A Writer’s Gift To His Country’ by Yasmine Gooneratne and Devika Brendon. Published in The Sunday Island in two parts in December, 2014.
(Influences from India might not be as healthy today as they were in 1961. Viewers have become addicted in recent years to Hollywood musicals and over-heated teledramas, and the difference between novels and the movies that are made of them is not always understood. Teachers of English literature hear evidence of this quite often, even in a class-room, when the question "Have you read Pride and Prejudice?" or Great Expectations, or even Hamlet. can receive the wholly inadequate reply from a stu-dent: "No, but I've seen the movie". Pressure exert-ed by the box-oMce, too, is often responsible for dis-disastrous mis-casting in Peries' filk of the village in the Jungle. Arthur C. Clarke with his American accent was quite unsuited to the role of Leonard Woolf's British Government Agent. Incompetent reading of the text, too, has sometimes occurred in these benighted times: the scripting of a key scene in the same film, for instance, missed a golden opportunity provided by the novel, when the 'civi-lized' West in faultless evening dress meets the 'primitive' East clad only in a loin-cloth on the AGAs veranda. Coming closer to home, the movie made by Dev Anand in 1965 of R.K. Narayan’s masterpiece The Guide is another. (Readers interested in following up this latter reference could look up Narayan’s brilliantly humorous essay ‘Misguided Guide’, which tells the story of the travesty that was made of his novel by well-meaning Indian movie-makers.) Fortunately for Martin Wickramasinghe’s trilogy, the genius of Peries, Siriwardene’s sensitivity and subtlety, and the responsiveness to text and direction of a perfectly chosen cast that included Punya Heendeniya as Nanda and Henry Jayasena as Piyal, saved Gamperaliya from becoming what it could very well have become in less competent hands – just another romantic story of thwarted love with a fortuitous, happy ending, obscuring Wickramasinha’s serious theme: the gradual replacement of the traditional economic and social structure of the village by commercial city influence.
Sixty-five years is a long time for a gift to await unwrapping, but at last, in 2014, all three volumes have become available in English translation as a single three-part publication, under the title of The Uprooted Trilogy. Published in the form of three neat paperbacks, Uprooted, The Age of Kali, and Destiny, the texts vary somewhat in literary quality: none of them benefited from professional literary editing. (Destiny, in particular, could have done with some editorial advice relative to pp. 122-123, where a detailed description of a surgical operation on an infected abscess, derived, we understand, from the author’s observation of the late Dr P.R. Anthonis at work, and therefore valuable in itself as a memento of friendship between two great men of the time, but quite out of place in a novel, is inserted into the fictional text.) The three parts can, however, be read as a continuous work in the style of a three-volume 19th century English novel. Gamperaliya in translation is certainly a substantial book (222 pages), the other two are much slighter in size. But even a reader who has acquired the short attention-span of a teledrama addict would find The Uprooted Trilogy a much less daunting proposition than a novel by George Eliot or Charles Dickens.
Part I: Gamperaliya. Published in Sinhala in 1944, The Uprooted depicts the crumbling of traditional village life under the pressure of modernization. That life, which is symbolized by the Mahagedera (Great House), located in the village of Koggala, is the ancestral home of the Kaisaruwatte family, Sinhalese people of quality who belong to the rural gentry of southern Sri Lanka. The head of the family holds the distinction of ‘Muhandiram’, which confers upon him both official authority and social leadership: the Muhandiram and his equally well-born wife, Matara Hamine, are the acknowledged leaders of Koggala village society, respected and looked up to by every person in the community. Like them, their children (two daughters and a son) have been brought up in the unostentatious but nonetheless dignified consciousness of an ancient lineage. In this close society, where every individual knows the family background of everyone else, high-born or not, personal aspirations must give way to social considerations. And so, when Piyal, a personable young bachelor from a neighbouring family, is hired to teach English to the Muhandiram’s younger daughter Nanda, and falls in love with his beautiful student, marriage with her cannot, according to the elders of her family, be a possibility: Piyal’s family, though respectable, is well known to be of lower social standing – his grandfather is remembered to have been at one time a vendor of vegetables to the Mahagedera kitchen.
