by Jehan Perera

President Anura Kumara Dissanayake is showing the change for the better that a single individual can bring by challenging old ways of doing things by those who have traditionally governed the country.  According to the news media and first person accounts by reliable commentators contacted in Jaffna, the president’s visit to the Jaffna peninsula last week was a resounding success that is good for the unity of the country. It seems that the president timed his visit to the north in the context of forthcoming local government elections that are anticipated to be held in April.

The focus on Jaffna during his visit would have been the central place that Jaffna has as the civilisational seat of the Tamil people.  The president used the time he had allocated to Jaffna to pay his last respects to former parliamentarian and leader of ITAK (Federal Party) who had, for decades, been at the forefront of the Tamil struggle for regional self-government, devolution of power and equal rights.  He also had the confidence to go to Valvettithurai which was the birthplace of the late LTTE leader Velupillai Prabakaran and conduct a public meeting there.

 The president’s visit took place without the usual high security in which large numbers of soldiers would be placed at strategic locations not only in the areas that the president would be visiting but also on the approach roads to Jaffna.  Residents observed that the security presence appeared to be low in comparison to the past, when roads would be closed and security personnel stationed on a 24-hour basis on the roads in residential areas. The reduced level of security demonstrated the president’s trust in the goodwill of the people.  During his visit he mingled at close quarters with the people, being embraced and having his photographs taken with them.

 EVERYDAY FOCUS

 Addressing the people, President Dissanayake promised to bring development to Jaffna.  In the year prior to the onset of fierce fighting in Jaffna that destroyed its housing and factories, Jaffna had a handful of industries, chief amongst them being the salterns in Paranthan and the cement factory at Kankesanthurai.  The president pledged to rebuild these industries and to establish three new industrial zones in Paranthan, Mankulam, and Kankesanthurai to boost employment and economic growth. Sri Lankans who emigrated due to the war were invited to invest in these projects.

 The president also used the occasion of his visit to present an analysis of the reasons for the ethnic conflict the country had experienced.  He said that previous generations of politicians had used ethnic nationalism as a means to win elections and this had resulted in the division of people into different communities that did not trust each other.  However, the last general election that had brought the NPP to power had seen the people reject the traditional political leaders who came from elite families.  Instead, they had voted for the NPP regardless of ethnicity, religion or region.  The president pointed out that this was a new development.

 The general election in December last year saw the NPP win the majority of parliamentary seats in the north and east which have traditionally voted for Tamil political parties which take up an ethnic Tamil nationalist line.  The main issues they have canvassed have been Tamil equality and self-rule in the north and east.  However, those parties have never been able to deliver on the mandates they received at elections.  Some of the Tamil parties reached agreements with the ruling parties of those days, but were invariably let down.  The president’s focus on the everyday problems of the people would be important in inducing them to vote for the NPP at the forthcoming local government elections.

UNHRC RESOLUTION 

It is worth noting that President Dissanayake made a positive impact on the people of Jaffna even though he did not address the issues of Tamil nationalism and self-rule that have preoccupied them in the past.  The fact that the forthcoming elections are local level ones also reduces the significance of national issues.  Local government elections the world over are about local level issues rather than national ones.  In his public speeches the president spoke about providing jobs to unemployed university graduates from the 30,000 vacancies in state institutions.  He stated that Tamil speaking police officers would be recruited.  He also referred to improving the water supply schemes to the people of the north, making the observation that they had the lowest consumption of piped drinking water in the country

The president would be aware that whatever concession he makes to Tamil nationalism will be seized upon by his political opponents in the south of the country to fan Sinhalese nationalism. There are indications that the former ruling parties that got defeated at the last presidential and general elections are seeking to make a comeback by coalescing with one another. Their concern about the present political developments would have been increased by the president’s statements in Jaffna that the government would not permit the self-seeking traditional political elites to divide the people anymore and that they will be held accountable before the law for corruption they have engaged in.

