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Selected Writings of Regi Siriwardena

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Selected Writings of Regi Siriwardena
Politics and Society Volume II
Edited by A.J. Canagaratna
international Centre for Ethnic Studies

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Published by International Centre for Ethnic Studies 2, Kynsey Terrace Colombo -8 Sri Lanka
Copyright 2006, by International Centre for Ethnic Studies
ISBN 955-580-103-6
Cover design by Rina Upadhyaya
Printed by Kumaran Press Private Limited 361 1/2 Dam Street, Colombo -12 Tel. +9411242 1388

COntentS
Introduction xi
INTERNATIONAL POLITICS 1.
75 Years. After: The Russian Revolution Reconsidered 3
The Illusion and the Reality 32
Soviet Society: The Fallout From Eastern Europe 44 Poland: Exorcising the Spectre of 1984 55 Nationalism and the Break-up of the Soviet Union 71 Gorbachev: Triumph and Tragedy 97
History is Open 103 The Gorbachev Éra and Soviet History 114
A New Slave Society (Book Review) 131
A Continuing Debate - The Difficult Dialogue Marxism and Nationalism, By Ronaldo Munch (Book Review) 135
The Aristocratic Anarchist (Book Review) 139
Isaac Deutscher Revisited (Review Article) 142

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vi
Homage to Fernand Braudel
From Workers' Organs To State Agencies
Subha and Yasa (A Play)
Leon Trotsky, Rusiyanu Viplavaye Ithihasaya (Book Review)
Mrs. Grundy in the Sovient Union
The Truth About Cuba (Book Review)
The Last Dissenter. Shooting an Elephant and other
Essays by George Orwell (Book Review)
The Russian people have outgrown Stalinism:
Russia. After Stalin, By Isaac Deutscher (Book Review)
Not all the quotes from Lenin (Book Review)
Literature and Politics (Book Review)
Revolution... (book Review)
SRI LANKAN POLITICS
Anagarika Dharmapala and Marxist Thought
Buddhism and Radicalism
Exorcising the Political: H.L. Seneviratne and the Modern Sri Lankan Buddhist Sangha
Bandaranaike — The Man and the Legend
Political Biography and the Role of Personality (Book Review)
160
163
169
200
206
209
215
217
223
227
231
235
237
242
24.7
262
265

NM - A political assessment
The 1971 Insurrection: CRM's Appeal to PM
The Bracegirdle Affair in Retrospect: Contradictions of Imperialism, of the Post-Colonial State and of the Left
Remembrance of Politics Past: The LSSP Documents of the Thirties and Early Forties
The Accord and the Peace Community Collective Identities (Book Review)
Guide to Ceylon Politics (Book Review)
Remembered (and forgotten) Yesterdays
SOCIETY
Human Rights
Neelan Tiruchelvam: The Scholar As Politician
Violence and Human Rights
The Case against the Death Penalty
Education And Society
National Identity Content of Education and Ethnic Perceptions
National Identity in Sri Lanka: Problems in Communication and Education
National Identity Strategies and Programmes
vii
280
285
307
330
349
362
366
369
375
ვ77
383
394
403
415
436

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will
What State Can Do for Swabhasa Children's Literature
The Sinhala Encyclopaedia must Popularize Knowledge
Art, Music, Literature And Society
Coomaraswamy, Art and Society
Fox vs. Hedgehog
Song without Words?
Woolf and the Jungle Village
The Family And Society
Patriarchy and Capitalism
Nash in the Family
Language, Culture And Society
Bilingualism in Sri Lanka
English as a Link Language'
Towards Multiculturalism in Sri Lanka
Problems of Translation
Indirect Translation and its Perils
The Missing Second person Pronoun
Which English?
443
447
455
460
465
470
476
489
493
498
502
509
512
517
523

Identity And Society
Identity Talk and Tales My Mother Told Me
Science And Society
The other Russell (Book Review)
The Media And Society
The Role of the Media in Relation to Democracy
COMPUTER TECHNOLOGY VERSUS HUMAN CREATIVITY
Prometheus: A New Version An Argumentative Comedy for Two Characters
THE GREAT WRITER AND THE ORIENT
The Temptations of Paradise: A Comedy in
Two Acts for Suha
ix
529
543
546
559
561
593
595

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IntrOCdu Ction
As I was compiling the articles in this volume Politics and Society - the second and concluding - volume of Selected Writings of Regi Siriwardena, the project launched by the ICES where he served as Editor for 15 years, I began to realize how the political and social are inexplicably intertwined. It's only by resorting to abstraction that one can think of the two categories - political and social - as separate entities.
One has to fall back on tacit knowledge to slot the pieces collected here into either of the two categories.
Before I comment on the individual articles I would like to set out the rationale for my grouping. I have had perforce to give pride of place to international politics which in this context inevitably means the ex-Soviet Union and the Eastern European bloc which is no longer under the control of the Soviet Union. Then follow reviews of books (on Cuba, for instance) and review articles on Braudel and Deutscher.
The first article in the section on Politics is "75 Years. After The Russian Revolution Reconsidered". In this incisive analysis, Regi comes to the startling but persuasive conclusion that the task of the Russian Revolution was the bourgeois transformation of Soviet Society, so it was a detour from pre-capitalism to capitalism. This applies, also, he points out to the revolutions that have occurred in some Third World countries.
All the articles in the section devoted to Politics demonstrate that Regi had a very well-informed, probing and critical mind.

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It is in this frame of mind that he approaches the legacy of Lenin and finds him guilty of paving the way for the later growth of Stalinism. In fact he says that Lenin was nursing a fatal illusion that the West European proletariat would rise up against the capitalist order. I recall that Octavio Paz, the poet and diplomat, once remarked how Trotsky had observed that if after the end of World War II, the West European proletariat did not take up arms against the capitalist order then they would have to rethink the basic assumptions of Marxism. Instead of overthrowing the capitalist order, the West European proletariat was co-opted by the capitalist establishment.
Though he doesn't white-wash Stalin, he doesn't demonize him either and gives him due credit for transforming Russia into a military super-power to be reckoned with, though at tremendous cost in terms of human lives and suffering. Regi says Stalin drove out barbarism by barbaric means.
Alexender Werth, then London Times correspondent in Moscow - and therefore one who cannot be suspected of being a Bolshevik - graphically describes in his book The Battle of Stalingrad how Stalin's shrewd appeal to Mother Rus' but not Marxist ideology, the heroic exploits of past Russian patriots, the heroism of the Red Army and the common people plus General Winter decisively and eventually turned the tide against the Nazis, despite the promised help not coming from its Allies, America and Britain
The other important articles in the section are Soviet Society: The Fallout from Eastern Europe; Poland: Exorcising the Spectre of 1984; Nationalism and the Break-up of the Soviet Union; History is Open. Regihas also two important articles on Gorbachev: Triumph and Tragedy and The Gorbachev Era and Soviet History. Regi's review article on Isaac Deutscher Revisited is a balanced piece as is also his homage to Fernand Braudel. The only creative piece in this section is Suba and Yasa (American Style) which I chose to include because it has political implications. It pin-points the influence that the Zionist lobby has on American politics so much so it can assassinate an incumbent president who is seeking a second

ΧΙΙΙ
term of office because he has spoken out against the undue pressure the Zionist lobby was exerting on American politics.
The section on Sri Lankan Politics begins with a critique of Gunadasa Amarasekera's pamphlet Anagarika Dharmapala and Marxist Thought. The other important articles in this section are: Buddhism and Radicalism; Exorcising the Political: H.L. Seneviratne and the Modern Sri Lankan Buddhist Sangha; Bandaranaike: The Man and the Legend; NM-A Political Assessment; The Bracegirdle Affair in Retrospect: Contradictions of Imperialism, of the Post-Colonial State and of the Left; the review article on Remembrance of Politics Past: The LSSP Documents of the Thirties and Forties; The Accord and the Peace Community.
The second section is devoted to Society. The first article is on Neelan Tiruchelvam, the second is the Commemoration Lecture on the late K. Kandasamy where Regi presciently points out that violence is a slippery slope and once you indulge in violence then it leads to internecine strife and ultimately to violence against members of your own group.
There are four important articles in the section on Art, Music, Literature and Society: Coomaraswamy, Art and Society; Fox vs. Hedgehog; Song without Words? and Woolf and the Jungle Village.
In the section the Family and Society there is one article Patriarchy and Capitalism and one book review-Nash in the Family.
There are seven articles on Language, Culture and Society all of which havę something pertinent to say even today.
In the next section on Identity and Society there is only one: Identity Talk and Tales My Mother Told Me.
There is one article on Media and Society.
All in all, the articles that appear in the section on Society, illuminate various important facets of society.
The last two items are creative pieces the first a play Prometheus: A New Version, An Argumentative Comedy for Two Characters which deals with Computer Technology versus Human Creativity and the last another creative piece on

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Chekhov's visit to Ceylon. The play is set in the Grand Oriental Hotel, evoking memories of a spacious by-gone colonial era and deals half playfully with the exotic' which later Prof. Edward Said described as Orientalism in a path-breaking book bearing that title.
If Regi had not been more interested in Literature and the Arts, he would certainly have become a peerless commentator in Sri Lanka, on international political and social affairs, especially as he had a knowledge of Russian, without having to rely on secondary sources.
A.J. Canagaratna

INTERNATIONAL POLITICS

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75 Years. After: The Russian Revolution ReCOnsidered
I wish to open this lecture with a few historical snapshots. On the 25th October (Old Style)'' 1917, the All-Russian Congress of Soviets met in Petrograd on the morrow of the October insurrection. Speaking for the left and centre Mensheviks, Martov denounced the insurrection as a Bolshevik coup and demanded the formation of a coalition government of the three socialist parties. Answering on behalf of the victorious Bolsheviks, Trotsky rejected the demand and ended his speech with these contemptuous words: 'you are pitiful, isolated individuals; you are bankrupt, your role is played out. Go where you belong from now on - into the rubbish-can of history? Martov left the hall with his followers, and later went into exile. Twelve years later, Trotsky, who had been so certain that the current of history was running in the direction he imagined, was overtaken by nemesis. In 1929, by a decision of Stalin's Politbureau, he was conveyed to the harbour of Odessa and put on board the ship that was to take him, in the dead of winter across a frozen sea, into exile. As his biographer, Isaac Deutscher, has graphically described the moment: "As Trotsky looked back at the receding shore, he must have felt as if the revolution itself had become congealed. Another three decades on, and the body of the all all-powerful dictator, who had deported his

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principal political opponent and later had him murdered, was ejected in disgrace from the mausoleum in Red Square. Yet another thirty years on, today, Lenin's body still lies in that same mausoleum, but the queues outside it have dwindled; his name has been erased from the city where he took power; his monuments have been toppled in public places throughout the country; and tomorrow (November 7th) there will be no official celebrations of the seventy-fifth anniversary.
The Russian Revolution and its vicissitudes might be a theme for a Shakespearean meditation on the uncertainty of political greatness:
how chance's mocks
And changes fill the cup of alteration With divers liquors!
The changing fortunes of the political actors and their reputations are an index of the shifts of social forces in the threequarters of a century between the birth and death of the Soviet state. What I shall try to offer in this lecture is not a narrative history of those years but a theory that can encompass and make intelligible the main lines of historical development, as far as this can be attempted in the compass of an hour.
I should like to remind you at the outset of what was the paradigm of revolution in classical Marxist theory - that is, in the work of the founding fathers, Marx and Engels. In the Communist Manifesto they said, of the epoch of the rise of the bourgeoisie:
... the means of production and of exchange, on whose foundation the bourgeoisie built itselt up, were generated in feudal society. At a certain stage in the development of these means of production and of exchange,... the feudal relations of property became no longer compatible with the already developed pro

75 Years After: The Russian Revolution Reconsidered 5
ductive forces; they became so many fetters. They had to be burnt asunder; they were burst asunder.
In other words, Marx and Engels saw the bourgeois revolutions - especially, the great French Revolution - as arising out of the contradiction between, on the one hand, the forces of production and, on the other, the relations of production, which had become incompatible with productive growth. Marx and Engels expected a similar contradiction to arise with the development of capitalism. As Marx said in Capital:
The monopoly of capital becomes a fetter upon the mode of production, which has sprung up and flourished along with, and under it. Centralisation of the means of production and Socialization of labour at last reach a point where they become incompatible with their capitalist integument. This integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated.
You will observe the close parallel, in concepts and terminology, between Marx and Engels's account of the “bourgeois revolutions of the past and Marx's vision of the 'socialist revolution of the future. In the last few decades the orthodox Marxist analysis of the French Revolution has come under intensive criticism, and there has been much debate whether it can be considered a bourgeois revolution' at all. (A parallel debate has taken place over the Marxist view of the 17th century English Civil War.) Irt the case of the English and French Revolutions, it has not been until the second half of the present century that there has been serious questioning of the Marxist paradigm. But the claim that the Russian Revolution was a 'socialist revolution' ran into theoretical problems from its very beginnings. Marx and Engels had naturally expected the contradictions of capitalism to mature earliest in the developed countries of Western Europe, and had therefore looked to these countries to pioneer the socialist revolution. How then explain

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the phenomenon of a supposedly socialist revolution in Russia - a country which was 80 per cent peasant, in which the proletariat was a small urban minority, in which serfdom has been abolished only in 1861, and in which feudal absolutism reigned in the state until the February Revolution of 1917? Not surprisingly, Lenin's enterprise in October of impelling his party to the capture of power for the purpose of creating a socialist state provoked not only bitter opposition from the moderate socialist parties, the Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries, but also deep misgivings among a section of his party. Two of Lenin's most long-standing collaborators, Zinoviev and Kamenev, even opposed the insurrection within the Central Committee itself.
Just over five years later, commenting on the book by the Menshevik Sukhanov, Notes Concerning a Revolution, which repeated the argument that Russia was not ripe for socialism', Lenin said:
Napoleon, I think, uvrote: "On s'engage et puis ... on voit." Rendered freely this mean: "First engage in a serious battle and then see what happens"... Our Sukhanovs, not to mention Social-Democrats still father to the right, never even dream that revolutions cannot be made in any other way.”
In quoting the Napoleonic maxim, Lenin was admitting that there was an element in the October Revolution of a historical gamble. But the record shows that Lenin wouldn't have staked everything on this gamble but for one consideration which was for him a certainty. That was his belief that Western Europe was ripe for socialist revolution, and that the Russian October would be the stimulus that would make the fruit fall from the tree.
There is ample evidence of this - in the first place, in the text of the resolution that Lenin drafted for the crucial meeting of the Bolshevik Central Committee on October 10 (OS)

75 Years After: The Russian Revolution Reconsidered 7
that took the decision to launch the insurrection. The resolution opens:
The Central Committee recognizes that the international position of the Russian revolution (the revolt in the German navy which is an extreme manifestation of the growth throughout Europe of the world socialist revolution); the threat to peace by the imperialists with the object of strangling the revolution in Russia) as well as the military situation... and the fact that the proletarian party has gained a majority in the Soviet - all this places the armed uprising on the order of the day.
Notice that in Lenin's calculations 'the international position of the Russian revolution' - that is, the revolutionary 'growth throughout Europe' - took precedence over the internal factors. After the seizure of power Lenin continued to reiterate for the next few years not only his confidence in the proximity of European - that is, especially German - revolution but also its indispensability for the survival of the Soviet state. In 1918 Lenin had to contend with those who, both within his party and outside, protested that because the German revolution was imminent, the Soviet state had no need to accept the harsh terms of the Brest-Litovsk peace imposed by Germany. Lenin refused to take such a decision on the basis of an estimate that the German revolution would come in 'six months, or Some such precise time schedule. Nevertheless, he asserted: "That the socialist revolution in Europe must come, and will come, is beyond doubt. All our hopes for the final victory of Socialism are founded on this certainty and on this scientific prognosis.” And again, two months later in 1918: "At all events, under all conceivable circumstances, if the German revolution does not come, we are doomed.'
There is no doubt that the self-confidence with which the Bolsheviks went ahead with the October insurrection and their refusal to compromise with the moderate socialists were bol

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stered by their conviction that a larger European revolution was in sight. Commenting on the fact, Isaac Deutscher raises the question whether Lenin and Trotsky would have acted as they did, or whether they would have acted with the same determination, if they had taken a soberer view of international revolution and foreseen that in the course of decades their example would not be imitated in any other country.' Deutscher goes on to say: History produced the great illusion and planted and cultivated it in the brains of the most soberly realistic leaders when she needed the motive power of illusion to further her own work.' It is a pity that even so independent and intelligent a thinker as Deutscher succumbs to the habit, so common among Marxists, of not merely anthropomorphising but even deifying history. It wasn't history' that planted in the Bolshevik's brains the illusion of the imminence of the European revolution: the illusion was self-created, and fostered by their faith in the Marxist doctrine that the contradictions of Western capitalism had reached breaking-point.
In 1919 victorious revolutions did occur in Hungary and in Bavaria, but the former was the most backward part of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire, and the latter of Germany. But the proletariat of the heartlands of European capitalism didn't emulate their example, and Soviet Hungary and Bavaria were crushed within three months by the counter-revolution. As an independent Marxist historian, Deutscher had this to say about the Bolsheviks' expectations of speedy revolutionary developments in Western Europe at the end of World War I:
What was wrong in their expectations was not merely the calendar of revolutionary events but the fundamental assumption that European capitalism was at the end of its tether. They grossly underrated it's staying power, its adaptability, and the hold it's had on the loyalty of the working classes. The revolutionary ferment was strong enough for a minority of the work

75 Years. After: The Russian Revolution Reconsidered 9
ing class to be determined to follow in Bolshevik footsteps. The majority exerted themselves to wrest reforms from their governments and propertied classes.'
Lenin's desperation regarding the non-fulfilment of these expectations and the consequent international isolation of the Russian Revolution was so great that in 1920 he attempted to foster revolution through a military adventure. He ordered the Red Army to pursue the retreating Polish armies that had attacked Russia into Polish territory, hoping that if they succeeded in overrunning Poland and standing on the borders of Germany, this would provoke the German proletariat to rise. Lenin wished, as he said 'to probe Europe with the bayonet of the Red Army'. This manoeuvre failed: the Red Army was turned back from the gates of Warsaw, and the German working class didn't rise anyway. By 1923, Lenin had to reckon with the fact that the European proletariat had not come to the rescue of the beleaguered Soviet state, and the fiasco in that year of the attempted revolution in Germany made the reality all the more inescapable. By that time Lenin was deeply troubled by the internal course of Soviet society and its state as well. In one of the last articles he wrote out of these preoccupations, Better Fewer, but Better", he found a fortifying hope in the prospect no longer of European but of Asian revolution:
In the last analysis, the outcome of the struggle will be determined by the fact that Russia, India, China, etc., account for the overwhelming majority of the population of the globe. And during the past few years it is this majority that has been drawn into the struggle for emancipation with extraordinary rapidity, so that in this respect there cannot be the slightest doubt what the final outcome of the world struggle will be. In this sense, the complete victory of socialism is fully and absolutely assured.'
When I read this passage, remembering Lenin's discouraged reflections during the same period on the

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bureaucratization of Soviet society and the party itself, I sense in the vehement assertions — “there cannot be the slightest doubt', 'fully and absolutely assured' - the attempt of the dying man to sustain his own faith in the face of assailing doubts."
III
I shall return later to the significance of the shift in Lenin's thinking in his last stages from an European to an Asian perspective. But first, I must now address frontally the question: Were the Russian Revolution, and the state to which it gave birth, socialist?
There are two possible ways in which this question can be confronted - assuming, that is, that one isn't a True Believer for whom in the former Soviet Union all was for the best in the best of all possible worlds. One way is to take all the attributes of a socialist state and society as found in the writings of Marx and Engels, and those of Lenin before the revolution, and put them in one pan of the scale. In the other pan one would put the observable features of the Soviet state and society, and weigh them one against the other. There can be no doubt what the result would be. This is, in effect, what most dissident Marxists (dissident, that is, from Soviet orthodoxy) have done. They have started with an ideal model of what socialism should be, constructed out of the classic texts, judged the Soviet Union by it, and found it wanting. On this intellectual road, once one has come to the conclusion that the Soviet state deviated from 'true socialism', the next questions will be: What went wrong, and when? When did the Revolution lose its innocence? When was the apple eaten, and who was responsible for the Fall?
In the Soviet Union under perestroika, from about 1988, large numbers of intellectuals were engaged in asking these

75 Years After: The Russian Revolution Reconsidered
questions, with indubitable sincerity, and often considerable heartsearching and anguish. When did the Revolution go off course? With the great purges and trials in the thirties? With forced collectivization and breakneck industrialization? With the establishment of the monolithic party at the end of the twenties? With the death of Lenin and the rise of Stalin to power? With the creation of the one-party state and the banning of factions in the ruling party in 1921? With the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly in 1918? Not surprisingly, some of the intellectuals who pursued this quest ended with the conclusion that the original sin lay in the October Revolution itself. Today, after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, similar questions are being raised and answers offered by nonSoviet Marxists, as one may see from a year's perusal of New Left Review or Economic and Political Weekly,.
The sterility of that line of thinking-starting with an ideal model of socialism and measuring the Soviet state and society against it - has been most lucidly and cogently brought out by the late G.V.S. de Silva:
The aberration theory: The Soviet is an aberration (largely due to Stalin). It is by no means a model of a true socialist society. This view was largely reinforced by the Chinese experience. Here at last was a true Socialist model. But now there are doubts about China too. Is China also an aberratign (due to Deng Ziao Ping)? And what of the countries of Eastern Europe, N. Korea, Indo-China, Cuba, not to mention Ethiopia, Mozambique, Angola, South Yemen, Afghanistan, Guinea-Bissau etc? Are they all aberrations? This is a very idealist position to take: reality as an aberration and only the idea of Socialism as real."
A related point was made in his own way by the former East German dissident, Rudolf Bahro, in the course of his cri

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tique of the Eastern European socialist regimes when they were still in power:
Theories of deformation are all rooted in Romantic manipulation of history. If only people, especially those in the Bolshevik party, had willed more intensely and acted more wisely, if instead of actually existing socialism, we had genuine socialism, or at least a different and better road! There is no need to be fatalistic to distrust conclusions of this kind. They do not provide any key to history or to the present, and neither therefore to the future of our system.'7
Besides the forms of wishful thinking mentioned by Bahro, there are are others to which dissident Marxists have been prone. If only Lenin had lived...If only Trotsky had succeeded Lenin. If only the social-democratic leadership - or Stalinist, according to taste - hadn't aborted the European revolution ... all these and similar fantasies err by elevating individuals and their subjectivities to the level of the decisive factor in human history.
It is true that social and historical forces do not operate otherwise than through the agencies of thinking, feeling, and acting persons. But one can say that since these forces- whether people in the mass or material and ideological circumstances - are so much larger than the individual actor - even the exceptional individual - what happens is that the leader who makes his mark on history does so because he is peculiarly fitted by his personal attributes to play the role demanded of him. In the specific circumstances of the rise of dictatorship in postrevolutionary Russia, the relationship between historical development and individual personalities is, I think, correctly defined by Bahro:
As Plato already discovered, the existence of homo politicus is tragic when he has not found the state that suits

75 Years After: The Russian Revolution Reconsidered 13
him'. This was the experience of Trotsky, Zinoviev, Bukharin and many other former revolutionaries, who had subjectively anticipated a different state than that which was the actual result of their efforts.... They lost power because they did not fit into the status that was in the process of developing. Stalin won power because he did fit it."
Bahro's strictures on theories of deformation' apply even to the book which has been probably the most influential, and is certainly the most eloquent of all those writings which espouse the view that the Soviet Union was a "deformed workers' state' - Trotsky's The Revolution Betrayed. As a polemic against the Stalinist regime and an exposure of its pretensions to have the perfectly classless and democratic society of Marx and Lenin's dreams, it is a brilliant feat of political pamphleteering. As political analysis it is seriously flawed by the implications inherent in its title and their development in the body of the book. Once again, the concept of betrayal' assumes an original uncorrupted condition which has been perfidiously violated. Whether one thinks of Stalin as an individual or the Soviet bureaucracy as a class, the charge of betrayal' belongs more to the realm of political mythology than to that of rational social theory. If the Revolution was betrayed in the sense that the hopes and aspirations of those who participated in it remained unrealized, then the betrayal was less by any individual or group than by social reality itself. As we have'seen the original Marxist vision assumed a revolution emerging out of the economic, political and cultural conditions of an advanced capitalist society. No such revolution materialized, and the undeveloped Russia that the Bolsheviks inherited could not have provided a substitute.
The concept of the Soviet Union as a 'deformed workers' state' that became part of the common parlance of the Trotskyist movement raises the question: At what stage does one sup

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pose the deformation to have taken place? One could use the concept to imply that in comparison with the ideal socialist model envisaged by Marx, the Soviet state was deformed from the start, like a thalidomide baby emerging from its mother's womb.' But that would be to admit that the 'model' was an irrelevant criterion in the given historical circumstances. Or one could use the description to suggest that the Soviet state was born healthy but suffered later maiming. The historical evidence doesn't support this latter view because strong and persistent criticisms of the bureaucratization of the Soviet state were being made by revolutionary participants or sympathetic observers from the early days of the Revolution - notably by Rosa Luxemburg and by the small oppositional factions in the Bolshevik party from 1918 onwards.
Trotsky's explanation for the triumph of bureaucracy in the Soviet Union relies heavily on the circumstance of the isolation of the Revolution in an undeveloped country with an economy of scarcity:
The basis of bureaucratic rule is the poverty of society in objects of consumption, with the resulting struggle of each against all. When there is enough goods in a store, the purchasers can come whenever they want to. When there is little goods, the purchasers are compelled to stand in line. When the lines are very long, it is necessary to appoint a policeman to keep order. Such is the starting point of the power of the Soviet bureaucracy. It "knows" who is to get something and who has to wait.
This parable of Trotsky is true as far as it goes; but in order to explain the power of bureaucracy in post-revolutionary Russia, we have to add other factors, some of which are indeed recognized by Trotsky elsewhere in The Revolution Betrayed. The fundamental task of the post-revolutionary era was to lay the basis for an industrial revolution through primitive

75 Years. After: The Russian Revolution Reconsidered 15
capital accumulation in the hands of the state; and with the scarcity of resources, this had to be accompanied by a drastic restriction of consumption, which necessitated coercion. Given the initially low cultural level of the masses and the influx into the industrializing cities of a raw mass of peasant labour, the requirement of rigid labour discipline further strengthened the power of the bureaucracy. Two other factors, however, that Trotsky was little disposed to recognize were the Byzantine traditions of the Russian state, now refracted through the Communist party, and the nationally heterogeneous character of the former empire which had to be held together by the steel frame of the monolithic party. Still less, however, was Trotsky ready to admit, at this time of his life, the inherently authoritarian tendencies of the Bolshevik party as a contributory element in the bureaucratization of the Soviet state. This blindness was in spite of the fact that in the pre-revolutionary years he had conducted a bitter controversy with Lenin over the closed and tightly controlled party organization that the latter stood for. In the course of that controversy he had given expression to a memorably worded prophecy: that Bolshevism would naturally gravitate towards a centralization of power: The party organization (the caucus) at first substitutes itself for the party as a whole; then the Central Committee substitutes itself for the party as a whole; and finally a single “dictator" substitutes himself for the Central Committee. Trotsky, however, had gone back on this insight in mid-1917 when he joined the Bolshevik party, and in the early post-revolutionary years he had himself participated in the fulfillment of the first part of his prophecy: the process by which the party organization substituted itself for the masses. By this time he wrote The Revolution Betrayed in exile, he had become a victim of its later stages: the substitution of the Central Committee for the party, and the substitution for the Central Committee.2

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III
I must return now to the question with which I initiated the second part of my lecture. Were the Russian Revolution, and the state to which it gave birth, socialist? I have tried to demonstrate that to try to measure Soviet reality against a theoretical model of 'socialism' derived from the Marxist classics is a sterile procedure which doesn't help our understanding of the historical phenomena. It is just as pointless as it would be to try to describe 19th century French society in terms of the doctrines of Rousseau. What remains? If we are concerned not to use 'socialism' as a political catchword but as a term with a value in the construction of theory, then we must study the social formations concerned and educe from their concrete relationships and institutions an account of what 'socialism' has meant in practice. We must conceptualise, in other words, 'actually existing socialism' (in the phrase that Bahro adopted in the seventies) - or, it seems more appropriate to say today: 'the actually existing socialisms and those that have actually existed.
The first two premises necessary for such a conceptualization were stated by G.V.S.de Silva with his customary lucidity:
i) No advanced capitalist country has become socialist (with the possible exception of Czechoslovakia, which is a very special case).
ii) On the contrary a number of pre-capitalist societies have become or are in the process of becoming socialist.°
De Silva goes on to draw the conclusion to be derived from these circumstances:
... where a country had got out of pre-capitalism through abourgeois revolution under the hegemony of the bour

75 Years After: The Russian Revolution Reconsidered 7
geoisie and consolidated the process of self sustaining accumulation and expanded reproduction, a subsequent proletariat socialist revolution has not only never taken place, but even the possibility of it has receded more and more into the background, other than in exceptional cases by external intervention, as in Czechoslovakia. This is the reality of our present historical experience and it points quite definitely in the direction that the socialist revolution takes a country out of pre-capitalism and not out of capitalism.’
This conclusion of de Silva is in line with that drawn by Bahro regarding the October Revolution:
The October revolution, already, was not, or was at least far more than, the ...'deformed representative of the proletarian rising in the West that has not taken place. It was and is above all the first anti-imperialist revolution in what was still a predominantly pre-capitalist country, even though it had begun a capitalism development of its own, with a socio-economic structure half feudal, half Asiatic.”
When Bahro use the term "Asiatic here, he is referring to Marx's concept of the Asiatic mode of production'. This, of course, is a controversial idea, even among Marxists. But whether we apply the term to Russia or not, we have to acknowledge that Bahro is right in implying that there was a fundamental difference between the structure of Russian society and that of Western European feudalism. Under the latter there was a parcellisation of sovereignty and the king was only primus inter pares in relation to the feudal nobility. In Russia power was concentrated in the hands of the Tsarist state. That is why some scholars have refused to apply the term 'feudal' to pre-revolutionary Russia at all.”
Both Bahro and de Silva, then, are agreed that 'socialism' must not be understood now in the sense in which Marx used

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the term. He meant by it a society arising out of and resolving the contradictions of advanced capitalism, but no such society has come into existence. Instead the societies that we have called 'socialist' represented an alternative route out of pre-capitalism for countries which have never produced a bourgeoisie strong enough to carry through far-reaching capitalist development. To modify a well-known epigram of Ernest Gellner, we may say that Marx sent a message to the proletariat of the metropolitan centre, but it was delivered to the peoples of the periphery who needed to climb out of pre-capitalism.
The question may, of course, be raised how far Russia in 1917 was pre-capitalist. It is true that in European Russia capitalist industry had progressed considerably since the 1880s, while capitalist differentiation on the land had taken rapid strides after the abolition of serfdom. This was, of course, the main point that Lenin was at pains to establish in his first book, The Development of Capitalism in Russia. However, recent scholarly research has evidently shown that this process was very uneven, regionally speaking. In 1910-half a century after the abolition of serfdom - the peasant communes in European Russia owned 151 million hectares of land, and only 14 million hectares were in outright ownership. The Tsarist empire as a whole was besides a conglomeration of different modes of production, from modern industrial capitalism to quasi-feudal, tribal and nomadic forms. Moreover, the fundamental problem of Russian society was the political dominance of the archaic feudal absolutist state, which was an insuperable obstacle to change. This was made clear by the failure of even the moderate political reforms initiated by Witte and Stolypin in turn, due to the distrust in these reforms of the autocracy and the obstruction of the nobility. The absolutist state collapsed in February 1917, but the weakness of the bourgeois political leadership and its lack of a tradition of parliamentary government meant that no political class was available to build Russia

75 Years After: The Russian Revolution Reconsidered 19
as a viable bourgeois state. Bahro's and de Silva's analyses are, therefore, I think, applicable to revolutionary Russia, and still more obviously true of the Eastern European countries with formerly retarded capitalist development and of the Asian and African societies that have taken the socialist path.'
Here I would return to the eastward shift in Lenin's thinking during the last stage of his life. Lenin, of course, had not gone as far as repudiating the Marxist concept of socialism as a way out of the contradictions of advanced capitalism. But in his last articles he was deeply conscious of the distinctive characteristics of the Russian Revolution, dividing it from the socialist revolution that Marx had envisaged; and in his reply to Sukhanov he predicted that these differences would be even stronger in the Asian revolutions to come:
Our European philistines never even dream that the subsequent revolutions in Oriental countries, which possess much vaster populations and a much vaster diversity of social conditions, will undoubtedly display even greater distinctions than the Russian revolution.'
I am therefore in fundamental agreement with Bahro and de Silva regarding the character of the Russian revolution. But they wrote more than a decade ago, and this is 1992. Between the time they developed their argument and now, we have witnessed the cataclysm of the fall of the Socialist states in Eastern Europe in 1989 and the break-up of the Soviet Union in 1991. In what ways does their thesis need to be modified today to be accommodated to these realities? I shall address myself to this question in the last part of this lecture through a discussion of the character and role of the Soviet bureaucracy.
IV
The Soviet bureaucracy was a composite class, including both political elites and economic managers and technocrats.

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The former in the immediate post-revolutionary era, having been recruited from the cadres of the Bolshevik party, were imbued with a strong sense of ideological devotion to the cause they served. Consequently for most of them, the observance of a Spartan life-style and the renunciation of economic privilege was a point of revolutionary honour. The managers and technocrats initially included large numbers of bourgeois' specialists, and it was necessary to offer them material incentives in order to obtain their willing co-operation. However, the general egalitarian climate of the time meant that disparities in remuneration and differences in standards of living between the economic and technical elites and the mass of workers had strict limits in the first years of the revolution.
This situation changed in the Stalin era. Partly, this was the result of the erosion of revolutionary fervour with time; partly, it was due to the need the regime felt, during the years of massive construction, to encourage effort with material rewards. Stalin in the thirties deliberately promoted inequality with his campaign against the heresy of egalitarianism, with the Stakhanovite movement designed to encourage skilled workers, and with the whole array of economic privileges granted to the bureaucracy.
Let me quote an account of the growth of privilege from the thirties onwards by one of the outstanding Russian journalists and political commentators of today:
A gulf in incomes and standards of living speedily opened between the ruling elite and the great mass of the population. Stalin consciously fattened his retinue, realizing that a hungry satrap was unreliable. It was important to him to separate, morally too, the elite created by him from the people. The maximum of party salaries established under Lenin was annulled. In the first half of the thirties there were created for 'responstble workers' secret distributing points, special canteens and

75 Years. After: The Russian Revolution Reconsidered 2
special rations. Gradually the spectrum of special services broadened, enveloping essentially all spheres of life and social existence. There appeared special shops, special car depots, special barber saloons, special petrol pumps, distinctive numberplates for cars, separate waiting-rooms in railway stations and airports, and finally, special cemeteries, where an ordinary mortal could not enter, either alive or dead.
By the thirties, then, the bureaucracy was clearly a distinctive and ruling class, concentrating both power and economic privilege in its hands. In the thirties Trotsky was haunted by the fear of a 'Soviet Thermidor' (the phrase was derived from the reaction in revolutionary France that followed the fall of Robespierre). Trotsky thought such a Thermidor in the Soviet Union might take the form of the bureaucracy converting itself into a possessing class and restoring capitalist private property. This prospect failed to materialize at the time, and Deutscher points out that under Stalin's rule by terror, the bureaucracy was too insecure to think of converting itself into a property-owning class:
Even the one bond that might have been expected to unite it, the bond of privilege, was extremely tenuous when not only individuals but entire groups of the bureaucracy could be, and frequently were, stripped of all privilege almost overnight, turned into pariahs, and driven into concentration camps. And even the strictly Stalinist elements, the men of the party machine, and the leaders of the nationalized industry, who formed the ruling groups proper, were by no means exempt from the insecurity in which all the hierarchies trembled under Stalin's autocracy.
After Stalin's death, the position of the individual bureaucrat was less precarious in a state which, though not law-governed, was at least for the privileged groups, less subject to arbitrary terror. Meanwhile the erosion of what was once dubbed 'communist morality' continued; cynism, careerism and

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the appetite for self-enrichment grew among the elite, and reached their apex during the Brezhnev years. Such sensational scandals as those of the massive corruption indulged in by Rashidov, the Uzbek party boss, or Churbanov, Brezhnev's son-in-law, which came to light during the years of perestroika, were evidently only the tip of the iceberg. What was decisive for the future of the Soviet Union, however was that from the 'sixties onwards the economic autarky of the Soviet Union began to end as necessity compelled it to enter more and more into the world market. Meanwhile, Western capitalism, instead of reaching the terminal crisis for which Marxists had been waiting at least since 1914, had reached new heights of productive expansion. Not only had its global reach widened since the Second World War, but it had carried through a new industrial revolution through electronics and information technology. The growth of international capitalism wasn't a harmonious or crisis-free process (capitalism by its very nature has always been conflictual and crisis-ridden), but this did not remove the pressures and strains on the Soviet economy as a result of the widening of the gap in technological levels and productivity. The situation was well described by Bahro in an interview with Fred Halliday in 1983:
The autonomy of the socialist system is very relative... The technological inferiority of the socialist countries forces them on to the world market, subordinating them to the rules of that market which work against their interests... In order to keep up with the West, including in the arms race, the Soviet Union is forced to import Western technology and therefore to sell its raw materials cheaply - and then there is the unsolved problem of agriculture. In short, the Soviet economic profile is a variable within the productive forces of a world market controlled by capital. If we put in perspective all the other factors, social, political and cultural, it is actually thē nuclear bomb which allows the Soviet Union to play the role

75 Years After: The Russian Revolution Reconsidered 23
of second superpower. And yet, this very superpower role is fatally overburdening the Soviet economy: the economic competition with capitalism which the Russian Revolution initiated has been a failure.
This was the state of things when Gorbachev launched perestroika. During the six years of that era, there were, I suggest, three tendencies among the Soviet bureaucracy. On the one hand, there were the conservative elements, entrenched in the central bureaucracy and the security apparatus, who wanted to preserve the status quo: it was the representatives of these groups who made their last-ditch stand with the abortive coup of August 1991. Secondly, there were the bureaucracies of the republics who saw in the loosening of central control and opportunity to strengthen their own power. Since the break-up of the Soviet Union, the leaderships of several of the minority republics have made a quick conversion from Communism to nationalism, and have retained their positions and their power structures under the new ideological labels. Thirdly, there were the ardent reformist elements, who started by supporting Gorbachev's initiative, but ended in many cases by wanting to go faster and further than him. I don't suggest that all of them were motivated by the same aspirations. There were no doubt some who by conviction opted for liberalism, parliamentary democracy and intellectual freedom; but it is very likely that among them too there were others who felt that a free enterprise system and linking with Western capitalism would offer them greater material rewards than what was by then the creaking inefficient bureaucratic structure of socialism. This, then, was the wing of the Soviet ruling class which, in the wake of the abortive coup of August 1991, spearheaded the movements towards privatization and a market economy.
What then have the three-quarters of a century of the Russian Revolution achieved? Perhaps this, as its most lasting

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legacy: that it has laid the essential foundations, through industrial growth, mass education and creation of scientific and technical skills, for the future bourgeois development of Russia. It would then appear that we have to modify Bahro and de Silva's historical perspective. Socialist revolutions are an alternative way out of pre-capitalism; but in Russia as well as in Eastern Europe, the overwhelming economic superiority of the West has determined that in the end these societies, after their detour, should rejoin the capitalist road. Evidently then, socialism turns out to have been really transition from precapitalism to capitalism for countries that have failed to produce a bourgeoisie who can make a direct passage from one to the other. This result is, of course, very different from the subjective goals of the revolutionary leaders or the aspirations of the mass of the people who participated in the revolution.
Let me sum up the argument in this way. The historical experience of this century already confirms the soundness of the Bahro / de Silva theory that socialism was an alternative way out of pre-capitalism for countries without a strong bourgeoisie. The experience of the last five years in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe suggests the further hypothesis that for such countries socialism is a transitional stage between pre-capitalism and capitalism. I am not suggesting, Fukuyama-wise, that immanent in all societies is a capitalism that is struggling to get out: in the present world context it is the strength of international capitalism that is remoulding the rest of the world in its own image, as far as economic structures are concerned. For final confirmation of this hypothesis we may await the future development of China, Vietnam and other socialist states that have already introduced market economies and are learning capitalist techniques.
It may appear strange that what the Communist Party of the Soviet Union did in the ultimate result was to prepare the

75 Years. After: The Russian Revolution Reconsidered 25
way for the bourgeois transformation of Russia. I have referred in an earlier part of this lecture to the historical controversies about the English and French revolutions. Although it now seems very doubtful whether these revolutions were led by the bourgeoisie, or were the outcome of the bourgeois mode of production chafing against fetters, it is perhaps still possible to argue that the political changes in England in the 17th century and in France in the 18th-19th prepared the way for the development of capitalism. So perhaps in their objective results, these revolutions can still be termed 'bourgeois'. But in Germany, the corresponding transformations were carried out from above, by Bismarck. So why should we think it inexplicable that in Russia, where no powerful bourgeoisie or reforming state had emerged before 1917, it was left to the Commu- nist Party regime to fill the historical vacuum?
The prospect of a new Russian bourgeoisie inheriting the legacy of the Communist state may be a melancholy one to dispirited Marxists. True, it is all rather anticlimactic: what was at one time regarded as the contest between two world systems to have ended 'not with a bang with a whimper'. I should like to offer this consolation: at any rate, it's better than the big bang we all dreaded at one time.
(This is the revised text of a lecture delivered at ICES on the 6th November 1992, on the eve of the 75th anniversary of the October Revolution.)
REFERENCES
(Dates of publication are those of the editions quoted in the lecture)
Acton, Edward (1990): Rethinking the Russian Revolution (Lon
don: Edward Arnold).
Bahro, Rudolf (1978): The Alternative in Eastern Europe (Lon
don: NLB).
Bahro, Rudolf (1984): From Red to Green (London: Verso).

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de Silva, G.V.S. (1988): 'Social Change', in The Alternative - Socialism of Barbarism: Collected Writings of G.V.S. de Silva, ed. Charles Abeysekera (Colombo: Social Scientists Association).
Deutscher, Isaac (1954): The Prophet Armed, Trotsky: 1879-1921
(London: Oxford University Press).
Deutscher, Isaac (1959): The Prophet unarmed, Trotsky: 1921-1929
(London: Oxford University Press).
Deutscher, Isaac (1963): The Prophet Outcast, Trotsky: 1929-1940
(London: Oxford University Press).
Farber, Samuel (1990): Before Stalinism - The Rise and Fall of So
viet Democracy (London: Verso).
Halkier, Henrik (1990): The Harder They Come: 1789 As A Challenge to Marxism', in Science and Society, Vol. 54, No. 3, Fall 1990. pp. 321-350.
Kostikov, Vyacheslav (1989): 'Splendour and Poverty of the Nomenklatura, trans. Reggie Siriwardena, in The Thatched Patio, March 1989, pp. 14-20.
Lenin, V.I. (1977): Selected Works, three-volume edition, Vol. 2
(Moscow Progress Publishers).
Lenin, V.I. (1977a): Selected Works, three-volume edition, Vol. 3
(Moscow Progress Publishers).
Luxemburg, Rosa (1961): The Russian Revolution and Marxism or Leninism? (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press).
Marx, Karl (n.d.): Capital, Vol. 1, translated by Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House).
Marx, Karl and Engels, Frederick: Selected Works, three-vol
ume edition, Vol. 1 (Moscow: Progress Publishers).

75 Years. After: The Russian Revolution Reconsidered 27
Pipes, Richard (1977): Russia under the Old Regime
(Harmondsworth: Penguin).
Pipes, Richard (1990): The Russian Revolution, 1899-1919 (Collins
Harvill)
Trotsky, Leon (1945): The Revolution Betrayed, translated by Max
Eastman (New York: Pioneer Publishers).
Trotsky, Leon (1957): The History of the Russian Revolution, translated by Max Eastman (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press).
The Thatched Patio, September / October 1992.
Footnotes
Until after the October Revolution, Russia preserved the old pre-Gregorian calendar which was by then 13 days behind the International calendar. Hence the anomaly of the 'October Revolution’ occurring in November, by the reckoning of the rest of the world.
? Trotsky (1957), pp. 310-311. 3 Deutscher (1959), p.471. * Marx and Engels (1977), p. 113.
Marx (n.d.), p. 763
o A neo-Marxist historian, writing in a special number of Science and Society commemorating the bicentenary of the French Revolution, says: "...the interpretation of the French Revolution as a political conflict between emerging capitalists and declining feudalists has become increasingly difficult to sustain in the light of accumulating historical evidence." (Halkier, 1990, p. 322)
7 Lenin (1977a), p. 707.
Lenin (1977), p. 402.

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12
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4.
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Lenin (1977), p. 481.
Lenin (1977), p. 535. Deutscher (1954), p. 293.
Ibid., pp. 293-294.
Deutscher (1954), p. 449.
Lenin (1977a), p. 725.
The article Better Fewer', but Better' is in fact fundamentally concerned with making proposals for reorganization of the state apparatus, which Lenin describes as 'so deplorable, not to say wretched".
De Silva (1988), p.242. It must be added that it is probably G.V.S. de Silva's earlier intellectual affiliations with Maoism that make him address the position of those who equate Mao's China with 'true socialism'. Trotskyists, on the other hand, would take the Russia of Lenin and Trotsky in power as the ideal norm, though this conception would be as vulnerable.
Bahro (1978), p. 139. I have not been able to verify whether G.V.S. de Silva was influenced by Bahro's book, though there are some striking affinities in ideas between it and his essay. De Silva's essay was published in full (posthumously) only in 1988, but was apparently written in 197980 (personal communication from Charles Abeysekera). Bahro's book appeared in German in 1977 and in English translation in 1978.
Bahro (1978), p. 116.
It is noteworthy that Trotsky's phrase echoes that of Lenin, 'a workers' state with bureaucratic distortions, which he used as early as 1920 to describe the Soviet state - and ironically enough, in a debate against Trotsky, who wanted the trade unions absorbed into the state apparatus.

75 Years After: The Russian Revolution Reconsidered 29
20
21
24
25
26
27
29
Luxemburg (1961) contains her main critique, the pamphlet on the Russian Revolution, especially Chapter VI on The Problem of Dictatorship', pp. 68-72. An excellent account of the early libertarian' Bolshevik factions can be found in Farber (1990).
Trotsky 91945), p. 112. Deutscher (1954), p. 90.
It must be said here that apart from the fact that Trotsky was by temperament little capable of self-critical reflection, he would in exile have been disinclined to look back on his former differences with Lenin because the ruling Stalinist group had exploited these differences to the full in their propagandist campaigns against him, and he was concerned to establish himself as the true ideological heir of Lenin.
de Silva (1988), p. 244. de Silva (1988), p.245. Bahro (1978), p. 50.
The question is in a sense one of terminology and of one's conceptualization of 'feudalism'. For a discussion of the theoretical issues involved, see Pipes (1977), pp. 48-57.
There is a useful summary of this research in Acton (1990), pp. 57-58.
Pipes (1990), p. 98.
Bahro explicitly excludes the GDR and Czechoslovakia, which are untypical precisely because they already had capitalist industry'. (Bahro, 1978, p. 48). These countries, however, as mentioned by de Silva in the case of Czechoslovakia, had no genuine popular revolutions: socialism was imposed on them by conquest.

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Lenin (1977a), pp. 707-708.
I wish to make it clear that I don't accept the orthodox Marxist definition of 'class' as defined in relation to the means of production; even in bourgeois societies cultural characteristics seem to me no less important for the definition of class. Moreover, concepts of 'class' need to be radically modified when applied to societies with no significant private ownership of the means of production.
Kostikov (1989), pp. 16-17.
At the outbreak of the Second World War and after there were tortuous theoretical debates within the miniscule Trotskyist movements whether the bureaucracy could be termed a "ruling class' or only a 'caste". All that needs to be said about this is that in a society where the means of production are nationalized, the class that controls the state is an exploiting class, not by virtue of private ownership as in a capitalist society, but by its ability effectively to appropriate a disproportionate share of the surplus through its political control of the state.
Deutscher (1963), pp. 120-121. Bahro (1984), pp. 202-203/
Deutscher, in his comments on Trotsky's fears of Thermidor, suggested that these fears were exaggerated. Deutscher made this judgment because he always tended to see planned economy and socialized property in the Soviet Union as irreversible. I think subsequent developments have in this respect vindicated Trotsky against Deutscher.
This situation is by no means unprecedented in history. Imagine an ardent young Jacobin, 18 years old at the time of the storming of the Bastille, who lived on through the succeeding political transformations of France and survived

75 Years. After: The Russian Revolution Reconsidered 3
39
to see the Second Empire in 1851. What would the old man have thought, looking back on the beliefs and actions of himself and his comrades in their youth, and the way in which they had led to a very different outcome from what they had intended?
Capitalism has been and is, of course, compatible with a variety of political structures, and in this respect cultural traditions, including the political cultures, of different societies may exercise an overriding influence.
Lanka Guardian November 15, December 1 and 15, 1992

Page 26
The Illusion and the Reality
Where a revolution leads may be very different from the direction its makers and leaders intend. The English Revolution of the 17th century didn't create the rule of the godly, nor the French Revolution of the 18th the reign of liberty, equality and fraternity. It might have been supposed that since the October Revolution was led by a body of men who considered themselves 'scientific socialists, there would be a lesser distance between expectation and outcome than with the previous revolutions. But it was Lenin who, four years after the revolution, produced the most haunting metaphor for the historical phenomenon I have been talking about. Addressing the last party congress he attended, he saw himself and the party as like the driver of a vehicle that was going in a different direction from what he wanted.
The frustration so evident in this and other pronouncements of Lenin's last years was inherent in the very project he had undertaken. Classical Marxist socialism had been created in the belief that it would come to fruition in the advanced capitalist societies of Western Europe, for that's where Marx expected the contradictions of capitalism to mature earliest. Even in making a would-be socialist revolution in a country with an 80 per cent peasant mass, Lenin and the Bolsheviks believed that the European, and especially the German, revolution would soon come to their rescue. But waiting for a victorious revolution in Western Europe turned out to be as illu

The Illusion and the Reality 33
sive as waiting for Godot. Stalin's call to 'socialism in one country in 1924 represented the point at which the Russian revolution turned inwards from the former dreams of speedy revolution in advanced Europe that have not been fulfilled to this day.
These realities meant that the social order that emerged from the Russian revolution was very different from the ideals with which its makers began. It's futile to discuss whether Soviet society represented 'true socialism'. For true'socialism', then, would be one that has never existed in the real world but only in the minds and texts of Marxist thinkers - a curiously idealist view, as G.V.S. de Silva once pointed out, for supposed materialists. It's equally unreal to argue that socialism in its pristine purity existed at some time after the revolution but was then 'corrupted' or betrayed'. Consider, for instance, the question of dictatorship - of the party over Society and of a ruling group over the party. We know the end-result, but when did the process begin? Those who think it started only with Lenin's death should be reminded that the faction in the Bolshevik party led by Shlyapnikov and Aleksandra Kollontai were criticizing the party's stranglehold over the soviets by 1921. Rosa Luxemburg, while defending the Russian revolution against its western enemies, made similar criticisms as early as 1918. Moreover, Trotsky, in his pre-revolutionary polemics against Lenin, had predicted that if Bolshevism came to power, the party apparatus would substitute itself for the party as a whole, then the Central Committee would substitute itself for the apparatus, and finally a single dictator would substitute himself for the Central Committee. That was an uncanny prophecy of what actually happened, but Trotsky forgot his own prediction when he joined the Bolsheviks in mid-1917; and when the sailors of Kronstandt revolted, demanding freedom of the Soviets from party control, he took the lead in shooting them down. This is not to suggest that

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what happened under Lenin was identical with what happened under Stalin, but to point to the clear continuity between them.
If you start with a theoretical conception of socialism derived from the texts of Marx and others, measure Soviet reality against it, find it wanting, and then cry betrayal, you are indulging in an anti-historical and even anti-materialist proceeding. It's as sterile as trying to construct an ideal capitalism from the books of Adam Smith and Ricardo and John Stuart Mill and treating actual British capitalism as a betrayal of it. If there was in fact a betrayal of socialism by the aftermath of the Russian revolution, it was the betrayal of an illusion by historical reality. So in this paper I shall take socialism as a historical phenomenon, for better or worse, as what existed in the Soviet Union and in certain other places. Of course, anybody who wishes to construct a more just and more equitable society anywhere is free to take a different road and call it 'socialism'.
The most substantial achievement that the Russian revolution made possible was the gigantic industrial revolution that transformed one of the most economically backward countries of Europe into a major industrial power. It was accomplished by a combination of state planning and centralized mobilization of people and resources, ideological fervour and coercive labour discipline; but historical fairness must make us recognize that coercion was no less present in the previous industrializations of bourgeois Europe and America. The spectacular triumphs of the Soviet regime in the traditional sectors of heavy industry and the techniques and methods of organization by which they were achieved became an inspiration and a model after the Second World War for other post-revolutionary societies; they were imitated also by some in the Third World that hadn't undergone revolution. Capital accumulation in the hands of the state and central planning thus became a widely accepted path for those societies that had failed to

The Illusion and the Reality 35
produce a strong bourgeoisie.
Today, however, we have to contrast the impressive tempo of Soviet development in the older heavy industries with the fact that it fell lamentably behind the leading capitalist countries in the new industrial revolution of information technology. It's impossible, I maintain, to understand this failure without taking into account the political structure of Soviet society. For that purpose it's first necessary to offer a brief account of that structure.
It's true that neither the level of material existence nor that of mass culture in the Soviet Union in the 1920s would have made possible a flourishing democratic development. This absence was, however, accentuated by the fact that the Soviet regime made a virtue of necessity. It identified the party dictatorship, and later the dictatorship of the ruling group within the party, with the dictatorship of the proletariat'. If we may return to Lenin's nightmarish image of the vehicle going in a direction unintended by the driver, we may say that no doubt one hand of Lenin had been trying to steer the Soviet system in the direction of a workers' state, but his other hand was taking it in another by the curbs on freedom of discussion and organization, not only of the opposition parties but ultimately even within the ruling party. (The organization of factions within it was banned, not by Stalin but already under Lenin in 1921). Concentration of political power in a few hands is sooner or later accompaniêd everywhere by the concentration of economic privilege. Let me quote an account by one of the most brilliant Soviet journalists of the Gorbachev years of the endresult of this process:
A gulf in incomes and standards of living speedily opened between the ruling elite and the great mass of the population... In the first half of the thirties there were created for 'responsible workers' secret distribution

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points, special canteens and special rations. Gradually, the spectrum of special services broadened, enveloping essentially all spheres of life and social existence. There appeared special shops, special car depots, special barber saloons, special petrol pumps, distinctive numberplates for cars, separate waiting-rooms in railway stations and airports, and finally, special cemeteries, where an ordinary mortal could not enter, either alive or dead. I think if there had existed an atheistic heaven, the nomenklatura would have fenced off for itself a special reserve even there.
If inequality of rewards was originally a necessity in an economy of scarcity in order to stimulate effort, and if concentration of power was inevitable in a society with a low level of mass culture, the bureaucracy became ultimately a parasitic group clinging to a monopoly of power and privilege even when these had become socially unnecessary. It is in these circumstances that we must find the explanation for the backwardness of the Soviet Union in information technology. It wasn't due just to the fact that it started from a position of technological inferiority. That had been equally so in other fields, but it hadn't prevented Soviet scientists from spectacular advances in nuclear weapons or spaceflight. But those were fields in which progress could be made by concentrating resources, skills and knowledge in the hands of a relatively small group of specialists. But there could be no broad development of information technology without democratizing access to the relevant knowledge and equipment, and this was impossible under a political dictatorship that feared the consequences of popularizing the use of advanced communication media. Access not only to computers butt even to photocopiers was tightly restricted under the Brezhnev regime - the period when the new technologies were taking off in the West.
Was the Soviet bureaucracy a 'new class? In the 1940s the

The Illusion and the Reality 37
minuscule Trotskyist movement in America was shaken by a theoretical controversy about whether the Soviet bureaucracy was a caste or a class. Was it a transient excrescence or the spearhead of a new exploiting class whose power would be based not on ownership of property but on political control of the state apparatus in which that ownership was vested? Out of this controversy came James Burnham's book The Managerial Revolution (1941), I don't suppose most younger people today have even heard of Burnham; they haven't missed much because he was a shallow thinker who created a brief sensation by claiming that the Soviet, Nazi and American corporate systems were all variants of one social form - the rule of the managerial class, and that this, and not socialism, would replace capitalism.
Some years later Milovan Djilas would espouse substantially the same thesis in The New Class. Trotsky didn't share that perspective. Between 1917 and 1923 he had himself joined in building the party dictatorship and suppressing dissent; but after he was edged out of power, he was haunted by the prospect of a capitalist restoration engineered by the bureaucracy. He believed, however, that this possibility would be forestalled either by a political revolution by the Soviet working class or by European revolution. The last two alternatives turned out to be chimeras, but it was the first that materialized, though many decades later than Trotsky had feared. Under Stalin there could be no capitalist restoration by the bureaucracy because the latter were too insecure; the political satraps who could be hurled any time from the heights of political power to the dungeons of the Lubianka couldn't possibly be makers of a counter-revolution. Life was safer, at least for the bureaucracy, in the relative relaxation of the post-Stalin years; and the increased economic and cultural contacts with the West, the wider opportunities for travel for members of the nomenklatura, must have transformed their consciousness. Their life-style, so gran

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diose in comparison with that of the mass of the Soviet people, must have seemed pitiful when measured against those of the American or European bourgeoisie. And how enviable the latter must have appeared to the Soviet bureaucrat in being able to enjoy their luxuries without the compulsions of hole-andcorner secrecy that were enjoined by outward conformity to official socialist morality! In the aftermath of the abortive coup of 1991 by a section of the party and armed forces against the Gorbachev reforms, the bureaucratic counter-revolution had its opportunity. Unlike the Communist Party regimes in Eastern and Central Europe in 1989, the Soviet regime wasn't toppled by popular action but by a revolt from above. And once this political opening had been created, considerable sections of the bureaucracy hastened to enrich themselves by the appropriation of state property, so that many managers ended as proprietors of the enterprises they had once administered as state officials. This triumph of the kleptocracy was the apotheosis of the Soviet bureaucracy. It brought to realization a witticism that had been current in the late eighties. What is socialism? The transition from capitalism to capitalism." Speaking seriously, the ultimate outcome of the Russian revolution had been to accumulate capital in the hands of the state, to build up the industrial structure and train the skills that no pre-revolutionary bourgeoisie was strong enough to do; once these had been accomplished, a new bourgeoisie, emerging from within the womb of the Soviet state itself, enjoyed the fruits.
Little inclined as I am to idealise or romanticize the former Soviet regime. I recognize that on the international scale, it did perform for four decades after the Second World War the role of a countervailing force to American imperialism. That was in its own interests, but it's undoubtedly true that its collapse has made the world a more dangerous place for the small, the weak and the poor everywhere. The events of the last six

The Illusion and the Reality 39
months alone are sufficient to bring home the terrible perils of a world dominated by a single predatory super-power. The devastation visited on the Afghan people for nothing they had done, the present menaces to Iraq, Iran and North Korea, and the complicity of the United States in the illegal and brutal Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory - all these may even induce nostalgia for the days when the existence of another nuclear super-power provided a partial balance. To those who think the big battle today is between American modernity and Islamic fundamentalist barbarism, it must be said that there is a high-technology barbarism as well as a low-level one, and that the former is by far the greater evil because of the immensely greater destructive power at its command. As for fundamentalism, the report by the journal Scientific American that 45 per cent of Americans believe all life was made by God less than ten thousand years ago should shake those who think reactionary religious ideology is the monopoly of Some Muslims; no doubt the true believers in Genesis are prominent among the docile majority that cheers George W. Bush on as he tries to re-enact the Crusades. The existence of overwhelming destructive power in the hands of a regime that rests on political illiteracy is the greatest threat today to international peace and security. The danger is all the greater because the technology of death has advanced to the point where targeted populations and territory can be devastated from the air, as in Kossovo and Afghanistan with little commitment of ground troops, so there will be few bodybags coming back and no risk of a civilian backlash against the war as with Vietnam.
There are some Marxists today who look forward to a different outcome when globalization has run its course and the contradictions of capitalism have intensified to breakingpoint; then Godot may finally be on the horizon and the Marxist dream of international Socialism may at last come true. I can't rule this out, but it's all too speculative and remote to

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serve as more than psychological compensation in the present. Other futures are also possible, perhaps even more likely, for instance, global warming and other consequences of the ravaging of the natural environment may make the planet uninhabitable before the end of this century.
At this point I wish to read a passage from Trotsky's The Revolution Betrayed, written in 1937:
Marxism sets out from the development of technique (i.e. technology)as the fundamental spring of progress, and constructs the communist program upon the dynamic of the productive forces. If you conceive that some catastrophe is going to destroy our planet in the fairly near future, then you must, of course, reject the communist perspective along with much else. Except for this as yet problematic danger, however, there is not the slightest scientific ground for setting any limit in advance to our technical productive and cultural possibilities. Marxism is saturated with the optimism of progress, and that alone, by the way, makes it irreconcilably opposed to religion.
The optimism of progress, of course, wasn't peculiar to Trotsky among Marxists: even his arch-enemy, who had him murdered in Mexico three years after these words were written, would have subscribed to it one hundred per cent. But reading this passage nearly seventy years later, I have to say that today it is not just the still incalculable possibility of a chance collision with an asteroid that we have to reckon with; it's the very real danger of human beings wiping themselves out as a result of that very technological progress in which Trotsky, like other Marxists, reposed his faith. If that were to happen, Gandhi, who exhorted people to limit their wants, would turn out to have been a wiser prophet than Marx.
We have to recognize that Marxism wasn't revolutionary

The Illusion and the Reality 41
enough. As the child both of capitalism and of Judeo-Christian culture, it took over uncritically the hubris of dedication to man's mastery over nature, the assumption of the inexhaustibility of material resources, and the striving towards a continually rising standard of living and an endless multiplication of man's worldly goods. In consequence socialism, like capitalism, has polluted the planet and destroyed the natural environment (the drying up of the Aral Sea is only the most conspicuous example), though, of course, capitalism's share of responsibility, and that of American capitalism in particular, is much the greater. Poverty is certainly an unmixed evil which crushes both body and spirit, and it should be eradicated; but the viable alternative to it isn't unlimited plenty. Today we have to realize that we can no longer consider the endless plenty that Marxism once envisioned as its ultimate goal to be either desirable or realizable: long before we reach it we would have destroyed ourselves. This has nothing to do with religion, for which I have as little use as Trotsky; it's hard reality.
I don't know, therefore, what constitutes the greater danger to humanity: the United States' present aggressive and militarist foreign policy or its rejection of the Kyoto Protocol and its promotion of a so-called 'Clear Skies' program that has been said to be a recipe for increased global warming. In either case, what is involved is the greed, selfishness and power of a small group, supported, of course, by the ignorant and the deluded.
It's true that the global over-extension of American power contains the seeds of its own undoing. That would be a consummation devoutly to be wished, and George W. Bush in his arrogant folly is doing everything he can to hasten it. But I fear that in spite of his best efforts, the enormous reserves of economic and military strength the United States has built up mean that there will be no sudden collapse like that of the Soviet Union but a slow decline and fall like that of the Roman empire. And what destruction it may accomplish before then!

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I can't honestly see a popular force of sufficient international range, numbers and strength emerging at present that can arrest it. In the ten years since the fall of the Soviet Union, in the global confrontation with the violence of American imperialism the initiative has passed from socialist movements of any shade to the counter-violence of nationalist and fundamentalist groups; the prototype of their militancy is not the social revolutionary but the suicide bomber. Where stands socialism today?' asks the title of this seminar. Where indeed?
On that bleak note I have to conclude, I'm afraid, leaving, I am sure, many people in the audience dissatisfied, irritated or angered. Some of you would probably have much preferred it if I had treated you to a full-throated variation on the theme of
Arise, ye prisoners of starvation, Arise, ye wretched of the earthl
I am sorry I can't oblige: the season for such heroics seems tO me OVer.
This paper were read at a seminar,
organized by ICES to mark the tenth anniversary of the fall of
the Soviet union, on the theme Where Stands Socialism Today?
Footnotes
The vehicle is pulling out of hand; it is as if there were Someone driving it and the car were going not in the direction in which he steers it, but in the direction someone else is steering it; as if the car were driven by some illegal, lawless hand..." (Lenin, at the Eleventh Congress of the RCP(b), 27th March 1922).
* Among them: the comparison in the same speech of the Bolshevik Party to a conquering nation that had been culturally absorbed by the conquered; the confession in his last

The Illusion and the Reality 43
notes' dictated on 30-31 December 1922, 'I am, it seems, strongly guilty before the workers of Russia for not having intervened vigorously and drastically enough on this notorious issue of autonomisation (i.e. of the republics); and the famous last letter to the party that came to be known as the 'Suppressed Testament'.
G.V.S. de Silva, 'Social Change' in The Alternative: Socialism or Barbarism; Collected Writings of G.V.S. de Silva, ed. Charles Abeysekera (Social Scientists' Association), p.242.
Vyacheslav Kostikov, Splendour and Poverty of the Nomenklatura', orig. in Ogonyok, trs. by Regi Siriwardena in The Thatched Patio, Vol. 2, No. 1, March 1989.
Burnham's thesis wasn't even original: its essentials had apparently been put forward before the war by Bruno Rizzi in a book published in Paris, La Bureaucratisation du Monde, that I haven't come across. I met Burnham in Colombo in 1950 when he came here on a visit sponsored by the American Embassy. He was reluctant to discuss the theory of the managerial revolution because he had by then put all that behind him, and was building a new career as a cold-war propagandist of American democracy against Soviet Communism.
Leon Trotsky. The Revolution Betrayed (Pioneer Publishers), p.45.1 conjecture that where the word technique occurs in the text, Trotsky's Russian original would have read tekhnika, which in this context would be better rendered as technology.
Nethra, Vol. 5, No. 2, April-June 2002

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Soviet Society: The Fallout From Eastern Europe
Everybody recognizes that the Eastern European democratic revolution of 1989 wouldn't have taken place but for the example and the stimulus of Soviet perestroika. One can go even further and say that in East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria and Romania the trigger for the popular upheaval was provided by Gorbachev's repudiation of the Brezhnev doctrine' at the Warsaw pact meeting of July 1989. (Poland and Hungary had, of course, embarked on the course of reform before that date.) If I may indulge in a little speculation, I would conjecture that in making his historic declaration Gorbachev deliberately called the Eastern European peoples to come out against the ruling Communist parties. I base this conjecture on the fact that so intelligent and subtle a politician couldn't have failed to foresee the electrifying effect that the removal of the danger of Soviet military intervention would have on the peoples of Eastern Europe. My view is that by mid-1989 the tempo of reform in the Soviet Union had slowed down - in particular, the desperately needed economic reforms were blocked by a conservative party bureaucracy - and Gorbachev had to find a fresh force for change. He did so, I think by summoning the Eastern European peoples into the arena. However, the rest of my analysis is not dependent on whether you accept this conjecture. For whether Gorbachev intended it or not, there can be no doubt about the outcome. At mid-1989 the greater

Soviet Society: The Fallout From Eastern Europe 45
part of Eastern Europe was still ruled by Stalinist structures and ideology. In the democratic revolution of the second half of the year Eastern Europe caught up with and outstripped the Soviet Union, not only de-Stalinising but dismantling Communist party rule. What we are now experiencing is the rebounding of this process back on Soviet society and its political system. This is a subject that has been little discussed, and that is why I have chosen it as the subject of my contribution to this seminar.
But before I embark on it, I must first say why it is relevant to a discussion on "Eastern Europe and Sri Lanka". Perestroika and Eastern European democratic revolution represent a major intellectual crisis for the Sri Lankan left, as for the left elsewhere. There are, of course, still many people who prefer to play the ostrich and pretend that nothing has happened that need disturb their cherished beliefs. There are others who have decided, more realistically, that they have belatedly to endorse the changes that have already taken place. Even lifelong devotees of Stalin and Brezhnev have begun to denounce them and to greet their dethroning as a great victory for socialism. But what I want to say in this talk is that the process of intellectual and ideological spring-cleaning can't stop there. That is why I think it will be instructive to look at the new debates and controversies that are going on in the Soviet Union. In the first three years of perestroika the ideological struggle was agafhst Stalinism. That debate is now over. Not that the political structures, the practices and even the mental habits that are the legacy of Stalinism are altogether dead. But nobody - except for some anachronistic figures like those who met recently in Stalin's hometown to form a World Communist Party' - any longer dares to defend Stalinism in public. During the initial phase of perestroika the cry was "Back to Leninism'. The push towards democratization was represented as the return to Leninist political norms, the trends towards a

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market economy as a revival of Lenin's NEP, and the moves towards greater autonomy for the constituent republics as a restoration of Lenin's nationalities policy. That is still the position of the Gorbachevist centre within the ruling Communist party. But that Leninist orthodoxy is now being called in question by new movements and trends among radical sections both of the party and the non-party intelligentsia.
I remember that the Russian poet Sergei Essenin in 1924 wrote a poem about his visit to the peasant home in which he had been brought up. He found that his sister who had joined the Komsomol had replaced the icons which used to hang on the wall with a picture of Lenin from a calendar. To me Lenin too is no icon, the poet commented. But of course an icon was exactly what Lenin was turned into during the sixty five years since his death. The saint's relic preserved in Red Square with the faithful paying their devotions is only the most obvious sign of this cult, and it seems to me entirely appropriate that it should have been instituted by an ex-seminarian. However, what has been more seriously disabling is the unquestioning deference to Leninism as an ideology, the ritual citation of Lenin's texts as the fountainhead of political wisdom, and the taboo on critical discussion of his theories and actions.
That taboo has been breached today. From my reading of the Soviet press I would say that this development had already started around the beginning of 1989. But it has been greatly strengthened and accentuated by the Eastern European revolution of the latter months of the year. The wholesale rejection of Leninism in Eastern Europe, the discarding even by the former ruling parties of the name 'Communist", the dismantling of statues and monuments of Lenin himself in Eastern European cities, have all given enhanced courage to those reforming elements in the Soviet Union who want to discard the ideological baggage of Leninism.

Soviet Society: The Fallout From Eastern Europe 47
In one respect this aspiration has already borne fruit in respect of State policy. Last year the Congress of People's Deputies refused by a majority vote to debate the issue of Article 6 of the Soviet Constitution which guarantees the political monopoly of the Communist Party. In February this year the deputies reversed their earlier decision and agreed to repeal Article 6. This was clear evidence of the pressure exerted on the Soviet polity by the developments in Eastern Europe. Everywhere in those countries the demand for the ending of the Communist Party's monopoly of power and the institution of a multi-party system had been the spearhead of the democratic struggle. It had seemed earlier that it might take many years for the same demands to be pressed successfully in the Soviet Union (I thought so myself), but the Eastern Europena example was apparently irresistible.
The repeal of Article 6 will only clear the constitutional block in the way of a multi-party system. Exactly what form that system will take and how authentically pluralist it will be will depend on the political processes through which its evolution takes place. Today it seems more than possible that it will begin with a split within the CPSU itself around the time of the 28th Party Congress in July - whether at the sessions or immediately after them. This could be a three-way split - between the Gorbachevist centre, the neo-Stalinist conservatives of whom Ligachev is the spokesman within the Politbureau, and the radical reformers who are organizing round the Democratic Platform, and whose outlook is avowedly social-democratic. However, such a split may be combined with and further accelerate the divisions resulting from minority nationalisms. What lies ahead, therefore, is a stormy and unpredictable future. But since this talk is not concerned fundamentally with political predictions, I shall consider instead the issues that are relevant to us in the Soviet Union's abandonment of the one-party system.

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The orthodox will argue that a multi-party system isn't incompatible with Leninism and the role of the vanguard party. In theory, yes; and even in practice, it may be recalled that the Bolshevik Party entered into a short-lived coalition with the Left Social Revolutionaries after October. But it can be asserted that the Leninist assumption of a single party as the instrument of history and political practice in conformity with this assumption made inevitable the development towards a oneparty state. This brings me to the thoroughgoing critique of Leninism that is being made by radical elements both within and without the CPSU today.
One of the phenomena evident in Soviet society since perestroika began has been the intense concern to re-discover history - the truth about the pre-revolutionary past. However, this preoccupation is not an interest in the past for its own sake. It springs from the urgent compulsion to know how Soviet society came to be what it is, and to find in the understanding of these shaping forces the guide to the directions of change that are necessary in the present. The first expression of this re-exploration of the past was the flood of revelations about the horrors and crimes of the Stalin era that was opened up by Soviet journalistic, academic and creative writing during the initial phase of perestroika. However, it wasn't enough to know that these things had happened, it was more important to know why they had happened. The naivety of Khrushchev's explanation — that Stalin was abad guy — could no longer be acceptable. Hence the enormous volume of historical and theoretical writing of the last few years directed towards exploring the social and political bases of the apparatus of dictatorship and terror without which Stalin couldn't have been possible. The fundamental problem is stated in two sentences at the end of the opening chapter in the new "History of Soviet Society' that is being written by a group of historians in the Institute of History of the USSR Academy of

Soviet Society: The Fallout From Eastern Europe 49
Sciences (this chapter has appeared in the journal Istoriya SSSR). I translate:
The socialist revolution could be considered to have been genuinely completed only with the achievement of democracy. How and when did the authoritarian alternative in the development of Soviet society arise, and why did it triumph?"
That puts very succinctly and precisely the crucial questions raised by the Soviet experience. However, until very recently, all explorations of these questions stopped at 1924, the year of Lenin's death, or at best, at 1923, the year when Stalin through the troika prepared for his takeover. What is profoundly significant is that some Soviet inquirers are today going back to the Leninist era, even as far back as the October revolution itself, to answer the questions raised in the two sentences I quoted from the new History of Soviet Society'.
In his Lenin Day address in April 1990 Gorbachev devoted one part of the speech to attacking what he called 'destructive approaches to Lenin', and said, "They are aimed at identifying Lenin with Stalin and can paint all Soviet history black to portray the October Revolution and the ensuing events as errors and, even worse, as crimes against the nation and humanity."
However, Gorbachev is wrong. The question is not that of 'identifying Lenin with Stalin', nor, I think, do the sober and responsible critics of Leninism in the Soviet Union today do so. There is arf important difference between the two men and the two eras. Lenin preserved freedom of discussion and dissent within the ruling party, while eroding and ultimately wiping out freedom of political expression outside it, Stalin turned the ruling party itself into a monolith, crushing dissent within the ranks of the party too. But once this distinction has been made, we have to recognize that there is a continuity of historical processes between the two stages. The Communist party could not indefinitely maintain political freedom within

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its own ranks once it had destroyed freedom outside them; the progression from one-party rule to the monolithic party and ultimately the dictatorship of one man was a necessary progression. Trotsky had prophetically foreseen this in his prerevolutionary polemics against Lenin, when he characterized Bolshevism as an endeavour to substitute the party for the working class, and predicted the outcome in the event of its triumph: "The party organization would then substitute itself for the party as a whole; then the Central Committee would substitute itself for the organization; and finally a single dictator would substitute himself for the Central Committee. However, Trotsky went back on this insight in entering Lenin's party in 1917, and later did even more than most of its other leaders to strengthen the centralizing trends within it. The figure that deserves to be honoured most today as prophet is neither Lenin nor Trotsky but the German Communist woman leader, Rosa Luxemburg. She defended the Russian Revolution against its right-wing enemies but from the earliest days frankly and relentlessly criticized its authoritarian tendencies. After the long and tragic experience of prison-camp socialism, not only in the Soviet Union but in many other post-revolutionary societies, the words of her pamphlet on the Russian Revolution have acquired an even desper resonance than at the time they were written:
“Without a free and untrammelled press, without the unlimited right of association and assemblage, the rule of the broad mass the people is entirely unthinkable... Freedom only for the supporters of the government, only for the members of one party - however numerous they may be - is no freedom at all. Freedom is always and exclusively freedom for the one who thinks differently.'
And again, in a passage which reads like a description in advance of Soviet political life in the seven decades to come:

Soviet Society: The Fallout From Eastern Europe 5
With the repression of political life in the land as a whole, life in the Soviets must also became more and more crippled. Without general elections, without unrestricted freedom of press and assembly, without a free struggle of opinion, life dies out in every public institution, becomes a mere semblance of life, in which only the bureaucracy remains as the active element... Among them, in reality only a dozen outstanding heads do the leading, and an elite of the working class invited from time to time to meetings where they are to applaud the speeches of the leaders, and to approve proposed resolutions unanimously - at bottom, then, a clique affair - a dictatorship, to be sure, not the dictatorship of the proletariat, however, but only the dictatorship of a handful of politicians...Yes, we can go much further; such conditions must inevitably cause a brutalization of public life...'
It isn't my intention, however, to follow the demonisation of Stalin with a demonisation of Lenin. Lenin and Leninism were a product of the Russian historical context - the belatedness of Russia's historical development, and the concomitant absence or retardedness of liberal culture enlightenment, bourgeois advancement and democratic political Leninist authoritarianism thus took on the imprint of the very power structures it overthrew. I fully agree that any society with a legacy of belated historical development will have to contend with similar burdens of the past in seeking to transform itself. But what was destructive about Leninism was that it sought to make the political forms evolved in the underground struggle against Tsarism the ideal, and to recreate the whole society in the image of the centralized party. This was fatal. The subjective drives of Leninism towards the imposition of a social model determined by a revolutionary elite on the rest of society worked together with the objective circumstances - the cultural gulf between the mass of the people and the leaders - to make dictatorship inevitable.

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Since then the Leninist model - further debased and brutalized by Stalinism - has established itself, with the prestigious authority of the first socialist revolution, as the example to be emulated by all third world socialisms. Wherever Leninist parties have come into power, the dangerous combination of the subjective drive towards authoritarianism inherent in their ideology and the objective Social circumstances favouring such a development have manifested themselves in practice. Hence the indifference or downright hostility of many Asian Marxist parties to perestroika is not surprising: it goes against the grain of their whole political culture. The contrast between, say, the reaction of the CPI (M) and that of the Italian Communist Party which is reconstituting itself as a social democratic movement is a measure of the distance between the two worlds.
One of the consequences of the kind of belatedness in historical development that I have been talking about is the tendency to compensate psychologically for it by claiming the privileges of backwardness. There are many examples in Russian history - from the Slavophiles and Narodniks who thought Russia could avoid the fate of the West by by-passing capitalism, to Lenin and Trotsky imagining in 1917 that Russia could lead the European revolution, to Stalin proclaiming socialism in one country. However, under Asian conditions, with their even greater belatedness of development, these aberrations become further accentuated, as in Maoism with its idealization of the peasantry. After perestroika and the Eastern European revolution there is a danger that some Asian political groups will see themselves as the guardians of socialist orthodoxy against a decadent western world enticed by the fleshpots of capitalism. This tendency is present among some Sri Lankan Socialists too. I see this is as a phenomenon within the socialist camp analogous to the rejection of Western thought by the nationalist propounders of 'jatika chintanaya'. Let us remember, therefore, that political democracy, the rule of law and

Soviet Society: The Fallout From Eastern Europe 53
human rights today represent fundamental and universal advances, and that any Socialism that turn its back on them is really perpetuating the ideology of a pre-capitalist past.
In conclusion I wish to say that I don't want to indulge in any euphoria about either the Eastern European or the Soviet developments. That Stalinism has been discarded in the Soviet Union, that Leninism has been thrown out lock, stock and barrel in Eastern Europe, are good things as far as they go. But all these countries face a host of complex and arduous problems, and there is no guarantee that their future path will be smooth and peaceful. The burdens of historical belatedness are not to be cast off in a day or a decade. Let me finish by quoting the concluding paragraphs from an article written last year in “Ogonyok', the most independent and forthright of Soviet periodicals, by a man whom I regard as one of the wisest political commentators today in the Soviet Union, Vyacheslav Kostikov. Its immediate purpose was to warn against overexpectations after the first sessions of the newly elected Congress of People's Deputies. But the political wisdom of his remarks is, I think, equally relevant to Eastern Europe today, and has also its lessons for us in our very different political circumstances. I translate from the original:
It does not follow that we should surrender to illusions and suppose that in one day democracy will reign among us. Enough of utopias! The years of a mature democracy are counted in centuries. Glassnost, freedom of the word, parliamentarianism, are only the attributes and the instruments of democracy. And those who expected from the first Congress of People's Deputies a miracle - the speedy introduction by decree of democracy from the western borders to the shores of the Pacific - will surely be disappointed.
To the emerging civil society the Congress of People's Deputies has given that without which no democracy can grow

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- the taste of freedom. Having tasted of what was yesterday still that "forbidden fruit", the Soviet people, like the Biblical Adam and Eve, will assuredly no longer be able and no longer desire to live in the sterile mythical paradise, but will prefer the "sinful world" of democracy'.
The Thatched Patio, Vol. 5. No. 2, March/April 199s

Poland: Exorcising the Spectre of 1984
The Ceylonese who visits Poland today is likely to be struck by the curious sense of familiarity in the atmosphere of this remote country. It is not only that he will feel more at home with the simplicity and austerity of Polish life than amidst the sophistication and elegance of Western Europe, that Warsaw is a relatively small and compact city, or that the Poles are an extremely warm-hearted, spontaneous and hospitable people.
No, I am referring more particularly to the similarity in the political and social climate. For Poland, like Ceylon, is living through the aftermath of a national upheaval, a change of regime forced by the people.
There are, of course, obvious differences: Poland's problems are altogether bigger and more difficult than ours. No one can even begi to judge the Polish situation fairly without remembering the tragic history of this nation. And if the visitor has forgotten it, the scars which Warsaw still bears in its ruined buildings, even after the tremendous achievement of reconstructing a city which twelve years ago was only a heap of rubble, will remind him of a martyrdom besides which the "epic" of the London blitz seems like soap-opera.
He will hear from his Polish friends personal memories, recounted in the most matter-of-fact manner, of the sufferings and privations of these years which will induce in him a spirit

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of chastening humility. I am not sure whether I should say that we in Ceylon have been fortunate in being spared such a history. For would the passionate national consciousness of the Polish people today have been possible if they did not have to struggle hard for their independence and had it handed to them on a platter?
But when due allowances have been made for the vaster scale and greater intensity of the Polish experience, the resemblances remain. One year after the "October turning-point", the regime is facing the political problems created by popular aspirations in an economy which is still unable to satisfy them. And the Polish people, for their part, are being compelled to shed some of the illusions engendered in the first flush of their victory and to recognize that they have to go a long way yet before they can enjoy the full fruits of October.
But before discussing the new problems which face the Poland of today, it is necessary to make clear the immense gulf which separates it from the pre-October era. It is true that Mr. Gomulka is now facing the difficulties which confront every one-time rebel who is placed in authority. But the predominant impression which the impartial observer still gets in Poland is of great intellectual and political ferment, of an impressive range and diversity of contending opinions, in spite of the partial limitations which have recently been placed on their expression.
After the "Po Prostu' affair, which will be discussed later, Mr. Gomulka has enjoined greater restraints on the Press; but polemic and controversy are still the life and soul of Polish newspapers and periodicals. And even more than in the printed word, it is in the intimate exchange of ideas in personal conversation that one feels the new freedom of thinking in Poland - particularly in the interminable discussions which go on in the coffee-houses which (just as much as in eighteenth-century

Poland: Exorcising the Spectre of 1984 57
London) are the focuses of social and intellectual life in War
SW. w
Over the cups of strong black coffee one becomes aware of the completeness with which the rigid ice of uniformity in the Stalinist era has been broken. The shock of the 20o Congress revelations, the reappraisal by the Polish party of its own past (more far-reaching than any that has yet been carried out in Russia), the rehabilitation as heroes and rhartyrs of the Polish Communists executed as traitors in the thirties - all these experiences have given the rank-and-file Communist in Poland a great openness of mind. Fresh from the dogmatism and cocksureness of most Marxists in Ceylon (whether of the Stalinist or Trotskyist breed), one finds it refreshing to meet people who do not shrink from saying that they do not know the answers or that they must think more and wait longer before making up their minds.
With this re-examination of Communist doctrine going on, many Polish Communists in inquiring about Ceylon's politics, showed an astonished curiosity in the unique phenomenon of the Lanka Sama Samaja Party as an influential Trotskyist party. It is in keeping with the changed climate the mention of the word “Trotskyism” is not met any longer with the stock Communist response, "Perhaps Trotsky wasn't right", said one Communist to me "but we know that he fought against Stalin, and we know that Stalin was wrong, so we can't dismiss Trotsky any longer as mérely a traitor or a counter-revolutionary."
Incidentally, I was considerably impressed by the degree of knowledge of the affairs of distant Ceylon which I encountered in Poland. It may not have been surprising that intellectuals and journalists should know of Mr. Bandaranaike as well as of Mr. Gluck, or that I should meet with questions about the prospects for the Paddy Lands Bill. But I must confess to being rather startled when the factory workers I encountered by

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chance when taking a tram ride from Cracow to the big steel centre of Nowa Huta were able to talk about the last general election in Ceylon, the defeat of Sir John Kotelawala, and the character of the new government.
The new wind of intellectual freedom that is blowing through Poland carries with it currents from the outside world. As far as Poland today is concerned, it is nonsense to talk of an "iron curtain". The Government is making a determined effort to attract back émigrés and many more Poles from abroad have returned to their mother-country, either permanently or as visitors during the last twelve months than in the several preceding years. Foreign books and newspapers are easily accessible; there is one coffee-house where you can read any important foreign newspaper while sipping your drink. It is in the realm of arts and letters that this freedom of contact is most striking.
Where, in the Stalinist period, a critic would not have dared to refer to a writer like James Joyce without prefixing a derogatory epithet such as "decadent", the Polish cultural journals now freely discuss the best contemporary literature, music and painting. Translations of Western literature, from the classics to the modern masters, are available in Polish, and when, for instance, Albert Camus was awarded the Nobel Prize last month, many Warsaw bookshops carried window-displays of his books.
In the theatre you can see not only Shakespeare, Moliere and Goldoni but also Shaw, Wilde, Brecht, Sartre and Beckett. Nor is this purely a "cultural" matter, for in the Poland of today, where politics is the breath of life, literature is inevitably "committed", and works of art acquire a new meaning which may startle the foreigner. A review of a Shakespeare performance is headed "Hamlet after the 20th Congress"; the historical plays are seen as penetrating studies of despotism (does not

Poland: Exorcising the Spectre of 1984 59
Bolingbroke extract a "confession" from the abdicating Richard II?); and the trial of Shaw's St. Joan carries with it overtones from the Moscow Trials of the 'thirties. And with Poland throwing open her doors, there have come in together with what is humane and revivifying in the Western intellectual tradition, fads and cults that are less desirable. October has brought the freedom (for those teenagers who want it) to rock'n roll, and I even discovered, in a cellar at the bottom of the official House of Culture in Cracow, an existentialist nightclub complete with all the Parisian properties.
The other solid achievement of October which is certain to endure is the pride of the Polish people in their new national sovereignty and their determination to preserve it. Those Western politicians who hope to swing Poland out of the Soviet orbit are indulging in wishful thinking; for apart from all considerations of ideology, a Poland which would be even neutralist in foreign policy is unthinkable as long as Western Germany is being rearmed by the West. But if the Poles realistically recognize the necessity of the Soviet alliance, they are also quite firm in their desire to retain their full freedom in handling their own internal affairs.
Shortly before I arrived in Warsaw, I happened to read an editorial in the "Daily Express" which, by a good leader-writer's trick, tried to set off against the triumph of the Russian space satellite the students' riots in what it described as "another Russian satellite'. I wish this writer could have been with me in Poland and seen the lack of self-consciousness with which people told the popular joke describing the Russian moon as "Albania'. Or else he should have been with me in a little restaurant in the village of Zelazowa Wola (Chopin's birthplace) on the day when Poland met Russia at football. "It is a very important match for us," everybody told me as they clustered in great excitement round the radio; and the jubilation when the Polish team finally won was such as was appropriate to a

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great national victory. By a happy coincidence it was only a few days after the anniversary of October, "Dwa-Jeden" (TwoOne), the Polish newspapers triumphantly proclaimed in frontpage headlines the next day.
Poland is Communist; but the bulk of the Polish people still remain Catholic by religion. (It is only necessary to drive out of Warsaw into the country on a Sunday and see the streams of peasants going to church to realize this fact.) The situation is made still more paradoxical by the fact that "Pax" the heretical Catholic organization which collaborated with the State during the pre-October era has become one of the last refuges of the Stalinist die-hards and is regarded by the party today with disfavour.
There is no doubt about the genuineness of freedom of worship in Poland today; but, one may well wonder whether for a Communist State there can be any permanent compromise with an organization like the Roman Catholic Church which claims the total allegiance of the faithful - unless that allegiance were to be naturally weakened with the passage of time. It would not be surprising therefore, if both parties to the agreement were to hope that it would work in their favour. I do not think that the Church in itself will constitute a danger to Polish Communism provided that the balance of political forces is not altered by other factors. But it is necessary to add that the head of the Roman Catholic Church in Poland, Cardinal Wyszynski who made the pact with Mr. Gomulka is a masterly organizer and strategist whom I have
heard compared to St. Ignatius Loyola.
In a speech to teachers last month, the Cardinal took as his text "Greater than all these is charity," and expatiated on the atmosphere of love - love from parents, Church and teachers - which should surround the bringing up of the child. "And even more," he went on, "we are awaiting love from the State. Be

Poland: Exorcising the Spectre of 1984 6
cause we are a Catholic country and therefore we cannot speak about any social hatred. We have been brought up on social love. And therefore we want the State too to begin to love us. I suppose that such a small desire is no sin. It seems to me that I have not sinned up to the end and therefore guiltless I can leave this place." The audience applauded, and the Cardinal exclaimed.
"Enough my children. I believe in the life everlasting. What does a hundred years mean?" -
The first anniversary of October was marked not only by Poland's football victory over Russia: a few days earlier there occurred the students' riots in Warsaw, while at the month's end the Central Committee of the United Workers' Party (the Communist-Socialist alliance) met at its Tenth Plenum, and Gomulka moved the postponement of the party congress which had been scheduled for December in order to enable a cleansing of the party ranks.
The riots which were touched off by the ban on the paper "Po Prostu', were never as serious as some sections of the popular Western press made out. The participants were principally students from the Polytechnic; and while on the first two days the demonstrations were political in character, adventurous teenagers and hooligans spoiling for a fight with the police joined in later. When the demonstrations degenerated into smashing of telephone booths and stoning of tramcars, public sympathy turned against the whole affair and the Government was able easily to discredit it.
Though as has been indicated, the riots were not a mass movement, they were symptomatic of the restlessness of a section of the intelligentsia and students whose voice "Po Prostu" had been. "Po Prostu" of course by its criticism of the Stalinist leadership and its exposures played a very important part a year ago in ushering in the October change. Since that time,

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however, it has been edited by a group of younger men in the party who want to go much faster and further in the direction of liberalization than the leadership (at present at any rate) is prepared to go.
The "Po Prostu" group, however, Seems to mean opposition with a not very coherent conception of what it wants in place of Gomulka's policy, so that the paper tended to become an open forum for criticism of the regime from many different points of view including some which were quite right-wing. Near-syndicalist slogans for "all power to the workers' councils", liberal demands for freedom of functioning for all political groups, praise of Adenauer's Germany - all these can be found in the pages of the paper.
What the censors found most objectionable in the September issue (the ban of which sparked the riots) was a leading article by a Catholic writer Kurowski who denied both the sovereignty of Poland and the possibility of economic progress under socialism, and claimed that in the face of this general hopelessness all that was left for the Poles was to drink vodka and to steal.
The "Po Prostu' group has since been expelled from the party though one of its members was a popular M.P. who had been returned at the last elections with a considerable majority. This decision like the ban on "Po Prostu" did not pass without some controversy in the party; certain party organizations sent in resolutions to the Central Committee expressing their dissent. This does not mean that any significant section of the party was in sympathy with the views of "Po Prostu', but there are quite a few Communists who think that while "Po Prostu" was wrong and entirely negative in its criticism it would have been better for the party to allow them to have their say and to reply to them in a polemic.
It would be an over-simplification to conclude on the face

Poland: Exorcising the Spectre of 1984 63
of the "Po Prostu' affair, as some Western commentators have done, that the October trend towards freedom of discussion in the party has been reversed. It would be more correct to say that Mr. Gomulka today is trying to hold the balance between the die-hard Stalinist wing ("conservative dogmatists" in the current party jargon) on the one hand and the intellectuals who want more elbow room on the other. His speech at the Tenth Plenum made it clear that the scrutinizing and revision of party membership which was to precede the party congress was intended to weaken both groups, and this is confirmed by some of the expulsions which have already been carried out.
If the brunt of the attack is nevertheless directed against those whom the leadership called "revisionists", it is because the old Stalinists have already been largely isolated. And to put the "Po" affair in its proper proportions it is only necessary to compare it with the Djilas case in Yugoslavia: Djilas was tried and jailed; the "Po Prostu' group (some of whose pronouncements were not very different from those of Djilas) has merely been expelled from the party.
The Tenth Plenum, in effect, indicates that freedom of discussion within the party will continue, but within the limits which have been strictly set. In appraising Mr. Gomulka's line it is necessary to remember two factors which to my mind, determine the political leeway that he has. One is Poland's relationship with hep great and powerful neighbour. Poland, true enough, enjoys full sovereignty today but with a cold war raging, the condition of that sovereignty must inevitably be a firm check on any political trends inside Poland which would be dangerous to the Soviet Union itself.
Last month Mr. Krushchev gave a resounding snub to James Reston of the "New York Times" who asked him whether he did not think the Polish Communists had gone too far. There is no reason to doubt the sincerity of Mr. Krushchev's answer;

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but what would his reaction be if the "revisionists' were to get the upper hand in Poland? The Polish Communists are very proud of the fact that they averted in their own country any development similar to the tragic events in Hungary, but those events remain a constant warning. This is one reason why the
demand for full freedom for all political groups in Poland is not going to cut any ice at present. "No responsible Pole" said Mr. Gomulka at the Ninth Plenum "will risk the fate of Poland, the fate of his nation by such a gamble which is called a "free play of political forces."
The other overriding factor in Polish politics is the economic situation: to put it very simply, how much political freedom Poland will be able to afford during the next few years will depend largely on her success in resolving her economic difficulties. It is this which, to my mind will largely determine the fate of the October change - a question which will be discussed next. Before going on to it, it is necessary however to say something about one of the most interesting elements in the Polish political amalgam - the relations of State and Church.
In this, as in other fields, October brought about a farreaching change - indeed, an un-precedented agreement; between a Communist State and the Roman Catholic Church by which Catholics were accorded not only full freedom of worship but also the right to run their own newspapers and to present candidates for elections. The thorny problem of religious education has been settled by the provision that in every State school (and nearly all schools are run by the State) parents should decide whether they wanted religious instruction or not with the result that the great majority of schools have opted for the teaching of religion.
The condition of these freedoms of course is that the Church should refrain from any political activity hostile to the State and this is very strictly enforced. For both parties this extraor

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dinary compromise has been forced by necessity. Both have had to accept facts unpalatable to them: the Church, whether it likes it or not.
"The basis of bureaucratic rule", wrote Trotsky in The Revolution Betrayed. "is the poverty of society in objects of consumption, with the resulting struggle of each against all. When there is enough goods in a store, the purchasers can come whenever they want to. When there is little goods, the purchasers are compelled to stand in line. When the lines are very long, it is necessary to appoint a policeman to keep order“.
Trotsky was writing about the cause of dictatorship in Russia, but his analysis has relevance to Poland too. The Stalinist regime in Poland was not merely an imposition from above; it also reflected the plight of a nation whose economy had been completely devastated during the War with the consequent sharpening of the "struggle of each against all."
During the first Six-Year Plan the regime concentrated on the building up of heavy industry. The rate of capital accumulation during these years was in the region of 30 per cent, while around 10 per cent of the budget every year went into defence. To some extent, this emphasis may have been inevitable owing to the destruction caused by the War on the one hand and the Cold War conflict on the other, but it was undoubtedly exaggerated by Stalinist policy. The painful sacrifices which have been forced on the Polish people since the War have produced their fruits in the radical transformation of an economy, which had been almost entirely agricultural before the War. It is only necessary to visit the big steel factories of Nowa Huta (already some of the biggest in modern Europe) and the surrounding beehives of workers' flats which stand where fields grew a few years ago, to realize how thoroughly the face of Poland has been changed.

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But the price which has been paid for these giant strides in heavy industry is to be found in the shortages and high prices of certain essential consumer goods. Twelve years after the War there is still "not enough goods" in the Polish store. Food, by and large is reasonably priced; rents are low in spite of housing shortages because of the public ownership of dwellings; travel is cheap, although the buses and trams are very crowded. Books - particularly school-books and children's books - are inexpensive. But the prices of clothes, shoes and other manufactured consumers' goods are incredibly high. The average journalist, for instance, would need a month's salary to buy a pair of shoes, or two months' salary for a suit.
The disproportion between heavy industry and consumers' goods production could only have been maintained under a dictatorial regime. With October, there has been a change in investment policy: the new Five-Year Plan provides for an increased production of such goods as cotton fabrics (22 per cent), woolens (17 per cent) and leather footwear (48 per cent). But meanwhile the new regime had to face the problems resulting from this accumulated unbalance in the economy. The popular elation after October was accompanied by a new spirit of selfsacrifice; the workers' unions are said to have declared: "We are ready even to eat grass for Gomulka." But as - always happens in the aftermath of a revolution - this mood did not last. Freed from the rigid labour discipline of the Stalinist era, the workers began to take things easy, and there was a trend towards falling production; at the same time the desire to enjoy immediately the economic fruits of the new freedom expressed itself in a demand for higher wages, which finally broke out in the Lodz strikes.
It was then that Mr. Gomulka put his foot down firmly and made it clear that - except for the few increases in the wages of the lowest-paid groups and of special classes of workers such as miners, for whom production incentives were needed

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- there could be no wage-raise immediately. He explained that until there was increased production, wage increases could only lead to inflation.
The biggest problem for Poland today is: How soon can the regime give the people the higher living standards that they will reasonably expect as the gains of October? On the answer to this question will hinge the political future of Poland and the prospects for the October course itself. In the last resort even the fuller liberalization which the intelligentsia want cannot be achieved without more economic plenty. For one reason why the political freedom of the intellectuals has been restricted is that this liberty had begun to have its impact on the masses and to provoke economic demands which cannot yet be afforded. Mr. Gomulka's greatest hope must lie then in the changes in policy which have been introduced since October in order to give new life to the economy.
Just as much as in politics, so in economics October has meant an effort to live down the crippling handicaps of the past, of "revolution from above" and to evoke a more natural process of growth to restore to the nation some of the spontaneous initiative it had lost through regimentation. The more realistic policies adopted in the economy since October have been called "Poland's New Economic Policy" (recalling the change of direction introduced by Lenin in a similar situation in post-revolutionary Russia).
Poland's N.E.P. had already been carried furthest, and has shown its most tangible results, in agriculture. The dogmatic Stalinist policy of forced collectivisation of the land, of trying to push the small peasant into collectives by taxes and other penalties, meant that the economy fell between two stools. Private enterprise on the land became uneconomic because of State penalization; on the other hand, the peasant resisted collectivization, and the economy in any case did not have the

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resources of mechanization which alone could make collectivization efficient.
Since October this policy has been reversed; the collective farms have been reduced from 10,000 to 2,000, and 88 per cent of the land is today cultivated in individual small-holdings. There has also been a reduction in the compulsory deliveries which the peasant is obliged to make to the State (in other words, he can sell a greater proportion of his crop in the free market). These concessions have already made their effect felt in the ending of land waste, in increased production in this year's harvest, which has been described as "the best in Poland's history", and in new prosperity among the peasantry.
The Polish Communists have not abandoned their ultimate objective of collectivization, but they have postponed its realization for an indefinite period. They recognize that collectivization can be efficient only if the peasant is convinced by example that it is more profitable, not merely for the economy but for himself. They hope that over a period of time the peasantry will move gradually and voluntarily towards collective farming. In the Stalinist era the traditional forms of co-operation which exist in any agricultural community had been destroyed in the anxiety to impose collectivization at once from above; these forms are now being allowed to grow organically from below.
In industrial policy too, change has begun, though here the process will necessarily be slower in making its effects felt. Here again the indiscriminate destruction of private enterprise has been ended; where at one time the party boasted that 26 per cent of industry was State-owned, the public sector today constitutes about 80 per cent. Private enterprise is being encouraged in small-scale industry (employing not more than 50 workers), where it is hoped that it will both increase production and act as a check on standards in the State sector through competition in the market.

