VIJAYA VIDYASAGARA WAS seventy-four when I met him at his house in Colombo. It was low and flat and well-shaded, a preserve of order, and it had the appeal of a place that had been comfortably occupied for a long time. It was on a small, quiet road across from a church called St. Theresa’s.
Seventy-four made Vijaya twenty-one at the time of the hartal in 1953. And he remembered the event vividly. “Can you imagine?” he asked when our long conversations turned to it. “The entire cabinet meeting on a British ship? It tells you everything.”
What was once a purer kind of outrage had taken on, over the years, the colorings of irony, even of bemusement. “We have to laugh,” Vijaya once said. “One must know how to laugh in Sri Lanka.” I would hear this thought often. But his feelings had been different during those crucial times long ago—this I knew. A few weeks before the hartal Vijaya had been named editor of Samasamajist, the L. S. S. P.’s weekly journal. The words quoted earlier about the historical significance of the hartal were more than likely Vijaya’s words.
VIJAYA WAS TALL AND SLIM. He lived alone in his shaded home, which was filled with books and pictures and all the objects one accumulates in the course of an active life. He always dressed in a sarong with a simple pattern, a loose, collarless shirt, and leather sandals of the sort one finds in great piles in the shoe shops. He was a little ascetic in material matters, which I admired. And though he told me he came from “a petit bourgeois family in Galle,” he carried himself with patrician grace.
There had been a conversion in Vijaya’s family long ago. When his father was young he had had studied under a man who had led one of the earliest strikes in Ceylonese history, a strike of laundry workers in 1896. The strike leader, the teacher, was also a priest—“anti-British and Christian,” as Vijaya put it. There was a Buddhist revival going on at the time, aimed partly against Christian schools, and Vijaya’s father had been sympathetic to it. Nonetheless, he took up the Bible under his Christian teacher. “Father decided to read the Bible to confound his enemy,” Vijaya said. “And then the enemy’s book spoke to him.”
In time Vijaya’s father was baptized, an act that caused his family to disown him. So the penniless new Christian made his way from Galle to Colombo and found himself, still very young, a successful business man. He took to frequenting the local Y. M. C. A. and offering fellow members lay sermons.
Then the true conversion came. Vijaya’s father contracted a spinal disease and was not expected to recover.
“In the hospital he took stock of his life. He said, ‘If I recover I will give my life to the gospel.’ He had a vision, or a dream. In it God told him, ‘I have a job for you on earth.’”
Vijaya’s father recovered and kept his promise. He studied at a seminary in Bangalore and then returned to become a Methodist minister. In time he became an Anglican. Until then, Vijaya added, no Ceylonese had been permitted to receive communion in the Anglican church. His father had been the first.
“He moved back to Galle and ran a school,” Vijaya said. “It was called Buona Vista—a famous old place.” I later saw it when I traveled in the south, in the beach town of Unawatuna, just south of Galle along the coast.
As we sat in rattan chairs on Vijaya’s verandah, I wondered why Vijaya told me this story at great length. In time I understood. Religion, belief, a public life and public concerns, rejection and acceptance, conversion and dedication—all this was the stuff of which Vijaya’s life was also to be made.
When Vijaya was a boy his father took up duties at St. Paul’s, a large church in Colombo, and the family moved to the capital.
“I remember a pastor at St. Michael’s Polwatte in Colombo 3”—a neighborhood in the center of the city—“and he preached against capitalism. He said, ‘Be a communist, but be a Christian first.’”
This seems to have been among Vijaya’s first political encounters. Soon afterward he abandoned the church: “Nothing was happening. The church was not responding to social issues. It was merely part of the establishment.”
It was at this point that Vijaya, still a very young man, joined the L. S. S. P. He hadn’t reached even university age. He went to Pettah to join the harbour workers and then the gas workers.
“This was my point of conversion,” Vijaya said. “I began to realize that the fellowship I didn’t find in church was there. I was sleeping in the worker’s quarters, or on the floor of the office. ‘Why this hardship?’ I remember asking myself. Then I said, ‘The Jesus of the gospel put me here. The Jesus I serve pushed me out of the church. His values are the values of the workers’ movement.’”
