Sex and the Villager: Nihal De Silva’s Undermining of the Village Kid’s Sexual Impulse

by Vihanga

Some writers display weird notions in their understanding of sexual relations among villagers and the working class. At one level, it is intriguing to observe the “more innovative than thou” attitude which these writers – often urban, upper middle class and with socialite boot polish – deem to peddle in their definition of working class / villager sex. An early example of such sexual snobbery which I have come across is in Punyakante Wijenaike’s The Waiting Earth, first published in 1966. Here, Wijenaike makes the villager Podi Singho’s daughter Isabella see her parents’ mating as a brief, bestial encounter – as opposed to her more “sophisticated” act of love making with the village’s school master, Podi Mahatmaya.

(Yet, in Wijenaike’s text, the bestial and primitive light cast on the two villagers’ sexual encounter is more as a way of showing the generational and intellectual alienation the daughter – Isabella – felt within the household. Primitive and abrupt as it may appear to the girl, the village is seen as a sexually normal / active space. There is much innuendo and sexual charge in Wijenaike’s holistic assessment of the village routine – from the harvest field, the well to the domestic settings sexuality by its own definition and norm can be located).

One way of categorizing Sri Lankan novelists who write in English is as the callously class-minded (as opposed to those who are less so) authorship. Sri Lankan English literature, being the “classed discourse” it is, has rendered in its output what, at their best, can be tabulated as “milieu items”: work that represent the interests of and are meant to be ego-pleasing of an affluent, upper than middle class and its milieu interest. As a result the “villager” often becomes a foil for that class and an exotic consumer good with little resonance. Nihal De Silva’s The Road From Elephant Pass and Ginirella Conspiracy are two recent novels (published in 2003 and 2005 respectively) where the “villager”, to the writer, becomes a fantasy “other”. Both novels undertake a characterization of the rural youth, and at degrees, their social as well as sexual tensions. Nihal De Silva’s village youth are both male and female. Captain Wasantha Rathnayake (in The Road from Elephant Pass) is a military man in his late twenties. He hails from Akuressa in the deep Southern Matara and has an intimate connection with the village of his birth. In Ginirella Conspiracy, the protagonist Sujatha, Ranjit and Nishantha all come from rural village backgrounds such as Tanamalwila.

De Silva’s protagonists are featured in several pathetic sex scenes – scenes which more than hint the authorial position of these youth being deficient of a “consciousness in pleasurable sex”: a want in a sexual instinct of one’s own. De Silva, from his metropolitan high seat, regulates the discourse in such a way that the sexual creativeness of all his rural characters become mere imitations of English movies. In fact, the characters are made to confess of such mimicry in the height of the sexual play itself. Captain Wasantha of The Road From Elephant Pass confides as much to Kamala Velaithan (the LTTE female carder whom he happens to escort through an arduous journey across the Wilpattu) even as they lie in each other’s arms, at the verge of having sex.

De Silva, who attempts the novel in “thriller mode” makes the Wasantha and Kamala “sex scene” an inevitable necessity. Hot into the casual encounter at the edge of the jungle’s southern boundary the Captain kisses the other’s mouth, when the latter queries: “Where did you learn to kiss like this” (348). Such a question, as two people kiss, would come across as an anomaly; but, in order to substantiate De Silva’s thesis – that the villager has no sexual instinct – the query becomes all too natural. The Captain’s pathetic response to the object of his desire is: “Watching English movies”.

Sujatha Mallika, in Ginirella Conspiracy, shows no sexual asset, even as she dates his NGO-serving, Colombo middle class boyfriend Mithra. There is very little sexual or romantic play up to the point where Mithra takes Sujatha to his Tangalle quarters. This flight is caused by necessity – for a neo-Marxist group (De Silva’s Orwellish projection of the JVP) is hunting for Sujatha, while killing all those are in close contact with her. While on retreat, the couple slip into having sex – Sujatha’s first kiss is thus received, in her mid 20s. “You kiss like a puppy” the boyfriend teases Sujatha: “Don’t you know how?”. Sujatha responds in the negative. Mithra asks her whether she hasn’t seen it in the movies; to which Sujatha responds: “There’s no kissing in Sinhala movies. They only hold hands” (274). In other words, if we are to take De Silva’s lead, had there been no English movies the rural masses would not know how to kiss or engage in pleasurable sex! The cosmopolitan Mithra then takes the lead in teaching Sujatha how to kiss – and, yet, the girl is skeptic: “Are you sure this is hygienic?”.