 The president’s analysis in Jaffna that ethnic nationalism was used by rival political parties to obtain electoral support to prevail at elections is an accurate one.  However, the underlying issues that the ethnic nationalist politicians utilised to come to power need to be dealt with in a way that is mutually accepted by all communities.  Sri Lanka is still in a post-war situation where there is no more war. But the causes and consequences of the war still remain unresolved in the form of missing persons, long term prisoners, land that is under military occupation and the continuing high military presence in the north and east of the country.

Sri Lanka now needs to become a post-conflict society. This requires that the issues of the war that continue to unresolved be dealt with without further delay. This is what the UNHRC resolutions in Geneva that come up time and time again are about.  There have been 16 IMF agreements in the past but not a single government could implement them to the end. It appears that the present government is determined to go the course to get Sri Lanka onto a sound economic footing. In the case of the ethnic conflict there have been many political solutions proposed to politically resolve the ethnic conflict. But no government has had the strength or conviction to take them forward and ensure sustainable national unity.   Perhaps government led by President Dissanayake will.

by Laleen Jayamanne and Namika Raby
(Part I of this article appeared in The Island on Friday (31 Jan.)

Women’s Mental Health: Trance/Dance in Folk Rituals

The lecture Namika heard on ‘pregnancy cravings’ (dola duka) among peasant women in a particular village, is one of Gananath’s earliest pieces of research which shows his turn of mind, originality, in taking seriously a compelling female desire which may not have been treated in the scholarly arena with the gravity and seriousness that it warranted. I associate a certain sense of cultural embarrassment on hearing the term ‘dola duka’ in Sinhala back in the day when a pregnant relative of mine craved to eat pieces from a freshly baked (navun) clay pot with its special fragrance. The film shows Gananath’s empathetic ability to pay careful ethnographic attention to a variety of gendered states of mental distress and trauma and their traditional ritualised ecstatic expressions, especially with regard to women, well before some feminist scholars in the West began to be interested in the topic of ‘Women and Madness’ from a Freudian psychoanalytic perspective. Psychoanalytic theory became methodologically important for Feminist Film Theory, which I used in my doctoral thesis on ‘Female Representation in the Lankan cinema’.

A sequence in Dimuthu’s film focuses on the subject of Gananath’s book Medusa’s Hair: An Essay on Personal Symbols and Religious Experience, which is a case history of an old woman called Karunawathi Maniyo (mother). She appears with her thickly matted, long snake-like grey locks which, we are told, were created by her as a mode of existence, entailing a ritualised daily practice of puja at an altar, with images of the fierce Kali with fangs and Durga Ashuramardani (a divine figure of combat capable of violence and great power), to express and assuage her mental distress. However, I did not see an image of Pattini, the ‘good mother’, on her altar.

It is worth noting that both Kali and Durga are not maternal figures and though they were incorporated into the Brahminical Hinduism, they have no consorts and were in origin folk goddesses, according to the historian of ancient India, D. D. Kosambi. It is worth remembering that the first feminist press in English, in India was called ‘Kali for Women’! There is here an evident externalisation of an unusual desire, intelligible within Karunawathi Manio’s social class/group and as such, acceptance of her idiosyncratic behaviour and appearance. It is impossible to imagine such a Medusa-like scary treatment of hair in a middle-class milieu.

Again, there are images of a possessed young woman, Nawala Maniyo, who participates in an exorcist ritual in a trance, eyes glistening between strands of her long tresses masking her face. This reminds me of Gananath’s extraordinarily gripping Case Study, ‘Psycho-Cultural Exegesis of a Case of Spirit Possession in Sri Lanka,’ which we dramatised for the soundtrack of my film A Song of Ceylon (Australian Film Commission, Sydney: 1985). Again, as an ethnographer he demonstrates how the Sinhala-Buddhist folk culture provided symbolic means of collective, public, theatricalised, somatic, expression of profound individual trauma registered in the unconscious of the young possessed woman, Somawathi, and the therapeutic value of these public, social forms of physical expression.

In the early 20^th Century Vienna, the Neurologist Sigmund Freud treated young bourgeoise female patients suffering from a new pathology named ‘Hysteria,’ which in turn led him to postulate a theory of the Unconscious and to develop his ‘Talking Cure’ through ‘free-association’, to assuage mental pain. This however was in a privatised and personalised setting in his study; the female patient lying down on a couch speaking in a ‘stream of consciousness’ mode, with Dr Freud as the silent listener, his gaze averted. Freud’s case studies of these patients are also gripping reading, like a 19^th Century novel, and they are also ‘ethnographic’ psychoanalytic interpretations of the pathology named Hysteria, a new medical category which entered the Diagnostic Manual.

