Midweek Review

The animating presence of folk literature

Published

5 years ago

2021/02/10

By Prof. Wimal Dissanayake

The dialogue between folk literature and classical literature, in many regions of the world, is as complex as it is fascinating. I am a great admirer of the post-modern writings of the distinguished Italian writer Italo Calvino. I have read all his books, creative and critical, translated into English with great interest. I have written critical essays on his works introducing them to the Sinhala reader. The other day as I was re-reading with mounting interest his book Italian Folktales, I was reminded of the urgency of the intersections between folk and elite literatures.

The Italian Folktales is a collection of 200 folk tales prevalent in various regions of Italy. Italo Calvino has rendered them into standard Italian, making adjustments and alterations when and where necessary. It is indeed a re-telling of these stories by Calvino. This book was first published in Italian in 1956 and translated into English in 1962. Since them there have been other English translations of it. In composing this volume, Italo Calvino was influenced by the thinking of the Russian folklorist Vladimir Propp. Clearly, this is a book intended for the general reader in a way that Propp’s Morphology of the Folktale is not.

The folktales gathered in this volume are full of kings, peasants, ogres, as well as strange animals and plants as indeed in most folktales the world over. Many discerning critics have claimed that Italo Calvino did for Italian folktales what Brothers Grimm did for German folktales. This collection of stories was extremely well received outside of Italy as well. The New York Times Book Review said, ‘This collection stands with the finest folktale collections in the world.’ The Times called it ‘a magic book and a classic to boot.’

The impulse of Italian peasants for collective self-representation and the subtle literary sensibility of Italo Calvino meet in these pages with remarkable results infusing the stories with a vibrant and seductive glow. Indeed, what Brothers Grimm did for German folktales, Calvino did for Italian folk tales. These stories are activated by various dualisms such as reality and fantasy, conventionality and originality, simple and complex, local and universal which discerning literary critics with a deconstructive bent of mind would find extremely attractive and will persuade them to harness their analytical impulses in diverse ways seeking to annul the facile dualisms.

The Colombian Nobel laureate Garcia Marquez is an equally talented writer; but he is very different from Calvino as a literary artist. However, he too was deeply attracted to folk art and folk literature. He has often observed that his narrative impulse and skills were stimulated and nurtured by the folktales that his grandmother told him. He was also profoundly stirred by the Colombian folk music form vallenato. It is a popular folk music genre that is highly lyrical and expressive of a vigorous folk imagination. Garcia Marquez was not only enticed by this musical genre, but he also promoted vallenato concerts. His literary sensibility was memorably penetrated by this musical genre. He once remarked that, ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude, his magnum opus, was a 250-page vallenato. As with Calvino, Garcia Marquez too displayed a great partiality for folk art and literature and the distinctive imagination of folk artists.

When discussing the power of folk art and folk literature, another distinguished writer that springs into mind is the Spanish poet and playwright Federico Garcia Lorca. Tragically, this highly talented writer was assassinated at a relatively young age. His work can best be understood as representing the intersection of folk literature and modern literary sensibility. His work the Gypsy Ballads exemplifies this aspect admirably. He deployed the traditional ballad meter with eight-syllable lines and traditional symbols with remarkable ingenuity. He made use of the self-protective symbolism of Spanish folk poetry to escape the nervous intimacies of personal anguish. Lorca was interested in uncovering the hidden contours of Andalusian imagination. A passage of poetry like the following taken from his Ballad of the Moon illustrates this facet of his work convincingly.

How the night heron sings

How it sings in the trees

Moon crosses the sky

With a boy by the hand

At the forge the gypsies

Cry and then scream

The wind watches

The wind watches the moon

Here Garcia Lorca deploys traditional symbols such as night, moon, sky and wind with new and at times Freudian valences. The ballads appear to be simple, but they conceal a sophisticated art.

The visionary Irish poet and playwright and Nobel laureate W.B.Yeats is another brilliant writer whose imagination was profoundly stimulated by folk art and literature. From the beginning he was attracted to folklore, myths, legends, ballads and so on. He once remarked that legends are the mothers of nations. He also said that, ‘all folk literature, and all literature that keeps the folk tradition, delights in unbounded and immortal things.’ Yeats was not, to be sure, enforcing a simple duality between folk literature and elitist literature; he was referencing a much more complex interaction.

Earlier, I referred to the collection of Italian folk tales by Italo Calvino. Similarly, Yeats published in 1888 a collection of folk tales and poems titled Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry. It consists of 65 tales and poems that lead us to the vibrancy of the Irish folk imagination. They introduce us to a fascinating world peopled by kings, witches, ghosts, priests, saints, fairies, demons and peasants. Italo Calvino was interested in uncovering the hidden powers of the Italian folk imagination. Similarly, W.B. Yeats was interested in demonstrating the hidden powers of Irish sensibility. It was his conviction that ‘the very voice of the people, the very pulse of the people’ could be happily recovered through folk literature. Yeats was closely associated the famous Irish Literary Revival and his interest in folk literature constitutes one aspect of it. A well-known literary critic once observed that, ‘Yeats turned to folk sources to give his work the grain of ordinary humanity and the direct appeal of ballads and other traditional forms.’

