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INTERNATIONAL CENTRE FO
 

Wol. 2 No. 4 ISSN 1391 - 2380
赣馨铃铃》铃《》铃》 : lively minds

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Nēthrā
Journal of the International Centre for Ethnic Studies, Colombo
Nethra will appear quarterly. Subscription rates are:
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Copyright 1998 by The International Centre for Ethnic Studies, Colombo
ISSN 1391 - 2380
Al correspondence to: International Centre for Ethnic Studies 2, Kynsey Terrace, Colombo 8, Sri Lanka
Printed by Unie Arts (Pvt) Ltd. No.48 B, Bloemendhal Road,
Colombo 13.

Nēthrā
Quarterly Journal
Editor Regi Siriwardena
International Centre for EthnicStudies, Colombo

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Nethra welcomes contributions from scholars and writers. Since the journal's interests are omnivorous, there is no restriction on subjectmatter. Ideally, however, Nethra looks for material that is serious without being ponderous, readable and interesting without being superficial, and comprehensible even to readers who are not specialists in the intellectual field in which the subject is situated.
In addition to papers and essays, we shall be glad to receive shorter critical comments and letters in response to any material that has already appeared in the journal.
Nethra also invites creative writing - poems or stories - from both Sri Lankan and foreign writers.
Editorial correspondence, including submissions to the journal, should be sent to:
The Editor,
Nēthrā Tnternational Centre for Ethnic Studies, 2, Kynsey Terrace,
Colombo 8,
Sri Lanka.
Notes on Contributor
Pradeep Jeganathan obtained his doctorate in anthropology at the University of Chicago, and is presently Earl S. Johnson Postdoctoral Fellow at the same university, He has edited, together with Qadri Ismail, a volume of essays, Unmaking the Nation. Readers of the old Thatched Patio will remember some of his short stories which appeared in that journal.

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Contents
"Violence' as an Analytical Problem: Sri Lankanist Anthropology Afterjuly, '83
Pradeep Jeganathan
Possessed by Death
Seehawk
The Honour
Regi Siriwardena
BookReviews
Tissa Abeysekara, Bringing Tony Home
Reviewer: A. J. Canagaratna
Vikram Chandra, Love and Longing in Bombay
Reviewer: Pradeep Ratnam
U.R. Anantha Murthy, Bharathipura Reviewer: Dattathreya C. S.
48
51
58
66
74

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"Violence' as an Analyticial Problem: SriLankanist Anthropology After July, '83
Pradeep Jeganathan
This essay is derived from the introduction to a work - in - progress by the same author.
How, why and when does "violence" emerge as an analytical problem for anthropology? What, in other words, are the conditions of possibility of an anthropology of violence? What, given that anthropology, are the analytical qualities of the category, 'violence"? Surely, this is an appropriate moment for such questions: a new anthropology of violence has been, and still is, coming into being. More
Earlier versions of this essay were presented at the South Asia Workshop, Foster Commons, University of Chicago in May 1996, and at the South-South Workshop: Re-Thinking the Third World, University of the West-Indies, Mona in December 1996, and the International Center for Ethnic Studies, Colombo in August 1998. I am grateful to all those who commented. This paper is published as written in April 1997: only minor changes have been made since then. In particular, lack of time has prevented my engagement with Jayadeva Uyangoda's important paper, 'Academic Texts on the Sri Lankan Ethnic Question as Biographies of a Decaying Nation-State', in Nahra, 1997 (3), 7-23, with which I see my essay as a fruitful and agreeable dialogue. I hope to return to that conversation in later work.

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scholarship is undoubtedly yet to come: indeed my efforts in the chapters to follow can be thought of as a very modest supplement to this growing literature. It is as part of that work of supplementation, of addition, that I interrogate the intersection of "anthropology" and "violence."
The new anthropology of violence announces itself with a complaint that both distinguishes it from otherfields, and is pervasive within its bounds. That cry is this: previous conceptualizations of "violence" are inadequate or 'undertheorized." Henrietta Moore's recent statement makes a nice summary example: "...in spite of a great mass of writing, research, and speculation, the concept of violence in the social sciences still seems remarkably undertheorized."'There is, then, the suggestion here of a lack or absence in relation to the literature on violence, an inadequacy, in other words, in the categorical inheritance of 'violence."
Why so? Surely there is an older literature on violence which in fact announces itself in a theoretical register. Among examples that come to mind are Hannah Arendt's assertion that violence is the
Henrietta Moore, "The problem of explaining violence in the social sciences," in Penelope Harvey and Peter Gow, (ed.) Sex and Violence: Issues in Representation and Experience, (London, Routledge) 1994: 138. Note that for Moore, an erudite anthropologist, this supposed theoretical lack is self-evident. It is not demonstrated in the article, and no literature that conceptualizes "violence" as such is discussed. See for other such 'complaints' about the category of violence in anthropology that are contextualized, Michael Taussig's remarks in The Nervous System (New York, Routledge) 1992: 116, on "how decidedly flat, how instrumental" Weber's notion of violence is; Allen Feldman's note in Formations of Violence: The Narrative of the Body and Political Terror in Northern Ireland, (Chicago, University of Chicago Press) 1991:21, of its reduction to a "derivative system" in a previous literature on Northern Ireland, and Fernando Coronil and Julie Skurski's point in "Dismembering and Remembering the Nation: the Semantics of Political Violence in Venezuela" in Comparative Studies in Society and History 33(2), 1991:289, that it has been hitherto positioned as "cause, function or instrument."

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opposite of power, Franz Fanon's claim that violence is the ultimate cathartic' or Rene Girard's argument that violence is generative of human societies. Yet, the complaints of inadequacy cited above ar made despite the existence of this literature.
It strikes me, then, that this general dissatisfaction with the existing conceptual/theoretical space available for violence, could point perhaps not to the lack of literature on violence, but to the lack of canonical literature on violence.
These are, of course, two quite different intellectual fields. Two very different absences. A canonical literature on violence would be a set of inter-referential texts that would be unified through debates about an agreed upon category: "violence." This would be an archive that has to be moved through before serious statements on the subject can be made. An intellectual field that would have to be navigated before new projects could commence. In the anthropology of violence, then, there is no such canon. That is to say there is an absence of battlefields in the landscape of the anthropology of violence -- sites of argument, debate and cumulation so familiar for the categories of caste, kinship, or ritual. Sothere is not a canonical literature on violence that can be operated from within, or critiqued from without. But if indeed there is such a lack, it shall not be for long. For as I have just suggested, the anthropology of violence is in fact expanding rapidly; soon there will be an identifiable literature that will be required to informany serious addition to that very literature. In fact, it may well be argued that such a canonical field is just emerging. For example, a very recent, insightful essay by Arjun Appadurai draws together a
Hannah Arendt, On Violence, (New York, Harcourt Brace) 1969.
Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, (New York, Grove Press) 1963.
Rene Girard, Violence and the Sacred, (Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press) 1979/1993.

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set of ethnographic texts, -- by Veena Das, Liisa Malkki and David Sutton - to think through the anthropology of 'extreme violence." Appadurai's suggestion, if I have grasped him correctly, is that these texts, collectively, help illuminate for him the problem of violence. If so, then it could well be argued, in turn, that the unified visibility of these texts to Appadurai's anthropological eye points to the emergence of a canonical literature on violence, which, for example, could be made up by a set of texts that include or are parallel to the texts cited.
My question is simply this: what are the conditions that make this emergent canon possible? Let me answer first, with the most limited, logically apparent answer possible. A canonical literature must be simultaneous with its object: if violence does not exist as an agreed upon object, then its literature would be diffuse. If "violence" as an object is gaining cognitive visibility now, then it is indeed possible that its literature will take on canonical status. If so, the question I began with now gains depth. In summary, it is this: what are the conditions of possibility and analytical qualities of this category "violence" that emerges now as a canonizable objectin anthropology?
See Arjun Appadurai "Life After Primordialism," in Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization, (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press) 1996:155 & ft.4, 203. The texts ih question are, Veena Das' Mirrors of Violence: Communities, Riots and Survivors in South Asia, (Delhi, Oxford University Press) 1990, and Critical Events: Anthropological Perspectives on Comtemporary India, (Delhi: Oxford - University Press) 1995; Liisa Malkki's Purity and Exile: Violence, Memory, and National Cosmology amoung Hutu Refugees in Tanzania, (Chicago, University of Chicago Press) 1995, and David Sutton's "Consuming Counter-Revolution: The Ritual and Culture of Cannibalism in Wuxan, Guanxi, China, May to June 1968," Comparative. Studies in Society and History 37(1): 136-72. Earlier attempts at the constitution of such a canon would include Veena Das's "Violence, Victimhood, and the Language of Silence," (with Ashis Nandy) in The Word and the World Fantasy, Symbol and Record, Veena Das (ed.) (Delhi, Sage) 1986, which provides a three-fold anthropological genealogy of violence through "sacrifice", "vivisection" and the "feud."

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The anthropology of Sri Lanka is, beyond any doubt, an ideal
site from which to answer this question. There has emerged in recent years a sophisticated anthropology of violence in the Sri Lankanist literature, so much so that it would be fair to say that the anthropology of Sri Lanka is now dominated by the category of violence. A brief glance will delineate the breadth of this field: two monographs by Tambiah, one by Kapferer and a collection of essays by Daniel on the one hand, and important articles by Obeyesekere, Roberts, Spencer, and Kanapathipillai on the other, are only the major landmarks in a vast and growing literature." If in fact, a canonical literature on the
Both S. J. Tambiah's Sri Lanka. Ethnic Fratricide and the Dismantling of Democracy, (Chicago, University of Chicago Press) 1986, Buddhism Betrayed? Religion, Politics and Violence in SriLanka, (Chicago, University of Chicago Press) 1992 and Bruce Kapferer's Legends of People, Myths of State. Violence, Intolerance, and Political Culture in SriLanka and Australia,(Washington, Smithsonian Institution Press) 1988 are extremely influential. Gananath Obeyesekere's articles"The Origins and Institutionalization of Political Violence," in Sri Lanka in Crisis and Change, James Manor (ed.) (New York, St.Martin's Press) 1984, A Meditation on Conscience, Occasional Papers, (Colombo, Social Scientists' Association) 1988 and the more recent"Buddhism, Nationhood, and Cultural Identity: A Question of Fundamentals," in Fundamentalism Comprehended, Martin Marty & Scott Appleby (ed.), (Chicago, The University of Chicago Press) 1995, make adistinguished contribution to the literature. Michael Robertsoffersonepowerfulessayon"1983: in "The Agony and the Ecstasy ofa Pogrom: Southern Lanka, July 1983" but the entire collection which contains this article, Exploring Confrontation --Sri Lanka. Politics, Culture and History, (Reading, Harwood Academic Publishers) 1996, is concerned with violence. Jonathan Spencer's views on the subjectarein"Collective Violence and Everyday Practice in Sri Lanka," in Modern Asian Studies, 24(3), 1990:603-623, and also in his monograph A Sinhala Village in a Time of Trouble: Politics and Change in Rural Sri Lanka, (Delhi, Oxford University Press). Walli Kanapathipillai's workisrepresentedin"July 1983: The Survivor's Experience" in Mirrors of Violence: Communities, Riots and Survivors in South Asia, Veena Das ed., (Delhi, Oxford University Press) 1990, and "The Survivor Ten Years after the Riots,"paper presented at the conference, July '83: Ten Years After, International Centre for Ethnic Studies, ColomboJuly 1993, while SasankaPerera's collection, Living with Torturers and Other Essays of intervention: Sri Lankan Society, Culture and Politics in Perspective, (Colombo, International Centerfor Ethnic Studies) 1994 is a prelude to ongoing work. This, as it turns out is but a small sampling. Tobe added to this listis the work of Malathide Alwis, Janide Silva, Purnakade Silva, Patricia Lawrence, Jagath Senaratne, Yuvi Thangaraja, Terese Ondadenwingaad. A representative cross-section of such work was presented at the Expert Meetingon Aspects of Violence in Sri Lanka, held at the Centre for Asian Studies, Amsterdam, The Netherlands in June 1995.

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anthropology of violence is to emerge in general, the Sri Lankanist accounts will undoubtedly make up some part of it. My specific formulation of the general question, then, becomes this: how does "violence" emerge as a problem for the anthropology of Sri Lanka? First the simple, chronological answer: it happens after "1983." By 1983' I mean, of course, in one sense the massive event of violence that took place in urban Sri Lanka between Sunday 24 July and Friday 29 July 1983. During this time, broadly put, urban and suburban working and lower middle class Sinhala men attacked the bodies, spaces and commodities of Tamils of all classes. Measured in conventional categories of capital, which are usually the most easily available in our readings of such events, the impact of this event was extra-ordinary: deaths in thousands, economic cost in billions. But such a description and attendantanalysis, though important by way of orientation, hardly begins to address the extraordinary significance of the event, which is also signaled in the concatenated form, 1983', that I use here. In fact it is my claim that "1983' is a crucial punctuation point in the modern history of Sri Lanka, and I believe the profound significance of this moment is yet to be fully grasped.
Firstly, "1983' is a clear historical marker in the anthropology of Sri Lanka. Work on violence is produced, in very large part, after "1983': violence was not a dominant category in Sri Lankanist anthropology before that event. "1983' marks a break in the
然 The political economy of the event, it has been argued in the most complex work available, is to be seen in relation to the undercapitalization of a Sinhala entrepreneurial class, in contrast to their Tamil counterparts, in the post-1977, monetarist regime. Such uneven capitalization, it is argued, provided structural conditions of possibility for the event. While I find such accounts important and useful, I shall not evaluate them in the course of my argument here. See Newton Gunasinghe, "The Open Economy and its Impact on Ethnic Relations in Sri Lanka," in Sri Lanka: The Ethnic Conflict -- Myths, Realities and Perspectives, Committee for Rational Development (ed.) (Delhi, Navrang) and Sunil Bastian "Political Economy of Ethnic Violence in Sri Lanka: The July 1983 Riots," in Das (ed.), 1990.

"Violence' as an Analyticial Problem: Sri Lankanist Anthropology. After July, '83. 13
anthropological terrain of Lanka, after which a new anthropological object is inaugurated. Furthermore, this new category then enables and authorizes new investigations into other older categories of Sri Lankan anthropology, that are not in and of themselves thought to be intertwined with violence. The events of July 1983, I suggest, are both historical and conceptual conditions of possibility of the contemporary Sri Lankan anthropologies of violence.”
To make my claims about these twin conditions clearer, let me offer a set of illustrative examples. To do this I turn to two central texts in the new Sri Lankan anthropology of violence I have alluded to. S. J. Tambiah's Sri Lanka. Ethnic Fratricide and the Dismantling of Democracy,' written soon after '1983', and Buddhism Betrayed? Religion, Politics and Violence in Sri Lanka,' written in the years after. They are both, taken separately, enormously influential texts in their field. Taken together, in my experience, their professional readership and authority are unmatched. There can be no better place to start an examination of '1983" as both a historical and conceptual condition of possibility of an anthropology.
The first volume is written less than an year after the riots, and its central question, which is posed after a lyrical description of Sri Lanka and Sri Lankans, is this: "How could such people and such a blessed island be capable of the horrendous riots that exploded in...1983?"'The second stages itself in relation to a question posed in very similar form: "If Buddhism preaches nonviolence, why is there so much political violence in Sri Lanka today?" It is worthconsidering carefully both the similarities and differences of the two questions. Both questions operate by positioning violence as a contradiction or dilemma. The first half of the contrast, in the first question, uses the
I understand these conditions as related and intertwined, yet distinct. I am grateful to Dipesh Chakrabarty for pointing out this distinction to me in a close reading of an earlier version of this paper.
10 Tambiah, 1986.
11 Tambiah, 1992.
12 Tambiah, 1986: 1.
13 Tambiah, 1992:1.

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familiar image of "luxuriant vegetation and striking scenery" of the island and the "warmth, hospitality and good humor" of its people. The first half of the contrast in the second question is the more scholarly, but yet still quite familiar idea of a non-violent Buddhism. The second half of the contrast or paradox in both questions is the emergence of violence in Lanka. First "1983'specifically, and then second, 'violence' more generally. I shall return to these problematiques and other parallel ones before the end of this chapter. At this point, it suffices to note that these problematiques operate through a contrast, contradiction or dilemma, where violence is one half of the paradox. My point is this: this problematique -- regardless of its specificities -- comes into being after '1983."
Note the difference between the two questions. The first question is concerned exclusively with "1983', and the second with violence in general. There is a movement between the two questions, from the specific to the abstract. This illustrates my point: as soon as "1983' is studied for its own sake, it becomes a condition of possibility for the investigation of violence in general. Or in other words, the first question is a specific version of the second; the second question encompasses the first. By 1992, in Tambiah's work as in others, 'violence," as a particular kind of problematique, had arrived.
It would be a mistake to naturalize or render transparent the emergence of this problematique after '1983. Such an argument, for the sake of debate, would go as follows: There was enormous violence in Sri Lanka in July '83, and a civil war ensued; surely there is nothing. remarkable about the study of violence in such a context. In short, we study violence because it is there. -- This seems to me to be a rather positivist response, and as such, is fraught with the problems of that approach. As a contextually located way of interrupting that positivism, let me ask a simple counter-question. It is this: why did not minoritydirected civilian violence in 1958, in many ways comparable to 1983', draw anthropological attention? It is not of course that there were no anthropologists in Sri Lanka at the time, the fifties were surely an extraordinary time for the anthropology of Lanka. In fact S.J. Tambiah
' * Tambiah, 1986:1.

