A life of letters
NIRUPAMA SUBRAMANIAN
Apparent in Siriwardena's works, but never intimidating the reader, was the depth of his learning and experience, whether it was about literature, politics, art, or film.
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India seems to have little time for the literature, films and art of any of its neighbours... The loss, unfortunately, is India's.
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Selected Writings of Regi Siriwardena: Literature and the Arts - Volume 1, edited by A.J. Canagaratna, International Centre for Ethnic Studies, Colombo, 2005, p.131, price not stated.
IT is a pity that little is known in India about Sri Lanka other than its conflict. In any case, India seems to have little time for the literature, films and art of any of its neighbours, except for the few works that have attracted international notice. The loss, unfortunately, is India's, underlined by this book of selected writings by Regi Siriwardena, the first of a projected two-volume set that brings together the work — spanning more than half a century — of a writer, poet, activist, journalist, playwright and critic. This volume collects his writings on literature, films and the arts.
From a different era
Siriwardena belonged to a generation of Sri Lankans that was born and grew up in the pre-independence years and that was fired by the hopes and possibilities that the country offered at its freedom in 1948. Though Sri Lanka never quite managed to live up to that promise, Siriwardena's inspiration never deserted him. Aside from publishing several collections of plays and poetry, he helped found the civil rights movement in Sri Lanka, counting the 15 years that he worked as editor at the International Centre for Ethnic Studies in Colombo as his most fruitful.
With his death in December 2004, Sri Lanka lost one of a rare breed of intellectuals who stood firm against Sinhala majoritarianism, was not afraid to criticise Tamil chauvinism and militancy, and could not suffer hypocrites, fools or social pretensions. Apparent in his works, but never intimidating the reader, was the depth of his learning and experience, whether it was about literature, politics, art, or film. He was fiercely critical of inaccessible writings.
Reviewing a compilation of essays on Sri Lankan poetry for the Lanka Guardian in 1996, Siriwardena called for the democratisation of literary criticism. "We should write literary criticism in the way George Orwell wrote it, so that it's open to any intelligent and generally educated person. Of course, that would be the end of academic criticism as we know it and have always known it, but then, all the better."
Accessible writing
His own work was completely accessible. Whether it was a discussion of Pushkin's The Bronze Horseman or of Yeats's right-wing politics in his poetry, or telling readers why he hated free verse, there was nothing abstruse about Regi's writing; rather, it was written to draw in even the uninitiated but at the same time, never dumbed down. Until the end, his work sparkled with a never-ending supply of energy, wit and irreverence.
Take for instance the poem he wrote on the occasion of his 80th birthday in 2002 — 80 pentameters in all. Titled "Birthday Apology and Apologia", the poem begins by expressing embarrassment at such longevity, and mourns the passing of those younger, snatched by Sri Lanka's violence. The poet holds his mother's "sturdy peasant genes" responsible for being able to witness the planet's "eighty revolutions around the sun" but gripes also of the diabetic legacy of his father.
But I shouldn't complain: to compensate,
I have acquired immunity to some
Infections — post-modernism, for one,
And free verse, for another. I'm glad, too
I never caught, as my late brother did,
The Sinhala nationalist flu. An early shot
Of Marxism, perhaps, took care of that.
In her introduction to the book, Radhika Coomaraswamy, the director of the ICES that has published this collection as a posthumous tribute, notes that Siriwardena "signified the creative imagination of Sri Lanka for much of the latter half of the twentieth century, an imagination, rooted in the national but universal in aspiration; an imagination that was openly political but also deeply spiritual".
Feet in two worlds
It was this that gave him his leftist politics, made him learn Russian at 15, seek out the "untranslatable" Pushkin in the original, and Yeats, Blake, Eliot, Edward Said and Shakespeare, while at the same time enabled his authoritative grasp on Sinhala literature, drama and cinema. Siriwardena captures his East-meets-West legacy poignantly in the poem "Colonial Cameo":
In the evenings my father used to make me read
aloud from Macaulay, or Abbot's Napoleon (he was short
and Napoleon, his hero; I his hope for the future).
My mother, born in a village, had never been taught
That superior tongue. When I was six, we were moving
house, she called at school to take me away.
She spoke to the teacher in Sinhala. I sensed the shock
of the class, hearing the servants' language...
A notable essay in the collection is "A Borrowed Tongue", written in July 1979, about sub-continental writing in English. He concludes that the Sri Lankan mastery of English was "disabling" when it came to describing the social environment from which the writer drew his inspiration. "The barriers are most evident when Sri Lankan novelists in English try to write about the village... I find in the prose a betraying quaintness and false poeticality when it seeks to express the thoughts and feelings of peasant characters".
The vast material included in the book has been thoughtfully arranged and grouped by the editor, A.J. Canagaratna, a long-time associate and friend of Regi's. A little more attention to the proofreading, and corrections to the irregularities in the setting would have removed unnecessary distractions in a valuable collection.
THE HINDU
07.08.2005
