Abstract
Liyanage Amarakeerthi, Kurulu Hadawatha [The Heart of a Bird], Fast Publishing Pvt Ltd., Colombo, Sri Lanka, 2013, pp. 366, SL ₹500, ISBN-978-9556772548 (Paperback)
Liyanage Amarakeerthi, Rathu Iri Adina Atha [The Hand that Underlines in Red], Vidarshana Publishers, Dehiwala, Sri Lanka, 2019, pp. 211, SL ₹500, ISBN 9786245087099 (Paperback)
Literature configures history and comments on its contemporary social realities. Informed by this perspective, this essay attempts to unravel the nexus between capital/media/exclusivist nationalism and ethnic tension in Sri Lanka in these two Sinhala novels by Liyanage Amarakeerthi, a professor of Sinhala at the University of Peradeniya, a multiple national award-winning novelist, critic and activist in leftist politics. Both these novels have many similarities; however, while the first exposes the capitalistic exploitation that underlies all projects done by a newly established private radio channel, and can be easily imagined as actually happening in present day Sri Lanka, the second goes to a darker, more brutal level (thankfully, almost unrealistic as being an actual occurrence) where a television channel is actually passing on information as to which political opponent should be assassinated next.
When Amarakeerthi’s novel Kurulu Hadawatha was published in 2013, the name itself seemed worthy of attention, apart from that got by its winning the State Literary Award for the Best Novel in Sinhala for that year. In English, the Sinhala title translates to The Heart of a Bird: it sounded poetic, sentimental and you wondered a little about the novelist whose previous novel had been about the Sinhala Marxist insurgency and the tortures it contained, Atawaka Puttu, (2007) [Sons of a Half-Moon Night]. And then you realise that Kurulu, meaning bird, is actually the name a man is given when he takes on the pseudonym Kurulugangoda for both himself and his village when he requests for songs on the radio. The story, therefore, is about his heart and what happens to this man whose journey starts with that simple wish to see his name broadcast over the airways, carrying a different, false sound which nevertheless he owned.
It’s a strange plot any which way you look at it. A young boy, Dinasiri who starts life as a postcard writer to listeners’ request programmes on radio and uses a false name for his village (and himself) to hide his real one that specifies the lowly potter caste to which the villagers belong. He ends up getting a job at one of the first private radio stations established after the government’s monopoly of radio channels ended in Sri Lanka in the early 1990s, simply because of the knowledge he has got by writing postcards to the radio for seven years. On a new radio programme he starts, he speaks about why his village was called Kurulugangoda, it is shaped like a bird’s head, he says. His words unleash a great desire in his listeners to speak about their villages, too. Thus, he is set on the path that catapults him eventually to stardom and fame: he is the voice of the ‘true’ Sinhala village, a representative of the authentic ‘homeland’. The director of programmes of this channel, described as ‘someone who knows how to earn in the field of media’ (Amarakeerthi, 2013, p. 190), takes charge of Kurulu’s popularity and establishes his own advertising company and takes in very large projects and Kurulu (he is no more addressed by his real name), becomes increasingly wealthy. The largest advertising comes from an agro-chemical company that needs to ‘localise’ their multinational product; Kurulu sees no irony in this and lets his popularity grow alongside his expenditure, like the purchase of a new house in Colombo which necessitates that the advertising contracts keep getting bigger and bigger. His celebrity status becomes such that there are tourist buses visiting his home to see the original potters’ village, for the programme director lets it slip that Kurulugangoda was actually a potters’ village. The villagers who had earlier hidden the pot-making equipment now display them proudly before their houses.
The programme director ends up finally managing everything—his final intervention is in Kurulu’s second serious love affair, making it clear that Kurulu now has nothing to call his own. The wedding is planned with the event manager creating a fake village-like atmosphere, providing actors to play even the role of the in-laws who will not come for the wedding because of Kurulu’s low caste. In the rehearsal for the pre-wedding shoot, in which he has to row a boat with his girl to get them across the ‘village’, Kurulu falls off the boat and drowns. The novel ends with his death and the mourning of his friend, Sarath, over it.
