A Venerated Teacher, Author and Scholar

Photo courtesy of The Island

In my tribute to her last week, I noted that Sumitra Peries belonged to a generation which also saw Mahagama Sekara, Gamini Fonseka, Madawala S. Ratnayake, Premasiri Khemadasa, Gunadasa Amarasekara and Siri Gunasinghe. I could have added to this list Gananath Obeyesekere, Sri Lanka’s foremost anthropologist, who passed away a day after Sumitra’s 90th birth anniversary, on March 25, at the age of 95.

To those of us who read him, studied him, venerated him and had the good fortune to be in the same room or place as he did, Gananath Obeyesekere was like a god. His contributions will doubtless be assessed and noted by those much more qualified than any of us, including his contemporaries and his students. Each will focus on some of those contributions more than others. C. R. de Silva, for instance, has noted how Obeyesekere inspired and supported the Ceylon Studies Seminar at the University of Peradeniya, back when there were few venues where scholars could freely exchange ideas and information.

My encounters with Obeyesekere, on the other hand, began at a time when social media and the internet had made the exchange of ideas easier and much more accessible. I began, unusually enough, with his last few books, including the wonderful trilogy of. sorts that Perera-Hussein published: The Doomed King, The Many Faces of the Kandyan Kingdom and The Creation of the Hunter. The latter has unfortunately not been reviewed yet, at least the way it should be, but it takes forward much of the research that Obeyesekere conducted when he began his career – his life – as an anthropologist. When I brought the book up during a conversation in San Francisco, an art historian I know exclaimed quite frankly, that after all these years, “He was still writing, still exploring, still at it.”

I think that just about sums Gananath Obeyesekere’s life: at no point did he stay away from writing, exploring and doing what he did best. Those among us who settle into academic careers tend to become administrators and petty officials and stray away from the more exhausting field of writing and research. Obeyesekere came from a generation that did not compartmentalise between these two; he was as much a part of the university system, here or elsewhere, as he was a researcher, a writer, a traveller and an explorer. His writings did give rise to debates including his essay Dutugemunu’s Conscience, which received a rejoinder from Ishanka Malsiri, and his thesis about Protestant Buddhism but that was, to quote my friend, what ultimately kept him going.

In his memoirs, Sarath Amunugama reflects on Obeyesekere, on the contributions that Ralph Pieris made and how Obeyesekere, who once told a student never to enter his classroom without muddying her feet in a field, took the field of anthropology forward in Sri Lanka. Whether it was questioning the Western scholarly consensus on land tenure patterns in Sri Lanka and, by extension, Asian societies, probing the Seligmanns’ thesis about the Veddha community or digging into the politics of Buddhism and the Buddhist revival under British colonialism, he fell in among a group of historians and social scientists who privileged both text and context: the material evidence available and the social, economic and political conditions surrounding it. In a way, Obeyesekere is responsible for popularising fieldwork in Sri Lanka and the Global South in the post-colonial conjuncture.

There were debates about some of his arguments although this is neither the time nor place to get into them. His Dutugemunu’s Conscience is a tour de force, one which reminds us that before he became an anthropologist, Obeyesekere was a student of English and English literature. Not unlike Senake Bandaranayake, who also studied English before attaining fame and renown as Sri Lanka’s foremost art historian, Obeyesekere revisited his fascination with literary texts in his forays into history and culture.

Although criticised by certain writers, Dutugemunu’s Conscience brings up one of his main concerns: how folk culture conditioned us and how, in the transition to modernity, we lost the sense of humanism and conscience that it entailed and promoted.

This is an argument that was central to the writings of Martin Wickramasinghe as well – that folk culture, despite what some see as its primeval state, helped insulate us from violence, that it gave us a sense of meaning both of life and the world around us and that kept us at bay from the descent to violence which has, unfortunately, defined this country’s history post-independence. In the process of “achieving” or attaining modernity, which Obeyesekere traces to the Buddhist Revival, we ended up not “demythologising religion”, as he put it, but rejecting all that was mythical and folkloric about religion.

“Thus the great life stories of the Buddha, the jatakas, tended to be rejected or ignored as folktales meant for the edification of an ignorant populace, and not as a repository of Buddhist ethics and morality, and a concretization of the difficult and abstruse doctrinal tradition.”

It is this thesis, this contention, that runs through Obeyesekere’s work, giving it a resonance that has, despite his critics or perhaps because of them, withstood the test of time. We can do no better than to keep those ideas alive, to keep debating and discussing them and to keep them resonant in the minds of our people.