1. Introduction: What might be a literary-cultural public in the global south?
Conceiving of a public humanities practice that is ethically, morally, and politically responsive to Sri Lanka’s conflictual postcolonial history is challenging. Any such attempt has to confront how Sri Lankan literary-public culture has a deep history of ethno-linguistic segregation, extending from the colonial past to the post-colonial present. I attempt to critically explore the emergence of this segregated literary-public culture in Sri Lanka. In doing so, I position Sinhala-language literary-public culture and its English-language counterpart as interconnected but distinct spheres where a majoritarian nationalist imaginary is reproduced and resisted. My analysis is limited to English and Sinhala literary-public spheres, and therefore the Tamil-language literary-public sphere is not addressed. While marking this limitation, I argue that in the English-language literary-public sphere, one can see “moments” where a “minoritarian” imagination—which holds up a critical mirror to the hegemonic Sinhala-language imagination—is fleetingly realized.Footnote 1 My overall contention is that while a literary-cultural public sphere is a “democratic” space in a broad and generic sense, it is also an arena of ideological and political contestation where patterns of political inclusion and exclusion are reproduced.
1.1. What is a literary-cultural public?
The idea of a literary-cultural public—a hyphenated term I use in this essay because I do not want to limit my discussion to “literature” defined narrowly but to see the literary as part of a broader cultural sphere—inevitably invokes the notion of a “public sphere.” The “public sphere” in its Habermasian sense implies a domain of public activity that lies outside the direct influence of the state and the market. The existence of such a public sphere is also seen as a critical component of a “healthy” democratic culture because it enables reasoned discussion and debate and a space in which a “civil society” can emerge. At one level, the Habermasian public sphere is an ideal rather than a lived empirical reality. When one looks at European history, the public sphere was an arena that was largely dominated by a male, educated, property-owning class, which excluded women, the working classes, and many other groups that did not conform to an exclusivist definition of “civility.” As scholars have observed, the public sphere is both an “ideal” and an “ideology”—in essence, a normative ideational principle.Footnote 2 The public sphere as a descriptive term, therefore, has limited application, but at the same time, it is a term that has had wide resonance in a number of humanities and social science disciplines, including literature. As part of a grand narrative of European history, it connects political, economic, and social democratization with the democratization of culture and, by extension, literature. In relation to literature, constructs such as the “reading public” can be seen as a subset of the public sphere. The emergence of the “reading public,” in this sense, is seen as a historical phenomenon that is made possible by the emergence of print capitalism and the displacement of sacred languages through the spread of “vernacular” literacy—a process through which a larger population was able to participate in an emergent literary culture.Footnote 3 But this public sphere was not egalitarian. If one looks at the emergence of a “reading public” in England, this was a highly classed phenomenon with aristocrats such as Samuel Johnson, the author of the first English dictionary, making arbitrary distinctions between “vulgarity” and “civility.”Footnote 4 As the work of other scholars such as Pierre Bourdieu and Nobert Elias has demonstrated, the spread of literacy and the emergence of literary cultures and notions of “civility” were closely allied.Footnote 5
Given the contested nature of the public sphere, the transfer of these ideas to postcolonial societies is even more challenging. On the one hand is a distinct Eurocentrism with which ideas such as the public sphere and allied notions of democracy, democratization, and civility have been applied to non-Western societies. This can take many “manifest” forms—ranging from late nineteenth-century debates about the need to “modernize” colonized societies by providing English-medium education to arguments in the late twentieth or twenty-first century about the relative lack of democracy in non-Western societies.Footnote 6 In terms of literature, such discourses sometimes took the form of literature being seen as a vector of civility within a larger colonial civilizing mission. As the work of scholars such as Gauri Viswanathan has shown, English literature as a discipline originated in a colonial sociological experiment in India and was then re-exported as a form of working-class education to Britain.Footnote 7
This, in turn, means that the emergence of a literary-cultural sphere in colonized societies was a complex and multilayered process. At one level, notions of literacy and “literariness” were shaped by colonial discourses about modernity and civility, which in turn were appropriated and reproduced by local intelligentsia. But this was not a unilinear process whereby “Western” notions of modernity, “literature,” “literariness,” or “civility” were simply reproduced in colonial societies. These ideas were actively negotiated and resisted, and the process of reproduction was selective. For instance, in nineteenth-century Sri Lanka, the emergence of vernacular publishing was largely connected to Christian missionary activity. British Christian missionaries eager to spread their religion established local presses and began translating the Bible and related religious literature into the Sinhala and Tamil languages.Footnote 8 But this also produced a local reaction by the Buddhist clergy and lay Buddhist activists who set up their own presses and began to produce a counter-literature. Alongside such public religious debates, a more “secular” literature also began to emerge.
