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Another national trait; UN journo; other snippets

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Cassandra often disparages Sri Lankans’ apparently inherent traits which are not so good, sometimes even derogatory. One such is closing the door once the horse has fled and then flapping around merely screeching. Another is belated reaction and too late action which Cass’ belly aches about today.

 

That endangered tree

After that intrepid fauna and flora saver Devanee Jayathilake brought to the notice of highway constructors the fact they were about to destroy a fast disappearing species of endemic tree – Curdia zelanica – environmentalists rallied forth to swell her cry of Stop Cutting Down! These true national-minded folk interested in saving our fauna and flora in the face of ever increasing grabbing of forests and wetlands and rape of trees, have proved themselves to be genuine and ready to face powerful politicians or their favoured sidekicks and patrons. (I do not include among these dedicated environmentalists ex-Prez Sirisena, who is now very interested in saving that tree which I shall call Devinee’s Discovery and marched forth, with cameras of course, to save it. Is the gesture an attempt to boost his almost rock bottom deprivation of clout and brake his fast descent to a has-been?)

We wonder how the tree will be saved? The planned highway to slightly detour to accommodate the living tree or as suggested by some ‘transplanting’ it? I asked an expert botanist and his opinion was the tree is far too grown to undergo that operation. We heard recently that the Botanical Gardens Peradeniya had grown many seedlings and planted some in the Hingurakgoda Gardens, so though first reported as being the only standing tree of this genus/family, that is not the case. It is endangered but the genus will not be extinct if this particular tree – Devinee’s Discovery – has to be reduced to logs and timber.

I said this demonstrated another national trait: rise up almost after the event or awaken to a danger when it is imminent. This tree has been standing there for a century perhaps; the highway was planned with all studies done. It’s only when the new road comes right up against the tree that the hullabaloo starts. In this case it points to authorities being negligent until Devini and others converged to save the tree.

Consider also the East Terminal fiasco (term used deliberately). The plan to give over 49 % to India and Japan was initiated long ago and the port workers must have known about it then. Why the uprising only when work by Indians, Japanese and Sri Lankan engineers were just about to commence? Monks also seem to display this trait: wake up to national or provincial/district dangers when the danger is right at the door.

The national trait has developed to slumber as regards Covid-19. No stats given except total numbers, not daily; no info at all on how vaccination of the common or garden citizen is to be after health workers, the armed forces; those in high level working spots; all MPs and Parliamentary staff are done. We older languish with diminishing hope, hearing from friends and relatives in the UK and the USA they were vaccinated as second priority. The lives of the retired are valued and considered high risk and already vaccinated. We here don’t even know when and where and which vaccine will be given us. Talk was the govt was getting 20 million of the Oxford vaccine. Superb! One person told me 100% immunization is aimed at. Stuff and nonsense! A Prez Task Force for Vaccination was constituted. Cass sneakily thinks the older may even be considered expendable, not contributing but now a drain on the economy.

 

Kudos

Good to write about another Sri Lankan who has made a name in the Big Apple of all places and continues to identify himself with his birth country. Interest was evoked by the article in the Sunday Island of February 14 written by Roderic Grigson and titled A Book Focusing on the Hilarious Side of the UN. The said book is by long working journalist – former UN Bureau Chief and Regional Director of Inter Press Service (IPS) news agency – Thalif Deen. The book is on Amazon.com and carries the long and explicit title No Comment and Don’t Quote Me on that with the longer subtitle: From the sublime to the ridiculous: over 40 years of reporting from the United Nations. The book is still to be procured and read but the author is known to many I spoke to. A long ago staff member of Lake House remembers Thalif Deen well, although memories are of the 1960s when Thalif was a cub reporter just out of school, probably. A friend in New York emailed he was very much with the Sri Lankans over there and was a film buff who loved to talk films; about the home country too. He contributes weekly to The Sunday Times.

The review of the book by Grigson, reinforced Cass’ lament that talent of the gentleman politician or diplomat has fast faded away. Grigson retells two anecdotes of Thalif with Dr Gamini Corea and Ambassador H M G S Palihakkara. Apart from an excellent journalist like Thalif, Sri Lanka/Ceylon boasted diplomats on the world stage highly recognised and valued by the UN. We know of Lakshman Kadirgamar, Jayantha Dhanapala, Radhika Coomaraswamy and others. Locally, we had MPs who could argue as arguing had to be done – N M Perera, Keuneman, Anura B. We now have only one among a rabble of government MPs – Dinesh G.