Poland: Exorcising the Spectre of 1984 69
Meanwhile, the State is seeking to combat bureaucratism and over-centralisation in industry by giving greater freedom of management to the individual enterprise. The central planning authority will confine itself to decisions on basic investment, the output of basic commodities and fundamental questions such as national income and the size of the wage fund. But within these limits each enterprise will enjoy considerable freedom in fixing its own wage levels in raising credits for subsidiary investment, in choosing the source for its raw materials, and in deciding what kind of goods to produce on the basis of consumer demand. (Thus, while the central plan may fix the number of shoes to be produced, each factory may make its decisions on the type of shoes which the market wants). Meanwhile, within the factories themselves the workers' councils are to be given a share in management and incentives for production through profit-sharing.
The Polish Communists frankly admit that quick results cannot be expected from these changes in industry. It will necessarily take time for the habits of freedom and initiative to develop in an economy which has been built on regimentation. It remains to be seen, too, how far economic decentralisation can be carried in a political structure which is still largely centralized.
The combination of these changes in economic forms, greater political freedom, and the distinctive national and cultural background of Poland makes the Polish experiment unique, and its course during the next few years is certain to fertilise the political experience of our time. The Asian nationalist or socialist who stands outside the politics of the Cold War will watch that course with sympathy; for if the trends that have been initiated in October develop they cannot fail to have a considerable influence in liberalizing Communism elsewhere in Eastern Europe and in the Soviet Union itself, and in

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helping to effect that resolution of world antagonisms on which our very survival may depend.
Whatever the future may hold, I am convinced that the people of Poland have at least exorcised a spectre which has been haunting the political thinking of our time - the spectre of 1984. It was a liberal humanist who had lost his balance who conceived the terrifying vision of a world permanently dominated by Big Brother. The irrational despair, fear and hatred engendered by the Orwellian view are to my mind no less fanatical and vicious than the forces it seeks to combat. The Polish experience, in common with recent developments elsewhere in the Communist countries vindicates the faith, which would have been truer to Orwell's humanism that human nature is not so easily destructible and that life is too various in its possibilities to be contained within any ideological straitjacket - whether Communist or anti-communist.

Nationalism and the Break-up of the Soviet Union
"Let him who wishes weep bitter tears because history moves ahead so perplexingly... But tears are of no avail. It is necessary, according to Spinoza's advice, not to laugh, not to weep, but to understand.
— Leon Trotsky
On the day the coup in Moscow took place a colleague asked me what I thought would happen. I said the coup had no chance of success because the republics that had struggled for the last four years to achieve either independence or autonomy wouldn't accept a reversion to a hardline regime. I added that this attempt to put the clock back would only accelerate the territorial disintegration of the Soviet Union.
This was at a time when, on the first day of the coup, unreformed Stalinists in Colombo and Calcutta were celebrating what they fondly imagined was the second coming of the Lord. These hopes were based on the fact that Mr. Gorbachev was patently unpopular, since perestroika had taken the gags off the Soviet people's mouths, but had failed to fill their stomachs. The plotters in Moscow must have counted on this too. But the timing of the coup was determined by the signing of the new Union Treaty that was due the following day.
Obviously the conservative central bureaucracy saw this treaty as the writing on the wall. Even the partial dismantling

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of the centralized structure of the state that the treaty envisaged must have seemed to them a mortal threat to their power and privileges. These were the motives behind that "monstrous act of Russian idiocy" (as one of Boris Yeltsin's aides was to call it later) - a last desperate gamble by the party and security apparatus to reverse the direction of change. What it achieved in fact was the collapse of Soviet Communism and the breakup of the former Union as twelve republics, during and after the coup, declared independence.
In the five years since perestroika began, there have been two social forces that have propelled the processes of political change. One was the Soviet people's desire to be finally rid of the straitjacket of political, economic and intellectual regimentation. The other was the re-assertion of ethnic and national identities in a country with an enormous multiplicity of nationalities, languages and cultures where an artificial unity had been imposed from above by the centralized Soviet state.
The first development had long been expected by Trotskyists and other non-Stalinist Marxists, though they made the error of supposing that democratization could be contained within the framework of the socialist order. The second development was unimaginable by them because, in common with all Marxists, they believed in the Supremacy of class and grievously underestimated the potential strength of nationalism.
I should like to quote here what I wrote in a paper in 1990 reassessing the work of Isaac Deutscher, who was the outstanding interpreter of Soviet history in his time:
'Deutscher down to the end of his life saw the future of the Soviet Union in terms of democratization and the struggle against bureaucratism, privilege and the police state, and this forecast, as far as it went, has been vindicated. But it would hardly have entered his head that within a quarter-century of his death the Soviet Union would also experience strident na

Nationalism and the Break-up of the Soviet Union 73
tionalism with their contradictory potentialities - liberating as well as retrogressive. It may be said that Deutscher was too much of a classical Marxist, sharing 'the clear bright faith in human reason' that Trotsky once affirmed, to have expected that seventy years after the October Revolution, scenes like those in Colombo, July 1983 would be enacted in the streets of Baku and other Soviet cities. The womb of history turns out to be more fertile in possibilities than the most acute of theorists can foresee."
It will be noted that in that paragraph I spoke of the 'contradictory potentialities' of nationalism - liberating as well as retrogressive'. This two faced character of nationalism has been much in evidence in the Soviet history of the last five years. Not only the ethnic riots and pogroms in various Soviet republics but also the growth of fascist tendencies like the Pamyat movement with its Great Russian chauvinism and its antisemitism exemplify the dangerous and destructive sides of nationalism.
But we must not forget it was both Russian nationalism and the nationalism of the minority peoples that more than any other forces stood in the way of the coup plotters who wanted to reimpose the old order on the Soviet Union. It was the resistance rallied in Moscow and Leningrad by Boris Yeltsin as the personification of Russian nationalism and the secessionist moves in the outer republics that brought the Emergency Committee tumbling down like Humpty-Dumpty.
It the Soviet Union in the last few weeks, as much as in Central and Eastern Europe in 1989, it is nationalism that has been the most powerful detonator of the bureaucratic Communist state. I should like to cite here the insight of Rudolf Bahro, the former East German dissident. In his book, The Alternative in Eastern Europe', published in 1984, he said:
Nationalism has an objectively necessary role to play in the destruction of the holy alliance of party apparatuses, in as

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much as it shows that these have not settled the national question in any productive way.'
I shall return to this question later in this lecture. But before coming to grips with the problems of nationalism in Soviet society, it is necessary to offer a characterization of the Soviet state. In doing so, I shall try to confront some of the myths about Soviet socialism that stand in the way of a clear understanding of present developments in the minds of many people.
Socialists up to now in their thinking about the Soviet Union have adopted an entirely different practice from what they have followed in the study of capitalist societies. What does one do if one wants to understand what capitalism is? One doesn't go in the first instance to the ideologues - to Locke or Bentham or Mill; one looks at the concrete social relations of capitalist society and tries to derive from them a theory about what capitalism is and how it works.
But in the case of the Soviet Union and other socialist societies most socialists have approached them through the spectacles of the theories of Marx and Lenin. They have either insisted, against all the evidence, that Soviet society was the fulfillment of those theories, or denounced the Soviet regime for failing to live up to them. I submit that either of these proceedings is as much a waste of time as it would be to measure American society by the rhetoric of the Declaration of Independence or French society by that of Rousseau and the proclamation of the Rights of Man.
What we have to realize in the first place is that the October Revolution was in flat contradiction to the expectations of Marx and of Lenin before 1917. Both of them had believed that socialist revolution would take place in the advanced capitalist societies of Western Europe where the contradictions of capitalism would, according to their theory, mature Sooner than elsewhere.

Nationalism and the Break-up of the Soviet Union 75
A socialist revolution in a predominantly peasant country was a historical absurdity which Lenin wouldn't have entertained before 1917. What made Lenin change his mind in that year was that he believed that Western Europe, with the fabric of its society subjected to the strains of the First World War, was ready for the proletarian revolution. He wanted to create a Russian revolutionary state which would be a springboard for the European revolution in whose imminence he firmly believed.
The collapse of the old Tsarist regime in February 1917 gave him the opportunity to embark on his project. The February Revolution that overthrew Tsarism was a spontaneous uprising with no party in command. October, in contrast, was a party operation directed by an urban vanguard mainly in two capital cities. In carrying out this operation Lenin had his eyes firmly fixed not on an isolated socialist transformation of Russian society but on the grandiose vision of an European revolution. The Soviet people were to pay dearly in the next seventy four years for Lenin's quixotic illusion.
The Russian revolution, like all other subsequent victorious revolutions led by Communist parties, took place in a society that had produced no strong bourgeoisie and had therefore undergone no bourgeois-democratic transformation of society. Its main imperative was, therefore, to carry out the tasks of primitive-capital accumulation that would make possible an industrial revolution.
These were tasks parallel to those that had been fulfilled by the British, French and German bourgeoisie in the 18th and 19th centuries, but in Russia this capital accumulation had to be carried out by the state. This was the main dynamic of Soviet society, and the class which has been bearers and executors of this mission is the bureaucracy - both political and economic.
The Soviet Union as it has existed up to now has been a society in which the ruling class has based its power not on

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private ownership of the means of production but on the control of state property. Just as in a capitalist Society the surplus created by the producers in partly ploughed back into investment and partly distributed as profits or dividends among the proprietors, so in Soviet Society the surplus has been divided between capital investment by the State and the personal incomes and other benefits and economic privileges enjoyed by the bureaucracy.
By comparison with the affluence of the bourgeoisie of Western countries the life-style of the Soviet bureaucracy may seem modest, but in relation to the mass of the people in their own society living at bare subsistence level, they have been in a highly privileged position, with a whole network of special services to cater exclusively to their needs.
This is what's 'actually existing socialism' (to use Rudolf Bahro's phrase) has meant, as distinguished from the utopian wishes and the millenarian dreams. Or perhaps I should say the socialism that actually existed", because I feel pretty sure that we are witnessing the end of that era.
There have been several analyses of Soviet society and of Communist states in general which have been based on the perspective that these represented a new form of class Society with a bureaucratic ruling class instead of a property-owning one. But I think we must modify these analyses to accommodate the fact that the Communist state seems now to be only a transitional phase in the life of societies that have failed in the past to carry through a bourgeois-democratic revolution.
Already the Union Treaty which should have been signed on August 20 provided for each republic to determine its own 'forms of property ownership and methods of economic management'. With the disappearance of the Communist Party and the breaking of hardline resistance to this direction of economic change, one can expect that there will be a speedier transition to a market and private ownership.

Nationalism and the Break-up of the Soviet Union ァク
What is likely is that over the next few years in at least the greater part of the Soviet Union (or of the several states that may emerge from its break-up) there will be privatization of the land and of most industrial enterprises (some of them, no doubt, in association with or established by foreign capital), though industries linked to defence and capital goods production as well as welfare services will probably remain in State hands.
The state bureaucracy will amalgamate with a new bourgeoisie, or rather the latter will be recruited in a large measure from the ranks of the old bureaucratic ruling class. This is already happening in the former Communist states of Central and Eastern Europe, where often the new proprietor of the private enterprise is the same man who administered it under State socialism. This is a natural development because the bureaucracy are the people who have the managerial and technical skills to seed the growth of new bourgeois property forms.
Ironic as it may seem therefore, when the epitaph is written on the seventy years of Communist Party rule in the Soviet Union, it will have to be said that its historic function was to create the infrastructure for future bourgeois development. To anybody who thinks this estimate fantastic, I submit that this is not the first occasion when the historical process has made out of the actions of participants in it something other than what they intended.
The 17th century English Puritans who thought they were creating the rule of the saints are seen now to have cleared the roadblocks impeding capitalist development; Robespierre who wanted to enthrone reason in society paved the way for a Napoleonic empire. History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors/ and issues, deceives with whispering ambitions...'
Let us consider the record of the Soviet bureaucracy since the industrial take-off of the late 1920s. By a combination of

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ideological fervour propagated by the state on the one hand and regimentation, coercion and repression on the other, it achieved what appeared to be a miraculous tempo of industrial progress in the first two decades of construction - miraculous particularly if one forgot the human cost it entailed.
However, by the time of the death of Stalin (who was the chief architect of the Soviet industrial revolution) the system was already revealing its latent contradictions. The political structure with its ruthless suppression of dissent, its imposed intellectual uniformity and its primitive leader-cult that had been created for a society only recently emerged from medievalism was hopelessly inadequate to cope with the conditions of a modern, urbanized and educated one.
This was the problem with which Khrushchev strove to grapple in his half-hearted and shortlived endeavour at deStalinisation. With the reversal of that effort Soviet society settled again in the political deep-freeze of the Brezhnev years as far as the structure and ideology visible on the official surface were concerned.
But below the tip of the iceberg the forces making for change were still working in the consciousness of a new young and educated Soviet generation. Meanwhile there was another contradiction emerging that was to undermine the established order.
The centralized command economic system that had carried through the primary industralisation of the Soviet Union and had raised it to the status of a military superpower (it was never more than that) showed its inherent bureaucratic inflexibility and lack of dynamism once the Soviet Union had to move beyond the bounds of a largely autarchic economy and to contend with advanced capitalisms in the world market.
It now seems almost incredible that in 1960 Khrushchev set Soviet society the task of catching up with and outstripping

Nationalism and the Break-up of the Soviet Union 79
the United States in twenty years. Actually, by the beginning of the 'eighties the Soviet economy was reaching stagnation, and the gap between its levels of technology and productivity and those of the advanced capitalist countries had widened in those two decades. It was this combination of creakingly antiquated political and economic apparatuses that Gorbachev inherited and that he strove to recondition in the last five years.
I shall try to draw up a balance sheet of the Gorbachev years later in this lecture, but I must first complete my historical conspectus by looking at Soviet nationalities problems since the Revolution. This will bring me to the heart of my subject; it will also involve questioning the assumption so common among adherents of Leninism that the conflicts between central state and minority nationalities were the result entirely of Stalin's errors and crimes.
At a time when statues and monuments of Lenin are being ravaged by Soviet citizens, when his name has been erased from the city where he took power and his face off the masthead of Pravda', when the monstrosity of his mummified body may soon disappear underground, the least we can do is to look searchingly, and critically at his intellectual and theoretical legacy. One of the fields in which this is most necessary is that of Leninist policy on the question of nationalities.
The Russian Tsarist empire was the archaic imperialism of a bureaucratic feudal state which, like that other prison of the peoples, the Austro-Hungarian empire, should have disintegrated at the end of the First World War. That it didn't do so was due to the fact that Lenin and the Bolsheviks were able to renovate it in another form.
Lenin is renowned as the man who wrote into the Marxist political programme the slogan of 'self-determination of nations'. I shall soon be looking at the contradictions between his theory and his practice in this respect, but I must first state

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that his understanding of nationalism was very limited and superficial.
In his polemics against Rosa Luxemburg on the eve of the First World War, Lenin's interpretation of nationalism was crudely reductive and economistic: nationalism was the product of the need of the rising bourgeoisie for a united national market, and even the role of language in relation to nationalism was reduced by him to the necessity for a common language of commerce.
Lenin had no awareness of or sympathy for the cultural dimensions of nationalism: when the Austrian Marxist, Otto Bauer, put forward the demand for cultural autonomy for the subject peoples of the Austro-Hungarian empire, Lenin strongly opposed it, saying that this was counter to the internationalism of the proletariat.
In fact, Lenin's entire approach to nationalism was instrumentalist: he didn't really endorse the strivings of the subject peoples of the Russian empire for independent existence, but he was quite willing to enlist them as an ally and tool of socialist revolution by putting forward the slogan of Self-determination.
There was always a potential contradiction between his support of oppressed nations or nationalities and his Socialist project, not only because he regarded the former only as a means towards the latter, but also because he was essentially a greater centralizer, in matters of state as much as of party. He shared with Marx and Engels the belief that, other things being equal, the larger state was more progressive than the smaller.
The contradictions between Leninist nationalities policy and Leninist socialism would come to the forefront only after the revolution. However, the most serious obstacle in the way of any genuinely liberating policy towards the minority na

Nationalism and the Break-up of the Soviet Union 8
tionalities was Lenin's dedication to the role of the vanguard party as the only instrument of historical progress.
This theoretical position was consummated in practice in and after 1921 by the establishment of the political monopoly of the Bolshevik party through the banning of all other parties. It is a common fact of experience that in multi-ethnic and multi-national states minority groups express and protect their interests through the creation of ethnic and regional parties. There was no place for this in the Leninist one-party state.
Indeed from the standpoint of internationalist Leninism such a development would have seemed abhorrent, since particularist nationalisms were assumed to be a disappearing phenomenon which socialism would relegate to the dustheap of history. In reality, and against Lenin's subjective intentions, the Leninist state effected a very different outcome.
Given the fact that the revolution and the revolutionary party had been centered in the Russian heartland, which continued to be its main base of power, given the inequality in levels of economic development and education between Russia and the outlying republics, given too the deep-seated tradition of Great Russian dominance, it was inevitable that the one-party state would become the instrument for the reproduction of unequal relations between the Russian centre and the periphery.
Lenin, the cosmopolitan and internationalist, had, unlike his home-bred successor, no trace of Great Russian chauvinism, and he may be acquitted of any intention to preserve Russian hegemony over other nationalities. But he cannot be exculpated of the charge of adopting and pursuing a policy of political monopolism on behalf of his party which in effect made impossible any real pluralism or equality in the relations between majority and minority nationalities.
It is out of the question within the space of this lecture for

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me to pursue with any degree of comprehensiveness the fortunes of the doctrine of self-determination during the Lenin years. I shall therefore concentrate on the single case of Georgia, because it is the most patent example of the conflict between national self-determination and the interests of the revolution as the Bolsheviks saw them.
After the October Revolution Georgia had claimed independence, and except for brief periods of occupation by the Germans and then by the British during the Civil War, had set up a government headed by Georgian Mensheviks which had been recognized by Moscow.
However, during the efforts of the Bolsheviks to bring the rest of the Transcaucasus under their control, the independence of Georgia became inconvenient. Stalin and Ordjonikidze, who as native Georgians were in command of operations in the region, sent the Red Army into Georgia in 1921 to occupy the country. To justify this action, the fiction of a popular proletarian insurrection in Georgia under Bolshevik leadership was invented.
The blatant contradiction between the invasion of Georgia and the doctrine of self-determination was glossed over by the claim that the right of self-determination should be exercised not by the bourgeoisie of the oppressed nation but by its proletariat: in practice, this meant the party, who were the self-appointed spokesmen of the proletariat.
It is evident from the historical record that Lenin was troubled by the invasion but he didn't condemnit or call it off; he confined himself to counseling Ordjonikidze to respect the sentiments of the Georgian people and to deal with them in a restrained manner.
The invasionof Georgia had a sequel in 1922 in internal differences within the party leadership. In the interval Ordjonikidze had behaved like a provincial satrap and had

Nationalism and the Break-up of the Soviet Union 83
dealt highhandedly with local Bolsheviks. The issue came to a head around the same time that a commission headed by Stalin was sitting to define the structure of constitutional relations between the Russian Federation and the republics.
Stalin proposed that the government of the Russian Federation should become the government of the whole group of republics; the Federation would incorporate the others as 'Autonomous Republics'. This issue, together with Stalin and Ordjonikidze's autocratic behaviour in Georgia, became the occasion for Lenin's struggle during his final illness to curb Stalin's dictatorial tendencies.
The letter he dictated from his sickbed to the Twelfth Party Congress made a vehement attack on Great Russian chauvinism, mentioning Stalin and Ordjonikidze by name, and urged that the future Union should be built on a footing of complete equality among all republics.
In the Soviet Union during the years of perestroika much has been made of this document as a proof of Lenin's concern for the rights of minority nationalities and of the good fortune of his intervention to thwart Stalin's nefarious purposes towards them. But though Lenin had his way on the constitutional issue, what equality did it establish between the republics beyond a formal and legal one?
The trend towards centralization was inherent in the oneparty state that Lenin himself had erected. His successor brought to the task of consummating it not only ruthlessness and single-mindedness but also an identification with Great Russian nationalism that was to grow more open with the years. Like Napoleon and Hitler, Stalin seems to have compensated for the misfortune of having been born outside the homeland of the majority nation by emphasizing his oneness with it, even though we are told that he spoke the Russian language to the end of his days with a thick Georgian accent.

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But it wasn't just Stalin's insecurity about his ethnic identity that led to the accentuation of Great Russian dominance in the Stalinist era. I have already indicated that this was a natural consequence of the centralized state; and that centralization was to be made total during the years of massive economic construction through the imposition of monolithic unity on the party and the suppression of free debate even within its own ranks. In this process the party leaderships in the republics became merely nominees of the centre docilely carrying out its orders.
There had been a practice from the early years of the revolution of appointing trusted party men from Moscow to head provincial republics; for instance, the first head of the Bolshevik government in the Ukraine, after the territory had been pacified by the Red Army, was Rakovsky, a Rumanian by birth. In the days when the party was proud of its proletarian internationalism, this may have seemed unexceptionable. But in time it facilitated the subordination of the local leaderships to the centre; and even when these leaderships were drawn from the provincial political elites, they became, with the lack of inner party democracy, mere agents of the central government and not representatives of their own peoples.
Together with the subordination of the governments of the republics to the party centre in Moscow, Stalin infused State ideology with a strong element of Great Russian nationalism. This tendency became most overt during the Second World War, when the mobilization of national resistance to the German invaders was promoted sometimes through Russian nationalist and sometimes through pan-Slavist appeals.
When the German armies were at the approaches to the Moscow in 1941, Stalin at the end of his October Revolution anniversary speech made a startling invocation of the warriors and heroes of imperial Russia: Let the manly images of

Nationalism and the Break-up of the Soviet Union 85
our great ancestors - Aleksandr Nevsky, Dmitri Donskoy, Kuzma Minin, Dmitri Pozharsky, Aleksandr Suvorov and Mikhail Kutuzov - inspire you in this war. When he added, May the victorious banner of the great Lenin guide you,' it seemed as if Lenin himself had been assimilated to the Great Russian pantheon. ܫ
Also in the middle of the war, the internationale was displaced as the Soviet national anthem by one which began, "An indissoluble union of free republics Great Russia has rallied for ever.' It still remains the national anthem though many Soviet people now feel embarrassed by the words and only play the music; and of course "indissoluble union' has acquired a new irony after August 1991.
Already before the War during Stalin's great purges there had been large-scale elimination of those elements in the republics who might be suspected of showing the slightest recalcitrance to central rule; "bourgeois nationalist deviations were a frequent charge against those accused during the purges.
During the War Stalin carried out mass deportations of several nationalities: the Crimean Tartars, the Volga Germans, the Chechens, the Meshketian Turks and others were forcibly evicted from their homes and transplanted in Central Asia, on the ground that some elements among these peoples had collaborated with the German invaders. Subsequent Soviet governments have acknowledged the injustice of these acts but the peoples concerned have not been returned to their original homelands to this day.
While the steel-frame of the monolithic central party and its grip over the republics was maintained in the half-century from Stalin to Chernenko, there was room within this structure for fluctuations in certain matters of nationalities policy that did not affect the essential character of centralized power.
For instance, on Russification, as against use of the local

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language in the administration of the republics, there were variations from time to time and from place to place, and so also in the matter of the encouragement of minority cultures in education and the arts. At all times, in fact - even under Stalin - there was a cosmetic display of the exotic cultures and folklore of minority nationalities, and gullible fellow-travellers from abroad could often be persuaded by watching Cossack dances or listening to Uzbek folk songs that the Soviet Union was a multicultural paradise.
These illusions, as well as the corresponding political claim that in the Soviet Union, the national question had been definitely solved, were blasted by the eruption of a multiplicity of nationalisms and ethnic identities once the lid of coerced conformity was removed by Gorbachev.
What was striking in the years of perestroika was the emergence not only of valid and democratic claims by minority nationalities for autonomy against the centre but also the recrudescence of tribal animosities of one ethnic group against another, expressing themselves sometimes in the most barbarous forms. Azeriskilling Armenians, Uzbekskilling Kirghiz, Uzbeks killing Meshketian Turks, Georgians killing Abkhazis, Ukrainians killing Jews, these and other manifestations of ethnic hatreds proved that seventy years of socialism had done nothing to change mass consciousness.
What the laboratory experiment of these decades in the
Soviet Union demonstrates is that one simply cannot root out
ethnic differences by a political uniformity and a state ideology imposed from above.
However, the revival of nationalism in the Soviet Union was not simply the explosion of primordial loyalties which had long been denied expression. Particularly in the republics of the Asian periphery, there was an important sense in which the emergence of nationalism was a product of Soviet development itself.

Nationalism and the Break-up of the Soviet Union 87
Recent scholars writing on nationalism in general such as Ernest Gellner and Benedict Anderson have focused attention on modern nationalism as a distinctively new phenomenon, when contrasted with older collective identities. They have emphasized the role of printing and other forms of communication as well as mass education in standardizing languages and in creating a sense of shared identity among the 'imagined communities' who are nations.
In several of the Soviet republics where in 1917 people were still living as tribals or nomads, the processes which are broadly described as 'modernisation came only after the revolution. In fact, in some of the Asian languages of the Soviet Union the adoption of written scripts was a post-revolutionary development, as was mass literacy.
The rise of a new intelligentsia and administrative stratum in the peripheral republics produced the class that could be the creators and transmitters of nationalism. Thus not Benedict Anderson's print capitalism' but a print socialism was a formative element in the growth of national identities in some of the republics.
In the last part of this lecture I shall sum up the record of the Gorbachev era in respect of nationalities policy and attempt some assessment of the possibilities of the future.
If one takes Mr. Gorbachev's three watchwords, glasnost, demokratizatsiya and perestroika, one has to recognize that the first two have made great advances during his regime.
In keeping with glasnost the Soviet media have attained extraordinary openness and freedom in the last five years.
The fact that one of the first actions of the Emergency Committee on August 19 was to impose press censorship and to suspend the publication of certain papers is evidence that they knew journalists in general could not be trusted to collaborate

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with the coup. Today, of course, there is hope that even Pravda (which has reappeared as an independent paper) will at last live up to its title.
Demokratizatsiya or democratization has also made progress under Mr. Gorbachev: open public meetings, free demonstrations and agitations have been a feature of the recent Soviet scene that had no precedent for five decades. Free elections have been held in several republics, including the Russian Federation, though at the centre the elections to the Congress of People's Deputies took place under a constitution which still reserved one-third of the seats for the Communist Party and its affiliated organizations.
But considering the fact that the Soviet Union had not had any democratic elections since those in 1918 for the Constituent Assembly (which was dissolved by the Bolsheviks when they failed to gain a majority), the advance of democratization has been substantial.
However, if one considers the third of Mr. Gorbachev's watchwords, perestroika in its most precise sense - restructuring - then, I think, one has to recognize that this was exactly what was lacking.
In the fields of both economic and nationalities policy Mr. Gorbachev could shake the existing structure but could not put anything concrete in their place. I don't propose to discuss the economic failures here, except to say that the decline of the economy contributed towards exacerbating the tensions and conflicts on nationalities questions. When the centre had little to offer by way of material benefits, it was inevitable that centrifugal tendencies would be accentuated.
It is true that Mr. Gorbachev cannot singly be blamed for the failures in either economic or nationalities policies; the hard core of the party apparatus was resistant to change in both of these fields. Where Mr. Gorbachev can legitimately be criti

Nationalism and the Break-up of the Soviet Union 89
cized is that in his anxiety to remain in power so that he could push through the reform process, he relied on a perpetual balancing act between conservatives and reformers which severely restricted his freedom of movement.
For at least four years liberal-minded intellectuals had been advising him that the Union could be saved neither in its previous form nor even as a reformed federal structure but only as a loose confederation. Yet Mr. Gorbachev couldn't opt for such a structure because he feared a backlash from the conservatives.
Again, on the Baltic states he was by 1989 constrained to publish the secret protocols to the Stalin-Hitler agreement by which these states had been brutally and cynically annexed; yet he kept insisting on the validity of their accession to the USSR and sustaining it by shows of force. Today, in the aftermath of the coup, he has had not only to advocate a loose confederate structure as the last hope for the Union but also to recognize the absolute right of the Baltic states to secede.
The Union Treaty was Mr. Gorbachev's final attempt before the coup to attempt a new relationship between centre and republics. It recognized the status of all republics as sovereign states, and embodied a new name for the Union, which was to become the Union of Soviet Sovereign Republics.
The dropping of the word 'socialist from the Union's title was significant particularly in the light of the clauses which gave the republics full control of land and natural resources in their territories and free choice of forms of property ownership and methods of economic management, thus opening the way to private property.
The other powers of the republics were to include determining their national state and administrative complexion and their system of bodies of power. Each republic was to have the right of direct diplomatic representation in dealing with for

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eign states. Each signatory to the treaty was to be pledged to democracy based on popular representation, the popular vote and the rule of law and to the establishment of a civil society.
On the other hand, the Union's defence and state security, co-ordination of foreign policy moves and foreign economic activities of the republics, money emission, the Union budget, enactment of Union laws and maintaining the law enforcement bodies of the Union were to remain in the hands of the centre.
There was a third sphere in which there was to be joint responsibility between the centre and the republics, and this included determining the military policy, state security policy and foreign policy of the Union and policies regarding fuel and energy resources, transport, communications and environmental protection, and supervising observance of the constitution and law enforcement. Disputes between the centre and the republics were to be resolved by negotiation, and when this failed, through arbitration by a constitutional court.
The language of the Union Treaty was that of a generous federalism which compared well with that of some other federal constitutions; yet one can understand why six republics decided not to sign the treaty. Apart from the fact that some of them - the three Baltic states in particular - had set their sights firmly on independence, they may well have been suspicious of this gift-horse, given the long tradition of dictatorship by the centre.
As is well known, federal structures are good only as they are implemented in a genuine spirit of devolution of power; constitutional terms like 'co-ordinator' can mean whatever they are interpreted to mean, and if taken illiberally, can provide an excuse for continued maintenance of authority by the centre.
The six republics which opted to stay out may well have thought that a central government still in the hands of a Com

Nationalism and the Break-up of the Soviet Union 9
munist Party with its Leninist traditions could not be trusted to act in a liberal spirit in dealing with the republics. Further, the provision for adjudication by a constitutional court on disputes between republics and centre may have seemed unreliable in a country with no tradition of judicial independence where outright politicization of the judiciary has been the norm.
The Union Treaty that was to have been signed on August 20th has been buried by the aborted coup. Last week's debate at the Congress of People's Deputies centered round the possibility of a much looser federation than that envisaged by the Union Treaty as a basis for future relations between the republics. On September 5th the Congressin its final session agreed on the proposals for a new Union under which each republic would be able to define the degree of its association.
This means the end of the former Soviet Union. But has the salvage measure to preserve something of the Union from the wreckage come too late?
The situation today is that twelve of the fifteen republics have made declarations of independence, while the largest and most powerful republic - the Russian Federation - has gone a long way towards assuming the power and authority of the paralysed centre.
Of the twelve declarations of independence three - those of the Baltic states - have already been given effect. It is likely that the Moldavian Republic, whose territory was annexed by the Soviet Union at the end of the Second World War, will also persist in its claim for independence. 64 per cent of the population of Moldavia are ethnic Rumanians, and it is possible that these people will seek independence only as a transitional step towards rejoining Rumania.
What of the other eight? The reality that must be recognized is that if any of them are in fact determined to secede, there is no longer any power in the Soviet Union that can re

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istrain them. The Communist Party is out of action and discredited, the army and security apparatus are compromised and probably deeply divided among themselves, and President Gorbachev's prestige and authority have been badly shaken.
So the republics have the opportunity to make their own decisions. Is there any consideration that can induce them to stay in some form of association?
The answer is that there is one material consideration which will have weight at least for the present, and that is economic. The economies of the republics have been developed in close interdependence in respect of raw material supplies and trade, although these economic relations have been distorted and bureaucratized by being routed entirely through the central administration.
That system can, of course, no longer be perpetuated; but the republics do have a self-interest in maintaining bilateral ties with each other for the maintenance of economic activity. This consideration will apply even to the Baltic states, who have been so heavily dependent on the Soviet economy for supplies of raw materials and power and for markets for their own manufactures that they cannot immediately cut themselves loose economically even whey do so politically. In time may be, the Baltic states could move into the German and Swedish economic orbits; and these possibilities may be followed also by Byelorussia and the Ukraine if they become independent. But the immediate prospect is that the sheer necessities of survival in an economic situation which is nothing short of catastrophic will compel the republics to enter into some form of economic association. This may involve no political centre beyond one which is set up by the republics themselves rather than one standing above them; the new regime in Moscow is thinking of such associations as the EC as a model of future

Nationalism and the Break-up of the Soviet Union 93
relations between the republics.
However, the problems of the Soviet Union or of any agglomeration of states that succeeds it will not be resolved simply by opting for a voluntary economic relationship between the republics. Among the republics one will be immensely larger than the rest, richer in natural resources, more advanced in economic development and more plentiful in skills - and that is Russia.
The circumstances of the post-coup situation have, as I have already stated, led to the government of the Russian Federation taking over many of the functions of the centre. Boris Yeltsin with his undoubtedly courageous stand against the plotters has emerged with his stature greatly enhanced; and in the wake of the failed coup President Gorbachev appointed Ivan Silayev, the Russian Federation's Prime Minister, as the new Prime Minister of the Union.
The Russian tricolour now flies over the Russian Parliament, and one must expect in the months and years to come a strong assertion of a reviving Russian nationalism - politically, culturally and spiritually. The removal of Lenin's name and the restoration of the pre-revolutionary name of St. Petersburg to the old capital (as asked for by a majority of its citizens) is a symbolic expression of this revival. I wouldn't be inclined to regard such a development in entirely negative terms, for I would maintain that the Communist era had a destructive effect on the rich heritage of Russian culture and even on the Russian language. The Russian Christian tradition, whether Orthodox or dissident, has today a better chance of reviving than Communism.
But at the same time the potential imbalance between Russian power and those of the smaller republics carries with it the dangers of continuing Russian hegemony over the outlying republics which may manifest itself it in new forms after

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the dissolution of the centralized Communist state. The second danger one can foresee in the future is that the removal of central authority may lead to the intensification of ethnic conflict either between neighbouring republics, as in the case of Armenia and Azerbaijan, or between majorities and minorities within republics.
At the time of writing, Georgia has protested that its declaration of independence has not been treated in the same way as that of the Baltic states. (They have a point because if the Baltic states were forcibly incorporated into the Soviet Union in 1940, so was Georgia in 1921.) The President of Georgia, where a nationalist party holds power won in free elections, has announced that they are breaking off all official relations with Moscow.
Meanwhile in Azerbaijan, President Ayaz Mutalibov has also set a definite course for independence. The Azerbaijani situation is fraught with uncomfortable possibilities because it was one of the only two republics (the other being Kirghizia) which supported the coup regime during its brief existence. Further, Azerbaijan has been conducting a bitter struggle with neighbouring Armenia over the status of the autonomous region of Nagorno-Karbakh, which is an Armenian enclave inside Azerbaijani territory.
Mutalibov has now announced that he is no longer a member of the Communist Party (there is really no longer any Communist Party to belong to anyway) and has held a hasty Presidential election to confirm himself in power. The election has been boycotted by opposition parties. Mutalibov will undoubtedly seek to strengthen his position by fanning Azerbaijani nationalism, and this bodes ill for relations with Armenia and for the Armenian minority inside Azerbaijan who can no longer rely on the federal army to protect them. The Armenian case is a reminder that while the two forces that have broken up the

Nationalism and the Break-up of the Soviet Union 95
Soviet Union are democratization and nationalism, the two elements may not always go together; and we must expect in the future the emergence of right-wing nationalist regimes in some former republics of the Soviet Union.
I wish to conclude with some brief observations on Marxism and nationalism.
1848, which was the year of mass upsurge of nationalism in Europe, was also the year of the Communist Manifesto. In that document Marx and Engels proclaimed that the nationstate had already been outdated by the creation of the world market under capitalism, and that the working class had no country; they ended the Manifesto with the ringing cry, Workers of the world, unite!" When seventy years later, a party and a leader dedicated to Marxist internationalism took power in the former empire of the Tsars, it seemed that Marx's prophecy was being borne out. But soon Great Russian nationalism refracted itself through the Soviet state, and the Communist International which was to have been the organ of international revolution became only an agency for the furtherance of Russian national interests.
In Russia the dominance of nationalism was a sequel to the revolution; in subsequent revolutions - the Chinese, the Cuban, the Vietnamese and others - nationalism was a strong force from their very inception and a condition of their victory. Thus in the céntury and a half since the Communist Manifesto nationalism turns out to have had a greater survival value than Marx and Engels imagined, and with the fall of Communism in Eastern and Central Europe and now in the Soviet Union, it will clearly outlive the political movement that Marx and Engels fathered.
There is no reason to regard the prospect of re-emerging nationalisms in the territory of the former Soviet Union through roseate spectacles. The subject peoples who are experiencing

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national liberation for the first time will rejoice, but there is much hardship, conflict and perhaps violence that they will go through in the years to come. Probably also some of the subminorities in the newly liberated states will experience the heavy hand of the dominant national majorities in their territories.
For those who have lived a long time with the illusion of the Soviet Union as moving towards a terrestrial paradise, this will be a gloomy prospect. But we must today recognize that belief as a secular messianism which never had a basis in reality. To accept that human societies will probably always be imperfect, as human beings are imperfect, that utopia never comes, is not to abandon the struggle against injustice, oppression and exploitation which is much older than Marxism.
The faith that it is possible to create a perfect society in which human beings will at last be freed from all their problems is in fact highly dangerous because it encourages the ruthlessness of Stalin, a Pol Pot or a Wijeweera: what does it matter - they must have thought - if any number of people are sacrificed if future humanity is going to live happily ever after? We should rather engage in the effort to correct human ills in the Sober recognition that the struggle is a never-ending one which needs to be renewed and sustained in every age. The intoxication is over; this is the morning after.
A lecture delivered on 6th September 1991

COrbaCheV: Triumph and Tragedy
Several times during the last few years I have toyed with the idea of writing a play about a young man in his early twenties during the last days of Stalin. The young man has made up his mind that the Soviet system doesn't work, and he makes a personal decision - to dedicate his life to making his way up the political ladder to the very peak of power, so that he can then dismantle the system.
The young man in the play I imagined was to have been Mikhail Gorbachev. I still believe it would have made interesting drama, and today I can think of an effective coup de theatre on which to ring down the curtain. As Gorbachev leaves the Kremlin in December 1991, the hammer and sickle is being brought down, and he pauses on the threshold to whisper to Raisa: Well, that's what I dreamed of forty years ago."
Perhaps there are some people who will see in that version of history not a writer's fantasy but the hidden reality. The Chinese stigmatized Gorbachev after his fall as 'the greatest traitor in the history of socialism." And I am sure that in Sri Lanka too there are orthodox Communists who, stunned by the collapse of the Soviet Union, can only explain it by supposing that Gorbachev was a surreptitious imperialist agent.
But the role of Gorbachev has been too complex to be explained by conspiracy theories or even by my imagined fan

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tasy. There is no precedent for it, not only in the history of the Soviet Union but even in the rest of world history. To find a parallel one would have to imagine that in the sixteenth century Martin Luther had become Pope, and inaugurated from the Vatican a Reformation that ultimately led to the fall of the Catholic Church.
The manner of Gorbachev's exit from the Kremlin was a revelation both of his achievement and of his failure. He left with the very men who had ousted him paying tribute to him for what he had accomplished. Contrast that with the fortunes of other top-ranking Soviet leaders of the past when they fell from power: Trotsky deported and later murdered, Zinoviev, Kamenev and Bukharin executed. Malenkov and Khrushchev thrust into ignominious obscurity. That Gorbachev didn't share any of these fates was due to the more civilized norms of political conduct that he had done more than anybody else to establish in what was then the Soviet Union. The fact that he had the opportunity to abdicate from power honourably, reaffirming in his final public message his convictions and his disagreements with his successors, is a measure of what he had achieved with perestroika.
On the other hand, the fact that he was leaving with the Union, that he had striven to maintain, in ruins, and the Communist Party, that he had struggled to reform, discredited and moribund, was the sign of the failure - the inescapable failure - of one part of his vision. For - contrary to the indictment of him by the Chinese and others - what Gorbachev had attempted to create in his seven years of power was a Soviet Communism transformed and democratized, and a CPSU regenerated to play the leading role in that process. Incredibly, he clung to that purpose even in the first days after his return to Moscow in the wake of the abortive coup, and it was only the pressure of the social forces that had made this programme obsolete that compelled him to abandon it.

Gorbachev: Triumph and Tragedy 99
For a man who had spent his adult life in the party apparatus and risen through it to its very summit, Gorbachev had shown in his years of power a degree of flexibility and pragmatism that nobody could have expected. But at the core of his thinking he remained a product of the Leninist tradition, and his fall - even while the monuments to his guru were being toppled around him - marks the end of that tradition in the country of its birth.
Since Gorbachev's exit, many commentators have, with the benefit of hindsight, attempted to identify where he went wrong and whether there were any alternative paths that he failed to take. To my mind, the most misguided of these speculations is the argument that Gorbachev would have done better to follow the Chinese example and put economic reform before political liberalization.
This supposition is unfounded - and not only for the reason that history has yet to deliver its verdict on the Chinese experiment, though we cannot yet say how long it will be before the regime faces the decisive test of the political pressures that will be released by economic reform. But to draw an object-lesson in retrospect for Gorbachev from the Chinese experience is to ignore the vastly different context in which the process of perestroika was launched. The difference goes back to the distance between the social character of the Russian revolution and that of the Chinese from their very inception.
The Chinese revolution, triumphed essentially through a peasant war, with the cities encircled by the countryside; the Russian revolution was made virtually in two capital cities by what was, in relation to the mass of the nation, an urban minority. The fact that the Bolshevik party and its successor, the CPSU, unlike the Chinese Communists, never had any substantial peasant base was compounded by Stalin's ravaging of the peasantry.

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In China, on the other hand, the peasant base which was the original motive force of the revolution remained strong enough to manifest its pressure in the concessions to private farming made after the receding of the Cultural Revolution. In the Soviet Union, on the other hand, the maintenance of the bureaucratic collectivized structure of agriculture was one of the issues on which the party and managerial apparatus put up its most stubborn resistance to reform. So strong was this resistance that as late as 1991 Gorbachev was affirming that there could be no privatization of land without a referendum.
Far from Gorbachev's failure being due to wrong priorities - putting political change before economic - I would contend that he was right in seeing that no effective economic reform could be achieved without breaking the strength of the conservative political apparatus. Where he can justly be faulted, in my view, is that he didn't go far enough in the latter direction.
The crucial turning point which doomed the Gorbachev programme, I would suggest, was in 1988 with the constitutional changes that opened the way for the executive presidency. The idea of the institution was right: Gorbachev was insuring himself against the possibility of an inner party coup to displace him in the way that Khrushchev had been eliminated in 1964. His installation as President meant that he couldn't be removed constitutionally except by the Congress of People's Deputies.
But Gorbachev had still two options: was he to become President through direct election by the people or through indirect election by a legislature in which the Communist Party's monopoly of power and reserved seats were still maintained? Gorbachev chose the latter option and this fatally circumscribed his independence and initiative.
Had he been elected by the people at that stage, he could have built for himself a prestige and a legitimacy independent

Gorbachev: Triumph and Tragedy O1
of the Communist Party. Logically, then, the next step would have been to create a broad front for democratization and reform embracing all those who stood for change, both within the Communist Party and outside it, isolating the conservative hardcore of the party.
But Gorbachev shrank from such a move because he was ultimately a man of the party, reared on Leninist doctrines of the guiding role of the party vanguard. Contrast that with the course taken by Boris Yeltsin, who broke with the party and won a popular election as President of the Russian Federation against the CPSU candidate, thus gaining the stature in the public eye that enabled him to become leader of the resistance to the August 1991 coup.
Since the fall of Gorbachev was finally determined by the refusal of the republics to stay with the Union that he wanted to salvage. I would add that as a figure bred in the Marxist tradition, he was, in spite of his innovative and independent mind, too little sensitive to the force of nationalism. When he came to power in 1985, a revision of the relations between centre and republics was not one of his priorities. While pushing his campaign for democratization, he failed in the beginning to see that in the multi-national state of the Soviet Union, there could be no real democratization without the emancipation of the minority nationalities from central control.
Gorbachev canne to address the nationalities question comparatively late - and only after the first outbursts of ethnic conflict had already shaken the Union. By the time the new Union treaty came to be formulated, the strength of the centrifugal forces of local nationalisms coupled with the discontent generated by economic decline made disintegration inevitable.
Yet Gorbachev, in spite of the partial nature of his achievement, remains one of the figures who have most decisively

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altered the course of world history. Perhaps in time to come, when the Russian and other peoples of the former Soviet empire look back on his era, they will say that his historic role was more to destroy the old than to create the new. But a
space has been cleared; the future is open.
The Thatched Patio, November/December 1991

History is Open
I would like to begin by stating what will be, and won't be, the scope of the talk. I am not going to indulge in any crystal gazing; So if you expect that I will try to work out what will happen to Eastern Europe next week, or next month, or next year you will be disappointed. That would be a hazardous undertaking in any case from a distance of several thousands of miles away - and all the more so in a highly fluid and volatile situation. I am concerned not so much with prediction as with the implications, in terms of our own political thinking in Sri Lanka, of the extraordinary events in Eastern Europe recent months.
There is a second preliminary point I want to make - and that concerns terminology. In the course of this talk I shall have occasion often to use the word "socialist" in referring to the social and political structures of Eastern Europe. This may raise a problem för some people. You know, I am sure, that according to Plato this table, and every other table, is only an inferior copy of the ideal table laid up somewhere in heaven. In the same way there are some species of Marxists for whom the societies existing in what has been the Eastern bloc are only an inferior version - or a distortion - of an "ideal socialism" which exists only in Marxist texts. I hope my talk as a whole will show why I consider such an approach unhelpful. But since I don't want anybody to get up and say "But that wasn't socialism', I must make a clarification. When I use the

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, term “socialism" here I mean what Rudolf Bahro called “actually existing socialism" - that is, the social and political forms that have existed in the Soviet Union since the Russian Revolution - not static, of course, but changing and evolving forms - and those that were created in East Europe after the Second World War.
My principal focus is not historical, but I think a short historical sketch will be in order. As a generalization one can say that Eastern Europe in the pre-modern period didn't produce a strong bourgeoisie, and this made for a different pattern of development from that of Western Europe. Of the region as a whole, it would be quite inaccurate to speak of the present movements as leading towards the "restoration of democracy" - for the simple reason that most of these countries didn't have a functioning democracy at any time in their history. The exceptions were Czechoslovakia - between the Treaty of Versailles and the Nazi occupation - and Eastern Germany as a part of the Weimar Republic until the triumph of Hitler. What existed elsewhere in Eastern Europe at the time the Second World War broke out were semi-feudal or military absolutisms - though perhaps behind a facade of formal democracy. Hugh Seton-Watson says that at the end of World War Two "the social structure of Eastern Europe more closely resembled that of Russia, or even of Asiatic countries, than that of France, Britain or Germany".
The entry of the Red Army into Eastern Europe in the latter stages of the Second World War resulted in the incorporation of these countries as satellites into the Stalinist empire. This was a highly ambivalent phenomenon - neither simple revolution nor simple conquest. The decisive factor in bringing about this change was the presence of the Red Army as an occupying force. In the initial stages nominal coalitions were set up in each of these countries where a whole spectrum of parties from right to left was represented. But in these coali

History is Open 105
tions the Communist parties made sure they controlled the army and the police; and through the armed force at their disposal they were then able to purge the bureaucracy, and ultimately to cut off the non-Communist parties from access to political life (except for those rumps which were willing to accept a servile position). The process was consummated peacefully not through insurrection but through pressures, manoeuvres and purges, though the working-class following of the Communist parties could from time to time be mobilized in the streets to lend mass backing to the stratagems being operated at the top. However, none of this would have sufficed without the implicit threat of Soviet armed intervention if there was any resistance. On occasions, the threat became an overt one - as in Rumania in 1945 when King Michael refused to replace his Prime Minister (Radescu). Vyshinsky flew to Bucharest and demanded that the king make the change in two hours, on pain of his refusal being treated by the Soviet Union as a breach of the armistice. Michael surrendered.
Indeed, the whole process of the creation of the so-called "Peoples' Democracies" was achieved at the choice not of the Eastern European Communist parties but of Stalin himself. This process of revolution by conquest resulted in the imposition on the Eastern European states of the forms and structures of Soviet socialism. Its political features were the one-party state with the Communist Party monopolizing power (though a pseudo-democratic facade could still be maintained by the toleration of parties which accepted Communist hegemony); the bureaucratization of the internal party structure itself, with policies and decisions being transmitted from the top down; wide-spread use of terror and coercion to maintain the power structure; and the total subordination of civil society and its life - economic, cultural and religious - to the norms laid down by the state. At the same time East European socialism stratified the dominant property forms, carried through land re

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form in a region where feudal and semi feudal relations had survived, and instituted extensive social welfare policies - notably, that of mass education. However, all this was achieved under conditions in which the interests of the East European states were subordinated to those of the Soviet Union. There is in fact some evidence that Stalin didn't at first even intend a radical transformation of East European society, and that it was the emerging conflict with the United States and Western Europe that made him decide to turn the region into a defensive outpost for the Soviet Union. Control of East European political life and of its economies became a matter of Soviet security. In particular, in a region well known for its tenacious nationalisms any manifestations of Titoist-style tendencies within the Communist parties were eliminated by the purges and trials of the late 40s and early 50s. The more drastic crises of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 and the "Prague spring" of 1968 were met by full-scale armed intervention.
Those who believe in simple historical schemes and linear patterns of historical development would do well to reflect on two paradoxes. The first is that in Eastern Europe some of the socio-economic tasks left unfinished by the abortive bourgeois democratic revolutions of 1830 and 1848 were consummated by a social revolution imposed from above by foreign domination. The second paradox is that other unfinished tasks - the political tasks of the establishment of parliamentary democracy - are being accomplished today by a people'revolution
against the Communist state.
This is an appropriate point from which to go to point out the limitations of both right-wing and left-wing interpretations of the present changes in Eastern Europe that are current in Sri Lankan political thinking. Reading whatever has been written on these developments. I have been struck by the efforts made by commentators on these developments. I have been struck by the efforts made by commentators committed to one politi

History is Open O7
cal doctrine or another to fit the events into a previously existing theoretical framework. For me, on the other hand, the East European democratic revolution is a phenomenon which calls in question a whole range of preconceptions and formulas, and demands a radical intellectual reorientation.
It seems to me that the right spirit in which to approach the East European changes is suggested by a reported conversation last year between Mikhail Gorbachev and Richard von Weiszacker, the West German President. On that occasion Gorbachev is reported to have said: "History is open". He had gone on to say one couldn't foresee where it would lead in 200 years. Yes, history is always open to the new, the unforeseen, the unpredictable, and we mustn't assume that it runs on preordained tramlines.
Since the East European democratic revolution began, there has been a simple right-wing interpretation of it: Communism is inherently a totalitarian system, and it has collapsed because the people's natural desire for democratic freedom can't be suppressed indefinitely. There are several reasons why such an explanation is inadequate.
In the first place, everybody will agree that the East European revolution couldn't have taken place without the stimulus of Soviet perestroika, and perestroika itself would have been impossible without the initiative of the reforming group in the Soviet hierarchy, led by Gorbachev. If the right-wing stereotypes of Soviet Communism as inherently totalitarian and monolithic were true, how did it produce at the top of the party a reformer like Gorbachev? Secondly, although political changes in Poland and Hungary had already taken place by the first half of 1989 in response to Soviet perestroika, what was decisive for East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria and Romania, was the historic declaration of July 1989. That was at the Warsaw Pact meeting, when Gorbachev made the pro

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nouncement: "Each people determines the future of its own country and chooses its own form of Society. There must be no interference from outside, no matter what the pretext." It was this repudiation of "the Brezhnev doctrine" - as well as the later explicit disavowal of the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 - that signaled to the East European peoples that the Soviet Union wouldn't intervene, whatever the road they took in determining their internal political and economic structures.
A third factor which demonstrates the inadequacy of these stereotypes: the East European revolution has been carried through by a multiplicity of political forces. Among the wide range of groupings participating in these movements - alongside liberals, religious groups, environmentalists etc., - have also been dissident Communists. Their numbers and weight in the movement varied from country to country. In Czechoslovakia after the 1968 invasion the resistance was sustained by liberals and human rights activists, and it is the Civil Forum that now seems to be dominant. But in Romania the Ceausescu regime had something of the character of a family dynasty, with a narrow base even within the Communist Party, so that the fall of the regime was accomplished by the large-scale defection of Communists themselves at all levels of the party. I therefore conclude that the European revolution can't be understood without taking into account the duality of Marxism and Marxist movements. Within them, throughout their history, there have been both authoritarian and libertarian elements, and the latter have entered into the making both of Soviet perestroika and of the East European democratic revolution.
One more word to those who speak of the "collapse of Communism'. I am sure that the political and economic structures of Eastern Europe will undergo far-reaching transformations in the months and years to come. But I am certain that one thing will be carried over into the future as the heritage of

History is Open O9
the socialism of the post-war years, and that is the spirit and ideology of egalitarianism. It would be quite wrong to suppose that what is beckoning East Europeans into the promised land is simply the spectacle of the goodies available on the other side of the Brandenburg Gate. The mass anger and revulsion aroused by the revelations of the Sybaritic life-style of the Ceausescus or of the luxury in which the East German party bosses lived is a sign that the passion for equality is alive, as it also is in the Soviet Union.
But now I want to turn to the preconceptions and formulas through which many people on the left see the current East European events. These are much more difficult to combat. There is a simple reason for this. The Sri Lankan right - no doubt with the exception of the Liberal Party - manages for the most part without a political theory; that is, perhaps both its weakness and its strength. But the left, true to its intellectual traditions, approaches every issue in terms of its theoretical orthodoxies. Theory is an extremely valuable tool, provided it is used as a tool - that is, if one is prepared to discard it or exchange it when one finds that it is no longer of use. It is a burden, a fetter when one is determined to make the reality fit an outworn theoretical framework. "Theory is grey, my friend," quoted Lenin on a momentous occasion during the Russian Revolution, "the tree of life is always green." Lenin didn't, I think, always take his own advice, but that is no reason why we shotildn't profit from it.
This why it is depressing to find people on the left in Sri Lanka greeting the East European events with cries of "Counter-revolution! Capitalism is being restored!" or "Back to Lenin!" or "Trotsky has been proved right". In all these cases, the ideological signal is "Business as usual".
Marxism was supposed to be "scientific socialism" - an analysis of the directions of social evolution based on the ob

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servation and study of the real forces at work in a society. But in parties and political movements, this has been superseded by a theological temper of mind which judges all issues through the enforcement of orthodoxies and the ritual enunciation of sacred texts. Let me take simply the most recent example of many that come to mind. I have seen a newspaper debate here on the market mechanisms that are sought to be introduced in the Soviet Union, and now, of course, also in Eastern Europe. I can perfectly understand a discussion on the basis of the relative merits of the market as against central planning in achieving economic productivity to meet social needs, and also on the compatibility or incompatibility of the market with social goals of equity. But much of the discussion has turned on this issue: "Is or is not the market mechanism that is being introduced today what Lenin stood for in his New Economic Policy?" And on both sides, this discussion is conducted through the mobilization of texts. To me this is wholly irrelevant. The New Economic Policy is nearly seven decades old, the society it was designed to serve has changed beyond recognition, the problems and needs of today are new and different. What have Lenin's goals in 1921 to do with the matter?
So it is in this spirit of fresh inquiry that the left must be urged to look at the changes in Eastern Europe. First and foremost, it would be a grievous illusion to believe that what is being rejected in Eastern Europe is merely Stalinism. It is also Leninism that is repudiated.
Everywhere in Eastern Europe, one of the first attacks on the existing political structure has been on the leading role of the Communist Party written into East European constitutions. This is the constitutional mechanism, backed by the coercive apparatus, that guaranteed the political monopoly of the Communist Party. That monopoly is now being dismantled throughout Eastern Europe. How long it will last in the Soviet Union itself is a matter for speculation. The Second Congress of Peo

History is Open
ple's Deputies recently declined by a majority to debate the relevant Article 6 of the Soviet Constitution, but the majority was hardly so large as to guarantee its indefinite continuance. My own guess is that unless perestroika is halted or reversed, the issue will rise again, and that the Soviet Union cannot avert the movement towards a multi-party system.
So what is being cast aside in Eastern Europe is the Leninist doctrine of the vanguard party - the party that by its superior understanding of the movement of history guides and directs society to the Socialist goals. Why has his doctrine proved repugnant — so much so that Communist parties in Eastern Europe are rushing even to shed their party names?
Again, I think, it would be a serious error to suppose that it is only the practice of Stalinist-style dictatorships that has led to the rejection of the vanguard party. For the necessary implication of this doctrine is the inequality of power. The assumption that a revolutionary elite possesses a superior wisdom by virtue of which it is entitled to lead and direct others towards historical goals that it has chosen is totally incompatible with diversity of opinion, open debate and free choice. In practice, therefore, whether during the Leninist or the Stalinist era, the role of the vanguard party has never been achieved without the suppression of contrary opinions and varying degrees of coercion.
I believe there are some Marxists - less starry-eyed than others who would admit this. But they would go on to justify this concentration of power in the hands of the vanguard party on the basis of two considerations - one, that it guarantees the speedy and thoroughgoing transformation of the social structure and the development of the productive forces; the other, that in the meantime political freedom has temporarily to be exchanged for economic egalitarianism.
My answer to the first point is that there is no calculus by which we can measure the human cost in lives, in loss of per

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sonal freedom, in enforced uniformity of thinking - against the presumed social development that is to be achieved through this means. If, as has been estimated, the price of the Stalin regime was 20 million lives, if ever the price of the Ceauseseu regime was 60,000 lives over 25 years apart from all the other sufferings and deprivation involved - where can we find the scale in which we can weigh these against the material or other progress won at this cost. Particularly when at the end of the process today, it seems evident from the condition both of the Soviet and of the East European economics that bureaucratized concentration of power ultimately frustrates even economic development.
My answer to the second point is that there is no way of bartering political freedom for economic egalitarianism - and the whole experience of "actually existing socialism" proves this. Socialist Societies have gone through three stages as far as economic egalitarianism was concerned. The first two stages were enacted in the Soviet Union; the third stage was shared by the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. In the first stage, because the Soviet regime was born out of a popular revolution, there was enough revolutionary fervour and enthusiasm to maintain a spartan austerity even among the political and bureaucratic elite. The second stage was reached in the Stalin era. A new class differentiation took over from the old, partly to provide economic incentives for skill and effort, but also to ensure the loyalty of higher cadres to the power structure, economic inequalities and privileges were actively promoted. By the time the Red Army entered Eastern Europe, the whole system of special rations, special shops, special housing, special transport and (as a Soviet journalist has recently remarked) even special cemeteries, had become part of the prerequisite of power for socialist rulers. This system of privileges was transplanted to Eastern Europe.
However, in the Stalin era, whether in the Soviet Union or in Eastern Europe, the members of the bureaucracy were al

History is Open 13
ways insecure, they were always vulnerable to the mechanism of terror, almost as much as the people were. This set limits to their acquisitive appetites, although they lived in relative comfort as compared with the mass of the people.
The third stage was reached in the Brezhnev era. Although throughout Eastern Europe the terror continued to rule the lives of the mass of citizens, there was considerable relaxation of it as far as the bureaucracy was concerned. Moreover, the era of idealism had long ended: those in the upper strata of the Communist parties were now hardened and cynical bureaucrats and for many of them, their position meant the opportunity to grab as much as they could for themselves. It was in these circumstances that there was an immense proliferation of corruption and personal enrichment.
In conclusion, I want to touch briefly on one question that you may feel I have missed out. I have indicated that the trend in Eastern Europe is towards mixed economies and multi-party systems. But I think it would be risky at present to speculate on the precise forms East European political and economic structures will take in the future. There is no reason to suppose that these will be uniform. The very conception of a single "Eastern Europe" has been engendered by Soviet hegemony and the imposition of a similar set of property forms and political systems on the region. Some Czech dissident or émigré intellectuals insist that their country isn't part of Eastern Europe at all, and that its identity and traditions are those of Central Europe, and I am sure that many East Germans would say so too. Actually, the region has a great diversity of ethnic, religious and cultural identities, and one must expect these to become more assertive from now on. The future course of these societies may therefore vary widely one from the other. More than ever for Eastern Europe, history is open.
The Thatched Patio, Vol. 3, No. 2, March/April 1990

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The GOrbacheV Era and Soviet History
I
Let me begin by explaining the meaning of my title. What I hope to do in this paper is to place the current momentous changes in the Soviet Union in the context of the history of post-revolutionary Soviet society. My view is that there have been two major turning-points in post-1917 Soviet history. The first was the period of intense ideological controversy and political struggle within the CPSU following Lenin's death (the years 1925-29) whose outcome decided the destinies of the Soviet Union for decades to come. The second great turningpoint is what the Soviet Union is now living through - the period of the 27th Party Congress in 1986 and after.
In the first part of this paper I shall go back sixty years to what I have described as the first major turning-point in postrevolutionary Soviet history and review the issues of that period for the light they throw on the problems and tasks that face the Soviet Union today. However, I am going to revert to those issues not in the dreary old mode of Stalinist-Trotskyist polemics, so familiar to Sri Lankan readers, but in a dispassionate spirit of historical inquiry. As T.S. Eliot put it in a poem:
We cannot revive old factions,
We cannot restore old policies,

The Gorbachev Era and Soviet History 15
Or follow an antique drum.
I shall not be reviving any old factions or following any antique drums in this paper; in fact, I hope to do justice to all the three protagonists of the party battles of the 'twenties - Stalin, Trotsky and Bukharin - who represented the three options that were available to the Soviet Union at that time. Unfortunately, it isn't possible in history to run the film backwards, change the plot and see how things would have worked out. One can only discuss theoretically and speculatively the viabilities of the two options that Trotsky and Bukharin stood for in comparison with that actually chosen by Stalin.
Of these three options Trotsky's was the least viable, because there was a fundamental contradiction between his political and economic programmes. He advocated rapid industrialization and increasing collectivization of agriculture several years before Stalin adopted these policies at the end of the twenties - and implemented them with a ruthlessness that Trotsky didn't envisage. During these same years Trotsky was also the most consistent critic of the party regime with its monolithic structure and its growing curtailment of inner-party democracy. (Not even Trotsky stood for the lifting of the ban on other parties which he himself had supported when it was imposed in Lenin's lifetime.)
Trotsky's political programme at that time could have been realized only if it had been tied to the kind of economic policy that Bukharin advocated. Bukarin stood for a continuation and extension of the New Economic Policy which Lenin had adopted as a temporary compromise. Owing to the political monopoly exercised by the Bolsheviks, various class interests tended to refract themselves through factions of the party, and the Bukharinist faction advocated policies which coincided with the interests of the upper and middle peasantry, the small traders and small industrialists. A mixed economy of the kind that

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Bukharin stood for, with concessions to small private enterprise would have made possible a minimizing of social tensions and a political atmosphere of greater liberalism. This is not to argue that always and everywhere political democracy is necessarily dependent on the maintenance of an element of private enterprise, although the reconciliation of political freedom with the concentration of total economic power in the hands of the State has never yet been realized in any socialist state. However, what I am arguing here is that in the specific circumstances of the Soviet Union of the twenties, with the embarkation on rapid and large-scale industrialization and collectivization, a high degree of coercion was made inevitable by the very imperatives of primitive socialist accumulation. Firstly, Soviet industry just did not have at that time the resources to offer machinery and other facilities on a scale adequate to make collectivization of the land voluntarily acceptable to the peasant. Secondly, the furious tempo of industrialization of the first Five-Year Plans necessitated dragooning a raw labour force and accustoming them to a modern industrial discipline which many of them, fresh from the village, lacked. Thirdly, the scant resources of the Soviet Union owing to its then low level of development meant that some of the savings for capital investment had to come out of lowered consumption. Hence under Stalin coercion and draconian control reigned in the economy, and the tensions these created within the political structure had to be contained by purges and terror. When allowance has been made for Stalin's personal ruthlessness of temper, one wonders whether the outcome would have been fundamentally different, whoever had been in his place, once the Soviet regime committed itself to the goals of rapid industrialization and development of the collectivist property forms.
Why didn't Trotsky see the contradiction between his political and economic projects? The answer is that mentally he was able to evade it because he trusted to Erupean revolution

The Gorbachev Era and Soviet History 17
to release the Soviet Union from its isolation. Not only in the twenties but right down to the day of his death in 1940 Trotsky continued to believe that the Western European proletariat would have to come to the aid of beleagured Russia, or social ownership of property in the Soviet Union would perish, either by external intervention or by internal bureaucratic degeneration. One has to conclude that Trotsky both underestimated the capacity of the Soviet system to survive and overestimated the revolutionary potential of the Western European working class.
Bukharin's policy would certainly have made possible a less coercive and more human development of Soviet society. It would have necessitated a slower tempo of development ('We shall move ahead by tiny, tiny steps, said Bukharin in 1924, pulling behind us our large peasant cart). Perhaps a triumph of the Bukharinist programme would have meant that the Soviet Union would have been less equipped with the industrial sinews of war to face the Nazi invasion of 1941, and might have had to fight a more total guerilla war, like the Vietnamese against the United States. Perhaps it was the awareness of the fact that the Soviet Union would have the challenge of survival in a hostile international environment which made inevitable the victory of Stalin's forced industrialization and collectivization over Bukharinism.
Rejecting the Trotskyist and Bukharinist options, the Soviet regime went ahead to an immense development of the productive forces - an industrial revolution concentrated into a shorter space of time than in any country before. Apart from the enormous human price this involved, it was effected with many contradictions and unevennesses - especially, the imbalance between industry and agriculture on the one hand and between capital goods and consumption industries on the other. Speaking this year (April 1987) in Prague, Mikhail Gorbachev referred to some of these disparities:

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'Quite frankly, sharp contrasts have emerged in our country. For example, the large-scale production of steel, raw material, fuel and energy resources - the sphere in which we have long been the leaders - versus the shortage of them due to their wasteful and inefficient utilization. Holding one of the first places in the world output of grain versus needing to buy millions of tons of fodder grain annually. The generally recognized achievements of Soviet science, specially the field of fundamental research, and the largest number of physicians and hospitals beds per thousand inhabitants versus the substantial shortcomings in the quality of medical aid.
'Our rockets find Halley's Comet with astonishing accuracy and fly to rendezvous with Venus, and yet, in contrast to this triumph of engineering and research, there is an obvious lag in the practical application of scientific achievements for economic needs and annoying imperfections in simple household appliances.'
These are some of the legacies in the economic sphere itself which the Stalin era has left to later generations. But when this has been said, we cannot deny the magnitude of the task Stalin performed in lifting a huge country out of its immemorial backwardness. I remember a sentence from an article by Isaac Deutscher in the Manchester Guardian in March 1953 when Stalin was dying - a prophetic article in which he predicted the coming end of Stalinism. But that sentence said:
The core of Stalin's historic achievement was that he inherited a Russia of wooden ploughs and is leaving it equipped with atomic piles."
Nor was this achievement, as Deutscher himself recognized, an economic and technical one alone. For the Soviet Union's industrial revolution involved carrying literacy and modern education to a vast mass of hitherto illiterate or rudimentarily educated people. True, this cultural revolution was itself dis

The Gorbachev Era and Soviet History 9
torted by political regimentation, by the fossilization of Stalinist ideology and by the barbarisms of Stalin's personal cult. Nevertheless, it bore with it certain liberating potentialities, which would in the long run react against the Stalinist political and ideological structures themselves. If today the Soviet Union is confronting the tasks that Trotsky and Bukharin envisaged sixty years ago - those of political and economic liberalization - it is because these tasks have now become viable with the bases of primitive economic accumulation and primitive cultural accumulation laid in the Stalin era. However, in this process the movement towards liberalization has to contend with the political heritage of Stalinism. That is part of the dialectic of history.
Indeed, when Stalin died three and a half decades ago, Stalinism was already outdated. Evolved to meet the political and intellectual climate of a still half-backward nation in the twenties, it could no longer satisfy the needs of a modernized society even in the fifties. However, political and ideological structures don't disappear automatically when the economic circumstances in which they emerged have ceased to exist. Not only because political forms and ideologies have an inertia of their own but also because ruling groups have vested interests in their perpetuation. That is why Stalin's heirs - Malenkov, Khrushchev, Brezhnev and Andropov - seemed so self-contradictory in their vacillations between reform and retrogression. They were faced with the dilemma that they had to overhaul the Stalinist inheritance if Soviet society was to move forward; on the other hand, they could not in their own interests go too fast or too far in this direction. I would like to illustrate this dilemma from an anecdote related by Isaac Deutscher in the preface to the second volume of his Trotsky biography; since Deutscher was a responsible historian who had access to sources of information inside the Soviet Union, I think we can accept the anecdote as authentic. The episode is said to have

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occurred during the June 1957 session of the Central Committee:
Pointing at Molotov and Kaganovitch, he (Khruschev) exclaimed, "Your hands are stained with the blood of our party leaders and of innumerable innocent Bolsheviks' "So are yours!" Molotov and Kaganovich shouted back at him. "Yes, so are mine," Khrushchev replied. "I admit this. But during the Great Purges I only carried out your orders. I was not then a member of the Politbureau. I was not responsible for its decisions. You were.'
That is why thoroughgoing de-Stalinisation had to await another generation of rulers whose hands were clean. Gorbachev does not carry the same burden from the past that Khruschev did (he was still a child of seven when the last of the great Moscow show-trials took place). And in the course of the two decades since Khruschev was ousted, a whole new generation of Soviet people has come into existence, who never lived through the darkest period of Stalinism, and who need and crave greater political and economic freedom.
II
I shall now examine the principal directions of the Gorbachev reform -economic, political and cultural.
The economic changes that Gorbachev has sponsored have certain Bukharinist echoes; and significantly enough, a prominent Sovieteconomist, Nikolai Shmelyov, writing in Novyi Mir recently, said, 'unless we recognize that the abandonment of Lenin's new Economic Policy catastrophically dislocated the building of socialism in the USSR, then we shall condemn ourselves, as in 1953, to half-measures. However, the Gorbachevist NEP is taking place in the context not of a predominantly agrar
ian economy dominated by small-scale private holdings but in

The Gorbachev Era and Soviet History 12
a highly industrialized State-run economy: the Stalin era has created an irremovable gulf between the Soviet society of the twenties and that of the eighties.
The Gorbachev economic reform do not involve as large concessions to private enterprise as the current policies in China, although the legalization of the small family enterprise represents a recognition of a de-facto situation that had existed for Some time. The main emphasis, however, falls on correcting the excessively centralized and bureaucratized structure of the state-owned economy, which has proved itself to be wasteful, slow-moving and inefficient. Speaking at a press conference in July, Prof. Abel Aganbegyan, one of Gorbachev's leading economic experts and a member of the Central Committee, said:
'We have 48,000 enterprises in the Soviet Union and it would be very useful to close several thousand of them tomorrow... I don't understand this kind of situation because it makes no economic sense to keep them going. It would be easier to bulldoze them away and build something new. We could all live better. Instead, we use our extra funds to run bad enterprises.'
The thrust of the Gorbachev economic reforms is towards the autonomy of the individual enterprise, which will set its own targets for output and quality on the basis of market demands. Prof. Aganbegyan estimated that by the 1990s only 30 per cent of the economy would be centrally State-controlled. The main form of material enterprise within the country will be wholesale trade between individual factories, farms and consumers with the state not directly involved."
This involves, however, a fundamental change in Soviet pricing policy, since a large range of goods and services have hitherto been subsidized. Holding the individual public enterprise to cost accountability will mean price rises and therefore burdens on the consumer. Gorbachev evidently hopes to bal

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ance this with the material incentives offered to workers for higher productivity and the removal of ceilings on individual income. Whether this balance can be maintained for all sections of workers is one of the problematic aspects of the new economic policy which will need watching.
Turning now to the political changes, I should like to discuss the operation of glasnost first in relation to the uncovering of the Stalinist past.
Western liberal comment has expressed its disappointment with Gorbachev's speech for the 70th anniversary of October on the basis that he didn't go further than Khrushchev thirty years ago in his criticisms of Stalin. However, these comparisons between Khrushcev's 20" Congress speech and Gorbachev's 70th anniversary address ignore the fact that the former was a secret speech delivered to party delegates and never available, except by hearsay, to the mass of the Soviet people. Moreover, Khruschev's critique of Stalin's political terror was limited by the fact that it was directed mainly against that period in which Stalin, having destroyed the Trotskyist, Zinovievist and Bukharinist Oppositions, turned on elements of his own faction in order to consolidate his personal rule. The 'good innocent Communists whom Khrushchev vindicated belonged mainly to the ranks of these latter-day victims of Stalin's purges. Khrushchev's attitude was that Stalin was acting correctly as long as he purged the party of the anti-party oppositions; it was his later excesses that were reprehensible.
The material that has so far reached us here from what has been released in Moscow during the seventieth anniversary suggests that there has now been a partial rehabilitation of Stalin's major victims during the expulsions of the late twenties and the purges of the thirties. Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin and several others have had articles devoted to them in the Encyclopaedia of the October Revolution; their status as revo

The Gorbachev Era and Soviet History 123
lutionaries has been recognized, and it is even said to be regrettable that owing to the obscuring of their roles in the revolution, Soviet people know more about Robespierre, Danton and St. Just than about some of the figures who led their own revolution. However, Trotsky and the other oppositionists are still treated as having erred in the political struggles of the post-revolutionary years. What is new, however, is that in some of the material that has appeared in connection with the anniversary these errors are regarded as part of the differences and controversies which are normal in political life and not the product of treachery and villainy.
It is characteristic of the new era of glasnost that on Stalin, there is no unvarying political line in the Soviet press; some of the critiques of him go much further than those made by Gorbachev in his anniversary speech. For instance, the journal Ogonyok recently published the open letter of Raskolnikov to Stalin. Raskolnikov was Soviet Ambassador in Bulgaria in 1938 when he was recalled by Stalin: Raskolnikov refused to obey the summons, knowing he would be arrested, and instead stayed on abroad and published there his open letter with its denunciation of Stalin, which said in part:
You have forced your supporters to wade in torment and abhorrence through the blood of their former friends and comrades... You have deprived Soviet scholars, especially in the humanities, of the minimum of intellectual freedom, without which creative work becomes impossible... On the eve of war you are destroying the Red Army, pride and joy of the nation, bastion of its strength.'
To substantiate this charge, the same issue of Ogonyok releases the figures of the high-ranking Red Army officers eliminated by Stalin: 3 of the 5 Field-Marshals, 3 of the 5 top-rank Army Commanders, all ten of the second-rank Army Commanders, 50 of 57 Corps Commanders, and 154 of 186 Divisional Commanders.

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However, even more important than the disclosures regarding the Stalin era are the critiques that are appearing in the Soviet press of institutions and practices in the recent past and the present. The new winds of glasnost in this respect are breathtakingly unexpected. One could, for instance, take dozens of examples from the issues of the last few months of Moscow News alone; it was once a stuffy propaganda sheet but now it is a lively and often controversial magazine. Thus, a political columnist writes:
A law professor admits to a Literaturnaya Gazeta journalist that seeing a militiaman he crosses to the other side of the street, obviously fearing that the law enforcement officer may abuse his powers as has too frequently happened until recently. Elections to government bodies were becoming irrelevant because of the absence of choice. The vague concept of a lawabiding society was being eroded together with one's concept of law. People believed rather than actually were citizens. Was it for that reason that the very word "citizen" came to be thought of by masses of people as a semi-irony associated exclusively with bureaucratic procedures and standing in queues?" (MN, 2.2.87).
What is particularly heartening about the criticisms appearing now in the Soviet press is that some of it extends even to the operation of the new policies. Thus in a dialogue between the novelist Anatoly Pristavkin and a journalist, the former says:
"As you please" is the formula that applies not only to the reactionaries. I don't think that writing boldly because ordered to do so, or truth by permission, is any better than passing over something in silence. Comformism is conformism.'
Reading the Soviet press, one gets the impression of a country in a state of ferment; the ferment has been released, of course, by invitations from the top, but one wonders whether

The Gorbachev Era and Soviet History 25
the pressures from below will not at some time outrun the pace that the leadership wishes to set. Symptomatic of these potentialities is the conference in Septembe of 600 delegates of about 60 cultural, ecological and other community groups. The conference said that they were fully supportive of glasnost and accepted the leading role of the Communist Party', but considered that the success of the new policies could be guaranteed only by democratic groups mobilizing from below in their support against the conservative bureaucracy. Of the party they said: V−
Its ranks include people who carry responsibility for the abuses and miscalculations of the past, and who made up the rows of bureaucrats and that oppressive mass of officials who cut them off from the hopes and needs of their people... We want to support the healthy and progressive forces in the party's leadership and the rank and file."
The conference passed two resolutions: one, asking for a monument to be built to Stalin's victims; and the other, that independent citizens should be allowed to stand at elections even against party candidates. What is particularly interesting is that the conference was unofficially organized, but was held in a hall made available by officials of the Moscow unit of the Communist Party; that a sympathetic report of it appeared in the Soviet press, but the two resolutions were not reported. These facts seem a pointer to the ambiguous relations between the official line and the position of those who are pressing for more far-reaching and faster change.
In the long run, Gorbachev's fundamental problem in the political sphere will be that he is trying to broaden the space for criticism and freedom of opinion and expression within the limits of a single-party state. Very early in his adoption of the new course he said: "We have no opposition party; therefore how can we do without glasnost? That was an unusual

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statement for a General Secretary of the CPSU to make, because it almost suggested that not having an opposition party was a limitation. The political columnist from Moscow News whom I quoted earlier referred to the meaninglessness of elections without a choice; Gorbachev is trying to meet this point by providing for a plurality of party candidates among whom voters choose. That this option already does not satisfy the more liberal sections of Soviet opinion is indicated by the demand made by the NGO' conference in September for freedom for individual citizens to contest party candidates. How long will it be before the demand is voiced for the same right to be open to alternative organizations?
It is in culture and the arts that glasnost has so far had most far-reaching scope. Western commentators have often interpreted this as a sign of Gorbachev's desire to satisfy the intelligentsia, who have always been in the Soviet bloc countries the potential centres of opposition. There is some truth in this interpretation; it is relevant that at the last Congress of the Writers' Union there was strong criticism from the floor of censorship, and demands for release of hitherto suppressed literary works. However, one must not make the mistake of supposing that in the Soviet Union liberalization of culture is of significance only to intellectuals; in a society which is not only highly educated but also serious-minded, and where the political role of the arts has always been emphasized, freeing them from an official straitjacket makes an impact on the mass of the people as well.
Over recent months the cultural establishment has frequently been under fire in the Soviet press; this, for instance, in Bulat Okudzhava, the well-known Soviet singer and poet:
Even back in 1919 Maxim Gorky said that the Revolution should not fear the Entente and the internal enemy - it should fear the philistine. Our philistine has gained enormous strength.

The Gorbachev Era and Soviet History h 127
Broad vistas were opened for him both in Stalin's times and subsequently. Usually such a person is silent and obedient, and does not interfere in the solution of acute social issues. But the philistine is terrible when he pushes his way to power. ...That our philistine has grown out of all proportion I judge by our Writers Union. What do they speak about often at our meetings? Instead of speaking about lofty moral standards, the literary process, workmanship or ethnical categories, what do some of our writers discuss? One of them lamented that the younger generation pays no attention and disregards the orders and medals with which he is decorated." (MN, 31.5.87).
Some creative works long circulated only in Samizdat are now available freely to the Soviet reader, and extend and deepen political consciousness of the past, by showing what it meant in terms of human experience to live through the Stalin era. The most important of these resurrected works is Anna Akhmatova's great sequence of poems, Requiem composed when her son was in prison during Stalin's purges, and published fully in the Soviet Union for the first time this year, half a century after it was written. Two works of fiction appearing this year which have also attracted a great deal of attention had been denied publication at the time they were written. One is Anatoly Rybakov's Children of the Arbat based partly on his own experience as an inmate of the forced labour camps under Stalin. It had been announced for publication in Novyi Mir in 1966 and thển withdrawn after the political climate had changed in the wake of Khruschev's fall. Anatoly Pristavkin's The Golden Cloud Slept There is based on the wartime eviction of Chechens from their homeland by Stalin because a few of them had collaborated with the Nazis during the invasion: this novel had been written in 1981 but could not find a Soviet publisher until now. A similar process of restoration is going on in respect of some of the suppressed and mutilated films produced during the Brezhnev and even the Khruschchev years. The great

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film director Andrei Tarkovsky who emigrated to the West because of problems he had with conservative cultural bureaucrats was invited back to the Soviet Union, but died shortly after in exile, but at this year's Moscow Film Festival a complete retrospective of his films was screened, and he was hailed as a great Soviet director.
The publication last year of a large selection of Nikolai Gumilyov's poems is an unprecedented case of the recognition of a writer who was executed for 'counter-revolutionary activity' not in Stalin's but in Lenin's time. Some of the novels and short stories of Vladimir Nabokov have been published, although he belonged to the first generation of post-revolutionary émigrés, and always held strongly anti-Soviet views. The case of the poet and current Nobel prize winner, Iosif Brodsky, is particularly interesting. Brodsky while in the Soviet Union was sentenced to a term in a forced labour camp on a charge of 'social parasitism' (anybody who does not hold a regular job can be penalized under the relevant law) and was later deported. In his new American home Brodsky has in his journalistic writings been stridently hostile to the Soviet Union, even opposing nuclear disarmament on the ground that it would weaken the West. Brodsky no doubt deserves the Nobel Prize because he is a good poet; but knowing how these things happen, one can't help feeling that his status as a Soviet émigré was not unconnected with the award, and in the light of the furore over Pasternak, a similar reaction might have been expected in the Soviet Union. However, negotiations are reported to be afoot for Novyi Mir to publish a selection of Brodsky's poetry, and thus, we have the piquant situation that Brodsky, rejected by Soviet publishers when he was a Soviet citizen, may be in print as an émigré:
The publication of heretical and émigré writers has led to some murmurings on the part of Soviet establishment intellec

The Gorbachev Era and Soviet History 129
tuals who fear that figures of the orthodox literary pantheonGorky, Mayakovsky and Sholokhov - are in danger of being displaced by Gumilyov, Nabokov and Khodasevich (another former avant-garde poet who has ben reprinted). Answering these criticisms, a writer in Moscow News says:
It is written with apprehension that, say, Nabokov and Khodasevich were not favourably disposed towards the socialist system. Indeed, the reality is more complicated than farfetched schemes. It turns out that one can take exception to a progressive social system but remain a great artist.' (MN, 7.6.87)
Truly, a sign of a new deal in Soviet letters!
However, the most dramatic sign of the change in the cultural atmosphere is the statement in the latest issue of Kommunist, the theoretical organ of the CPSU - a statement which has been described as an 'open apology' by the party to Soviet writers, artists and intellectuals for the official cultural policies over the last half-century. The statement says in part:
The mightier the Soviet state became, the more cowardly, mistrustful and often suspicious were the departments and official organs in charge of culture, in their treatment of the creative intelligentsia and their creative works.'
Addressing the intelligentsia, the statement says: 'The party once again tells you, as it did in Lenin's day, "Join us, you are welcome," inviting you to work together on a basis of full trust and confidence, shoving aside administrative methods and the habits of giving orders, or bootlicking and falsehoods.“
The statement says that the party will return to Lenin's attitude to the creative arts, which never depended on banning or censorship or persecution."

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III
I should like to conclude by answering the questions: Will
the Gorbachev reforms survive? Will he be pushed out of of
fice as Khruschev was by diehard resistance or forced to beat a retreat?
On these questions I agree with Martin Walker of the Guardian, the most perceptive Western journalist reporting from Moscow, who has recently expressed his confidence in Gorbachev's staying power. He has, so far, proved a more skilful politician than Khruschev. While the latter tried to impose his changes largely from above, Gorbachev has clearly been building a popular base of support for his reforms. But even if the worst were to happen, and Gorbachev were toppled by an innerparty coup, there is no doubt that the reversal would be temporary, and that the general direction of his changes would sooner or later reassert themselves. For glasnost and perestroika are not simply the creation of one man: they are necessities called for by the development of Soviet society itself, and the Soviet Union cannot go forward today without democratization.
The Thatched Patio, No. 16, October/November 1987

A New Slave Society
SLAVE labour is one of the political and economic foundations of the modern totalitarian state. Politically, the penal labour camp acts as a powerful deterrent to opposition and as a means of sealing off from the rest of society those who are guilty of the crime of independent thought and action. Economically, the army of slaves serves as a source of labour-power whose ruthless exploitation not only helps in organizing the economy for war but also swells the wealth of the new ruling class which controls the state.
Since the defeat of Hitlerite Germany we have had numerous accounts of the Nazi prison camps by their victims. Of the Soviet slave labour camps which have been in existence for a longer period of time and are apparently more extensive only a few eye-witness accounts have yet succeeded in reaching the outside world - the testimonies of observers like Kravchenko and of former sufferers like Ciliga, Victor Serge, Mme. Neumann, and the collection of evidence in that remarkable book, The Dark Side of the Moon. The Bulletin of the Association of Former Political Prisoners of Soviet Labour Camps, now issued under the name of The Challenge, is an invaluable addition to this body of documentary literature. Its articles, containing both narratives of experiences inside the camps by former prisoners as well as discussion and theoretical material, help to illuminate this concealed aspect of Soviet reality.
The history of the Soviet penal labour camps is traced by

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one of the contributors in the October issue of this Bulletin. Originally set up by the Bolsheviks purely as a means of dealing with political opponents, the system of forced labour became by the end of the twenties, an essential part of the Soviet economy. The achievements of the first Five Year Plan, progandised as a triumph of "socialist construction", were made possible in large measure by the armies of slave labourers at the disposal of the state. As the writer, A. Sergerv, says,
"Without any expense for initial communal housebuilding, for labour wages, for maintenance of workers' families, just for a chunk of bread and a ladle of thick soup, men transformed into slaves produced millions of cubic metres of lumber, built railroads and canals, created new industrial centres on the far outskirts of Russia."
Far from being an achievement of socialism, the constructions built by slave labour in Soviet Russia have their parallel only in the Pyramids of Egypt and other grandiose monuments of antiquity raised by the tears, toil and sweat of human chattels.
The liquidation of the kulaks at the end of the 'twenties, the mass purges of the 'thirties, and finally Soviet expansion into Eastern Europe accompanied by large-scale deportations swelled the number of slave labourers to millions.
How many millions? Naturally there are no exact figures, only guesses. One of the pointers is provided by the Soviet statistics of population. In 1939 the official Soviet census gave the total population of the U.S.S.R. as 170,126,000 which was about 15 millions less than might reasonably have been expected. For the census of 1926 had given a population figure of 147 millions, while the official government estimate in 1930 was 157,500,000. In 1935 Stalin himself stated that the average yearly increase of population was 3 million. On the basis of these figures the minimum estimate of population for 1939

A New Slave Society 133
would be 183 million. Thus at the beginning of the War there were 15 million people unaccounted for - as Arthur Koestler calls them, 15 million "lost souls". This figure corresponds to the estimates made by observers like Trotsky and Victor Serge of the number in the penal labour camps, which in their opinion was between 15 to 20 million, that is around 15 per cent of the adult population of Soviet Russia.
The existence of a permanent stratum of slave labourers of such magnitude must obviously make this class one of the economic foundations of the Soviet system, and one of the most important phenomena to be considered in answering the question, 'What kind of state is the Soviet Union?' Here I cannot do better than quote the opinion of so authoritative a writer as Victor Serge, an ex-Communist who had known the life of the labour camps from the inside:
The penal manpower constitutes a sub-proletariat "in rags" which has literally "nothing to lose but its chains..." and its condition is below that of the slave or the serf. This is the new sociological fact. The owner of slaves or serfs was interested in the preservation of his property. In Russia, particularly, traditional patriarchal habits softened the conditions of serfdom. Law and custom always assigned limits to slavery and often set conditions for possible emancipation. The immense agglomeration of Stalinist concentration camps is, on the contrary, outside the law, beyond the ban of society, benefiting from neither a single tradition nor a single known law. They are slave-pariahs and, naturally, it is proper to give a new name to this Social category.
Slave labour is, therefore the most complete expression of the nature of Soviet society - its destruction of the restraints exercised by law and tradition on Social oppression, and its creation of a new form of economic exploitation through the medium of state-owned property for the enrichment of the

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bureaucracy who "owns" the state itself. The study of this new "social category' must be recommended particularly to those who, imprisoned by their own theoretical abstractions, still believe the Soviet Union to be a 'workers state."
THE CHALLENGE: Bulletin of the Association of Former Political Prisoners of Soviet Labour Camps, 112 West 72d Street, Room 325, New York 23, N.Y: Vol.1, No.2: October 1959; Vol.
1, No.3: January 1951, (25c. each).

