Reflections on a Video: Martin Wickramasinghe in Context

Photo courtesy of martinwickramasinghe

A friend of mine asked me what I thought of the recent hullabaloo over a video that surfaced on social media of a popular tuition master “insulting” writer, journalist, critic and thinker Martin Wickramasinghe.

The video garnered a lot of interest as well as outrage. Scholars and academics and admirers of Wickramasinghe quickly came up in arms.

Since then the situation has gone out of hand. A few days later the master came out with another video apologising for what he said. At a press conference a day after the original video surfaced, Cabinet Spokesperson Nalinda Jayatissa made some comments that were critical of the tutor. In the meantime, a number of pundits have taken to social media to give their hot takes and two cents on the video and on Wickramasinghe.

I think there are a great many things that can be said about all this. Of these, three points are particularly relevant.

The first is that the master’s comments were not just about Martin Wickramasinghe. It was more broadly about literature. He ridiculed Gamperaliya and the Selalihini Sandesaya in the same breath. I think this reflects the state of the arts and humanities and how these subjects are viewed by a certain group.

The way I see it, and I stand to be corrected on this, what the tuition master was trying to say was that he saw no practical value in these books and saw no point in students reading and studying them for their O’Levels and A’Levels.

The man was speaking to his own students. That was the whole point of his theatrics. Tuition masters are businessmen. They provide the supply to an inexhaustive demand. However much they parade themselves as charitable beings that do good, at the end of the day they exploit gaps in our education system and milk as much profit as possible. I am not moralising here; merely pointing out a fact.

Almost as a custom, these tutors spend minutes during a seminar pondering on topics not immediately relevant to their subject. That Wickramasinghe should have been the topic of such a session should surprise no one. What is surprising, and I am sure this surprised even the tuition master going by the expression on his face in his second video, is the anger it provoked. After all, we have had tuition masters lambast or promote politicians and political ideologies in their classes before without any issue.

That underlies my second point. The discourse around Wickramasinghe, and for that matter our other literary and artistic icons, has never been uniform and should not be so. But it seems to me that the way we engage with these individuals today is different to how we engaged with them back in the day. Even in his own lifetime, Wickramasinghe had plenty of detractors to respond to. Indeed, he spent the last two years of his life battling nationalist activists and monks because of Bhavataranaya. One of these activists went so far as to suggest that the book be banned and its author be jailed, something which the government thankfully refused to do.

Wickramasinghe himself was critical of many of his contemporaries. As Garrett Field has described in his excellent book on song and poetry in early-to-mid 20th century Sri Lanka, he could be devastatingly candid about new literary forms, including Siri Gunasinghe’s Mas Le Naethi Ata. Similarly, books like Nava Padya Sinhalaya and Sinhala Navakathava Ha Japan Kama KathaHewanella show that his views were hardly predictable.

What offended a lot of Wickramasinghe’s admirers was not that Wickramasinghe was subject to criticism at all but rather how he was attacked as an irrelevant figure. In his own lifetime, writers and thinkers criticised each other to no end. There were rivalries that occasionally spilt over, for instance, between George Keyt and Justin Deraniyagala. But these played out in a certain way even in public.

Constructive debate should always, without exception, be the norm. In that sense, I find it ironic that the point of the tuition master’s harangue was that “irrational” subjects like literature had no relevance when he made the point in the most irrational and obtrusive way possible. Certainly, I do see a malaise in the way we teach subjects like literature and the arts. But judging from the video, I am not sure whether the way other subjects, including science, are being taught whether at school or by tuition masters, is any better. I am also not sure about whether critical discourses and debates are up to the mark or whether they have become debased.

The third point is that the video and the debates around it provoked interesting comments about Wickramasinghe. These were thankfully more seasoned. There was, for instance, a post on his views about Buddhism by an activist allied with Jathika Chintanaya, although that too provoked quite a few responses.

Wickramasinghe passed away in 1976. This was a good three or four years before outfits like Jathika Chintanaya came into being. Throughout his life, Wickramasinghe saw Buddhism as compatible with a rational worldview. As Crystal Baines notes in her brilliant dissertation, although he was careful not to categorise Buddhism as a completely rational philosophy in his later years, he nevertheless saw a congruence between the two.

For obvious reasons, this has been a subject of contention. Wickramasinghe himself could be candid on the matter. His views on the Ravana myth in Sri Lanka and his foreword to a later edition of Bhavataranaya where he ridicules monks who subscribe to “foolish poets” who spung “fantastic stories of the Buddha flying through air and causing miracles to happen” make it clear that were he alive in the 1980s he would have become a bete-noire of many nationalist activists and thinkers.

My take on the whole matter is that we need not blow it out of proportion. There is no need to take action against anyone; indeed, to do so would be to violate the very culture of criticism which the likes of Wickramasinghe fostered in their day. I am an admirer of Wickramasinghe and I find it intriguing that a book like Gamperaliya can be dismissed so deftly. But unless we reflect more critically on the tuition master’s comment, we risk missing the woods for the trees. His review of the book may not have been correct but this is no reason for us to overlook his point about subjects like literature and how best we can resolve the issues it raises, however crudely that point was made.

More importantly, we need engage more deeply with Wickramasinghe’s work. The raison-d’etre for my research into him is that we know surprisingly little about the ideas that influenced him. This is why last November I planned a series of lectures on him with the Martin Wickramasinghe Trust. One of these was a webinar at the School of Oriental and African Studies and another was a presentation at the India International Centre in New Delhi.

The point of these lectures is that we need to imagine him as more than just a novelist or a writer of fiction. We need to question received assumptions about him and probe more deeply into how he thought. There are points that we need to raise about books like Gamperaliya but there are other aspects to him, including his contribution to the discourse of anthropology and art history in Sri Lanka, which must be covered.

In a way, the tutor’s harangue about Gamperaliya and our response to it make it clear that we need to go beyond this narrow canvas to which we have limited the man acknowledged as our greatest novelist. The truth is that he was much more than the author of the Koggala trilogy. Neither the tuition master nor some of those who have taken umbrage at his video seem to have considered this enough.