De Silva’s attitude towards the villager is both a belittling of their intelligence; leave alone their sexual impulse. Sujatha Mallika is in her mid twenties and has come to Colombo from rural Tanamalwila. She enters “Jaypura Campus” (a mask for the university of Sri Jayewardenepura) and receives a degree in Mass Communication. At the time of her sexual encounter she is already “adult enough”, working at an English newspaper while displaying a mature understanding of other socio-political aspects of life. Nihal De Silva strives to superimpose a “naiveness in sex” as well as a “primitive sexual instinct” on the villager. This, by implication, is contrasted with the finesse and the poetry of the “love making” which De Silva’s ilk-classed, like-minded audience is seen to exhaust. It is Mithra – a representative of the Colombo upper middle class – who teaches the girl how to kiss.

Wasantha – while mesmerizing over the memory of his village girlfriend Sriyani – is seen feeling excited and “wanting to bed her” (italics mine; the stress being on the bestial, deromanticized quality of the reference). Elsewhere, having sex with the LTTE “informant”, Wasantha licks her neck, chest and shoulders. The rationale behind such play is no sexual instinct but because “all mammals do it”. He asks the stupefied woman: “haven’t you seen the Discovery channel?” (349). Such undermining regarding the villager’s sexual instincts betrays a class arrogance and a superiority on the writer’s part.

Sujatha’s father kills his wife and sexually molests the daughter for weeks at end. The adolescent Sujatha is impregnated and her aunt Yasawathi beats the girl’s abdomen with a club until she bleeds and aborts. Such perverse sexual practices and extreme sex-related violence have throughout had a dominant place in the Lankan novelist’s portrayal of village life. This feeds to the text the grotesque and vivid fantasies of the writers which, in turn, become the “villager’s burden” to carry. The chief malady in the writer – as manifested by De Silva – is the lack of empathy with the setting and the culture of the villager he desires to project. The sexual imbecility thus attributed is more a limitation of his understanding and the arrogance of naive judgment.

“Ginirella Conspiracy”: The Author’s Fantasy of the Rimless, the Undergraduate and the JVP.

by Vihanga

Nihal De Silva’s Ginirella Conspiracy is one of those texts that has got lost in translation. I assume De Silva’s expectation was that the novel would be a solemn and weighty read, for it undertakes a series of compelling issues of the day. For instance, the university rag and other class issues connected to it, youth angst, social victimizations of sorts become central to De Silva’s effort. Nor does De Silva lack in seriousness where his attempt is concerned – he makes a genuine effort to promulgate what – according to him – is the harshness and the poignancy of ragging.

However, as hinted, De Silva’s attempt is largely “lost in translation”. The displacement occurs when his delivery is transcribed from De Silva’s “sense” of the university and the rag; to a general university student’s informed notion of it. There are many anomalies which stem out of De Silva’s story of Sujatha Mallika and Mitha. From being a highly unlikely improbability the story develops into a shallow and bottomless romance – a reflection of De Silva’s naïve reading of class and society.

The protagonist cum narrator of the “lost diaries” that are delivered to the writer / author is a rural young girl from remote Tanamalwila. She, Sujatha Mallika, has qualified entrance to the “Jaypura University” (an obvious mask for the University of Sri Jayewardenapura) under the Arts stream. The novel builds up through the near-demonic hardships the freshers are exposed to, courtesy of the ragging which takes place in the canteens, the walks and the hostels – both at day and night.

