By 1971, more than 45 English novels had been written in Sri Lanka. The first novels were authored by British civilian officials and some others were penned at the behest of missionary organisations which, as Piyadasa Sirisena did at the turn of the 20th century, cloaked their religious zeal under the veneer of romantic fiction. It’s interesting to note that many of these works of the two centuries were authored by women: Fanny Farr’s Fickle Fortune in Ceylon (1887); Evelyn Karney’s Punchirala (1904), Ranmenika (1909), Kiri (1909) and The Dust of Desire (1912); Amelia Burr’s The Three Fires (1923); Isabel Smith’s A Marriage in Ceylon (1925); and Rosalind Mendis’s The Tragedy of a Mystery (1929). Of the lot Rosalind was the only local, and her novel was preceded 12 years earlier by Lucien de Zilwa’s The Dice of the Gods, considered to be the first English novel by a Sri Lankan, though it had been preceded 11 years earlier by another work of his, The Web of Circumstances.
Between Fanny Farr in 1887 and Lucien de Zilwa in 1917, certain changes had swept across the literatures of England and Sri Lanka that made the emergence of a new consciousness in fiction writing all the more inevitable. The age when the white man’s burden was seen as a greater good and when Rudyard Kipling’s stories of romanticised imperialist exploitation and stereotypical portrayals of locals commanded a market of their own was waning swiftly, and in the colonies a nascent national bourgeoisie had made it possible for a literature to crop up which sharply contrasted and collided with colonial desiderata.
If in India and Sri Lanka Westerners sought refuge in Shakespeare’s plays and drawing room comedies – the twin peaks of theatre in British Ceylon of the 1920s, according to D. C. R. A. Goonetilleke – their local counterparts were busy reading up Walter Scott, H. Rider Haggard, and Daphne du Maurier to romanticise their past and their heritage and oppose the brunt of imperialism. Such streaks of opposition were not confined to novels, but also, perhaps more crucially, to poetry: at the height of the anti-colonial riots of 1915, the Inspector General of Police made special reference to a poem by Nancy Wijekoon which, in an exhortation worthy of Walter Scott’s nationalist ballads, described Sri Lanka as “loved but fallen.” The reference to Scott isn’t coincidental, since it is to Scott that many from the nationalist petty bourgeoisie went in search of a literary style, moulded in the imperialist’s tongue, which they could wield against the imperialist. By contrast, de Zilwa in The Dice of the Gods subscribed to the values of the pseudo-British Westernised upper middle class, to which he belonged.
Periodising literary history is as difficult as periodising history itself. In the wake of universal franchise and free education, and the emergence of a nationalist consciousness, writers took to historical narratives and myths they transliterated to English. Most of the time this resulted in literary failures, but occasionally it resulted in a unique, if not a delicate, idiom of its own. Rosalind Mendis wrote Nandimitta 23 years after the publication of her debut novel, and this was followed by W. T. Keble’s King in Kurunegala (1963) and Son of the Lion (1968), which in turn was preceded by Astrapani (1950) and followed by Lucien de Zoysa’s Self-Portrait of a King (1971). Even after this period, historical fiction appropriated the Kassapa-Sigiriya and Dutugemunu-Elara sagas, the latter epitomised no doubt by Colin de Silva’s Sinhala quartet, beginning with the magnificent Winds of Sinhala (1982).
1971 marked an important turning point for local English literature, because of the first JVP insurrection. It’s an interesting point of departure for Sri Lankan English literature because it showed, to varying degrees, the divergent responses to it by writers hailing from a contrasting set of social milieus. Obviously, no two novelists, poets, or dramatists are the same, and this becomes most evident in how they react to social upheaval and political rebellion, especially by the underclass and lower middle class from the ranks of which most of the insurrectionists in 1971 were drawn. While these reflections do not permit me to dwell at length on how their responses diverged, it’s pertinent to observe that the more deracinated the writer was from his or her wider society, the more limited the depiction of the rebellion was: compare Ediriweera Sarachchandra’s Curfew and a Full Moon (1978), for instance, with Punyakante Wijenaike’s The Rebel (1979) and Romesh Gunasekera’s Monkfish Moon (1992).
