(May 15, Colombo, Sri Lanka Guardian) The newspaper editorials that Munidasa Cumaratunga wrote, while he was the editor of the Lak Mini Pahana, have now been collected into a book under the title Lak Mini Pahan Kathu Vaki. This book serves to re-focus attention on the significant relationship between Cumaratunga and the public sphere. The term public sphere was popularised by the German social philosopher Jurgen Habermas, and is now widely used in academic discourse. Newspapers and journals are a vital adjunct of the public sphere. What is interesting about Cumaratunga’s editorials is that while bearing testimony to the salience of this concept, they also underline its conceptual limitations and Eurocentric genesis and partialities.
Lak Mini Pahan Kathu Vaki consists of over seventy editorials that Munidasa Cumarartunga wrote during the period from June 26, 1934 to January 28, 1936, when he was the editor. Lak Mini Pahana was one of the most important and prestigious newspapers in the early part of the twentieth century; it exercised a profound influence on the thought and imagination of the Sinhala-speaking intelligentsia, and shaped the national conversation and agenda of public life. Lak Mini Pahana was registered as the earliest Sinhala newspaper, and its founding editor was Koggala Dharmatilake. It was subsequently edited by Batuvantudave Devarakshita Pandituma, C. P. Jayasuriya, J. H. Perera, and M. Dharmaratne. It was after the death of Dharmaratne that Munidasa Cumaratunga took over the editorial reins of this newspaper. After the death of M. Dharmaratne, Lak Mini Pahana became defunct, and Cumaratunga was responsible for reviving it and making it into a vitally significant organ of public opinion.
Lak Mini Pahana, under the editorship of Cumaratunga, displayed a sustained vigor and an unflinching sense of purpose. News coverage, both local and international, reflected a catholicity of interest. Matters pertaining to the local legislature, and the executive branches as well as issues related to the spread of Nazism, Mahatma Gandhi’s struggles and so on appeared regularly in the news columns. Much attention was devoted to creative writing; indeed, such works of Cumaratunga as Mangul Kama, Hath Pana, Heen Saraya, first appeared in the pages of the Lak Mini Pahana. Many of the leading scholars and intellectuals of the country exchanged ideas and presented viewpoints and considered judgements in the pages of this newspaper.
As an editor, Munidasa Cumaratunga was animated by a deep moral consciousness and restless yearning for knowledge and truth. The agonised self- debate that characterised his writings was a cause and symptom of the unease he felt with circumambient realities. Through his editorials, he created an enunciatory space for his viewpoints, and was able to place the stamp of his original personality on them. One of his desires, as an editor, was to promote healthy and constructive debates on a wide range of issues, social, religious, artistic and political. He guided these debates and conversations with a firm hand and unclouded vision.
One outstanding feature of Munidasa Cumaratunga’s journalistic writings, as is evidenced by the editorials gathered in this book, is his ambition to fashion a lucid, forceful and supple language medium that was at once contemporary and traditional. Contrary to conventional wisdom, he was not mired in medieval Sinhala writing or interested in displaying a fondness for verbal obscurity. Instead, he drew on Sanskrit terminology (e.g paramothkrishta) as well as colloquial idiom (pessam). He also put into circulation the use of the present tense in news headings and captions that has become the common practice now. Contrary to much ill-informed thinking, Cumaratunga mobilized the full expressive potential of the Sinhala language, and words such as rajaya, hediya, kamituva, papdiya, sarasaviya, which are the common currency of Sinhala journalists, were inspired by the pioneering efforts of Munidasa Cumaratunga. His writings for newspapers carried grace, gravitas and precision. He was up to date in both matter and manner.