The raggers are seen as the detritus of the “backward” social nooks of rural villages. Incidentally, the leader of the Socialist Students’ Union (which, we are told, is an arm of De Silva’s mask for the JVP) – Kumudu – is a Royalist: but not a “pure Royalist”. He has been a scholarship entrant to that school, coming from a rural village, but who had never found his feet in the new premise. Being a students’ union leader at campus, Kumudu was now a vocal champion of garnering the common cause of bringing about an egalitarian community. De Silva’s polarized understanding of the rag, to say the least, is a stereotype. He attributes the “rag culture” to be the prerogative of underprivileged vernacular educated students from villages and low income groups.

The speech made by Kalinga – the representative of De Silva’s dummy for the Inter-University Students’ Federation (IUSF) – works as a manifesto of the raggers. It is a speech which, in its essence, is made against the English speaking world and the privileged. Kalinga’s rhetoric calls for a denigration of that language – for no other reason but because they (the village entrant to the campus) cannot thrive in it. This attitude, perhaps, has a dated relevance; but, as to whether the IUSF or the student bodies officially manifest such a stance today is arguable.

While the raggers from the low income backgrounds wield their inferiority complexes by harassing the freshers into hegemony, they are more brutal to the town born studentship and those from English speaking, privileged schools. Mithra – a Royalist – becomes a favourite victim; and more so – it is stated – because of his polio affected leg. Tagged “Nondiya”, Mithra is made to kneel, crawl, bear physical pressure – all in the name of him being a “class other”; as well as of him being weaker than the rest.

But, the Royalist endures all with an optimistic smiling face. Even as the onlookers dread that he will fail and that his courage will drain, Mithra snubs off such doubt with all smiles. On a day the English speaking urban studentship are given a mallun with ground cockroaches mixed in it. The next day Mithra turns up smiling, wondering whether the day’s menu would be worms: worms, he concedes, is good for the health.

Mithra, with time, develops a romantic tie with the protagonist. It is the utopian union where the Colombo bred Royal educated lad woos with success the hand of a girl from an outreach Tanamalwila. But, the consummation of the love happens only after Mithra’s polio gets cured. In spite of Mithra’s keen interest in communicating with Sujatha Mallika during the rag season, the latter shows lukewarm interest. This is more so, for any form of communication would result in the seniors’ torturing them both. Yet, all the same, Mithra braves all such threats on a couple of occasions – on the pain of being cashiered – to communicate with Sujatha.

De Silva’s portrayal of the rag seems to be an improvisation based on hearsay and other second hand sources. There are moments – innocuous moments which one would easily overlook – where the details lack resonance or credibility. For instance, Mithra – a student in Management – and Sujatha of the Arts are ragged together. It is not very customary for an inter-faculty rag as such. Very often – and this is the general culture – the rag is marked by faculty boundaries. More so, different faculties and different universities have their own tailor-made implements, as well.

De Silva’s rag has the following items – “learning to be equal”, “learning to perform a perahara”, stomaching the filth of the seniors, eating together out of a “melting pot” and being bathed with foul water. The rag victims, too, are asked to carry their files on their heads and to wear slippers the wrong way around. These are commonly spoken of rag entities – but, when essentialized, they become a reduction of a deeper (and more violent) political programme. At one point, two rival student factions clash at the canteen. The violence gets intense and then – as if on cue – two police trucks appear. In my experience I am yet to come across an instance where, upon cue, the Police would barge in to interfere with an intra-students’ friction.

Nihal De Silva’s lack of social engagement (if not his naivety to the forces and instincts that govern human action) can also be seen in novels such as The Road From Elephant Pass. The English literate Sujatha Mallika – an issue of a remote village where, she herself admits, noone speaks English – is both a novelistic necessity as well as a “moral” in person. As a moral, Sujatha is the foil for all the other vernacular educated, swabhasha championing youth: for, one’s individual salvation and progress as a community lies in learning English and absorbing the culture that language implies. All the heroes in De Silva’s novel are affluent champions of English. The villagers who “cannot compete” with the English speaking are seen to be pernicious, ruthlessly bestial and burning with an urge to purge society through genocide.

