By Siri Gamage –

Dr. Siri Gamage

During the recent State ceremony held to present the award to the Chief Sangha Nayaka of Sri Amarapura Nikaya, President Anura Kumara Dissanayake reiterated the three main challenges facing the country. They are 1) economic development 2) changing the political culture and 3) reforming and purification of the decadent society. He stated that the first two are the government’s responsibility, the third one requires the support of all in society, especially the Sangha institution. He also mentioned that the challenges cannot be met only by imposing rules. But to reform the society rule of law that applies to everyone equally is important. When the new government came to power, mini kingdoms had been created by those with power, wealth or underworld connections. Economic system had been constructed in a way that the benefits did not trickle down to the common man. Society cannot be transformed into one that provides benefits to all cannot be accomplished only by laws. Cultural traditions, values and norms, rituals, etc also play a significant role. These ideas show a deep and critical understanding about the bigger challenge facing the society by the President. In particular, the social decay and decadence dawned on society over the past decades. The root cause of the problem according to the President is the craving for money at the expense of everything else. Human interactions and the basis of these like empathy for the other have seen a deterioration. Relations between parents and children, teachers and students even have become nominal. An artificial (atopa)set of values have replaced the ones which had been nurtured over the centuries. Actually, such values are exhibitionist rather than real. He emphasised the cardinal humanistic and liberatory value of Buddhism also.

The fact that the President reiterates the decay in society even when the previous rulers implemented various policies to develop the country is an important matter. It brings into question the economic model adopted by the ruling class since 1977 following the path adopted by some South East Asian countries like Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan, South Korea and later Vietnam, Malaysia and Thailand. Did we lose the plot in giving priority to the economic development -a dependent kind- while not addressing the social problems that emerged in the process? Was there an organic relationship between the new economy, polity and culture or did “a deep state” emerged linking the economy and polity in unsavoury ways benefiting the mini kingdoms that the President referred to?

For a long time, sociologists and anthropologists in the country especially since the 60s, the author included, had been discussing the need for modernity following western ideals, science and technology and the discoveries and inventions. There was debate about whether we can follow and adopt western scripts for development without adapting them to fit the local conditions especially cultural traditions. Thus, much research effort was devoted to examine how the cultural traditions in the country work to stifle modernisation attempts -especially the policies of the government. Some research focused on new settlements organised with irrigated water. Others focused on traditional villages in the South, Central and North Central provinces. S.J Thambiah published an article or a book about the breakdown of village society called Disintegrating village. Others studied the land tenure, marriage and kinship, religion and morality, as well as rituals. Underlying theme was that the traditional social institutions were seen as obstacles to create so-called development or social change according to the assumptions of modernity and modernisation. To address various problems in society such as poverty, suicide, unemployment, lack of income, and finally the breakdown of village society due to the embracing of modern values through education, media and government policy, it was emphasised that we need to embrace Western modernity and modernisation with necessary changes. In fact, later some social scientists from the global south argued that a different kind of modernity emerged in countries of the global south.

While some sociologists and anthropologists concentrated on such subjects, another brand of sociologists and anthropologists emerged pointing out the so-called modernity and modern society being created in Asian societies was indeed a dependent one. Economy thus created was also a dependent one on former imperial centres of power such as Britain, France, Germany, Spain and later USA. One such sociologist was late Newton Gunasinghe who created Institute of workers and Peasants based in Kandy. His training was from Institute of Development studies in the UK which adopted a critical perspective to development. During my time at Peradeniya in the 70s and 80s, Newton provided intellectual direction for a different kind of development sociology through public lectures, publications and other means. At the department of Sociology also several academics obtained postgraduate qualifications with knowledge and analytical skills in exposing the nature of dependent economy. Economists like S.B de Silva also provided further inputs. To some extent the publications by Sarath Amunugama also reflected the need for an economic model based on our indigenous values and traditions.

Some sociologists and anthropologists focused on the nature of class society and how the emerging middle class embraced western modernist values, attitudes and orientations almost imitatively at the expense of traditional values and attitudes. On the part of international agencies also it was a core strategy to train and brain wash leaders in society including in the university sector about the superior status of western knowledge and ways of doing compared to the traditional ones. For such activities there were a range of scholarships and funding available. Publications by Susantha Goonatillake highlight the way such activities contributed to the maintenance of a dependent society and economy though his work was viewed as heretic by the academic establishment in faculties of arts and social sciences at the time. Even the social scientists that examined class structure, relations and conflict limited their studies to gaining qualifications from western institutions rather than creating a brand of future intellectuals capable of independent thought and analysis with applicational value to the government decision making and society at large. The gulf between government authorities making policy decisions and university academics not aligned with a ruling party also contributed to this unfortunate outcome.

Dependency on western ways of knowing and doing was not limited to international relations between the government and international agencies on one hand and the universities and international centres of research and teching on the other. As the decades went by and the deep state took root with a corresponding faulty political culture, a system of dependency developed inside the country as well. The hierarchical system of control by formal and informal institutions, practices contributed to this leaving the average citizens who relied on the system helpless. Some referred to this trend as internal colonisation. The system of patronage relations that made the backbone of the system cut across class stratification or lines. For the political leadership this system proved more beneficial to maintain and exercise power than any notion of class distinctions. There was a study of Mirissa, a fishing village in the southern part of Lanka by Anderson who highlighted the existence of a patron client system of relations at the village level. However, there was no serious study about how this expanded into the national and provincial levels since the 70s?

Generally speaking social scientists in Lanka’s universities had been engaged in teaching Western theories and concepts, perspectives and methods of research almost by translation without adding any creative modifications. They have also been considering themselves as a breed of academics who are different from those teaching and researching humanities subjects like language, civilisation, history, art, music, religion, and literature. Segregation of disciplines into departments also created a gulf between academic staff members pursuing research on a discipline without examining the benefits of inter disciplinary or integrative teaching and research. Cross fertilisation potential of disciplines was never their interest. Until today, in the faculties of arts and humanities this system continues. Knowledge for the sake of knowledge seems to be the adopted motto rather than any utility of knowledge for social and economic change. This approach has to change.

The university training with a critical analytical orientation did not transfer into the establishment policy making via the Central Bank. Establishment economists and sociologists followed the international prescriptions aided by the political leadership. As much needed funding and technical know-how for lifting he economy from its poverty levels came from international agencies like the World Bank, IMF, Asian Development Bank and various bilateral aid agencies, economists and social scientists working for the government naturally paid much attention to such avenues in the policy making and project design. The social and economic decay coupled with the flawed political culture mentioned by the President imply a serious intellectual failure in the soceity, especially from the perspective of higher education institutions which failed to develop a critique of the dependent economy on one hand and the way forward on the other. Unfortunately, this failure continues.

If there is to be any educational reforms in coming years, the authorities need to give serious attention to the role of Universities and other higher education institutions including those entrusted with policy decisions to be conversant with the new developments in development thinking away from the western prescriptions and the economists and social scientists who perpetuate the same instead of prescriptions for a renewed economy based on the country’s traditional values and norms. Social scientists have a major responsibility to absorb the new thinking and prescriptions coming from postcolonial and decolonial intellectuals from the global south including the need to enhance south-south dialogue and cooperation. Ideas for sustainable economy and independent society can be harnessed from their literature. Writings by authors like Said Farid Alatas, Walter Mignolo, Sujata Patel, Julian Go and Bhambra, can be useful in this regard.