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

Year ends with the NPP govt. on the back foot

Published

2 days ago

2025/12/24

Sahan Weerasooriya

President Dissanayake addresses Parliament as PM Dr. Harini Amarasuriya looks on. Dissanayake is the leader of both the JVP and NPP

The failure on the part of the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP)-led National People’s Power (NPP) government to fulfil a plethora of promises given in the run up to the last presidential election, in September, 2024, and a series of incidents, including cases of corruption, and embarrassing failure to act on a specific weather alert, ahead of Cyclone Ditwah, had undermined the administration beyond measure.

Ditwah dealt a knockout blow to the arrogant and cocky NPP. If the ruling party consented to the Opposition proposal for a Parliamentary Select Committee (PSC) to probe the events leading to the November 27 cyclone, the disclosure would be catastrophic, even for the all-powerful Executive President Anura Kumara Dissanayake, as responsible government bodies, like the Disaster Management Centre that horribly failed in its duty, and the Met Department that alerted about the developing storm, but the government did not heed its timely warnings, directly come under his purview.

The NPP is on the back foot and struggling to cope up with the rapidly developing situation. In spite of having both executive presidency and an overwhelming 2/3 majority in Parliament, the government seems to be weak and in total disarray.

The regular appearance of President Dissanayake in Parliament, who usually respond deftly to criticism, thereby defending his parliamentary group, obviously failed to make an impression. Overall, the top NPP leadership appeared to have caused irreparable damage to the NPP and taken the shine out of two glorious electoral victories at the last presidential and parliamentary polls held in September and November 2024 respectively.

The NPP has deteriorated, both in and out of Parliament. The performance of the 159-member NPP parliamentary group, led by Prime Minister Dr. Harini Amarasuriya, doesn’t reflect the actual situation on the ground or the developing political environment.

Having repeatedly boasted of its commitment to bring about good governance and accountability, the current dispensation proved in style that it is definitely not different from the previous lots or even worse. (The recent arrest of a policeman who claimed of being assaulted by a gang, led by an NPP MP, emphasised that so-called system change is nothing but a farce) In the run-up to the November, 2024, parliamentary polls, President Dissanayake, who is the leader of both the JVP and NPP, declared that the House should be filled with only NPPers as other political parties were corrupt. Dissanayake cited the Parliament defeating the no-confidence motions filed against Ravi Karunanayake (2016/over Treasury Bond scams) and Keheliya Rambukwella (2023/against health sector corruption) to promote his argument. However, recently the ongoing controversy over patient deaths, allegedly blamed on the administration of Ondansetron injections, exposed the government.

Mounting concerns over drug safety and regulatory oversight triggered strong calls from medical professionals, and trade unions, for the resignation of senior officials at the National Medicines Regulatory Authority (NMRA) and the State Pharmaceutical Corporation (SPC).

Medical and civil rights groups declared that the incident exposed deep systemic failures in Sri Lanka’s drug regulatory framework, with critics warning that the collapse of quality assurance mechanisms is placing patients’ lives at grave risk.

The Medical and Civil Rights Professional Association of Doctors (MCRPA), and allied trade unions, accused health authorities of gross negligence and demanded the immediate resignation of senior NMRA and SPC officials.

MCRPA President Dr. Chamal Sanjeewa is on record as having said that the Health Ministry, NMRA and SPC had collectively failed to ensure patient safety, citing, what he described as, a failed drug regulatory system.

The controversy has taken an unexpected turn with some alleging that the NPP government, on behalf of Sri Lanka and India, in April this year, entered into an agreement whereby the former agreed to lower quality/standards of medicine imports.

Trouble begins with Ranwala’s resignation

The NPP suffered a humiliating setback when its National List MP Asoka Ranwala had to resign from the post of Speaker on 13 December, 2024, following intense controversy over his educational qualification. The petroleum sector trade union leader served as the Speaker for a period of three weeks and his resignation shook the party. Ranwala, first time entrant to Parliament was one of the 18 NPP National List appointees out of a total of 29. The Parliament consists of 196 elected and 29 appointed members. Since the introduction of the National List, in 1989, there had never been an occasion where one party secured 18 slots.

The JVP/NPP made an initial bid to defend Ranwala but quickly gave it up and got him to resign amidst media furor. Ranwala dominated the social media as political rivals exploited the controversy over his claimed doctorate from the Waseda University of Japan, which he has failed to prove to this day. But, the JVP/NPP had to suffer a second time as a result of Ranwala’s antics when he caused injuries to three persons, including a child, on 11 December, in the Sapugaskanda police area.