A portrait sculpture of Prof. Gananath Obeysekera by Prof. Sarath Chandrajueewa

In contrast, while deeply interested and trained in psychoanalytic theory and methodology at the University of Washington, Seattle, by European specialists, Gananath appreciated and powerfully theorised the public, social nature of Exorcist Rituals (Bali Thovil) and other such therapeutic practices.

Further, he showed how the rituals, based on folk beliefs, were imaginative, performative public events with an ‘audience’ participating in them and their importance as witnesses, for the cure. In these, the female ‘patient’ or woman possessed of demons danced to drum beats in ecstatic trance, resisting through spirited dialogue, the Exorcist (Kattadirala), who embodied patriarchal authority and even physical violence. In these rituals the possessed woman is given a public arena to play (dance) in, and while the ritual has a familiar cultural ‘script’ so to speak, the possessed woman has every chance to improvise and play as she desires or as the demons (all male) possessing her desire.

It is clear through this work that, contra psychoanalysis, the unconscious is not structured like a language and the repressed is insighted to find expression through trance-dance and vocal expression which go against traditional notions of femininity. In ecstatic states the patient is animated by drum beats that touch her nervous system directly and thus the entire body, revealing deep registers of affective trauma, that a purely static, talking cure (while lying down on, what became, that famous couch, now preserved in the Freud Museum in London) could not possibly do.

Dimuthu brings all this out lucidly, not only with the questions he poses to Gananath but also by placing the relevant photographs or clips within the interview sequences themselves. This montage technique of placing carefully chosen stills and clips from Gananath’s very extensive ethnographic archive, interspersed with the ‘Talking Heads’ interviews, makes the film very lively and watchable. It also teaches us something about the complex theoretical ideas Gananath worked with in an accessible way because of his powers of ‘scientific’ rigorous ethnographic observation, tempered by a Buddhist Humanist empathy and engaging style of writing so rare in scholarship.

Perhaps the film would encourage young scholars to read Gananath’s writing as Dimuthu did even before he entered the University. And I hope it encourages the translation of at least some of his major work. The film is significant in this sense, too, because Gananath did not accept the orthodoxy in his field and questioned received methodologies and theories. His critical mind is truly dazzling in its generosity of spirit and sense of curiosity even so late in his retirement. We hear him say, ‘Even now (then in his 80s, soon to be 95!), I am learning something new every day in the Uva-Wellassa area’ and exhorts us also to make that a goal. Yes, let’s!

Gananath’s use of the idea of the unconscious, via Freudian Psychoanalysis, in his ethnographic theorisation of rituals was enabling methodologically. It provided a key theoretical concept for understanding the actions performed by men and women under immense mental and physical duress, which went against the mandated gender norms of the traditional culture. I remember in the 1980s how Gananath was severely criticised by Marxists for ‘indulging in and validating superstitious folk beliefs and practices’ among the so called, ‘ignorant peasantry’.

The whole nexus of folk beliefs and cultural practices, including aspects of Hinduism, and their integral articulation with Buddhism, practiced as a popular religion with rituals and dramatic enactments by these rural communities was dismissed in a simplistic rationalist critique, as myth, hence false. But what has survived time, as an anthropologically cogent theoretical analysis based on meticulous, imaginative ethnographic work, is Gananath’s central argument about the hybrid, generous, inclusive nature of Buddhism as a religion, practiced in the robust, open folk traditions, by the peasantry. Dinidu gives considerable time to Dr Kumudu Kusum Kumara, who explains Gananath’s very detailed, complex argument and research with clarity and imagination in the film.