A Continuing Debate
THE DIFFICULT DIALOGUE: MARX ISM AND NATIONALISM by Ronaldo Munck
(Zed Books Ltd., 184 pp., 1986).
The epigraph to this book is the following quotation from a veteran Belfast Republican, who says: w
The strongest thing in Ireland is nationalism. I suppose it's the strongest thing in the world; there's millions of men have died for nationalism in various countries, in England, in Russia, in Germany, America, countless millions of people have died, but very few have died for socialism. My experience is that throughout the world men will die for their country but
// 7
are not prepared to die for an “ism“.
This quotatich leads into one of the main arguments of Dr. Ronaldo Munck's book - that Marxists traditionally have underestimated the power and the tenaciousness of nationalism. This underestimation goes back to a primal error in the thinking of Marx and Engels — the assumption that capitalism was unifying the globe by drawing all peoples into the world market and thus making national frontiers archaic. What Marx and Engels failed to foresee - even within their own framework of thinking - was that the process of capitalist development was uneven, and that by accentuating differences between

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regions and states, it would give a fresh lease of life to nation"alism.
Munck in his opening chapter brings out the extent to which Marx and Engels originally depreciated nationalism by drawing a distinction between what they termed historic and 'nonhistoric nations: the former were those who were in the mainstream of historical development and progress, and the latter those who had lagged behind and were incapable of building viable national states. This distinction could be used to support expansion by the former at the expense of the latter: thus Engels could argue that it was in the interests of 'civilisation' that California had been taken away from the lazy Mexicans' by the energetic Yankees'. Later, however, the reality of the Irish struggle against British rule and of the subjected peoples in the Russian Empire brought the two founding fathers of Marxism to modify their position on nationalism, but it remain true that what they left to their heirs was, as Munck brings out, an ambiguous and self-contradictory legacy.
Lenin is usually credited by orthodox Marxists with the achievement of having worked out the 'correct' Marxist position on nationalism. Munck acknowledges that Lenin for the first time in Marxist discourse recognized the relative autonomy of the national question, but he brings out clearly the limitations of Lenin's thinking on nationalism. He did not give a coherent theoretical formulation to the theory of nationalism, because for him it was a pragmatic question of political practice. Fundamentally, for him oppressed nationalities were significant only as necessary allies in the class struggle, and nations were transitory phenomena, which would disappear under Socialism. Moreover, there was an inherent bent in Lenin's thinking in favour of the centralized and larger state as the vehicle of historical progress.
The potential contradictions in Lenin's position on nationalism surfaced after the revolution, when Ukrainian and Geor

A Continuing Debate 37
gian nationalists wished to exercise the right of self-determination and secession which the Revolution had guaranteed them. Faced with the possibility of a disintegration of the Soviet republic, the Bolsheviks intervened militarily, but Munck brings out the qualms which Lenin felt about this intervention. The sequel to the suppression of the independent (Menshevik) Georgian republic was the conflict between Lenin and Stalin on the eve of the former's death over policy in Georgia. Crippled by his illness, Lenin left the task of combating 'Great Russian chauvinism' at the Twelfth Party Congress of 1923 to Trotsky, but the latter failed to carry out this mission - and one of the reasons, as Munck indicates, was his own lack of sympathy with nationalism.
All in all, Lenin's efforts to reconcile national self-determination with the building of a socialist state must be regarded as a failure: the codifier of his theory on the national question became also the most ruthless centralizer of the Soviet state under Great Russian hegemony. Munck does not, to my mind, adequately explore the reasons for this failure: apart from the limitations in Lenin's thinking on nationalism described earlier, we have to face the fact that no democratic policy on minority nationalities was ultimately viable within the framework of monolithic one-party rule - and that, a party which was strongly centralized in its internal structure too.
It can reasonably be argued that all victorious 'socialist' revolutions since 1917 - which have taken place within the third world - have been fundamentally wars of national liberation (in the case of the Russian Revolution, the nationalist element became dominant in the post-revolutionary era, and was oppressive rather than liberating). The later chapters of Munck's book are devoted to the relations between Marxism and nationalism in the third world: he surveys here the paradoxical phenomenon that the nations who Marx and Engels regarded as 'non-historic have come to be seen as the bearers of the

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socialist cause. However, the reversal of the earlier Eurocentric standpoint within Marxism has been accompanied by the fact, disturbing for Marxists, of rival and contending nationalisms within the socialist world, culminating in the wars between China, Kampuchea and Vietnam. Confronting this situation, Munck says: Ultimately nationalism is not a sufficient explanation of the Indo-China wars, any more than it was for the First World War... There is no evidence of antagonism at the level of the people between the various nationalities, which after all had a long history of common struggle against colonialism." (p. 140) He ultimately concludes that these wars were in the interests only of the bureaucratic castes of these countries. However, this comforting conclusion is at odds with the recognition elsewhere in the book that 'whatever political strategy is adopted, Marxists operate within the framework of Specific nation-states, workers feel their particular nationality as something real, and nationalism has immense power as a historical force.” (p. 159)
Although this book is not a profoundly original study of its subject, it is a well-informed and, in the main, objective treatment of it. Munck is a Marxist but not a dogmatic one, and he seems to have no sectarian allegiance to any particular school of Marxism. My principal criticism of the book would be that while Munck in theory recognizes the relative autonomy of ideological and cultural factors, he does not give sufficient weight to them in analyses of particular historical situations.
The Thatched Patio, No. 9, September/October 1986

The AristOCratiC AnarChİSt
This is the first full length biography of one of the most interesting figures of Russian revolutionary history - Prince Peter Kropotkin, aristocrat, anarchist, geographer and sociologist.
Peter Kropotkin was born in 1842 into the highest rank of the Russian aristocracy. He was educated in the "corps of pages" who attended personally on the Czar and his household, and was intended for a career in the army. Dissatisfaction with the Czarist regime, however, made him ask for a post in distant Siberia. Here he not only carried out expeditions which advanced geographical knowledge but also met many political exiles who influenced his way of thinking.
At the age of thirty Kropotkin went abroad and in Switzerland he contacted groups of the First International, who were then divided between the authoritarian socialism of Marx and the anarchism of Bakunin. Kropotkin embraced the latter faith. On his return to Russia he was imprisoned on account of his political activity, but escaped from prison after two years.
From that time until the outbreak of the Russian Revolution in 1917, Kropotkin remained an exile abroad; more than thirty years of this period he spent in England. He became a leader of the international anarchist movement, and influenced a large number of British socialists including William Morris, Hyndman, Sidney Webb and Bernard Shaw. The most impor

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tant part of his life's work - his writing - was done mainly during his exile in England.
Of Kropotkin's numerous Sociological and political works the most important are his study of the French Revolution and the book Mutual Aid. In the latter work Kropotkin attempted to answer those who used the Darwinian concept of the "struggle for existence" as an apologia for competitive capitalism. Kropotkin claimed that the "struggle for existence" was not the only principle of the animal kingdom, that side by side with it, there operated also that of co-operation or "mutual aid". From this Kropotkin deduced that co-operation was a universal law, which extended also to human society and would find its highest fulfillment in the anarchist community of the future.
The authors of this biography treat Kropotkin's ideas rather uncritically, evidently on account of their own anarchist sympathies. Mutual Aid may have been useful in its own time as an answer to those who attempted to give laissez-faire capitalism the sanction of natural law. It should however be apparent today that in extending the idea of "co-operation" to the animal kingdom, Kropotkin's method was as unscientific and as anthropomorphic as that of the theorists whom he sought to counter. The real interest of Mutual Aid is as an embodiment of a political myth of human society as the arena of perpetual struggle.
When the February Revolution overthrew Czarism in 1917, Kropotkin greeted it with enthusiasm. He returned to Russia a few months later. But the course of the Revolution disillusioned him. The victory of the Bolsheviks in October and the dictatorship they set up could hardly be acceptable to the anarchist philosopher who believed that the state was a form of oppres
S1O.
Kropotkin continued to write and to criticize the Bolshevik regime as a new despotism. Although the Government had

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imprisoned his anarchist comrades, they did not interfere with Kropotkin, on account of his age as well as prestige as writer and thinker. As the authors of this biography state, his position was similar to that of Tolstoy under Czarism.
In 1921 Kropotkin died: his last words according to one account, were "why has the revolution no noble side?" His death was the occasion for an incident which pointed to the irony of the revolutionary become a stranger in a world he had helped to make. The Bolshevik Government wished to pay their homage to Kropotkin by giving him a State funeral, but this was declined by his family and friends. Meanwhile, his anarchist comrades in prison asked for parole to attend the funeral. The Government undertook to grant them permission, but finally only seven men were let out on parole. At the funeral banners bearing the legend, "Where there is authority there is no freedom" were displayed; and after spokesmen for the Government had paid their tributes to Kropotkin, one of the paroled prisoners made a speech denouncing the ruling regime. It was probably the last public expression of opposition to the Bolshevik dictatorship.
THE ANARCHIST PRINCE: A Biographical Study of Peter Kropotkin, by George Woodcock and Ivan Avakumovic (Boardman, 21s.)
Ceylon Daily News, February 1951

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Isaac Deutscher ReVisited
On many thinking people of my generation who couldn't accept either of the rival orthodoxies of the cold war - Stalinism or anti-Communism - the writing and thought of Isaac Deutscher exerted a profound influence. He was, to my mind, the outstanding interpreter of Soviet history as well as the most penetrating commentator on Soviet affairs during the last two decades of his life. My own intellectual debt to him is considerable. From the time of the publication of his political biography of Stalin in 1949 until his death in 1967, I read nearly every one of his books as they came out and reviewed some of them. In the fifties I arranged for the publication of his periodical articles in the middle page of the "Ceylon Daily News", and in 1952 I had the privilege of a long afternoon's conversation with him at his home in Coulsdon. Nearly a quarter of a century has passed since Deutscher's death. How well do his analyses and his historical prognostications stand up in the light of these two decades and a half- and particularly in the context of the enormous changes that have shaken the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe at the end of that period? To attempt answers to that question is the task of this paper.
I should like first to indicate by a single example the wide gulf that separated Deutscher's thinking from that of most professional Western Sovietologists of that time. When Stalin was dying he - the wire services had just flashed the report of his stroke - Deutscher wrote an article for the "Manchester

lsccac Deutscher Revisited 43
Guardian" which appeared on the day of his death. The historial Sweep of the article would in any case have been striking for a piece that must have been written in a few hours, but what made it even more remarkable was Deutscher's prognosis. For Deutscher titled his article "The End of Stalinism: The Soviet Union's Coming Crisis". I shall try to indicate the direction of its analysis by quoting one paragraph:
"Let me sum up the elements of the crisis looming ahead. While Lenin was on his death-bed the revolution was evolving towards an autocracy and withdrawing into its national shell. While Stalin is wrestling with death the Soviet people seem to be sick with the autocracy, and the revolution has long broken out of its national shell. It is impossible to prophesy how this crisis is going to be solved. Probably no rapid or startling developments should be expected in the near future. "Stalin is dead - long live Stalinism' - the cry will resound from Moscow in the next few months, regardless of the fact that Stalinism has been half-dead even before Stalin has died.'
To appreciate how unusual such a perspective was at that time, one must recall that among both Western scholars of Soviet affairs and cold-war ideologues, it was taken for granted that Stalin's death would change nothing in the Soviet Union; the system would go on. The orthodox theoretical model of Soviet society that was current was that of the 'totalitarian state', which by definition was monolithic, static, and impervious to change - at least by internal forces. (This last qualification was important, because it implied that if Soviet totalitarianism was to be overthrown it had to be done from outside.) This was the paradigm of the Soviet state that was common to academic Sovietologists like Kennan, Fainsod, and Brzezinski on the one hand and to vulgar and now forgotten propagandists such as Whittaker Chambers and James Burnham on the other. Against them, Deutscher was to argue then and later that Soviet society, even after the rigid mould imposed on it

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by Stalin, was a living and evolving Society, possessing its own dynamics and its potentialities of change. Or - as he put it in an essay in 1956 - “Yes, the Soviet universe does move."
With other non-Stalinists of the left Deutscher had his disagreements, too. They indeed did accept that the Stalinist state was ephemeral, but they - many of them following Trotsky's analyses - looked to a political revolution by the Soviet masses to overthrow it. Against them Deutscher argued that in a society that had for so long become unaccustomed to political selfmobilisation, the initiative for change had to come from above - in other words, from a section of the ruling group itself. He wouldn't assert that the democratic regeneration of Soviet society could necessarily be completed without revolutionary intervention by the people, but he wasn't prepared to rule out the possibility of its consummation by continuous reform either. The era of Khrushchev vindicated Deutscher's opinion that reform had become an inescapable necessity from the standpoint of the Soviet rulers themselves, and though the clock was again set back by Khruschev's fall, Deutscher remained confident that the tide of reform would return. A few months before he died, Deutscher said delivering the George Macaulay Trevelyan lectures titled The Unfinished Revolution:
Soviet society cannot reconcile itself much longer to remaining a mere object of history and being dependent on the whims of autocrats or the arbitrary decisions of oligarchies. It needs to regain the sense of being its own master. It needs to obtain control over its governments and to transform the State, which has long towered above society, into an instrument of the nation's democratically expressed will and interest. It needs, in the first instance, to re-establish freedom of expression and association'.
If Deutscher had lived into the era of glasnost and perestroika, he would certainly have found in these develop

lscaac Deutscher Revisited 145
ments a confirmation of his expectations.
Deutscher's fundamentally optimistic view of the Soviet future would have been impossible if his analysis of the Stalin era hadn't also been significantly different from that of either Western anti-communists or of many left-wing anti-Stalinists. Deutscher had been through the school of anti-Stalinism as a member of a Polish Trotskyist group before the war, and he shared none of the Stalinist myths and dogmas. But when he wrote his biography of Stalin, he rejected the analogy which it was so fashionable to make at that time between Stalin and Hitler as tyrants whose record is one of absolute worthlessness and futility'. In spite of his consciousness of the gigantic human cost of the Stalin era. Deutscher recognized also the achievement made possible by it. In the article written at the time of Stalin's death to which I have already referred, there occurs this observation:
The core of Stalin's historic achievement consists in this, that he found Russia working with wooden ploughs and is leaving her equipped with atomic piles."
Nor was this, as Deutscher was at pains to stress, merely an economic or technological transformation; Russia's economic advance would have been made impossible without sending a whole nation to school. In the biography of Stalin there is a remarkable passage which occurs immediately after Deutscher has described the crippling regimentation of artists, writers and other intellectuals by Stalin. He goes on:
However, the cultural significance of Stalinism cannot be judged merely by the way it ravaged letters and arts. It is the contradiction between Stalin's constructive and his destructive influences that should be kept in mind. While he was mercilessly flattening the spiritual life of the intelligentsia, he also carried ... the basic elements of civilization to a vast mass of uncivilized humanity. Under his rule Russian culture lost in depth but

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gained in breadth. The prediction may perhaps be ventured that this extensive spread of civilization in Russia will be followed by a new phase of intensive development, a phase from which another generation will look back with relief upon the barbarous antics of the Stalinist era. It will then perhaps be said that Stalin's style was peculiarly adapted to the tasks of a ruler himself not well educated, who had to dragoon the muzhiks and a bureaucracy issuing from the muzhiks out of their anarchic poverty and darkness."
We may salute Deutscher's insight all the more appreciatively today when the great intellectual ferment of the Gorbachev years has confirmed his hope of a new generation looking back with relief upon the barbarous antics of the Stalinist era.
Deutscher's strength, then, was in his recognition that Soviet society, and even its ruling group, could generate the internal forces for democratic transformation. But what Deutscher expected was that transformation would be directed essentially towards a return to the original social and political programme of the October Revolution. Let me quote part of the concluding paragraph from the "Manchester Guardian" article written as Stalin was dying:
No revolutionary nation has ever made real peace with returned Bourbons or Stuarts and renounced its revolutionary heritage. The peoples of the Soviet Union may in due time shake off Stalinism, or rather the oppressive aspects of Stalinism. But there is no reason to suppose that they will ever genuinely and effectively renounce the Bolshevik Revolution.'
It is noteworthy that in this passage Deutscher, having looked forward to the shaking off of Stalinism by the Soviet people, adds the qualification, or 'rather the oppressive aspects of Stalinism'. This is because for him the legacy of Stalinism consisted not only of the one-party state, the dictatorship,

lscaac Deutscher Revisited 147
leader worship and police terror: it included also planned economy, public ownership of industry and collectivization of the land. Whatever the distortions of these by the Stalinist political structure, Deutscher considered them to be a continuation of the Bolshevik Revolution which the Soviet people would not want to renounce.
Deutscher, in other words, was a classical Marxist, and he was confident that the future regeneration of the Soviet Union would take the form of a return to classical Marxism. There is an explicit statement of this belief almost on the last page of his massive and brilliant biography of Trotsky, where he envisages the future rehabilitation of Trotsky in the Soviet Un
Ol:
When it does come, it will be more than a long-overdue act of justice towards the memory of a great man. By this act the workers' state will announce that it has at last reached maturity, broken its bureaucratic shackles, and re-embraced the classical Marxism that had been banished with Trotsky."
Trotsky's formal rehabilitation has not yet come, but one may doubt whether, if it were to take place next month or next year, it would signify a re-embracing of classical Marxism. The Gorbachev ruling group has progressively moved away from Stalinism, but this same momentum has in several respects carried it far from classical Marxism, even while it was affirming its fidelity to it. The doctrine of the dictatorship of the proletariat has been silently buried. The efficacy of central planning is questioned and the superiority of the market mechanism affirmed, the concept of the decisive struggle between two contending world systems has been replaced by that of international co-operation between them, and the priority of class interests is continually denied on the basis of 'universal human values'. This has all taken place within the ruling group itself. Outside it, a far more thoroughgoing critique of classical

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Marxism - indeed, often a rejection of Marxism in all its forms - is going on among the reforming intelligentsia. And such information as is available about the broad trends of thinking among the Soviet people - for instance, from the new institutions of opinion polls - seems to indicate that if there were a free and open election in the Soviet Union today, last year's experience of Eastern Europe would be repeated and the Community Party defeated. Let me recall Deutscher's words at the time of Stalin's death: There is no reason to suppose that they (i.e. the Soviet people) will ever genuinely and effectively renounce the Bolshevik Revolution. Today it is perfectly possible to envisage that, given the opportunity, they will do just that.
The Eastern European revolution of 1989 offers an interesting occasion to compare Deutscher's historical analysis with subsequent developments. In his biography of Stalin he draws a parallel between Napoleon's and Stalin's historical roles in relation to the countries they conquered in Europe.
Napoleon, the tamer of Jacobinism at home, carried the revolution into foreign lands, to Italy, to the Rhineland, and to Poland, where he abolished serfdom, completely or in part, and where his Code destroyed many of the feudal privileges. Malgre lui-meme, he executed parts of the political testament of Jacobinism... It is mainly in Napoleon's impact upon the lands neighbouring France that the analogy is found for the impact of Stalinism upon eastern and central Europe. The chief elements of both historical situations are similar: the social order of eastern Europe was as little capable of survival as was the feudal order in the Rhineland in Napoleon's days; the revolutionary forces arrayed against the anachronism were too weak to remove it; then conquest and revolution merged in a movement, at once progressive and retrograde, which at last transformed the structure of society.'

isoac Deutscher Revisited 149
Returning to this subject in 1950 in his essay "Two Revolutions“, Deutscher said:
I do not believe that the verdict of history on the Stalinist system of satellites will in this respect be more severe than it has been on the Bonapartist system'.
Today, in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet satellite regimes, one has reason to doubt Deutscher's conclusion. Stalin's attempt to revolutionise Eastern Europe by conquest has turned out to be more ephemeral than Napoleon's corresponding endeavour. It is true that the Social advances of the French Revolution, carried by Napoleon's armies to the conquered lands, were rolled back by triumphant reaction after 1815. To this process popular nationalist opposition to French domination undoubtedly contributed. But the reversal of the progressive changes that Napoleon had brought to the conquered lands - the restoration of the old monarchies and aristocracies - required the military defeat of France and the victory of the Grand Alliance. Nevertheless, the counter-revolution was - on the historical scale - a short-lived phase. The new popular risings - in 1830 and 1848 - continued to be inspired by the example and the legend of the French Revolution. Moreover, two contrary images of Napoleon himself survived in the lands of his former empire - one, of the oppressor, and the other, of the liberator. Deutscher himself recalls in a footnote to his essay, 'Two Revolutions:
"I was brought up in Poland, one of Napoleon's satellite countries, where even in my day the Napoleonic legend was so strongly alive that, as a schoolboy, I wept bitter tears over Napoleon's downfall, as nearly every Polish child did.'
But if the return of the older order after Waterloo was ensured by the military victory of the Grand Alliance, aided by nationalist forces within the former French Empire, the

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Eastern European revolution of 1989 - or counter-revolution, if you want to call it that - was not brought about by American intervention or the military defeat of the Soviet Union. It was the peoples of Eastern Europe themselves who rose to topple the Stalinist regimes. There Deutscher's analogy seems to me to break down. And in rejecting Soviet domination the peoples of Eastern Europe have evidently repudiated the Russian Revolution too: Marx and Lenin have been cast into the historical dustbin as much as Stalin. The optimistic Marxist may argue that this swing to the right in Eastern Europe will be historically as shortlived as the post-Waterloo counter-revolution was, and that socialism will return in due course in Eastern Europe. I would certainly agree that the enthusiasm for the free market may not survive the economic rigours of rising prices and unemployment, and that a people accustomed to subsidized social services will not willingly forego them.
But whatever the political and economic structures that may emerge in Central and Eastern Europe from the present period of transition, it is reasonably certain that at least in Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia, it will bear no resemblance to the one-party state and the centralized economy of the pre1989 model. (Eastern Germany will soon no longer have an independent destiny of its own.) It is only in the more backward regions of the former Soviet empire - in Romania and Bulgaria - that the old structures retain something of their tenacity, though covered over with a veneer of reform. I would therefore argue that Stalin's enterprise of 'revolution by conquest' has been much less enduring in its historical legacy than Napoleon's.
What would Deutscher have said if he had lived to see the Eastern European events of the last year? It is always possible, of course, that he may have modified his ideas in the light of the new realities. But if he had remained true to his former

saac Deutscher Revisited 5
position, he would have had to describe these developments as 'objectively counter-revolutionary', as he did characterize the East Berlin uprising of 1953. We know also that after the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 he wrote:
'One can say that the Hungarian people, driven to desperation and to a state of heroic frenzy tried to wind the clock back while Moscow tried once more with its b a y o – nets to re-wind the communist revolution in Hungary...'
What is implied in this position is Deutscher's certainty that public ownership and planned economy - the essential feature of the Soviet economic forms - are the road of the future, and that these must not be abandoned because of the political deformations of Soviet socialism. To question this position involves not only debating with Deutscher's ghost but also interrogating the entire experience of the Russian Revolution. This is too large an undertaking to attempt in any thoroughgoing fashion in the latter half of a paper, but I shall try at least to throw some light on one aspect of the question. What I want to take up is Deutscher's concept of 'revolution from above'.
The phrase is not Deutscher's own: it comes from the History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union: Short Course, attributed to Stalin himself. It is used there to describe Stalin's collectivization of the land, though the History, while characterizing it as carried out from above, with the initiative of the State power", is careful to preserve the semblance of popular legitimacy by adding, with direct support from below". Deutscher, however, applies the term “revolution from above' not only to Stalin's collectivization and FiveYear Plans but also, as we have seen, to his conquest of Eastern Europe.
What are the distinguishing elements of 'revolution from above", in Deutscher's conceptualization? We may infer from

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his analyses that he saw it, in the Soviet context, as consisting of a fundamental social transformation, conceived to be historically necessary and progressive, but initiated and carried through by the will of the party and the state. The role of the masses in such a process may vary from subordinate participation to even outright hostility - as in the case of the majority of the peasantry in relation to collectivization.
If this is what is meant by 'revolution from above", it will be evident that there can be no absolute distinction between 'revolution from above' and revolution from below', but that in the range of revolutionary phenomena there is a gradation across a spectrum. There is never such a thing as "pure spontaneity' in mass action: people in such situations have always been influenced by ideas and slogans, however inchoate, and propelled into action by agitators and activists, though these leaders may not have come from organized political parties. The Eastern European democratic revolutions that we witnessed last year, for instance, tended towards this pole of 'revolution from below'. So did the February Revolution in Russia: the masses entered into it by their own momentum, and no political agitation and propaganda would have gone into shaping the consciousness of the workers and soldiers who went out into the streets to overthrow the Tsarist regime.
What then are we to say of the October Revolution? The decision to take state power through an insurrection was made by the Bolshevik party, and the organization and successful completion of the insurrection was effected fundamentally by groups directed and controlled by the party. Of course, in making that decision Lenin and the Bolsheviks acted in the knowledge that their seizure of power would receive substantial support from the working class and the soldiers in the two capitals, Petrograd and Moscow, which were decisive of the fate of the revolution. In that estimate they appear to have been right.

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However, there is more to the issue than that. Between February and October the slogan that all parties on the left (including the Bolsheviks) had pushed was "All power to the Soviets!' - that is, to the popular organs of workers, peasants' and soldiers' deputies. It is well known that on the eve of the insurrection there was a division of opinion with in the Bolshevik Party leadership itself on whether the insurrection should forestall the Congress of Soviets which was about to meet. Waiting for the Congress and taking power in its name would have created pressure for a sharing of power with the other parties represented in the Soviets. Lenin wanted to face the Congress with a fait accompli so as to clear the way for a Bolshevik monopoly of power. (There was, of course, a brief coalition with the small group of Left SRs.)
Why did Lenin take this road? It is clear from the historical record that what actuated him was, above all, the will-ofthe-wisp of the impending European revolution. In the resolution he put to the crucial Bolshevik Party central committee meeting on the eve of October, the first reason advanced for carrying out the insurrection was precisely that - the international position of the Russian revolution (the revolt in the German navy, which is an extreme manifestation of the growth throughout Europe of the world socialist revolution).
Deutscher himself raises the issue (though he puts it aside as unanswerable) whether Lenin and Trotsky would have acted as they did, or whether they would have acted with the same determination, if they had taken a soberer view of international revolution and foreseen that in the course of decades their example would not be imitated in any other country. What is clear in any case is that Lenin wanted to use the Russian revolution as a spring-board for European revolution, and that perspective ruled out a compromise or a coalition with the moderate parties in the Soviets.

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In the October revolution, therefore, there was a significant element of 'revolution from above' - not only in the sense that the insurrection was decided on, organized and directed by a party vanguard, but in that its fundamental aim was an international revolution on which that vanguard had set its sights and its hopes. The determination to preserve Russia as the fortress of social revolution until the European working class should rise had as its necessary concomitant an intransigence in the face of the contrary strivings of the great mass of the population. The revolution had been won fundamentally in two cities, but the vast majority of the nation were peasants. They were willing to accept the Bolsheviks as long as they were given land, but the socialist - let alone the internationalist - aims of the Bolsheviks were alien to most of them. In 1918, only a few months after the revolution, the nation gave its verdict in the elections to the Constituent Assembly - the first free elections that Russia had ever had, conducted by the Bolshevik government itself. The Bolsheviks got 24 percent of the seats, but the SRs got 40 per cent. A Soviet political analyst, Vyacheslav Kostikov, has recently commented that this distribution of seats should have made possible the formation of a left democratic government, which would have reflected the real democratic strivings of the toilers'. Perhaps so, and if this could have happened, the Soviet Union might have been spared the worst horrors of the Civil War, not to mention the dictatorial terror to come. Such a compromise would, however, have been alien to the Bolshevik project of holding on in the beleaguered fortress until the European proletariat came to the res
CUe.
The October Revolution was not only a socialist revolution imposed by an urban vanguard on a predominantly peasant country; it was also a revolution brought to a vast and ethnically diverse country by a movement based principally in the cities of the Russian-majority regions. This ethnic di

lsaac Deutscher Revisited 55
mension of the Russian revolution has still not been adequately explored. In the mainstream of writing about Soviet history the ethnic aspects have been relegated to the margins. This is especially true of the work of left-wing scholars like Deutscher or left-liberals like E.H. Carr, influenced as they were by the Marxist tradition of treating ethnicity and nationality as subordinate to class or only an epiphenomenon of it. Yet the contradiction between the Bolsheviks' theoretical allegiance to the principle of self-determination and their anxiety to preserve the bulk of the territory of the empire for the revolutionary state was evident from the earliest period of the revolution. This was the beginning of the long process of transformation of a regime that claimed to speak for the entire Soviet people, and indeed for all mankind, into an instrument - as it became in the Stalin era - of Great Russian dominance. The contradictions between Bolshevik theory and practice surfaced when both the organs of self-rule of the Ukranian anarchists during the Civil War and the Georgian republic set up under Menshevik leadership were crushed by the Red Army. Here 'revolution from above assumed also the character of the suppression of the independent strivings of minority nationalities. The dilemmas of the Civil War were, of course, complex and difficult. On the one hand, there were the military compulsions of defeating the White Guards; on the other, there were the varying trends of nationalist sentiment in the republics which fluctuated between the contending camps; and these were further complicated by the fact that the peasantry were alienated by the rigours of war communism. Nobody can claim that there were simple answers to these problems, but that is all the more reason why the later historian should refrain from seeing the issues in black and white terms - or shall I say, in red and white.
Without claiming that there were infallible alternatives to the courses the Bolsheviks followed, one may suggest that their

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choices were limited not only by the objective circumstances but also by certain partialities of their own. Firstly, their thinking was strongly centralist in tendency, and therefore could not easily adapt itself to the aspirations of autonomous nationalist movements; secondly, they did not value national selfdetermination for its own sake but only as an instrument of socialist revolution: thirdly, they believed in the special mission of their own party as the privileged bearer of historical destiny; and fourthly, they were guided by the supreme objective of international, and not purely Russian, revolution.
Deutscher cannot in general be faulted for simplifying the historical issues, but like most Marxist writers of his time, he does underplay the ethnic and nationalist tensions within the Russian revolution. Their crucial character is apparent today in the light of ethnic violence and claims for secession, and this should make us re-examine the legacy of the past. In the chapter on the Civil War in his biography of Trotsky, Deutscher does not even mention the nationalist element in the conflicts in the Ukraine. He does indeed pay attention to the occupation of Georgia, but only in terms of the issue of military intervention, dismissing Georgian separatism as a 'convenient pretext' by the Mensheviks. The latter indeed have used it as a political instrument. But that Georgian nationalism was a real force is indicated by the fact that nearly seventy years after the incorporation of Georgia into Soviet Union, the Supreme Soviet of that republic has repudiated its validity. It is pertinent to note that Soviet historical scholarship today, with the greater objectivity that is possible in the new political climate, is beginning to emplore these blank spots in the history of the Civil Waryears. The March-April 1990 number of the journal “Istoriya SSSR" (History of the Soviet Union) published by the Historical Division of the Academy of Sciences, carries an outline for a projected 5 volume work, The Civil War in Russia'. The outline includes the following paragraph:

Isaac Deutscher Revisited 57
National movements and national problems. The question of self-determination of peoples. The establishment of a national state in the Transcaucasus at the time of the Menshevik regime in Georgia, the Dashnak regime in Armenia and the Musavatist regime in Azerbaijan. Politics of the nationalist governments in the Ukraine. The struggle between centrifugal and centripetal forces. The position of White Guard circles on the national question."
Deutscher's Marxist blindness to the strength of separate nationalisms within the Soviet Union comes out not only in relation to the early post-revolutionary and Civil War years. It is evident also in his conception of the motive forces making for the increasing centralization of power and its concentration in fewer and fewer hands, partly as due to the compulsions of a society striving to lift itself up by its bootstraps from a low level of productivity and mass culture, partly as an expression of the Byzantine traditions of the Russian state refracting themselves through the Communist dictatorship. While giving due recognition to these factors, I think we should distinguish another which was not less important. In a country which contained a bewilderingly diverse variety of nationalities, languages and cultures, existing at widely different levels of social development, there would have been a natural tendency to rely on the steel-frame of the monolithic ruling party as a means of holding in check the centrifugal trends arising from that ethnic diversity. This should be very clear today, when the relative liberalization under Gorbachev has led to the surfacing of distinct ethnic nationalisms, often within the very ranks of the Communist Parties of the republics. Deutscher cannot be criticized for having failed to live long enough to see the implications of present-day phenomena for the whole of Soviet history. But we must, in assessing the adequacy of his historical vision, set his prognoses against the reality of today. In this respect too, Deutscher down to the

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end of his life saw the future of the Soviet Union in terms of democratization and the struggle against bureaucratism, privilege and the police state, and this forecast, as far as it went, has been vindicated. But it would hardly have entered his head that within a quarter-century of his death the Soviet Union would also experience strident nationalisms with their contradictory potentialities - liberating as well as retrogressive. It may be said that Deutscher was too much of a classical Marxist, sharing 'the clear bright faith in human reason' that Trotsky once affirmed, to have expected that seventy years after the October Revolution, scenes like those in Colombo, July 1983 would be enacted in the streets of Baku and other Soviet cities. The womb of history turns out to be more fertile in possibilities than the most acute of theorists can foresee.
In the concluding chapter of his biography of Trotsky, Deutscher said that Trotsky's strength and weakness alike were rooted in classical Marxism'. I think the same judgment may be made of Deutscher himself. The strength comes out in the far-ranging sweep of his vision, his ability to place men and events in a large-scale temporal perspective, and his readiness to subordinate personal preferences and antipathies to his comprehension of the movement of historical forces. The line that - Trotsky was accustomed to quote from Spinoza might have served as a motto for Deutscher the historian: “It is necessary not to laugh, not to weep, but to understand'. But his historical writing is neither bloodless nor impersonal, and certainly the Trotsky biography is deeply pervaded by the moving sense of the tragedy of a great man at odds with his time and place, enhanced by Deutscher's superb command of a language to which he was not born.
Yet Deutscher's limitations were also those of the classical Marxist. Though he spoke of Trotsky's 'almost irrational belief in the craving of the western working classes for revolution and in their ability to make it, Deutscher himself never

lsoac Deutscher Revisited 59
lost the faith that ultimately the original Marxist vision would find its true home in the West. These are his words at the end of the Trotsky biography:
The West, in which a Marxism debased by Mother Russia into Stalinism inspired disgust and fear, will surely respond in quite a different manner to a Marxism cleansed of barbarous accretions; in that Marxism it will have to acknowledge at last its own creation and its own vision of man's destiny. And so history may come full circle till Hope creates From its own wreck the thing it contemplates' That final piece of Shelleyan utopianism is appropriate to what seems to me a voice from another era - an era whose certainties we may envy, but, alas, cannot share.
The Thatched Patio, Vol. 3, No. 2, March/April 1990

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Homage to Fernand Braudel
Fernand Braudel, who died last month at the age of 83, was regarded by many members of his profession as the greatest historian of his generation; some would say, the greatest of the century. The leading figure of the French "Annales' School, he originally gained his great reputation with his work , The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II (1949), which scholars still place as his masterpiece. However, his impact on the serious general reader is due mainly to his three-volume work, Civilisation and Capitalism: 15-18" Century", written in his latter years. This is a book unique in its combination of a close observation of social minutiae and a large-scale historical vision. In an age when scholarship tends too often to narrow specialization, the encyclopaedic erudition and creative originality of Braudel's mind enabled him to produce one of the great works of historical Synthesis, presenting a unified theory of one of the central processes of world history - the genesis and growth of mercantile capitalism in its original home - Western Europe. (In his final volume, Braudel also surveys the other world economies in order to throw light on the question why it was left to Europe to ensure the triumph of capitalism.) But this sweeping historical perspective is supported by a wealth of local and specific detail, so that the book seems to move constantly from the long panning shot to the Zoom into close-up.
How long did a letter take to get from Antwerp to Venice

Homage to Fernand Braudel 6
around 1500? How far afield did Polish weavers travel to peddle their cloth in the eighteenth century? How much sugar were ordinary people in Paris eating at the time of the Revolution? These are just three random examples of the enormously rich and diverse variety of phenomena which enter into the amalgam of Braudel's book. In reading it one often comes across a page or two which suddenly sheds a new light on a whole aspect of human living - as when Braudel shows the world can be divided into cultures where people sat on chairs and those where people sat on the floor - and the two met in China.
Until he came to his third volume, Braudel didn't tell his story in chronological sequence. What he did instead was to analyse in succession three different levels of economic life. The first was what he called 'material life' or the 'infra-economy': to define it in his own words, the world of self-sufficiency and barter of goods and services within a very small radius.' He sees this as a very old substratum of economic life which survived (and has revived from time to time in different places) beneath the more complex upper levels. The second level is what has usually been taken to be the source and the mainstay of capitalism - the market economy. But this is where the distinctive originality of Braudel's contribution lies, because one of the fundamental purposes of his book is to question that traditional equation.
As he tells it 'direct observation of so-called economic realities, between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries ... did not seem to fit or even flatly contradicted the classical and traditional theories of what was supposed to have happened." Mainstream academic as well as Marxist economic historians have propagated the view that capitalism was synonymous with free competition and that it was only in its latter-day phases that monopoly capitalism took over. For Braudel, however, capitalism essentially belonged to the zone which is not the true market economy, but indeed often its exact opposite'. Capi

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talism supervened when speculators, financiers and other powerful economic interests succeeded in controlling the free market for their profit, and he shows in his second volume that the emergence of such manipulators goes back to the very beginnings of European capitalism. The great merchant companies of the heyday of mercantile capitalism, says Braudel, were already multinationals. Capitalism, in short, for Braudel is essentially “anti-market'.
Braudel's revolutionary new thesis on the origins and history of capitalism will continue to be the subject of discussion and controversy for a long time to come. Not the least part of his merits as a historian is the elegance and lucidity of his writing, apparent even in translation through the skill of Sinn Reynolds, who won the Scott Moncrieff Prize for translation with her rendering of his second volume.
The Thatched Patio, No. 5, January 1986

From Workers' Organs To State Agencies
BOOKS on the Soviet Union can be said to be of three kinds. These are the apologias and diatribes of the propagandists, for and against, which, diametrically opposed in their viewpoint are yet similar in their indifference to truth when it conflicts with political self-interest. Then there are the writings of Trotsky and his followers, which, though convincing enough in their criticisms of Stalinism, are distorted by their purpose of counterpoising to it, a Simon Pure Bolshevik tradition (initiated by Lenin and maintained by Trotsky) which they uncritically defend. Finally - and this is where we get nearest the truth - there is the work of the writers (most of them exMarxists) who have made a re-appraisal of Bolshevism as a whole so as to make clear the processes by which the "bureaucratic dictatorship" of Stalin grew out of the "revolutionary dictatorship" of Lehin and Trotsky.
The best of these studies, in my opinion, is Isaac Deutscher's Stalin: A Political Biography, published last year. It is remarkable equally for the clarity and vigour of its writing, the breadth of its historical vision, its meticulous care in the examination of evidence, and the dispassionateness and objectivity of its judgments. Stalin is the first instalment of a biographical trilogy on which Deutscher is at work (the other volumes will be a Life of Lenin and a study of Trotsky in Exile); when finished, the

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trilogy will provide a complete picture of the Russian Revolution seen through its three most important figures.
The present monograph on Soviet Trade Unions might be considered an adjunct to Deutscher's larger work in progress. In this pioneer piece of research on the development of the Soviet trade unions between the Revolution and today, Deutscher shows how they were transformed "from independent organizations of the Russian working class to their present status as more or less compulsory State agencies." He thus throws light on one aspect of the development from the utopianism of the early years of the Revolution to the realpolitik of the present regime.
Bolshevik theory on the role the trade unions should play in a socialist order can be best understood in terms of the argument of Lenin's State and Revolution, written on the eve of the October Revolution. The essence of this argument is that the State, as "a distinct administrative machine separated from ... the people", would cease to exist, and would be replaced by popular control of the political and economic organs of power. The trade unions, from this point of view, would be one of the most important means of control from below. "We must ever more broaden," these were Lenin's words, "the participation of the workers themselves in the direction of the economy ... If we fail to convert the Trade Unions into organs educating the masses, on a scale ten times larger than at present, for the immediate participation in the direction of the state, then we shall not achieve our objective in building commu
声f
S.
As Deutscher shows, however, this theory, from the very earliest years of the Bolshevik regime, came into conflict with the need of the party dictatorship to establish centralized control of every aspect of economic life. This conflict became particularly keen during the Civil War, when the emergency of

From Workers' Organs to State Agencies 65
the situation compelled militarization and rigidly centralized direction of labour. Under such conditions trade union control and the freedom of the unions to bargain with the State on behalf of the worker could have no meaning. By the period of the Civil War the exigencies of practice were already leading to modifications of theory on the part of at least some of the Bolshevik leaders. In answer to Griticism by the Mensheviks of the policy of militarization of labour, Trotsky said:
"Let the Menshevik speakers explain to us what is meant by free non-compulsory labour? We have known slave-labour, serf-labour, compulsory regimented labour in the medieval crafts, and the labour of free wage-earners, which the bourgeoisie calls free labour. We are now heading towards the type of labour that is socially regulated on the basis of an economic plan, obligatory for the whole country, compulsory for every worker. This is the basis of socialism . . . The militarization of labour, in the fundamental meaning of which I have spoken, is the basic method for the organization of our labour forces."
On the speech from which this quotation is taken Deutscher COmmentS:
"In making this striking statement, Trotsky elevated an expedient as a principle, and, as So often happens, made an ideological virtue out of a bitter necessity. The immediate purpose was to justify the labour armies and to prove the inescapable need for this, without necessarily proclaiming the unlimited right of the State permanently to conscript labour and without declaring militarization of labour to be of the essence of Socialist planning. In later years, Trotsky himself became the strongest critic of a labour policy of which he had unwittingly been an inspirer."
Popular dissatisfaction with military communism led to the controversy within the ruling party on the trade union

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question in 1921. There were three viewpoints in this dispute. The faction known as the Workers' Opposition demanded the transfer of the entire economic administration to the trade unions. At the other extreme, Trotsky demanded that the trade unions be merged with the state apparatus. Lenin attempted to strike a mean between these two views, and it was his position which was finally accepted by the party. It was during this controversy that Lenin made a historic statement when he termed Trotsky's description of Russia as a 'workers state' an "abstraction' and declared, "Ours is a workers' state with bureaucratic distortions.'
Lenin certainly sensed the bureaucratic danger better than Trotsky, but the compromise between trade union democracy and party dictatorship which he proposed was inconclusive. It could have had some reality, as Deutscher points out, "only if the State had become more democratic. This was not to hap
Αν
pen.
In the latter half of the book, Deutscher shows "how with the triumph of the Stalinist faction, the evolution of the totalitarian state in Russia was completed. According by “to all intents and purposes the unions became part of its governmental machinery" and lost whatever margins of freedom and relative independence they had possessed during the Leninist era. Deutscher analyses the mechanisms by which, while the freedom of the trade unions has been preserved in theory, it has been completely destroyed in practice. As an inevitable result there has been a rapid growth of economic privilege, seen in the wide disparities between the wages of ordinary workers on the one hand and bureaucrats and other privileged groups on the other. Taking advantage of the occasions when the web of secrecy, with which the truth regarding Soviet conditions is surrounded, has been "brushed aside for a moment by the rude fist of administrative or economic necessity." Deutscher

From Workers' Organs To State Agencies 167
documents his conclusions with facts taken from official Soviet
SOU11C6S.
In the last chapter of his book, the author asks what lessons can be drawn from the Russian experience? Does it bear out the argument that planned economy must necessarily take us along the "road to serfdom", as predicted by Hayek, Burnham and other prophets. Deutscher shows convincingly that this view is unsound. "The essential condition in which planning can yield the fruits expected from it by its socialist adherents," he states, "is that it should be applied to an economy of plenty and not to one of scarcity." This condition did not obtain in Russia, which was economically one of the most backward countries of Europe. "In Russia no bargaining was really possible between management and workers because of the extreme scarcity of all material resources . . . But in any economy possessing its safety margins in material wealth a degree of bargaining between management and workers would not only be compatible with planning but also essential to its effectiveness.'
"Nor (Deuitscher concludes) is this merely a matter of the industrial resources with which a country embarks upon a planned economy. Social custom and habit and the peculiarities of native civilizations play their part. The traditional outlook of any nation permeates the fabric of any new social organization that the nation may adopt and lends to it its own colour. Soviet Russia, with its public ownership and planned economy, has absorbed all the still fresh traditions of Tsarist autocracy and serfdom. It was not planned economy that drove Russia on to the road to serfdom. In countries with a deeprooted tradition of liberty, their social and cultural climate should help them to evolve methods of planning so efficient and humane that by comparison the Russian experiment would appear what historically it is - the first barbarously clumsy

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and costly, and yet profoundly significant attempt of a nation to master the blind forces of its economy".
Soviet Trade Unions: Their place in Soviet Labour Policy, by Isaac Deutscher (Royal Institute of International Affairs,
7s.4p.)
The Ceylon Daily News, November 1950.

Subha and YaSa (American Style)
Yasa (Yasalalaka Tissa) was a first-century king of Sri Lanka, at whose court there was a gatekeeper, Subha, who resembled him closely. The king enjoyed playing practical jokes on his ministers by changing clothes and places with the gatekeeper. One day, according to the legend, when the king was chuckling over the spectacle of the courtiers paying obeisance to the disguised gatekeeper, the latter, from the throne, ordered Yasa seized and executed immediately for his insolence in laughing in the royal presence.
None of this would have happened if President Ryan O'Malley hadn't included the Sri Lankan Ambassador among the guests to be invited to a White House dinner shortly before he left on his South Asian tour. During the presidential election campaign of 2004 O'Malley had made great play with the idea that "Amerasia", as he called it, would be the centre of global development in the new millennium, and after his assumption of office, he had already made two whirlwind tours of East Asia and SouthEast Asia. Now it was South Asia's turn to be the object of the President's courtship, and the region should feel especially favoured because this was also the year when the President would be seeking party nomination for a second term.

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Actually, Sri Lanka wasn't on the President's itinerary: he was stopping over only in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. But the President thought it would be a nice gesture to invite the Ambassadors of all seven SAARC countries, so he could make them feel that even the countries that wouldn't be fortunate enough to receive him on their soil were still partakers of his friendly interest and concern.
So it was that Ambassador Sunil Pathirana found himself sitting between two ambassadorial wives at the dinner. Throughout the first part of the evening, indeed, he found it much more agreeable to chat to his neighbour on his right, a charming Bengali woman (surely a good twenty years younger than her husband) than to participate in or even listen to the high-level political conversation that was going on at the head of the table. The President was testing his guests' views on a question that was troubling American opinion - the possibility of an upsurge of militant Islamic fundamentalism in the successor states to the Central Asian republics of the former Soviet Union. This had led to a rather warm argument between the Pakistani Ambassador, who thought the danger greatly exaggerated by the American media, and the Indian Ambassador, who thought it very real indeed. Such snatches of the argument as drifted past Ambassador Pathirana's ears he found confusing rather than enlightening (who the hell were the Kara-Kalpaks?). The Ambassador wasn't particularly well-informed: he was a political appointee who owed his job to the massive contribution he had made to the governing party on the eve of the last elections; and his wife had lobbied and cajoled and wheedled several Ministers to make sure he would get the Washington embassy because their daughter had recently been admitted to an east-coast campus. In any case, it was much pleasanter to watch Mrs. Das flutter her brilliant eyes as she described the trials of running house in Moscow

Subha and Yasa (American Style) 171
(her husband's last posting) than to pay attention to the debate whether the Iranians or the Turks or the Afghans were likely to gain most influence in Central Asia. Fortunately, the Ambassador's left-hand neighbour, a stout, middle-aged woman, with an expression rather like that of a melancholy basset hound, showed little inclination to demand conversation from Ambassador Pathirana, and he had been able to get by with tossing an occasional polite triviality in her direction. But when President O'Malley, evidently feeling that the argument between the Indian and the Pakistani had lasted too long, deflected the conversation in another direction, Ambassador Pathirana found his attention riveted.
Policy-making would be much simpler, the President remarked in his markedly mid-Western accent, "if only we had reliable ways of looking into the future. Did any of you read the story in this morning's Washington Post about the guy who has become a billionaire by making killing after killing on the stock market?
Yes,’ said the Nepali Ambassador. He had visions from time to time which told him what shares to buy."
That's it,' said the President. Now if only I could be sure he could see the shape of things to come in international politics as well, I would make him my National Security Adviser."
Excuse me, Mr. President,' said Ambassador Pathirana. To materialistic Americans that story may seem fantastic. But we Sri Lankans wouldn't find anything unusual in it.'
Why so?' asked the President.
Because there are people in my country who make a living out of foreseeing the future. They light an oil lamp in front of a saucer stood upright, with a black patch smeared

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on it. When you ask them a question about the future, they stare at the black patch, and then they see a picture, which tells them the answer."
But does it work?' asked the President.
"Of course, many of them are just charlatans. But there are a few, very few - probably not more than five in the whole country - who have the real gift. But I put my real trust in an old man to whom I have gone for many years. He doesn't use the flame and the black patch; you just have to take him a sheaf of betel.'
Beetle?' asked the President, puzzled.
It's a leaf that people chew in our country.' 'What we call pan, said the Indian Ambassador. “Ah, pan, said the President. I've read about that.'
'So when you give my old man the sheaf of betel leaves, he takes one leaf from it and keeps staring into it. Then the pictures appear in it and he finds the answer to your question. Sometimes you don't even have to ask him a question because he sees both question and answer."
Why the leaf'?" the President asked.
The old man never explains that, the Ambassador said. But it's my belief that the touching of the leaf by the client and him in turn sets up a communicating chain of psychic energy. That's what I think starts the whole process going.'
And Ambassador Pathirana proceeded to tell marvellous stories about the old man's powers. From the day he predicted when Mr. Pathirana would recover a dog he had lost ("Don't look for him, it'll be useless, but on the 22nd of March about five o'clock, take your usual evening walk, and the dog will come rushing into your arms) to the day he had foreseen the ambassadorial appointment.

Subha and Yasa (American Style) 173
'How did he see that as a picture?' asked the President. Were you presenting your credentials to me?'
'No, he wouldn't have understood that if he saw it,' responded the Ambassador. "You must realise, Mr. President, he's a simple man who has lived all his life in his village, and knows very little about the outside world. But he saw the White House, he described it in great detail, so I understood what it was, and he saw me arriving there in a car and being received ceremoniously. I put two and two together, and I was right."
The conversation was diverted at this point by an interruption from the Indian Ambassador, who wanted to tell the President about vakyams. These were collections of palm leaves on which sages thousands of years ago had written the horoscopes of people for ages to come. There were people in Madras who had collections of them, and if you consulted them, they could predict your life-events for you.
Although the President listened politely, the vakyams didn't interest him as much as the old man with the leaf of betel. Sages writing down horoscopes thousands of years ago seemed just so much oriental mumbo-jumbo. But the other story appealed to him because it meshed with one interest he had pursued in his youth. He had been convinced of the reality of PSP, had attended some lectures given by J.B. Rhine on his experiments with it, and, if he hadn't been drawn into a political career, he might even have taken to experimenting with it himself. But now...
2
Emily, the First Lady, had noticed for some time that her husband had become unusually moody and irritable. However, on the night of the dinner party, after the guests had left, he seemed in buoyant spirits. Emily was grateful

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for this relief, but couldn't find any explanation for his change of mood.
The fact is that two things had been preying on the President's mind. One was that, a few months earlier, he had been told that a sect of Afghan fundamentalists had passed a death sentence on him, declaring him an emissary of Satan“. Unlike Ayatollah Khomeini's fatwa on Salman Rushdie, this judgment hadn't been made public, but American intelligence claimed to have discovered it, and the President had been duly informed. The President's security staff who had been told of the danger, had raised the question whether it was prudent for him in these circumstances to expose himself to the hazards of a South Asian tour. The President had decided he wouldn't be deterred, but he was, understandably, troubled, though he hadn't confided even to his wife the reasons for his anxiety.
The other cause of the President's disturbed state of mind, however, could have been guessed by any knowledgeable political commentator. At the forthcoming presidential election later that year, his opponent was likely to be the personable and popular Steve Crawford. He would be a formidable contender. An analyst of American elections once said that the most important asset for a presidential candidate was a dazzling set of teeth to smile with, and Crawford had one that would have done credit to a toothpaste ad.
For several months now, the President, who normally considered himself a rational man, had found himself giving way to small superstitions, making little propitiating gestures to whatever unknown devils might harbour malicious designs against him. He strove to correct this weakness in himself, but his irrational doubts and fears were often too strong for him. Now, after the dinner party, he

Subha and Yasa (American Style) 175
was seized by a superstitious hope that was probably a reaction to and an escape from his superstitious anxieties. Hadn't it been a stroke of luck that he had included the Ambassador for Sri Lanka among his guests that night? And hadn't it been another piece of good fortune that he had directed the conversation at one point to the subject of foreseeing the future? He had done this, of course, only for the purpose of closing the argument between the Indian and Pakistani diplomats, but the outcome had been the unexpected story told by the Sri Lankan Ambassador. In his beleagured emotional state the President couldn't help supposing that this was the intervention of a benevolent destiny.
The morning after the dinner party Ambassador Pathirana was surprised to receive a call from the White House, and still more astonished to be connected directly to the President himself. Would it be at all possible for the Ambassador to call on him at the White House that day? It was a matter of some urgency, and, the President added, of the utmost discretion. The Ambassador, of course, was happy to oblige.
Later that morning he arrived at the White House, and was shown immediately into the Oval Office. After a few polite formalities, the President wasted no time in getting down to business,
Your story last night about your old man has interested me greatly, Mr. Ambassador, he said. As it happens, I have had for many years an interest in such psychic phenomena - what our scientists call ESP, parapsychology, and so on. Do you think it at all possible that I could test your old man's powers myself?”
How, Mr. President?'
By flying him out to Washington.'

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The Ambassador seemed taken aback by this suggestion. He pondered his response silently for some moments.
'I'm sorry, Mr. President, but I'm afraid that's quite out of the question. In his entire life of sixty-five years Punchirala (that's how he's known) has left his village only once. It was when he was a young man in his early twenties, and he made a trip to Colombo to see what was called "the pond that sounds ho.”
The pond that sounds ho? What's that?'
That used to be the old name for the sea among peasants who had never seen it. There are very few of them left, but Punchirala is one of them. For the first and last time in his life he travelled to Colombo out of curiosity to see the sea. But as his bus entered the city, the crowds and the noise and the congestion and the dirt horrified him so much that he got off the bus and took the next one back."
And he never saw the sea?
'No, he didn't, Mr. President. And in more than forty years since then, he has never left his village.'
But couldn't he be persuaded, Mr. Ambassador? Offered a very large fee, perhaps?"
Punchirala is an obstinate man, Mr. President. If he doesn't want to leave his village, he won't do it, even at the request of the President of the United States or the Queen of England. And money won't tempt him. But those aren't the only reasons why it won't be possible to bring him to Washington."
'What then, Mr. Ambassador?'
'Punchirala is deeply convinced that his powers are bound up with his presence in the village and the house in which he lives. He believes that his powers come to him

Subha and Yasa (American Siyle) 177
from his ancestors, whose influence is passed on through those places. Even if you were to kidnap him and bring him to Washington, he would refuse to operate here.'
The President was sunk in thought for some time.
Then there's only one alternative, Mr. Ambassador, he said at last. Please transmit a message at once to the government of Sri Lanka, asking whether I can stop over there a few days - two, or three, perhaps - during my South Asian tour. Then, when we are there, 1 will visit this old man of yours myself."
Yes, Mr. President. But have you considered the problems? Think of it. You - if I may say so, the most powerful man in the world - visiting an unknown fortuneteller - that's what the media will call him - in a Sri Lankan village! Just think of the possible consequences to your image."
"I think 1 have a way of getting round that problem,' the President said.
3
Ryan O'Malley was still a Senator when he discovered John Henderson. He had gone to his hometown, Kansas City, which he had rarely visited since he left it as a young man, for a political meeting; and after it he took one of the city's big businessmen to dinner at a fashionable restaurant. He was so absorbed in his discussion with his guest - it turned on the merits of the new tax reductions - that he didn't even glance at the face of the waiter who was serving them until the end of the meal. It was only then, as he reached into his wallet for an appropriate tip, that he looked up at the waiter's face, and felt something like an electric shock course through him. O'Malley might have been looking into a mirror: the waiter had the same hawklike

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features, bushy eyebrows, blue eyes and curly fair hair as himself. O'Malley's guest had been aware of the resemblance right through the meal, but he had tactfully refrained from referring to it. The uncanny similarity between the successful politician and the waiter at Old Times was in fact well known to the regular patrons of the restaurant, just as it was a subject on which John Henderson's fellow-waiters often chaffed him. Nor, as far as they were concerned, was there any great mystery about this seemingly improbable resemblance. Kansas City gossip said O'Malley, Sr., who had been a wealthy lawyer, had in his youth sown quite a few wild oats, and it was likely John Henderson was among the crop. He even had a powerful baritone voice like the younger O'Malley's, but his accent, though also midWestern, hadn't the cultivated tones of his half-brother (if that's what he was).
As he rose to leave the dinner-table, O'Malley had a momentary conversation in an undertone with the waiter. Having asked his name, O'Malley said:
'I'm at the Brownstone, Room 224. If you'll see me tomorrow morning at ten, it may be useful to you. The name is O'Malley.’
Yes, sir, said Henderson, who knew very well who the other was.
When Henderson called the next morning at O'Malley's hotel room, the latter put to him a proposition. It was possible, he said, that in two years' time he might be occupying 'a more powerful political position than at present'. (Henderson didn't need an elaboration of that hint: O'Malley's name was already in the news as the favoured contender for his party's nomination for the presidency.) If he did obtain the office he expected, O'Malley went on, he could make use of Henderson in a capacity

Subha and Yasa (American Style) 79
pertaining to his security, and Henderson would find it very much worth his while. "I mean, of course, financially." O'Malley paused, and added: Would you like to hear more?'
'Yes, sir, Henderson said.
The outcome of the interview was that Henderson came away with an informal contract that O'Malley wrote on a sheet of hotel notepaper, but, he assured the other, he would formalise it as soon as he got back to Washington. Henderson walked out into the street with the contract in his pocket and a mix of contending emotions raging in his heart.
John Henderson had grown up from childhood with the knowledge that he was illegitimate although he had been given the surname of his mother's legal husband. His mother had worked as a part-time cleaning woman in the O'Malley household. With a face whose curves and planes looked as if they had been carefully moulded and a complexion of the colour of pale honey, she had an air of refinement that was strangely discrepant with her menial position. It was because her beauty seemed to cross the class barriers that Ryan O'Malley's father, then a young lawyer, became enamoured of it. Marjorie Henderson was already married: her husband was an engineman on the railroad, and his frequent absences from home facilitated the growth of the affair. But soon after Marjorie had her baby, her husband became suspicious, had a violent quarrel with her and deserted her. O'Malley maintained her and the child for a few years, then tired of her as her beauty was ravaged by years of poverty and hard work in a series of squalid apartments in the slummier quarters of the city. He finally told her he couldn't keep up the relationship because it would endanger his own marriage: he settled a not too generous sum of money on her and said goodbye. The money ran out in five years,

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and Marjorie had to survive and bring up her son by her work. John Henderson left school at fourteen and, after some years of odd jobs, went to work as a dish-washer in the same restaurant where he had later risen to be a waiter.
Until the meeting with Ryan O'Malley in his hotel room, Henderson had hated him with a kind of disembodied hatred, merely as the legitimate son who had had it good all those past years when he and his mother had endured privations and hardships. Henderson also knew that O'Malley, wealthy enough in his own right from what he had inherited from his father, had made a socially advantageous marriage: Emily was the heiress to the Peabody millions. But Henderson left the Brownstone that morning with more immediately felt reasons for disliking O'Malley. 'What a stuffy, arrogant bastard!' he said to himself. O'Malley had made no allusion to the link between them, nor inquired about his mother, although the offer he was making to Henderson turned upon the resemblance deriving from their common paternity. And yet, Henderson couldn't have turned down the proposal because what O'Malley was offering him straightaway was more than he could ever hope to earn, and there was the prospect of its being greatly increased if O'Malley's political ambitions were fulfilled. At least, Henderson thought bitterly, with part of his income he would be able to give his mother, who lingered on in her seventies, some comfort and care in her last years... No matter that the price he would be paying would be to risk his own life on behalf of that glib stuffed shirt who had said to him, shaking hands at parting: "I hope you realise that in taking this job, you'll not only be benefiting yourself: you'll be serving your country.'
Over the next few months O'Malley arranged for Henderson to leave Kansas City and move to New York. He also decided that Henderson should take the new name

Subha and Yasa (American Style) 81
of Peter Warren, and should acquire a moustache and beard, not real ones but fakes that he was always to wear in public. In short, a whole new identity and biography were created for him that were meant to obliterate, as far as possible, any links with the John Henderson who had been born in Kansas City. The newly born Peter Warren also had to take lessons from a teacher of speech, who taught him to speak not in his working-class manner but with the accent and idiom of an educated mid-Westerner.
By the time Ryan O'Malley received the party nomination for the presidential election, he had everything ready for the role Henderson was to play. When O'Malley won the election and moved into the White House, Henderson was enrolled on the staff (of course, under the name of Peter Warren), nominally as a special intelligence agent with direct access to the President, but in reality as a double to be used whenever the President thought it desirable. To begin with, the two of them did a try-out once or twice. Henderson would enter the White House with his beard and moustache on, take them off in secrecy inside and change his clothes, adjust his hairstyle, give a few touches to his face, and then leave for an engagement where he was to impersonate the President. Meanwhile the President put on a matching beard and moustache and moved into the special office that had been assigned to Henderson. Of course, some people had to be let into the secret: two top men of the President's security personnel, as well as the First Lady, because Henderson would sometimes have to impersonate her husband in her company.
Emily was at first rather taken aback when her husband told her of the plan.
'Your illegitimate half-brother!' she said. 'Isn't that a bit much to ask of him?"

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'No,' the President said. 'Why shouldn't I use the gift God has sent me? Other guys in power have to look high and low to find a suitable double. Thanks to Dad's peccadilloes and the O'Malley genes, I have one ready made."
The results of the first experiments were encouraging: Henderson even succeeded in fooling some habitues of the President. O'Malley had conceived of the impersonation as something to use occasionally, or to keep in reserve for a real necessity. That necessity became a reality once the death-threat had been reported. The President now fell back on it whenever he thought a public appearance might carry a greater risk than usual, and he congratulated himself on his foresight in recruiting his double. When the South Asian tour was planned, the President had intended to take Henderson along anyway. But the plan to meet and consult Punchirala made his presence on the tour absolutely vital.
4.
Emily burst into a peal of laughter, so unusual on the presidential plane that the steward, approaching with a trolley of drinks, stopped for a moment, astonished.
"Oh Ryan, you're a scream! Emily exclaimed. "I'm sure you've missed your real vocation, you could have made a fortune on Broadway."
But it wasn't Ryan O'Malley she was addressing, but Henderson, who had just mimicked the self-important tones and vacuous rhetoric of a Senator who had delivered the welcoming address at a commemoration ceremony where Henderson had stood in for the President. Emily had been carefully instructed before the impersonations began that in company she should address Henderson as Ryan', or even by such endearments as 'dear' or 'darling". She had dutifully learned her lesson and followed it. But now, she

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reflected, (while the steward was pouring out the drinks), she had an uneasy feeling when she called him Ryan' that not only he but she was living a double life. It wasn't just that the physical resemblance between the two men was so close as to make illusion and reality confusingly indistinguishable to the sight: Henderson's charm, gallantry and, most of all, his sense of fun, were what she would have hoped for in her youth from a husband. But any traces of these qualities in O'Malley had long been submerged by his public life. Emily had married young, and was still in her forties. But she had resigned herself to accept the seemingly inevitable renunciation of the poetry of life, when, unexpectedly, contact with Henderson shook her into the realisation that she retained youthful desires and feelings that found little fulfilment in her role as First Lady. The moments of companionship with Henderson in the course of the official engagements were refreshing oases in the desert of her routine-bound existence, but they were now also disturbing. The knowledge of Henderson's illegitimate birth, and some hints he had let fall about his early struggles in life, engaged her feelings towards him all the more strongly. Whenever she called him Ryan', Emily felt that she was inwardly committing an act of infidelity; and although she had lightly addressed him as "darling' in the early days of their assignments, she couldn't now bring herself to say the word: it would have been too much like mental adultery.
Henderson wasn't unaware that Emily had grown selfconscious and tense in his presence, and he guessed correctly at the cause of her uneasiness. Emily had saved enough of her natural good looks, and even more of her graces of personality, to make her an attractive woman, and nothing would have given Henderson greater pleasure than to enjoy at the same time the flattering position of the lover of a

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First Lady and the sweet revenge of cuckolding the man he hated. But when he considered these temptations, they seemed to open on uncharted and possibly perilous waters, before which he still hesitated. He contented himself for the time being by light-hearted flirtation with Emily, punctuated by occasional caresses, which could always be justified, if necessary, as giving credibility to his role; and he was pleased that at such times she seemed overcome by a troubled joy.
But one morning, only a week before the Asian tour was due to begin, Henderson received a message that his mother had suddenly died of a heart attack, and he flew to his hometown for the funeral. Marjorie Henderson had survived into her eightieth year, and towards the end her mind had begun to wander. She didn't know her son was working for the President (Henderson was under orders not to tell her, and his visits to her were infrequent, also under official instructions). But strangely, on the last occasion he saw her before her death, she had spoken long and resentfully of the wrong O'Malley had done her. You must make him pay for it, she said. "Promise me, son, you will make him pay.' Henderson promised, though he knew the elder O'Malley had long been laid in his grave.
At the funeral, Henderson was joined only by one other mourner - the old lady in whose house Marjorie had lodged. As the coffin glided down into the cremating chamber, Henderson consoled himself that though there was no way of keeping the promise his mother had extracted from him six months before her death, he had at least kept the promise he had made to himself when O'Malley engaged him: he had made her last years somewhat more tolerable than her life had been for a long time.
He had thanked the old lady who came to the funeral and seen her leave; he had said he would wait to collect the

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ashes, so he decided to take a stroll along the cemetery paths. But as he turned to go, a man in a long grey overcoat, a derby hat and a pair of rimless glasses stopped him by holding out his hand. Mr. John Henderson?' he said.
Henderson took the outstretched hand. As was customary on his infrequent visits to Kansas City, he wasn't wearing his disguise, resuming his Henderson persona, and he assumed the other was an old acquaintance, of himself or of his mother, who had come to condole with him.
Or should I call you Peter Warren?' the other said. enderson looked at him, startled.
"Don't worry, the man in the derby said, smiling as if to reassure him. Your secret is safe with me. But shall we sit down for a moment,' and he motioned Henderson to a near-by bench, 'so that we can talk more freely?"
Henderson obeyed him mechanically. If the man had penetrated his alias, by whatever means, there was, he thought, nothing to be gained by a denial. It was better to find out what he was after.
You can call me Stephen, the man went on after they had sat down. "I'm a journalist. Here's my card. He had reached into his pocket and brought out a card which he handed to Henderson. The card said Pacific-Asian News Services', with an address in San Francisco, and below, “Stephen Dreyer, Roving Reporter“.
"How did you know my name?' Henderson asked Him.
Which one?' Stephen replied. But I won't embarrass you by asking you questions of that sort. It's our business - that of us investigative journalists - to know things. So let me ask you something much more interesting in that line. What's so hot about Sri Lanka?
"I'm told it's in the tropics, Henderson said.

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Stephen condescended to give a small chuckle. 'Seriously though. Why does the President summon the Sri Lankan Ambassador to the White House for a private interview? And why does he then change his plans for his South Asian trip to include that insignificant island?'
'Search me, Henderson said. "I'm not in on the making of U.S. foreign policy." -
I didn't imagine you were. I know your talents lie elsewhere. But I thought you might have picked up some gossip about it in the corridors of the White House.'
I haven't,' Henderson said. But supposing I had, is there any reason why I should tell you?'
"Ah!" Stephen smiled, and paused to take a long breath. 'Shall I say, perhaps because we have some interests in common?'
I don't understand you. What interests?'
'Let's approach the question this way. Why have I disclosed to you so openly that I've discovered the secret of your double identity?
'Okay. Why?"
One would suppose that your duty, as a special intelligence agent (Stephen gave a mocking inflection to that phrase and grinned), would be to inform the White House immediately that - well, to use the language of spy stories - that your cover had been blown. But I know you won't do that, Mr. Warren."
"And why not?'
Think about it. If the White House learns that your double identity is known, that would be - (Stephen made an expressive gesture, opening out his hand and spreading his fingers) - finis. The end of your career.'

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Henderson was silent.
But I won't insult you, Stephen continued, by assuming that your interests are purely, shall we say, materialistic. Of course, I don't mean to question your loyalty to the government of the United States. But you have no great reason for loving the O'Malley family, do you, Mr. Henderson?' And he gestured again, but this time in the direction of the crematorium's chimney from which wisps of grey smoke were curling into the air.
Henderson was still silent. Stephen rose.
"It's possible we may meet again, Mr. Warren. Because I'll be covering the President's South Asian tour for PacificAsian. It was nice meeting you. Bye for now.'
Henderson continued to sit on the bench, watching Stephen's figure receding along the path. His mind was shaken by questions to which there were no clear answers. Stephen had surmised rightly that he wouldn't want to report this encounter and incur the almost certain loss of his job. But what was Stephen really after? Was he only a Smart investigative reporter looking for a scoop? Or was there a hint of something bigger when he suggested that Henderson had no reason to love the O'Malley family? Had Stephen been suggesting there was some danger to the President from yhich Henderson wouldn't want to protect him because of his personal animus against the O'Malleys? Henderson had never been told by White House security, or by the President himself, of any specific menace against which his function as double was to serve as a shield. But when he took the job on, he had assumed that a president's life would always be endangered, and that he was required in some measure to deflect that danger. What if the threat that up to now had seemed to him general and hypothetical were to take on a more immediate and concrete form?

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Suddenly into Henderson's mind there flashed the image of a possible future in which O'Malley was absent and he was free to court and to win Emily. It would be pleasant if it could be said that contemplating that event, Henderson had only Emily's looks, attractions and charms in view. But honesty requires the admission that the thought of the Peabody millions wasn't entirely out of the picture.
5
The government of Sri Lanka had been delighted to know President O'Malley wanted to include the island in his itinerary, and had lost no time in agreeing to and in making arrangements for the visit. Sri Lanka was now to be the first stop on the tour, for good reasons that the President had thought of. A week before his arrival, Ambassador Pathirana arrived in Colombo to co-ordinate arrangements with the officials at home. But he also paid a flying visit to the remote Kandyan village in which Punchirala lived. All he told the old man was that "an important American official' who would be accompanying the President wanted to consult him. It was important that his visit be kept secret, so the visitor would arrive by night, when no other clients of Punchirala would be on the premises. Punchirala readily agreed to preserve complete confidentiality.
It had been arranged between the President and the Ambassador that the visit to Punchirala should take place on the second day in Sri Lanka, when the President and his party would be in Kandy. The President had specially requested that the evening of that second day be kept free of official engagements. The morning was taken up by a drive round the city, and visits to the Dalada Maligawa, the Peradeniya University and the Botanical Gardens, where the President planted a tree.

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On the morning of that second day in Kandy, Henderson was on his own. He had been told his services wouldn't be required till the evening of that day, when he had to be at the official residence known as the King's Pavilion, where the President and First Lady were. In the morning, however, he was free to take in the sights of the city. Henderson had just emerged from the hotel where he was accommodated and was thinking of taking a stroll along the lakeside, when his attention was held by a figure standing on the other side of the street and apparently contemplating the lake. A tall figure in a derby hat - yes, and glasses. Henderson crossed the street, and Stephen turned and hailed him, evidently having no difficulty in recognising him, although he was in his Warren disguise, with beard and moustache.
What are you doing here?' Henderson asked. Just admiring the view, Stephen answered.
But if you're covering the President's tour, why aren't you where he is, with the other journalists?'
"And listening to all that crap about "strengthening the ties of friendship between our two countries' and "the democratic traditions which our two peoples are proud to share"? No, thank you. I'm an investigative journalist, I told you. Now this is what I'm really interested in." Stephen put his hand in his pocket and brought out a Sri Lankan government booklet that had been distributed to all the journalists reporting the tour - a program of events for the President's stay in Sri Lanka. He held it out to Henderson and put his forefinger on the second day's schedule. 'See? Nothing arranged for this afternoon or evening. Why?"
I have no idea, Henderson said. 'Perhaps he was tired and wanted a break."
'On the second day of his visit to the first of four countries? Tell me another."

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"Anyway, it's useless pumping me, Henderson said. 'I know nothing about the President's program, beyond what that booklet says."
'So I should suppose. But are you going to be free this evening? Is there anything laid on for you?'
Henderson thought Stephen wanted to invite him to a drink or to dinner, probably to sound him for more information. "Sorry, he said. 1 have to be at the King's Pavilion all evening."
Stephen stared at him, and Henderson felt he almost heard something click into place behind the dome of Stephen's forehead.
'Oh, is that so?" Stephen said slowly. Thank you very much. I think I shall take a walk. Goodbye."
He turned and hurried off down the street, leaving Henderson wondering whether what he had disclosed had been of any importance.
6
Twilight was becoming palpable when Henderson arrived at the King's Pavilion, and told the American security officer at the entrance he had an appointment with the President. While waiting on the veranda he felt depressed by the colonial architecture of the King's Pavilion, the heavy furniture, the uniformed servants: athough all that was different from the style and atmosphere of the White House, in some ways he was reminded of it. Kandy itself depressed him. He remembered what he had read in the tourist brochure, that it had been the seat of the old Sinhala kings'. He didn't know how long ago that was, but it seemed to him there had always been a world of power and wealth on which people like him had been dependent, and he felt a hunger for that state he had never known any

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time in his life: of being his own master.
He was summoned; he went in and was directed towards an inner room. O'Malley was waiting for him, and after a cursory greeting, gave him his orders for the evening.
'You will take off your disguise, change into casual clothes- - they are here ready for you - and act the President, spending a quiet evening with Mrs. O'Malley. She, of course, knows, but nobody else does. Meanwhile, I shall be going out, impersonating you.'
Henderson was bewildered by this news. Whenever in the past he had had to put on his act in the company of Emily, it had always been to keep a public engagement, and then it had been the President who had stayed under cover in the White House. Now it was the latter who was going out in disguise - but where? It was impossible for him to ask, but Stephen's question recurred to him: What's so hot about Sri Lanka? Could there be some meeting that was so hush--hush that O'Malley had to arrive in disguise? His thoughts fumbled with possibilities: Kandy as the venue for secret negotiations... treaties... military pacts... but with whom? Henderson just didn't know enough about international affairs even to guess. But his heart suddenly gave a leap: he would be spending an evening alone with Emily... And there was the possibility that his conversation with Stephen might dramatically change things...
He had been taking off his moustache and beard while his mind had been engaged with these questions, and he turned to O'Malley who was before a mirror, affixing a similar pair on his face.
'How long will you be away, sir?' 'Two hours, two and a half, perhaps."
Soon after they had both changed their appearances,

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there was a call from the entrance to say that Ambassador Pathirana had called for Mr. Peter Warren. It was the President who emerged, and was escorted by the Ambassador to his waiting car. The President had brought with him Peter Warren's passport and identification as a member of the presidential staff, in case (as the Ambassador had warned him) they ran into security checks, which were especially tight because of the presidential visit. The President's security staff saw the bearded and moustached figure leaving the King's Pavilion; but none of them (even the one man there who knew of the existence of a double) had reason to suspect that was the President; why should he play tricks with his own security? Meanwhile Henderson was ensconced with the First Lady in the same inner room where O'Malley had received him.
There was a long silence after they had sat down on an ornately carved sofa. Emily was less ebullient than usual because she was embarrassed by her own feelings, while Henderson was hesitant about the strategy he should employ in the course of the evening. Finally he broke the silence by his opening gambit. 'We're alone together for the first time,' he remarked.
“Yes, Peter.“
'Do you know a jazz tune called Alone Together?
As Emily shook her head, Henderson whistled the opening melody. There was a recording of it by Chet Baker that I loved when I was a boy, I used to play it over and over again till the tape wore out. Alone Together. What do you think that means, Emily?"
Emily pondered. Doesn't it mean two people being together, by themselves, away from everybody else?"
Yes, I suppose that's what most people would say. But

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listen to the tune.' Henderson whistled it again. It's sad, right? That's why I used to think it meant two people together, maybe even two lovers, but each feeling alone. Together but alone. That's why I loved it. Because it seemed to say just what I felt."
Did you often feel lonesome as a boy, Peter?
'Oh Emily, I wish you wouldn't call me Peter. I don't know whether you're aware of it or not, but that isn't my real name. I'm John Henderson. Peter Warren is part of my disguise. So call me John, please, Emily, at least when we're alone together.
But it'll be so complicated, Peter. Ryan and Peter and John - I'll get all mixed up. I'm mixed up enough already between the two of you - I sometimes have to stop and think: now is that Ryan or is it Peter?
"I'll teach you how to tell us apart. I'm sure, after all these years you know the feel of your husband's hands. Now feel mine.'
He held out his right hand to Emily.
'Go on, feel it.'
Emily took the proferred hand, and began stroking it.
'See? Behind that hand is a lifetime of hard work. You don't get hands like that by being a lawyer, or a Senator, or even the President of the United States.'
'Or even the President's wife, I suppose."
That's true. Your hands are wonderfully soft, Emily." Emily withdrew her hands, and looked challengingly into his eyes.
And do you resent that, too, John?

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'No, Emily. I like them that way. Because I love you. Do you resent that, Emily?
'No, John. Emily said that almost in a whisper. Then, like a swimmer preparing herself for a dive, she seemed to brace herself, and, to his surprise, burst into song:
'Oh no John, no John, no John, no!'
7
Meanwhile the Ambassador's car had driven out of Kandy, along the road to Anuradhapura. The Ambassador himself was driving, so that he and the President were the only people in the car. It was an unusual experience for the President, one that he hadn't known for several years, to be on a journey without a posse of security men. Night had fallen when they reached their destination, having turned from the main road on to the bumpy dirtroad that led to the village where Punchirala lived. Punchirala's house was modest, not distinguishable from other middle-size houses in the village. It was lit not by electricity (there was none in the village) but by one kerosene lamp on the veranda and another in Punchirala's consulting room; a few clay lamps, with wicks immersed in coconut oil, flickered feebly in the interior of the house. As the visitors stepped on to the veranda, Punchirala came out of his room and greeted them with folded hands. The President was struck by his appearance. He was short, and his bodily frame was shrunk, but in his piercing eyes there seemed to burn an inner fire.
Punchirala led the way into the consulting room, and with a gesture asked his visitors to seat themselves. The Ambassador, speaking in Sinhala, introduced the President as 'the important American official he had mentioned. The President offered Punchirala the sheaf of betel leaves he had brought. Punchirala received it, placed it on the table, and lifted the top leaf with his fingers. As he took it into

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his hand, his expression changed. He stared in silence at the leaf for some time, then spoke:
'You are not just an important person. You are the biggest man, the lokka, of your country.'
When the Ambassador translated this, the President made no attempt to deny the old man's discovery, whether reached by shrewd guess or by special insight. The old man continued to peer at the leaf with eyes whose normal faculties of sight must surely have been affected by age: did this, the President wondered, not extend to his other vision? After a long silence Punchirala spoke again.
You have come here to ask me two questions."
Yes,' said the President after the Ambassador had translated. You want to know what will happen in the next election in your country. There is no need to worry: you will not lose that election.'
The President drew an audible sigh of relief when these words were translated.
Thank you. I'm happy that I'll be able to serve my country again. And the other question? Do you see it in the same way, or shall I speak it?'
Punchirala responded immediately, as soon as the Ambassador had translated.
'Those enemies you fear are no threat to you.'
The President turned to Punchirala after the translation and spoke with feeling.
'I am deeply grateful to you for receiving me. Some day perhaps, after that election, I may come back, if it's possible, or I may send somebody else to meet you. But now, may I know: what is your professional fee?'

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Punchirala made a dismissive gesture with his hand, saying at the same time in Sinhala:
'Nothing." When the President protested, the old man said gravely:
It is a great honour to me to have been consulted by the leader of a country. To take money from you, in addition to that honour, would be unworthy.'
After the visitors had left, with much reiteration of gratitude, Punchirala stood on the veranda and watched the car being driven off, then walked into the inner room where his wife was laying the table for dinner.
'You know about that President from America who has come on a visit?'
"Yes,' said his wife.
'That was him.'
The old lady looked up, startled. What did he want to know?'
He wanted to know what would happen in the next election in his country. I told him not to worry: there was no question of his losing it. He was happy. How could I tell him he wouldn't lose it because he wouldn't live to contest it, that he wouldn't live out the rest of this night?'
But why didn't you warn him?
'You know my way, Menike. If a man asks me when he's going to die, I don't answer. The karmic pattern must work itself out. If a man has to die, he has to die. What would have been the use of telling him there were assassins waiting for him? If he escaped them, he would have died of an accident, or an illness, next week or next month.'

Subha and Yasa (American Style) 97
8
By now you probably have questions of your own. Okay, shoot.
Well, Punchirala got away with a quibble on the President's first question, like so many other soothsayers and oracles, but surely he lied on the second?
No, he didn't, as you will understand in a moment: have patience. Next question? Yes, that lady over there in the corner...
Wasn't it hard luck on the Ambassador that he should have to die to fulfil the President's karmic pattern? If he did die, that is.
Yes, madam, he did die, but his death must have been due to his own karma. Next question? Yes, you sir...
After the President's death, did John Henderson take over, like Subha, and continue to impersonate the President?
Are you crazy? What a legendary figure supposedly got away with in ancient Sri Lanka couldn't possibly be repeated in 21st century America... Oh, the title? I'm sorry to have misled you. Didn't I say 'American style'? What I meant was that, in one sense, John Henderson did step into Ryan O'Malley's shoes, or shall I say, into his pants.
John and Emily were in bed together when a call came through from the police that a man by the name of Peter Warren, with papers showing he belonged to the President's entourage, and the Sri Lankan Ambassador to the United States had both been shot on a road emerging from a village in the Kandyan backwoods. Enormous complications followed. The real identity of the dead American couldn't, of course, be kept secret. But Ryan O'Malley had confided in Emily that afternoon where he was going and why, and with quick ingenuity she thought up a story that had enough

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truth in it to stand up. Recalling the conversation at the diplomatic dinner party in Washington, she made out that her husband, as a former student of ESP, had been fascinated by the Sri Lankan Ambassador's story about the old man, and had decided to test his psychic powers. The switching of roles with Peter Warren was explained as a necessity in order to evade the security restrictions on the President's own movements. Peter Warren's role as a double had necessarily to be made public, and was confirmed by the two members of the presidential staff who were in the secret. What Emily left out of the story were the two urgent personal questions to which the President had wanted
aSWerS.
Punchirala was grilled by the police, but they could find no basis for suspecting complicity on his part in the murder. The story of an assassination conspiracy hatched by Afghan fundamentalists turned out to be a piece of misinformation. The assassins were actually an extreme Zionist group in the States angered by the President's new policy on Israel. They had been alerted to the possibility of some unusual development by the President's last-minute change of itinerary to include Sri Lanka and by the contacts between the President and the Sri Lankan Ambassador, of which they learned from their own intelligence network. (So, you see, Punchirala didn't lie in answering the President's second question.) John Henderson, though questioned during the investigation, said nothing about Stephen Dreyer, whose name never surfaced, so he was left guessing how deeply the latter was involved in the conspiracy. Nor did he ever disclose to Emily his possible share of complicity (witting? unwitting? - he didn't think about that too much) in her husband's death. But he was troubled by no pangs of conscience, even feeling that in a strange way he had kept his last promise to his mother, helping to visit the sins of

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the father on the son.
Punchirala was surrounded by a blaze of international publicity as media people with cameras, tape recorders and notebooks, researchers into parapsychology and tourists descended on the village to interview the man who had excited the interest of an American President. He endured it for three days, then fled to the village temple, where he asked for ordination as a monk and refused to talk to any visitors thereafter.
After a decent interval of time for the widow's mourning, John Henderson, who had shed his beard and moustache, and resumed his old identity, was married to Emily O'Malley. It was a quiet wedding, kept secret until it was concluded, and to those journalists who tracked the couple down later, Emily said she had fallen in love with John because he had been so kind and supportive to her after the great tragedy. 'I wonder what it's like to have a second husband who's a replica of your first. I can imagine it's kind of consoling, but do you lose some possibilities that way?' asked the woman from Newsweek. "Ah, but I have the best of both worlds," said Emily. John looks exactly like Ryan, but he's a very different kind of person.'
Oh yes. Steve Crawford didn't win the presidential election. The Vice-President who took over from O'Malley had an even more dazzling set of teeth.
Nethra, Vol. 1, No. 4, July - Sep 1997

Page 110
Leon Trotsky, Rusiyan u Vi plavaye Ithihasaya
(History of the Russian Revolution), Volume I, translated by T. Andradi (published by the translator).
During the years of the Second World War, as a young university student, I was working for the LSSP, then proscribed by the colonial government. One of my jobs in the early months of 1941, as I have narrated in Working Underground, was to act as a courier between the party and Leslie Goonewardene who was living under cover after evading arrest.
One afternoon Leslie showed me a copy of his summary in Sinhala of Trotsky's History of the Russian Revolution. It was, if memory serves me right, under a hundred pages (the original was a massive three-volume work). Inevitably, therefore, Leslie's abridgment was a bald summary of historical narrative and analysis, with nothing of the colour, the drama or the literary power of the original.
If anyone had told me, then, that there would be a time when somebody would attempt a complete translation into Sinhala of this classic work, I would have been skeptical. But this has now happened: T. Andradi, a translator with several other translations of both political and fictional writing to his credit, has brought out the first volume of what is to be a full and unabridged translation of this - one of the major historical works of world literature.

Leon Trotsky, Rusiyanu Viplavaye fthihasaya 2O1
What wouldn't historians give to have had an account by Cromwell or Fairfax of the English Revolution, or of the French by Robespierre or Danton? But with the Russian Revolution, we do have a such narrative by one of its two principal leaders. That alone would be sufficient to make the History a precious historical document. But when we add that the author was not only armed with a theory of history that guided him in interpreting the revolution just as much as it did in helping him to make it, but was also a writer of literary genius, then we have to recognize that the History is a book that is literally unique.
Yet Trotsky would probably never have had the time to write this book but for the melancholy fact that he had lost out in the post-revolutionary struggle in the Soviet Union, and had been exiled by the victor, Stalin. It was on the island of Prinkipo, off the coast of Turkey, which was his refuge in the opening years of the decade of the 1930s, that Trotsky wrote his History.
I have never had access to the original Russian text of the History (which now survives only in a few specialist libraries abroad), except for some brief excerpts published in a Soviet historical journal during the Gorbachev years. Fortunately, Trotsky's book received a superb English translation at the hands of Max Eastman, and this is the text from which Andradi translates. He has approached his exacting task with great care and scrupulousness, striving to be faithful not only to the Sense but even, as far as possible, to the structure of each sentence, and to approximate to the stylistic dynamism of the original.
The first volume already contains an abundance of riches. The five days of the February revolution are re-enacted by Trotsky with an almost cinematic vividness: his biographer, Isaac Deutscher, has compared the technique of this account, moving between long shots of mass action and individual close

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ups to that of Eisenstein's Potemkin. Or, in a different mode, the pioneering theoretical discourse on dual power that illuminates the unstable division of power, following the February Revolution, between the Soviets, the organs of people's power, and the Provisional Government.
Let me quote a passage from this chapter, which is replete with historical examples and analogies, as an example of the vigorous rhythms, the metaphorical richness and the dramatic force of Trotsky's writing. He is recapitulating the intervention of the common people of Paris in the struggle between the old regime and the bourgeoisie during the French Revolution:
"How striking is the picture - and how vilely it has been slandered! - of the efforts of the plebian levels to raise themselves up out of the social cellars and catacombs, and stand forth in that forbidden arena where gentlemen in wigs and silk breeches were settling the fate of the nation. It seemed as though the very foundation of Society, trampled underfoot by the cultured bourgeoisie, was stirring and coming to life. Human heads lifted themselves above the solid mass, horny hands stretched aloft, hoarse but courageous voices shouted!"
Trotsky as a Marxist, of course, saw history as determined by objective historical laws, but in the book he never loses sight of the fact that it is human beings who make history. The characters who people the pages of the History - whether the anonymous masses on the street, their leaders and would-be leaders, or the representatives of the old order - are not theoretical abstractions but flesh-and-blood beings, as alive as in the pages of a good novelist. The half-chapter in which he compares the personalities of the doomed Romanov imperial couple with those of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette is a penetrating demonstration of the weave between individual character and social circumstances in the web of history.

Leon Trotsky, Rusiyanu Viplavaye lthihasaya 2O3
The one major actor in the events who is missing in the foreground of the narrative is Trotsky himself. Excessive modesty was never one of his failings: yet in the writing of the History, he carried impersonality to the point of referring to his own role sparingly, and then only in the third person. This was all the more striking since the Stalin regime had been engaged for several years in defacing his name in the historical record.
Today, when the social order to which the Russian Revolution gave birth has passed into history, one cannot conclude a review of Trotsky's work without considering a further question: How well does the book stand up in the perspective of the seventy years since it was written?
By a pure coincidence, it so happened that when Andradi's translation reached me, I had just finished reading the Cambridge scholar Orlando Figes's book A People's Tragedy (1966). Figes's is perhaps the only alternative account of the Russian Revolution that invites comparison with Trotsky's in depth and comprehensiveness, though it doesn't even attempt to compete with the later in literary distinction.
It's striking that although Figes is non-Marxist and strongly anti-Leninist, his analysis tends to confirm Trotsky's on two fundamental points. One is the historical inevitability of the Russian Revolution. This is in marked contrast with the attempts made byright-wing Western scholars, both during and after the cold war, to argue that Russia could have had a peaceful democratic development but for certain misfortunes. If only Witte's or Stolypin's reforms had been allowed to take their course... If only Russia hadn't been involved in the First World War... If only the last tsar and tsarina had been wiser...
Against these speculations, it is evident, as much from Figes's as from Trotsky's history, that the stubborn insistence of the last tsar on upholding autocracy in the face of a rebel

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lious people was rooted in the imperial system that he inherited. The liberals, while dreaming of a Westminster-style monarchy, were impotent in the face of the tsar's obstinacy, and the moderate socialists trailed behind the liberals. These weren't the weaknesses of individuals merely; they were by-products of Russia's belated political development and the shallowness of its representative institutions.
Trotsky has been much criticized by some Marxists (including his biographer Deutscher) for asserting that Lenin's role in 1917 was so decisive that if circumstances had prevented him from being there, the October Revolution might never have triumphed. Yet reading Figes's history - and in spite of the author's relentless hostility to Lenin - we cannot help coming to the same conclusion. Of the other leaders only Trotsky perhaps had the same single-minded strength of purpose, but he couldn't possibly have filled Lenin's shoes because he was a newcomer to the Bolshevik party.
Yet on the part of both Lenin and Trotsky there was an element of grievous illusion in the enterprise of the October Revolution - a socialist revolution launched in a country with an overwhelming peasant mass. They both assumed that Germany in particular, and Europe in general, was ripe for revolution, and that an advanced socialist Europe would soon rescue the Russian workers' state from its isolation and economic backwardness. These optimistic hopes did not materialize, and the Soviet Union was left to pull itself up by its bootstraps. For this endeavour it paid a heavy price for decades to come, not only in the material privations but also in the iron party dictatorship imposed on its people. Historical reality took a very different course from the roseate dreams of the makers of the revolution.
If the Russian Revolution in its outcome was, as Orland Figes terms it, 'a people's tragedy, it was also one that, like

Leon Trotsky, Rusiyanu Viplavaye lihihasaya - 2O5
any classical Greek tragedy, was immanent in its very ante
cedents and beginnings, and to which there was perhaps no realisable alternative.
Nethra, Vol. 5, No. 1, January - March 2002

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Mrs. Grundy in the SOVient Union
Recently a friend who was translating some of Anton Chekhov's short stories into Sinhala asked me about the writer's visit to Ceylon. I told him what I remembered about it from Roland Hingley' biography. Chekhov spent some days here on his way back to European Russia from visiting Sakhalin, the Siberian penal colony. I recalled that Chekhov had admired the "dusky women' in Ceylon, and that the highlight of his visit was when he made love to a black-eyed Indian girl' (I wonder whether he meant ‘Sri Lankan in a coconut grove on a moonlight night.
Later I thought I would look up the original Russian letter in which he narrated this experience, and I turned it up in the 30-volume edition of Chekhov's 'Complete Works' published by the USSR Academy of Sciences (the most comprehensive edition of the writer ever published). The letter was there, but the crucial sentence about the black-eyed girl was gone. (Hingley quoted the passage from a pre-revolutionary edition of Chekhov's letters). The Soviet editors clearly think such behaviour by a great Russian writer must have a veil drawn over it. The introduction to the edition says: "The letters of Chekhov are printed in full, without deletions, except for passages unsuitable for publication." (I love the doublethink there.) On this principle all references to Chekhov's sexual experience have been expurgated, as also the Russian equivalents of four-letter

Mrs. Grundy in the Sovient Union 2O7
words, which sometimes appear like this — ‘zh (...)" — or more strictly, like this - "(...)" (All the relevant words are to be found in the Oxford Russian-English Dictionary', but not in Soviet dictionaries.)
The Soviet Union - at the level of establishment policy - has always been a prudish society. In the early days some young Communists began advocating free love', but Lenin soon shushed them. After all, he remarked to Klara Zetkin, "does a man like to drink from a glass of water that someone else has touched with his lips?' When I was a student, a Sri Lankan academic who was then a Marxist theoretician said to me: "Lenin was such a prude. The answer to him, of course, is that one washes the glass and drinks from it."
The official moral canons became still more restrictive when Stalin decided to strengthen marriage and the family as pillars of Soviet society. But I hadn't realized how far the puritanism of Soviet policy extended till I began reading the Russian literary classics in Soviet editions.
Of course, the great nineteenth century writers for the most part maintained decorum in their published work (there was a Tsarist censorship too). But some of them wrote bawdy literature for private circulation, Pushkin, for instance. There is a verse tale by him called "Tsar Nikita and his Forty Daughters'. The daughters were marvellously beautiful, but had the misfortune to be born without pudenda. The poem narrates how they solved this problem. All that survives of it in my scholarly ten-volume set of Pushkin's works are 26 lines. In the notes the editors refer to it sternly as 'this tale of improper content, and that it represents a mischievous joke, which does not pretend to any connection with the poetry of the folk' - thus saving the honour of the Russian people.
However, it is in their private letters that many of the classic writers really flouted the proprieties of polite society.

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So today we have complete editions of their writings produced by Soviet publishing houses - monuments of scholarship and literary piety, often preserving every scrap of paper left behind by their authors, but with this exception that the letters are peppered with "....' where the censors' blue-pencils have been at work. For instance, I open my copy of Pushkin's letters, and a few pages from the beginning, there is a letter written by the poet as a young man about town in St. Petersburg: The champagne, thank God, is fine, and the actresses also - the former is being drunk and the latter (...) - amen, amen.'
And translations of foreign writers get the same treatment, Shakespeare, too. The word bowdlerise' comes from a certain Dr. Bowdler, who in Victorian times produced an expurgated edition of Shakespeare that was guaranteed not to bring ablush to the cheek of any young person. What adult Soviet readers still get is bowdlerized Shakespeare. Boris Pasternak's translation of Shakespeare's tragedies are among the great translations of the world, but he had to conform to the prevailing prudery of Soviet editorial policy. One example must suffice. When Othello asks for proof that Desdemona is unfaithful, Iago answers:
Would you, the Supervisor, grossly gape on, Behold her topped?'
The coarseness of that is, of course, essential to the Sadistic delight that Iago gets out of tormenting Othello. But poor Pasternak has to translate chastely:
Would you watch secretly
when he and she embrace'
Lets' hope the Gorbachev era will see the end of all this.
The Thatched Patio, No. 4 November 1985

The Truth About Cuba
"In my thirty years on The New York Times", said Herbert Mathews, addressing the American Society of Newspaper Editors last year, "I have never seen a big story so misunderstood, so badly handled and so misinterpreted as the Cuban Revolution."
It must be added that the misinterpretation has not been accidental. There has been a massive propaganda campaign to stamp on the public mind an image of Fidel Castro as a crude, ranting demagogue and dictator who has made his country a satellite of the Soviet Union.
I remember a particularly gaudy example of this technique at the time Castro visited New York to attend the sessions of the United Nations. A US news agency reported that after Castro and his entourage had left the hotel in which they were staying the management had to clean up the suite because the Cubans had left a litter of chicken bones on the floor!
The man against whom this slander was perpetrated is a Doctor of Laws of the University of Havana and an intellectual so learned in philosophy and history that when he was tried for treason under the Batista dictatorship, he made a five hour speech to the court replete with quotations from the great thinkers - from the ancient Indian philosophers down to Rousseau. This speech was made extempore, without a scrap of paper or a book, after Castro had been held incommunicado for 76 days in solitary confinement.

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Today, after the abortive US aided invasion of Cuba, it is more necessary than ever that public opinion the world over should know the truth about Castro's Cuba. This book by two distinguished American scholars dispels the cloud of ignorance and prejudice. It is one of the outstanding works of reportage and interpretation of contemporary events in our time. Huberman and Sweezy achieve a rare combination of journalistic brilliance and scholarly thoroughness. Their book is indispensable to anybody who wants to understand the recent crisis over Cuba.
Huberman and Sweezy wrote and published their book before the invasion, but it is a proof of their soundness and insight that in their final pages they predict an attempt at invasion by exiles and mercenaries trained and armed in the US.
But they do not stop there. They also predict that "nothing short of a full-fledged invasion by the United States army, navy and airforce could hope to achieve a military overthrow of the regime in Cuba. No expeditionary force of Batistanese or Latin American mercenaries no matter how lavishly financed and equipped, would stand a chance against the Cuban army and the Cuban people."
That too has been borne out by events. It has also been confirmed by no less an authority than President Kennedy, whose speech to the American Society of Newspaper Editors after the failure of the invasion clearly looks forward to allout American intervention as the next possible step.
The Kennedy administration has made much play with the idea that the invasion was intended to restore "Cuban free
ΑΑ
dom”.
In his pre-election statement on Cuban policy, (a declaration which he has carried into effect as President), Mr. Kennedy also said that the policy of the US should be to aid "democratic

The Truth About Cuba 21
non-Batista elements" to overthrow the Castro regime. The ill-informed might suppose from this that the US had consistently stood for democracy in Cuba and had never had any sympathy for the Batista dictatorship which Castro toppled.
What is the truth? Huberman and Sweezy give the evidence straight from the horse's mouth - the evidence of Earl E.T. Smith, former US Ambassador to Cuba, before the SubCommittee investigating the administration of the Internal Security Act in August last year:
"Senator let me explain to you that the United States, until the advent of Castro, was so overwhelmingly influential in Cuba that, as I said here a little while ago, the American Ambassador was the second most important man in Cuba: sometimes even more important than the President.
"That is because of the reason of the position that the United States played in Cuba. Now today, his importance is not very great'.
Nor is this surprising when read side by side with the official report of the US Department of Commerce in 1956 on the Cuban economy,
"The only foreign investments of importance are those of the United States, American participation exceeds 90 per cent in the telephone and electric services, about 50 percent in public service railways and roughly 40 per cent in raw Sugar production. The Cuban branches of United States banks are entrusted with almost one-fourth of all bank deposits... Cuba ranked third in Latin America in the value of United States direct investments in 1952, outranked only by Venezuela and Brazil'.
Today, of course, (if we may paraphrase Mr. Smith's understatement) the importance of US in the Cuban economy is

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"not very great". Is that what all the fuss over "Cuban freedom” is about?
The Batista regime - under which the American Ambassador was “the second most important man in Cuba" — was corrupt and tyrannical. Batista staged a military coup in 1952 on the eve of the presidential elections in which, as public opinion polls showed, he was running last. He killed 20,000 people during his period in power. Under him corruption was so rife that, according to one Cuban observer, "many of the people who were honest boasted that they too, were in on it. They preferred to be called rascals rather than fools".
There was only one possible way of toppling Batista-revolution. But what was the attitude of the US Government after the civil war began? The US continued to supply arms to Batista for six years: its military missions continued to train Batista's forces fighting Cuban patriots, socialists and democrats who wanted to end the dictatorship. In August 1958 one member of the anti-Batista Unity Group wrote a letter to President Eisenhower protesting against the continuance of the military mission.
"It is well known, and both your government and the Cuban government have so recognized it, that our country has been involved in a bloody civil war for almost two years. Nevertheless, the corresponding Departments maintain those Missions in Cuba, which produces resentment, since their maintenance, contrary to the spirit and letter of the agreement is proof of the moral and material backing offered by the government of the United States of America to the dictatorial regime in Cuba."
The protest was rejected by the US Government. The author of that letter was none other than Miro Cardona, who has today joined hands with the US and is hailed by President

The Truth About Cuba 213
Kennedy as a liberator. The civil war, however, ended in the complete defeat of Batista because superior arms could not prevail against the popular hatred of the regime. When the fighting started, Castro had 300 guerrillas against 12,000 men armed with modern weapons. It was the support of the people which swept Castro to power.
And what of Castro's regime itself? This is what Huberman and Sweezy have to say of it after first-hand observation during two visits to Cuba.
"Experience of government has traditionally been experience in mismanagement, exploitation and stealing. Far from solving the problem of the country, government has itself been one of the worst features of a rotten system. Among the greatest advantages of the young men and women who fought and won the revolution were that they had indeed no experience of government, that they despised the hopelessly corrupt class that had such experience, that they were fired by a consuming ambition to do the simple and obvious things that must be done to rescue their fellow countrymen from the misery in which they lived out their lives.
"Simple and obvious things like reducing the prices charged by profiteers, giving the beggars and prostitutes and waifs who crowded the streets of the capital city a chance to rehabilitate themselves in decent surroundings; building houses for the homeless; schools for the illiterate and hospitals for the sick; above all, creating year-round jobs for the unemployed and underemployed and in this way not only raising their material standard of living but also giving them for the first time the priceless sense of full membership in the human brotherhood....
"To be with people to see with your own eyes how they are rehabilitating and transforming a whole nation, to share their dreams of the great tasks and achievements that lie ahead

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- these are purifying and liberating experience. You come away with your faith in the human race restored."
Cuba, Anatomy of a Revolution by Leo Huberman and
Paul M. Sweezy (Monthly Review Press, Routledge and Kegal Paul).
Ceylon Daily Mirror, April 28, 1961

The Last Dissenter
George Orwell was not, perhaps a great writer; but I would say that he was even more salutary for our age than many writers to whom one would confidently award that title. His chief virtue was that he preserved the quality of independent thinking in a world in which the great temptation of the writer is to lose himself in one big movement or another, that he remained a dissenter from what he once called "the smelly little orthodoxies which are contending for our souls." The best essay in this posthumous collection, The Prevention of Literature, states Orwell's conviction that "literature is doomed, if liberty of thought perishes." Examining the forces which are curbing the freedom of the writer both in Russia and (in a lesser degree) in the democracies, Orwell speculates on what is likely to be the result of these tendencies in a finished totalitarian society of the future. The Prevention of Literature contains many of the ideas which later found expression in Nineteen Eighty-Four: it is at the same time immensely superior to that much overrated book, and shows that Orwell was more at home in the essay than in the novel. The best of Orwell's critical writing is concerned with the relations between writing and society. Apart from The Prevention of Literature, two other essays in this book - Politics and the English Language, a study of the

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deterioration of language caused by political jargon, and Politics vs. Literature, an examination of Gulliver's Travels - belong to this kind. In another essay Orwell discusses Tolstoy's objections to Shakespeare, particularly to King Lear. He is rather out of his depth when he writes about Shakespeare; but his explanation of Tolstoy's hostility to Lear that he felt a similarity between the king's situation and his own - is interesting and plausible. Three essays in the book, Shooting an Elephant, A Hanging, and How The Poor Die, give vivid impressions of colonial life and the life of the down-and-out, both of which Orwell knew at first hand. There is a brilliant piece of political criticism of James Burnham and an essay on Gandhi, from which I should like to quote a passage which exemplifies very well Orwell's admirable humanist attitude. Referring to Gandhi's belief that one should not take animal life even to save the life of one's wife or child, Orwell says: "This attitude is perhaps a noble one, but in the sense which - I think - most people would give to the word, it is inhuman. The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection, that one is sometimes willing to commit sins for the sake of loyalty, that one does not push asceticism to the point where it makes friendly inter-course impossible, and that one is prepared in the end to be defeated and broken up by life, which is the inevitable price of fastening one's love upon other human individuals. No doubt alcohol, tobacco and so forth are things that a saint must avoid but sainthood is also a thing that human beings must avoid".
SHOOTING AN ELEPHANT and other essays, by George Orwell (Secker and Warburg, 10s). Ceylon Daily News, February 1951

The Russian People Have Outgrown Stalinism: Russia. After Stalin
by Isaac Deutscher
Mr. Isaac Deutscher's 1949 biography of Stalin is, to my mind, one of the great historical works of our time: in the grand sweep of its view of contemporary history and the magnificence of its writing it is alike worthy of the magnitude of its subject. The biography remained, however, an unfinished story: and in his last chapter Mr. Deutscher made the careful reservation: "After so many climaxes and anti-climaxes his (Stalin's) drama seems only now to be rising to its pinnacle; and we do not yet know into what new perspective its last act may yet throw the preceding ones."
In his new book, "Russia. After Stalin", Mr. Deutscher returns to his undertaking. From the vantage point of mid-1953 he looks back on Stalin's work, now seen in perspective and attempts to discern the outlines of the post-Stalinist era which lies ahead.
"Russia. After Stalin," although it might be regarded as an epilogue to the Stalin biography, is in its mode of treatment a different kind of book. One of the astonishing things about Mr. Deutscher's earlier book was that with all its sense of the

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urgency of contemporary history it yet achieved the detachment and dispassionateness of the historical analyst regarding events from a height. It was as if one was looking at a battlefield through a telescope: one was close enough to the struggle to be moved by its tragedies and grandeurs, and yet remote enough not to be involved as a partisan.
In his new book Mr. Deutscher is not so much the analyst of history made as the journalist interpreting history in the making; and he is out in the front-line, too, which shifts around him even while he writes. Mr. Deutscher began his book in the middle of March 1953: events moved so fast that, he says, "at its beginning I discussed expected developments in the future tense; later I had to describe these developments in the present and even the past tense."
Any interpreter of political events as they happen must indulge in a certain amount of speculation - all the more when he seeks to unriddle the enigmas of Russian politics. But "Russia. After Stalin' is not to be confused with the whispered confidences of the cognoscenti who claim to know in every detail the goings-on behind the Kremlin walls and who only succeed in making one feel that there is a great deal to be said for George Kennan's view: "There are no experts on Russia: there are only various degrees of ignorance."
Unlike these "experts", Mr. Deutscher conscientiously preserves the distinction between fact and speculation; and his speculations are rarely concerned with the unverifiable details of individual manoeuvres in the Kremlin. His theme is the historical destiny of the Russian regime and Russian Society and the fate of Malenkov or Beria or any other Soviet politician interests him only in relation to this larger question.
In the first half of his book, Mr. Deutscher completes the task which he left unfinished in his biography of Stalin: he draws up the balance-sheet of the Stalinist era and makes his final

The Russian people have outgrown Stalinism 29
estimate of it. This is undoubtedly both the best part of the book as well as the most carefully reasoned and most convincing analysis which has been made anywhere of the Stalin era since the dictator's death.
The official Communist view, at least in public statements, has been that Stalin's death will mean no change in the character of the Soviet regime. Certain sections of opinion in the West have also reiterated this idea of "no change" - but on different grounds. The totalitarian machine (the latter assert) will go on working in the same way, irrespective of the hand that runs it.
Against these two pictures of the Soviet Union, diametrically opposed and yet bearing a strong similarity to each other in their simplified view of history, Mr. Deutscher argues that Stalin, like Lenin before him, died at a point of crisis in Soviet history. And this crisis grew out of the deep-seated paradox of the Stalin regime which he states in these words:
"...it was the peculiar paradox of Stalinism that with one hand it fought ruthlessly and desperately to perpetuate its domination over the mind and body of the Russian people and with the other it was, with equal ruthlessness and persistence, destroying the very pre-requisites of self-perpetuation."
To condense into a paragraph the argument which Mr. Deutscher brilliantly elaborates and supports with abundant evidence over nearly a hundred pages: the Stalinist dictatorship was old Russia's revenge on the Bolshevik revolution. Marxism merged with the traditions of serfdom and autocracy of backward Russia to produce the barbarisms of the Stalin cult and the tyranny of the Stalin regime. But at the same time by modernizing Russia through planned economy, industrialization and urbanization, Stalinism was at the same time destroying the very backwardness which had made possible its perpetuation. Before Stalin's death, Mr. Deutscher concludes,

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the Russian people had already spiritually outgrown Stalinist tutelage.
This then is the historical situation to which the Malenkov regime has succeeded. And Mr. Deutscher persuasively argues in the second half of his book that the first moves of the new regime have been an attempt to come to terms with this changing moral climate of the nation. In an illuminating historical analogy Mr. Deutscher suggests that Malenkov echoing the “liberal“ Czar, Alexander II, might well have said: “Better to abolish the worst features of Stalinism from above than to wait until they are abolished from below."
Yet how far can the Malenkov regime - itself a child of Stalinism - go on this road of protective reform? If any criticism can be made of Mr. Deutscher's arguments in the second part of his book, it is that he does not bring out clearly enough the fact that any thorough-going democratization of Russia can come only from the Russian people themselves.
This seems to me to follow from Mr. Deutscher's own recognition that the Malenkov regime faces the dilemma inherent in its situation - that "it is always difficult and dangerous for any dictatorial regime to try to liberalize itself." He completes the historical analogy with Alexanderby pointing out that when the "liberal" Czar found that popular opinion demanded more freedom than he was prepared to grant, he began to retrace his steps back towards despotism. The émigrés who gathered in London in 1861 to celebrate the emancipation of the Russian peasants had their rejoicing darkened by the news that the Czar's troops had quenched in blood Polish demonstrations in Warsaw.
Mr. Deutscher's book was in the press when two events occurred to confirm this analogy - the purge of Beria and the East Berlin revolt of June 17.
The reasons for Beria's fall can only be a matter of specu

The Russian people have outgrown Stalinism 221
lation (commentators seem to be almost equally divided between the view that he represented the Old Guard of Stalinism and the contrary theory that he was the real inspirer of the liberal reforms). But whatever the truth about this may be, the purge is a confirmation of the fact that the Malenkov regime has not cast off the Stalinist past. After the calling off of the trial of the doctors, the amnesty for prisoners, and the abandonment of the more blatant forms of leader-worship, the purge of Beria was a throw-back to the methods of the Stalin era, whose familiar idiom was echoed by the “Pravda” editorial when the purge was announced.
The East Berlin revolt again demonstrated the dilemma of the Malenkov policy - it was the very initiation of reforms in East Germany which provoked the uprising against the puppet Communist regime.
Any decisive break with Stalinism can come only as a result of an independent movement of the Russian and satellite peoples. Whenever such a regeneration of Russian Society takes place, it will not amount, of course, to a restoration of the old order. Planned economy, industrialization and socially-owned property are the genuine achievements of the post-1917 era which will survive when Russia has cast off the incubus of the totalitarian dictatorship and regained free political life. One of the most valuable parts of Mr. Deutscher's book is that where he demonstrates that it is no more possible to reimpose private ownership in Russia than it would have been to restore feudalism in nineteenth century France. He points out that:
"...among the many political groups formed in the West by the new Soviet refugees, each of which swears to destroy the whole structure of Stalinism to its very foundations, none has dared to write into its program the abolition of public ownership of industry. On the contrary, each group ardently Swears to preserve it. If this is the mood among émigrés, among the

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victims and the extreme opponents of Stalinism, it can be im
agined how strong the attachment to public ownership is
among the people in the Soviet Union."
RUSSIAAFTER STALIN, by Isaac Deutscher
(Hamish Hamilton, 10s.6d.) The Daily News, September 1953

Not all the Quotes from Lenin
It was once said of a certain English literary critic that he "shared with the Pope the privilege of changing his mind and yet of believing himself to be equally infallible at all times". Dr. Colvin R.de Silva's familiar pompous and pontifical tone in this pamphlet leaves us in no doubt that he has the same opinion of himself.
Yet the very title of the pamphlet announces a hundredand-eighty degrees turn, a wholesale revision, on the part of Dr. de Silva and his party, in characterizing the events of 1971, which, in anyone less egotistically cocksure than its author, would call for an explanation, if not an apologia. Ultra-leftist? One rubs one's eyes incredulously. Between mid-1970, when the JVP surfaced publicly, and post-April 1971, the recurrent burden of the LSSP's propaganda was that the JVP was not ultra leftist but ultra-rightist - in fact "the criminal and fascist arm of the UNP". The phrase comes from the LSSPdirected Nation f 16th March 1971, which went on to say, "Behind it stands the UNP, ready with funds, transport and personnel. Behind the UNP stands the CIA, dreaming of another Indonesia."
A week later (this was barely a fortnight before the insurrection) the Nation returned to the subject with the question, "What is to be done?" The question has Leninist echoes, but the answer the Nation gave was very different from Lenin's. "The Security Forces must strain every nerve to bring the true

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organizers of this dastardly plot into the light of day, and supporters of the Government must give them all the assistance possible. We would suggest once again that it is high time the Government set up a secret service to combat political conspiracy."
Ultra-right or ultra-left? Much more than a difference of a syllable was involved. It was precisely by labelling the JVP "fascist agents of the UNP and the CIA" that the LSSP leadership was able to convince its following that any methods were permissible and legitimate in order to crush the "fascist threat". The sinister implications of the last quotation (an invitation to the party following to turn police informers) were realized a fortnight later in the erosion of conscience - not merely of socialist conscience but of plain humanitarian feeling-in the ranks of the LSSP in the face of the massacres and tortures of April. Hence Dr. N.M. Perera's notorious "no-mercy" broadcast at the height of the insurrection: hence his 1971 May Day call to 'smash this reactionary terrorist movement, Fascist in intent and content"; hence (on the same May Day) the Nation's whitewashing of "excesses": "If the truth is to be told, the Government has not only been humane but has shown the most extraordinary forbearance under very difficult circumstances."
As for Dr. Colvin R.de Silva himself, one episode will suffice to show how far the erosion of conscience went in his own particular case. Early in 1972 the Civil Rights Movement announced that it was setting up a fund to assist families who were destitute on account of the breadwinner being under detention (it must be remembered that these detenues were not even convicted persons but only suspects, and that the great majority of them were ultimately released without being charged). Dr. de Silva used the occasion of the debate on the CJC Bill to attack CRM for this proposal, comparing it to the action of anybody who collected money to help wives and children of foreign enemy soldiers when their country was at war!