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himself recounts how he was confronted with the "ethnic riots" of 1958 duringfield work in the Gal Oya valley. Yet this event did not emerge as an object of inquiry for him or his senior colleagues. In addition a major youth insurrection in 1971 occasioned only limited anthropological scholarship.' And in any event the question of "violence" as such did not emerge, anthropologically, in either context. Remember that from our present vantage point it is undeniable that the massive atrocities that surrounded those events were well known soon after they took place. Yet, they were not anthropologized through the object of 'violence." But "1983' is different. That is to say, it is anthropologized differently. It produces a break in the ethnographic archive by reaching anthropological cognizance, and in so doing, makes available to that project violence as a general object of inquiry. It is this break produced by "1983' that I wish to call a "historical condition of possibility' for the anthropology of violence.
That is not the only effect of this break, for "1983' is also a 'conceptual condition of possibility' for the anthropology of violence. The new problematique that encompasses Sri Lankan violence, framed as a paradox, is not only concerned with describing and grasping the presence of violence anthropologically in the ethnographic present or the historical archive. The point, as it turns out, is to re-conceptualize that ethnographic present and historical archive, so that the presence of violence, now visible as never before, can be accommodated in its new visibility. "1983' becomes, therefore, a conceptual condition of possibility for a new Sri Lankan anthropology. After that event received knowledge about Sri Lanka can be re-examined, a new view
15 Tambiah, 1986: 137.
' The disciplinary literature, as opposed to explicitly leftist accounts, is concerned, in the main, with the question of social inequality raised by the insurrection. The caste composition of the insurgents becomes the central site for this problematique. See Gananath Obeyesekere, "Some Comments on the Social Background of the April 1971 Insurgency in Sri Lanka (Ceylon)," in Journal of Asian Studies 33, 1974:367-84, and Janice Jiggins, Caste and Family in the Politics of the Sinhalese, 1947-1976, (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press) 1979.

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of the past, present and even the future can be constructed. So, for example, the entire gamut of inter-ethnic relations can be now reexamined in light of this massive event of ethnic violence. Returning to my illustrative example of Tambiah's text," we see that this intervention, even though staged specifically around the riot and devoted in large measure to describing and analyzing its peculiarities, also becomes an occasion for an intervention in a much larger field; "1983' becomes a conceptual condition of possibility for the investigation of Sri Lankan inter-ethnic relations in general. In this vein, Tambiah writes in the preface to the text, "As I labored over this essay I became increasingly confident that I was in fact correctly comprehending, both theoretically and scientifically, the historical movement of Sinhalese-Tamil relations as a whole...." Let not the remarkably sweeping nature of this claim distract from my own rather more modest point: the emergence of '1983" as an object of investigation has opened up questions about inter-ethnic relations and their historicity that are not, in and of themselves, about "1983." This logical movement is to be compared with a similar one in the opening pages of Tambiah's next intervention: "The main question I shall probe; is the extent to which and the manner in which, Buddhism, as a "religion" espoused by Sri Lankans of the late nineteenth century and the twentieth century, has contributed to the current ethnic conflict and collective violence in Sri Lanka."' Note once again that the question of "Buddhism," which once had its own anthropological and historical narrative,' is now inserted into the problematique of the emergence of violence. This makes' 1983'a conceptual condition of possibility for Sri Lankan anthropologies of violence. In summary,
17 Tambiah, 1986.
* Tambiah, 1986:ix.
19 Tambiah, 1992:2.
The foundational texts in this field, are in turn, Obeyesekere's "The Great Tradition and the Little in the Perspective of Sinhalese Buddhism," in Journal of Asian Studies, 22(2), 1963:139-153 and Kithsiri Malalgoda's Buddhism in Sinhalese Society, 1750-1900, (Berkeley, University of California Press) 1976.

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then, "1983'authorizes investigations of violence, and furthermore, in the name of violence, enables vast new anthropological histories and new ethnographic projects infields and archives once thought to have been exhausted or closed.’ s
Why so? The question is this: If it is now clear that this location of '1983' as a condition of possibility binds the new anthropology of violence in an analytical unity, it is by no means clear why this should be so. What is it about "1983' that allows it to be the condition of possibility of these multiple intellectual interventions? An attemptat a full and convincing answer to this question will take us on a detour. Its object will be to locate '1983' in the narrativization of Sri Lanka's modernity. My suggestion is this: to understand the significance of "1983' for anthropological projects, we need to find the place, and by this I mean the political place, of that event in the narrative of Sri Lanka's recent past, or put more specifically, the narrativization of her modernity. This narrative of modernity, that is to say, the narrativization of the possibility of Lanka's modernity - since colonies and post-colonies are never always already modern -- was not, of
In this vein, note that previous events, such as '1958' and "1971' are now available for anthropologies of violence. In fact, one such event, the 'anti-Moor' riots of 1915, distinguished from others because it has a dense written archive associated with it, has now emerged as an object in the anthropology of violence in Tambiah's latest work. See S. J. Tambiah, Leveling Crowds: Ethnonationalist Conflicts and Collective Violence in South Asia, (Berkeley, University of Califonia Press), 1996:36-81. This event previously was the provenance of historians who debated questions of class, caste and community - but not 'violence' -- within its contours. Michael Roberts too, has offered such a reworking of previous events of 'violence." The 1915 riots are addressed in "Noise as Cultural Strugglè: Tom-Tom Beating, the British and Communal Disturbances in Sri Lanka, 1880s-1930s" in Das (ed.), 1990, which is reworked and extended in "The Imperialism of Silence Under the British Raj: Arresting the Drum" in Roberts, 1996:149-181. Additionally "The Asokan Persona and Its Reproduction in Modern Times," in Roberts, 1996:95 and passim, offers a comparative commentary on eight rebellions and riots.

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course, conventionally the preserve of anthropology. That narrative, rather, was constructed and maintained by administrative historians and political scientists, or those concerned with the problems and possibilities of governance.
Therefore, the location of "1983' in that narrative will require a brief and temporary move out of anthropology into those other discourses. In summary, the claim I wish to argue, in relation to this narrative is this: "1983' is where the possibility of modernity, the dream of every new nation, turned into a nightmare. That is its central significance. If the point of origin of the possibility of a Lankan political modernity is marked, historically, by the Colebrooke-Cameron reforms of 1832, then the violence of 1983 marks, in this very field, the possibility of its impossibility. Not simply its impossibility, but the possibility of the impossibility of political modernity. Inow turn to a defense of this claim that will take us through a signposting of the scholarly narration of Lanka's progress to modernity through its ups and downs, twists and turns to the punctuation point of 1983."
Sri Lanka of the 1950s, then the new nation of 'Ceylon,' was the example that warmed liberal hearts everywhere, with its happy combination of democracy, development and (re)-distribution. It was in these times that a first generation of professional scholars, properly trained and equipped in academia and concerned with the subject of Sri Lanka, came into their own. It is here, among the writings of these intellectuals, both Sri Lankan and non-Sri Lankan, that the postcolonial narrative of the nation's political modernity is to be found.
G.C. Mendis' "Introduction" to The Colebrooke-Cameron Papers' must be a classic in this regard. In focusing on the administrative reforms of an early moment of British rule Mendis produces a textured, complex and sustained account of the historiographic wisdom of his generation: the possibility of Ceylon's modernity -- political, economic, and social -- was the work of the
G.C. Mendis "Introduction" in The Colebrooke-Cameron Papers: Documents on British Colonial Policy in Ceylon, 1796-1833, 2 vols. selected and edited by G.C. Mendis, (London, Oxford University Press) 1956.

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reforms of 1832. It is a story that had been told before, where "1832" appears as a break, a rupture or watershed in a longer story of intricate twists and turns of European empires, appearing not just as a year or a date -- but as a marker which bounds an era, after which, as David Scott has recently remarked "modernity, a mere glimmer until...then)... burst in upon the colony."'
But Mendis' work of 1956, is also different from accounts that were written before. "The Introduction" is a work of the 1950s, written not only at a time of great intellectual flower in Lanka, but also, and more importantly, written after the transfer of power from London to Colombo in 1948, after empire had receded and independence was at hand. This, it is worth emphasizing, is a postcolonial text. Not merely because it is written chronologically after independence but because it is conceptually located in the wake of de-colonization. So in Mendis' narrative the promise of modernity and progress that the reforms of 1832 inaugurate is in fact fulfilled, in a neat, self-assured teleology, by the attainment of the condition of independence. Throughout the text Mendis is explicit about this postcolonial context within which the Colebrooke-Cameron reforms become intelligible to him. "The...reforms," he writes, "are of importance also as a prelude to the study of the developments that took place in Ceylon in recent years which aroused so much interest in the colonial world and outside...," referring, of course, to the country's smooth transition to independence. But this independence is a product, not of argument, struggle or conflict, but of advancement from the years of reforms to the self-evident modernity of the present. Ceylon, Mendis wants to stress was, "conferred...a constitution...with a
David Scott, "Colonial Governmentalities", Social Text, 1995,43:206. My understanding of the reforms is indebted to Scott's important essay. See also Vijaya Samaraweera, "The Colebrooke-Cameron Reforms," in University of Ceylon History of Ceylon, vol. 3, (Colombo, University of Ceylon Press) 1973. For a location of Mendis' work, see Kingsley M. de Silva, "History and Historians in Twentieth Century Sri Lanka -- The G.C. Mendis Memorial Lecture," Sri Lanka Journal of the Social Sciences, 1978, 1:1-12.

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greater degree of autonomy than any British Dominion legally had in 1930 and more advanced than that of any colony under the British." And furthermore, Mendis points to the crowning moment of it all, the announcement of "immediate steps...to confer upon Ceylon fully responsible status within the British Commonwealth of Nations." All this is, for Mendis, related to the reforms of 1832. "These developments," he writes, referring to Commonwealth status, "are no doubt due to numerous causes. But it cannot be denied that they are partly at least the logical outcome of the trend of British rule in Ceylon....British rule from time to time was...directed...towards modernizing the administration and the economic system and towards producing in the people a measure of political capacity which would fit them to be entrusted some day with their own government." And the central such colonial intervention was the reforms of 1832: "of these attempts which led finally to the recent advances none was more remarkable than the Colebrooke-Cameron Reforms." It is, then, given these claims, that Mendis can proclaim triumphantly at the end of his introduction that "the reforms...turned the course of the history of Ceylon in a modern direction and enabled Ceylon to fall in line in many ways with modern developments and ultimately to attain to the stage to which it has risen today as equal member of the commonwealth of nations."'
Mendis was not alone in making this argument about the successful tutelage of Ceylon under British rule. In fact the idea that Ceylon had attained a condition of remarkable modernity, in relation to its peers, through and because of the Anglo-imperial project was common in the dominant conservative Ceylonese intellectual circles of the time. As Kingsley de Silva demonstrates in his essay on this idea, which he calls that of "Ceylon, the Model Colony", powerful
' All preceding quotations are from Mendis, 1956:x-xi.
2o Mendis, 1956:lxiv.
See Kingsley M. de Silva, "The Model Colony': Reflections on the Transfer of Power in Sri Lanka," in The State of South Asia: Problems of Integration, A.Jeyeratnam Wilson and Dennis Dalton (ed.), London: Hirst, 1982:79, passim.

"Violence' as an Analyticial Problem: SriLankanist Anthropology After July, '83 21
conservative nationalists of the time, Senanayake and Goonetilleke, amplify and mobilize this very idea with great tactical skill in independence negotiations with Whitehall. But clearly the idea was not just a "clever public relations exercise;" it had greater depth and resonance than that. De Silva puts it this way: "the concept of Ceylon, a model colony', owed much of its effectiveness to the fact that...there was enough of a corresponding reality to sustain a genuine belief in it..."27
I have dwelt on this idea to mark not only its crucial place in the narrativization of Sri Lanka's modernity, but also to emphasize its extraordinary contours and texture. Note that this idea of modernity does not depend on an allied idea of the indigenous with a capital I, or of culture with a capital C. The nation is independent not because its inner core has always been worthy of self-administration, not because of its long tradition of indigenous kingship, not because the contours of its ancient customs, manners, habits, indeed all its culture, had always been compatible with the modern. Of course, such arguments and ideas were current at the time; they had originated in the mid-nineteenth century together with archaeological discoveries of medieval ruined cities and translations of medieval texts. Yet these ideas were
' de Silva, 1982:79. I do not, myself, make claims about 'reality' here. Rather my argument is that this idea was the dominant idea in conservative intellectual circles of the time. Indeed, this idea has a much longer colonial history: it is manifest through the writings of British colonial officials separated by a hundred years. I have in mind Sir James Emerson Tennent's Ceylon: An Account of the Island, Physical, Historical and Topographical, 2 vols., (London, Longman, Green, Longman and Roberts) 1859 and Sir Charles Jeffries' Ceylon: The Path to Independence, (London, Pall Mall) 1962.
" See, on the important example of Anuradhapura, Elizabeth Nissan "History in the Making: Anuradhapura and the Sinhala Buddhist Nation" in Social Analysis, 1989, 25:64-77. My own account is in "Authorizing History, Ordering Land: The Conquest of Anuradhpura," in Unmaking the Nation: The Politics of Identity and History in Modern Sri Lanka, Pradeep Jeganathan & Qadri Ismail (ed.) (Colombo, Social Scientists' Association) 1995.

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associated with anti-establishment nationalists such as the Anagarika Dharmapala, and were not therefore the dominant, conservative ideas that ruled the day.’ And even when they were thought to be legitimate they were relegated to the sphere of 'culture and the arts.' Such ideas of past glory and compatibility with modernity were not, in any event, part of a discourse of political modernity. Rather, the idea of political modernity depended on the idea of the 'model colony'; in this view, progress made towards the modern, enabled by British tutelage which operated against the grain, sought to uplift a people from all that was feudal, primitive and archaic. Hence the importance of the Colebrooke-Cameron reforms of 1832 which were designed to produce the flower of modernity despite a feudal earth. The modernity of Lanka was possible, then, in spite of what she had been, not because of her legacy.
This idea is as remarkable as it is tenuous. If modernity is thought to be a lesson learnt, it may indeed be a lesson forgotten. This soft underbelly of the idea of 'the model colony' is visible even in Mendis' writings, for example in the very text we read earlier. "The results of the reforms," Mendis writes, in a critical passage that precedes one of fulsome praise we read earlier, "would have been more effective had they been in a position to take into account the strength of nationality and tradition or the evolutionary view of life." Then adding a stinger, "they...underestimated the depth of caste prejudice in Ceylon)." But these comments, on what for Mendis was the incompleteness of modernity in the island, despite the reforms, are reticent and muted ones. They only marginally qualify his laudatory
' Of the extensive literature on Dharmapala, what is most relevanthere is Kumari.Jayawardena's early account in The Rise of the Labor Movement in Ceylon, (Durham, Duke University Press) 1972.
For a comprehensive account of such a debate, in relation to the 'ancientness' of Sigiriya, see Malathi de Alwis' "Sexuality in the Field of Vision: the Discursive Clothing of the Sigiriya Frescoes," in Embodied Violence: Communalizing Women's Sexuality in South Asia, Kumari Jayawardena and Malathi de Alwis (ed.), (Delhi, Kali for Women) 1996.
31 Mendis, 1956:lxiv.

"Violence' as an Analyticial Problem: Sri Lankanist Anthropology After July, '83 23
assessment of the reforms of 1832, and the state of modernity in lanka. But note that the very logic of his argument allows for the dream of modernity to be undone as a nightmare.
But it is not undone in the fifties or sixties; the idea of the 'model colony' only gives way to the idea of an exemplary new nation. So much so that a concomitant and rather conventional intellectual division of labor operates: political scientists concern themselves with the constitution, elections, political parties and such -- what might be called the areas of government' -- and anthropologists concentrate on categories such as caste, kinship, and marriage, which required, in Nur Yalman's words, "to leave aside...the lively and important intellectual life of Colombo and Peradeniya, the political repercussions of which) can be felt around the world" for the "small, relatively isolated, traditional communities far from sophisticated centers." His subjects, both animate and inanimate, were located in "the interior of Ceylon." Note, however, that this neat division between political science and anthropology, between government on the one hand and social or cultural organization on the other, is not by any means inevitable. For example, political parties could have been anthropologized throughkin categories or secular political rituals could have been located in relation to 'folk' rituals. But they were not. In fact, Sri Lanka has not seen apolitical anthropology of the conventional sort just because of this reason: the triumph of modernity in the arena of government, and the relegation of anthropology to the 'villages of the interior in these intellectually formative years.
So the idea of the 'model colony' gave way easily to the idea of a 'new nation' that was indeed a model among its peers. This idea was challenged, quite severely, but not undone by anti-Tamil riots in
' Foundational texts would be W. Howard Wriggins, Ceylon: Dilemmas ofa New Nation, (Princeton, Princeton University Press) 1960, Robert Kearney, Communalism and Language in the Politics of Ceylon, (Durham, Duke University Press) 1967.
' Nur Yalman, Under the Bo Tree: Studies in Caste, Kinship, and Marriage in the Interior of Ceylon, (Berkeley, University of California Press) 1967/1971:3, and title.