Coming closer to home, the distinguished Nobel Prize winning writer Rabindranath Tagore also displayed a remarkable interest in folk art, music and literature. Yeats, of course, played a significant role in gaining a reputation for Tagore in the West. His poetry manifests a memorable amalgamation of folk, classical and Western influences. The spatial and temporal structures in his poetic compositions can be usefully understood in terms of folk art and literature. The foundational alphabet of his poems’ codes are traceable to folk roots. He was deeply sensitive to the interesting ways in which the folk imagination left its imprint in the vicissitudes of language. His poetic and lyric texts are marked by a pulse of folk-musicality.

Tagore was undoubtedly one of the greatest Indian writers of the modern age. His myriad talents moved in diverse directions. He earned a wide reputation as a poet, lyricist, novelist, playwright, short story writer, painter, musician, cultural critic and educationist. He was the author of some 60 collections of poetry and a great body of prose writings. He was a gifted musician who composed over ten thousand songs. As a painter, his work was exhibited in New York, Paris, Moscow, Berlin and Birmingham. In all these manifold endeavors one can identify the animating presence of folk art and literature. The rhetorical frameworks guiding his literary creations make audible a dialogue between the folk and elite traditions.

Among the Sri Lankan writers who have assiduously sought out the nurturing presence of folk literature, Gunadasa Amarasekera merits close study. His book of poetry, Amal Biso constitutes a landmark in the evolution of modern Sinhala poetry. In it, he has drawn heavily on the vitality of Sinhala folk poetry. The challenging equation of sense and sound, content and form, logic and syntax, the polyphonic achievements, the musically-patterned complex articulations that one discerns in this poetry book display a deep allegiance to the folk tradition. He combined the power and possibilities of folk poetry with an evolving cotemporary sensibility to produce poetry of a high order.

Let us, for example, consider a poem like Mal Yahanavata Vadinna, which I consider to be one of the finest Sinhala poems of the twentieth century. It recaptures the struggle between carnal love and romantic love drawing on all the available resources of folk poetry – diction, spatial and temporal structures, registers of discourse and rhetorical frameworks. It reconfigures a world fissured by complexity. He annuls easy disjunctions between binarisms of purity and impurity physicality and ideality. As Calvino, Garcia Marquez, Yeats, Garcia Lorca and Tagore had amply demonstrated, to draw on folk literature is not to romanticize it but to make it a vital contemporary presence, poignantly relevant to modern times. Gunadasa Amarasekera, too, has drawn attention to this important fact. It is interesting to observe the ways in which he allows the poem to rediscover the sense of its own textuality. Broadly speaking, a number of other outstanding Sinhala writers have been sensitive to this conjunction of folk and elite literature. In my book Enabling Traditions: Four Sinhala Cultural Intellectuals’ I have drawn attention to this point.

So far, I have discussed how highly gifted and consequential writers from different regions of the world have drawn on the vigor of folk literature to enhance the power and reach of their own work. Another facet of the influence of folk poetry is the diverse ways in which the discourse of the folk tradition has inflected the main tradition of literature. If we take the example of the Sinhala poetic tradition, we can observe how from the beginning the folk tradition has played a pivotal role in shaping the visage of the main tradition. For example, among the Sigiri poems, some of the earliest poetic compositions we have, we see representations and exemplifications of the classical as well as folk traditions.

Most literary historians are inclined to regard the folk tradition and the elite tradition as running along parallel tracks. At a superficial level, one can appreciate the legitimacy of such as approach. However, when we pause to inquire into this topic more deeply we would realize that throughout history there has been a constant and mutually fructifying interaction between the two traditions. Discerning literary critics like Martin Wickremasinghe and Gunadasa Amarasekera have established this fact. If we consider a highly esteemed and popular poem like the Guttila Kavya we would realize how the two traditions fruitfully meet in its pages. Gunadasa Amarasekera in his Sinhala Kavya Sampradaya has drawn attention to this fact. Srinath Ganewatte and I, in our book on Sinhala meter titled Viritha ha Arutha have demonstrated how folk literature has played a determinative role in the growth of Sinhala meters.

As we seek to explore in depth the power and resourcefulness of the folk tradition we need to bear in mind its diverse heuristic possibilities and the need to interpret it from fresh angles.

For example, some products of folk poets lend themselves to a form of subaltern approach. What I seek to highlight by this is the way folk poets foreground their agency, give voice to their predicaments and offer, through their texts, a kind of counter-tradition. Sinhala folk poets have demonstrated the fact that subalterns indeed can speak through their poems of deprivation and loss. This is an attempt to unsettle conventional structures of feeling and upend taken for granted viewpoints. This is indeed a subject area that invites further analysis. It requires elaborate theoretical equipage.