In late nineteenth-century Sri Lanka, there was significant interest about history among literate Sri Lankans, which produced lively public discourse visible in a burgeoning culture of letters. This interest in history was driven by two interrelated developments. One was colonial historiography and its “discovery” of Pali-language chronicles. The other was the “discovery” of monumental ruins of ancient civilizations in the north-central plains of Sri Lanka, which provided material credence to the history recorded in the chronicles.Footnote 9 However, the emergent historical consciousness and its circulation in public literary culture were ethno-religiously particularistic—the textual history and the archeological “discoveries” were about a Sinhala and Buddhist past. This ethno-particularistic nature of the emergent cultural discourse, though it was not seen as such at the time, had a distinct impact on the nationalist literary-cultural discourse that would later develop in post-independence Sri Lanka. In the late nineteenth century, the discovery of a grand civilizational past fed into a public discourse of historical pride. For instance, prominent public figures such as James de Alwis, an active participant in public cultural debates of the time, celebrated the Buddhist civilizational past of the country, though he was a devout Christian—an indication that the kind of Sinhala and Buddhist cultural consciousness that became hegemonic in the 1950s was not a dominant concern at the time.Footnote 10
At the same time, lay Buddhist missionary activists, like Anagarika Dharmapala, saw in this historical discourse a means of reactivating pride in a Sinhala and Buddhist civilizational past. In Dharmapala’s worldview, while Sri Lanka did not measure up in terms of markers of Western modernity such as science and technology, through Buddhism, in particular, it could lay claim to a “rational” civilizational history.Footnote 11 However, the colonial insecurities that informed this discourse were also clear in a figure like Dharmapala, who authored a popular pamphlet titled “Things people should know” (denagatha yuthu karunu), which was similar to a Victorian treatise on etiquette and contained advice ranging from table manners to toilet sanitation. In effect, this was a form of print capitalism. As Kalukondayave Pragnasekhara notes, between 1832 and 1932, there are records of 3,000 titles being published, which he classifies as sangarā. Footnote 12 Sangarā is an expansive term in Sinhala that covers different serial literary forms, such as magazines, journals, and newspapers, and is an indication of the vibrancy of this literary-cultural public sphere. What this very brief and condensed sketch of the emergence of a literary-cultural public sphere in Sri Lanka suggests is that it should be seen as a space where a kind of “democratization” of public discourse historically occurred—in the sense that it provided a space where different ideas could circulate, and a vernacular literary culture also began to emerge. However, this process was also simultaneously circumscribed by class, language, and the dominant concerns of the historical context in which it emerged.
1.2. Literature, social, and cultural value—the emergence of a postcolonial longing for “national form”
Late nineteenth-century confrontations between Christian missionaries and Buddhist activists foreshadow a number of themes that shape the Sinhala-language literary-public sphere from the late nineteenth century to the mid twentieth century.Footnote 13 One theme that takes shape is an exploration of an “Indigenous” sense of modernity in which Christianity and “Western values” associated with the religion have to be resisted or re-negotiated to make them “Indigenous.” Parallel to this theme is also an emergent binary between the village and the city and the positioning of the village as a site of nationalist authenticity.Footnote 14 Within this discourse, Westernized and Anglophone social classes—often Christians and city dwellers—became embodied representatives of the lack of indigeneity. Politically, this village-centric imaginary also dovetailed into a discourse about historical continuity. Both in the literary and political imagination, the coordinates of an “essential” pre-colonial Sinhala identity were thought to reside in the village—a space relatively unaffected by the impact of colonial modernity. However, while an East–West binary was the most prominent expression of this imaginary, there were also other more “regional” or “local” influences that shaped it. For instance, by the early twentieth century, some literary commentators, such as Munidasa Cumaratunga who founded the hela (the movement of the indigenes), were more concerned about Sanskrit influences and Indian cultural hegemony on Sinhala literature, culture, and identity rather than the West per se. Footnote 15 Therefore, while an East–West, Buddhist–Christian, village–city dynamic was the most prominent and visible influence on the emergent literary-public sphere—and an influence that has implications for how the “value” of literary studies can be conceived today—it is also important to keep in mind that “alternative” possibilities of imagining indigeneity were available.
The earliest Sinhala novels published in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries are a site on which the contours of this literary-cultural imaginary took shape. As recent work by Kaushalya Kumarasinghe demonstrates, a serialized novel published in the Christian journal Ruwan Mal Dama (the Golden Garland) titled Wasanawantha Saha Kalakanni Pawul (Happy and the Miserable Families) in 1888 introduces a new notion of romantic love, placed within the bounds of a “proper” Christian marriage, into Sinhala literary-cultural discourse.Footnote 16 Kumarasinghe argues that classical Sinhala literature influenced by Theravada Buddhism had no comparable notion of romantic love and that the idea of romantic love between two individuals becomes possible because such secular or sexualized love can be expressed as a form of sublimated love for God—a representational possibility available in the Christian tradition. A Buddhist response to this Christian literary discourse was most sharply visible in the writing of Piyadasa Sirisena. Sirisena was a writer, social reformer, and activist who espoused nascent Sinhala nationalist sentiments.Footnote 17 In Sirisena’s fiction, a binary is drawn between urban life, Christianity, and westernization on one hand, and village life, Buddhism and Indigenous Sinhala identity on the other. Sirisena’s response to what he saw as a Western-Christian form of Romantic love was to create a Buddhist-Sinhala alternative. In Jayatissa saha Roslin, Jayatissa, a Buddhist Sinhalese man, falls in love with Rosalin, a Christian Sinhalese woman, and manages to convince her and her family to convert to Buddhism—fictionally inverting the trend of Buddhists converting to Christianity and at the same time placing romantic love within a Buddhist representational framework.Footnote 18
While Sirisena’s fiction was crude, didactic, and schematic by modern literary standards—the literary-cultural imaginary represented in his fiction had popular appeal. It has been claimed that 25,000 copies of Jayatissa saha Roslin were sold by 1909.Footnote 19 Sirisena’s role as a literary-cultural figure is also significant because his interventions extended to many domains—editing the Sarasavi Sandaresa newspaper, a prominent member in the temperance movement and functioning as a political activist who later joined the Ceylon National Congress (styled after the Indian National Congress). The “structure of feeling” that Sirisena represents—poised between a sense of Sinhala, Buddhist, and village-centric authenticity and a non-Sinhalese, non-Buddhist, and urban-centric life that is seen as alien to Sinhalese authenticity—is one that extends well into the twentieth century.Footnote 20 This does not mean that this literary-cultural imagination remained static over the course of nearly a century. It underwent changes and permutations but something of its “essential” characteristic of looking for Sinhala authenticity within a Buddhist, village-centric, and non-Western (if not anti-Western) framework has remained.