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1958. The terrain upon which this recuperation of political modernity takes place will certainly illuminate our understanding of 1983 and I therefore turn to the extraordinary crisis of 1958." This was a time when those who mattered waited, breathless, for those institutions and structures of order, so well 'modeled" on the imperial originals, to hold against an upsurge of the archaic or the primitive, in short, the darkest nightmares of the 'interior." For days, cracks appeared and widened in the structures of government and the forces of law and order. But then a heroic figure emerged under the sign of the Queen Herself. Then there was calm as the possibility of modernity was enforced by the forces of civility. Structures of government were recuperated. The authoritative political scientist Howard Wriggins' remarks on the matter are brief, but firm: "After three days of terrifying disorders...the Prime Minister finally made his decision and asked the governor-general to declare a state of emergency. The toll during the days of disorder included an estimated 300-400 killed..." Then comes the huge sigh of relief. "The governor-general then became the effective center of government. The armed forces received orders to shoot if commands were not obeyed.... The troops methodically set about clearing out the trouble spots in the city." If Wriggins' descriptive account only dwells briefly on the nature of the crisis, that was because an earlier account had already explored that question more fully.
Tarzie Vittachi, one of the most influential Sri Lankan journalists of his generation, wrote in 1958 what still stands as the most comprehensive account of the event attempted: Emergency, 1958: The Story of the Ceylon Race Riots. The title of the volume, intended both for a Sri Lankan as well as a global audience, is telling; in it is encapsulated the terrain of discussion of the event for intellectuals such as Vittachi: "1958" was about the declaration of a state of emergency. This was only the second such declaration in post-colonial Lanka, and as such represents a clear moment of crisis in the story of Lanka's modernity.
* Wriggins, 1960:268-9.
Tarzie Vittachi, Emergency, 1958: The Story of the Ceylon Race Riots, (London, Andre Deutch) 1958.

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The story of '1958' becomes the story of its management. The most vivid and memorable image in Vittachi's text is that of the Sri Lankan Governor-General Goonetileke sitting behind a desk with six telephones, two of them cradled at each ear, whispering authoritatively into each one, with his characteristic stutter: "sh..sh.oot". In the months after the crisis of 1958, Vittachi's witty account of the Governor-General's handling of the event becomes the definitive framing of that moment. Every crisis throws up its hero, and Goonetileke could play this part with aplomb. The story of '1958' is then told through a debate about its management by the GovernorGeneral. Was the emergency too harsh? Was press censorship too strict? And, most important of all, was the Governor-General legitimately entitled to have managed the crisis, in the face of the Prime-Minister's inaction? Was all this constitutional? All these are clearly acceptable and familiarquestions in the 'science of government, and professional political scientists enter the lists in the wake of Vittachi. A. Jeyeratnam Wilson's detailed, landmark discussion of these very questions is an example of the development of this problematique." It is, then, through this framing that '1958' becomes easily comprehensible as an acceptable bump on the road in a long journey to modernity.
Twenty five years later, "1983'signifies very differently. T. D. S. A. Dissanayake's volume on the subject occupies a somewhat similar intellectual place to Vittachi's earlier, but yet the framing of the text could not have been more different.' Dissanayake's title
Vittachi, 1958: 70-1. On the fascinating figure of Goonetilleke compare Sir Charles Jeffries' laudatory biography O.E.G.': A Biography of Sir Oliver Ernest Goonetilleke,(London, Pall Mall) 1969, with D.B. Dhanapala's sharp, even caustic, sketch"Oliver Goonetileke" in Among Those Present (Colombo, M.D. Gunasena) 1962.
See A. Jeyeratnam Wilson, "The Governor-General and the State of Emergency, May 1958-March 1959," in the Ceylon Journal of Historical and Social Studies, 1959. 2(2):160-181.
' T.D.S.A. Dissanayake, The Agony of Sri Lanka: An Indepth Account of the Racial Riots of 1983, (Colombo, Swastika) 1983. Note the echo of Vittachi, 1958, in the title.

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"The Agony of Sri Lanka" signals this difference: the image signals a nation writhing and contorting with the pain of its wounds." 1983' could not be troped as an 'emergency' since such a state had been promulgated in the country, nearly continuously since 1971; in effect "1983' could not be troped through its calm, strategic management as was '1958." Even Dissanayake's conservative account, constructed as it is to demonstrate the working of the apparatus of order, can only produce a familiar yet tenuous version of the narrative of repression: scenes of lonely, heroic policemen battling rampaging 'mobs." There is no pause, no break, no possibility of a long sigh of relief when these diffuse acts of heroism finally coalesce under a heroic figure, perhaps murderous but firm, from 'the very top,' to become finally the 'forces of law and order." On the contrary, the very top fiddled this one off. As Dissanayake concedes "one of the tragic features" of the event was that of the army who were of "passive deportment merely looking) on nonchalantly...while fresh violence irrupted." Other accounts, written from positions more critical of the state and its agencies, are nearly unanimous on the virtual absence or lethargy of what was once thought to be a well oiled state apparatus. Of the complex apparatuses that the state might have mobilized, nothing, not the police, nor the army, not even the most elite of all commando regiments, could be relied on.' In these accounts, 1983' is one long moment of violence, that could not be repressed, managed or even contained: in short, the entire apparatus of the institutions of government had cracked open and collapsed. Something exploded in 1983, and it wasn't just another erupting mob." There was rather more to this event than could have been recuperated in yet another re-writing of
*o Dissanayake, 1983:81.
' This 'eye witness account'is exemplary: "...the police and armed forces were most conspicuous by their absence. They either looked the other way or joined in the looting. Several onlookers reported that army men traveling in lorries waved merrily to the looters, who waved back. No action was taken what so ever to disperse the mobs. Not even tear gas was used." See "Sri Lanka's Week of Shame: an Eyewitness Account," in Race & Class, 1984, (xxvi)i:41.

"Violence' as an Analyticial Problem: Sri Lankanist Anthropology After July, '83 27
the "prose of counter-insurgency" that Vittachi managed so well. 1983 was the nightmare of the model colony and new nation. Not only did the organs of order and repression fail in the crisis, but with and through that failure was visible as never before, on the streets for all to see, what the post-colony thought it had left behind in the museums of the primitive and archaic: vicious primordiality. It was as if the cover of "iron frames," and the 'tall leaders," so central to political analysis, was blown, leaving visible and gaping that dark, secret, uncivilized underbelly of Lanka. These were G.C. Mendis' little reservations, just an aside in the fifties, come back to rule the roost in the eighties. Those colonial lessons, inaugurated in 1832 and mimicked so well, had turned out to be just so much superficial polish. "1983' represents in the narrative of Lankan modernity that moment when we wondered if "they" - those long forgotten imperial nay-sayershad been right, and "we" -- post-colonial citizens -- had been wrong. When we wondered if we were, by any stretch of our imagination, civilized at all. This, I want to suggest, is a moment of great profundity.
As far as the political scientists and the administrative historians went, a categorical crisis was at hand. Dissanayake's trope of "agony" is a last-ditch effort to comprehend'1983': it is a symptom of this crisis. Nor is he alone here, other tropes of incomprehensibility abound. Similar images are frequent in the titles of immediate, parallel interventions, with "anguish", "shame" and "holocaust" being among the commonest.' July 1983, taken as a totality, and positioned in a
" The phrase is, of course, from Ranajit Guha's classic essay, "The Prose of Counter-Insurgency" in Subaltern Studies 2, Ranajit Guha (ed.), (Delhi, Oxford University Press), 1983: 1-44, but this section of my account is especially indebted to Gyanendra Pandey's work that builds on Guha's essay. See "The Prose of Otherness" in Subaltern Studies 8 (Essays in Honour of Ranajit Guha), David Arnold & David Hardiman (eds.), Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1994.
' Take for example: Canaganayagam Suriyakumaran, The Anguish of '83" : Sri Lanka's Ethnic Crisis and the Way Out, 1983-1990, (Colombo, K.V.G. de Silva) 1990; "Sri Lanka's Week of Shame: an Eyewitness Account," in Race & Class, 1984, (xxvi)i:41 and L. Piyadasa, Sri Lanka: the Holocaust and After, (London, Marram Books) 1984.

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narrative of Lanka's possible modernity, is distinguished by its incomprehensibility to political and administrative discourses. It is not just another riot. The event does not have a political name and place - such as insurrection, anti-colonial uprising, repressive excess or emergency, - as other comparable events have in those discourses. "1983' marked the end of the authority of these scholarly discourses of government in relation to Lanka. They may not have gone out, but they were down; their ability to define the categories and terrain of debate receded. No longer did questions of constitutional traditions, forms of electoral representations, bureaucratic structures or legislative bodies matter, as they did before. The time when political and administrative institutions in Lanka received attention as some version of older originals in the imperial metropolis was over. Those discourses were profoundly interrupted by "1983."
Into the breach rode anthropology. Or at least anthropologists. That's not primordiality, they cried. That's culture, they said, and we have been studying it for years in the interior. Since the crisis of "1983' was a crisis in the institutions and structures of modernity it is then conversely logical that anthropology with its privileged access to the non-modern, the specific, the local and the indigenous, that is to say 'culture', would be the discipline of that moment. At first pass this might have seemed a straightforward anthropological intervention. After all it only required a move from country to city, from the little community of the village to the great community of the city. The fundamental work of that anthropology would be the work of all anthropology: to make intelligible in terms of Enlightenment reason the specific culture of Lanka.
The most elegant example of this discursive shift I can point to is James Manor's 1984 collection.' The first part of the book, entitled "Sri Lanka in Change -- Late 1982" consists of six essays, all written by administrative historians and political scientists. The essays are fundamentally concerned with the conduct of presidential elections, and a referendum that was held in 1982, the constitutional changes
James Manor (ed.) Sri Lanka in Crisis and Change, (New York, St. Martin's Press) 1984.

"Violence' as an Analyticial Problem: Sri Lankanist Anthropology After July, '83 29
that preceded these elections and its significance for future legislative composition. The essays worry about "creeping authoritarianism" in these electoral events, or more specifically, repressive excesses on the part of the regime and state in the pursuance of electoral objectives. Yet none of the essays use "violence" in their titles; there is no need to since the excesses in point are well contained within the structures of government. Not, of course, that any of this is unusual in a text cdited by Manor, himself known, at the time, for his essay on the kind and quality of democratic political structures in Sri Lanka.' What is remarkable, to my mind, is part two of the book which is called "Sri Lanka in Crisis - Mid-1983." Here we have a second set of six essays, not conceptually linked to the first set, all on '1983. Five of them use the word "violence" in their titles; all six are by anthropologists. I rest my case.
Foregrounded in this way, Anthropology was then challenged to fashion an analytic for the event. The troping of the totality 1983' by anthropologists in Manor's volume, for example, as the "perpetration of evil," is little different from Tambiah's an year later: "horrendous." These tropes indicate that even though anthropology is ready and willing to commence an investigation, 1983' interrupts, leaving it stunned and confused. In fact in Tambiah's first monograph we find a description of the riot - which stretches for a whole paper, with all its twists and turns, and ins and outs - entitled, simply: "The Horror
" This essay is the key disciplinary contribution in the pre-1983, post1971 period. See James Manor, "The Failure of Political Integration in Sri Lanka (Ceylon)", in Journal of Commonwealth and Comparative Politics, 1979, viii (1):21-46. His authoritative biography, The Expedient Utopian: Bandaranaike and Ceylon, (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press) 1990, was yet to be published.
' "I found myself desperately trying to make sense of that familiar paradox -- the perpetration of evil by apparently nice, decent people," Jonathan Spencer, "Popular Perceptions of the Violence: A Provincial View," in James Manor (ed.), 1984:187.
* Tambiah, 1986: 1.

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Story." The exclamation, "the horror, the horror, ofit all," is a familiar one at the edges and cracks of the modern. And as a trope of 1983' it joins others of that ilk: "agony" and "anguish." "1983' is incomprehensible to the discourses of anthropology, as it was to the discourses of government and administrative history. "Horror", I suggest, is the name of that incomprehensibility.
The anthropological intervention, however, was not attenuated by incomprehensibility, rather it was catalyzed by it. Perhaps this move, this effervescence of knowledge - given incomprehensibility - has a historical analogy, in the logic of modernity. I have in mind Michel Foucault's suggestion, that "the intervention of psychiatry in the field of law occurs in the early nineteenth century, in the face of crimes that were, and continued to be, incomprehensible in law. It is that very incomprehensibility then, that allows for the production of a range of psychiatric categories, the central of which, "homicidal monomania," then provides an analytic of comprehension for great crimes "without reason." And so, analogously, the intervention of Sri Lankanist anthropology, given the political incomprehensibility of an event, is to be seen in relation to the intervention of psychiatry in the field of law. Just as psychiatry produces the analytic of homicidal monomania in the face of horror, so does anthropology produce an analytic in the face of the horrors of '1983'. The master category that these analytics stand under, or the category that horroris meticulously transformed into through anthropological intervention, is 'violence." As an aside, let me be clear that I do not argue that "horror' must be, necessarily, a trope of incomprehensibility. While an analytic of horror could well be possible, in another configuration of knowledge, such a theoretical object does not emerge in the texts under consideration. Rather, in the rhetorical economy of these texts horror remains an untheorized trope. Nor is this trope itself exclusive to the construction of 1983." In Vittachi's account of '1958' also the trope emerges, and
“7 Tambiah, 1986:19-33.
** Michel Foucault, "The Dangerous Individual" in Michel Foucault -- Politics, Philosophy, Culture, Lawrence Kritzman (ed.), Alan Sheridan (trans.), (New York, Routledge) 1988: 128.132,135.

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is explicitly visible in the chapter"The Horror Spreads." However, as we have already seen, Vittachi's account can move quickly to its two defining chapters "General Oliver (Goonetilekel" and "Governor's Rule." In sum, then, in 1958'horror' is transformed into a problem of 'order, in 1983, given the crisis in the apparatus of order, it becomes an analytic of 'violence." That is how "violence" comes into being. It is not, of course, that Sri Lankan anthropologists did not use the category violence prior to 1983. They did but the usage was rare. In fact the category of violence did have a certain place in the anthropology of Lanka before "1983." But it did not have the density, the authority and the weight it now does; there was not an "anthropology of violence" before "1983. There now is. ኦ ሩ
Let me pause to consolidate my argument here. "1983' is a moment of incomprehensibility in the narration of Lanka's modernity.
' See Vittachi, 1958:44-50;68-71 and 75-77.
For example the category does not make the index of Obeyesekere's masterful study, The Cult of the Goddess Pattini, (Chicago, University of Chicago Press) 1984.
* Joke Schrijvers' Mother's for Life: Motherhood and Marginalization in the North Central Province of Sri Lanka, (Delft, Eburon) 1985, is an interesting example that marks that'other' place of violence precisely, because it is located in a completely different political narrative from the texts I am reading here. Her work is a product of an important feminist intervention that names 'domestic conflict as violence. I note, from the point of view of my argument, that the categorical emergence. of violence is predicated, once again, on a political narrative. This is what enables Schrijvers' reevaluation of Obeyesekere's pioneering "Pregnancy Craving (Dola-Duka) in Relation to Social Structure and Personality in a Sinhalese Village," American Anthropologist, vol.65, no. 2, April 1963, as a foundational (professional) ethnographic account of domestic violence. This is indeed apt, but Obeyesekere's original account, is not, however, staged around the category of 'violence'-- and was not read as such by politically aware intellectuals at the time
of its publication. It now is. I am grateful to Malathide Alwis, Kumari
Jayawardena, Gananath Obeyesekere andJoke Schrijvers for discussing this point with me in different contexts.

