Some reflections on cultural revival of 20th Century Ceylon

By Uditha Devapriya

Until the 1940s and 1950s, much of the arts in Sri Lanka, then Ceylon, remained the preserve of an English-speaking elite. They were very much moulded by colonial attitudes: the two most representative institutions of this period, the University Dramatic Society (Dramsoc) and the Ceylon Society of Arts, had been modelled along the lines of British institutions, including the Royal Academy. Restricted to a Westernised elite and circumscribed by their narrow vision, they became anachronistic long before their demise.

Maname and Rekava are typically described as the artistic high points of the 1950s, and both are seen as having facilitated a rupture with the colonial setup. Correct as this view may be, however, it is important to note that by 1956 theatre and cinema had become dominated by another social class: a Sinhala petty bourgeoisie, who saw plays and films as entertainments. There was no difference between these art forms: between, for instance, the plays of John de Silva and the films of B. A. W. Jayamanne. Both replicated each other, both amplified one another, and both responded to just about the same crowd.

What this means is that, by the 1950s, Ceylon’s cultural landscape had bifurcated between two diametrically opposed ideological streams: an Anglicised colonial elite on the one hand, and a Sinhala petty bourgeoisie on the other. The colonial elite had their own institutions, well-funded and well recognised at official levels. The petty bourgeoisie lacked that kind of institutional support, but the emergence of political forces sympathetic to their demands compensated for such limitations. Before we go any further with this trajectory, however, we need to take stock of some crucial developments in 20th century Ceylon.

Ironically – or perhaps not so ironically – it was the sons and daughters of the colonial elite who first went against the grain, questioned accepted artistic conventions, and opened the arts to indigenous elements. In this they found themselves occupying the best of both worlds: access to money and capital, and the freedom to rebel against the same class that had provided them with that capital. The example of Lionel Wendt is the best there is: hailing from a prominent legal family, he spurned a legal career and took to photography and music, emerging as a patron of Sinhala culture and Kandyan dance.

The formation of the 43 Group only reinforced these trends. None of the founding artists of the 43 Group – with the prominent exception of Manjusri, the ex-Buddhist monk – were conversant, still less fluent, in Sinhala. Yet they patronised Sinhala dance, painting, literature, and other cultural forms, going back to Sinhala villages, outside Colombo, talking to locals, forming seminal friendships, broadening their horizons, helping them take their art to the world beyond their homes. To be sure, the elite’s conception of traditional art could be narrow, one could say even orientalist – as Qadri Ismail has noted in his critique of the 43 Group. But to local artists, their intervention proved to be pivotal.

The plays of John de Silva and the films of the Minerva Players – of Rukmani Devi and the Jayamanne brothers – pandered to a completely different milieu, as far removed from the Anglicised elite as they could be. Art forms like literature and dance could be revived: they could be salvaged and “redeemed” in the eyes of the elite. The sons of traditional dancers thus found themselves teaching Colombo’s upper-classes, in schools like Trinity and Ladies’ College, paving the way for that transition – which Sarath Amunugama dwells on in his study of kohomba kankariya – from art-as-ritual to art-as-performance.

These transitions more or less made it easier for the elite to absorb, immerse themselves in, and rejuvenate such art forms. Theatre and cinema, however, proved to be somewhat challenging here. For elite audiences, they remained, at best, mere entertainments. There was thus hardly any push to elevate these art forms: theatre and film producers merely pandered to the audiences who typically went to see Sinhala plays and Sinhala films. When Lester Peries, Titus Thotawatte, and Willie Blake visited Sir Chittampalam Gardiner, of Ceylon Theatres, for instance, the following exchange unfolded.

“I have just seen the finest Sinhalese film ever made.”

Our hearts fluttered for a moment.

Could it be – was it possible – that he was alluding to Rekava?

“Do you know that Seda Sulang will be an all-time great? I have seen it in Madras.”

Gardiner hailed from one of the most established families in Jaffna. His response to Seda Sulang – which today’s critics would put down as puerile and peechan, a typical song-and-dance medley that contains nothing to redeem it – was conditioned by the context of his times. The elite did not view film or theatre seriously, in part because these had already been taken up by a different crowd. That crowd had neither the money nor the political clout that the elite did. But as a class – formed mostly of merchants and mudalalis – they were influential in their own right, and they patronised these art forms. The colonial elite, for the most, accepted that state of affairs and played along.

Lester’s and Sarachchandra’s interventions were thus pivotal. They faced a dual challenge. On the one hand, they strived to use these art forms – theatre and cinema – to revive traditional culture, to represent that culture to the world outside. On the other hand, they had to emancipate them from the colonial petty bourgeoisie to which they had been confined until then. To put it crudely, Sarachchandra had to rescue Sinhala theatre from Tower Hall, while Lester had to rescue Sinhala film from the Madras studios.

This was a challenge that the colonial elite, especially the founding members of the 43 Group, did not face and did not have to resolve. The likes of Lionel Wendt, George Keyt, and Ivan Peries did not discover the traditional Sinhala village; the Sinhala village existed well before their time. Yet when they arrived on the scene, it was entirely up to them to depict it for everyone else. They did not have to contend with other social classes in this task because they were the first to arrive, the first to become patrons and financiers.

Lester James Peries and Ediriweera Sarachchandra did not have this luxury, because theatre and cinema had already been discovered, and dominated, by another class. That both succeeded in taking these art forms in a different direction, away from the confines of that class, is a tribute and a credit to them. In later years a completely different generation – more bilingual and more sensitive to cultural nuances – took up the challenge of going beyond even Sarachchandra and Lester. In doing so, they established these art forms as more than entertainments, fulfilling a task – a historical task, no less – which had originally fallen on the colonial elite, in early 20th century Ceylon.

Uditha Devapriya is a writer, researcher, and analyst based in Sri Lanka who contributes to a number of publications on topics such as history, art and culture, politics, and foreign policy. He can be reached at udakdev1@gmail.com.