Not all the quotes from Lenin 225
As CRM said in a Press reply to Dr. de Silva at the time: "We believe that nobody whose natural human feelings have not been completely blunted will want innocent wives and children to suffer for the actions or supposed actions of their husbands or parents." Dr. de Silva, not inappropriately, was next to Mr. Felix Dias Bandaranaike - the most vehement supporter during the same debate of the CJC Bill, which (among other monstrous provisions) made confessions admissible even if they had been extorted by force.
When the same gentleman, in the pamphlet now under review, talks of "the sheer determination and the most heroic sacrifices of the insurrectionists" and "the strength of their revolutionary Spirit and fervour', one feels more than a little sick, as if one had been listening to Mr.PeckSniff.
I have said enough to suggest that the questions raised by this pamphlet are more elementary than political questions - they concern simple good taste and human decency. But something needs to be said about the political argument in it too. With a battery of quotations from Lenin, Dr. de Silva argues that insurrection "must rely upon a revolutionary upsurge of the people", that there was no such upsurge in April 1971, and that what the JVP tried to do was to substitute a conspiratorially organized party for the working class.
Moreover, Dr. de Silva goes on to put the blame on the insurrectionists for the fact that they "disarmed and disoriented the masses politically, pushing them to the Right and Reaction for a whole period, as has been amply demonstrated anew and on a decisive scale in the results of the 1977 General
Election.' w
There are two things that need to be said about these arguments. They ignore the fact that the insurrection was a reaction - a desperate reaction - to the opportunism of the LSSP (and CP) in and after 1964. If, on the authority of Lenin, we

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are to condemn the JVP for substituting a conspiratorial party for the working class, what are we to say, on the same authority, of those who sought to substitute for the working class - Mrs. Bandaranaike? And as for Dr. de Silva shuffling off on the insurrectionists the responsibility for the electoral rout of the left in 1977, the only appropriate comment would seem to be a Biblical one: "Thou hypocrite, first cast the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast the mote out of thy brother's eye."
All this does not mean that the tragic experience of April 1971 should not be sifted and its portentous lessons for the future underlined. But that is a task for those who are unstained by political complicity in the repression and the horrors of 1971. Here's the smell of the blood still: not all the quotations from Lenin will sweeten these hands.
April 1971: A Foredoomed Ultra-Leftist Adventure by Colvin R.de Silva (Janadina Rs.2/= Ananda Press) Lanka Guardian, Vol. 1, No.1, May 1978

Literature and Politics
This is the first of a series of paperbacks which will deal with the relations between writers and politics in different European countries in modern times. Compared with that of Russia, France, Germany or Spain (the subjects of some of the books to follow), the literature of contemporary Britain seems markedly non-political. Twentieth-century Britain had no revolution, no civil war, no experience of dictatorship, no occupation and resistance movement: the General Strike of 1927 and the Great Depression represent the peaks of general political activity in a period in which Britain was for the most part an island of stability and tranquility in a disturbed Europe.
How does one trace the relations between literature and politics in a society where writers have been largely indifferent to politics? Dr. Morris notes in his opening chapter that "there are those who will claim that all literature is political, which if true, would . . . instantly invalidate any reason for writing this essay." He settles for a definition of political literature' as concerned with 'affairs of state', then confesses that, even so, it is hard to draw a line of distinction between political literature' and 'social
literature".
There seems to be some critical confusion here. Not all literature is political, if one intends to treat political literature as a genre in the same sense in which one talks of religious

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literature or nature poetry or science fiction. But all literature can be examined politically, and this seems to me the more significant and fruitful approach in discussing literature and politics. The overt expression of political ideas in literature (writing about 'affairs of state') is often less influential than literature of whose implicit political content the writer himself may be unaware. The most trivial escapist fiction which is innocent of any conscious political intentions is far more powerful in upholding a class and power structure through the popular myths it disseminates than the commitedly right-wing literature of Wyndham Lewis or Roy Campbell that Dr. Morris examines.
At the end of his 94-page survey Dr Morris comes to the conclusion that political literature that succeeds as literature does so, not despite its political content or commitment, but because of an aesthetic potency unassessable and unjustifiable in political science.
Secular devils, too, of whatever shade or colour may well have the best tunes. The phrase "aesthetic potency' here represents an intellectual blur, unless Dr. Morris simply means that literature is to be judged solely by its success in communication, by its style regardless of its content, and that would make it a technical exercise devoid of any larger human significance. One can appreciate Dr. Morris' anxiety not to fall into the simplistic critical method of judging works of literature by the political ideas or beliefs that can be abstracted from them and their acceptability or nonacceptability to the critic himself. But political criticism of literature need not be as simple-minded as that.
Engels long ago pointed out (though few Marxist critics have taken notice) that the 'reactionary' Balzac was a greater social realist in his novels than the progressive Zola, because his satire is never keener, his irony never bitterer,

Literature and Politics 229
than when he sets in motion the very men and women with whom he sympathizes most deeply - the nobles. The critic of literature should be concerned not with the writer's political beliefs qua beliefs but with the experience and imaginative vision of society conveyed through the felt life of the work, and this may be different from or even at variance with the consciously held beliefs of the writer.
I suggest that such an approach gives us a basis for distinguishing between the poetry of Yeats and of Eliot, both of whom, as Dr. Morris recognizes, held strongly authoritarian right-wing opinions (Eliot was anti-semitic and was a disciple of Charles Maurras, the later collaborator with the Nazis, while Yeats wrote marching songs for the Irish fascist movement with which he sympathized). In Eliot's work I see no gulf between the beliefs and the poetry: Dr. Morris rightly notes the animal imagery, suggestive of some low and repellent form of life, which recurs in Eliot's anti-semitic references, while the caricature of working class conversation in the pub scene and of lower middle-class sex in The Waste Land reflects Eliot's rooted class antipathies. In Yeats's poetry, on the other hand, there is, under the pressure of events like the Easter uprising, a tension between Yeats's right-wing beliefs and his imaginative response to reality - especially in the magnificent Easter 1916. It is when this tension is absent that Yeats relapses into the simple nostalgic idealization of the aristocratic past ("all that great glory spent') of his lesser poems. The distinction I have suggested between political belief and imaginative vision should help us also to place the left-wing English writers of the thirties - Auden, Spender, Day Lewis, Rex Warner, Edward Upward and the rest - in whom an intellectual political commitment found no counterpart in lived experience. It was George Orwell who made the most acute diagnosis of the reasons for the immaturity and falsity of

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the English left-wing creative writing of the period. Dr. Morris quotes his comment on a line from Auden's Spain, The conscious acceptance of guilt in the necessary murder'. Orwell said: 'It could only have been written by a person to whom murder was at most a word".
Yes, indeed. And yet when Orwell came to write his political fantasy of the future, 1984, he revealed as betraying a shallowness and over-simplification in this antiCommunist hysteria. Of 1984 we may say that it could have been written by somebody to whom totalitarianism was, not a word, but a projection of his own irrational phobias. One has only to compare it with the work of European writers who had first-hand experience of the police state - Victor Serge's The Case of Comrade Tulayev, Tibor Dery's Niki, Nadezhda Mandel’shtam's Hope against Hope to see the difference. The pro-CP critic quoted by Dr. Morris who called 1984 a horror comic' no doubt had an axe to grind, but he was right.
Writers and Politics in Modern Britain by J.A. Morris, (Hodder and Stoughton, Stg. Pd. 1.75) Lanka Guardian, Vol. 1, No. 5, July 1978

Revolution . . .
This book is the first instalment of a large-scale history of Russia since the Revolution on which Professor Carr is at work. The first part of the project, entitled The Bolshevik Revolution, is planned to cover the period up to Lenin's withdrawal from active political life in 1923 and will occupy three volumes.
Volume One, now published begins by tracing the development of the Bolshevik Party to the conquest of power and goes on to deal with the internal politics of the Soviet state (including the question of nationalities) down to 1923. The second and third volumes, to be published in the course of this year, will be concerned with economic policy and foreign relations during the same period. The second part of the history (still in the planning stage) is to be called The Struggle for Power: 1923-1928.
This outline alone will show that Professor Carr's work is conceived on a much larger scale than any previous historical studies of the Soviet Union. Judging from the present volume, however, I would say that it is unlikely in some respects to supersede existing works on the same subject.
Professor Carr makes clear in his preface that his history is meant to be not a chronicle but an analysis of the events. It seems to me, however, that the main value of the book is in the large amount of factual information it contains, which will make it a useful reference work for the student of Soviet Communism. As interpretation, it cannot compare with such

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studies as Isaac Deutscher's Stalin: A Political Biography or Souvarine's Stalin: A Critical Survey of Bolshevism. Professor Carr's work is scholarly and painstaking but - by comparison with the books I have mentioned - pedestrian.
In spite of the smaller scale of their histories, Deutscher and Souvarine succeed in giving us the living feel of the events, while this book, with all its detail, remains abstract and schematic. What one misses is the imaginative insight, the quality of flesh and blood, which are necessary not only in the chronicler but also in the historical analyst.
A serious limitation of the book is that Professor Carr concentrates on developments in the ruling party and the state, but gives comparatively little attention either to the personalities or to movements outside the state and party apparatus. This not only deprives the history of some interest but reduces the value of its analysis. It is impossible to judge correctly such concepts as the "dictatorship of the proletariat" unless we examine the actual relations which existed under the Bolshevik regime between the state and the masses, so as to decide how far the reality conformed to the formula.
Even the Kronstadt revolution, an event of crucial significance which showed clearly that by 1921, the "dictatorship of the proletariat" had become a dictatorship over the proletariat is passed over by Professor Carr in a few lines. One does not know how far these deficiencies will be made up for in the forthcoming volumes, but it seems proper that the present volume should have provided a fuller treatment of these aspects.
It is difficult to avoid feeling that the selection of facts in this book has been influenced to some extent by Professor Carr's evident sympathy with the Bolshevik regime. Certainly, in his comments and judgments, the objectivity and impartiality of the historian is not always maintained. Thus, in discussing

233
the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly by the Bolsheviks, he repeats (without dissent) the Bolshevik argument that the large majority held by the S.Rs in the Assembly had lost its authority because the candidates lists had been prepared before the split between the Right and Left S.Rs.
Professor Carr fails to give proper weight to the fact that (1) the Bolsheviks themselves had consistently agitated for the Constituent Assembly before they seized power, (2) the elections were held under the Bolshevik Government, (3) the argument regarding the invalidity of the elections were thought up only after the Bolsheviks found themselves in a minority, (4) even if these arguments were correct, nothing prevented the Bolsheviks from holding fresh elections.
It is impossible, on an impartial examination of the facts regarding the Constituent Assembly to draw any conclusion other than that the Bolsheviks held the elections in the hope of giving the insurrection a constitutional sanction through a parliamentary majority, and dissolved the Assembly when they were foiled in this hope. Professor Carr, however, concludes from the ease with which the Constituent Assembly was dispersed that this "was one more demonstration of the lack of any solid basis, or any broad popular support, in Russia for the institutions and principles of bourgeois democracy." On this basis one could give moral authority to any successful suppression of a democratic body by armed force.
On the question of the evolution of the Bolshevik regime into a one-party state, Professor Carr's conclusions seem again to be inconsistent with the facts. He holds that this development was not the responsibility of any single party, and says, "If it was true that the Bolshevist regime was not prepared after the first few months to tolerate an organized opposition, it was equally true that no opposition party was prepared to remain within legal limits." Professor Carr here ignores the

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fact that the opposition parties of the left were ready to enter into a coalition or to function as a democratic opposition, and that it was the Bolshevik dictatorship which drove them to the methods of conspiracy and terrorism. It might be mentioned that this was in substance the opinion of such an authoritative and sympathetic critic of Bolshevism as Rosa Luxemburg.
I must repeat in conclusion that while many of Professor Carr's historical judgments seem to me partial and unsound, his book remains a valuable source of information. He is at his best when he examines the evolution of Bolshevik theory before and after the Revolution. His analysis of Lenin's views on the character of the Russian Revolution is particularly illuminating. Trotsky and some of his disciples have claimed that in April 1917 Lenin abandoned his earlier view of the Revolution as a "bourgeois revolution" and, in effect, accepted Trotsky's theory of "permanent revolution". Professor Carr's examination of Lenin's own pronouncements shows that his theoretical statements after April were actually improvisations, reflecting "the persistent dilemma of a socialist revolution struggling retrospectively to fill the empty place of bourgeois democracy and bourgeois capitalism in the Marxist Scheme." There is also a useful note discussing Lenin's theory of the state, tracing its origins in Marx and its evolution after the conquest of power.
A HISTORY OF SOVIET RUSSIA: The Bolshevik Revolution, 1912-1923: Volume One, by E.H. Carr (Macmillan, 25s.)
Ceylon Daily News, February 1951

SRI LANKAN POLITICS

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Anagarika Dharmapala and Marxist Thought,
The reader who is startled by the question posed in the title of Dr. Gunadasa Amarasekera's pamphlet. Anagarika Dharmapala Marxvadhee dha? (Was Anagarika Dharmapala Marxist?) will be relieved to learn from the opening page that he isn't posing it seriously: the title, borrowed from a reviewer of one of Dr. Amarasekera's earlier books, is a piece of shocktactics that is no doubt good sales promotion. However, Dr. Amarasekera doesn't find it necessary to ask another question, much more pertinent than that so provocatively displayed on his cover. Was Anagarika Dharmapala racist? Dr. Amarasekera is so unaware of the reality of this issue that in claiming for the Anagarika the status of a leader who sought not only national liberation but also the creation of a 'socialist Society' in Sri Lanka, he accepts without demur the idea of a call for 'liberation, addressed exclusively to Sinhala Buddhists. That, clearly, in Dr. Amarasekera's eyes, is how things should be.
However, the case for answering affirmatively the question I have posed rests on evidence a good deal more substantial than simply the ethnic and religious character of the base that the Anagarika sought for his movement. In the course of his pamphlet Dr. Amarasekera refers to Dr. Kumari Jayawardena as one of the few scholars who has understood Anagarika Dharmapala's aims correctly, and quotes from her

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Rise of the Labour Movement in Ceylon. I think it a fair criticism of Dr. Jayawardena's book that, in spite of the invaluable research material it incorporates, its evaluation of the nationalist movement in the period it coversis, if I may say SO, equivocal. But I should like to recommend to Dr. Amerasekera a study of Dr. Jayawardena's paper, Nationalism, Revivalist Movements and Ethnic Consciousness in Sri Lanka, read at a Social Scientists' Association seminar earlier this year, and representing Dr. Jayawardena's more recent and more mature afterthoughts on the subject. In that paper Dr. Jayawardena brings out the Anagarika's strong animus against the minority Communities who were non-Sinhala and non-Buddhist. He described Tamils and Muslims, equally with Europeans, as 'infidels of degraded race'. Another utterance of the Anagarika that Dr. Jayawardena quotes reads: 'Look at the Administration Report of the General Manager of Railways. Tamils, Cochins and Hambankarayas are employed in large numbers to the prejudice of the people of the island - sons of the Soil, who contribute the largest share." There is no doubt that in the Anagarika's thinking the people of the Island' and 'sons of the soil' meant exclusively Sinhalese, and especially Sinhalese Buddhists. Dr. Amarasekera himself quotes one of his demands that the State should be a Buddhist State and that the Governor, the Colonial Secretary and all other high officials should be Buddhists - the same kind of demand that racists and chauvinists have made and continue to make down to the present day.
Dr. Amarasekera's own quotations from the Anagarika's speeches and writings also bring out the fact that he shared and propagated the Aryan racial myth which has been one of the principal symbols of Sinhala chauvinism. The Anagarika referred to 'our innate Aryan nature' and kinship with the Aryan races in the Ganges valley. The significance of this myth was not only that it bolstered Sinhala racial pride by evoking

Anagarika Dharmapala and Marxist Thought 239
the chosen Aryan race' of which the Sinhalese were assumed to be a part, but also that it drew a sharp dividing line between 'Aryan Sinhalese' and Dravidians - in short, that it was anti-South Indian and anti-Tamil.
All this goes to prove that when the Sinhala racialist politicians of today resuscitate the image of Anagarika Dharmapala and echo his slogan 'Sinhalayanee nagitiv' (Sinhalese, arise) they are not (as Sevaka Yohan Devananda claimed in an exchange with me some time ago in the LG) perverting his thought but recognizing in him their true ancestor. But it is important not only to characterize the Anagarika's racist ideology but also to identify the class interests it served. Amarasekera rejects the characterization of Anagarika Dharmapala by some Marxists as one who 'dedicated his services to building a national bourgeoisie class.' I don't think a Marxist characterization of the Anagarika's role need be as simplified as that. To say that any thinker or leader served the interests of a particular class is not necessarily to say that he was conscious of doing so, still less that he was hired or commanded by that class. All that is necessary is to identify what class interests his thought and action objectively served and what class outlook his ideology reflected. Even the question of a leader's sincerity and honesty, on which Dr. Amarasekera lays so much stress (for him the Anagarika's political failure was due to the fact that the movement he began was grabbed from him by Self-seeking and power-hungry politicians) is for the purpose of characterizing his class position, irrelevant. And haven't there been other racist propagandists who seriously believed in the virtues of the nostrum they were peddling? . Who is there to say, for instance, that Professor F.R. Jayasuriya is not sincere?
Dr. Amasekera defends the Anagarika's choice of 'constitutional struggle as one which was right in fighting a mighty empire on which the sun never set. Yet, at the same time, not

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only in immense India but even in small Ireland there were leaders who confronted that same empire with other means. It does not occur to Dr. Amarasekera that the Anagarika's verbal rhetoric against imperialism, coupled with his racial and religious chauvinism, reflected the character of the class he served - a belated and weak embryonic bourgeoisie (in fact, hardly more than a small trading and handicraft petty bourgeoisie) who did not have the capacity to lead a genuine mass struggle against imperialism, whose economic interests brought them much more into conflict with Tamil and Muslim traders than with imperialism, and whose backwardness and impotence found an appropriate image in their retrogressive, narrow and stunted ideology.
It is perfectly correct, therefore for Dr. Amarasekera to see S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike as the heir of Dharmapala: it was in fact that same petty bourgeoisie aspiring to be a national bourgeoisie who found their leader in the incongruous figure of Bandaranaike. When Dr. Amarasekera presents S.W.R.D. as a tragic figure who, like Dharmapala, fell a victim to the machinations of the bourgeoisie, I am reminded of Thomas Paine's answer to Burke's elegy on Marie Antoinette: Burke pitied the plumage, but forgot the dying bird'. What was the real tragedy - the fate of Bandaranaike or that of the masses he had deluded with a racism masquerading as socialism?
Dr. Amarasekera ends his pamphlet with a grandiose vision of an assimilation of Marxist economic and political thinking into the Buddhist philosophy that will not only fulfil the Anagarika's aims but will also be the third interpretation of Marxism in our century' (the other two being presumably the Soviet and the Chinese), which can point the way forward to socialism not only for Sri Lanka but also for India, Burma and other countries of this region. To me it seems that, whether Dr. Amarasekera is conscious of it or not (as I said, all that matters is the interests a writer objectively serves), he has in

Anagarika Dharmapala and Marxist Thought 24
stead produced the perfect ideology for a burgeoning new SLFP-LSSP alliance. It is not inappropriate that the chief promoter of this alliance should be a scion of the Anagarika's family. A friend once told me that when he visited Mr. Anil Moonesinghe's office at the time the latter was Chairman of the CTB, he found on one wall a portrait of Anagarika Dharmapala, on another photographs of Mr. & Mrs. Bandaranaike, and on the desk a picture of Trotsky! Just such as that Dr. Amarasekera recommends!
Lanka Guardian, Vol. 3, No. 8, August 15, 1980

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Buddhism and Radi CaliSm
I am glad that my article Where are the radical Buddhists? LG. March 15) seems to have prompted Dr. Kumari Jayawardena to write her four-part article 'Monks in revolt" LG, May 15, June 15, July 1 and 15), since it was explicitly my purpose to provoke such discussion in raising tentatively the question whether there has been a radical tradition in Sri Lankan Buddhism. Dr. Jayawardena has brought to bear on her articles an abundance of historical scholarship to which I cannot pretend, but it seems to me that in these articles the erudition is not matched by an equal analytical rigour.
I don't think that clarity of thinking on this subject is helped by using the word 'radical as a blanket-term to cover everybody from the monks who participated in the nationalist revolts of the 19th century to those who were associated with the LSSP and CP in the '30s and '40s. The comparison which Dr. Jayawardena makes in her first article confuses rather than illuminates.
Just as priests like John Ball and Thomas Muntzer were among the leaders of peasant uprising in 14th century England and 16th century Germany respectively, in Sri Lanka the Buddhist monks took a prominent part in the revolts and rebellions that occurred in the 19th century in resistance to British
imperialism.
John Ball and Thomas Muntzer not only led peasant

Buddhism and Radicalism 243
uprisings: their pronouncements and writings reflected the egalitarianism and millenarianism, clothed in religious terms, of an insurgent peasantry. Is there any evidence that Ihagama Unnanse or Kudahapola Unnanse expressed the class-outlook and ideology of the peasantry they helped to spur to revolt, or that they were imbued with anything more than a nationalist consciousness? As Dr. Jayawardena recognizes, the advent of imperialism had been a major blow to the Buddhist religion, which further fell into decay and disarray under British occupation.' That militant Buddhist monks should have resisted imperialism in the interests of their own institutions is, therefore, to be expected.
What has to be asked is whether the 'monks in revolt' whom Dr. Jayawardena writes of in her first article did more than mobilize the peasantry in defence of their own interests and those of the feudal aristocracy whose position has been weakened by imperialism. To say that 'the bhikkus moved closely with the peasantry' is not enough. Throughout history there have been figures who moved closely with and even placed themselves at the head of masses in revolt, only to serve as the transmitting agency of the ideology of other and more privileged classes.
Of 1848 we do know that it brought into action broader strata of the peasantry, and (as Dr. Jayawardena says) was led by the adventurers' of the emerging middle class. But, as far as the question of religion radicalism is concerned, is there any proof that the 1848 rebellion gave expression to any egalitarian or socially radical ideology/an ideology, of non-feudal and non-bourgeois class - in the language of religion? If there was such evidence, I presume Dr. Jayawardena would have cited it.
When we come to the nationalist and Buddhist revival of the late and 19th and early 20th centuries, the question of its

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class character becomes crucial in deciding whether it can be called "radical'. If I may return to the European analogy, Dr. Jayawardena will be aware that in the period of the rise of the bourgeoisie in western Europe, the ideology of mercantile capitalism was expressed in religious movements such as Calvinism and Presbyterianism. But at the same time radical Christianity in such movements as those of the Anabaptists, the Hussites, the Diggers and numerous other radical Puritan sects at the time of the English Civil War voiced the world-view and aspirations of the peasantry and smaller artisans and craftsmen in revolt, whose outlook was radically different from that of the big bourgeoisie.
It seems to me that in the Buddhist revival of the late 19 to the early 20th century, the parallels with the bourgeois elements of the European Reformation are clear. Anagarika Dharmapala, for instance, was a Calvin-like figure' with the Puritanism characteristic of a period of primitive capitalist accumulation. What the nationalist Sri Lankan bourgeoisie could not beget, however, was a bourgeois Enlightenment - even to the extent of their Indian counterparts (e.g. the Bengali Renaissance) - because the bourgeoisie behind our nationalist movement were a stunted class - and, for the most part, little more than a petty bourgeoisie aspiring to be a bourgeoisie. Hence the backward and reactionary character of their ideology.
But while (with appropriate modifications) one may find the Sri Lankan counterparts of the Calvinists and Presbyterians, I look in vain for Thomas Muntzer or Gerard Winstanley. That some Buddhist groups associated themselves with the early labour movement, and others with the left parties of the '30s and '40s, (as shown in Dr. Jayawardena's third and fourth articles) is true. But in elevating these tendencies into a 'religious radicalism' Dr. Jayawardena seriously misses the point.

Buddhism and Radicalism A. 245
One may, of course, use terms in various ways: what is important is not to be mistaken about the character of the social phenomenon that is under discussion. What I would characterize as 'religious radicalism' would be the expression in religious terms of the ideology of an oppressed class, seeking to transform religious doctrine and practice themselves so as to make them the vehicle of that ideology. Dr. Jayawardena may say that she does not mean the same thing by the term: but what is really at issue is whether one can find in Sri Lankan Buddhism any manifestation of the social phenomenon that I have described.
If there had been a Buddhist radicalism in my sense, in Sri Lanka during the period examined by Dr. Jayawardena, I would have expected it to be manifested in a broad and active movement for the re-interpretation and re-statement of Buddhist doctrine and practice - in, let us say, the re-vitalisation of Buddhist pronouncements on caste as a weapon against caste oppression, the use of the concept of tanha as a counteracting force to acquisitive capitalism, or a movement for religious worship and ritual to be conducted in the vernacular rather than in the arcane Pali. Dr. Jayawardena has not been able to discover any development of this kind. The most she has able to find is that the political bhikkus of the '40s defended the participation of the monks in politics as being in keeping with the Buddhist concept of parathacharya (altruistic service to Society) - a concept which is itself paternalistic rather than radical.
As Dr. Jayawardena admits, the political bhikkhus' of that time who flirted with the left movement were swept away by the communalism of '50s which carried S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike to power in 1956, I see that Dr. Jayawardena's view of this event is very different from mine, since she describes it as one which had a progressive content, in that it was a movement of the underprivileged against the English-speaking bourgeoisie'.

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I would say instead that 1956 diverted the discontent of those 'underprivileged' into false channels, and thus helped to preserve the fundamental class structure intact - a development for which we are paying the price today. I suspect that the difference between what Dr. Jayawardena and I See as 'progressive' underlie our variant views on Buddhist radicalism' too.
I conclude that in Sri Lankan Buddhism the consolatory aspects of religion have been dominant at the expense of any potentially radical elements, if they could have been found in the Buddhist tradition. That some Buddhist monks may be 'drawn into popular movements for political and Social change', as Dr. Jayawardena says in her last sentence, is of course true. But I don't think any socially radical movement in Sri Lanka will have a specifically Buddhist character: the intellectual inspiration will continue to come, as it has done in the last four decades, from the secular, humanist, socialist and Marxist traditions.
A Critique of a four part articla: "Monk in
Revolt" by Kumari Jayawardena Lanka Guardian, Vol. 2, No. 7, August 1, 1979

Exorcising the Political: H.L. Seneviratne and the Modern Sri Lankan Buddhist Sangha
It is more a value-imbued activist document than the scholarly treatise it is often mistaken to be.' (168) That is Prof. H.L. Seneviratne speaking of Walpola Rahula's Bhiksuvage Urumaya (The Heritage of the Bhikku). Of his own book, The Work of Kings, one may say that while it's certainly a scholarly treatise and not an activist document, it's also value-imbued: in fact, I would describe it as steeped in value-based discourse. Very late in the book, the author, in discussing the tradition of thinking deriving from The Heritage of the Bhikku, says: The task of the anthropologist is not to question and even less to denounce the monk's claim that his role is social service but rather to examine the Social formations such a claim brings about." (334) That reads like a self-reminder, because earlier, the author had spent twenty pages, though not in denouncing, still in conducting a debate on that same book where his own social preferences and aversions are clearly evident. The Work of Kings is, in fact, a book written with personal conviction, commitment and passion, as much a polemic as it is a social analysis. But don't get me wrong: I have no quarrel with it on that ground. Perhaps because I am not a professional social scientist, I even doubt whether it is possible to write a work of social science of any significance that is value-free. Of course, scientists of all

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kinds have to be objective, but in the very nature of the material that social scientists deal with, we can't expect that their beliefs and attitudes shouldn't enter into their work: all we can reasonably ask is that they should be honest in recording, examining and displaying all the relevant data. So where I disagree with Prof. Seneviratne, it's not because he makes so many value-judgments, but for a different reason. Sometimes it's because I don't share some of these values; at other times, it's because I share the values but can't endorse the judgments. All that will come out in the course of this review, but first let me make a general comment. I regard The Work of Kings as a tragic document: it's for me evidence of the intellectual impasse into which a serious-minded, able and humane scholar may be driven in contemplating the irrational, destructive and murderous forces that have been unleashed in our society.
The subtitle of the book is 'The New Buddhism in Sri Lanka', but it doesn't indicate quite precisely the scope of the book. Unlike, say, Gananath Obeyesekere and Richard Gombrich in Buddhism Transformed, Prof. Seneviratne doesn't Set out to examine the range of new religious practices in the community at large. His focus is the role of the monk, the new conceptions regarding that role and the activities that have arisen from them. Anagarika Dharmapala is presented as the innovating figure in this respect, who saw his task as that of regenerating the lost glory of the Sinhala Buddhist people. It was a task that was economic as well as cultural, ideological and political. This mission, says Prof. Seneviratne, needed a missionary, and the monk was the obvious choice.'(27) But it also demanded a new vocation for the monk. In fact it called for the creation of a new type of monk, different from the traditional one, sunk in what Dharmapala saw as un-Buddhist practices such as ritual or astrology. The new monk had to be a "soldier of the dhamma".
Prof. Seneviratne's chapter on Dharmapala is lucid and

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succinct, but it doesn't alter substantially the picture we have already formed of him and his work from previous writers in this field. What is most original - and also most controversial - in the book begins with the two chapters he devotes to the monks of the Vidyodaya and Vidyalankara pirivenas. He argues that they constitute a bifurcation of Dharmapala's heritage - the former working towards his economic goal of regenerating the village economy, and the latter taking up his ideological and political mantle. These chapters are punctuated by a series of reiterated contrasts between these two groups. Of the two agendas of Dharmapala, Vidyodaya embraced the sober and pragmatic one, and Vidyalankara the ideological and uncompromisingly cultural one which by definition was nationalist.” (57) And again, The Vidyodaya monks visited and worked in individual village communities and literally got their feet dirty. The Vidyalankara monks proclaimed lofty nationalist slogans, keeping their feet up and dry. The Vidyalankara monks were talkers, the Vidyodaya monks were doers.' (193) In particular, he celebrates three Vidyodaya monks - Kalukondayave, Hinatiyana and Hendigala - whom he salutes rhapsodically as hero-giants of regeneration'.(96)
This contrast between Vidyodaya and Vidyalankara is pivotal to Prof. Seneviratne's argument in the book, and I want to interrogate the terms in which he makes it. In doing so, I shall concentrate, for brevity's sake, on the principal hero-giant' of Prof. Seneviratnės devotion — Kalukondayave.
Like that of the rest of his spiritual soldier-band. Kalukondayave's activity in the village was directed to rural development, which went hand in hand with moral reform through exhortation, temperance and crime prevention. In this reformist project, he accepted the framework of colonial authority as a part of the landscape, and he also accepted the conservative indigenous political leadership of the day that ruled the country in collaboration with the colonial power as

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the legitimate authority which could restore to the village its unity and harmony'.(84) We learn that this readiness to acquiesce in the status quo could sometimes attain extraordinary proportions. He was on excellent terms with some imperial governors, and when Governor Herbert Stanley was the chief guest at the privena prizegiving in 1926, the address presented to him began with these words: 'The king named George the Fifth, in whose dominions the sun, as though unable to overreach his sway, never sets, may he live long, steeped in glory.' (132) Kalukondayave's 'pragmatism', as Prof. Seneviratne calls it, included also a hostility to Marxism, which, in his view, 'destroyed the traditional order and the mosaic of deference that ... sustained the idyllic harmony of the village community.' (83) Marxism' here obviously referred to the activity of those who were its pioneers in Ceylon, the LSSP.
I want to ask now: can Prof. Seneviratne's distinction between the pragmatic' and the 'ideological be sustained? I would suggest that all Social action implies an ideology, even when the ideology underlying it is unformulated and the actor is unconscious of it. However, in Kalukondayave's case, the ideology seems to have been quite consciously held, in his conception of the idyllic traditional village and in his acceptance of existing authority - whether colonial or indigenous - as given' and not to be challenged or undermined. Prof. Seneviratne himself describes Kalukondayave's position on Social questions as 'conservative', and isn't conservatism an ideology? I would raise similar questions about Prof. Seneviratne's sharp distinction between the political and the 'economic'. The program of rural development of Kalukondayave and his fellow-monks was one of ameliorating poverty through self-help. But, like the later Sarvodaya movement, which probably drew inspiration from it, it was incapable of confronting the structural causes of poverty; to do that it would have had to question the political framework

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within which it was content to work. What is most striking is Prof. Seneviratne's own response to these limitations of the Vidyodaya program, which for him is praiseworthy because of these very limitations. Quoting the address to Governor Stanley, he first remarks that 'it is possible to describe it as the epitome of servility“ (132) — only “possible' because that isn't his ultimate judgment on it. He goes on to describe how Kalukondayave, on receiving a prize from Govenor Robert Chalmers, felt as if he went to heaven'. (133) Years later, however, looking back on these feelings, he felt embarrassed that he, as a monk, had gone to the feet of a layman'. But he ultimately justified himself by reflecting that his original feeling of exultation was only natural, considering the deference at that time to colonial governors. Now comes Prof. Seneviratne's assessment. There is a healthy realism in this attitude, as if to say it is too bad that there is imperialist domination, but it is a fact that it is there, and one should make the best of the situation."(134) This apologia seems to me problematic. The receipt of the prize was in 1915 (a significant year: that of martial law). I don't know when the autobiography, in which his later feelings are recorded, was written, but Prof. Seneviratne gives the publication date as 1970. If we assume that it wasn't written much earlier, there was half a century between the heavenly feeling and the embarrassment - a period during which the political landscape had been transformed beyond recognition. So there's no evidence that in 1915 Kalukondayave thought of all the rationalizations that Prof. Seneviratne attributes to him.
But what is most startling in this part of the book is Prof. Seneviratne's speculation on an alternative political history. It occurs in a footnote: "It is possible to speculate that, had Vidyodaya, with its realistic view of imperialism, triumphed over Vidyalankara with its bitter and paranoid view, the fate of the country would have been different. It would, then, have

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been placed on the path of realism, accommodating the necessary evil of imperialism and using it to the country's advantage. Such an attitude also would have bred pluralism and a willingness to accommodate ethnic and other minorities as well as tolerance and the creative accommodation of dissent.(134) In the first place, I don't understand what Prof. Seneviratne means by his hypothesis, Had Vidyodaya triumphed over Vidyalankara...' He has already told us that Kalukondayave 'accepted the conservative indigenous political leadership of the day that ruled the country in collaboration with the colonial power'. And that conservative leadership exercised power for at least a good quarter of a century, from 1931 to 1956. And they did follow on the national scale what Kalukondayave practised in his own activity - co-operating with the British , while from the forties onwards they denounced the Vidyalankara monks as 'political bhikkus’ who were subverting Buddhism. So in those years Vidyodaya did triumph, or at least its outlook did, but this didn't lead to the beneficent results Prof. Seneviratne envisages; instead, it was a period largely of political, economic and cultural stagnation whose legacy of unresolved problems provoked the explosions after 1956. Secondly, what the language of the passage I quoted reveals to me is Prof. Seneviratne's deep distrust of politics. Realism', pragmatism', 'sobriety', as against bitter' and paranoid" - this is a wishful effort to exorcise the demon of the political.
I think the wish that Prof. Seneviratne indulges here betrays a failure of political understanding. The happy three-cornered co-operation between Vidyodaya, the imperial regime and the indigenous, conservative, 'natural leadership belonged to an era that was doomed by two developments. One was the institution of universal franchise by the British themselves, in the teeth of opposition from the national leadership; the other, a consequence of mass politics under universal suffrage, was free education. These two developments created an educated

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and increasingly politically active electorate, under the conditions of a stagnant or sluggish economy. The Sri Lankan political system failed to resolve the acute tensions resulting from this contradiction, which was further accentuated by the ethnic and cultural cleavages concomitant with the absence of a truly unifying national culture. Given a far-seeing and enlightened political leadership, we might have carried through the liberating and democratizing aspects of the changes in and after 1956 and avoided, or at least minimized, the retrogressive and destructive. That this did not happen was a national tragedy, but even of the actual outcome of the post-1956 changes, it must not be forgotten that the former aspects were as real as the latter. In any case, there was no way in which the idealized colonialist or semi-colonialist order of Prof. Seneviratne's imagination could have been preserved - not after the social effects of universal franchise and free education matured , so his is "an incantation to summon the spectre of a rose'.
When Prof. Seneviratne turns from Vidyodaya to Vidyalankara, the tone changes from the laudatory and lyrical to the vigorously and uncompromisingly critical. The shift is announced already in the heading of the relevant chapter: Vidyalankara: The Descent into Ideology' (my emphasis), and for Prof. Seneviratne, such a development must necessarily be a fall. I must make clear the implications of this view. For Prof. Seneviratne, Dharmapala was ideological because he was opposed to imperialism from his own standpoint, though he was partially redeemed because he also engaged in the 'nonpolitical' activity of reviving the village economy. The Vidyalankara monks were also ideological because they were anti-imperialist and declared themselves to be socialist, but the Vidyodaya monks weren't because they pragmatically' accepted the status quo. As I have already indicated, I can't accept such a definition of what is political and what is not.
Much of the chapter on Vidyalankara is taken up by the

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argument against the text Bhiksuvage Urumaya, which urged that the crucial role of the monk in contemporary Society was that of 'social service'. Prof. Seneviratne argues, and I think rightly, that 'social service here was a kind of code-word for political activism. He places the political orientation of the Vidyalankara monks as a movement deriving, on the one hand, from the nationalism of Dharmapala, and, on the other, from the new Marxist politics, principally of the LSSP. By the mid1940s these monks became openly associated with Marxism in general and the LSSP in particular. As later developments show, the Marxism of these monks was superficial... The Vidyalankara monks continued to talk about socialism, but this has to be distinguished from the international socialism of the Marxists. Theirs was rather a "Buddhist socialism." Increasingly it became more Buddhist than socialist, and in the mid-1950s it turned into a hegemonic Sinhala Buddhist chauvinism." (131)
I regret, as much as Prof. Seneviratne does, that the brilliant constellation of monks who became prominent at Vidyalankara in the 1940s should have succumbed by 1956 to the hegemonic Sinhala Buddhist political project. But there is much in Prof. Seneviratne's account of them that I find wanting. In the greater part of this book, he shows himself to be a conscientious and careful researcher, even when one disagrees with his conclusions: but in respect of the Vidyalankara monks, he hasn't done enough homework, perhaps because of his disfavour for them. In the case of the Vidyodaya hero-giants' we get a clear picture of the processes and influences by which they reached their kind of social activism. With the Vidyalankara monks, we have only generalities about their intellectual and political evolution. This is a shortcoming, because the influence of the LSSP on the Vidyalankara radical monks represents, to my mind, the promising potentialities of Sri Lankan political history that remained unfulfilled. If it has been fullfilled, it could have been far more productive than the triumph

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of 'pragmatic Vidyodaya that Prof. Seneviratne would have wished.
We learn relatively little from Prof. Seneviratne's book about how the principal Vidyalankara monks came to consider themselves socialists. All I can say from personal knowledge is that in the late 1930s Walpola Rahula was a student at what was then the Ceylon University College, and was a member of the LSSP's student group there. The other Vidyalankara monks did not have those opportunities, so I presume they were drawn to socialism by the propaganda and activity of the LSSP in the pre-war years. That was the period when the LSSP was an open, broadly radical mass party, not yet committed fully to Marxism, except in the convictions of some of its leaders. I remember Hector Abhayavardhana, who was then my mentor in the LSSP, giving me in 1939 a booklet that had been presented to him by Kotahene Pannakitti, another of that constellation of monks. It was called Sahityaya ha Samajaya (Literature and Society); I read it and was impressed. But the Vidyalankara monks could have had no significant contacts with the LSSP in the wartime years when the party was underground and the main leaders were either in jail until 1942 or in India. Meanwhile in those same years the party went through fundamental changes in political orientation and organization which would have made them uninterested in maintaining their influence on a group of Buddhist socialists' in yellow robes. This was a pity, fecause there was a considerable reservoir there of talent, energy and capacity for dedicated work. The best remembered of these monks today is Walpola Rahula because of his standing and international reputation as a scholar of Buddhism. But I think the most original and creative mind among them was Yakkaduve Pragnarama, a writer in Sinhala of rare talent, with an ability to draw for literary purposes on the rich resources of colloquial Sinhala, and a personality of quiet but magnetic force. Prof. Seneviratne describes his dra

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matic confrontation with D.S. Senanayake at a meeting of the Vidyalankara executive committee and pirivena staff at the height of the controversy on political bhikkus’, as they were called, in 1947. But perhaps more permanently significant was the vigour of his satirical and polemical writing in his Vana Katha (Jungle Tales). It was brought out as a translation of the Panchatantra, but like Ezra Pound translating Propertius so as to make him a contemporary, Yakkaduve made the stories from the Panchatantra a vehicle of his criticism of the Sri Lankan political powers of the time.
I can't agree with Prof. Seneviratne in his wholly negative picture of the political activism of the Vidyalankara monks. In their opposition to the political establishment in the 'forties and early 'fifties they did play a positive role which was measurable by the intensity of the anger against them of that establishment. Prof. Seneviratne says the Marxism of these monks was 'superficial' (131). I would go even further and say they weren't Marxists at all. I don't have space here to make a textual analysis of the Kelaniya Declaration of Independence of 1947, with its compound of the Declaration of the Rights of Man, the American Declaration of Independence, the Gettysburg Address, and the Mahavamsa. As for Prof. Seneviratne's characterization of these monks, at least initially, as "Buddhist socialists; I see nothing objectionable in such a position, just as I have nothing against Christian liberation theology, although I am a non-believer in either religion and am interested in religion in general only in respect of its Social and political effects. In fact, I would say that if the Vidyalankara monks could have consistently sustained a radical Buddhist socialism, free of sectarian ethno-religious nationalism, it would have been a positive contribution to Sri Lankan political culture.
Why didn't this happen? I don't think one can answer this question without looking at the political and intellectual evolution of the LSSP itself.

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The LSSP when it began was handed a great historical opportunity because there was in Sri Lanka, unlike in India, no vigorously anti-imperialist national movement led by the bourgeoisie. It was thus open to it to work towards winning hegemony over the national movement by developing a socially radical, militantly anti-imperialist, but also inclusive Lankan nationalism. This could have been the only viable alternative to the divisive and destructive ethno-nationalism of both North and South. In other words, it could have played a role analogous to that of the Chinese and Vietnamese Communist parties, though its strategy and mode of operation would have had to be different, considering the fact that we had a parliamentary political structure and universal franchise. To some extent, the pre-war LSSP did develop in such a direction, but that process was short-circuited when it embraced the theory and objectives of permanent revolution. This involved rejecting nationalism altogether, and concentrating on mobilizing the proletariat for revolutionary struggle. I can't really blame the Vidyalankara monks for not joining in the pursuit of this will-of-the-wisp. But with the LSSP's turn to an ideologically sectarian and myopically economistic Marxism, there was lost the possibility of a broad alliance of forces across the country standing for radical Social change but rejecting the deceptive and disintegrative racist options.
The last chapters of this book are less unified than the first four. Prof. Seneviratne surveys a wide range of contemporary monks engaged in Social and political activism. Some of them are followers of the paths opened by Dharmapala and theorized by Rahula, but operating on right, centre and left. Others are products of a different development altogether: the open economy, globalization and the large-scale entry of foreign capital, and are no more than entrepreneurs in robes. What, however, holds these chapters together is Prof. Seneviratne's sustained antipathy to politics. For instance, when he discusses

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Inamaluve Sumangala Thero, the chief monk at the Dambulla Vihara, who organized the protests and demonstrations against the construction of the Kandalama Hotel, he can see him only as a clever and able political strategist. He seems to find it impossible even to give him credit for the fact that when he broke with the Asgiriya Chapter, he threw ordination open to people of all castes - an action that must surely be applauded. One of the great failures in the practice of modern Sri Lankan Buddhism has been its inability to root out caste, not just in Sinhala society but within the Sangha itself.
I suppose I should make a brief response to Prof. Seneviratne's discussion of an article, written by me for the Lanka Guardian in 1970 and titled 'Where are the Radical Buddhist?", about the absence of a radical socio-political movements in Sri Lanka basing itself on Buddhism. Prof. Seneviratne says my article was thoughtful, but more important for the question I raised than for the answers I gave. (319-320). I agree. I think now that the error in my twenty year-old article was that I looked for an explanation of the phenomenon I was discussing in the social context of original Buddhism rather than in the social forces that have shaped its thought and practice in modern Sri Lanka.
To conclude, The Work of Kings is the product of the trauma of a sensitive, decent and liberal-minded scholar in the face of the current careerism, corruption and violence of Sri Lankan politics. He has looked into the eye of the Gorgon, and though he hasn't been turned to stone, some of his critical facilities have been numbed. This is the only explanation. I can find, not only for his wish that there had been a more orderly development with Vidyodaya working hand in hand with the colonial regime and the indigenous bourgeoisie, but also for what is perhaps the most astonishing thing in the book - his idealization of antiseptic and authoritarian Singapore. Under able, disciplined and honest leadership, Singapore, a small city state

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with practically no conventional resources, was able to achieve an admirable standard of living and opportunities for its people.' (footnote, p. 161) Is it really necessary to remind Prof. Seneviratne that the achievements, such as they were, of that 'able, disciplined and honest leadership' have rested on the denial of those very democratic and human rights to which Prof. Seneviratne expresses his commitment in his first chapter? It will be remembered that he also expected the 'creative accommodation of dissent to have been one of the good results if the Vidyodaya pragmatism' had triumphed in Sri Lanka. Singapore has hardly been known for its "accommodation of dissent, creative or otherwise. The reaction against contemporary social and political disorder in Sri Lanka seems to have induced in Prof. Seneviratne a nostalgia for order at any price. But this is an intellectual and emotional temptation that should be resisted. There are many examples from regimes of both right and left in the modern world to demonstrate that an order that is imposed coercively from above is in the long run unstable and impermanent, and when it collapses, the resulting convulsions may be all the more violent because of the intensity of the pressures that have been dammed.
I said The Work of Kings was a tragic document because it is a cry of despair, and in that sense, for all its scholarship, courage and honesty, it is unfruitful. There are plenty of demons around us, but they are not to be exorcised by recoiling from the political in disgust and horror. The only remedy for the evils of a bad politics is a better one. And as I closed this book, I wanted to say to Prof. Seneviratne: "Cheer up, HL, we're in a bad way alright, but it isn't as desperate as you think. Forty years ago a group of monks brought the Prime Minister to his knees simply by squatting on Rosmead Place, and forced him to tear up the Bandaranaike-Chelvanayakam pact. Then you could hardly find a single monk to support him. Now, in this year's political battle on the constitution and devolution, the

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Sangha were divided - more divided than you thought possible when you wrote your book. Not because all the monks on one side had been intellectually converted to pluralist democracy, but because, like a lot of other Sinhala people, they had learnt the hard way, through sixteen years of war, terrorism
and suicide bombings. It's a slow, costly and painful way of learning, but unfortunately, you know, HL., that's the way most people do learn. And even for the sake of ethnic peace I wouldn't wish we had a Lee Kuan Yew to bully and terrorise us into learning faster."
Endnotes
H.L. Seneviratne, The Work of Kings (University of Chicago Press, 1999). Page references to quotations from this book are given in parentheses in the body of this paper.
* I should explain that I am following the practice of the author who frequently refers to well-known monks by the first part of their names denoting their village - a practice that is often adopted also in popular Sinhala usage. He also drops the customary prefix "The Venerable" since monks' names are so frequently cited in the book, and the invariable use of this prefix would mar the reader's smooth progress. This does not mean any disrespect to the monks mentioned. They are all venerable men.“(xv).
There was a point during the reading of this book at which I stopped and metaphorically rubbed my eyes - at p. 202, where it refers to the 'decline in all fields of academic and artistic activity' since 1956. Academic' I would grant, though even there the issues seem to me more complex than emerges from his book. But 'artistic? Is everything innovative and creative in Sinhala literature, theatre, film and music of the last forty years to be written off as worthless? And how much, apart from the fiction of Martin

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Wickramasinghe, has the pre-1956 period to show in comparison?
These points are more fully argued in my Working Underground: The LSSP in Wartime, A Memoir of Happenings and Personalities (ICES, 1999), The sterility and unreality of the LSSP's 'international socialism’ should be evident from the fact that it was no more effective than the populist socialism of the Vidyalankara monks in preventing surrender, in and after 1964, to Sinhala ethno-nationalism.
5 The voiciferousness of those monks who take the extreme Sinhala nationalist position, and the prominence given to them by the private owned media for their own political purposes, tend to create an exaggerated impression of their influence on publicopinion. The 2000 general election confirmed the fact of its decline.
Nethra, Vol. 4, No. 3 & 4, April - September 2000

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Bandaranalike - The Man and the Legend
He has been dead for two years, but he remains the dominant figure in our political life. His spirit, like that of another historic victim of assassination, 'walks abroad.'
Those who believed that the forces he set in motion had been interred with his ashes were confounded by the discovery that he was perhaps even more powerful in death than in life.
Yet today when the devotion of his followers and the gratitude of a people have turned him into a legend and a symbol, we have to make an effort to discern the man beneath.
Only the willfully blind could fail to see the impact on his time - greater than that of any other Ceylonese of this century. But to discern the true nature of that impact, we must see it free of the distorting haze of both hostile prejudice and admiring adulation.
Conservative minds have pictured him as the fateful Pandora who let loose on this country the forces of social unrest which till then had been safely locked up within the iron case of authority. The verdict of the future may be very different.
He may well be seen then as the most intelligent and farsighted politician of his generation and his class, who saw that

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it was not possible to rule indefinitely in the old way, who sought to save social stability by adapting himself to the inevitable processes of change instead of provoking a violent explosion by resisting them.
His political heirs see him as the path-finder in whose footsteps we must walk unswervingly, whose precepts and whose practice are the only map and compass we need to guide us to the promised land.
He made no such claims for himself. It would probably have surprised, or even amused, him to see his most casual pronouncements transformed into a creed and a dogma. It would scarcely have occurred to him - the great empiricist who was always ready to change with events - to believe that the solutions and expedients he adopted during one period could be immutable for all time.
He saw himself, perhaps as history will see him, as a bridgebuilder between one era and another. "I look upon our Government," he said in 1958, "as in some way laying the foundations in preparing the way for a more progressive line of thinking and action in this country.
Believing that his function was to smoothen the process of social change, he did not try to lay down in advance a rigid course which that process should follow. If he did not have the singleness of purpose of the social engineer who relentlessly drives a straight road through all obstacles, he rarely faced the risk of being overturned by failing to zig-zag when the lie of the land required him to do so.
More fully than any other politician of his time, he saw the social and cultural forces which demanded a new order, but he left behind no magic formula for completing the work which he left unfinished.
What he bequeathed to the future was not a set of cast

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iron solutions but a certain political vision. It is fitting that as always he should have the last word:
"Symbolically, I feel that I am in my own small way both a nurse and a midwife. That is the function that I consider I am performing in this new world in our country. I am the nurse at a deathbed. I realize at least that the patient is dying. I would like to see, as anybody should, at every deathbed, that the death is reasonably peaceful and dignified. That anyone should try artificially to galvanise the dying thing into life would be as shocking to me as that anyone should place his hand on the throat of the dying thing and squeeze out the life that is already fast ebbing away.
I am also, I feel, a midwife at the birth of a new era. I would like that birth to be auspicious and painless as far as possible. I am not impatient to perform a Caesarean operation. I am not impatient to drag the living thing before its time out of the womb with instruments and bring forth to the world something grotesque and distorted. I am also not prepared to strangle that life in its womb."

Political Biography and the Role of Personality
Political biography is a genre that requires its practitioner to make up his mind about the role of personality in the historical process. It is possible for a historian to regard individuals as merely epiphenomena of classes or other social forces, but nobody holding such a view is likely to take to the writing of biography. Not that the biographer need assume that it is great men who make history, and James Manor explicitly disavows such a view. But we are entitled to expect that we may derive from a biography an understanding of what the individual personality of the man, his strength or his weaknesses, contributed to the course of events.
James Manor's book on Bandaranaike belongs strictly to the category of political biography, since it doesn't deal with its subject's personal life except in so far as it is relevant to his political role. This Manor tells us little or nothing about Bandaranaike's relations with his sisters, or with his wife and children, because these don't enter into his political story. But the biography does present in considerable detail the circumstances of Bandaranaike's childhood and youth before he entered the political arena. That is because Manor believes that the personality and character structure formed then had a good deal to do with his conduct in public life in later years. From Bandaranaike's own autobiographical accounts, the family papers and the reminiscences of his associates Manor has been

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able to build up a convincing portrait of the boy and the young
ΥΘΙΟΥ,
It is well known that Bandaranaike's father, Sir Solomon Dias Bandaranaike, was the Maha Mudaliyar, who in the early years of the century was considered the first Sinhalese gentleman'. His mother came from the Obeyesekere family who were also among the small super-elite at the apex of the Sinhalese society'. However, relations between father and mother at the time the young Solomon came into the world were mutually hostile. Lady Bandaranaike not only considered her own family superior to her husband's but with justice regarded herself as being better educated than her husband. "Lady Bandaranaike had little hesitation," writes Manor, "in pouring scorn upon Sir Solomon even before guests and often in coarse terms.' The outcome of these quarrels was that during Bandaranaike's childhood - somewhere between his eighth and eleventh years - his mother had to leave the ancestral estate at Horagolla together with her two small daughters. Thereafter the young Solomon grew up alone with his father, and saw his mother only at infrequent intervals. Manor brings out the fact that this break was a severe shock for the boy. "Young Solomon," he writes, "spent much of his youth in a state of near isolation, largely cut off from sustained, intimate relationships." The isolation was all the greater because the father insisted that his son should not even mix with children of other elite families. Young Solomon was taught by British tutors till the age of sixteen, and then, when he was admitted to St. Thomas, Sir Solomon arranged that he should stay not in the school hostel but in Warden Stone's bungalow.
Bandaranaike's childhood upbringing left him with both a fear of his father's domineering authority and an anger and resentment against it; yet he couldn't escape the paternal influence. What Sir Solomon stamped on his son was the conviction that he was exceptional and marked out from birth for a

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great destiny. While still a schoolboy he wrote, "I was brought up with the idea of greatness and superiority to others surrounding me and imbued with the notion of my greatness to come." However even more revealing than this statement by an adolescent is the extraordinary passage he was able to write as an adult in his 'thirties on the same subject. Posturing and humourless, it is a deadly self-exposure of personal vanity:
"I suppose, in my own small way, I am one of those unfortunate beings who are driven by destiny. In passing, I may say that I have a deep sympathy for the much harassed, but pious, Aeneas. Not for such, is a life of quiet or happiness or the enjoyment of the ordinary pleasures of men. As a boy at school, as an undergraduate at Oxford, and now in the wider arena of life, I have ever been conscious of some task I had to perform, of the need for striving and effort that appears to have no end, but rather to increase in the widening circle of a ripple on the surface of a pool. But there is also a part of me that longs for ease and quiet. Sometimes I yearn with a fierce yearning for the calm content of a priest, sheltered in his cloistered temple, or the care-free happiness of some jungle-dweller with the singing of the birds about him and the blue sky above him, or even the humdrum life of the average man with its small delights and small troubles. But, alas! It cannot be.'
Equally self-betraying are his expressions of his belief in his intellectual superiority, as when during his Prime Ministership he spoke of his wish to retire and write a historical novel - "something like War and Peace." This conviction of superiority was no doubt intensified by the mediocrities who surrounded him in this period of his life and activity. "When a bumbling Cabinet colleague once quoted a man of letters in a speech to a public meeting, Bandaranaike turned to a journalistand said, 'You see, some of my ministers actually readbooks."
What is of concern to the student of politics, however, is how the character formed by Bandaranaike's early family mani

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fested itself in politics. Manor argues that his relations with his father shaped his subsequent dealings with authority. When Bandaranaike returned from Oxford in 1925, his father put on a show appropriate to a conquering hero. He was met at the jetty by a large family crowd and taken to All Saints Church for a thanksgiving service. "A few days later," writes Manor, "he was driven to the estate at Horagolla, the last three miles in a procession headed by a number of caparisoned elephants and attended by dancers and music'. At the boundaries of the estate, he was met by 'a mammoth crowd' gathered round "gorgeous pandals' where he was received with respectful obeisances' and presented with florid and obsequious addresses by local villagers. Then, on the lawn before the great house, there followed performances by beasts from Sir Solomon's private menagerie, a school sports meet, devil dances and fireworks." However, in answer to the speeches of welcome, Bandaranaike, much to his father's displeasure, said, "If fate has decreed for me a prominent place among you, it is not that I may be your master but that I may be your servant." He declined an allowance from his father, moved into a town house where he supported himself by his earnings at the Bar, and decided, again in opposition to his father's wishes, to take to a political career. However, when he fought his political battle, at the Municipal Council election for the Maradana ward in 1926 against the formidable A.E. Goonesinha, Bandaranaike depended on his father both to persuade the sitting member A.E. de Silva (later Sir Ernest), to stand down, and to use his influence with one of the powerful Muslims in the ward to secure their support.
Manor's argument is that this pattern of alternating rebellion and dependence in relation to his father was the prototype that foreshadowed his future behaviour towards figures who represented higher authority. He records three such relationships in Bandaranaike's later political life. One is the first

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State Council, where as backbencher he first castigated the Board of Ministers, and then, when he was slapped down by Jayatilaka and Senanayake, shifted to an attitude of submission and became the defender of the Ministers against outside criticism. The second occasion was when in wartime he clashed with Governor Caldecott. To the Governor's lack of co-operation with the Board of Ministers on the immigration issue, he reacted violently, making a personal attack on Caldecott, pouring Scorn on British war aims, and imposing a ban on local bodies making contributions to war funds. Caldecott replied by writing to Bandaranaike to say that these actions were inconsistent with his ministerial office. Apparently fearing dismissal, Bandaranaike backed down. That by itself might merely have signified that in the absence of a militant nationalist movement, Bandaranaike would have recognized his isolation. But what followed tends to support Manor's theory of a pattern in his behaviour where rebellion was followed by submission. He made another 'dramatic turnabout' as in the earlier case, and 'assumed the role of Governor's champion in the Board of Ministers'.
The third and perhaps most significant example of this syndrome was his relationship with D.S. Senanayake in the postindependence Cabinet. Between 1949 and 1951 Bandaranaike pressed within the U.N.P. government a number of mainly nationalist issues which were turned down by Senanayake and the rest of the Cabinet. Moreover, there occurred several incidents which seemed designed to humiliate Bandaranaike and push him to resignation. Yet even when his usually docile followers in the Sinhala Maha Sabha pushed for confrontation, Bandaranaike temporized. He took the final step of resignation in July 1951 only when Senanayake had left him with virtually no alternative.
Those who reject the projection of personal psychology into the study of political behaviour may find Manor's Erikson

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style analysis unacceptable. However, Manor has a strong point because he can find confirmation in Bandaranaike's own words. In his resignation speech in Parliament in 1951, Bandaranaike began by comparing his break with Senanayake with his decision in 1926 to take to politics against his father's wishes. Of that earlier step he said, "I was faced with a most difficult decision involving not only personal relations with those whom I would not wish to displease but also certain sacrifices and hardships for myself. It would seem that I am faced with a similar decision once again now." He went on to say of his resignation, "I have conquered myself."
The discussion of Bandaranaike's attitude to authority leads naturally to the question of how he exercised it when he attained the position of head of the government. But I think it is necessary to preface this part of my review with a consideration of Bandaranaike's political philosophy. For this purpose I wish to cite two quotations from Bandaranaike himself. The first is on the subject of truth:
"Whatever may be the eternal verities, truth itself is in many ways a relative thing. What is true today may not have been true yesterday, and may not be true tomorrow. What is true for one person need not necessarily be true for another. Very often, the whole truth lies neither entirely on one side, nor on the other. It is very often, a rather puzzling compound of many things."
The second quotation is on the subject of social change, and was made in a parliamentary speech when Bandaranaike still sat on the UNP front bench. It may therefore be taken to have been intended to mark his differences with Senanayake on the one hand and the left on the other:
"I feel that I am in my own small way both a nurse and a midwife. I am a nurse at a deathbed. I realize at least that the thing is dying. I would like to see, as should be the case at

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every deathbed, that the death is reasonably peaceful and dignified. It shocks me equally that anyone should try artificially to galvanize the dying thing into life and that anyone should place his hand at the throat of the dying thing and squeeze out the life that is already fast ebbing.
"I am also, I feel, a midwife at a birth. I would like that birth to be auspicious and painless as far as possible. I am not impatient to drag the living thing before its time out of the womb with instruments and bring forth to the world something grotesque and distorted. I amalso not prepared to strangle that life in its womb."
When Bandaranaike used his metaphor of the midwife, he was probably borrowing and transforming Marx's application of it in his famous aphorism. "Force is the midwife of every old society pregnant with the new." He was, in other words, rejecting the forceps of revolution. But in his casting of himself in the roles of both nurse and midwife, and in the way in which he conceptualizes these roles, there is a devaluation of the tasks of political leadership. Change is seen as an organic process that is already taking place and will inevitably be consummated in Society; the function of the leader is only to create the conditions under which that process can be completed naturally and peacefully. Such a conception excludes both the choice of social goals as well as guidance and direction by leadership in the process of change. This becomes all the clearer when combined with the agnosticism in respect of truth declared in the other passage. If 'truth" itself is so indeterminate and many-sided, what else is there for leadership to do but let social forces express themselves freely and work out their own directions?
I don't want to deny that there are certain attractive features in such a political position, if one compares it with that of a Pol Pot or a Wijeweera who is dogmatically convinced of the

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infallibility of his own political model and wishes to impose it by force on society. But the record of Bandaranaike's premiership is a demonstration on the other hand of the disastrous consequences of his abdication of the legitimate and necessary tasks of leadership in a democratic society. I cannot go here into every aspect of this weakness - what Manor calls his "general and quite astonishing tendency to make unwarranted concessions to almost any groups that demanded them". But the most costly manifestation of this habit was in the ethnic conflict between Sinhalese and Tamils.
Bandaranaike had begun by endorsing in all sincerity the general consensus among political leaders of the mid-forties onwards for equality of official status between Sinhala and Tamil. During his phase as an internal opposition within the UNP Cabinet, he urged - quite correctly - that nothing was being done to replace English in its official functions by both national languages. When in the mid 1950s linguistic nationalism surfaced among the Sinhala-speaking middle classes and a few intellectuals who spearheaded their cause, they didn't think originally of Bandaranaike as their potential leader. This was natural in view of the contradictions in Bandaranaike's image and public behaviour. Although he had wooed these same social groups through the Sinhala Maha Sabha from 1937 onwards, he also projected a distinctly anglicized and elite personality - a contradiction that was to persist to the end of his days. Manor records how in 1938 he appeared in national dress at a public meeting and condemned the adoption of English customs, but within a fortnight was photographed wearing a western suit alongside his greyhound Billy Micawber, winner of six prizes at the Kennel Club dog show'. He also relates how on assuming the Premiership Bandaranaike substituted, at the weekly press conference-cum-breakfast, kiribath for Sir John's egg hoppers, but spoilt the effect by himself eating the symbolically national food with a spoon. I should like to add to these

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anecdotes one not told by Manor but derived from my own experience in the parliamentary press gallery after 1956. As Prime Minister, Bandaranaike was once involved in heated cross-talk with Robert Gunawardena. The argument was in English, and Robert at one point said something that was rather inelegant grammar. Bandaranaike turned on him in withering scorn and said, "Why don't you speak a language you understand? Speak Sinhalese!" His tones left no doubt that this was a language fit only for the lower orders. The Prime Minister must have recollected himself later, for when Hansard came out, it didn't report the remark.
So it was not to Bandaranaike that the Sinhala nationalists first went in 1955 when they wanted a charismatic politician to espouse their cause but to the Dudley Senanayake. It was only after Dudley turned them down that they fell back on Bandaranaike. When the SLFP responded to this offer by passing its resolution on language policy in September 1955, Bandaranaike framed it in a form that was much more liberal than the later 1956 Act, and in fact approximated to the presentday regional solution. "Sinhala would be the language used by all court, government offices and local boards except in the Northern and Eastern Provinces where the language should be Tamil." From then onwards, Bandaranaike, in keeping with his practice of yielding to articulate pressure groups, steadily gave way to chauvinist demands for pure 'Sinhala only". The final and most shameful surrender was the abrogation of the Bandaranaike-Chelvanayakam pact in response to the group of monks who squatted outside his house at Rosemead Place. Let me quote Manor:
"He (Bandaranaike) drove to the radio station and announced to the nation that the Bandaranaike-Chelvanayakam pact was dissolved. He then returned home and informed the bhikkus of the announcement, but they demanded a declaration in writing. He refused, saying that it was unnecessary,

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and still they insisted. He then consented, but before they took their leave the bhikkus’ leader added further humiliation by asking that the Federal Party be banned, that demonstrators among the estate Tamils be sent back to India and that Tamil lettering be deleted from the official stamp that government employees used on correspondence. The premier explained that he had the power only to accomplish the last of these, and promised to do so."
This and similar episodes have a bearing on the paradox summed up in the title that Manor has chosen for his biography, The Expedient Utopian. I am not sure whether "utopian" is the most appropriate word in this context to relate to Bandaranaike's inchoate liberalism and idealism. But the combination between this and his quite evident readiness to compromise his principles in the face of political necessity can probably be explained by the political philosophy that I have already described. Perhaps Bandaranaike saw no inconsistency between the two because his brand of populism was dependent on the assumption that whenever supposedly popular forces asserted themselves, authority should bend before them.
How far does Bandaranaike bear the responsibility for the cycle of ethnic violence that has devastated our society for three decades and more since his time? I would recognize that ethnic assertion, on the part of both Sinhalese and Tamils, was inevitable in the post-independence era, and that inherent in this process was some degree of conflict. It is also true that some of the sting might have been taken out of these divisive trends if in the first post-independence decade the politicians in power had acted speedily and farsightedly to accommodate the emergent nationalist forces; this they could have done by honestly implementing the change-over to the national languages in official spheres to which they had committed themselves five years before independence. However, the UNP leaderships in power were too myopic, too limited in vision by

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their class and cultural orientation to move in such a direction. It is also possible that the nationalist pressures might have been partially relieved if Bandaranaike had not been edged out of the UNP and if he had succeeded D.S. Senanayake as Prime Minister on the latter's death in 1952. He might then have found a more favourable climate in which to strive for the realization of the liberal elements of his political programme.
However, having indulged in these might-have-beens of history, I have to agree with Manor that much of the guilt for the actual, destructive course of events lies at Bandaranaike's door, by virtue of both what he did and what he didn't do. But when one has recognized that his weakness of personality and his peculiarity passive conception of the role of leadership contributed to these failures, I would be inclined to stress a cultural factor that Manor doesn't really take account of. Bandaranaike must have felt acutely conscious that he was an outsider to the Sinhala Buddhist forces that he had mobilized, and must therefore have seen himself as vulnerable and insecure before them. He could not have failed to be aware that as a scion of anglicized aristocrats and a Christian born, he could be readily represented as a betrayer of the Sinhala cause - as indeed he was stigmatized at various times by extreme chauvinists. This cultural insecurity in the face of the populist forces he himself summoned explains how easily he could be politically blackmailed by them, and how cynically he could sacrifice his liberal prinéiples for self-preservation under the pressure of these same forces.
I should like to illustrate this by an episode which I regard as even more revealing than the surrender to the bhikkus at Rosmead Place but which Manor doesn't adequately discuss. I refer to the assault of the Federal Party satyagrahis at Galle Face Green at the time of the introduction of the 'Sinhala only' bill in 1956. This event was against peaceful Tamil demonstrators. For my knowledge of the facts I am indebted to a jour

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nalist who was an eye-witness of the happenings and whose testimony I can trust. The satyagrahis who squatted on the Green were assaulted by thugs who took advantage of their Gandhian non-resistance, some of them were thrown into the Beira, and others were urinated on. However after Some time, the police appeared on the scene on their own initiative to keep the peace, and the thugs withdrew. Thereupon, says my eyewitness, the Prime Minister came down the steps of Parliament and summoned the officer in charge of the police party. The officer returned from his conversation with the Prime Minister and drove away with his men. The reasonable inference is that the Prime Minister had ordered the police away. Soon after, the thugs returned to the scene and renewed their attacks. Up to this point the facts can probably be confirmed by many other people who were present on the scene. For the rest of the story I am dependent on my journalist friend. He says that many years later the police officer concerned confirmed to him that Bandaranaike had indeed ordered him to take his men and go'. He returned to police headquarters, but later in the evening the IGP told him that the Prime Minister wanted the police to go back to Galle Face. (Perhaps the Prime Minister had lost his nerve). The officer then told the IGP that he had been ordered away from the scene by the Prime Minister himself, and he was not going back. Shortly after, he sent in his resignation from the force and emigrated.
Bandaranaike's action on this occasion may seem surprising, for he was not vindictive towards his political opponents. The Lake House press had treated him shabbily when he was in opposition, and tried persistently to destablise his government when he was in power, but he didn't accept the idea of nationalizing it even when this was proposed by one of his backbenchers. It is reasonable to conjecture, as Manor does, that he would have disapproved of his widow doing so after his death. Manor also records the fact that his fallen opponent,

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Sir John Kotelawala was allowed to bend exchange control regulations' in order to buy a farm in Kent. I can therefore explain his really shocking behaviour towards the Tamil satyagrahis only by the supposition that he felt he had to support Sinhala chauvinist toughs in order to retain credibility with them. In such circumstances, he evidently could submerge not only his liberalism but even the canons of proper conduct for a head of government.
One last encounter between personal psychology and political behaviour. While Manor is ready to convict Bandaranaike of opportunism on several occasions, he disagrees with the view that he was simply, as used to be said, "a Donoughmore Buddhist". He produces evidence that Bandaranaike had never been seriously attached to Christian belief, and argues plausibly that his conversion to Buddhism was due to genuine respect for what he took to be its rationality. Bandaranaike's version of Buddhism was, in other words, the Protestant Buddhism of many middle-class intellectuals, and he didn't share the belief in supernatural cults held by many Sinhala Buddhists. Not, that is, until his personality weakened under the political stresses of his last year. Manor deals illuminatingly with the strange episode of his traffic with the gods in the last months of his life. Earlier, when his wife visited the Lunawa temple to fulfil a vow to the Kataragama god, Bandaranaike accompanied her but remained an onlooker at the ceremony. However, in July 1959 with his parliamentary majority eroded and his government facing the prospect of defeat, he consulted a light reader' in the South, and on her advice, revisited Lunawa. This time he participated in the ceremonies from which he had distanced himself on the earlier occasion. Surrounded by Kavadi dancers, he carried the gem-studded gold image of the God Kataragama on his head from the Devale to place the statue on the chariot at the start of the procession. Two months before his assassination, this episode provided a bizarre finale

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to the many contradictions of his life and personality.
In attempting to draw up the balance sheet of Bandaranaike's career, I would like to take my point of departure from a sentence in Manor's introductory chapter. He says that Bandaranaike "did more than anyone else to institutionalize these two largely contradictory themes - chauvinism and reform - as core elements of the island's politics." I would like to raise the question of how we should understand the term "reform" as a major component of Bandaranaike's political life. I am not inclined as much as Manor to give weight to his social welfare programme: he was not an innovator in this respect, since welfare was one of the main thrusts of all governments since independence. But reform of the political system, in the sense of making government more open, more accessible, and therefore more responsive and democratic, was certainly one of his consciously held aims when he took power in 1956. The crowds who surged into the Parliament chamber after the opening session under his regime and the popular talk of "ape anduwa’ in the months following were, however naively, a recognition of these declared intentions of the new Prime Minister. At one level he succeeded in these aims. It may even be said that he could not have been assassinated so easily but for his practice of keeping open house to callers at Rosmead Place. Through his policies he gave a degree of social mobility to the Sinhala-educated and enabled some of them to rise to positions of political and administrative authority. But it was the fatal ingredient in this populism that it involved also the appeasement of the hegemonistic drives of the linguistic and religious majority. Not only therefore did he leave behind a country which was to remain more deeply divided than before his accession to power but his aspirations towards broadbasing government were compromised by these conflicts. In that sense Manor is right in saying that the two themes he institutionalized - chauvinism and reform - were contradictory. His ideas

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of regional devolution of power-part of the concept of locally based democracy that he had long cherished - were wrecked by ethnic conflict. Furthermore, the internecine divisions he failed to control ultimately led to growing militarization and authoritarianism of government in the hands of his successors - an outcome he could not have foreseen or desired but for which he unwittingly prepared the way.
THE EXPEDIENT UTOPIAN: Bandaranaike and Ceylon, by James Manor(Cambridge University Press, 1989: pp. 327+ bibliography and index).
The Thatched Patio, January/February 1990

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NM - A Political ASSessment
The strains of the funeral ceremony at Independence Square are coming over the radio as I sit writing this article - a ceremony which comes as a climax to what appeared to be a national consensus of right and left to mourn the departed leader of the Lanka Sama Samaja Party. Yet the bewildering diversity of the tributes paid to N.M. during this week - as revolutionary and leader of working-class struggles, as parliamentarian par excellence and constitutional scholar, as SinhalaBuddhist and defender of the rights of the Tamil-speaking people - mirrored the dichotomies of the man himself and of the political phenomenon that he represented. It would be too easy and too superficial to say that these dichotomies corresponded with the divergent halves of his political career - early and late. The reality seems to me more complex than that: it is rooted in the very origin and development of the political movement that he helped to found and to build.
The historic significance of the foundation of the Lanka Sama Samaja Party in 1935 was that it represented both the first militant anti-imperialist mass movement in Sri Lanka as well as the first attempt to bring a Marxist consciousness to the working class. The first of these tasks was one which elsewhere - and notably in neighbouring India - had been performed by bourgeois nationalist parties. It was, however, the very absence in Sri Lanka of abourgeoisie capable of leading a mass movement against imperialism which left this role unful

NM - A political assessment 28
filled until the formation of the LSSP. But this distinctive feature of Sri Lankan social development was also reflected in the dualistic character of the LSSP itself.
On the one hand, in the aspect in which it presented itself to the people as an open and public political party, the LSSP of 1935-40 was Marxist neither in its organization nor in its programme; it was a populist party agitating in the State Council and outside on a broadly anti-imperialist and social reformist platform. On the other hand, within the leadership of that party there existed an inner group imbued with Marxist theory which had very early set itself the goal of converting the LSSP into a revolutionary party of the working class with an organization of a classic Leninist character.
To the public at large the LSSP was represented in its first aspect above all by two figures-Philip Gunawardena and N.M. Perera - because they turned the legislature into a base for a struggle against both the colonial regime and its brown dependants. Of the party in its second aspect the public had little inkling until the post-war years, since the transformation of the original loosely-built open LSSP into a party of selected and politically educated cadres was consummated only under conditions of wartime illegality with four of its leaders in jail and its other activists reduced to the condition of a sect functioning in the underground.
In the inner party leadership which guided that transformation there was one dominant figure - Philip Gunawardena. His political leadership was then (and until the factional struggles which split the underground LSSP in 1942) accepted universally by his comrades in the party and in the leadership with the deference to his superior experience in the left movement abroad, his profound knowledge of Marxism, and the incisive and penetrating force of his political intellect. It was also Philip who steered the LSSP towards Trotskyism - a de

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velopment which was intelligible in Sri Lankan condition of the thirties and forties when the formulation of the Comintern of the Popular Front period just did not make sense in the local COntext.
Since both N.M. and Philip were to travel a long political distance between their beginnings and their ends, it is relevant to ask what in their personal qualities and their cast of mind helped them on this winding road. Both of them were, from the outset, divided figures, but the contradictions were of a very different character between the one and the other. Philip, in spite of the depth of his immersion in the Marxist political tradition, also had a part of his character and outlook which was coloured by the background in which he had been brought up - that of the rural landed gentry. This part of himself was not to emerge strongly until he had been driven into political isolation in the early fifties by his inherent incapacity to work in a party or an alliance except as unquestioned leader. But in that situation his hitherto submerged ties with his family and class background gained ascendancy and found expression in his compromises with Sinhala-Buddhist nationalism and with the coalition politics first of the S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike and then of the Dudley Senanayake government.
N.M's strengths and weaknesses were of a different kind. His mind had been formed in an urban, secular and rationalist context, and whatever public genuflections he may have made later to traditional pieties out of political expediency, it is quite wrong to make out, as some of his biographers in recent weeks have done, that these were the motive springs of his thought and action. Where Philip's compromises with communalism in the latter period of his career seemed to spring out of something deeply rooted in his origins, N.M's corresponding shifts went against the natural grain of his thinking. N.M's real duality lay in a different direction - his curious intellectual blend of Marx and Erskine May, of Trotsky and Harold Laski. In his

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formative years the essential habits of his thought had been shaped by the left-liberal outlook of the LSE, and the later accretions of Marxism and Trotskyism never really dislodged him from these first political roots. It is not surprising, therefore, that in the process of moving the LSSP in the direction of Leninist organizations and Trotskyist political theory. N.M. played a lesser role than not only Philip Gunawardena but also Colvin Ride Silva or Leslie Goonewardena.
Yet the end-product of the evolution of the LSSP was a party in which N.M. emerged as the commanding figure, overshadowing his colleagues - among them, some used to whisper in the forties that N.M. was fundamentally a social-democrat with a Marxist veneer. Of course, in the process of N.M's ascendancy, the LSSP itself underwent a transformation from a revolutionary to a social-democratic parliamentary party. Here Sri Lankan history belatedly took its revenge on the LSSP and its leadership. The nationalist bourgeoisie who had failed to materialize in the 1930s, thus giving the LSSP the historic opportunity to build an anti-imperialist mass movement, emerged in the fifties under the leadership of Bandaranaike, displacing the LSSP from its role of sole potential alternative to the UNP. By the time that Bandaranaike began to build his own future base of power, the LSSP, while still paying theoretical deference to revolutionary politics, had in practice found the main field of its activity in parliamentarianism.
●
The truth is that the transformation attempted by the leadership within the party in the forties had been carried out in insufficient depth: it affected only the leadership and the politically trained and educated cadres at the top but did not really reach the broad mass of members and followers, and was therefore soon submerged once the party became caught up in day-to-day trade union and parliamentary activity. In that shift N.M. appropriately played the leading role. His particular skills and personal temperament made him fully at home

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in the parliamentary arena. Not only was he deeply wedded to the convention and decorum of the parliamentary game played by House of Commons rules (where Philip at heart despised them), but his affable and equable temper (where Philip was volatile and unpredictable) was an asset in the giveand-take of parliamentary exchange, bargaining and compromise. The more the LSSP became involved, therefore, in the shadow-boxing of parliamentary politics, the more N.M. strengthened his dominant position in the party itself. But the inevitable result of that process was the coalitions of 1964-65 and 1970-75, in which N.M's social-democratic philosophy finally and irrevocably triumphed over the residual Marxism of his colleagues.
It is not really surprising, therefore that N.M's death should have evoked such a wide-ranging expression of grief and tribute from the most seemingly unexpected quarters, or that Government, State-controlled Press, radio and film should all have joined in paying homage to the dead man as a national hero. But N.M's death comes also at a time when the social and political evolution of Sri Lanka has already in the General Election of 1977, closed the doors on that era of compromise through parliamentary reformism and accommodation between classes which he incarnated and to the fruition of which he brought his talents. It may not be fanciful to suppose that the national consensus of widely different political elements which the mourning for N.M.'s death evoked was also the last regretful salute to the illusions of a past that has already ended.
Lanka Guardian, Vol. 2, No. 9, September 1, 1979

The 1971 InSurrection: CRM's Appeal to PM
10th December, 1971
The Hon. Sirimavo R. D. Bandaranaike Prime Minister's Office Colombo 1
Dear Madam,
We address you on behalf of the Civil Rights Movement, an organization committed to the protection and promotion of the civil rights and liberties of the people of Ceylon at all times. The organization regards these rights and liberties as a necessary accompaniment to radical, social and economic change and the movement towards an egalitarian Society.
As one of its immediate tasks the organization has decided to address this letter to you in order to appeal to you and your Government to restore certain rights and liberties of the people that have been suspended since the declaration of the state of emergency in March this year.
We recognize the fact that at the time of the declaration of the state of emergency the Government was faced with an unprecedented situation - the threat of an armed insurrection, which materialized a few weeks later in April. We consider,

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however that a democratic government, even when its own existence is imperiled, has certain obligations which it must respect in resorting to emergency powers. It must ensure that the interference with normal rights and liberties is no greater in extent or no longer in duration than the exigencies of the situation actually require. It would have been reasonable to expect therefore, that together with the restoration of order there would have been progressive relaxation of the emergency regulations affecting civil rights and liberties. We regret, however, that such a relaxation has not taken place to any appreciable extent. We welcome, indeed, the lifting of the curfew, as well as the restoration of civilian rule in certain districts. Our satisfaction in this latter respect, however, is much qualified by the continuance not only of the powers of military Co-ordinating Officers in some areas, but also of the far-reaching powers conferred on the police and armed forces by the emergency regulations throughout the island. Further, we regret to note that restrictions on freedom of expression and publication have not only been maintained but have in certain respects been extended. Press censorship has been intensified by fresh regulations and by directions that curtail the freedom of information and of criticism even on matters that have nothing to do with the insurgency or with national security. We see in these developments a grave danger to which any government that makes use of emergency powers is exposed when it prolongs such powers unduly. From the point of view of persons in authority emergency powers may come to appear a convenient, speedy and efficient instrument in comparison with the uncertain dilatory processes of democratic government. In these circumstances emergency rule can be a dangerous addiction which, if persisted in, may undermine democratic institutions.
The issues concerning specific rights and liberties that we raise below can broadly be divided into three groups. In the first instance, we ask for the lifting of certain emergency

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regulations that affect the general civil liberties of every citizen. Secondly, we ask for the restoration of those rights of trade unions and employees that have been suspended. Thirdly, we ask that action be taken to ensure certain rights of persons in custody and of any who may be taken into custody in the future. The principles in terms of which we have approached the first two groups of issues have already been indicated in the previous paragraph of this letter. A word of explanation is perhaps necessary in relation to the third group. We consider that just as much as a democratic government has certain obligations in exercising its powers in relation to the general body of citizens, it has also certain obligations evening dealing with persons who have broken the law or are alleged to have broken it. It must guarantee that all such persons are dealt with by due processes of law and in keeping with fundamental principles of justice. At the same time it has a duty to ensure that no person who has not committed an offence under the law is punished by indefinite detention or by other means. For otherwise a government would be flouting the principles of justice that are vital to democracy in the very act of claiming to defend democratic institutions.
We set out below the specific questions in respect of which we ask for action by you and your Government.
1. Right of public meeting
Under the emergency regulations in force the right to conduct public meetings has been restricted by the necessary to obtain police permission for this purpose. We ask that these restrictions be lifted with immediate effect. The right of free expression of opinion through public meetings is not only a fundamental democratic right; we consider that it is especially vital at the present time when important changes in social and economic policies have been initiated or are under consideration by your Government. We consider that the most

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certain guarantee of development in a progressive direction is the active interest, participation and pressure by the mass of the people. Freedom of expression through public meetings is one of the essential means by which the people can bring their views to bear on their elected representatives and participate in the shaping of national policy. We wish to urge, therefore, that political parties, trade unions and other organizations as well as the people in general must have the fullest freedom to discuss and express their views publicly on all national questions.
2. Lifting of censorship
The Press censorship imposed in the early period of the emergency has not only been sustained but has also been tightened by new directions given under the emergency regulations at a time when the situation in the country was easing. Under the present emergency regulations censorship extends, as we have already pointed out, to matters that have nothing to do with the insurgency or with national security. Editorial comment, on any subject, has to be submitted for approval by the Competent Authority, and we have observed that this directive has been utilized by the censor to curb criticisms of the Government on various matters of policy or of administration where no questions of security were involved. Further, the directions forbid the publications, without the permission of the Competent Authority, of the contents of any Cabinet paper or the substance or part of any Cabinet proceeding, or of any Cabinet decision, or any proposal or any matter "which is considered or is alleged to be considered by any Minister or any Ministry or the Government". Thus the Competent Authority has been given sweeping powers to interfere with the right of the public to be informed, fully and freely, of the actions and proposals of the Government it has placed in power. Indeed, the last clause

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of the direction we have quoted could, if the Competent Authority was so minded, be used to prohibit the publication of any matter whatsoever, for of what subject could it be said that it had not been considered by some minister or ministry? If these restrictions on editorial comment and on reporting of Government proposals and decisions on matters unconnected with security were not considered necessary during the critical period in April and May following the insurgency, we cannot see what justification there can be for their introduction at a later stage and their maintenance at the present time.
We urge, therefore, the immediate lifting of Press censorship by the rescinding of all relevant emergency regulations.
3. Right of distributing or affixing posters, handbills and leaflets
Under the emergency regulations no person may affix in a public place or distribute among the public any poster, handbill or leaflet without police permission. We ask for the lifting of this regulation as a further restriction on freedom of expression and free political life.
4. The right of trade unions and employees in the public and private sectors
The trade union movement and the Ceylon working class have, over a period of eighty years, been engaged in a long struggle to win certain democratic rights for the working people of this country. Some of the important trade union rights that have been acquired include the right to form trade unions, recognition of the unions from employers and government, the right of collective bargaining, the right to strike, to picket and to hold meetings in furtherance of an industrial dispute.

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Apart from the rights of trade unions, the workers themselves over the course of years, have not only obtained certain political rights including the right to vote but also certain specific rights such as the minimum wages, regulated hours and conditions of work and the right to appeal to the Labour Tribunals in cases of alleged wrongful dismissal.
We believe that these rights, which have been secured after many struggles should only be abrogated in exceptional circumstances such as a national emergency.
We appreciate that the events of April made it necessary to proclaim certain industries "essential services" as was originally done in 1942 during wartime when the Essential Services Order was first introduced to Ceylon. However, at the end of the war this order was repealed and full freedom for unions to strike was restored to the trade union movement.
We would like to point out that the concept of "essential services" is defined as services "of public utility or essential for the public safety or to the life of the community". Once an industry is proclaimed an essential service, strikes and lockouts in such industries are illegal. While we appreciate that the supply of water and electricity, hospital facilities, postal and telegraph services and other such services may be deemed public utilities or essential to the life of the community, we fail to see how Hentley Garments Ltd., the Ceylon Pencil Company and a host of minor industries listed in the order including the manufacture and distribution of ice, soap, bottles, wire nails and bicycle tyres, can come under this category. Further "the services provided by any mercantile or commercial undertaking engaged in the importation, exportation, sale, supply or distribution of goods of any description whatsoever" have been classified as essential services, thus making the concept of "essential services" meaningless, and depriving the workers of some of their rights of protest. We would strongly urge the discontinuance of the

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Essential Services Order. We would also like to point out that under the Emergency Regulations the Board of Directors or the Manager of a Public Corporation may in their absolute discretion, suspend a worker suspected of (a) any activity prejudicial to the interests of, or dangerous to the security of the government, (b) complicity with or being privy to the activities of a proscribed organization, (c) contravening or failing to comply with any emergency regulation or any order or a rule made thereunder. This suspension cannot be challenged before any court or tribunal and the worker suspended will not be entitled to any salary during the period of suspension, unless the Board of Directors of the Corporation in their discretion decide to pay half the salary.
These provisions give sweeping powers of suspensions to Directors of Corporations against which a worker has no redress, as such suspensions cannot be questioned in the courts. Such regulations are liable to lead to victimization of workers, and to false allegations resulting in suspensions. Workers so suspended may not only lose their salary, thereby causing distress to entire families, but also be made to suffer in other ways, by the loss of certain privileges associated with their employment. We submit that giving Corporation Directors wide discretionary power of suspension, without redress, is undemocratic, unwarranted and calculated to cause dissatisfaction among Corporation workers who have been singled out for these harsh regulations. We would add that where government servants have been taken into custody, they have in many cases been denied their salaries, thereby causing great hardship to their families. In normal times when persons are arrested, they are either bailed or remanded for a short period before being brought to trial. Hence the loss of employment of salary pending investigation or trial is seldom a serious problem. But today we know of cases of government servants in custody without pay, whose families have no means of subsistence.