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Twin elements make up the equation here: the perceived collapse of the state, and the concomitant rise of cultural passions. The rise of "cultural passions" in the face of a firm and decisive state would not have been a crisis of modernity: this, put another way, is "1958." The collapse of the state, in the face of a modern or modernizing movement such as a left insurrection, led by workers or peasants, would not have been a crisis. This, put another way, is "1971." The crisis of modernity that is '1983' is also an epistemological crisis for the disciplines. Horror (agony/shame) is (are) the name(s) of that incomprehensibility, in both Political Science and Anthropology. Seeing its major object of inquiry, the practices of government, no longer apprehensible to its categories, Political Science gives way to Anthropology. Specially armed by its privileged access to culture, anthropology sets to work to transform its incomprehensibility into an analytical category. "Violence" is the analytic of that incomprehensibility. The anthropology of violence, in other words, is a development of this analytic. I have not argued, and indeed my argument does not imply, that an anthropology that arises out of a moment of incomprehensibility is in itself flawed or incorrect. Rather my efforts so far have been to answer one half of the question with which I began: what are the conditions of possibility of 'violence' as an anthropological category? My answer must now be clear: that condition of possibility is incomprehensibility. Political incomprehensibility.
This is a crucial point that must be consolidated from this argument before I proceed further. "Violence" in this anthropology begins as a problem in politics. The crisis in the narrative of modernity is also a political crisis. Concomitantly, the object of violence, as it emerges in this anthropology, is a response to this crisis which is a loss of the political. As such, "violence" as an anthropological category has an irreducible political content which it acquires negatively through a navigation of political incomprehensibility. It is not, of course, my argument that 'violence' is reducible to its political content. It is rather a conceptual response to a political crisis, and as such has particular contours of its own. An investigation of these contours takes me to the second half of the question I began with: what are the analytical

"Violence' as an Analyticial Problem: Sri Lankanist Anthropology After July, '83 33
qualities of the category 'violence'? I shall return to Sri Lankanist anthropology to answer that question, but as I do so it will become increasingly apparent that conditions of possibility and analytical qualities have much in common and can not be completely divorced from each other. As such, I will have occasion to return to the first half of the argument consolidated here, even as I traverse the second half.
I return to Tambiah's problematization of 'violence." Two interventions are available, as I have indicated, the second more thorough than the first.' "Violence', in Tambiah's work in relation to Sri Lanka, is inserted, as I have already suggested, into other sets of anthropological categories. To grasp that field in its entirety, I will produce two interrelated intellectual genealogies: the first of 'nationalism'/'ethnicity' and the second of 'religion." By this move, I intend to re-locate Tambiah's problematique fromits usual metropolitan positioning as a clear-eyed, pedagogic corrective to popular"zealotry" in Lanka, to a rather more suitable position of a supplement to a sophisticated, on-going set of Sri Lankan intellectual debates that predates it by many years.
Nationalism emerges as a problematique for an important strand of Sri Lankan scholarship in the late sixties. This move, more than a decade after Mendis, is indicative of a profound conceptual shiftinintellectual terrain. It is not, of course, the question of modernity, or its possibility that is problematized; that question, as I have already argued, comes much later in relation to "1983." Rather what is called into question in the late sixties is the 'nation." In Mendis' formulation of the early 1950s the "nation" is fully formed, and united, and therefore not itself available for problematization. A decade later another generation is not so sure; the question it put forth was this: has the
Tambiah, 1986; 1992.
' For such an account of Tambiah's work see Jonathan Spencer, "The
Past in the Present in Sri Lanka. A Review Article" in Comparative. Studies in Society and History, 1995, 37(2): 358-367. My response "Sri Lanka as Curative Project: Ordering and Authorizing a Post-Colonial Scholarship" is forthcoming.

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"nation" of Lanka come into being, if so how?' The appearance of this question in the field of history, was simultaneous with a move out of the then dominant framework of administrative histories into another field. That, very broadly put, was social history. It is in the interventions of that moment, of both the left and the right, that 'nationalism' emerges as a problem.
In its earliest phase, this work surrounds the Ceylon Studies Seminar at Peradeniya (which commences in 1968), and is published in that extraordinary journal Modern Ceylon Studies, beginning in 1970. Key signposts, from both the seminar and journal, would be in chronological order, Malalgoda's history of political Buddhism, Obeyesekere's now canonical work on the colonial modernity of Buddhism, Tissa Fernando's examination of nationalism and the temperance movement, Kumari Jayawardena's landmark account of the working class roots of nationalism, Michael Roberts' reexamination of the 1818 rebellion as a nationalist moment' are united by their concern with the problem of the 'nation." It is in this vigorous debate that the questions that currently surround the study
' My understanding of the intellectual field in question is indebted to conversations with Kumari Jayawardena, Michael Roberts and Ananda Wickremeratne, all scholarly participants of the moment under discussion. The views expressed are my own interpretation of these conversations. Kithsiri Malalgoda, "Millennialism in Relation to Buddhism" Ceylon Studies Seminar Paper, 1969, (Peradeniya, University of Ceylon) ' Gananath Obeyesekere, "Religious Symbolism and Political Change in
Ceylon," Modern Ceylon Studies, 1970, 1(1): 43-63. Tissa Fernando, "Arrack, Toddy and Ceylonese Nationalism: Some Observations on the Temperance Movement, 1912-1921" in Modern Ceylon Studies, 1971,2(2):123-150. ' Kumari.Jayawardena, "The Origins of the Left Movement in Sri Lanka"
in Modern Ceylon Studies,202): 195-221. '' Michael Roberts, "Variations on the Theme of Resistance Movements: The Kandian Rebellion of 1817-18 and Latter Day Nationalisms in Ceylon,"Ceylon Studies Seminar Paper, 1972, (Peradeniya, University of Ceylon).

"Violence' as an Analyticial Problem: Sri Lankanist Anthropology After July, '83 35
of nationalism in Sri Lanka were inaugurated, and -- to move rapidly through a decade -- it is the liberal and conservative strands of scholarship from this forum that are collected and edited by Roberts in 1979.60
The late seventies brought a new crisis of the nation: the question of Tamil separatism gained support, for the first time, in the democratic political space. And at the same time the left was decimated innational elections. Left scholars, who had been theorizing the crisis of the nation as a problem in nationalism and national liberation, turned to ethnicity as a categorical name for the new crisis of the nation. In 1979, left-leaning scholars coalesced at a new forum, the Social Scientists' Association (SSA). A seminar held there brought together path-breaking scholarship that was published as a collection five years later. Seminars organized the next year, in 1985 -- again by left scholars -- at Peradeniya, under the sign of the Seminar for Asian Studies, and also at SSA, inaugurated yet another collective cffort, which was published two years later.' All these efforts then name and theorize the political crisis of the moment: ethnicity.'
This, then is an account of the intellectual field into which Tambiah's first intervention, "Ethnic Fratricide and the Dismantling...",
" Michael Roberts, Collective Identities, Nationalisms and Protest in
Modern Sri Lanka. Colombo: Marga Institute, 1979. ' Social Scientists' Association, (ed.) Ethnicity and Social Change in
Sri Lanka. (Colombo, Social Scientists' Association) 1984. ' Charles Abeysekera and Newton Gunasinghe (eds), Facets of Ethnicity in Sri Lanka. (Colombo, Social Scientists' Association) 1987. Also important as a parallel intervention is the collection edited by scholars at the International Centre for Ethnic Studies, Sri Lanka. The Ethnic Conflict -- Myths, Realities and Perspectives, Committee for Rational Development (ed.), 1984, (Delhi, Navrang). ' This tradition of scholarship continues in different institutional locations, under different political signs in present day Sri Lanka. See, for a very recent intervention Gunawardana's Historiography in a Time of Ethnic Conflict: Construction of the Past in Contemporary Sri lanka., 1995, (Colombo, Social Scientists' Association).

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must be inserted.' The problematique of the text, as we have seen it, hovers around the question of horror"How could such people and such a blessed island be capable of the horrendous riots that exploded in... 1983?" is then transformed into one of ethnic/nationalist history, So Tambiah sketches out a social history of two "ethnicities", Sinhala and Tamil, with a view to mapping points of breakdown in relations, historically and contemporaneously. The argument itself adds little to the scholarship that has preceded it; what is important to note here is the form of the problematization of '1983." The riot, in this account, stands 'explained,' by the play of inter-ethnic relations: so'Sinhalaness' + "Tamilmess' => "1983."°
The second intervention in question moves into a different categorical space, that of "religion," specifically Buddhism. This space, anthropologically speaking, is a very different one from the categorical space of nationalism: 'religion' as a field of organized knowledge about Sri Lanka has a much older, colonial and evangelical history. The specific problematique here is also a well worn one: "If Buddhism preaches nonviolence, why is there so much political violence in Sri Lanka today?" It is important to note that this question is staged by Tambiah as one posed not by himself, but by a public that has a fanciful understanding of Buddhism. Tambiah's counter move is to challenge the "Pali text puritan" version of an "essentialized Buddhism... that...has viewed...developments...of a political kind as deviations and distortions from its canonical form." He chooses to look instead "not at something reified as Buddhism, but at the universe, sofar as possible, through the eyes and practices of Buddhist actors situated in history and in their local context." Which is of course the conventional and powerful move of Anthropology in the face of Indology. Yet, it could
Tambiah, 1986. Emphasis added. ' The text is also explicitly pedagogic, with an entire chapter entitled, "What Is to Be Done? A Prescription for the Future." See Tambiah,
1986:122-128.
66 Tambiah, 1992:3,
" Nosources are mentioned, but I believe Tambiah has Richard Gombrich
in mind.
o Tambiah, 1992:3.

"Violence' as an Analyticial Problem: Sri Lankanist Anthropology. After July, '83 37
be argued that Tambiah still sits quite squarely in a colonial problematique. For him, "religion" is prior to the political: the problem for him is how Buddhists become politicized. That he does not see this as deviantor corrupting is another matter: the historical, and logical, priority of the "religious" over the "political" is a central assumption of the argument. But it could well be argued, however, that this relationship must be rethought: reversed in fact.
Such an argument will take seriously epistemological spaces produced by colonial power in relation to places like Sri Lanka; or in other words take seriously Bernard Cohn's remark: "The conquest of India was a conquest of knowledge." David Scott's recent work on "religion" as a category of knowledge in the context of conversions, and as a political space in colonial civil society, are important in this regard." "Buddhism", in this argument, is always already a political
' Bernard Cohn, "The Command of Language and Language of Command" in Ranajit Guha (ed.) Subaltern Studies 4, (Delhi, Oxford University Press) 1985:276. It would be impossible to review the enormous literature on this subject here; landmarks in relation to South Asia would be, Cohn's An Anthropologist Among the Historians, (Delhi, Oxford University Press) 1990, and Colonialism and its Forms of Knowledge, (Princeton, Princeton University Press) 1996, Ronald Inden's, Imagining India, (Oxford, Blackwell) 1990, Gyanendra Pandey, The Construction of Communalism in Colonial North India, (Delhi, Oxford University Press) and Carol Breckenridge and Peter Van der Veer (ed.) Orientalism and the Post-Colonial Predicament, (Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press) 1992.
7 David Scott "Conversion and Demonism: Colonial Christian Discourse and Religion in Sri Lanka" in Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol.34(2), 1992:331-365, and "Religion in Colonial Civil Society: Buddhism and Modernity in Nineteenth Century Sri Lanka," in The Thatched Patio, 7(4), 1994:1-16. These two texts, which are, in my view, the most important extensions to Obeyesekere, 1963, and Malalgoda, 1976, ever attempted are unaccountably missed in Charles Hallisey's curious review essay, "Roads Taken and Not Taken in the Study of Theravada Buddhism," in Donald S. Lopez.Jr., ed., Curators of the Buddha. The Study of Buddhism Under Colonialism. (Chicago, The University of Chicago Press) 1995.

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category, fashioned simultaneously in two projects, that of missionary conversion and colonial rule. As such Tambiah's conclusion, "Sri Lankan conditions have revealed features that have made it so far a pressure chamberleading to periodic explosions...", because Buddhist nationalism and Buddhist nationalists have not "stretched to)... incorporate a greater amount of pluralistic tolerance" for the minorities, may have to be reversed." For this argument implies that Buddhism has trouble with pluralistic politics; and assumes that Buddhism is prior to modern politics. On the contrary, Buddhism itself, it could be argued, is a political category of colonial civil society. The 'trouble' then is with political spaces of (post)-colonial civil society rather than with Buddhism as such. Almost needless to say, then, the entire question of the politicization of Buddhism' loses salience.
In any event, arguing this point at length does not concern me here. By signaling the limitations of Tambiah's argument, I wish only to draw attention to its form, which parallels the previous argument I examined. The form of the problematization of violence is this: History x (Buddhism--Politics) => Violence. This, then, is one of the dominant forms of the problematization of violence that emerges in the anthropology of Sri Lanka after 1983." Gananath Obeyesekere's work on this point, even though offering a far more sophisticated account of 'Sinhala Buddhism' than Tambiah's, also seeks to explain the emergence of violence with recourse to ethno-history.' Yet another strand of this anthropology, exemplified by the work of Bruce Kapferer and Jonathan Spencer, takes a different standpoint. Rather than insert"violence' into histories of 'ethnicity,' or 'religion' they attempt to provide 'cultural" explanations of 'violence." In this view, violence emerges in the Lankan ethnographic field, not because of the unfolding
71 Tambiah, 1992:125.
' See for his most recent and complex account "Buddhism, Nationhood, and Cultural Identity: A Question of Fundamentals," in Fundamentalism Comprehended, Martin Marty & Scott Appleby ed.,(Chicago, The University of Chicago Press) 1995.
Kapferer, 1988 and Spencer,"Collective Violence..."1990.

"Violence' as an Analyticial Problem: Sri Lankanist Anthropology After July, '83 39
f ်းူးဂြိုးမှူး history, but because of certain elements of Sinhala Buddhist culture. I have examined such accounts in depth, elsewhere.'
For the purpose of this argument, what is important is not the internal intricacies of each of these approaches but their overarching form. My question, in this section, after all is this: what are the analytical qualities of the category 'violence' that emerges in Sri Lankanist anthropology after 1983?'Let me summarize my answer. Recall that "horror" was a name of incomprehensibility, and "violence" was an analytic response to it. Another way of asking that question is this: what his been the analytical movement in this anthropology from
Sinhalaness or Buddhism. The hard, causal explanation tells us "violence" is, because x+y. As such the epistemological burden is on the received anthropological categories; those categories must do the work of explaining violence. While being the enabling category of the work, violence remains a condition of possibility in these texts, not an object of inquiry in its own right. Violence itself is not investigated. So by positioning violence as 'caused', explanations shunt violence outbfanalytical sight, not addressing the incomprehensibility that gave riseto it in the first place, but rather, displacing that incomprehensibility on so received anthropological categories.
It is, I think, as an antidote to this move that some may advocate the autonomy of "violence." Such a move attempts to preserve or cohserve the density and weight of the object of violence, as a thing in itself. Allen Feldman, whose work must surely be part of any energing canonical literature on violence, puts it this way "Wiolence...is)...an institution possessing its own symbolic and rformative autonomy." In light of this move, let me consider, at
' "A Space for Violence: Politics, Anthropology, and the Location of a Sinhala Practice of Masculinity," in Community/Gender/Violence: Essays on the Subaltern Condition, Partha Chatterjee and Pradeep Jeganathan ed., forthcoming
' Feldman, 1990:21. See for citations of Feldman's work, Daniel, 1996:132 and Malkki, 1995:107. Michael Taussig, 1992:16, is both eloquent and forceful on the same point.

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some length, a recent intervention in the anthropology of Sri Lanka that seems to take this approach to the problem of violence: Valentine Daniel's Charred Lullabies.' My questions concerning the analytical quality of 'violence' will remain unchanged.
While "1983', is for this text, like its recent predecessors in Sri Lanka's anthropology of violence, a historical and conceptual condition of possibility, "violence" is positioned differently in its pages. On the one hand, Daniel is clear that 'violence' in his anthropology will not be 'explained', or 'solved: "...anyone who reads this book to find causes and their corollary, solutions, to what has come called the ethnic conflict, reads in vain." So therefore, the text
unmoored and unencumbered by other anthropologies of religion, ethnicity or nationalism, comes into its own. It is an anthropology of violence.
How then is this category'violence' positioned and located i the text? At the outset, Daniel writes that this positioning is not coheren, Explicitly, in the introduction -- as if anticipating an unnamed interlocuto -- Daniel writes that the chapters of this book "do not march toward a single point; they barely sustain a consistent thesis." Thes inconsistencies -- named "discordances" by Daniel - "echo," for him, "the discordance of the phenomenon being studied -- violence and its effect." This discordance is not one that can be captured at a metalevel, according to Daniel, which might have given the work a certain
Valentine Daniel, Charred Lullabies: Chapters in an Anthropography of Violence, (Princeton, Princeton University Press) 1996.
77 Daniel, 1996:9.
' Daniel, 1996:6. My understanding of the positioning of violence here was greatly aided by the discussion at an ICES seminar on "Charred Lullabies" held in Colombo in June, 1994. I am grateful to Valentine Daniel for participating in that occasion.
7' Daniel, 1996:6.
 
 
 
 
 

"Violence' as an Analyticial Problem: Sri Lankanist Anthropology After July, '83 41
"coherence." Rather the "discordance" is produced by "a set of disparate and desperate forays into the roughest waters in order to recover meaning." Daniel is right: "violence" is positioned differently across different essays. But I'm not as certain as Daniel is that an account of this "discordance" can not be written; in fact it is my claim that an examination of the conditions of possibility of the category "violence" will produce a coherent account of its existence in Daniel's anthropology. That account, I submit, will not only unify Daniel's text, but also locate it in relation to previous Sri Lankanist anthropologies of violence.
To do this, I examine closely the discordant place of 'violence'. in this text. Take the last chapter first. In this chapter "Crushed Glass" Daniel is concerned to trace the relationship of "violence" to "C/ culture." Having thought this issue both broadly and narrowly, Daniel moves to illustrate a point by presenting a verbatim, eyewitness account of an event of 1983." In this account, Piyadasa, a Sinhala man in his twenties, tells of the killing of a young Tamil boy during the riots. The boy is pulled out of a Hindu temple where he is hiding on to the street. The crowd circles the boy, to shouts of "kill the Tamils, kill the Tamils." Then after a while the boy is cut with a sword; blood begins to pour. After beating him with sticks and cutting him up more, a tire and petrol are brought. Then the boy is thrown on to the tire. Piyadasa concludes: "So they piled him up on the tire and set it aflame. And can you imagine, this fellow stood up with cut arms and all and stood like that, for a little while, then fell back into the fire." For Daniel, as for me, this in an extraordinary story. The anthropologist writes that he was, and continues to be, "struck 'speechless" by this "event."' He calls it, before he moves on to analyse it as an event of violence, a "horror-story." Inote, here, as I have done before in this argument,
' The only coherence that Daniel can find in his chapters is the
"movement of time itself", 1996:7.
All preceding quotations are from Daniel, 1996:209.
Daniel, 1996:209.
Daniel, 1996:209, "This was in the early days of my horror-story collecting,..."