Vijaya was not so clear about dates. I was not certain just when he had left the church or joined the L. S. S. P., or when he had gone to university. He had become a lawyer in 1952, practiced for five years, and then spent the rest of his career as a civil servant in the revenue department. It was in government that he had met Stanley Kahinde. This he told me later on. But all of the events we talked about that first long morning on his verandah, with Vijaya’s legs casually crossed as he spoke, occurred in the 1950s, when Vijaya was still in his twenties, before and after the hartal, and before and after the election of 1956 and the language law that came soon after the election.
The 1956 election and the language law seem to have shattered a dream for Vijaya. The budget of 1953 and the Newfoundland cabinet meeting had revealed the U. N. P. government, under Senanayake père et fils, for what it was. But then came the hartal. It was a moment of confrontation, but also a moment of promise, a moment of definition. The 1956 election was something else. It was the moment when all the promise that went back many years, even before the time of Bracegirdle in the mid-1930s, came to a sudden end.
S.W.R.D. BANDARANAIKE had been in opposition before the election. He was a cautious and highly political man from the famous old family of mudaliyars, and like many other members of the elite he was what is commonly known as “a brown Britisher.” He was grand, and cultivated his grandness in his dress and manners.
Nonetheless, Bandaranaike promised something different from the top-hat-and-tails politics of Don Stephen Senanayake and the U. N. P. As Vijaya put it, he articulated the aspirations of the majority, and the majority was Sinhalese. The British had discriminated against the Sinhalese precisely because they were the majority. The British favored the minority Tamils. So the Sinhalese suffered, to a degree. “There was a rub there,” as Vijaya put it.
The rub was Bandaranaike’s opportunity in 1956. He would speak for the masses, casting himself in dramatic contrast to the U. N. P., but only because this presented itself as an expedient to power—an unexploited route in a new country. Before the elections, the rest of the opposition had stood against English as a national language and in favor of both Sinhala and Tamil as its replacements: “One country, two languages,” as the slogan went. And it was in this that Bandaranaike saw his opportunity. With “Sinhala only,” he would appeal to the majority and counter the leftist parties the S. L. F. P. had had to depend upon. Quite significantly, for it is often mentioned even now, Bandaranaike set aside his English clothes and put on sarongs and simple cotton shirts for his public appearances. An Anglican earlier in life, he became a Buddhist. This was how he won the election: as a Sinhalese and a Buddhist, not as a Ceylonese.
In the early 1920s Bandaranaike had studied at Oxford. When he returned he began to advocate a federal political structure, an arrangement that would take account of the separate identities of the Tamils and the Sinhalese and still allow Ceylon to be Ceylon, a single nation.
By 1956, plainly enough, Bandaranaike had abandoned this idea. But away from the political light he opened negotiations with the Tamil Federal Party, a party that stood for precisely what its name implied. At a convention in the summer of 1956 party leaders called for a federal constitution, equal status for the Sinhala and Tamil languages, autonomy in the Northern Province and the Eastern Province, where the Tamil population was concentrated, and redress for the Tamils who had been disenfranchised in 1948 and 1949. Together with the Tamil party leader, S. J. V. Chelvanayakam, he agreed that Tamil would be recognized as an official language for administrative use in the North and the East, there would be a devolution of administrative authority in the two Tamil-majority provinces, and Sinhalese resettlement would be restricted to preserve these majorities.
Bandaranaike’s talks were held in secret, and the agreement he signed with Chelvanayakam was also kept secret. Then, in July of 1957, the talks and the pact were made public. The S. L. F. P. erupted in revolt. A group of bhikkhus, Buddhist monks, performed ceremonies on the lawn of Bandaranaike’s home. And in the end the prime minister capitulated: He dropped the pact with the Federal Party. He later won approval for a legislative provision that allowed “reasonable” use of Tamil in administrative affairs, but, as Sri Lanka has learned too painfully, this proved insufficient to make much difference.
