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| Sunday, 21 August 2005 |
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Cumaratunga, memory and melancholia Sunday Essay by Ajith Samaranayake The first cultural intellectual of modern times whom Wimal Dissanayake deals with in his book 'Enabling Traditions' is Munidasa Cumaratunga who during a comparatively short life of 57 years yet made a contribution to Sinhala literature quite disproportionate to those years. Cumaratunga who was a teacher by profession was a scholar in the classical mould quite familiar not merely with Sinhala, Pali and Sanskrit but also English, Latin and Greek and indeed sought through the study of these languages to discover the structure and nature of Sinhala itself. As Dissanayake correctly points out Cumaratunga was contrary to popular myth no dogmatist clinging to tradition for its own sake but an innovative grammarian who sought to relate the language to the changing realities of the times. Born in 1887, Cumaratunga was reared on a classical scholarship which worshipped the ancient literary texts but was obviously quite conscious of the unfolding realities of the coming century and the need for adaptation. Dissanayake through repeated quotations shows that Cumaratunga believed in critically re-evaluating tradition and what passed for inherited wisdom. He was by no means therefore a hide-bound traditionalist as his detractors would like to make out. Dissanayake says that in terms of the central focus of his own work Cumaratunga's significance was that he saw tradition as a way of establishing linguistic identity. This was no doubt of central importance at a time when the established grammarians were relentlessly bound to the ornate Sanskritised language of classical times while the Sinhala language itself was being pushed to the periphery by the domination of English, the language of the conqueror. To take up a point from the previous essay Cumaratunga long before Edward Said seems to have been critical of Orientalism. The whole basis of his criticism of the 'Sinhala Grammar' by Wilhelm Geiger, the German scholar, was Geiger's Euro-centric attitude of approaching the Sinhala language through western standards. On the other hand his criticism of the classical Sinhala grammar, 'Sidath Sangarawa,' was that it turned unnecessarily to the Sanskrit tradition. In short as Dissanayake says Cumaratunga urged the need to recognise the intellectual autonomy of each tradition. He eschewed slavish adherence to both East and West. Dissanayake sees as an important strand of Cumaratunga's work his recognition of how language impacts on both personal and collective identity. He saw tradition as an instrument for transferring to the present the values, beliefs and norms of behaviour from the past which have a contemporary relevance. In modern jargon he saw the significance of symbolic capital in the formation of identity. He saw the need for linguistic discipline and conceived language as a spiritual force which promotes 'self-discipline, economy of expression, communal identity and group solidarity.' These might appear self-evident truths today but in the context of a colonialism suppressing both the language and the traditional ways of living this dimension of Cumaratunga's work gains considerable moral force. After thus enunciating Cumaratunga's linguistic theories Dissanayake next turns to the poet's best known work 'Piya Samara' a memorial to his father but which Dissanayake claims is actually about the poet himself and his memories. He demonstrates how it stages the complexities of self-production, focuses on the idea of human agency and is characterised by a sense of melancholia. It is his view that the self which Cumaratunga projects in this poem is not that of an atomistic individual as in the case of most modernist western poetry, such as that of T. S. Eliot for example, but rather a poetic self which is the product of social networks and social meanings. To quote Dissanayake: 'The emphasis of the poem is not so much on a strong and continuous narrative as on reconfiguration of memory and mnemonic impressions. The economical transitions and the way he modulates his emotions and transposes them into another key deserve careful consideration.' Dissanayake then has done a signal service by illustrating how both Cumaratunga's critical theories and his poetry are still very much relevant to our times and this is particularly important in the context of the prevailing wisdom that Cumaratunga sought to resurrect a moribund Sinhala prose which had nothing in common with the realities of the present. As he remarks 'Piya Samara' has been largely neglected by modern day critics because of the stilted and artificial language to which the poet retreats at times but does not fully explain the gulf between this work and his prose and poetry for children where he employs a much more vigorous language close to the rhythms of colloquial speech. Was it that Cumaratunga thought that the language proper for children's
literature did not carry the weight suitable for mature adult writing?
Whatever the reason it is true that much of the criticism made of
Cumaratunga stems from the fact that in the hands of his less talented
adherents and camp-followers the 'Subasa' that he championed degenerated
into a petrified arcane usage bordering on the dense. |
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