Buddhist Humanism or ‘Protestant Buddhism’

Kumudu explains the significance of Gananath’s formulation of the concept of ‘Protestant Buddhism’ introduced by the Theosophist Colonel Olcott in the 19^th Century, who schooled the Buddhist revivalist Anagarika Dharmapala in constituting a Sinhala-Buddhist Catechism based on the Thripitakaya (the canonical Buddhist text), fit for school children in Daham Pasal modelled on Sunday School for Christian kids. He explains how this was a rationalising, westernising move, following Max Weber’s thinking here. Gananath’s brilliant coinage ‘Protestant Buddhism’, which was also strongly aligned with the Nationalist Anti-Colonial Movement, rationalised religious practices making them exclusive. A Victorian-English-Protestant-Puritanism thus entered Buddhism in Lanka, making it more akin to Protestantism in Europe which had a very severe moral code. Thereby the inclusive flexibility of the Buddhist folk tradition with its humour and sense of play, is lost along with, crucially, the story-telling tradition based on the Jataka Tales of the Buddha’s many rebirths, parables about ethical behaviour towards all living beings.

With this loss, we are told, the tradition of Buddhist Humanism, with its values of compassion as exemplified in these stories teaming with natural life and animals, too, also disappeared. Further, through this loss the ethical values nurturing and sustaining ‘a Buddhist Conscience’ were also lost, he argues. We are shown (via images), how the painterly folk tradition in Temple Murals and the literary sources, song, poetry (kavi), trance-dance, drumming, dramatic enactments within the folk traditions (as distinct from the official chronicles of the Mahavamsa and Deepawams), offered an alternative vision of Buddhism as practiced by the peasantry.

We learn that in the folk tradition Dutthagamini repented killing Elare the Tamil king and conscience struck, he attempted reparation and contrition, unlike the patricidal king Kashyapa who escaped into a hedonist life in the rock fortress of Sigiriya. Kumudu says that Gananath argued his case by reading the folk archive, of images on Temple walls and anonymous folk texts (Panthis Kolmura, a large corpus of 35 long poems, some of which he translated and also sang, Kadaym poth or Boundry texts and Vitti poth or Event books), which were authorless and title less work of the people, for the people and by the people. The film helps us to understand that it is this folk tradition, cultivating empathy and an ethical conscience, a capacity to be contrite, that has been lost within the post-independent ethno-nationalist version of official Protestant-Sinhala-Buddhism, with state patronage. This imported ideology of the English speaking coloniser is then presented as the ‘pure original Buddhism’ shorn of local superstition, hybrid folk tales and beliefs and rituals, rejected as ‘unBuddhist’. Indologists in turn supported this rationalising move of creating a ‘pure, original Buddhism’.

A Case Study

Kareem, a young Muslim man hangs on hooks (attached to a swing-like structure on wheels in a religious procession), as penance at the Kataragama Hindu festival and is also seen dancing in a trance. Gananath explains in his Case Study of Kareem that he was imprisoned in 1961 for assisting in the Army Coup against the Government. One wonders how a humble young Muslim cook got caught up in and imprisoned for a foolish Coup staged by a select group of English-speaking bourgeois gentlemen of Colombo, who were all high up in the armed forces of that era. Daughters of three of these officials who were arrested and served sentences were close friends of mine in school during this time, which heightens a sense of the absurdity of this poor man’s plight. Gananath’s case study of his childhood revealed an authoritarian paternal figure who instilled fear in him. However, he seemed serene and happy in the photographs taken with Gananath after the ritual and even when swinging from the ritual hooks.

Here, I would like to cite Arjun Appadurai’s review of Gananath’s magnum opus, The Cult of the Goddess Pattini because it is not readily available to those outside the academy.

“This is a book of unusual scope, quality, and scholarly significance. Ostensibly a description and analysis of a single cult in Sri Lanka, it is in fact a major symbolic, psychological, and ethno-historical study of practical religion in Sri Lanka, and of the relationship of that island to Indic culture and society. It is the product of two decades of field research by Sri Lanka’s most distinguished anthropological interpreter, and its combination of textual analysis, ethnographic sensitivity, and methodological catholicity makes it something of a blockbuster”.

