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Towards necessary exercise in discursive disentanglement?

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(Prof. Sasanka Perera’s recent speech as guest speaker to the National Academy of Sciences)

In present times, there is an intriguing, but at times seemingly dangerous entanglement between science, belief and state policy or government action. This kind of phenomena range from the government’s sudden ban of Glyphosate in 2015; the state sponsorship of a conference on the air power of the mythical king Ravana to the layers of stories surrounding the advent of what is now popularly known as the Dammika Peniya. These are merely three well-known phenomena from a whole series of such phenomena in the country with varying impacts on social life, politics and commerce. As a collective of occurrences with their own structure of associated events, these phenomena have not been reckoned with seriously. We have not carefully reflected upon them and asked ourselves why they are more evident now, and what their broader consequences and reasons for manifestation might be. As a result, we do not have credible sociological explanations for these phenomena that goes beyond popular rhetoric. These phenomena are seemingly dangerous too, because many of them defy what we might think of as commonsense and leads in the direction of collective chaos and counter-productive action on the part of the state. And in this journey, ‘science’ is one of the most obvious casualties.

To me, all this points to a contradictory entanglement involving science, belief, and state policy when ideally such contradictory entanglements should not take place. By ‘science’ I do not merely mean the vast systems of knowledge that originated in the west, which now have global hegemony including in our country. Instead, science is any system of knowledge “concerned with the physical world” and phenomena emanating from this world along with formal “observations and systematic experimentation.”i In other words, a “science involves a pursuit of knowledge” that covers “general truths” as well as “the operations of fundamental laws.”ii In this sense, Ayurveda, Unnani, present day engineering, allopathic medicine or any other system of formal knowledge are mostly matters of science though the bases for their fundamentals would vary considerably from the more dominant post-enlightenment sciences to much older systems of knowledge.

Similarly, by ‘belief’, I mean not only matters of faith rooted in religion and tradition but also contemporary beliefs that are created by the repetitive circulation of ideas across media whether they are based on fact and science or not. Often, these ideas address contemporary issues and politics though they might be camouflaged in a rhetoric of the past, resort to specific conventions, and identity politics. And these associations are quite important today given the propensity for fake news and the enhanced ability of people to accept these ideas easily without being formally countered.

In the same sense, ‘state policy’ and actions linked to such policies are expected to be based on formal legal principles and empirical facts, and ideally should have nothing to do with matters of faith or untested assumptions and should benefit the polity.

Generally, I consider science, belief, and state policy to be independent discourses with their own epistemological routes and purposes though there will be close and necessary interactions among these such as between science and state policy. At other times, as we are seeing now, this association can be between belief and state policy where science might be eclipsed.

My intention today is to simply place in context three recent phenomena of this kind that are structurally very similar but contextually very different, which I think would explain to some extent how this amalgamation of discourses function, and the ways in which their politics manifest. As far as I am concerned, what I have to say today are simply preliminary thoughts about which I would like to think further and theorize.

 

Phenomenon 1: Glyphosate Ban

The use of the weedicide glyphosate was banned by presidential order in 2015. In a paper published in the same year, Jayasumana, Gunatilake and Siribaddana note that people in areas where kidney disease has become endemic have been exposed to multiple heavy metals and glyphosate.iii Their conclusion as far as I could see as a non-expert, was very vague, which amounted to the following observation: “Although we could not localize a single nephrotoxin as the culprit” “multiple heavy metals and glyphosates may play a role in the pathogenesis.”iv This is one of several public articulations related to this matter that has some semblance of what I may call scientific noise, but clearly inconclusive.

The ban was quite sudden and was implemented following on the heels of intense lobbying by Member of Parliament and Presidential Advisor, Reverend Athuraliye Rathana. He argued along with his supporters that this chemical caused chronic kidney disease of unknown etiology (CKDu) in the North Central and Uva Provinces. But what is clear is no reliable and specific scientific evidence was offered by him or the President’s Office as the basis for the ban. In this overall process, it does not seem that the Registrar of Pesticides; Fertilizer Secretariat; Medical Research Institute and Tea Research Institute, all of whom could have presented valuable and more formal input into the decision were consulted. It almost seems that the ban found its genesis in the popular belief that chemicals are bad.