When we begin to unpack the creative and critical possibilities of the folk tradition, we should pay attention to the notion of the performative. Folk poems are nothing if not performative. It is not only in the case of oral poetry but also on the later written poetry, the idea of performance is supreme. Performativity should not be confined to folk poetry alone. All poetry, whether ancient or modern, folk or elite is performative. We do not seem to pay adequate attention to this important fact. By regarding modern poems as a performative events we can open new doors to their many-layered meanings and complex structures.

It has become increasingly clear that the discourse of tradition has to be located within the proper historical and cultural contexts and to focus clear-sightedly on the material forces that contribute to the shaping of tradition. In recent times, critics, like Sena Thoradeniya, have sought to underline this fact. The interplay between the folk and elite literature enables us to map more productively the dynamics of literary tradition. An exploration into the nature and significance of folk literature would permit us to engage in a more focused analysis of the constructedness of literary tradition.

Literary traditions are the outcome of the interaction between language power and nationality. We normally tend to discuss the evolution of literary traditions in linear terms. But it is becoming increasingly clear that we need to adopt a more complex vision which does justice to periods of intense activity and those marked by relative dormancy. Instead of linearity we need to foreground complex re-configurations. Traditions are not innocent of politics in the broader sense of the term. Questions of exclusivity and repressiveness and resistance loom large. We need to reimagine literary traditions as sites of conflict and challenging negotiations where an incessant struggle for meaning and truth takes place. A serious engagement with folk literature as instances of collective self-representations enable us to appreciate the importance of this move. We have been led to believe that literary traditions are transparent and free from the exercising of hidden power. The rhetorical strategies that go to form the discourse of literary traditions, along with the promoted hierarchical truths, have to be patiently mapped.

When we investigate into topics such as literary traditions, literary history and folk literatures our inescapable reference point and the guiding framework become the nation. Our desire to adopt a national framework in the evaluation of tradition is understandable. However, owing to the increasing impact of globalization the inevitability of the concept of nationhood is being challenged. We are asked to come up with a broader frames of intelligibility. The supra-national perspective has several implications. Let us consider a poem like Mal Yahanavata Vadinna by Amarasekera that I alluded to earlier. It is securely located in the folk tradition thematically, structurally and rhetorically. However, readers familiar with the respective writings and visions of Sigmund Freud and D.H. Lawrence would almost certainly find additional layers of meaning in the poem. The need to locate the poem in a larger horizon of meaning becomes apparent. What this highlights is that we need to be aware of both the metaphors of globalism and metonymies of localism. This awareness has a way of mitigating the anxieties of recognition.

On the basis of the preceding discussion, it can plausibly be argued that folk-literature can become a useful point of departure for the deconstruction of literary tradition and literary theory. Traditions are sites of the confluence of language, power and knowledge. This entails choices and preferences which result in exclusions and marginalizations. We have to think about traditions and literary history in new ways in the light of newer theoretical developments in the humanities and the social sciences.

The focus on literary traditions should pave the way to newer explorations of literary history. Literary history is not linear and transparent as is commonly believed, but circulatory and multi-layered. Our focus should be on reconfigurations and parallel assemblages obeying the dictates of Bakhtinian chronotopes (space-time formations). Such an approach will facilitate a more comprehensive view of literary history. An inquiry into folk-literature will expedite this hermeneutic process.

This short article consists of some reflections triggered by my re-reading of Calvino’s Italian Folktales. This re-reading brought to mind the works of Garcia Marquez, Garcia Lorca, Yeats, Tagore and Gunadasa Amarasekera, all of whom in their diverse ways, drew upon the power of folk literary forms. This discussion, I am persuaded, points to the importance of deconstructing literary traditions and literary history and demonstrating their constructed nature and the power plays involved. This article has, inevitably, taken the form of scattered reflections rather than a tightly constructed argument. Given the vast scope of the subject under consideration, and the limited space available, this is only to be expected.

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Midweek Review

SJB jolted by AKD-Eran move

Published

2 days ago

2026/05/6

Sahan Weerasooriya

Sri Lanka’s disastrous tour of Australia in 2022 (09 Oct. to 13 Nov.) caused widespread anger among the cricket community and the cricket loving public. The Auditor General’s special report that dealt with that tour revealed significant financial irregularities regarding the SLC executive committee’s visit there for the 2022 T20 World Cup. In spite of heavy media focus on the AG’s report in the run-up to the World Cup debacle in India, the government lacked the political will to deal with the developing situation. The then Auditor General W.P. C. Wickramaratne stood by his report. The top official, who retired in April 2025, reiterated the serious revelations but the Parliament conveniently discarded it.

Former parliamentarian Eran Wickramaratne’s unexpected move jolted the Samagi Jana Balawegaya (SJB). In spite of being aware of covert moves to bring in Wickramaratne as chief of the corruption-riddled Sri Lanka Cricket (SLC), in place of Shammi Silva, the SJB never really believed it could succeed as it was considered a literal goldmine. But when President Anura Kumara Dissanayake pushed the deal through on 29 April, a furious SJB General Secretary Ranjith Madduma Bandara, however, tried to save face by merely declaring it as a political appointment. The veteran politician said so when the media sought his reaction to Wickramaratne’s move at the P.D. Sirisena grounds, Maligawatte, the venue of SJB May Day rally.

