Laughingstock at the Republic Day
By Liyanage Amarakeerthi
Recently having seen a grand party at the residence of the High Commissioner of India on television, I could not resist my temptation to laugh. All our major politicians were at the function. Politicians who could barely walk, younger ones with all kinds of personal ambitions, old and young ones who should have been on the Guinness book for jumping here and there with no ethical or ideological commitment – they were all there at that grand occasion. It was hilarious indeed.
High Commissioner Gopal Baglay did nothing wrong. He acted like a true diplomat and invited all the political elites in the country. I was only laughing at ourselves. It was us who produced those clowns. Some of them may have earned their PhDs and other degrees. But yet compared to those great names, one is reminded of in relation to India – its Independence Day, Republic Day, and so on, what names do we have? It is obvious that many elites who were at that Baglay party are responsible for what has happened to Sri Lanka right now. Our failure, however is much deeper. Nearly all senior politicians today remind us of our own failure.
Let’s recall some of the great names associated with early 20th century Indian affairs: Mahatma Gandhi, Rabindranath Tagore, Rammohan Roy, Jawaharlal Nehru, B. R. Ambedkar, Syd Ahmad Khan, Jayaprakash Narayan, Hamid Dalwai and so on. I have written and given talks on some of them at numerous times in Sinhala and English. I consider Tagore to be one of my teachers, and I know that because of my own essays on him, many younger intellectuals, working mostly in Sinhala, have to realize the significance of Tagore for us in Sri Lanka.
The work of Professors Ramachandra Guha and Amartya Sen has provided new insights into these founding leaders and intellectuals on modern India. The Makers of Modern India, a book Prof. Guha edited, clearly indicates how rich India has been in terms of producing great and influential intellectuals. If we were to compile a book of that kind, the apt title would be The Breakers of Modern Sri Lanka. Some of those breakers were there at the Republic Day party.
Gurudeva Rabindranath Tagore is perhaps the most influential modern Indian for us in Sri Lanka. His influence primarily fell on the cultural scene because some leading artists from the early to mid-20th century were educated at Shanti Niketan. Prof. Ediriweera Sarachchandra’s education and experience at Shanti Niketan can be interpreted as the single most important factor that defined the course Sinhala art in the 20th century.
Sarachchandra changed his former Christian name, Eustace Reginald de Silva, to what he is now known with the partial influence of Indian cultural nationalism. That trend led to Albert Perera becoming Amaradeva. In addition, Sarachchnadra mentions in his memoirs that Tagore’s play Papa Mochan, shown at the University College, Ceylon, in early 1930s, made him realize the importance of looking for indigenous forms of drama.
That was nearly thirty years before Sarachchandra became the ‘father of modern Sinhala theater.’ In that indirect sense of influence, Tagore was one of the ‘grandfathers’ of modern Sinhala theater. Those influences are important in cultural history indeed. But compared to what we have learnt from a great thinker like Tagore, those were rather superficial.
Rabindranath Tagore as a cosmopolitan thinker was almost never influential in Sri Lanka, especially in the Sinhala language public culture. Thus, much my writing has been on the ‘rooted cosmopolitanism’ of Tagore. Tagore’s suspicion of ethnic and cultural nationalism finds a beautiful expression in his two great novels Gora and The Home and the World. Satyajit Ray’s film based on the latter captures the essence of Tagore’s thought.
Extremely productive intellectual debate between Gandhi and Tagore on the pitfalls of nationalism enriched the intellectual scene around the world. Tagore’s powerfully written book-length essay on nationalism is still studied at postgraduate programs in many universities. Yet the book, including other critiques of nationalism by Tagore, is virtually unknown in Sri Lanka.
No wonder that the majority of Sri Lankan politicians, who were invited to the Republic Day events, was racists or nationalists of various kinds. Yet again, it was a party organized by ‘Modi India’ not by a ‘Tagore India!’ In that sense, those invitees were more than appropriate for a ‘Modi India’.
‘Modi India’ is something ephemeral compared to the legacy of Gurudeva Tagore, and we, Sri Lankans, must continue to seek the wise counsel of that immortal poet-thinker. Tagore loved India; he meant everything what he said of India in the song which later became the country’s national anthem. He had great respect for Indian intellectual traditions, arts, philosophy and so on. Yet he was ready to locate everything Indian in the larger fabric of human history and evaluate those as a part of larger humanity.
He never thought intellectual or cultural achievements of one ethnic group essentially belonged to that group alone. Even before the advent of modern international relations, Tagore thought, human communities had all kinds of connections and affinities. Hence, his mistrust of ethnic essentialism.
Gurudeva Tagore held that human beings should continuously aspire to reach perfection. He did not want to think that any ethnic group, including Hindus, has finished becoming ‘perfect.’ Here is what he said as early as 1910:
“That our forefathers, three thousand years ago, had finished extracting all that was of value from the universe, is not a worthy thought. We are so unfortunate, nor the universe, so poor. Had it been true that all that is to be done has been done in the past, once for all, then our continued existence could only be a burden to the earth, and so would not be possible.” (Makers of Modern India, P. 188)
Rabindranath Tagore while respecting his Indian heritage, which was extremely multifaced, was ready to learn from the rest of the humanity. He was also a modernist, a rooted one at that, and if he were to be alive today, unlike Gandhi, he would have been deeply happy about India’s phenomenal technological and economic growth. And he would have been saddened by the tragic gap between the rich and the poor and by India’s insane pursuit of military power.
On a day like the Republic Day, we must look beyond our own buffoons at those Indian greats such as Gurudeva Tagore. If not, we must continue to deserve the tragic situation we are in right now. As a nation, all our political and ideological persuasions, have failed to create the makers of modern Sri Lanka?
Source : Daily Mirror