Although the Mahagedera in its pride would most certainly regard a marriage proposal from him as an insult, Piyal, who is intelligent and energetic, aware of his own abilities and deeply in love, is hopeful that it will be accepted. (Regi Siriwardena’s film script, imaginatively substituting an European fairytale for the Robinson Crusoe of the novel, shows that Piyal cannot not see why, in the words of the text he is teaching Nanda to read, a commoner should not marry a princess – when and if he can become wealthy enough to win her as his wife.) Nanda is, in her turn, attracted to him, but, restrained partly by her duty to her parents and her lineage, and partly by the confusion in her own mind as to whether she is in love or not, cannot articulate her feelings either in speech or in letters. Consequently she submits, at her parents’ urging, to marriage with Jinadasa, a young man with little to recommend him beyond an acceptable appearance and an unexceptionable family background. The latter, though it is by no means comparable to their own, the Muhandiram and his wife are willing to accept. Piyal, disappointed and resentful, leaves the village to better his prospects in the city. Nanda devotes herself to her social role of good wife and dutiful daughter, and tries to forget him.
This is not an easy thing to do, as Shakespeare demonstrated long ago: like the lady in Twelfth Night, who ‘never told her love, but let concealment, like a worm ‘i th’ bud, feed on her damask cheek’, Nanda pines ‘in thought’. Her melancholy results in a psychological condition, the treatment of which drains the financial resources of her family. Despite the Muhandiram’s efforts to preserve his family’s prosperity, his finances dwindle and the Mahagedera, the symbol of his status, begins to show signs of dilapidation and decay. The ladies of the family, hitherto accustomed to dress, decorate, and conduct themselves in a style befitting that status, are forced to adopt various stratagems in order to conceal their predicament from those outside the immediate family circle.
Uprooted describes these stratagems in detail: they include maintaining strict domestic economy in matters of household diet, crocheting lace for sale through discreet third parties, pawning their valuable personal jewellery, and gilding silver beads for everyday wear so that the most critical eye would take them for pure gold. Such seeming trivialities are not trivialities at all, for a great deal is at stake.
[This theme is carried to its logical end in Destiny when, seated alone in her husband’s Jaguar, Nanda’s daughter Nalika removed the valuable jewellery that adorned her ears and her neck. She had lost her son. She would not be able to prevent her daughter leaving her. As [the car] neared Anoma Villa, she saw the image of her face in the car mirror. She was shaken by the grief and the fear she saw in the reflection. (Destiny, pp. 219-220) The gesture (a potent symbol that was, alas, omitted in the film made of Yuganthaya), signifies Nalika’s recognition of her situation: she has lost the love of her children, her status in society, everything she values most.]
After the loss of his first child, and the death of the Muhandiram, Jinadasa, unable to support his wife or himself, leaves for the interior, hoping to make a better life for his family. He never achieves his goal and a six-year silence ensues, during which Nanda returns to the Mahagedera, and Piyal, far away in Colombo, becomes a successful city businessman. When Jinadasa is rumoured to have died, Piyal makes a second proposal for the girl he has never ceased to love. This time he is successful, and the lovers can now come together in marriage.
Although her new life takes her away from her mother, her sister Anula, and the ancestral house in Koggala, Nanda is pleased to leave the village for the comforts and opulence of city life with Piyal. Her happiness is haunted, however, by feelings of guilt, born of the knowledge that the gossips of Koggala society attribute Jinadasa’s unhappy end to his wife’s liking for high style and good living. Piyal, becoming aware that Jinadasa is still a presence in Nanda’s mind, is angry and jealous. His attitude very nearly sends her back to the Mahagedera. Piyal’s love for her is unshaken, however; and although Nanda’s family pride initially resists her husband’s apologetic overtures, both the novel and the film that was made of it in 1964 end on a note of reconciliation.