The Underlying Story
Beneath this plot line, what Amarakeerthi does is, in fact, to analyse what the media has been doing in Sri Lanka’s recent past. The media played a large role in the unfortunate post-Independence trajectory of this country, which saw a 30-year war between two ethnic communities and after the military conclusion of it, started another problem with another ethnic community and the majority population. Such was the ideological drive that was constantly and continuously built up by these, of the ‘enemy’ and ‘the other’, that Jayadeva Uyangoda (2010) can rightly say, ‘Sri Lanka’s media has been quite influential in sustaining ethno-political ideologies and agendas, thereby contributing to the intractable nature of the ethnic conflict’ (p. 54). In Kurulu Hadawatha, Amarakeerthi does something else too: he ties this role of the media with the economic reasons underlying it all; capitalist exploitation using ethnic tensions for their own ends, often manipulated by the same politicians who outwardly propound the importance of race and religion, something that Nimanthi Perera-Rajasingham (2019) has shown very convincingly in her recent work.
How he configures this in the story is by making Kurulu do, often unconsciously, things done by nationalists in Sri Lanka; the early ones who were trying to shake off the yoke of colonialism as well as the more modern ones who use it to cling to power given to them by the majority population. The very first paragraph of the novel establishes the fact that Dinasiri has failed the Advanced Level examination the second time round. It also manages within the next few sentences to establish the fate of a young man in rural Sri Lanka when he loses the only chance to enter the higher education system which has been traditionally considered the only doorway available for the advancement for young, underprivileged Sri Lankans. The only choice then is to join the Army which Dinasiri defines as ‘The best chance that boys who failed had of showing that they could succeed’ (Amarakeerthi, 2013, p. 10). That afternoon, as he thinks about his future, he happens to hear the radio, which he calls one of the most precious things in the house, playing a listeners’ request programme. These programmes were often preceded by the name of the person making the request along with the name of his or her village, giving both equal importance. Hearing the name of the village of a young aunt of his, who had married into his area, he cycles to her home to ask her if she knows the person who had requested that song, but she doesn’t. These could easily be made up, she says. This brings Dinasiri face-to-face with a truth he had never seen before. You can write to the radio, in fact, to anything at all, with a false name and false village name (Amarakeerthi, 2013, p. 13). It is this truth that determines the rest of his life. He writes that same evening, on a postcard found by accident, a request for a song and signs his name as Dinasiri Kurulugangoda from the village of Kurulugangoda. It’s a small action, but it was done after a paradigm-changing realisation that the media doesn’t have to meet reality at all.
Historical Untruths
The novel is a slow unfolding of the untruths possible in life and in fact the untruths that have made life possible up to now, if you take the historical unfolding of a ‘nationalised’ being. Immediately after his name had started to become popular and people talk about who and where Kurulugangoda is, in his defence, Dinasiri thinks of the other famous Sinhala people who have turned to untruths.
The taking of ‘Sinhala-sounding’ personal names is in fact a historical occurrence tied to the early nationalist movement in Sri Lanka. Names that sound ‘pristine’ to that particular culture have value when constructing an idealised past, a ‘golden age’ (Batiashvili, 2012, p. 194) so important to nationalism. Early Sinhala nationalists were quick to cover the real, hybrid-sounding names of important people who were making an impact especially in the field of arts. The most famous among them being the iconic singer mentioned specifically in this novel, Amaradeva, whose name was Don Albert Perera, the famous writer and critic Sarathchandra (Eustace Reginold de Silva) and beloved actress/singer Rukmani Devi (Daisy Rasammah Daniels; she is remembered as a Sinhala actress, though she was born into a Tamil Christian family). The problem with each of the original names is that they show the influence of the colonisation process which brought with it Christianity, and which also necessitated a name change if embraced. This didn’t help in the process of building up a ‘pure’ Sinhala culture during Independence (Wickramasinghe, 2006, p. 110). It must be remembered that the country’s culture was never imagined as Sri Lankan; the divisions among the ethnicities here were clearly drawn by the time the early nationalists got to work, no matter to what ethnic group they belonged to. For whatever purpose, this renaming of Sinhala cultural icons was still a manoeuvre of falsity, and in hindsight, harm, for in a country that needed to admit its cultural mix what such name-changing did was to deny any sort of amalgamation which can push minority communities further to the margins.
And this is exactly what Dinasiri’s later advent into radio, and the popularity he achieves there, helps in getting pushed through at a national level. He is the example from an ‘authentic’ life, his language a net to capture and blind audiences into what was being sold to them. The fact that he himself was unaware of his own role is incidental.