It is a structural malady that all the characters which we meet in the course of the novel — including the ones such as Nishantha (the late teen youth who squeezes Sujatha’s boob in a bus — a chance meeting) — feature in the big climax De Silva has in store for us: the “concentration camp” scene. All economic deprives from Nishantha, Ranjit (Sujatha’s village school mate who was unsuccessful at his A/L as well as in wooing Sujatha), Loku, Capt. Marasinghe etc are found to be in assistance of Kalinga’s megalomaniac plot to seize power from the Upper Classes. The English educated are seen to emancipate themselves to “civilized norms”; while the non-English speaking villager takes up perversion as a means of hitting back at society. In the penultimate chapter, Ranjit — deprived of his sexual desires by Sujatha who, a few years earlier, had turned him down — comes up to the imprisoned quartet of Sujatha, Nali, Mithra and Harith and expresses his desire to sadistically violate Sujatha.

The English speaker and the ally of the metropolitan socialite, on the contrary, are saved. This is the case with Sujatha: whose rise from the doldrums of poverty and social backwardness to being a much sought after journalist is dependent on her seamless surrender to the aspect under study. Her Royalist boy friend Mithra, in that sense, is the sexual gratification which her “English expectations” promise her. In Dickensian terms, Mithra becomes to Sujatha Mallika a form of “Estella” — only that Mithra has within him the “Royalist ethic” of uprightness and virtue. Sujatha — for the sake of the novel — becomes both a fluent user of English as well as a good enough scribe in that language. Had she failed to master the language (in spite of her Zero English origins) the novel – recorded as a journal – would not be.

The arrogant writer in De Silva who is deeply engrossed in his socialite, elitist environs alone that he does not even entertain the possibility of allowing the story to “take place” in Sinhala. The Sujatha Mallika journals, therefore, have to be in English. In justifying the necessity, we’re told (by Sujatha) that she kept the records in this “second language” so as to help her improve her English. But, the English we encounter throughout the text is not that of one who would rather keep a journal in order to rehearse the language. That English, to say the least, is good and clean (Nor does Sujatha Mallika eat, make love, speak of day to day issues etc in any other language but her acquired English….. More instances of seking improvement, perhaps?). De Silva would have done better by allowing the reader to absorb the journal as being in Sinhala.

Sujatha, as an adolescent, has been nagged by a benevolent Catholic priest to learn English. This priest, Father Basil, becomes a father figure to Sujatha – helping her, in Englishless Tanamalwila, to learn the language in six years. Father Basil can be located as an extension of Mr. Karl in The Road from Elephant Pass. The tangled hair, the untidy beard, the preoccupation with birds, the weight both lay on education are unmistakable resonances. Both represent Catholic / Christian agencies; and are seen as charitable forces that uplift the life chances of rural potential. These charitable agencies are foils to De Silva’s mapping of the JVP who are seen to destroy and callously gun down all such benevolent forces.

De Silva’s (1) ahistorical and context-deprived misrepresentation of the JVP,  (2) the university students from without the socialite metropolitan circuits and his (3) parading of the neo-Marxist wave of contemporary Sri Lanka as a demonic, megalomaniac project only substantiates his class snobbishness and his lack of depth and / or empathy to the issues that permeate outside his class. These fanatical fantasies, however, require a separate space for a worthwhile probe.

Guneratne as Colombus: the Discussion of Caste in “Tortured Island and the Price of Peace”

by Vihanga

I recently had the opportunity of reading Malinga (Herman) Gunaratne’s Tortured Island and the Price of Peace. This book – primarily a memoir – had been written in 2004, in the height of the Ranil Wickramasinghe’s UNF cabinet and the “peace process” brokered by Norway. The impetus for the writer to compile this work – a reflection on numerous conflicts the political history of the island was tear shaped by – appears to be the anxiety of possible segregation. Gunaratne makes a strong plea for “oneness”; making claims – some of them naïve and populist – as to why a “separate state”, for the Tamils, should not be constituted.

