Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
From ‘Poetic Drama and Poetic Theory’ (edited by Dr. James Hogg) -
Ediriweera Sarachchandra’s’s ‘Pemato Jayathi Soko’ translated by D. M.
de Silva.
On the face of it, the plays might appear to countenance this view.
Sarachchandra’s dramatic personae are usually royal or mythical personages
and the particular situations they find themselves in might seem to have little
relevance to a modern condition. Added to this, they are given to poetic
utterance, the playwright’s characteristic idiom being the highly embellished
and un-contemporary diction of classical Singhalese poetry. Other Sinhalese
dramatists writing at the moment dramatise social problems in contemporary
terms in a partisan spirit. They quite frequently achieve theatrical success as
well as the congenial notoriety that goes with tendentious writing. But this in
no way affects the reception of the Sarachchandra plays. With no ideo- logical
bias to assure their success, they still continue - to the occasional
embarrassment of Sunday journalists - to attract and hold their audiences.
The life-history of the nation has until recently been to a great extent a history
of foreign rule.
For over four centuries Sri Lanka had known the burden of subjection to
foreign imperialisms. The Portuguese, the Dutch and the British, all three of
them Western and Christian powers, had- ruled the island in succession. The
political and economic consequences of this need no elaboration; they have
been established by the researches of the historian and the rhetoric of
politicians. It is only necessary for our purpose to notice that, all other burdens
apart, the very presence of the stranger - alien, imperial and so unconscionably
over-long in time - was of itself a grievous burden to the national psyche. It
resulted in a demoralisation more insidious and fundamentally ruinous than
economic hardship, involving a resentful feeling, often submerged but fiercely
active nonetheless, of ethnic and cultural inferiority. The road to salvation or a
restoration of national self-respect lay of course in the resentment. Its most
potent spokesman was the turn of the century religious and social reformer
In the 1920’s the Singhalese purist and social reformer Cumaratunga Munidasa
(1887-1944) tried to carry the resumptive tendency of contemporary writing to
an even greater extreme and to resuscitate an idiom from beyond the thirteenth
century. As purists always will he failed, but in his own writings and speeches
achieved the stature of a great symbolic figure of the resurgence, carrying into
the sphere of specifically cultural activity the demand of the Anagˆrika for a
new valuation of the national psyche. In his addiction to the inane boast he
showed himself an heir of the Anagˆrika whom he far outdid, as when he
insisted on the antiquity of pure Singhalese (‘Helese’) which he declared to be
‘older than the oldest of Indian languages.’ He repudiated with scorn all
suggestions of an Indo-Aryan origin for the language. "There is perhaps no
nation older than we. How can we therefore accept the theory that everything of
ours is derived from outside?"
The achievement was a difficult one, the result of long and complex striving,
and cannot properly be understood or rightly valued without an understanding
of that striving. Thus it would be useful to consider the playwright’s career in
the context of the Sinhalese theatre.
Sarachchandra had little in the form of a live tradition of drama to help him.
There had never been, as far as we know, a literary drama in the Singhalese
past. The plays of Kalidasa although they were studied, unlike his poems
provoked no imitations. Among the folk, however, towards the beginning of the
nineteenth century a species of dramatic entertainment had evolved called the
nadagam. The nadagam derived from the Roman Catholic folk plays of the
Tamils of the North of Ceylon but came among the Singhalese to occupy itself
with more secular concerns. However, it preserved in its mingling of song,
dance and rustic buffoonery the salient formal characteristics of its original.
There was besides the kolam a primitive entertainment which took over
demonic and human characters familiar from popular magical rituals and
paraded them for the general amusement without any unifying story.
To be continued