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the emergence of the trope of "horror" as a name for the incomprehensibility of violence, in relation to "1983." This example then is another such example, that joins others I have pointed out earlier in my argument. Therefore this marks a congruence between the positioning of 'violence' in Daniel's text and its positioning in other texts, such as Tambiah's read earlier.
Yet this is not the only positioning of violence in this text. There is yet another location of the category in this text; in that location violence is not horror. An examination of that contrastive location will be instructive not only of the "discordance" of "violence" that Daniel has warned us about, but also of the meta-coherence of that discordance I have promised.
My example is taken from Daniel's third chapter, the first in the book to address violence categorically. Here, within a rich, original reading of the semiotics of agronomy and agriculture a "communicative event" is located in its ethnographic context: the "story of the Perumal cut." In this tale, told by Tamils who work on a tea plantation, where Daniel didfield work, an oppressive and ignorant white superintendent confronts a young male worker pruning tea bushes: Perumal. The Superintendent, brash in his ignorance and bullying in his exercise of authority, demands the pruning knife from Perumal, proposing to show him how exactly the cut -- to be made fifteen inches above the earth -- is to be executed. Perumal hands the superintendent the knife and watches his inept, insulting demonstration. Perumal felt his "blood boil and rise to his head, in his stomach was hunger." He asked for the knife, and then "like a flash of lightning...[he]...swung at the Englishman with the word "ippati" (like this!). The next thing you saw was the Englishman's arm, severed from below his elbow, writhing in the drain, spouting blood. It was exactly fifteen inches long."
What I want to contrastis the troping of this "event" as opposed to the previous one I examined. The first, as we have seen, is a "horrorstory." The second, which we have just read, is not. That is to say it is not troped as such in Daniel's reading of it. It is in fact, located quite differently in a very different tropic field. That field is defined by a
All preceding quotations are from Daniel, 1996:86-7, my emphasis.

"Violence' as an Analyticial Problem: Sri Lankanist Anthropology After July, '83 43
(anti-colonial) political narrative that is not easily available in the first instance. Daniel locates the story of the 'Perumal cut as an instance of 'effective history' that is a "useful appropriation by the collective memory of a subordinated people against future oppression." It is just this political narrative of (colonial) oppression/ (anti-colonial) rebellion which makes this "event" intelligible to both the anthropologist and his reader; note, therefore, that this event is barely called "violent." The category "violence" is not part of the naming of the event in its immediate retelling nor is it explicitly part of the final analysis that comes at the end of the chapter. That analysis is summarized thus: "Ungoverned by the courtesies of rule-governed behavior, energetic interpretents explode. Their meanings are precipitated, not before, not after but in the act: "The Perumal Cut." Theorized as an 'energetic interpretent here, the Perumal cut is troped as an 'explosion." It is after that move that 'violence' appears as an analytical category in relation to this incident. Daniel reads Foucault to suggest that the story of the "Perumal Cut" is a "violent or surreptitious appropriation of a system of rules." Note, here, that for Daniel to call the "Perumal Cut" "violence," is in itself an analytical move.
Contrast this with the "horror-story" we read earlier. That "event" had no easily available political framing such as anti-colonial rebellion/colonial oppression. It is then a "horror-story." And during analysis of that "horror-story," in lines immediately below its appearance, in fact, the category'violence'emerges. This is a moment I have noted earlier. In shorthand, horror is the name, and violence is the analytic, of incomprehensibility. The movement here from horror to violence is distinct but rapid. They may in this particular analytic stand in for each other: 'violence as horror or "horror as violence." This much we have seen before: for this is the very same movement I foregrounded earlier in the work of Tambiah. Note that for both anthropologists the emergence of 'violence' as "horror must be inserted into an analytic. This is different from the Perumal cut: there calling
Daniel, 1996:87. Daniel, 1996:103. 7 Daniel, 1996:103.

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the event "violent" was a final analytic move. Here in the face of "horror more analysis is produced.
Tambiah's move, as I have argued before, is to 'explain' violence, in the form 'violence is, because x+y."xandy can be 'SinhalaBuddhists' and Tamil-Hindus' or they can be a similar anthropological category. Daniel disavows such moves, responding differently to the problem of violence. The analytical quality of the category changes shape in his hands: the emergence of 'violence'enables an analytic of violence itself. Therefore Daniel's statements on violence are in the form 'violence is x." where x is an abstract quality. In this case (chapter seven) the sentence is: "violence is an (event in which there is a certain) excess." This, then, is the break that Daniel makes in his text, that distinguishes it from the (Sri Lankan) anthropology of violence that has been written before him, taking him to a new terrain in that anthropology.
Let us return, with this reading in mind, to Daniel's original claim of "discordance." "Violence", we have found upon analysis is in fact differently positioned in the two chapters read, as it is in others. But in the preceding paragraphs I have been able to produce an account of that 'discordance." My account has, as has this entire chapter, examined the historical and conceptual conditions of possibility of the emergence of violence in an anthropology. These conditions, as we have seen, are politically constituted. Violence," as a category, has different analytical qualities, given its differential positioning in political narratives. There is then a certain coherence to the emergence of violence in Daniel's text, and therefore a certain coherence to 'violence as it appears across chapters. It is worth noting, however, that the predominant positioning of violence is that of "horror," that is to say, a location where political narratives have, for Daniel, been rendered meaningless.'
Daniel, 1996:208.
' It is perhaps a reflection of this overall orientation that allows for this statement: "The flow of events in Sri Lanka, its unpredictable turns, and the magnitude of its meaninglessness, have made some of these concerns lose their earlier force and urgency." Daniel, 1996:6, my emphasis.

"Violence' as an Analyticial Problem: Sri Lankanist Anthropology After July, '83 45
I would like to reflect on this dominant moment in this text, for I think it an important one. In short, it is the moment which allows 'violence' to come into its own. Already, we have seen in Daniel's anthropology an unmooring of violence from other categories such as ethnicity, religion or nationalism which have informed previous anthropological accounts of violence in Sri Lanka. That move glides into another, which allows the category violence to leave Lanka, as it were, rise above it, and be available to other fields and other anthropologies as 'violence as such." Let me return to Daniel's text to illustrate this point. My example comes from chapter five: "Embodied Terror." At the end of an ethnographic description of terror, and its aestheticization Daniel reflects on Adorno's response to a poem on the Holocaust. Having done so he writes: "Granted the horrors of Nazi Germany -- and more recently of Uganda, Rwanda and Bosnia -- may appear to dwarf those of Sri Lanka." Note first here the reappearance of "horror as the framing trope of the entire sentence. "Horror" both as trope and now as a comparative category allows in this point of the text, as it does at other points, for an entire economy of sites to appear as a unity. Nazi Germany, Uganda, Rwanda and Bosnia. And Sri Lanka. My point is not, of course, that this list is too long or too short or that it needs to be rewritten in some way. Rather I remark on the very possibility of such a list. The sites on this list have a certain economy, Istress: surely Indo-China of the 1960s and '70s would not make this list, this economy of horror, at first pass? That site does not make this list because it is not clearly a moment of breakdown in political narratives, not a place where the sheer "magnitude of meaninglessness' of events has horrified anthropology, What then does this economy of horror enable? In Dahiel's text it allows for a comparison between two moments of horror. Nazi Germany and contemporary Sri Lanka. Auschwitz and "1983."Daniel's concern is about the representation of these two events; his worry is about his own implication in such a representation.' But such a
o Daniel, 1996:153.
9 Daniel, 1996:6.
' This movement, through 'horror' to Auschwitz, occurs again in Daniel's
text. See Daniel, 1996:211.

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comparison can not proceed without "horror being available as a general, abstract category. Through it -- horror as violence, violence as horror - violence itself emerges as a general, abstract category. Here then emerging before us is that elusive thing many have been looking for, that complained-about lack or absence in relation to the problem of violence: 'violence' as a canonizable category.
"Violence" in this view is an analytical name for events of political incomprehensibility, events of horror, events that challenge ideas of humanness and humanity, without a countervailing and intelligible political meaningfulness. And the current effervescence of the category of "violence", I would suggest, is simultaneous with the delegitimization of received political narratives that produced that political comprehension in another time. So with the destruction of the liberal narratives of the new nation and left narratives of national liberation and socialism, old ways of making meaning in the face of conflict are also destroyed. Taken together with the perceived collapse of the state, a profound loss of political space results. Hence, the rise of cultural arguments about "violence." Or in other words, an anthropology of violence. Note that my argument here does not in any way depend upon knowing if there is more violence in the world today than at another historical conjuncture. Take the simple example of the war in Indo-China that extinguished more than two million lives in the 1960s and 1970s. Is there "more" "violence" now in Rwanda, Bosnia and Sri Lanka than there was in Indo-China? My answer is categorical, not empirical: the war in Indo-China had a political name -- American imperialism, communist aggression, nationalist uprising or popular revolution -- whatever hue one's cloth was. What is called "violence" today is different, for it cannot be easily placed under a suitable political sign. This then is the condition of possibility of its emergence as a category. That is indeed why it is now commonplace to refer to Rwanda, Bosnia and Sri Lanka in the same sentence: they all represent sites of the emergence of "violence" in the face of the loss of political meaning.
I claim, then, that this is one possible and plausible answer to the set of general questions I began with, or in other words, these are conditions of possibility of an anthropology of violence, for as we

"Violence' as an Analyticial Problem: Sri Lankanist Anthropology After July, '83 47
have seen, under these conditions violence can and does emerge as a canonizable category. Not only have I been able to point to the conditions under which such a category might emerge, but have also, given its emergence, delineated its analytical qualities (x+y=> violence or violence => x). This does not mean, of course, that this is an exclusive answer to the question; undoubtedly other answers are possible. Yet my journey does demonstrate that this is one possible answer to the general question.
My efforts here have not been intended to be read only for their own sake: they are part of a larger work, of which this is a part. By asking categorical questions of the anthropology of violence, I have, I hope, made the way clearer for myself. Let me formulate one partial and preliminary conclusion from this investigation, reserving a more substantial statement for a later moment.
This conclusion is simple: "Violence'is not categorically selfevident to anthropology. An investigation like mine, then, which seeks to make 'violence' visible to an anthropological eye must be mindful of its own conditions of possibility. On the one hand, the condition of possibility of my anthropology is "1983, with all its entailments; in other words my work shares in the very conditions of possibility I have delineated. But on the other hand, there is another condition of possibility of my anthropology: the very texts of my distinguished predecessors which I have passed through in this account. Having done so, I can now think 'violence' in my anthropology in a critical relation to that archive.
My strategy is to avoid causal explanations for violence: to do that would be to shunt violence out of analytical sight and ignore the incomprehensibility that gave rise to the category in the first place. On the other hand, Ishall not treat violence as a thing in itself, unmoored from the social. Such an approach runs the risk of treating 'violence' as self-evident, not thinking through its categorical emergence. My effort, rather, is to comprehend the emergent location of 'violence' in a given field. This allows the analysis to stay with the destiny of the category of violence, not replacing incomprehensibility with causal 'explanations', however sophisticated, and not removing violence from its sociality.

Page 26
Quarterly Quarks
POSSESSED BY DEATH
Seehawk
Somewhere in his massive work on capitalism and civilisation, the French historian Fernand Braudel notes that civilisations can be divided into those where people sit on raised seats and those where they sit on the floor, and that the two meet in China, where they do both. A striking observation, but this, of course, is only one of the many ways of distinguishing between cvilisations in their patterns of everyday existence.
One could, for instance, talk of the difference between those who eat with their fingers and those who use cutlery or chopsticks. One of the most interesting anecdotes in Robert Knox's narrative of Ceylon is in his account of being marched, together with the other shipwrecked sailors, from the seacoast where they had been captured to Kandy. On the way they were halted in a village so that they could eat, and the villagers roared with laughter on watching the Englishmen's incompetent efforts at eating rice with their fingers.
Or one could talk of the difference between those who wipe their backsides and those who wash them, for which there is a simple climatic explanation, but each of the differing cultures tends to regard the other's practice with equal repugnance. Leonard Woolf, with all his affection for the Sinhala peasant, evidently couldn't conquer his. In The Village in the Jungle there is a passage of dialogue in which a character speaks of 'the hand with which you eat rice', and the

Quarterly Quarks 49
author explains in a footnote that this is a common expression for the right hand, adding: 'the left hand being used for an unmentionable purpose'.
But what I want particularly to talk about here is the difference between those who bury their dead and those who burn them -- a difference that is rooted in deep-seated cultural, and ultimately religious, assumptions about the nature of life and the body, the status of the individual being and the relation between the earthly lifetime and the life hereafter. For Christians who regard the present life as a unique existence on earth, who believe in the immortality of the soul as distinguishing humans from animals, and also look foward to the ultimate resurrection of the body, it seemed proper to bury the dead rather than to burn them. "Dust thou art and to dust thou returneth'; nevertheless there was an attachment to the body being given intact to the earth rather than being reduced to smoke and ashes: an underlying, if illogical, feeling that it would somehow facilitate resurrection if the body stayed in one place instead of being scattered over many. There used to be, I believe, speculation about how bodies of people who had died at sea and whose flesh had therefore beeen incorporated into that of the fish who ate them, which then might have been eaten by other humans, could be resurrected. It is only quite recently that some Christians have been able to conquer their aversion to cremation.
But there was a price paid for the Christian preference for the burial of the dead. European literature is haunted by the horror of the worm in the grave, the grinning skull, the dust that has closed Helen's eye. The high value placed on the individual body which will ultimately rise gloriously from the grave makes all the more terrible the imagined process of its slow, ghastly decomposition. It was not only Webster (in T.S. Eliot's line) who was 'much possessed by death', but the entire European imagination.
The Hindu-Buddhist consciousness, of course, had no such problems, regarding the individual lifetime and the individual body as only temporary, impermanent vehicles for whatever it is that marks the continuity between one birth and the next. Burning, and in its most consistent sequel according to Hindu practice, the scattering of the

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ashes in river or sea, were therefore the proper recognition of the ephemerality of the body and the individual personality. It is a spirit that seems to me violated when I visit the Kanatte cemetery and see ornate tombs and monuments enshrining ashes in the Buddhist section of the cemetery -- a vain attempt at making a stand against transience. For my part, I would hate to think of the body of a loved person mouldering in the grave, and therefore much prefer the quick, clean disposal of the dead by fire. But, of course, my feelings have also been shaped by my cultural upbringing. It would be difficult for me to conquer an emotional reaction against the funeral practices of Parsis. who regard fire as sacred and therefore don't pollute it by cremating the dead body but give it over to predatory birds. But if I think rationally about it, I realise that if the Hindu immersion of ashes in a river is a way of returning the body to the larger life of natural things from which it came, then the Parsi is another and equally legitimate one.
Or there is a more clinical, impersonal way of coping with the fact of death: you can donate your body, as the rationalist Abraham T. Kovoor did, for dissection by students of the Faculty of Medicine.
Clerihew
Galileo Galilei Was imprisoned ad majorem gloriam Dei. Bruno's was a different story: He was burned for God's greater glory.
The new legislators
"The unacknowledged legislators of the world.' That was
Shelley's description of poets. Today the phrase would seem to apply better to the economists of the IMF and the World Bank.

THE HONOUR
Regi Siriwardena
1
The Presidential Secretariat was agitated. The President had personally put the name of a singer, Ariyawansa Haputantri, on the list of people to receive national honours that year. Haputantri had been a well-known performer in the 'fifties and 'sixties, when he had sung and acted in plays belonging to the post-Maname renaissance of Sinhala theatre. It was at least thirty years since he had last appeared on the stage, but many people, including the President, still cherished the memory of the rich voice that had captivated them in their adolescence and youth.
"Find out whether he's still living,' the President had said, 'and if he is, offer him a Kala Suri."
A call to the Cultural Affairs Ministry elicited the information that Haputantri was indeed among the living, but only because, by pure chance, the officer who took the call had seen him only a month earlier at a Sinhala play.
"What's his address?" the official from the Presidential Secretariat asked.
"That I don't know,' the voice at the other end said. The man from Cultural Affairs, however, promised to do his best to find out. A week passed, and the Presidential Secretariat tried again -- only to receive bad news. Cultural Affairs had no record of Haputantri's address in its files, and none of the playwrights in whose productions he had taken part knew where he lived.