2. Post-independence Sri Lanka and the institutionalization of a national “cultural form”
The 1950s and 60s, the decades immediately following independence in 1948, were a time when the newly independent nation-state was characterized by a strong “longing for national form.”Footnote 21 In theater, film, song, and literature, there were numerous experiments in both form and content. In literary-public culture, the intergenerational relationship between Martin Wickramasinghe—a literary polymath, public intellectual, and prolific writer credited with establishing the Sinhala-language novel as a prose genre—and Gunadasa Amarasekara—who succeeded Wickramasinghe as his literary heir—was significant. Wickramasinghe could be characterized as an “organic intellectual.” A self-taught individual, he was widely read in European literature, including Russian literature, and had an equally in-depth knowledge of precolonial Sinhala literary culture as well as Sanskrit literary culture. Wickramasinghe’s Gamperaliya, considered the first “modern” Sinhala novel, explores themes of colonial modernity and social change.Footnote 22 In the character of Piyal, the novel’s central protagonist, Wickramasinghe traces the emergence of a conflicted postcolonial subjectivity—a man rebelling against the feudal order of the village who reinvents himself as a successful businessman in the city and returns to the village to displace the patriarch of the old order and marry his daughter. While far more complex and nuanced than Sirisena’s didactic work from the early twentieth century—Wickramasinghe also stages an urban–rural dichotomy. Though Gamperaliya sees the socioeconomic change represented by Piyal as inevitable and does not romanticize the village or the quasi-feudal order it represents, Piyal is also seen as a kind of “inauthentic” individual—a man who has internalized a capitalist-instrumentalist rationality through his experiences in the city and has lost touch with the organicity and Buddhist compassion associated with the village. Wickramasinghe continues the exploration of these themes in Kaliyugaya (Age of Kali) and Yuganthaya (End of an Era).Footnote 23 The trilogy is an elegiac meditation on modernity, urbanization, and changing social dynamics in a postcolonial society.
In Wickramasinghe’s nonliterary, semi-autobiographical writing, one can see a similar, if differently nuanced, exploration of postcolonial subjectivity. In books such as Kalu Nika Seveema (In Search of the Kalu Nika), Sinhala Lakuna (The Sinhala Sign), and Upan Da Sita (From the Day I Was Born), Wickramasinghe both documents and imaginatively recreates the village of his childhood from the vantage of a displaced urban psyche searching for an intangible but keenly felt sense of authenticity.Footnote 24 In Wickramasinghe’s writing, the village becomes a generative site of postcolonial mourning where the modern self, displaced by colonial modernity and urban experience, finds the spectral presence of an authentic pre-colonial Sinhala selfhood.Footnote 25 However, as Charles Hallisey has demonstrated, Wickramasinghe’s fascination with the village as a site of authenticity was not only a response to colonial modernity but also a critique of pre-colonial Sanskrit metropolitanism in which Sinhala literati saw Sanskrit as a metropolitan standard to aspire for.Footnote 26 Wickramasinghe’s village was therefore not simply an East–West binary but also a site that inscribed “regional” South Asian literary-cultural hegemonies against which a distinct sense of Sinhala self could be negotiated. What is relevant to my argument here is the insight Hallisey provides that in pre-colonial Sri Lanka the “ideal literary self” was seen as a cosmopolitan one that connected the self to the world, whereas in Wickramasinghe’s twentieth-century imagination, there is a narrowing of this possibility where the “ideal literary self” is seen as an essence that can be found in the rustic simplicity of village life—suggestive of the ways in which the territorially bounded imagination of the modern nation-state begins to overdetermine a more accommodative pre-colonial imaginary emerging from what Sheldon Pollock has called the Sanskrit cosmopolis.Footnote 27
In Amarasekara—who can be seen as Wickramasinghe’s literary successor—Wickramasinghe’s search for an intangible sense of Sinhala selfhood finds a nationalist resolution. In Amarasekara’s “nationalist turn” in the 1960s, which was partially influenced by Wickremasinghe’s critique of Amarasekara’s work, the sharp binary between an urban, Western, and non-Buddhist and pastoral, Indigenous, and Buddhist sensibility visible in Sirisena’s early twentieth-century fiction makes a postcolonial return.Footnote 28 This return presents itself as a culture of postcolonial “mourning”—an inauthentic present made dissolute by colonial contact, contrasted with an authentic pre-colonial past.Footnote 29 While there are close parallels between Wickramasinghe’s and Amarasekara’s sensibilities, there are also significant differences. In Wickramasinghe, the search for an authentic postcolonial selfhood is an agonistic dialectic—similar to what scholars such as Ivy has called “discourses of the vanishing” in relation to Japan’s aggressive modernization in the nineteenth century and the haunting sense of loss it created.Footnote 30 Though Wickramasinghe was clearly influenced by the political imagination of the newly emergent Sri Lankan nation-state, his literary-cultural imagination was not completely overshadowed by the politics of the moment.