Earlier, in response to Wickramaratne’s declaration that he quit the SJB’s Working Committee and Management Committee to pave the way for him to accept the top SLC post, Madduma Bandara asked Wickramaratne to give up the party membership, too.

President Dissanayake’s move caught the main Opposition party, as well as the Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna (SLPP), by surprise. The vast majority of parliamentarians, representing the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP)-led ruling National People’s Power (NPP), couldn’t have been aware of the operation executed by President Dissanayake.

There hadn’t been a previous instance of the NPP accommodating an ex-parliamentarian from a rival party in any capacity. The top NPP leadership always indicated that those who represented other political parties in Parliament wouldn’t be welcome. Ex-lawmaker Field Marshal Sarath Fonseka threw his weight behind the JVP/NPP on numerous occasions, during Aragalaya and the post-presidential polls. Although some expected the war-winning Army Commander to receive an invitation from the NPP, it never materialised. Then, what really made the NPP extend an invitation to Wickramaratne, who first entered Parliament on the UNP National List at the 2010 general election. Wickramaratne contested Colombo at the 2015 general election on the UNP ticket and was appointed Deputy Minister of Investment Promotions and Highways. Widely regarded as one of UNP leader Ranil Wickremesinghe’s favourites, Wickramaratne switched his allegiance to Sajith Premadasa in early 2020 and contested the Colombo district on the newly registered SJB and served as a lawmaker till 2024. Wickramaratne failed to regain his seat in the 2024 general election.

Wickramaratne had been one of the leading proponents of Yahapalanaya (2015-2020) that perpetrated Treasury bond scams in February, 2015, and March, 2016, and a key member of the 106 parliamentary group. As a SJBer, he represented a much smaller parliamentary group that consisted of 54 lawmakers.

What made the former banker, Wickramaratne, accept the daunting challenge of restructuring the utterly corrupt SLC, the country’s richest sports body, embroiled in wasteful practices? As a key member of the SJB, during the 2020-2024 period, Wickramaratne knew how SLC manipulated Parliament and proceeded with its agenda during Shammi Silva’s leadership.

The SJB spearheaded a vigorous campaign, targeting SLC, though it never managed to overwhelm the sports body that enjoyed unprecedented backing of the executive. In spite of the Parliament unanimously adopting a joint resolution calling for the removal of the SLC management, including its Chairman Shammi Silva, that board remained. President Dissanayake executed an operation that replaced Shammi Silva with Eran Wickramaratne. That brought Wickramaratne’s affiliation with the SJB to an unceremonious end. Ex-MP Wickramaratne made his move at the expense of the SJB parliamentary group, now down to 40 in the current Parliament.

The NPP secured an extraordinary 159 seats at the last parliamentary election. That tally included 18 National List slots.

The second largest party in Parliament consists of 40 including five NL slots. The remaining seats in the 225-member Parliament were shared by Ilankai Tamil Arasu Kadchi (ITAK/8), New Democratic Front (NDF/5), Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna (SLPP/3), Sri Lanka Muslim Congress (SLMC/3), Sarvajana Balaya (SB/1), United National Party (UNP/1), Democratic Tamil National Alliance (DTNA/1), All Ceylon Tamil Congress (ACTC/1), All Ceylon Makkal Congress (ACMC/1), Jaffna – Independent Group 17 (IND17-1) and the Sri Lanka Labour Party (SLLP/1).

A surprising move

The NPP brought in Wickramaratne ostensibly to clean up SLC at a time the current dispensation, plagued by various allegations, is under heavy fire. Many eyebrows were raised over the calculated move that eased pressure on the government. Obviously, the former investment banker had no qualms in joining the government, amidst the continuing controversy over (1) release of 323 red-flagged containers from the Colombo port, without mandatory physical checks; (2) resignation of Energy Minister Punykumara aka Kumara Jayakody, after the release of the damning National Audit Office (NAO) report on the coal-scam, in the wake of the unsuccessful SJB No-Confidence Motion (NCM), the first since the 2024 September presidential election; (3) massive Rs 13.2 bn fraud at the National Development Bank in which Eran served as the Chief Executive Officer in 2001 (4) staggering USD 2.5 mn heist at the Treasury that devastated the government.

It would be pertinent to mention that he resigned from the NDB to enter Parliament on the UNP National List at the 2010 parliamentary poll, close on the heels of the re-election of Mahinda Rajapaksa for a second presidential term.

Within 24-hours after Wickramaratne accepted the NPP offer, the Treasury scam took an absolutely unexpected turn when an Assistant Director at the External Resources Department of the Finance Ministry, Ranga Rajapaksa, who had been interdicted over the alleged theft, was found dead, under suspicious circumstances, just outside his residence in Kuliyapitiya.

In spite of a panel of Judicial Medical Consultants, appointed to conduct the post-mortem examination on the body of Ranga Rajapaksa, concluded that all injuries were self-inflicted and that the death was due to suicide, the SJB questioned the circumstances of the death.