Munidasa Cumaratunga’s seventy-odd editorials from the Lak Mini Pahana collected in this book touch on a broad gamut of issues ranging from language, education, politics, economics, literature, law, crime, religion, the constitution. Whatever the chosen topic, Cumaratunga presented his case with cogency. Many of his most powerful editorials deal with the topic of educationtopic that was close to his heart and stirred his deepest imagination till the very end. He saw schools as a crucial site which was responsible for the moulding of a particular kind of citizen, critically-oriented and culturally grounded. For example, his editorial titled "Guru Puraya" exemplifies this penchant of his. His power of persuasion arises from the clear-sighted discussion of the issue at hand as well as the deft use of rhetoric, metaphors, catachreses, speech rhythms, parallelisms etc. An editorial like "Suba Nimithy", bears this out. From a communication viewpoint, Cumaratunga’s editorials gathered within the covers of Lak Mini Pahan Kathu Vaki merit very close study indeed.
This book serves to dispel three deeply-entrenched misconceptions about Cumaratunga’s intentions and aptitudes as a writer. These myths have been perpetrated, at times, by writers who should know better. First, that Cumaratunga was stuck in the past, and had no serious and sustained interest in current affairs and the modern world on the move. Nothing could be further from the truth. Second, that he wrote in a style reminiscent of medieval times, without connecting to the modern living idiom. This is totally misleading. Except for the overuse of the "a karaya", which I do not find particularly attractive, Cumaratunga’s editorials, linguistically speaking, echo to the dynamics and pulse of the modern idiom and reflect a sensibility perfectly at home in the interstitial space between the past and present, the authority tradition and the imperatives of modernity. Third, that Cumaratunga was dogmatic, close-minded and failed to appreciate or recognise alternative viewpoints. These editorials dispel the groundlessness of this charge. In fact, in his editorial titled, "Lak Mini Pahane Bhasha Ritiya", he openly invites diversity and plurality and says quite open-mindedly that there is no compulsion for everyone to write uniformly, emulating the style and mode of his writing, and that he deeply valorises variety.
Munidasa Cumaratunga was a vigorous writer; he was unafraid to excoriate even the most well-known of writers when he felt that they were on the wrong side of an argument. He was merciless in his condemnation of hypocrisy. He pointed out the operations social dynamics of power, subordination and subversion with remarkable effect. He was quick to call attention to the epistemological and cultural fault-lines of his opponents. As we read his combative pieces, we begin to see how ideas take shape and quicken within his mind. He was a master of sardonic commentary; he would pull the trigger of his sarcasm, and hordes of his opponents fell helplessly to the ground.
At the beginning of this short article, I said that Lak Mini Pahan Kathu Vaki serves to highlight the Habermasian concept of the public sphere, that is to say, to bring out its inherent strengths and weaknesses. Habermas’ book, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, has generated a great deal of critical discussion among scholars both in the social sciences and humanities. In this book, which was published in German in 1962, and translated into English very much later1989Habermas delineates a set of forces and institutions that emerged in the late seventeenth century and eighteenth centuries in Europe, and which he perceived as being pivotal to the understanding of democratic discourse and oppositionality. He termed this the bourgeois public sphere. What was most interesting about this discourse, from the point of view of Habermas, was the potential for separating out the political discourse from both the state and civil society and promoting a critical and interrogatory gaze on both domains. It is Habermas’s conviction that the bourgeois public sphere was central to the democratic social transformations that took place in the eighteenth-century and the consequent emergence of the nation-state. According to him, the institutionalised bourgeois public sphere was not merely a nexus of interests and a site of oppositionality between state and society, but was also a constituted practice of rational-critical discourse on issues germane to politics in the larger and more inclusive sense of the term.
Habermas remarks that the bourgeois public sphere, "may be conceived above all as the sphere of private people come together as public; they soon claimed the public sphere regulated from above against the public authorities themselves, to engage them in debate over the general rules governing relations in the basically privileged but publicly relevant sphere of commodity exchange and social labour. The medium of this political confrontation was peculiar and without historical precedent; people’s public use of their reason." And it is interesting to observe that this public sphere originally came into existence in the world of letters. Habermas explicates the complex ways in which the public sphere differentiated itself from the state and civil society in terms of the crucial role played by newspapers and magazines. As Michael Warner points out, one of the great virtues of Habermas’ book, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, is that it regards the reading practices of the seventeenth and eighteenth century not just as mere reading, but a novel kind of institution. Reading was highly relevant to the emergence of the public sphere, because print discourse was now systematically differentiated from the activities of the state and from civil society. Reading and the public became a means of establishing agency and citizenship. This line of thinking has a great bearing on the efforts of Munidasa Cumaratunga as a newspaper editor.
