In the early part of the nineteenth century, the classical age in Sinhala literature came to an end in the Kandyan kingdom no less than in the littoral where the current spoken Sinhala had been enriched by the languages of the two Western powers that had ruled it in turn, the Portuguese and the Dutch. Neither of these languages was a substitute for the traditional sources of Sinhala culture, especially Sanskrit. (Portuguese had greater potential in this regard than Dutch for it survived well into the mid-nineteenth century as a spoken language on the littoral.) In the Kandyan kingdom, the ancient literary tradition still survived but its sterility was all too evident.
Because of the rapid shrinkage of the world in the nineteenth century, Sri Lanka would have faced westernization anyway, but the British, in fact, deliberately started the process in the 1830s after some hesitation in the early years of their rule on the island; the English language became a vehicle for the entry of new ideas and techniques from the West and revitalized the indigenous languages, Sinhala and Tamil alike, as profoundly as Sanskrit had done in the past, perhaps even more so. Its influence was seen first of all, and naturally enough, through translations into the indigenous languages of the authorized version of the Bible and such intrinsically religious works as Pilgrim’s Progress. If this seemed a rather unpromising continuation of a pattern established under the Portuguese and the Dutch, translations of works of a more decidedly secular, if not utilitarian, nature heralded the beginnings of more far-reaching changes, the adoption of a new set of values and new attitudes to life and society, in short, a transition from an essentially religious ethos to an intrinsically secular literature.1
Journalism was the bridge to the new literature. At the core of this journalism were polemical essays, some of them on religious themes (controversies between Buddhists and Christians and between Buddhist nik•yas) but mostly on literary and caste controversies. By fostering a taste for fiction, the new journalism was the take-off point to a new phase in the evolution of indigenous literature which began in the early years of the twentieth century. The transition from journalism to a new Sinhalese literature took several decades to effect, the last quarter of the nineteenth century serving as a period of preparation. Indeed, the new genres, the novel and the short story, had a long struggle before gaining acceptance among a reading public whose tastes had been set by traditional literary forms. They were put off by themes such as romantic love—a puritanical streak in Sinhalese society reinforced now by the teachings of the missionaries—which was the stuff of novels and short stories. There was also a problem of evolving a style and developing a vocabulary suitable for the new genres and a new age. Some continuity in language was possible in Sinhala prose—classical Sinhala had been used for prose narratives although there had never been avowed narrative fiction—but not in poetry where the language of the classical tradition was too rigid, formal and conventional for easy adaptation to the new ideas in vogue.2
The same trends were perceptible in Tamil literature. Its prose and poetry alike were stylized, tediously conventional and suffused by a concern with Hindu doctrine and mythology and by an overpowering Sanskrit influence. On these as on their Sinhala equivalents, English had an invigorating effect, stimulating the adoption of new genres and a new outlook. On Tamil too the most immediate effect lay in the development of prose literature linked with journalism and polemics—some of it religious—Hindu ripostes to missionary criticism which modernized the language and rid it of much of its classicism. In Tamil as in Sinhala, the pioneer lexicographical works came from the Protestant missionaries based in Sri Lanka. A more distinctive contribution of the missionaries working in Jaffna was introductory textbooks in Tamil on modern sciences.3
Tamil literature was dominated by the protean figure of Arumuga Navalar, the father of modern Tamil prose literature, the one man of his day who could be described as a polymath of oriental learning. His creativity ranged from contributing to the production of a standard Tamil translation of the Bible to the writing of scintillating polemical works and editions of the Hindu classics many of which he rendered into a chaste modern Tamil. This last was his greatest achievement and perhaps as a result the link between modernity and tradition was stronger in Tamil than it was in Sinhala. As with Sinhala literature, the nineteenth century was for Tamil a period of preparation for the acceptance of new literary genres rather than of any substantial creative achievement in them. The few novels and short stories that were produced were important as being the first of their kind rather than for any intrinsic artistic merit. Nor was the emerging modern Tamil literature of Sri Lanka so distinct in style or content as to set it apart from the south Indian variety.