Dimuthu informed me that Gananath studied six different traditions of the Pattini Cult, starting in the 1950s. Dimuthu and his research team went looking for the priests of each of these traditions named in his book and found that they had died but they did meet a student of Yahonis Pattini Mahattaya of the Rabaliya tradition and of Podi Mahaththaya, H. D. Edwin Pattini Mahatthaya, who is now the only living informant of Gananath’s Pattini research. Edwin Pattini Mahattaya performed aspects of the Pattini Cult for Gananath at his request for the sake of photo documenting it for his book. His son Tilak is seen dancing as Pattini in the Dimuthu’s film. Seeing him becoming Pattini (after his ritual investiture), even in an all too short clip, is among the high points of this film for me, because we see a profound metamorphosis of this young male ritual dancer into a female archetype, Pattini, the only Mother goddess of Lanka, in an inspired rhythmic play with codes of gender and beyond to reach an ecstatic body and spirit – words fail me. What we can also see is the profound gestural, rhythmic, spiritual transmission of this syncretic tradition across generations, across the abyss of death itself.

Pattini’s origins are in Kannagi, a heroic human figure from the Tamil Epic Silappadikaram, who is worshiped as a mother goddess, Kannagi-Amman, in India and in the East coast of Lanka by Tamils who still observe matrilineal descent (a system of tracing kinship through a person’s female ancestors), according to Gananath. The significance of this for gender and family relationships would be of particular interest to feminists. There is a large modern Bronze statue celebrating Kannagi in Chennai, India and colourful plaster ones and paintings in Hindu temples in Lanka, seen carrying her iconic anklet. (To be concluded)

International Theatre Festival of India
In Collaboration with
Swami Vivekananda Cultural Centre, Colombo
University of Visual and Performing Arts, Colombo 6-9 February 2025
Tower Hall Theatre, Colombo
Panibharatha Theatre, UVPA Colombo

by Saumya Liyanage

Bharath Rang Mahothsav (BRM) is one of the foremost theatre festivals in the world. It is an annual theatre festival organised by the National School of Drama, popularly known BRM India. This year BRM is taking place in the month of February with the diverse theatre groups and productions representing various regions and countries in India and the World.

For the first time in the history of BRM, National School of Drama has extended its theatre festivals to other regions and has decided to showcase two of their NSD repertory productions in Sri Lanka and Nepal. With the collaboration of the University of Visual and Performing Arts Colombo, and the Swami Vivekananda Cultural Centre, Colombo, two theatre productions, namely, Tajmahel Ka Tender and Babuji produced by the NSD repertory theatre company along with the two Sri Lankan selections for BRM 2025, Sindu Kirilli 2 (Veronica Returns) by Buddhika Damayantha and Romeo and Juliet by Jayanath Bandara will be staged at Tower Hall and Panibharatha theatre, UVPA Colombo on the 6-9 February 2025.

Taj Mahal Ka Tender is a hilarious story about the construction of the famous Taj Mahal monument and it is a story told in a style of a traditional poetry and drama. According to the production notes, the play is about the construction of Taj Mahal and its bureaucratic process leading to many hilarious situations and calamities. This bureaucratic procedure takes 25 years to float the tender notice of Taj Mahal.

The playwright of the Taj Mahal ka Tender is Ajay Shukla, a graduate from the Lucknow University India and is an award-winning poet and a playwright in the Indian contemporary theatre. Ajay Shukla received Sahithya Kala Parishad award for this play, Taj mahal Ka Tender in 1997.

Taj Mahal Ka Tender is directed by Chittaranjan Tripathi, the director of the National School of Drama New Delhi, India. Tripathi has MA in Sociology at University of Hyderabad, India and is a graduate from the National School of Drama, New Delhi India, specialiing in Acting. He has obtained his Sangeeth Visharad in Oddissi vocal from Prachin Kala Kendra, Chandigarh and is a recipient of the prestigious Charles Wallas Fellowship to study at the Department of Music, Guilford School of Acting,

Guilford, UK. He is a practicing director, writer, actor and musician in the field of theatre and has directed many theatre productions for various theatre groups and repertory companies.

Taj Mahal Ka Tender will be staged at Tower Hall Theatre Maradana on the 6th of February, 2025, at 6.30 pm.