Deen was educated at Zahira College Colombo, University of Peradeniya and then his MSc at Columbia University. He was a Fulbright scholar too and worked in countries other than SL and USA. To quote Grigson: “No Comment … is part memoir, part discourse on international reporting reality from a third world perspective.” Go back to last Sunday’s Island and read the article if you missed it. We can swell out with legitimate pride in these dark times of sham and shame. The fact that enamoured Cass most after learning about Thalif Deen was that we had persons who comfortably straddled the world stage. In sharp stark contrast what we suffer in SL are the likes of pontificating monks who love a mike in hand, Gaman and Weera.

 

Colonised by India, this time

What a hue and cry and warnings reported in the news broadcast by MTV Channel I on Monday 15 night. There were two monks and others who made it out as if the BJP had invaded Free Sri Lanka and we were already an official colony of India. All over “Biplab Deb jokes about BJP expanding base to Nepal, Sri Lanka; Tripura unit comes out in support” (The Island of Tuesday 16). It was a political rally and a jocular statement that was picked up and ballyhooed by our true blue national blood veined yellow robed and those who see aggression from all countries.

 

Paddy/Rice Mafia

Cass asked a person who lives quiet but keeps his eyes and ears intelligently open and gets plenty input off the intellectual grapevine, about the shortage of rice in the market and high cost of what is available. “It’s the rapacious middleman and the millers’ associations who are to blame. They are wealthy and have clout with the government. Paddy Marketing Board gets lax. The poor farmer suffers.” And then he literally spat out in sheer disgust. “Everyone, top to bottom, is rotten with corruption. Mafias even in the medical profession.”

Cass asks dismally: Any hope of cleansing Sri Lanka of dishonesty, self-seeking greed and corruption?



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Virulence of identity politics underscored by rising India-Pakistan tensions

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Injured tourists in Indian-administered Kashmir. (AP Photo)

In the wake of the ‘leave India’ order issued to all Pakistani nationals in India by the Indian centre, the authorities in India’s Madhya Pradesh are reportedly up against a troubling dilemma with regard to what they must do with the offspring of Pakistani fathers and Indian mothers. In other words, of what nationality are they: Indian or Pakistani?

Such challenges could be confronting quite a few states in India in view of the likely widespread presence of mixed origin children in the country but the tangle helps to also highlight the harmful impact identity politics are continuing to wield on India, South Asia’s most successful democracy. Given its official democratic and secular identity, India would need to steer a policy course on this question that would indicate a rising above narrow nationalistic politics by the centre.

It is in fact a testing time for India. Given its democratic credentials the observer would expect the Indian centre to take a broad, humane view of the matter and allow the children to stay on in India, since the situation is not of the children’s making. If eviction orders are issued on the children as well narrow identity politics could be said to have won in India. However, this is entirely a matter for the central government and would be resolved by it in keeping with what it sees as its national interest currently. Hopefully, India’s enlightened national interest would be heeded.

Such policy dilemmas over a person’s true national identity, decades into India’s ‘political independence’, point to the persistence of challenges central to nation-making in the country. But such challenges are continuing to be faced by the entirety of South Asia as well.

All over the region, divisive identity politics are continuing to challenge the credentials of those states that are claiming to be democratic. Would they say ‘no’ emphatically to those political forces that are championing narrow ethnic, religious and language identities, for example, and steer a policy course that would be faithful to secularism and equity in all its dimensions?

This is the question and it could be of course posed to Sri Lanka as well, whose current government is claiming to work towards the establishment of a polity that is free of ethnic and religious nationalism. Democratic opinion in Sri Lanka would like to have concrete evidence that it is genuinely committed to these ideals.

Thus is a re-visit of the founding ideals of India and other democracies of the region being prompted by the current crisis in India-Pakistan relations. The conflict ideally ought to prompt democracies to question to what degree they are truly democratic and take the necessary measures to put things right on that score.

If nation-making in the truest sense has occurred in South Asia we of the region would not be having on our hands the currently endemic and wasting identity-based conflicts and wars. Nation-making is rendered possible when equity in all its respects is practised by states. It is the surest means to national integration and unity. The majority of states of South Asia are nowhere near these goals.

The fillip it may provide identity based discord in the region could be counted as one of the relatively slow-acting but dangerously insidious effects of the present India-Pakistan confrontation. The current, dangerous war of words between the sides, for instance, would only serve to intensify the populist perception that the region is seeing a vastly invigorated Hindu India versus Islamic Pakistan polarity. However, in the immediate term, it is a hot war that ought to be guarded against.

As mentioned in this column last week, a regional initiative towards resolving the conflict would prove ideal but since SAARC is currently in a state of virtual paralysis, Commonwealth mediation emerges as the next best option to explore in working out a negotiated solution.

