A singular modern Lankan mentor – Part III

by Laleen Jayamanne and Namika Raby

Gananath Obeysekere: In search of Buddhist conscience
(Baudha Hurdasakshiya Soya)

(Part II of this article appeared in The Island on Monday – 03)

Tissa Ranasinghe’s and Gananath’s Kannagi

Gananath’s Pattini book has a mysterious blue-black cover with an icon of Kannagi in Bronze sculpted by Lanka’s foremost Modernist sculptor Tissa Ranasinghe, commissioned by Gananath. What Appadurai termed Lanka’s links with ‘Indic culture’ is encapsulated in this image of the heroic figure Kannagi from the Tamil epic, striking a gesture of mourning for her husband Kovalan, unjustly killed by the king of Madurai. She kneels with her arms held raised around her head in the familiar triangular formation suggestive of the aniconic representation of the Yoni (an emblematic civilisational gesture of great iconic strength and power, in the Bronze lineage of India, which stretches back to the little bronze figurine of The Dancing Girl of Monhenjodaro itself), even as she laments the injustice. And those of us who know the legend also see that her left breast is missing. Kannagi, it is told, tore her breast and hurled it at the city of Madurai, setting it on fire with her righteous anger! Together, Gananath and Tissa have presented Kannagi in a most generative posture and gesture for the cover of the book on the Sinhala Pattini cult, the only Mother goddess of the Sinhala folk, borrowed from the Tamil Epic, to assuage and heal Sinhala male sexual anxieties and group trauma. This marvelous collaboration between Lanka’s celebrated Modernist Sculptor and Anthropologist was a multivalent, therapeutic intervention into Lanka’s cyclical interethnic violence. The book was published in 1984, one year after the state sponsored pogram against Tamils in July ‘83. Tissa’s modernist Kannagi demonstrates how an archaic ‘Maternal Archetype’ can be creatively mobilised by an artist, to express contemporary predicaments without diluting her orginal power and affective vitality magnified by the use of bronze, a resonant civilisational material.

Pattini is the Sinhala Buddhist incarnation of the Tamil heroic Kannagi and as far as I can tell she appears not to have the iconographic attributes of heroic rage and righteous anger which Kannagi embodies in the Tamil Epic. Kannagi is the step mother of Manimekalai who became a Buddhist nun, according to legend. Is it the case that Pattini is without progeny and so, as a Mother Goddess, rather like the West Asian mother Goddesses who were also virgins? As a girl, my mother and I were devoted to rituals of Mother Mary (mother of Jesus), also known as the Virgin-Mary from, let’s not forget, West Asia (in historic Palestine).

Professor Sunil Ariyaratne’s 2016 film Pattini, warrants a passing comment or two in this context as an example of the institutional consolidation of Neo-Liberal capitalist extraction and commodification of the residual vitality and power of the perennial syncretic Folk traditions of Lanka. It is a neo-traditionalist extravaganza in the genre of nostalgic revival of ‘the Sinhala-Buddhist Folk Heritage of Lanka’ which flourished recently with much fanfare and state patronage as a ‘Rajapaksha genre’. The film deals with the Kannagi legend just so as to reduce it to reinforcing the Sinhala-Buddhist ideology of purity and virginity for women through the exemplary tale of ‘the pure wife’ Kannagi and her step-daughter Manimekala, who becomes a Tamil Buddhist. Her dearest wish is to be reborn as a male so that she can indeed aspire to become a Buddha. The emphasis is on the preservation of virginity (Pathiwatha), and the enthroning of male sexuality as the route to attaining Buddhahood. The mythic epic figure of Kannagi who in her rage enacts heroic justice in the Tamil epic is converted into a parabolic emblem of virginal purity.

A Humanist Education

Gananath’s education is a strand very comprehensively covered in the film, a source of his immense openness to the world of ideas and refusal to accept them on authority without critical evaluation. The film opens at Gananath’s home in Kandy which he shares with Professor Ranjini Obeysekere who appears with her vibrant intellect and grace and ends there too. The couple are shown warmly welcoming the film crew to their house as they have done over their long engagement with numerous students, as they did with me both in Kandy and the US when I was tangled up and blue. It is worth remembering here that Ranjini is the Editor in Chief of the magnificent multi-volume translation project of the Jataka Tales into English, published just last year. It is only now that I can see how deeply Ranjini and Gananath’s scholarship is in conversation with each other.