The English language stimulated a revitalization of literary activity in Sinhala and Tamil in nineteenth-century Sri Lanka but was curiously sterile when it came to producing a distinctive Sri Lankan English literature. This is all the more surprising because of the remarkable receptivity of the educated elite, especially its Sinhalese segment, to anglicization and the blandishments of the lifestyle of the upper classes in the metropolitan country. For most of them English had a utilitarian value; they spoke it fluently and communicated in it in their professional work, but in creative writing they seemed incapable of using it with any proficiency. They produced no novels in English, no short stories, no memoirs, no biographies, no literary essays and no poetry—in short, no indigenous English literature. There was just one historical work in English written by a Sinhalese, James Alwis’s History of Ceylon, some chapters of which appeared in instalments in one of the English newspapers of the day. Its analysis and narration were competent, as was the use of documents, but its language was somewhat ponderous—it had nothing of the exciting style and brittle eloquence of Tennent’s classic work on Ceylon published in 1859–60, the model by which a nineteenth-century history of Ceylon would have to be judged. Had it been published in book form, as the author clearly intended, this would have been the first historical study by a Ceylonese in a western language. Thus, as with Sinhala and Tamil, such creativity as there was lay in journalism. There the performance was truly professional—the style clear and sharp, the comments incisive and, on political issues, often witty and iconoclastic.
In the early twentieth century, the indigenous tradition in the visual arts petered out, its vitality sapped by the lack of state support which had sustained it in the past. The adjustment to changed circumstances proved too difficult and, unlike in literature, the traditions of the new rulers in the visual arts, far from stimulating a revitalization, contributed to a swift decline.
The civic and domestic architecture of the early nineteenth century was a pleasing adaptation of Dutch styles; indeed, the Dutch achievement in tropical architecture was the most distinguished and successful in the long history of western rule on the island. When in the course of time the British broke away from this, the result was often an unsatisfactory mixture of European (predominantly British) styles which neither blended harmoniously with the landscape nor coped successfully with the rigours of a tropical climate. The public buildings, however, had at least a certain subdued grandeur which compensated for their more obvious aesthetic flaws. On the other hand, the Protestant churches and chapels, which proliferated in nineteenth-century Sri Lanka, were conspicuously English in design. Their clean lines conveyed an impression of blandness and austerity which enhanced their remoteness and alienation from the temple architecture of the island. There is not a single piece of sculpture, indigenous or British, produced at any time in the nineteenth century which could bear comparison with the best or even the less distinguished products of the past. As for painting, the new modes and outlook in vogue neither developed a fruitful creativity of their own nor became successfully integrated with the artistic traditions of the country. Only two artists of the nineteenth century deserve to be mentioned in this survey, namely, Andrew Nichol, an Englishman, and J.L.K. van Dort (1831–91), a Sri Lankan, from a small Burgher community. Nichol, the first serious painter in watercolours to work on the island, was in charge of the School of Design in the Colombo Academy in the 1840s. Van Dort was the sole superior talent thrown up in the new wave of popular painting launched by Nichol. Apart from these two, the record in painting in the nineteenth century was singularly barren; in painting, no less than in sculpture and architecture, the break with tradition was complete.
In this phase of its history, Sinhala literature developed from the pioneering efforts of Piyadasa Sirisena and W.A. Silva in the early years of the twentieth century to the mature artistry of Martin Wickremesinghe (1891–1976), novelist and literary critic, whose prolific career spanned a half-century of distinguished creative achievement from the 1920s. Sirisena’s novels reflected a passionate commitment to the threatened values of traditional society, a root-and-branch opposition to the pervasive anglicization to which the educated elite was succumbing so easily. As a novelist and poet, Sirisena was first and last a combative, argumentative and totally dedicated nationalist. This propagandist strain obtruded in all his work to the point of damaging its artistic quality. W.A. Silva placed greater stress on literature as entertainment and his most notable contribution was the clean break he effected in his novels from both the other-worldly orientation of classical prose narrative and Sirisena’s turgid didacticism.4
If any one writer deserves the title of father of modern Sinhalese literature it is Martin Wickremesinghe. Like Sirisena, he came to literature from journalism and remained in journalism after his reputation as a novelist and literary critic had become securely established. His trilogy about the village of his birth, on the south coast of the island, is a deeply moving depiction of the human condition set against the background of a society in the throes of change. The first two parts of the trilogy, Gamperaliya (1944) and Yuganthaya (1948), appeared in this period. The third part of the trilogy, Kali Yugaya, appeared in 1957. With them the Sinhala novel came of age. In technique, theme and language he demonstrated a mastery and sophistication that Sirisena and W.A. Silva had lacked.