However, in Amarasekara, there is a more insistent, often polemical, urgency in attempting to resolve the uncertainties of postcolonial subjectivity, where the political imaginary of the nation-state colonizes the literary-cultural imagination more explicitly. Amarasekara, who was studying dentistry at the University of Peradeniya in the 1950s—a site of vibrant postcolonial literary and artistic production—was initially influenced by European literary modernism. This was largely through Ediriweera Sarachchandra—another iconic figure in Sri Lanka’s Sinhala postcolonial literary-cultural scene—who was associated with the “Peradeniya School,” an artistic movement that professed a self-consciously “urbane” orientation as opposed to the organic authenticity of Wickramasinghe’s esthetic practice. The formative influence of the Peradeniya School is visible in a number of Amarasekara’s early novels, such as Karumakkarayo (The Fateful Ones) and Yali Upannemi (I Am Reborn).Footnote 31 In these texts, Amarasekara explores the psychological interiority of a Sinhalese subjectivity grappling with a range of issues emerging from postcolonial modernity: sexuality, family life, social mobility, and so forth. However, after facing public criticism for his portrayals of rural Sinhala and Buddhist culture—including criticism from Wickramasinghe—Amarasekara began to turn to a kind of Lukácsian social realism.Footnote 32 With this “turn,” Amarasekara produces a body of prose literature in which there is a recurring self-alienated figure—a young man from a village background who loses his organic authenticity through contact with urban (Western) modernity, most often represented by the university and the city.
Amarasekara’s “nationalist turn” also needs to be read within a larger referential framework of how a cosmopolitan decolonizing imagination transforms into a more ethnocentrically particularist one. Two terms in Sinhala literary-cultural discourse from the 1950s delineate this transformation. One is the term desheeya (thesiya in Tamil), which denoted “Indigenous” and could encompass the multiplicity of Sri Lanka’s ethnocultural diversity at the time of independence and the term apekama, which denotes an exclusively Sinhala sense of selfhood and heritage.Footnote 33 The imaginative geography of Amarasekara’s writing following his “nationalist turn” is instructive in this regard. He begins to depict the university as a site of self-alienation and cultural deracination and a vector of ideological discourses that are harmful to an authentic sense of Sinhala and Buddhist selfhood. Similarly, the city becomes a site of inauthenticity. In some of its cruder manifestations, Amarasekara presents the city as a space where male Sinhala and Buddhist protagonists lose their selfhood to a series of seductive urban vices—alcohol, women and, “Western” instrumentalist and selfish modes of existence. What is perhaps most striking is how Amarasekara reproduces the schematic didacticism of Sirisena from almost half a century ago. “Westernized” sexually alluring women, often depicted as Burgher women (women from Sri Lanka’s Indigenous Eurasian community), become the inauthentic foil to virtuous desexualized Sinhala and Buddhist women—repositories of Sinhala authenticity. What was particularly damaging in this emergent post-independence cultural and esthetic discourse in Sinhala society, of which Amarasekara was an influential agent, is how it marginalized critical artistic work produced by avant-garde artists, who were attempting to grapple with issues of modernity, urbanization, and Sinhala selfhood in ways which were more cosmopolitan and culturally accommodative.Footnote 34 For instance, novelists like Siri Gunasinghe or dramatists like Sugathapala da Silva explored esthetic imaginaries grounded in gritty urban realities with protagonists trying to come to terms with postcolonial existential questions emerging from rural to urban migration, unemployment, sexuality—without attempting to resolve them through a retreat to a rural authenticity.Footnote 35 However, the contours of the dominant esthetic form that was taking shape in post-independence Sri Lanka—arguably most clearly articulated in Amarasekara—has had multiple impacts in shaping literary-cultural discourse well into the late twentieth century.
3. Sri Lankan writing in English and the allure and impossibility of a “national form”
Sri Lankan writing in English can potentially be understood, with a number of qualifications, as a “minor tradition”—following Deleuze et al.’s definition—in relation to the development of the literary-cultural public sphere I sketched above.Footnote 36 This appears counterintuitive, given the elite status of English, its colonial history, and its continuing associations with privilege and class in postcolonial Sri Lanka. However, the cultural minority status of the imaginary that English writing represents, which is also at times matched by the ethnocultural minority backgrounds of many of those who write in English, allows English-language writing to be counterposed to Sinhala cultural production productively where it at times submits to but also subverts the dominant logic of the cultural nationalist form that gains sociocultural hegemony and institutional recognition in post-independence Sri Lanka.
When one places the development of the literary-cultural imagination in English writing alongside Sinhala literary discourse, a pattern of convergence and divergence emerges. Published about a decade after Sirisena’s Jayatissa and Rosalin, Lucien de Zilwa’s The Dice of the Gods presents a more complex sociology of colonial Sri Lanka.Footnote 37 de Zilwa belonged to the Burgher (Eurasian) community, which enjoyed a certain degree of cultural capital within society, where their ability to use English and perceived “westernization” was seen as an asset.Footnote 38 However, this status was always ambiguous as they were seen as products of colonial miscegenation—a “people in-between,” neither fully belonging to the culture of the colonizer nor of the colonized. As the positioning of Burgher women as vectors of moral decadence in Amarasekara’s post-independence fiction suggests, by the 1950s, much of this cultural capital that was available to the Burgher community under colonialism had diminished. But in The Dice of the Gods (1917), a number of possibilities for a different sociological imagination of the nation—one that is not overdetermined by the mourning for a lost cultural essence—are visible. In de Zilwa’s novel, the main protagonist, William van der Beck, a Sri Lankan burger educated in England and Europe, finds himself alienated from Sri Lanka but achieves a kind of reintegration by the end of the story.Footnote 39 However, van der Beck’s reintegration is not premised on a pre-conceived notion of indigeneity. Instead, he adjusts his “metropolitan” orientation to the realities of early twentieth-century Sri Lanka.