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We would like to further point out the dangers of using emergency regulations to restrict the democratic rights of the organized working class, which forms one of the most important sections of our society. At a time when radical economic and social changes are contemplated, we submit that the participation and co-operation of the working class is necessary to implement such changes. For this participation to be effective, a restoration of freedom of expression, of the rights of public meeting, freedom from arbitrary suspension, and other democratic rights of the works, is an urgent necessity.
5. Persons in custody
From recent statements made in Parliament we understand that the number arrested now totals about sixteen thousand. This figure is the highest ever, indicating an increase of about two thousand since July 20th when it was stated in Parliament that the number was of the order of fourteen thousand.
Category "A"
In the statement of July 20th you also stated that out of the fourteen thousand then in custody, the cases of seven thousand had been investigated and that of these, 2500 had been recommended for release. Now, four months later, we understand the investigation of the balance is more or less complete. In your statement of November 25, however, you say that only 2600 have been released. If, by July 20th, 2500 had been recommended for release out of the seven thousand cases which had been investigated by then, one would expect a far greater number than 2600 to have been released by now.
Category "B"
We understand that the persons who, although not having participated in acts of violence or plans for violence, have

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shown sympathy with or interest in the JVP, are being kept in continued detention even where their release has been recommended. These have been described as Category "B" persons, who "had attended classes on the political activities of the JVP but are not involved in the criminal activity of that party". (The Hon. Minister for Local Government, Public Administration and Home Affairs in Parliament on 30 November, as reported in the C.D.N. of 1st December 1971).
No explanation for the continued detention of such persons, or of the government's plans as regards them, has been given. We urge that such persons be released. Those who have committed offences under the existing laws of the land, and against whom there is sufficient evidence to frame charges, should be brought to trial expeditiously. But we see no justification for the continued detention of young persons whose involvement' amounts to nothing more than activities which were perfectly lawful at the time, such as attending classes.
We are told, in the same statement reported in the C.D.N. of 1st December, that within this category 'B' "there are also a group against whom further charges could be framed but under the present law of the land could not be indicted and brought to trial. Those persons were a security risk and could well in the future form the nucleus of more such activity. For that reason the Prime Minister and the Cabinet had not taken any decision about their release".
We appreciate the fact of the government's apprehension that those persons, are 'a security risk and may, if released, engage in undesirable activities. But we would nevertheless urge that as many persons as possible in this group be released for two reasons. First, it appears clear that they are guilty of no crime under the existing law of the land. And, in spite of this, they have undergone detention for a long period without any opportunity to know or contest the evidence on which

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the authorities have decided that they are in some way involved with the insurgent movement.
Secondly, we cannot accept that the adoption on so large a scale of the principle of detaining a person not for what he has done, but for what he might do, is warranted by the exigencies of the situation today. Hitherto, during the period of investigation, it has been possible to counsel patience to the people in custody and their families and friends. These people accepted the fact that the government was faced with an un unprecedented situation, that it had to make mass arrests on suspicion, that it would take some months to complete investigations. Everybody who had a son, daughter, wife, husband, mother or father in custody, nevertheless could live in the knowledge that his case would be looked into, in the hope that he would be found innocent, and in the belief that, if he was not released, he would be brought to trial expeditiously so that he might have the opportunity of clearing himself. Great encouragement was given to such people by the undertaking that persons against whom there was evidence would be brought to trial as soon as possible, coupled with the statement that "the government does not want to keep anybody in custody one minute longer than is necessary. In fact steps have already been taken to release those persons whose cases have been investigated and against whom there is no evidence". (Hon. Minister of Justice: Senate September 21st 1971).
Now that the investigations are over or practically over, the government faces a turning point. From this point onwards, if the detentions continue, there is a qualitative change in the situation. It means that the hope and belief enjoyed by these people and their families turns to disillusionment and despair. If it is considered that certain persons are a security risk, then the proper preventive measure to be taken is surveillance. We appreciate that this may not be an easy task, but surely it is a

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necessary, and in any way preferable alternative to detaining them. After all, they are now known. They may be asked to report to the authorities regularly. The government has more knowledge and understanding of the insurgent movement today than it did before April, and its intelligence services are better equipped to deal with any situation that may arise. What is the alternative? How long can they be detained and deprived of their normal lives in society?
Every day of continued detention in our view only aggravates the situation. Continued detention of such persons after it has been established and accepted that they are guilty of no crime can only embitter and alienate them, and inspire in them a genuine sense of outrage. These feelings will be shared by their families, relatives and friends. One would think that from the government's own point of view the encouragement of such feelings of sorrow, outrage, indignation, and despair would constitute a surer danger to itself and to its stated aim of involving all of the people in a dedicated effort to overcome the economic crisis than any possible hazard that may arise from letting these young people to go back to their families.
6. Persons detained by order of the Permanent Secretary to the Ministry of Defence and External Affairs
Persons detained by order of the Permanent Secretary to the Ministry of Defence and External Affairs come under a different category. These are persons originally taken in not because of evidence of actual involvement in the armed uprising, but because they were considered to be a security risk. However, in your statement of July 20th you explained that subsequently some of these detenus had been implicated in the course of the investigations. Therefore, it was said, the detenus could not be released until the investigations of the

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balance 7000 were complete, as these investigations might result in the implication of more of these detenus.
Now that the investigation of the balance is more or less complete, we urge that those against whom no evidence has transpired so far be released without further delay. We understand that some of these detenus have not been interrogated even once since they were taken into custody, which would suggest that there is no evidence at all of actual involvement on their part. A number of these detenus were, presumably, considered security risks at an early stage on account of connections they had with certain foreign countries or embassies.
However there has now been plenty of time to assess the evidence on this and the government has since indicated its conclusion that there was no foreign involvement except that of the North Korean Embassy, the financial involvements of which are still under investigation, and which "had through its indirect assistance to the movement caused embarrassment to the Government' (Hon. Minister for Local Government, Public Administration and Home Affairs in the report cited above). If it is now found that any assistance given by this embassy was merely "indirect", resulting only in "embarrasment' to the government, it is open to question whether it is justifiable to continue to detain persons as "security risks" merely because they held office or were otherwise active in Ceylon-Korean (or other) Friendship Associations before the insurrection. North Korea had always been considered a friendly socialist state by the parties of the United Front, and one of the first acts of the present government was to grant it full diplomatic recognition.
We also understand that in a number of cases the Advisory Committee set up under the Emergency Regulations has recommended release, but that the detention continues

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notwithstanding. We urge that at least in these cases the persons concerned be released immediately.
7. Access to lawyers - habeas corpus
We urge that all persons in custody or detention be permitted access to lawyers so that they may have the opportunity to make effective representations regarding the legality of their detention or the legality of the treatment received by them while in detention. Those against whom prosecutions are to be launched, should have access to lawyers in order to give instructions for the preparation of their defence.
We also urge that the rights to apply for the writ of habeas corpus be restored.
8. Communications of grounds of arrest
In the case of persons detained by order of the Permanent Secretary to the Ministry of Defence and External Affairs there is provision that at the hearing before the Advisory Committee, the detenu must be informed of the grounds for his detention with sufficient particularity to enable him to state his objections to the detention order. In practice there may be considerable delay in the detenu receiving this all important information. In the case of persons taken into custody by the police, however, there is not even this minimum provision. In normal times when a person is arrested on a warrant, the contents of the warrant (which specify with particularity the crime of which he is suspected) must be communicated to him. When the arrest is without warrant too the person arrested has the right to be informed of the reason, and the requirement that he be produced before a magistrate within 24 hours is a further safeguard in this respect. However, in the case of

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arrests under the Emergency Regulations, which are made without warrant, persons are often not informed of the reason.
We urge that in all cases of arrest or detention the persons be informed of the grounds promptly, so that he or his relatives may be enabled to place before the authorities evidence, where available, indicating his innocence.
9. Confidential communications
We also urge very strongly that the emergency regulation requiring any person interrogated under the regulations to truthfully answer any questions irrespective of the capacity in which such person came by his knowledge be rescinded insofar as it can be used to compel a lawyer to disclose confidential communications from his client. The inviolability of such confidences is a necessary concomitant to the right of legal representation enjoyed by a suspect or an accused person in any democratic Society. Without it, there can be no adequate legal representation, and therefore no fair trial.
10. Future arrests
We appreciate that during an armed uprising and its immediate aftermath, when mass arrests may have to take place, it may not be practicable to insist that persons arrested be produced before a magistrate within 24 hours.
However, we see no reason for the continuance today of the regulation removing this all important safeguard against arbitrary action, secret arrests, and possible ill treatment at the hands of the police. Under the emergency regulations, a police officer may arrest a person without warrant and may keep him for fifteen days without producing him before a magistrate, and without even reporting the fact of his arrest to any other authority. This has two significant results. In the

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first place it means that if the person is arrested in the street, without witnesses, his family can spend the whole fifteen days searching for him, without any way of finding out what has happened to him. In the second place (and this is very important), it means that during the fifteen days after he was produced before a magistrate he is kept in the police station, he may be assaulted or otherwise ill treated, he has no access to the outside world, and the outside world may not even know that he is there. Complaints of brutal and inhuman treatment being accorded to the ordinary men and women of our country in police stations are unfortunately, a common occurrence even in "normal' times. In these abnormal times we are certain that the position cannot be any better, to put it at its lowest. Many of us have had first hand accounts of the most brutal assaults committed in police stations during recent times.
The further fact must be noted that police stations are just not meant for detaining persons for days on end. The cramped, ill ventilated (and invariable smelly) police lock-up, with its bare cement slab to sit and sleep on, is tolerable, if at all, only because the maximum duration a person can be kept in it in normal times is 24 hours. The absence of exercise, washing, bathing and other facilities mean that detention in the police lock-up for anything over 24 hours is under sub-human conditions. If the lock-up is crowded these become truly medieval. It is noteworthy that the Emergency Regulations permit the detention of even a woman under such circumstances.
We therefore urge that the safeguards of the normal law relating to the production of persons arrested without warrant before a magistrate, and the reporting of such arrests to a magistrate, be restored as a matter of urgency. For similar reasons we urge that the emergency regulation permitting police officers to remove persons from prisons and keep them

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in police custody for the purpose of interrogation be rescinded. If it is necessary for prisoners to be interrogated by the police, arrangements should be made to do this while they remain in the custody of the prison authorities, and furthermore such interrogation should be conducted in the presence of such authorities. If it is necessary that a person be taken from place to place for the purpose of the investigations a prison official should accompany him and remain responsible for him.
11. Disposal of dead bodies
An aspect of the Emergency Regulations that we find most difficult to understand is that relating to the cremation or burial of dead bodies by the police without inquest or compliance with the provisions of any other written law.
This means that not only an inquest, but even a death certificate, is not necessary. It may be left to a police officer to decide whether a person is actually dead or not before he is burnt or buried.
If such a departure from the normal law and procedure is necessary at all, it can surely only be to deal with a situation found on the battlefield, where, in the aftermath of a military engagement, a large number of corpses may have to be disposed of speedily and unceremoniously in the interests of public health. Even then, one would expect some formalities to be strictly observed. If there is time to cremate, or bury, there is also time to at least make a note of the number of corpses so dealt with, and the circumstances, with basic details such as date, place, sex and aids to identity. One cannot understand why such a regulation should have been introduced throughout the length and breadth of the island, whether the deaths occurred in the course of armed clashes or not, and why such a regulation is necessary at all today.

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The existence of this regulation today is of especial significance when one considers the large number of persons in custody. Under the ordinary law, whenever a person dies while in the custody of the police or while in prison, an inquest must be held. The present emergency regulation overrides this requirement. The anxiety thereby caused to the families of persons in custody (to say nothing of the persons themselves) is great. The agony they undergo when there is news of shootings and violence inside the prisons can be imagined. The regulation, if not in fact is an encouragement to arbitrary or reckless action by the police, armed forces and prison guards, or at least appears to be so in the eyes of these frantic mothers and fathers, wives, sons and daughters, who make their adverse judgments on hearsay. The regulation thus may do a disservice to the security forces as well.
We therefore urge the immediate rescinding of this regulation and the restoration of the ordinary law on this subject.
12. Admissibility of statements to the police
We also urge the rescinding of the Emergency Regulations relating to the admissibility in evidence of statements made to certain police officers, statements made while in police custody, and statements by co-accused.
The provisions of the ordinary law which make confessions made under such circumstances inadmissible as evidence before our courts provide one of the most important safeguards of the rights of the ordinary men and women in our land. They exist in recognition of the fact that statements are likely to be procured by the police by improper means, be it by inducements, threats, or actual physical violence. That such statements are in normal times inadmissible as evidence acts as a disincentive to the police to try to obtain confessions

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by hook or by crook. That this is not a sufficient disincentive is unfortunately a sad reality, as the repeated complaints of police brutality by the public made over the years - irrespective of the government in power - bear witness. It would be difficult to find the person who would deny that such complaints are often true, that police brutality is an unfortunate but undeniable feature of our society, that a humble citizen without influence or important connections who is taken into custody on suspicion of crime even in normal times fears violence at the hands of the police almost as a matter of course. This is the reason why we believe the United Front, recognizing the suffering undergone by our people in this respect, in its manifesto promised that "the armed services and the police, which the UNP regards merely as instruments to oppress the people and defend the interests of big capital and political reaction, will be reorganized so as to identify them with the national and progressive aspirations of the people and to reflect their interests".
Unfortunately the present crisis came upon before such reorganization could take place. We still have the same police force, with its same methods. If the situation is bad enough in normal times, how very much greater is the danger of abuse of power when active encouragement to obtain confessions from persons in custody is given by making them admissible as evidence?
Quite apart from this, there is the intrinsic unreliability of statements obtained under such conditions, which makes them very dangerous to act upon in a court of law. This unreliability is, in our view, greatly increased in respect of confessions obtained during a state of emergency. One must not forget the atmosphere in the country in general, and in police stations in particular, especially during April and May. The tendency to fall in line with a version that the police seem to expect, or with a version given, or stated to have been given, by another

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person, questioned, irrespective of its truth, would have been greater than ever during these times. Several of us are aware of instances where the relative in handing over young people to the police when they were sought for questioning, advised them to say whatever the police wanted and save their lives. We have also had accounts of assaults during interrogations when persons protested their innocence. To make things worse, under the Emergency Regulations not only are confessions to police officers and confessions made while in custody made admissible, but also the onus is put on the accused who wishes to vitiate such a confession to prove that it was obtained by threats or inducements. This is yet another grave departure from the ordinary law which requires that, even in the case of an admissible confession, the onus is on the prosecution to establish the free, voluntary nature of the Statement.
We do not consider the proviso that such a statement must have been made to a police officer of the rank of A.S.P. or above is adequate safeguard. When, under the normal law, a person in custody wishes to make a confession, he has to be taken before a magistrate. The magistrate goes through an elaborate procedure to ensure that the confession is being made of his own free will. He questions the person carefully, in the absence of the police, as to whether any inducements have been offered or threats made to him. The magistrate explains - and this is very rhnportant - that there is no compulsion on him to make a statement. He is then given time to think over the matter, away from the influence of the police. Only then does the magistrate record the statement. Contrast this with the atmosphere in a police station (especially in April and May), one sees at once that the mere presence when the statement is made of an A.S.P. or higher officer, who may not know (or care to know) what has gone before, does little or nothing to ameliorate the situation.

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We therefore urge that the safeguards of the normal law on this subject be restored immediately.
13. New laws
We appreciate that legislation may be necessary in order to deal with administrative problems that may arise if a large number of trials are to take place. We are, however, gravely perturbed by the suggestion that new laws may be enacted to make a permanent feature of some of the Emergency Regulations such as those relating to confessions to the police, which, as stated earlier, we feel should not exist even as Emergency Regulations. We believe that a rule so fundamental to safeguard the personal Security of each and every person in our country, and in particular the so-called "ordinary man", the poor and humble citizen who has no influential friend or relative to come to his aid in his hour of need, should under no circumstances be jettisoned. To do so in the belief it is necessary to safeguard democracy would be, in our view, in itself a subversion of the very democracy that we seek to protect. We most earnestly appeal to you not to seek to make part of the permanent laws of our land regulations of a temporary and drastic nature introduced to deal with a situation of acute crisis. We also urge that any new legislation should, in keeping with the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, respect the principle that there should be no ex post facto creation or aggravation of crimes and no change of the rules of evidence for the purpose of securing convictions.
14. Need for effective machinery for dealing with complaints against the Police and Army
As you are already aware, in the first few months of the insurgency certain excesses were unfortunately committed by

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members of the armed forces and police. Many persons in Ceylon, lawyers, doctors, priests and others have received numerous complaints of brutality and torture by police officers and army personnel.
Equally if not more important is the continuing problem of how complaints regarding present and future actions of the security forces should be dealt with.
The degree to which a citizen is able fearlessly to complain and obtain redress regarding injustice by members of the police force is a basic test of democracy. We appreciate the recognition of this by the Government in appointing a Ministerial Committee to receive complaints against the security forces.
However the difficulty in our country has always been that to whichever authority a person has directed his complaint, it is invariably referred for investigation to the very same police force. Independent investigation is of particular importance during a state of emergency when the security forces are given far reaching powers and when the likelihood of abuse is greater. The Ministerial Committee unfortunately suffers from this same defect, it has no investigating machinery of its own. Another drawback is that complaints have to be channeled through MPs. Furthermore, Ministers are extremely busy persons, rightly preoccupied with pressing problems of national policy, and they are therefore not the most suited to fulfil a function of this kind.
We therefore urge upon you the need for effective machinery which can ensure inquiry into such allegations with accuracy and impartiality.
In conclusion, Madam, we would like to repeat once more that we fully appreciate that your Government has been faced with an unprecedented situation. However, the equally important fact remains that when your Government resorted to emergency powers and armed force to crush the April

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insurrection, it did so with the declared aim of protecting democratic institutions. You have yourself stated on more than one occasion that the mass of the common people of this country stood by your Government in the critical days of April. We urge you and your Government in turn to restore and safeguard the democratic rights and liberties which are the common man's protection against injustice and the guarantee of his being able to live without fear. We wish finally to state that the restoration of these rights and liberties is also necessary to create the climate in which the mass of the people can participate in the movement towards radical social change and towards a more equal and just society.
We would be grateful if you would be so good as to grant an appointment to a deputation from our organization so that we may discuss these matters further.
Yours faithfully, E.R. Sarathchandra R.K.W. Goonesekere
(Chairman) (Deputy Chairman) Reggie Siriwardene (Secretary) The Rt. Revd. Lakshman Wickremesinghe The Ve. Puhulwelle Wimalawansa Thero
ON BEHALF OF THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT OF CEYLON

The Bracegirdle Affair in
Retrospect: Contradictions of Imperialism, of the
Post-Colonial State and of the Left
1
I was only a schoolboy of fifteen in the colonial Ceylon of April 1937 when Governor Sir Edward Stubbs ordered the deportation of Mark Anthony Lyster Bracegirdle.' I had never seen or heard Bracegirdle or, at that time, any of the leaders of the Lanka Sama Samaja Party, for association with which Bracegirdle was to have been deported. However, even an adolescent with only the vaguest political knowledge or awareness could be excited by the Robin Hood drama that followed - Bracegirdle's disappearance and the unsuccessful manhunt by the police, the interview with him that appeared in the Daily News after a reporter had been taken blindfolded to his hiding place, his spectacular reappearance after eleven days on the platform of a mass meeting at Galle Face, and the legal battle in the Supreme Court which ended with the quashing of the Governor's order and Bracegirdle's release.
But four years after these events I was inducted into the underground organization of the LSSP, which was functioning illegally after four of its leaders had been detained. The image of Bracegirdle I had acquired in the intervening years was

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that of the romantic hero of an anti-imperialist drama, but I found that in the inner party group he was no longer regarded in that light. He was now cast in a different role - as a kind of bad guy. In 1942 Edmund Samarakkody, in hiding after the jail escape, told me that Bracegirdle was the man who brought Stalinism to Ceylon"; he said virtually the same thing in print in 1960. That was an exaggeration: given the prestige of the Soviet Union and the presence of a strong Communist Party on the other side of Palk Strait, Stalinism would have come to Ceylon, Bracegirdle or no Bracegirdle. But there is another interesting fact I remember from my LSSP years. There was in the small collection of books called the party library a book of reproductions of the murals that the great Mexican painter, Diego Rivera, had done for a Rockefeller building in New York. When the sponsors found to their horror that the murals were revolutionary paintings, they reduced them to dust; but before this act of vandalism they had been photographed. I was told that the copy in the party library of these reproductions had originally belonged to Bracegirdle, but when Rivera helped to secure asylum in Mexico for Trotsky, Bracegirdle had thrown the book away in disgust. One must remember that the year was 1937, in the middle of Stalin's Great Purges and Moscow Trials, when Communist parties the world over were denouncing Trotsky as traitor, saboteur and fascist agent: at that time it must have seemed to Bracegirdle that Rivera had become an ally of the devil himself.
What lay behind Bracegirdle's conversion from hero to bad guy was the resolution of the LSSP's Executive Committee in 1939 condemning the Third International, which precipitated the split between Trotskyists and Stalinists in the party. Bracegirdle himself in old age told Wesley S. Muthiah in London, 'Of course, my views on Trotsky have changed considerably'. By then Stalin was no longer deified and Trotsky demonized by Communist parties. On the other hand, the LSSP

The Bracegirdle Affair in Retrospect 3O9
had departed from Trotskyist orthodoxy, the Bracegirdleaffair had passed into party mythology, and last year two of its members brought out a volume of documents commemorating it.” Before I pass on from this aspect of the matter, I should like to say that the 1939 resolution of the LSSP seems to me to have been wholly correct: if the party hadn't avoided being drawn into the Comintern net, it would have, like the Indian and Ceylon CPs, stultified itself in 1942 by supporting the British war effort and opposing the "Quit India' movement. But today it seems to me unfortunate that the LSSP should have taken over all the theoretical baggage of Trotskyism. To pursue this matter further, however, would be to digress from my main concerns in this paper.
In a brief introduction to Muthiah and Wanasinghe, Hector Abhayavardhana says that by reading the documents in the book
Students, teachers and writers of history can make up their own minds about the regard displayed by the British administration of colonial Ceylon for the civil rights of one of their own citizens and the responsibilities that had been devolved on a local administration constituted by the British Parliament.
To make precisely such an assessment is my first concern in this paper. My Second purpose is to consider how the record of the British regime in respect of civil rights in the Bracegirdle case compares wifth that of post-colonial administrations in Ceylon/Sri Lanka on similar questions. Thirdly, I consider the general significance of the issues concerning the rights of the individual and the powers of the state that arose in the Bracegirdle affair.
2
It is evident that the deportation order on Bracegirdle was issued as a result of the alarm of British planterdom on the one

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hand and the police at the appearance on LSSP platforms of a white man, a Samy as the estate workers greeted him, who could talk from personal experience about the wretched living and working conditions of these workers. H.M. Thomas, the planter in charge of the tea estate where Bracegirdle had worked, had been in communication with senior British police officers after Bracegirdle had left the estate but had failed to quit the country, and had begun his association with the LSSP.0 Police anxieties were heightened by the fact that in MarchApril 1937 the Indian nationalist Kamaladevi Chattopadhyaya was in Ceylon on a lecture arranged by the LSSP; some of the meetings she addressed were in plantation areas, and at these meetings Bracegirdle was accommodated on the platform and spoke too. This combination would have aroused in the minds of the police the alarming vision of the spread to Ceylon of the militant anti-imperialism of Indian nationalism together with the subversive social doctrines of the left. The report on Kamaladevi Chattopadhyaya's tour by the DIG in charge of the CID ends on the note that it will no doubt give a fillip to the Party's line (the LSSP's) activities and generally to the spread of Socialism in Ceylon'. All this led to the request of the police for the deportation of Bracegirdle.
The authority under which the Governor issued the order was derived from an Order in Council of Queen Victoria in 1896; the law was not only antiquated but had clearly been devised for use in wartime and other grave emergencies. It had been brought into operation in Ceylon during the First World War, but in the intervening years it had occasionally been resorted to by the executive for relatively unimportant purposes simply because it was there and convenient to use. However, when it had been invoked for food control during drought and malaria epidemic in the thirties, Governor Stubbs himself had 'objected to using war powers for such purposes'.'
These scruples, however, were waved aside in the face of

The Bracegirdle Affair in Retrospect 3 11
the threat to law and order that Bracegirdle was taken to represent. But it was precisely the fact that the power of deportation had been designed for use in major emergencies that led to the collapse of the Government's case when the application for a writ of Habeas Corpus was argued before the Supreme Court. All three judges - Chief Justice Sir Sidney Abrahams, British, and Justices Maartensz and Soertsz, Ceylonese - concurred in finding the deportation order illegal.
Muthiah and Wanasinghe say in their book:
The verdict of the State Council on 5th May was overwhelmingly in favour of Bracegirdle. This may have influenced the decision of the Supreme Court as well.'
I don't claim that judges are always and necessarily immune to the influences of extra-judicial political considerations. But I think it inappropriate to try to explain the outcome of the Bracegirdle case in this way. Soon after the conclusion of the case the Chief Justice was called upon to preside over a commission of inquiry that had to decide whether Sir Baron Jayatilake or IGP Banks was correct in their differing versions of the events leading up to the order of deportation. The main question was whether the Home Minister, Sir Baron, had been formally consulted by the IGP about the order. The Commission unanimously upheld Bank's version and rejected Sir Baron's. The State Council, loyal to Sir Baron, passed a motion condemning the report. Sir Sidney Abrahams must have known this would happen, but that didn't deter him from the position he took. If the Chief Justice wasn't influenced by the opinion of the State Council in one case, it's hardly likely that he took it into account in the other. The hypothesis is in any case unnecessary because even to a layman reading the record it's evident that the Governor's order, legally, had no leg to stand
O.
To appraise the outcome of the Bracegirdle case rightly

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one must take into account the two faces of British imperial rule in the colonies by that stage of the twentieth century - one, liberal; the other, repressive. The first was the product of laws, institutions and practices evolved in the home country that had been transferred, in part, to the colonies. The second arose from the continuing need to maintain the sovereignty of a foreign power and the exploitative structures and relations of colonialism. Which prevailed could vary with time, place and circumstances. But to focus only on one face and ignore the other is to produce an unreal and unhistorical caricature.
In the specific case of Ceylon in 1937, the country had been granted six years earlier a measure of representative government such as did not obtain at the time in any other British colony. This was partly a reward for good behaviour on the part of the nationalist leadership, so unlike that of their rebellious counterparts in India, and partly an expression of confidence that they would not use that measure of self-government to the detriment of fundamental British interests. But in the constitutional reforms of 1931 the British government had given the local political elite more than they had asked for by introducing universal suffrage, which in fact the dominant leadership had actively opposed: A.E. Goonesinha was the only important political figure to advocate it before the Donoughmore Commission. It's therefore apparent that in the 1931 reforms the British imperial regime was trying out a political experiment in their model colony, where the environment seemed both propitious and safe for such a venture.
In this context the autocratic action of Governor Stubbs in issuing the deportation order on Bracegirdle over the heads of the elected Board of Ministers was a reversal of direction that shocked and alarmed even moderate nationalists in the State Council. Of the elected members only one, G.G. Ponnambalam, pursuing his own political agenda, voted against

The Bracegirdle Affair in Retrospect 33
Siripala Samarakkody's motion of protest over the Governor's action. The general current of feeling during the debate was that the people of Ceylon were loyal subjects who had not merited such treatment. Samarakkody, the very mover of the motion, used that phrase, loyal subjects, dissociating himself from those who wanted independence' - presumably, the two LSSP members. In one of the concluding passages of his speech, he declared:
When peace, order and good government are going on, to execute an emergency act under these powers is something far from trying to gain the confidence of the people over whom His Majesty reigns, specially at a time when His Majesty's coronation is about to take place."
Governor Stubbs's order must therefore be regarded as an aberration at variance with the general course of British imperial policy in Ceylon at the time, and one dictated by the alarmist fears of the police and his own. The Secretary of State for the Colonies, in a memorandum to the British Cabinet after the Supreme Court's judgment, observed that the Governor's action had been politically unwise".' That it was so was confirmed by its counterproductive results. The LSSP had been founded only in 1935, but the Bracegirdle affair, as Muthiah and Wanasinghe remark, propelled the party into the foreground of national politics'." That is the judgment of two party adherents, but a not very different assessment is made by a scholarly historian who can't be suspected of partiality to the left. This is what Professor K.M. de Silva said in his own treatment of the episode in the University History of Ceylon:
The most notable political and constitutional crisis of the first decade after the introduction of the Donoughmore Constitution, the Bracegirdle incident brought the LSSP into the limelight on a national scale, and gave it substantial publicity and increased popularity. Not only did they assume the initia

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tive in taking the issue before the people, but they were also able to Secure the support of the entire Board of Ministers, of A.E. Goonesinha and the majority of the members of the State Council on it. At a mass meeting organized by the LSSP to demonstrate popular feeling against the action of the colonial authorities, a number of prominent politicians appeared on their platforms, including S.W. R.D. Bandaranaike, A.E. Goonesinha and George E.de Silva, to mention three of the most noteworthy among them.'
The political hegemony that the LSSP established over the national movement on this issue was shortlived. By the time the State Council came to debate the Bricegirdle Commission's report in November/December 1938, it had already vanished. On the Commission accepting IGP Bank's evidence against Sir Baron's, Philip Gunawardena moved a motion in the State Council that read:
That this House condemns and rejects the Report of the Bracegirdle Commission as being a mischievous political document, whitewashing the permanent officials and embodying decisions against the weight of evidence that are designed to undermine the rightful power, position and prestige of popularly elected representatives and to reinforce the efforts of a white bureaucracy, hostile to the people, to entrench itself in power as against a popularly elected Council.’’
The majority of the Council wanted to exonerate Sir Baron but were unwilling to go all the way with the LSSP. Siripala Samarakkody moved an amendment that took all the anti-imperialist rhetoric out of the motion, so that it read simply. That this House condemns and rejects the Report of the Bracegirdle Commission. At voting time only five members voted for the original motion and 34 for the amendment. The gulf between the moves of the LSSP towards a radical confrontation with the colonial regime and the cautious and hesitant actions of

The Bracegirdle Affair in Retrospect 35
the conservative nationalist leadership was to manifest itself on a larger scale in the aftermath of the shooting on Mooloya estate in 1939.
Of some greater duration as a source of strength than these manoeuvrings in the legislature, and perhaps more significant for the LSSP's activity at that time, was the momentum the Bracegirdle affair gave the LSSP's trade union and political goals in the plantation areas. When a massive wave of strikes of estate workers swept over these areas in 1939-40 the LSSP played a significant role in organizing and leading them.
It must therefore be said that over the Bracegirdle affair the executive brought into play the repressive arm of imperialism, but in doing so acted shortsightedly and imprudently from the point of view of long-term imperial interests themselves. But the institution of independence of the judiciary, which was part of the liberal system of checks and balances, enabled the corrective action to be taken that was represented by the Supreme Court's judgment.
There was, however, a sequel to the Bracegirdle case that was unknown to the general public until the documents relating to it in the Public Record Office in London were recently made open, but it is significant in embodying the liberal traditions of restraints on arbitrary action by the executive and of equality before the law. After the Supreme Court's judgment, the Governor was oncerned that Bracegirdle might have cause for a civil action for damages against him and the police offices involved, and he requested the Secretary of State for the Colonies to secure the enactment of an Order in Council giving them indemnity against any such action. When the British Cabinet met to consider this request, they had before them a memorandum by the (unnamed) Legal Advisor to the Colonial Office which merits extensive quotation:
The present constitution of Ceylon is, subject to certain

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safeguards, a form of self-government. It is true that we have reserved (sic)23 but I feel little doubt that the intention of this reservation was to enable us, if necessary, to deal with constitutional matters and with matters of defence and other large imperial interests. To use that power in defiance (as we believe) of the will of the Legislature in Ceylon, to deprive an individual of his civil rights, seems to me to be unconstitutional and not a proper exercise of the power.
Further, I know of no reason why an individual who has suffered a wrong should be deprived of any remedy which he may have in a court of law. Such a thing would be impossible here, and I do not know why, or upon what principle, the liberty and rights of the citizen should be less respected in Ceylon; and the fact that Bracegirdle seems to be a thoroughly unpleasant person does not seem to me to have any relevance to the determination of questions which depend upon high constitutional principles.
To my mind the spectacle of a Governor or the Chief of Police being made subject to the consequences of an illegal action is more likely to enhance the impartiality and integrity of British rule than is his protection from Downing Street over the head of the Legislature in Ceylon, and at the expense of an individual whom he has wronged.’
The Lord Chancellor also opposed any indemnity, but urged that if Bracegirdle obtained compensation in a court, it should not be left to the individual officials to pay it. The Cabinet rejected the idea of indemnifying the Governor or other officials, but decided that any damages awarded by a court of law should be settled out of the revenues of the Government of Ceylon in order that no official should suffer pecuniary loss. However, the question did not ultimately arise because
Bracegirdle never sued for damages.

The Bracegirdle Affair in Retrospect - 31 7
3
I now wish to offer some parallels and contrasts between the case of Bracegirdle and some examples from post-independence Ceylon and Sri Lanka where the power of the state in respect of deportation has been exercised.
Bracegirdle had benefited from the umbrella of protection of the lights of a British subject. In fact, several speakers in the State Council spoke of the heinousness of attempting to deport a British citizen who had not been convicted of any offence in a court of law. No comparable protection was available to Rhoda Miller de Silva when she was deported from Ceylon by the government of Sir John Kotelawala. She was, legally, an American citizen, though the wife of a Ceylon citiZen, Joe de Silva. She and her husband had earlier been in Poland, and were both members or associates of the Communist Party (I am not sure which), but had left the country under a cloud because they were accused of oppositional activity. They were, in fact, branded as Trotskyites' - a blanket term then in Communist parties for left-wing dissidents. (I might mention that I was in Poland in 1957, and a high-ranking journalist who was a member of the Communist Party asked me about Rhoda and her husband; he too spoke of them as Trotskyites'.) The couple arrived in Ceylon, intending to settle down here, but she was not given Ceylon citizenship because she was regarded as 'undesirable' by reason of her political beliefs, although citizenship was normally granted as a matter of course to wives of Ceylon citizens. The police, in fact, put up a request for her deportation to Prime Minister Dudley Senanayake, who, to his credit, turned it down. However, when Dudley was succeeded by Sir John Kotelawala, the police renewed the request, and he, with his obsessions with the Red menace', approved it. She was hustled on to a plane bound for the United States, there was, unlike in the case of Bracegirdle, no organization to appeal on her behalf to the

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courts, and even if such an appeal had been made, it wouldn't have succeeded. She was an 'undesirable alien", and that was that. Husband and wife remained separated for some time, because he could not have got admission to the United States as a supposed Communist. Ultimately a British civil liberties organization interceded on their behalf with the British government, and they were reunited in Britain; they were permitted to return to Ceylon only after the change of government in 1956. Rhoda spent some fruitful years thereafter as a free-lance journalist; her weekly column was an attractive feature of the Daily News in the sixties.
If it was sought to victimize Bracegirdle for his political activities, Rhoda Miller de Silva was victimized only for her political opinions. She had been ostracized by the Communist Party after her arrival, she had no links with the LSSP or any other political party, she had not appeared on political platforms or engaged in any political activity. Her deportation was legal, though clearly immoral and indefensible, but there was no remedy in this case against the arbitrary power of the state.
Rhoda Miller de Silva was one individual, just as Bracegirdle was. On the other hand, the four lakhs of estate workers and dependants categorized as "Indian Tamils' sent out of the country under the Sirima-Shastri pact of 1964, were just as defenceless under the law as Rhoda was. They had been deprived of citizenship by the Acts of 1948 and 1949. D.S. Senanayake had, even before the constitutional reform of 1947, made no secret of his objections to granting citizenship to these workers; but if anything was needed to strengthen his resolve, it was the fact that in the general election of 1947 the plantation electorates returned Ceylon Indian Congress members, who generally voted with the left. Hence, the 'nationalist arguments on this issue of citizenship were a cloak for the interests of the ruling party. Since disenfranchisement, Tamil estate workers had languished as 'stateless' persons. The bargain

The Bracegirdle Affair in Retrospect 319
struck by the two Prime Ministers in 1964 settled their destinies without their wishes being consulted or respected. The process by which those who were rejected by Ceylon were sent to India was called "repatriation'. The term was a mockery since the vast majority had been born in Ceylon, had lived and worked here, and had known no other home. In the Bracegirdle case, too, the Chief Secretary had argued that the matter came within his province because repatriation was a subject assigned to him. This claim was indignantly rejected by State Councillors who said that "repatriation' in this case was a misnomer for deportation or expulsion.” The approximately four hundred thousand people who were cast out under the Sirima-Shastri pact were also compulsorily expelled in the name of repatriation. Moreover, whether any individual was granted citizenship or sent out was determined, not by any degree of legitimacy of his/her claim, but by arbitrary proportions agreed on by the two premiers. The separation of Rhoda Miller de Silva and her husband had been temporary and remediable; the break-up of families by so-called "repatriation' was permanent and irrevocable.
There is an irony here that affects the left - the LSSP, in particular. In the 1930s the LSSP had championed the cause of Bracegirdle, threatened with deportation for helping to organize estate workers; by the end of the decade, they had a solid base among the Tamil estate workers of the hill-country. I have already mentioned the party's leadership of 1939-40 estate strikes. Its agitation after the shooting on Mooloya estate and the killing of Govindan, and Colvin.R.de Silva's forensic triumph at the subsequent Commission of Inquiry - these were at one time regarded as legendary battles of the party as much as the Bracegirdle case. The LSSP's view then was that the estate workers would play a key role in the coming revolution because of their strategic position in the economy, their high concentration in their places of work, and what was

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thought to be their complete proletarianisation, having, in the words of the Communist Manifesto, 'nothing to lose but their chains. Some later Marxists have disputed this view, arguing that the estate workers then, indentured and bound to their estate, were semi-serfs who had not yet reached the condition of the 'free' wage-labourer, free to sell his labour power. Be that as it may, the LSSP of the forties had a different conception. In the first Trotskyist programme of the party (which I remember studying in the early months of 1941 before admission to the party) the emphasis on the crucial role of the estate proletariat was one of the ingredients. Since the formation of the Bolshevik-Leninist Party of India in 1942, in which the LSSP played the initiating role, was based on the assumption that the future revolutions in India and Ceylon would be organically linked, the party could not at that time have countenanced any national dividing lines between the working classes of the two countries. In 1948-49 the LSSP bravely and conscientiously opposed the disenfranchisement of estate Tamils. But with the party's increasing shift to parliamentary politics in the fifties, the estate workers began to count less and less in the party's concern, particularly because they now had no electoral clout. Further, the ascendancy of ethnic politics from 1956 onwards made involvement with the claims of estate workers to citizenship an electoral embarrassment. Gone were the days when, after the Mooloya Commission's report, the party could campaign for the prosecution for murder of Sergeant Suraweera, a Sinhala policeman who had shot a Tamil worker. Finally, between 1964-65, and again in 1970-77, the party became a coalition partner in a government that was committed to the implementation of the Sirima-Shastripact. The one-time key players in the future revolution had now been relegated to the role of OutcastS.
I should like to sum up this part of my argument thus. The expulsions of Rhoda Miller de Silva and of the Tamil estate

The Bracegirdle Affair in Retrospect 32
workers were both legal, but only because they had already been victims of political discrimination by the state - the former in not being granted citizenship and the latter in being deprived of it. I find it, to say the least, anomalous that in 1999 two members of the LSSP should compile a book celebrating the Bracegirdle affair as one of the great victories of the party while the fate of the descendants of the people whose plight impelled Bracegirdle to action is forgotten. Bracegirdle had been in Ceylon only for a year and three weeks when the Governor ordered his deportation and the LSSP mounted its great crusade on his behalf, and even after his release he stayed only another six months. But for the Tamil workers who were expelled, their estate line-rooms were the only home they had ever known. The tragedy of the estate Tamil deportees - I will not call them Indian Tamils and I will not call them repatriates' - uprooted from their homes and places of work and consigned to unfamiliar places where the local population regarded them as interlopers, was such an enormity that most of uS have chosen to avert our eyes from it and let it be covered by oblivion. But it remains one of the great blots on the Sri Lankan Social conscience, whether of right, centre or left.
4.
In the Bracegirdle case, as it was fought out before the Supreme Court, the issue was the legality of the deportation order. But once judgment was given, the further question arose whether Bracegirdle should be entitled to sue for damages in respect of an order that the court had held to be illegal. I have already described the decision the British Cabinet took on this latter question, guided by the opinions of the Legal Adviser to the Colonial Office and the Lord Chancellor. It will be recalled that the former described Bracegirdle as "a thoroughly unpleasant person'. He couldn't have been referring to Bracegirdle's

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table manners or his behaviour in a drawing room: he could only have meant that Bracegirdle was a Communist. However, this political prejudices didn't prevent him from upholding 'the high constitutional principles' of equality before the law and the right of the subject to have redress in a court of law of any wrong done to him.
Let us compare this decision with the actions of a postcolonial regime in situations that were broadly comparable.
During the period of J.R. Jayewardene's presidency there were two important cases where citizens had recourse to the Supreme Court when their fundamental rights had been violated by the police. One was the Vivienne Goonewardene case and the other the Pavadi Handa case. In both the court held that there had in fact been a violation of fundamental rights and awarded damages to the petitioners. On both occasions the Government paid on behalf of the offending officers the compensation ordered by the court. The British Cabinet, too, had intended that if Bracegirdle was awarded damages, they should be paid out of state funds. But there the parallel ends. In both the Vivienne Goonewardene case and the Pavadi Handa case the police officers with whom the court had found fault were promoted by the Jayewardene government, as if to reward them for their illegal behaviour. Stubbs wasn't promoted: he retired in the odour of having been judged by the Cabinet to have acted unwisely, and under the disgrace of a judgment . against him by the Supreme Court.
Moreover, in Sri Lanka, after the judgment on one of the two cited cases a mob gathered outside the houses of the judges who delivered it, throwing stones and screaming insults. Nobody was prosecuted or punished for this unprecedented behaviour, although the ringleader of the mob took responsibility for organizing the demonstration in a statement to a newspaper. The President himself condoned that behaviour by say

The Bracegirdle Affair in Retrospect 323
ing that everybody had the right of criticism. So much had respect for the institutions of the law been eroded, even at the highest level of the state! We have to conclude that the Legal Adviser to the Colonial Office and the British Cabinet as a whole in 1937 acted as better liberal democrats than the late President half a century after.
5
In the political mythology of the Sri Lankan left the Bracegirdle episode has been treated as one of the open manifestations of the repressive character of British imperialism, and Bracegirdle's release as one of the great popular victories over it. I have in this paper given reasons for concluding the first of these images to be an over-simplification, and that in fact the repressive and liberal tendencies within British imperialism were in contention with each other in the affair. As for the Second image, one can understand why the episode should still be surrounded by a romantic aura; but while it is true that the struggle over the deportation order helped in the growth of popular anti-imperialist consciousness; respect for the facts should compel the recognition that it was neither the State Council nor the mass agitation that freed Bracegirdle but three judges acting on a reasonable interpretation of the law and taking advantage of the liberal principle of the independence of the judiciary to do so.
In Marxist discourse freedom from arbitrary arrest, imprisonment or deportation, and the right of the individual to have redress in a court of law against such arbitrary actions by the state, have customarily been called 'liberal bourgeois norms'. Usually in the same discourse the historical origin of these rights in the European context has been attributed to the need of the rising bourgeoisie to secure their interests against feudal monarchies and absolutist states. It is no part of my

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purpose to contest this historical explanation or to deny the fact that in the actual operation of these rights in the heyday of bourgeois liberalism, they were skewed by class inequalities - and, as many radical thinkers would add today - by inequalities of race and gender. But do these incontestable realities exhaust the question of the validity and the significance today of these and similar rights and freedoms?
Let me draw an analogy from another realm of human activity. Around the same time that I discovered Diego Rivera's frescoes in the LSSP party library, I also found there a book that contained a famous paper by a Soviet scientist, B. Hessen. It was titled "The Social and Economic Roots of Newton's Principia', and it aroused a great deal of interest when it was read during the 'thirties at an international science congress in London. Hessen showed that Newtonian laws of mechanics were not the outcome of an individual flash of genius: they were the culmination of a long period of experiment and discovery in ballistics, navigation and time-keeping - all practical fields of activity that were of great importance to the rising mercantile bourgeoisie. Since that time Hessen's argument has been extended and refined by later Marxist historians of science who have shown that Newton's image of the world in terms of particles pushing and pulling each other was a projection onto the cosmos of the earthly order of an individualist bourgeois Society.
At eighteen I read Hessen's paper with total admiration and conviction; but if I had thought further, I would have realized that while his analysis revealed the origins of Newtonian mechanics in 17th-century bourgeois society, it could not dispose of the question of the validity of his laws. In that range of phenomena in which it is still useful, Newtonian mechanics is still used to operate socialist trains or airplanes as well as capitalist ones. This exemplifies the fact that what has been evolved on the basis of the needs and interests of a particular class at a

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particular stage of history can enter the general human heritage and serve others in very different contexts. This is just as true of social concepts and institutions as of discoveries in the physical realm. It doesn't follow from the demonstration that liberal civil and political rights originated in the needs of a rising European bourgeoisie that they must now be jettisoned as outdated or irrelevant. I shall try to cast further light on this question by citing the case of an individual more internationally celebrated than Bracegirdle who, eight years before this Ceylonese case, was deported from his own country. That was Trotsky.
In 1927 Trotsky was expelled from the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, ostensibly for 'counter-revolutionary activity' - in fact, for opposition to the politics of the ruling group - and exiled to Alma Ata in Kazakhstan. At the beginning of 1929 the Politburo decided to strip him of Soviet citizenship and expel him from Soviet territory. The order was served on him after he had been removed from Alma Ata by the political police and put on a train en route to Odessa, in whose harbour a ship was waiting to transport him out of the country.” The decision and its execution were purely administrative actions: there was no question of intervention by any judicial body. Neither the theory nor the practice of the post-revolutionary state recognized the principle of an independent judiciary or gave it the authority to review the decisions of the ruling executive bodies of the state. (The expulsions from the Soviet Union of such well-known deportees as Solzhenitsyn and Brodsky in the post-Second World War era were carried out under fundamentally similar procedures.)
It is an ironic fact that even at the time Bracegirdle fought his legal battle against Sir Edward Stubbs's deportation order on him, he would, as an orthodox Communist, have unreservedly defended Stalin's right to have Trotsky deported without any possibility of appeal to a court. But it isn't for the pur

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pose of dwelling on this simple irony that I have advanced the Trotsky parallel - rather, to bring out the fact that where no independent judiciary exists, the individual who falls foul of the state has no defence against the arbitrary exercise of its punitive authority.
It is for these reasons that I find it unsatisfactory to describe the right of appealing to a court against un unjustified action of the state a bourgeois right'. It was a bourgeois right in its historical origin, but today it should be part of the necessary conditions of any civilized society. This doesn't mean that the gamut of rights traditionally asserted by classical liberalism represents all that is necessary in the contemporary world to defend human freedoms: we have to extend and complement them in several directions. But we have to go forward from the liberal rights; to discard them as the appurtenances of an outworn past, or an excrescence that must be shed in the interests of social change, is to open the way to tyranny.
Endnotes
Bracegirdle, British by birth though an emigrant to Australia at sixteen, arrived in Ceylon in March 1936 to become a 'creeper' (trainee in planting) on a tea estate. In Australia he had been an active member of the Young Communist League. His sympathies with the workers on the tea estate on which he was led to his dismissal, and he then joined in the activities of the LSSP.
* The LSSP was not legally proscribed until after the jail escape of the four detenus in April 1942, but open activity would have led to further arrests and the smashing of the party's organization.
Samasamajist, 1.3.60. I derive this reference from Y. Ranjith Amarasinghe, Revolutionary Idealism and Parliamentary

The Bracegirdle Affair in Retrospect 327
Politics: A Study of Trotskyism in Sri Lanka (Colombo: Social Scientists' Association, 1999), p. 45, n. 97.
In order to avoid discrepancies in nomenclature between quotations from the relevant documents relating to the Bracegirdle affair and my own comments, I use the name 'Ceylon' throughout for the island before 1972.
Trotsky was informed in December 1936 that the Mexican government would grant him asylum, and when he and his wife arrived in Mexico in January 1937, Diego Rivera and his wife, Frida Kahlo, were waiting to receive them (Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet Outcast: Trotsky, 1929-1940, Oxford University Press, 1963, pp. 352-356). Bracegirdle was in Ceylon till 31 October 1937, so the dates are consistent with the story I was told.
Wesley S. Muthiah and Sydney Wanasinghe (eds.), The Bracegirdle Affair (Colombo: Young Socialist, 1999), p. 8. This book will be referred to hereafter in this paper as Muthiah and Wanasinghe.
7 Muthiah and Wanasinghe. The documents are mainly those of the Public Record Office in London, though the Supreme Court judgments in the Bracegirdle case and the State Council debates on the issue of Bracegirdle are also reproduced. The work is that of two party enthusiasts; there are shortcomings in the editing, and the text is occasionally imperfect. Nevertheless one must be grateful to the two editors for their initiative and industry in making the compilation, on which I have drawn considerably for the documentary material in this paper.
* I have, however, made some observations on this question in my book Working Underground (ICES, 1999), especially pp. 68-75.
o Muthiah and Wanasinghe, p. viii.

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See Letters exchanged between Thomas, P.N. Banks, then Deputy IGP, and G.H. Ferguson, DIGP, CID in Muthiah and Wanasinghe, pp. 16-24. The alarm of the planting community is reflected also in some of the speeches of European nominated members during the State Council debates on the issue.
Muthiah and Wanasinghe, p. 35.
Ibid., pp.55-56.
The reference is to the voting 34-7 on the motion of Siripala Samarakkody declaring the Governor's action unconstitutional and asking for the withdrawal of the deportation order.
Ibid., p. 184. Muthiah and Wanasinghe, p. 88.
Ibid., p. 94.
Ibid., p. 245.
Ibid., p. ix..
K.M. de Silva (ed.), History of Ceylon, Vol. 3 (University of Ceylon Press Board, 1973), pp. 515-516.
Muthiah and Wanasinghe, p. 324.
Ibid., pp. 571-573.
A good account of this can be found in Y. Ranjith Amarasinghe, Revolutionary Idealism and Parliamentary Politics., pp. 33-36.
I believe Muthiah and Wanasinghe's text here is defective, and some such phrase as 'certain powers for the Governor' is missing. -
Muthiah and Wanasinghe, p. 248.

The Bracegirdle Affair in Retrospect 329
* This wasn't true of the grant of citizenship to husbands of
female citizens, but that pertains to another issue
* See, for example, comments by B.H. Aluwihare in Muthiah
and Wanasinghe, pp. 75-76.
7 I have drawn here on the narrative of the events in the
second volume of Isaac Deutscher's biography. The Prophet Unarmed: Trotsky, 1921-1929 (Oxford University Press, 1959). Pp. 468-471.
Nethra, Vol. 4, NoS. 1 & 2, October - December 1998, January–March 2000

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POliti CS Past The LSSP DOCuments Of the 'Thirties and Early Forties
The subject of this paper is the collection of documents relating to the Lanka Sama Samaja Party in the pre-war and wartime years down to 1942, edited by Wesley S. Muthiah and Sydney Wanasinghe, and recently published. The greater part of this collection has been transcribed from the hitherto confidential documents in the Public Record Office, London, which have become open to the public after 50 years. These include communications between the Governor in Ceylon and the Secretary of State for the Colonies, internal documents of the Colonial Office, as well as police reports from Colombo. The editors appear to have made an effort to supplement the documents available in London with party documents obtained from local sources.
We must be grateful to the editors for the labour they have devoted to the collection and editing of these documents, thus making generally accessible a mass of valuable and interesting material. It is, however, a pity that the editing and presentation of the documents fall short of the importance of their subject matter. What might have been adequate if the book was merely a party souvenir for its sixtieth anniversary is not good enough for a compilation which will naturally be consulted by students of colonial policy and administration and of the political history of that era. Even though the editors

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are not professional historians, some effort should have been made by them to meet the norms generally maintained in the publication of such documentary material. The book doesn't distinguish systematically between the documents derived from the Public Record Office in London and others; nor, in the case of the former, are file numbers given: this customary practice in quoting such source material would have assisted future researchers. It is not stated whether the documents bearing on the LSSP in the London records have been reproduced comprehensively or selectively. I shall refer later to one document that I have been told exists in the colonial records but isn't there in the book. Many of the documents are undated, and while in some cases the originals in the Public Record Office may not have carried a date either, there are others where dating should have been easy, but hasn't been done owing to editorial indifference. For instance, Dr. Colvin R.de Silva's presidential address to the Second annual party conference is dated by year, month and day, but his address to the third such conference doesn't carry even the year, though this is given as 1938 on page 22 of the editors' introduction. On the same page the editors state that they have reprinted three of Dr. de Silva's presidential addresses, and refer to Document No. 2 as the first of these. However, on turning to the text of that document, we find that it is an article titled 'What is Communism?" by Dr. de Silva, reprinted from the Ceylon Daily News, in which the author thanks the editor for the opportunity to place the Communist or Socialist view before the public. This article, too, is undated, though this deficiency could have been eliminated by a search in the back files of the paper. At the end of the book (pages 257-259) there is reproduced what seems to be a party document in Sinhala, but this is neither numbered nor identified.
Another editorial fault is that explanatory matter is sometimes inserted in parentheses into the body of a text instead of being given in footnotes or endnotes, or at least marked off by Square brackets, as is the scholarly convention in respect of interpolated matter: failing this, the reader may

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be left in momentary confusion whether the explanation is part of the original text. Apart from the one contradiction between introduction and text that I have already noted, there is another serious inaccuracy in the editors' introduction. This is the reference on page 31 to the resolution moved by George E.de Silva in the State Council in May 1941 regarding the detention of four leaders of the LSSP. The introduction says: 'The resolution was worded as follows: "In the opinion of this Council, the four detenus at present, detained in Kandy should be forthwith released." However, on turning to the text of the debate included in the body of the book, we find that while the form in which the resolution stood on the order paper was indeed as stated in the introduction, George E.de Silva, in rising to move it, asked for and obtained leave to amend it. In its amended form the resolution read: 'That this Council requests His Excellency the Governor to release the four detenus at present detained in Kandy under the Defence (Miscellaneous No. 3) Regulations dated June 3, 1940. This represented a watering-down of the original wording of the resolution, perhaps due to political pressures, and the editors should have taken note of this. Although the introduction states, on page 32, that 'the entire debate has been included', a reading of the text suggests that there are on pages 243 and 244 breaks and omissions, maybe of less important matter, interruptions and crosstalk, perhaps, but these hiatuses should have been explained. A further point regarding the shortcomings of the book concerns the incompleteness of the collection. It doesn't contain a single party programme - neither the one which the party issued at the time of its inauguration and which bore a reformist character, nor the later one, adopted. I believe, in 1941, which was based on a Marxist analysis and commitment to socialist revolution. The absence of these documents would seem to indicate that the party hasn't been as successful in keeping its records intact as the former imperial rulers!
In his preface to the book Mr. Bernard Soysa says: "A general reader cannot be expected to see a living pattern of

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history in these documents. However, the sponsors in their narrative do to a small extent enable the reader to glimpse the living reality." In spite of the qualification, 'to a small extent, I think the editors' introduction is inadequate to perform this function. Their narration of the history of the LSSP gives the impression that, with the exception of the expulsion of the Stalinists in 1940, that history was a seamless whole, while actually it was marked by several breaks and transformations, some of which fell within the period covered by the book. I should therefore like to trace what I see as four phases in the history of the LSSP, so as to provide a context in which the documents can be placed. ー
The significance of the pre-war LSSP was that it represented the first attempt, indeed, the only one, to build a militant antiimperialist, mass movement on a national scale in Ceylon. A.E. Goonesinha's Labour party had preceded it, in rousing working-class consciousness and leading major strike actions. Goonesinha's role in almost singlehandedly agitating for and securing universal franchise at the time of the Donoughmore Commission has scarcely been given the recognition that it deserves. But Goonesinha lacked a coherent political perspective, and by the time of the foundation of the LSSP, he had declined into racist politics. In Jaffna the Gandhian agitation for Swaraj found its response in the politics of the Youth League and the boycott it organized in 1931 of the Donoughmore Constitution, on the ground that nothing short of independence was acceptable. The Jaffna Youth League was more radical than any political grouping in the South at that point of time; its leader, Handy Perinpanayagam, was later to work with the LSSP. But the national leadership which occupied front stage at the time the LSSP entered the political arena - the Ceylon National Congress - had not even a faint echo of the anti-imperialist commitment of their Indian counterparts. As the Ceylon National Congress avowed in its memorandum to the Donoughmore Commission:

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Ceylon is one of the few British possessions in which the demand for political reform has never passed from constitutional agitation to hostile demonstration.
But the gentlemen leaders of the Congress, some of whom are still ritually celebrated every year as national heroes, were not only incapable of leading a popular movement against imperialism: they were against even universal franchises, which they opposed, to a man, at the time of the Donoughmore Commission. Marxists, in analyzing the failure of the Ceylonese political leadership to promote a militant anti-imperialist movement, have emphasized the absence of an industrial bourgeoisie and the dependent role of the indigenous landowning and mercantile classes in relation to imperialism. But it seems to me that one should also take into account the total cultural colonization of these classes and their political representatives. It was left to the new generation of young political intellectuals who formed the LSSP, themselves by origin of the English-educated elite, to bring back from the West the theories of socialism and Marxism which were to stimulate a new political development in Ceylon.
I think we should be especially thankful to Messrs. Muthiah and Wanasinghe for reprinting from the pages of Hansard the 1941 State Council debate on the LSSP detenus to which I have already referred. It is a document that illuminates glaringly the political temper of the leadership of the so-called nationalist movement. Clearly, a large proportion of the membership of the State Council was more frightened of the 'subversive' politics of the LSSP than of any violation of civil liberties by the colonial government. Indeed, the Minister of Home Affairs and his Executive Committee, composed of State Councillors, had approved of the defence regulations which authorised the Governor to detain persons without trial, and the Minister had concurred in the order for the detention of the four Sama Samajists. During the debate, which took place nearly a year after the detention orders were made G.G. Ponnambalam moved an amendment whose purpose was to make the request for the release of the detenus conditional on their undertaking

Remembrance of Politics Past 335
'not to engage in activities inimical to the successful prosecution of the war or subversive of the stability of the State'. This amendment, which was seconded by A.E. Goonesinha, was lost. But only a few members, like George E.de Silva himself and Siripala Samarakkody (who had a brother under detention), would even take the liberal position that they disagreed with the politics of the LSSP but would defend their right not to be detained without trial. Ultimately, the resolution, in the form in which it had been adulterated by the mover himself, squeaked through by a majority of a single vote, with nine abstentions.
The LSSP had germinated from the Surya Mal movement, which was an amorphous association of progressive nationalist elements (two of its leaflets and articles are in the book, one of them written by Doreen Young, later Doreen Wickremasinghe). The party's public propaganda and agitation were originally on a broadly populist radical platform. It had from its beginnings a firm commitment to full national independence, but its popular base was also built by its opposition to the headman system, its stand against police repression and violence, its advocacy of welfare measures and the leadership it gave to workers' struggles. However, there was apparently an inner group within the leadership whose aim was to propel the party in the direction of a Marxist revolutionary organization. But the LSSP's development from the condition of an open, radical populist movement to a Leninist-style revolutionary party wasn't consummated until wartime arrests and restrictions drove it underground. This second phase of the party's life was marked by the expulsion of its Stalinist wing, the adoption of a new, explicitly Marxist programme and the reconstitution of its membership on the basis of selected cadres. The period documented by the book falls within these two phases that I have outlined. I should like, for purposes of comprehensiveness, to indicate briefly what I regard as the two subsequent phases of the party's history. The third phase began with the resumption of open public life by the party after the end of the war. During that

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third period there was a gradual shift in the centre of gravity of the party from revolutionary to parliamentary activity, bringing it closer, in practice though not yet in theory, to the character of a social democratic political organization. That shift is, in itself, not to be regretted, since the earlier goal of proletarian revolution was a chimera. If nothing else had changed, the LSSP might have emerged as the effective socialdemocratic alternative to the UNP. But the dominance of Sinhala ethno-nationalism in the mid-fifties and the ascendancy of the SLFP presented the party with new challenges. Once class was overshadowed by ethnicity as the main basis of political mobilization, the LSSP went into decline as an independent political force. This was the marker of the fourth phase of the party's life, as is evidenced by its twists and turns on the ethnic question in the last three decades, in response to external pressures. In 1955-56 the party had stood valiantly against 'Sinhala only"; it surrendered to that policy on entering the first coalition with the SLFP in 1964, and in 1965-66, it made a 180 degree turn from its position a decade earlier, lining up behind the SLFP to oppose Dudley Senanayake's language regulations. In 1972 Dr. Colvin R.de Silva, on behalf of the United Front government, wrote Sinhala as the only official language into the Constitution. This meant that where the legal validity of 'Sinhala only' had until then rested on an Act of Parliament, which could have been amended by a simple majority, it now had a status that could be altered only by a two-thirds majority. The 1972 Constitution also gave Buddhism primacy of place, and made no concessions to Tamil demands.
To lament these shifts on the part of the LSSP is not just to make a fetish of consistency. In the 'fifties and early 'sixties the Tamil people could still look on the left movement as the significant political force in the south which defended their rights. In abandoning them, the LSSP (and CP with it) accentuated the ethnic polarization of our politics, and thus contributed to the triumph of extreme nationalism and of separatism in the north. The 1972 Constitution, it may be

Remembrance of Politics Past 337
recalled, was the precursor to the Vaddukodai resolution in which a leading Tamil party for the first time put separatism on the political agenda.
In recent years several people have quoted approvingly the dictum attributed to Dr. Colvin R.de Silva in 1956, “Two Languages, one country; one language, two countries'. Well, I suppose prophets should be honoured even when they have gone back later on their own prophetic insights. But if it has now become respectable to quote that dictum, it is because the two major Sinhala-based parties have themselves shifted from their original uncompromising positions: the Jayewardene government in 1987 enacting the 13th and 16th Amendments and the Provincial Councils Act, and the present President making since 1994 more extensive moves towards devolution. On both these occasions the LSSP supported the new initiatives, but one can hardly say that their political agitation or activity made a big difference in bringing about the changes. In the first case, it was Indian pressure that was decisive; in the second, it was the outlook of the new leader of the SLFP.
Having brought the history of the LSSP up to date - from my own point of view, of course - I wish to go back now in time to the year 1940 and discuss the first major transformation in the orientation of the party. In that year the Executive Committee of the LSSP, by a majority of 29 votes to 5, adopted the following resolution:
In view of the failure of the Third International to guide itself by the needs of the international revolutionary working class movement, the Lanka Sama Samaja Party, while reaffirming its support for and solidarity with the Soviet Union, the first workers' state, declares that it no longer has confidence in the 3 International.
That resolution led to the expulsion of the Stalinist group in the LSSP, who became the nucleus of the future Communist Party.
In his great three-volume biography of Trotsky, Isaac Deutscher noted the failure of Trotsky's adherents successfully

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to build mass parties anywhere, with the peculiar exception of Ceylon'. I had a personal conversation with Deutscher in London in 1952, in which he expressed his curiosity about how that 'exception' could be explained. I should like to suggest that the triumph of Trotskysism inside the LSSP was more than fortuitous circumstances. Both Stalinism and Trotskyism have now receded in the perspective of history. The LSSP of today no longer pays even lipservice to Trotskyism, while the last surviving admirer of Stalin in Sri Lanka is probably Mr. Dayan Jayatilleke. But I wish to argue that the question of Trotskyism vs. Stalinism was in 1940 a question that had very direct implications for the practical politics of a left party in Ceylon.
The gravitation of the LSSP leadership away from the Third International, or Comintern, had taken place in the context of the Popular Front policies which the International had imposed on all Communist parties. With the drift towards an European war, the Comintern's efforts had been concentrated on building up broad alliances of anti-fascist parties which would favour, in the international arena, an alliance between the democratic Western powers and the Soviet Union against Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. This line, which reflected the defensive needs of the Soviet Union, had, it is true, been temporarily submerged by the time the LSSP moved its anti-Comintern resolution. Stalin had started the world, and indeed the Communist parties themselves, by signing the non-aggression pact with Hitler's Germany on the eve of the war. But the Popular Front line would be revived two years later once Germany attacked the Soviet Union.
What were the implications of this line for socialist parties in colonial countries like India and Ceylon? Once Britain became a wartime ally of the Soviet Union, the line involved suspension of the anti-imperialist struggle and support of the war effort in the interests of the 'defence of the Soviet Union'. The Communist parties of India and Ceylon proved this by changing their attitude to the war, proclaiming that the

Remembrance of Politics Past 339
imperialist war had been transformed into a people's war', and, in India, opposing the "Quit India' movement of 1942.
The LSSP's dissociation of itself from the Comintern was, therefore, farsighted in the context of the international situation and its possible repercussions on Ceylon politics. But there was another factor, more directly related to the character of class forces in Ceylon, which must have contributed to the LSSP's repudiaton of the Comintern.
In the Popular Front period/s, the Comintern's policy for colonial countries was that Communist parties should support the national bourgeoisie in their countries in furtherance of the strategy of building broad national fronts. Against both Stalinists and Trotskyists, I would hold today the question of the character of the national bourgeoisie, its role in relation to imperialism and the degree of its progressive or reactionary nature, is one to which the answers had to vary from country to country, and even perhaps between one period and another. In India, for instance, there was indeed at this time a national bourgeoisie playing an oppositional role to imperialism. But in Ceylon, where the bourgeoisie and its political leadership were interested only in bargaining for favours from the imperial rulers, the Comintern line was politically stultifying. This was fully demonstrated in 1947 when the Communist Party, docilely looking round for a national bourgeois leadership to support, could find one only in the United National Party!
The Trotskyist theory, on the other hand, said that in colonial countries the bourgeoisie were a class dependent on imperialism who could not be expected to carry through national liberation, and that this task had therefore to be performed by parties leading the proletariat. Whether this was generally true or not, it must have seemed to mirror correctly the political realities of Ceylon. In his presidential address to the LSSP of 1937 Dr. Colvin R.de Silva had said:

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Ceylon is peculiar in that it has a completely cowardly bourgeoisie that never has and never will at any stage provide national leadership against imperialism.
This conviction would have strengthened the movement of the LSSP leadership towards Trotskyism.
It must be noted that the LSSP's resolution of 1940 only condemned the Third International. Neither in that resolution nor in the article of Leslie Goonewardene clarifying the resolution, which is reprinted in the book, is there any comment on the internal political or social structure of the Soviet Union, any critique of the Soviet bureaucracy, and the political dictatorship. The LSSP, in other words, was not yet taking the full Trotskyist position publicly, whatever opinions some of the leaders may have personally held. This again confirms my view that it was not that the LSSP leadership split the party in the interests of a theoretical perspective that was far from home; it was the pressures of immediate practical choices that pushed them to a theoretical commitment.
By the time the LSSP detenus were interned in mid-1940, the LSSP had publicly taken positions against the war. It was in fact the statements made by Philip Gunawardena and N.M. Perera in the State Council on a vote to provide money for an RAF base that provoked the Secretary of State in London to take seriously the anti-war stand of the party and led to the detention of the two State Councillors. LSSP members and supporters fell in line with the opposition to the war as occasions arose. There are two documents reprinted in the book which concern one such expression of opposition at what was then the Ceylon University College. I should like to offer an eyewitness account of some of the piquant aspects of this episode, going beyond what is recorded in the book.
Soon after the declaration of war, the Amalgamation Club of the University, which was maintained by students' fees, voted a hundred rupees to war funds. LSSP students condemned this grant and called a meeting of protest at College House. Professor Pakeman, who was then Acting Principal,

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banned the meeting. It was then made known that the meeting would be held nevertheless. At the appointed time one student who was functioning as chairman (I shall identify him in a moment, but there was no chair, he was standing like everybody else) was about to open proceedings, when Professor Pakeman appeared. 'you can't hold this meeting, he barked (he was a Colonel in the army), I have banned it!" The student-chairman turned to the crowd and asked, 'Do you want me to go on with the meeting? There was a chorus of Yes!" Pakeman went red in the face. You, you, you, you,' he said, pointing to the students in front, 'you are all suspended." He turned on his heel and left. The crowd of students moved to Queen's Road, just outside, and the meeting went on. Later the Deputy Inspector-General of Police in charge of the CID reported in his periodical confidential report that many of those who organized this protest were youths of good family, whose fathers are highly placed in Government Services and the Professions, or possessed of considerable private means'. He was right. The student-chairman on that occasion was Esmond Wickramasinghe, later to be D.R. Wijewardene's son-in-law and Managing Director of Lake House. It may be said that that confrontation on the veranda of College House was Esmond's finest hour.
In November 1940, a few months after the detention of the four LSSP leaders, Governor Caldecott reported to the Secretary of State that police plans, which would fructify in the course of the month, would involve the extinction of the party'. But by that time the LSSP was putting in place an efficient clandestine organisation which during the next two years ran a secret press which produced illegal papers and pamphlets in Sinhala and Tamil, produced, in response to a Government regulation banning the hammer and sickle, an epidemic of hammer and sickle graffiti on walls, bridges and culverts, successfully concealed Leslie Goonewardene, who was wanted under a detention order, and organized the escape of the four detenus in 1942. However, this last-mentioned adventure, even while it captured the popular imagination,

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was also the beginning of one of the major internal problems of the party. Somebody, parodying the Communist Manifesto, once made the wisecrack that 'the history of all hitherto existing Marxist parties is the history of factional struggles'. The LSSP had survived in 1940 its first factional struggle, that between Stalinists and Trotskyists, with little loss; and, in any case, as I have suggested, this was an inevitable split. The second factional struggle, which lay just beyond the period covered in this book, was more bruising; in my view, it led to the seizure of the illegal party press by the police and the arrest of Some of the wanted members. But owing to the fact that this division took place while the party was underground, it remained unknown to the public until it burst into the open at the end of the war. This was the breach between Philip Gunawardena and other leaders.
The four detenus arrested in 1940 returned after their escape to a party very different from the one they had known before they were incarcerated. There were new faces, new forms of organization and functioning, imposed both by the conditions of illegality and by the party's commitment to a Leninist-style structure. Philip Gunawardena found himself ill at ease in this environment. He tended to the opinion that Rosa Luxemburg, in her advocacy of a more open party, was right against Lenin on this question, though an open organization would have been impossible under conditions of war-time proscription. However, the future was to show that there was more to this dispute than variant opinions on the style of party organization. Philip Gunawardena, as his later political history showed, was temperamentally incapable of working in a party on a footing of equality with other leaders; he needed to be the absolute supremo.
This is, however, to run ahead of the story, since Muthiah and Wanasinghe's collection ends with the jailbreak of 1942 and official documents and British newspaper reports relating to it - an appropriate document for the romantic and heroic chapter in the history of the LSSP that the book records. It is not surprising that Mr. Bernard Soysa, writing a foreword to

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the book, confesses to a certain nostalgia regarding the past, and even quotes Wordsworth's lines on the French Revolution, while admitting the different scale of the events: 'Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, but to be young was very heaven.' I too have allowed myself a touch of nostalgia in titling this paper in the way I have. But Mr. Bernad Soysa's quotation carries with it an irony, whether he was aware of it or not. Wordsworth's recollection of this youthful ardour at the outbreak of the Revolution was made in the context of a rueful contemplation of the distance between the hopes and illusions of that time and the realities that followed. Is it possible to avoid a similar reflection when we compare the LSSP's revolutionary dreams with the often uncomfortable realities of its politics in the era that lies outside the covers of this book? Read Dr. Colvin R.de Silva's two presidential addresses included in the book, and you will see that behind the flamboyance of phrase and the resonant periods, there is a view of the world as simple as the opposition between good guys and bad guys in a Wild West film. The issue is not between Capitalism and Fascism or Democracy and Dictatorship; the issue is between Capitalism and Socialism." O sancta simplicitas! Who would have thought then that the author of these speeches, for whom everything was so plain and clearcut, would find himself three decades and a half later mired in the compromises of coalition politics, the pressures of ethnic fanaticisms, the repression of insurrectionary youth, and the framing of a constitution that, in the name of the sovereignty of the people, conferred virtually absolute power on the Cabinet of Ministers and the legislative majority? One can imagine the scorching indictment that the Colvin R. de Silva of the 'thirties would have made of the Colvin R. de Silva of the 'seventies, if only he could have foreseen the future.
However, if the nostalgia that the book may inspire must, for many readers, be shadowed by disenchantment, it is not only the loss of direction of the LSSP or of Sri Lankan left politics that are responsible. These are manifestations of the

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larger, international erosion of the socialist vision. In one of his presidential speeches Dr. Colvin R. de Silva said:
Capitalism has not only reached the limits of its development, but already so to speak, turned in upon itself. This system so admirably designed to expand the productive capacity of the world has by reason of its inherent contradictions and dependence on the profit motive proved utterly incapable of utilizing that capacity actually to produce in a manner to satisfy the needs of the masses.
Dr. de Silva was wrong in 1937 in concluding that capitalism had reached the limits of its development, since the system was to achieve its greatest technological heights, its highest productivity and its furthest global expansion after the war. However, it is still true to say that the system has proved incapable of satisfying the needs of the masses, that it has perpetuated the paradox of poverty co-existing with affluence. Yet in 1996 it should be equally clear that socialism failed too; the messianic hopes on which the same presidential address concluded were never fulfilled: "Conscious of the responsibility of our acknowledged mission, we shall go into the long fight that will give to mankind through utilizing to the full those powers and potentialities whose application and use will prove that the real history of mankind has only just begun. Instead, socialism proved to be another form of class society, where economic privilege was guaranteed not by private ownership of property but by political control over the State in which property was vested.
I wish to make one final set of observations about this book. Since so much of the original party documents as well as the editors' introduction are pervaded by anti-imperialist rhetoric I think it pertinent to say that the evidence contained in the book brings out the contradictory nature of British colonial rule, divided between the liberalism which was part of its ideological heritage and the necessities of imperial power. The confidential minutes made by officials at the Colonial Office when the detention of the two LSSP State Councillors

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was contemplated in 1940 provide some interesting documentation of this conflict. After Philip Gunawardena and N.M. Perera had made their anti-war speeches in the State Council, the Colonial Office in London was in a certain dilemma. There was no question that people who made such speeches were a threat to the war effort and should be detained, but on the other hand the Colonial Office was concerned that this might be taken to be a violation of the rights and privileges of State Councillors. One official wrote:
The problem, of course, is going to be the question of free speech in the Legislature, but if free speech is abused it had better, at a time like this, disappear. There may, however, be legal immunity for speeches in the Legislature and if it is desired to proceed against, these people I must look into that and see, if it is so, whether there is any way of getting over it.
By the next day the officials had found a number of ways of 'getting over it': firstly, the Powers and Privileges in relation to the State Council had not yet received the King's assent and was therefore not yet Law: secondly, the Councillors probably had in their possession in their residencies incriminating literature and correspondence which would be sufficient grounds for detention; and further, the relevant Defence Regulation entitled the Governor to detain a person if he was satisfied that it was necessary to do so in the interests of public safety or defence. Ultimately, the grounds of detention served on the two LSSP Councillors, as on the other two detenus, made no reference to speeches in the State Council, so any rights of "free speech in the legislature weren't overtly violated.
Again, a commission of inquiry had held that Sergeant Suraweera who shot the worker Govindan during the strike at Mooloya Estate had no justification for the act, largely owing to the brilliant cross-examination of the sergeant by Dr. Colvin R.de Silva which was one of his greatest legal triumphs. The LSSP demanded thereafter that the sergeant be tried, but no legal action was taken against him. (An interesting sidelight

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this, on the difference between Ceylon then and Sri Lanka now, a mainly Southern-based party could, without courting unpopularity, demand the prosecution for murder of a Sinhala policeman who had shot an Indian Tamil estate worker).
What we have seen in the last paragraphs were part of the negative face of British imperialism. On the other hand, it was the British tradition of independence of the judiciary that permitted the Chief Justice, Sir Sidney Abrahams, and two other judges to declare the order of deportation on Bracegirdle by the Governor illegal. I have been told by Mr. Desmond Fernando that there exists in the colonial records a document relating to a sequel to the judgment, both the Governor and the British IGP were seriously worried that Bracegirdle would have a cause of civil action against them for wrongful attempted deportation. The Governor therefore appealed to the Secretary of State to have a Bill introduced in the British Parliament indemnifying them. The Secretary of State approved this request, and put up a Cabinet paper accordingly. However, when it went to the Lord Chancellor, he observed that Mr. Bracegirdle was no doubt a Communist and therefore probably an objectionable character, but as one of His Majesty's subjects, he was entitled to the same legal protection as any other. The Bill of Indemnity was not pursued because of this dissent.
The cover of this book states that it shows how the British imperial government persecuted, suppressed and incarcerated the leaders of the Lanka Sama Samaja Party because of their opposition to the war." So it did, but I wonder whether the colonial government's record in respect of civil liberties in these years can be said to compare unfavourably with that of several post-independence Sri Lankan governments. The colonial regime detained initially four people, and wanted to detain another who evaded arrest (that was Leslie Goonewardene). After the jailbreak of 1942, it issued warrants against 22 others, of whom eleven were not then found. In 1971, in comparison, a government which included two of the former detenus as Ministers detained at peak 16,000 people. True, this was after an abortive attempt to overthrow the State; but it could also

Remembrance of Politics Past 347
be said that the 1942 detentions were ordered at a time when a Japanese invasion was believed to be imminent, and when there could have been British fears that the LSSP leaders had done a Subhas Chandra Bose. Certainly the propaganda of the Communist Party, which called the escaped LSSP leaders 'fifth columnists, could have contributed to such fears. More than for the romantic exploits of the LSSP in that era, we should feel nostalgia for the lost social conscience that it was able to arouse in that time. One shooting of one worker belonging to an ethnic minority was enough ground for a national agitation that secured the appointment of a commission of inquiry. In the last decade and a half the scale of the extra-judicial killings and disappearances, perpetrated by both state and anti-state forces, makes anything that happened in the thirties and 'forties seem like a tea party. The British government refrained from giving indemnity to the Governor and IGP in Ceylon over the order to deport Bracegirdle, but indemnity has freely been conferred in recent times on members of the security forces who have engaged in acts of violence during periods of emergency, whether with justification or without. Moreover, under the Jayewardene government, police officers who had been held by the Supreme Court to have violated fundamental rights received the accolade of promotion, the judges became the target of hooliganism, and the President himself condoned that behaviour as an exercise of the freedom of expression. Finally, Messrs Muthiah and Wanasinghe's collection owes its existence to the practice of the British Record Office under which confidential state documents pass into the public domain after the lapse of 50 years. We have no such practices, nor any law compelling it, and freedom of information is not even a right under the Constitution. Here papers that are sealed by political authority can remain sealed for ever, or perhaps shredded, so that public accountability, even posthumously at the bar of history, need never arise.
The comparisons I have made are not meant to idealise or whitewash imperialism. We must remember that in spite of the efforts of the LSSP to lead a militant mass movement against

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imperialism, colonial rule did not in fact, between 1935 and 1948, face any major threat to its existence in Ceylon as it did, say, in 1942 in India. Otherwise, the fissures between its liberal professions and its governing practice might have gaped yet wider. But I doubt whether anybody has the moral right to throw stones at imperialist rule if he or she is not equally critical of the violations of people's rights by post-colonial governments, of whichever party. The most important conclusion, however, that I wish to draw from a comparison between colonial and post-colonial rule is this: that under any system, power is a necessary evil, which requires institutional and ideological checks and restraints to mitigate it. Thus, for the citizen who is at the receiving end of power, a liberal tradition has its virtues in providing at least a limited protection, though its efficacy may be partial or its operation inconsistent. To be content with exposing the infirmities of that tradition is to throw the baby out with the bathwater. The struggle that is necessary is to build institutions and evolve a consciousness, among both the wielders and the sufferers of power, that will enable the rule of law and the fundamental rights of the citizen to be upheld at all times and not bent in the interests of the state. Perhaps the greatest danger is when men who are wholly convinced of the correctness of their aims and of the potential goodness of these aims for others set out to centralize power and to remove all the roadblocks in the way of its omnipotent operation. Post-independence Sri Lankan political history provides several examples, both on the left and on the right, of this danger. In this respect the record in office of Colvin R. de Silva, Felix Dias Bandaranaike, J.R. Jayewardene and Ranasinghe Premadasa may serve, in the words of Dr. Johnson, 'to point a moral or adorn a tale'.
Endnotes
1. Wesley S. Muthiah and Sydney Wanasinghe (eds.), Britain, World War 2 and the Sama Samajists (1996: A Young Socialist publication)

The ACCOrd and the Peace Community
I am particularly glad of this opportunity to speak because during the last few weeks a campaign has been mounted of misrepresentation, vilification and intimidation of those groups and individuals, who, independently of the government, have supported the Peace Accord. These groups and organizations I would like to identify as the peace community of Sri Lanka which, during the last four years even when the government was following a militaristic course, stood consistently for a peaceful negotiated settlement.
Now speaking of this campaign of vilification and intimidation, I would like to stress that it has been mounted particularly in that section of the press which is interested in undermining the Peace Accord. It has taken the form of articles - some of you may have read the articles by Dr. Susantha Gunatilleke in the Island etc - and editorial comments, but it has also taken various other forms. Threats have been directed at groups and individuals actively supportive of peace sometimes publicly and sometimes through anonymous letters. If you would permit me I would like to show you a communication I received through the post just two days ago.
If I may play the role of Sherlock Holmes for a moment I would like to say that this has been typed on a sophisticated electronic typewriter - hardly the type of machine available to

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underground guerilla groups - but going by the number of typing errors I can surmise that it has been produced in an institution equipped with high technology but it has been typed by somebody who normally gets his letter typed by his secretary but in this he could hardly trust his Secretary to do this work for him. Therefore I would presume it was typed by somebody who is an executive. It has been typed by somebody who is literate in English but if I may say so, not too literate as he uses such strange terms as "out migration". I do not know whether such a word exists in the English language.
I do not want to bore you by reading this whole document but that it has been addressed to thirteen groups and organizations in Colombo and it accuses them among other things of supporting separatist causes, open support for the JR-Rajiv Accord and then goes on to make the demand 'Stop All Your Research and Activities on the Ethnic Issue', 'Make a public announcement that the Tamil demand for a homeland is to the detriment of a united Sri Lanka', 'Sever all connections with Tamil separatists and their sympathisers' etc. and very considerately it gives a period of 36 (I do not know whether there is any mystical significance in this number) days for these demands to be carried out. My final deduction is that the person concerned is an addict of spy fiction as the letter is signed
Yours Sincerely, Unit S/K/F/0014!
It would take more than that to deter me from saying what I think.
In view of this campaign of misrepresentation I would like to restate the fundamental position that the peace community took, in these last critical years, and which has been entirely vindicated and borne out by the recent course of events. This has been the case both in regard to the Accord and what followed its signing.
Even before 1983, such organizations as were then in ex

The Accord and the Peace Community 35
istence, like the Centre for Society and Religion, the Citizens Committee for National Harmony, the Movement for InterRacial Justice and Peace - took the position that unless the legitimate demands of the Tamil people for a share of power and the protection of their fundamental right for protection were met, armed militancy would grow and become more powerful. And after the war became a daily condition of life of the country the entire peace community warned that the longer the war continued not only would ruin and destruction grow but also the demand of the militants for setting up a separate state would get the support of the Tamil people as they would be left with no democratic alternative.
I would like to quote from a document issued by the Committee for Rational Development, mainly because it is an organization to which I belong and of which I am one of the Joint Secretaries - not that we were alone in stating this since most of the Peace Community held similar ideas. This statement was made shortly after the failure of the Thimpu Conference. There we have stated "Unless a meaningful settlement is negotiated Sri Lanka will slide into a war of attrition at the end of which there may be an imposed peace in which no Sri Lankan whether Sinhalese or Tamil would have a say." Now I would maintain that if these warnings uttered so often during the last four years had been heeded in time not only would Sri Lanka have been spared the horrors of the last four years but there would have been less emitterment, less hardening of positions on both sides and therefore less resistance to the peace when it came both in the North and the South. We would not have been presented with the tragedies of the post-Accord period.
Now this brings me to the role of India. Before I examine the role of India in relation to the Indo-Sri Lankan Accord I want to point out that there was a time when we could have solved this problem without the mediation, intervention or dictation of any foreign power.

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The earlier speaker referred to the seventies when the armed militancy began. I would like to go further back and remind you that there were two negotiated agreements between the elected governments of this country and the representatives of the Tamil people. One was the pact negotiated by Mr. Bandaranaike and Mr. Chelvanayagam in 1957 and the other the pact negotiated between Mr. Dudley Senanayake and Mr. Chelvanayagam in 1965. Let me remind you also that at that time there was no separatist demand, no armed militancy, and no 'terrorists'. All that the Tamil people were demanding was a fair share of power through power sharing. Now who was responsible for the breakdown of those pacts? Let me remind you that it was not the representatives of the Tamil people who repudiated those pacts. It was the Sinhala dominated governments of the period who repudiated them under the pressure of extremist opinion. It is the same extremist opinion which is now trying to undermine the Accord.
So if we created a situation in which the peace Settlement had to be utltimately virtually imposed by a foreign power, we have only ourselves to blame. The naked truth is that the internal forces of this country failed miserably not only during the last ten years but during the last thirty years to solve the problems of the ethnic conflict which was a conflict affecting the destinies of our people. So before we blame India let us blame ourselves for our folly, our shortsightedness and our
lack of responsibility to our own citizens.
Now it is perfectly true that the present government - I am no defender of it - bears a large share of blame for the political isolation and impotence which the state found itself in by the middle of 1987 and therefore made the Indo-Sri Lanka Peace Pact inevitable. But I think it is dishonest to confine our criticisms to the present government which come from political parties who have themselves held power in the past and who have contributed to the present situation, which is the

The Accord and the Peace Community 353
accumulated result of thirty years of errors of omission and commission. I do not want to spend time discussing the record of every single party but would only say that no major party is guiltless because the present situation is a result of what they did partly when they were in power and partly when they were in opposition.
However I would like to single out one particular political party because it is the principal opposition party today and it is the most vociferous and articulate party opposed to the ACcord - the Sri Lanka Freedom Party.
During a press conference after the Peace Accord was signed President Jayewardene spoke about his lack of intelligence, courage and foresight in having failed to solve this problem four years earlier. I think we should give him some credit for having said that.
I would wish that Mrs. Bandaranaike would follow suit and meet the press and acknowledge her own lagk of intelligence, courage and foresight in not having even attempted a solution to the ethnic problem during her tenure of government unlike her husband and Mr. Dudley Senanayake.
She in fact contributed to the worsening of the conflict by introducing the blatantly unfair and discriminatory measure of standardization. Everybody knows that this step helped to push the disillusioned sections of Tamil youth into the militant movement at its very inception.
Secondly in the 1972 Constitution she did not even make a meager concession, even on paper, to the aspirations of the Tamil people. She really prepared the way for the TULF (Tamil (Jnited Liberation Front) at its Vadukoddai sessions 1975 demanding for the first time a separate state and ultimately for that demand to be taken up by the militant youth. So no party is guiltless - no party that had a share in the shaping of policy - whether in government or opposition.

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Last, let me come to the Indian role. The same peace groups or the peace community which asked for a negotiated settlement always pointed out that with the existence of militant bases in South India and the militants receiving military help from India there could be no question of bringing the militancy to an end without the good offices of India. That is why we consistently asked the government during the last four years not to get into a situation of confrontation with India but to Secure the co-operation of India in winding up the militancy. Of course the necessary pre-condition for this was a viable, reasonable and just political settlement with the representatives of the Tamil people. In short an acceptable measure of devolution of power and regional harmony.
Instead the government got into a position of flirting with various western powers. It believed that if they got into a situation of confrontation with India, it would get the backing of these western powers. This belief was at total variance with the realities of the world political situation. No government in the world, not even the United States of America, wanted to embroil itself in a conflict with India regarding the ethnic isSues of Sri Lanka. This the government was belatedly compelled to admit after the failure of its Vadamarachchi adventure when the Indian air-lift brought the military offensive to a halt.
During the last few weeks certain newspapers have begun to argue that all of us who agitated for a negotiated settlement to the problem, who said the answer to the problem was not repression or attempt to achieve a military victory, were proved wrong in view of the conduct of the LTTE during the postACCORD period. This argument was presented last week by the Island. Events proved, the argument went, that the LTTE was prepared to fight in any case and could not be bound by any reasonable settlement or accord and therefore we should have gone for a military settlement in any case. Now this of

The Accord and the Peace Community 355
course is simply poppycock. In the first place, politics is the art of the possible. Whether it is hurtful to Sri Lankan national pride or not, no military solution was possible simply because Indian power would not have permitted it. The air-lift was the clear signal that this was so.
Secondly, the fact that the LTTE is now fighting the Indian Peace Keeping army is not proof of the proposition that it was correct for the Sri Lankan army to have gone for a military solution. This is so because there is a fundamental difference between a military solution as an alternative to a negotiated settlement and the move to crush the Tigers after definite guarantees of a just settlement. The Tamil people have been assured of regional autonomy, the Provincial Councils bill was tabled, and all steps were underwritten by India. The Tigers were given a majority in the Interim Administration Council - seven out of twelve - and after all that when the Tigers go on the offensive and massacre innocent Sinhalese civilians, then it is quite a different proposition to engage in a military offensive at that point. By saying that I am not minimizing the tragedy that has overtaken the ordinary civilian population of Jaffna. Undoubtedly it is not only the Tigers who are being killed but many civilians are also being killed.
However I am astonished - no, not astonished because nothing from that quarter surprises me - but disgusted by the newspapers which only last week were howling that the IPKF (Indian Peace Keeping Force) had betrayed its trust and was inactive when poor innocent Sinhalese civilians were being killed are now shedding crocodile tears that poor innocent Tamil civilians are being killed. I am of course disgusted by this selective exercise of human compassion when no such feelings were expressed when civilians were killed during the Vadamarachchi offensive. So it is only a question of who does the killing and whether it suits your particular purpose. Now we must say that we have not engaged in that kind of selective

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compassion, and we are horrified when civilians are killed, regardless of whether they are Sinhalese, Tamils or Muslims and who does the killing. We have always expressed grief, horror and distress at such events.
Actually in the entire course of this ethnic conflict and especially during the last four years the vast majority of Sinhalese and Tamil people were deceived regarding the realities of the political situation. I do not want to make moral criticisms at this stage because unfortunately it is not mortality that determines in politics what succeeds and what does not. So the failure of both successive Sri Lankan governments as well as the Tamil Separatist movements was due not to the moral weaknesses of their positions but to their fundamental folly and stupidity.
On the side of the Sinhalese and their governments they failed to realize that with an ethnic minority which was territorially consolidated in one region and which had a strong sense of cohesiveness and collective consciousness, you could not force on them policies which were abhorrent to their fundamental sense of justice and righteousness. Ultimately this was bound to meet with violent resistance.
Secondly, when that resistance began governments failed to realize that you could not stop that resistance by military means, with repression, torture and imprisonment without ultimately inviting a reaction from the great power across the Palk Straits. Therefore self-interest and prudence alone should have guided the Sri Lankan governments in a fairer and juster course of action.
On the side of the Tamil militants they also suffered from a grave error of judgment. Because they received support from India they believed that India was all out to help them achieve their object of a separate state. In other words the Tamil militants looked at India in the same mistaken way that the

The Accord and the Peace Community 357
Sinhalese did. The Sinhalese believed that India was a diabolical power which wanted to force a separate state on Sri Lanka. The Tamil militants thought that India was a great benefactor which was going to give them Eelam on a platter. Both were mistaken. India used this situation here at the time to Secure its own foreign policy objectives. This tendency was aggravated after 1977 when the government foolishly moved away from the non-aligned foreign policy which successive governments had followed since 1956. Consequently Sri Lanka began to act as an irritant against India in the foreign policy sphere; India was extremely anxious to wring from Sri Lanka its acceptance of fundamental Indian foreign policy.
If anyone is shocked by that, all I can say is that you are living in a naive world of your own. This is so because no power big or small is guided in its foreign policy by anything. except self-interest. The government of India is certainly not a charitable institution. So its action in this instance was certainly guided by self-interest. We have to blame ourselves for not having realized that and foolishly provoking India to ultimately dictate to us policies which we should have voluntarily adopted as a matter of prudence and self-interest. This is exactly what successive governments from 1956 to 1977 did. This in effect meant that we followed the same broad policies as India in the sphere of foreign policy. This course led to the elimination of friction between the two countries.
Certainly the problems could have been solved in 1956 and 1965 and again in 1977 at much less cost. They could again have been solved in 1983 - at the time of annexure X - which I think is a less humiliating position on the side of Sri Lanka. But we reduced ourselves to that position where we totally isolated ourselves diplomatically and politically in the world.
Having reduced ourselves to that situation what is the solution? I have heard many voices criticizing the Accord. But to

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my mind I have not heard anyone coming out with a viable alternative. It is all very well to say that if we come to power we will find the solution. They can say we will renegotiate the agreement. They can say we will abrogate the Accord. This is merely trying to repeat in the future the errors of the past.
I can say with certainty that any attempt to engage in confrontation with India will only fasten more firmly Indian domination over Sri Lanka. Please do not cherish the illusion that India has come so far merely to pack up and go home at the slightest sign of opposition. We are part of India's regional strategic interests. India is not going to desist from going on that road. What is it that made our polity vulnerable to external interests? Is it the division we created among the Sinhala and Tamil people. Until July 1983, no Prime Minister of India stated as Indira Gandhi did in the Lok Sabha "we cannot remain indifferent to the fate of the Tamil speaking people of Sri Lanka'. Until then India considered that matter only as a domestic Sri Lankan problem. But we created the situation by which we became a part of vital Indian concern partly because refugees were flooding India, partly because destabilization in Sri Lanka was affecting India's strategic interests. It created the possibility that some other power would exploit the situation here and make Sri Lanka its base. So we provided the opening for India to impose its vital and strategic interests on Sri Lanka.
So in the future we have to resolve this breach between the Sinhalese and Tamil people and the only way it can be done is by generous measures of regional autonomy, not only by introducing the Provincial Councils Bill but also implementing it in a fair and generous spirit. We must go through this not merely as a legal exercise but we must recognize the necessity to grant the Tamil people their just place as citizens of this country. Let us avoid confrontation with India so that withdrawal of Indian forces and resumption of more normal and

The Accord and the Peace Community 359
equal relations between our two countries can be achieved in the future.
I do not intend to go into the legal details of the Provincial Councils Bill but I would like to address myself to the most controversial issue of the Provincial Council Bill. This is the issue on which there has been the greatest discussion viz. the north and east merger.
Here I would like to put on record that the peace community did not during the last four years propose the merger of the north and east. That was not a solution to which most of us gave our backing. For instance the Committee for Rational Development to which I belong implicitly stated in an article published in the Lanka Guardian in December 1986, on the specific issue of the unit of devolution and dissociated itself from the demand for a merger of the northern and eastern province. We only asked for a Tamil speaking area to be created joining certain areas in the eastern province to the northern province but excluding the majority Sinhala and Muslim
ES.
It is true that the President himself at the time the Accord was signed publicly stated that he himself was not in favour of the merger, and at the time the proposed Referendum was held he would campaign against it. However the temporary merger was included in the Accord and is therefore translated into the terms of the bill. This was included as a necessary inducement for the militants to accept the Accord and co-operate in the peace effort.
Now those gentlemen like the leader writers of the Island newspaper who say that they know that the Tigers would never co-operate are talking with the wisdom of hindsight. Nobody except those privy to the inner bodies of the Tiger movement could have predicted how the Tigers would react to the Accord. The fact that they were fighting a war for the

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last four years does not necessarily mean that they would not fall in line with the Accord once it becomes a reality. I must say that several guerilla groups in other countries which have fought armed struggles against their governments have once a peaceful settlement been effected ultimately settled down to participate in the normal democratic processes of life. There have been people sitting as heads of state who have been terrorists in their time.
Therefore I would not blame President Jayewardene or Prime Minister Gandhi for laying down the north and east merger as a temporary measure.
However the situation today is different. Not only have the Tigers repudiated the agreement and resumed armed struggle, by their massacres in the eastern province they have created violent feelings of hatred in the province among the Sinhalese and also provoked deep seated fears among the Muslims. So the question arises whether even a temporary merger is desirable in the present situation. Even if peace is restored in the north and east due to the military actions of the Indian army it is always likely these acts of violence will break out in the eastern province because the eastern province will be the bone of contention. Various groups will be jockeying for position before the Referendum. Therefore I think there is a case for arguing that this aspect of the Accord and the Provincial Councils Bill needs to be reconsidered in the light of later events.
I think we have to face the fact that what is possible in the eastern province is a measure of power sharing between the Sinhalese, Tamils and Muslims. I think it is desirable that the government should enter into discussions with the government of India to revise the agreement as far as this aspect is concerned.
Before I sit down I want to say a final word. I have spoken as a member of the Peace Community of Sri Lanka, and

The Accord and the Peace Community 361
one who believes that the resolution of the ethnic problem is an indispensable precondition for achieving any kind of progress in this country, social, political or economic. I do not claim that the Peace Accord automatically guarantees that solution but I do believe that the Peace Accord is a necessary foundation for that solution and therefore we cannot go forward without accepting and implementing it. That is, if you accept my proposition that if we want to survive as a nation we have to solve this problem.
Of course if you are in some other project like toppling the government, whether by force or at a general election, or if your purpose is to save the Sinhala race from what you believe is threatening disaster or you are in Some project of promoting armed revolution then of course you will take a different view. But these are my priorities, and I have tried to present my case to you.
Logos, Volume 26, December 1987, Centre for Society & Religion

Page 191
COlle CtiVe ICdentitieS
I had wished for a long time that the book on Collective Identities that Michael Roberts edited in 1979 should be updated, revised and reprinted. I had not only read it through but gone back to it many times over the years, for information, understanding and sometimes, for fruitful disagreement. It has also been one of the books in its field, most sought after by students, researchers and scholars. I can testify that at ICES, at a time when our library was less efficiently run than it is now, copies of the book were pilfered twice over by some unknown researchers hungry for knowledge.
Collective Identities was itself, of course, a collective endeavour, taking its origin principally from research and discussion at the University of Peradeniya. But while there were several essays in that original edition that were instructive and some that were even pathbreaking, I think the greatest intellectual significance of the book came from the long introduction, both historical and theoretical, that Michael himself contributed to it. To appreciate its challenging force at that time, one had to remember the then prevalent scholarly discourse; the generally adopted term (probably derived from Indian usage) was "communalism", with its inherently limited implications. What were dominant in the 1970s in the study of the various sectional nationalisms in Sri Lankan society were two broad intellectual paradigms: one on the liberal right and the other on the left. Both, in very different ways tended to give

Collective lodentifies 363
primacy to economics, and both concurred in seeing ethnonationalism, or, as they usually termed it, "communalism', as a legacy of the past that social progress would eliminate. On the right that progress was identified with modernization, on the left with the class struggle and the advance towards socialism.
Much of Michael's introduction to his 1979 edition was concerned to question the simplifications involved in both these perspectives (although the book appeared only in 1979, the introduction had reached its final form in January 1977). In the decade that followed, history provided what were almost two text-book demonstrations of the inadequacy of the positions against which Michael had argued.
In 1977, J.R. Jayewardene came to power on a programme which promised both the redress of Tamil grievances and the freeing of the economy. Given also his admiring references to the Singapore model, it might have seemed reasonable to expect policies of capitalist rationality which would create the conditions for ethnic peace. Instead, the compulsions of ethnic politics subverted his economic project. Having inherited a country that, in spite of conflict, was still one, he left it divided; and his principal legacy to his successors was a war that in its fourteenth year continues to waste the life-blood both of the people and of the economy. On the other hand, the last years of the eightjes saw the most nearly successful attempt to topple the Sri Lankan state by class-based insurrection. But not only was this insurrection, in the social character of its participants and its strategy, different from the proletarian revolutions of Marxist theory, but in it class issues were inextricably interwined with the agenda of Sinhala nationalism. It seems certain that the insurrection of 1987-89 would not have attained its tenacity and ferocity without the favourable situation created by the presence of the IPKF on Sri Lankan soil.

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In the last words of the introduction to his original volume, Michael, having expressed his doubts that economic affluence, even if it were to be reached, would resolve ethnic tensions, said:
This is a truly black note to end on. Neither the recent assessments by several scholars, nor the economic crisis, nor the yawning possibility of "nation breaking" permit anything other than this depressing and ominous finale.
In the editorial preamble to the new volume Michael quotes a remark I once made that these sentences were “prophetic", and adds that "there is little joy attached to such a claim". The Cassandra-role is never comfortable, and the more so when foreboding and warnings went unheeded. But I wonder whether Michael even in the depths of what he calls his "deep blue pessimism" in 1977, could have quite foreseen the destructive scale and savagery of the violence of the next two decades.
That the revised edition is planned to run to two volumes isn't surprising because there is a whole world of events, trends and outcomes since 1977 to catch up with. But it isn't only the subsequent history that has made it necessary to reconceive the new book. The original volume was heavily weighted, in the character of its contributors and of their essays, to historical scholarship - and historical, for the most part, in what was then the academic mainstream of empiricist analysis. Though a fistful of essays has been kept from that book, the new volume bears ample evidence of the shifts in the editor's thinking since that time - due not only to his own academic transition from historian to anthropologist but also to the cross-fertilisation that has taken place internationally between history and anthropology as disciplines. The projection of contributions to the forthcoming volume gives even more evidence of this symbiosis.

