What the Sri Lankan
Tamils should not fail to see
Northeastern Herald, 27 September 2002
Last Saturday morning on the Subaarathi call-in pro
gram of the Sinhala service of the Sri Lanka Broadcasting
Corporation, a listener made a very significant remark. “In our
Sinhala society, we hear about political terminologies through the
media and politicians. We really do not have much understanding of
their implications,” the caller said. In a way his statement is true
because the chief communicators in the contemporary world are the
media and politicians.
But to give a truer picture of Sinhala society, particularly of the
countryside, the listener should have added the Sangha – the
community of Bikkhus.
The Sangha is a very important institution in any Buddhist society.
And in the Sinhala Buddhist society it is considered the moral
guardian of the people. If the Tamil people want to know the actual
position an ideal Bikkhu occupies in that society he or she should
read the section on asceticism/renunciation in Thirukkural for as we
know, these concepts speak about a person within a society but
completely devoid of worldly pressures and ambitions. An ideal
Bikkhu or for that matter a Jain monk draw his social power and
eminence through renunciation. And this is something that is not met
with in the Sanyasa concept of Hinduism.
The Bikkhu performs his role in society chiefly through the Dhamma
desena (lectures on the Buddha Dhamma). Through the desenas he
shapes public opinion at the village level. It is not left at that
point. He oversees the application of his preaching in the
day-to-day life of the people. And the more articulate a Bikkhu is,
the more respected he would be. Even today audio tapes of leading
Bikkhus are very much in demand among the Sinhalese.
The desena tradition enables the Bikkhu to inform, to persuade, to
motivate to act according to the five fold path (right way of
thinking, of speaking, listening etc.) But in this could mean that
the Bikkhu was able to persuade people on certain political lines.
And being also the institution that legitimises royal authority in
traditional Sinhala society he virtually become either a
consolidator of state authority or one who repudiates it.
Thus the Buddhist monk is the axial factor of culture and
communication in Sinhala Buddhist society. Therefore in Sri Lanka,
the role of the Sangha became all-important since the late 19th
century in that its moral guardianship of society inevitably merged
with the politicisation of the country given the position of the
Bikkhus as the chief communicator in Sinhala society.
As all scholars agree, resurgent Buddhism became a political force
and was the motivating factor behind the rise of Sinhala
nationalism. It is quite interesting to note here that the in the
history of the resurgence of Buddhism in the late 19th and early
20th centuries, the Kandyan Sinhalese did not play as much an active
role as the Karawas, Durawas and the Salagamas of the low country.
The Buddhist identity gave a social power which they could not get
from their traditional position in society. Thus their emphasis on
Buddhism was more emphatic.
From this resurgence comes Anagarika Dharmapala. Again it is
important to understand the concept of Anagarika which means a
non-householder. Buddhism and Jainism divide society into two well
defined sections – the Gihi (Householder) and Pavithi
(non-householder). This is the well-known Illaram Thuravaram
division in Tamil.
Dharmapala gave up household life for the sake of the community. (In
later years he became a Bikkhu) Sinhala Buddhism was very much
opposed to the foreign influemce of the day. It had challenged the
Christians and was very intolerant of interventions in the economic
life of the Sinhala community. The Bikkhu was the chief communicator
of these sentiments at the grass roots.
As the Mahavamsa became the text of Sinhala Buddhist resurgence, the
sentiments expressed by its author against the “Damilas” as William
Geiger put it, crept into Sinhala nationalism. There was no
necessity in the early stages of Sinhala-Buddhist revivalism to
articulate these sentiments as interpreted by Sinhala nationalist
later. Sir Ponnambalam Ramanathan supported the their demand for the
Vesak holiday and later their position against the Muslims in 1915.
Nonetheless, with
Sir Ponnamabalam Arunachalam coming into the picture and the
Sinhala Mahajana Sabha elements beginning to dominate the thinking,
especially in territorializing communal politics, the rift with the
Tamils was increasingly felt and began to be openly voiced. The
politics of the ‘20s and ‘30s amply demonstrate this.
The resurgence of Buddhism with its nationalist fervour saw Sri
Lanka as the land of the Sinhala Jathiya (race) and Sinhala
Buddhism.The realities of pre-colonial history were forgotten and
the island was taken as a single indivisible unit haloed by places
of Buddhist pilgrimage in the north, east and the west – Nagadipa,
Seruwila and Kelaniya. It was a worldview that emerged from and
fitted well into the desena tradition. In fact the provenance of the
political idiom of the Sinhala press could be in a way traced to the
influence of the desena tradition on Sinhala resurgence in the late
19th century.