Another form of local integration is presented through the character of Dr. Santiago—a catholic Sinhalese who marries Mattie van der Beck, a member of the extended van der Beck family.Footnote 40 This Burgher–Sinhala union—which runs counter to the Sinhala nationalist cultural logic of Sirisena and Amarasekara—is another instance through which the novel offers possibilities of imagining a multicultural indigeneity. Yet another character, a Buddhist priest named Rev. Dhammananda, who has become ordained because he is unable to marry a Roman Catholic Sinhala woman, presents a form of cultural victimization within the Sinhala community, where Buddhism and Sinhala identity are becoming increasingly fused into a discourse of authentic national selfhood. As Jayasuriya observes, the novel presents a polyphony of voices that could encompass the notion of a “Ceylonese identity”—a marginal but inclusive national imaginary that was briefly present within the Burgher community from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century.Footnote 41 In fiction and his public writing, de Zilwa presents this Ceylonese vision as a multicultural counter-didactic to dominant Sinhala and Buddhist discourses. However, de Zilwa also recognizes that the realization of such a Ceylonese identity is an ideal rather than a practical possibility.Footnote 42 The significance of de Zilwa’s novel and the social imaginary it represents—in terms of my argument about literary-public culture in Sri Lanka—is that this historical moment represents a space when a writer from a minority community could imagine a multicultural Sri Lanka—a possibility that diminishes as majoritarian discourses become more dominant later in the twentieth century.
By the 1950s—the period I sketched previously as the time when a Sinhala nationalist political and cultural imaginary becomes socially and institutionally ascendant—Sri Lankan English writing struggles to find a social location for itself. At one level, those writing in English did not have the linguistic or cultural knowledge to participate in the post-independence Sinhala cultural nationalist imaginary.Footnote 43 At another, English writers saw this as a “parochial” communal discourse, viewing themselves as more “cosmopolitan”—an elitist perspective deriving from colonial discourses that equated the knowledge of English with modernity and progress. For instance, historian G. C. Mendis, writing as late as 1957, sees this as a reversal of a process of modernization initiated under colonial rule. Mendis refers to the Colebrooke–Cameron reforms of 1833—the first major administrative reform after Sri Lanka became a British colony in 1815.
Colebrooke, after a study of two years, made a thorough analysis of the political, social and economic conditions of the Island and came to the conclusion that the river of life in Ceylon was practically stagnant…. He searched for the causes that obstructed this flow, and came to the conclusion that it was not British rule but the continuity of the ancient system. Therefore, he made recommendations to liberate Ceylon from the burden of its past heritage.Footnote 44
Mendis’ views, while partly representative, of the attitude of many whom Yasmine Gooneratne categorizes as the “English-educated”—a label that is less about linguistic competency and more about ideological and class orientation—were intermixed with views that decolonization was inevitable and that the “English educated” needed to act as a kind of cultural bridge between the “world” and “Indigenous” social and cultural forces. Such views can be found in the writing of figures like E. F. C. Ludowyck, an iconic professor of English at the University of Peradeniya and in the formation of the Community Institute in the 1950s, which published the journal Community. Footnote 45 The institute and its journal were an attempt by the “English-educated” to intervene in what they saw as increasing ethno-nationalist divisiveness in the country and to promote a “Ceylonese literature” in the absence of a “Ceylonese language.”Footnote 46
However, anti-Tamil riots in 1958 that followed the enactment of a discriminatory Sinhala-only language policy in 1956, which made Sinhala the sole official language, shattered the illusion of a Ceylonese identity and led to a more intense and politically conscious process of self-reflection among the “English-educated.” Tarzie Vittachi, a journalist and writer, observes in his book Emergency 1958, “It couldn’t happen in Ceylon.Footnote 47 That is what we all thought. After all, we had all lived together, Sinhalese and Tamil, for so long….” Godfrey Gunatilleke, a board member of the Community Institute, and a prominent literary-cultural commentator, observed that the “English-educated” were culturally and socially alienated from the broader public life of post-independence Sri Lanka:
The Central fact (is, that) the western-educated elite as a class, have aroused a deep hostility among the majority of the citizens of this country, that they are not acceptable to the wider community, in the status they have assumed and the role they have played up to now. In that sense, and whether we deserve it or not, we ought to realise our condition and face the fact of our alienation from the wider community.Footnote 48
One can see some convergence between these remarks and the sentiments expressed by Wickramasinghe and Amarasekara during the same period about cultural alienation and the search for an Indigenous authenticity in the Sinhala literary-cultural sphere. However, since both the source of alienation and options available to the “English-educated” were different, their response to this crisis of authenticity generated different outcomes than their Sinhala literary counterparts. In English literary production, one trend was an attempt to graft a sense of rural authenticity—distinct from the much more multivalent and productive discourse about the rural in Sinhala literary production I discuss above. This sudden and unreflective turn to the rural in writers such as James Goonewardene and Punyakante Wijenaike led literary critics like Rajiva Wijesinha to label this trend the “village well syndrome.”Footnote 49 However, at the same time, this sense of cultural alienation produced more critically reflective work, such as Godfrey Gunatilleke’s essay “A language without metaphor,” which argued that the English language used by Sri Lankan English writers was a derivative one with little or no localization and therefore ineffective as a creative medium.Footnote 50 The political and social urgency of the moment also produced more radical responses, as in the writing of Lakdasa Wikkramasinha, who in the preface to his 1965 poetry collection “Lustre Poems,” declared that:
I have come to realise that I am using the language of the most despicable and loathsome people on earth; I have no wish to extend its life and range, enrich its tonality. To write in English is a form of cultural treason. I have had for the future to think of a way of circumventing this treason.Footnote 51
However, despite Wikkramasinha’s renunciation of English, he continued to write creatively in the language.
