One may often wonder as to why lifetime awards exist. An award stands for the recognition of a single achievement. A lifetime award, then, means a singular achievement within a lifetime. Does it mean that the award recipients are no longer supposed to contribute to the field? If that is the case, it may not be the case for the 2021 recipients of the State Literary Award Sahitya Ratna Lifetime Award. The award is generally conferred upon three personalities representing the three major languages of the country: Sinhala, Tamil and English.
WA Abeysinghe receives the award for his contributions to the Sinhala literature while KS Sivakumaran and Namel Weeramuni are honoured for their contributions to Tamil and English literary fields respectively. These three personalities are not alien to the English readership. Most interestingly, the Daily News has featured their writings as well as writings about them from time to time. The common factor, therefore, is clear. The three recipients are bilinguals. That is very much an important factor in intercultural studies.
This is an attempt to unearth their significance in a case-study perspective.
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WA Abeysinghe
In his tribute written two years ago, Professor Wimal Dissanayake aptly calls Abeysinghe a prolific writer. This much is apparent when a reader opens a book authored by WA Abeysinghe; the list of previous titles authored by him runs over 250. In these books, Abeysinghe has established his mark as a cultural critic, poet, lyricist, social commentator and a juvenile author.
Adds Professor Dissanayake:
He has clearly been influenced by Marxism throughout his carrier, but has always combined this interest with cultural specificities that are unique to our society. He is a writer who believes in the importance of lucid communication. He always writes clearly and lucidly and is constantly aware of the dangers of miscommunication. Hence I thought it would be appropriate, as we honour Dr. Abeysinghe’s contribution to the world of Sinhala arts and letters, to reflect on the idea of miscommunication in language. Dr. Abeysinghe and I have been deeply interested in language and communication studies.
Therefore, I thought it would be productive to examine how modern scholars of communication have conceptualized communication and mis-communication. For this purpose I sought to focus attention on some of the more dominant models developed by communication theorists. Commenting on the use of models in the social sciences, Karl Deutsch identified the following three functions performed by them. First, they perform an organising function in that the serve to order and relate systems to one another and convey to us an idea of the system as a whole which we may otherwise lose sight of. To phrase it differently, a model affords us the opportunity to observe how a given system is organised.
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KS Sivakumaran
Siva (as he is fondly known among the colleagues) is no stranger to these pages of the Daily News. He has been a longstanding columnist of his own standing. His uniqueness owes to his bilingualism in Tamil and English, which is a rare feat in this country. That was not a big issue for Siva, who started his career as a translator attached to the government service. He was also a radio announcer in both Tamil and English. He also served as an English teacher in Sri Lanka and abroad. He was also a copy editor. Siva has also authored over thirty books in both Tamil and English.
In his columns, Siva has extensively shared the usually unexposed territory of Tamil literary culture. Plus, he is a movie buff.
The following is Nipuna Wickramage’s take on that:
Understanding the film medium has become an essential prerequisite. Usually most of us see a film purely for entertainment. The entertainment value in all arts is always there, but its emphasis vary in terms of its purpose. The purpose again is manifold. If we take the film medium as an art form, we find that there are basically three kinds of films: The entertainers termed commercial films, the arty films which are creative and personal statements of filmmakers and the middle cinema which is neither too arty nor too crude as a banal commercial film. Therefore, viewing a film can be in many ways. But the real enjoyment of seeing a film can be derived only if we understand the medium thoroughly. Cinema too is a functional art meaning that every component in the film has a definite purpose.
Such is how K S Sivakumaran sees cinema. Reading Sivakumaran is significant as he takes us a few decades back.
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Namel Weeramuni
Namel is widely known for that mini colosseum located in Borella called Namel Malini Punchi Theatre. But there is more to the Weeramuni legacy than a pile of bricks. He has endeavoured the most arduous task of translating Sinhabahu into English. Just to think of translating the Sarachchandrian verse into English is itself an most arduous task. But Weeramuni accomplished that task.
Weeramuni launched his autobiography to coincide with his 85th birthday. Nandasiri Jasentuliyana, a contemporary of Weeramuni, shared his encounter in the following manner:
We live in a global village where the main road has many forks and takes us on many incredible journeys. It is increasingly difficult to know the final destination of these journeys. It means we choose the life we want for ourselves often amid uncertainty.
We choose the paths of our lives by doing the best we can to be bold each moment when we come to a fork, Namel was indeed bold right at each such moment and chose his own paths, and let life roll along without certainty of outcome as noted in the apt title of his autobiography, Sailed I on Life – Like a Lark in the Sky.
In his book, he vividly describes the tortuous journey he experienced while flying aimlessly as a lark over land and across oceans until he perches on his ‘lovable’ nest, the ‘Punchi Theatre’ (the Guhawa). On that journey, he had two wings propelling him forward, his ferocious passion for theatre arts and his uncompromising love for his wife, Malini. The rest was mundane to him and mattered only in so far as it supported the family he so dearly loved and nourished his immersion in the world of dramatic arts.
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