The history of the ‘true’ Sinhala press starts on the heels of
Sinhala Buddhist resurgence. The Sinhala Jaathiya (started in 1903)
and the Sinhala Bouddhaya (started in 1906) were the first truly
Sinhala journals (the Gnanartha Pradeepaya, a Catholic journal,
started in 1866 was of course the first).
They were the fount of indigenous Sinhala journalism. Their idiom
was derived from the Desena tradition. It is because of this
provenance, even under the centralised editorial control of the
great Esmond Wickremesinghe at the Lake House the Daily News and the
Dinamina could not speak the same political language.
(This was in sharp contrast to what was happening in the north at
the time. The upsurge in Jaffna was limited to Saivism and Tamil;
but there was definitely no trace of Tamil nationalism even within
the Saivite fold).
The inherent ‘originary’ compulsions of the idiom of the Sinhala
press were such that demands put forward by the Tamils for any
constitutional position were considered attempts to divide the
country. It can be gleaned from the Tamil side that at no time was
an effort made to tell the Sinhalese the Tamil position in their own
language. It must be said however that since independence until 1956
there was an earnest attempt to teach and learn Sinhala in all major
schools in the north.
The 1956
Sinhala only
was the death knell to this effort. The Tamil politicians of the
day, perhaps drawing their inspiration from the Dravidian movement
in South India depicted the Sinhala only as a conflict between two
languages. The Tamils felt the great indigenous tradition they had
developed was nullified by the act. The Tamil clerical servant was
asked not to learn Sinhala and the Sinhala masses were exhorted to
erase Tamil street names, shop boards, signposts etc., in Colombo.
Thus a great divide was created between the two languages. To add to
this as commented upon earlier, a democratic decision to bring in
vernacular education led to the exclusion of Tamil and Sinhala in
schools. Therefore communicating to the Sinhalese became almost
impossible. Historically the role of the Sangha within resurgent
Sinhala Buddhism is at the basis of this communication block.
Given the socio-political background of Sinhala-Buddhism since the
1930s the preservation of Buddhism meant the preservation of the
Sinhalese and vice versa. The political demand for the retrieval of
the Buddhist tradition was reflected in the Sinhala Commission
Report – the title of which was ‘Betrayal of Buddhism’. Thus the
Bikkhu was placed right at the centre of Sinhala politics.
Therefore the Buddhist monk communicator inevitably interpreted
Tamil demands for regional autonomy in terms of his own worldview.
And the Sinhala press which shared that worldview and his idiom was
openly antagonistic to Tamil demands.
Having said all this about the sangha as the a socio political
institution it should be added that there have been Bikkhus who did
not follow the same path. Scholars like the Ven. S.L.A Dharmaratna
Thero who also reflected the Buddhist tradition of openness in/to
discussion brought to the knowledge of the Sinhalese the treasures
of Buddhism in Tamil. He presented the story of Manimekalai (the
medieval Tamil Buddhist epic) in Sinhalese.
He wrote extensively on intellectual and literary contribution of
Tamils to Buddhism. It is very refreshing to hear when Prof. H. L
Senevratna in his book ‘The work of Kings’ (Chicago Univ. Press.
1999) says there are some Buddhist who call for a sympathetic
understanding of the Tamil position.
It is also heartening to see the winds of change are blowing even in
the Sinhala press. The ‘Yukthiya’ was carried this message of unity
(It is also symptomatic that it could not continue publication) With
the emergence of Tamil militancy there were efforts to tell the
Sinhala people the aims and activities of the of the movement. The
PLOTE ran a popular Sinhala radio service in 1984-5.
However, it should be admitted that neither Tamil grievances nor the
motivations of the Tamil militants were properly made known to the
Sinhalese in their own language. Worse still all the reports on
losses of life, property, mass displacements and traumas were
reported mainly in English. The bulk of the Sinhala press
judiciously avoided translating these.
This gap is very well seen in remarks by many leading Bikkhus. “What
are the problems of the Tamils? Aren’t they coming to Colombo and
living safely here?” they ask. And one could say this is often said
in earnest for the Tamils here also failed to reach out to Sinhala
society’s chief communicators. The need for such attempted
communication has been brought out in very clear open terms with the
decision by the Tigers to go for negotiations.
Any negotiation with the Sinhala-Buddhist community should be with
the knowledge of its important channels of communication. Any
negotiation with the Sinhala polity should touch/deal with at one or
many points the persons who are virtually the real managers of
Sinhala public opinion.In this context the recent decision of the
Tigers to publish a periodical in Sinhala, ‘Dedunna,’ is very
important.
One could be tempted to argue that rainbows occur only when there
are pregnant clouds. We also hope that the MOU is pregnant enough to
deliver the baby Sri Lanka needs so urgently and so fondly.
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