The fact that there is considerable prevalence of kidney disease in parts of the country is a fact, which needs to be more rigorously studied to work out its causes. Personally, I am not a supporter of excessive use of chemicals for anything including agriculture, and to the extent possible, I have made changes in my personal lifestyle to address this anxiety. But that kind of personal, emotional or popular anxieties cannot be the foundation for state level decision-making, particularly if the government and the people both subscribe to the idea of commercial agriculture and the eradication of hunger.

The consequences of the ban have been substantial in monetary terms. It caused production costs to increase substantially and the industry, particularly the tea sector, incurred losses up to 10-20 billion rupees annually while the ban lasted. Though the ban was eventually partially lifted, even at that time, no credible and conclusive data supporting the ban existed. So, it appears, that the ban was solely based on a popular and largely correct general belief of the negative impacts of chemicals, tempered by political rhetoric emanating from matters of faith and popular beliefs. I am sure we can all agree, while we can entertain popular beliefs or even conspiracy theories among people, if they are injected into broader politics and formation of state policy, that would have serious consequences as this event has shown. Part of the problem here is not only the undue credence given to freely circulating popular notions without situating them in the context of formal and reliable knowledge, information and science, but the ability of popular political leaders to convert untested ideas into practices of state policy and action without facing consequences.

 

Phenomenon 2: The State’s Embrace of Ravana

People of my generation will know that Ravana and his flying machine were merely elements in an interesting story in our youth while in some parts of the country specific local stories linked to this myth circulated. Unlike India and elsewhere in South Asia and in the east right up to Bali, there is no evidence of Ramayana performances which may have included a dramatization of the Ravana narrative in Sinhala cultural lore. But this situation has dramatically changed in recent times where Ravana’s popularity has rapidly increased among a cross section of the people, while his name and alleged historicity have also been openly embraced by the state.

By 2019, the story of Ravana had been directly appropriated by the Sri Lankan state and engrossed in a highly superficial but allegedly scientific discourse on aviation. In July 2019, Civil Aviation Authority of Sri Lankan organized a “conference of civil aviation experts, historians, archaeologists, scientists and geologists” in Katunayake.v The Authority’s Vice Chairman at the time, Shashi Danatunge told Indian media, “King Ravana was a genius. He was the first person to fly. He was an aviator. This is not mythology; it’s a fact. There needs to be a detailed research on this. In the next five years, we will prove this.”vi He further noted, “they had irrefutable facts to prove that Ravana was the pioneer and the first to fly using an aircraft.”vii The conference’s main conclusion was “that Ravana first flew from Sri Lanka to today’s India 5,000 years ago and came back.”viii Many conference participants in their own peculiar wisdom, dismissed the powerful stories narrating Ravana’s kidnapping of Lord Rama’s wife Sita, as a mere “Indian version.”ix For them, this was not possible because Ravana was a noble king.”x

Intriguingly, one part of the myth cluster became a fact while another became fiction based simply on nothing more concrete than emotional and nationalist appeal. The ideas expressed in public on this matter were not private articulations of individuals. Particularly the Vice Chairman of Civil Aviation was speaking as a representative of a state agency. Also, the general conclusions of the conference and the acceptance of the Ravana story as historical fact could simply not be entrained by formal historiography and archaeology.

 

 

By 2020, the same agency took its sense of scientificity of these claims even further by launching a research project looking for evidence of Ravana’s flying and his “aviation routes.”xi The theme of the project was, “King Ravana and the ancient domination of aerial routes now lost.”xii Towards this, the Civil Aviation Authority placed advertisements in national newspapers asking people to send in evidence they may have. The purported scientific objective and the reason for the Civil Aviation Authority’ central involvement in this state-sponsored effort was explained as follows: 1) Because the Civil Aviation Authority was “the main aviation regulatory authority in Sri Lanka,” it was the most logical entity to host such and effort, and 2) Because “there are multiple stories over the years about Ravana flying aircrafts and covering these routes” there was a necessity “to study this matter.”xiii

Though there are seemingly rational and seemingly scientific ‘noises’ in this episode, the entire exercise is enveloped in taking myth as fact, and that too, with the direct participation of the state.