Part 2: Kaliyugaya. A drastic change of theme and temperature is immediately evident in the opening pages of The Age of Kali, which was first published in Sinhala in 1957. Although village values are still strong in Tissa and Anula, attempts by Piyal and Nanda to have their parents and her sister Anula leave the Mahagedera and live with them in Colombo are not successful. As long as she is alive, Anula, a repository of folk stories that fascinate the children, provides a link with the village for Nanda and Piyal’s son Alan and their daughter Nalika. But when Anula falls ill in the city and eventually dies, that link is broken for Alan.
Nanda, who is permanently resident now in the city and is energetically seeking acceptance in what she thinks of as Colombo’s ‘high society’, listens angrily to the 100-page letter of analytical reproach that her self-exiled son Alan has written from Britain, where he had gone with Irene, the Burgher girl he married in protest against what he had seen as his parents’ closed, insular minds. Although she had learned to read English under ‘School-master’ Piyal’s tutelage (cf. Uprooted), had taken lessons in English conversation for a year in order ‘to socialize’ since settling in the city, and has consistently spoken English at home in order (she claims) to assist Alan with his studies while he was growing up (p.3), Nanda appears to avoid reading Alan’s letter. Tactfully edited extracts from it are read aloud to her by her younger brother Tissa, who has himself changed from the playful, precocious lad the reader first met in Gamperaliya, into a thoughtful, sometimes cynical, observer of the social scene as it changes around him. His comments on Alan’s letter as he reads it, are rejected by his sister:
"So Alan [has] given up his studies and gone to England with a girl because we tried to educate him?"
"Alan has not suggested anything of the kind," said Tissa.
"Tissa, don’t you see that he is writing … with that in mind, to blame us?"
"I don’t think so. Your conscience knows it was wrong of you to have opposed Alan’s affair with Irene so harshly."
"We never thought and will never think what we did was wrong. When a child who is still studying has an affair with a woman, is it wrong to stop him?"
Although Nanda ‘aggressively’ rejects her brother’s truth-telling, asserting that their unsympathetic treatment of their gifted son was entirely justified since it was meant for his own good, Nanda’s restless mind cannot find comfort. Memories crowd in on her: she recalls her sister’s death – was it brought about by her own neglect? - and guiltily remembers occasions on which she had been unfaithful to Piyal, in mind if not in body. She might try to close her mind to Tissa’s observations, and stop her ears from hearing Alan’s reproaches, but she cannot escape ‘the intuition that … her pride in her family lineage was just a mask for hiding her self-centred thoughts and feelings’. (p.24) In the violence of her conflicting emotions – guilt and sorrow (vigorously repressed), and seething anger (violently expressed) – Nanda speaks more truly than she knows:
"This must be the beginning of Kali Yugaya, the age of destruction! When did you learn to preach this outrageous sermon, Tissa?"
"Only after coming to Colombo," murmured Tissa. (Chapter 2)
From this point on, the family’s history is a tale of unremitting change that frustrates the social-climbing Nanda, and is interpreted by her as decline, a punishment inflicted by a revengeful fate (karma). Nalika, the daughter for whom she has planned to arrange a brilliant marriage with a successful young doctor which will lift the family into the ‘professional’ class, admits to a relationship with another young man her mother cannot approve: Saviman Kabalana is, according to Nanda, the son of ‘an unscrupulous man who collects taxes from slum-dwellers on behalf of rich landlords’. Nanda learns that her daughter’s intended husband had spent his childhood amongst ‘children of the slums’, and that his father had become ‘a contractor for the city council, to remove garbage from the city streets, earning thousands of rupees from each contract’(p.156). It is clear that Nanda has not given up her pride in her family lineage, choosing to forget, perhaps, that her husband Piyal had been rejected by the Mahagedera on his first application for her hand, for similarly prejudiced reasons.