“THAT ELECTION GAVE PEOPLE a place in the sun,” Vijaya said. “The ordinary man was able to feel he was something—somebody.”
Vijaya was not a Sinhalese nationalist. But like many other Sri Lankans, he had a mixed view of Bandaranaike. The language law was a fateful mistake, but the new prime minister had opened political space to ordinary Ceylonese. He had introduced a new kind of politics, or so Vijaya and many others like him said.
I confess I have never understood how Bandaranaike can be credited with anything other than a tragic turn in Sri Lankan history. The ordinary man, as Vijaya put it, was finding his own voice anyway by then. How could this be placed against the devastating decision to push through the language law?
Vijaya had spent the 1956 election in a memorable place. The L. S. S. P. has sent him to Negombo, a coastal town north of the capital, to run the campaign for its candidate. “Negombo was called ‘little Rome’ because it had so many churches,” Vijaya said. “”It was there I realized the strength of religion, for good or ill.”
Negombo was considered a hopeless seat for the L. S. S. P. The party’s candidate was called Hector Fernando, and he was a declared socialist. Fernando had advised the party that the most it could hope for was to put up a credible fight. The problem was not the Buddhists, or the governing party, or the appeal of Bandaranaike’s “Sinhala only” platform. It was the Catholic Church. In little Rome it had been declared a mortal sin to vote for “a Marxist”—a thought that carried considerable weight in 1956.
Vijaya told me a story of something that had happened in Negombo at about the time of the election—again, he was never clear just when.
There was a landowner who took a great interest in the welfare of the poor. When he died the priest in his parish declared that he could not be buried in the family grave because he had supported some of Hector Fernando’s political projects. The man’s family objected, and then forced the burial to take place in the proper way. Then the priest put barbed wire around the family plot and declared it “a polluted site.”
Vijaya smiled his bemused smile. “That’s the Roman Catholic Church for you,” he said, wagging one of his slender fingers in the air.
Vijaya decided to take on the church in little Rome—to fight, as he put it, “the old conflict.” He said, “The priests couldn’t connect the poor and the church. Eventually I confronted one of the leading priests. We neutralized them all—except two—and we won. We worked hard and we won it in Negombo. Afterward we said, ‘We have captured little Rome.’”
THE ELECTION OF 1956 WAS FOUGHT, as others had been before and would be afterward, on the basis of symbols. The S. L. F. P., Bandaranaike’s party, took as its symbol a hand. For the L. S. S. P., it was a key. And for the U. N. P., the long-governing party, it was an elephant, which had also been part of the colonial government’s symbol in Ceylon. The hands and the keys won, not the elephants. “People voted for symbols,” Vijaya said. “Symbols helped the illiterate.”
The U. N. P., until then invincible, was reduced to eight legislative seats—an unimaginable loss, a reversal no one thought possible. And the S. L. F. P. won a huge victory. So a certain kind of politics, the reign of the brown Britishers, had come to an end, and a new kind of politics—in the land of symbols and gestures, let us call it “sarong and cotton shirt” politics—had emerged. The ordinary Ceylonese had found a voice and had made themselves count. It is for this many Sri Lankans, not just Vijaya, still credit Bandaranaike, despite the method he chose.
But at what price this? What were the consequences of sarong-and-cotton-shirt politics as Bandaranaike introduced them?
We can answer this question in two ways. We can say the price paid was nothing less than Sri Lanka, for conflict and destruction and death, corruption and institutional collapse, social dysfunction and economic underdevelopment—if all this did not flow from the 1956 election, certainly the country began then to lose its ability to address these problems. Alternatively, we can say that the price paid was not less than “Sri Lanka,” Sri Lanka with quotation marks, meaning the idea of Sri Lanka, the consciousness of Sri Lanka and of being Sri Lankan—in a single phrase what the Japanese call in another context “healthy nationalism.” The 1956 election fixed the kind of nationalism Ceylon would have—an unhealthy nationalism, an inauthentic nationalism rooted in exclusion, sentiment, and nostalgia.