Unfortunately, UN mediation, although desirable in this crisis is unlikely to prove entirely effective in view of the possibility of the major powers using such intermediation to further their partisan interests. Going forward, the UN General Assembly would need to take note of these considerations and figure out as to how it could play a constructive role in peace-making and insulate itself against interference by major powers.

Comparatively, the Commonwealth of Nations could prove more balanced in its managing of the confrontation. This is on account of the formation being widely representative of the developing world and its main interests. However, well-meaning groupings and individual states that have generally insulated themselves to big power manipulations could prove effective in these peace-making efforts as well. The need is for an in-gathering of countries that place peace in South Asia above partisan, divisive interests.

Given India’s major power status and its crucial economic interests worldwide it could be justifiably surmised that the April 22nd terror attack on civilians in Indian-administered Kashmir was deliberately planned to cause the greatest harm to India. The setback India’s tourism industry may suffer, for instance, should be taken cognizance of.

Besides, the strategy was also to ignite another round of religious riots in India and outside. Given these considerations it should not come as a surprise if the Indian political leadership sees it to be in India’s interests to initiate a tough response to the attack.

However, a military response could prove extremely costly for India and the region, as pointed out in this column last week. The negative economic fallout from a new India-Pakistan war for the region and the world could be staggering. The disruptions to the supply chains of the countries of the region from such an outbreak of hostilities, for instance, could be prohibitive and bring the countries of the region to their knees.

A crucial need is for politicians in both India and Pakistan to think beyond their short term interests. Quick military action could yield some perceived short term gains for these politicians but in the long run the South Asian region would be reverted to the position that it was in, in the mid- forties of the last century: a region dismembered and divided against itself.

Stepped-up peace efforts by civilian publics on both sides of the divide could prove enormously beneficial. Besides other things, these civilian groupings need to work tirelessly to curb the fatal influence identity politics wield on politicians and publics.

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The Broken Promise of the Lankan Cinema: Asoka & Swarna’s Thrilling-Melodrama – Part IV

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Swarna / Manorani

“‘Dr. Ranee Sridharan,’ you say. ‘Nice to see you again.’

The woman in the white sari places a thumb in her ledger book, adjusts her spectacles and smiles up at you. ‘You may call me Ranee. Helping you is what I am assigned to do,’ she says. ‘You have seven moons. And you have already waisted one.’”

The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida

by Shehan Karunatilaka (London: Sort of Books, 2022. p84)

(Continued from yesterday)

Swarna’s Obsession with Manorani

Swarna was clearly fascinated by Manorani Sarwanamuttu. She has noted the striking, angled close-up photograph of Manorani’s face, eyes closed, head thrown back, dressed in a black sari with a large white print and her hair held in place as usual with a spray of Jasmine, at the public cremation of Richard’s body on an open pyre. A brilliant public theatrical riposte, fearless. I think Lucien de Zoysa was standing beside her.

Swarna mentions a detail she observed during one of her four visits to meet Manorani, beginning in 1996, dressed with her hair tied in a low knot adorned with Jasmine flowers as Manorani usually did, as some Tamil women do. She said that she saw Manorani ‘gulp down her tears (kandulu gilagatta).’ Her response to what she saw clearly puzzled her as a Sinhala mother. So, her response in enacting her as Rani was to offer the opposite in her portrayal of Manorani. In her rendition of Asoka’s Rani (Queen) she indulged in a limited melodramatic gestural repertoire, perhaps imagining that Manorani had ‘repressed’ her sorrow. Therefore, she, Swarna, was doing her a favour by finally enabling the ‘return of the repressed,’ through her Melodramatic rendition of her Rani.

A Cosmetic Tamilness

The red pottu functioned as the seal for the white scroll invitation to the premier and in the advertisement to dot the ‘I’, in Rani. As well, a close-up of Rani pasting on a red pottu after having delivered a baby, emphasises it as a marker of difference. This is a cosmetic use of Tamilness without any idea of the multi-ethnic Ceylonese social milieu in which she grew up.

Used adjectively,Cosmetic’ implies superficial measures to make something appear better, more attractive, or more impressive but doesn’t change anything structurally.