Piyal, devoid of family pride but regretfully aware that he had sometimes resorted to dishonest practices himself in advancing his own business interests, does not share his wife’s biased attitude to the Kabalana connection; but he has problems of his own. Disillusioned by the estrangement of his cherished son Alan, worried by apparent irresponsibility in his second son Chandrasoma, and anxiously dreading a break with Nalika, Piyal has begun to lose his grip on his businesses. His earlier entrepreneurial energy is giving way to feelings of futility. By the end of the novel, he has died; and although Alan and his second (English) wife manage to attend his funeral, England has ‘engulfed’ them both.
Part 3: Yuganthaya. Destiny opens on a new scene. The neglected Mahagedera, decaying with time, is little more than a memory in the minds of the fourth generation. It does not appear at all in the film that has been made of the novel. Instead, a generational clash between Saviman Kabalana, the son-in-law whom Nanda had instinctively dreaded acquiring, and their son Malin, is the focus of both film and novel. Saviman Kabalana has developed into a powerful business magnate who opposes the formation of the labour movement, while Malin, driven by ideas developed in Britain and powered by socialist theory, hopes to bring about social change. Challenging his powerful father’s uncompromisingly capitalist methods of making money and running his business empire, Malin rejects also the social snobbery of his mother Nalika Kabalana (Nanda’s daughter, who has achieved her ambition of entry into Colombo’s wealthy social world). It would seem that Nanda’s family pride, which was a key theme of Gamperaliya, has taken the form, in the new generation operating in the ‘new’ society, of social snobbery. Nanda’s younger brother Tissa, Nalika Kabalana’s elderly bachelor uncle, who still moves between Koggala and Colombo, is the family’s only remaining link with village life.
Malin, who is covertly encouraged by Tissa, has another supporter: his young sister Chamari. She (like her brother, and her self-exiled uncle Alan, before her) values her own independence, and has a kindly and charitable sympathy for the poor that is more reminiscent of her grandmother Matara Hamine than either of her parents. The film of Yuganthaya stops short after Malin obtains a parliamentary seat, by means of which he will presumably succeed in raising the living standards of the poor. The novel goes beyond that, projecting a future for Chamari as the wife of her brother’s England-returned friend Aravinda, a highly qualified surgeon with a village background not dissimilar to that of the Mahagedera family in past times.
When Martin Wickramasinghe died (in 1976, at the age of 86), independent Sri Lanka had become a republic, and undergone many changes of government. He had outlived both the Emergency of 1958, and the JVP uprising of 1971. It is fortunate that he did not live to witness the horrors of 1983 and escaped the sorrows and dangers of the LTTE war, although allusions made in Alan’s letters to underhand political moves made by Sri Lankans at home and abroad might cause the reader of Destiny to credit his creator with unusual prescience, and wonder what kind of sense Malin Kabalana, as an idealistic socialist MP, would have made of today’s murky political scene.
The publication of all three novels together is certainly a boon to the English reader who has had to wait 70 years (from 1944 to 2014) to read this classic of our literature in its entirety. One aspect of the staggered publishing history of the novels and their English translations might, however, be seen in some lights as an advantage, for as a result of it Martin Wickramasinghe’s work may encounter in some Sri Lankan readers today a much more sophisticated response than it would have met with in the 1950s. Study of post-colonial and world literature in English, which has developed in educated Sri Lankans an awareness of literary works that were once unknown or unavailable to local readers, and introduced them to new ways of assessing literature, has made its way into our schools and universities. Illuminating comparisons can now be usefully made between The Uprooted Trilogy and a long line of substantial literary works from both within and outside Sri Lanka that have common links relating to period, theme and style: among the latter would certainly be Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles and E.M. Forster’s Howard’s End, not to mention the works of the Russian masters that Wickramasinghe himself read so assiduously. In Africa, Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart is an obvious candidate for literary comparison, while among works set in Asia one could cite Leonard Woolf’s The Village in the Jungle, R.K. Narayan’s The Vendor of Sweets, Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyay’s Pather Panchali, and the Indonesian author Pramoedya Ananta Toer’s Buru Quartet.