The SJB felt betrayed by Eran’s move at a time the Opposition was making headway, though the NPP enjoy an unchallengeable 2/3 majority in Parliament. Confident that corruption allegations, particularly the USD 2.5 mn affair and the suicide of top Finance Ministry official eroded public confidence, the SJB challenged the NPP to hold the long-delayed Provincial Council polls. The challenge was issued at the May Day rally held at P.D. Sirisena grounds, Maligawatta. SJB leader Sajith Premadasa declared if President Dissanayake accepted his challenge the next May Day will be held with SJB Chief Ministers in charge of the PCs.

The man is definitely no saint either as he once got caught campaigning with a group of his supporters in Moratuwa during the moratorium on canvassing just before an election.

Eran Wickramaratne, whatever said and done in his defence, will find it extremely difficult to explain why he switched his allegiance to the NPP, particularly against the backdrop of serious allegations. The ongoing parliamentary probe into the container affair, as well as the growing energy crisis due to the West Asia conflict, and low quality coal supplied to the country’s only coal-fired power plant, Lakvijaya at Norochcholai, and threat to the banking sector, obviously failed to deter Wickramaratne from switching sides. The former Deputy Minister obviously risked his principled stand throughout his political career against corruption.

However, like all other UNP and SJB politicians, Wickramaratne cannot, under any circumstances, absolve himself of the UNP’s culpability in Treasury bond scams, perpetrated under Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe’s watch. Perhaps, over a decade after the first Treasury bond scam, many people still do not know that the Central Bank had been under Wickremesinghe at the time when then Central Bank Governor, Singaporean Arjuna Mahendran, struck. Wickramaratne remained loyal to the party though, unlike Sujeewa Senasinghe (current member of SJB parliamentary group), he didn’t launch a booklet in defence of Mahendran.

In the wake of Sajith Premadasa’s defeat at the 2019 presidential election, the party split, with the majority of members of the UNP group in the Yahapalana parliament switching allegiance to Sajith Premadasa. The SJB never explained its stance on Treasury bond scams that ruined the administration, at the very onset of its much-touted 100-day programme. The SJB needs to at least acknowledge its responsibility for its conduct, during that time, as some of those who shielded the bond thieves represent the party in Parliament now.

Widely referred to as the “footnote gang” the group has been accused of inserting footnotes into a COPE committee report on the Central Bank Treasury bond scams, literally challenging its findings. Key members often highlighted include Harsha de Silva, Sujeewa Senasinghe, Ajith P. Perera, Harshana Rajakaruna, Hector Appuhamy, Ashok Abeysinghe, Abdul Maharoof, Wasantha Aluvihare, and Ravindra Samaraweera.

Shammi vs Roshan

In the wake of Sri Lanka’s humiliating exit from the 2023 ICC Men’s Cricket World Cup following a massive 302 run-defeat inflicted by India at Wankhede Stadium, Mumbai. Australia won the tournament played in India from October 05 to November 19, 2023.

Sports Minister Roshan Ranasinghe, who also held the Youth Affairs and Irrigation portfolios, pounced on the opportunity to oust Shammi Silva’s cricket administration. The Polonnaruwa District MP, as well as those who wanted to see the back of Shammi Silva, who had been at the helm, since February, 2019, felt that they wouldn’t get a better chance. The SJB threw its full weight behind the Sports Minister’s project though he represented the SLPP that reached a consensus with Ranil Wickremesinghe, regarding post-Aragalaya administration. For the SJB, the Sports Minister’s move presented an opportunity to rock the administration struggling to cope up with growing economic woes.

Within days after India thrashed Sri Lanka, Ranasinghe sacked the cricket administration and brought in a committee, headed by Arjuna Ranatunga, the skipper of 1996 World Cup winning team. Inclusion of Jayantha Dharmadasa in the Ranatunga-led interim committee caused controversy though, as a whole, the public approved the move. But, Shammi hit back hard. Within 24 hours, SLC challenged the Minister’s action.

The Court of Appeal quashed the Sports Minister’s decision to sack the country’s crisis-ridden cricket board and restored the expelled officials, pending a full hearing. Shammi had the unconditional backing of the Indian Cricket board and, most importantly, the protection of the executive. Wickremesinghe had no qualms in shielding Shammi and his team, though Sports Minister Roshan was elected to Parliament on the SLPP ticket.

An irate Sports Minister revealed in Parliament how Wickremesinghe demanded that he rescind the decision to sack the cricket administration. Wickremesinghe wanted Shammi back at the helm of the SLC whatever the allegations directed at him. The Sports Minister disclosed in Parliament how he refused to carry out Wickremesinghe dictatorial directive and challenged him to do whatever he desired.

The resolution, unanimously adopted by the Parliament on 09 November, 2023, to get rid of the cricket administration, had no impact on Wickremesinghe. Eran Wickramaratne had been a member of that Parliament though he now quietly contributed to a strategy that enabled the NPP government to replace Shammi without causing any unnecessary issues.