The saris worn by Swarna as Rani and her styling are clearly chosen by her as she has a professional knowledge of Indian handloom cotton saris which she once sold at an exclusive boutique in Colombo. Interestingly, young women emulated Swarna’s excellent taste in a certain Indian look which is very flattering too. There is a lovely photograph of her with a pottu and draped in Indian cotton sari with a choker necklace, a low-key elegance. It is also the look that Shyam Benegal, coming to film from advertising, popularised with Shabana Azmi in their films together; a ‘Festival of India’ look. This styling was part of the ‘fiction’ determined by Swarna and her tastes and had no relationship to Manorani and her tastes. It’s the marketability of a rather exotic and strange (aganthuka she said) upper-class woman, dressed up as a ‘Tamil,’ that appears to have been the main ‘design objective’ in choosing costumes and accessories.

al Melodramatic Scene Construction

Asoka’s ‘fictional’ (Prabandhaya) scenes and narration are composed using melodramatic devices; coincidences, sub-plots, climaxes, sudden reversals, revelations and the like. Here I am engaging Asoka on his own terms, arguing that his ‘fiction’ as fiction, has not been constructed well. That is to say, that the ‘fictional world’ Asoka has constructed is not believable, feels false in the way many of our early melodramatic genre films felt artificial. It is wholly inadequate to create the violent political context for the main story.

But those simple films never claimed the status of art, their simplicity, their sarala gee, their naive characters, part of their faded charm. There are Sinhala film fans who are professional journalists I have listened to online, who still express their deep love of those films, the song sheets, hearing them on radio and records, that whole cinematic experience.

Rani with its orchestral score for solemn moments, Rani pacing up and down, smoking furiously at troubled moments, framed at the window with smoky mood lighting, are all hackneyed devices which fail to express a sense of interiority, they are just ‘cosmetic’ superficial, cliched gestures of a hundred melodramas globally. Swarna’s Rani’s drunken dance scene with Richard and his friends has a forced quality, stagy. Rani’s driving scene looked like a drive in a studio with a projected white wall as the outside, again felt unreal and pointless except to show that she dared to go into a kade to buy cigarettes. The play within the film of Asoka’s much-loved Magatha felt very clunky, therefore for specific melodramatic plot points; ‘Rani’s irritation with Sinhala theatre and the opportunity to see Gayan being assaulted without stopping to help as mother and son drove back home. Then the same moral is underscored, as simplistic melodramas always do, when her own neighbours also don’t do anything when they see Richard being abducted.

This kind of melodramatic moralism does a disservice to the intelligence and sophistication of those Lankans who created the multi-ethnic Aragalaya/Porattam/Struggle in 2022, who have appreciated immensely Manuwarna’s film Rahas Kiyana Kandu both in Lanka and here in Australia. Rani’s Christianity is used again to stage a symbolic scene with the stained-glass window image of ‘the sorrowful mother Mary holding her son’s body’, and to recite the famous biblical lines which are quite inappropriate for the context. Absalom was a traitor to his father King David and fought against him and died in battle. King David spoke those lines when his son died. It has no connection with a mother’s relationship to her murdered son who wasn’t guilty of anything. It’s just a cheap ‘poetic’ touch that sounds solemn, a ‘cosmetic’ use of the Hebrew Bible.

Sinhala cinema time and time again makes a female character Christian when she behaves ‘badly’ that is, sexually promiscuous, takes an independent initiative, as though Christianity with its ‘western values’ are the cause of behaviour considered immoral from the point of view of the good Sinhala Buddhist girl. A popular male critic went so far as to say that Rani shows Lankan men that there is nothing wrong with women drinking and smoking.

Talking of girls, the sub-plot line with the sweet and innocent young girl whose child is delivered by Rani is straight out of Melodrama which often needs an ‘innocent girl stereotype’ to contrast her with another kind of femininity, worldly, lax. The orchestration of the coincidence of a birth with Richard’ death through ‘parallel montage’ is one of the staple editing devices of Melodrama and police thrillers. The innocent young mother’s sentimental story about the crush she has on Richard and the relationship between Rani (who has been friendless) and her over time feels tacked on, artificial, to find a ‘bitter-sweet’ melodramatic narrative resolution on the beach, with ‘HOPE’, writ large.

Perhaps this is why when a well-prepared young Lankan Australian podcaster with a special interest in acting, interviewing Swarna, attempted to ask her about the criticism back home about the construction of the character of Rani, she sharply interrupted him in mid-sentence, to say, ‘those things are not worth talking about, a waste of time … we have made a good film, well directed, edited…’.

Swarna’s normally affable manner changed, and the interviewer politely agreed with her and she went on to conduct the interview herself, informing us of screening several of her films at a festival in Calcutta. The implication of this arrogant move is that an actor with that record couldn’t possibly have made a dud.

It’s just not cool for actors to praise their own films. Let the public, critics, academics and cinephiles make their judgements which are their democratic prerogative, pleasure and professional work. The critical reception has been unprecedented and the Social Science Journal, Polity’s special Issue on Rani is essential reading.