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"What are we to do?" the Presidential Secretariat's official
lamented. After we said the man was living, the President was keener than ever. If we don't find him, it'll be put down to our inefficiency.'
"I'll have another try, the voice from Cultural Affairs said soothingly.
Yet another week passed, and this time it was Cultural Affairs which rang. By a piece of good fortune, the officer concerned had run into a play-producer who had given him, from an old diary, an address for Haputantri.
32/1, Dharmaloka Patumaga, Colombo 8," he read out. Mind you, this address is about twenty years old. My friend doesn't know whether Haputantri is still living there."
"Where is Dharmaloka Patumaga?"
"How do I know?"
"Did you ask your friend?"
"He didn't know either. It's somewhere in Borella. Now I've found the address for you, you do the rest."
2
Dharmaloka Patumaga wasn't in the Colombo A-Z. Nor did the Colombo Municipality or the postal services know of its existence. The Presidential Secretariat went into another bout of despondency. Time was flying, and all other letters and invitations to the honours ceremony had already been delivered. Finally, a high-powered genius at the Secretariat came up with an idea.
"Use your brains," he told the lesser bureaucrats. "Patumaga. It must be a small pathway, probably without a nameboard. Also, Dharmaloka must mean that it leads to a temple, or a Buddhist school, or even some kind of religious association. Go out and look in all the lanes and by-ways of Borella for such a place.'
The genius was right. A duo of minor officers from the Secretariat had set out on this quest. The older of the two men, Senaratne, thought of it as an adventure: he had himself heard and admired Haputantri in the 'sixties. After a whole day's fruitless wandering, they heard of a small, dilapidated temple in a neigh

The Honour 53
bourhood where they had happened to stop and make inquiries. They were driving in the direction they had been asked to take, when the younger of the two officers spotted an inconspicuous by-lane branching off the road on which they were. The lane had a name-board, but it was lying on the ground. The officer asked the driver to stop the car, got off and looked at the fallen nameboard. The lettering was largely effaced, but he could just make out that it read "Dharmaloka Patumaga'. The lane was narrow, probably too narrow for their large official vehicle. The two officers walked, picking their way gingerly past the clumps of mud and pools of accumulated rainwater they encountered. The houses were either tenements or makeshift shanties that had been put together out of metal sheeting. A group of small boys playing marbles in a front yard looked curiously at them as they went past. It was evident from the numbers tagged on to the doorways of the houses or scrawled in tar on the shanty walls that all the dwellings down the lane had a number with a subscript/1. Perhaps, Senaratne suggested to his younger colleague, the Municipality had at some time decided to treat Dharmaloka Patumaga as non-existent in its own right, and renumbered the houses with the addition of the subscript /1 to every one of them. But to their dismay, the officers also found that the numbers seemed to follow no recognisable order. At the end of the lane they came to 30/1, but there seemed to be no 32/1. The lane's end straggled away into a plot overgrown with weeds, on which stood an old image house, seemingly neglected and dilapidated. An old mangy dog was lying beside the wall of the image house, scratching himself. They were about to turn back and start asking people whether Mr. Haputantri lived anywhere there, when their attention was caught by a sound unexpected in that setting. It was the soft sound of a sitar, and, as Senaratne recognised, it was playingan Indian raga.
The music seemed to come from a source behind No. 30/1. Meanwhile a young woman in a housecoat, with a plumpbaby astride her hip, had appeared in the doorway and looked at them inquiringly.
"Is there a Mr. Haputantri staying here?" Senaratne asked. The young woman gestured towards the side of the house. 'Go down that small path to the back."

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The path led past the side wall of the house to what must once have been its back compound, but another, smaller dwelling stood there. It was a curious structure, which gave the impression that the builder had changed his mind halfway through its construction, or, perhaps, only run out of money. It began in brick and whitewash at the front and ended in bare brown mud at the back, but the transition from one material to the other ran in an irregular line down a side wall. The roof was also a composite -- of tiles and corrugated metal sheets. The strains of the sitar sounded louder as the two officers approached the front door of the dwelling.
From the doorway they could see that the sitar was being played by an old man in glasses who was sitting on a mat. He broke off, put the sitar down and came up to the door.
'Are you Mr. Haputantri?" inquired Senaratne. "Yes,' the old man said. He was, at a guess, in his mid-sixties, with a near-bald head and wisps of grey hair above his ears, a face creased by wrinkles and a gap in his front teeth.
"We have come from the Presidential Secretariat to deliver a letter to you,' Senaratne said.
Haputantri's eyes blinked behind his glasses: he looked bewildered, and even alarmed, by this news.
"Please come in,' he said. Then, motioning them to the only two chairs in the room: "Please sit down.'
Besides the two chairs, the only furniture in the room was a deskpiled higgledy-piggledy with magazines and books, and a campbed. There was a suitcase on the floor which probably contained Haputantri's clothes. but a shirt and a pair of trousers hung from two nails on the wall. There were cigarette stubs strewn on the floor, which had probably not known a broom for some days.
Once the two officers had sat down, Haputantri perched himself on the campbed, and looked anxiously at his visitors.
Senarate explained why they had come, and handed over the letter.
"It's the President who personally decided to confer the honour on you," he said. "Because the Presidentiremembers your performances in the 'sixties. I too remember them. I was a young man then."

The Honour 55
A slow smile broke over Haputantri's face. "I can remember how thrilled I was when you played Asoka in that play of Susil Liyanage,' Senaratne went on. The great moment when Asoka repented about all the people who had been killed in the war -- that song, your voice, your acting -- I can never forget them." Senaratne had genuinely been carried away by his memories, and the enthusiasm in his voice must have communicated itself to Haputantri. His face quivered gently as he stood up.
"If you two gentlemen can wait a little time," he said, "I can make you a cup of tea ..."
"No, no, thank you, there's no need for that,' Senaratne put in hastily. "We didn't come to trouble you, only to hand over that letter. But since I am an admirer of yours, if you don't mind my asking, do you do any kind of work now?"
'No,' Haputantri said. "My son is working in Abu Dhabi. He sends me money every month. Not a lot --just enough for my needs. It pays for my rent and food and clothes. That's enough."
"And you live alone?" "Yes, alone. It's five years since my wife died." He looked down at the sitar lying on the mat. To the visitors it seemed that the instrument too was nearing the end of its life.
3
When the two officials had gone, Haputantri continued to sit on the campbed for some time, deeply shaken by his emotions. It wasn't the honour itself that moved him: what did he care about such things now? But he had been excited to learn that the President remembered his performances from the 'sixties. And that man who brought the letter -- with how much feeling he had talked about the scene from Asoka The memory of that first night came back to him - Nandini embracing him as he came off the stage: that was the week before they were married. "You have never sung so well in your whole life," she whispered, with her cheek against his, while he breathed the scent of the araliya flowers in her hair, and he had said, "I knew you were listening, that's why."

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He opened the letter. It was when he saw the official letterhead with its gilded crest that a question disturbed him. How could he attend this ceremony? Could he walk from the bus-stop to the presidential mansion? He quickly leafed through the papers that accompanied the letter. There was a car label to be affixed to the windscreen of his vehicle. Perhaps he could have it put on the windscreen of a taxi, but could he afford a taxi. His son's remittance would arrive next week; until then he had to be careful. Perhaps he could manage a threewheeler, but was that allowed -- to arrive at the Janadhipathi Mandhiraya in a three-wheeler?
Haputantri read the list of instructions to invitees that came with the letter. He stopped short when he read the paragraph about dress:
The dress to be worn by the recipients and their guests will be the national dress, lounge suit or military uniform.
Haputantri had never worn cloth and banian in his life: when
the political vogue for them had been at its height in the 'fifties, he had refused to fall in line, saying he wasn't impressed by this parading of bogus equality and simplicity. And he had been right, he thought: the young had preferred levelling up to levelling down; all of them -- office peons and bus conductors -- wore trousers now. Open shirt, trousers and slippers: that was the real national dress.
Slippers. The thought shook him. He couldn't very well enter the Janadhipathi Mandhiraya in slippers, his normal footwear. He did have one pair of shoes, which he kept for those rare occasions when he went to a wedding or a funeral, but on the last occasion he wore them, the sole of one shoe had come off. He didn't have the money then to get it repaired, so he had left it lying around. Perhaps he could get it done now before the function, but what was the use? He had no national dress, no lounge suit, no tie.
He sat down at his table, shifted the pile of books a little to make space, and began to write a letter:
Your Excellency...

The Honour 57
What could he say? Could he tell the truth?
I am sorry that I cannot attend the ceremony for the conferring of honours because I have no national dress or lounge suit, and besides, one of my shoes is broken...
No, it wouldn't do. They would think he was fooling, even, maybe, that he was impertinent. He would have to tell a lie: that he was ill.

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BOOKREVIEWS
Tissa Abeysekara, Bringing Tony Home. Colombo, published by the author, 1998
Stanley Kirinde's evocative sketch of a cherubic-looking authornarrator with his pet Tony lying at his feet immediately conjured up in my mind the Penguin cover of Tibor Dery's Niki - The Story of a Dog with its sketch of a forlorn-looking dog, a ball by its side. But there the resemblance ends.
Dery centres his story on a dog in order to make a kind of oblique political indictment of the pre-1956 Hungarian police state. Though Tissa's novel spans the turbulent years of the transitional period ushered in by Bandaranaike, the social and political events of that time are hardly heard even as peals of distant thunder in the novel.
If political' is defined narrowly, there are only two references to political events: one (page 10) is a reference to Mysoor parippu, fine-grained and pink and mistakenly believed to be coming from Mysore in India and boycotted under the orders of the JVP when the Indian Peace Keeping Force was alleged to be raping girls in Jaffna." This might give one the impression that the JVP was so worked up about the 'chastity of the girls in Jaffna that it ordered a boycott of Mysoor parippu. The truth of the matter is that the boycott of Mysoor parippu and Indian-manufactured autos was prompted by the JVP's obsession with what it termed "Indian Expansionism' rather than by any concern for girls or the people of Jaffna or the travails they were undergoing at the time. The other (page 14) is a reference to D.S.Senanayake denying segments of Indian labour on the plantations Ceylon citizenship and deporting them to India.

Book Reviews 59
This seeming lack of interest in politics (in the narrow sense) is
enough to damn the novel in the eyes of some critics of a Marxist persiasion as petit (or is it lumpen?) bourgeois indulgence in nostalgia, a lament for a lost Eden. Though the novel does strike an elegiac note, especially in its description of the physical transformation and the eco-devastation of the landscape of the narrator's childhood, that's not the one on which it ends.
The epigraph gives us a clue to the theme of the novel and the nature of its preoccupation.
"If I die and an born again, as you say I will be, is that which is reborn, the same me" queried a man from the Buddha, and the Buddha replied "Neither you, nor yet any other." The author's gloss runs. Likewise, what follows in this book, being truth recreated through memory, is neither true nor untrue. But then, does it matter?"
The novel begins with the narrator driving out of the Television
Training Institute in early March 1996 having completed the final episode of Pitigamkarayo', and his state of mind is best described in his own words: "My mind was cross-cutting between reality and the last moments of the film I had just completed in the editing room... The shooting of Pitigamkarayo' was a prolonged nightmare and there were many moments in the crisis-ridden production when its completion was seriously in doubt. Finally when it did end on that March evening it was almost a miracle and I should have been mightily relieved. But as I drove home, I felt disoriented, like when coming out of a coma... For the next couple of weeks I moved around like in a dream and I lingered on in a world of memories and shadows. My mind was a confusing montage of images constantly cross-cutting between past and present, fantasy and fact. Through it all there was a recurring motif. It was an episode from my childhood over 40 years back in time, something which was always there in my memory as clearly as if it happened yesterday. But now it kept coming back with an intensity I had never felt before." (Page 3)
Then there is a flashback to the year 1950 when "we were moving house for the second time within two years, having moved once before to a smaller house from the big one in the same vicinity. Now we were moving out of the area completely and by some strange

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coincidence the month was March once again, as faithfully recorded in Father's diary." This ends the first movement: apart from the allusion to music, the movements in the novel seem to be both literal and metaphorical (the downward slide from financial stability and social respectability, besides change in general).
Even a cursory glance at the novel would reveal the author's use of cinematic techniques. This is not to be considered something which comes naturally to a film-maker turned novelist or merely a virtuoso display of technique (or gimmickry) for its own sake. On the contrary, cinematic techniques (which involve both movement and freeze) are integral to his theme of inpermanence, mutability, and express the narrator's inner conflict, the tension between the boy in him to 'freeze' memory in an Edenic world in the company of Tony 'so that everything which happened after we left the Big House by the fir trees and with that sculpted heron on the crest of the portico roof was only a bad dream" (page 54) and the realisation by the adult in him that though memory "freezes', life is essentially movement and change. Just before the end of the novel, the narrator retraces the landscape of his childhood. He discovers that not only the landscape, even the friends of his carefree boyhood days have changed. He meets Jayasena, a childhood playmate, and tries to remind him in detail about all the things they had done. Much to the narrator's consternation, Jayasenatells him that he can't remember the narrator or any of the things he had described. "After a moment of uneasy silence when neither of us spoke but kept looking at each other stupidly, I said it was alright, that may be I have made a mistake and though that was a stupid thing to say, he looked relieved and quickly turned around and started walking away.... and I thought may be if I spoke to Chutti and Edmund earlier on the road I would have had a similar resposine and I was feeling empty and for the first time having serious doubts about many things." (Page 53)
The second movement, "Tony', begins with the narrator and his mother (carrying his little sister) leaving Depanama when it was jSut begining to get dark, followed by Tony who had been with them for well over seven years.
This section with its flowing lyrical prose - like tracking shotsreminds me of Sherwood Anderson's story I Want to Know Why'.

Book Reviews 61
The flowing lyricism is the only common element: their ambience is so different that a reader is hardly likely to mistake one for the other. The film maker's eye (and ear) is evident in a sentence like: "the Kelani Valley train was pulling out of the Pannipitiya railway station, the little compartments already lit and moving in a chain like a glowworm seen over the low line of cactus bushes on the edge of the embankment beyond which rose the two-storeyed building of the station, and the sad whistle of the train rose and fell three times lingered in the air and then settled over everything" (page 7) The film-maker's almost obsessive attention to visual detail is a marked feature of this InOWement.
The narrator, who was then round about 10, is sad and angry not because we had left Depanama. Not because we had become poor and were shifting to half a house; I was too young to understand the implications of that and I wa not angry becuase I was carrying a bag full of smelly onions. I was sad and angry because we had left Tony behind." (Page 9)
Four days later the narrator is back in Depanama, sent by his mother without his father's knowledge, "to buy the weekly rations from the co-op store, collect the new ration books and also if I could feel up to it, collect the dressing table mirror." But the narrator had another very important task to perform, "something I had secretly vowed to myself I would do. I was going to take Tony home: walk with him all the way from Depanama to Egodawatte."
As the narrator nears a break in the thick undergrowth along the edge of Jayasingha's land, his mind-in a jump-cut in time - recalls one of his earliest memories of dinner in the Jayasingha house: only the visual came with no sound, like when the sound track of a movie is switched off". Then there's another cut to Tony crashing through Mrs.Jayasingha with the custard pudding in the dessert cut held delicately in one hand and the dessert spoon suspended somewhere between my mouth and her ample bosom, and Uncle Ronald opening and closing the folds of the accordion in an are just below his chin'; this abrupt cutting may momentarily dismay the unwary reader but it's a masterly touch by a film maker to convey the impact of the narrator's meeting up with Tony again. Tony came out of

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nowhere,charging and barking, leaping - turning - twisting - rollingjumping-licking - whining-moaning in a delirum. The run-on words, separated only by hyphens, are reminissent of E.E.Cummings Buffalo Bill' and very effectively convey Tony's delirious excitement at his seeing his young master again. Another and effective cinematic touch but one which produces a different effect comes towards the end of the novel when the narrator goes back to the landscape of his childhood in search of familiar landmarks and his childhood playmates. The rubber trees have given way to flat concrete rooftops sprouting the dead plants of TV antennae' (page 52). At this point the narrator's verbal camera tries to reenact his search for recognition: "A man began emerging from the abyss: his head kept bobbing up and down for sometime and then came the rest of the man, tall and strongly built and dressed in a white gauze banian and a checked sarong" (page 52 and 53). The author thinks he has recognised him; he could be Jayasena, the second of three brothers who had taught him to row a boat in the rain waters. Much to the narrator's chagrin, Jayasena can't remember the narrator or their rowing a boat in the rain waters.
To come back to the narrator and Tony, the former recounts his almost epic walk back with Tony from Depanama to Egodawatte, interspersed with moments of utter panic when he mistakenly thinks he has lost the new ration books (P5: "and now I have gone and lost not one book but all four, which meant the entire family was wiped out from Ceylon in one fell blow, and that by me doing a damnfool thing walking with a stupid dog all the way from Depanama)," and idyllic moments like when he put his fingers in the water and the fish come rushing to peck and I felt warm and good like when I did that in the streams on the paddy field where we lived after shifting from the big house. The water in the stream was warm from the sun and the smell of ripened paddy mixed with the smell of mud was like in Depanama when Anton and I went collecting fish in Horlicksbottles." (page 18). Then there's an effective mix from the narrator leaning against the trunk of a mara tree and waiting for the train to pull out of the Nawinna station to his feverish, delirious state when "the train came straight at me and then went over as if I was in a pit under the wheel and it rumbled like thunder and there was a red light which

Book Reviews 63
glowed like a monstrous eye and became bigger and burst in a flash. of white and everything became still and dark and silent" (page 20). When he recovers, the first thing the narrator hears is, paradoxically, silence. Then as the story is pieced together, the narrator learns that Tony is gone. His reaction to this bit of information surprises us: "The strangest thing was - and I remember it clearly as if it happened yesterday - that I wasn't feeling surprised or shocked or angry or anything like that. It was as if I had known this would happen all along" (page 22). This evidence of a maturing narrator prepares us for his final meeting with Tony.
After his recovery, the narrator's father lectures him on the nobility of deeds which are done in consultation with elders, on Casabianca and the Charge of the Light Brigade. Listening to the croaking frogs (the juxtaposition of the frogs' croaking and the solemn lecture produces an ironic effect), the narrator kept silent but thinks "I very much wanted to tell father that my idea in bringing Tony home was not because I wanted to do anything heroic like the boy who stood on the burning deck, or the six hundred horsemen who rode into the valley of death, or on the contrary not even because I wanted to do anything naughty and bad to annoy my parents - I had done such things in the past - but simply because I felt bad about leaving Tony behind after he had been with us for such a long time." (Page 27).
Exactly one month after the family left Depanama and three weeks after the narrator walked with Tony to their new home in Egodawatte, the narrator's mother sends him back to return some money she had borrowed from Mrs. Lawrence Perera: "The money was put in an envelope and stitched into my shirt pocket and in it was a note to Mrs.Lawrence Perera with a kind request to see that I don't end up doing something stupid like last time". (page 33) The narrator's growing maturity comes through in his reaction to his mother's firm advice not to try anything fancy." He says "all this was quite unnecessary, for by now I had struck firm roots at Egodawatte and I was going to finish up with whatever I had to do at Depanama and be back as soon as possible for Sirisena and the boys had planned a game of cricket in the paddy fields which had by now become dry and hard, and they were going to wait for me."