The account of Ranjini and Gananath’s meeting at Peradeniya University while studying English Literature with Professor E.F.C. Ludowyk is one of the highlights of the film for me. Ranjini acted in the plays directed by Ludowyck and they studied English Literature at honours level together. Interestingly, though Gananath followed the Dram Soc activities on campus, he didn’t participate in any of them, his interest being elsewhere. He says, whenever he could he got onto a bus or train and travelled to distant villages to talk to villagers and monks and tape their songs (kavi). Gananath says that Ludowyck was the best teacher he has ever met and that he was responsible for directing him at every key juncture of his undergraduate life and soon after when making the unusual choice of going to a US graduate school, refusing a scholarship to Cambridge because of colonial history. Gananath’s brilliant textual analysis and exegesis of texts in Sinhala of myths and legends, especially the complex corpus of the Gajabahu legend, owes a great deal to the textual training he received from Ludowyck in ‘Practical Criticism’. We are all beneficiaries of this tradition of Literary Criticism which was part of the training we received in English Lit in old Ceylon and now continued by scholars such as Professor of English, Sumathy Sivamohan and others. Ranjini tells us that it was Ludowyck who collected Rs 10,000 from ten of his friends and handed it to Gananath to go travel the country and do what he wished soon after he graduated with English Honours. All he was asked to do was to write and thank his benefactors. So, it’s this tradition of mentorship and duty of care that Gananath and Ranjini have practiced with their own students during their long working life at American Universities.

A Counter Archive of a People’s Literature, Painting and Ritual

Though I was familiar with some of Gananath’s writing and studied a couple for the film I made, there is a major topic of his research which I didn’t know anything about and as such this film has provided an important learning experience for me. In drawing from the local non-canonical texts preserved in Temples, libraries and archives, which are written, in Sinhala by the folk and as such are anonymous, not by scholar monks in Pali, the language of high learning, Gananath has been able to piece together stories, legends of migrations from India, Kerala and Tamil Nadu and the ways in which some of these waves of migrants have been incorporated into the folk Buddhist body politic and culture. The gist of which is the seemingly heretical idea (an affront to Sinhala exceptionalism and their sense of manifest destiny as ‘pure Ariya’ Sinhala-Buddhists claiming to be the only real Lankans), that at one time, all people who call themselves Sinhala in Lanka did come from India and were indigenised through various practices and this happened in waves of migration over long periods of time. This section draws from the folk archive of poetry, ritual and Temple murals and legends such as the complex Gajabahu Myth, that bear witness to these processes of migration and acculturation, to make the case for the existence of robust muti-ethnic, diverse communities dotting the island. The legendary folk tales and rituals were, he says, imaginative, fictionalised, poetic expressions of folk memory of these migratory events, not ‘false’ accounts.

Here I want to cite a longish relevant passage from Professor Patrick Olivelle’s highly acclaimed book, Ashoka: Portrait of a Philosopher King. Ramchandra Guha, the editor of the series called ‘Indian Lives‘ of which this is the first, says of the Lankan Olivelle that, ‘he is one of the greatest living scholars of Ancient India’. Here’s Olivelle’s argument, on the familiar opposition between History and Legend, which supports Gananath’s theoretical move with practical consequences for how we understand ourselves as Lankans.

“In a seminal remark, the historian Robert Lingat notes: ‘There are two Ashokas—the historical Ashoka whom we know through his inscriptions, and the legendary Ashoka, who is known to us through texts of diverse origin, Pali, Sanskrit, Chinese and Tibetan. Although essentially correct, there are two problems with Lingat’s assessment.

First it is simplistic to contrast the ‘historical with the legendary’. The portrait of Ashoka I have constructed in this book is based on Ashokan inscriptions and artefacts, yet it contains a heavy dose of interpretation, translation, imagination, narrative, perhaps bias… The ‘legendery’ is not simply false and to be dismissed; it is the reimagination of the past to serve present needs, something inherently human. These narratives were meaningful and important to the persons and communities that constructed them. Their purpose was not to do history in the modern sense of the term, but to do something much more significant to them in their own time.

….There are actually not two but several Ashokas, including modern ones”.

Following this argument, we Lankans who try to practice ‘Loving-Kindness’ must be thankful that Gananath has highlighted for us at least two Dutthagaminies, in his timely essay, Dutthagamini and the Buddhist Conscience, written in the wake of the carnage of the ‘July ‘83’ state sponsored pogrom against the Tamil people of Lanka. There is the familiar Dutthagamini, taught to us in school, as a Sinhala-Buddhist, Tamil-hating ethno-nationalist, constructed from the Mahavamsa narrative taken as incontrovertible historical fact. On the other hand, Gananath presents evidence, from the Dambulla temple paintings, for a humanist Dutthagamini, who like Ashoka himself, was contrite about the mass slaughter he conducted and his killing of Elara the Tamil king.

The film shows us how Gananath makes a radical scholarly move in the late stages of his life by researching the indigenous folk of Lanka, the Veddhas. He argues against the deep-seated idea, promulgated by the ethno-nationalist Sinhala-Buddhist ideologues, that there is an ancient historical enmity between the Sinhala and Tamil folk of Lanka going back to the days of the kings, prior to colonialism. Gananath analyses the myth of origin of the Sinhala folk as represented in temple murals that show Vijaya’s arrival in Lanka from India and his marriage with the indigenous woman Kuveni. The Veddhas are the descendants, he says, of Kuveni and her children by Vijaya and are the ‘other’ or outsider, so to speak, to the Sinhala.

