{"id":50294,"date":"2012-08-07T07:44:42","date_gmt":"2012-08-07T07:44:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.colombotelegraph.com\/?p=50294"},"modified":"2012-08-11T17:42:39","modified_gmt":"2012-08-11T17:42:39","slug":"the-sri-lanka-reader-history-culture-and-politics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.colombotelegraph.com\/index.php\/the-sri-lanka-reader-history-culture-and-politics\/","title":{"rendered":"The Sri Lanka Reader – History, Culture And Politics"},"content":{"rendered":"

By\u00a0Tissa Jayatilaka<\/a>\u00a0–<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Tissa Jayatilaka<\/p><\/div>\n

Duke University Press( Durham and London) has published this superb anthology edited by that most perceptive and shrewd observer of Sri Lanka and its complex social, economic and political history, John Clifford Holt who is William R. Kenan, Jr., Professor of Humanities in Religion and Asian Studies at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine in the United States.\u00a0 He has written several books and, of those, the ones I am familiar with and profited from reading are The Buddhist Visnu: Religious<\/em> Transformation, Politics and Culture(2004), The Religious World of Kirti Sri: Buddhism, Art and Politics in<\/em> Late Medieval Sri Lanka(1996), Discipline: the Canonical Buddhism of the Vinayapitaka(1981), and<\/em> Buddha in the Crown: Avalokiteswara in the Buddhist Traditions of Sri Lanka<\/em>(1991), for which he received an American Academy of Religion Book Award for Excellence.\u00a0 Prof. Holt is the recipient of an honorary Doctor of Letters from the University of Peradeniya and, in 2007, was selected by the University of Chicago Divinity School as its Alumnus of the Year .<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Edited by John Clifford Holt,792 pages, 54 illustrations , ISBN: 978-0-8223-4967-9, Publication: June 2011<\/p><\/div>\n

John Holt and I have been friends for over two decades now.\u00a0 During this period I have watched with great admiration and pride his invaluable contribution to the promotion of mutual understanding between his country and mine. Promoting of such understanding is also the mandate of the United States-Sri Lanka Fulbright Commission, with which institution I have been associated for as long a period of time as the length of Prof. Holt\u2019s and my friendship.\u00a0 As founder – director of the Intercollegiate Sri Lanka Education (ISLE) programme, since 1982 Prof. Holt, along with several of his colleagues from the U.S. academic world, has brought over 400 American undergraduates from some of the leading Liberal Arts colleges in the U.S. on a semester abroad to Sri Lanka. ISLE is formally associated with the University of Peradeniya and Sree Padma Holt is now its capable executive director. As noted above, Holt has written four solidly researched books on aspects of Sri Lanka\u2019s religious culture, three of which have been translated into Sinhala and published locally.\u00a0 I consider John Holt to be a direct descendant of that excellent American scholarly line that stretches from the late and much revered Howard Wriggins, of Columbia University, to the present.\u00a0 Besides Wriggins and Holt, this line includes Robert Kearney, Marshall Singer, Myron Weiner, Bardwell Smith, John Ross Carter, Donald Smith, Dennis McGilvray, Steven Kemper, John Richardson, Patrick Peebles, James Manor, Anne Blackburn, Susan Reed, Charlie Hallisey, John Rogers, Jon Walters, Susan Mrozik, \u00a0Michele Ruth Gamburd and others. A number of these scholars have also been connected to ISLE as students or faculty directors. Some also have been Fulbright award recipients over the years.\u00a0\u00a0 Neither my friendship with John Holt nor my obvious admiration for his scholarship has got in the way of what I say in my comments on The Sri Lanka Reader<\/em>.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Prof.John Clifford Holt<\/p><\/div>\n

The well- known observation about books and their covers notwithstanding, sometimes a book cover does justice to the contents of a book, other times not. In the case of The Sri Lanka Reader<\/em><\/strong>, the cover of the book and its contents complement each other beautifully. The photograph by\u00a0 Adele Barker ( she is a former Fulbright scholar and author of Not Quite Paradise \u00a0An American Sojourn in<\/em> Sri Lanka<\/em> published in 2010) that adorns the cover of The<\/em><\/strong> Sri Lanka<\/strong><\/em> Reader<\/em><\/strong> <\/em>and the cover design are both extremely pleasant.\u00a0 The tastefully designed \u00a0cover is an apt forerunner to the handsome and insightful \u00a0\u2018documents, analytical accounts, photographs and poetic works\u2019 that Holt has woven together in spellbinding fashion in producing this volume. As its editor and publisher declare, \u00a0\u00a0The Sri<\/em><\/strong> Lanka<\/strong><\/em> Reader<\/em><\/strong> is indeed \u2018a sweeping introduction to the epic history of the island nation located just off the southern tip of India\u2019.\u00a0 It is an anthology that includes \u2018more than ninety classic and contemporary texts written by Sri Lankans and foreigners\u2019.<\/p>\n