The NPP made a pathetic, UNP and SLFP style effort to save the parliamentarian by blaming the Sapugaskanda police for not promptly subjecting him for a drunk driving test. The declaration made by the Government Analyst Department that the parliamentarian hadn’t been drunk at the time of the accident, several days after the accident, does not make any difference. Having experienced the wrongdoing of successive previous governments, the public, regardless of what various interested parties propagated on social media, realise that the government is making a disgraceful bid to cover-up.

No less a person than President Dissanayake is on record as having said that their members do not consume liquor. Let us wait for the outcome of the internal investigation into the lapses on the part of the Sapugaskanda police with regard to the accident that happened near Denimulla Junction, in Sapugaskanda.

JVP/NPP bigwigs obviously hadn’t learnt from the Weligama W 15 hotel attack in December, 2023, that ruined President Ranil Wickremeinghe’s administration. That incident exposed the direct nexus between the government and the police in carrying out Mafia-style operations. Although the two incidents cannot be compared as the circumstances differ, there is a similarity. Initially, police headquarters represented the interests of the wrongdoers, while President Wickremesinghe bent over backwards to retain the man who dispatched the CCD (Colombo Crime Division) team to Weligama, as the IGP. The UNP leader went to the extent of speaking to Chief Justice Jayantha Jayasuriya, PC, and Speaker Mahinda Yapa Abeywardena to push his agenda. There is no dispute the then Public Security Minister Tiran Alles wanted Deshabandu Tennakoon as IGP, regardless of a spate of accusations against him, in addition to him being faulted by the Supreme Court in a high-profile fundamental rights application.

The JVP/NPP must have realised that though the Opposition remained disorganised and ineffective, thanks to the media, particularly social media, a case of transgression, if not addressed swiftly and properly, can develop into a crisis. Action taken by the government to protect Ranwala is a case in point. Government leaders must have heaved a sigh of relief as Ranwala is no longer the Speaker when he drove a jeep recklessly and collided with a motorcycle and a car.

Major cases, key developments

Instead of addressing public concerns, the government sought to suppress the truth by manipulating and exploiting developments

* The release of 323 containers from the Colombo Port, in January 2025, is a case in point. The issue at hand is whether the powers that be took advantage of the port congestion to clear ‘red-flagged’ containers.

Although the Customs repeatedly declared that they did nothing wrong and such releases were resorted even during Ranil Wickremesinghe’s presidency (July 2022 to September 2024), the public won’t buy that. Container issue remains a mystery. That controversy eroded public confidence in the NPP that vowed 100 percent transparency in all its dealings. But the way the current dispensation handled the Port congestion proved that transparency must be the last thing in the minds of the JVPers/NPPers holding office.

* The JVP/NPP’s much touted all-out anti-corruption stand suffered a debilitating blow over their failure to finalise the appointment of a new Auditor General. In spite of the Opposition, the civil society, and the media, vigorously taking up this issue, the government continued to hold up the appointment by irresponsibly pushing for an appointment acceptable to President Dissanayake. The JVP/NPP is certainly pursuing a strategy contrary to what it preached while in the Opposition and found fault with successive governments for trying to manipulate the AG. It would be pertinent to mention that President Dissanayake should accept the responsibility for the inordinate delay in proposing a suitable person to that position. The government failed to get the approval of the Constitutional Council more than once to install a favourite of theirs in it, thanks to the forthright position taken by its civil society representatives.

The government should be ashamed of its disgraceful effort to bring the Office of the Auditor General under its thumb:

* The JVP/NPP government’s hotly disputed decision to procure 1,775 brand-new double cab pickup trucks, at a staggering cost exceeding Rs. 12,500 mn, under controversial circumstances, exposed the duplicity of that party that painted all other political parties black. Would the government rethink the double cab deal, especially in the wake of economic ruination caused by Cyclone Ditwah? The top leadership seems to be determined to proceed with their original plans, regardless of immeasurable losses caused by Cyclone Ditwah. Post-cyclone efforts still remain at a nascent stage with the government putting on a brave face. The top leadership has turned a blind eye to the overwhelming challenge in getting the country back on track especially against the backdrop of its agreement with the IMF.

Post-Cyclone Ditwah recovery process is going to be slow and extremely painful. Unfortunately, both the government and the Opposition are hell-bent on exploiting the miserable conditions experienced by its hapless victims. The government is yet to acknowledge that it could have faced the crisis much better if it acted on the warning issued by Met Department Chief Athula Karunanayake on 12 November, two weeks before the cyclone struck.

Foreign policy dilemma

Sri Lanka moved further closer to India and the US this year as President Dissanayake entered into several new agreements with them. In spite of criticism, seven Memorandums of Understanding (MoUs), including one on defence, remains confidential. What are they hiding?

Within weeks after signing of the seven MoUs, India bought the controlling interests in the Colombo Dockyard Limited for USD 52 mn.