The decades from the 1950s to the 1960s, therefore, demarcate a period when the literary-cultural public sphere in Sri Lanka had the potential to become a linguistically and culturally hybrid space, but failed to do so for a number of reasons. The sense of cultural alienation expressed by intellectuals such as Gunatilleke and Wikkramasinha demonstrates a cultural and political awareness about decolonization that was largely lacking among their “English-educated” peers—making them a minority within their community. At the same time, Sinhala-language writers like Wickramasinghe and Amarasekara, who were bilingual and aware of the need for Sinhala literary culture to be open to influences from outside, were also culturally conservative and fearful of how English and Western influences could engulf what they saw as a tenuous and hard-won space of political and cultural decolonization. Wickramasinghe, writing for the Journal of the National Education Society of Ceylon in 1957, observed that “the danger is not that the future Sinhalese writers will fail because of their narrow nationalism, to assimilate Western culture through the medium of English, but that they will become slavish admirers and imitators of Western literature.”Footnote 52 Such comments indicate that Wickramasinghe, among other Sinhala language literati, was aware of the dangers inherent in the rise of an inward-focused Sinhala nationalism but saw “Westernization” as a greater threat. This cultural conservatism of major Sinhala public intellectuals meant that more iconoclastic Sinhala writers like Gunasinghe, or the young Amarasekara, were unable to impact Sinhala literary culture substantially. Gunasinghe, who migrated to Canada in the 1970s, reflects on the criticism of his work by conservative Sinhala literary critics:
We read the Sinhalese press, we knew (Sinhalese) folk stories and legends. We were as much Sinhalese as any of them. But we had the extra bit of English education. We … read English literature, our medium of instruction at the time was English.Footnote 53
This linguistic and cultural bifurcation between Sinhala and English literary-public cultures within a larger decolonizing context meant that the impact English literary culture could have had as a “minor” tradition was never fully realized.Footnote 54
3.1. The 1938 ethnic riots and national belonging and unbelonging in English writing
The most significant social and political event that impacts writing in English, after the nationalist cultural debates of the 1950–60s period, is the 1983 ethno-nationalist violence. Sinhala mobs—tacitly and openly backed by the center-right government in power at the time—attacked Tamil homes and businesses, killing many and displacing thousands. Writing in the aftermath of the riots, Newton Gunasinghe, a leftist progressive public intellectual, predicted that “ethnicity” will supersede “class” as the category through which progressive leftist discourse would need to grasp Sri Lankan society in the coming decades.Footnote 55 The writer Jean Arasanayagam, a Burgher woman married to a Tamil man, who experienced the violence of 1983 at first-hand, best exemplifies the trauma of ethno-nationalist violence and a “minoritarian” critique of majoritarian nationalism.Footnote 56 In 1983, her house was attacked by Sinhala mobs, and she and her family had to seek refuge in shelters set up for the internally displaced. As a Burgher woman from an English-speaking background, her socioeconomic status had largely shielded Arasanayagam from Sri Lanka’s history of post-independence ethno-nationalist violence. But the scale and breadth of the 1983 riots were such that the “English-educated” experienced the violence with an unprecedented immediacy. Arasanayagam’s poem titled “1958 … ’71 … ’77 … ’81 … ’83”—years that mark violent social upheavals in post-independence Sri Lanka—marks the disorienting effect of 1983.
It’s all happened before and will happen again
And we the onlookers
But now I’m in it
It’s happened to me
At last history has meaning.Footnote 57
In Arasanayagam’s post-1983 poetry, one finds a structure of feeling and an esthetic about the exclusionary nature of the Sri Lankan postcolonial state almost entirely absent in the Sinhala language literary-cultural discourse of the time. In a series of post-1983 poetry collections, Arasanayagam explores the impact of ethno-nationalist violence with visceral intensity.Footnote 58 While Arasanayagam stands out due to the immediacy of her experience, the issue of ethno-nationalist violence permeates much of Sri Lankan writing in English in the aftermath of 1983. A number of writers such as Arjuna Parakrama, Richard de Soyza, Suresh Canagarajah, Alfreda de Silva, and Yasmine Gooneratne, to name a few, begin to explicitly explore the social, affective, and political costs of ethno-nationalism and the violence it produces. In terms of literary-public culture, what is significant in this output is that it largely operates outside the logic of dominant nationalist imaginaries. As Qadri Ismail has observed, one of the ethical and political dilemmas that Sri Lanka’s ethno-nationalist conflict produces is a majoritarian cultural and political logic that pervades both Sinhala nationalist discourse and Tamil nationalist counter discourse.Footnote 59 Tamil nationalism, which emerged historically as a minority discourse of resistance, became “majoritarian” in its imagination. It attempted to subsume other minorities, such as the Muslims, within its nationalist project and was unable to offer an ethical or political alternative to the majoritarianism of Sinhala nationalist discourse.