In the wake of the JVP insurrection, we thus see a heightening of contrasts of social class, not merely between the authors, but also between what they authored. These contrasts found an outlet in the civil war, as well as the second JVP insurrection. Since the one was linked to the other – the insurrection was a protest against the Indo-Lanka Accord, which in turn was born from the war against the LTTE – it shouldn’t surprise one that a singularity of vision crops up frequently in the works of English writers during this period.
We have, for instance, the poetry of the late Jean Arasanayagam and Anne Ranasinghe, the former drawn out and melancholic, and the latter austere and simple; we have the fragmented vision of Punyakante Wijenaike in An Enemy Within (1998); we have the poetry of a dozen or so dilettantes for whom the war represented a bifurcation, often trifurcation, of the national character; and we have dramatists presenting a counterpoint to the narrative espoused by the majority, rather evocatively so in Ruwanthi de Chickera’s Dear Children, Sincerely (2017). Sinhala and Tamil literature have been, on the whole, receptive to the immediacy of the war; by virtue of their distance from the milieus that suffered from it, most English writers, barring those who had been involved with it in some way or the other (most notably Nihal de Silva in The Road from Elephant Pass), betray a clumsiness in their handling of it.
This, of course, is not only true of the way the war has been written on and about, though it is certainly true that the approach of most writers in English to the conflict has been applauded abroad and critiqued at home. The story often happens to be a variation of the same pattern. The protagonist hails from a certain community, the antagonist hails from another. The latter almost invariably is a scion of a depressed underclass: lack of education is the reason for his or her chauvinism and bigotry, and this in turn is linked, tacitly or otherwise, with the failure of the 1956 revolution that freed the majority, the rabble, from the elitist hierarchies that held sway at the time. The situation before 1956, while not glossed over or romanticised, is still presented in a better light than what followed it: we see this even in Dear Children, Sincerely, the only blot on that otherwise fine production. Occasionally, for instance in the novels and short fiction of Romesh Gunasekara, the line dividing the refined underdog from the inferior kind is the privilege of Western education and patronage of the Western educated privileged, from Triton in Monkfish Moon all the way to Vasantha in Noontide Toll.
The conflict is between the writer’s lack of proximity and command of language. If one sees in the depiction of the ethnic war a faint whiff of similar depictions of insurrections from an earlier period, it’s because the parallels are there. The principle governing English literature in Sri Lanka hence seems to be this: the more distanced the writer is from a community, the more stereotyped his or her depictions of that community will be; the closer he or she is to it, conversely, the more authentic those depictions will be.
However, one shouldn’t take such a principle too far, and generalise on the basis of it. What we have here is a curious paradox, hardly specific to Sri Lanka: on the one hand, the English writer is in full command of the language on account of a privileged background; on the other hand, he or she can only penetrate into the larger culture by defying or rebelling against that background. Gunadasa Amarasekara once observed that what was ignored in the teaching of English was the fact that English contained within itself an altogether different historical context from that of Sinhala and Tamil. This no doubt had the effect of encouraging writers to paste over their writings rhetorical conceits imported from foreign authors: invariably, they end up operating in, at best, a borrowed tongue.
Thus, at the end of the day, it’s a matter of squaring the circle: no one can do it, and so writer after writer, with the occasional, refreshing exception – who materialise either in the form of non-professionals like Nihal de Silva, for whom writing became at best an ancillary interest; or savants like Carl Muller, who lacked a formal education and, due to that handicap, found a means of exploring their world and expanding their interests; or idiosyncratic iconoclasts like Ashok Ferrey who, despite their privileged backgrounds, took their inability to relate to the culture outside their sheltered, cloistered quarters as a cue for parodying the world they lived in, Colpetty People and all – present their country, even when they are resident in it, from a one-sided, clichéd standpoint. The writer in English who can square the circle, or replace the square peg with a round one, is in the meantime sorely missing. Can he or she stand up? On that question rests the future of English literature in this country.
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