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But the thought of Tony yet bothers him: "What if I were to
meet Tony again at Depanama. If he had gone back there he was sure to get my scent ... and seek me out wherever I was around Depanama, and if that happened, I couldn't figure out what I was going to do."The narrator learns from Mrs.Perera that Tony is at Proctor Gunawardene's and he's being well looked after. The tensedup narrator sets off immediately after lunch "and once more my heart started pounding because at a particular point in the ground along which I had to walk to reach the macadam road I could see across another compound to the rear of Proctor Gunawardena's house and I looked down and walked briskly and I was sick with tension. I had cleared the little climb just before the path joined the main road and was feeling relieved, when it happened. First I heard a faint whining sound and I closed my eyes immediately, and then there was the sound of rushing dog's feet and something fell heavily against my legs. I opened my eyes and there at my feet lay Tony with upturned paws in that gesture of canine loyalty and affection." (Page 35)
It is a moment of Buddha-like initiation for the narrator, an initiation into life's mutability, decay and impermanence: "It was Tony and also not Tony. The dog who lay at my feet wriggling and moaning in a trance of affection was not the Tony I knew, not the dog with that beautiful coat who always smelled good and clean; this was a sick dog with sores all over; tufts of fur stood among patches of red skin through which the bones showed." The narrator has, for the first time, an intimation of mortality.
The narrator feeds Tony abun and then slowly backing away, turns around, closes his eyes and runs. As the bus pulled away, the narrator looked at the High Level Road glistening like silver in the noonday heat and there was no dog on the road, and I knew that I would never see Tony again, and it would be a long long time before I revisited Depanama, because there was nothing for me there any more." (Page 37). The narrator has matured to the point where he can calmly accept the transience of life. Yet this maturity and calmness have not been without an inner struggle; they arise out of the Buddhist ethos which is brought in unobtrusively through the reference to Sri Pada, the Holy Peak, (page 3 and page 43) and the pilgrims in the train whose voices rose up in chorus "Sadhu, Sadhu."

Book Reviews 65
Space permits me only a look at the classroom in the third
movement before I conclude. I consider this episode a tour de force for the complexity of its effects, ranging from the broad comedy of the narrator's schoolboy prank with Padmini's pigtail, which makes the entire class explode in hysterical laughter (there is a slip-up here, by the way, "and Karunatilaka on my right passes me the pencil" (page 40), the Kirinde illustration (page 39) shows Karunatilaka seated on the narrator's left: this slip-up and a few printer's devils somewhat mar an otherwise neatly produced book) to the subtle humour of an unprepossessing Mr.Jayakody who with a combined movement of the lips and tongue" adjusts his dentures and asks What were the Naga maidens doing?" after quoting some lines from the Selalihini Sandeshaya which praise the Naga maidens in conventional romantic terms, to the dramatic cross-cutting between the garden lizard hissing and blowing as Tony moves sideways with fangs-bared and barking wildly and Mr.Jayakody advancing on the narrator: "Mr.Jayakody has stopped right near me and he pushes his dark black ugly face right up and I could almost hear his breathing, heavy and angry, and the black dragonis Swishing his scaly tail and Tony is dangerously close to the monster and the barking becomes fierce and desperate but in the classroom there is awesome silence and I keep looking helplessly at the dark face and the tiny eyes in front of me and then there is a blinding flash and a cracking sound and I close my eyes and hold my cheek and slowly an excruciating pain begins on my lower jaw and spreads all over my face like scalding water and all I hear is Tony barking furiously" (pages 46 and 47).
In spite of the narrator's wanting to hang on to a dream and not wanting to wake up' (page 51), impermanence and mutability govern the universe. The roly-poly-fluffy pup becomes the sick dog with sores all over and, in the end, the yahyahyah of the fluffy pup becomes the plaintive cry of a chained dog trying desperately to be free. Tony becomes the apt symbol of the impermanence, the decay and the dukkha inherent in the human condition.
A remarkable first novel in English by a Sri Lankan and a worthy winner of the Gratiaen Prize for 1996.
A.J. Canagaratna

Page 35
Vikram Chandra, Love and Longing in Bombay, New Delhi, Viking Penguin India, 1998.
Chandrais to metropolitan India what Scottfitzgerald was to American Jazz, screamed a popular Indian daily renowned for its literary supplement. He doesn't borrow metaphors, observed another, he invents them. Compassionate and penetrating, exulted a third.
Odious comparisons aside, and quoting Salman Rushdie, "South Asian writing in English is definitely no more the bastard child of the colonial empire, sired by the departing British, with the continuing use of the old colonial tongue that renders it forever inauthentic," what Vikram Chandra epitomises, like others in his proliferating breed of contemporaries, is naturalised Indian English, replete with colloquialism, jargon and the flavour that is India today. Literary prowess from the South in English, entirely indigenous in appeal, has in fact, come to replace fabled exotic depictions of the Oriental. Well, like all things which go with the global village, this sells. There is an obvious demand for local flavours: smells, locations and themes which are home brewed, yet laced with a universality which transcends parochial particularities of experience, vernacular and rhetoric. Hence, however localised, the mystical, almost ethereal bond the protagonist zygotic twins share in Arundhati Roy's novel, the drudgery of urban life during the dark years of political turmoil in Rohinton Mistry's A Fine Balance and the poignancy of adolescent homosexual love against a backdrop of ethnic strife in Shyam Selvadurai's Funny Boy all strike a chord which does not require as a precondition, first hand empathy for the ambience in which the narratives are set.
Love and Longing in Bombay hit literary charts and trendy book stores alike, by winning the Commonwealth Writers Prize.

Book Reviews 67
Chandra was no more an obtuse aspirant among a galaxy of young South Asian writers, some of whom pack within attractive paperbacks tales as rancid as spurious Bhelpuri served on the streets of Chowpatti in Bombay. No more was his mammoth first novel Red Earth and Pouring Raininconspicuous despite its size, with the quizzical monkey and the typewriter on the cover. Chandra is in the big league, his writing "impeccably controlled, intelligent, sensuous and sometimes grim", as described in an emotional tribute.
His second book is a collection of five stories, each titled to capture the essence of oriental philosophy: Dharma, Shakti, Kama, Artha and Shanti. A common link factor is the narrator seated in an idyllic bar with the "perfect gin sling" spewing tales from his fertile imagination to an eager and at times bewildered audience. It is in this bar off Sassoon Dock, replete with images of the sea in the vicinity, murky lanes, dilapidated concrete and imposing sky rise, that the narrator with the wizened eyes and the whispery voice transports the listeners to the world of fantasy and the astral.
The stories deal with a diverse range of subjects - a retired army general's tryst with the supernatural in Dharma, the intrigues within high society cocktail circuits of Bombay in Shakti, which is also an ode to female power, feline, vengeful and destructive; a murder mystery with a cop in a beleaguered marriage on the docks in Kama, furtive homosexual love and underworld crime in Artha and a surreal romance in Shanti with shifting time frames and baffling plots within plots to tease one's intellect and powers of cognition.
The protagonistin Dharma has a past shrouded in heroic tragedy
- which seems to have a mysterious nexus with his somber, almost dour present. As the plot unfolds, one learns of his indispensable contribution to the war of independence in Bangladesh in 1971, and the dramatic act of self-amputation of his diseased limb. There is unmistakable melodrama, truly Bollywood style, but there is also a beautiful poignancy which comes with candidly extravagant language that brings the caricatures alive.
They were all staring at him but he could not make them cut him "Give me your kukri," he said to Jung the radio assistant. The boy hesitated, but then the blade came out of the scabbard

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with a hiss that Jago Antia heard despite the ceaseless roar outside. He steadied himself and gripped it with both hands and shut his eyes for a moment, and there was impossibly the sound of the sea inside him, a sob rising in his throat, he opened his eyes and fought it, pulled against it with his shoulders as he raised the kukri above his head, against darkness and mad sorrow, and then he brought the blade down against his knee. What surprised him was the crunch it made against the bone. In four strokes he was through. Each was easier: "Now", he said, and the nursing assistant tied it off Jago Anita waved off the morphine and when he looked up he saw that Jung was crying.
Shakti is a tale of feuding business families where the women call the shots. It is also (if anything, a superficial) insight into Bombay's ethnic conglomerate and in a sense emerging social formations in India's burgeoning metropolises, with Parsis, Gujratis and Sindis vying for acceptance into the privileged club of the rich and the famous. The extent to which they go to achieve this seems almost ludicrous; preserving social prestige is non-negotiable, reputations count, as much as the unfailing backbiting and hostility under the ostensible veneer of social pleasantries and sophistication. Chandra writes of what in India is commonly viewed as the divide between inveterate Khandanis (i.e people with generational wealth) and the nouveaux riches which reigns large.
Dolly was not perfect, she was long everywhere, she was sallow, she wore old jewellery missing a link here or there, today she wore a tatty green scarf over her shirt, and that was just it. Sheila on the other hand was perfect, but she knew that however hard she tried she could never achieve the level of careless imperfection that Dolly flaunted. It had nothing to do with perseverance or intelligence and it took generations. It couldn't be learnt, only grown with the bone.
However convivial the plot, it does not seem inherently futile, as do similar pieces of, say, Shobha De's fiction. There is natural wit and effervescence which is hilarious, with underlying cynicism to carry it through.
"...if Dolly had been a little less Boatwala and a little more

Book Reviews 69
sagacious, she could have adopted Sheila and taught her and patronised her in a thousand little ways, but Dolly saw only a little upstart, which Sheila was, Dolly didn't see the ferocious political will, that hidden glint. This is how all WCS Sf.
How it all began was this finally Dolly accepted one of Sheila's invitations. Actually she had no choice but to accept, which may be why she went from being coolly condescending to openly sarcastic. And it started. What happened was that Sheila had finally been able to join the Lunch Club. Not many people knew that the Lunch Club existed. Most of the people who knew what it was also knew they couldn't be in it. The women in the Lunch Club met once a month for lunch at one of the members' houses. After lunch they played cards. Then they had tea and went home. That was it, nothing very exciting on the face of it, but if you knew anything you knew that that was where marriages were arranged and sometimes destroyed, deals were made, casually business was felt out, talk went on about this minister in Delhi and that So-andSo's son who was school captain in Mayo. It was the real stuff you know, masala grinding, how the world works. So Sheila's name came up, naturally several times, and every time, Dolly sniffed and said, Not our type really, and that finished of Sheila's chances. But then Sheila made friends, fast ones, and they pushed it, they liked her, for her money, her nippy wit, for her snap, and maybe also that some of them were tired of Dolly, of her Boatwala sandwiches served soggy but with absolute confidence, of her pronouncements and the delicate way she patted her pursed lips with a napkin after she ate pastries. So they insisted, and it was clear that there would be either agreement or a direct struggle, and Dolly decided that it wasn?t worth risking defeat, so finally she flung an eyebrow towards the roof, sighed, and said, "All right, if you must, can we talk about something else, this is really so boring."
Kama, the third in his collection, is a wannabe Hercule Poirot tale and a James Hadley Chase sex thriller thrown in one, set in urban Bombay. The Swatzernigger prototype Sikh cop traverses much of

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sleazy Bombay bars, innocuous restaurants, brothels as cover-up hotels, advertisements lush with innuendoes, inching his way to unraveling the mystery of the murdered Mr. Patel. As the reader discovers, the deceased and his family resonate with archetypal middle class values, and it is with a palpable feeling of nausea that one reconciles to the near certitude of their under-cover fetish for sex orgies. It is a murder mystery with a difference, because the who-did-it fades into oblivion towards the end and what assumes significance is the inconsistency of human relationships, common to both the investigator and the deceased.
Ashaben Patel spoke in a Kutchi he didn't completely understand, but what he did understand was that there was no solution as simple as a bad man. What Chetanbhai Patel and Ashaben had done together was as complete and as inexplicable as what had happened between him and Megha, real, true and impossible to tell afterwards. Ke
The story isjuxtaposed with the cop's crumbling marriage, some steamy erotica and philosophical overtones as if to reinforce the fact that it is brain-teasing suspense, but with a difference. This seems unnecessary, however you chose to interpret it. The consummate physical passion, which the characters employ in a desperate bid to salvage their illfated relationship, unfortunately does not come out as either intense or pathetic and just ends up seeming superfluous. It evokes neither sympathy nor the fact that even cops are humans if that is what the author is trying to reiterate.
In contrast Artha seems a lot more philosophical in its appeal. The author skillfully manoeuvers through the world of arty parties, of aesthetics interfaced with human vulnerability. There is truth and there is despondency, and then there is more despondency at the fallibility of human relationships. Sandhya and her estranged painter lover Anubhav, who oscillates between being an artist and a gigolo, finally reunite in what is an assault to every pore of your sensibilities. On the imbroglio that is love the author writes:

Book Reviews 71
Anubhav drags on. Yes, I wish I could tell you that she never saw him again, that he was exiled forever. But you know that life never does the things it should. He had a big show at the Pushkara Gallery, and a grand opening. Mahatre gave Anubhav's paintings a review that I can only call a rave. He said that Anubhav had created a searing vision of the realities of rural India. On the first night itself Ratnani bought five paintings. Since then, in the last month, Sandhya had lunch with Anubhav twice. She says to talk things over. Both you and I know what is really happening. The trouble with beauty is that you cannot give it up, not ever. So I know tomorrow she will tell me about another lunch trying not to look guilty. I'll try to be nice, and we'll take Lalit for a walk, and he'll stroll between us skipping, holding both our hands.
Comparisons to his earlier novel seem inevitable. Red Earth was exasperatingly convoluted in plot but this was mitigated by the sheer magnificence of imagery, prose and characterisation. One was left with a profound reverence for his magical expression, even as the Hindu pantheon descended in modernised avatars, taking ridiculous jibes at one another. The richness of medieval India is recreated with as much ease as the oomph of modern day America narrated through the eyes of a immigrant student in an American university.
What perhaps is lacking in Love and Longing is the effortless mastery of the author's earlier endeavour. Red Earth could pass as a lot of rambling with an almost languorous narrative as there is no conventional or cogent story-line, and yet at a deeper level its aesthetic appeal and effortless flamboyance of style surpass other limitations. As for the book currently under review, one cannot help sensing the loss of spontaneity and the fact that the author has not really infused his stories with the carefully nurtured love and longing more characteristic of his earlier writings. So you have all the ingredients of a successful piece of fiction - pacy, varied, defined plots and the requisite masala to keep you riveted just when your attention wanes and you might want to take a breather. But whatjar are the palpable traces of insincerity and the almost contrived attempt at linking the stories to the mystery that is Bombay.

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Both these detract from the otherwise efflorescent richness of
presentation and the wealth of emotions sought to be captured in the lives of ordinary people. This perhaps can be attributed to too varied a spectrum of experimentation, mystery, romance, erotica and caricature of which only the last seems to have succeeded fully.
Locating narratives in Bombay is by no means something new to Indian fiction. Familiar landmarks and sights crowd the pages of Rushdie's and Rohinton Mistry's settings. Anita Desai and Shashi Deshpande capture both the ebullient gaiety of the city as well as its somber decadence, BEST buses, local trains, protest Morchas, dabbawallas delivering home cooked lunches, plush Churchgate and Malabar Hill apartments, the languid squalor of Dadar and Dharavi, the vibrant physical and geographical realities of Bombay. It is a city of high vitality, linguisitic verve, and exudes, in the words of Salman Rushdie 'a kind of metropolitan excitement which European cities have for the most part forgotten."
All this seem to have been ignored in Chandra's writing. The effort to locate his tales in Bombay is almost contrived and the occasional rendition of its bustling exterior seems, well, forced. One does not get the feel of a sprawling metropolis where post-modernist architecture mingles comfortably with slums and chawls and nineteenth century pseudogothic landmarks. Neither can one discern the smells, the sounds and the chaos, the plurality and the coexistence, the fusion of the north and the south - Goans and Syrian Christians, immigrant Punjabis, lavish and ostentatious, the Gujratis swarming the commercial district, businesses and the exalted portals of the High Court, Chembur which is quintessentially Madras, where Tamils and Malayalees rule, MTV, yuppies and Coke, communal carnage and Hindu fanaticism - that is the city I know. The stories could have been anywhere else. But then again, perhaps this enforces the universality of some of the points the author makes. Also, in Bombay's multifacetedness lies the impossibility of any stereotype; this might have been one of the dilemmas the author faced in trying to locate his narrative and textualise the complexities of the city's realities.
On longing there is one sample of interest. Iqbal, in the story Kama reminisces on his missing lover, presumably killed through his involvement in underworld intrigue.