I do wish Swarna Mallawarachchi many more moons (than the 7 Moons destined for Maali Almeida), to explore what Eugenio Barba called The Secret Art of the Performer. In Shehan Karunathilaka’s The 7 Moons of Maali Almaida (which provided the epigraph for my piece), this phantom figure Maali plays multiple roles of the actor called Richard de Zoysa. Notably, that of Malinda Albert Kabalana, in the ‘In-between Worlds’ haunted by the phantoms of Rajani Thiranagama and the multitude of anonymous victims of that era of political terror in Lanka.

Shehan had clearly read Martin Wickramasinghe’s Yuganthaya and seen Lester’s film, where Richard de Zoysa played the idealist son Malinda Albert Kabalana to Gamini Fonseka’s conservative, capitalist father. He has also done a formidable amount of research into recent Lankan political history and then transformed that History into an Allegory. Melodrama as a genre structurally, simply does not have the formal power that inheres in Allegory to represent History in ruins, unless one has been able to create, as Fassbinder did, a Brechtian Melodramatic Cinema. If not, one ends up exploiting political histories of violence and suffering, to create thrillingly sensational Melodramas that play well to the box office but are freighted with emptiness. It is Frederick Jameson, the highly influential Marxist Literary critic, who once said that the best of ‘Third World Literature’ was allegorical, thinking of Marquez’ One Hundred Years of Solitude and closer to home, Rushdi’s Midnight’s Children.

I hope Swarna will allow herself some time to reflect on the Dr Manorani Sarwanamuttu that her own phantasy-Rani has suppressed. Perhaps she has played the formidable roles of the angry and the furious, ‘avenging women’ for too long. Vasantha who studied ‘true crime’ deeply, also astutely showed us through Swarna as a mature woman in Kadapathaka Chaya, where the relentless pursuit of ‘REVENGE’ can lead an individual. And we see its results at a national scale in these eras of terror. In this process of taking stock, Swarna might also think a little about Rukmani Devi and perhaps hunt down the booklet she had written called Mage Jivitha Vitti. ‘Vitti is different from ‘Jivitha Kathava’. In this way she just might begin to understand deeply, affectively, as only an actor worthy of that name can, the reserve, dignity, grace, lightness, joy and yes, the sense of theatre, with which Dr Manorani Saravanmuttu and Rukmani Devi faced the many ‘slings and arrows of outrageous fortune’ as professional women of Lanka who were also Tamil. (Concluded)

by Laleen Jayamanne

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A piece of home at Sri Lankan Musical Night in Dubai

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The much-anticipated Sri Lankan Musical Night was held recently in the heart of Downtown Dubai, at the Millennium Plaza Hotel.

Reports indicate that the venue was transformed into a vibrant enclave of Sri Lankan culture, unifying the power of music and the enduring spirit of the Sri Lankan diaspora.

The band DOCTOR, from Sri Lanka, was very much in the spotlight, blending traditional Sri Lankan melodies with contemporary rhythms, evoking nostalgia and delight among the audience.

In addition to Lanthra Perera’s vibrant performance, the supporting artiste, too, made it a happening scene with their energetic and exciting vocals; Sajitha Anthony, I’m told, mesmerised the audience with his soulful voice; Rajiv Sebastian, a crowd favourite, both here and abroad, displayed his professionalism and energetic presence on stage; Nushika Fernando’s captivating act was widely applauded. Sudewa Hettiarachchi did the needful as compere.

Sri Lankan Musical Night was organised by DJMC Events in collaboration with Event partners Chaminda De Silva and Romesh Ramachandran.

The band DOCTOR

DJMC Events Chairman Dunstan Rozario’s vision and dedication were vividly evident in every aspect of this show. His passion for creating cultural platforms that unite communities through entertainment resonated throughout the evening, setting the tone for an event dedicated to unity and celebration.

Beyond the musical performances, the occasion served as a dynamic gathering for the Sri Lankan community in the UAE. Attendees, from long-time expatriates to recent arrivals, found common ground in shared songs and stories, creating an atmosphere imbued with warmth and belonging.

Feedback from attendees was overwhelmingly positive, with widespread enthusiasm for more culturally enriching events in the future. One attendee aptly captured the essence of the evening, stating, “Tonight, we didn’t just listen to music; we felt a piece of home.”

DJMC Events plans to build on this momentum, further promoting Sri Lankan culture in the UAE and internationally.

Plans are already being laid out for future happenings to celebrate and preserve Sri Lanka’s rich cultural heritage.

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