Although some Opposition members, representing the SJB, raised the issue, their leader Sajith Premadasa, during a subsequent visit to New Delhi, indicated he wouldn’t, under any circumstances, raise such a contentious issue.

Premadasa went a step further. The SJB leader assured his unwavering commitment to the full implementation of the 13th Amendment to the Constitution that was forced on Sri Lanka during President JRJ’s administration, under the highly questionable Indo-Lanka Accord of July, 1987, after the infamous parippu drop by Indian military aircraft over Jaffna, their version of the old gunboat diplomacy practiced by the West.

Both India and the US consolidated their position here further in the post-Aragalaya period. Those who felt that the JVP would be in a collision course with them must have been quite surprised by the turn of events and the way post-Aragalaya Sri Lanka leaned towards the US-India combine with not a hum from our carboard revolutionaries now installed in power. They certainly know which side of the bread is buttered. Sri Lanka’s economic deterioration, and the 2023 agreement with the IMF, had tied up the country with the US-led bloc.

In spite of India still procuring large quantities of Russian crude oil and its refusal to condemn Russia over the conflict in Ukraine, New Delhi has obviously reached consensus with the US on a long-term partnership to meet the formidable Chinese challenge. Both countries feel each other’s support is incalculably vital and indispensable.

Sri Lanka, India, and Japan, in May 2019, signed a Memorandum of Cooperation (MoC) to jointly develop the East Container Terminal (ECT) at the Colombo Port. That was during the tail end of the Yahapalana administration. The Gotabaya Rajapaksa administration wanted to take that project forward. But trade unions, spearheaded by the JVP/NPP combine, thwarted a tripartite agreement on the basis that they opposed privatisation of the Colombo Port at any level.

But, the Colombo West International Terminal (CWIT) project, that was launched in November, 2022, during Ranil Wickremesinghe’s presidency, became fully operational in April this year. The JVP revolutionary tiger has completely changed its stripes regarding foreign investments and privatisation. If the JVP remained committed to its previous strategies, India taking over CDL or CWIT would have been unrealistic.

The failure on the part of the government to reveal its stand on visits by foreign research vessels to ports here underscored the intensity of US and Indian pressure. Hope our readers remember how US and India compelled the then President Wickremesinghe to announce a one-year moratorium on such visits. In line with that decision Sri Lanka declared research vessels wouldn’t be allowed here during 2024. The NPP that succeeded Wickremesinghe’s administration in September, 2024, is yet to take a decision on foreign research vessels. What a pity?

The NPP ends the year on the back foot, struggling to cope up with daunting challenges, both domestic and external. The recent revelation of direct Indian intervention in the 2022 regime change project here along with the US underscored the gravity of the situation and developing challenges. Post-cyclone period will facilitate further Indian and US interventions for obvious reasons.

****

Perhaps one of the most debated events in 2025 was the opening of ‘City of Dreams Sri Lanka’ that included, what the investors called, a world-class casino. In spite of mega Bollywood star Shah Rukh Khan’s unexpected decision to pull out of the grand opening on 02 August, the investors went ahead with the restricted event. The Chief Guest was President Anura Kumara Dissanayake, who is also the Finance Minister, in addition to being the Defence Minister. Among the other notable invitees were Dissanayake’s predecessor Ranil Wickremesinghe, whose administration gave critical support to the high-profile project, worth over USD 1.2 bn. John Keells Holdings PLC (JKH) and Melco Resorts & Entertainment (Melco) invested in the project that also consist of the luxurious Nüwa hotel and a premium shopping mall. Who would have thought President Dissanayake’s participation, even remotely, possible, against the backdrop of his strong past public opposition to gambling of any kind?

Don’t forget ‘City of Dreams’ received a license to operate for a period of 20 years. Definitely an unprecedented situation. Although that license had been issued by the Wickremesinghe administration, the NPP, or any other political party represented in Parliament, didn’t speak publicly about that matter. Interesting, isn’t it, coming from people, still referred by influential sections of the Western media, as avowed Marxists?

By Shamindra Ferdinando

Midweek Review

The Aesthetics and the Visual Politics of an Artisanal Community

Published

2 days ago

2025/12/24

Sahan Weerasooriya

Through the Eyes of the Patua:

Organised by the Colombo Institute for Human Sciences in collaboration with Millennium Art Contemporary, an interesting and unique exhibition got underway in the latter’s gallery in Millennium City, Oruwala on 21 December 2025. The exhibition is titled, ‘Through the Eyes of the Patua: Ramayana Paintings of an Artisanal Community’ and was organized in parallel with the conference that was held on 20 December 2025 under the theme, ‘Move Your Shadow: Rediscovering Ravana, Forms of Resistance and Alternative Universes in the Tellings of the Ramayana.’ The scrolls on display at the gallery are part of the over 100 scrolls in the collection of Colombo Institute’s ‘Roma Chatterji Patua Scroll Collection.’ Prof Chatterji, who taught Sociology at University of Delhi and at present teaches at Shiv Nadar University donated the scrolls to the Colombo Institute in 2024.