Phenomenon 3: The Advent of the Dammika Peniya

Now we come to the advent of the Dammika Peniya which is formally known as ‘ශ්‍රී වීර භද්‍රධම්ම කොරෝනා නිවාරණ ප්‍රතිශක්ති ජීව පානය’ (Shri Vira Bhdradhamma Corona Nivaranana Prathishakthi Jiva Panaya). According to its inventor, Mr Dammika Bandara, the formula for the syrup was given to him by Goddess Kali in a dream. This is a crucial point in which the genesis of this syrup differs from the more formal discourses of knowledge in Ayurveda and Sinhala medicine, within which this claim is located.

It was a claim protected by rhetoric of local medical superiority, power of ancient knowledge and very loud articulations of cultural and political nationalism. But certain things need to be understood clearly. Even within the structure of faith and belief in Sinhala culture, goddess Kali, the alleged ultimate progenitor of the syrup is not known for healing. She is seen more as a powerful deity but with considerable destructive potential. More typically associated with healing is goddess Pattini. So, the claim seems to be out of place even in the context of conventional Sinhala myth and belief. Second, though Ayurveda and Sinhala medicine have associations with faith and ritual, the bulk of their formal discourses on medicine are based on experimentation, repetitive practice and fine-tuning and formally scripted knowledge or that which is handed over word of mouth across generations. My maternal grandfather wrote two books in the early 1970s after he had retired from his Ayurvedic practice and teaching. The first was called Rasayana saha Vajikarana (රසායන සහ වාජිකරණ) in which he presented a specific body of knowledge already known to his field, but with fine-tuning offered by his own practice and studies. The second, called Avinishchitha Aushada (අවිනිශ්චිත ඖෂධ) was very different. It dealt with a series of plants whose medical utility was unknown or unsure. In it, he dealt with the unknown, based on both generations of institutionalized uncertainty as well as conjecture on his part, but based on his long years of practice and observation. Both these point to the nature of the scientific discourse of contemporary Ayurveda.

Compared to this kind of background, Mr Bandara offers a set of contradictions. He is not a medical practitioner, but a mason by profession who runs a small Kali shrine in his neighborhood. However, his claim over having invented a treatment for Corona received massive publicity via media outlets supportive of the state and unreserved public support from numerous local and national political leaders including the Minister of Health and the Speaker of Parliament all of whom consumed the concoction in public along with some of their colleagues. This does not tantamount to formal state support as in the other two cases. But such open adulation and support by senior members of the government is a public performance of confidence for an untested medication with a dubious claim. These actions played a major role in ensuring large numbers of people flocking to Mr Bandara’s house in Kegalle in search of this ‘miracle’ drug – in the midst of a pandemic. This is not a general condemnation of traditional medicine. In the 1950s, the establishment of the Ayurvedic Research Institute was to offer traditional medicine a sound research and dissemination base and bring it on par with formal understanding of science. But Dammika Peniya has no such provenance; it simply came from a dream according to its inventor himself, and such provenance simply cannot be the basis for its public adulation by political leaders. Most criticisms of the concoction and its provenance were vociferously put down in public as acts of anti-nationalism and lack of respect for traditional culture. A dubious study involving several colleagues of the Wathupitiwala Hospital and a handful of test cases had taken place though it is not clear to me if this exercise even had ethical clearance. A committee consisting of medical professionals has now been appointed to undertake a clinical study of the concoction using acceptable clinical trial criteria and practices. Its results have not yet been published.

What does all this mean?

All these three incidents have several obvious things in common:

the core notions in all stories are based on popular assumptions and untested ideas;

they all have powerful political and state support directly or indirectly;

their main arguments are governed by belief whether tempered by faith or by the mere repetition of mass circulating non-facts; and

in all cases, science in the formal sense – from allopathic medicine, Ayurveda and natural sciences to archaeology and history – have been dispelled even though such input could have more sensibly impacted these discourses if they were formally made available.

