By

Dr.Dayan Jayatilleka

“The humanist’s article of faith embraces a human heritage. All literature is part of that…”
–Mervyn de Silva (1972)

The recent death of Prof. Siri Gunasinghe led to a rich discussion of the question of Sinhala — and Ceylonese/Sri Lankan — culture. Sri Lanka (and earlier Ceylon) has witnessed not only a clash of cultures but clashes within cultures. While there has been a clash between the Westernized and the anti-western elites, within Sinhala culture itself there has been a clash between the moderns and the traditionalists, and within the westernized elite, a clash between the Western-oriented and the national oriented– the mimics and the synthesizers. These protracted cultural, intellectual and ultimately political struggles still unfold. In the writings of Mervyn de Silva whose 18th death anniversary falls tomorrow, June 22, the cultural question is addressed in its complexity with penetrating lucidity, and a resolution — almost a strategic direction — suggested.

Move I: Thesis

Where was Mervyn de Silva coming from, intellectually and culturally? What was his vantage point?

The distinguished civil servant and ex-ambassador Neville Jayaweera recalls the setting.

“Nineteen forty nine, the year that Mervyn de Silva and I entered university at Thurstan Road, was still the best of times — that is for those who were from the “right set”…There was a mystique about Ludowyk and the English Department…It was upon this scene that a clutch of outstanding students from Royal College arrived in 1949, having carried away almost all the scholarships and exhibitions that were on offer that year for entrants to the arts faculty. Among them was Mervyn who had won the coveted English scholarship and every prospect seemed to suggest that he would profit from and himself enrich the tradition he had inherited…” (‘Deconstructing Mervyn de Silva’s Undergraduate Years’, Neville Jayaweera, The Island, Sept 8, 2002)

Jayaweera records that “In 1952 he ran for Editor and no one would think of contesting him, so undisputed was his claim to the post. The 1952 issue of the Union magazine produced by Mervyn was reviewed in the Daily News by Godfrey Gunatilleke of the Civil Service, perhaps up to that time the most distinguished product of the English Department, as the best journal that had been produced by the university students’ body. It exceeded in depth and quality anything that had been produced by Mervyn’s predecessors, among whom had been big names such a Basil Mendis, Guy Amirthanayagam and Upali Amarasinghe, all outstanding products of the English Department.” (Ibid)

Writing two days after his death in the pages of the newspaper Mervyn had edited, Ajith Samaranayake, whom Regi Siriwardena characterized as the Prince of Obituarists, said: “…Ahangama Vithanage Mervyn de Silva was indubitably the most brilliant product of the Peradeniya University English Department to enter Sri Lanka’s journalism…Mervyn burst upon Lake House in the early 1950s with the dazzle of a meteor.” (‘The Last Great Stylist’, Daily News, June 24, 1999)

Ajith Samaranayake reconstructed a turning point; the moment of the Mervyn de Silva-SWRD Bandaranaike encounter: “That magic year 1956, brought other winds of change. Nimal Karunatilleke took the lobby correspondent to SWRD Bandaranaike. Bandaranaike was unhappy with the western orientation of the foreign affairs commentaries then broadcast by Radio Ceylon and was looking for somebody with a fresh approach. It was a subject new to Mervyn but he made a careful study of it and soon blossomed into the country’s most authoritative commentator on the foreign scene.” (Ibid).

Move II: Antithesis

In 1967, Mervyn had launched a sharp critique of his class, in the ‘Politics Today’ think-piece “1956: The Cultural Revolution That Shook the Left” and “The Left Awakens from Romance to Reality”– full-page articles published in the Ceylon Observer Magazine Edition, May 16 & 23, 1967. A critical reconsideration of postcolonial society, it was also a pioneering auto-critique of the Westernized elite and English-educated cosmopolitan intelligentsia of the Right and Left. It contained the suggestion of a possible synthesis, a third politico-cultural and intellectual sensibility and stance. At the time, Mervyn was 37 years old.

“…In little manageable Ceylon, colonialism meant both the spoliation of traditional culture and the total surrender of our upper classes to the alien’s “superior” way of life. In the way of resistance, there were few lonely voices…In the main, though, the foreigner took the Ceylonese upper class by the scruff of its neck, scrubbed away the native mud, dressed it top hat and tails, tutored it in table manners and taught it that the umpire’s word was the only logos which a gentleman need honour…The Western-oriented Ceylonese…bends obligingly, since he has nothing of his own, nothing strong or individual, with which to resist the external thrust of another’s cultural influence.”

Move III: Synthesis

The elements of a synthesis were already contained in the antithesis, the critique. Mervyn used the term ‘fusion’.

“…Had the English educated, in his own clime, retained some of his roots; if he had critically absorbed the ideas and values of the foreigner and assimilated what was good and true for his own people; if he had gone to his own folk and engaged in generous exchange and sympathetic dialogue; if he had not so cruelly decried and degraded the traditional, but tried to foster harmonious fusion where he promoted conflict, our history may have been different. Perhaps, our politics too…The English educated intellectual may live long enough to write his own epitaph as the man who watched the train of history go by.” (Ibid.)

Five years later, in his landmark polemic with Regi Siriwardena (Nov 7-23, 1972) written from the editorial chair of the Daily News, Mervyn rounded off his synthesis. He makes two major points, which taken together would constitute a cultural program for the intellectual elite. What is also striking is that the two points are dialectically related.Mervyn criticizes the Westernized for not reaching out to their indigenous language counterparts. He also criticized those who would react against and abandon the Western tradition as a whole, because they abandon that which was universal in Western culture and education. He goes beyond this dual critique to suggest a synthesis.

Godfrey Gunatilleke, an intellectual-literary icon of the ‘Great Generation’, sums up Mervyn’s core cultural philosophy and suggested synthesis:

“…In reaching out through “the cosmopolitan hothouse” of the English educated elite to what was “universal” in it, Mervyn was drawing on his own personal experience…He saw what was tragic in the incapacity of that elite to relate to the larger society in which they lived, their failure to mediate between what was “finest in what they assimilated from another culture” and the cultural resurgence that was taking place around them.

“The humanist’s article of faith embraces a human heritage. All literature is part of that…” (‘Pound, Poetry and Politics’, CDN, Friday Nov 17, 1972, p.4) This was the way Mervyn articulated his own rejection of relativist nihilism and defined the “universality” to which all societies and their cultures need to be linked. It is in this sense that Mervyn pointed to what was finest in other cultures which the English educated elite had tried to assimilate to some degree. ….Mervyn would probably say that the growth of our own culture depends on this capacity – a capacity to relate to what is finest in other cultures separating what is “universally” humanist from what is not.” (‘A Bright Fleeting Moment’, Godfrey Gunatilleke, The Island Features, June 24, 2005)

Mervyn’s synthesis is a complex one, comprising two interpenetrating moves. It requires the Western-educated elite to be Janus-like, looking simultaneously towards the national and the universal. It requires the Westernized to realize the limits of its consciousness and seek to expand it, while never forgetting, still less renouncing, the length and breadth and richness of its own education and formation.

Courtesy:Daily Mirror