When Roshan declined to reinstate what he repeatedly described as corrupt cricket administration, Wickremesinghe sacked him from the Cabinet of Ministers. Perhaps, the UNP leader had the tacit support of the top SLPP leadership to drop the ‘Pohottuwa’ man from the Cabinet. The SLPP never really took up that issue as Wickremesinghe, in consultation with his Chief of Staff Sagala Ratnayaka, plotted a controversial course.

The sacked Sports Minister hit back hard at Wickremesinghe and Sagala Ratnayaka, in and outside Parliament. Alleging that his life was in danger, Roshan said that in case of any harm caused to him, Wickremesinghe and Ratnayake should be held responsible. The lawmaker urged the Speaker not to expunge his statement from Hansard.

During the war of words, between Roshan and the SLC in November, 2023, the latter lodged a complaint with the Commission to Investigate Allegations of Bribery or Corruption (CIABOC) accusing him of misappropriation of funds made available by them to the National Sports Fund. There had never been a similar case in which the Cricket Board/SLC moved CIABOC against the subject Minister.

Shammi proved again that with right connections challenges could be successfully neutralised. But, his feat remains extraordinary as he thwarted the unanimous resolution adopted against him in Parliament. There had never been an instance where the Parliament took such a stance in respect of an individual or a particular body. Wickremesinghe, in spite of the Parliament, at that time, represented by only one National list MP from the UNP (defeated Galle District candidate Wajira Abeywardena) without hesitation sacked a Cabinet Minister appointed by his predecessor Gotabaya Rajapaksa.

Wickremesinghe’s actions underscored how the executive could undermine Parliament, regardless of consequences. Shammi emerged far stronger and proceeded with his agenda.

A visit to Mandaitivu

Having backed the SJB-led November 2023 move in Parliament against SLC, perhaps the electorate believed the first elected post-Aragalaya government would swiftly move against the powerful cricket administration. However, that issue took a back seat as the NPP confronted other challenges. By then previously mentioned issues, particularly the coal scam that exposed the NPP’s duplicity, grabbed media attention, and SLC was conveniently forgotten.

Then suddenly, on Shammi Silva’s invitation, President Dissanayake visited Mandaitivu island, situated about three kms off Jaffna town and is connected to the peninsula, via a causeway.

On September 1, 2025, Dissanayake laid the foundation stone there for what the SLC called Jaffna international cricket ground, on 48 acres, featuring 10 centre wickets with boundary distance extending up to 80 meters, exceeding international standards. The SLC declared the proposed seventh international stadium would have a spectator capacity of 40,000, positioning it as a premier cricket destination in the region.

The SLC couldn’t complete the work before the end of December, 2025, due to Cyclone Ditwah, and other reasons, including the absence of an Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) report. The Chairman of the Central Environmental Authority, Professor Tilak Hewawasam, is on record as having said in late February this year that instructions were issued to halt the construction work under way at the Jaffna International Cricket Stadium until SLC secured environmental impact assessments to permit them to grant formal approval.

The launch of the Mandaitivu project was in line with the overall plan to create a 138-acre sports city in the Jaffna district. Those who opposed the project have alleged that it would be an ecological disaster and Mandaitivu should never have been considered for an international cricket stadium. It would be interesting to see how the new SLC chief addressed this issue alone, leaving aside all else.

Some of the criticism directed at the Jaffna sports city project is political. Northern Province-based politicians and other interested parties, not with the NPP, feel the proposed project may further erode their support base. Their concerns have to be addressed, taking into consideration President Dissanayake’s success in winning both the Northern and Eastern electoral districts at the presidential and parliamentary polls in 2024. The NPP created political history when it defeated the Illankai Thamil Arasu Kadchi (ITAK) in predominantly Tamil speaking regions thereby proving that the party could be overwhelmed.

Although the ITAK regained some respectability at the Local Government polls in 2025, the NPP still enjoys overwhelming superiority in the North and East but the actual situation can be ascertained only if President Dissanayake accepted the SJB’s challenge to conduct Provincial Council polls soon.

Wickramaratne now faces an extraordinary challenges, a situation he never experienced during the time as a UNP MP from 2010 to 2020 and then SJB lawmaker from 2020 to 2024. It wouldn’t be easy as many interested parties, including those antagonised by his move whatever the consequences of Mandaitivu environmental issues, would be out to target him. In case Wickramaratne failed in his capacity as the SLC chief to take remedial measures, he would have to face the consequences. The NPP, too, will be at the receiving end for obvious reasons.

While a section of the SJB asserted that Wickramaratne’s actions were treacherous, given his role in the party, some believe that the invitation extended to the former parliamentarian revealed that the NPP lacked suitable persons among them to take such a high profile assignment. The question is whether Wickramaratne can pull it off or himself be overwhelmed by an utterly corrupt system that progressed over the years with the connivance of politicians.

Shammi Silva couldn’t have retained SLC leadership without contest for just over seven years sans heavy political backing. That is the undeniable truth. The latest ‘arrangement’ that compelled him to give up the hot seat about 11 months before the end of his term enabled the controversial figure to avoid investigations into past affairs. Bringing in Wickramaratne, too, seems to have the approval of Shammi Silva who proved his mettle as a shrewd negotiator.