Why Tortured Island and the Price of Peace first detained my attention, however, was the book’s account of the JVP as a party and as a rebellious movement. Gunaratne had been fascinated of the JVP’s carder constitution and of how its forces were mustered by the subscription of the “lower” and “oppressed” castes of the Southern geography. The “caste factor” in the JVP and its implications are established with several references to personal encounters Guneratne had undergone in the late 1980s. What originally stimulates him to undertake the study, we’re told, is when a group of JVPers come to his estate in Ahangama and acts with presumption.

Guneratne, as always, does not lose his cool. On the contrary, he manages to confound the JVPers – who, according to Guneratne, often like to “show off” their presumption with a gun in hand – and come out trumps. An investigation proves him that the band of JVPers who had stormed his bungalow were from a nearby village and of the Oli caste. Gunaratne, too, is a class ‘A’ planter in Sri Lanka. He has had very close links with both the SLFP as well as the UNP regimes through the 1970s and 1980s. He has also held several key positions and walked shoulder to shoulder with prominent statesmen – he himself makes a clear testimony of the fact in his work.

Therefore, the sudden epiphany Gunaratne has of the existence of “caste” in Sri Lankan politics comes as no surprise. The mainstream party politics of the island being, in its basic essence, a politics of caste is acknowledged. But, when the JVP’s caste fault lines are “newly discovered” it creates a doubt in the author’s mind as to whether the late Wijeweera – the original leader of that party – was actually manipulating caste oppression to enhance his own mileage.

Gunaratne’s class-bound assumptions, on the whole, are rabid to the touch. He is already prejudiced against the JVP – the “lesser” yakkos – even as he undertakes an analysis of their agenda. The text is merely a substantiation of that undermining. The neo-Marxist party, the first organized “people’s force” that almost shook Gunaratne’s upper class cradle over, is seen as an idealist rabble who were “misled” in their assumptions. He quotes an anecdote about a JVP “rebel” who, after successfully capturing a Police station in 1971, had donned the Police uniform and paraded his authority. This “rebel”, later, had been captured and detained in reprisal attacks. Guneratne’s theory is that the activist in question is the prototype for the JVP’s political consciousness – that they were a band of frustrated “have nots”, who were craving to invert the status quo and to oppress the socialite. Based on this singular event, a gross over-simplification is made and meted out at a mass collective project of historical importance.

Gunaratne also relates to a meeting with Shantha Bandara – the JVP student leader – while the latter was in custody. Gunaratne makes this an occasion to further belittle the JVP for its “idealist fervour”, but more so, to apologize for the regime of the day. Gunaratne’s shopping cart, for once, is full as he skims through the surface of a dark age of state sponsored violence. Rather, what we find is a patient and generous government, trying its optimal best to avoid human carnage; being reticent to the last, but being pushed by the “rebels” to a violent end.

Nor does Gunaratne sufficiently historicize either the Southern or the Northern rebellions against the state. The political marginalization and contempt which garnered dissent and distemper are mere scenery by the way. The state agents and proxies who were closely linked to the top political brass of the 1980s are marked for their resource and tact. The likes of Zernie Wijesuriya and Ravi Jayewardene play Homeric roles in these chapters, as opposed to the illusionist in Shantha Bandara – the misled idealist – who hollowly speaks of a JVP victory to be. Shantha, in fact, is released to work out a “peace deal” for the government; but, is later “captured” and “killed by his enemies”. Gunaratne, however, acts innocent and makes no mention as to who these “enemies” are.

[A wiki entry on Shantha Bandara: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shantha_Bandara]

Gunaratne’s lack of empathy of the politically and culturally down-trodden is the more real tragedy. The fact that the literature of his ilk, which propagates similar vanities, makes the shelves is both the torture and the price of their peace.

 

[Originally carried by the The Nation]