Holt dedicates The Reader<\/em><\/strong> most appropriately to \u2018all Sri Lankans who have died as a consequence of political violence and those who work for peace\u2019.\u00a0 I wish to draw \u00a0attention to a couple of crucial points the editor of the publication makes in his introduction as they are the same that I have been making during numerous \u00a0orientation programmes to countless American diplomats, other American public servants and academics for nearly three and a half decades \u00a0now, namely, that despite its small size (approximately that of the U.S. State of West Virginia) Sri Lanka is an enormously complex and complicated country; one that, despite its cultural similarities, is markedly different from its giant neighbour across the Palk Straits and is an entity not to be imagined–no matter how strong the temptation may be– as \u2018a manageable version of India\u2019.<\/p>\n

John Holt\u2019s \u00a0Reader<\/em><\/strong> \u00a0<\/em>\u00a0is a stellar collection of wide-ranging essays both scholarly and popular, folklore, poetry and reportage that run into a mammoth 700 plus pages.\u00a0 Nor is this all. The book contains 54 images of paintings, sculptures and architecture together with its editor\u2019s suggestions for further reading and, a comprehensive index. It is an extreme labour of love on the part of John Holt, a sincere admirer of all that is best of Sri Lanka and an equally sincere critic of the seamier side of this complex Indian Ocean island.\u00a0 C.R. de Silva, a former Professor of History at Peradeniya now at the Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia, is absolutely right in his observation that The Sri<\/em><\/strong> Lanka<\/strong><\/em>\u00a0 Reader\u00a0 <\/strong>\u201c\u2026 is a book that you will return to time and time again.\u00a0 It will undoubtedly become the standard collection of documents on Sri Lanka and its history.\u201d<\/p>\n

It is impossible in a brief essay such as this to do justice to so varied and broad-ranging an anthology .\u00a0 The most one can do is to seek to offer a flavour of the publication in an effort to entice the discerning reader to search for more. \u00a0I undertake the latter task in this brief essay.<\/p>\n

The Sri Lanka Reader<\/em><\/strong> is divided into five sections: (i) From Ancient to Early Modern; (ii) The Colonial Encounter; (iii) Emerging Identities; (iv) Independence, Insurrections, and Social Change; and (v) Political Epilogue.\u00a0 The editor has sought to present his sources in a \u2018fundamentally historical\u2019 way and he has also, to his eternal credit, attempted to be inclusive, representative and fair to all things \u2018Sri Lankan\u2019 without pandering to petty and narrow sectarianism.\u00a0 Furthermore not only has John Holt included in his anthology those \u2018classic\u2019 pieces that should find their way into any serious collection of writings on Sri Lanka, but he has also found the space for writers and artistes whose works are yet to receive the exposure and acclaim that they deserve.\u00a0 The contributions of Robert Knox, Anagarika\u00a0 Dharmapala, Ananda Coomaraswamy, Martin Wickramasinghe, R.L. Spittel, Walpola Rahula, K.M. de Silva, K.W. Goonewardena, Howard Wriggins, S.J. Tambiah, Robert Kearney, Paul Caspersz, Dennis McGilvray, A.J. Wilson, A.T. Ariyaratne, Ismeth Raheem, C.R. de Silva, K. Indrapala, Michael Roberts, Jean Arasanayagam, and John Holt himself are interspersed with the writings of such younger Sri Lankans and Americans as Ramya Chamalie Jirasinghe , Mirak Raheem, Antoinette Ferdinand, Lilani Jayatilaka, Michele Ruth Gamburd and Ben Schonthal.\u00a0 In addition, English translations of notable works of those Sri Lankans who write in Sinhala and Tamil are included.<\/p>\n

Of the essays included in The Reader<\/em><\/strong>, my personal favourites are found in Sections IV and V.\u00a0 These are K.M. de Silva\u2019s Sri Lanka in 1948<\/em>; James Manor\u2019s The Bandaranaike Legend<\/em>; Howard Wriggins\u2019s After Forty – Five Years<\/em>; Lasantha Wickrematunga\u2019s And Then They Came for Me<\/em>; and Lilani Jayatilaka\u2019s Moderation the Only Way.<\/em><\/p>\n

