. Pondering on this anomaly, Walpola Rahula Thera made the following observation:
Before Pandukabhaya there was nothing which could precisely be called a city in Ceylon. All centres of population were called gamas or “villages”. But the words gama and nagara in the early part of the Mahavamsa are used indiscriminately both for “village” and “city” or “town”, and do not help us to decide on the size and extent of a place... But from the time Anuradhapura was raised by Pandukabhaya to the eminence of a city in the latter part of the fourth century BC, it remained as the capital of Lanka for about 12 centuries.
In other words there was never a firm dividing line between city and village. This explains why, when the Sanskrit alankarists invaded our literature after the 12th and 13th centuries AD, they were regarded as secular, alien, and cut off from the people. Tissa Abeysekara noted this when he wrote that the value systems of the Indian poets were based on the assumption that the city was a secular depository of knowledge, as opposed to the village, which was more of a backward wasteland.
In Sanskrit poetics, the rule was that “the language of the poet should not be that of the uncultivated man of the village” (translated to Sinhala by the greatest Sri Lankan alankarist of the 20th century, Ediriweera Sarachchandra, as “gamvasi vadanaruth rasa sun bavatama vatay”). Such a value system was totally alien to Sinhala culture, which was based on the trinity of the wewa, the dagaba, and the ketha whereby all knowledge flowed from the temple at the centre of the village. To apply the Sanskrit rule to a country like Sri Lanka, as the alankarists did through their poetry, would be to graft one aesthete on another without any cultural modification; in fact even at its most alankarist, the poetry of this period had to adhere to the rule laid down in Siyabaslakaraya: “peden budu siritha.”
Scholars such as R. A. L. H. Gunawardhana and H. L. Seneviratne have contended that there was no unifying racial-religious identity even at the time of the Nayakkar kings in Kandy. But this is stating just half of the story. Seneviratne considered it as evidence for his view that the country was never really unified, when in fact even the people of Jaffna, right down to the people of Ruhunurata, pledged their allegiance to the king of Kandy, which after all was the reason why the British were so anxious to annexe the hill country and capture the monarch.
What needs to be pointed out is that until the advent of the British there were two cultures that subsisted on a thinly veiled distinction between the town and the village which was not always apparent: the folk culture and the scholarly culture. The one did not always stay independent of the other, but there was relative autonomy.
In other words the one did not encroach on the other, and when it did, as in the Kandyan era, it was because the arts were getting closer to the people, the exponents of folk culture. The British uprooted this relationship and facilitated the bifurcation of the arts into two other streams: the traditional and the colonial. Initially, the latter pandered to British officials; after the opening up of the civil service to locals and the formation of the colonial elite, it transmogrified into a protean subculture.
To begin with, the British were fascinated with the cultural artefacts of the country. At the same time, they were opposed to the Buddhist undercurrents on which they had been constructed. Until the Colebrooke-cameron reforms the debate over the attitude of the colonial office in this regard was dictated by the Orientalists. But with the shift to the secular evangelists, the Utilitarians, the policy changed and, barring a few minor exceptions (such as the efforts of Henry Ward to revive the gamsabhawa), the attitude was cold and distant at best and hostile and bigoted at worst. No longer, it seemed, could the British be depended on to preserve the arts.
So what did people read, watch, and listen to in the period between 1833 (when the Colebrooke-cameron reforms were implemented) and 1931 (when the Donoughmore Constitution granted the franchise)? Archival documents point at the existence of a neitherhere-nor-there culture, uprooted and incapable of being creative. English of course was the gateway here, but even that never became a means of channelling creativity among the Anglicised elite.
I was reading some Sessional Papers and Commission Reports from this period at the Archives and I was struck by the mistakes in the language the children of the native elite made, even while attending elite schools; Denham called them “non-vernacular illiterates” in his Report for the 1911 Census.
Despite its preeminence, English was never harnessed as the language of a literature, beyond translations
of texts such as the Sidat Sangarava and intermittent flashes of brilliance such as James Alwis’s History of Ceylon. “The English language,” K. M. de Silva observed, “stimulated a revitalisation in Sinhala and Tamil... but was curiously sterile when it came to producing a distinctive Sri Lankan English literature.” This distinctive literature eludes us even today, one can add.
Moving on. The shift from the hill country to the metropolitan centres of Kalutara, Panadura, Moratuwa, and Colombo and the careful distinction sustained between the many and the few meant that the bourgeoisie subculture was Anglophile, secular, and disdainful of the local; it was also deeply puritan and romantic, reflecting the zeitgeist prevalent in the home country: “The bourgeois ladies,” Tissa Abeysekara wrote, “read Mrs Henry Wood’s East Lynne”, which became so popular that an ancestral home on the paternal side of his family was named after the title.
George Beckford in one of the best accounts of the workings of the plantation economy, Persistent Poverty, differentiated between the subculture of the planters and that of the blacks who aspired to join their club. The economy which they lived in was free of caste and ethnic identities, yet was also dependent on the distinctions that such identities fermented. Uyangoda called it the “colonial caste system.”
For this reason, a line was drawn between the traditional and the colonial (as noted earlier), though, not unlike the situation in pre-colonial Ceylon, the one could and did intrude on the other. Kamalika Pieris, in an article on the ways in which udarata natum thrived and survived in the British era, noted as much:
In 1907 [the] Colonial Secretary, Hugh Clifford had wanted Leonard Woolf, AGA [of] Kandy, to organise a “show of the finest Kandyan dance” to impress a lady visitor. Woolf ran to the Diyawadane Nilame who arranged for an enormous number of dancers to perform by torchlight on the grounds of the King’s Pavilion, Kandy. Woolf made the necessary payments to the dancers. This shows that during British rule Udarata dance was also performed, on invitation as a nonritual, secular dance, not merely to entertain but to demonstrate its excellence as dance.
The arts were, in other words, secularised, if not “exoticised” in much the same way oriental cultures were being “orientalised” elsewhere. Shorn of its ethnic, religious, and caste-ist foundations they had to survive on foreign patronage: Kamalika writes of how in the 1880s the German impresario Carl Hagenback “added a ‘human zoo’” in which Ceylon was included featuring dancers and drummers “presented as the ‘wild men of Ceylon’.” It was a subtle mixture of fascination and condescension. But even at the time of Hagenback’s “Sinhalese caravan”, the “cultural polity” was changing rapidly thanks to a historical eventuality: the Buddhist revival.
In my essay next week, the last in this series, I will point out just how the revival, mainly through the establishment of Buddhist schools, aided in the upliftment of the indigenous arts, including not just dance and music, but also literature, and how these art forms reached their peak, not in a renaissance as one would expect, but in a hybridised medium: the Nurti theatre of the early 20th century.
Before Pandukabhaya there was nothing which could precisely be called a city in Ceylon. All centres of population were called gamas or “villages”
The British were fascinated with the cultural artefacts of the country