New territories for the Sinhala novel
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by Ajith Samaranayake
New territories for the Sinhala novel
Come September and the cry goes out across the land. It is the
Sahitya Month. The Department of Cultural Affairs bestirs itself
to hold the annual literary festival. Pundits solemnly pontificate on
the state of play in Literature (writers invariably in caps).
Booksellers bemoan the decline in the reading habit. And a good
time is had by all. Or is it?
This year round, however, it would appear (going on a survey in
one of the Sinhala newspapers) that the reading habit is on an
upward spiral although not much fiction still seems to be getting
read. Among critics this is generally attributed to the fact that the
Sinhala novel is still stuck in the conventional mould, a mould
which the more innovative writers are trying to break by falling
back on magic realism if not post-modernism. These efforts are
looked upon with some amusement by old pundits such as
Gunadasa Amarasekera who is known to make fun of the
modern pantheon from Milan Kundera to Arundathy Roy.
The conventional mould, of course, is the tradition of realism
which has been the form that the mainstream novel in Sinhala has
taken from the early days of Martin Wickramasinghe. But has
this form become ossified today and incapable of absorbing the
developments and attitudes of changing times? This question has
been posed but never satisfactorily answered so far. How can
the Sinhala novel in this day and age express new attitudes?
Writers such as Simon Navagaththegama and Tennyson Perera
have tried to transcend the bounds of realism with a leap into the
surrealist unknown but the great mould of the realistic tradition
still remains comfortably solid. Does the form still have the
potential to convey new experiences or is it the writers who are
lacking in new material?
This is the backdrop against which Eric Ilayaparachchi offers us
his new novel 'Bagandara.' Ilayaparachchi is a short writer and
poet whose six earlier works have won critical acclaim including
a state literary award for his poetry.
Running into 380 pages this is his first novel and comes with a
frontispiece composed from the drawings of Ivan Peries. The
nuclear family which is the novelist's focus consists of Simon, a
shopkeeper, Kusumawathie, his wife and a school teacher and
her three children, two boys and a girl. Round this family,
however, rotate a constellation of characters, both major and
minor, big and small, which make for a rich story. The story is
set against a village near Negombo which is native country for
the novelist. On the face of it this coastal village with its sea and
sun-caked shore and the ramshackle shop which looms over the
action offers a grim setting. But the village also has its fields and
streams, the great stretches of the Muthurajawela paddy fields
and the shrub land with its rich offering of medicinal plants which
the novelist sketches with loving detail creating something of an
exotic setting where the land meets the sea, the constant physical
and geographical motif of his fiction.
If that is the space the novel occupies, in time it extends for
about just over four decades, from the early days of the Left
Movement to the 1971 Insurrection and after. Simon, the small
shopkeeper, is also a Samasamjist of the old school. His eldest
son, Kulasiri, is a delicate child on whom his mother,
Kusumawathie, leading a dissatisfied life with her drunken
husband, showers all her maternal affection and thwarted
personal ambitions. He also comes under the influence of his
uncle, Jayasena, a young man who represents the Sinhala
nationalism which ran parallel with the Left Movement in the
1950's. Here we are in the peculiar milieu of Sinhala nationalism,
radical Catholicism and Marxism which characterises the
Negombo against the backdrop of which the novel is set typified
by the real life figure of 'Asap guruthama, a well-known
left-leaning and Nationalist school teacher of the time. However
this world is petrified just as the lifeless tableau offered by the left
leaders who come for Simon's funeral. But what is to replace it?
It is Kulasiri's idealism which anyway curdles in the setting of the
rehabilitation camp and peters out finally in mawkish
sentimentally? By now we are also well aware of the less lovely
face of this radicalism as represented by Mao Sir' with his
Machiavellian ways and predatory sexuality. Is he an idealist or
an opportunist and if an opportunist what factors contributed to
changing him from an idealist into a mercenary? On the same
token isn't the high official who interrogates Kulasiri mouthing
fashionable political and sociological platitudes himself a fake?
And finally is the way out for the young the half-baked
communitarian socialism offered by the regime at the end of the
novel through collective farms and a return to the soil?
Like any good novelist Ilayaparachchi does not offer us any
answers but only challenges us with the questions. The novelist is
mature enough to note both the drawbacks of ossified Marxism
as represented by the old left as well as the rigidly doctrinaire
and puritanical nature of the new left which seeks to replace it.
There are no permanent heroes or permanent villains here but
only men and women sporting many masks. The book is written
in the third person but the narrative shifts between the major
characters so that the plot is illuminated from different points of
view. The style and tone of the narrative is the slightly absurdist
and surreal voice which is now identified with Ilayaparachchi's
prose. Sometimes this is taken to an extreme and caricatured as
in some descriptive passages but on the whole it makes for a
complex story with a stage army of minor characters such as
'betting mahattaya', Selasthina and Veda Mahattaya and his wife
adding some fascination and allure to the narrative.
Extending as it does over several decades and encompassing
major social, political and cultural developments 'Bagandara'
leaves us with a sense of a story well told. The old shop
crumbles to the ground and the old ways will not do any more.
Children grow up and grow away from their parents. But the
novel ends nevertheless on a note of hope. We are left with a
sense or fulfilment shot through with a cord of melancholia.