De Silva\u2019s is a superb account of the socio-political dynamics of Ceylon in 1948 when the island made the transition from a British colony to a newly independent state.\u00a0 As de Silva notes, at the dawn of independence the country was an \u201can oasis of peace, stability and order.\u201d\u00a0 However \u201cbeneath the surface\u2026, religious cultural and linguistic issues were gathering momentum and developing into a force too powerful for the existing social and political set-up to accommodate or absorb.\u00a0 They were to tear the country apart within a decade.\u201d\u00a0 De Silva\u2019s essay gives us a persuasive and convincing assessment of D.S. Senanayake, the country\u2019s first prime minister.\u00a0 It is a pity that no scholarly biography has yet been written of this towering national political personality, \u00a0arguably the best prime minister Sri Lanka has had to date.\u00a0 The editor has very deftly placed The Bandaranaike Legend<\/em>, the conclusion to James Manor\u2019s (1990) notable study of S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike (The Expedient Utopian : Bandaranaike and Ceylon<\/em>) between de Silva\u2019s essay and Howard Wriggins\u2019s swan – song of Sri Lanka titled \u00a0After Forty – Five Years<\/em> .\u00a0 Each essay complements and reinforces the other.\u00a0 Manor\u2019s substantial study of Bandaranaike is too well known to need recapitulation here.\u00a0 I should like, however, to quote anon \u00a0\u00a0an extremely significant paragraph from Manor\u2019s The Bandaranaike Legend<\/em> that Holt has included in The Reader<\/em><\/strong>, since \u00a0<\/em>\u00a0the key points Manor makes in it mesh with my personal assessment of Bandaranaike the man as well as of the government he headed as prime minister in 1956.<\/p>\n

My long held view is that although he played to the Sinhala gallery to gain transient political power, Bandaranaike himself was no Sinhala zealot.\u00a0 He was too educated and possessed of a universal worldview for such zealotry, as evidenced by his early (1926) advocacy of federalism as a possible solution to the then not yet-deadly competition between the Sinhalese and Tamils and later by his decision to enter into a pact with the then leader of the Federal Party in 1957. We should also not forget his substantial, and for the time, pioneering work done in relation to constitutional reform and devolution as Minister of Local Administration in the State Council (1936- 1946) and later (1947- 1951) as Minister of Health and Local Administration in the House of Representatives when the State Council was replaced by the former. \u00a0Having exploited the resurgent Sinhala nationalism that was on the rise in post – independent Sri Lanka to ensure his electoral success, Bandaranaike the non – chauvinist attempted subsequently to put that genie back in the bottle.\u00a0 However, the passions he had unleashed proved far too strong for Bandaranaike to contain them.\u00a0 His vacillating and indecisive attempts at containment led to destructive factionalism within his own Sri Lanka Freedom Party and the Mahajana Eksath Peramuna (MEP) coalition that formed the government of the day. In sharp contrast to his notable predecessor D.S. Senanayake and his successors Sirimavo Bandaranaike, J.R. Jayewardene, R.Premadasa, and Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga–who were all surer-footed and hence exercised more authoritarian control over their subordinates, as does the current incumbent–eventually the politically fragile Bandaranaike was destroyed by the very forces that propelled him into power. \u00a0Here, as promised above, is how Manor captures effectively the rise and fall of Bandaranaike:<\/p>\n

He [Bandaranaike] had hoped to use chauvinism as a means to achieve power, believing that he could disarm it by making modest, long – overdue concessions to Sinhalese Buddhist interests, and then by concentrating on reform to remove social injustice and soothe the anxieties of would be communalists.\u00a0 He did not succeed partly because the problems he inherited were so severe, partly because his ruling coalition contained too many contradictions, partly because his government functioned so sluggishly, but very substantially because of the way Bandaranaike himself thought and acted.<\/p>\n

In his After Forty – Five Years<\/em>, Howard Wriggins \u00a0\u00a0confirms \u00a0our views. He records his 1955 encounter with Bandaranaike, the then leader of the opposition and aspirant for the post of the prime minister of Ceylon.\u00a0 Whilst discussing the rising swabasha <\/em>movement, which demanded a change in official language policy, Bandaranaike had startled Wriggins by saying: \u201cyou know, Professor Wriggins, I have never found an issue as good as the language issue for exciting the people! Bandaranaike had said so in a way that had suggested he was confident the excitement could be managed\u201d — i.e., that the genie could be put back in the bottle.\u00a0 Here is how Wriggins put it:<\/p>\n

It would be wrong to assign all the blame (or credit) for this [ the Ceylonese Jacksonian revolution Bandaranaike ushered in 1956] to Bandaranaike alone. \u00a0Others, far more passionately committed to Sinhalization of Sri Lanka than he, seized the opportunity and pushed all the harder.\u00a0 They found ready acolytes, and no leaders of principal parties dared stand against the tide.<\/p>\n