Within this context, the “minoritarian” structure of feeling—produced partly by the cultural alienation of the English-educated from the national mainstream—generated an imaginary that implicitly questioned the dominant logic of nationalist cultural forms. This “minoritarian” orientation was particularly visible in Arasanayagam’s writing. As a woman, a Burgher, and someone married to a Tamil man from a high-caste background, she was excluded at multiple levels from hegemonic notions of national belonging. While her immediate post-1983 poems explore the visceral intensity of ethno-nationalist violence in later poetry, she begins an intense and passionate exploration of her Burgher inheritance and what it means for national belonging and unbelonging.Footnote 60 The significance of this body of work is that Arasanayagam sees Burgher identity not as a form of cosmopolitan privilege but as a precarious form of existence that holds up an ethical mirror to majoritarian nationalism. This contrasts with early and mid-twentieth-century sentiments when the “English-educated” and Burghers saw themselves as a cosmopolitan elite, victimized yet aloof from mainstream cultural nationalist discourses in the country.
Another significant trend in the English literary-public sphere emerged out of a similar sense of precarity generated during the 1987–89 period. Due to a Marxist-Sinhala nationalist uprising by youth in the south of the country (led by the JVP or People’s Liberation Front which had staged a similar insurrection in 1971), a full-scale military conflict in the north between the Sri Lankan state and Tamil rebel groups and the presence of an Indian Peace Keeping Force in the north due to Indian geo-political intervention, this was a particularly unstable period in Sri Lankan history. While the insurrection in the south and the state’s bloody counter-response, which resulted in the deaths of thousands of Sinhala youth, resonated in the Sinhala literary-cultural sphere, the war in the north produced little empathy. One of the reasons for this was that post-1983 Sinhala literati saw themselves as a beleaguered group. International opinion was critical of Sinhala majoritarianism, and there was also an increasing body of academic knowledge that linked Sinhala ethno-nationalism with modes of social and cultural thinking in Sinhala society. Therefore, ironically, while the Sinhala literati were quick to critique what they saw as “Western” criticism of Sinhala culture and society—a discourse in which they also saw the “English educated” in Sri Lanka as being complicit—there was little or no compulsion to discuss the suffering in the north.Footnote 61 Most Sinhala commentators reductively understood the conflict in the north as a “terrorist” problem, whereas the killing of Sinhala youth in the south of the country produced a more ethically engaged response. The “fear of the West” articulated by Martin Wickremasinghe in the 1950s as a cultural and esthetic critique had morphed into a political and existential fear, where the Sinhala majority community began to see themselves as a minority under threat. Though a numerical majority within Sri Lanka, they viewed themselves as a regional and global minority, threatened by cultural, social, and political dissolution.Footnote 62 Amarasekara, Wickremasinghe’s literary heir, thematizes this existential fear as an epistemological and political resistance to “Western” influence through jathika chinthanaya (national philosophy)—one of the most intellectually articulate and socially influential expressions of Sinhala nationalist discourse that Amarasekara co-founded.Footnote 63
The qualitative difference in the English literary-public sphere—compared with its Sinhala counterpart—was its relative sensitivity to the culture of violence and impunity in the country, regardless of the ethnocultural basis of such suffering. The abduction, torture, and killing of Richard de Zoysa in 1990—a journalist, writer, dramatist, and human rights activist—from a mixed Sinhala and Tamil, elite English-speaking background was a site where this broad ethical possibility of an English literary-public sphere became particularly visible. de Zoysa’s killing was another stark reminder to the “English-educated” that their social privilege was tenuous—just as much the violence of 1983 had breached social and class privilege. Anura Bandaranaike, a member of parliament and a scion of the powerful Bandaranaike political dynasty in post-independence Sri Lanka observed that:
The killing of Mr. Richard Zoysa [sic] has pricked the conscience of the middle class of this country. You can kill a hundred de Zoysas in Hambantota, as hundreds have been killed … but this single individual epitomises the somewhat anesthetised conscience of Colombo’s middle class.Footnote 64
At another level, de Zoysa’s activism, where he identified with the socialist aspirations of the Sinhala youth insurrection—though not its Sinhala nationalist ideology—and his equal commitment to social justice for the Tamil minority and his broad stance against statist discourses of impunity made him an iconic figure. Poems such as “Animal Crackers,” which presents a dark parody of the ethno-nationalist violence of 1983 from the naivete of a child’s perspective figures a lion (the mythical symbol of the Sinhala people), a tiger (the emblem adopted by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Elam, which became the most powerful of Tamil rebel groups), and an elephant (the political party symbol of the United National Party under whose watch the 1983 riots unfolded)—are powerfully emblematic of de Zoysa’s critique of multiple sites of social and political exclusion and violence.Footnote 65 Praba Manuratne in an article about de Zoysa argues that he was critically aware of the dangers of cultural nationalist thinking, such as jathika chinthanaya, which de Zoysa argued “provide[s] a philosophical underpinning for racism of the worst kind.”Footnote 66 In the same essay, de Zoysa goes on to critique the political and philosophical impoverishment of Sri Lanka’s leftist politics as having failed to craft a political tradition that could stand as an alternative to the ethno-nationalist mainstream and could address the concerns of minorities. What one sees in de Zoysa’s critique of jathika chinthanaya is that, unlike interventions from “English-educated” intellectuals in the 1950s or 70s, he has a critical orientation that is not burdened by the anxiety of its self-perceived inauthenticity and at the same time does not adopt an elitist sense of distance.
