Ediriweera Sarachchandra: Life and works

Prof. Ediriwira Sarachchandra Memorial

Orations presided over by Dr. Pundit
Amaradeva Sarachchandra Sahurjjana
Sansadaya is organising third annual
orations at Sri Lanka Foundation Institute on
Friday 14th June at 4.30 p.m. in appreciation
of the service rendered by Prof. Ediriwira
Sarachchandra to Sinhala Literature, Theatre
and Social thought. The Sansadaya has
invited Dr. Pundit Amaradeva, who was
honoured recently with the prestigious awards, Magsaysay by the
Government of Philippines and Bharat Padmasri by the
Government of India, as a mark of honour to preside over these
orations. Pandit Amaradeva will deliver one of the key note
addresses on "my pleasant experience in composin g music to
some plays of Prof. Sarachchandra. He hopes to discuss his
experience working in close collaboration with Sarachchandra,
while demonstrating his application of North Indian rages and folk
melodies in his composition of music for the plays Pabawathie,
Vessantara, Lomahansa and Bhawakadaturawa. This would be a
novel experience to the audience as he hopes to present the
original form of the Raga and demonstrate how he has changed
this to suit the dramatic situations of the Play. Mahanama
Wickremasinghe, Nissanka Diddeniya, Menike Attanayake the
veteran dramatists who took part in Sarachchandra’s Plays would
assist him in singing. The other lecture will be delivered by Dr.
Ranjini Obeyesekere of the Department of Anthropology,
University of Princeton, U.S.A. on "Modern Sinhala Literary
Criticism; Professor Ediriwira Sarachchandra’s contribution." Dr.
Obeyesekere will examine in this lecture the Contribution of
Sarachchandra as a pioneer in search of a method to evaluate
Sinhala Literature. How he was influenced by Sanskrit and modern
English critical theories will be discussed in detail. Dr.
Obeyesekere was a pupil of Sarachchandra and had taken part in
Sarachchandra’s Plays and published a book on modern Sinhala
Literary Criticism. Sarachchandra Sahurjjana Sansadaya invites all
who are interested to listen to the above orations to be held on
Friday 14th June, 2002 at 4.30 p.m. at Sri Lanka Foundation
Institute, 100, Independence Mawatha, Colombo 07.

From ‘Poetic Drama and Poetic Theory’ (edited by Dr. James Hogg) -
Ediriweera Sarachchandra’s’s ‘Pemato Jayathi Soko’ translated by D. M.
de Silva.

The name of Professor Ediriwira Sarachchandra is today a household word in

Sri Lanka. He is the author of three major plays: Maname (1956), Sinhabahu
(1961) and Pemato Jayati Soko (1969) as well as of a number of smaller pieces
which have enjoyed great popularity with the theatre-goer and take pride of
place in the dramatic literature of his country. He has achieved the unusual
distinction (the more unusual for an academic) of being recognised in his own
lifetime as the national dramatist of his country. The recognition came with
Maname in 1956, nearly twenty years ago. Since then many things have
changed in the country, and in the theatre, new plays have been written and new
reputations made; but the standing of Professor Sarachchandra has continued in
the general estimation refreshingly unchanged. In 1974 he was appointed
Ceylonese Ambassador in Paris. It was an appointment which was very clearly
meant to have a special significance. For though his personal culture and his
achievements in the Sinhalese theatre made him an eminently suitable
representative of his people, he had no diplomatic career behind him and
certainly no political qualifications. The appointment came appropriately as an
acknowledgement by a Government, entrusted with power for a period only, of
his more stable distinction beyond the reach of political and other vicissitudes.

The question of his continued distinction is an interesting one, and a

consideration of it will help to define the nature of his achievement and the
place it occupies in the national consciousness. His finest writing dates from
1956, the year in which the phenomenon which used to be called South-East
Asian resurgence was at its highest in Sri Lanka. It marked the 2500th
anniversary of Buddhism which was expected to inaugurate a second
efflorescence of the Buddhist teaching and of the Singhalese people who were
its custodians. The nation was invited to look forward to an era of millennial
prosperity under a righteous ruler called Diyasena whose advent had been
prophesied in the thirteenth century. The victory at the General Elections, in the
same year, of the People’s United Front, a political party with an emphatically
populist and Sinhalese Buddhist programme, seemed to offer a palpable
guarantee of just this; and its leader Mr. Bandaranaike, though not perhaps the
legendary Diyasena, came with all the charisma of a Messianic figure to
Singhalese-Buddhist nationalism. By the mid 1960’s however the enthusiasm
had sadly waned. The assassination of Mr. Bandaranaike at the hands of (of all
people) a Buddhist monk put a cruel end to all hopes of the millennium. Even
in his own life-time, his more futuristic legislation had been adroitly frustrated
by cautious statesmen with a clear eye to their own immediate interest, and the
Freedom Party Government which succeeded to his name and programme
could hardly be expected to fulfil expectations so monumental. The road to the
millennium was blocked by the hard facts of economics; and the endemic ills of
a "developing" country - unemployment, food scarcities, the complicated
inefficacies of a stultifying political system -came to constitute the national pre-
occupation. Sarachchandra’s plays which do not address themselves to any one
of these particular problems, might seem in the current ethos of depression to
stem from a period of outdated, if enviable, innocence.