The paintings on display are what might be called narrative scrolls that are often over ten feet long. Each scroll narrates a story, with separate panels pictorially depicting one component of a story. The Patuas or the Chitrakars, as they are also known, are traditionally bards. A bard will sing the story that is depicted by each scroll which is simultaneously unfurled. For Sri Lankan viewers for whom the paintings and their contexts of production and use would be unusual and unfamiliar, the best way to understand them is to consider them as a comic strip. In the case of the ongoing exhibition, since the bards or the live songs are not a part of it, the word and voice elements are missing. However, the curators have endeavoured to address this gap by displaying a series of video presentations of the songs, how they are performed and the history of the Patuas as part of the exhibition itself.

The unfamiliarity of the art on display and their histories, necessitates broader explanation. The Patua hail from Medinipur District of West Bengal in India. Essentially, this community of artisans are traditional painters and singers who compose stories based on sacred texts such as the Ramayana or Mahabharata as well as secular events that can vary from the bombing of the Twin Towers in New York in 2001 to the Indian Ocean Tsunami of 2004. Even though painted storytelling is done by a number of traditional artisan groups in India, the Patua is the only community where performers and artists belong to the same group. Hence, Professor Chatterji, in her curatorial note for the exhibition calls them “the original multi-media performers in Bengal.”

‘The story of the Patuas’ also is an account of what happens to such artisanal communities in contemporary times in South Asia more broadly even though this specific story is from India. There was a time before the 21st century when such communities were living and working across a large part of eastern India – each group with a claim to their recognizably unique style of painting. However, at the present time, this community and their vocation is limited to areas such as Medinipur, Birbhum, Purulia in West Bengal and Dumka in Jharkhand.

A pertinent question is how the scroll painters from Medinipur have survived the vagaries of time when others have not. Professor Chatterji provides an important clue when she notes that these painters, “unlike their counterparts elsewhere, are also extremely responsive to political events.” As such, “apart from a rich repertoire of stories based on myth and folklore, including the Ramayana and other epics, they have, over many years, also composed on themes that range from events of local or national significance such as boat accidents and communal violence to global events such as the tsunami and the attack on the World Trade Centre.”

There is another interesting aspect that becomes evident when one looks into the socio-cultural background of this community. As Professor Chatterji writes, “one significant feature that gives a distinct flavour to their stories is the fact that a majority of Chitrakars consider themselves to be Muslims but perform stories based largely on Hindu myths.” In this sense, their story complicates the tension-ridden dichotomies between ethno-cultural and religious groups typical of relations between groups in India as well as more broadly in South Asia, including in Sri Lanka. Prof Chatterji suggests this positionality allows the Patua to have “a truly secular voice so vital in the world that we live in today.”

As a result, she notes, contemporary Patuas “have propagated the message of communal harmony in their compositions in the context of the recent riots in India and the Gulf War. Their commentaries couched in the language of myth are profoundly symbolic and draw on a rich oral tradition of storytelling.” What is even more important is their “engagement with contemporary issues also inflects their aesthetics” because many of these painters also “experiment with novel painterly values inspired by recent interaction with new media such as comic books and with folk art forms from other parts of the country.”

From this varied repertoire of the Patuas’ painterly tradition, this exhibition focusses on scrolls portraying different aspects of the Ramayana. In North Indian and the more dominant renditions of the Ramayana, the focus is on Rama while in many alternate renditions this shifts to Ravana as typified by versions popular among the Sinhalas and Tamils in Sri Lanka as well as in some areas in several Indian states. Compared to this, the Patua renditions in the exhibition mostly illustrate the abduction of Sita with a pronounced focus on Sita and not on Ravana, the conventional antagonist or on Rama, the conventional protagonist. As a result, these two traditional male colossuses are distant. Moreover, with the focus on Sita, these folk renditions also bring to the fore other figures directly associated with her such as her sons Luv and Kush in the act of capturing Rama’s victory horse as well as Lakshmana.

Interestingly, almost as a counter narrative, which also serves as a comparison to these Ramayana scrolls, the exhibition also presents three scrolls known as ‘bin-Laden Patas’ depicting different renditions on the attack on New York’s Twin Towers.

While the painted scrolls in this collection have been exhibited thrice in India, this is the first time they are being exhibited in Sri Lanka, and it is quite likely such paintings from any community beyond Sri Lanka’s shores were not available for viewing in the country before this. Organised with no diplomatic or political affiliation and purely as a Sri Lankan cultural effort with broader South Asian interest, it is definitely worth a visit. The exhibition will run until 10 January 2026.