Collective lodentities 365
I must finally congratulate Michael on the judiciousness and skill with which, in his new introductory chapter, he has surveyed the literature in the field of the last two decades,
doing justice to the contributions of a wide range of scholars and schools of thought.
Michael Roberts (ed.). Sri Lanka: Collective Identities Revisited Volume 1

Page 193
Guide to Ceylon Politics
The U.N.P.'s resounding defeat in 1956 - unexpected as it was to many not only of its supporters but even of its opponents - provoked a rash of speculations about the causes of this dramatic overthrow of a party which had seemingly been so strongly entrenched in power. We have since had a variety of superficial explanations (some of them from the most "scholarly" quarters), ascribing it all to the Bhikkus, to the existence of the Senanayakes, or even to the stars.
Mr. Denzil Peiris in the opening chapter of this pamphlet makes a much more satisfactory analysis of the General Election in terms of the social and class forces behind it. The defeat of the U.N.P., he argues, was "the result of the maturing of the long submerged Sinhalese intelligentsia." He sees the main slogans which brought the M.E.P. into power - Sinhalese only, the Buddhist Commission's Report etc. - as the expression of social protest on the part of the Sinhalese middle class of teachers, ayurvedic physicians, small businessmen and small landowners, against the ruling classes who blocked their way to advancement.
This analysis will not, of course, be acceptable to those who would like to see the M.E.P. victory as a vote for socialism pure and simple. But it is clear that the left vote of the urban workers and middle class would not have been sufficient to topple the U.N.P., just as it had already failed to do so in 1947 and 1952. What really turned the scales in 1956 was the

Guide to Ceylon Politics 367
defection of the Sinhalese rural middle class from the U.N.P. to the M.E.P. This fact explains too why since 1956 the M.E.P. has had to balance itself uneasily between satisfying the demand for radical economic policies and appeasing communal pressures.
Mr. Peiris goes on to examine the social composition and interests of the M.E.P. right-wing whose outlook he contrasts with that of the leader:
"The extraordinary fact about the M.E.P. is that the major part of the coalition, the S.L.F.P. is far behind its leader, Mr. S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike ideologically and intellectually. Mr. Bandaranaike has a prescient sense of the inevitability of socialism and has indicated he would not like to obstruct its progress but would prefer to assist its arrival peacefully. He recognizes that the urge among the masses to Social equality and untrammelled economic opportunity may not be denied and that in the process of reaching to socialism certain privileges must be curtailed. His party on the other hand, is haunted by Mr. Bandaranaike's past. It was initially organized around the lower middle strata of Sinhalese-speaking professional groups like the notary and the Ayurvedic physician and the small businessman. They were essentially conservative."
In a subsequent chapter, Mr. Peiris traces the origins of the left parties in Ceylon in the English-educated intelligentsia who were convefted to Marxism in the 'thirties. He demonstrates that the weakness of the left movement in Ceylon is that its leadership has been drawn predominantly from this vanishing class, and singles out Mr. Philip Gunawardena as the only left politician who has tried to link socialism with nationalism. "Will he be the man who will translate Marxism into Swabhasa?" On this unresolved question Mr. Peiris closes except for a final chapter which discusses the evolution of Ceylon's foreign pọlicy and incidentally, provides some inti

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mate glimpses of behind-the-scene events at Bandung and elsewhere.
The reader of this little book should find in it a clue to the real forces behind current political developments - the language conflict, the internal struggle in the M.E.P., and the varying trends on the left. In shifting attention from political slogans to the social content of the policies of different groups, this book should render a service.
1956 AND AFTER: Background to Parties and Politics in Ceylon Today, by Denzil Peiris

Remembered (and forgotten) Yesterdays
Mr. Karalasingham has rendered a great service by reprinting in this book his 1963 booklet on the Tamil question, together with a postscript added in 1977, as well as several articles on related themes written over the intervening years. Taken together, these writings constitute an illuminating document for a study of the role played by the Old Left in helping to bring us to the present dangerous and tragic impasse on the national question in Sri Lanka. The fact that Mr. Karalasingham does his best to minimize the responsibility of the Old Left, and of the LSSP in particular, for this situation does not diminish the historical value of his book but rather enhances it.
When the original of The Way Out for the Tamil Speaking People appeared, the LSSP had entered the United Left Front of that day, which included the MEP and CP. This political context explains a peculiar contradiction which is evident in Mr. Karalasingham's 1963 text. The greater part of the original booklet is an able and cogent exposition of what had been till then the LSSP's traditional position on the Tamil question, a convincing demonstration of the sterility of the Federal party's policies and programmes as an answer to the problems of the Tamil people, and a persuasive analysis of the Social basis of both Sinhala and Tamil racialism.

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However at the point of time at which Mr. Karalasingham was writing, the LSSP had already compromised its earlier inflexibility on the Tamil question in the interests of an alliance with the MEP by accepting a joint programme on language and citizenship which, as Mr. Karalasingham admitted in his 1963 booklet, did not 'represent the traditional Marxist position.' Hence the contradiction I mentioned - that Mr. Karalasingham's theoretical consistency didn't prevent him from subscribing, though not without some uneasiness, to a practical course of action that can now be seen as the beginning of the LSSP's surrender to racialism.
At that point of time, Mr. Karalasingham foresaw two possibilities of development. The first was that in the process of evolution of the ULF, the MEP itself would move towards a more thorough-going socialist position on the controversial questions. The second, and more unfavourable possibility, was that the non-proletarian and backward elements within the bloc would pressurize it in the direction of increasing compromises.
This denouement (wrote Mr. Karalasingham in 1963) can be avoided only if the forces of the working class and the minorities, and of the latter, in particular the Tamil speaking people, throw their weight behind the Marxist parties. It is only to the extent that they rally behind the LSSP that they would be able to neutralize the reactionary opposing pressures and compel the LSSP-CP-MEP Parliamentary bloc to carry out the promised reforms and to get the bloc to go beyond its self imposed limits. If they remain aloof from the new regroupment, and specifically this means the LSSP, what they would in effect ensure is that the LSSP itself is but a prisoner in the bloc as far as their demands are concerned.'
These words, read in 1979, are charged with a historical irony of which Mr. Karalasingham seems entirely oblivious. In his 1977 postcript he actually quotes this passage to

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demonstrate his own prophetic insight! True, he concedes, the ULF broke up, and the LSSP together with the CP entered a new front led by the SLFP, but an SLFP which had jettisoned its then Right wing led by C.P. de Silva' and was therefore refurbished'. In all fundamentals, therefore, continues Mr. Karalasingham 'the United Front of the SLFP-LSSP-CP which bid for electoral support at the general elections of May 1970 represented in the main the same class forces as the front of the LSSP, CP, MEP. But what followed? The Tamil people didn't heed Mr. Karalasingham's advice to them, they 'stayed aloof from the Front, indeed rejected it in no uncertain terms, and the worst fears expressed in the above quoted passage were realized." (1977 postcript)
Mr. Karalasingham's simple equation between the ULF of 1963 and the coalition of 1964 and after is disingenuous. Dominated though the MEP was by petit-bourgeois elements, it can scarcely be characterized (even in all fundamentals' or in the main") in the same terms as the SLFP, which was in every sense a bourgeois party, with a bourgeois leadership, serving bourgeois interests. (One thought that the LSSP had discovered this fact belatedly after the rude shock they had in 1975, but apparently not. Moreover, the weight of the working class, as well as of the LSSP, in the ULF of that time, was much greater than their corresponding position in the later coalition, where indeed the LSSP and its working-class following were prisoners', though willing and self-manacled. (It is no accident that Mr. Karalasingham speaks not of the LSSP-CP-MEP bloc' but of the SLFP-LSSP-CP front: note the order.
It will also be noted that in equating the 1963 ULF with the SLFP-led coalition, Mr. Karalasingham refers in the latter case to the front which bid for electoral support at the general elections of May 1970. Whey doesn't Mr. Karalasingham refer to the general elections of 1965? The jettisoning" and refurbishing that Mr. Karalasingham talks about had already

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taken place within the SLFP before the 1965 elections, which the same front fought as a coalition in power. (I must add, however, that it is curious to find Mr. Karalasingham saying that the SLFP jettisoned the C.P. de Silva wing, when what happened was just the reverse).
But it is all too apparent why Mr. Karalasingham passes over 1965 in silence. The fact is that in 1965 he wasn't there in the coalition with the 'refurbished SLFP. Though in 1963 he had been willing to remain in a LSSP bloc with the MEP, even at the cost of compromises on the Tamil question, he had quit the party in 1964 when the LSSP joined the SLFP-led coalition, thus rejecting the equation between the two fronts which he asserts today!
Indeed, when Mr. Karalasingham now reproaches the Tamil people with failure to support the SLFP-LSSP-CP coalition and attempts to shuffle off on them the responsibility for the LSSP's total surrender to racialism after 1964, the Tamil people are entitled to retort that, after all, they took a lesson from Mr. Karalasingham's own actions in 1964 when he rejected the coalition! And they remained consistent when they opposed the coalition in 1970 though Mr. Karalasingham had by then changed his mind and returned to the fold. Who was wiser - the prodigal son who departed in 1964 or the repentant prodigal who came back before 1970? The refurbished' SLFP which had jettisoned its then right wing proved quite capable of engendering another right wing and more C.P. de Silvas from its own womb - as the LSSP learnt to its cost in 1975.
The Tamil people stayed aloof from the Front, indeed rejected it in no uncertain terms' What did Mr. Karalasingham expect? Is he aware of the disillusionment and bitterness with which even radical and non-racialist Tamils received the capitulation of the LSSP and CP (whom they had regarded as one of the few surviving bastions against racialism in the South)

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to 'Sinhala only? Does he really maintain that they should have rallied with cries of joy round a front which he himself had rejected?
What of the actual record of the Old Left, in opposition and in office, between 1964 and 1977 on the Tamil question? The nearest that Mr. Karalasingham gets to facing this unpleasant reality is in one sentence in his 1977 postscript: "The worst that could be said ... was that on some question or other they may have yielded to the pressure of Sinhala communalism, and this only for the reason that the countervailing pressure of the Tamil masses was singularly absent in the anti-imperialist camp'. On some question or other! They MAY have yielded. What these evasive and mealy-mouthed phrases conceal is the ugliness of the racialist depths to which the LSSP and CP descended on May Day 1965 and in the January 1966 campaign against the language regulations of the Dudley Senanayake government, their failure to secure guarantees for the rights of the Tamil people in the 1972 constitution, and their connivance in the armed repression of the North during the period of the United Front government. And for all this Mr. Karalasingham blames the Tamils! You didn't support us, so we had to become prisoners of the racialists.' What Marxist logic!
However, to do Mr. Karalasingham justice, he has himself unwittingly proyided the most cogent argument against himself. It appears on his title-page in the form of a quotation from Ferdinand Lasalle:
Show not the goal
But show also the path. So
closely interwoven
Are path and goal that each
with other

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Ever changes, and other paths
Forthwith
Another goal set up."
Means and ends are interdependent, and you cannot get to socialism by making a detour through racialism.
Those who fail to learn from the past are doomed to repeat it. Neither Mr. Karalasingham nor his party has sifted, honestly and critically, their policies and actions between 1963 and 1977 - on the national question as on other questions. There is, therefore, no guarantee that, given the appropriate set of political conjecture, they will not repeat the worst features of their past. Indeed Mr. Karalasingham has already provided in advance the justification for this, since the Tamil people have as little confidence (and with justice) in the ULF of today as in the ULF of 1963 or the United Front of 1964-1977.
Lanka Guardian, Vol. 1, No. 20, Feb. 15, 1979

SOCIETY

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Neelan Tiru Chel Van: The Scholar AS Politician
Among the many thousands of words, that have been written about Neelan Tiruchelvam since his assassination, there are two describing phrases that often recur: one, that he was a Tamil moderate', the other, that he was a liberal political thinker'. Like Jayadeva Uyangoda in a memorial tribute soon after Neelan's death, I find these descriptions wholly inadequate to represent his role or his significance.
Neelan was, of course, Tamil; and he was 'moderate', in the sense that he never promoted violence and that he was distrustful of extremism of any kind. But while growing up as a Tamil in the post-independence era in Sri Lanka indelibly marked his experience and his awareness, that ethnic identity is insufficient to explain the range of his commitments and of the causes to which he was dedicated.
Neelan identified himself with the claim of the Tamil people to full recognition of their democratic rights as citizens of Sri Lanka. But he was also conscious of the dangers of sectarian and exclusivist nationalism among any community. He was alive to them not only from the tragic experience of Sri Lanka in the post-independence decades, which had erected ethno-nationalist walls between Sinhalese and Tamils, but also from the parallel histories of similar ethnic conflicts in other parts of the world.
Neelan wrestled ceaselessly with the central issues con

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fronting multi-ethnic societies everywhere in the world. His interest and concern extended to any community whose rights had been violated or were endangered anywhere. It was this wide-ranging concern that found recognition in his election, towards the end of his life, as Chairman of the Minority Rights Group and was expressed in his participation in the UN Working Group on Minorities.
But it would be inadequate to characterize Neelan's role only by reference to his commitment to the promotion of minority rights, even globally. Minority rights were for him a constituent, a vital and significant constituent, of the broader spectrum of human rights. After his death the Civil Rights Movement testified to his active contribution to its work, and several women's groups and women activists paid tribute to his ready sympathy and encouragement for their cause. His intellect and his heart were always open to the claims of the weak and the victims of power anywhere.
To categorise Neelan as a 'moderate', except in the limited sense I have indicated, is also misleading. While his weapons were only those of discussion, argument and persuasion, his objectives can even be said to have been 'immoderate because they were animated by a dedication to human rights, most extensively conceived, as the guiding principle. He was ready to work, when necessary, for limited and immediate objectives in day-to-day action, but he would, I believe, have agreed with the words of Browning's painter:
Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp, Or what's a heaven for?
To describe Neelan as a liberal thinker is less reductive than to pigeonhole him as a Tamil moderate, but even in this case certain qualifications have to be made. It is perfectly true that by virtue of his education, the intellectual traditions he inherited, and also perhaps the temper of his own personality,

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liberalism was the philosophy that was at the core of his thinking. The problem, however, is that some of those who use the term liberal of him intend by it a limiting judgment.
It has often been said in recent times by critics of liberalism that it was the philosophy of white bourgeois males. The implied placing of classic European and American liberalism in a particular historical and social context seems to me valid. But it fails to answer the question whether there is anything in the rights and freedoms enunciated by liberalism that is of significance in the very different context of a twenty-first century developing country.
It is probable that Neelan began his adult intellectual life very much in the framework of traditional Western liberalism. But he was not a static thinker, and his growth and development came from his openness to other currents of thought as well as to the turbulent historical experiences of the second half of the twentieth century. Without enrolling himself in any ideological bandwagon, he did assimilate what seemed to him relevant and acceptable in socialism, both Marxist and nonMarxist, and feminism.
Neelan was deeply attached to pluralism and diversity. This again stemmed partly from a personality and temper of mind that allowed him to engage in dialogue with people who had very different intellectual or political loyalties from his own. In terms of Isaiah Berlin's distinction he was a "fox" rather than a hedgehog': that is, he believed in the plurality of life, without which the world would be poorer, and not in any single allsubmerging truth. But Neelan's core commitment to certain liberal value remained; indeed, that was the basis of his acceptance of pluralism and diversity. Politically, he could never endorse limitations on political freedoms or on human rights, whether they were preached by right-wing ideologies in the interests of rapid economic growth, or by Marxists and leftwing nationalists as necessary for social change.

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And in this refusal, I am deeply convinced, he was right. Experience of both right-wing and left-wing regimes in many countries has shown that the argument that political and civil rights must be 'temporarily sacrificed for the general good, by way either of economic development or of Social equity, is illusory. The temporary' sacrifice turns out to be of very long duration indeed, because it enthrones a ruling class that has a vested interest in its perpetuation, and becomes a parasitic element, impeding both economic and social equality. Liberalism is not a complete philosophy for today's world, but Neelan was right in asserting its commitment to the freedoms of expression and organization and to the rule of law.
When Neelan Tiruchelvam first became a Member of Parliament, in March 1983, several people, even among those who were close to him, were skeptical or critical of his decision, believing that he would be wasting his talents and his energies. (It is only honest to admit that I was one of them). It was not that Neelan had ever been the secluded academic scholar, or that he had maintained a finicky indifference to political issues.
His own scholarly studies and writing in the preceding years had been deeply involved with questions of devolution of government, of majority-minority relations, and of law and justice in plural societies. Moreover, the institutions which he had taken a leading role in founding-principally, the International Centre for Ethnic Studies and the Law and Society Trust - were dedicated to the promotion of public consciousness on these and related questions.
But Neelan's effort up to that time had been directed, in the main, to stimulating the awareness and mobilizing the activity of civil society. His one effort before 1983 directly to influence state policies, by responding to an invitation from President J.R. Jayewardene and becoming in 1980 a member of the Presidential Commission on Devolution, had not been happy in its outcome. Neelan's ideas did indeed contribute largely to

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the shaping of the subsequent legislation for the creation of District Development Councils.
But even this meager first venture in devolution foundered in the trickery and violence-including the burning of the Jaffna Public Library - that attended the DDC elections in Jaffna.
So, when Neelan agreed to fill a parliamentary vacancy of the TULF in 1983, I was one of those people who asked: What for? What could he achieve? Behind these questions lay an ingrained distrust of party politics itself - a conviction that it was a matter of compromises and horse deals, and that, at best.
It is impossible that Neelan should not have been aware of, or that he could not have wrestled with, these deterring considerations. But if he decided, against them, to seize the opportunity that had been offered him, it was because he felt he couldn't stand aside while our Society slid into barbarous violence and, ultimately, into a continuing internecine war. He had to try to explore the possibilities of the parliamentary forum as a means of furthering the ideas and policies that he had been advocating for years in the direction of creating a Sri Lanka in which people of all communities could live together in peace, equality and dignity.
And, as for the contamination of day-to-day party politics that we feared for him, he had an in-built armour against it. He didn't enter parliament in the pursuit of places or office, so no corruption of power could touch him.
The range, the cogency and the vigour of Neelan's contribution to parliamentary debate are, of course, preserved in the pages of Hansard, but they may be sampled conveniently in the selection that has been edited by Lisa M. Kois and published under the title Transcending the Bitter Legacy. Whatever the subject on which he spoke - whether he was closely scrutinizing the latest set of emergency regulations, or examining a bill for the prohibition of ragging or considering amendments to the penal code - he devoted to it conscientious and minute

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attention which would make one think that he was a full-time parliamentarian who took his duties very seriously.
But when one remembers that he was at the same time running the institutions he had fostered, working on constitutional reform, tirelessly lobbying a great range of people for devolution and peace, addressing international forums as the occasion arose, engaging in spells of teaching at Harvard Law School, meanwhile keeping up with his reading not only of scholarly books and journals but also of Western and Indian fiction, even discovering for himself the poetry of Akhmatova (whom he quoted in Parliament), one can only marvel at the prodigious intellectual energy and vitality of the man.
But what I most admire and envy (particularly since I could never hope to emulate) was his ability not to yield to cynicism or despair, even through the darkest and most discouraging years, and even when he was dogged by the shadow of the assassin, his preservation of his unquenchable hope and faith in a better future. He said once in Parliament:
This moment in history must be grasped. We can bring an end to bloodshed and human suffering. We can transcend the bitter legacy of distrust and destruction and frame a future that is positive and ennobling. The journey will be a difficult one, and there would be inevitable setbacks. But if one's resolve is firm, we can ensure that 'the spirit of man can transcend the flaws of human nature'.
Only the knowledge that Neelan died in 1999 will prevent the reader to whom these words are new from thinking they were spoken in 2000. Actually, Neelan said this in 1994 when there seemed more than a glimmer of hope for peace, which was to be cruelly dashed when the LTTE resumed hostilities. But if he were living today, he would still be affirming his continuing confidence in life and the human spirit against hatred, death and destruction.
Daily News, July 29, 2002

Violence and Human Rights
K. Kanthasamy, lawyer, relief and rehabilitation worker and human rights activist, was abducted in Jaffna on 19 June, 1988, and is presumed to have been killed. Regi Siriwardena's lecture on Violence and Human Rights uvas delivered as a memorial lecture to mark the first anniversary of the abduction, and the release of the commemorative volume "An untimely Death", containing tributes to Kanthasamy's life and work.
I should like to begin by referring to the fact that the Kanthasamy Commemoration Committee has included at the end of its memorial volume my poem "Waiting for the Soldier". The reason for its inclusion apparently is that a friend sent it to him in Jaffna shortly before his tragic end. The poem was written towards the end of 1987 at a time when the hopes of peace kindled by the Indo-Sri Lanka Accord were guttering low as violence swept the country again. What the poem expresses is a sense of impotence to influence the public world - a feeling that one could only withdraw into one's intellectual interests, while being aware that one's private life might at any moment be overwhelmed by the disorder and violence outside. Why I refer to the subject of the poem here is that Kanthasamy's life offered an example of a very different response to the dark time through which we are living. Here was a man to whom it was open to devote his outstanding talents and abundant energies wholly to his professional voca

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tion, and to enjoy the satisfaction and success to be derived from it. He chose instead to dedicate himself to the cause of
fighting injustice and sucCouring the victims, of tirelessly striving against the erosion of humanity and reason in our society; and for that dedication he paid with his life. No, the only thing that Kanthasamy's death has in common with that of Archimedes is the triumph of brute force over the civilized virtues, and "Waiting for the Soldier" therefore can't really be an epitaph for him. Perhaps I may offer instead these lines of the English poet W.H. Auden as an expression of my own feelings about his life and death. The modest and muted tones of Auden's lines seem to me appropriate to this man who did so much quietly and unassumingly and shunned heroics and rheto
1C
When there are so many we shall have to mourn, when grief has been made so public, and exposed to the critique of a whole epoch
the frailty of our conscience and anguish,
Of whom shall we speak? For every day they die among us, those who were doing us some good, who knew it was never enough but hoped to improve a little by living.
When I had the honour of being invited by the Kanthasamy Commemoration Committee to deliver this lecture, I chose 'Violence and Human Rights" as my subject. I selected it as being best fitted to commemorate a man who lived to protect the rights of his fellow human beings and who died by violence in doing so. But I chose it also because no subject can be of more pressing concern to us at a time when the most fundamental of human rights - the right to exist - is violated each day in our

Violence and Human Rights 385
country. The form of this lecture is determined by the very nature of the situation we confront. Human rights are violated today by the agents of the State in the name of democracy or of the protection of the society and integrity of the country. They are violated also by militant groups in the name of national or social liberation. It would be evasive and dishonest to deal with one and not with the other. My lecture therefore will fall naturally fall into two parts, in which I discuss first State violence, and secondly, militant violence. But before I proceed to deal with this dual nature of the violence in our society, there are some preliminary considerations I wish to present.
It is possible, in looking at the phenomenon of violence in Sri Lanka, to examine its larger social causes - to analyse the struggle of different ethnic groups and economic classes for distribution of power and resources, for social mobility and for control of the State. I don't question either the validity or the necessity of such analyses. But this is not the way in which I shall be looking at the phenomenon of violence. The underlying social causes making for division and conflict in our Society are very real. But there is no fatality about the way in which these conditions, and the issues arising out of them, translate themselves into widespread and continuing violence. The transition from conflict to violence of that nature is dependent on decisions made by the choice and will of leaders, is dependent on judgments made by the former about what is legitimate in maintaining the security of the State and by the latter about what is justified in opposing or in subverting it. Often the decisions in this respect by one of these forces evoke a countervailing reaction from the other, as we have seen in the cycles of State violence and anti-State violence in recent times. It is this area where conscious decisions, which can raise or reduce the level of violence in our society, are made by political actors that I am concerned with in this lecture.

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When I say "conscious decisions", I am not claiming that the decisive agent - the head of a government, the leader of a militant group, or any other - is always aware of the ultimate consequences of his actions. His decisions are often motivated by considerations of immediate expediency. But it is all the more important, therefore, to bring into focus the wider and long term consequences of such decisions.
Let us consider, for instance, the fateful day in 1956 when the Official Language Act was introduced in Parliament. The adoption of the Sinhala only policy was itself one of those momentous decisions that have changed the course of Sri Lanka's history. Some of us may wish that S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike had possessed the courage and consistency of his liberal principles that Jawaharlal Nehru showed when he desisted from imposing Hindu on the South. But it isn't this aspect of the events of 1956 I want to discuss but another which has a more direct bearing on the question of violence. On that same day when the Bill was introduced Tamil opponents of the Bill staged a peaceful satyagraha on Galle Face green, and were assaulted by thugs who had been transported there. The head of the government not only permitted this to happen but ordered the police away when of their own volition they had arrived to keep the peace. This was the first of a series of occasions in the fifties and sixties when peaceful protest by Tamil political groups would be met with violence. The long-term consequences of this response would become apparent in the seventies and eighties when a younger and more militant Tamil generation emerged to pursue their struggle by other means.
Let me compare these events with others which took place in the area not of ethnic but of socio-economic conflict. In 1978 and 1979 there were several cases where striking and picketing workers and demonstrating students on the university campuses were attacked by thugs, sometimes with extreme brutality. The right to picket and the right peacefully to demon

Violence and Human Rights 387
strate had until then been regarded as normal democratic rights. They were now met with violence.
What was the thinking behind those in power when they dealt in this manner with minority satyagrahis, workers and students? Perhaps they said to themselves. "We'll teach them a lesson they won't forget!" But the lesson learnt was very different from the one intended. The leadership of the Tamil political movement and of the working class and student movements had been drawn from parties and organizations which worked within the constitutional and democratic framework. The effect of the violence used against them was to undermine their credibility. By crushing democratic and peaceful opposition, it promoted the belief that the only effective weapon against a State ready to resort to violence was counter-violence. The notorious Referendum of 1982 with the widespread violence unleashed on the Government side, extended this conviction into a far-reaching scepticism about the main mechanism of democracy - the electoral process itself. Thus, in both North and South, State violence actually promoted extremism and strengthened those whose methods of dissent were the AK-47 and the T-56.
Once the State was faced with armed insurgency, a different rationale was adopted to justify the resort to unrestrained violence. The very survival of the State was threatened; therefore all methods were permissible against those who sought to subvert it. "There are no rules in war": one often heard this self-justifying maxim from those who held the power of life and death over the people. On this basis, torture, arbitrary killings, use of terror against non-combatants, could all be legitimized as necessary when the State had to fight for its exist
C2.
There is in fact a deadly symmetry between the logic of ruling powers and the logic of militant groups engaged in mor

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tal combat with them. Both believe that the end justifies the means. In the one case, it is the end of preserving democracy, restoring law and order, protecting national integrity; in the other case, it is the end of national liberation or social liberation. In either case, the lives of individual human beings are considered to be a small price to exact for the cherished end.
What makes this logic unacceptable are not just human considerations, which some people will dismiss assentimental moral squeamishness. It is the fact that the means you use determine the end you reach. As the German socialist Lassalle wrote in the last century:
Show us not the aim without the way. For ends and means on earth are so entangled That changing one, you change the other too. Each different path brings other ends in view.
I shall deal later with the practice of militant groups, but first, the insane logic of preserving democracy by undemocratic methods and upholding law and order by breaking the law must be questioned. An elected government has certainly the right to defend itself against attempts to overthrow it by force. But a democratic state cannot use illegitimate methods even in fighting terrorism and insurgency without becoming indistinguishable from what it is fighting. Consequently, in resorting to such methods it alienates the sympathy and cooperation of those whom it claims to be defending. Civil wars are won not merely by guns but by the support of the people. In that political battle every victim of torture, every person arbitrarily executed, every village terrorized, is (whatever the short-term effects) again for the other side in the long run. That was fully demonstrated in the North and East; it has since been confirmed in other parts of the country.
I must now confront the logic of militant groups whose

Violence and Human Rights 389
chosen method of political struggle is violence. The issues which arise here are different, in certain important respects, from those which relate to State violence. Governments which are elected within the parliamentary democratic framework claim to adhere to political principles that exclude arbitrary violence. When they resort to illegal terror, one may argue with them on the basis of their professional principles. But militant groups make no secret of the fact that violence is their means, that they hold this to be the necessary way of changing society.
Militant groups in fact present themselves in the aura of a historical tradition of revolution as an act of liberation. Next month, France and the world will commemorate the bicentenary of a great revolution, and the Russian and Chinese Revolutions, and yet others after them, all make the same appeal to our faith in the right of people to overthrow unjust and oppressive rulers. Whether everything that happened in those revolutions was desirable can be questioned. But, with whatever qualifications, the liberating character of the great revolutions has to be recognized - not least, in their capacity to reassert and regenerate themselves after periods of reaction. How then can we take the position that violence in all forms and in all circumstances is to be condemned? Or must we, on the other hand, concede the claim of militant groups that whenever violence is committed in the name of liberation, it has to be accepted as justified?
I am not one of those who regard Marxist theory as a body of sacred Scriptures whose canonical authority can't be questioned. In fact, I don't like today even to hang a label round my neck and call myself a "Marxist". But on this specific question of violence, I think there is a great deal that is valid and useful in the thinking of the classical Marxists, and that can guide us in making a judgment about the violence of military groups today.

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The classical Marxists made a clear distinction between popular revolutions in which the broad masses intervene to overthrow the existing state, and all forms of coups, putsches and conspiracies in which an organized minority acts to take control of the state into its own hands. They also distinguished between the methods used in one and the other form of overthrowing the state. Mass agitation, demonstrations and other actions involving popular participation, the mass uprising, are revolutionary forms; terrorist acts, such as explosions of bombs in public places, sabotage and assassination of individuals, are the work of groups seeking to substitute themselves for the people as the agents of change. This doesn't mean that in popular revolutions people acted with pure spontaneity; they were always organized and led. But people in the mass don't rise unless it is clear to them that they have no other means of changing their condition. This is the moral justification for the violence of a popular revolution when it occurs: that the masses, by their action, have shown that they have no other way out.
But when a minority, determined and ruthless as it may be, seeks by its own terror and violence to change society, with the people as onlookers, then we must ask not only, "Does the end justify the means?' but also, in terms of Lassalle's question, "Do the means lead to the end?' If the end is liberation - which, if anything, must signify a freer, more just and humane society - can this be achieved by planting bombs regardless of whom they may kill, by massacring defenceless and innocent civilians because they speak a different language, or by eliminating those who are in a different political camp, and even wiping out their families? The practice of this indiscriminate and unrestrained violence coarsens and brutalises those who participate in it, those who order it and those who carry it out, and if they come to power, it will leave its stamp on the society they create. What kind of society can that be except a regimented one, run by a political leadership freed of popular con

Violence and Human Rights 39
trol in which all dissent will be ruthlessly stamped out? To call that "liberation" is possible only in accordance with the linguistic practice of Lewis Carroll's Humpty-Dumpty for whom words meant just what he chose to make them mean.
I should like to dwell a little on the subject of individual assassinations because it is relevant to the fate of the man we are commemorating today. I think everything we have gone through in the last decade confirms the wisdom of those who ruled out assassination as a legitimate method of pursuing liberation of any kind. You may start by killing unpopular politicians or oppressive agents of the State, and claim that their killing is just retribution for their crimes, and perhaps few people will shed tears for the victims. But once you have started on this slippery slope, there is no possibility of stopping anywhere. You will go on to eliminating police informants and feel justified again. But you won't stop there because you have already convinced yourself that the sacred end of liberation justifies the killing of anybody who is an obstacle in the way. And you are also certain that you and your group possess the only right formula for achieving liberation. The combination of complete certainty of your infallibility and total ruthlessness with regard to your means is a terrifying thing. So, armed with this logic, you will go on to kill even members of other parties or groups who claim to be working for the same ends but are doing so(according to you) by the wrong methods. But you won't stop there because you have already convinced yourself that the sacred end of liberation justifies the killing of anybody who is an obstacle in the way. And you are also certain that you and your group possess the only right formula for achieving liberation. The combination of complete certainty of your infallibility and total ruthlessness with even members of other parties or groups who claim to be working the same ends but are going so (according to you) by the wrong methods. But you won't stop there either. Because by the same logic

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even those who disagree with you in your own group are traitors to the cause and must therefore be eliminated. And there is no reason to suppose that this process will end with the seizure of power. What it prepares is the way for is a society of permanent purges, torture chambers and execution camps.
In this light we can see why Kandiah Kanthasamy had to die. He believed in the freedom of the individual conscience and judgment, and was not prepared to subordinate it to any political group or leader. In reading the memorial volume, I have been particularly struck by some passages from his own hand, which I could not have read earlier, and which state precisely and forthrightly his commitment to independent and unfettered thought and activity. One is his admirable memorandum and project proposal for the founding of "Saturday Review'. In the course of it he wrote:
This is not intended to be a political paper, nor a
partisan one. It will be a forum for all opinions so far as they concern Tamil rights and race relations in this country, but yet not parochial in content...
While the style of journalism will be individualistic,
the approach will be liberal and catholic.
Later he said in a letter:
We should take extreme care to preserve the freedom of the press which is achieved more by publishing conflicting views rather than suppressing any.
And three weeks before his abduction, already facing threats to his life, he wrote regarding TRRO:

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If we cannot carry on as a free organization, we should
close it down.
It isn't difficult to see that the very existence of such a man was a challenge to any group which was seeking to enforce a coerced uniformity of opinion. Kanthasamy can rightly be honoured as a martyr in a cause which too few people are prepared to defend today in this country.
The Thatched Patio, Vol. 2, No. 3, May 1989

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The Case against the Death Penalty
In the year 1849 in Russia a group of young men who were members of a radical political circle were arrested and charged with conspiracy. Some months later they were led to a place of execution, a sentence of death was read to them and the first batch among them were tied to the posts as if to await death by shooting. It was only after the whole group had been made to believe that they were on the verge of death that the real sentence passed on them - that of several years imprisonment - was read out. This cruel joke had been devised by the authorities as an additional punishment. By the time the young men who had been tied to the posts were unbound, one of them had gone mad.
Among the group of people who went through this terrible experience was Fyodor Dostoevsky, who was later to become one of the greatest of Russian novelists. He never forgot those moments of waiting for death and the agony he had undergone. In one of his novels he put into the mouth of a character these words:
To kill for murder is a punishment incomparably worse than the crime itself. Murder by legal sentence is immeasurably more terrible than murder by brigands. Anyone murdered by brigands, whose throat is cut at night in a wood, or something of that sort must surely hope to escape till the very last

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minute. There have been instances when a man has still hoped for escape, running or begging for mercy after his throat was cut. But in the other case all that last hope, which makes dying ten times as easy, is taken away for certain. There is the sentence, and the whole torture lies in the fact that there is certainly no escape, and there is no torture in the world more terrible. You may lead a soldier out and set him facing the cannon in battle and fire at him, and he will go out of his mind or burst into tears. Who can tell whether human nature is able to bear this madness? Why this useless, hideous, unnecessary outrage? Perhaps there is some man who has been sentenced to death, been exposed to this torture, and has been told "You can go, you are pardoned". Perhaps such a man could tell us. It was of this torture and of this agony that Christ spoke too. No. You can't treat a man like that
That man of whom Doestoevsky spoke, who had been through the torture and then been told, "You can go" is of course Dostoevsky himself. It is this fact - that he spoke from personal experience that gives weight to his conviction that there can be no comparison between the crime of murder and the death penalty by which it is punished. Some people unthinkingly argue for the retention of the death penalty on the principle that the punishment must fit the crime'. The murderer has taken another man's life: therefore, his own must be forfeit. But it is the terrible certainty of death, the absolute foreknowledge lasting usually for months, this prolonged and repeated torment of dying many times over in the imagination that makes the death of a man on the gallows immeasurably more horrible than that of the man whose life he has taken. As the French writer Albert Camus has said:
Many laws consider a premeditated crime more serious than a crime of pure violence. But what then is capital punishment but the most premeditated of murders, to which no criminal's deed, however calculated it may be, can be compared?

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For there to be equivalence, the death penalty would have to punish a criminal who had warned his victim of the date at which he would inflict a horrible death on him and who, from that moment onward, had confined him at his mercy for months. Such a monster is not encountered in private life.
And the monster in this case is the State which, in the name of the sanctity of life commits this most horrifying of violations of that sanctity. A writer once summed up the twisted patterns of thinking on which the death penalty is based in three short sentences: This man has killed another man. It is wrong to kill. Therefore let us kill him. Through the instrument of the gallows the State outrages that very principle which it claims to defend.
When one turns from communal killings to the more normal types of murder, the deterrent effect attributed to the death penalty seems equally doubtful. Broadly speaking, there are two types of murders that need to be considered: those committed under the compulsion of a sudden outburst of anger, jealousy or other violent passion, and those carefully planned and prepared over a long period, most often for financial gain. The first type is the most common in Sri Lanka, especially in the village. Where murder is the consequence of sudden and violent feeling, it seems self-evident that there is no opportunity for the murderer to consider and weigh the consequences of his action, as the argument about deterrence would have him do. Again, in the case of this kind of murder, capital punishment claims as its victims people who do not in a fundamental sense bear the guilt for their actions. It seems obvious to me that the great majority of murders among the poor peasantry of the villages or the dwellers in urban slums are provoked by the psychological stresses and tensions caused by the conditions of poverty, exploitation and oppression under which our society has doomed them to live. By sentencing to death those unfortunate individuals whom these stresses and

The Case against the Death Penalty 397
tensions have driven to murder, our society shuffles off its collective guilt for this situation on to the backs of its most helpless and weakest members. Let me recall that book which I think is the finest novel yet written about any aspect of Sri Lankan life - The Village in the Jungle. In that book Leonard Woolf, with the experience and knowledge of a man who had known the Sri Lankan village at first-hand and the insight of an artist, reveals how long and persistent oppression and persecution can drive even a patient and long suffering villager like Silindu to fury or murder. It is significant that in his autobiography Woolf mentions that when he sat on the bench during his years as Civil Servant, a nervous trembling of his hands from which he suffered all his life would become uncontrollable when he had to find some poor villager guilty and write out the sentence. He suggests that the cause may have been the resistance due to the unconscious consciousness that the judge was no less guilty than the bewildered man in the dock".
What of the carefully planned and plotted murder carried out by the more sophisticated murderer or the professional criminal? Can the death penalty operate as a deterrent in this case? There are, in fact some people who would agree that it is inhuman and unjust to hang some poor peasant whom desperation has driven to murder but argue that the death penalty must still be retained as a deterrent to those who kill - as the phrase goes "in cold blood.' I must first point out here that the murders of this second type are rarer than the public tends to suppose; their importance gets exaggerated in the popular mind out of all proportion to their actual numbers because it is this kind of murder which gets reported and publicized at greater length and with sensational headlines and photographs in the newspapers. In any case, however, the death penalty is not likely to and has not in fact eliminated the planned murder, because it is precisely the man who commits this kind of murder who believes that he has the ingenuity to avoid

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getting caught, and such stratagems to throw the police off the scent are always part of the preparations which go into a planned murder.
A third type of murder which may also be considered in relation to the question of the different effects of the death penalty is that type which is usually called Terrorist - that, murder motivated by political ends. The death penalty is even more ineffective as a deterrent in this case as compared with the other two. For people who kill in a mistaken belief that an unjust and oppressive political system can be changed by killing individuals will not be deterred by the fear of their own death because they are acting out of devotion to a cause and a belief. Wherever terrorism exists, in any country in the world, it can be eliminated, not by the death penalty or any other form of repressive action, but only by political action to remove the causes of resentment and frustration that provoke people to terrorist acts. In fact, executing terrorists usually makes martyrs of them and thus stirs other dedicated young men and women into following in their footsteps.
Another type of murder which may be considered is one which is known in this country but of which cases occur from time to time in the so-called advanced countries of the West. I mean the mass murder. Every now and then one hears of somebody, most often in the United States, who has gone berserk with a gun and killed twenty or thirty people, or who over a period of months of years has disposed of a large number of people - usually women. It is clear not only that this kind of murder springs from a sadistic mania but also that it is related to the psychological distortions caused by living in highly urbanized, industrialized, competitive societies. The fact that people who commit mass murders are mentally unbalanced (whether or not their behaviour falls within this narrow legal definition of insanity) means, of course, that the death penalty can have no deterrent effect on them. In fact, it may be sug

The Case against the Death Penalty 399
gested that at least some murderers who are mentally abnormal may even be stimulated to kill by the knowledge that they may be executed if caught, since the drama of the gallows is likely to have attractions for a morbid personality.
On the general question of whether the death penalty is an effective deterrent to murder, Dr. Thorstein Sellin, in a memorandum to the Canadian Parliament in 1954 wrote as follows (Dr. Sellin was then regarded as the world's leading authority on statistical material relating to homicide and capital punishment):
"It is obvious from the data presented (in the memorandum), as well as from more detailed data given in the Report of the (British) Royal Commission on Capital Punishment, that there is no observable relationship between the homicide death rates and the practice of executing criminals for murder. In other words, whether or not a State uses the death penalty, murders will occur in number and frequency determined by other factors inherent in the social, political and economic conditions of the country. It is interesting to note that this supposed effect is discussed only in debates about the abolition or adoption of this penalty. Students of the problem of murder and of murderers rarely think of mentioning the death penalty when they discuss ways and means of preventing murder, probably because they have found no relation between them'.
A glance at the graph showing homicides rates in this country for the years 1900 to 1958 contained in the Morris Commission's Report confirms Dr. Sellin's view that "there is no observable relationship between the homicide death rates and the practice of executing criminals for murder'. The four highest peaks on the graph during the years when the death penalty was in force are for 1915, 1944, 1946, 1947, for which years the rates were approximately 7.8, 8.2, 8.2, 8.1 respectively per

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thousand of population. In comparison, the figures for the years when the death penalty was suspended for the duration of the whole years are 5.7 in 1957 and 7.5 for 1958. This latter figure includes the communal killings in the riots of 1958. If these killings are included, the homicide rate, with the death penalty suspended, was lower than that of the other major year of communal riots, 1915, when the death penalty was in force.
However, people who believe, in the teeth of all the evidence, that the death penalty is an effective deterrent to murder are in fact thoroughly inconsistent. For if they really believed in the force of their argument and had the courage of their convictions, what should they do? They should logically demand that the death penalty should be carried out in such a manner as to publicise it and dramatise it so as to enlist its supposed deterrent force fully in the minds of the public. They should demand that executions should be carried out in public, as they were at one time, that in addition, making use of the resources of the modern mass media, people who were unfortunately unable to attend one of these spectacles should be able to derive its moral benefits through close-up photographs in the newspapers of the murderer's body twitching on the gallows, as well as through newsreels and television moving pictures of all the action. But what in fact happens today? A man is sentenced to death, and except in the case of a few sensational murders, the verdict gets a few lines in the papers. It is not mentioned at all on the radio significantly, although this medium has always been owned by the same State which upholds the law relating to the death penalty. If the man is ultimately executed, he dies also with the public unaware of his fate, for who reads those meager three or four lines announcing the carrying out of an execution which are probably used by newspaper sub-editors as space-fillers?
It is this hypocrisy that makes it possible for society to maintain the barbarity of the death penalty while averting its

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eyes from its gruesome and horrible realities. And these realities become all the more horrible when one considers that some of those who have died in this slow torture and final agony were probably innocent. In many countries there have been proved cases of miscarriage of justice in which people were executed for murder and subsequently proved to have been innocent. The Evans case is the most famous of these in England. If no clear cut cases of the innocent being hanged have been established in our country, it is because there has not been enough research and study to discover them, not because our police are immune from error and corruption, or our processes of law are infallible. In fact, the Morris Commission examining this question, came to the conclusion that in this question, in this country there was a greater likelihood of "erroneous convictions and unjustified sections' than in the United Kingdom or the United States.
This paper has been directed towards setting out some of the principal arguments against the death penalty. The detailed examination of the history of this question in Post-Independence Sri Lanka will be made by Mr. Donomovan Moldrich in his paper. But in conclusion, it seems to me necessary, as President of the Human Rights Organisation, to clarify one point which will help to explain why we organized this seminar at the present time. Indeed, some people may even consider this seminar a waste of time and energy in view of the fact that nobody has been hanged in Sri Lanka since 1976 and, in particular, no executions have taken place in the lifetime of the present government. On the contrary, it is this situation which in the opinion of the Human Rights Organisation makes the retention of the death penalty on the statute book all the more illogical and indefensible. The convicted men who have had their death sentences commuted during the last three years have in many cases escaped the gallows only because of some general amnesty on a ceremonial occasion. While we welcome

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anybody being saved from the horror of being hanged, we also consider, that adhoc amnesties instead of a legal abolition of the death penalty turns the punishment into a matter of chance, something almost in the nature of a grim lottery, and thus deprives it even of the appearance of moral force and justice. That is why we think the time is appropriate to call upon the Government, if it takes pride in the fact that it has not carried out any executions in the last three years, to act in logical conformity with this claim by abolishing the death penalty. The motion by Mr. M. Sivasithamparam on this subject which is now before Parliament gives it an excellent opportunity to do so.

National Identity Content of Education and Ethnic Perceptions
History may be servitude/history may be freedom"; for history as servitude we can go to the popular images of our history projected and in the language readers used in schools.
In the weeks after the eruption of July 1983 the Englishlanguage press in Sri Lanka carried a number of readers' letters and articles placing the responsibility for ethnic conflict on the educational system. Two recurrent points of view emerged from them:
a. The segregation of school children into separate Sinhala and Tamil language streams has widened the gulf between the two ethnic groups;
b. The adoption of the Swabasha (national languages) as the media of instruction in schools has imposed a communication barrier between children of different ethnic groups and deprived English of its former role as a unifying factOr.
It is apparent that many of these writers (probably in their fifties or older) look back nostalgically to their own childhood when they claim a sense of common nationhood transcending ethnic differences given by education through the English medium. A similar viewpoint was expressed three months after

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the July violence by Mr. Justice D. Wimalaratne, speaking as the Chief Guest at the prize-giving at St. Thomas' College, Mount Lavinia. Looking back on his schooldays, Mr. Wimalaratne said:
"Whether one was a Molamure or an Abeysekera, a Saravanamuttu or an Abdulla, a Mugabe or an Arndt, all were equal and no one was considered superior to the other except, of course, when a boy showed his superior talents in the classroom or in the playing field".
It so happened that I too went to the same school as Mr. Justice Wimalaratne and at the same period, and can confirm that the state of affairs he describes admiringly did obtain there. But what was the precondition for this obliviousness to ethnic differences? The fact was that children attending such schools as St. Thomas' during the colonial era were not only taught in English but came from homes that were English-speaking and, therefore, belonged to a specific social strata. The letter-writers and authors of newspaper articles (referred to above) were also probably educated in English in the colonial period or its immediate aftermath; both generationally and class-wise, therefore, they belonged to a particular group with a distinct social and cultural outlook. What is striking however, is the unawareness these writers seem to share of the fact that their experience was not characteristic of the entire nation. In some of these passages, indeed, there is an underlying assumption that at one time everybody was educated in the English medium and that ethnic conflict began after and as a result of the 'shift' to the national media. The facts are very different.
The turning-point in the history of our educational system is constituted by the "Report of the Special Committee on Education in 1943", which recommended the adoption both of free education and of the Swabasha media of instruction in primary classes. At this time, according to the figures given in the report itself, the distribution of pupils between different types of schools was as follows:

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English 92,040
Bilingual 15,917
Vernacular 650,910
It should be evident from these figures that linguistic segregation of children did exist in the colonial period on a different basis from that which obtains today. There was a threefold division between those who were taught in English, in Sinhala and in Tamil. However, the main dividing line was between those who belonged to the first group and those who fell into the latter two, since this division corresponded to a class differentiation, related to the capacity to pay for education. What is also evident from the figures is that the great majority of children were even at that time educated in Sinhala and Tamil (that is, if they were educated at all). This last reservation is necessary because there were many children who had no access to education before the wide dissemination of Schooling in the post-independence period. However, of the children who actually went to school those who were educated in the English medium constituted a little over 12% small and unrepresentative minority, therefore, though their parents and families constituted then the socially and politically influential elite.
It should be apparent that when writers in the Englishlanguage press idalized the happy ethnic harmony of their schooldays, they were unwarrantedly assuming that what was true for them was true for the entire nation. Moreover, they failed to recognize that the 'common identity' which they remember sharing was less a common national identity than a class identity, which transcended their ethnic identity as Sinhalese, Tamils, Muslims or Burghers. Fluency in the English language and their Western-style dress were distinguishing marks of that class identity, which was in many ways defined through differentiation from the rest of the nation, the majority of whom, who spoke Sinhala or Tamil, went barefoot and

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wore sarong, verti or cloth and jacket.
This historical context must be borne in mind when considering the argument that the promotion of English as a link language' between communities would be a way of erasing ethnic tensions. The fundamental assumption behind this proposal comes, as it seems to me, from people who remember the role of English in the past as a link between members of different ethnic communities and who, however, belonged to the same social class. Such people imagine that the function that English performed in a different era for a social minority can be resuscitated in the present in respect of the whole nation. To state the proposal in that way is to bring out the fallaciousness of the thinking on which it is based. This is all the more evident when one notes that the possession of a common medium of communication in the English language hasn't prevented racism from spreading among the English-speaking strata in recent years, and that those among them who are involved in the rat-race of competition for jobs or for places in higher education for their children, are often as racist as anybody else.
Those who advocate the development of English as a link language' are also usually oblivious of the fact that it simply isn't practicable, with our present resources, to give every school child an effective knowledge of English. In fact, we yet don't have adequate teaching skills and other facilities even to give every child, who will reach the stage of tertiary education, a sufficient command of English to enable him to use the language as a means of access to wider knowledge. That is the useful and necessary function which English language teaching should serve; but if the solution of our ethnic problems has to await the day when Sinhalese, Tamils and Muslims can talk to each other freely in English, then Gold help us all!
The alternative proposal in respect of a link language' which has been mooted is that Sinhala and Tamil-speaking chil

National ladentity Content of Education and Ethnic Perceptions 407
dren should be taught each other's languages. In the atmosphere of euphoria which followed the UNP's election landslide of 1977 and the party's election promises to uphold national unity, this proposal was even adopted as part of the Government's educational policy. It was, however, never implemented on any significant scale, and seemed abandoned. The official reasons given for jettisioning it were: (a) that Jaffna schools have not co-operated to teach Sinhala, and (b) that more time was needed for English-language teaching.
The idea of Sinhala and Tamil as mutually supportive link languages was, in principle, a useful contribution to communication between communities, and it was not open to technical problems of the same order as any endeavour to teach every child English. The political problems are another matter. Unfortunately, one has to conclude that what might still have been made acceptable in 1977, if energetically and persuasively promoted, now would meet with greater resistance in the atmosphere of intensified ethnic conflict today; and that the adoption of Sinhala and Tamil as link languages requires as a precondition a different political climate.
There is, however, a more fundamental point which must be made in respect of the very concept of a link language' as an answer to ethnic problems. It assumes that linguistic diversity and segregation of school-children in different language streams is the heart of the problem, and that the problem would be, if not totally solved, at least substantially solved if schoolchildren had a common language in which to communicate: this assumption is questionable. In a survey of ethnic perceptions among schoolchildren of Grades 11 and 12 in which I participated, my colleagues and I observed that the presence in the same class of children of different ethnic groups who were being taught in the same language did not necessarily make for more enlightened or tolerant attitudes. We even had the experience of hearing Sinhala children making derogatory statements about Tamils in the presence of Tamil children who

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were being taught in Sinhala in the same class. On a larger scale, there is no reason to think that possession of a common language as a medium of communication, ipse facto, guarantees harmonious ethnic relations. Catholics and Protestants have been fighting each other in Ulster for a long time although they have no linguistic difficulty in talking to each other.
What is taught is more important than the medium in which it is taught, in determining school-children's ethnic perceptions.
The exploitation of history as an instrument of divisive ethnic ideologies has long-standing precedents in our Schoolbooks. For instance, the Kumarodaya, the most widely used Sinhala School reader in the era of private publication, began by plunging the kindergarten child into the cesspool of racial hatred with a lesson on the young Dutugemunu in which his father warned that the Tamils were 'very cruel'. The only set of Sinhala readers of the immediate post-independence era which was designed to promote a sense of a larger identity transcending ethnic consciousness was the Nava Maga Series by H.D. Sugathapala. Their content bears out in a large measure their author's claim:
"These books have been prepared so as to create in the child a good understanding of his country and its people, and to help him to live with others free of communal hostilities, in affection and co-operation'.
On the Tamil language readers of the same period I should like to quote the observations of Professor K. Indrapala:
"Until the introduction of common text-books published by the state, the language text books in Tamil were not, as a rule, directed towards creating an understanding of and a respect for the way of life and culture of ethnic groups other than the Tamils. There was hardly a lesson on the Sinhala people, culture and society, or on Buddhism. Even lessons on Sri

National lalentity Content of Education and Ethnic Perceptions 409
Lanka were conspicuously missing. On the contrary, most of the text-books fostered in the Tamil child a special feeling for his or her community and language and helped to strengthen communal attitudes. What is even more significant is that there were lessons which helped to foster a kind of patriotic feeling, not towards Sri Lanka, but towards Tamil Nadu. Many of the hardened attitudes regarding race and language among the Tamils who received their education exclusively in the medium of Tamil in the fifties and sixties could be attributed to some extent to the text-books they had used in their schools."
In the 1960s, however, the state took over the publication of all basic text-books. The language readers on which I am going to comment on are the fruits of that policy and are all published by the Educational Publications Department, which is a state organization, for compulsory use in schools. There are two sets of Sinhala readers - one, originally produced in the 1970s under the previous administration but reprinted and used in schools until the end of 1982; the other, introduced from the beginning of 1982. I shall refer to these as the (Sinhala) Old Series respectively. In Tamil, on the other hand, a single set of readers has been in continuous use throughout this period.
It is evident from these books that the state take-over of textbook publication has had different effects in respect of Sinhala and Tamil readers. In the case of the Tamil readers, it has served to eliminate all traces of the sectarian ideology that Prof. Indrapala described as having been dominant in the era of private publication. What has replaced it is a recurrent concern for the project of a national identity bridging ethnic differences. The keynote is struck already in the kindergarten reader, which has on two facing pages pictures of a Sinhala, Tamil and Muslim family, and then of the fathers, the mothers and the children of the three families in friendly postures. The accompanying test reads.

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We are Tamils
We are Muslims
We are Sinhalese
Ilankai (Lanka) is our land
We are friends
The land of Ilankai is our land
It is our sweet motherland.
Lessons in later readers include themes relevant not only to Hindus but also to the Christian and Muslim minorities. There is material presenting relations of friendship between Tamil children on the one hand, and both Sinhala and Muslim children on the other. Stories are drawn not only from Hindu, but also from non-Hindu, including Buddhist culture. The festivals portrayed cover all four major religious of the island, while the major secular festival of the country the indigenous New Year is identified as the Sinhala and Tamil New Year. There are lessons on both Sinhala and Tamil anti-imperialist national heroes.
How well do the Tamil readers promote the purposes for which they have been designed? I hesitate to offer an answer because I can judge them only from translations, but it seems to me that the methods adopted are too often overtly didactic (it is hardly likely that kindergarten children will be influenced by preaching national harmony). The Nava Maga readers could have provided useful models of more oblique and imaginative methods of communication. But, well or ill done, what is most significant about the Tamil readers is that they provide a total contrast with the parallel Sinhala books.
Taking the old Sinhala Readers first, one notices that they maintain a solely mono-cultural context, and this means not merely a Sinhala culture but a specifically Sinhala-Buddhist culture. The readers in the early grades are based on the experi

National laentity Content of Education and Ethnic Perceptions 411
ence of a family, its friends, relations and neighbours; and the characters, way of life, festivals and practices presented in these readers are confined to a Sinhala-Buddhist milieu. Even the evidence of Sinhala-Christian children, of whom a large number study these books, is ignored. In fact, if a child's knowledge of Sri Lanka was confined to these readers, he would not even be aware that there were any people in Sri Lanka who were not Sinhala. The commonality between Sinhala and Tamil cultures is cast aside. The New Year is simply the Sinhala New Year, and there is even a lesson which starts with the rituals and observances of Sinhala New Year and goes on to describe corresponding festivals in India, Laos, Kampuchea, Japan, Burma and Germany. But nowhere is there even a mention of the fact that Tamils in Sri Lanka observe the New Year on the same day as the Sinhalese and with broadly similar practices.
In the higher grades (3–9) the readers don't shed their mono-cultural character, but they begin to acquire a further and more disturbing element. They project an image of a SinhalaBuddhist identity which is defined fundamentally through opposition to and struggles against Tamils in past history.
Some of this material is extremely sinister in its potential effects on young minds. Thus, one lesson on Gajabahu starts by reminding the child that parents frighten naughty children by threatening to hand them over to the billo (bogeymen). It then asks: Who are these billo'? It goes on to explain that the Chola king wanted to kidnap Sinhalese to make them work for him and sent a group of fierce people of the billa race to Sri Lanka. The lesson goes on:
The billo' who entered the Sinhala land by force began hunting the Sinhala with bundles of ashes in one hand and strands of rope in the other. As soon as they saw an isolated Sinhalese approaching, they thrust a bundle of ashes into his mouth and straightaway bound him hand and foot with the rope they had and sent him to a Chola ship.

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What this lesson does is to evoke the child's memories of being frightened by his parents with threats of the mysterious and fearful billo, to identify these bogeymen as Tamil agents, and thus to enlist the deep-seated irrational fears of early childhood for the purpose of creating apprehension and hatred of Tamils.
Finally, in respect of more recent history, the readers project an image of an exclusively Sinhala struggle for independence (all the national heroes celebrated are Sinhala Buddhists). This trend culminates in a lesson which presents the freedom gained in 1948 as a liberation of the Sinhalese. It does not seem to have struck the authors that if this was true, no further argument would be needed to justify Tamil separatism. In the entire range of the ten readers (Old Series), there is only a solitary lesson - a poem of Sagara Palansuriya - which expresses a sense of shared experience common to Sinhalese and Tamils, and which is entirely at variance with the general character of the Series.
The New Series of readers is not essentially different in character; although all the books have been re-written, the pattern of the Old Series is maintained. Thus, the context of the first three readers, based on family life and experience, is again mono-cultural. By looking at the living styles of the main characters and the religious and cultural activities in which they participate, one can easily infer that those are Sinhala-Buddhist children, living in a Sinhala-Buddhist environment. All the names of the characters are clearly Sinhala, except for one boy who is named Raja. Raja is a name common to both Sinhala and Tamil communities, although the Raja in the lessons is not identified as a Tamil. But this ambiguity is dangerous because of the characters in the lessons it is only Raja who is identified as a bad boy'. This could easily have been avoided.
In the depiction of history the New Series sustains the Sinhala-Buddhist ideological interpretation of the Old Series.

National identity Content of Education and Ethnic Perceptions 413
The lessons drawing on Sri Lankan history relate either to great kings who saved the island from Tamil invaders (e.g. Dutugemunu and Vijayabahu) or to recent personalities who saved the Sinhala language (Munidasa Kumaratunga) or 'restored the self-respect of the Sinhalese (Ven. Hikkaduwe Sri Sumangala Thero). What appears to be an innovation in the form of a lesson on Deepavali turns out to be less liberalminded than superficial examination might Suggest. Having described the ritual of Deepavali, the lesson goes on to identify it as 'a festival of the people of India' as well as one which is celebrated here by those descended from the Tamils of India. If the intention was to give Sinhala children some understanding of Tamil culture, the effect is negated by giving an alien character to Sri Lankan Tamils. One wonders whether in a lesson on Vesak the writers would have thought of describing it as a festival celebrated by those who are descended from the Bengalis of India. Again there is a lesson which describes a trip by a party composed predominantly of Sinhalese, but there is among them a girl called Harriet, who is described in these terms, although Tamil, she was a pretty girl, who in appearance and speech seemed really Sinhalese'. Obviously this is the ideal by which Tamil girls are to be judged.
The New Series raises the same fundamental problem as that posed by the Old: Why is there this immense gulf in attitudes, outlook and objectives between the Sinhala and Tamil readers produced by the same state institution? Why must a sense of common nationhood be taught only to Tamil children, and why must Sinhala children be infected with a sense of Sinhala-Buddhist dominance? There are, no doubt, people who think this is as it should be. To them I would like to quote the words I have written at the end of a critical study of school textbooks:
"A system of education that encourages and fosters ideas of racial superiority and domination among the majority

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community is no basis for national unity, or even for national peace... To adopt or sanction a two-faced educational policy by giving Sinhala and Tamil school children different conceptions of the relation between the two communities and their place in the national life, is in fact, to promote continuing discord, conflict and bitterness and to foster divisiveness and separation.'
"One pre-condition for any effort to build a sense of national identity is the rewriting of school books". In the same study I have suggested that such a reform should be based on 'a new perspective on our history, culture and national life, free of an unscientific recital of myths and obsessions with the invasions and wars of another age and another Society, and a recognition of the common elements that link the peoples of this country in shared experiences and mutual assimilation of elements from each other's cultures.'
(The text of this article is an amalgam of extracts from two separate papers of Mr. Reggie Siriwardene's which he had presented on two different occasions at Marga Institute and also at the International Centre for Ethnic Studies in May and August 1984 respectively).
Footnotes
H.D. Sugathapala, Nava Maga Reader for Grade 3, Preface.
* Reggie Siriwardena, K. Indrapala, Sunil Bastian and Sepali Kottegoda, School Text Books and Communal Relations in Sri Lanka (Council for Communal Harmony through the Media, 1982). (Refer P.25).
* Reggie Siriwardena, et.all., op.cit., p.62.
Ibid., p.61.
5o CDN, 2/8/83
Logos, Vol. 31, No. 1 & 2, March/June 1992

National Identity in Sri Lanka: Problems in COmmuniCation and EduCation
I shall be using the term communication in this paper in the broadest possible sense to refer to all those modes in which information, attitudes and values are transmitted. Of course, with such a broad definition my treatinent cannot aim at any kind of comprehensiveness. I shall be selecting for discussion some modes of communication which are especially significant for Sri Lankan national identity and ethnicity. There are other limitations that will appear as I go along, some of them adopted by choice and others forced on me by lack of access to appropriate material. For instance, bana preaching is undoubtedlya powerful mode of communication and one that exercises considerable influence on ethnic relations, but no body of recorded material or transcripts exists such as would offer an adequate basis for analysis. I wish to add one more remark to these preliminary observations; but for the fact that much attention is devoted in this paper to education, the inclusion of this word in the title is superfluous. Education is, of course, part of the processes of communication as here conceived.
In examining modes of communication as already defined, we are looking essentially at the means by which the ideologies current in a social formation are produced and reproduced. When I speak of ideology, I am not referring merely to overt

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propaganda or forms of conscious persuasion. Ideology includes all those ways in which people are brought to see themselves and their relations to other people and the conditions of their existence. Much of ideology is unconscious because, as we shall see, it is produced through language and the various practices in which language is employed.
The French philosopher Louis Althusser introduced the term 'Ideological state apparatuses' to cover all those institutions ranging from the family, the church and educational systems to communications media which are involved in the production of ideology. Althusser has been criticized for his use of the word 'state' in this context, and I too think Althusser was guilty of blurring the distinction between the state and civil society. However, in the Sri Lankan case, the considerable role of the state in the functioning of institutions of communication is an important part of the reality we have to deal with. Today the state, in practice, has a monopoly of radio and television; it owns or controls two major newspaper establishments: it intervenes powerfully in the cinema through censorship and state distribution: and it manages all but a few private schools and produces all basic school text-books. One of the questions we shall have to consider, therefore, is that of the problems created by the preponderant role in the institutions of communication of a multi-ethnic Society of a state that is not ethnically neutral, that rests on the support of the majority ethnic group and identities itself closely with its interests. There is in fact a close link between the role of the state in communication and the processes by which the dominant ideology of our society is produced and reproduced. That dominant ideology is the Sinhala-Buddhist ideology, and I shall be concentrating attention on it in this paper for two reasons. One reason is simply the fact that it is the dominant ideology, in terms both of the masses of people whom it impels and of the pressures it exerts on the policies and actions of the state. The

Nationalldentity in Sri Lanka: Problems in Communication and Education 417
other reason is that I am better equipped, for linguistic reasons, to deal with this than with the Tamil ideology or ideologies that are in some respects its adversary and in other respects its mirror-image. However, at certain points I shall be referring to the ideological expressions of the Tamil people for purposes of comparison and contrast.
I have already indicated that some of the roots of ideology lie concealed in the very structures of language. Let us look at the way in which the Sinhala language shapes the underlying and often unconscious conceptual framework of thinking about ethnic relations. I have selected for illustration a passage from a school text, the Social studies book for Grade 7: I translate from the Sinhala, leaving one word untranslated:
There are people of different religions and different jathi living in this little island... Since the majority of the inhabitants are Sinhalese, they are known as the majority jathiya. We describe the other jathi who are fewer in numbers as the minority jathi.
What is the concept of a jathiya that underlies this statement? There is no direct answer given in the book, but from the fact that it goes on to say the Sinhalese are descended from Aryans who came here from North India, and the Tamils from Dravidians who migrated from South India, it is evident that jathiya is used here as equivalent to race - that is, as denoting a community of people who share a common ancestry. I shall call this usage JATHIYA (1).
But now look at another passage from another social studies text in the same series, produced by the same state publishers - the text for Grade 6. It says:
'Sri Lankan society is made up of different racial (vargika) groups. Although in general usage the word jathiya is used to denote each of these groups, what we should characterize as a jathiya is the Sri Lankan jathiya. It is more appropriate to term

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its different constituents racial (vargika) groups.'
In this use (which is incidentally inconsistent with that adopted by the succeeding text in the same series) jathiya means nation, the whole community of people within the boundaries of Sri Lanka, or the political entity to which they are all conceived as belonging. I shall call this usage JATHIYA (2).
However, there is another use of jathiya which occurs in contexts where it carries strong emotional connotations. The most familiar context is the trinity rata jathiya agama, which occurs frequently in political rhetoric, in the media, and also in schoolbooks (not in the social studies texts but in language readers). Here rata is country, agama is religion (but always identified here with Buddhism). But how do we translate jathiya here? The answer is that we have to combine the senses of race and nation. For what we have here is the assertion of an ideological conception in terms of which the 'Sinhala race is the nation-the entity to which fundamental allegiance is due. There JATHIYA (1) places the 'Sinhala race' as one among several others, and JATHIYA (2) pictures all these races as incorporated in a higher entity, the third sense of jathiya (JATHIYA (3)) works by exclusion of all other communities and assertion of the Sinhala racial identity as the only significant reality. Popular Sinhala usage in fact commonly shifts between JATHIYA (1) neutral, descriptive contexts and JATHIYA (3) in those where mass emotions are evoked. What this linguistic phenomenon reflects is the national failure in creating a consciousness of a common Sri Lankan identity which can evoke a popular response.
What also emerges from this analysis is that there is no adequate way in current Sinhala usage of rendering the term ethnic groups or ethnicity. It will be noted that in association with JATHIYA (2) (jathiya as the Sri Lanka nation), the term vargika was used to describe its constituent communities; each

Nationaldentity in Sri Lanka: Problems in Communication and Education 49
of them is a vargaya. This was the usage adopted officially in the 1972 and 1978 Constitutions, and a comparison between the Sinhala and English texts of these documents shows that vargaya is adopted here as an equivalent of race. Thus its application to Sinhalese and Tamils implies that they are different races. This tends to reinforce myths of racial purity which are questionable not only on general ethnological grounds but also specifically in the light of Sri Lankan history. What this history points to is the fact that Sinhalese and Tamils are ethnic groups differentiated on the basis not of race but of language and culture (though still with many cultural elements which they have assimilated from each other in the course of their long existence in proximity).
2
JATHIYA (3) has brought us to the bedrock of the dominant ideology. In the trinity of rata jathiya agama loyalty to country is identified with loyalty to a particular race' and religion — that of the majority. We have also encountered obliquely the belief in the exclusively North Indian/Aryan descent of the Sinhalese and the exclusively south Indian/ Dravidian descent of the Tamils. I wish to dwell on this latter concept for a moment because of its powerful influence in shaping thinking and feeling on both sides of the ethnic battle-line. It is, of course, completely mythical, not only because no respectable scholar would use Aryan Dravidian as racial terms but also because what the historical evidence denotes of migrations from different parts of India to North and the South Sri Lanka makes it impossible touphold any simple racial differentiation between the two populations. However, in popular Sinhala as well as Tamil mythology, the Aryan-Dravidian cleavage is not only affirmed but also equated with what are believed to be inherent racial characteristics handed down

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through the generations. For a particularly strident example of Aryan myth-making, I turn to one of its principal propagators, Anagarika Dharmapala:
Two thousand four hundred and forty six years ago a colony of Aryans from the city of Sinhapura in Bengal ... sailed in a vessel in search of fresh pastures ... The lion-armed descendants were the present Sinhalese, whose ancestors had never been conquered, and in whose veins no savage blood is found. Ethnologically, the Sinhalese are a unique race, inasmuch as they can boast that they have no slave blood in them, and never were conquered by either the pagan Tamils or European vandals who for three centuries devastated the land, destroyed ancient temples, burnt valuable libraries and nearly
annihilated the race.'
For a contemporary example of the opposing Tamil racial myth, I quote from a recent report in the journal India Today.
'Six hundred years before Christ, when Sri Lanka was an obscure island, sparsely inhabited by a sedate, peaceful population of Tamils, an event of great significance took place. Prince Vijaya from Bihar invaded the island with his conquering armada. According to Mahavamsa, the Sinhala historical document, he liked the island, struck up a friendship with the daughter of a local chieftain and conquered the ill-organised local population. Says Tamil lawyer and rebel ideologue S.P. Ruthramoorthy, Vijaya's first act was a genocide of the Tamils. He slaughtered thousands. Then he founded the Sinhala race and kingdom. So deep and old is our distrust of the Sinhala people.'
It is not perhaps surprising that racial ideologues on both sides should traffic in the fuel by which irrational passions are kept burning. What is more shocking is that millions of schoolchildren should be taught, in the name of social studies, through text-books published by the state, the myths of divergent ra

National ladentity in Sri Lanka: Problems in Communication and Education 421
cial origins which will help to divide Sinhalese and Tamils for more generations to come.
Blood. It is a significant word, to be found in the racist vocabulary everywhere. Perhaps if you really believe that your blood is inherently superior to that of another race, you will have less compunction about shedding the latter. The Sinhala school readers also contain this mystic belief in blood. Madugalle, don't dishonour Sinhala blood, Keppetipola is made to say reproachfully to a fellow-chieftain who tries to persuade him to compromise with the British. Unfortunately, historical evidence shows that Keppetipola's blood', if you want to put it that way, was Tamil. Butlet me turn to an example of how this irrational and obfuscating belief turns up in another medium - in an utterance of one of our outstanding artists, our most accomplished woman singer, Nanda Malini. She has a beautifully sung lullaby in which the apparent intention is to dispel old myths and root the child to whom it is sung in reality. It isn't fairies in the moonlight who are crooning the child to sleep, it isn't the pot of milk as in the old song which is floating down the river: don't listen to such tales, says the mother, it's I who am putting you to sleep, it's I who give you the milk of my body. Then comes the last stanza:
They say that in the evening a hobgoblin
comes with a bag to carry you away.
My brave daughter, don't be frightened:
It's Sinhala blood that runs in your veins.
It's what all this concern for rationality and realism comes to in the end! The artist seems to be unaware that she is sourcing a myth more pernicious than any she is rejecting - begging people to believe that there is something distinctive in 'Sinhala blood' or that Sinhalese are intrinsically more than other peo
ple.

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Against this background of the racist belief in blood' Parakrama Kodituwakku's poem One of us is exhilarating to read. Not only does the poet metamorphose the ElaraDutugemunu legend which is one of the central myths of the dominant ideology: he defiantly flings in its face the word
blood' at the end of the poem. I translate from the Sinhala:
ONE OF US
Stop it stop it stop that fight.
King Elara. get off that elephant king Dutugemunu,
give Elara a chair.
Here she goes round the rubber trees going with the tappers' gang Mother's gone a-milking
Sarasvati
in her full smiling lips
flashes Elara's Smile
Hands aching under the tea bushes soaking in the drip drip widening her dark eyes under the black pimples silently waiting

National identity in Sri Lanka: Problems in Communication and Education 423
a quartz stone glistening in a nostril - Nithyakala Elara's sister
Sarasvati
Nithyakala
We who bathed at one place in the Menik Ganga we who were in one band climbing Sri Pada we who were in one gang at School
we who ate vadai at the thosa kade together
At Kataragama Somadevi from our office was given his address
by Sivalingam...!
The Elara-Dutugemunu battle! Victory upon victory for Dutugemunu Elara's corpse on an elephant's back!
Stop that applause stop that applause stop that applause To hell with that clapping
Who has
One tear

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to shed
for that name?
He who died that day Was one of us ...
One of our own
Blood relations...!
Unfortunately there are few other works in contemporary Sinhala culture of that kind. One film Sarungale, which takes as its central character a Tamil victim of the 1958 race riots; one play, Mavathe Api, which shows how a community of workers overcome ethnic antagonisms - how much more is there that can be set by their side!
3
Kodituwakku's poem is a creative re-interpretation of past history, setting it in a new and meaningful relation with the present, reminding us of the English poet's lines, "History may be servitude/history may be freedom.” For history as servitude we can go to the popular images of our history projected in the language readers used in schools. Some words of introduction are necessary.
The exploitation of history as an instrument of divisive ethnic ideologies has long-standing precedents in our schoolbooks. For instance, the Kumarodaya, the most widely used Sinhala School reader in the era of private publication, began by plunging the kindergarten child into the cesspool of racial hatred with a lesson on the young Dutugemunu in which his father warned him that the Tamils were 'very cruel". The only set of Sinhala readers of the immediate post-independence era which was designed to promote a sense of a larger identity transcending ethnic consciousness was the Nava Maga se

National identity in Sri Lanka: Problems in Communication and Education 425
ries by H.D. Sugathapala. Their content bears out in a large measure their author's claim:
These books have been prepared so as to create in the child a good understanding of his country and its people, and to help him to live with them free of communal hostilities, in affection and co-operation.'
On the Tamil language readers of the same period I should like to quote the observation of Prof. K. Indrapala:
Until the introduction of common text-books published by the state, the language text-books in Tamil were not, as a rule, directed towards creating an understanding of and respect for the way of life and culture of ethnic groups other than the Tamils. There was hardly a lesson on the Sinhala people, culture and society, or on Buddhism. Even lessons on Sri Lanka were conspicuously missing. On the contrary, most of the text-books fostered in the Tamil child a special feeling for his or her community and language that helped to strengthen communal attitudes. What is even more significant is that there were lessons which helped to foster a kind of patriotic feeling, not towards Sri Lanka, but towards Tamilnadu. Many of the hardened attitudes regarding race and language among the Tamils who received their education exclusively in the medium of Tamil in the fifties and sixties could be attributed to some extent to the text-books they had used in their schools'.7
In the 1960s, however, the state took over the publication of all basic text-books. The language readers on which I am going on to comment are the fruits of that policy and are all published by the Educational Publications Department, which is a state organization, for compulsory use in schools. There are two sets of Sinhala readers - one, originally produced in the 1970s under the previous administration but reprinted and used in schools until the end of 1982; the other, introduced from the beginning of 1983. I shall refer to these as the (Sinhala)

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Old Series and New Series respectively. In Tamil, on the other hand, a single set of readers has been in continuous use throughout this period.
It is evident from these books that the state take-over of text-book publication has had different effects in respect of Sinhala and Tamil readers. In the case of the Tamil readers, it has served to eliminate all traces of the sectarian ideology that Prof. Indrapala describes as having been dominant in the era of private publication. What has replaced it is a recurrent concern with the protection of a national unity and national identity bridging ethnic differences. The keynote is struck already in the kindergarten reader, which has on two facing pages pictures of a Sinhala, Tamil and Muslim family, and then of the fathers, the mothers and the children of the three families in friendly postures. The accompanying text reads:
We are Tamils
We are Muslims
We are Sinhalese
Ilankai (Lanka) is our land
We are all people of this land
We are friends.
The land of Ilankai is our land
It is our sweet motherland.
Lessons in later readers includes themes relevant not only to Hindus but also to the Christian and Muslim minorities. There is material presenting relations of friendship between Tamil children on the one hand and both Sinhala and Muslim children on the other. Stories are drawn not only from Hindu but also from non-Hindu, including Buddhist cultures. The festivals portrayed cover all four major religions of the island, while the major secular festival of the country - the indigenous

National dentity in Sri Lanka: Problems in Communication and Education 427
New Year - is identified as the Sinhala and Tamil New Year. There are lessons on both Sinhala and Tamil anti-imperialist national heroes.
How well do the Tamil readers promote the purposes for which they have been designed? I hesitate to offer an answer because I can judge them only from translations, but it seems to me that the methods adopted are too often overtly didactic (it is hardly likely that kindergarten children will be influenced by preaching national harmony). The Nava Maga readers could have provided useful models of more oblique and imaginative methods of communication. But, well or ill done, what is most significant about the Tamil readers is that they provide a total contrast with the parallel Sinhala books.
Taking the Old Series of Sinhala readers first, one notices that they maintain a solely monocultural context, and this means not merely a Sinhala culture but a specifically Sinhala-Buddhist culture. The readers in the early grades are based on the experiences of a family, its friends, relations and neighbours: and the characters, way of life, festivals and practices presented in these readers are confined to a Sinhala-Buddhist milieu. Even the existence of Sinhala Christian children, of whom a large number study these books, is ignored. In fact, if a child's knowledge of Sri Lanka were confined to these readers, he would not even be aware that there were any people in Sri Lanka who were not Sinhala-Buddhists! The opportunity presented by the New Year for bringing out a certain commonality between Sinhala and Tamil cultures is cast aside. The New Year is simply the Sinhala New Year, and there is even a lesson which starts with the rituals and observances of Sinhala New Year and goes on to describe corresponding festivals in India, Laos, Kampuchea, Japan, Burma and Germany, but nowhere is there even a mention of the fact that Tamils in Sri Lanka observe the New Year on the same day as the Sinhalese and with broadly similar practices.

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In the higher grades (3-9) the readers don't shed their monocultural character, but they begin to acquire a further and more disturbing element. They project on image of a SinhalaBuddhist identity which is defined fundamentally through opposition to and struggles against Tamils in past history.
Some of this material is extremely sinister in its potential effects on young minds. Thus one lesson, on Gajabahu, starts by reminding the child that parents frighten naughty children by threatening to hand them over to the billo (bogeymen). It then asks, Who are these billo?" It goes on to explain that the Chola king wanted to kidnap Sinhalese to make them work for him and sent a group of fierce people of the billa race to Sri Lanka. The lesson goes on:
The billo who entered the Sinhalaland by force began hunting the Sinhalese with bundles of ashes in one hand and strands of rope in the other. As soon as they saw an isolated Sinhalese approaching, they thrust a bundle of ashes into his mouth and straightaway bound his hand and foot with the rope they had and sent him to a Chola ship.'
What this lesson does is to evoke the child's memories of being frightened by his parents with threats of the mysterious and fearful billo, to identify these bogeymen as Tamil agents, and thus to enlist the deep-seated irrational fears of early childhood for the purpose of creating apprehension and hatred of Tamils.
Finally, in respect of more recent history, the readers project an image of an exclusively Sinhala struggle for independence (all the national heroes celebrated are Sinhala Buddhists). This trend culminates in a lesson which presents the freedom gained in 1948 as a liberation of the Sinhalese! It does not seem to have struck the authors that if this were true, no further argument would be needed to justify Tamil separatism. In the entire range of ten readers (Old Series) there is

National laentity in Sri Lanka: Problems in Communication and Education 429
only a Solitary lesson - a poem of Sagara Palanasuriya - which expresses a sense of shared experiences common to Sinhalese and Tamils, and which is entirely at variance with the general direction of the series.
The New Series of readers is not essentially different in character; although all the books have been re-written, the pattern of the Old Series is maintained. Thus, the context of the first three readers, based on family life and experiences, is again monocultural. By looking at the living styles of the main characters and the religious and cultural activities in which they participate, one can easily infer that these are Sinhala-Buddhist children, living in a Sinhala-Buddhist environment. All the names of the characters are clearly Sinhala, except for one boy who is named Raja. Raja is a name common to both Sinhala and Tamil communities, although the Raja in the lessons is not identified as Tamil. But this ambiguity is dangerous because of all the characters in the lessons it is only Raja who is identified as a bad boy'. This could easily have been avoided.
In the depiction of history the New Series sustains the Sinhala-Buddhist ideological interpretation of the Old Series. The lessons drawing on Sri Lankan history relate either to 'great kings who saved the island from Tamil invaders (e.g. Dutugemunu and Vijayabahu) or to recent personalities who saved the Sinhala language' (Munidasa Kumaratunga) or 'restored the self-respect of the Sinhalese" (Ven. Hikkaduwe Sri Sumangala). What appears to be an innovation in the form of a lesson on Deepavali turn out to be less liberal-minded than superficial examination might suggest. Having described the ritual of Deepavali, the lesson goes on to identify it as 'a festival of the people of India' as well as one which is celebrated here by those descended from the Tamils of India.' If the intention was to give Sinhala children some understanding of Tamil culture, the effect is negated by giving an alien character to Sri Lankan Tamils. One wonders whether in a lesson on

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Vesak the writers would have thought of describing it as a festival celebrated by those who are descended from the Bengalis of India' Again, there is a lesson which describes a trip by a party predominantly composed of Sinhalese, but there is among them a girl called Harriet, who is described in these terms: "Although Tamil, she was a pretty girl who in appearance and speech seemed really Sinhalese..." Obviously this is the ideal by which Tamil girls are to be judged!
The New Series raised the same fundamental problem as that posed by the Old: Why is there this immense gulf in attitudes, outlook and objectives between the Sinhala and Tamil readers produced by the same state institution? Why must a sense of common nationhood be taught only to Tamil children, and why must Sinhala children be infected with a conviction of Sinhala-Buddhist dominance? There are no doubt people who would think this is as it should be. To them I would like to quote the words I have written at the end of a critical study of school text-books:
A system of education that encourages and fosters ideas of racial superiority and domination among the majority community is no basis for national unity, or even for national peace... To adopt or sanction a two-faced educational policy by giving Sinhala and Tamil school children different conceptions of the relation between the two communities and their place in the national life is in fact to promote continuing discord, conflict and bitterness and to foster divisiveness and separation.'
One pre-condition for any effort to build a sense of national identity is the re-writing of schoolbooks. In the same study I have suggested that such a reform should be based on 'a new perspective on our history, culture and national life, free of unscientific racial myths and obsessions with the invasions and wars of another age and another Society, and a rec

National identity in Sri Lanka: Problems in Communication and Education 43
ognition of the common elements that link the peoples of this country in shared experiences and mutual assimilation of elements from each other's cultures.'
4.
I should like to conclude with some remarks on the news media. This is a large subject, and to dispose of it as briefly as I shall do here will seem shockingly inadequate. But I must confess to a sense of weariness on this subject, particularly as far as the mainstream press is concerned. I have spent a good part of the last four years studying and criticizing the press in respect of its treatment of ethnic relations, and during that period I have seen the behaviour of the greater part of the mainstream press grow steadily worse in this area. I have almost come to feel that the irresponsibility of most newspapers in this respect is one of those natural ills that one has to live with, like flood or drought, that it is hopeless for people who are critical of the mainstream press grow steadily worse in this area. I have almost come to feel that the irresponsibility of most newspapers in this respect is one of those natural ills that one has to live with, like flood or drought, that it is hopeless trying to reform or correct them, and that the only worthwhile task for people who are critical of the mainstream press is to build, on however modest a scale, alternative structures of communication
However, there is one contrast I want to make between the press on the one hand and radio and TV on the other as news media. There is a great deal of news, including news on matters affecting ethnic relations, that is not reported at all by radio and TV. (Sometimes I feel inclined to say that this is a blessing.) But whatever news radio and TV choose to report (some of it, no doubt, often trivial and insignificant) is generally presented in a common news bulletin in all three languages.

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Radio has occasionally deviated from this principle; TV hasn't, as far as I am aware, during its relatively brief existence. In our situation of the lack of communication between different ethnic groups it is a small but real step forward that, for instance, events of importance to Buddhists, Hindus, Christians or Muslims should be presented in the same way in Rupavahini's Sinhala, Tamil and English news bulletins. And sometimes, because of the visual character of the medium, inter-ethnic communication does take place even when it was not intended. I should like to relate an experience of this fact.
Two years ago, I was in Jaffna helping to make a film based on the indigenous New Year as a festival common to Sinhalese and Tamils (a theme, let me add, prompted by the discovery that Sinhala school-books totally ignore this character of the festival). During the shooting a neighbouring farmer came to the location to talk to one of the people who was helping us with the arrangements. He didn't know anything about our theme, but it happened by chance that the previous evening he had seen a Rupavahini programme on the New Year. It was a Sinhala programme for Sinhala viewers on the Sinhala New year - it hadn't been made as an effort at inter-ethnic communication at all - but watching it, this Tamil farmer had discovered something he had never known before: to quote his own words, as translated for me. Apparently Sinhala people celebrate New Year very much in the same way that we do, a testimony to the potentialities of a visual medium and its ability to speak across language barriers: an indication also of what could be done if TV were consciously used as an instrument of communication across cultures.
With the press we have a very different story. It's not just the fact that few people read newspapers in more than one language: the press widens these barriers of communication by its own practice. The mainstream press has long been accustomed to speak in different voices and with different ac

National identity in Sri Lanka: Problems in Communication and Education 433
cents in its three languages, even in the case of newspapers published in different languages by the same newspaper group - the same private or state management. One story will appear with varying slants in different language media, or news reported in one medium will not be reported at all in another, or widely divergent opinions on the same question will be voiced by newspapers of different languages of the same group.
I should like to offer just two examples from the many I could quote of this chameleon-like character of the mainstream press in respect of ethnic issues. In the dark days immediately after July I knew several people who were gratified that The Island was saying editorially things that needed saying. Fortunately most of them didn't read Sinhala. They would have been much less gratified if they knew that while The Island was talking of the shame and the agony of the July events, its sister Sinhala newspaper was publishing a set of articles headed, "After the fall of the Pettah dictatorship' urging the Government to consolidate by administrative and legislative means the gains secured for Sinhala merchants during the July days. Yet another and more recent example. The press in the last few months has been full of stories and editorial comment regarding the menace of narcotics. But only in the Sinhala press has it been said that the great majority of those who are drug addicts (one newspaper says 95%, another 100%) are Sinhalese, with the insinuation that Sinhala youth are being ruined by design. The authenticity of the statistic is questionable. But if the story is true, why it does it appear only in the Sinhala press?
The conduct of the mainstream press is one of the principal reasons for the failure of the Sinhala and Tamil communities to understand what the other is thinking and feeling. The problem is more serious in the case of the Sinhala people, and that for a significant reason which should be of interest to those who are concerned about 'ethnic balances'. Of the principal Tamil newspapers one is published by the state, and another

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by a Sinhala management, so that Sinhala majority opinion gets fair reportage in these papers. Even in the case of Tamil-owned newspaper such as the Virakesari and the Eelanadu, the reality of a Sinhala-dominated state means that these papers feel an obligation to report representative Sinhala opinions: certainly Government personalities get adequate coverage. However, there are no corresponding pressures which operate in the case of the reporting of Tamil opinion by the Sinhala press, and consequently very little of it gets through. During a recent survey in which I participated of student opinion in Colombo schools regarding the ethnic question, we found that the great majority of Sinhala students had not the faintest conception of what were the grievances that the people of the North felt. It wasn't a matter of prejudice or lack of sympathy: it was first and foremost a matter of ignorance. We also found that hardly any student in the four schools we visited (these were all ALevel students we talked to) knew that estate workers of Indian origin had problems of citizenship. A sad reflection of the myopia that our educational system engenders!
Endnotes
' A friend objects that the common phrase 'Sinhala Buddhist
is a contradiction in terms, since Buddhism is a universal religion which addresses itself to all mankind and is not the special property of any ethnic group. A valid point if one bases oneself on the doctrinal Buddhism enshrined in the original texts. However, the enlistment of Sri Lankan Buddhism in the service of Sinhala ethnicity is at least as old as the Mahavamsa. It is to this politicised' Buddhism that I refer when I speak of 'Sinhala Buddhist ideology'.
* Anagarika Dharmapala, History of an Ancient Civilization', in A. Guruge (ed.) Return to Righteousness, p. 479.
India Today, 31.3.84

National ladentity in Sri Lanka: Problems in Communication and Education 435
4.
10
Ralph Pieris, Sinhalese Social Organisation, p. 3, footnote, cites the historical evidence.
Translated from Ape Kenek' in Parakrama Kodituwakku, Podi Malliye. Pp. 9-13.
H.D. Sugathapala, Nava Maga Reader for Grade 3, pref
aCe
Reggie Siriwardena, K. Indrapala, Sunil Bastian and Sepali Kottegoda, School Text Books and Communal Relations in Sri Lanka, p. 35.
Except from the Mul Potha (kindergarten reader) which was replaced at the beginning of 1982.
Reggie Siriwardena et al., op.cit. p. 62.
Ibid., p. 61.
Sri Lanka - The Ethnic Conflict

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National Identity: Strategies and Programmes
I wish first to make four preliminary points regarding strategies for promoting national identity in Sri Lanka.
First, the proposition that a genuine national identity hardly exists in popular consciousness, but has to be constructed or created; people are, of course, conscious that they are citizens of Sri Lanka, and will make the appropriate response in answering a question regarding their nationality or filling up the relevant cage in an official form. This is, however, a recognition only of a legal relationship to a state; it does not engage an individual's fundamental sense of identity, with its accompanying consciousness of belonging to a group with a shared history and culture. For most Sri Lankans, that fundamental identity, and the emotional charge that goes with it, is given by the relationship to an ethnic group.
For Sinhalese, and especially for Sinhalese Buddhists, it is possible to speak of a 'national identity and invest it with patriotic fervour while its real content is an ethnic identity. This reality is built into the language of popular discourse. While English-speaking Sri Lankans may use the term 'the nation' and mean all the people of Sri Lanka, there is no practice in Sinhala of talking of a Lankikajatiya'; the 'jatiya' - for instance, in the trinity of ‘rata, jatiya, agama“ — is the Sinhala people. The symbols of national identity created by the state - the iconog

National identity Strategies and Programmes 437
raphy of the flag and the official crest and the imagery of the national anthem - have a predominantly Sinhala/Buddhist flavour which makes Sinhala-Buddhists to feel that the state is rightfully their possession and that its main function should be to serve their interests. However, this very situation makes 'national identity' a problematic concept for minority groups.
It doesn't follow from what has been said earlier that our strategies for promoting national identity should be directed towards obliterating or eroding ethnic identities. Any such strategy would be unreal. Most people will not abandon their ethnic identities - whether linguistic, religious or putatively, racial which are bound up with their innermost sense of who they are and where there belong. The image of an idealized colonial past of some middle-class Sri Lankans (When we went to school we didn't think of ourselves as Sinhalese, Tamils, Muslims or Burghers') must be recognized for what it is - a class identity masquerading as a national one. It's not going to be replicated in the future.
We must recognize that it isn't the existence of ethnic identities which creates conflict, since these identities have always existed and, for all we know, may always exist. It is the perception of them as antagonistic, of the interests of one group as being fundamentally opposed to those of another, or of one group as being intrinsically Superior to another, that comes into play in situatigns of conflict. Of course, these perceptions don't fall from the sky; they are the expression of real competing social interests. To resolve, or at least to relax, the underlying social conflicts, is the task of political policy-making. What we are talking about - the promotion of a consciousness that will help to bring people of different ethnic groups together - is in some ways secondary, but that doesn't mean it's unimportant. It can be of vital importance in mitigating conflictual situations, or in making political solutions more acceptable whey they are found.

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Any concept of Sri Lankan national identity that can be unifying rather than divisive must necessarily be a composite one, precisely because we are a multi-ethnic people. It has to be based on a recognition of differences as well as shared elements between the constituent groups making up the Sri Lankan nation. This argument will be developed in the next two paragraphs.
No nation composed of various ethnic groups, with real differences in language, religion and culture, and with differences, real or presumed, in racial origin, can hope to survive in peace and harmony without the acceptance of those differences and of the equal right of all groups, whatever the language they speak or the gods they worship, to membership of the nation. The majoritarian ideology that rules so much of our political and cultural life treats difference from the cultural norms of the majority as inherently a justification for suspicion or exclusion or discrimination. We need to promote a consciousness not only that each ethnic group has a right to its own existence and cultural identity but also that an ethnic diversity is an enrichment of the nation because it opens the doors to an understanding of many human possibilities.
However, the different ethnic groups that make up the Sri Lankan nation have a long history of living together in this island - ranging from a couple of centuries in some cases to over two millennia in others. We have therefore behind us a real shared history, during which we have transmitted, borrowed and exchanged a great deal among ourselves. The commonalities are, therefore, as real and as important as the differences. The record of both is to be found in our cultures. Let me make it clear at this point that I am not using the term 'culture' to mean merely high culture, the culture of social and intellectual elites. In fact, the high culture is often a force for division because the academics and the specialists who control it have often a vested interest in upholding the idea of cultural

National laentify Strategies and Programmes 439
purity. For our purpose, popular culture, whether of rural folk or of urban masses, is often more significant than the high culture because it has always been open to cultural borrowing and assimilation from a variety of sources. But more generally, I am using the term 'culture' in the anthropological sense to include the whole way of life of a community - including its customs, its dress, its food, its dwellings and recreations. Culture includes also of course religion, but here again and what should be of most significance to us are not the orthodox doctrines and official institutions ofeach religion which are dedicated to the preservation of sectarian divisions. The practice of religion among the mass of the people, the manifestations of popular religiosity, are not confined by these compartmentalisations. Whether you go to Kataragama or Sri Pada or the Kali Temple at Modera, or even to the seashore mosque at Beruwela or to St. Anthony's Kochichikade, you will find that the inner needs that make people turn to religion transcend the divisions between creeds and sects.
My argument can be summed up in a word; what we should celebrate, if we are true to our real national identity, is not purity but hybridity. It is an ideal that will be hateful to all those who cling to a single monolithic identity, a single truth, an unchanging, uncontaminated tradition. But where will you find these in the real world? Certainly not among our island people, not shut away behind mountain fastnesses or desert but exposed from time immemorial to the changing winds and tides of the outer world. In fact, the highest praise of the Sinhala people is that before the rise of insular fanaticisms, they were free and open, taking from everybody what could add to the richness and variety of their culture.
I have talked so far on the level of aims and strategies, but the task I have been given involves spelling out programmes to meet them. But here I am faced with a real difficulty. To

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illustrate the nature of that difficulty let me describe two personal experiences.
Last year, at a festival of South Asian documentary organized by ICES, the institution for which I work, I saw a film on Sufism in India. The first part of the film was devoted to the character of this tradition of Islamic mysticism; the second part was about the interactions between Sufism and Hindu bhakthi cults, and about those figures such as Kabir and Guru Nanak who drew on both religious traditions. It was a beautifully made film directed by an outstanding Indian filmmaker, Girish Karnard, but what was especially significant was that it was made for the Films Division of the Government of India.
But several years earlier and quite independently, we at ICES had conceived the idea of making a film about the commonalities between popular religious beliefs and practices in Sri Lankan Buddhism and Hinduism. The director who made it for us was one of Sri Lanka's best, Vasantha Obeysekere. But though we offered the film to Rupavahini for telecasting, it was never shown. Notice the difference between the Indian and the Sri Lankan situations. The Indian Films Division commissions a film aimed at inter-religious understanding; Rupavahini is unwilling to show such a film even when an NGO has gone to the labour and expense of making it. This isn't an isolated example, because we have had the same experience with a film on the historical links between the Sinhala and Tamil languages, also made for us by a leading director, Tissa Abeysekera.
For our part, we have stopped making films with an eye to TV because we are convinced that it is futile. But it is the more general problem I want to pose. If we want to use media to promote inter-ethnic understanding, we have to face the reality that neither the State institutions of mass communications nor the big privately owned media institutions are sym

National laenfity Strategies and Programmes 44
pathetic to such an endeavour. I see no way out of this situation except the building of alternative networks to promote distribution and circulation of media material by like-minded NGOs.
The problems of education are even greater: preparation of curricula, production of textbooks and teacher training are all in the hands of the State. More than a decade ago, I worked with a group that scrutinized and criticized the existing school text books (produced by the State) that were full of material highly prejudicial to good relations between ethnic groups. Since that time the more blatant and strident elements of ethnic prejudice seem to have disappeared from the books (whether due to our criticism or not is not important). However, it isn't enough to eliminate from the educational curriculum what is harmful; it is necessary to use education positively as a means of creating in children the consciousness that may make them future good citizens of a multi-ethnic society. How do we achieve this - in other words, how do we influence the educational planners? I ask the question because I have no simple
af SWET.
The arts are, of course, relative by free here perhaps the greatest space exists for creative endeavour towards bringing people together, not through didacticism and propaganda but through imaginative expression of shared human experiences. Though fiction, the theatre and the cinema have produced some valuable work of this kind, very little effort has been made to use the now highly popular form of teledrama for this purpose. Commercial producers and sponsors may not be interested, but cannot public-spirited NGOs take the initiative here? Finally, in the print medium readers of one language have little access to the best work that is produced in the other. In India again this access is provided by an officially established body, the Sahitya Academy, which sponsors literary transla

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tions between the major languages of the country. In Sri Lanka it has been left to a few conscious individuals to promote translations between Sinhala and Tamil literatures, and the output has naturally been small. Here again is an opening for NGOs. If the initial tasks of organizing the activity of translation is done, publishers can be found in the book industry.
Social Justice, Vol. 28, Nos. 9/10, September/October 1994

What State Can DO for SWabhasa Children's Literature
An example from Poland
During a recent visit to Poland, I was anxious to find out what we in Ceylon could learn from this country about one of our biggest educational problems - the production of good children's literature in the mother tongue.
Poland is a good model in this respect because her historical circumstances have been in many ways not dissimilar to
OU OWI.
Poland was deprived of her independence and partitioned between three great powers for a hundred and fifty years before the First World War. During this period the Polish language was suppressed and outlawed in the school though the Polish intelligentsia (owing to their fierce national consciousness) never became de-nationalised in the way that Westernised Ceylonese did under British rule.
More recently, during World War II, Poland went through persecution under Nazi occupation. Throughout the war the Nazis compulsorily closed the schools for the same reason that they destroyed all monuments of Chopin, Mickiewiez and other great figures of Polish art, literature and music. Polish culture was to be stamped out completely. Polish children were to

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have no education, because in the New Order the Poles were to be merely a nation of slave labourers. The only education the children of Poland did have during these years was in the underground schools run by the resistance movement.
Add to this the tremendous physical devastation of Poland during the war, and it is obvious that the achievement in producing children's literature in the post-war years has been made under handicaps such as Ceylon has never known.
To round off the comparison, Poland has a population three times as large as ours but is still not a big nation by European standards. Her language like Sinhalese, is not an international language used outsider her own frontiers. Finally, Poland is still a poor country, and life there is in some ways harder than in Ceylon.
How then has Poland been able to put into the hands of her children an abundant literature in their own language, while we in Ceylon have no more than a tiny handful of good books in Swabhasa?
The simple answer is that whatever their difficulties, the best the Polish people can afford is given to their children because they know that the most important resources of a country are its youth. This is the attitude which underlies the magnificent children's section in the Warsaw Palace of Culture and the similar centres in other towns and cities (described in an article in the "Daily News" of November 23). It is also the animating force behind the work in children's literature.
The central publishing house for children's literature set up by the State in Poland is Nasza Kalegarnia (the name means "Our Publishers"). This publishing house produces in the first place, five magazines for children of different age groups.
TIS" (The Little Bear') is a fortnightly for children between 3-6 years, and has a circulation of 300,000.