Moreover, the public manifestation and power of these discourses became possible due to the very clear inability of the public services directly associated with these contexts to be guided by formally collected data and scientific conclusions and their inability to advise their political Masters, and withstand the pressures of political interference. Such political interference is obviously not based on advice from subject experts or from a clear political vision, but from short-term political agendas for popular mobilization. This main conditionality allowed these unstable claims to become part of national politics and in some cases become policy or in the very least lead to actions sanctioned by the state.

But how does one explain the massive public support especially for the last two incidents. I have noticed for many years that people in our country, and particularly the Sinhalas seem to have a desperate urge to be part of grand historical claims and narratives. But I have not yet been able to gather adequate data or theorize what might be going on. But one can tentatively make some observations. The rediscovery of Ravana and brining him from the pages of myth and epic narrative of the Ramayana to state-sponsored formal discourses of populist and non-empirical historicization, and therefore formal reiteration of myth itself shows the urge to control what might be thought of as a popular and powerful narrative of the past. The way in which Sinhalas have reinvented Ravana over the last decade or so is not only as an aviator, but also as an engineer, medical expert, inventor, scientist and scholar. And this is done within an idiom of nationalist discourse that insists a pre-Vijayan and wholly Sri Lankan civilization once existed in which Ravana is a central attraction. These claims also assert this civilization was somehow superior to the cultural landscape across the ocean in the rest of South Asia. This seems to me to be more like what anthropologists would call millenarian mythmaking where Ravana appears at least in part as a millenarian hero. Generally, millenarian stories, beliefs and heroes have to do with delivering a society from danger, introduction of new ideas and technologies to ensure the safety of a collective, and so on. Such stories generally manifest in times of crisis. In the case of the Ravana story, the preoccupation is to recreate an important place for Lanka in the broader political history of South Asia in the context of a politically unstable present.

Even the story of the Dammika Peniya has some of these millenarian features. After all, it was presented as a very local remedy for COVID 19 based on a lost Sri Lankan body of scientific knowledge delivered directly by a goddess in a dream. And that too at a time when people were desperate to be safe and keen to protect their livelihoods from the vagaries of Corona virus at a time the state’s effort at controlling it appeared to be faltering. The Peniya seemed to be a sign of miraculous deliverance from the island’s past glory emerging in the midst of its chaotic present.

To end this preliminary sketch let me refer to a final comment. It seems to me, these kinds of stories emerge in times of crises – be these emotional, social, or political crises. This is not unique to Sri Lanka, and can also be seen in many other parts of the world in structurally similar circumstances. These stories have their genesis in realms of conjecture. I am not objecting to the deployment of conjecture as such. Most good ideas in all our disciplines would often begin with conjecture. As we know, the philosophy of science has shown us the importance of “assumptions, foundations, methods” and “implications of science.”xiv Reflections in philosophy of science also indicate the efforts to distinguish between what is considered science and what is thought of as non-science.xv It is in the latter domain where untested conjecture would generally be located until they can be given a basis in science or dispelled.

In this general context, it seems to me, these stories allow people to be part of a more powerful and often a winning idea of history and hyper-real present even though that domain of belief might have very little or nothing to do with lived reality as such. Partly, these can also be seen as coping mechanisms in difficult and turbulent times. But these are clearly not remedies for very real socio-political or public health issues that can be utilized brazenly by the state as long as their core ideas remain in domains of belief and conjecture.

The collective failure that typifies our situation is the inability of many people to understand this commonsense and as a result, become dangerously entangled in the internal logic of these stories, which have no external empirical foundations except for the real-life calamities some of them might generate. It is also likely our political leaders consciously and deliberately promote these stories and phenomena to divert people’s attention from evolving crises.

In this situation, I find it unfortunate that Sri Lankan social sciences have not yet spent the time to collect these stories and study them more carefully in their border social and political contexts and offer a more coherent, empirically-based, and nuanced theoretical explanation.

(Sasanka Perera is a trained anthropologist and is a professor at South Asian University in New Delhi. This is the text of a guest lecture delivered at the Induction Ceremony of the National Academy of Sciences of Sri Lanka on 22 January 2021)



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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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