A brief overview of some of the titles cited above may convey some idea of our reasons for suggesting them as comparable with The Uprooted Trilogy:
Pather Panchali (1929) was adapted into a film of the same name by the late Satyajit Ray, the distinguished film-maker to whose work in Bengali, Peries’ Sinhala movies have been frequently likened, and with which they (especially Gamperaliya) have been frequently compared. Pather Panchali, like Gamperaliya, deals with the life of a well-born rural family, both in their ancestral village in a rural setting (Bengal) and later when they move to Varanasi in search of a better life. Like Gamperaliya, it depicts the anguish and loss they face during their travels. Originally published in 1929, Pather Panchali was followed in 1932 by a sequel Aparajito, which was later also adapted into a film of the same name by Satyajit Ray, and that was followed by Apusansar.
Pramoedya Ananta Toer’s Buru Quartet,is a series of four novels chronicling the development of Indonesian nationalism and based in part, like The Uprooted Trilogy, on the author’s own experiences growing up. The English titles of the books in the quartet are This Earth of Mankind, Child of All Nations, Footsteps, and House of Glass. The quartet includes strong female characters of indigenous ethnicity, addresses the discriminations and indignities of living under colonial rule and, like Yuganthaya, explores aspects of the struggle for personal and national political independence.
Besides the fact that Thomas Hardy’s rich evocation of Dorsetshire in Tess of the D’Urbervilles has many parallels with the Koggala landscape depicted in Gamperaliya, Hardy from the first sources Tess’s tragic character arc in her mother and father’s unrealistic desire to resurrect their ancestral lineage and restore the family name. The scene in which Tess gathers her younger siblings and retreats to the ancestral family vault, which is the only piece of land to which she has legal claim, may seem to readers of the English Victorians as a sequence very reminiscent of Wickramasinghe. The Uprooted Trilogy is really a saga a story cycle, and cyclic in moral structure too tracing the rise and fall of a family across the generations: rising through energy and enterprise, falling through pride, inability to adapt, and insularity. It traces the rise from the Village to the City, and thus traces the aspirations of many modern Sri Lankan citizens, all of whom have rural origins, and are making their way in a post-modern commercial world, tempted by the bling, glitz and glamour of urban life, with its elegant veneers and sophisticated allurements.
We see how timely this translation is and how relevant to contemporary experience, when in modern Colombo traditional village life is represented only in architectural statements of whimsy, when traditional rural images and artefacts are routinely described as ‘iconic’, and fashionable ladies in Colombo invite each other almost apologetically for ‘just a simple rice & curry lunch’.
Although there is no evidence that Wickramasinghe, whose major interest in the European novel was apparently centred on the Russian masters, had ever read The Village in the Jungle (published in 1913) or been influenced by Woolf’s novel, it is interesting that both authors open their books with powerful evocations of southern landscapes in Sri Lanka and reflections on the effect such settings have on the characters who live in them. Both writers show us how deeply formative our social contexts are; and how, in contrast to the individualism and fragmented familial contexts of the Western world, whose lifestyle of conspicuous consumption is one to which our middle and upper middle classes aspire, people in the South Asian context can never really make their life choices independently of their sense of social obligation and the responsibilities conferred by their family ties.
In translating and publishing his late father’s masterpiece, Dr Ranga Wickramasinghe has made a valuable gift to the nation, and indeed to the world. It was high time that the trilogy really did become the possession of "the people" as its author intended, rather than remain a treasure owned exclusively by a Sinhala readership. This classic work in its English version, whole and entire, can now – at last - take its rightful place among the world’s great books. Our thanks are due to the dedicated translators who made the miracle happen while we were still alive to see it.
Dr. Devika Brendon is an award-winning Sri Lankan writer and teacher of English language and literature, whose short stories have been published in Australia and India. She is presently working on her first novel. Emeritus Professor Yasmine Gooneratne’s last-published novel, The Sweet and Simple Kind, was shortlisted for the 2007 Commonwealth Writers Prize and the 2008 Dublin International IMPAC Literary Award.
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