Liyanage Amarakeerthi’s 2019 novel Rathu Iri Adina Atha [The Hand that Underlines in Red], a harsher, an almost crudely written novel in comparison with the exquisitely crafted Kurulu Hadawatha, had a narrator who knew what he was doing when he was doing exactly what Kurulu did. The difference was that there was an even deeper level of action in that novel, moving unbeknownst to the ‘star’ who had gone on the same journey as Kurulu, activating consciously (unlike Kurulu) and very effectively, the cultural symbol system for the use and exploitation of the television channel owned by his adopted brother. Here, the dark, deeper level contained assassination and murder of opponents and critics of power is apparent; while in Kurulu Hadawatha, it remains at the level of capitalist exploitation which didn’t hesitate to use ethnic tensions to further its ends.
Imagining Authenticity
The surprising popularity of Kurulu’s programme is explained by the fact that it provided the Sinhala people, ‘caught’ in the cities, to look back with nostalgia at their own villages, causing the people back there also to see beauty that they hadn’t seen there before. Kurulu quickly learns how to make use of particular emotive words to refer to the villages and the lifestyle there; these words functioned as quick mechanisms to release a particular feeling in people that made them imagine themselves as being a part of a particular life, even if it wasn’t so in reality. And they were the exact words that the advertising world snapped up and used Kurulu’s voice and body to sell their, often not local, products.
Where exactly do words like these hit within us? Perhaps the best explanation of this is given by Harshana Rambukwella when he brings in a concept he calls ‘ourness’ (apekama in Sinhala) into analysing what has very often been activated and is still being activated by exclusivist nationalists in this country. He says,
Sinhala authenticity … has shaped much of Sri Lanka’s post-independence history. At the heart of this discourse lies the notion of apekema––loosely translating as ‘ourness’, or the idea that there are things that are authentically Sinhala and Buddhist. (Rambukwella, 2018, p. 1)
As he points out, a clear definition of these terms is difficult for ‘[t]he cultural coordinates of apekema are debated hotly. They have rarely remained static, but one constant is the belief that something called apekama exists and that it is a national virtue with overarching unity’ (Rambukwella, 2018, pp. 1–2). It is indeed this apekama that Kurulu conjures up with his programmes, his words and his persona, and what the main character of the later novel Rathu Iri Adina Atha also uses so effectively, with careful pre-planning, to become an overnight sensation with just one TV programme and get people all over the country to hang on to every word, he says afterwards.
What, one can wonder, is the problem with that? The answer that Amarakeerthi gives through both these novels is two-fold. First, it gives no space for minorities in the social imaginary; it brings into the process of imagining the nation, only one ethnicity and one religion. The reference is constantly to a history in which famous Sinhala kings had passed through these lands. This itself would not be a problem if that history is also not taught as being one in which the ‘other’––generally ‘invaders’ from south India––were subdued by these same kings, that being the estimation of their power and greatness. In a multicultural country where there has always been ethnic tension, this does not help if the intention had actually been to ease them. That this may not necessarily be the case is also something that Amarakeerthi shows in his work—the close link between ethnic tension and the economy being something that others have also pointed out (Gunasinghe, 2004, p. 114; Nagaraj & Haniffa, 2017; Venugopal, 2018, p. 103); the former, that is, being created to be in service of the latter.
This is what Amarakeerthi shows, secondly: it’s all done, finally in the service of capitalism. That the neoliberal market forces, in short, the desire for profit is what lies at the bottom of many overtly nationalistic manoeuvres is shown quite brilliantly in both these novels. Though Kurulu/Dinasiri doesn’t realise what is happening, his friend, Sarath, does. Significantly, this friend is a university student who was a member of the People’s Liberation Front, the party of young Sinhala Marxists which twice tried to bring in an insurrection in Sr Lanka, once in 1971 and once in 1988–1989, the time dealt with in Kurulu Hadawatha. Sarath returns after being imprisoned (not killed like many of his friends) for his involvement in this movement and re-enters Dinasiri’s life as the boyfriend of his university-going sister. In this role, he is able to observe what is happening to Dinasiri, the only other person capable of doing so being the oldest villager, Muthu aththa [grandfather] who has no problem telling Dinasiri that what he propagates about the village in his radio programme is absolute bunkum. It is only the two of them who do not join the general chorus of admiration for Dinasiri, made up of villagers, including his own family. Whereas Muthu aththa’s interventions are humorous (for example, he asks, ‘Why would you say on radio that the threshing floor is sacred to us, boy?’ and ‘Why don’t you mention that we hide pots of liquor under the hay, and only say that we worship the threshing floor before we get on it?’). Sarath’s is more nuanced and incisive: ‘Now global capital comes with the noise of nationalism that they themselves make. Capitalism now comes with nationalists at the forefront’ (Amarakeerthi, 2019, p. 284).
