I love British comedy.
Long before Fawlty Towers, Blackadder, ‘Allo ‘Allo!, Dad’s Army, and Mind Your Language, there was Monty Python’s Flying Circus. Something of a precursor to Saturday Night Live, which in turn influenced our own Api Nodanna Live, Monty Python did to British comedy what the Beatles did to British music: invade the Anglosphere.
Monty Python’s Flying Circus revolutionised TV comedy. Instead of focusing on a specific theme, the show featured a series of skits, each funnier than the one before. No two items were ever alike, and some were more memorable than others.
The show had a catchy tagline, used during transitions from one skit to another: And Now For Something Completely Different. This became the motto of Monty Python, a fitting summing up of the absurdity that underscored all its skits.
In 2013, I began writing to various newspapers. I have been writing since, mostly delving into art and culture, history, society and politics, and foreign policy.
Over the last few years I have picked up new interests and explored new subjects, like cinema, art history, and anthropology. My interest in these fields has been driven by my fascination with, and I suppose one could say love for, the culture of my country. That culture is not, and should not be, restricted to one type or community: it is not Sinhala, Muslim, Hindu, or Parsee, but rather a mosaic or collage of them all.
New realities
A writer evolves as he writes, and my evolution has been as predictable as anyone else’s. But over time I have come to appreciate how well travel and fieldwork can improve one’s writing. The internet is clearly there to be used, and it always yields the results one is looking for, if one looks hard enough. Yet nothing can, or will, replicate the results of hard travel, fieldwork, and physical research, particularly in the realm of culture.
That is especially true when considering that Sri Lanka’s culture has yet to be properly assessed, analysed, and written about. There is always something new to discover in it, something that has never been explored before. This means that there is no line of research which cannot be questioned, no body of work which cannot be added to.
When progressing, one could say transitioning, from one body of work or line of research to another, I hence think we should abide by Monty Python’s credo: we should always seek to discover and unveil something new, something completely different, for the reader. Good research adds to existing knowledge. Often it can supplant that knowledge, relegate it to the proverbial dustbin. That should ultimately be the columnist’s aim.
Two simple examples would suffice here. For over 50 years, Ananda Coomaraswamy’s Mediaeval Sinhalese Art was accepted as the final word on Kandyan art and culture. It was considered a heresy to depart from what it had to say on, for instance, the murals of Kandyan temples. Coomaraswamy’s view, that these murals represented the art of a simple people, of craftsmen rather than artists, thus held strong.
Then a group of scholars began disagreeing with his views, critiquing them as simplistic generalisations that failed to account for the dynamism of 18th century Kandyan society. Among these scholars was the art historian Senake Bandaranayake.
Bandaranayake, in his masterpiece The Rock and Wall Paintings of Sri Lanka, evaluated Coomaraswamy’s assertions. He contended that “simple” though they were, the paintings and sculptures of Kandy represented the continuation of a tradition, rather than a separate tradition. Drawing on colonial and oral sources, including accounts by Dutch and British travellers, he argued that the artistic style of the panels and the registers of 18th century Kandyan temples could be traced back to the 14th century.
Challenging orthodoxy
He also criticised what he saw as Coomaraswamy’s pan-Indian approach to Kandyan art. While conceding that Coomaraswamy went against the grain of colonial historiography – which attributed the achievements of a society to a past that supposedly had been lost, and thus was in need of restoration, in the period immediately preceding Western colonisation – Banadaranayake argued that he still saw Kandyan art, which had been neglected by colonial officials, as a reflection of another “superior” culture, Indian.
For their time, these critiques of Coomaraswamy were seen and lauded as radical and revolutionary, since they were questioning orthodox knowledge. Yet they themselves became widely accepted only later. Today, no one would call the artistes of Kandy simple craftsmen or villagers. No one would view them as passive players in the historical evolution of Kandyan society. In large part owing to Bandaranayake’s intervention, they have been rescued from history, and that has helped us construct, or reconstruct, a new history of the Kandyan kingdom: one told from below rather than above.
From Ananda Coomaraswamy, we move on to the Royal-Thomian. The oldest interschool cricket match in the world, older than the Ashes, the Royal-Thomian has never been seriously examined in relation to contemporary Sri Lankan society and culture, though its evolution over the last 144 years – 145 this year –parallel the changes that have taken place in Sri Lankan society, including the transformation of public schools.
Apart from the Sri Lankan anthropologist Michael Roberts, the most substantive scholarly account of the Royal-Thomian comes to us from the British journalist and photographer Emma Levine. Levine’s observations yield a different picture of the match, though it is not too different from how students and old boys view it (to quote Sanjana Hattotuwa, “More booze. More chaos. More riotous dancing. And then more booze”). Pitched at an old boys tent, talking with booze-ridden, rambunctious middle-aged men, Levine comments caustically on what unfolds before her, offering a fresh perspective on a cricket match that is clearly venerated by Old Boys as different from all other matches.
Cultural complexity
Even the most prestigious gathering of the Sri Lankan elite (MPs, company directors, lawyers and what were considered to be “respectable professionals”) revealed their true souls to be nothing more than that of rumbustious schoolboys. There was a constant background of music coming from small brass bands playing funky tunes that got everyone on their feet. Most of the chairs were discarded as people danced in the aisles, swigging out of bottles and spilling food down their shirts as the sweat poured down their faces.
What is interesting about Levine’s account is that despite being an outsider twice over – she is neither an Old Boy nor a Sri Lankan – she manages to delve into the rites, rituals, and practices – typically described as “traditions” –which dominate the Royal-Thomian. At one level her approach is almost anthropological.
One of the traditions she explores in-depth at the match is the father-son relationship: the father sees the Royal-Thomian as a testing ground for their sons in just about the same way tribal elders see a rite of passage as a testing ground for theirs.
[One father] confided that he had given his 16 -year-old son, a pupil of Royal College, strict instructions to “get drunk, tease the girls and behave badly.” “Why do you encourage your son to do that?” I asked with surprise as he attempted to swing me round. He gave a long and hearty chuckle. “Because I did when I was his age!” he replied.
As these examples show, there is always something new to find out about the art, culture, and society of a country: something completely different.
Starting from next week, this column will explore these aspects, incorporating different angles and perspectives. My belief is that, as far as art and culture and history go, nothing is too small or inconsequential to delve into. Be it Kandyan art or a school cricket match, George Keyt or Percy Abeysekara, Khemadasa or baila, the divide between great and little traditions no longer hold. Everything needs to be explored.
It is this which the title of my column reflects and affirms. We think of culture as a single entity, a cohesive whole undisturbed by the movement of its parts. Yet culture is actually the sum of its parts, and its parts rarely lead autonomous lives: they are related to one another, and their meaning derives from these relations. Culture, in other words, is never single whole: it is a set of interlocking fragments and figments, seeping into one another, bonding together, and rarely, if at all, staying apart.
Uditha Devapriya is a writer, researcher, and analyst who writes on topics such as history, art and culture, politics, and foreign policy. He is one of the two leads in U & U, an informal art and culture research collective. He can be reached [email protected].