What State Can Do for Swabhasa Children's Literature 445
"SWIERSZCZYK" ("The Cricket") also appears fortnightly and is read by children between 6 and 9, and has a circulation ranging from 800,000 to a million. Next comes "PLOMYCZEK" ("The Little Flame" - that is the Firefly) which reaches half a million children of ages between 9 and 14. "PLOMYK" ("The Flame") for the oldest children (12 to 14 years), sells 200,000 copies. Finally, there is a special Scientific and technical magazine “MLODY TECHNIK“ for young people.
Every one of these magazines is beautifully produced and illustrated in full colour and their prices are justincredible when measured against the quality they maintain. The Smallest of them costs about as much as a little roll of bread (equivalent in local purchasing power to about 5 or 6 cents) the highest priced of them about two and a half times as much.
As an example of what the Polish child gets at this fantastically low prices, I shall describe the contents of one sample issue "PLOMYK" which I have with me. This is incidentally a number with a special emphasis on Asia: the front and back covers (both in colour) show two works of Indonesian sculpture. Inside there are four full-page pictures of Indian miniatures and an Indian temple and two pages of classical Japanese prints (also in colour). There are two full-page colour photographs of chimpanzees and a parrot, and a double-page spread illustrating the exports and imports which are exchanged between Poland and various foreign countries.
So much for the pictorial features. As reading matter, the issue has a poem on India, two articles on the Kon-Tiki expedition, the story of Ali Baba, an article on the Snake and the garuda motif in India, an article on Sydney in connection with the Olympic games, a stamp collectors corner, a sports column and a number of other features and stories. And most of the stories and articles are illustrated in colour. Thirty-two pages and translated in terms of the corresponding real value in

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Ceylon, the price would be around 15 cents!
Apart from these magazines Nasza Ksiegarnia produces a flood of children's books. In 1956 alone, it published about a hundred and fifty new books, in addition to the reprints and new editions of earlier publications. (Just compare that with the situation in Ceylon, where ten good children's books a year in Sinhalese would, in present circumstances be a miracle to be thankful for).
None of the books published by Nasza Ksiegarnia, it should be noted are school-books, which are handled by an entirely different organization: they are all story-books and general reading for children.
Just as in the case of the magazines, the Polish children's books amaze one by their consistently high quality of production and their prices. The books range from translations of all the best-known children's classics - Andersen, Grimm, Carroll, Ilikne, Collodi, Kipling - to abundant original writing for children in Polish. Some of the finest contemporary writers in Poland have produced children's books - notably, the great Polish poet Julian Tuami who died a few years ago.
I have not seen in any country children's literature of such unvarying excellence (in Britain or the United States for instance, there are a few enlightened publishers such as Oxford University Press, which have done excellent work in children's literature.
And with this central direction there is no difficulty in getting the co-operation of the best writers and artists.

Sinhala Encyclopaedia must popularize knowledge
This is obviously an educational undertaking of the highest importance and of great potential value. It is also a difficult venture. Not only is it the first work of its kind in Sinhalese; the sponsors have had to face the added difficulty that the intelligentsia in Ceylon, from whom the contributors are drawn, is still largely English-educated. Many of the specialists in particular fields who have written for the Encyclopaedia are unable to write in Sinhalese, and their contributions have had to be translated.
I have tried to make every reasonable allowance for these difficulties in reviewing the volume of specimen article and in assessing on the basis of this volume, the work which is being done by the sponsors and editorial board of the Encyclopaedia. Perhaps I should add also that the criticism offered in this article has been inspired by a conviction of the very great usefulness of this project if it is intelligently executed, as well as by a desire to help towards this end.
The contents of this Encyclopaedia, of which the specimen articles presumably offer a representative cross-section, seem to fall into two categories. On the one hand there are articles relating to the various branches of human knowledge which are covered by any standard encyclopaedia. In addition, the editors have tried to serve the specific needs of the Sinhalese

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reader with a whole range of articles on subjects relating to his own physical and intellectual environment - Ceylon history and geography, Sinhalese literature, art and culture, Buddhism, etc.
This latter group of articles was, of course, very necessary in a Sinhalese encyclopaedia. But is it enough, for the purpose of making this undertaking genuinely useful to the Sinhalese reader, that the editors should give the encyclopaedia this local slant in subject-matter? What about the mode of presentation in the work as a whole? This is what the editors have to say on this subject. They explain in the preface to the present publication that they preferred not to translate articles bodily from some standard encyclopaedia even though this would have shortened the time needed to complete the work:
The idea of getting article written specially for this work by local contributors instead of translating them from a foreign encyclopaedia is fundamentally sound in principle. But have the editors thought out fully the difference of approach, the difference in methods of presentation, which should go together with this procedure? If is futile having articles written in Ceylon if the end-product is not materially different from what might be found in a standard English encyclopaedia, if the particular needs of the Sinhalese reader are not borne in mind.
It is not enough for this purpose that the editors should include local topics in the encyclopaedia or recognize that the place which the horse has in English life is occupied here by the ox. On reading this volume of specimen articles, it strikes me that the editors have failed to ask themselves what I think are essential preliminary questions: For what particular public is this encyclopaedia intended? What is their degree of acquaintance with the subjects discussed? What is the level of

A49
comprehension which the encyclopaedia should maintain if it is to be useful to this public?
A Sinhalese encyclopaedia at present has to be very different, not merely in subject-matter but in its methods of presentation, from a work like the Encyclopaedia Brittanica. An English encyclopaedia like the latter is intended as a reference work for a public which has already available to it a vast mass of literature on every subject (to take some examples from the specimen, volume, Einstein, bacteria, turbines, Plato): the Sinhalese Encyclopaedia will be virtually the first piece of writing, or the first serious and authoritative piece of writing to appear in the language.
In dealing with international thought and knowledge, therefore, the Sinhalese encyclopaedia has to be both more and less of an encyclopaedia than a work of the same kind in English. It has to do more in the sense that it cannot, assume the same background of knowledge, the same access to other literature on the same subjects, which the English reader possesses. It has, therefore, to do much more explanation and simplification than an English encyclopaedia. On the other hand, the Sinhalese encyclopaedia has less to do in the sense that the Sinhalese reader who is getting his first introduction to a subject like bacteriology, will not need the same detail and weight of erudition that is offered by similar reference work in English.
In short, what the Sinhalese Encyclopaedia has to do - in subjects outside those immediately familiar to the Sinhalese reader - is a job of popularization. Its general approach should be not that of the Encyclopaedia Brittanica but of a work like H.G. Wells's Outline of History, Lancelot Hogben's Mathematics for the Million and Science for the Citizen or Gordon Childe's Man Makes Himself. These are not, of course, encyclopaedias. But the point of contact is that these

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are books which try to present specialist knowledge to a mass audience which has little or no previous acquaintance with the subjects discussed, and which use techniques of communication, of presenting ideas in a readily intelligible and attractive manner, which are appropriate for this purpose. That is precisely the job which the Sinhalese Encyclopaedia has to do. From the evidence of this specimen volume, it would appear that the editors have not even grasped the necessity for such an approach.
From the account given in the preface as well as the internal evidence in the base of the articles themselves one would conjecture that this is how the editorial board has set out on the work. An authority is invited to write an article on a particular topic. More often than not the contributor is unable to write in Sinhalese and has little or no understanding of the background of the Sinhalese reader. He sits down and writes an article in English in the same manner in which he would write for any internal reference work. A translator in the Encyclopaedia office with a set of technical terms by his side, sits down and turns the article into Sinhalese.
If this mechanical job of translation is all that is necessary to produce an encyclopaedia in Sinhalese, one fails to see what values there is in having articles specially turned out for this work. It is true that a certain number of articles appear to have been written directly in Sinhalese by contributors or staff men. But the majority of these articles show no essential difference. The approach is the same as in the translated articles - all that the writer has done is to substitute a set of Sinhalese terms for English concepts without making any attempt to meet the special problems of communication in addressing himself to the Sinhalese reader.
The fallacy underlying this encyclopaedia is the fallacy which has vitiated a good deal of recent translation and

45
educational writing in Sinhalese - the assumption that all you need do to introduce a new concept into the language is to coin a Sinhalese equivalent for the foreign technical term. The fact that a term by itself is merely a label, that before the term can be used meaningfully the reader has to understand the whole complex of ideas associated with that term has not been understood. If I say therefore, that the passage on Einstein I have quoted will be meaningless to the great majority of readers of the encyclopaedia it does NOT mean that the technical terms in it are new. I mean that in the absence of preliminary explanation and simplification, the technical term - to whatever degree the word itself may be understood - remain pure gibberish.
I shall no doubt be told that the time the encyclopaedia is completed - the first part is expected to appear, facilities for higher education in Sinhalese may have been provided and a class of students would have grown up who will be able to comprehend this new knowledge in Sinhalese without any difficulty. But that brings me back to the question which I posed at the beginning of this article. What is the particular public to whom this encyclopaedia is addressed? Is it the general reader or the specialist student?
To my mind, the real job which the Sinhalese encyclopaedia has to do is a job of mass education and popularization of knowledge. All th time and expenditure which the State is going to spend on it will not be worthwhile if it is to be read and understood only by a tiny minority at the University. Even if it is presumed that facilities for University education in Sinhalese will be available in every subject, these students will have their own basic text-books in Sinhalese. Moreover, for a long time to come, University students will need to have a good knowledge of English as a second language, and they will be able to consult background literature in English.

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The need of the specialist student for a Sinhalese encyclopaedia therefore, is not so urgent. But meanwhile, there is the vast mass of Sinhalese readers, greatly expanded by free education, who are thirsting for wider knowledge. Is this encyclopaedia going to be beyond their intellectual reach? Will all the money devoted to this work be justified if only a handful of Physics Honours students each year can read the article on Einstein? If only students of medicine and biology can read about bacteria or professional engineers about turbines?
How far even those who might be presumed to have the needs and interests of the common Sinhalese reader specially at heart have failed in their task is evident in an article on money contributed to the encyclopaedia by Mr. F.R. Jayasuriya. Mr. Jayasuriya's article is no different from anything that might appear in a Western text-book of economics; in referring to the early use of coinage, he draws his example from Greece, Rome and Carthage-not from Ceylon or India. I am regretfully forced to the conclusion that if the Sinhalese encyclopaedia is to be executed on these lines, the editors would have done better, after all, to translate directly from a standard encyclopaedia (apart from the articles on national subjects). The material could not have suffered in local relevance and the scholarship would probably have been superior.
It may be asked what the editors could have done in a situation where a large number of the specialist contributors were unable to write in Sinhalese and were largely ignorant of the Sinhalese reader's background. But why should it be assumed that the actual writing for the encyclopaedia must be done by the specialist? Except in the case of those scholars who have also a gift for popularization - a communication skill which is very rare - it is positively undesirable in our cultural situation that the writing should be done by the people who live in a rarefied atmosphere of learning removed from the general reader. The specialists should serve as guides to

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the writing staff, whose task should be to present the material in a simplified and readable manner for checking for accuracy by the scholars.
I intend no disrespect to the Editor-in-Chief of the Encyclopaedia, Professor D.E. Hettiarachchi, in saying that the general approach of this work, as exemplified by the specimen volume is such as I would have expected of him as an editor. For Professor Hettiarachchi, whatever his eminence in his own particular field of learning, has shown no evidence of the special gifts which in my mind an editor of a Sinhalese encyclopaedia at the present time should have - the talents, if I may repeat myself of a Wells, a Hogben or a Gordon Childe. The original work which is involved in devising methods through which new learning can be intelligibly presented to a virgin public has not been done. Instead, the emphasis has been purely linguistic, the hard work which, we are told in the preface, has gone into the undertaking has been devoted primarily to finding accurate Sinhalese verbal equivalents for foreign terms and purifying the text of possible language errors. But if pouring knowledge, into ready-made linguistic moulds was all that was needed, any translator with a set of glossaries and a library of reference books could have produced this encyclopaedia.
I think the failure in imagination which is in danger of violating this project is similar to that which makes futile a good deal the labour which is being expended on translating literature into Sinhalese. There again we suffer from the delusion that all that is necessary to produce new literature in Sinhalese is mechanically to translate into this language the English "classics" we remember from our own Westernised childhood. We translate David Copperfield, The Vicar of Wakefield, The Children of the New Forest or Treasure Island without asking whether these books will have any meaning or value for the Sinhalese reader of today. The original thinking

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which the translator should do in discovering those books which have a bearing on the Sinhalese reader's own environment and experience is largely absent. Why for instance, does nobody think of translating a book like Richardson's Pamela which is much closer to our own world than most English novels which have already been turned into Sinhalese. The answer, of course, is that Pamela is less well known and most translators are content to follow the beaten track.
If the private publisher and author are deficient in imagination, it is surely the responsibility at least of a Department of Cultural Affairs to show the way. To return to the Sinhalese Encyclopaedia - it is not too late for the department to carry out the task of re-writing in order to bring this work within the grasp of the common reader. It can be done, if the department will find people with the necessary originality and gift for popularization. It must be done, if the Encyclopaedia is not to remain an expensive white elephant, a permanent reminder of our failure in responding to the growing desire of the people for a democratization of knowledge.

CoOmaraswamy, Art and Society
We shall hope to have demonstrated that the human value of anything made is determined by the coincidence in it of beauty and utility, significance and aptitude; that artifacts of this sort can only be made by free and responsible workmen, free to consider only the good of the work to be done and individually responsible for its quality: and that the manufacture of "art" in studios coupled with an artless "manufacture' in factories represents a reduction of the standard of living to subhuman levels."
The quotation comes from Ananda K. Coomaraswamy's essay Why Exhibit Works of Art? Side by side with it I wish to set another statement:
'Nothing made by man's hand can be indifferent: it must be either beautiful and elevating, or ugly and degrading; and those things that are without art are so aggressively; they wound it by their existence, and they are now so much in the majority that the works of art we are obliged to set ourselves to seek for, whereas the other things are the ordinary companions of our everyday life; so that if those who cultivate art are intellectually inclined never so much to wrap themselves in their special gifts and their high cultivation, and so live happily, apart from other men, and despising them, they could not do so: they are as it were

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living in an enemy's country; at every turn there is some thing lying in wait to offend and vex their nicer sense and educated eyes: they must share in the general discomfort - and I am glad of it.'
That isn't Coomaraswamy: that is William Morris writing a generation earlier in The Beauty of Life. Morris's ideas regarding the separation between art and labour in contemporary society were among the most important influences that young Coomaraswamy brought back from his English education when he returned to Ceylon in his mid-twenties. There were other influences that he derived from Morris: his debt to the inspiration of Morris as the preserver of an architectural and artistic heritage of the past acknowledged in one of his early pieces of writing, An Open Letter to the Kandyan Chiefs, whose closing sentence is quoted from the manifesto of the English Society for the Preservation of Ancient Buildings founded by William Morris.
But what Coomaraswamy derived principally from Morris was the conception of the disastrous division, in modern industrial societies based on the profit motive beween (on the one hand) mechanical unintelligent labour expended on the production of articles for daily use and (on the other) creative work directed towards the generation of works of art for the pure aesthetic pleasure of a minority. And, in contrast, Morris had pointed to the union of beauty. and utility, of art and labour, in medieval England where production was for use and not for the market. Coomaraswamy drew attention to the same phenomenon in Kandyan Society in Medieval Sinhalese Art.
But beyond this point lies the great divergence between Morris's view of the relations between art and society and Coomaraswamy's. For though Morris had begun as a

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romantic medievalist, he developed to become a social revolutionary. 'So there I was in for a fine pessimistic end of life, he wrote, if it had not some how dawned on me that amidst all this filth of civilization the seeds of a great change, what we others call Social-Revolution, were beginning to germinate. In the latter phase of his life he no longer merely looked back to the past: he foresaw a reunion of art and labour in the socialist society of the future. "One day we shall win back Art, that is to say the pleasure of life: win back Art again to our daily labour." Morris's great significance was that he went beyond the romantic critique of industrial society by Carlyle, Dickens, Ruskin, Arnold, into a political analysis which recognized in the working class the shaping force of the future, and in socialism the hope of integration between art and life.
The intellectual road that Coomaraswamy took was very different. He does seem to have been influenced by Morris's political thinking to the extent of trying, in some of his writings, to mix his traditionalist ideas with a kind of guild socialism or syndicalism. In Medieval Sinhalese Art he envisaged the restoring of the entire control of production to the actual workers through a development of the trade unions of West, historically the representatives of the old guild associations of producers.' But even under such a syndicalist order, Coomaraswamy wanted recognized the general desirability of marriage within the group and of following one's parent's calling.'
For Coomaraswamy's social ideal was oriented fundamentally not to the future but to the past: it was based on an exaltation of the Brahmanical caste system (which he described as 'the only true communism') and the patriarchal amily. Of course, the picture that Coomaraswamy presents f these institutions is different from the actual hierarchical

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societies we have known in India and Sri Lanka, with the abominable indignities and violence directed against the oppressed: it is painted in the rosy colours of transcendent metaphysics.
It must be granted, of course, that the metaphysical
myth was not without its historical significance. The Indian Marxist historian D.D. Kosambi has remarked that Indian history was marked by less violence than the European because in India the oppressed were induced to a much greater degree to acquiesce in their oppression by the consolations of religion. (This is probably true of Sri Lankan history too.) Traditionalists like Coomaraswamy who claimed that in Indian society the Shudra or the immolated widow willingly accepted his or her lot never saw that they were only pointing to the psychological mechanism of the internalisation of oppression. (Correspondingly, when the traditional sanctions break down, external force must necessarily be increased to maintain inequality, as we see from the daily violence directed against 'depressed castes' which has become one of the major problems of Indian society today).
It was not only as a social thinker but also as a theorist of art that Coomaraswamy ended in the cloudy realms of metaphysics. His ultimate position about art was Platonic - a conception of art as a reflection of timeless, transcendent realities. 'Art is essentially symbolic, and only accidentally illustrative or historical'. His influence has gone into the making of a group of critics of art and literature who seek to sever these activities from their material and historical focus, and to discover in them the manifestations of the philosophia perennis, like Kathleen Raine, dissociating Blake the mystic from Blake the social revolutionary (though his great originality and significance lies in the union of these

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two roles). I prefer the critical temper of mind of Morris, as he described it: 'careless of metaphysics and religion ... but with a deep love of the earth and the life on it, and a passion for the history of the past of mankind."
Lanka Guardian, July 1978

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FOX VS. Hedgehog
There is a famous essay by Isaiah Berlin titled 'The Hedgehog and the Fox in which he uses a saying of a classical Greek writer called Archilocus to make a contrast between two types of writers and thinkers. The quotation from Archilocus reads: 'The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.' Apparently nobody is quite sure what Archilocus meant by this, but Isaiah Berlin uses it to distinguish between those thinkers and writers who see the world in terms of one fundamental principle-hedgehogs' - and those who believe that the world is irreducibly diverse and pluralistic - foxes'. It is an interesting intellectual parlour game to play. Take these pairs: Dante/Shakespeare; Joyce/ D.H. Lawrence; Eliot/Yeats - which are foxes and which are hedgehogs?
However, the purpose of the article is not to test your fox-and-hedgehog spotting skill. I want to suggest that Berlin's categories can be extended into another realm - that of music. At least, I want to propose Mozart as the preeminent musical fox and Beethoven as the musical hedgehog par excellence. This may seem an untenable conception, for music belongs to a realm quite different from that of the ways of seeing the world, as articulated in verbal forms that Berlin was concerned with in his essay. Butlet me argue my case.
Actually, I came to think in terms of foxes and hedgehogs in music by examining my own reactions to Beethoven when I

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listen to him today. Here I am talking about middle-period Beethoven, who for most people is the Beethoven who matters. All those things that most thrilled me when I was young - the Third, Fifth, and Seventh Symphonies, the Emperor Concerto, the Appassionata Sonata - I now find almost intolerable to listen to. I flinch at those pounding chords, those insistent and aggressive rhythms, because they seem to me to glorify energy and power as the highest reality. Soon after I had come to this conclusion, I found that Beethoven had once said something which confirms it. Power, he said, 'is the morality of those who stand out from the rest, and it is mine.'
This remark not only confirms the fact that Beethoven was a hedgehog who saw the world in terms of the fundamental principle of power, but it also brings out how much for him the celebration of power was part of his selfassertion. I think that this is ultimately why I now react against middle-period Beethoven: the music seems to me altogether too self-regarding, too much a product of the greatly suffering, grandly triumphing self — it falls, as I see it, into the sin of hubris and spiritual pride.
I remember reading that the distinguished musical scholar Tovey once protested against those who when they talk about Beethoven's music try to relate it to the French Revolution. I believe Tovey was against this kind of talk because for him music was an autonomous world to be regarded in terms of its own structures and its own language. But whether this is the whole truth about music or not, I should like to agree with Tovey's criticism from another point of view. The violence, the defiance, the titanic oppositions, and - in terms of musical tradition - the shattering of inherited forms in Beethoven are the expression not so much of the revolutionary energies of the age as of Beethoven's own self-will and urge to dominate. But in one way, those who hear the music of the French Revolution in Beethoven are right. Without the breaking down

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of the social norms of the ancien regime by the French Revolution and all its social consequences in Europe, Beethoven would not have had the opportunity to express his selfassertion in music: the cultural and social decorum of the prerevolutionary age wouldn't have permitted it. Which is the appropriate point to turn to Mozart.
Mozart's music presents us again with the difficulty of deciding how much in music is personal and how much is social. From reading his letters - with their extraordinary diversity of elements, from the infantile scatological jokes to the sharp Social observation, the delight in play with language and the dedicated and acute musical intelligence - we have an impression of a personality which has a many-sided and ebullient vitality. This corresponds to what we find in his music. But it is impossible to treat Mozart's music simply as 'self-expression'. Wolfgang Hildesheimer in his superb critical biography of Mozart has demonstrated that one cannot find in Mozart's compositions a straight reflection of the experiences and emotions we know, from other evidence, that he was undergoing at the time he wrote them. I think Eliot's famous dictum that “the more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates' is very far from being a universal truth. But it is certainly true of Mozart.
It is possible perhaps that the very spontaneity with which Mozart produced music (he is known to have often written' whole works in his head before setting them down on paper) had something to do with this autonomy of his musical life. But it was undoubtedly related also to the nature of the society for which he created music. The aristocratic world of Vienna or Salzburg of which Mozart was a hired entertainer thought of music in a very different way from the audiences of the Romantic era in the nineteenth century. Music for the former was not an opportunity for the release of the composer's

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private emotions: it was a social diversion oran accompaniment to public activities like dancing, court ceremonial or worship, and what was expected of the composer was a workmanlike skill in fulfilling these needs.
We today can listen even to some of the serenades and divertimentos that Mozart wrote for the Viennese aristocracy as the eighteenth-century equivalent of Muzak - music to chat or eat to - and enjoy them as enchanting music. But the social demands made on Mozart ensured that the personal emotion in his work was never obtrusively self-regarding, it was always contained within the bounds of the discipline enjoined by inherited forms. I think in this connection of the difference between Mozart's piano concertos and Beethoven's most advanced works in the same form (Nos.4 and 5). The concerto is by its very nature a dialogue between soloist and orchestra - one might say between the individual and the social group. But in Mozart's concertos the dialogue remains, even in the more passionate of his works in this form, a friendly conversation. It is the orchestra which opens and sets the context in which the piano emerges, and the balance between the two partners to the dialogue is sustained to the end. In Beethoven's most characteristic concertos, however, it is the piano as the individual voice which leads and dominates.
The combination of Mozart's multifaceted personality and the social code which governed his musical creation made him the great fox among composers. I remember many years ago putting on the record-player a string quartet for a friend to listen to (the D minor, K421). When I stopped to change records in the middle of the first movement (this was in the days of '78s), my friend said "Gosh, that music is witty!' I could see what he meant. Yet this is the quartet which some critics have called 'tragic'. I think a lot of Mozart's music is witty in that it has a civilized poise of feeling - what Eliot was driving at when he said of Marvell that wit in his poetry involved the

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recognition, implicit in the expression of every experience, of other kinds of experience which are possible.' That is why even in the gayest of Mozart's works - say, the ravishingly beautiful Oboe Quartet - there is an undertone of sadness.
I have referred to the civilized equipoise of Mozart's music, and I would suggest that his music, created for an aristocratic society, embodies a civilization of the spirit that the Viennese aristocrats who snubbed and insulted him never achieved in their own existence.
But let us return now to the great hedgehog. Having articulated my dissatisfaction with middle-period Beethoven, I must now say that for me the consummation of his music is not there but in the works of his last years. Out of the violence and rebellion of his middle years Beethoven seems to reach, in the last period of his creation, a humility and a hard-won serenity that signalize a maturity of the spirit. There are, indeed, anticipations of this development in some of the music of the transitional years, particularly in the radiantly lyrical Archduke Trio and the Violin and Piano Sonata, Op.96, with the hymn-like melodies of their slow movements. But it is only in his final years that this new world of feeling, which can appropriately be called 'religious, finds full expression - in the conclusions of the last Piano Sonata, Op.111, and of the Diabelli Variations (which have, not without reason, been called 'paradisal'), or the slow movement of the String Quartet, Op. 132, which Beethoven significantly titled "a convalescent's hymn of thanksgiving". Of this final stage of Beethoven's creative evolution we may indeed say that there he outpassed Mozart - at least the Mozart who died at 35 with half a lifetime of potential creativity left unfulfilled.
The Thatched Patio, November 1986

Song Without Words?
I am not a music critic, but as an interested listener to the music of both East and West, I found Dr. A.J. Gunawardana's article on the late Rukmani Devi (Lanka Guardian, Nov. 15) so provocative that I feel impelled to offer some comments on it. Objecting to the attitude of critics who judge all art by its social relevance, Dr. Gunawardana sums up their position thus:
"The more relevance' there is, the better the music, hang the quality of the music or the singer's rendering of it." (My emphasis). ܗܝ
By implication, therefore, Dr. Gunawardana holds that there are at least two indispensable criteria without which vocal music cannot be judged - the quality of the music and the singer's rendering of it. However, when Dr. Gunawardana comes to make his own estimate of Rukmani Devi as an artist, he seems to forget one of his own criteria. Conceding that the lyrics of her songs were woefully mired in the banalities of the Colombo school of poetry, Dr. Gunawardana goes on to say that "nonetheless on her lips, they acquired a life that transcended the commonplace sentiments embodied in them.' So much for the singer's rendering'. But what about the quality of the music'?
As far as Rukmani Devi is concerned, Dr. Gunawardana seems to have been so carried away by her voice and her

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execution that, in effect, he says "Hang the quality of the music' too - It is the singer, he concludes, that finally makes the song, not the lyric, however meaningful, not the melody, however sweet." (my emphasis.)
Shouldn't Dr. Gunawardana have considered the fact that the greater part of Rukmani Devi's repertory consisted of the plagiarized Hindi and Tamil film hits that constituted our popular music during a whole era - that, indeed, the banality of the words was matched by the banality of the music? No doubt, it wasn't Rukmani Devi's fault that, with her undoubted natural gifts, she had the misfortune to be born into the darkest era of Sinhala music and to waste her talents on music which was not only third-rate but also second hand. But in these circumstances one can speak only of potentialities and not of musical fulfillment. If Dr. Gunawardana had paused to invoke one of his own criteria, he might have been compelled to ask himself the question whether anyone could be considered a singer of the front rank without her skills being tested against music which was also of artistic distinction. A good singer is not a mere performer but an interpreter, and there can't be interpretation without something significant to interpret.
I remember being told that the legendary Adelina Patti used to sing even Home, Sweet Home enchantingly. I doubt, however, whether any music critic worth his salt would have called her the great singer she was held to be if her golden voice had always been expended on music of this quality - and even if she had died a regrettably tragic death. I don't imply that Dr. Gunawardana's judgment has been swayed by this last circumstance, but the hysteria of the 'national press makes it necessary to draw a clear line of distinction between the expression of grief or sympathy on the one hand and critical assessment on the other.

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Now about the words. Dr. Gunawardana seems to consider words and their meaning irrelevant to one's critical judgment of song. I find this extremely odd in some one who, when we were both helping to prepare an HNCE anthology in English, appropriately suggested the inclusion of Bob Dylan's Blowing in the Wind. But one doesn't need the example of contemporary protest music to show that the power of song depends on the fusion of meaningful words and effective music.
I suggest that in all ages and places, wherever music has had a vital place in relation to the life and culture of a society, song has been linked with social activities such as worship, labour and communal celebrations, or associated with other arts such as dance and theatre, including the fusion of music and drama that makes opera. Of course, the same thing could be said even about instrumental music in older cultures, but with the dissociation between art and social activity that takes place in bourgeois societies, it has become possible to make instrumental music, because of its more abstract nature, 'pure' music - music for music's sake. Song can never be pure music in this sense, because by its very nature it is a mixed art, bringing together poetry and music; and since it is words that are usually sung and not pure sounds, the element of verbal meaning cannot be excluded from song, and is an inseparable part of the impact made on the listener.
What I would consider (to use Dr. Gunawardana's phrase) the authentic mainstream of song' is therefore based on the union of meaning and melody. To ignore the quality of the music and its execution in the interests of 'relevance' is no doubt wrong; but it is equally wrong to judge vocal music solely on the quality of the singer's voice and her command of it. There are no doubt examples of inferior words being redeemed by their musical setting:

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what I do not accept is that banal words and banal music can be transfigured merely by the singer's performance. To listen to song merely to be titillated by a beautiful voice is not to be in contact with the authentic mainstream of song' but to indulge in an aesthetic divagation from it. If Dr.Gunawardana were to extend his position to other arts, he would be telling us that in a play one need not consider the content but only the production and the playing, or that one should judge a film by the quality of its photography.
As for relevance", I grant that the term has been recently overworked as a critical cliché and often misapplied. But does that entitle Dr. Gunawardana to dismiss so lightly the concept or the urges that find expression in it? To go no further, Mr. Charles Abeyasekera's article on the Tower Hall drama in the same issue of your journal shows how discussion of theatre and music in terms of social relevance can be illuminating. I would say the same thing about an article on Amaradeva by the same critic in an earlier issue of your journal – an article at which Dr. Gunawardana is perhaps glancing in some of his observations. What we need on Rukmani Devi is an examination of her songs in similar terms, particularly in the context of the social images and myths projected by the Sinhala cinema during her heyday.
Finally, I should like to enter a dissent regarding Dr. Gunawardana's attitude to singing through the mike. Of course, it is true that where musical performance is centred round the concert-hall and the operatic stage, the artist who matters is the one capable of what Dr. Gunawardana calls 'open-voiced, full-throated singing". I wonder, however, whether even in the past this was the only style that was cultivated, for wasn't Indian classical music essentially chamber music? But be that as it may, why shouldn't the modern technology of artificial amplification of sound permit the cultivation of another kind of talent - that of the

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singer whose voice may lack power, although beautiful in quality and expressive in articulation, and who can therefore reach a large audience only through the microphone?
Moreover, it is not only the use of the mike in the concert-hall but also the rise of the cinema, of radio and TV, and the dissemination of record-players and taperecorders that have helped to change styles of singing the world over. To turn one's back on the inevitable impact of these technological innovations and to see this process as always and necessarily a musical decline is to ring the bell backward, to summon the spectre of a rose'.
An analogy with another art may help to clarify my point. It is well known that the development of the cinema has changed acting styles, since the expansive, larger-thanlife modes of theatre seemed ludicrously exaggerated on the screen, particularly after the rise of the sound film. The best film actors today have developed styles of acting which in their intimacy and subtlety would be lost in theatre. There may have been critics in an earlier day and age who lamented the decline of the full-blooded, full-bodied acting styles of the past and their diminution in the cinema. Today we take it for granted that the cinema, an art made possible by modern technology, requires a different kind of acting. Why should we be more supercilious about the microphone?
Lanka Guardian, December 1978

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Woolf and the Jungle Village
When Leonard Woolf died ten years ago, the New Statesman (with which he had a long and intimate association) published an obituary article on him by Professor W. Robson which paid generous tribute to his varied achievements, listing even his minor accomplishments in gardening and cookery, but didn't so much as mention The Village in the Jungle. I wrote a letter to the New Statesman at the time, remarking that the neglect of Woolf's novel by English readers had always surprised me: that many of us in Sri Lanka thought much more highly of the book; and I claimed that it was a novel unique in the English literature of the colonial era, since Woolf had succeeded in doing what none of his contemporaries, not even Kipling or Conrad or Forster, had attempted - to get inside the skins of Asian peasants.
The New Statesman published my letter, and I wonder whether it made even a single English reader turn to Woolf's novel. But I didn't know then that my claim for The Village in the Jungle had already been made by Alec Waugh in a personal letter to Woolf that has only recently been published. I discovered it a few weeks ago in the biographical account of the Leonard-Virginia Woolf marriage by George Spater and Ian Parsons, A Marriage of True Minds (1977). Waugh had never read Woolf's novel until in 1964 he happened to be talking to a young Malay

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student in Singapore and remarked, "No Western novelist - not even Forster - has really got inside the Asian mind. Kipling and Forster described the effect of the Far East on the Westerner.' The Malay student said: "There is one novel that has, The Village in the Jungle. Having read the novel, Waugh found this was true, and wrote to Woolf to say: You have done what I did not think it was possible for a Westerner to do - got inside the mind and heart of the Far East. It is a unique achievement."
Alec Waugh's name can now be added to that small group of English critics and readers (they include Arnold Toynbee and Kingsley Martin) who have recognized the novelistic achievement of The Village in the Jungle. Why hasn't the novel been more widely acclaimed? There are, I think, several possible reasons for this. Literary reputations aren't always dependent solely on literary merit. Woolf's single good novel could easily have been overlooked as a diversion in a lifetime of sociological and political writing, and he had the misfortune to be overshadowed by the more sustained novelistic activity of his wife (though I would rather re-read The Village in the Jungle any day than The Waves). Nor did a novel about the Sri Lankan jungle village have the topical and adventitious interest that Forster's A Passage to India had for English readers in the twenties and thirties when India was a major political problem.
But the most important reason for Woolf's failure to interest the general run of English readers was that there was no parallel for what he was doing in any previous English fiction. To find something comparable in context and material we have to go to the literature of those European countries where peasant life survived into the age of the modern novel and became a subject for fiction. But even here the parallel isn't exact because Russian and Italian novelists, say, of peasant life were writing about their own

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countrymen, while Woolf brought off the extraordinary feat of creating a novel about a community of people different from him in race, in language, and in modes of living, thinking and feeling. Nevertheless the parallel may help to suggest why English readers brought up on Fielding and Jane Austen should have responded as little to Woolf as they have to Verga or Gorky.
It is still more saddening to me, however, to find that some Sri Lankan critics and readers err about the kind of novel that The Village in the Jungle is. It seems to me solidly a novel of social realism, set in a specific place and time (which doesn't mean that it has outlived its interest). In critical writing about the novel and in classroom teaching (since it is now much studied as a prescribed text) far too much attention is concentrated on the theme of man vs. a hostile nature'. Not that that isn't there, but the point is that this struggle takes place in a particular social environment which determines its outcome - in a context of exploitation and oppression, and of an alien system of administration and justice. It is part of the strength of The Village in the Jungle that while it shows the novelist's feeling for character-creation, his eye for natural description, and his ear for peasant speech, it is also anchored in an understanding of social and economic relationships such as a sociologist might command.
It troubles me too, that some readers and teachers seem determined to take Woolf's jungle as a 'symbol of evil'. Behind this bent of mind there is, no doubt, the heritage of a certain critical tradition which has propagated the belief that the more symbols you can find in a novel, the better. According to this way of reading fiction, novels are not about people, places and things but about abstractions like good and evil, and characters and their environment are only shadowy reflections of the ultimate realities which are

Woolf and the Jungle Village 473
the real stuff of novels. There may be some justification for approaching the novels of Henry James or Conrad or even Forster in this way: the jungle in Conrad's Heart of Darkness is, no doubt, a symbol of metaphysical evil, just as the Marabar caves in Forster's A Passage to India are a symbol of metaphysical nothigness. But these are precisely the weakest aspects of the two novels. Heart of Darkness is strong as long as Conrad confines himself to the moral corruption of Kurtz by his imperialist mission, but what ruins the novel is the obfuscating cloud of suggestion of some mysterious and ineffable evil. In A Passage to India what comes off successfully is the Anglo-Indian social comedy, where Forster is dealing with a world he is familiar with and which is manageable in terms of his kind of satire and irony. But the echo in the Marabar caves is a tiresome piece of literary contrivance designed to inflate the novel with a portentous hint of profundities that Forster hasn't really experienced.
However, a Brooks-and-Warren training in the critical game of hunt the symbol' is a bad preparation for reading The Village in the Jungle, because it isn't that kind of novel at all. And no Sri Lankan reader has an excuse for failing to realize that the dry zone jungle is a tangible, physical reality - in Woolf's book as it is in life. So against all the critical patter about symbols, I want to insist that the jungle is the jungle. It is true, of course, that the peasants see the jungle as evil, but they don' regard it as a 'symbol of evil' either, but as a place of real hunger and thirst and danger and a habitation of devils. And Woolf makes quite explicit in the novel, the way in which the peasants' beliefs are shaped by the unequal struggle between themselves and the natural and social environment.
The Village in Jungle is, I suggest, not only the finest novel about Sri Lankan life but a remarkable novel by any

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standards, though it remains Woolf's only achievement in fiction, He was not a novelist by natural vocation, but the contact with the dry zone jungle and village of Sri Lanka released the springs of his creative imagination to produce this single masterpiece. (Like Lampedusa, who exists as a writer by virtue of one major novel, producing it in old age where Woolf finished his in youth.) It required extraordinary gifts of both mind and heart to achieve the understanding that went into the book. The Cambridge circle from which Woolf came, the Bloomsbury group to which he returned after his years in the Ceylon Civil Service, had - for all their distinguished intellectual and artistic talents - a kind of cultivated narrowness. This narrowness is to be found even in the excquisite art of Leonard Woolf's wife, Virginia, who was to achieve much greater fame as a novelist than himself. Incidentally, to read Virginia's Wool's comments, in her recently published diaries, about D.B. Jayatilaka and E.W. Perera, whom she met in London, is to be shocked into realizing how even an intelligent and cultured English woman in those days could share the most blatantly racialist feelings.
One must admire, therefore, all the more Woolf's ability to project himself into a culture and an experience very different from that of the world from which he came, and to identify himself sympathetically with a people of an alien race. Perhaps the fact that Woolf himself was, as a Jew, a partial outsider in English society may have helped; but this alone would not have sufficed without his singular intellectual courage, honesty, humane understanding and imaginative sympathy. By comparison, his friend and fellowmember of Bloomsbury, Forster, for all his liberal sympathy with India and Indians touched only the fringes of Indian life. The anonymous masses of India remain quite outside Forster's experience and comprehension. The enigmatic

Woolf and the Jungle Village 475
figure of the punkahpuller in the trial scene, the beautiful naked god who confronts Miss Quested as the representative of the India she has never known, stands for the India that Forster didn't know either. The use in Woolf's novel of Buddhism and the forms its beliefs takes in the peasant consciousness is very different from Forster's use of Hinduism in A Passage to India. Forster is manipulating the symbols of Hindu belief as a literary device to express a despair and meaninglessness fashionable among English intellectuals of the twenties: Woolf communicates the view of life and the beliefs of a real community - the Sinhala jungle peasants.
Yet, for all the neglect of his novel by English readers and critics, Woolf achieved something which is perhaps a surer mark of literary distinction than the fame of his wife or his friend Forster. In translation The Village in the Jungle has become virtually a classic of contemporary Sinhala literature: and to have transcended the boundaries of language and culture in this way, to have reached the heirs of Silindu and Punchi Menika, is a mark of the book's unique quality that sets it apart from the rest of the English fiction of its time.
Lanka Guardian, April 1979

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Patriarchy and Capitalism
It is almost a hundred years since Friedrich Engels wrote his classic work THE ORIGIN OF THE FAMILY, PRIVATE PROPERTY AND THE STATE (1884). It is significant that Engels should have devoted attention to the question of the family and the position of women, since in his own life he defied bourgeois morality, living with a working-class girl to whom he was not legally married.
Drawing mainly on the researches of the American anthropologist, L.H. Morgan, Engels traced the history of the family, showing that the modern monogamous family was only one of several different forms of that institution that had existed in human history. The rise of the monogamous family, with its domination by husband and father, he related to the emergence of private property. The function of the monogamous family, with its strict emphasis on the fidelity of the wife, was to guarantee the paternity of the children and thus to safeguard the inheritance of property.
Engels argued that in bourgeois Society, marriage for the bourgeoisie was a marriage of convenience, determined by property considerations, but that among the proletariat which did not own property, there was no 'stimulus whatever to assert male domination'. Moreover he argued:
'....Since large-scale industry has transferred the woman from the house to the labour market and the factory, and makes

Patriarchy and Capitalism 477
her, often enough, the bread-winner of the family, the last remnants of male domination in the proletarian home have lost all foundation - except, perhaps, for some of that brutality towards women which became firmly rooted with the establishment of monogamy.“
Engels therefore looked to the introduction of the entire femalesex into public industry as the first premise for the emancipation of women. The participation of women in the social processes of production would become general under socialism while housework would become collectivized. This would ensure the total emancipation of women. With these developments, too, men and women would be able to order their sexual relations on a basis of freedom and equality. Engels looked forward to a new generation under socialism:
A generation of men who never in all their lives have had occasion to purchase a woman's surrender either with money or with any other means of social power, and of women who have never been obliged to surrender to any man out of any consideration other than that of real love, or to refrain from giving themselves to their beloved for fear of the economic consequences. Once such people appear, they will not care a rap about what we today think they should do. They will establish their own practice and their own public opinion, comfortable there with the practice of each individual - and that's the end of it.
Engel's analysis has been the foundation for the position that most organized Marxist movements since his time, have taken on the women's question. Since the emancipation of women was regarded as dependent on the overthrow of capitalism, Marxist movements have drawn the conclusion that all that women had to do in order to end their oppression was to enter the labour force and ally themselves with the proletariat in their struggle for socialism. In other words, the liberation

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of women was seen as subordinate to the class struggle: the way to emancipate women was to further the class struggle.
In the last decade, however, the inadequacies of such an analysis have been clearly proved and certain Marxists have made attempts to fill out some of these inadequacies of the traditional Marxist position on women by developing a political economy of housework. Thus, Eli Zaretsky recognizes that capitalism has not incorporated women into the labour force on equal terms with men; instead, it has created a separation between the home and family on the one hand and the workplace on the other. While men are oppressed by having to work for wages, women are oppressed by being largely excluded from wage work. Zaretsky's explanation for this is that capitalism requires women to work in the home in order to reproduce and nurture wage workers for the capitalist system. Mariarosa de la Costa argues that housework performs an essential economic function for capitalism, not only by reproducing the labour force, but also by creating surplus value through that work, since women's work in the home is not paid for by wages. She asks women to organize themselves to demand wages for housework; a common feature in this wide spectrum of arguments is that if one is to approach an analysis of the 'women's question' in present day capitalist society in the scientific and correct manner, it is essential to reach a correct understanding about domestic labour, the work that women perform in their homes, and the relationship it bears to the general capitalist mode of production.
The rise of militant women's movements in the west in the last decade has been accompanied by the development of new schools of thinking regarding the oppression of women - the radical feminists, who have rejected the traditional Marxist analysis that the oppression of women is rooted very firmly in class society, - and instead view the problem from the perspective of a male-female contradiction. They see the motive

Patriarchy and Capitalism 479
force of history to be the striving of men for power and domination over women and they use the term Patriarchy to denote this institutionalized oppression of women. Some radical feminists have sought to bridge Marxism and feminism by claiming that two forms of oppression have existed in the course of history and survive at the present time - a class oppression of exploited classes by the ruling class, as analysed by Marxism, and a sexist oppression of women by men. It would follow from their position that while women ally themselves with the proletariat in the struggle against capitalism, they would need to wage an independent and separate struggle against patriarchal oppression for their own liberation.
The value of the radical feminists is that they have recognized the specific character of women's oppression which had been ignored or given little importance by traditional Marxist thinkers. But the radical feminists err in seeing patriarchy as an historical phenomenon - a constant factor underlying all other processes of social change. History shows that the character and intensity of women's oppression has varied greatly from one society to another, and that in fact in certain societies there has been no institutionalized oppression of women at all. Patriarchy, while a real phenomenon must therefore be recognized as one which has a determinable historical origin and Social roots.
In order to exist, any society, whatever its level of development, has to possess the means of satisfying certain fundamental needs. The needs are the production of food and of other material essentials of existence as well as the reproduction of its members, without either of which the society would die out. For our present purpose, two points need to be made in clarification of these two fundamental needs:
1. Production of food and other essentials includes not only production for exchange in field or factory but also pro

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duction for consumption within the family through household work - e.g. cooking, making of clothes, etc. In pre-capitalist societies, the family was in fact the fundamental unit of production, both for exchange and for domestic consumption. In capitalist societies, production of exchange commodities is generally carried out in capitalist production enterprises, while the production of use values takes place within the family.
2. The production of human beings includes not only sexual propagation but also the care of infants and young children, since it is one of the distinguishing features of the human species that the new-born come into the world more helpless than the young of animals. This fact makes possible the plasticity of human nature and its freedom from rigid subordination to inherited instincts, thus enabling human social and cultural evolution.
A materialist philosophy of history should, therefore, take as its starting point the changes that have taken place in the course of human history in the ways in which human beings have satisfied these fundamental needs - the production of material things and of people - and the relations into which they have entered for this purpose. This was realized long ago by Engels who wrote in the preface to the first edition of THE ORIGIN OF THE FAMILY, PRIVATE PROPERTY AND THE STATE:
According to the materialistic conception, the determining factor in history is, in the final instance the production and reproduction of immediate life. This again, is of a two-fold character: on the one side, the production of the means of existence, of food, clothing and shelter and the tools necessary for that production; on the other side, the production of human beings themselves, the propagation of the species. The social organization under which the people of a particular ep

Patriarchy and Capitalism 48
och live is determined by both kinds of production; by the stage of development of labour on one hand and of the family on the other'.
In spite of this statement in what has universally been recognized as the first classic Marxist work on the family and sexual relations, most writers in the Marxist tradition have, in their analysis of Society taken as their basis the mode of production conceived in narrow economic terms - i.e. the mode of production of things and relegated the relations between the sexes to the superstructure.
In a recent publication (Capitalist Patriarchy and a case for Socialist Feminism - ed. Zillah R. Einstein - MR Press 1979) Zillah R. Einstein draws our attention to the shortcomings of this view and the manner in which the family came to be viewed in the traditional Marxist analysis. According to her, "family comes to be viewed as just another part of the superstructure, totally reflective of class society, and relations of reproduction become subsumed under the relations of production. The point is not that the family does not reflect the society, but that through both its patriarchal structure and patriarchal ideology the family and the need for reproduction also structure soci
y7y
ety”.
Taking into account these views we feel that the relations between sexes, and the institutions of reproduction have to be viewed in a different manner because:
1. The relations between the sexes in the reproductive proc
ess and care of children are not just a matter of ideology, they are as material as the relations of economic production, and must therefore be regarded as part of the material base. On this base is reared, of course, an institutional and ideological superstructure which helps to sustain the base - e.g. marriage laws, beliefs regarding the superiority and inferiority of the sexes etc.

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2. The division of labour between the sexes - i.e. the relegation of women to looking after children, house-work etc. Or their admission only to inferior levels of economic production outside the home represents an important aspect of production relations which cannot be ignored in any analysis of the mode of production.
It will be noticed in the quotation from Engels that he speaks of the modes of production and reproduction of immediate life' as constituting the material base of a Society, and says that both the modes of production determine its Social organisation. It is suggested that the best formulation would be to use the term 'mode of production to cover the production both of things and of human beings, since, as has been pointed out, these two sets of relations interpenetrate each other.
In applying the definition to the capitalist mode of production, we can see that the production of the material necessities of life gives rise to exploitative relations between capital and labour, while the reproduction of the labour force is characterized by patriarchal relations between mean and women. These two units of the capitalist mode of production are, of course, not independent of each other. On the contrary, they supplement each other; in capitalist Society, a strong partnership exists between patriarchy and capital.
The traditional Marxist analysis expected capitalism, in the course of its development, to change the above in the following manner:
a) by drawing out more and more women into the labour market, as would be demanded by the growth of productive forces of capitalism, the sexual division of labour was expected to change radically, making women wage labourers who were equal partners in their work with men. It was expected that capitalism would abolish the difference between male and female workers, and

Patriarchy and Capitalism 483
treat all equally. The principal contradiction in society would become that of capitalist, proletariat and the position of women in society as a whole would change accordingly.
b) The participation of women in the labour-force on an equal footing with men was expected to have a profound influence on the position of women within the family. Engels thought that an undermining of the patriarchal family system would take place especially among the proletariat, since both men and women would be equal partners in their work places.
The political implications of this 'traditional Marxist approach are clear. Marxist women's liberation requires first, that women become wage workers like men and second, that they join with men in the revolutionary class struggle against capitalism. Capital and private property are seen as the causes of women's oppression; therefore, there cannot be any women's struggle other than the class struggle.
Our experiences of developed capitalism and the effect that the development of capitalism has had on the position of women in capitalist society has led us to question the validity of this approach, on several counts.
A study of capitalism today shows that it has not incorporated women into the labour force to the same degree as men. Developed capitalism still seems to confine a large proportion of women to domesticity, and it is obvious that the less developed the form of capitalism in a society, the greater will be the proportion of women involved in the home. Thus, capitalism maintains the separation between wage work and housework which became widespread in human society for the first time after the emergence of capitalism. According to Zaretsky, whose work we briefly mentioned earlier and who studied developed capitalism a century after Engels, the resulting di

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chotomy between homes, family and personal life on the one hand and the work place and public life on the other is the crux of the problem of women's liberation.
Even when capitalism has drawn some part of the female population into the work force, it has done it in such a way as to recreate a sex-based division of labour within the labour market itself. Thus, we have certain types of jobs for example, typing, public relations, serving, nursing - in the service sector which are primarily occupied by women who continue to play their traditional roles in this type of employment by being pleasing and of service to others. This phenomenon is to be seen even in fields of employment requiring some professional training. For example, many professions concerned with the welfare of children - for example, teaching, child psychology, probation and social welfare work - are largely serviced by women. In developed capitalism, the expansion of the service sector and the high degree of atomization of the processes of labour (for instance, by the use of the conveyor belt) has increased the employment of women expanding their range of employment, because once a large proportion of women occupy certain areas of work, it is to be clearly seen that these jobs sooner or later become specifically 'women's jobs'. If it was a genuine case of women expanding their areas of employment we must see all spheres of activity occupied by both men and women to the same degree. And we very well know that this is not so.
In the same way, the impact of the development of capitalism on the relations between men and women within the family is not what was expected in the traditional Marxist analysis. Engels' view that capitalism, by drawing women into the labour market, would undermine the foundations of the patriarchal family, is not borne out by the experience of a whole century of capitalist development. In spite of the increasing involvement of women in work outside the home, the male

Patriarchy and Capitalism 485
dominated family is still as strong as ever, and it would appear that capitalism, far from undermining patriarchy, has preserved and adapted it to its own needs.
At the same time, Engel's contention that in the proletarian family there is no basis for male domination since the proletariat is propertyless, idealises the proletariat family in a way that can be seen to be unreal. He does, of course, make some reference to the survival of some brutality towards women' but seems to think of it as simply an ideological and cultural remnant; according to him, the material basis for the oppression of women has disappeared in the proletarian family under capitalism. But this is to ignore the very real and continuing material basis for such oppression - the division of labour between the sexes and the performance of housework by women (including women workers who do a day's work outside the home) from which the men (including proletarian men) from which the men are exempt.
A woman who works under capitalism can be economically independent yet, within the family, she is just an additional income earner, expected to serve the men in the family with traditional subservience in spite of her economic stature. Her position in relation to male members of the family has not changed in any significant way, and since the prevailing tendency of society in general is to define women in terms of their roles as wives and mothers rather than as workers, most working women also see their domestic status as the one which gives them a social identity. Thus, the glorification of motherhood and housewifery at the cost of all other aspects of the female character persist, leaving most working women with a dual burden of work, both outside the hose and within it - the notorious Double Day.
In a situation of underdeveloped capitalism like in Sri Lanka these contradictions of capitalism are felt to an even

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greater degree. Women have been drawn to the organized sector to an extent less than in the advanced capitalist countries, the division of labour within the labour market is more significant and the impact of the fact that women had started to work has affected their position in the family negligibly.
Recent Marxist analyses of the family and housework have resulted only in clarifying how the family is linked to the capitalist mode of production and what role it plays in making the whole system work. Dalla Costa argues that what is socially important is the fact that housework is necessary to capital. Zaretsky expresses the same idea, saying that while the superficial impression of capitalist society is that of women serving man, the reality of the situation is that these women are serving capital.
The work of Dalla Costa and Zaretsky is valuable in that it recognizes the social importance of the labour performed by women in the home. Yet it suffers from the same limitations that have characterized traditional Marxist approaches to the women's question. It reduces women's oppression to exploitation by capitalism, since in their analysis, housework is a service performed by women for the maintenance of the capitalist system. It ignores the fact that men, as husbands, fathers and brothers, also benefit from this sexual division of labour and therefore obscures the sexist nature of this form of oppression. And, as other classical Marxist analyses do, it sees the women's struggle as purely a struggle against capitalism.
The political implications of the traditional Marxist analysis on the women's issue meant that it submerged the women's struggle in the class struggle. This was somewhat deduced from the expectations of the traditional analysis which hoped that capitalism would undermine patriarchy. Later analyses, although they accepted that capitalism had not undermined patriarchal relations, did not derive any political implications

Patriarchy and Capitalism 487
from this but instead concentrated on the link between housework and capital; thus, their conclusions also emphasized the role of the class struggle in the liberation of women.
In our analysis of capitalism, in relation to the women's question, what we have tried to show is that while capital is not all powerful, it is nevertheless tremendously flexible. Therefore, when the forces of capital accumulation encounter preexisting social forms in its path towards capitalist development, it sometimes destroys them to the extent that it is able to do so, and at other times adapts them to its own purposes, always being guided by the principle of what is of more advantage to its own ends. This is what we see in relation to patriarchal relations: On the one hand, capitalism brings about changes in it to the extent that it is able to and on the other hand adapts to it, and strengthens it to meet its own needs. Thus patriarchy becomes necessary for the propagation of capitalism itself.
The direct political implications of this type of an analysis is the need to treat both the class struggle and the struggle for women's liberation on equal terms considering them to be of equal importance in our search for a socialist Social order. This means that the struggle has to be waged on two fronts, both in relation to the mode of material production as well as in relation to the mode of reproduction.
The male-female dichotomy which pervades working class political activity at present must be viewed in the light of the above analysis of capitalism. It will then be clear that capitalism uses patriarchal relations just as it does racism, in order to keep the working class divided against itself and without a clear and correct understanding of the issue in hand, thereby successfully defusing the class struggle.
The other implication that we would like to draw as a result of the above analysis is the inability to consider any so

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ciety within which elements of patriarchy persist as being Socialist.
In human history, patriarchy emerged with the appearance of class society. Therefore, this oppressive element of human society should disappear with the establishment of a classless society.
(The summary of a paper presented by Regi Siriwardena
in collaboration with Sunila Abeysekera and Sunil Bastian) Logos, Vol. 21, No. 4, November 1982

Nash in the Family
ASKED to make a selection of his published work for children, Ogden Nash preferred to make a book for the family, which he defines in the foreword to this volume as "a unit composed not only of children, but of men, women, an occasional animal, and the common cold". Family Reunion brings together the verses on these subjects scattered through several earlier books over the last twenty years - or at least, those which still seemed, says Ogden Nash, "to stand up fairly firmly by which I mean that the writer can read them without visibly wincing."
Not only will the reader of this book have the pleasure of encountering again old favourites and of being introduced to other pieces which he has missed but he may also be able by the time he finishes it to make a statement about Nash's Attitude To The Family. Nash, however, has anticipated him in the foreword: "I have been a member of one family or another all my life. I think families are interesting. Only in the family do we find the battle between the sexes raging concurrently with the battle between the generations." Sociologists may perhaps draw conclusions from the fact that Nash shares this theme of the war in the modern family with another great American humorist - James Thurber. But the tone of Nash's verse is very different from the somber comedy of family relationships which Thurber has delineated in both words and line. The follies and frailties of husbands,

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wives and their offspring fill him with elation and move him to ecstatic heights of verbal clowning.
Nearly half this collection is devoted to verse about and for children. It is something of a miracle that in sixty-five pages on this subject Nash is hardly ever sloppy or affectedly whimsical - I say "hardly ever" because it must be confessed that in just one or two poems about his own Lineli and Isabel, paternal feeling seems to have got the better of Ogden Nash and the shade of A.A. Milne's muse casts itself for a moment over his verse. But apart from these few and (in the circumstances) forgivable lapses these verses are most exhilarating. They range from such original discoveries as that embodied in It Must Be The Milk:
"There is a thought that
I have tried not to but
cannot help but think,
Which is, my goodness how
much infants resemble
people who have had
too much to drink."
To such examples of versified pediatrics as this, which we may surely describe as "What oft was thought but ne'er so well expressed:"
"Many an infant that screams like a calliope
Could be soothed by a little
attention to its diope."
Or this - a two-line Reflection on Babies:
"A bit of talcum

Nash in the Family 491
Is always walcum."
It is of course Nash's verbal horseplay which is, as always, the chief delight of his verse. He handles rhymes and spelling as anarchically and as creatively as e..e. cummings does punctuation. Take, for instance, The Porpoise:
"I kind of like the playful porpoise, A healthy mind in a healthy corpus. He and his cousin, the playful dolphin, Why they like a swimming like us
Or The Octopus:
"Tell me, O Octopus,
I begs, Is those things arms or is they legs? I marvel at thee, Octopus;
If I were thou, I'd call me Us.'
Indeed, we take Nash's brilliant distortions of language so much for granted that he is able to give his method a new twist in The Skink:
"Let us do justice to the skink Who isn't what so many think.
On consultation with a wizard
I find the skink a kind of lizard.
Since he is not a printer's whim. Don't sniff and back away from him.
Or you may be adjudged too drunk

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To tell a lizard from a skunk."
The reviewer, like the reader, of Ogden Nash is tempted to go on saying, "Listen to this one," indefinitely. Since he must stop sometime, this review may well be concluded with a piece which happens to be seasonal:
"Come children, gather round my knee; Something is about to be. Tonight's December thirty-first, Something is about to burst. The clock is crouching, dark and small
Like a time bomb in the hall.
Hark, it's midnight, children dear, Duck! Here comes another year."
The Ceylon Daily News, 31 December, 1951

Bilingualism in Sri Lanka
Just as a geologist can read in the strata of the rocks the history of the earth's crust, so the reader of the 13th Amendment to the Second Republican Constitution may find in it the record of our progress from constitutional monolingualism to bilingualism. Article 18 states in its first sub-section that 'the official language of Sri Lanka shall be Sinhala' - which is as it was in 1956, 1972 and 1978. Sub-section 2 then adds that Tamil shall also be an official language'. We may be inclined to forgive the violence done to grammar in speaking of the official language' and "an official language' if we remember that between sub-section I and sub-section 2 lie over thirty years of political violence and conflict - the price paid before this advance could be effected.
The 16th Amendment makes it clear that the basis of the political settlement of the language issue achieved in 1987-88 is a regional one. Under this amendment Sinhala is the language of administration in all provinces except the Northern and Eastern, where the language of administration shall be Tamil. However, the language rights of non-Sinhala speaking persons are guaranteed by the proviso that in the Sinhala-majority provinces a person may transact business with the State in either Tamil or English (whichever he or she chooses). Symmetrically, in the Northern and Eastern Provinces, a corresponding right for people to transact business in Sinhala or English has been recognized.

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Considering the passion aroused at various times during the last three decades and a half over the issue of official language, we may find satisfaction in the fact that the raising of Tamil to the status of official language in 1987 met with no opposition from any significant section of political opinion. There is therefore room for hope that whatever the situation with regard to other controversial ethnic issues, the resolution on language has come to stay. However, this hope has to be tempered by a sober recognition of the enormous effort needed to make the language provisions of the 13th and 16th Amendments a reality through implementation.
The first steps needed to give these amendments teeth have already begun. There will shortly be placed before Parliamenta Bill to set up an Official Languages Commission. This, it must be made clear, is not a commission of inquiry but a body charged with monitoring, regulating and initiating corrective action in respect of the workings of the new constitutional provisions on language. The first proposal for the establishment of such a commission was made at a workshop organized in July 1989 jointly by the Department of Official Languages and ICES. The proposal was adopted by the Ministry of Public Administration and received Government approval. From the inception of this proposal, it was urged that the Commission should be an independent body so that it could exercise its functions free of pressure or partiality. The model that was used when the Bill was drafted was the Canadian institution of the Commissioner of Official Languages. However, where Canada has a single Commissioner, the Commission in Sri Lanka will be composed of six members in order to provide for representation of different ethnic groups. The members will be appointed by the President, and will have tenure of their office for three years. The powers of the Commission envisaged under the Bill are very broad, and include investigations, both on the Commission's own initiative and in re

Bilingualism in Sri Lanka 495
sponse to public complaints regarding the working of the language laws, and the making of recommendations to public institutions to comply with such recommendation; either the complainant or the Commissioner of the Official Languages Department can apply to the courts for a directive.
The establishment of the Official Languages Commission will help to ensure that the new bilingual language policy is not frustrated by inertia, indifference or prejudice within the executive. But given a vigilant and active Commission, progress in implementation of the language laws will still require the provision of the requisite linguistic skills and facilities. It is clear that at a time when Government policy is emphasizing the elimination of redundant administrative staff, there can be no question of duplicating or triplicating administrative staff in order to provide services in Sinhala, Tamil and English. Further, such a system would be likely to foster unhealthy divisive tendencies within the administration itself. The answer has therefore to be sought in making it possible for as many public servants as possible to work at least in two languages, or in three, where this can be achieved. Thus language training for public servants becomes a matter of the highest importance. Progress towards this end is being sought through a considerable expansion of the language classes conducted by the Official Languages Department and through generous incentives, including leave with pay, bonuses and increments for public servants in order that they may acquire language skills.
The 16th Amendment contains also provisions for Sinhala to be used as the language of the courts in all provinces except those where the language of administration is Tamil. The problems of implementing the new language policy in the courts are in some respects similar to those which will arise in the administration. There will be a similar need for training in linguistic skills for translators, clerical servants and other officials of the courts and the provision of equipment. But in other

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ways the problems of language in the courts are more complex than those of the administrative sphere. At present the Magistrates' Courts, the District Courts and the High Courts in the Sinhala-majority provinces function in a large measure in Sinhala. It can be assumed that whenever normality is restored in the North and East the corresponding courts in these provinces will function in Tamil. However, the higher courts - the Supreme Court and the Court of Appeal - function at present in English. This situation is constitutionally protected by the discretion given to the Minister of Justice to order that a court may function in a language other than one of the official languages. The use of English in the higher courts is inevitable not only because many of the judges and the lawyers who practice in these courts are best equipped to work in English but also much of the case law and other legal literature bearing on the arguments conducted in these courts have to be consulted in English. Even in the lower courts it can be observed that the proceedings often move from Sinhala to English where arguments have to be conducted on legal points.
Although the 13th and 16th Amendments can rightly be said to be based on a policy of bilingualism (only Sinhala and Tamil have been accorded status of official languages), the term does not strictly correspond to the position that obtains and will obtain in the immediately foreseeable future in respect of justice. In the administration, English will occupy a marginal place; its functions will be confined to dealings with foreign countries and international agencies and transactions with those minorities within the country who use English as their preferred language. However, in the courts it is likely that trilingualism rather bilingualism will prevail.
The other sphere of public activity where trilingualism seems necessary and desirable is that of education. The constitutional provisions relating to education are limited to guaranteeing to every person the right to be educated in either

Bilingualism in Sri Lanka 497
Sinhala or Tamil. However, an exemption is made for institutions of higher education which may function in another language - that is, in practice in English. However, beyond the ambit of constitutional law, educational policy is now being directed towards trilingualism in the schools. The declared aims of the Ministry of Education are to give Sinhala children a knowledge of Tamil and Tamil children a knowledge of Sinhala, while giving all children proficiency in English. There are great problems to be surmounted in achieving these goals in terms of supply and training of teachers, provision of facilities and equipment and motivation of children for learning. But the directions of this policy are unquestionably correct. In the long run, the tasks of producing public servants capable of functioning in more than one language will be greatly facilitated if a foundation of language skills is laid in the schools. Further, from the broader standpoint of building national unity, it is essential that we move beyond the monolingual cultures which are among the deep psychological roots of ethnic divisiveness.
The Thatched Patio, Vol. 3, No. 3, May/June 1990

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English as a Link Language'
The Indo-Sri Lankan Accord provided for the recognition of Tamil and English as official languages, side by side with Sinhala. Subsequently, Sri Lankan government policy has shifted towards adopting English as a "link language". However, there has been no clarity about what this means in concrete terms. Even on the broad content of the policy, there seems to be no unanimity among policy-makers. For instance, while some members of the government and some administrators speak enthusiastically about the "unifying potentialities of English and its value as a means of communication between different ethnic groups, others do not believe that a foreign language can serve this purpose, and emphasise the need for Sinhalese and Tamils to learn each other's languages.
It is non-controversial ground today that we cannot do without English for certain purposes - as a medium of communication with the outer world, as a means of access to international knowledge and as (at least) an auxiliary language in higher education. However, the preservation and development of English in Sri Lanka for these indisputably essential purposes cannot be equated with its adoption as a link language. It is unfortunate, therefore, that some policy-makers who are really concerned about the value of English for Scientific and technological purposes snatch at the "link language" argument in order to promote the former purpose. This only leads to confusion in thinking, and we should disengage the two questions.

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Before discussing the viability of English as a "link language" for Sinhalese, Tamils and others, I wish to make a pre
of Burghers, Eurasians, some Colombo Chetties and other small minority groups. If the right of Sinhala and Tamil speakers to transact business with the State in their own language is to be guaranteed, don't the minorities who speak English as their mother tongue have a corresponding democratic right to the use of what, in the process of historical development, has become "their language"? If this principle is accepted, one has to look into the question of how this right is to be made effective in consistency with similar provisions regarding minorities of Sinhala/Tamil speakers in different regions.
The main issues regarding English as a "link language" are set out below.
1. If it is regarded as desirable for furthering national unity that different ethnic groups in Sri Lanka should have a common medium of communication, what would the adoption of English for this purpose involve in practice? What is the level of communication we are concerned with? Are we thinking of a knowledge of English sufficient to enable a Sinhalese visiting Jaffna or a Tamil who finds himself in Galle to ask his way to the railway station or post-office? Or are we aiming at a linguistic knowledge adequate for the communication of ideas - so that, for instance, students from North and South can engage in a discussion on separatism or on fundamental rights? If it is the former, would it be an effective contribution to national unity if we were to give every citizen a knowledge of English sufficient for such purposes? If it is the latter, what would such a programme mean in educational resources - qualified teachers, books, equipment, training? Is such an ambitious objective within our means? Considering the fact that even after several decades of teaching English as a

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second language, educational levels are miserably low outside the "better schools" with pupils who come from traditionally English-speaking homes, is it realistic to expect that within a foreseeable period of time we can produce a nation sufficiently fluent in English to use it as a vehicle for the communication of ideas?
2. It is arguable that given the limited resources available for the development of English language teaching, we should give priority to utilizing these resources where they are most urgently needed - that is, for the purpose of enabling every student who pursues higher education (in a university or technical institution) to use English as an auxiliary language for gathering information and knowledge. In these circumstances, it can be suggested, the policy of English as a "link language", if interpreted in the farreaching sense in which some policy makers use the term, can be a chimerical and dangerous distraction.
3. A further question that arises in the context of the present discussion is whether adopting English as a language on the national scale is really reconcilable with the objectives of bilingualism (Sinhala and Tamil). There is a serious danger that to try to work both policies together will lead to weightage being given to the former, because of the vested social interests of the elite in retaining the privileged position of English speakers. Many policy-makers and administrators may feel that it is not worthwhile expending much effort on promoting bilingualism if English is there to serve the same functions of inter-ethnic communication. Of course, this will not lead to English fulfilling this purpose in reality (as brought out earlier the practical difficulties are too great), but it can favour the re-enthronment of English in the administration and therefore the furtherance of elite interests under cover of promoting national unity.

English as a "Link Language' 5O1
4.
What has been said here does not mean that we should not take advantage of English as a mode of communication among the intelligentsia and elite groups - one of the functions it has always served in the colonial and postcolonial periods. For these social groups it has been and continues to be a "link language" and it retains its value in this limited milieu. Hopefully, if English-language teaching can be made more effective, the circle of intelligentsia able to use English in this way can in time be enlarged. The breaking down of the monopoly of the knowledge of English by a Socially elite group is certainly desirable. But we should beware of setting ourselves illusory goals or cherish illusory conceptions about "more and better English" as a panacea for ethnic conflict - one of the favourite pipedreams of liberal middle-class intellectuals in Sri Lanka.
(Paper presented at a seminar on Bilingualism in Sri Lanka', organized jointly by the ICES and the Department of Official Languages)

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TOWards MultiCulturalism in Sri Lanka
What do I mean by the term 'multiculturalism'? It seems to me that the best way to dispel confusions and misunderstandings regarding this concept is to refer to a controversy that is going on in the United States at the present time regarding this same issue. As you are aware, the United States had been peopled over the last two centuries by immigrants coming from many different parts of the world; but in spite of the composite character of the American nation, it is the white, English speaking population whose culture has been dominant. This was in the past so consistent a trend that ethnographers used to refer to the United States as 'the melting pot' where people, whatever their original ethnic identities, had been successfully assimilated into a unified American culture, which was inevitably the culture of the white English-speaking majority. However, this situation is today being questioned by representatives of the black American minority, of American Indians and of many Spanish-speaking groups. The debate between them and upholders of the dominant Anglo-Saxon culture began with educationists and other intellectuals, but it has now become a vigorous popular issue, so much so that it made the cover-page of the mass-circulation magazine Time' a few months ago. What the minority groups are asking for is a policy of multiculturalism, which involves the recognition of their right to their distinct cultural identity as well as of the

Towards Multiculturalism in Sri Lanka 503
contributions they have made to American society.
I am not going to draw a facile parallel between the issue of multiculturalism in the United States and the same question in Sri Lanka. There are obvious differences between the peopling of the United States and that of Sri Lanka. In the former case the dominant white, English-speaking majority has had a history of only a few centuries of settlement, whereas in Sri Lanka the two principal ethnic groups have an approximately equally long record of over two millenniums as inhabitants of this country. However, this fact strengthens rather than weakens the case for multiculturalism in Sri Lankan Society.
What do I mean by the term 'multiculturalism'? It is necessary to clarify this since there have been attempts by some biased sections of opinion to discredit it by equating it with a hotchpotch of cultures. That is not what the term implies. In fact, multiculturalism involves the acceptance of the right of every ethnic group to maintain its own cultural traditions and to develop its own cultural life. This is the sense in which the term is used not only in the current American controversy but also in Australia which has officially committed itself to a multicultural policy, and has set up a Commission for Multicultural Education, headed by a scholar of Sri Lankan origin. Such a policy includes provision of opportunities by the State for the development of the cultures of all ethnic groups through education, through media and through art and literature.
However, I would argue that for the creation of a Society based on a genuine multicultural consciousness, popular attitudes are no less important than official policy. What we have to create in the first place is the awareness that one must respect the cultures of ethnic groups other than one's own, and that every such group has a fundamental human right to the maintenance of its identity and culture.

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In the United States today it is being argued by conservative educationists that the multicultural education that minority groups are asking for will be divisive because it will heighten the awareness of ethnic differences, and that national unity demands the upholding of a single American culture. There was a time in Sri Lanka too when some ideologues argued that the imposition of a single language was the best way to submerge ethnic differences and to create a homogeneous nation. We have learnt from the bitter experience of three decades how illusory such beliefs were. But the argument that multiculturalism will promote divisive ethnic consciousness remains to be answered. Certainly there would be the danger of such a development if a policy of multicultural education were based on the segregated development of different languages and cultures. This is, not, however, what an enlightened policy of multiculturalism should be directed to. It should aim at enabling each ethnic group not only to preserve and develop their own culture but also to respect, understand and appreciate cultures other than their own. The foundation for such a consciousness has to be laid in the school, for it is in the formative years of childhood and adolescence that people's fundamental attitudes to ethnicity are shaped.
State policy in education has recently adopted the principle that Sinhala-medium children should be encouraged and assisted to learn Tamil and Tamil-medium children to learn Sinhala. Although the programme is still in its infancy, it is already working in some schools. This is an excellent beginning towards using education as an instrument of inter-ethnic understanding rather than as a source of suspicion, rivalry and conflict as it has too often been in the past. However, if education is properly to be used for this purpose, it cannot stop at the teaching of linguistic skills. The teaching of the 'other' language should be the first step in a programme of multicultural education which will promote sympathetic understanding by

Towards Multiculturalism in Sri Lanka 505
children of the way of life and the culture of communities other than their own.
How often has education promoted ethnic hatreds through the misrepresentation of history and the emphasis on the differences between communities in Sri Lanka while ignoring the shared elements that can bring people together! And yet the reality of our national life and history offers an immense wealth of material that can be used to demonstrate the inter-dependence and the fruitful exchange of cultural elements between different ethnic groups in their long co-existence in Sri Lanka.
What has stood in the way of this recognition has been a mistaken idea of cultural purity and a denigration of cultural borrowing as in some way compromising or debasing. The reality is that no rich culture in the world today has grown without absorbing elements from other cultures. I am not speaking here of ephemeral influences which are left behind and leave no lasting trace in a cultural tradition. When, on the other hand, what was originally borrowed becomes incorporated into the host culture it is because the latter is genuinely enriched by the borrowing. It soon becomes meaningless to talk of that element as alien because it has become part of the flesh and blood of the culture into which it has entered.
Whether we think of religion, of language, of the arts, of social customs, of food or dress, it is easy to discover many significant cross-cultural elements in Sri Lankan life.
Buddhism is often spoken of as the most distinctive cultural possession of Sri Lanka. However, Buddhism, as everybody knows, did not originate in Sri Lanka but was transmitted from the neighbouring sub-continent. Moreover, while Buddhism in its original teaching was a subtle philosophical doctrine, in its popular practice in Sri Lanka it has incorporated many rituals and practices which it shares with popular Hinduism. There is a good reason for this, because ordinary peo

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ple often look for supernatural help in their worldly troubles. Pure philosophical Buddhism, being directed towards transcendental salvation, did not serve his need. In fact, it has been argued by certain scholars that at the level of popular religious belief and practice what we have had was a common social religion. One feels the strength of this view when one visits such a popular place of worship as Kataragama, where the cult and ritual of the god seem to have brought together what were originally the three principal ethnic groups of the island - the Veddas who were the aboriginal inhabitants and the Sinhalese and Tamils who came later. Subsequently Muslims too created their own shrine at Kataragama, and it is not unknown even for Christians too to visit this centre of devotion.
With regard to language, it is usually said that Sinhala and
Tamil belong to two distinct families of languages - the former Indo-European and the latter Dravidian. However, there are scholars like the late W.F. Gunawardhana who have claimed that while the vocabulary of Sinhala is predominantly IndoEuropean, its grammar and syntax are closer to Dravidian. Not being an authority on the Sinhala language, I will not express any view on this subject, but there are two other aspects that nobody can deny - that both Sinhala and Tamil derive their scripts from a common source - the Brahmi script - and there has been a heavy influx of Tamil words into Sinhala over the centuries.
I have recently been watching a film made for the institution for which I work on the historical relations between the Sinhala and Tamil languages and cultures. It was made by one of the most distinguished of Sri Lankan film directors, Mr. Tissa Abeysekera. In the film there is a sequence bringing out the connections between the Tamil folk drama, and its counterpart, the nadagama, in Sinhala. This link has been fully recognized by Prof. Ediriweera Saratchchandra who is not only the outstanding authority today on the Sinhala folk play but

Towards Multiculturalism in Sri Lanka 507
also the creative artist who has done most to revive the tradition of the folk drama as a source for the contemporary theatre. However, in the film which I mentioned, the connection is brought home in a way that is truly electrifying in terms of image and sound. Mr. Abeysekera has taken from Prof. Saratchchandra's play Maname' - the play that gave birth to the renaissance in contemporary Sinhala drama - the best known and most popular song, beginning “Premayen mana ranjita vay." The music of this song is derived from a Tamil folk melody, and the film brings this out in the most striking manner possible by having alternate lines sung by a Sinhala and a Tamil singer, each in his own language, with the melody fitting either set of words like a glove.
I don't want to leave the impression that it is only the Sinhala and Tamil traditions that have contributed to that complex fabric woven of many threads that we call Sri Lankan life and culture. Moors and Malays, Malayalees and Parsis have contributed to our food, our dress and our arts. Even those who originally came as conquerors - the Portuguese and the Dutch - have left behind not only the ethnic groups who are their descendants but also their cultural heritage in religion, in music, in cookery and in dress that have added to the variety and colour of our national life. Some of these elements have become so integral a part of Sri Lankan life that many people do not even know their origins. At the first meal at the indigenous New Year and on other ceremonial occasions, Sinhalese serve kavun, kokis and kiribath - what seemingly could be more traditional and thoroughly Sinhala than that? Yet kokis is a sweet introduced by the Dutch: koekjies is the Dutch name for it (pronounced like 'cookies). So too, how many people who sing or dance the baila on festive occasions remember that it is Portuguese in origin? And they are right in a way, for what has been fully absorbed has taken on a new life and ceases to be alien. All these phenomenon encourage me to believe

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that Sri Lanka, as befits an island people, had in the past a tradition of great openness and receptivity to many cultures, and that it is this multicultural heritage on which we should seek to build for the future.
Sri Lankan Culture - A Symposium - Department of Hindu Religious and Cultural Affairs, November 1991

Problems of Translation
Mr. Patrick Jayasuriya (LG, May 15) suggests that in discussing the differences between Russian and English pronominal usage in my article on problems of translation. I have isolated "one from the complex factors that go to create an effect in literature'. He makes the point that the English translator can make up for the absence of a special deferential or formal second person pronoun by preserving in his translation the formal manner of address in Russian by first name and patronymic. There is some truth in this, though not all English translators preserve this form (Constance Garnett, I agree, does). Even as good a translator as Rosemary Edmonds explains that she substitutes the surname, wherever possible, for the sake of clarity.
However, the numerous shades of relationship (personal and Social) that can be conveyed by the two Russian second person pronouns cannot be exhausted by the one possibility that Mr. Jayasuriya is thinking of. What of the tones of intimacy, or alternatively of Superiority, that are expressed by the non-formal ty, or the effects created by a character switching to ty from the formal vy, or vice versa? I don't wish to repeat what I have said before, but if Mr. Jayasuriya will look at my article titled The missing second person pronoun (LG. June 15, 1979), he will find that I have examined, for instance, the subtle shades of relationship and feeling that Chekhov gets into The Lady with a Little Dog out of the two second person

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pronouns. There is no English translation of the story that conveys these effects, nor can there be.
I was not, however, suggesting that the English translator should use the archaic thou. My purpose in the article on problems of indirect translation was to draw the Sinhala (and Tamil) translator's attention to the fact that in translating through the medium of English, he might sometimes miss possibilities that he should be able to realize in his own language. To take a simple example that I haven't used before, when Trofimov in his tirade against the intelligentsia in Act II of The Cherry Orchard says. They call themselves an intelligentsia, but they say ty to their servants, The English translator can only render the last phrase as 'they still talk contemptuously to their servants' (Elizaveta Fen: Penguin Classics edition of Chekhov's plays). The Sinhala translator has available to him a more literal, direct and expressive rendering.
Regarding Mr. Jayasuriya's question whether there has been 'a change in the Russian use of personal pronouns since aristocratic times, I want to say that after the Revolution the Soviet state put its weight behind the effort to universalize the use of the polite vy in all social intercourse, except in relations of personal intimacy where the use of ty continues uninhibited. In other words, the official endeavour has been to stamp out the use of non-reciprocal ty as a form of address to inferiors and subordinates. However, the struggle against this old tradition has been necessarily a prolonged one, and Comrie and Stone in their well-informed and documented study, The Russian Language since the Revolution, produce evidence that even in the 'sixties the use of non-reciprocal ty by some managers, militiamen and other persons in positions of authority was being criticized in the Soviet Press.
It is also worth mentioning that in pre-revolutionary Russia asymmetric usage of the pronouns of address between per

Problems of Translation 51
sons also occurred within the family: parents said ty to their children and were addressed by them as vy, while a similar situation often existed between husbands and wives, particularly among the peasant and merchant classes. These usages in the family have also largely disappeared.
Lanka Guardian, Vol. 3, No. 15, July 1, 1980

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Indire Ct Translati On and itS PerillS
Until very recently English was always the medium through which works from other literatures were translated into Sinhala. This practice arose at a time when it was impossible to find anybody with a knowledge of Continental languages who could write expressively and correctly in Sinhala. English served as the medium even for the translation of Asian works of literature into Sinhala. Tagore has been translated mainly through his own English versions, while whatever Chinese poetry has been rendered into Sinhala has come by way of Arthur Waley and other English translators.
It recent years this situation has begun to change, with learning of foreign languages being diffused among a broader group of students and intellectuals. Thus, in the last decade we have had a few works translated directly from Russian, French and German into Sinhala - a welcome development. But until there are enough Sinhala translators with a knowledge of a broad range of European and Asian languages, it is likely that the practice of translation through the medium of English will continue.
One need not scorn this process of 'indirect translation', as it is called: it has been a necessary stage in the growth of many cultures. At one time, for instance, French, as the dominant cultural language of Europe, served as the intermediary

Indirect Translation and its Perils 53
through which Russian works were translated into English and vice versa. However, indirect translation has its perils, and the translator needs to be on his guard against them. I should like to draw attention to some of these dangers and suggest ways in which they can be averted. My particular examples will be taken from the translation of Russian literature, but what I have to say is equally relevant to indirect translation of other foreign literatures.
The pitifalls are greatest in the translation of poetry, where nuances of feeling and rhythm and connotations of words are most likely to be obscured when translating from a translation. Moreover, one of the recurrent problems of translating poetry is that of reconciling the claims of sense and form. Translating into English from a Russian poem, one may sometimes depart from literal sense in order to satisfy the needs of rhythm, metre or rhyme. Thus, in a recently published translation of one of Anna Akhmatova's poems, The Grey-Eyed King, I have thought it necessary to keep the rhyming couplets of the original, with their suggestion of a popular ballad, even at the cost of some deviations from the sense, and would consider that a defensible liberty. But if a translator were to take my version as a source for translation into Sinhala, I would think it necessary to warn him that my variations of the Sense of the original should not necessarily be carried over into Sinhala: he might on the other hand, need to make other departures to suit the demands of his own verse form.
Translating prose fiction, one is not confronted by problems of like complexity, but the indirect translator of fiction has his own difficulties with which to cope. With the masters of classic Russian fiction, the indirect translator has often a plethora of English translations between which he must choose. Without access to the original, he is likely to judge by what reads best in English, but this is not necessarily the most accurate translation Constance Garnet's versions of Tolstoy,

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Dostoevsky, Chekhov and Turgenev made their great impact on several generations of English readers as well as on many of us in Sri Lanka because she wrote with style and elegance - her versions didn't sound like translations. But looking now at some of her translations through which I first discovered Russian literature as a young student, I find their virtues greatly counterbalanced by their frequent inaccuracies.
It is only necessary, for instance, to skim the pages of Garnett's version of Anna Karenina to realize that she was a most slipshod translator. Some of her errors are no more than amusing howlers which don't make a great difference to the reader's response to the novel, as when she renders Sam Nikandrov (Nikandrov himself) as "Sam Nikandrov" or confuses edim (we eat) with edem (we ride). But sometimes her slips interfere more seriously with the understanding of situation and character. Thus, when Princess Shcherbatskaya, early in the novel, troubled by the possibility that Kitty might make what in her eyes would be the wrong choice in love, asks her to promise not to have any secrets from her mother, Garnett makes Kitty answer, "... but there's no use in my telling you anything.' The reader may well wonder why the Princess is satisfied with such a rude answer. But what Kitty really says is, But I have nothing to say at present, meaning she hasn't yet had a proposal. Again, in Anna's anguished reflections just before her suicide, when she recalls guiltily the son she deserted, Garnett has her think, 'I gave him up for another love, and did not regret the exchange till that love was satisfied, instead of till one should read as long as, which makes a great difference to the sense.
However, even with more conscientious and accurate translations (Rosemary Edmond's versions of Tolstoy are greatly to be preferred to Constance Garnett's), one still has the problem that certain nuances of relationship and emotion disappear in English translation because of differences inherent in

indirect Translation and its Perils 515
the language itself. I have discussed some of these in an article in the Lanka Guardian entitled 'The missing second-person pronoun' (15.6.79) where I pointed out that the second-person pronouns in Russian (the same would be true of French or Spanish), with their polite and non-polite forms carry indicators of personal or social relationships which are obliterated in English translation since English has a single form, 'you'. The Sinhala translator who renders a Russian novel through the medium of English may therefore be deprived of an expressive resource which is in fact available to him in his own language.
Another important expressive feature of the Russian language which is blurred in English translation is the use of diminutives. Many Russian words have an accompanying diminutive form: thus, ruka (hand) has a diminutive ruchka (literally, little hand"), which could be used of a child's hand, but could also be used affectionately of one's girl-friend's hand, even if it wasn't particularly small in size. Diminutives contribute tones of feeling ranging from the tender to the contemptuous which are often difficult to render in English without awkardness, so that English translators frequently leave them out. It seems to me that Sinhala in this respect may often be better able to capture the shades of feeling of the original, so that the indirect translator is again losing something which he may well be able to keep.
Assuming that indirect translation is often an unavoidable necessity, can we not find methods of overcoming its dangers and limitations? I suggest that a translator who seeks to render through the medium of English a work of literature in a foreign language of which he is ignorant, should always have the collaboration or assistance of somebody who knows the origiinal. A model for such collaboration can be found in the account by Jon Stallworthy and Peter France of how they worked on their generally pleasing English translations of the poetry of Alexandr Blok. JS was a poet who knew no Russian, while

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PF was a Russian scholar. PF would send JS a literal line-byline prose rendering into English of the original Russian poem with notes on rhythm, tone, ambiguities of meaning etc., from which JS would make a creative rendering into English verse, to be refined and perfected later in the light of PF's criticisms.
This method can well be adapted for indirect translation of European poetry into Sinhala, Prose fiction doesn't require so elaborate a process, but the guidance of a collaborator who knows the original language can help the indirect translator in choosing an English version from which to work, and in checking that version as well as the finished translations against the original.
Lanka Guardian, Vol. 2, No. 2, March 1, 1980

The Missing Second PerSOn PrOn Oun
They have seven or eight words for Thou, or You, which they apply
to persons according to their quality, or according as they would honour
them. And they are To, Topi, Umba, l'Imbela, Tomnai, Tomsi, Tomsela,
Tomanxi. All these words are gradually one higher than the other.
- Robert Knox: An Historical Relation of Ceylon
Knox's list of the second-person pronouns in the 17th-century Sinhala of the Kandyan kingdom (recognizable through the distortions of his English transliteration) reflects the linguistic usages of a Society based on an elaborate system of caste and class hierarchies. It seems to me that today, after several decades of the erosion of caste, the decline of feudal relationships, and the growth of bourgeois democracy, the second-person pronoun (always one of the linguistic features most sensitive to relationships of power and class) is undergoing Some interesting transformations in the Sinhala spoken language.
The pronouns listed by Knox ranged from the dominating tho and thopi to the deferential thamunanse (Knox's tomanxi). Umba, in its traditional usage could vary in significance, depending on whether its use was symmetrical or not between two persons. Clearly, a person who addressed someone else

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as umba, and was addressed by him as thamunnanse, would be using the former pronoun to express a relationship of superiority or power. But two persons could also address each other as umba, in which case the pronoun would indicate a familiar relationship between equals.
What has happened in the last few decades is that tho and thopi have increasingly gone into abeyance, except as terms of abuse and as survivals in somebackward feudal pockets. Umba, as an indicator of a relationship of superiority or command is also on the decline (though somewhat more slowly than tho), but we have reached the point where many people no longer feel that it is a proper form of address even to domestics. So it is likely that in time to come umba will survive only as a form of familiar address between equals - used more commonly perhaps by workers and peasants, but also by members of more privileged classes when talking intimately or jocularly.
So far, the changes in the Second-person pronoun usage in modern spoken Sinhala parallel what has happened in many other languages during the evolution from pre-capitalist relationships to bourgeois democracy. Many European languages, for instance, have had at least two second-person pronouns, non-polite and polite - e.g. French tu and vous, Spanish tu and usted, Russian ty and vy. (In French and Russian the polite forms of address to a single person are identical with the universally used plural forms.) Originally the non-polite forms were used non-symmetrically to social inferiors as well as symmetrically by intimates, but with democratization it is this second aspect that has become standardized.
In pre-revolutionary Russia, where bourgeois development was belated, and distinctions of rank were bureaucratically institutionalized, the official army regulations right down to 1917 even laid down which ranks should be addressed by superior officers as vy and which as ty, and it required the Feb

The Missing Second person Pronoun 519
ruary Revolution and the overthrow of tsarism to abolish this distinction. Even after October, however, the Soviet regime had to wage a long battle against the use of ty to subordinates in army or factory by officers and bureaucrats who had become habituated to it. Comrie and Stone, the authors of a new Sociolinguistic study, The Russian Language since the Revolution, quote official exhortations for the use of vy to subordinates and condemnations of the use of ty by militiamen, managers and others, as late as the 1960s, which suggest that old habits had not entirely died out even at that time.
In French, Russian and other European languages, however, the decline of the non-polite form was accompanied by the universalisation of the polite form as the normal and neutral mode of address between non-intimates. But it is striking that in modern spoken Sinhala we have had the first development but not the second. There is in fact no generally recognized neutral second-person pronoun in Sinhala speech today. Oba is much too formal to be used outside public speeches and the dialogue of bad plays. Thamuse was apparently deferential in Knox's time, but in contemporary usage it has acquired a tone of familiarity, and Sounds condescending when used to a stranger. What is tending to fill the gap, at least in urban speech is oya. But oya, too, when addressed to non-intimates carries with it an air of brashness. I do hear oya often used, for instance, by bus-conductors to passengers, and while I understand and even sympathise with this usage as a form of democratic self-assertiveness I would not use the pronoun myself to a stranger.
In my own Sinhala usage and that of many others, I find that in polite conversation with strangers or non-intimates, one tends to do without the second-person pronoun at all, for lack of an all-purpose neutral form. One says: Mister Ratnayake heta enavada? Or Chandrata dhen iskole nivadudha? Or even, to a complete stranger, Mahatmayage nama mokakdha? where

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one would say in English, Will you come tomorrow, Mr. Ratnayake? Or Are your school holidays now on, Chandra? Or What's your name? Here social change seems to have outstripped the development of pronominal forms. (it would be interesting to know whether there is a parallel situation in contemporary Tamil.)
I have so far said nothing about English, which had at one time different polite and non-polite forms of the second-person pronoun. This is, in fact, like universal franchise, equality of persons before the law, and freedom of contract between employer and worker, one of those fictions of formal equality which conceal the real inequality of bourgeois relations.
It is not surprising, therefore, that Britain, which led the rest of Europe in the development of capitalism and bourgeois democracy, should also have gone fastest and furthest in the accompanying process of pronominal change, obliterating the distinction between polite and non-polite forms altogether. It is also evident why this change should have taken place around the time of the 17th century English revolution. Significantly, where the myth of formal equality was abandoned, as in racial relations in the Southern States of America, other forms of address had to be developed by white English speakers to mark the openly acknowledged racial inequalities: hence, the practice of addressing Black American adults as boy.
One consequence of the development of the English second-person pronoun is that you often cannot translate Russian, French or Spanish literature into English without losing Some nuances of Social or personal relationships conveyed by the second-person pronouns. For instance, in Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment (Part I, Ch.3), Nastasya, the servant in the house where Raskolnikov lodges, uses ty to him, because she regards him with affectionate familiarity: she is much older than him, and he is a poor student and therefore not

The Missing Second person Pronoun 52
appreciably her social superior. (David Magarshack in the Penguin Classics translation destroys this effect completely by making her address Raskolnikov as 'sir'.) In The Idiot (Part I Ch. 2) Prince Myshkin's indifference to class distinctions as against the common humanity of all men is brought out by his using vy to the servant at the Epanchins' home (while in Part I Ch.8 Nastasya Filippovna, mistaking, the Prince for a servant, addresses him as ty). The effect of the Prince's conversation with the Epachins' servant is to make the latter feel something that was entirely proper between man and man but completely out of place between guest and servant'.
Something of the quality of these scenes (and of many others in Russian literature) disappears in English translation with the loss of the differentiating pronouns. Sinhala and Tamil, with their linguistic heritage of a hierarchical society, could convey these nuances better. It is not only the pointers to class relationships but also some of the subtler shades of personal feeling carried by the second-person pronouns in Russian that are obliterated in translation into English. It is not too much to say that in Russian fiction the two pronouns (and the corresponding singular and plural forms of the verb) serve as continual signals of the quality of a relationship, or of the shifts within it. Between a man and a woman, for instance, the change from vy to ty signals growth into intimacy or love; on the other hand, a reverse change indicates coldness or estrangement.
In Tolstoy's Anna Karenina the Karenins, who early in the novel call each other ty (as is customary between husband wife), change to vy as the relationship chills. Significantly, Karenin, to whom keeping up appearances is of first importance, uses the formal pronoun for the first time when Anna has betrayed the proprieties of marriage in public by openly displaying her emotion over Vronsky's fall in the steeplechase (Part II ch. 29). In the last chapters preceding Anna's suicide her rapid oscillations between bitterness against Vronsky and

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a desperate clinging to him are signalled by her alternation between the two forms of address. We're definitely going tomorrow, aren't we?" Vronsky asks, and she answers, 'You (vy), but not I. The vy is like a glass of cold water thrown in his face. The next moment, after he has left she sends him a note, 'Come home, I must explain. For God's sake, come I'm frightened' (singular forms, intimate, pleading).
Chekhov's Lady with a Little Dog is another example of how much a great writer can get out of the contrast between the two second-person pronouns. After Gurov has slept with Anna, the lady he has encountered casually at Yalta, he slips easily into saying ty to her (he is an experienced roué, who thinks of the affair as a passing diversion). She, on the other hand, continues to address him as vy, since she feels guilty after her act of marital infidelity, and holds herself back emotionally. Gurov goes back to Moscow, finds he can't get Anna out of his mind, makes a journey to her home-town and encounters her in the theatre. In the ensuing conversation not only she but he too uses the more formal vy - a sign of greater seriousness on his part, since he can no longer put on a show of easy intimacy. In the last section of the story we seem them again after the relationship has grown into lasting though unhappy love, and here for the first time Anna is given a single line where she uses the second-person singular form of the verb (ty implied): the emotional barriers she maintained have fallen.
Lanka Guardian, Vol. 2, No. 4, June 15, 1979

Which English?
The questions I am going to discuss here arise from the fact that the English Language is no longer the exclusive property of the British people and that there are, therefore, many varieties of the language current in different regions of what is called 'the English-speaking world'. I want to discuss this linguistic situation in relation to the position of the third world writer of imaginative literature who chooses to write in English, or has no choice other than that of writing in this language. The question 'Why write in English?" is a relevant and important one for writers who belong to English-speaking communities in the third world but who also possess indigenous languages, or live in Social environments where such languages are spoken around them. But this is a question I shall not be discussing here. I shall take it for granted that given the existence in third world countries of groups who think and feel in English, it is legitimate for writers who belong to these groups to use English as a medium of creative expression.
In colonial Ceylon, or in any other part of the empire in the same era, the question of what English one should write in was hardly regarded as a matter for debate, because of the general acceptance not merely of the Superiority but also of the exclusive correctness of Standard British English. In fact, English-educated Ceylonese in the colonial era prided themselves on the closeness of their speech and writing to British norms. This belief was largely an illusion, since

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Ceylonese English (as many linguistic scholars have demonstrated) had its own peculiarities of pronunciation, vocabulary, idiom and syntactical usage. However, the relevant fact here is that even when these deviations were recognized, they were regarded as linguistic faults, since there was no questioning of the absoluteness of the norms of British English. The situation in India or in the African colonies was similar. It must be noted here that the British cultural tradition has itself had a strong emphasis on linguistic correctness based on class considerations, since what was called the King's English' was essentially a class dialect, and this dialect had until recently an unchallenged supremacy in written literature.
The unquestioning acceptance by colonial writers of British linguistic norms went with the deference to British literary models - and this deprived colonial writing in English of the possibility of any independent or original life. When Sarojini Naidu - an active participant in the Indian national movement - wrote poetry, she tried, as in The Palanquin-Bearers, to use Indian subject-matter and imagery, but the poetic idiom, even the rhythms, were tritely Swinburnian. A similar comment could be made, a fortiori, of Sri Lankan writing in English of the same period. It is instructive to look, for instance, at undergraduate writing in the university magazines from the 'thirties to the fifties: the models shifted from Romantic to modernist, in keeping with British literary fashions, but the writing remained equally derivative.
It must be recognized that there has been some change in attitudes in this respect over the last few decades. This can be attributed to two factors. One is the growth in nationalist feeling in the third world, accompanied by a reaction against cultural dependence on the West. The other factor is the work done by new schools of linguists in the third world who have given legitimacy through their theory to third world varieties of English. In Sri Lanka, for instance, there has been the work of Thiru Kandiah, and comparable work has been done in India

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on Indian English. The effect of these new approaches has been to call in question the earlier orthodoxy which held that third world Englishes were debased or corrupted varieties of English. Contemporary sociolinguistics recognizes that any language, or any variety of a language, actually used by a community of speakers is a coherent and rule-governed linguistic system adequate for the communicative needs of that community. There is no linguistic basis (as distinct from reasons of Social prestige) on which any variety of a language can be considered inherently inferior or superior to another.
Today, therefore, the right of a third world writer to use his native variety of English as a medium of creative expression no longer needs to be argued. While taking this right for granted, I shall go on to discuss certain issues that arise in interpreting this principle in relation to the creative practice of writers in particular third world English-speaking communities.
I want to make an important distinction at this point between the position of the West Indian or the Black American writer of English and that of the Indian, Sri Lankan, Malaysian, Kenyan or Nigerian.
The West Indian or Black American writer used a language which he shared with his whole community. In India, Sri Lanka or any of the African countries, however, the position of English is different. I would like to distinguish in the case of the latter group of countries three strata of English-language
U1S61:S:
1) Those who use English as their only, or principal, medium of thought and communication. This stratum consists mainly of people of the older generation, and it can be assumed that in the course of time it will die out.
2) Those who are effectively bilingual- i.e. equally or nearly equally competent in English and in their native language.