On the face of it, the plays might appear to countenance this view.
Sarachchandra’s dramatic personae are usually royal or mythical personages
and the particular situations they find themselves in might seem to have little
relevance to a modern condition. Added to this, they are given to poetic
utterance, the playwright’s characteristic idiom being the highly embellished
and un-contemporary diction of classical Singhalese poetry. Other Sinhalese
dramatists writing at the moment dramatise social problems in contemporary
terms in a partisan spirit. They quite frequently achieve theatrical success as
well as the congenial notoriety that goes with tendentious writing. But this in
no way affects the reception of the Sarachchandra plays. With no ideo- logical
bias to assure their success, they still continue - to the occasional
embarrassment of Sunday journalists - to attract and hold their audiences.

If we are not to accuse Ceylonese audiences of a particularly debased

appreciation or of sentimental self-indulgence - something which the extreme
sophistication of his literary style precludes - it would appear that even at the
present time the plays of Sarachchandra are in some wise relevant and fulfil a
national need. The nature of this need and the playwright’s mode of answering
it become clear to us when we consider his creative endeavour and achievement
in the context of the cultural life- history of the nation of which they are
inextricably a part.

The life-history of the nation has until recently been to a great extent a history
of foreign rule.

For over four centuries Sri Lanka had known the burden of subjection to
foreign imperialisms. The Portuguese, the Dutch and the British, all three of
them Western and Christian powers, had- ruled the island in succession. The
political and economic consequences of this need no elaboration; they have
been established by the researches of the historian and the rhetoric of
politicians. It is only necessary for our purpose to notice that, all other burdens
apart, the very presence of the stranger - alien, imperial and so unconscionably
over-long in time - was of itself a grievous burden to the national psyche. It
resulted in a demoralisation more insidious and fundamentally ruinous than
economic hardship, involving a resentful feeling, often submerged but fiercely
active nonetheless, of ethnic and cultural inferiority. The road to salvation or a
restoration of national self-respect lay of course in the resentment. Its most
potent spokesman was the turn of the century religious and social reformer

Anagˆrika Dharmapˆla (1864-1933). Displaying equally with moral intensity a

remarkable force and versatility in invective, he raged against "the diabolism of
vicious paganism introduced by the British administrators" and reminded the
Singhalese people ("the sweet, gentle Aryan children of an ancient and historic
race") of their splendid past: "There exists no race on the earth today that has
had a more glorious, triumphant record of victory." His tirades are unreadably
ill-bred today, and the rhetorical assertions about past glory sound fatuous
merely . But in a man not lacking in intelligence and possessed of a genuine
moral afflatus, both the ill-breeding and the fatuousness are evidence of an
intense and fundamental need for a new valuation of the national psyche. The
Anagˆrika (the Homeless One) was expressing a feeling, that was to grow
stronger through his influence, of opposition to the Westernising and
Christianising influences that British imperialism meant, which were
threatening to submerge and utterly destroy the national identity. That identity
he insisted on and firmly defined: to be genuinely Sinhalese one must also be a
Buddhist. In the face of the threat to it the Anagˆrika succeeded in establishing
the Sinhalese-Buddhist self-consciousness. (It is notable that he used the label,
which has since gained wide currency, of Sinhala Bauddhaya as the title of his
influential newspaper in 1906.) The fact remained however that the glories he
pointed to, in so far as they had ever existed, belonged to a distant antiquity: the
pride he invoked found pitifully little to sustain itself in the shabby context of
our modern dispossession.

The Anagˆrika expressed a social and religious pre-occupation. In the

movement of Singhalese-Buddhist resurgence there were also men with
specifically aesthetic and literary concerns. As might be expected, they looked
back in the same spirit of patriotic fervour to the literary glories of the past.
Throughout the latter half of the nineteenth century lay pundits and learned
monks issued and re- issued the lost classics of Singhalese-Buddhist literature
through the newly available medium of the printing press. The style of
language in which these works were written, their rhetorical conventions and
grammar, came to provide a standard for contemporary writing, so that a staple
of literary expression was evolved which based itself on one developed around
the thirteenth century. The phenomenon is no more curious than it is natural.
Foreign invasion, internal political dissension and all the long agony of a
culture in decline had necessarily entailed the decline of letters. Consequently,
any attempt at original writing had to be also an attempt to restore the
interrupted tradition of Singhalese literature. The Singhalese of modern
colloquy was admittedly remote from the literary idiom but the convention of
separate registers had always existed (as it still exists), and the question of its
sometimes difficult intelligibility could not in the climate of resurgence prevent
its general acceptability. The idiom of the classics had a certain splendour of
association: its Sanskritic sonorities came to the modern ear with the
reverberations of a glorious antiquity, while its patterns of rhetoric and
conventions of mythological allusion seemed to be palpable witness of the
sumptuous rituals of an ancient culture.