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When I walked home I tried to remember the truth of meeting Rajesh. When we told each other our full names we looked at each other for a moment and noted and dismissed the difference in our religions in one smile, that was all. We passed the next year in meetings and quarrels and separations and phone calls. We argued about cricket and movies and broken promises, on faithlessness, disease and death, but on the next New Years we were together again, against the same wall in Vertigo where we had first met. I leaned my forehead against his shoulder; against the curving in from his chest and the tight bulk of his biceps and he whispered into my ear, "Bastard, you like me just for my Maharashtrian muscle." I laughed at him, for what he said was true, and a little more than true, and much less than true. I pinched the tendon under his shoulder. "And you?" I said, "Why do you like me?" "For your beauty," he said, and cupped my cheek in his hand. I wanted to believe it but I couldn't.
Its true," he said and kissed me. Alone I look for the painting in the dim shifting light. I know that Rajesh is not in those lines, that the body is not in the colour. But there is that colour that moves through the body, rangek sharirka, I know what that is. It is the absence
in my heart.
Pradeep Ratnam

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U.R. Anantha Murthy, Bharathipura. translated from the Kannada by P. Sreenivasa Rao, Macmillan India Ltd., Madras, 1996.
The immediacy of U.R. Anantha Murthy's thematic concerns was brought home to me long before I had actually read any of his writings. Two formative contexts are pertinent here; firstly, my childhood spent in a Brahmin joint family setting in a town in southern Karnataka, a town very much like Bharathipura. and, secondly, my circle of friends and acquaintances in university. Members of my extended family have a strong dislike for Anantha Murthy as they see him as being antiBrahmin. My urban "progressive radical" friends also dislike him, but this time precisely for the opposite reason; they see him as being Brahminical. As a result, my preconceived notions about Anantha Murthy had traversed both these positions before I had actually read him.
Bharathipura, written in the early 1970s, is about Jagannatha, the son of a Brahmin landlord, and former trustee of the Manjunatha temple in the town, who has just returned after a five year stay in England where he had gone to study English literature. He gives up writing his thesis on E. M. Forster, declaring to his English professor, "I have no more than ten pages to say about E.M. Forster", and comes back to Bharathipura. He does this to authenticate himself, to get away from what he sees as his facile and hypocritical liberal ways in England and to engage in "pure action". The novel is set in a deceptively sleepy Malenad town in the district of Shimoga in Karnataka. If one were to strip the novel to just its geographical and human settings, Bharathipura wouldn't be all that different from R.K. Narayan's Malgudi. But of course, the similarity ends there. In Bharathipura all the complex social relations associated with the caste system are

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the complex social relations associated with the caste system are consciously and deliberately foregrounded. Jagannatha's singular, overarching concern is to initiate radical social change in the town. He sees the faith that people seem to have in the deities of the town as the bane of all human social relations that prevail there. As Jagannatha writes in a letter to Margaret, his lover in England, "(W)e can restore dignity to man only by destroying God." Even among the deities there is a hierarchy. Manjunatha is the lord of the upper castes and Bhootharaya is the lord of the lower castes. Bhootharaya, seen as a deputy of Manjunatha, is responsible for the lower castes and outcasts and is in some way also accountable to Manjunatha in regard to his responsibilities. In order to achieve his goals, Jagannatha decides to lead a group of untouchables into the Manjunatha temple on the day of an auspicious festival. Jagannatha starts "training" the group of untouchables for that event well in advance. He asks them to gather at his house every evening and tries to speak to them about the struggles of oppressed people in other places in the world and also tries to teach them the alphabet. There is a grand build-up to the event with socialist and sarvodaya leaders, a few of them clearly venal, from various parts of the state converging there to express their solidarity. On the appointed day and hour, as the untouchables finally enter the temple after some confusion and some coercion, they discover that the Shiva linga which is the deity in the temple has been removed from the sanctum sanctorum by Ganesha, the son of the chief priest of the temple. Ganesha is an inarticulate, nervous, stuttering atheist who reads novels like Devadas by Sharath Chandra Chatterjee on the sly. Removing the linga from the temple is for him an act of personal rebellion; against god, against his father and against the social order in the town. The newspaper headlines announce the next day "Failed revolution in Bharathipura. Untouchables enter the godless temple." The upper castessee the whole event as a vindication of the prevailing socio-religious and temporal order.
The narrative of Bharathipura is a sustained and unrelenting interrogation of the very notion of human agency. What constitutes "pure action"? Is it possible for one to remain undistorted while engaging in initiating radical social transformation? Can'one'speak,

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act or think for an 'other, etc.? Although the third person narrator's voice is clearly articulating Jagannatha's inner workings, the depth of Jagannatha's characterisation is such that all contrapuntal positions are extremely well articulated and argued. It is perhaps this that saves the novel from lapsing into a rambling and self-indulgent stream-ofconsciousness sort of narrative.
At one level Bharathipura documents with great precision the encounter between the praxis generated by a distinctly 'modern' consciousness, and extant 'other life-worlds (which may or may not have been transformed by the material interventions of modernity). The depth and intensity with which it does this has little parallel in Indian English writing, most of which, of course, originates in urban India or in the West. Neither the high Brahminical metaphysics of a Raja Rao's Serpent and the Rope nor the riotous cosmopolitanism of a Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children can claim to interrogate this dimension with such complexity. If recent'success' is any measure, Agastya Sen's (in Upamanyu Chatterjee's English, August) bored, blase and jaded bureaucrat disposition appears to tickle and delight the sensibilities of English-speaking urban India more profoundly than would Jagannatha's tortured and agonising ethical rationalisations. Not surprisingly, that last book, along with the movie based on it, was a big hit in urban Indian English-speaking college campuses, particularly among the young radical existentialists.
The introduction to the present book, authored by T).R. Nagaraj, serves as a sharp and insightful assessment of the book. In his introduction, Nagaraj distinguishes two modes of rebellion, viz., the organic and the ontological. Jagannatha's rebellion clearly falls within the ontological mode because "for Jagannatha to rebel is not a personal necessity, for he is not a direct victim of the structures of humiliation and deprivation that he is fighting." In contrast, Ganesha's act of rebellion arises out of "sheer organic necessity..., is a product of both tangible and concrete experiences.and is not contaminated by problems of imaging the self." And, as Nagaraj also points out, "(N)otwithstanding the inherent pull towards the organic mode of revolt in it, even Bolshevik politics has large chunks of ontological necessities built into it. Strangely, Gandhian praxis too is essentially a product of

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the ontological necessity school, and the Gandhian approach to the question of untouchability is shaped by such impulses.... Bharathipura explores the tragic separation between organic and ontological necessities, where the latter is forced to carry the halo of martyrdom and despair."
The novel also lends itself to a fairly neat application of the interpretative tool of flat and round characters. Bharathipura's flat characters, i.e., those who do not have a personal voice in the narrative or are stereotypes, remain nevertheless very real. The least credible of these is perhaps Raghava Puranik. Puranik starts off in life as a radical social activist who creates a furore by taking the unprecedented step of marrying a widow. As the years pass however, he retreats into his own world populated by Russell, Bernard Shaw, Kipling, Churchill, scotch, western music on the radio, and an assortment of other things western. He keeps himself occupied through such quaint activities as reconstructing a map of London in his mind. His Kannada is English-accented and he doesn't read the newspapers, and when asked about Jagannatha's planned act of rebellion, says to him,
I am sorry, but it is utterly futile. In India, we live in the womb of God. Perhaps you can save yourself, and a few others who are like you. But collective action is impossible. Therefore I say - westernise yourself Staysane.
Chikki, Jagannatha's aunt and only family member, is another flat character. The affection the two share is evident but Chikki almost never speaks. She runs Jagannatha's household but clearly does not partake of Jagannatha's desire for radical social transformation. After one frustrating evening "training" session with the untouchables, of which Chikkiclearly disapproved:
Chikki hurt him unconsciously. In the way she served him coffee, in the way she neglected her hair, starved herself presenting a drawn face, and much more through her painful silence at not having any guests at home, a silence that searched Jagannatha's eyes to counter them.
The denial of a voice to Chikki in the narrative is no doubt problematic and the same is the case as regards the characterisation of the

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untouchables. The untouchables, like Chikki, have no voice in the narrative. The narrative does not even attempt a peek into their inner workings, leave alone credit their characters with any sort of inner rationale. The accusation that Anantha Murthy is Brahminical perhaps comes from this angle. As Nagaraj points out, "It is perfectly understandable if Dalits are seen as lifeless objects by the protagonist, but what if the narrative viewpoint also unconsciously reinforces such a perception?". But, as Nagaraj also points out: "(A)ny simplistic conclusion either way tends to ignore the complex relationship between the conscious ideology of the novelist and the autonomous politics of (the novel's) style and form."
Another interesting flat character is Ramesh Chandra, a reader in sociology at the University of Mysore. He is a Hoysala Karnataka Brahmin, who had worn earrings till he finished his B.A.
In England he had learnt how to don a three-piecesuit without spoiling the creases and folds. The way he used to rub his spectacles with a handkerchiefbefore launching into a serious discussion, his body bent forwardslightly, persuaded people to think he was an intellectual.
Upon hearing about Jagannatha's planned action, he writes to him:
I admire your heroism in trying to bring existentialist socialism to Bharathipura. But, as a sociologist I feel that your attempt will fail. This problem of untouchability needs to be solved through arbitration, not through the confrontation that you have planned. Intellectuals like you should attack the neo-Brahmins, namely, Vokkaligas and
Lingayats.
I will linger on Ramesh Chandra for a while longer because he is a slightly exaggerated stereotype of so many casteist social scientists one finds in Indian academia:
Ramesh Chandra was in a sense the most innocent picture of Indian hypocrisy. He argued with the utmost sincerity, "Adultery is all right for Shudra women but not for Brahmin women..."

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This innocence can perhaps be explained thus. Much of modern sociological thought also posits a correspondingly appropriate praxis. But where such an epistemology (in this case, of the discipline of sociology) is just a material introduced by modernity, the prevailing life-world is affected only to the extent that the ontological equilibrium is not inordinately disturbed. Ramesh Chandra, the casteist social scientist, is a good illustration of this. No matter what he teaches in his sociology class, he remains in life a Hoysala Karnataka Brahmin who complains about the neo-Brahminism of the Vokkaligas and Lingayats. Tradition, while being mediated and transformed itself, capaciously absorbs even modern elements into its own life world without there occurring an ontological rupture.
Another flat character, Venkatakrishnaraya, a devout Brahmin, brings in a dash of bathos to the proceedings while simultaneously illustrating an even more innocent manner in which tradition is mediated by modernity:
This Venkatakrishnaraya had a rigid routine morning to afternoon - a cold water bath at four in the morning, two hours of worship at home, then bathing the cows, and applying vermillion on their foreheads, next he worshipped them, gave them their morning meal, milked them, and finally spent the rest of the time until lunch reciting holy verses at the temple, his eyes closed. At least twice a week, he would not eat until he had seen a Garuda as he stood under the peepal tree. If one asked this devout Brahmin, "Why all this rigorous routines?, he would answer in all seriousness. At least, in my next birth, I would like to be born in America."
The round characters, i.e. the characters whose inner workings are better articulated in the novel, are almost all closer to Jagannatha than the flat characters. Of the round characters, Sripathi Rao comes closest to displacing Jagannatha himself as the real hero of the novel. Rao is a man with impeccable credentials, having been an active participant in the freedom struggle. Rao represents the practical and quotidian counterpoint to Jagannatha's intellectual meandering: at one point he says to Jagannatha,

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All that's fine in theory. Meanwhile, children have to be borne, raised, holy festivals like Ramanavami, Krishnashtami have to be celebrated, medicines have to be brought from Doctor Anthony, Jaganna, you are still an egoist. You believe in your power to achieve things. Well, people like you are also
necessary.
But Rao is at the same time one of Jagannatha's closest friends and most reliable allies in his planned revolutionary act. Jagannatha could
sit with Rao without having to converse with him. To be together in silence was in itself satisfying to both of them. This sort of relationship was rare, possible with only a very few. However, at times such togetherness had not been possible even with Margaret.
Rao, however, could not himself be a revolutionary like Jagannatha because he had more immediate little tasks to attend to: filling up an application form for an illiterate farmer, advising someone else regarding a financial problem, etc. He is in essence, a humanist, the term being employed here in its rudimentary sense, before it is usurped by the language of any ideology. On responsibilities and revolutions, he opines:
A man with a wife and children understands the meaning of responsibility. If your planned action can be carried out while you are being responsible for a family, your action becomes meaningful. If you talk about revolution without knowing what it is to co-exist with a wife and bring up children, it is pointless.
But Rao's rooting in his immediate humanscape sometimes also spills over into what Jagannatha perceives to be cynicism that is occasioned by Rao's awareness of actuality. As Jagannatha rightly recognises, Rao's earthy, quotidian engagement with the world vests him with a wisdom in which no fundamental change is possible. After Rao recounts a risible incident illustrating the absurdity and vanity of a

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Brahmin-wannabe-Shudra minister, the ever skeptical Jagannatha discerns in Rao a certain craftiness of the Brahmin consciousness, which made the Brahmin an outsider.
Subraya Adiga is another round character who offers yet another alternative to Jagannatha's intellectual and rationalised mode of engagement with the world around him. Adiga is a spiritualist, a mystic who lapses into ecstatic trances and for whom Bhakti, i.e. devotion offers the only experience that can transcend the consciousness of material realities. But he is rendered real because he does have a family towards whom he discharges his responsibilities, albeit a trifle wildly. Jagannatha's human sensitivity is such that he is able to engage infruitful discussions even with Adiga without dismissing his world view as escapistor abstract. In contrast, most of our 'radical activists possessed of a leftist tendency wouldn't tolerate even the slightest suggestion of the devotional or transcendental.
Jagannatha's own character acquires depth from the fact that he is surrounded by such a diverse set of round characters. Jagannatha appreciates and respects each of these positions, and this in turn contributes to the healthy tension in the narrative, a tension which even in the end is refused resolution. None of the articulated positions are actually proved right or proved wrong. The arguments just continue.
In one of the tautest sections of the novel, Jagannatha, in one of his evening 'training' sessions for the untouchables, tries to break the stiflingly tenacious grip that the social order seems to have on the untouchables. In this particular incident, played out as a rehearsal of the entering of the temple, Jagannatha brings out the holy Shaligrama (the household sacred stone) from inside his house and carries it to where the untouchables are seated and asks them to touch it. There is tension all around, with Chikki and otherhousehold members behind his back watching with bated breath while Jagannatha, with the Shaligrama in his hand, is trying to get the untouchables to touch the Shaligrama to prove to them that there is nothing holy or insurmountable about it. But when even after long and repeated entreaties the untouchables don't come forward to touch it, Jagannatha becomes indignant and screams at them: "Touch this, touch this, touch!" and

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(N)onplussed by this piercing cry, the untouchables came forward mechanically, touched with no feeling whatsoever what Jagannatha had extended to them and withdrew swiftly.... Jagannatha, weakened by cruelty and grief, threw away the shalligrama. His moral anguish had been thoroughly twisted and distorted. He had even lost for a moment the very human feeling that Chikki had for the untouchables.
Zeroing in on the implications, Nagaraj pithily remarks, "(W)hat is experienced as a momentary disappearance of the human element in Jagannatha solidifies over a period of time in the history of ideologies as historic necessity. This is the unavoidable conflict between the present and the future."
There is also a profound irony in this incident, an irony that is obvious even to Jagannatha himself. He finds himself investing the Shaligrama with immense symbolic value in the very process of trying to destroy such an irrational belief.
Bharathipura is a veritable sociological treasure trove. The layered complexity of the characters and situations is mind-boggling. Anyone who reads it, particularly if he or she has a slant for the sociological, is bound to keep going back to it for wisdom and, perhaps more honestly, for reassurance. At a time and in a political climate when tribal women are reportedly taking up arms against the progressive' naxalite movement in Andhra Pradesh, the issues that Bharathipura throws up resonate with ever greater urgency.
Dattathreya C. S.

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Call for Papers
150th Anniversary.TheCommunistManifesto
The International Centre for Ethnic Studies, Colombo (ICES) proposes to commemorate the 150th Anniversary of the publication of The Communist Manifesto with discussion to be held in Colombo in the first week of December 1998. Papers, preferably dealing with impacts on Sri Lanka, are invited for this occasion. Selected papers will be published.
Expressions of interest are invited.
M. Somasundiram International Centre for Ethnic Studies 2, Kynsey Terrace Colombo 8
Tel:94-1–685085/679745 Fax : 94-1- 698048 E-mail:iceswebG) sri.lanka.net

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ICE C)
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