What Wickremesinghe was to the Sinhala novel, G.B. Senanayake was to the Sinhala short story and E.R. Sarachchandra—in the first phase of a remarkable career—to literary criticism. Wickremesinghe and Senanayake combined creative writing with literary criticism. While Wickremesinghe’s criteria in evaluating the classical literary heritage were a synthesis of Indian and Western traditions of literary criticism, Sarachchandra’s were those of the major figures in British and American literary criticisms.5 As a literary critic Sarachchandra outshone his two rivals. All of them spoke English—Sarachchandra more fluently than the others—and an easy familiarity with Western (especially English) literature widened their intellectual horizons and buttressed their self-confidence. Through their literary criticism they contributed to the creation of a new Sinhalese literary elite capable of synthesizing and harmonizing the best features of the western indigenous literary traditions. As novelists and literary critics, they educated the Sinhalese reader to a more mature response to his environment.
Creative achievement in Sinhalese—prose, poetry and criticism alike—overshadowed that in Tamil. There didacticism and tradition were deeply entrenched and survived much longer against the efforts of the English-educated elite among the Tamils to do for Tamil literature what men like Wickremesinghe had accomplished in Sinhala. Although their efforts did enrich the Tamil of Sri Lanka and south India alike, it neither secured a breakthrough to greater refinement and modernity in literary tastes nor succeeded in conferring an individuality or distinctiveness on the island’s Tamil which would differentiate it from the overpowering south Indian version.
In the works of two writers, S.J.K. Crowther and J. Vijayatunga, both journalists, Sri Lankan English at last showed signs of establishing itself as a creative force in its own right. In the hands of a lesser talent, Crowther’s The Knight Errant might have been no more than a clever roman a clef on Sri Lanka’s political elite of the 1920s, which he intended it to be. But what he had achieved was something more substantial: a political satire of considerable distinction. When Vijayatunga’s Grass for My Feet was published in London in 1935, it came like a storm after a long drought, refreshing proof that a Sri Lankan could use the English language with the same sureness of touch as the major Indian and West Indian writers in English. Few Sri Lankan novelists and essayists—whatever their language—have evoked the island’s rural scene with Vijayatunga’s subtlety and sensitivity to mood. Like Wickremesinghe, he wrote of the rural south, but his vignettes and characterization alike are sharper and clearer, and the atmosphere is more authentic and less sentimental. Only Leonard Woolf’s poignant tale of rural Sri Lanka—again the southern part—Village in the Jungle, the distilled essence of a British civil servant’s sympathetic but acute observation of the people over whom he ruled as assistant government agent at the turn of the century, ranks above Grass for My Feet in literary skill. Vijayatunga and Crowther, however, proved to be two swallows who did not make a summer rather than the heralds of a new age in Sri Lankan literature. Neither of them produced another work of similar quality, nor did their contemporaries, writing in English, rise above an uninspiring vapidity of sentiment and mediocrity in technique.