Through his ethnographic work on the powerful Vadi procession (perahera) in Mahiyanganaya, Gananath is able to show the ritual means through which they are incorporated into the Sinhala community. The ethnographic film, demonstrating this robust festive ritual event of staging cultural difference and incorporation, supports Gananath’s argument that the Veddas have been the true ‘outsiders’ of the Buddhist polity (in dress, culinary habits, religion), and despite that, the Buddhist culture had ritual mechanisms of incorporation of the outsider, without resorting to slaughter, while also acknowledging and respecting the awesome power of the Veddas. This section should be shown to school kids, I think, because of its liveliness and pedagogic value. Gananath acknowledges the fine scholarship of Paul E. Peiris on the Veddas and shows the colonial hostility and violence towards these indigenous folk of Lanka. Gananath’s ‘Cook Book’, also relevant to Australia’s colonial history, would have provided a global perspective on colonisation of indigenous peoples and the violent means used in casting them as ‘uncivilised primitives’, which in turn would have prepared him well to write the book on, the Veddas, Creation of the Hunter, in 2022.

What to Do, Napuru Kaleta? (In Wicked Times)

It seems to me that young scholars and artists might be able to generate a new thought or two by reading Gananath’s essays and books in relation to Ananda Coomaraswamy’s Mediaeval Sinhalaese Art (Campden: Gloucestershire, 1908) and Olivelle’s book on Ashoka. In this way, the monodisciplinary compartmentalisation of knowledge, ideas, can be disturbed so as to gain aesthetic nourishment to create, with what’s left, after the ravages of Neoliberal cultural nationalism’s cognitive extraction of our brains. All three distinguished, visionary Lankan scholars were writing about times when material culture and the ‘Intangible Heritage’ (A UNESCO Platform for their preservation) of Lanka and India were/are being destroyed from within, extinguished.

Some ‘transversal’ or lateral ways of understanding and connecting material practices/stuff and immaterial ideas are called for now, I believe, and these three Lankan scholars have shown us many ways in which this can be done. Let me clinch my argument by citing the full title of Coomaraswamy’s indispensable book which took 60 years to be translated into Sinhala. Professor Sarath Chandrajeewa (who also taught ‘mati-weda’) gave me this information for which I am most thankful. I read it in English as an undergraduate, quite by chance. Here’s the extended title:

“Being a Monograph on Mediaeval Sinhalese Arts and Crafts, Mainly as Surviving in the 18^th Century with an Account of the Structure of Society and the Status of the Craftsman.”

Gananath might well have known through Ludowyk that the first edition of this book was hand printed in England by Coomaraswamy himself over a period of 15 months on the same printing press (which he purchased), as the one in which the first edition of the complete works of the Mediaeval English poet Chaucer was printed by William Morris, one of leaders of the ‘Arts and Craft Movement’. There is a wonderful story I heard from a native informant of California, of Gananath’s freshman lecture at the University of California in San Diego, on Pilgrimages. On hearing Gananath recite an entire section from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales ‘by heart,’ the students gave him a standing ovation!

Felix Guattari’s Three Ecologies, (namely Social Ecology, Mental Ecology, Environmental Ecology), is another a book worth reading (now freely downloadable), alongside the others as he was a radical psychotherapist trained in psychoanalysis by Lacan, and a Left Activist in France who also collaborated with the philosopher Gilles Deleuze on Anti–Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1968), which was a best seller. He also worked at a humane, innovative mental health institution which was part of the radical anti-psychiatry movement of the 60s and was a wild thinker who reminds me of Gananath and also had the requisite discipline, like him, to write books that crossed generations. He died all too soon, but Gananath will turn 95 on the second of February 2025.

Finally, my gratitude to the producers of this film, the Kathika Collective whose independent spirit, deep research, dedication, and not least, the love of cinema has led to the production of this film over a long period of time, which included the hiatus of the COVID pandemic. While Dimuthu is credited as researcher, script writer and director and Chathura Madhusanka with editing and camera, a great many well wishes (acknowledged in the credits), contributed freely to this film which has not received any external funding. The spirit of education that drove this film is a truly beautiful tribute to Gananath and Ranjini Obeysekere, our indispensable mentors, both.

Yahonis Pattini Kapumahattya’s haunting voice emanating from a deep folk history (which Gananath much admired and we are privileged to hear), accompanies the long credit list.

The film is dedicated:

“To all rural folk who in their diverse ways enriched the peasant Buddhist tradition and found Buddha in that”. (Concluded)