On the morning of 8 January, 2009, Lasantha Wickrematunga was brutally assassinated\u00a0 in broad daylight as he drove to his office.\u00a0 Like most independent-minded journalists, Wickrematunga \u00a0\u00a0lived in the shadow of death by assassination for a considerable period of his professional life.\u00a0 He had left behind an editorial to be published, consequent to his death, which the Sunday Leader<\/em> duly carried on 11 January 2009, \u00a0\u00a0titled \u00a0And Then They Came for Me<\/em>.\u00a0 It is a powerful indictment of the culture of impunity that has prevailed\u00a0 in Sri Lanka from 1970 onwards \u00a0but has become particularly virulent \u00a0since 2005.\u00a0 Towards the end of this hard-hitting editorial Wickrematunga expresses the hope that \u201cmy assassination will be seen not as a defeat of freedom but an inspiration\u2026\u201d\u00a0 And he goes on to hope against hope and say:<\/p>\n

I hope it will help galvanise forces that will usher in a new era of human liberty in our beloved motherland.\u00a0 I also hope it will open the eyes of your President to the fact that however many are slaughtered in the name of patriotism, the human spirit will endure and flourish.\u00a0 Not all the Rajapakses combined can kill that.<\/p>\n

After Wickrematunga\u2019s murder, Sri Lanka witnessed further death and destruction during the last stages of the war against the LTTE and in May 2009 we witnessed \u00a0the brutal and intransigent Tigers\u2019 spectacular demise.\u00a0 Most of us hoped that the bloody events \u00a0\u00a0\u2018on the sands of Mullativu\u2019 which brought the internecine war to a close would pave \u00a0the way for healing and national reconciliation. Tragically, post-war developments have instead taken us on a disappointingly different direction where Sinhala triumphalism, coupled with increased authoritarian governance, \u00a0\u00a0have placed reconciliation on the back burner. Our Holocaust<\/em>, an editorial published on 16 May, 2009, in the Tamil diaspora newspaper The Tamil Guardian and republished in The Sri Lanka Reader<\/em><\/strong>, \u00a0\u00a0makes a tragic and \u00a0ominous prediction to the effect that as long as the Tamils are oppressed, \u201cSri Lanka will never be able to live in peace\u2019.<\/p>\n

Neither Sinhala triumphalism nor the continuing violent defiance of the Tamil diaspora will help the Sinhalese and Tamils of Sri Lanka to learn to respect each other and share constitutionally guaranteed equal rights as citizens of the country.\u00a0 Only the moderate middle– \u00a0the non-sectarian segment of the Muslims, Tamils and Sinhalese living in Sri Lanka– can and will usher in ethnic peace and social stability in our island home. It is such a consummation that Lilani Jayatilaka devoutly wishes for in her essay of 17 May, 2009 titled Moderation the Only Way<\/em> that is the penultimate item included in The Reader<\/em><\/strong>. Before I proceed further I wish to state that, unlike the disclaimer made with regard to my comments on John Holt, nothing I say about Moderation the Only Way<\/em> \u00a0\u00a0or its author is dispassionate: they are entirely passionate for both professional and profoundly personal reasons! Lilani Jayatilaka\u2019s essay, \u00a0as editor \u00a0John Holt notes, offered \u201ca more moderate humane, and nuanced perspective\u201d than the predictably slanted editorials and other contributions that appeared in most Sinhala, Tamil and English newspapers published in Sri Lanka and overseas at that time.\u00a0 It is an essay, John Holt goes on to note, that is \u201cnoteworthy not only for its expose` \u00a0of the internment camps containing Tamil refugees but also for its insistence on the need for Sri Lankans not to be held hostage by Sinhala ultranationalists, on the one hand, and by Tamil separatists, on the other.\u201d\u00a0 I wish to end my comments on The Reader<\/em><\/strong> quoting the concluding lines of Moderation the Only<\/em> Way<\/em> as I identify totally with the sentiments expressed therein:<\/p>\n

[T]hen \u00a0there \u00a0are \u00a0the Tamil Tigers who manipulate the emotions of the vulnerable with information and misinformation.<\/p>\n

But then there is information and misinformation disseminated by the government of Sri Lanka as well.\u00a0 The Sinhala supremacists and the radicalized Tamils make an emotional choice as to whom and what they will believe, fuelled by their ethnic loyalties.\u00a0 Each has access only to partial truths, which they believe are whole truths.\u00a0 In this lies their blindness.\u00a0 I write in favour of moderation — to \u00a0see these \u00a0partial \u00a0truths for what they are and to recognize the fact that the whole truth will continue to elude us; to beware of the rhetoric of hate and to refuse to become a pawn in the diabolical vision of either the nationalists or the separatists.\u00a0 For while the ultranationalists and the separatists pursue their own ends, the people of this land of whatever ethnicity are being required to pay with their lives for the intolerance and intransigence of the bigoted few.<\/p>\n

*Tissa Jayatilaka<\/a>\u00a0is the\u00a0Executive Director\u00a0at\u00a0U.S-Sri Lanka Fulbright Commission<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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