It is especially tragic that this fate should befall a nation such as Ceylon. All that promise Ceylonese nationalism seemed to hold in the pre-independence period was quite singular. After centuries of human traffic from practically everywhere, independent Ceylon might have enjoyed an enviable cosmopolitanism. It would be multicultural. It would be color-blind and speak several languages. This did not happen, and here we return to an historical fact that most Sri Lankans, even today, eventually get around to mentioning. “We had no national struggle,” as Vijaya put it. “They gave us independence. So independence was for the rich boys.”
The consequence of this has to do with what we can call the space of nationalism—the physical space, the intellectual space, the emotive space. Only the brown Britishers made even a pretense of occupying this space. No one forged a national identity in the course of imagining nationhood and then thinking through what this nation would mean. This is what lent importance to 1956. It was independent Ceylon’s first great chance to correct the error of omission that had taken place when it formally became a nation.
The kind of nationalism Bandaranaike ended up encouraging must have been extremely powerful—powerful in an individual sense, in the way it made people (meaning here the Sinhalese) feel about themselves. It is strange for outsiders to realize that the Sinhalese can be a majority on their home island and still feel beleaguered and surrounded. The Tamils were always a minority. But then there were the Tamils across the water in southern India, and this changed everything for the Sinhalese. Today the Sinhalese account for seventy-four percent of the Sri Lankan population; but there are nearly four Tamils to every Sinhalese if one thinks in terms of south Asia altogether. In this respect, a psychological respect, 1956 must be understood as a kind of restoration for the Sinhalese. The natural order of things, as the Sinhalese saw it, would be put right. But this order was not that of a modern nation-state. It was pre-modern. This was understood as nationalism, but in reality 1956 represented precisely the opposite—a mass retreat from nationalism in the modern, secular sense of this term, healthy nationalism, and the duties and responsibilities—and above all the public space—that come with it.
VIJAYA HAD A BEAUTIFUL way of speaking. When he spoke—almost always in the same rattan chair in the corner of his verandah, with his legs crossed languidly and the housekeeper bringing tea and soft drinks—it was usually about the personal memories he had, the days and nights spent here and there. Sleeping on the office floor at the old party newspaper, campaigning amid the churches in Negombo: It was through these that Vijaya put the 1950s, the great era of independence across the developing world, there on the glass-topped table between us. It was by way of his private memories that he conveyed an idea of how Ceylon should proceed, on what grounds and in what space.
This idea had changed over the years. Vijaya had retired from government service in 1990—sixteen years before I met him. His wife had only recently passed away, and so his life had suddenly changed again.
One day at the end of our conversation he said, “There are some people I’d like you to meet.” He mentioned a Jesuit priest who lived in Kelaniya, a town near Colombo, and a man named Marshall Fernando, a Methodist. Then he added Batty Weerakoon, who had once served as minister of justice and then of science and technology. There was a mass he wanted me to attend with him. “A service for a fallen comrade,” Vijaya explained. “It’s in Ratmalana”—another town not far from the capital.
Then he told me why he wanted to take me. He wanted me to see something with my own eyes, something that we had talked about earlier. “It will be an Anglican service, but with others, too. It’s a mass, but in the indigenous way, using English, Sinhala, and Tamil. We use roti instead of bread. You break it and you share.”
Negombo in 1956, it turned out, was a complex passage in Vijaya’s life. He had left the church by then. “But I was thinking of my position,” he said. “I was three-quarters reconnected to Christianity when I went, and after I felt that I could become a full Christian again.”
It took me some time to understand fully what had happened to Vijaya in 1956. He was a young activist who had gone to fight a provincial election, but it was not so straightforward as this. He had also been fighting a battle between Christianity and politics. And he had been fighting a third battle within Christianity, between the temporal church—the ecclesiastical establishment such as the priests in Negombo—and Christian activists.