These two aspects are cleverly brought together in a scene describing a protest before a Western embassy, one of the many held during the last stages of the war when there were appeals made by Western countries for ceasefires (Obeyesekera, 2013). Kurulu and the programme director are in a car caught in the midst of the protest and the director points to the fact that the words on the placards that the protesters are carrying are ones that Kurulu himself had made popular. Then Kurulu notices that the representatives of the multinational agro-chemical company he is advertising for are also marching in this protest. When he points out the irony of this to the programme director, he is told not be stupid. But the point is, Kurulu is stupid: he still doesn’t see what he is being made to do with his skill in words, he doesn’t believe Sarath; that only happens much later.
In Rathu Iri Adina Atha, the ‘star’ is intelligent; his media journey is carefully planned in advance by himself, but fake from the beginning. He is a man named Chandana Mihindukulasuriya (again, the real name is Fernando) who is known as the Japanese Sensei because the character Chandana created for himself is that of a Sri Lankan professor teaching in Japan while on a holiday (when in actual fact, Chandana Fernando, called Buddy in the underworld he belongs to, had been in prison for years for murder). The Sensei’s activation of the cultural symbol system was to get his adopted brother, the TV channel owner, commercial projects which he would quietly push through while talking about Sinhala culture, its value and uniqueness. He does this consciously without a problem. His doubt starts about his real role in the channel when a young university student draws a link between what the Sensei reads from a newspaper clipping that the producer gives him and the subsequent murders of the men he refers to in it. He confronts the media owner and his thugs and learns that it is indeed so: his words, tailor-made for patriotism and devotion to Buddhism is the only way in which messages can be got across to the hit men.
Final Awareness Comes at a Cost
However, there is a difference between how Chandana and Dinasiri handle the final realisation of what they have become. Chandana is extremely skilled, having used the years in prison for study and self-improvement (the murder he committed is not a premeditated one; his environment, since someone killed his own parents, had always been amidst death and destruction). Once he realises what is happening through his TV programme, he manages to save the life of the university student (which is what finally makes Chandana redeem his humanity, no matter the deceptions he had woven earlier) and himself from the gun of an assassin and disappear back ‘to Japan’.
When awareness strikes Kurulu, however, it is too late for him. He cannot get out of the contracts; even if he does, he can now be replaced even as himself, the director tells him. So Kurulu finally understands what he has become—nothing. He loses his voice in a symbolic sense when he realises that another, newer, boy can easily duplicate it: His own body is not his—the last scene with Sarath and himself sees him being metamorphosised into different personalities by the make-up artists as they shoot television ads. One of the last things Dinasiri sees in his village is some of his relations putting up a board with the real name of the village, Walangangoda (the potters’ village), on a signpost to make it easier for local tourists to come here.
So, in a way, he has come a full circle: He has managed to change nothing he had wanted to, and he is back in a potter’s village. But now he has no core/content to call his own; he is truly a hollow man, just an image. And indeed, after his death, we see him being replaced as him—another actor plays him (he is called ‘little Kurulu’ too by the crew). He has become generic, a consumer item to be used just like the products he promoted. And we begin to wonder if his death was by drowning or whether it was the only way in which he could show agency and manage to overcome his fate of being absolutely nothing, but an instrument for other, more evil-minded, people.
And such wonderings might lead us to connect the dots and see what is happening in Sri Lanka today and the role of the media in it. That is the best thing about literature—it gives us a way to look below the surface and see what we wouldn’t normally––and in the hands of this master storyteller, What he lays bare after stripping many things in contemporary Sri Lanka of their outward niceties, is truly spellbinding.