Following his death, de Zoysa’s mother, Manorani Sravanamuttu, founded and provided leadership to the iconic “Mother’s Front,” a broad coalition that transcended class divisions and to some extent ethnic divisions to seek justice for children who had been abducted and “disappeared” during the 1980s.Footnote 67 The discourse surrounding de Zoysa and his mother, and how it continues to haunt the public imagination, is a thread that extends into the concluding section of this essay. While exploring a recent controversy arising from a film that pays tribute to Manorani Saravanamuttu, I reflect on what “value” a literary-cultural public sphere has to offer in the context of a conflictual postcolonial context like that of Sri Lanka.
4. Concluding thoughts—the “value” of a literary-cultural public sphere
A recent controversy following the release of the film Rani—based on the lives of Saravanamuttu and de Zoysa—is a productive site to reflect on the contemporary manifestation of the historical tensions in Sri Lankan literary-public culture I have been tracing. The film has had significant box-office success, which is unusual in Sri Lanka for what is considered an “art film.” The critical reception of the film, though, has been sharply divergent. In the English-language literary-cultural sphere, there have been a number of harshly critical assessments. Some of these criticisms are by people who knew Manorani and de Zoysa personally. They have found Manorani’s fictional representation—as a profane, chain-smoking, and alcohol-swigging character on screen—an affront to the memory of the “real” Manorani.Footnote 68 In contrast to the cinematic “Rani,” they insist on the quiet dignity, heroism, and courage of the “real” Manorani. Other, less personally inspired critiques of the film argue that the cinematic representation of both Manorani and Richard depoliticizes them—that Manorani is shown to be a naïve agent manipulated by political discourses of the time and that Richard’s homosexuality, rather than his politics, becomes the reason for his killing.Footnote 69 Pitigala-Liyanage and Liyanage, in effect, argue that the film esthetically re-victimizes these two figures while also rendering their politics banal.Footnote 70 However, in the Sinhala literary-public sphere, the film has been received with much adulation. Many critics have admired the fictional rendering of the impunity and violence that characterized the historical period covered in this film by director Asoka Handagama—considered one of the most accomplished contemporary Sinhala filmmakers—as masterful. Many of these prominent Sinhala-language cultural critics, such as Viyangoda Gamini and Chinthana Dharmadasa, have defended Handagama and argued that criticisms of the film have failed to grasp its artistry and the creative license of an artist in relation to the historical record.Footnote 71
The significance of this controversy is that in English-language criticism, a central concern has been the film’s misrepresentation of the social and cultural habitus of two elite English-speaking figures. While no direct parallels can be drawn, I see echoes in this representation of how Sinhala literary-cultural discourse has historically struggled with what is perceived as “Western” and “urban” culture. In the film, Manorani’s profane representation is not meant to be negative. In fact, it is an image of a “liberal” and agential woman—a foil to a “traditional” Sinhala woman and the archaic value system she is thought to embody. However, at the same time, as a number of English-language critics have pointed out, this nonconformist depiction robs Manorani’s character of its political agency. The film’s ending, which implies that Richard’s death was due to homophobic violence, rather than the threat he posed to the political establishment of the time, equally depoliticizes his death—despite significant evidence that he was killed due to the political threat he posed.Footnote 72 Both these discourses about Manorani and Richard have some historical basis. The iconic Mother’s Front Movement that Manorani founded, some observers felt, was co-opted by instrumental political interests, and there were also rumors that Richard was killed due to personal reasons because of his sexual orientation.Footnote 73 However, both these discourses also implicitly dovetail into a larger discourse about the “rootless” cosmopolitanism of English-speaking society in Sri Lanka and how it is marginal to Sri Lanka’s political mainstream. This moment is a far cry from Sirisena’s didactic Sinhala and Buddhist counterfictions written as a response to Christian missionary fictions, which presented romantic love within a Christian worldview in the early twentieth century. It is also different from the culture wars of the 1950s and 60s when Sinhala literary culture was becoming institutionalized within an emergent majoritarian post-colonial nation-state. But ghosts of this decolonizing past, where linguistically and culturally segregated worldviews established themselves in the English- and Sinhala-language literary-cultural spheres, still haunt Sri Lanka’s postcolonial present.
What these unresolved tensions in Sri Lankan literary-public culture suggest is that there is no inherent normative “value” attached to public humanities. The Habermasian notion of a grand public sphere—within which the idea of a literary-public sphere is nestled—is a normative ideal and an ideal that has never been fully realized. Instead, it is more productive to think of the literary-public sphere as an arena of ideological contestation. As the history of the linguistically and culturally bifurcated Sri Lankan literary-public sphere I trace in this essay demonstrates, literary-public cultures develop in tandem with the larger political economy of a given society—in Sri Lanka, it first emerged as a response to colonialism and then increasingly took an ethno-nationalist “shape” as the post-colonial Sri Lankan nation took a decidedly majoritarian turn. However, what the history of the literary-public sphere in Sri Lanka also shows is that it is a space where different imaginings of community, belonging, and the nation can emerge. In this sense, rather than a normative sense, it remains a vital arena of public cultural, social, and political engagement in an increasingly utilitarian world where market discourses have overwhelmed most aspects of social life.
Author contribution
Conceptualization: H.R.
Conflicts of interests
The author declares no competing interests.
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