By Shamindra Ferdinando

Midweek Review

Monks, the Law and the Future of the Buddhist Monastic Order

Published

2 days ago

2026/05/6

Sahan Weerasooriya

A file photo of some Buddhist monks, nabbed at the BIA, with narcotics, being taken to court.

As almost the whole country knows by now, a group of 22 Buddhist monks were arrested on 25 April 2026, by the Police Narcotics Bureau at the international airport in Katunayake carrying approximately 112 kilograms of Kush, a high-grade, potent strain of cannabis and Hashish with a street value of over LKR 1,100 million. It is supposed to be the largest drug haul of this kind at the airport and has made global news too.

Locally, and particularly on social media, it has opened a very vocal debate with two main streaks. One has already judged the monks as guilty, purely based on information and stories in free circulation on the internet. The other claims that these are not even monks, but are imposters planted to bring disrepute to Buddhism while some articulations within this streak even go to the extent of claiming government culpability, without offering an iota of evidence. Almost none of these discusses in any serious manner what this means in terms of the law of the land and its applicability to Buddhist monks, and why this level of criminality has occurred from within the clergy in the first place. Such reflection, however, is the only sensible thing that should come out of this unfortunate incident which had considerably dangerous consequences for society if the narcotics went undetected.

The law in our country seems to apply differently or at least very slowly when it comes to Buddhist monks. This suggests that they occupy some kind of undefined but privileged status above citizenship and its constituent responsibilities. People may have noticed that Buddhist monks do not stand when the national anthem is being sung even though it is standard etiquette across the world including in our country to do so. But this exception in practice does not seem to apply to other religious leaders.

When as a schoolboy in the 1980s, I asked one of my teachers, a Buddhist monk, whom I still hold in high esteem, why this was the case, his answer was, this was the tradition since the time of the Buddha. My classmates and I pointed out to him that at the time of the Buddha, there were neither nations nor national anthems, and this question would not have even arisen. But there are stories from Buddhist history and literature that might be interpreted as monks being treated differently and elevated in status even above rulers due to their spiritual attainment. But today, we are not dealing with remnants of a distant history and belief, but the present in vastly transformed social and legal conditions.

Obviously, this is a tradition born out of wrongful and selective interpretation of respect and veneration, and not a formal legal exemption. Partly, that veneration comes from narratives in Buddhist literature, such as the incident involving Emperor Asoka and the seven-year-old novice monk, Venerable Nigrodha, who it is said to have sat on the emperor’s throne, when invited to be seated. Whatever the actual sources of this veneration are, what it does in contemporary times, is to set apart Buddhist monks symbolically from other citizens with the indication that the law of the land applies differently to them and that too, favourably. In practice, unfortunately, this becomes a cover within which errant individuals can hide from the long arm of the law as well as common sense and ethics that apply to all others.

The cultural and political logic behind this practice assumes that Buddhist monks are beyond and above the law, which is meant for the laity, and that such noble individuals will not do anything wrong. But even in the time of the Buddha itself, this was not a fact as Buddhist history explains well. It is precisely this cultural logic that led some commentators to use two interesting words to describe the 22 monks arrested at the airport and another who was arrested later who was to be the recipient of the drugs. One word is chiwaradhaarin,

literally meaning those wearing robes without implying their possible belonging to any local ecclesiastical order. In contemporary usage, it is also a somewhat insulting term. The other word is, bhikshu prathirupakayin, literally meaning people masquerading as monks. The whole point here was to delink these errant monks from monkhood and therefore from Buddhism itself because the alleged crime was too serious.

The Mahanayaka Theras of the Siyam, Amarapura, and Ramanna chapters issued a statement on 26 April 2026, just one day after the arrests, referring to the arrested as bhikshu prathirupakayin (people masquerading as monks) who were misusing the robe and noted these acts were against Buddhism and called for the suspects to be duly punished and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. On 28 April, the President met the Mahanayaka Theras and other senior monks to discuss the fallout and possible future action including closer supervision of monks within the order. Ideally however, neither this statement nor the meeting with the President was necessary if monks were treated as a matter of routine like normal citizens when they violate the law of the land. It is precisely based on this principle that the police arrested them in the first place. But there is no doubt they receive special treatment everywhere in the country, including in the airport.

It is this sense of privilege under the law that needs to end. When I say this, I am not talking of individual respect to monks people might have, based on their knowledge of the dhamma, including myself. That is a matter of individual preference. I also do not mean disciplinary supervision, investigation of institutional malpractices and disciplinary or vinaya breaches and punishments which can be carried out by the religious organisations themselves if they have a workable system. But if monks, like any other citizen, violate the law of the land whether it is drug trafficking, rape, child abuse, financial irregularities, instigating violence and so on, then, they cannot be offered special treatment or leniency. They must be held accountable and prosecuted, but fairly, like all of us deserve. No exceptions can be made.