Newspapers, then, were seen as a vital institution shaping the public sphere. Benedict Anderson has pointed out how newspapers, or what he terms "print capitalism", played a crucial role in fostering the idea of the nation. Similarly, newspapers were of paramount importance in galvanizing the public sphere. Habermas, of course, is discussing the emergence of the public sphere in terms of the European experience. However, it is important to bear in mind the fact that the birth of the public sphere in different societies took different pathways of growth. For example, in Sri Lanka, the various debates that were conducted in public related to issues of language, religion, social structure etc. exercised a formative influence in bringing into existence the indigenous public sphere. It is interesting to note that newspapers, as well as early Sinhala fiction, carried on this tradition of public debate. For example, in many of Piyadasa Sirisena’s novel, the protagonist is cast in the position of a debater pleading his case. Sirisena’s ultimate aim is to convince the reading public through his narrative of the validity of his views and claims. He selects episodes, emphasises incidents, uses tropes with the firm desire to construct a narrative of persuasion. Here, we see the impact of the public debates.
While Jurgen Habermas’s concept of the public sphere deserves careful study, It needs to be pointed out that there are a number of deficiencies associated with it. He seems to have glamourised the public sphere, and ignored the fact that women, minorities, working class people were excluded from it. He was also unsuccessful in delineating how the public sphere presented itself in the twentieth and twenty first centuries. Munidasa Cumaratunga’s editorials contained in Lak Mini Pahan Kathu Vaki, point to two central weaknesses in Habermas’ formulation of the public sphere. The first is the phenomenon of social movements. One of the glaring omissions in Habermas’s work is any reference to social and public movements that were equally important as the bourgeois public sphere. He focuses on the latter to the virtual exclusion of the former. The writings of scholars such as Christopher Hill and E. P. Thompson have admirably demonstrated the importance of social movements in generating public opinion and raising public awareness during the period under review. What is interesting about Cumaratunga’s journalistic writings in the public sphere is that they make a direct contact with public movements related to linguistic, religious, social issues, and in point of fact promote them. Here we see an obvious blind spot in Habermas’s conceptualization of the public sphere.
Another important difference is that while Habermas was expounding the value of the public sphere in terms of the European experience, the role of colonialism did not enter into his calculations. On the other hand Munidasa Cumaratunga’s newspaper articles and editorials were clearly written under the long shadow cast by colonialism. His exhortations, protestations and admonitions have to be understood in the context of colonialism. Hence, this book serves to pinpoint certain weaknesses in Habermas’s understanding of the public sphere. There is no universal model of the public sphere; how it operates in specific cultural locations, historical conjunctures, under the sign of changing political realities merits very close attention indeed.
In my book, Enabling Traditions, discussing Munidasa Cumaratunga’s writings, I made the following observation: "One of the important aims of his notion of linguisticality is to establish the fact that language impacts on personal identity as well as collective identity. At a time when the colonial powers had enthroned English and pushed Sinhala to the margins, he repeatedly drew attention to the disconcerting peripheralisation of the Sinhala language. He complained that there was a tendency to ignore Sinhala and worship English. It was not that he was opposed to people studying English; in fact, he realized full well its importance as a window onto the world. What he was seeking to establish was the fact that Sinhala language should not be peripheralised and allowed to lead a precariously impoverished existence." The editorials gathered in this volume unambiguously voice this anxiety of his. By producing Lak Mini Pahan Kathu Vaki, Visidunu Publishers and the Cumaratunga Foundation have performed a valuable service. The discerning reader will, no doubt, be grateful to these two institutions.
- Sri Lanka Guardian
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