Babuji, an NSD repertory production encapsulates a story of the fate of a traditional artist, his struggle to survive in the midst of his own personal family life and his art. The main protagonist is an artist who is struggling to maintain his integrity in arts and also to his family responsibilities.

His fondness in folk dance like Nautanki and his struggle to maintain the balance between his artistic journey and the family life finally comes to a tragic end. This play is dedicated to one of the eminent theatre personalities in Indian Theatre, Babukodi Venkataramana Karanth. Karanth is one of the most celebrated theatre practitioners in the contemporary Indian theatre.

He has served as the director of the NSD between 1977 and 1981 and has composed music for many theatre productions ranging from folk theatre to contemporary productions. Karanth has received many prestigious national accolades including Padmashree, Kalidasas Samman, Sangeeth Natak Academy, and Amritlal Nagar. NSD repertory production, Babuji will be staged at Tower Hall theatre on the 7th of Feb 2025 at 6.30 pm.

This year, two Sri Lankan plays have also been selected for Bharath Rang Mahothsav. A play, Sindu Kirilli 2 (Veronica Returns) directed by Sri Lankan award winning director, Buddhika Damayantha and Romeo Juliet Written by William Shakespeare and directed by award winning actor Jayanath Bandara will be staged at Panibharatha theatre, University of the Visual and Performing Arts on the 8th and 9th of Feb at 6.30 pm. Sindu Kirilli 2 (Veronica Returns) is a translation of the play, Coming Home by renowned South African playwright and director, Athol Fugard.

Babuji

Romeo Juliet, a well-known masterpiece by William Shakespeare, is translated by Vindya Harankaha. The production is a debut directorial intervention of Jayanath Bandara. Both Sri Lankan plays will be staged at Bharath Rang Mahothsav in India and the two theatre groups will return to Sri Lanka in order to take part in the parallel festival In Colombo.

As Jepson and Clarke assert community festivals are more important activities for the world today as the austerity measures are imposed on societies due to economic recession and calamities. They further argue that ‘festivals offer all stakeholders an opportunity to ‘celebrate community values, ideologies, identity and continuity’ (ibid.). As a social cultural phenomenon festivals can be seen as prime manifestations of the experience economy (Pine & Gilmore, 1999) as they entertain, educate, hold aesthetic value and provide the platform for escapism. Farber (1983, cited in Getz, 1991) investigated festivals and public celebrations and learned much about a community’s symbolic, economic, political and social life’ (Jepson and Clarke, 2014, p.3). As a society, and as a university community, it is important for us to re-establish these symbolic social values, communal essences and empathic projection to engage with each other which has been a vital ingredient in the democratic sphere of the society.

The UVPA as a premier university for creative and performing arts, it is vital for its teaching and learning communities to explore various communal engagements through festivities and other social activities. This allows the students and academics to deepen their creative insights through engaging with professional artists and communities. Particularly the faculty of dance and drama, encapsulates various degree programmes ranging from traditional dance drama to theatre and ballet. The undergraduates who pursue their degree programmes learn traditional dance drama, contemporary dance, Ballet, theatre and film acting, playwriting and directing, scenography, set designing and makeup in their curricula. This opportunity opens up avenues for students and academics to experience how professional theatres work in the region and also how the cultural industries are a part of the economic growth of a country.

Tickets, priced at Rs. 1,000, Rs. 500 and Rs 300 are available at Tower Hall Theatre and Panibharatha Theatre, University of Visual and Performing Arts from 30 Jan 2025 onwards.

(The writer is Professor in Theatre and Drama, Dept. of Theatre Ballet and Modern Dance Faculty of Dance and Drama University of the Visual and Performing Arts (UVPA), Director, Social Reconciliation Centre, UVPA Colombo, Editor in Chief, Journal of Visual and Performing Arts – Sri Lanka (JOVPA_SL) ISSN 2651-0286, University of the Visual and Performing Arts – Colombo, Sri Lanka jovpasl@vpa.ac.lk, and Member – Research & Innovation Committee (RIC) Association of Universities of Asia and the Pacific.)

Reference Jepson, A., & Clarke, A. (2014). Defining and exploring community festivals and events. In Exploring community festivals and events (pp. 1-13). Routledge.