The sheer noise of the local debate also has not posed yet another pertinent question that is important in this context. That is, how has it become possible for monks to engage in such obviously illegal acts with massively negative consequences for the society which they are supposed to serve selflessly? What has gone wrong, where and why?

Ven. Gurugoda Siriwimala made the following observations in a Facebook post in Sinhala on 27 April, which outlines the prevailing situation very rationally and clearly:

“The Bhikkhu Sasana (The Buddhist Monastic Order) in Sri Lanka is part of the country’s own decline. When a nation falls into decay, it is impossible for one specific segment within it to remain unaffected. The most tragic aspect of this is that in a country like Sri Lanka, where the cultural fabric is heavily built upon religion, the clergy—who ought to be the ultimate role models—have descended into such a state of degeneration.

The Monastic Order in Sri Lanka has become mere puppets of political parties and the media. For ordinary monks like us—who travel in public buses and subsist on the alms provided by ordinary people—it has become a matter of such shame that we feel like we must hide our faces. But these are not issues to monks who hardly walk in the streets, who constantly hold press conferences and utter foolhardy things from political stages.

Political parties in Sri Lanka have divided the clergy among themselves, maintaining a group of prominent monks who would act according to party agendas. We see even at this very moment how they are being manipulated like puppets. A group of hollow, senseless fools with no spiritual sensibility whatsoever are making a mockery of themselves in front of the whole country by holding press conferences morning and night. These monks lack education; they possess no understanding—either at a national or international level—of the subjects they speak about …”

Ven. Siriwimala’s articulation is the clearest explanation of what is happening in the Buddhist monastic order that I have read in recent times. What is even more important is that it has come as a self-reflective critique from within. The drug-carrying monks are not an unusual occurrence or an anomaly when it comes to drug trafficking in the country in general or reported malpractices involving some other monks on numerous other occasions. According to publicly available reports, some monks have repeatedly insulted minority religious practices and sentiments. One example of this is the current case in which indictments have been served against one of these monks for a case from 12 years ago. His discourses of violence are matters of public record as are the records of others. Sexual violence and child abuse involving some other monks have also come to the forefront on and off including the case of a monk who was found guilty of multiple counts of sexual assault by the Isleworth Crown Court in London in 202 and placed on the UK Sex Offenders Register for life even though he is running a school close to Colombo. There are many such cases circulating in public discourse, but not all of these have been prosecuted. Much has been silenced by inaction.

As Ven. Siriwimala has rightly pointed out, many monks have become problematic mouthpieces for political parties and political interests. Even the manner of their public articulation and behaviour as well as the nature of political involvement have become shameful, to put it mildly. But almost none have faced consequences within the ecclesiastical order of institutional Buddhism.

What this overall situation has done is to bring the Buddhist ecclesiastical order into needless disrepute. And much of this has happened due to the unfortunate silence of the Mahanayaka Theras and other senior prelates when they should have campaigned for reform within their monastic orders and paved the path towards prosecution in the same way they have done in the context of the recent drug interdiction. Seen in this sense, the present issue is nothing new. It is merely one of the more visible examples of a much deeper malaise.

Whenever I hear of these issues and the relative silence from within the monastic order, I am constantly reminded of the Buddha’s own words in Aṅguttara Nikāya (Numerical Discourses) and particularly in Anāgatabhaya Sutta (Discourse on Future Dangers). The ‘future dangers’ that would lead to the corruption of the Sangha and the disappearance of the Saddhamma (True Dhamma) the Buddha articulated include the following, all of which have to do with monks: 1. Lack of training and discipline among monks and the resultant consequences; 2) consequences of monks stopping paying attention to the profound teachings of the Dhamma; 3) monks focusing on excessive materialism and luxury and distancing themselves from practices such as meditation and seeking liberation; 4) the emergence of conflict and factionalism as a result of which monks becoming argumentative and using the Dhamma as a weapon to attack one another rather than as a means to liberation; 5) all this would finally lead to the corruption of the teachings of the Buddha and monks would end up teaching what is not the Dhamma but present it as the Dhamma and will teach what is not the Vinaya but present it as the Vinaya.

Is it not this that is happening today? Aren’t the kind of examples of malpractices I have outlined above indicative of this situation which the Buddha himself foresaw in his own lifetime? If the April 2026 drug bust is to serve a purpose for the future, it should happen at two levels: 1) the government and the laity should not treat monks as privileged when they engage in wrong-doing and violate the law of the land. The government should make it very clear formally that the law enforcement and judicial systems must fully prosecute violators of the law without any exceptions; 2) Leaders within the Buddhist monastic order including the Mahanayaka Theras and other senior prelates as well as their lay supporters should establish and empower an urgent system of internally addressing issues within their own orders and organisations, which should include the identification of wrong doers on the basis of specific ecclesiastical or legal violations and their expulsion from their monastic orders. There should not be any exceptions.

If this bare minimum can be achieved without delay and that too with honesty, then, we can imagine a more sanguine future where Buddhism can play the role it is supposed to. If it cannot be done, then, the future will be what the Buddha has already predicted.