After Negombo, Vijaya seemed to have drifted away from the L. S. S. P., though he never said so. He began to seek out “groups of people getting together,” as he put it. Then he did something striking: Just as his father had, he went to the Y. M. C. A., and there he helped produce a document called The Christian Worker and the Trade Unions. This was the beginning of a long association Vijaya had had with a small group called the Christian Workers’ Fellowship. “It was long before ‘liberation theology,’” Vijaya said.
Then he said, “Either you’re a conformist, and religion is your special dope, or you make it a means to spur you on to build a new society. This is the choice for the religious community. Sinhalese, Tamil—these divisions must go, and we have to be one.”
So in his long journey through the first decades of Ceylon and Sri Lanka as an independent nation, something quite fundamental had changed for Vijaya. It seemed to speak for some part of the national experience. The end for Vijaya was always a just society, but the means had changed—and then changed back again. He was a secularist, but he had come to represent himself by way of his religion. This was his path into public space—a religious path, or as he put it, the path of the historical Jesus. He had not turned inward, to a private life, but he had turned elsewhere. And this had happened in 1956, just as Ceylon was turning away from one kind of nationalism and toward another, false kind.
I HAD ARRIVED AT VIJAYA’S early one morning and, with some time to spare, I asked the tuk-tuk driver to drop me at St. Theresa’s, the church near his house. After this I took to going there, usually at the end of a long conversation on the verandah. If I arrived at a certain time of morning—ten, perhaps, or a little earlier—there would be a groundskeeper in the little churchyard with a broom made of tree branches bound together. He wore a sarong and a cotton shirt, and he would sweep the leaves and twigs that had fallen from the surrounding trees during the night. Arrive later and I would see the neat lines his broom had brushed into the dirt and little piles of leaves smoldering here and there. The smoke had a sweet smell that I liked.
St. Theresa’s was always spotless. There were numerous murals inside, and they made a curious collection. Behind the main altar there was one that showed angelic figures playing local instruments and dancing local dances: syncretism. In another, St. Albert the Great sat among his scientific instruments: a Westerner with his technology. Just under the dome, high above the main altar, was a row of seven portraits. St. Thomas Aquinas was in the center, and to his left were Plato, Augustine, and Paul. On his right were Aristotle, Bonaventure, and Melchisédech Thévenot, a seventeenth-century French scientist, cartographer, and student of “the East”: an early “Orientalist.”
“It’s very popular now,” Vijaya said when I first asked him about the church. “On Sundays it’s crowded out to the churchyard.” I had heard this from others. Someone else had told me—perhaps my landlady—that St. Theresa’s was much favored among the well-to-do of Colombo.
One day at the end of one of our conversations, Vijaya saw me to his gate and then decided to go with me to St. Theresa’s. In the churchyard the fires had gone out and the ashes had been swept away. “It’s a house-proud pastor,” Vijaya whispered with a smile and a hint of disdain.
Inside he took me on a sort of tour: It turned out he knew the place cold. It was Vijaya who first pointed out the local instruments and dances in the mural behind the altar and who told me who Melchisédech Thévenot was.
Together we looked up at the seven portraits high above us.
“Westerners can go to heaven, you see. Orientals can’t.”
I laughed as I stared high above us.
Vijaya said, “I asked the pastor, ‘Why not pictures of Buddha and Confucius? Men of the East.’ He wouldn’t hear of it.”
On the way out we crossed in front of the main altar. I genuflected, and this time it was Vijaya who laughed.
“We don’t do that,” he said. “It’s European: ‘My lord, my liege.’ We do this,” and he put his hands together in the gesture of Buddhist prayer and bowed his head very slightly.
In the churchyard I walked with Vijaya to the gate. When we had closed it between us and I had turned, Vijaya called after me. When I turned back Vijaya’s face was pressed against the churchyard gate, his fingers curled around the bars on either side of his eyes. He was smiling.
He said, “When you go to Kandy, the Temple of the Tooth is a must. But go to some of the other temples nearby, too. You’ll see them. There will be many people there, including many young people. Look at their faces.”
Vijaya paused, catching his breath and collecting his thoughts, looking down at the ground.
Then he said, “We are a religious people. You’ll see it for yourself. That’s why there is hope.”