Of Sri Lankan English poetry there is little to be said except to emphasize its singular lack of distinction. In Tamil poetry the dead hand of tradition crushed creativity just as completely—if not more so—than it had done in prose writing. Even though poetry was the most popular literary form in Sinhala in the years before independence, it did not seem set for a more promising start than its English and Tamil counterparts with the neoclassicism of men like Sirisena, Ananda Rajakaruna (1885–1957) and G.H. Perera (1886–1948). What they attempted to do was to resuscitate the narrative form and stylized idiom of classical poetry, but in their hands it regressed into jejune narrative verse or versified fiction more concerned with precision in grammar and an archaic poetic diction than with content, which was totally banal. When the reaction to this spiritless exercise in sustaining the archaic set in, the avant-garde adopted a more contemporary idiom, discounted precision in grammar, explored new forms and themes but still maintained the traditional prosodic form. Their works were distinguished by a restless experimentation rather than any substantial improvement, in terms of artistic merit, on the work of neoclassicists.
Very little by way of a dramatic literature had survived in Sri Lanka, and no tradition of the theatre, at least not of the kind that would have provided entertainment for the court and literati in the days of the Sri Lankan kings.6 What had survived was a tradition of folk drama: kōlam, sokari and n•dagam. Its vitality was revealed in the years after independence when Sarachchandra used it for a strikingly successful and innovative departure into a more sophisticated theatrical experience. In the last decade of the nineteenth century, this tradition of folk drama contributed to the growth of an urban theatre, but the greatest influence on the latter was exerted by the Parsi theatre companies from India which toured the island and attracted large and appreciative audiences. This urban theatre, symbolized by the Tower Hall in Colombo, flourished for two decades in the first quarter of the twentieth century before it began an unexpected but rapid decline. It left behind only a dim memory of a theatrical experience, of little value by way of dramatic literature, and a few melodies. John de Silva (1854–1932) and Charles Dias, the main playwrights in this theatre, went back into legend and history for their themes and to the repertory of the Parsi companies for their melodies. They were to drama what Sirisena was to literature, nationalists using the theatre as a platform for their political message.
The most notable feature in the history of the theatre in Sri Lanka in the 1940s was the role of the University of Ceylon as a disseminating centre for a more refined and discriminating taste in drama, and as a workshop for experiment in artistic expression in the theatre. E.F.C. Ludowyk as professor of English kept pace with his productions of some of the classics of western drama, in English, an exciting start which led to a reanimation of Sinhala drama in Sarachchandra’s adaptations of these western classics. In Tamil drama too there was this same trend towards a more sophisticated theatrical taste, drawing its inspiration from western drama.
In music the search was on for a national idiom, identity and authenticity. Because traditional music had all but disappeared by the beginning of the twentieth century, its resuscitation and revival were altogether more difficult. The urban theatre of John de Silva and Charles Dias created a taste among the Sinhalese for the Hindustani music of northern India, which was soon adopted as the standard, or classical music of the Sinhalese. The emerging national musical tradition took on a distinct Indian form when the avant-garde adopted nūrti music, using north Indian classical ragas for their compositions. But by the 1940s, the search for a national identity in music took the form of a deliberate attempt to break free from the pervasive influence of this Indian tradition.7
Nowhere was the discontinuity between tradition and modernity sharper and more complete than in painting, sculpture and architecture. The only evidence that continuity was still possible and real was in the crafts of the island. There the indigenous tradition lived on. The civic and public architecture of this period was decidedly less successful than that of the nineteenth century. When it was not overwhelmingly utilitarian it was totally occidental in concept. Indeed, the British architectural legacy in Sri Lanka is extraordinarily uninspiring, without a single building or monument which could stand comparison with those of the past for originality in design and aesthetic appeal. Surprisingly, the Anglican Church led the way in the 1930s and 1940s in a fruitful fusion of western building technology and the indigenous architectural tradition in the construction of chapels and churches but not only were such new departures few but they hardly amounted to a determined reversal of the established pattern of an obtrusive occidentalism in public buildings, secular and religious.
In painting, however, the synthesis between east and west was both powerful and successful. The two outstanding painters of the day were Justin Daraniyagala and George Keyt. The latter fused together the tradition of Picasso and Hindu mythology with a virtuosity that established him as one of the greatest south Asian painters of the century—his reputation being even more securely established in India than in Sri Lanka. Keyt, in fact, is the one major artistic talent to emerge out of the encounter between east and west under British rule on the island.