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.