In the 1920’s the Singhalese purist and social reformer Cumaratunga Munidasa
(1887-1944) tried to carry the resumptive tendency of contemporary writing to
an even greater extreme and to resuscitate an idiom from beyond the thirteenth
century. As purists always will he failed, but in his own writings and speeches
achieved the stature of a great symbolic figure of the resurgence, carrying into
the sphere of specifically cultural activity the demand of the Anagˆrika for a
new valuation of the national psyche. In his addiction to the inane boast he
showed himself an heir of the Anagˆrika whom he far outdid, as when he
insisted on the antiquity of pure Singhalese (‘Helese’) which he declared to be
‘older than the oldest of Indian languages.’ He repudiated with scorn all
suggestions of an Indo-Aryan origin for the language. "There is perhaps no
nation older than we. How can we therefore accept the theory that everything of
ours is derived from outside?"

Whatever of splendour might have accrued to Singhalese literature in the

patriotic retrospect, its present remained unilluminated by original greatness.
The energies of the contemporary writer, it appears, were used up in
resuscitating and mastering the older styles or (frequently) embarrassed by the
incongruity between an ancient idiom and a modern condition. Despite
continuous and varied striving throughout the early decades of the twentieth
century, there was, when the island achieved independence in 1948, with the
notable exception of Martin Wickremasinghe’s novel Gamperaliya (Change in
the Village) 1944, no work of signal merit produced. The work of art that was
to give brave and beautiful expression to Singhalese-Buddhist self-
consciousness still belonged to the future. To the present belonged the
depressing awareness or worse, ignorance, that English and with it Western
literature, was immeasurably superior, more live and daily discovering itself,
while in the light of it the local achievement was provincial, second-rate and
lacking in critical direction.

It was the achievement of Professor Sarachchandra, in 1956, to annul this

inferiority. His plays, it was immediately recognised, made use of traditional
styles and motifs; his dramatic persons were the symbolic figures of national
myth, and they spoke a language which, while rich in its classical resonances,
was also graciously intelligible to the modern ear. For the Singhalese play- goer
the effect of his plays was to dramatise the glory of the past and to demonstrate
that the splendour of their ancient civilisation was still current among them, that
the creative energies which produced it were active in the present in the soul at
least of a single playwright. In other words, in Professor Sarachchandra’s work
the inane vaunts with which the leaders of Singhalese resurgence had tried to
stimulate - and simulate - national self-confidence found at last their substance.
The cultural emancipation the Anagˆrika and Cumaratunga had worked for,
Sarachchandra made possible; his plays quite definitely represented in their
own sphere a decisive phase in the ‘struggle against imperialism.’ They
expressed potently the national sense of identity, re-assured it perhaps, and
certainly transfigured it - a function of abiding significance in a postcolonial
society. That they performed this function without themselves subsiding in a
nationalist hysteria is a vital factor in explaining their continued effectiveness
and validity for the ‘outsider.’ For, though the playwright undoubtedly derived
his stimulus from the intensification of nationalist feeling around 1956, he was
not himself trapped within its confines, and did not, as dramatist, subscribe to
its heady optimism. (His major plays, one might interject, are after all,
tragedies.) Consequently, his plays do not address themselves to the transient
mood of a nation but to its permanent experience, and with it to the experience
of all mankind: they contrive to be national without losing their claim to be
universal. Thus, at the present time, when the urgency of economic problems
has so drastically changed the mood of the nation, his plays, while they still
provide a focus of identity, answer also deeply to the spectator’s sense of the
complexity of experience.

The achievement was a difficult one, the result of long and complex striving,
and cannot properly be understood or rightly valued without an understanding
of that striving. Thus it would be useful to consider the playwright’s career in
the context of the Sinhalese theatre.

Sarachchandra had little in the form of a live tradition of drama to help him.
There had never been, as far as we know, a literary drama in the Singhalese
past. The plays of Kalidasa although they were studied, unlike his poems
provoked no imitations. Among the folk, however, towards the beginning of the
nineteenth century a species of dramatic entertainment had evolved called the
nadagam. The nadagam derived from the Roman Catholic folk plays of the
Tamils of the North of Ceylon but came among the Singhalese to occupy itself
with more secular concerns. However, it preserved in its mingling of song,
dance and rustic buffoonery the salient formal characteristics of its original.
There was besides the kolam a primitive entertainment which took over
demonic and human characters familiar from popular magical rituals and
paraded them for the general amusement without any unifying story.
To be continued