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3) Those for whom their native language is their only internal medium of thought and feeling and their normal mode of expression and communication, but who are capable of using English for certain utilitarian functions: e.g. to obtain information, to communicate with superiors, foreigners or people of other communities.
I don't think there are any significant differences between countries in the group I have referred to in respect of the existence of all three strata, though there are differences in their distribution. For instance, in some African countries Stratum One would be proportionately smaller than in India or Sri Lanka. Again, Stratum Two probably constitutes a larger proportion of the totality of English-language users than in Sri Lanka. (It is noteworthy that India has many more bilingual writers of note than Sri Lanka).
Now how does the existence of these three strata of English-language users in third world countries relate to the production of creative literature in that language? It should be clear that Stratum Three, who would not use English to talk to their lovers or wives or children or intimate friends, would still less try to use it as a means of creative expression. Their English would be a strictly functional language adapted for limited purposes, and its range of linguistic resources would be correspondingly limited. In Sri Lanka most writing in English has come from Stratum One, though in recent years some bilingual writers (i.e. of Stratum Two) have emerged. I don't think the situation in India is significantly different, except, as I have already said, that there have been more writers of Stratum Two.
At this point I would like to refer to the position taken up by Thiru Kandiah who has attributed the lack of vitality in Sri Lankan writing in English to the shamefaced attitude of the writers towards Sri Lankan English. Kandiah bases himself on the principle, which has become a commonplace in

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contemporary literary criticism, that any literature, if it is to possess vitality, must be rooted in the living speech of the community in which it is written. This principle has also been cited by Kandiah's pupil, Quadri Ismail, who in his newspaper reviewing of Sri Lankan writing, has tended to use the test of whether a writer adopts a distinctively Sri Lankan English idiom or not as a criterion of merit.
Kandiah has in one of his essays even rewritten a folk tale in Sri Lankan English to demonstrate the possibilities of using this dialect as a creative medium. However, on reading this exercise, I find that many of the idiomatic and syntactical constructions used by Kandiah are those currently in the English speech of Stratum Three. But this, as I have already argued, is a variety of English used by people for whom the language is not a medium in which they live their inner experience or their intimate relationships, so that it seems misconceived to try to adopt it as a medium of creative literature.
There is no doubt that if one were writing a novel where one had a situation in which a character of Stratum Three was articulating himself in English, the writer should, to be realistic, use the linguistic idiom which would in actual life be used by such a character. But apart from such dramatically appropriate uses, there are serious limitations involved in the use of Stratum Three dialects of English for creative purposes. Suppose that one were to write a novel with a first-person narrative in English projecting the consciousness, say, of a clerk whose thinking and feeling in real life would be in Sinhala or Tamil. Suppose, too, that for this purpose one adopted the English idiom of Stratum Three, which the clerk might in real life use if he had to talk English. But the very choice of that idiom would be impoverishing, would diminish the character in a way that would be distorting and falsifying because the language would not correspond to the quality of the Sinhala or Tamil in which he would think and feel in actuality.

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I don't know of any novels which correspond to my hypothetical example, but I do know some poems. For instance, it seems to me that Nissim Ezekiel's 'Very Indian Poems in Indian English' do just what I have been describing in the last paragraph. In these poems the writer adopts the persona of a semi-literate Indian speaker of English (semi-literate, that is, in English) and the result is to make the character seem comically fatuous and unintelligent. But this is a caricature which, though it unfailingly gets a laugh from elitist English speakers (Indian as well as Sri Lankan) who are reinforced by these poems in their own sense of superiority, is grossly unfair to the level of life that is portrayed in them. It never seems to strike those who are amused by these poems that they themselves could be caricatured similarly, and equally unfairly, by writing; a poem in their incompetent Sinhala, Tamil etc., which would make them seem as clownish and stupid as the characters whom Ezekiel reduces by his linguistic devices.
Nothing I have said here precludes the fact that a good writer, in Sri Lanka or anywhere else in the third world, will use the variety of English that comes naturally to him because it is that in which he makes love, argues with his friends or transacts business in a department store. And if he is alive in his environment, that English will necessarily have significant differences from British English in elements of vocabulary relating to things, events and cultural features that are distinctively local, as well as idioms and turns of syntax that belong to the speech of his own community of English-speakers. What I have tried to refute is the view that because a particular dialect of English represents the maximum deviation from British English, it is also the most authentically Sri Lankan, Indian etc., and therefore the most appropriate vehicle of creative writing.
(A summary of a talk given in the ICES/British Council series on Third World Literature.)

Identity Talk and Tales My Mother Told Me
Professor Michael Roberts' Monograph Modernist Theory is presented explicitly as a critique of one aspect of Benedict Anderson's enormously influential Imagined Communities? - where he argued that nationalism required as a condition the emergence of what Anderson called print-capitalism'. Michael (since I am accustomed to address him or refer to him in that way, I shall do so in this essay: to keep saying Professor Roberts would be impossibly stiff) doesn't really engage in his 46-page monograph with the Andersonian thesis on nationalism (except in a shadowy way, of which more later). His battle is against the overweightage attached in the Andersonian view to the print-medium, in which he sees a Eurocentric bias that he considers has been transmitted to some writing on Sri Lanka in the wake of Anderson: My position is simple. All these approaches underestimate the power of visual and oral modes of communications. They therefore undervalue the capacities of illiterate peoples to think for themselves and communicate their ideas. (p.3)
Michael proceeds to illustrate the flourishing life of these pre-print modes of communication of diverse kinds in pre-modern Sinhala Society - oral poetry, both recited and sung, oral storytelling; reading aloud written texts to a collective audience; preaching; conversation in ambalamas, pilgrimages, rituals; temple wall-paintings.

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As far as this main thrust of Michael's text is concerned, I have no problems with it. The power and vitality of oral and visual modes of communication before the coming of print was a reality not confined to Sri Lankan society: it was common to all rich cultures, eastern or western, Asian or European. How else could these societies have sustained a culture at all, considering the fact that manuscripts were confined to a few copies and reading skills to a small class of (especially monastic) literati?" In both continents the vigorous life of the oral tradition for the mass of the people continued long after printing had come into existence.
But if to assert the strength of the oral visual tradition in pre-modern Sri Lanka is the burden of the text of Michael's monograph, it has also a sub-text that peeps out, not so much in explicit assertions, as in suggestions, in questions that imply preferred answers, in selectivity of examples - all modes of indirect and impressionistic communication. Reading carefully through the monograph, I notice that, while there is abundant evidence offered for the existence and vigour of oral-visual traditions, there is much less said about the content that was communicated through these forms. Indeed, Michael admits this at the end of the monograph in two revealing passages:
The question remains whether the contemporary ideologues advocating specific world views or collective identities are not, so to speak, re-asserting or re-working ideas espoused by their ancestral generations. Without deciphering the content of their arguments in relation to those of past time one cannot reach even a tentative conclusion
Within the context of a societal order dominated by the institutions of kingship and the Sangha, did the pilgrimages, rituals and conversations of the bulk of the Sinhala-speaking people in those centuries work deeply - and thus effectively, albeit slowly - to constitute most of them as Buddhists? And

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to make them Sinhalese? Since this article did not probe the content of their 'conversations' in depth, these questions are not answered. (ibid., emphasis in original p.35)
I have already characterized these two passages as 'revealing, and what to me is most striking in them is their mode of what I might call 'indirect affirmation' - that is, of stating without appearing to state. In both passages, there is an apparent refusal to come to conclusions in the absence of adequate investigation: "one cannot reach even a tentative conclusion'; 'these questions are not answered'. Similarly, neither the 'contemporary ideologues' nor their ideologies, in spite of the putative 'specificity' of their world views, are identified. However, every text has a context, and often that context defines meanings that may not be full spelt out in the words of the text. If the context of the 'visible' part of Michael's text is the publication of Anderson's book and its influence on theorists of Sri Lankan nationalism, I suggest that the context of its less evident sub-text is the publication of R.A.L.H. Gunawardena's 'The People of the Lion' and the prolonged and often acrimonious controversies it has provoked. And in that context it becomes possible to identify more specifically the unspecified 'contemporary ideologues of the first paragraph. The main issue of those controversies was the question whether contemporary Sinhala nationalism was a construction of colonial times or an inheritance from an immemorial tradition. On the one hand there were the 'ideologues' who pointed to the Mahavamsa and other chronicles and literary texts as evidence confirming the latter position. Against them, we have had theorists of the opposing camp saying: "But those texts can only give you the ideas that the kings and the court and the monastic elite wanted to promote? How can you assume that the common people thought the same way? Now comes Michael to point to the oral-visual tradition as the source from which we can discover what the common people thought and

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felt. Of course, he doesn't claim to be able to tell you what can be discovered there because he hasn't done the necessary work, and even in relation to what he says in the monograph he makes this acknowledgement:
Given shortcomings in my expertise relating to this period and its literature, I have relied heavily not only on secondary sources but on extended conversations with historians and literary specialists familiar with the literary and oral traditions pertaining to the middle period.”
A list of fourteen people follows. Such frankness is admirable. But how far is it reconcilable with the fact that, even while declaring that he doesn't know the answers, Michael poses the questions in such a way as to convey that he knows what the answers should be? If we examine again the two passages I have quoted from p. 35, the opening sentence of the first is cast in a form that my old teacher of grammar would have categorized as “a sentence expecting the answer “yes", while in the second passage the reference to the dominance of kingship and the Sangha and the emphasis on deeply point to a conclusion, not asserted but implied, that the common people could not but have replicated the fundamental identities of their social and political betters.
This impression is further confirmed by the few examples of particular communicational content from the oral tradition that Michael offers us in the monograph. While re-iterating that he isn't equipped to pronounce on content, he yet offers us these examples which are all tilted in one direction: they seem to show that what the oral tradition disseminated was essentially the same ideology as the literate tradition - for instance, through stories of the deeds of heroic or munificent kings. Michael does concede in one place:
The importance of oral and visual means of cultural exchange in a context of a relatively uniform language does not

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mean that Sinhala speakers, and those becoming Sinhala, thought as one. Apart from differences in emphasis arising from class and caste distinctions, one would expect regional variations in story line. This is a major issue for scholars to address.
(p.27)
But welcome as this qualification is, this is the only place in the monograph where Michael refers to class or caste or region as possible sources of difference. This is all the more disappointing because Michael was one of the first Sri Lankan scholars to break the taboo on serious investigation of caste in what remains a path-breaking study.
Reading Michael's monograph, I am strengthened in the view I had already formed that identity-talk, whether by politicians or scholars, acts like a steamroller: it obliterates the diversity of the actual relations in which people — whether individuals or communities - live, reducing them to an imposed homogeneity. It has to be asked whether this is any less crushing and any less depreciating than the assumption against which Michael inveighs in his monograph - that illiterate people before the coming of print couldn't think for themselves or communicate their ideas. Of what good is it to uphold their capacity to do these things if at the same time we are saying that the ideas they could think or communicate were essentially those transmitted to them from kings or monks?
At the end of the first and main part of the monograph, Michael offers us this summing-up:
In broad overview, then, we can say that pilgrimages, pirith, kavikara maduvas, kohomba kankariyas and other ritual gatherings, as well as moments of evocative storytelling or casual expressions of gi and kavi, were some of the embodying practices through which Sinhaleness as well as Buddhistness came into being. Or to phrase it differently, these are the modalities that enabled Sinhalaness as well as Buddhistness to become em

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bodied... (p.24)
It will be noted that these two sentences are not questions but assertions, and assertions that do not carry the tentativeness that hedges some of the other generalizations about content in the monograph. But 'Sinhalaness' and Buddhistness, across the multiform oral tradition covering many localities and over the six centuries of time Michael is surveying, weren't unchanging and monolithic unities. There were (and still are) several different ways of being Sinhala and of being Buddhist. There have been people in the Wanni, in Negombo, Chilaw and elsewhere who lived out their entire lives without bothering to define whether they were ethnically or linguistically Sinhala or Tamil.” Not did Buddhistness' prevent popular religion from developing what Gananath Obeyesekere and Richard Gombrich call 'syncretism' and Jonathan Walters prefers to term 'multireligion'." Whichever term we use, the reality was that of a coming together of three currents of religious worldviews and practice - those of Theravada Buddhism, Hinduism' (itself a colonially invented term for a multitude of sects and observances), and home-grown cults of gods and demons (indeed, the openness of Buddhism and its freedom, traditionally, from imposed authoritarian uniformity, have been among its most attractive features). Even after the crushing pressure of over a century of political mobilization of ethnonationalism, half a century of strident ethnic conflict and two decades of war, these commonalities are not entirely dead. To rediscover them may help in putting together the fragments of the nation.
2
I agree with Michael that the oral-visual tradition should be explored in depth - or what is left of it, because every year its survivals have been eroded by formal education, modern media, urbanization and the rise of modern 'democratic poli

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tics. Still, what survives in records and memories should be garnered and examined, but the effort will be futile if we start by assuming that we already know what we can find there, because then that is all we shall find.
I am, if anything, as removed by my education and academic training from the oral tradition as Michael is, and I am not even like him, a trained anthropologist. I have, however, one advantage over him: I knew intimately one person whose mind had been shaped by the oral-visual culture. That was my mother.
My mother was born in the last decade of the nineteenth century in a village in the Gampaha district, where she lived until she was married and migrated to Colombo and its suburbs. Her only language, to the end of her days, was Sinhala, and in this too she had no formal education. Her childhood preceded by several decades the great expansion of school education in rural areas that followed universal suffrage and free education, and who then in a peasant family would have thought it necessary to educate a girl-child? After marriage my mother learnt to write her name in English - no doubt on the instruction of my father who had an education in English and was a government clerk. When, after my father's death, she went monthly to draw her widow's pension of Rs.74.99 (on which, for a time, she fed and clothed five people), I used to watch her writing laboriously "S.A. Babanona Hamine' in a big sprawling hand.
I have said that there are different ways of being Buddhist, and my mother's Buddhism was less ritualistic than ethical - not in an abstract philosophical way but in the sense of being expressed in the moral norms of daily living. She had several great sorrows in her life, but these didn't turn her into a pinkam-haunting upasika-amma, because she had resources of inner strength that enabled her to survive.

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I think my mother was the first creative artist in language I encountered, though it is only belatedly that I have come to appreciate this fact. Because of her lack of education, her creativity could express extraordinary originality and wit in the private nicknames she bestowed on everybody in the neighbourhood, and to each of whom she would refer in the family circle by no other name. There was, for instance, a vedamahattaya nearby who was a well-known toper on toddy: she called him thaniakurah. This is really untranslatable into English: the best II can do is 'single-letter fellow', because ra (toddy) is a single character in Sinhala. Knowing now the stresses and strains of my mother's life, I guess that her wit was a source of emotional catharsis, even while it maintained the linguistic fertility of speakers in a pre-print culture.
When I was four and five years old, my mother used to tell me bedtime stories. There weren't, of course, about Little Red Riding Hood or Jack and the Beanstalk, of whom she had never heard: they were village folk-tales that no doubt had been told her by her elders. Although I enjoyed the stories, I couldn't at that time realize the value of the treasures she was unfolding before me, and soon - under the combined influence of my father, who taught me to read English, Schooling and the environment of a colonial society - I began to read Grimm and Andersen and grew away from my mother's stories. By the time I started schooling, in a class of proper middle-class children in a suburban English-medium School, it was a shameful secret that I had a mother who couldn't speak English.11
Now, when I try to remember my mother's stories, disconnected sentences float up in my memory... ithin yanakota yanakota, maha russa gahak thiyanava... “So after going and going, there was an enormous tall true', but who the traveler was and what the tree signified I have forgotten, though I can

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still recall, across seventy-five years, the sense of awe I felt on hearing that sentence.
But what I am certain of is that my mother never told me stories of kings, or of battles, or even jataka or other religious stories, either because these were not what she was interested in narrating or because she didn't think this was what would interest me: her stories were all of the marvelous or of the comic. There are only two stories that I can now specifically, recall, and these too, alas, in fragments. One was a story about Hava and Nariya (Hare and Jackal): many years later I came across a version of this in a printed book of children's stories, but there it had been sanitized and made respectable. My mother's version was a piece of earthy, even scatological, village humour.
The other story, which is more directly relevant to the subject of this essay, was about an Appuhamy who went on a journey, taking with him a servant. As the name of the former indicates, he was of the superior goigama caste, and affluent enough to afford a retainer. The latter was in the story a man of the batgama caste, very low in the caste hierarchy, some of whose traditional functions were to act as household servants and carriers of baggage for the higher caste. There is a popular name for this caste, and this is now, rightly, regarded as demeaning; this, complete with its derogatory suffix, is what my mother used in narrating the story.
But what is striking in the story is that, throughout, the Appuhamy is characterized as stupid, feckless and cowardly, while it is his servant - the man of low caste - who is the hero, ingenious, resourceful and brave. On the first lap of the journey, at midday, the Appuhamy discovers that he has forgotten to bring any food, so he asks the other to give him a share of his bathmula, his bundle of rice. Of course, this is breaking the caste taboos, so the Appuhamy strictly enjoins him not to

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blab when they get back home. This leads to a series of situations in the course of the story in which the servant blackmails the Appuhamy who prohibits him to do this or that: 'ehenan mama ara vittiya kiyanava', then I'll talk about that happening, and the Appuhamy has to give in.
The climax of the story is that when night falls, the pair have to find lodgings, and they knock at the door of a house where a kindhearted woman offers to put them up in the atuva above the hearth provided they stay mum because her husband won't like it if he discovers their presence. It turns out that the husband is a rakshasaya (demon) or raSSaya, in my mother's rural speech. There is a near-disaster because even in this situation of extreme peril the Appuhamy can't contain himself, and insists, first on pissing, and then on shitting from his perch. Not surprisingly, the raSSaya Smells out the hidden pair, though he can't see them, and threatens to eat them up. But the servant is equal to the occasion. He calls out, "mama thamai raSSayan kana baraSSaya' (I am the barassaya who eats raSSayah), and succeeds in intimidating and outwitting the raSSaya.
When one reflects on it, it becomes clear that this is an extraordinary story to have been disseminated in a goigamacaste community. Not only is the upper-caste Appuhamy ridiculed throughout, and the low-caste servant raised to heroic stature, but the story even mocks the caste taboos: when the Appuhamy is hungry, he doesn't mind breaking them although he tries to keep the breach a secret. My mother wasn't trying to instill in me modern liberal or radical ideas about the caste system, and in any case the story wasn't her creation but that of the community. (My sister heard the same story a few years later from my aunt, my mother's sister, so it must have been one they had both grown up with).
How can one explain an anti-upper-caste story being told in a community of upper-caste peasants? My mother's family,

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as far as I can determine, were middle-level cultivators, neither rich nor very poor. I think what happens in the story is that the class antagonism of this group towards the Appuhamys above them wins out over caste stratification and caste loyalty. This should be unsettling to those who think there were no class oppositions in the traditional village, or that there was one-to-one correspondence between caste and class relations. What the story brings out is a contradiction between these two forms of hierarchy. But what it also reveals is the ability of peasant story-tellers in the oral tradition to 'think for themselves' and find a voice of their own. If they were able to situate themselves independently in imagination in relation to caste and class, why suppose that in other respects they were the passive transmitters of values handed down from above by kings, nobles and monks?
There are other areas of the oral tradition that also challenge established caste hierarchies that have been little explored by scholars. In 1988 Nireka Weeratunge produced a remarkable study related to the most marginalized of Sinhala castes, the Rode - the only Sinhala caste that has in fact been stigmatized as 'untouchable'. The study has recently been reprinted by ICES. 12
Nireka is a very modest about the study, describing it as only "a survey of sorts' because it was carried out primarily in one village over a few months. But the recovery in the book of the oral traditions of the community is illuminating and fascinating. Not only does her research point to the likelihood that the Rodi were originally a separate ethnic group with their own language and region, who were later incorporated into Sinhala society by being assigned the lowest place: the evidence in the study of the way in which their myth of origin is told and re-told by speakers of different generations shows how the myth serves sometimes as a reconciliatory mechanism

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explaining and inducing acceptance of their marginalized condition, sometimes as a compensatory elements by evoking the memory of a different past, and sometimes as a critique of the values of the outside society and, therefore, implicitly of the caste structure itself. Reading this study, I am impelled to speculate on the neglected material that may still be unexplored in the oral traditions of other castes as well as of regional communities that await the enterprise of a new generation of scholars without crippling pre-conceptions.
Endnotes
Michael Roberts, Modernist Theory. Trimming the Printed Word: The Instance of Pre-modern Sinhala Society (Colombo: ICES, 2002).
* Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991).
3 He specifically mentions Jonathan Spencer's A Sinhala Vil
lage in Time of Trouble (Roberts 2002, p. 3).
'. I don't wish to deal at any length here with the European case, so I will confine myself to one instance. Most people take for granted that the highest achievement of European culture was in the plays of Shakespeare. But Shakespeare wasn't a book': his plays were created in and for the oral and visual medium of the theatre, where a good part of the audience couldn't read anyway; and all the relevant evidence suggests that Shakespeare took no interest all in the publication of his plays.
5 R.A.L.H. Gunawardena, The People of the Lion: the Sinhala Identity in History and Historiography' in, Ethnicity and Social Change (Colombo: SSA, 1985).
I should like to make it clear that I am not referring here

ldentity and Tales My Mother Told Me 54
10
11
to the more narrowly focused debate between R.A.L.H. Gunawardena and K.N.O. Dharmadasa on the time when the general body of the Sinhala people, as distinct from the ruling elite, came to think of themselves as'Sinhala' (10th century, 13th century, or whenever). I add this because Professor Dharmadasa once referred in print to a non-existent essay or essays I had written on this question - something I shouldn't have dreamt of doing because I had neither the linguistic nor the historical knowledge needed to express an opinion on it, nor indeed was I interested in that issue. In spite of his attention being drawn to it, Professor Dharmadasa didn't acknowledge his er
O.
The middle period is defined as 'the long span of time extending from the Dambadeniya period to the Kandyan period, from 1232-1815. (Roberts 2002, p.6)
Michael Roberts, Caste Conflict and Elite Formation: the Rise of a Karava Elite in Sri Lanka, 1500-1931 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982).
Darini Rajasingham-Senanayake, 'Identity on the Borderline: Modernity, New Ethnicities, and the Unmaking of Multiculturalism in Sri Lanka, ed. in Neluka Silva, The Hybrid Island (Colombo: SSA, 2002).
Richard Gombrich and Gananath Obeyesekere, Buddhism Transformed (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1988); Jonathan S. Walters, Multireligion on the Bus: Beyond Influence' and: "Syncretism' in the Study of Religious Meetings, in eds. Pradeep Jeganathan and Quadri Ismail), Unmaking the Nation: The Politics of Identity and History in Modern Sri Lanka (Colombo: SSA, 1995).
My poem 'Colonial Cameo recalls a dramatic and painful moment when the secret was bared.

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Nireka Weeratunge, Aspects of Ethnicity and Gender among the Rodi of Sri Lanka (Colombo: ICES, 2002).
A lecture delivered at the Course on Ethnicity, Identity and Conflict held at the ICES on August 28, 2002

The Other RuSSell
Bertrand Russel is a Jekyll-and-Hyde figure. He is the logician and mathematical philosopher who has caused a revolution in the philosophical thinking of our age and whom it would be rash to quarrel with unless one were trained in the handling of his own weapons. He is also the street-corner prophet who feels obliged to discourse on every subject from Communism to the Conquest of Happiness. The Impact of Science on Society (published on his eightieth birthday) is written by this latter self; and much as I respect Dr. Jekyll, I see no reason why I should extend the same deference to Mr. Hyde.
What is the wisdom of age that Russell has to offer us? Only the hoary rationalism, the optimism, the faith in human progress through science that made up the climate of opinion in his own infancy eighty years ago. Russell's view of history is hardly less naive than that of tub-thumping nineteenthcentury rationalists like Robert Ingersoll. The entire past before the Renaissance (or more accurately, according to Russell, before the reign of Charles II) is seen as a period of darkness and superstition which were happily dispelled by the advance of scientific enlightenment. The implied view of the medieval age here is as superficial as Russell's contemptuous dismissal of primitive myths. "The study of anthropology," he says, "has made us vividly aware of the mass of unfounded beliefs that influence the lives of

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uncivilized human beings." He goes on to refer to the superstitious fears of eclipses and comets. It doesn't occur to him that civilized twentieth-century man has merely exchanged these primitive terrors for an up-to-date "scientific' mythology of flying saucers and spacemen.
Having grown up into the twentieth century, however, Russell finds it hard not to have some moments of uneasiness. In the chapter entitled "Scientific Technique in an Oligarchy" he draws a picture of what "a totalitarian government with a scientific bent" could do - an Orwellian picture of a state in which by selective breeding the differences between rulers and ruled could be increased until they became almost "different'. How can these "scientific horrors' be prevented? "There must be", answers Russell, "that kind of respect for the individual that inspired the doctrine of the Rights of Man." He does not explain where in a purely scientific philosophy he derives these values nor how he could establish them by scientific verification. And some pages later, very diffidently and apologetically, he tells us what our age most needs:
"The root of the matter is a very simple and oldfashioned thing, a thing so simple that I am almost ashamed to mention it, for fear of the derisive smile with which wise cynics will greet my words. The thing I mean - please forgive me for mentioning it - is love. Christian love or compassion. If you feel this, you have a motive for existence, a guide in action, a reason for courage, an imperative necessity for intellectual honesty. If you feel this you have all that anybody needs in the way of religion. Although you may not find happiness, you will never know the deep despair of those whose life is aimless and void of purpose."
At this point one feels impelled to ask Russell whether as his "study of anthropology' should have taught him the

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"uncivilized human beings" whom he so despises did not get nearer "the root of the matter" than his vague messianism, whether their myths did not at least provide them with "a motive for existence" and preserve them from "the deep despair of those whose life is aimless and void of purpose" - from the boredom of much contemporary living.
THE IMPACT OF SCIENCE ON SOCIETY, by Betrand Russell, (Allen and Unwin, 7s. 6d.) Ceylon Daily News, 17 October, 1952

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The ROle Of the Media in Relation to Democracy
I will like to begin by taking you back in memory to the year 1958, when for the first time, as far as I am aware, a proposal for the take-over of the Press was made in Parliament by a backbencher of the Bandaranaike Government, Mr. M.S. Themis, who moved a motion to this effect in Parliament. When one looks back at that debate reported in the Hansard and also the comments that were made at that time, one finds that many were opposed to the motion on the score that State ownership and control of the Press were incompatible with Press freedom. That was certainly the position taken up by the United National Party, and it was also the position taken up by most newspapers. In fact, even the S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike Government, although it made use of the opportunity to air its dissatisfaction with the Sri Lankan Press did not, in fact, act on that motion. One may recall that Mr. Bandaranaike had more reasons that most politicians in this country to resent the treatment he had suffered at the hands of the Press through the long period of his political career. But, nevertheless, maybe because of some residual liberal instincts in him, he never opted to impose State control or ownership of the Press. That was left to Mrs. Sirimavo Bandaranaike, widow and successor.
Let us compare that with the situation that exists today, because one often reads in the newspapers that the President

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has made public speeches emphasizing the importance of the freedom of the Press and the dedication of his Government to uphold the freedom of the Press. When the President makes such remarks it does not seem to strike him as a contradiction that he heads a Government which owns the biggest newspaper group in the country. And that it had one time, in fact, run two newspaper establishments. Furthermore, I read from time to time in the Daily News editorials saying what an important thing the freedom of the Press is and how important it is to uphold it. It does not seem to worry the Editor of the Daily News or its leader writer, whoever it may be, that these worthy sentiments are expressed in a State-controlled newspaper.
So, as compared with the situation 30 years ago - when Mr. Themis' motion was moved, it seems to me that there has been a shift in the dominant elements of the political establishment on the definition of what constitutes press freedom. If it was thought at that time that State control and ownership of the Press was incompatible with press freedom; that apparently is no longer upheld by politicians in power and by the organs of the media which reflect their viewpoint.
If I try to conjecture what the new definition of the freedom of the Press would be, say by the United National Party (UNP) Government, perhaps, it is that the control and ownership of certain newspaper establishments by the State does not violate Press freedom as long as other people are free to run and maintain their own newspapers. And if that is the position taken up today by the regime in power, then I would like to examine what actually has happened to Press freedom since the Press take-over of Lake House in 1973.
Since time is limited I am going to confine my discussion really to events after 1977, by which I am not in any event holding a brief for the previous Government. I think its conduct in relation to Press freedom is open to as much or may be

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sometimes even more serious criticism than that of the present Government. However, I would prefer to confine myself to events closer to us that have a continuing impact on us.
The effect, I think, when you have one or more powerful newspaper establishments directly controlled by the State is, that a situation is immediately created which puts pressure on other newspaper establishments, even if they are privately owned. It exerts a continuing pressure against the independence of privately owned newspapers. I would like to demonstrate that first with regard to the record of the Sri Lankan Press in the last few years over the ethnic question.
We are all aware of the impasse we have reached with regard to the ethnic problem. May be, we have reached the point of time, when the Government for whatever reasons, (may be due to international pressure or because of the compulsions of the economy) seems to be making a serious endeavour to arrive at a peaceful settlement; yet the Government finds itself now confronted by a situation in which it cannot find any group of representative Tamil opinion which commands effective power that is able to deliver the goods with whom it could negotiate.
I maintain that this tragic impasse is the consequence of the Government's own past follies, mistakes and shortsightedness which have brought us to this position. I could quite conclusively demonstrate that, but it is not my purpose here as that is not my subject today. But I would like to examine the record of the complicity of the Press, not only the State-owned Press but also the bulk of the dominant mainstream privately-owned newspapers in contributing to this situation and in leading us to this disastrous position.
In two ways, the major dominant sections of the Press have been directly contributing to make the ethnic problem more

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difficult to solve. In the first place, by consistently biased and one-sided reporting they have concealed from the reading public in the South the real situation in the North and East and have also concealed the sufferings and the long period of agony that the Tamil-speaking people of those areas have gone through. They have presented a situation in which what is brought home to the people in the South is only a record of atrocities and massacres on one side while totally suppressing or under-playing the atrocities on the other side.
This is not a situation that is conducive to any kind of rational or peaceful solution, because you cannot for years go on telling the Sinhala people that you are facing barbarous and criminal killers, and you yourself have had your hands completely clean, and then the next moment expect the Sinhala people to accept to co-operate in a peaceful settlement with those very elements whom they have up to now stigmatized as murderous killers.
The second aspect in which the Press has contributed towards making the ethnic problem more difficult to solve is that it has concealed from the Sri Lankan public the extent to which Sri Lanka has been discredited and its record has been questioned by international public opinion and in international fora. The most recent such event is the discussion in the UN Commission of Human Rights in Geneva on the resolution presented by Geneva on the Sri Lankan ethnic problem. That debate in Geneva was followed by a chorus of Press propaganda not only in the State-owned Press but in the privatelyowned Press as well: (a) by questioning the right of Argentina to raise an issue of human rights when Argentina itself, it was said, has a black record in respect of human rights; and (b) by presenting reports that the outcome was a triumph and vindication of the Sri Lankan position and a clearing of the Sri Lankan Government's record and an endorsement of the position it

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had taken. One only needed to read the actual text of this resolution at Geneva, which was accepted by a consensus vote to realize that this was very far from the truth. One could look at the preamble which begins by saying "taking note of the report presented by the special investigator on torture and taking note of the report presented by the Committee which inquired into disappearances", and then it goes on to call upon all parties connected with this conflict to respect human rights etc. etc. All parties' means not only the militants but the Sri Lankan Government as well and its security forces. Of course, taking note firstly, of torture and the other on disappearances, in diplomatic language, simply means that a prima facie case has been established regarding torture and disappearance. And secondly, does the Press seriously think that its reading public is so stupid that it cannot distinguish between Argentinian military dictatorship which perpetrated monstrous abuse with regard to human rights and was responsible for the disappearance of thousands of Argentian citizens and the present democratic Government of Alfonsu which, in fact, has an admirable record of corrective action, extending to the point of putting on trial and securing conviction of generals who had headed the previous regime? Is it that those who write such things are themselves ignorant, or do they have such a low estimate of the intelligence of the reading public that their readers cannot distinguish one government from the other?
So much for the role of the Press with regard to the ethnic conflict. If its record of partiality was confined to this subject one could say that it was a result of the division into two hostile ethnic camps, and that the Press was merely acting out of a spirit of ethnic solidarity. But that this is not so is proved by its record in other spheres than the ethnic conflict. I do not want to go into a long list of acts of omission and commission by the Press but I would refer to one striking fact, and that is the entirely disgraceful record of the Press in relation to the

The Role of the Media in Relation to Democracy 551
reporting on the 1982 Referendum by the Commissioner of Elections - an issue of fundamental importance to our democratic institutions. A report so forthright in its exposure of abuses has to be a fundamental issue for every citizen, but it was virtually blacked-out by most of the Press, or relegated to the background. And we owe it to a few non-mainstream organs like the Attha, the Forum and so forth that the reading public was able to get an impression of what the Commissioner had said. So this is the extent to which the Press, including the privately owned Press, is prepared to go to please the regime in power.
As stated earlier, this situation of the Press today is a reflection of the pressures exerted on the whole Press. When you have a State-owned institution which sets the tone and lays down the line, it puts enormous pressure on other newspapers to follow the same line. Of course, there are other pressures as well, such as the threat to withdraw advertisements etc., but even without those, the very existence of a State-owned Press, by itself acts as a powerful deterrent against the independence and integrity of the rest of the Press, and it requires, initiative, courage and integrity of a considerable order to resist such pressures, as Some organs have honourably done.
My critique of the institution of the State-controlled Press does not mean that I am one of those people who think that all was well with the Press until 1973, when the United Front Government took over Lake House. I do not think that Press freedom was flourishing in Sri Lanka before that day. I have seen the earlier system from the inside and I know very well what existed before 1973 was not the freedom of the Press but the freedom of the capitalist ownership of the Press. To me freedom of the Press connotes two fundamental things: (1) The freedom of the public to have access to all news and opinion that are relevant to itself, and (2) The freedom of the journalist

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to report news and express opinions freely and fearlessly according to his conscience and his judgment of what is true and correct. If that is the conception of the freedom of the press, then by and large that did not obtain in Sri Lanka even before 1973. There were, of course, short periods, may be under the direction of a strong editor, some approximation to this ideal, but never continuously during the pre 73 period.
If I were to reject a State-controlled system or a private capitalist ownership of the Press, as both being detrimental to Press freedom, then what do I Support and stand for? An outline of an ideal system of Press control and management could be brought into being, irrespective of the practicalities of Sri Lanka's political situation today. There are ways of maintaining the freedom of the Press which involves neither State-control nor private capitalist ownership. The ownership of the Press by large capitalist enterprises is in any case totally incompatible with democratic press freedom. I would go so far as to look back to the day when the dissemination of news, information and opinion was not controlled by entrepreneurs for their private profit, with as much incredibility as we today look back at a situation where individuals were able to own individuals as slaves; from a fundamentally rational point of view, both are unacceptable.
There is no alternative to public ownership of media institutions, whether in the form of total public ownership or cooperative ownership by groups of people, since private capitalism cannot be reconciled with Press freedom. But my point of view is that public ownership is not necessarily concomitant with State-control. My friends in the Liberal Party may say that public ownership will necessarily lead to State-control. I would say: No.
Even in existing capitalist societies, I can point to certain situations where public ownership has not led to State regimentation of media institutions.

The Role of the Media in Relation to Democracy 553
Let us take the relationship between the State and the BBC before the Thatcher Government made its inroads into the independence of the BBC. Not that all was totally well as far as the BBC was concerned, in that there has been some kind of government pressure that may have been exerted from time to time before Thatcher, but the BBC was able to maintain a proud record of independence in relation to the Government. The very fact that the Thatcher Government had vented its wrath on the BBC over its reporting of the Falkland War, the film "Real Lives" and the attempt to make a film on spy satellites, is proof of the tradition of independence the BBC has had in relation to the Government.
I will quote one example of how far-reaching these traditions of independence were. The dispute over the film "Real Lives", which was to have been televised by the BBC broke out because this film was on Northern Ireland and it included (and this was the main grouse of the Government) an interview with an IRA Leader who was to express on the screen his views and attitudes when this film was withdrawn under the orders of the Governors of the BBC as a result of pressure from Government Ministers. The Listener which is the organ of the BBC, ran a report interviewing various people on the rights and wrongs of this issue. Everybody who contributed to that symposium was of the opinion that the Government had exerted pressure to prevent showing of this film and that was wrong; and that there was a fundamental violation of the independence of the BBC.
The issue that was being debated was: did the Board of Governors have the right to issue instructions holding up the film? Many (and these were important people in public life) took up the position that all that the Board of Governors had to do was to lay down the general policy for the BBC, but that the issue of what particular programmes should be made and

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how they should be presented, and whether a particular programme should go over the air or not, was a decision that should be made by the working journalists of the BBC, programme producers and others and was not a matter for the Board of Governors.
To measure that degree of independence here you have to think of a situation where people would maintain that the Board of Directors of the Rupavahini Corporation had the right to decide what should go on the air and what should not. For us that would be a fantastically unimaginable situation. This example shows how far traditions of journalistic independence in relation to the BBC were maintained at least in the era before Thatcher. This is an example of how in a pluralistic democracy with certain traditions of long growth of media freedom and journalistic independence you can reconcile public ownership with the absence of State control.
Even in certain countries of Eastern Europe, as a result of the experience of dictatorship over the whole post-revolutionary period, people are beginning to try to evolve different modes of running media and other institutions. For instance, in Yugoslavia newspapers are often owned by co-operatives of journalists. Not that the Yugoslav Press is totally free, because the limits within which those journalists can exercise their discretion is set by the fact that Yugoslavia is still a one-party State and, as such, there is no pluralistic democracy.
But in a country with democratic traditions, such as we have, or shall I say we had, if it is possible to regenerate that tradition, it is perfectly possible to work towards a situation in the long run, where you have socialist forms of ownership combined with the control of the management of media enterprises by the actual producers, which to me is real socialism and not bureaucratic state-control that some people identify it. with. The decision what should be made or produced should

The Role of the Media in Relation to Democracy 555
be taken by people who produce it - whether it is a matter of producing ordinary consumer goods, or producing newspapers, radio or TV programmes.
We are a long way from bringing these models into operation. But I do not despair that some day, if we overcome, on the one hand, the dictatorial trend within government and, on the other hand, the view held by some sections of the Opposition that Socialism is necessarily equivalent to centralized State control, we may be able over decades perhaps to evolve to such a system of democratic media management.
The issue of how radio and TV institutions should be run is not fundamentally different. We, in Sri Lanka, have unfortunately tended to assume that even if private individuals or companies can run newspaper establishments, the radio and TV should necessarily be the monopoly of the State. This assumption is based on the fact that radio was initially introduced to Sri Lanka by the State and has remained a State monopoly since. TV, however, which was initially introduced by two private individuals, has rapidly become a government monopoly.
That assumption is quite wrong because in countries like the USA both radio and TV are private enterprises. There again, I do not think that the ideal form of ownership and control is that of large-scale capitalist enterprises. In many smaller countries of Europe, on the other hand, we have seen developing the institutions of community radio. It has proved to be perfectly feasible where small local groups and organizations own their broadcasting stations. Today the technology is extremely cheap and simple and well within the reach of local community groups, local government bodies, as well as NGOs. If one accepts the principle that any group of people should be free to start a newspaper, there is no reason at all why any group of people should not be free to set up a radio or TV station.

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Naturally there has to be certain safeguards against, say, racial hatred or inciting people to violence. Those safeguards will have to exist even in the case of newspapers.
I cannot think of any effective form of political move towards any kind of local autonomy such as is envisaged in all the proposals that have been made for the resolution of the ethnic problem, without the means of devolution of communication, which includes radio and TV.
If after all the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam can run their own TV station, there is no reason why local communities elsewhere in the island should not sometime reach that position. A necessary step, therefore, towards the freedom of the media and democratization of Sri Lanka media involves a multiplicity of media run by democratic, popular groups, including community radio and community TV.
Recognising how far we are away from any such ideal objective, we now face the question of how do we try to preserve and extend what limited areas of media we have at present. The surviving areas of Press freedom depend on the continued vigorous life of small circulation newspapers and magazines outside the mainstream press. Journals like Attha, Lanka Guardian, the Saturday Review etc and, I am glad to say, the multiplying proliferation of a large number particularly of Sinhala weeklies and monthlies, which have developed during the recent period, often provide a forum for the expression of views which do not find representation in the mainstream press.
Our task is to try to strengthen that movement, whether as publishers, writers or as readers, and work through them towards creating a counter opinion against the largely monolithic media establishment, and to try to create among the public a consciousness that there are other means available for com

The Role of the Media in Relation to Democracy 557
munication, management and running of media than the twin
monsters of a large-scale private press on the one hand and a bureaucratic State controlled press on the other.
Logos, Vol. 26 No. 2, August 1987, Centre for Society & Religion

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COMPUTER TECHNOLOGY VERSUS HUMAN CREATIVITY

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PrOnetheus: A NeW Version An Argumentative Comedy for TWO Chara CterS
Preface
In the name of Annah the Allmaziful, the Everliving, the Bringer of Plurabilities, haloed be her eve, her singtime sung, her rill be run, unhemned as it is uneven!
In the first version of this play, which I wrote in the last week of 1988, my main interest was in the subject of human creativity vs. the machine; but I placed the plot of the play in the context of the rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union. No more than most people at that time did I expect the early demise of the Soviet Union: I had recently returned from a visit to Moscow and Leningrad, and I was still optimistic about the Gorbachev reforms, believing (and hoping) they would lead to the democratic regeneration of the Soviet Union.
Since the play was set in the future - in the latter half of the 'nineties - the Cold War setting has been outdated by history. However, I am still as interested as before in the question whether machine intelligence can be a substitute for the human mind, so I thought it would be a pity to discard what I had written merely because the red flag no longer flies over the Kremlin. Hence this new version, which is set in a post

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Cold War world a few years from now, and in which I have introduced what I hope is an interesting alternative to the political maneuverings that were the backdrop of the original play. I have also taken advantage of this opportunity to make other improvements to the original text.
The first version was published only in a very small privately circulated edition (so that it should be new to most TP readers), but it was subsequently included by Professor D.C.R.A. Goonetilleke in an anthology he edited, Modern Sri Lankan Drama in English, published in India. While saying several appreciative things about Prometheus, Professor Goonetilleke thought the game of chess not significant enough to support the theme of the play, I should like to say that I chose to build my play around chess for a very special reason (quite apart from my personal interest in the game). Hardly anybody, I believe, would agree with Rohan in the play that a computer could be programmed to write better music that Mozart; but many people will consider Rohan's actual enterprise quite plausible. I was therefore raising the question whether even in such a human activity as chess - in the case of the greatest players, of course - there may not be an innovative element that wouldn't be reducible to a programme. In The Act of Creation, Arthur Koestler has shown that there is a non-rational element not only in artistic creation but also in mathematical and scientific discovery. The same thing may be true of chess: as David Hooper and Kenneth Wyld say in The Oxford Companion to Chess: "Contrary to popular belief a grandmaster does not often calculate much further ahead than ordinary players do: his greater playing strength stems from a quick appreciation of the coherence and significance of a position. As yet no-one knows what intuitive reactions are formed in the instant of recognition. If Hooper and Wyld are correct in referring to 'intuitive reactions, then there may be an element in the great player's faculty that is not amenable to the

Prometheus: A New Version An Argumentative Comedy for Two Characters 563
calculations of a machine. Since I wrote my first version Gary Kasparov, the reigning world champion, after beating the most powerful chess-playing computer in existence, Deep Thought, said: "Even if the computer can make a billion calculations per second, I can still beat it, because I can always think of something new."
Prometheus was an attempt lightly to explore these questions in the form of an entertainment, not to provide categorical answers to them. It is possible to treat Susil's stratagem as an admission of uncertainty; and Rohan, once he has recovered from the shock of the collapse of Prometheus, will certainly maintain that Susil was making a last-ditch stand against the triumph of the machine, and that some day the super computer which will play chess better than any human being will be built. Nor did I want to present Susil as a heroic champion of the human spirit, though he does affirm, in the words of the prayer from Finnegans Wake, the unpredictable, "allmaziful' character of creativity, whose flow is 'unhemmed as it is uneven, Howeve, this isn't incompatible with any reader finding him a
little comical!
For those who aren't knowledgeable about chess, I should explain that Judit Polgar is a real person: the youngest and most brilliant of three chess-playing Hungarian sisters, who were all child prodigies. Still in her middle teens, she has already outdone Fischer and Kasparov's achievements at the same age, and has the potentiality of fulfilling the destiny envisaged for her in the play.
CHARACTERS
SUSIL, a university teacher of English, around thirty-five. ROHAN, a computer programmer, also around thirty-five.
The play is set in Susil's apartment in New York in the years
1998 and 1999.

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SCENE ONE
(The living room of Susil's apartment. It's austerely furnished with a few chairs, a writing table, a bookcase. The only thing in the room that looks expensive is a CD player and amplifier with stereo speakers. Over the speakers comes the music of Mozart's Clarinet Quintet, halfway through the first movement. The volume is quite high.
Downstage there's a small table at which Susil is seated, playing a game of chess through from a book. He moves a piece, contemplates the position, then glances back at the book and makes another move.
A doorbell rings. Susil gets up, walks across to the record player and reduces the volume, so that the music continues as a soft accompaniment to the rest of the scene. He then moves to the door and opens it. Rohan is standing in the door
way.) ROHAN: You remember me, of course? SUSIL: Er – I'm not quite sure. But Come in. (Rohan does so.) Rohan sits. Susil does the same.) ROHAN: So you don't remember me? SUSIL: I'm sorry. I have a very bad memory for faces.
ROHAN (with an air of disappointment): Well, Susil, perhaps there's no reason why you should remember me. But I haven't forgotten you, for sure. You saved my life, pulling me out of a burning building in Colombo in July '83. Now do you remember?
SUSIL: Ah yes, of course. You're Rohan.
ROHAN: You haven't changed that much in fifteen years. I
would have recognized you anywhere.

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SUSIL: Is that so?
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I wrote to you after I came here, late in '83. But perhaps you didn't get the letter.
(embarrassed): No... I think I did get your letter... but I was so busy... I'm very bad at writing letters...
That's OK. But when I heard this morning you were here - it was Rajan who told me - remember him? He was at school with us - well, I couldn't wait to look you up. Rajan gave me your address. I would have rung first, but he said you weren't on the phone.
No, I'm not on the phone. I don't want to be.
I just had to see you. After all, without you, I wouldn't be here, I wouldn't be anywhere. I hope I'm not barging in when you're busy.
No, no. I was playing a chess game. By yourself?
I was playing Something through from a book. Judit Polgar versus Kasparov. The last game in the world championship. One of the great games.
(motioning towards the speakers): And what's that? Mozart's Clarinet Quintet. One of his masterpieces.
It beats me how you can follow a game like that with that sort of racket in the background.
Oh, I know the music so well, I can take it in with half my mind. Besides, they match.
Match?
Judit is like Mozart: so precise and impeccable in her style, and yet always surprising you by some unexpected new development. I always like to suit the

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music to the game I'm playing. (Rohan makes a grimace at this, as if sceptical.)
You don't believe me?
ROHAN: I wouldn't know, anyway. I'm not into that sort of
music. Rock's more my cup of tea.
SUSIL: That reminds me, Rohan, will you have something
to drink? Tea? Or something stronger? A martini?
ROHAN: Yes, thank you, if there's gin. SUSIL: Sorry, there's no gin. ROHAN: OK, I'll take a plain martini. (The conversation continues while Susil is getting the drinks.)
ROHAN: I'm told Sri Lanka is building up to another spot of
ethnic tension at the moment.
SUSIL: So my friends at home tell me.
ROHAN: The damn fools. I really don't know why they can't grow up - you Sinhalese as well as us Tamils. They should all be sent here on short tours to see how well people get on together - whites and blacks, and oh, everybody - Italians, and Irish and Germans and Poles and Chinese and Vietnamese.
SUSIL: But what about the Puerto Ricans rioting in the city
last week?
ROHAN: Oh, I think that was all the doing of the demagogue Mendoza, wanting to strengthen his position for the mayoralty.
(Susil serves him his drink).
Thank you. Cheers.
SUSIL: Cheers.

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(He sits down.) ROHAN: And what are you doing now, Susil?
SUSIL: I teach English at Peradeniya. I'm here doing a PhD
at New York State.
ROHAN: Some incomprehensible subject, I suppose?
SUSIL: Well, not really... My working title is: "Indetermi
nacy as Creative Principle in Finnegans Wake'.
(Rohan makes another grimace at this.)
ROHAN: It's quite a coincidence you should be such a chess fan because I'm occupied a lot with chess these days.
SUSIL (enthusiastically): Oh, so you're interested in chess
too?
ROHAN: Well, I don't play it for amusement at all. But you see, Susil, I work as a programmer for Rawlsons, one of the biggest computer firms in the States. Part of their business is producing chess-playing comput
eS
SUSIL (his enthusiasm giving way to indifference): I once tried playing chess against a computer. It was so stupid, it couldn't see anything beyond its nose. When I started moving my pawns up against its castled king — any intelligent player would have realized what was up at once - but the computer didn't smell anything afoot till it was too late.
ROHAN: When was this?
SUSIL: Sometime around '84, '85.
ROHAN (smiling): My dear Susil, that's nearly fifteen years ago, and even commercially marketed computers have come a long way since then. Everything depends on how sophisticated the program is. I don't

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know how good a player you are, but unless you're on Grandmaster level, you may find it tough going against some programs that are on the market now. And that's just what's commercially available.
You mean, there are others you can't buy?
Of course.
But what's the point of that?
ROHAN: Well, there are research labs which develop advanced
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programs simply as a tool for studying human intelligence.
But what can a machine tell you about human intelligence?
Has it ever struck you that there are only three fields in which child prodigies occur fairly frequently? You know, when Pascal was a small boy, he worked out many of Euclid's theorems for himself. I don't need to tell you about the Polgar sisters (he points towards the board and pieces) or about Mozart (he gestures towards the speakers). So there you are - mathematics music, chess.
So what?
What do all three have in common?
I wouldn't know.
Mathematical structures.
I don't know anything about maths. I was very bad at it in school.
But don't you see? Chess is animated geometry. Music- (he gestures again towards the speakers.)
Music? It's quite different. It appeals to the senses

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and the emotions - it isn't just cold and intellectual, like maths.
You're talking about how beings react to music. But take the stuff of music itself. All those notes you hear are vibrations of the air, and there are simple mathematical relations between them.
So what has that to do with child prodigies?
Well, I think the reason why child prodigies - born geniuses - crop up so often in mathematics, music and chess is this. There must be some connection we yet don't understand between the structures of their brains and the structures of what they're working with.
So that's what you're after at this place - what is it? Rawlsons?
No, not at all. I merely brought that up to show you one of the things chess programming might lead to - in time. At Rawlsons I'm working on something much more immediate. Something that should interest you.
What?
I - we - that is, the team I head - we're building a super chess computer. Something that we believe will beat any Grandmaster in the world today.
But that's impossible?
And just why do you think it impossible, Susil?
Because chess isn't just a matter of mechanical reasoning. I'm told a chess computer simply works out every possible move in any position and selects the best, according to some set of rules it has been given. That isn't the way even a raw beginner plays, be

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cause he has some kind of notion about which moves are relevant and which aren't. And the great masters — Capablanca, Alekhine, Kasparov, Polgar — with them you have to reckon with intuition, insight, imagination. It's like music - or poetry, for that matter. You'll be telling me next a computer can write better music than Mozart!
Well, actually, I do believe that might be possible some day if - (Susil throws up his hands in exasperation.) Well, well, we won't go into that. Let's stick to chess.
(He gets up and walks across to the board.)
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Just look at this position here. There may be, let's say, thirty different moves possible for White at this point. I'm talking just about legally permissible moves - nothing to do with whether the moves are good or bad. Take Black's possible replies to each one of those thirty, and then White's replies to those, and the number will grow enormously. By the time you reach four or five moves, it'll be colossal; before you get to the end of the game, astronomical. But do you agree that however unimaginably large the number of possible moves in the game is, it's still finite?
(thinking for a moment): I suppose so.
So you see, the moves actually played by Kasparov and Polgar in this game were only a subset of that huge but still finite number. Now, if you had an omniscient intelligence-let's call it God - who could foresee all those possible moves and weigh them one against the other, he could look at this position on the board and say: These are the moves which lead to White winning, and these to Black winning. And

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that would be absolutely definite. You agree? Mm... I suppose that's true.
You know, that's what I like about chess. It's so determinate. It appeals to me because I believe life is like that too. We imagine we are free because we
don't know the limits within which we live from
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moment to moment. Isn't that what old Omar Khayyam was talking about? Life like a chessboard. How does it go ? Come on, you must know it, professor of literature!
'Tis all a checkerboard of nights and days Where Destiny with men for pieces plays, Hither and thither moves, and mates, and slays, And one by one back in the closet lays.
That's it.
But what's that to do with your super chess computer? Don't tell me you're creating a God who can work out all the possible moves in a chess game? A pretty dumb God he'd have to be if that's the only way he could play chess
No, that's not my point. All I'm trying to show you is that even your great master with his imagination, insight, what have you, doesn't step outside that limited range of possible moves. Though he may be unaware of it, he's operating within that closed circle. And that what makes it possible for a thinking machine to compete.
Thinking! I don't call that thinking. Plodding like an ox, through each and every possibility -
Now, now, Susil. I bet you haven't bothered to keep

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up with what's been happening in chess computers since you played with your toy in '84.
No, I just wasn't interested.
Well, at that time most computers did work like that. Going through every possibility three or four moves ahead. But there's only so far you can go that way. No computer will ever be my hypothetical God, seeing all the possible moves in a chess game, because all the time in the universe won't be enough for that. But in our project we don't have to match God, we need only outstrip the human mind. I'll show you what we can do to beat Homo Sapiens at his own game.
(He looks down at the board.)
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Look - this game. It's a Sicilian Defence, isn't it?
Yes.
Well, all the variations of that opening - say, for the first twenty moves or so - are pretty well known, aren't they?
Yes.
And so with any of the standard openings. Right?
Right.
And so also with the basic game endings?
Right.
And any championship player would need to have all that stuff or as much of it as possible - at his fingertips. Am I right?
Yes.
Now everything that's known about the openings

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and basic endings will go into the database for our computer. So far -
Excuse me. What's a database?
Well, let's say it's a body of stored information to which the computer can have access. So far that's nothing new. Any good computer today comes programmed at least for the openings and basic endings. Except that our computer's knowledge of openings and endings will be absolutely comprehensive and continually updated.
But that's not going to take you very far. Any moderately good player can play openings or basic endings by the book. It's when you're into the middle game that you're on your own.
Yes, yes. Butlet me go on. Our database will contain also every significant game played by an International Grandmaster or Master over the last half-century. Something of the order of 250,000 games, we estimate.
You're going to cart a library around with your computer?
Library? My dear Susil, that entire database will be stored on one small diskette. And the computer can have access to any game, any position, any move in that stupendous mass of material in a matter of seconds.
Don't tell me the computer's going to stop in the middle of a game and look up what Capablanca or Alekhine played.
Well, there might conceivably be situations in which it might do just that, if in doubt. But that's not going

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to be the main use of that database.
Then what?
You know, Susil, chess computers up to now have been very strong on tactics but weak on strategy. That's because you can always think four or five moves ahead by just plodding through, as you said. And the computer thinks immensely faster than any human and doesn't make mistakes: it doesn't miss any possibility. But for long-term strategy you can't work like that, you need principles. Of course, there are known principles. At an elementary level - take control of the centre, put your rooks behind open files, get your bishops on long diagonals, don't move the pawns in front of the castled king if you can help it-you know the lot. But how far does all that take you? When you get down to brass tacks, you find that even the great masters don't help you that much because half the time they don't really work with theory -
Yes, that's exactly my point. When a great player makes a brilliant move, it doesn't have to be that he has made laborious calculation. He or she, I should
say. The move may have come to him or her in a
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flash, like a line of poetry. He or she just sees it.
(making another grimace): I see you have fallen for this feminist crap about patriarchal pronouns.
Well, they have a point. And particularly now. It was OK taking about a chess player as 'he' in the past when all great chess players were man, but now — with Judit Polgar as champ —
Well, I hope that won't last very long. Why, I think it quite fitting a woman should be chess

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champion. It's a matriarchal game, after all. The Queen is the strongest piece.
Ah, but you don't win the game until you have checkmated the King. Seriously though, I'll tell you in a moment my plans about disposing of Judit Polgar. But let's get back to what we were talking about. My guess is that even though the chess player may not know what is behind his intuition when he makes a move (I'll stick to the masculine pronoun, if you don't mind), there is reasoning - instrataneous and unconscious reasoning - behind it.
Even if that were true, what's the use if we can't discover it?
Ah, that's where we come in-actually, where I come in. Because I'm going to write a program whose direction will be heuristic.
You know that's a word I keep coming across, but I'm not really sure what it means.
Let me put it this way. The program I'm going to wrote is for the purpose of getting the computer to discover things for itself. To discover every possible principle of strategy in those 250,000 games. Principles that the great chess masters hadn't consciously thought out themselves. I'm going to call the program 'Archimedes.
Poor man.
Why do you say that? Archimedes will be pretty much in the position of the early scientists, looking for regularities and laws in a mass of material that looks bewilderingly diverse. Writing Archimedes is going to be the crucial part of this project. And the most difficult. Because obviously you have to give

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the computer some principles to start with - otherwise, it can't begin analyzing the game at all. But the program has to be open-ended enough so that the computer can make its own discoveries, even if they contradict the principle is started with. It won't be easy, but I'm going to try.
(clearly lost by now): Well, I must say I find what you're trying to do thoroughly anti-human. What are you trying to prove - that machines are superior to people?
Ohno, that isn't the point at all. That's old hat. There are computers doing every day what men can't do.
Then do Rawlsons hope to make a lot of money selling your super computer?
No, not that either. Developing it is a fiendishly expensive. It would be idiotic to try getting the money back from sales. How many people do you think want to buy a million-dollar chess computer that's guaranteed to beat them every time?
Then what's the point?
We want our computer to take on the reigning world champion. Your friend Judit Polgar (he gestures again towards the board). For the world title.
But that's ridiculous! Computers aren't eligible to compete for the world championship. There are separate contests for them.
Yes, that's the apartheid system we want to end. Actually, there wasn't a rule of that kind until 1994simply because nobody had imagined it would be possible for a computer to make a bid for the title. Then, when computers beat some famous players,

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the alarm bells started ringing. FIDE - you know, the International Federation - was pressurized into adopting the new rule. They said it was unfair a human player who carries his memory only in his brain should compete with a computer with everything stored in its information bank.
I think that's true.
Bullshit. I call that 'species chauvinism'. Because that information bank is part of the computer's brain. Is the computer to blame if it has a brain much bigger, more easy of access, and more reliable than that limited, slow-moving and inaccurate device that's called the human brain?
But if the rules debar computers -
Oh, we are moving heaven and earth to get FIDE to change the rules. We are starting a campaign: Tustice for Chess Computers!'
Some of us are even thinking of appealing to UN to adopt an International Declaration of Computer Rights. But species chauvinism dies hard. And women - we anticipate tough opposition from the women's movements.
Because of Judit Polgar, you mean?
Yes, You see. Polgar winning the title was a real feather in the feminists' cap. They said it disproved everything that has been said about women being bad at thinking logically. So now our computer project is being smeared as a male conspiracy to take the title away from a woman. Big bad male technology against female genius.
But perhaps there is something in that, Rohan. You

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did say you wanted to change the situation of a woman holding the title -
Oh, I admit I want to prove we can do better than that chit of a girl. Don't get me wrong. I'm not antifemale. I love women - in the proper place.
Bed, I presume.
Sure thing. But my private feelings aren't what is pushing this project. It'll be a great victory for American technology - the biggest since we put a man on the moon.
We? I thought you and I were kids in shorts thenway back in Sri Lanka.
You know what I mean. That's why Washington is very interested in our project. But I'm not in it just out of patriotism, though I'm an American citizen, and proud of it. For me it's a fascinating technical exercise. I'm sorry I can't put it you in the language of computer programming because you wouldn't understand.
I don't even know how a computer manages to play chess at all.
(Getting up and walking about meditatively): Well, let me try to explain it to you in a way you will understand. I once talked to a man who was an expert in playing blindfold chess. He told me that when he played blindfolded, he felt he was much more in contact with the essence of chess than with a board
and pieces. Because when he pictured the game in
his mind, the material form and feel and look of
pieces and board vanished. All that was left was a set of relations between forces. Can you imagine a Queen on a board not as a solid object but as a cen

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tre of a radiatingfield of force? A minute ago I told you chess was animated geometry. That's how my friend would have seen it when blindfolded. Can you follow that?
Yes.
But that's still not abstract enough to explain the way a computer thinks. Because to think of a chess game as animated geometry is still to picture it as a set of relations in space. Now imagine the layout of the board, the rules for moving each piece, the changing positions in the game - all translated into Symbols with which the computer operates. These are just abstractions. The computer knows nothing about kings or queens or rooks or pawns, nothing even about position or movement in space. Have you ever used a word-processor?
No, but there's a typist feeding the draft of my thesis into one. Last week Joyce's hundred-letter word nearly gave her a nervous breakdown. The computer asked her where to hyphenate it. She was totally flummoxed, and she rang me in desperation. It gave mean idea for a whole new section of my thesis - on indeterminacies in syllable groupings in Joyce's language. (Distracted from his argument): Did you say hundredletter word?
I did.
But there's no word with a hundred letters.
Yes, there is. Invented by Joyce in Finnegans Wake. It goes like this:
Bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntoonnerron ntuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenen

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thurnuk!
(Rohan, not satisfied with making yet another grimace, takes out a handkerchief, and mops his brow.)
You see what I mean. If you just take the first few syllables, you can read them as ba-ba-badal or baba-ba-dal or baba-badal or bababa-dal.
I think I need another drink after that.
(Susil gets up and pours another martini into Rohan's glass.)
What was I saying? Ah yes. Obviously the wordprocessor doesn't know the difference between any English word and that gibberish you just spouted -
(indignantly): It isn't gibberish! It's the sound of the thunder, also of Humpty Dumpty's fall, the fall of Finnegan, the Fall of Man —
OK. OK. All I'm trying to say is that the word-processor doesn't know anything about language, but it manipulates characters perfectly. For the chess computer there are no pieces or squares or directions, there are just symbols which it shuffles according to a code of rules. Isn't that marvellous?
(Susil frowns. He doesn't seem to think it marvellous.)
I'll tell you what, Susil. A little while ago, you said our purpose was anti-human. Actually, I think what we're doing is to perfect chess after its millennium and a half of history.
What do you mean, perfect?
Well, the difference between chess and other games is that it leaves nothing to chance. With bridge you can have a bad hand, with tennis the sun can be in

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your eyes, with cricket the pitch can be wet. Chess, as far as the game itself is concerned, is free of such aberrations. So it should be perfect. Unfortunatley, it has still had to endure the imperfections of human players. Even a Grandmaster can have a stomachache or a quarrel with his wife on the morning of a decisive game. Remember the tantrums thrown by Bobby Fischer, remember the maneuverings that went on during the Karpov–Kasparov match. So I say: chess will be perfect only when it is freed from human frailties, when it is played by supremely wise beings, without weaknesses or errors. In other words, by machines.
(rising, strongly moved): What a horrible thought! Damn you, you're a monster!
ROHAN (taken aback): Why? What do you mean?
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You don't understand the first things about chess. Maybe you can program machines to make faultless moves, but can you program them for elegance, style, beauty? Chess is an art. A great player has his personal style, and that requires a human mind. Just as it takes a human to write that (gesturing towards the speakers). A marvel of form and grace, yet the man who wrote it could make infantile jokes about shit. Perhaps he even had a stomach-ache when he wrote the Clarinet Quintet.
So then?
That's the glory of human beings. They're frail, open to error, imperfect, but if they weren't, they couldn't create perfections of art. But are you capable of understanding that? (His voice rises to a fury.) You! Destroyer! Vandal! Monster! I'm sorry I saved your life

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(Rohan recoils. He moves silently to the door. Sunil collapses into a chair. After a moment, he gets up, goes to the record player and turns up the music. Then he seats himself at the chessboard, consults his book and moves a piece. He contemplates the board again.)
(Blackout)
SCENE TWO
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(The same living room, six months later.
Over the speakers comes the music of Bach's Goldberg Variations, some way into the second variation, at rather high volume.
Susil is seated at the chessboard, playing a game through from a book.
There is a ring at the door. He walks over to the player and reduces the volume, then opens the door. Rohan is standing in the doorway.)
Come in. Take a Seat.
(Rohan comes in and sits down, and Susil does so too.)
When you rang me this morning and asked me to drop in, I was - may I say - a little surprised.
I take it that's because of the note on which we parted six months ago.
Yes.
I'm sorry. I shouldn't have lost my temper. You see, I was upset. I love chess, and I... well, I was disturbed by the idea of machines taking it over. But I

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shouldn't have lost my temper and shouted at you. I'm sorry.
ROHAN: Forget it, Susil. After all, you're the man who saved
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my life. There isn't much I couldn't take from you.
Will you have a gin and martini? I got some gin specially for you.
Oh, you shouldn't have bothered. But thanks very much.
(The conversation continues while Susil is getting the drinks.)
What's that game?
Botvinnik vs. Vidmar, 1946. Do you know it? It's full of endless delights, from opening through middle game to endgame.
ROHAN: (pointing to the speakers): And what's that?
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To go with the Botvinnik I thought I should have something that was equally packed with ideas, so I put on Glenn Gould playing Bach's Goldberg Variations.
I can't stand Bach at all. He sounds like a sewing machine to me.
(Susil grunts. He serves Rohan's drink, then sits down with his own.)
I see from the news today that FIDE has decided to allow computers to compete for the world title.
Yes. On my way here I had to stop at a red traffic light. There was a group of women at the corner, dressed like chess Queens, and they had placards saying Women against the machine!" and "Keep computers out of the chess title!" and they were shriek

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ing, Unfair to Judit Polgar!' I yelled back at them, Unfair to computers!" The whole pack came rushing in my direction, waving their placards aggressively. Just then the light changed and I got away.
How did FIDE come to change their rule?
Oh, it was tough going. The Hungarians and their allies fought it tooth and nail to the bitter end. But the US government had some tricks up their sleeve. In the end it was the Dutch who turned the scales. And do you know how our boys got them to fall in line? They put pressure through the Dutch government on their delegate in FIDE by offering funding for a massive reclamation project. Billions of dollars.
But is a chess title worth so much to the Americans?
Well, the administration feels we need something to boost prestige after the Chinese beat us to the invention of an oral insulin. Besides, it'll give American computers an enormous boost -help us catch up with the Japs in the world market. In the end it all adds up.
Oh.
TIME is putting our computer on their cover next week. I must leave shortly because we have a ceremony at the office where we'll be christening the computer. What do you think it's going to be called?
I don't know.
Just guess.
I have no idea.
You know, Susil, this is going to be a turning point in the history of civilization. A machine beating man in one of his great cultural inventions. Nicely timed

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for the new century to come. So I thought of a parallel. You remember, there was somebody who was supposed to have stolen fire from the gods and given it to men.
Prometheus.
Exactly. And what we're doing is to take chess from men and give it to machines. So we're going to christen our computer Prometheus'. Don't you think it's a wonderful name?
Mm.
But you know, Susil, this is only the beginning. Prometheus will be simply the first in a line of super chess computers that'll keep getting more powerful. You know what'll be the result?
What?
Chess won't be played by people any more. Oh, of course, there'll still be silly asses pushing chessmen around for fun, like children playing tik-tak-tuk. But nobody will play chess seriously. They'll know they can't compete with the only Grandmasters who'll be left - the computers. So it'll be the end of an age. And you know who'll be the real Prometheus?
Who?
Me. Because it'll really be me who would have stolen chess from men and given it to machines.
(Susil winces. He calms himself with a visible effort.)
Meanwhile I see my former countrymen are back at their old game. I'm told there's an emergency on.
Yes.
Damn fools. You know, Susil, I've been thinking about

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what you said at the end of our last meeting. About people having to be frail and imperfect to create wonderful things. Pardon me, but I think that's an illusion created by you humanists. It's only when all human beings are wholly rational and intellectual that they'll shed their surviving vestiges of barba
1S.
(He finishes what is left of his drink and stands up.)
Well, I must be leaving now.
One moment, Rohan. There's something I wanted to ask you.
What?
Please sit.
(Rohan does so.)
You know, Rohan - after our argument that day - I thought for a long time over what you said. In the end, I felt foolish about having let my emotion get the better of my reason. I began to see you were right. The future of chess does lie with computers.
Oh, I'm so glad you've recognized that, Susil.
It was a bitter pill for me to Swallow, you may imagine, but there's no getting away from reality. I've been converted. So I have a reauest to make of you. Rohan.
What is it, Susil?
As you're aware, I know a lot about chess. Perhaps I may know more about it than some of the people on your team.
I'm sure.

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I'd like very much to work on your project, Rohan. In any humble capacity. And not for money. Just because I feel it's going to be fascinating. I'd love to be in on this turning point in chess history.
Oh Susil, I'd be delighted to accommodate you - except for one thing. I hate to refuse you anything - after all I owe you. But you see, Susil, in our project we need not just people with a mastery of chess but
But people who know computer science. Yes. And unfortunately -
I thought you'd say that. Please take a look at this. (He reaches towards the writing desk and produces a file which he hands Rohan.)
(reading): "The Arden Computer School. Ah, the best in New York. (He looks through the file.)
But this is extraordinary! You mean, you've taken a course in computer programming!
Yes, I started a few days after our argument. And I got the university to give me a year off my thesis. It's taken me six months to get the certificate.
How on earth did you manage to get so far in that time?
Ah well, Rohan, after one has lived in the mazes of Finnegans Wake, computer programming does seem a little elementary. What does Joyce say? 'So you need hardly spell out how every word will be bound over to carry three score and ten top typsical readings throughout the book of Doublends Jined.'
Sorry, that's Greek to me. But this is marvellous! You're not only a chess scholar but you now know

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the fundamentals of computer programming
So do you think I have a chance?
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you to do. You'll be just the man to run through our database and tell us whether we've missed any important game. And that's just for a beginning. We'll see how you make out.
Thank you.
And hell - now that FIDE has changed the rules, we won't need to go scrounging around for funds. We'll get a government contract for Prometheus. So we can easily put you on the payroll.
No, no money, Rohan. I insist.
I tell you what, why don't you come with me now to the party and meet the boys? I'm sure they'd be glad to meet a new convert to our gospel
(rising): OK, Let me change.
(Blackout.)
SCENE THREE
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(The same living room, six months after Scene Two.
The speakers are silent, and there's nobody at the chess table. However, the room looks the same, except that there's a telephone on the writing desk. As the scene begins, Susil is calling a number, with a file of papers before him.)
Hullo! Can I speak to Tina Carducci, please?... Hullo, Tina? This is Susil. You remember me, I'm the man

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who was working on what you called that loony book - Finnegans Wake ... Tina, you know I took a year off my thesis. Now I want to get back to it... Thanks, Tina. Can we start by making some corrections to your last print-out?... Yes, can I give them to you now?... Good. Page 6, line 10. That word should be hierarchitectitiptitoploftical'... I'll spell it. H for Humphrey, I for Isabel, E for Earwicker... Earwicker!... No, Earwicker with an E. R for Rory ... Rory!
(A ring at the door.)
One moment, Tina, I think there's a visitor.
(Hegoes to the door.) Oh, it's you, Rohan, Come in.
(entering): Disaster! (He is wildeyed and his hair uncombed.) Just a minute, Rohan.
(He goes to the telephone.) Sorry, Tina. I'll call you back later. What's up, Rohan?
(sinking into a chair): Absolute bloody unmitigated disaster
What's wrong? Prometheus has gone up in smoke, that's what! But how? What's happened?
Somebody has planted a computer virus among the files.
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ROHAN: One year's work ruined! Archimedes is hopelessly corrupted. Everything Prometheus has done with the database - wrecked
SUSIL: But isn't there anything you can salvage?
ROHAN: It's a thorough job. Don't you know how these computer viruses can be made to spread - just like real viruses?
SUSIL: So machines aren't perfect after all, Rohan. They can
catch colds, like people.
ROHAN: We're back to where we started. And I doubt anybody giving us the money to start again.
SUSIL: But after all the publicity, won't it be a loss of face for
the States if they don't set us up again?
ROHAN: I know, Susil, this is going to be just as hard for you as it's for me. After all the work you've put in, helping us the last six months. But there's no question of getting the dough to play about with once more. Already there have been Congressmen asking awkward questions - why so much money for computer chess instead of for housing? This’ll raise one hell of a stink in Washington! No, let's face it, Prometheus is dead.
SUSIL: His liver eaten by vultures. But how could it have
happened?
ROHAN: There's only one way.
SUSIL: What?
ROHAN: Sabotage.
SUSIL: But who would have wanted to wreck it?
ROHAN: I've been thinking of two possibilities. It could be a Hungarian agent - somebody among the team bribed

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to stop the project. Or it could be a crazy feministprobably one of the women feeding in the data.
(A silence.)
SUSIL: (his tone suddenly changing to the authoritative): I think you have a paranoiac mind, Rohan. There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
ROHAN: What do you mean?
SUSIL: Well, let's try to imagine it this way. Supposing there was somebody among your team who hated the whole idea of a machine aspiring to the world title. Somebody who prized human creativity above everything else. Somebody who believed he could defend human beings against the automated world by wrecking Prometheus. And somebody who thought that in any case chess shouldn't be a means of boosting the prestige of nation-states.
ROHAN: Bloody hell!
SUSIL: There are such lunatics around, you know. Like the people who used to picket missile sites and nuclear power stations.
ROHAN: It's a penal offence, wrecking industrial property.
SUSIL: Ah, but it would be so difficult to track the criminal down. Not like a burglar who leaves his fingerprints behind. You can be sure whoever did it has destroyed all the evidence. And even if you did find something, it would be awkward for you, wouldn't it?
ROHAN: What the hell do you mean?
SUSIL: Won't all thosenosy Congressmen ask who recruited this crazy saboteur? It might be the end of a brilliant career, you know. If I were you, I'd keep it under

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my hat.
(Rohan gets up and contemplates Susil silently for a moment.)
If you hadn't saved my life.
Yes?
I would have smashed your face. Come, come. The surviving vestiges of barbarism.
(Rohan storms out through the door. Susilkneels, and clasps his hands together in the posture of prayer.)
(intoning): In the name of Annah the Allmaziful, the Everliving, the Bringer of Plurabilities, haloed be her eve, her singtime sung, her rill be run, unhemmed as it is uneven!
(Blackout.)
The Thatched Patio, November/December 1992

THE GREAT WRITER AND
THE ORIENT

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PREFACE
On 10 November 1890 (Old Style) the great Russian master of the short story, Anton Chekhov, arrived in Ceylon on board the steamer Petersburg". He was on his way home from a long and arduous journey which had taken him, by the land-route, across the Eurasian continents. The object of the journey was to observe at first-hand the conditions in the penal colony of Sakhalin Island, off the Pacific coast of Russia. In 1891 Chekhov published his account of what he had found there in a book which has been recognised as one of the most important works of penological writing in Tsarist times.
Chekhov stayed in Colombo for a few days, and lodged in Colombo at the Grand Oriental Hotel (now the Hotel Taprobane). While in Colombo he began his short story 'Gusev, one of the most interesting of his middleperiod works, based in part on two burials at sea he had watched on board ship. After his return to Moscow, he said in a letter to his publisher, A.S. Suvorin, 'Since the story was begun in the island of Ceylon, you may for chic, if you wish, write below, "Colombo, 12 November' '. This place

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and date were in fact inserted at the end of the story when it was first published in the journal Novoe Vremya, but dropped when it was reprinted in a collection of his work. While in Ceylon Chekhov took a train journey of, by his account, 'more than 100 versts" (66 miles), which may have been to Kandy. He also took back with him from the island a pair of mongooses, who became much-loved pets.
It is evident from his letters that Chekhov's brief stay in Ceylon left him with the most vivid and enchanting memories. Later that year, he wrote to a friend, 'I have been in hell, which is represented by Sakhalin, and in paradise, that is, in the island of Ceylon. What butterflies, insects, flies, cockroaches!' In 1891, writing to his family during an Italian journey, he said, of the road from Vienna to Venice: "But I am disillusioned with this road. The mountains, precipices and snowy summits that I saw in the Caucasus and in Ceylon were far more inspiring than here.'
The great enigma concerning Chekhov's visit to Ceylon, however, stems from a letter written to Suvorin soon after his return to Moscow. In it, after saying that he had bad memories of Singapore, he went on: "Then came Ceylon - the place where paradise was. Here was I in paradise, and rode more than 100 versts on the railway, and glutted myself to the full with palm groves and bronze-skinned women.' Virginia Llewellyn Smith, who has devoted a whole book to the subject of Chekhov's relations with and fictional depiction of women, seems to have taken this last sentence as referring to sexual experiencies; but surely the collocation with palm groves' suggests rather that he meant he had enjoyed looking at dark-skinned women in Ceylon.
Immediately after the quoted sentence of the letter, however, there is a cut in all post-revolutionary Soviet editions of Chekhov which print it. This is true even of the

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monumental 30-volume Polnoe Sobranie Sochineniy (Complete Works), published by the USSR Academy of Sciences (197482), which is so comprehensive that it seems to have been intended to reproduce every scrap of paper Chekhov left behind. But from time to time in the volumes containing the letters there is the tell-tale mark <...>, of which the only explanation by the editors is that it denotes passages which are 'unsuitable for publication'. The great majority of these deletions are clearly of sexual references or of the Russian equivalents of four-letter words'. This practice was quite normal for Soviet publishing, since the spirit of Dr. Bowdler was very much alive in Soviet literary censorship (one hopes that the post-Communist dispensation will do away with these, as with other limitations on the freedom of publication).
Chekhov's letter to Suvorin had, however, been published intact in the pre-revolutionary edition of 191216, and the subsequently expurgated passage has been referred to by Western biographers of Chekhov and translated in Western selections of his writings. From these we learn that Chekhov claimed to have made love, while in Ceylon, to a black-eyed Indian girl - and where? In a coconut grove on a moonlight night!" Evidently postrevolutionary editors, in accordance with the prudery of official Soviet morality, thought that a veil should be drawn over this piece of conduct, unbecoming of a great Russian Writer.
The passage in question has provoked much speculation. Chekhov was not given to the flaunting of amorous exploits. This has led some biographers to give credence to the story, precisely because, as Ronald Hingley says, "It seems to represent the only occasion on which Chekhov is ever recorded as making such a boast.' However, even if we

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believe that the incident did occur, we are still left uncertain about the girl's ethnic identity. A black-eyed Indian girl': but another translator calls her Hindu', for the simple reason that the adjective induskiy was used in 19th-century Russian indiscriminately to mean either Indian' or Hindu'. Further, we can't suppose that Chekhov made precise distinctions between Indians and Sri Lankans. So we have the shadowy figure of a girl with black eyes and, no doubt, the bronze skin that Chekhov had admired, but who may have been Hindu or non-Hindu, Indian or Sri Lankan, Sinhala, Tamil or what-have-you...
We are hardly likely to have definite answers to these questions, ever, so it would appear that imagination is free to body forth the form of things unknown as it wishes. But not really. The form and the medium one uses set their own constraints. The coconut grove on a moonlight night seems to call for a peasant girl, between whom and Chekhov there could only be virtually wordless communication, and this might have worked in a short story or a film-script... But how would one have avoided the romantic cliche to whose perils that setting and situation seem dangerously prone?... Come to think of it, can't one, reading between the lines of Chekhov's letter, find in it a deliberate, tonguein-the-cheeked indulgence in that same cliche? Is there an opening here for another possibility?... In any case, opting to write a stage play, and in the English language, carries with it its own demands. A turn of the imagination's kaleidoscope, and the setting, the figure of the girl change. So...

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ACT ONE
(The lounge of the Grand Oriental Hotel, Colombo, on a November morning in 1890. In one corner of the room two elderly Englishmen are seated at a table, playing chess. In an armchair a young gentleman (30), bearded and moustached, wearing pincenez, is engaged in reading a manuscript; from time to time he makes corrections with the stub of a pencil. On a small table beside his chair is a tray with coffee-pot, cup and accessories. Perched on a stool is a liveried Sinhalese hotel attendant.)
ONE ENGLISHMAN (moving his Queen): Check.
(The other Englishman moves his King.)
FIRST
ENGLISHMAN : (again moving his Queen): Check,
(The second Englishman studies the board ruefully, then shakes his head.)
SECOND
ENGLISHMAN: I'm afraid it's all over with me, Harry,
eh?
FIRST
ENGLISHMAN : (smiling): Yes, I'm afraid so. Care for
another game, old boy?
SECOND
ENGLISHMAN : Right.
(They begin to rearrange the pieces. .
A lady enters the lounge. She is young, around 25, not conventionally pretty but striking in appearance. She is dressed in European clothes, but her skin is a clear rich brown. The young

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gentleman glances up from his manuscript and looks attentively at her while she sits down. The attendant moves towards her.)
Coffee, please.
(The attendant goes out. The young gentleman returns to his manuscript. The lady takes from her bag a book, finds her place in it and begins to read.)
J'adoube.
(The lady suddenly begins moving her body convulsively, putting one hand to an ear and waving her other hand frantically, while crying out as if in pain.)
Ah! ah!
(The chess players have interrupted their game but make no move to help; the young gentleman has risen and come up to the lady.)
What is the matter, madame? Are you ill?
(He speaks with a strong Russian accent, and with the studied articulation of a person speaking a foreign language in which he isn't quite at home.).
Ah! An insect seems to have flown into my ear. It's moving around, inside...Oh!
(The gentleman looks around, as if for an instrument; then picks up the manuscript he had dropped on his chair, tears off from the last sheet a strip of paper and rolls it between his palms into a long thin shape.)

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(bending down beside the lady and holding her head firmly): Allow me, madame. I am a doctor.
(He probes her ear with his improvised instrument, then brings the insect out with it, drops it on his palm and holds it out to her.)
There you are, madame. That is the intruder.
Oh, thank you so much. I feel so relieved.
I am glad to have been of service. Shall I sentence him to death as punishment?
Oh no, just let him fly away, please.
(The gentleman blows the insect off his palm. He stands there a moment, irresolutely.)
(looking up at him, smilingly): Won't you sit down, doctor?
I would be delighted to.
(He fetches his cup of coffee and his manuscript, and sits down by her.)
May I introduce myself, madame. I am Anton Chekhov. (He says the name as it is pronounced in Russian - An-TON CHEkhov', the "kh" a fricative 'h' with no k-sound in it, the last 'o' like that 'o' of 'mirror".)

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I am sorry I didn't catch your surname. You sneezed as you said it.
Sneezed? No, it is a Russian name. “Chekhov".
You're doing it again.
(Chekhov stares at her in perplexity for a moment, then realises she is pulling his leg and bursts into laughter, in which she joins.)
And I'm Regina Lawrence. You have an English name, but I thought...
Yes, I'm Indian. Lawrence is my married name. Actually, my first name was Rajini, but when I was brought up in a convent the nuns gave me the name Regina. It means the same thing as Rajini, you know - 'Queen'.
Razhini - am I saying it right?
Not too bad, doctor - for a first try.
It is a beautiful name - much better than Regina. And 'Queen' -- how suitable to you.
Thank you. I'm sure you must be very
successful, doctor, you must be flattering all your women patients.
No flattery, I assure you. And please do not call me 'doctor'. Actually, I do not treat patients at all now.
But what can I call you? I can't say Mr. - what's it - Atishoo.

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Why not call me Anton? - that is easier to say.
Alright, if you'll call me by my beautiful name. I like to hear you say it, nobody has called me Rajini for a long time.
(carefully pronouncing the name): Rajini.
Ah, you're improving. But tell me, why don't you practise as a doctor?
Well, I am more a writer than a doctor now. I once said that medicine is my legal wife, but literature is my mistress. And as usually happens, the mistress attracts me more than the wife.
And what do you write?
Short stories, most of the time.
Oh, how interesting, Anton! And what you have on your lap - what you had your eyes glued on when I came in - is that one of your stories?
Yes, the newest, Rajini. I began it here in Colombo. It is not finished yet.
It's in Russian, I suppose?
Yes.
(pursing up her lips): Oh, then I can't read it, Anton. How sad! But do tell me the story! I would love to hear it.
(embarrassed): I really do not know how to tell it... .
Oh, please!

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You see, Rajini, it is not like the stories that people like to read in newspapers
and magazines -
Ah, but I'm a great reader. I read novels all the time - long novels. (Holding up her book) This is East Lynne by Mrs. Henry Wood. Have you read it, Anton?
No, I do not think so.
It's so beautiful, and so sad. I'm crying buckets while reading it. It's about a married woman, who's unfaithful to her husband, and she suffers .... But Anton, let's not talk about that now. I want to hear your story.
(The attendant returns with a tray and coffee
and puts it on the small table beside Rajini.)
(to the attendant) Thank you. (To Chekhov) I'm waiting.
(after a pause of hesitation, while she gazes expectantly at him); I will tell you how I came to think of the story. You see, I am travelling back to Russia on a ship. It is in harbour now. I think you can just see the top of it if you look through that window. (Pointing) Yes. Look, Rajini, there it is. Those red funnels, just above that roof. That is it.
And where are you travelling from?
From Sakhalin.
Where's that?
It is an island, in the Pacific, near the coast

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of Russia. It is a - how do you say it? - a place of habitation for prisoners.
Ah, a penal settlement. We have one too, in the Andaman islands.
I went there to see how the prisoners lived, and how they were treated. To write a book about it.
So that's what your story's about?
Oh, no. But coming back on the ship, on the way to Singapore, I saw two sailors who had died -- their bodies being dropped into the sea.
Oh, Anton, that must have been a nasty thing to watch.
No, it only filled my mind with strange thoughts. So then I thought of this story.
Yes?
It is about this Russian soldier - his name is Gusev. He has served for five years in the Far East. He is being sent back home, by ship. But he is very ill, with consumption.
Poor fellow.
He is lying down in the ship, and he thinks always of his home, in the Russian village. He even dreams of it. He sees the village in the winter. In the heat of the Indian Ocean it is comfortable for him to think about the snow.
And so?

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And so he dies. His body is put into a sail, and they sew it up. It, looks like a carrot or a radish - broad at the head and thin at the legs. (Rajini covers her mouth with her hand.) Then it is dropped into the ocean. It goes down, deep, deep. Then it meets a crowd of fish - I don't know how you call them in English - but we call them lotsmany. They accompany the shark, and pick up the pieces from what he kills. (Rajini's eyes open wide in horror.) Then the shark himself appears. He swims under the sail, and with his teeth he tears at it.
(her voice hushed): And then?
And then, nothing. The sun sets, and the ocean and the sky turn all kinds of colours.
Oh, Anton, what an awful story! Why do you want to write things like that? And I'm sorry, but I don't think you can be a very good writer after all. In your story nothing really happens — a man dies and his body is dropped in the sea and a shark eats it up. That's a story?
You have no right to complain, Rajini. I warned you you must not expect what you read in newspapers and magazines -
No, but not in newspapers and magazines, there are so many interesting stories in books. Like this one. (She holds up her novel.) I'm sure, Anton, you're just

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beginning, you're just learning to write stories after all your years as a doctor. Look, I'll give you a lesson. I'll tell you about my life. It's very interesting, and you can write a story about it.
Thank you. I am ready to listen.
Well, the story begins in a place called Rajkot. It's a small state in the foothills of the Himalayas. It's a beautiful place, with lots of flowers and fruits, and the Snow-covered mountains up above. I was born there. My father was what we call a Maharaja. That means, he was the ruling prince of Rajkot.
Ah, so then you really are a queen, or, at least, a princess?
(smiling Sadly): No, unfortunately, not now. You see, Anton, my father was a man who loved books and music. He loved them more than the business of the state. More and more he retired into his library and let other people carry on the state affairs. That wouldn't have mattered so much, but he had a younger brother. A wicked man.
I see. Enter the villain.
Don't make fun of it, Anton. It's a true and sad story.
I am sorry. I did not mean it...
My wicked uncle took advantage of my father's neglect of his duties. He saw to

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it that things in the state went from bad to worse, so that people blamed my father for it. Then, at the right time, he conspired to seize the throne. My father had to flee for his life, taking me with him. ar
And your mother?
My mother had died in giving birth to me. So we fled to another part of India, to the city of Bombay. I was then only ten years old. My father couldn't take care of me by himself. In Rajkot I had an English governess, but now my father had very little money, so he put me in a convent school.
You were a Christian?
No, but the sisters felt sorry for me and
looked after me. But then a greater tragedy happened to me. Even though he had driven my father out, my uncle didn't feel safe as long as he was alive. So he hired somebody to poison my father, there in Bombay.
And he died?
Yes, in great pain. (She takes a handkerchief from her bag and wipes her eyes.) So I was left all alone in the world, with only the convent sisters to help me.
And how did you come to marry this Mr. Lawrence?
Yes, that's what I'm coming to. When I

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was seventeen, the convent had a prize day. They invited Mr. Lawrence as chief guest - he was the principal of a boys' school in the city. I was the best girl in the school at reciting poetry - I was asked to recite... do you know Wordsworth?
Vortsvorth? No; I know Byron, and of course Shakespeare.
I recited Wordsworth's poem Daffodils. It begins: "I wandered lonely as a cloud'. I put a lot of feeling into it, because I felt so lonely at that time. Mr. Lawrence praised me a lot, he said he had never heard the poem recited better. He was even more concerned about me when he heard I was an orphan. After that he used to send me books. From time to time he would come to the convent and see me, but always in the presence of one of the sisters.
And then?
And then, when I was nineteen, he told the Mother Superior he wanted to marry me. The nuns thought it would be a great thing for me, although he was much older than me - forty-five. So I accepted him. Later I learnt that all his friends thought he was making a great mistake in marrying an Indian girl, but he didn't change his mind.
And if you do not mind my asking, you are happy?

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(shrugging her shoulders): Happy? I think I stopped expecting happiness when my father died. But I am not unhappy. Henry - my husband -- is very kind.
And he is here with you? In this hotel?
He's with me and we're on holiday, but he has gone out. To see an old friend of his, the Principal of Royal College. It's the best school in Ceylon.
His friend is another Englishman?
Yes, of course. I excused myself, I said I had a headache, but actually I thought it better not to accompany Henry. You never know how English people treat you. Henry will stay to lunch there and come back in the afternoon. But now, Anton, you must tell me what you think of the story of my life.
I was deeply moved by it, Rajini, but I do not think I can make a story out of it.
Why not? If you were moved, so will other people be.
But it is not my kind of story, Rajini. I do not write about poison and wicked uncles.
Ah yes, I know. Only dead soldiers and sharks. Oh, you are hopeless, Anton, you'll never be a story writer. Let's talk about something else. Is this your first time in Ceylon?
Yes.
What do you think of the place?

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(enthusiastically) It is beautiful! I went up by train - to Kandy. Such marvellous landscapes - I have never seen anything like it in Europe. The mountains, and the rice fields, and the birds, and the butterflies, and the women --
(roguishly) Yes, the women?
I only gazed at them, you understand. But to admire their beautiful brown faces, their slender brown bodies - it was better than looking at any bronze statue. I can well understand why they thought Paradise was in Ceylon.
Be careful, Anton. There was a snake in Paradise too.
Oh, talking of snakes, you know what I brought back from Kandy?
(with an expression of distaste): A snake?
No, quite the opposite. You know the animal called a mongoose. It kills Snakes, they say.
Yes.
Well, I bought two... how do you say it? I know if you have two of those birds called goose, in English you don't say 'gooses', you say 'geese'. So do I say I have two mongeese?
(smiling) You know the story about the man who wanted to get a pair of them from a pet shop?
No.

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He started to write a letter, but like you, he didn't know whether to say 'two mongooses' or 'two mongeese'.
Well?
So he thought, and then he found the answer. He wrote Dear Sir, Please send me a mongoose.' Then he added a postscript, "And by the way, send me another.'
(laughing): Ah, that is good! That is very clever
But where are yours?
In my hotel room. Would you like to see them?
I would love to.
(rising) May I have the pleasure of showing you my mongoose, madame? And by the way, may I show you another? (He bows.)
(She rises too. As they turn to go out, the stage blacks out.)
(The same hotel lounge, early in the afternoon of the same day. Rajini is seated, touching up her face with the help of a small handmirror. Chekhov is sitting in an adjacent chair, gazing gloomily into space.
Rajini finishes her attentions to her face, puts her things away in her bag, and begins fanning

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herself. She glances at Chekhov, who is still lost in his thoughts. She taps him on his hand with her fan.)
Anton.
Yes?
Are you still worried about this morning?
Mm.
But you don't have to worry. It was very nice, in spite of... And you were so clever, Anton. I've read about men who say things like May I show you my Chinese drawings?' But, May I show you my mongooses?' - that's a new idea. Brilliant!
But it was wasted, was it not?
Now, now, Anton, don't say that. Alright, you failed to get to the top of Mount Everest, but wasn't the journey worth it?
But I do not want you to think I am incapable - -
No, of course not.
It has never happened to me before. I wonder why today -
It must be my fault. Perhaps I don't attract you enough -
Oh, no, no! How can you suppose that? I think you are the most beautiful woman I have seen in a long time. No, no, it is not that. It must be the heat of Colombo.

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Perhaps. Or the strangeness of the bed.
Or perhaps the mongooses watching put you off... . I
(Henry Lawrence comes in. He is in his early fifties.)
Ah, there you are, my dear.
(Chekhov rises.)
Henry, this is Dr. Sneeze. He's Russian. Doctor, this is my husband, Henry Lawrence.
(The two men shake hands, and they sit down.)
Sniz - is that a Russian name? I must say I've never heard it before.
No, Mr. Lawrence, your wife is having a little joke. She thinks my surname sounds like a sneeze, that is why. I am Dr. Anton Chekhov.
(to Rajini): Is your headache better, Regina? Oh it's all gone, Henry. Dr. Sneeze has cured it.
You must be a very good doctor, sir. My wife was suffering agonies this morning.
(Chekhov smiles shyly.)
My friend was so sorry you weren't able to come. He sent you his regards.

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I'm sure you'd have had a pleasant chat without me. And now (rising) if you'll both excuse me, I must visit the ladies'
OO.
(She goes.)
Have you been long in Ceylon, doctor?
No, I am just passing through. My ship sails tomorrow. I am going back to Russia.
We live in India, doctor, as my wife must have told you. Many of my countrymen there believe your Tsar has designs on India. What is your view of that, sir?
I take no interest in politics, sir. To me it is all a treacherous and dishonourable game. Your wife was telling me about her uncle. Well, that was a matter of a small state and a small throne. But I believe the conduct of great powers is no better.
My wife's uncle?
Yes, the one who poisoned her father.
Poisoned her father?
Yes, after seizing the throne.
I am sorry, my dear doctor, but Regina is sometimes given to flights of fancy.
But was her father not the ruling prince

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of a state?
Not at all. He was Professor of Music at the arts school in Bombay, a very good teacher too. That's how I met Regina. I'm afraid she does rather enjoy spinning stories and taking in unsuspecting people. But this is the first time I've heard of her claiming to be a prince's daughter. (Rajini comes back.)
Ah, so you've been pulling the doctor's leg, you naughty girl, have you? (He tweaks her ear gently as she sits down.)
Well, now I must go up to my room and change, Regina. My clothes are really damp after I've been out in this heat. You stay and talk to the doctor, Regina. I hope we'll see you at dinner-time, doctor, since it's your last night in Colombo.
With pleasure.
Au revoir, then.
Au revoir.
(Lawrence goes out. Rajini looks at Chekhov with a sly smile on her face.)
Are you angry, Anton?
Not at all. But why did you tell me that fairy tale?
I was only trying to give you a lesson in making up stories. And wasn't I clever? I thought it all up as I was talking.
Perhaps you should take to writing

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popular fiction, Rajini. I am sure you will do better than... who was it?... Mrs. Henry Wood.
No, Anton, I prefer to keep my inventions for audiences of one at a time. But I do hope you don't bear me a grudge. Will you go back thinking I was the Snake in Paradise?
Oh no, no, Rajini. I will never forget this morning, and I will always think of you most lovingly and tenderly. And it is not only you who can make imagination better than reality.
What do you mean, Anton?
When I go back I shall tell my friends about my great romantic adventure in Ceylon. And years later, if I have sons and grandsons, I shall say to them, 'You sons of bitches, do you know that I have made love to a black-eyed Indian girl. And where?' Not, of course, in a hotel room by day. In a coconut grove on a moonlight night!"
(Clapping her hands): Oh good, Anton! Now you're learning (Blackout.)
1. Letter to A.S. Suvorin, 23 December 1890.
2 Letter to I.L. Leontiev, 10 December 1890.
3 Letter to the Chekhovs, 25 March 1891.
4. Letter to A.S. Suvorin, 9 December 1890.

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Virginia Llewellyn Smith, Anton Chekhov and the Lady with the Dog (1975: Oxford University Press), p 53
Reggie Siriwardena, Mrs. Grundy in Moscow', in The
Thatched Patio, No. 4, November 1985, pp. 15-17.
Ronald Hingley, A New Life of Chekhov (1976: Oxford University Press), p. 142.
The Thatched Patio, November/December 1992

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